I think religion (and I include cryonics in that category for the purpose of this discussion) is far from being a scam as it most certainly provides immediate benefits that cannot be dismissed. I'm sure it makes people happy to pay a high price for effectively convincing themselves that their death is merely temporary, thus hopefully alleviating what may be a very burdensome dread. That money would otherwise be spent on alcohol, drugs or therapy, and may not be as effective.
But what if what you really need is not the promise to be delivered (which will be long in the future in any case) but it to be fully convincing. That is, you're paying for a convincing promise -- not for its fulfillment (then again, some would say that all scams work like that)
Yes, I understand what you're driving at. But wishes, horses, beggars. This is a scam, pure and simple in the long term with decreasing chances of probability either one of the following things will happen: people will stop believing this and rationality will reassert itself, people will continue to believe until we run out of resources to preserve all the vitrified corpses (it's essentially a graveyard without the benefit of decomposition and filling up billions of dewar flasks with liquid nitrogen is not the most rewarding job) and then it will be time for some tough decisions on how to clean up the mess, the last person on the planet will attempt to cryopreserve themselves in the faint hope that maybe one day in the distant future and hopefully before the sun runs out to power the fully automated planetwide cryogenics facility aliens will discover planet earth and will revive us all or miraculously someone will figure out how to restore all the preserved people in some substrate or give them new bodies (never mind the details here) and will successfully deal with all the social upheaval that will cause (luxury problems).
If the voting in this thread is any indication there are a lot of believers.
> people will stop believing this and rationality will reassert itself
Those are two very different things. Rationality will not reassert itself (has it ever been asserted? :)) because human existence is probably not compatible with pervasive rationality (i.e. rationality in humans is limited to very narrow scopes, usually those that don't scare us or induce other strong emotions), but people will stop believing this and start believing something else, or -- many won't believe this to begin with because believing in cryonics contradicts their other beliefs. If cryonics were compatible with, say, Christianity, then the resurrected would be really pissed for being dragged out of heaven. In fact, this contradiction with other, far more ubiquitous religions and most of all -- the contradiction with people's income -- will keep cryonics a very exclusive religion (like Scientology, only for geeks rather than Hollywood actors), so we need not worry running out of room in that particular, cold, cold heaven.
