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Sebastian_Hagen comments on A proposal for a cryogenic grave for cryonics - Less Wrong
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Why? Several baskets certainly make sense if you're trying to maximize the probability that at least a few patients survive, and might make sense if you assign significantly negative utility to higher variance in your probability distribution about survival percentage. If you just care about the mean, why would more baskets be better?
It seems to me that, for someone to conceive of their actions as "specifically killing Jack", they have to believe that cryogenics works. If they don't, they're not killing Jack, they're just vandalising his grave, and he was clearly a weirdo. This doesn't necessarily invalidate your points; I'm just saying that you should be careful not to project your own beliefs onto future opposers-of-cryogenics, or you will defend against the wrong attitudes.
I think you're Rokomorphizing an awful lot. You just need to be in a state of mind where smashing a cyro container seems cool, something that can score points with your friends, and where you think you can get away with it.
And in particular, where smashing cryonics facilities will infuriate the people who care about them, even if you don't believe cryonics will work.
I don't have a feeling for whether anti-cryonicism will ever get to that point. My feeling is that the sort of vandalism I'm talking about is extremely impulsive, and just not having cryonic storage near where people live is enough to greatly improve the odds that there won't be random vandalism.
Also guns. People with guns.
You probably mean security guards. Note that decent security is going to add something to the cost of cryonics.
However, this gets to the scarier possibility-- government policies opposed to cryonics. Any ideas about the odds of that happening?
Absolutely, and this conversation has prompted me to consider how best to handle such factors to ensure my head has the maximum chance of survival.
Now that is really scary. Also beyond my ability to create a reliable estimate. I wonder which country is the least likely to have such political problems? Like, the equivalent of the old style swiss banks but for heads.
It's hard to predict that far ahead, though Scandinavia is looking attractive-- the people there don't have a history of atrocious behavior, and there's cold climate available.
The nightmare scenario is a hostile world government, or similar effect of powerful governments-- think about the US exporting the war on drugs.
I hate saying this, but the only protective strategies I can see are aimed at general increase of power-- make money, develop political competence (this can be a community thing, it doesn't mean everyone has to get into politics) and learn how to be convincing to normal people.
This has happened at least once in British Columbia. See this article. As far as I am aware this is at present the only location which specifically singles out cryonics although there are other areas where the regulations for body disposal inadvertently prevent the use of cryonics.
This kind of stuff makes me boil with anger. Some bureacrat busybody inserts garbage about irradiation into a law at the last second, and there's nothing we can do to get it out? Is there some kind of international law against defamation? Because that is exactly what this is. And the stuff they prattle on about it taking advantage of patients in a vulnerable state is total nonsense. What they're doing -- pressuring patients into not cryopreserving -- is taking advantage, and in a particularly grotesque and unconscionable manner.
Ironically, if I were to send them a letter or call them about this stupid law they'd take it as me being a foreign busybody. This is stupid. They're the ones harming BC's global reputation by keeping such idiotic laws on the books.
/rant
According to Mike Darwin one cryonics facility (don't remember which, sorry) has already been shot at from the street.
For being a cryonics facility? Is there enough evidence to determine if it could've been just a random drive-by?
I'm afraid all I know about it is a brief remark from Mike Darwin somewhere in this sequence of videos:
http://www.youtube.com/user/KoanPhilosopher#grid/user/B6A98520CF2F56AC
Putting a big gravestone on top would be a good idea. If the cryo organization fails, it's too easy for all paper and digital records of the grave to be lost. In that scenario, a gravestone will make it more likely that the grave will be rediscovered before the liquid nitrogen boils away.
It'll still be safe from random vandals if it's underground in a remote location, and in the case of anti-cryonics fanatic vandals, there's nothing you can do to keep them from finding out where all the graves are.
Hello, people of the future! Please unfreeze us, and give us warm soup! We'll be very grateful! Thanks much.
Seriously, though, I wonder about the ability of future archeologists to dig through historical Internet information. At the moment, the only attempt to create a thorough historical archive of the Internet is the Wayback machine, and since (I estimate) that the growth of the Internet is accelerating faster than the cheapness of reliable long-term storage, they'll either have to get lots more funding or start being more selective about what they archive.
In terms of the ability to maintain information of interest to future archaeologists through a straight-up global disaster, the Internet isn't any better than paper. Maybe we need to start looking into cuneiform printers...
You could handle this by having each separate cryonic organization exchange data about locations of grave sites. The probability that they will all fail is much lower than any single one failing. Moreover, the most likely situations resulting in such large scale failure will be situations where the human economy is so damaged that replacing the liquid nitrogen will not be feasible.
What do you think about a honeycomb like structure that has individual cells for a single person, but is bundled together enough to get a lot of the insulation benefits of being big?
When you consider the pool of potential patients (over a given century) is in the billions, a few million per location does not necessarily constitute putting all your eggs in one basket. And the process of making it mainstream enough for this to happen could have a huge positive impact the sanity waterline.
With only a few dozen patients, I don't think you will see appreciable economies of scale. The whole idea seems to me reliant on at least a few thousand patients becoming available within a short period of time (or prepaying).
At r=2.9 meters, the size is about in the 10,000 neuro patient range. (V~=102m^3, patients per cubic meter is about 125). You might only fill it part way though if you are aiming for maximum duration, as the less cryogen is displaced the longer the system stays cold. Even so, this could probably hold every cryonicist currently in existence.
Still, filling it to 50% of its volume would only bring down refill time by 50%. And you only can fill to a certain percentage with patients as they are irregularly shaped. I suppose the real question is whether cost or hands-off reliability is the biggest concern.
Not graves!