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[YOLF]

Status: Not signing up yet/Cryonics needs to improve its model

 

So I've been slowly analysing cryonics and it has some major problems. Anyone who has read through the Cryonic's Institute's forums knows that there are members who are very concerned with so called carrington events which can be roughly described as something terrible that happens to an organization about once every 100 years and which has the possibility of destroying the organization.

 

Today, there are useable plans which would allow high quality cryonics to be sold for $5,000, yet currently, full service cryonics would start at around $80,000 to preserve just the head, or $90,000 to preserve the whole body with options as expensive as $368,000 currently being available. There are several problems that exist with this model as follows:

1. With such high prices, cryonics isn't likely to survive something such as a carrington event which could take virtually any form as the small number of cryonicists who would be mostly dead/frozen at the time the event occurred would be helpless and have to rely on a handful of living supporters and a public that was mostly apathetic towards cryo patients. With a more engaged public, the cryonics industry could more readily be saved or recovered after a carrington event.
2. Most people pay for cryonics with life insurance. Given that companies like Google's CaLiCo moonshot are aiming to have a lucrative position on life extension in the next 20 years and plan to achieve an average lifespan of 170 years (and presumably more) our likelyhood of living to aging escape velocity is increasing. Assuming that we do reach aging escape velocity, out life insurance will never pay out and our insurance premiums will have been largely wasted or better spent on other life extension technologies, gym memberships, investments and most importantly dating (date only at the gym for a more cost effective way of meeting healthy people).
3. Cryonics with a high price point has some pretty bad ethical caveats. For instance, by sticking with high cost cryonics we're pricing the developing world, the working poor, and other impoverished peoples out of an equal chance at life extension through cryonics where as with HQ cryonics at $5,000 or less, we would also be putting cryonics within the range that it could be readily subsidized by charitable organizations and thus extend cryonics to the needy. The formative writers on cryonics had imagined everyone getting cryonics. Read The Penultimate Trump for more on this.
4. Let's face it, cryonics is speculative and for all we know, it could just be a scam to get people to punish themselves financially for believing that they have the right to live forever. With the system as it is, cryonicists may just be making life insurance payments to give money to people who aren't in support of the things that they spent their hard earned money trying to ensure and could be dead before they know it. This is my major turn off and why I'm not signed up for cryonics yet. 
5. At the present price point, cryonics fails to even attract a significant proportion of the rich. Most are are on the middle class spectrum, and many are even disabled and on the low income spectrum.The rich simply aren't interested in cryonics because they are satisfied with the lives they've already lived and the next one might not be as good for them, it might even be worse. Wealthy people just aren't going to drive this movement as living as someone from a lower class than they had previously would be very depressing. The rich are also society's decision makers and probably won't enjoy the social position they are accustomed to in the future. On the other hand, those from the deepest recesses of the income spectrum through the upper middle class of the income spectrum are those who will be excited at the prospect of living a radically longer lifespan and taking the risk of eking out a living in what might be the far future.The cryonics movement will thus need to be financed from the discretionary income of the lower - upper middle class. We can't count on a significant enough number of patients signing up for the high cost services. The larger the discretionary purchase, the more likely it will involve both decision makers in a relationship. 

CryonicsCulture's Solution:

Chemical Preservation is available for $2,500 or even as low as $900. The Merkle Plan shows that cryonics could be offered for $5,000 or less. My solution for the cryonics business model crisis is to begin with a Federal Credit Union (FCU) and offer among our products, a certificate of deposit for $5,000 that would be held ITF or In Trust For the organization that would be building the facilities for the Merkle plan (further discussion will follow). The CD would continue to accrue value for as long as it was left with the FCU and the company building the facility would be able to claim the CD funds from depositors when the total value of the ITF Cryonics CDs would enable the first central facility to be built and maintained. With 5.5 million patients paying $5,000 ea, there would be a surplus of 27 billion dollars and a few hundred million in change remaining to build facilities and cryonics infrastructure elsewhere as well as to create cryonics research endowments.

 

With cryonics being more readily affordable and having far less risk, more people will find signing up for cryonics to be a valuable proposition. The CDs could be funded over time from smaller, and thus more independently decided upon amounts of discretionary income and could lead to a single family member purchasing services for others in their family. If the proposition fails, the cryonicist would get their money back with interest. This would be far more attractive to most middle income buyers.

 

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Edited by PerC, 01 December 2014 - 12:41 AM.