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SodaPopinski comments on Open thread, Dec. 1 - Dec. 7, 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Elon Musk often advocates looking at problems from a first principles calculation rather than by analogy. My question is what does this kind of thinking imply for cryonics. Currently, the cost of full body preservation is around 80k. What could be done in principle with scale?
Ralph Merkle put out a plan (although lacking in details) for cryopreservation at around 4k. This doesn't seem to account for paying the staff or transportation. The basic idea is that one can reduce the marginal cost by preserving a huge number of people in one vat. There is some discussion of this going on at Longecity, but the details are still lacking.
I've seen extremely low plastination estimates due to the lack of maintenance costs. Very speculative obviously,, and the main component of cost is still the procedure itself (though there are apparently some savings here as well.)
Currently the main cost in cryonics is getting you frozen, not keeping you frozen. For example, Alcor gives these costs for neuropreservation:
The CMS fund is what covers the Alcor team being ready to stabilize you as soon as you die, and transporting you to their facility. Then your cryopreservation fee covers filling you with cryoprotectants and slowly cooling you. Then the PCT covers your long term care. So 69% of your money goes to getting you frozen, and 31% goes to keeping you like that.
(Additionally I don't think it's likely that current freezing procedures are sufficient to preserve what makes you be you, and that better procedures would be more expensive, once we knew what they were.)
EDIT: To be fair, CMS would be much cheaper if it were something every hospital offered, because you're not paying for people to be on deathbed standby.
So, for how long will that $25K keep you frozen? Any estimates?
I believe the intention is "unlimitedly long", which is reasonable if (1) we're happy to assume something roughly resembling historical performance of investments and (2) the ongoing cost per cryopreservee is on the order of $600/year.
The question is whether the cryofund can tolerate the volatility.
Aha, that's the number I was looking for, thank you.
Note that it's just a guess on my part (on the basis that a conservative estimate is that if you have capital X then you can take 2.5% of it out every year and be pretty damn confident that in the long run you won't run out barring worldshaking financial upheavals). I have no idea what calculations Alcor, CI, etc., may have done; they may be more optimistic or more pessimistic than me. And I haven't made any attempt at estimating the actual cost of keeping cryopreservees suitably chilled.
Didn't you say it's on the order of $600/year?
It sounds as if I wasn't clear, so let me be more explicit.
(Why 2.5%? Because I've heard figures more like 3-4% bandied around in a personal-finance context, and I reckon an institution like Alcor should be extra-cautious. A really conservative figure would of course be zero.)
Ah, I see. I think I misread how the parentheses nest in your post :-)
So you have no information on the actual maintenance cost of cryopreservation and are just working backwards from what Alcor charges.
I'm having doubts about this number, but that's not a finance thread. And anyway, in this context what matters is not reality, but Alcor's estimates.
That's debatable -- inflation can decimate your wealth easily enough. Currently inflation-adjusted Treasury bonds (TIPS) trade at negative yields.
Correct.
I did try to make it as clear as I could that I do too...
Well, I defined it as the maximum amount you can take out without running out of money. I agree that if instead you define it as the maximum net outflow that (with some probability close to 1) leaves your fortune increasing rather than decreasing in both long and short terms, it could be negative in times of economic stagnation.
No, ve said that "unlimitedly long" is reasonable if that's the cost. Ve didn't say that that was the cost.