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.
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 one can't say "I want more evidence" or "A,B and C would convince me that this was worthwhile." What is a problem is when one your claims is "I want a demonstration of complete revival." And the problem with that is simple: no one is claiming that we are able to do that now or that we are anywhere near that capability. This would be as if we were discussing the possibility of eventually sending a very slow probe to Alpha Centauri fifty or a hundred years from now and one insisted that the only thing that mattered is whether you could see a working probe now. See the problem? One is making a demand for something which even if everything the tech proponent says is correct, they shouldn't be able to produce.
Ok. So what are the single points of failure you want eliminated? Why don't you give a list of what you think the single points of failure are and then we can discuss whether those points are as severe as you think they are.
Moving on, you discuss the work with rat hippocampal material, you say:
I'm not sure what you mean by the second sentence. The first sentence is interesting because we know that neural processes can be restarted. For example, rats and dogs can be deprived of oxygen and brought to hypothermic temperatures so that brain activity is close to zero and then brought back up with minimal problems. Neural structure is pretty robust. To use what may be a weak analogy, it functions much more like a CPU than like RAM. This is well understood.
The length of time of preservation is not very relevant. We know that at liquid nitrogen temperatures the vast majority of chemical reactions become negligible. So the "100 year old" part isn't relevant. I also don't think that anyone is claiming that these successful studies with rabbits imply that cryonics will work. To be very explicitly Bayesian P(cryonics working|rabbit kidneys can successfully be vitrified and revived with negligible damage) is greater than P(cryonics working).
It seems like you are personalizing this conversation unnecessarily. This does not help having an actual discussion where we each learn interesting things and come away with something useful. It is likely a major reason that you are getting voted down.
I have to wonder given your personal attacks above, and your apparent return to using the phrase "corpse popsicle" when even the simple "corpse" would get your point across, what are you attempting to accomplish? Are you trying to understand why some people here consider cryonics plausible or worth looking into? Are you trying to convince the individuals you are talking to that they shouldn't engage in cryonics? Are you trying to convince people who are not posting but might read that they shouldn't engage in cryonics? Are you trying to have an open exchange of ideas and information? It doesn't seem like your strategy would succeed at any of those things. So what is your goal?