Freezing yourself.

[Ramses II CP]

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This I can't agree with at all. 100 years ago was 1908, a point where the first cars had been built, trains were everywhere, radio had been invented, heavier-than-air flight was 5 years old and lighter-than-air flight even older.

The only thing a person from a developed nation of that time wouldn't recognise today is a PC, a TV, a microwave and mobile phones. Everything has a pre-cursor in their time, or would be self explanatory. Nor do you need to recognise or understand something to use it or live with it - with 10 minutes explaining of it, all you need to is learn what buttons to push and what it does. Do you know how a TV functions as any other than a vague intellectual fact you learnt in secondary school, or do you just how to turn it on - I'll bet its the latter.

If Julius Ceaser re-incarnated in my living room tomorrow morning then I'm sure he'd be able to 'understand' that the fridge keeps food and drink cold and the TV shows moving pictures 'sent' from a central location, with only a brief explanation needed. I've got a friend who comes from Southern Sudan. His home region for the most of his life was a place more backwards than Britain or USA was in 1908 in many ways. Some experience and education is all you need.

As for no skills: what skills do 90% of humanity have that a person from any time period couldn't have? Secretaries, burger flippers, sales staff, office managers, etc; these people either don't have any skills at all or are using generic human traits that any person could have. In fact the further back your time-traveller, the more likely they would have useful skills, as the further back the more likely they'd be a physical worker who was used to regular hard physical labour and self-survival in a less developed environment. A woodworker, a blacksmith, any sort of woodsman - they'd all potentially be employable in certain specialist modern work environments.

You're taking an insanely optimistic view here. Trains? Radio? Neither of those have any importance to modern life. I've ridden on a train once in my almost 35 years, and I haven't listened to a radio in 10 years. Are you quite sure you're not a rehydrated human from the 70s?

Nor is it reasonable to think I don't know how a television works, though that may be a reasonable assumption for the majority of the population. I've taken apart and rebuilt several old tube televisions, including one of the first portable televisions ever made (Which I still own, but replacement tubes are no longer made so it doesn't work). People from one hundred years ago wouldn't recognize virtually any of our social conventions or mores, which are the keys underlying any job related skill set and ability to fit into society.

Limiting myself to the US of 100 years ago... We're talking about a society in which ballroom dancing was decried as the corruptor of youth and innocence. In which a single crude photgraph was, for many, the prized possession of a lifetime. In which over 90% of the population got virtually every scrap of food they ever ate from within ten miles of their home. In which travel beyond the bounds of one's county, much less one's state, was a dangerous and expensive proposition very rarely undertaken. Yes, trains existed, as did cars, and they were used by the marginal 2% of the population at the very upper edge of society. For the polio scarred farmboy from Iowa a horseless carriage was as much magic as successfully freezing and reviving a human being is for us.

Not only that, but our very language, our methods of dress, our belief in the divine, the essential flavor of our culture has been altered at it's root. What do you think a person from 1908 would call an African American? Or a Chinese woman? They'll be shorter than we are, with bad teeth uncorrected by braces, and probably with some degree of dementia from a lifetime of exposure to lead paint.

...and we're not talking about young, flexible minds here either, both because the young cannot reasonably afford such an absurdly expensive and purposeless procedure and because the young have no incentive to do so. We're talking about the old, set in their ways, ill people who are already desperate and have nothing to lose. Sure, they can do any brute labor work which requires no skill today the same as 100 years ago, but that's exactly my point. Who, given that they could afford to be frozen and were so desperately ill that they needed it done, is going to want to be unfrozen to flip burgers next to people that they looked down their noses at in their former lives?

No one. You're selling a pipe dream. The type of person who could've been frozen 100 years ago could not adapt to modern life, and the rate of social change is accelerating. If you have it done now you'll probably wake in a hundred years to find Farsi or Hindi is the dominant language, mixed with some pidgin English of course, and all of humanity except you has 'the implant.' Exactly as I said, you'd be a curiosity for your brief moment, and then relegated to the trash heap of society, flipping worm burgers at McArb Bell for a couple of rupees a day.

Don't do it. Be thankful for the span you've had so far, live the rest of your life with what joy you can find, and hope for a painless exit when your day comes.

[Papewaio]

Not only that, but our very language, our methods of dress, our belief in the divine, the essential flavor of our culture has been altered at it's root. What do you think a person from 1908 would call an African American? Or a Chinese woman? They'll be shorter than we are, with bad teeth uncorrected by braces, and probably with some degree of dementia from a lifetime of exposure to lead paint.

Actually the peak levels of lead contamination in the air according to Ice Core samples from Greenland and Mont Blanc was around about 1973. The worst time to have this is at childhood... so anyone who is a child of the seventies has had the worst general atmospheric exposure to lead.