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jimrandomh comments on The cost of universal cryonics - Less Wrong
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Overall, I think you've overestimated the cost of society-scale cryopreservation by at least a factor of 2, for a couple reasons.
You're multiplying by the number of deaths worldwide, but using United States prices. If cryonics were adopted in poorer countries, their per-person costs would be much lower, in dollar terms.
Also, if cryonics really were universal, to the extent that every major hospital had a cryonics ward, then in most cases there's no reason for transportation to have any incremental cost at all; transportation to the hospital was already required for the attempted life-saving treatment. While occasional out-of-hospital deaths will require transportation to a cryonics center, these will be much less expensive than ambulances because they do not require as rapid a response time as cardiac events do, nor as well trained a crew.
I'm not sure how you come up with only a 50% discount in equipment cost, given that we're talking about a switch from non-mass-produced to mass-produced equipment. Liquid nitrogen can't get much cheaper, but that's because it's already produced at large scale for other applications; the expensive parts are currently expensive because they're custom.
Quoting the Alcor article from my post:
This suggests to me that, at least with current techniques, response time is actually quite important. While about 50% of the population dies already in a hospital, and another chunk has 911 called only to be pronounced dead, there is also a sizable portion of the population which dies quietly at home. It is that last category which would still require a fair amount of expense.
If there's new developments that allow cryonic suspension to start hours or even days after death without issue, then transportation expenses can probably be eliminated. At that point you can probably also discount labor another 50%, since you wouldn't need to ensure 24/7 staffing, and a backlog wouldn't be a horrific situation. However, until that development occurs, transportation seems to actually be one of the most critical and expensive issues facing modern cryonics. Both Alcor and CI charge rather heavily for that transportation / standby service.