@Gophernevich, “Clearly insane?” I rather think not, given sufficient technology – however I am extremely skeptical that the current state of the art is sufficiently far advanced to make it likely that a cryonically preserved human body frozen with current techniques can be reanimated at some future date, even given advanced nanotechnology. The basic problem is the cell damage that occurs during the freezing and thawing processes using current techniques, which disrupts the cell membranes. Nanotechnology may eventually be able to repair some cell damage caused by freezing and thawing in small-ish tissues or organisms (and some very small organisms can already be flash-frozen successfully), but repairing damage to billions of cells simultaneously is far more difficult – you’d need far more nanomachines than cells to achieve timely repairs during the thawing process, and there are serious questions about whether you could physically infiltrate enough of them into the frozen body without causing further damage (remember that even though the nanomachines might be small, they must still have a finite size, and there’s only so much space to try to fit the trillions of them that would be required into the frozen body).

Once information is lost, you can’t just expect to wave the magic wand of “nanotechnology” and make it reappear. But on the other hand I’m reasonably optimistic that continued research in this area may well yield more promising results on improved techniques that might work.

I’m not impressed that some wealthy individuals have signed up for cryonics – after all, other than whatever hope one might have for an afterlife, it’s really the only game in town. Unfortunately I think you’d be looking at far better odds if you put all of your money into the lottery (not that that would do much for life extension).