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CronoDAS comments on This Didn't Have To Happen - Less Wrong
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The Cryonics Institute does whole-body preservation for $28,000. (I looked it up.)
That is cheaper than I expected. Surprisingly cheap - storage costs must be pretty low if that covers initial preservation and enough funds for the investment return to cover storage in perpetuity.
Liquid nitrogen is not very expensive.
Still, that money presumably has to fund storage costs in perpetuity. Assuming some of the money goes to up-front freezing costs, say you have $25,000 in 20 year TIPS yielding a fairly risk free inflation indexed 2.5%, you've got $625 a year to cover storage. That barely pays for a small self-storage unit around here. It's almost suspiciously cheap.
Liquid nitrogen is on the order of $80 - which is either the cost per month per cryostat or the cost per customer per year, I don't recall which. The Cryonics Institute owns its own building, and you can keep more than one body in a single cryostat (big cylinder of liquid nitrogen).
The annual fixed costs of cryonics are practically nothing. The costs would decline even further with economies of scale and the scale to invest in better technology. Immortality for everyone in the United States would be a rounding error in the stimulus bill.
For everyone? Well, there'd also be the cost of building the facilities... Anyways, maybe we really should try to push something like that? (Yeah yeah, I know, unlikely.)
Anyways, did you get the PM I sent? (About talking me through some of the specifics of actually signing up?)
I emailed The Cryonics Institute this morning with my details based on this application form - http://www.cryonics.org/LifeMem.html.
I got a reply almost immediately.
Then I sent $1,250 to CIHQ@aol.com via paypal.
And I'm signed up.
I also have to send a copy of the signed app form by post. I'm lucky enough to have saved up the $28,000 needed for the cryopreservation, but I reckon it's not too expensive to get a life insurance policy for the amount.
I have cheated on this decision by writing down the bottomline without figuring out an answer for myself. But if I had to give one reason to justify it, it's simple:
I want to live.
The arguments against cryonics in the comments here have any ground only in a world accustomed to disposable human life. Now I have a chance to wake up in a world which is not so.
Cool! (well, very cold, I guess... :)) and thanks.
I think I'll probably be doing the "link an insurance policy to it" thing instead, though.
I think I want to sign up as a neuro... but I think CI doesn't do those, only Alcor... Now the thing I'm trying to figure out is this: Are the Alcor membership fees the same for both whole body members and neuro members? Because, if so, it would seem that costs push me more toward CI. (seems silly that a full body suspension would be less expensive, but...)
Congratulations. See you 'round - eventually!
Thanks Eliezer.
I am imagining waking up to see you on a plasma screen with a long white beard saying "Welcome. Didn't I tell you I'll see you 'round - eventually? Now look here, meet Bruce the Friendly AI".
Sorry that is pretty bad but I couldn't resist...
PM? Nope, I'm not sure how to check PMs here. (Can you please ask someone else, though? Almost anyone else in the world would probably be better...)
The button isn't there explicitly (There probably should be, but http://lesswrong.com/message/inbox/ should get you to your inbox)
And okay. The message explains why I was asking you in specific. Hopefully, given the context, there should be others I could ask instead. Well, thanks anyways.)
But yeah, I'm basically at a "okay. I want to sign up. I seem to be able to afford to. Now I just need to actually work out the steps to do so (including all the specific legal details I need to take care of to make it all work), decide on CI vs Alcor, etc..." stage.
And technically "almost anyone else in the world" is very unlikely. I mean, "the space of people that have actually signed up or are otherwise familiar with the specific details of doing so" is rather smaller, no? :)
But okay. Well, I may as well see if anyone else who sees this message and has already signed up would be available to talk me through some of that.
Try Rudi Hoffman, who sells cryonics-friendly life insurance policies and can talk you through other aspects as well. He handled mine.
Okay, will check into that, thanks!
Cost of facilities per person should go down significantly as the number of people gets large, right?
Also, don't bother with whole-body preservation. It's useless, because regrowing a body is the least of revival problems, and it's harmful, because your brain spends longer warm while the whole useless hunk of meat attached to it is cooling down. Plus it costs more.
I'd feel more comfortable with that if we knew more about the extent to which the glial cells around the heart -- not to mention the remainder of the nervous system -- play a role in learning, decisionmaking, emotion etc. I'd hate to lose any non-recoverable data from those systems and have to recreate it, e.g. learning to walk again or being missing emotional reactions, or who knows what else. I think I'd want to keep the "useless hunk of meat" around, just in case, even if it had to be separated from the head for better cooling.
If they did play such an important role in human thought, wouldn't you expect there to be case studies of people who become psychologically impaired after heart surgery (in particular, the installation of an artificial heart)?
CI only offers full-body, but it's cheaper than Alcor's neuro option.