The most important reason that cryonics wants to be big is because if people thought that they were going to be alive in the future, then they would work hard to prevent the future from going wrong. They would also work hard to prevent cryonics from going wrong, and it would be made illegal for cryopatients to be thawed, eliminating a huge risk in the success of cryonics.
Developed societies in the 21st Century have started to break down in certain ways because we live in "the long run" discounted by people who made bad decisions for us when they ran things decades ago. I've seen this happen in cryonics organizations, even though, as Roko speculates, you'd expect that the members who have a stake in cryonics' success would insist on better performance.
For me, the deciding factor is cost. I would be willing to sign up for cryonics at 1/3 the current cost. However, this is unlikely, since I had to negotiate to get the smaller amount of life insurance I actually needed -- my cost would currently be about $15/month life insurance and $10/month CI fee. No matter how much we cut the cost of cryonics, my life insurance refuses to charge less. One solution is a cryonics group willing to take care of the life insurance themselves -- go under $100,000 -- then this would help cut the bottleneck cost.
Oh, also I'll commit to signing up for cryonics when it drops below $10/month. And perhaps before, since there's a good chance cryonics prices slowly drop or a singularity occurs before I'm 40.
Given the large storage mass involved, preventing temperature fluctuations without being at the exact boiling temperature of LN2 is feasible; it could be both highly failsafe and use the ideal cryonics temperature of -135C rather than the -196C that LN2 boiloff as a temperature regulation mechanism requires. Feel free to raise further issues in the comments.
Wow, that's incredibly attractive - it would completely eliminate cracking as we pass through the glass transition temperature. I take it that would also reduce LN2 costs by a further 30% or so?
Does anyone have some actual numbers on what fraction of the expenses of existing cryonics companies are spent on cooling? That should give an indication on how much can be saved by scaling up.
In fact, we can be mathematically precise about this. Consider the equation for heat conduction (Q watts) through a spherical shell, where T and t are the outside and inside temperatures, R is the outer radius, r is the inner radius:
Q = 4 x k x pi x R x r x (T-t)/(R-r)
For R > 2r, this equation says that the power getting from the outside to the inside scales only linearly in the overall size of the system (and further increases in R/r make no more difference). But the volume of cryogen stored in the inside sphere scales as the size cubed. This means that the boiloff time scales inverse-quadratically in system size, which in turn means that you could construct a sufficiently large system that it wouldn't need topping up for a century or so (sufficiently large being a mere r=15m or 3000 tons of liquid nitrogen, and a cost of $50M or so). Such a system would virtually eliminate the risk that the patient is killed because the cryo company goes bust, because it would have zero maintenance cost, and would be like a "cryonics grave".
Roko... you must have been dealing with small scale cryonics. I am an engineer in the LNG industry, and we routinely design cryogenic storage tanks up to 200,000 m3 in volume. Vacuum is never used on this scale, in fact we use pearlite powder insulation and wood blocks to support the inner liner, and glass or polyurethane foam to insulate the shell. The PU foam is cheap and can be more or less as thick as you wish. Heat loss for LNG tanks is around 5 watts/sqm, for large tanks this represents a boil-off of around 1/50th of 1% per day. I'm sure this can be lowered. $100 million will buy a 140,000 m3 tank. If you want one, let me know :)
(AFAIK, powder is also used in vacuum flasks instead of multiple layers).
Early adopters are (relatively) crazy and have to put up with ridicule from their friends because it's not cool yet. That's just how it goes. The trouble is that cryonics has stayed in the early adopter phase for 40 years.
Suddenly I have the mental image of a t-shirt reading "I was into cryonics before it was cool."
Things like this are 90% self-confidence and 10% innate weirdness. Talk about it like it's obvious, normal, and you're part of a community of smart people out there, and they'll pick up on the cues.
I know saying that won't help a lot of people, but it's what I do. When I introduce cryonics to someone, I don't sound nervous and timid and censure-expecting, I take off my necklace and say "This is my contract of immortality with the cult of the severed head."
I have found that anything is socially acceptable so long as you effectively signal that your non-conformity is a choice, not a result of an inability to conform or a way of coping with fear of rejection. Weird is NEVER OK with successful people. Deliberately different is ALWAYS OK so long as you are willing to not draw attention to it all the time.
Example. Vibrams with a suit are generally the best attire for most formal situations in my experience. You show that you are able and willing to conform, not psychologically unable to do so, but you also show that you aren't afraid of the penalties for not conforming and that you will stand up for some principles some of the time. That's attractive. The devil classically does it, in myths where he can/will take any form and disguise himself perfectly except for retaining cloven hooves, a tail and/or some similar indication of his identity.
Incorrect demanding further proof for an idea with as many single points of failure as cryonics is logical and sensible. The ability to make a rational decision means you need sufficient evidence of a sufficient quality to make you conclusions. Eliminate some more single points of failure from cryonics then maybe. Its like thinking you can solve a math problem with ten variables where you only have information and relations for two.
This paragraph seems very confused. You have made a decision, have you not? You have decided not to be cryopreserved. And you've made it with no more information than we have. The fact that your decision consists of deciding upon inaction, doesn't make it not a decision. Whether you choose to be cryopreserved or not, you have to choose one way or the other, albeit not necessarily explicitly. You are simultaneously claiming that a rational decision is impossible while arguing for your decision! It's not clear to me how that can be considered consistent. One of these choices is the "default" one, to be sure, but that's just a result of current circumstances; it's not inherent in the problem.
Furthermore you seem to be insisting that it ...
Gosh I have no life here I am throwing more pearls before swine.
We are clearly not worth your time. Please give up on us.
Looking at:
http://www.secularhumanism.org/fi/dealing-with-dying/hoffman.jpg
...it shows lots of small freezers on wheels - and not one big one.
So, perhaps there are factors involved which have not been considered in this analysis. It would seem that the benefits of large size run into diminishing returns, and the costs rise faster. It is the same reason why there are no surviving land animals bigger than an elephant.
I already stated that I disregarded the last link for lack of evidence that the source is trustworthy (published papers and the like).
I don't see where you said that. And even given that, I find that response to be deeply confusing. We are talking about this post http://lesswrong.com/lw/1rv/demands_for_particular_proof_appendices/) yes? That post has nothing to do with specific claims of evidence. It is a self-contained argument about what sorts of arguments are or are not valid when discussing cryonics, or for that matter, when discussing any future ...
Incorrect demanding further proof for an idea with as many single points of failure as cryonics is logical and sensible. The ability to make a rational decision means you need sufficient evidence of a sufficient quality to make you conclusions. Eliminate some more single points of failure from cryonics then maybe.
You seem to be confusing matters. It might help to reread the essay about the particular proof demand. No one is arguing that more evidence wouldn't be a very good thing. I have my own list of things that I'd like to see. No one is arguing that...
Actually to be fair cryonics has to many single points of failure yet to be avoided to make deciding about it any thing more then a total crapshoot.
Are you stating a preference for allocating resources towards finding out whether it will work or not?
I can respect that. Let's make a deal. When you can get science to prove cryonics is not going to work, I will give up my intention to be cryopreserved.
As a side note, what if you knew the exact odds of it working, and it was say 1 in a million. Assuming that your life is worth 5 million dollars, would you put $5 towards cryonics?
Ok, this is the point where I decide to be mildly obnoxious and use Sam's work as an indication that humans have many more cognitive biases and fallacies than even people at LW realize. In particular, the above post displays a large amount of artificial classification in trying to claim that specific scale issues somehow become differences in kind. This seems very similar to (for example) creationists who claim to accept microevolution but not macroevolution. Moreover, the presence of these problems does not leave in some cases even after prolonged exposur...
Yes. I think LW's problems as an introduction to rationality go far beyond this. The Sequences are a great introduction to rationality if you were in to them from early on and could take part in the discussions they generated, but as a sequence of cold blog posts they're a large, disconnected and forbidding introduction, and in any case there's no easy way to read them in order. LW in general doesn't come across as a website with a mission of improving rationality so much as a community with curious shared interests like deciding how many boxes to take and getting our heads frozen.
The reply link isn't there for the post where you laid out your point of view.
I can understand thinking that cryonics is unlikely to work and therefore thinking that it's not worth doing. What I can't figure out is why you're so angry about it.
Using a large unit for cryonics does have some complications. One would need to be able to be able to add people in at different times without disrupting the temperature. And when we eventually start taking people out they'll need to be able to remove the the then repairable ones without disruption to the more injured/sick. I suspect that neither of these will be a large technical hassle. Maybe someone who knows more about low temp engineering can comment if that's correct.
Cryonics wants to be small, or why should the future want you?
All this technical discussion misses what I see as the major problem of cryonics if it works as advertised - why should the future want us?
Imagine if today were discovered few frozen Homo habilis and had technology to revive them. After, they would spend their lives in comfortable zoo that is paradise by ape men standards ( plentiful food! no dangerous beasts! warm shelter!)
Now try the same scenario, but with few millions of our frozen ancestors. The results will be same - at best, few dozens wo...
Sam,
The nanotech required is so far outside of current science that trying to predict what it can do is a hard problem at best
I wanted to pick on this in particular, because you seem to be saying "there's no overwhelming evidence either way, so I can believe whatever I want". But really, advanced molecular nanotechnology does have evidence in favor of its eventual achievement:
For example, progress in self-assembly with DNA nanotechnology (http://www.physorg.com/news9322.html), primitive nanomachines that locomote (http://www.nature.com/nnano...
to many single points of failure = a crapshoot when trying to be rational about something
Actually, it's pretty simple. Take each point of failure and rate its probability of actually happening. Then multiply all those chances. Say you stack three 99% chances of failure. That's a one in a million chance. If your life (in terms of willingness to pay) is $5M, it is rational to pay $5.
On thing that strikes me: has anyone told you about information theoretic death vs. legal death?
The idea of somebody being information-theoretically alive is simply that if their brain is in a state such that you could read it with some kind of advanced technology (e.g. advanced nanotech) and logically infer what their brain used to be like before they died, which would then allow you to repair the brain atom-by-atom.
The difference between information theoretic death and what we would call medical or legal death is that legal death changes over time as technology gets better.
Information theoretic death is what cryonicists care about.
I really think people shouldn't downvote SamAdams to -7. This is a reasonable comment from somebody who hasn't read the sequences.
In large enough quantities, it is conceivable that indefinite storage costs would be as low as $50 per person, or 50 cents per year.
Could you provide a cite for this? Thanks!
Is it established that molecular nanotech is required? Uploading might be possible with scanning technology of sufficient speed and accuracy, for example. Just because someone three hundred years ago might have suggested that flapping wings was necessary to flight doesn't mean that the technology that eventually succeeds need use them.
Sorry. Er, that post had a formatting error that was making most of the post not appear (I don't fully understand how to do html links. Sometimes they garble stuff up and make sections not visible). The full post is now actually visible. If someone else had wrote was visible there I'd have probably downvoted it to if I could.
I don't think we should go into details on this. It's creepy enough that lifesaving stasis now involves having your head cut off. I don't think it will reassure people to learn that the ideal it to then drop it into a giant jar of heads. i know it would be a giant frost metal ball, but in my mind's eye it's transparent and the heads are shrunken.
Cryonics scales very well. People who argue from the perspective that cryonics is costly are probably not aware of this fact. Even assuming you needed to come up with the lump sum all at once rather than steadily pay into life insurance, the fact is that most people would be able to afford it if most people wanted it. There are some basic physical reasons why this is the case.
So long as you keep the shape constant, for any given container the surface area is based on a square law while the volume is calculated as a cube law. For example with a simple cube shaped object, one side squared times 6 is the surface area; one side cubed is the volume. Spheres, domes, and cylinders are just more efficient variants on this theme. For any constant shape, if volume is multiplied by 1000, surface area only goes up by 100 times.
Surface area is where heat gains entry. Thus if you have a huge container holding cryogenic goods (humans in this case) it costs less per unit volume (human) than is the case with a smaller container that is equally well insulated. A way to understand why this works is to realize that you only have to insulate and cool the outside edge -- the inside does not collect any new heat. In short, by multiplying by a thousand patients, you can have a tenth of the thermal transfer to overcome per patient with no change in r-value.
But you aren't limited to using equal thickness of insulation. You can use thicker insulation, but get a much smaller proportional effect on total surface area when you use bigger container volumes. Imagine the difference between a marble sized freezer and a house-sized freezer. What happens when you add an extra foot of insulation to the surface of each? Surface area is impacted much as diameter is -- i.e. more significantly in the case of the smaller freezer than the larger one. The outer edge of the insulation is where it begins collecting heat. With a truly gigantic freezer, you could add an entire meter (or more) of insulation without it having a significant proportional impact on surface area, compared to how much surface area it already has. (This is one reason cheaper materials can be used to construct large tanks -- they can be applied in thicker layers.)
Another factor to take into account is that liquid nitrogen, the super-cheap coolant used by cryonics facilities around the world, is vastly cheaper (more than a factor of 10) when purchased in huge quantities of several tons. The scaling factors for storage tanks and high-capacity tanker trucks are a big part of the reason for this. CI has used bulk purchasing as a mechanism for getting their prices down to $100 per patient per year for their newer tanks. They are actually storing 3,000 gallons of the stuff and using it slowly over time, which implies there is a boiloff rate associated with the 3,000 gallon tank in addition to the tanks.
The conclusion I get from this is that there is a very strong self-interested case (as well as the altruistic case) to be made for the promotion of megascale cryonics towards the mainstream, as opposed to small independently run units for a few of us die-hard futurists. People who say they won't sign up for cost reasons may actually (if they are sincere) be reachable at a later date. To deal with such people's objections and make sure they remain reachable, it might be smart to get them to agree with some particular hypothetical price point at which they would feel it is justified. In large enough quantities, it is conceivable that indefinite storage costs would be as low as $50 per person, or 50 cents per year.
That is much cheaper than saving a life any other way. Of course there's still the risk that it might not work. However, given a sufficient chance of it working it could still be morally superior to other life saving strategies that cost more money. It also has inherent ecological advantages over other forms of life-saving in that it temporarily reduces the active population, giving the environment a chance to recover and green tech more time to take hold so that they can be supported sustainably and comfortably. And we might consider the advent of life-health extension in the future to be a reason to think it a qualitatively better form of life-saving.
Note: This article only looks directly at cooling energy costs; construction and ongoing maintenance do not necessarily scale as dramatically. The same goes for stabilization (which I view as a separate though indispensable enterprise). Both of these do have obvious scaling factors however. Other issues to consider are defense and reliability. Given the large storage mass involved, preventing temperature fluctuations without being at the exact boiling temperature of LN2 is feasible; it could be both highly failsafe and use the ideal cryonics temperature of -135C rather than the -196C that LN2 boiloff as a temperature regulation mechanism requires. Feel free to raise further issues in the comments.
