This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
Cassy: That may be beside the point, but I read in a scientific magazine that all of the people cryogenized till now and probably a few decades from now will be or already are Popsicle Splat. There's no known way of freezing a body without the process ripping its cells apart and, expensive though it is, the cryogenization process eventually turns people into bacteriological weapons: those who open the cryogenic vessels (if that's what they're called) will very likely just find infectious goo... So I guess Popsicle Splat is a huge Truth in Television thing. Hope I managed to make this explanation clear with my lack of scientific background and all (and I apologize for the morbidity -which is pretty much the point of the trope isn't it?). If there are science students or researchers who can shed light on this, it'd definitely be appreciated.
Clarste: The impression I got is that, yes, the freezing process is extremely destructive, but the people undergoing it know that. The bodies are just more preserved than they would be otherwise. What they're hoping for is that future medical technology will be so good that they can be saved from that state in addition to from whatever disease they had when they chose to get frozen. So while yes if we opened them up now they'd be a pile a infected and very dead tissue, but the plan is to leave them closed until we can practically revive them from the dead. It's a gamble with low odds but high payoff. They were going to die anyway, so it's not too unreasonable for them to bet on that.
