Posted 28 March 2017 - 08:26 PM
Posted 28 March 2017 - 11:04 PM
IMO, people ARE already being priced out of cryonics, otherwise everyone would be signing up and taking family members along with them. It's not simply a matter of affordability, but belief in the value of their return on investment. It's a risk, lots of people will take smaller risks that they might not at higher prices, Put cryonics in the $5,000 range and it's not as important if it doesn't work out. In fact, it is more likely to work out b/c it will generate higher revenue. People who are presently insured for cryonics won't lose anything, and in fact, for the price of a neuropreservation at Alcor ($80k), you could give the opportunity to yourself and 15 family members. Sign up for whole body at Alcor? Well that'd freeze 40 family members including yourself. The cost of preservation at the Cryonics Institute would preserve your whole immediate family. Not to mention standby support would grow to be more localized. Everything gets better for everyone with economies of scale. We should do this, there is a moral obligation to do so. On the other end of cryonics, one would also add the economic boom that would result with so many people getting out of stasis and going quickly into the work force. There will always be a need for more solutions, so an instant workforce could go a long way and be a treasure left to posterity.
Posted 31 March 2017 - 03:00 PM
Posted 31 March 2017 - 05:53 PM
Yes, there is certainly a need to plan for bringing us back. A small amount, invested wisely over the course of several hundred years should be more than adequate to make grant us good lifestyles in the future. If you look at Ralph Merkle's cost estimates for whole body storage using economies of scale, the actual cost of an Alcor grade preservation with local processing rather than transport is less than $2600 and you'd eventually get trucked in bulk to the storage facility once frozen. With 5,000 - 200,000 people getting stored in each "Really Big Dewar," most Funeral Directors or hospitals would be providing the necessary services in an assembly line fashion. The rest is left for profits and improvements and money for Alcor's Charitable Trust which is established to help bring members back when I suggest a $5000 price point.
At a $5000 price point, you can basically freeze yourself and 50 friends and family members for the cost of planning for a $250,000 neuro suspension with standby services. If you get a $2-7M insurance policy, you might be able to give this gift to all the descendants of your family and friends, or at least subsidize a pretty substantial amount for them. So it makes sense to me that there is a good moral argument for accelerating the Really Big Dewar that many are planning. When you can give the gift of nearly eternal youth, why not just get it out of the way so your beneficiaries can live knowing that they will get this opportunity and let them instead worry about the lives they're living now? In my mind, we must do this, the excessively high price point is exclusionary where no exclusion needs to be made. There either is enough space and resources for us all, or we can go get the resources we need from asteroids and radiation proof orbital ring colonies. We can dream big.
Posted 01 April 2017 - 06:34 PM
I've discussed the financial figures elsewhere on the site. But yes, $5,000 absolutely does pay for the initial investment if you get people signed up in advanced. It is likely however that you'll have to get commitments or investments to get it built in time for the first patients though. So you'd have to get enough young people to pay in advance for it or enough old people to buy it for enough young people and get the currently expensive iteration for themselves. It's really just a matter of marketing the idea to those who are insured for cryonics as I'm sure they could contribute to the project to some degree as I plan to. This most certainly CAN be done with the right business plan and the right people getting involved IF you can get around 100,000 people signed up. If we assume that there are 1,500 people signed up for cryonics and paying with insurance and they agree to leave cryonics to 30 people each in their wills at a cost of $5,000, then we'd raise about 45% of the necessary capital from existing cryopatients assuming they have enough insurance to do so already and the beneficiaries they select are young enough. But give them all cards or something that is a statement of their cryopreservation and they'll sell it to their friends.
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