Cryonics as a 500+ year project

In response to Mike Darwin's post on the Chronosphere blog, which deserves reading in its entirety, Paul B writes:

While nanotechnology is certainly in its most early stages I have to be skeptical that it will ultimately prove the solution to reviving patients in suspension. The same temperatures needed to keep tissues from decaying will likely prevent molecular machines from functioning well.

No, I imagine there will need to be the emergence of brand new technologies we can barely imagine to restore resting cryonauts. As such the time frame will be much longer than most might guess and I believe we need to plan for 500 years plus.

I guess Paul B disagrees with Eric Drexler's assessment of "Nanotechnology" as "the last technological revolution." Assuming that enough cryonicists awaken from the mass hypnosis about imaginary and probably impossible "nanomachines" as the revival mechanism, and instead start to treat cryonics as a venture into the indefinite future with unknowable outcomes, what would that require us to do?

Boy, I wish I had some good answers to that. If I had a say about how to run a cryonics organization (and I have demographic reasons to expect that I could in the next few years), just from common sense I would emphasize the aggressive accumulation, growth and protection of the organization's wealth, which means that we shouldn't let America-centric chauvinism get in the way of practicality. If America experiences economic decline relative to other countries, then we should figure out how to plug into the wealth creation in those other countries, even if we have to evade capital controls to do so.

We also need a civilization which stays scientifically, technologically and medically progressive, which means that we have some "skin in the game" in maintaining scientific and technological education, like Dean Kamen's FIRST. Despite what some cryonicists think, religiosity competes with the desire for radical life extension, so cryonicists as individuals also have some incentive to promote atheism, skepticism and critical thinking. Fortunately ordinary secular education works in our favor.

Going out on another limb, I suspect cryonics would benefit more in the long run from conservative politics than from progressive politics. Conservative policies tends to build up a society's capital, both physical and moral, while progressive policies tend to deplete it through the punishment of bourgeois habits and the erosion of self-reliance, self-discipline and planning for the future.

But I label these as idle speculations. I'd like to participate in discussions with other cryonicists to see what ideas they have about the prospect of a 500+ year planning horizon for cryonics, given the likely impossibility of Nanotechnology.

I think I stand on firmer ground with my advice that we should distance cryonics from the propeller heads' other fads, like Friendly AI, mind files, the Singularity and other speculations which will probably sound preposterous in a few years.