Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Timeless Identity - Less Wrong

23 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 03 June 2008 08:16AM

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Comment author: handoflixue 25 May 2011 12:31:47AM 0 points [-]

"If cryonics were widely seen in the same terms as any other medical procedure, economies of scale would considerably diminish the cost"

To what degree are these economies of scale assumed? Is it really viable, both practically and financially, to cryogenically preserve 150,000 people a day?

Is there any particular reason to suspect that investing this sort of funding in to cryonics research is the best social policy? What about other efforts to "cure death" by keeping people from dying in the first place (for instance, those technologies that would be the necessary foundations for restoring people from cryonics in the first place)?

I see cryonics hyped a lot here, and in rationalist / transhuman communities at large, and it seems like an "applause light", a social signal of "I'm rationalist; see, I even have the Mandatory Transhumanist Cryogenics Policy!"

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 25 May 2011 01:46:35AM 10 points [-]

Liquid nitrogen is cheap, and heat loss scales as the 2/3 power of volume. Cryonically preserving 150,000 people per day would, I fully expect, be vastly cheaper than anything else we could do to combat death.