Roko comments on A proposal for a cryogenic grave for cryonics - Less Wrong
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Good idea! A few refinements:
You probably don't want a literally spherical tank; it might roll away and hit something or bother someone. Trading a few % of efficiency for a flattened, ridged bottom might be a good idea.
If you're going to rely on social taboos against disturbing graves, you probably have to keep bodies/tank down to 30, if not an even lower number. A group of family and friends who are buried together in the same crypt are eccentric; a community of essentially unrelated people who are buried together in the same crypt are a cult, and lose a lot of the respect that they would otherwise get from mainstream culture.
Does having a grave with no human/infrastructural maintenance mean that you can't slap a generator on it somewhere? What would having a small solar panel or a petroleum mini-tank do for the chances of repairing minor cracks in the vacuum, or of reducing heat infiltration?
[grin] I wasn't sure if those were sci-fi or not.
Sure, for starters, but it's hard to say what will and won't be permafrost in 100 years, what with the non-trivial risk of catastrophic climate change and all. If the tank is built right, I think rolling, although unlikely, would still be one of the top 5 most likely failure modes; it is an easy enough flaw to fix.
Even municipal water towers, e.g., aren't perfect spheres, and nobody expects those to fall off their columns and plow through downtown Suburb Beach.
Far from being sci-fi, they are quite common (if we're talking about the same thing): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_generator#History Common enough that they're the main reason NASA has been targeted by green groups, even.
Cool!
I can verify that these places are accessible, and that the permafrost extends quite a bit farther south than one might expect. I used to live just south of the Yukon territory.
There are regular long-haul trucks that go up there all year round; if you go in winter, you can use an ice road to get to the very cold and remote places. Given the regular volume of traffic, I'd say the cost is not prohibitive. I can get precise figures if you'd like.
Hits on google for "coldest place on earth" seem unanimous that it's somewhere in Antarctica. Here's an interesting newspaper article:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/antarctica/6121866/Scientists-identify-coldest-place-on-earth.html
This sounds like it could be a lot of fun.
This place is much colder...
http://gcaptain.com/maritime/blog/wp-content/uploads/2007/07/inside-lng-tank.jpg
If you could only get permission to use it...