INTRODUCTION

I recently got sparked by both Eliezer's post on Cryonics(http://lesswrong.com/lw/qx/timeless_identity/) and lsparrish's post on the economies of scale(http://lesswrong.com/lw/2f5/cryonics_wants_to_be_big/) that go in to cryonics, to do some actual research. Unfortunately, while both authors are happy to assert that there are "economies of scale" at work, there doesn't seem to actually be any published research on the matter. If I happen to be wrong, and someone else has more accurate numbers, I'll be pleasantly surprised to see myself corrected :)

Alcor Costs as of 1990 (http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/CostOfCryonicsTables.txt) seems like a reasonably reliable source of information. I'll be using them primarily because they were the only institute I could find that actually provides a break-down of their costs. The accompany article(http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/CostOfCryonics.html) suggests that the labor rates and equipment markups are actually excessively optimistic, but it gives a simple cost of $18,908.76 for neurosuspension (not whole body). Maintenance costs are given as $66.08 annually, which would require a $6600 investment to yield suitable interest. Call it $25K total.

Now, figuring out how economies of scale will affect this is tricky. I'll go ahead and run two estimates, but they're both reasonably crude. I'm trying to be optimistic in my math, because my starting premise is "cryonics is not financially viable, even with economies of scale", and I don't want my numbers to favour my starting hypothesis. It's also worth noting that I am assuming that the major cryonics facilities are already taking advantage of some economies of scale: it is quite true that one can get a 90% discount on liquid nitrogen, if you start at the price that someone would pay for a liter for personal usage; it is far less likely that a business that already dropped it's prices from $0.50/L to $0.13/L [1] can still claim a 90% savings by sufficient economies of scale.

There was recently a proposal that we should create YouTube commercials for cryonics. This is an area where the cryonics community is sorely lacking fresh content, and which in my opinion has higher leverage per unit effort relative to other kinds of content, for making the kinds of cultural changes that need to be made for cryonics to gain acceptance.

One important strategy to beat procrastination, is to turn ideas into concrete action quickly rather than talking about them for too long. Another is to raise the amount of positive feedback a person expects to receive. Prizes have been used successfully in the past for the promotion of creative efforts with considerable success, and I have long thought that this would work for cryonics promotions as well. It's time for a simple empirical test.

To get things started, I am offering the nominal sum of 10 bitcoins¹ as a prize to whoever creates the the most "liked" promotional or educational video for cryonics on YouTube for the month of May, 2011. If anyone wishes to contribute to the prize and thus increase its size, send bitcoins here: <removed>

All funds sent to the above address will be transferred to the address of the person whose YouTube video promoting cryonics receives the most "likes" on YouTube during the month of May. Donors who let me know that they have donated will be given credit for donating below.

• Start date: May 1, 2011 at 12:00 AM GMT. Entry video cannot have been released on YouTube sooner than this.
• End date: June 1, 2011 at 12:00 AM GMT. This is when the votes (likes) will be tallied and the prize awarded.
• Video must promote cryonics and/or answer common questions about cryonics.
• Multiple submissions per person are allowed and encouraged, as are collaborations².
• Xtranormal videos, slide shows, stick figure cartoons, voice-overs, and anything else that can go in a YouTube video are acceptable.
• Winner must have or obtain a bitcoin address³, and must let us know what it is along with a link to their video (which must be posted to YouTube) in the comments section of this post.
• In the event that there are multiple videos with substantially similar numbers of likes (to within 1% of the top number) at midnight of June first, they will all be treated as co-winners and receive equal shares of the prize.

Anyone who wants to donate to non-winning entries that they liked is welcome to do so as well (the bitcoin address of each entry will be visible below).

Let the games begin!

1. These are a digital commodity that I thought would make a more fun and interesting prize than dollars, and seem to have a positive reputation on LW so far. It is also easy for me to keep track of. Market value was about $4 per bitcoin as of April 31.
2. One bitcoin address per video please. Teams are responsible for divvying up the prize money among members.
3. The simple way is to create an account on MyBitcoin. You can also install the Bitcoin client.

Current prize fund (to be updated): 14.75 BTC (103.29 USD @ 7.003)

Donors known so far:

• drethelin
• Pavitra

There will be a meetup for Southern California this Sunday, January 23, 2011 at 4PM and running for three to five hours.  The meetup is happening at Marco's Trattoria.  The address is:

8200 Santa Monica Blvd
West Hollywood, CA 90046

If all the people (including guests and high end group estimates) show up we'll be at the limit of the space with 24 attendees.  Previous meetups had room for walk-ins and future meetups should as well, but this one is full.  If you didn't RSVP in time for this one but want to get an email reminder when the February meetup is scheduled send me a PM with contact info.

A meetup in Southern California will occur on Sunday December 19, 2010.  The meetup will start around 3:30PM and run for at least 2 hours and possibly 4 or 5.  Anna Salamon and Yvain are very likely to be in attendance, as well as people from the last few meetups who may have projects to talk about, if are people are interested.  Bring guests if you like.  The location of the meetup will be...

...at the IHOP across from John Wayne Airport, about a mile from UC Irvine.

What are the plausible scientific limits of molecular nanotechnology?

Richard Jones, author of Soft Machines has written an interesting critique of the room-temperature molecular nanomachinery propounded by Drexler:

Rupturing The Nanotech Rapture

If biology can produce a sophisticated nanotechnology based on soft materials like proteins and lipids, singularitarian thinking goes, then how much more powerful our synthetic nanotechnology would be if we could use strong, stiff materials, like diamond. And if biology can produce working motors and assemblers using just the random selections of Darwinian evolution, how much more powerful the devices could be if they were rationally designed using all the insights we've learned from macroscopic engineering.

But that reasoning fails to take into account the physical environment in which cell biology takes place, which has nothing in common with the macroscopic world of bridges, engines, and transmissions. In the domain of the cell, water behaves like thick molasses, not the free-flowing liquid that we are familiar with. This is a world dominated by the fluctuations of constant Brownian motion, in which components are ceaselessly bombarded by fast-moving water molecules and flex and stretch randomly. The van der Waals force, which attracts molecules to one another, dominates, causing things in close proximity to stick together. Clingiest of all are protein molecules, whose stickiness underlies a number of undesirable phenomena, such as the rejection of medical implants. What's to protect a nanobot assailed by particles glomming onto its surface and clogging up its gears?

The watery nanoscale environment of cell biology seems so hostile to engineering that the fact that biology works at all is almost hard to believe. But biology does work--and very well at that. The lack of rigidity, excessive stickiness, and constant random motion may seem like huge obstacles to be worked around, but biology is aided by its own design principles, which have evolved over billions of years to exploit those characteristics. That brutal combination of strong surface forces and random Brownian motion in fact propels the self-assembly of sophisticated structures, such as the sculpting of intricately folded protein molecules. The cellular environment that at first seems annoying--filled with squishy objects and the chaotic banging around of particles--is essential in the operation of molecular motors, where a change in a protein molecule's shape provides the power stroke to convert chemical energy to mechanical energy.

In the end, rather than ratifying the ”hard” nanomachine paradigm, cellular biology casts doubt on it. But even if that mechanical-engineering approach were to work in the body, there are several issues that, in my view, have been seriously underestimated by its proponents.

...

Put all these complications together and what they suggest, to me, is that the range of environments in which rigid nanomachines could operate, if they operate at all, would be quite limited. If, for example, such devices can function only at low temperatures and in a vacuum, their impact and economic importance would be virtually nil.

The entire article is definitely worth a read. Jones advocates more attention to "soft" nanotech, which is nanomachinery with similar design principles to biology -- the biomimetic approach -- as the most plausible means of making progress in nanotech.

As far as near-term room-temperature innovations, he seems to make a compelling case. However the claim that "If ... such devices can function only at low temperatures and in a vacuum, their impact and economic importance would be virtually nil" strikes me as questionable. It seems to me that atomic-precision nanotech could be used to create hard vacuums and more perfectly reflective surfaces, and hence bring the costs of cryogenics down considerably. Desktop factories using these conditions could still be feasible.

Furthermore, it bears mentioning that cryonics patients could still benefit from molecular machinery subject to such limitations, even if the machinery is not functional at anything remotely close to human body temperature. The necessity of a complete cellular-level rebuild is not a good excuse not to cryopreserve. As long as this kind of rebuild technology is physically plausible, there arguably remains an ethical imperative to cryopreserve patients facing the imminent prospect of decay.

In fact, this proposed limitation could hint at an alternative use for cryosuspension that is entirely separate from its present role as an ambulance to the future. It could perhaps turn out that there are forms of cellular surgery and repair which are only feasible at those temperatures, which are nonetheless necessary to combat aging and its complications. The people of the future might actually need to undergo routine periods of cryogenic nanosurgery in order to achieve robust rejuvenation. This would be a more pleasant prospect than cryonics in that it would be a proven technology at that point; and most likely the vitrification process could be improved sufficiently via soft nanotech to reduce the damage from cooling itself significantly.

There have been many previous discussions here on cryonics and why it is perceived as threatening or otherwise disagreeable. Even among LWers who are not signed up and don’t plan to, I’d say there’s a good degree of consensus that cryonics is reviled and ridiculed to a very unjustified degree. I had a thought about one possible factor contributing to its unsavory public image that I haven’t seen brought up in previous discussions:

COLD is EVIL.

Well, no, cold isn’t evil, but “COLD is EVIL/THREATENING/DANGEROUS/HARSH/LONELY/UNLOVING/SAD/DEAD” seems to be a pretty common set of conceptual metaphors. You see it in figures of speech like “cold-hearted,” “in cold blood,” “cold expression,” “icy stare,” “chilling,” “went cold,” “cold calculation,” “the cold shoulder,” “cold feet,” “stone cold,” “out cold.” (Naturally, it’s also the case that WARM is GOOD/COMFORTING/SAFE/SOCIAL/LOVING/HAPPY/ALIVE, though COOL and HOT sort of go in their own directions.) Associating something with coldness just makes it seem more threatening and less benevolent. And besides, being that “COLD is DEAD,” it’s pretty hard to imagine someone as not really dead if they’re in a container of liquid nitrogen at -135ºC. (Even harder if it’s just their head in there… but that’s a separate issue.) There is already a little bit of research on the effects of some of the conceptual metaphors of coldness and the way its emotional content leaks onto metaphorically associated concepts (“Cold and lonely: does social exclusion literally feel cold?”; “Experiencing physical warmth promotes interpersonal warmth.”; any others?).

Within the immortalist community, cryonics is the most pessimistic possible position. Consider the following superoptimistic alternative scenarios:

1. Uploading will be possible before I die.
2. Aging will be cured before I die.
3. They will be able to reanimate a whole mouse before I die, then I'll sign up.
4. I could get frozen in a freezer when I die, and they will eventually figure out how to reanimate me.
5. I could pickle my brain when I die, and they will eventually figure out how to reanimate me.
6. Friendly AI will cure aging and/or let me be uploaded before I die.

Cryonics -- perfusion and vitrification at LN2 temperatures under the best conditions possible -- is by far less optimistic than any of these. Of all the possible scenarios where you end up immortal, cryonics is the least optimistic. Cryonics can work even if there is no singularity or reversal tech for thousands of years into the future. It can work under the conditions of the slowest technological growth imaginable. All it assumes is that the organization (or its descendants) can survive long enough, technology doesn't go backwards (on average), and that cryopreservation of a technically sufficient nature can predate reanimation tech.

It doesn't even require the assumption that today's best possible vitrifications are good enough. See, it's entirely plausible that it's 100 years from now when they start being good enough, and 500 years later when they figure out how to reverse them. Perhaps today's population is doomed because of this. We don't know. But the fact that we don't know what exact point is good enough is sufficient to make this a worthwhile endeavor at as early of a point as possible. It doesn't require optimism -- it simply requires deliberate, rational action. The fact is that we are late for the party. In retrospect, we should have started preserving brains hundreds of years ago. Benjamin Franklin should have gone ahead and had himself immersed in alcohol.

There's a difference between having a fear and being immobilized by it. If you have a fear that cryonics won't work -- good for you! That's a perfectly rational fear. But if that fear immobilizes you and discourages you from taking action, you've lost the game. Worse than lost, you never played.

This is something of a response to Charles Platt's recent article on Cryoptimism: Part 1 Part 2

Cryonics fills many with disgust, a cognitively dangerous emotion.  To test whether a few of your possible cryonics objections are reason or disgust based, I list six non-cryonics questions.  Answering yes to any one question indicates that rationally you shouldn’t have the corresponding cryonics objections. 

1.  You have a disease and will soon die unless you get an operation.  With the operation you have a non-trivial but far from certain chance of living a long, healthy life.  By some crazy coincidence the operation costs exactly as much as cryonics does and the only hospitals capable of performing the operation are next to cryonics facilities.  Do you get the operation?

Answering yes to (1) means you shouldn’t object to cryonics because of costs or logistics.

2.  You have the same disease as in (1), but now the operation costs far more than you could ever obtain.  Fortunately, you have exactly the right qualifications NASA is looking for in a space ship commander.  NASA will pay for the operation if in return you captain the ship should you survive the operation.  The ship will travel close to the speed of light.  The trip will subjectively take you a year, but when you return one hundred years will have passed on Earth.  Do you get the operation?

Answering yes to (2) means you shouldn't object to cryonics because of the possibility of waking up in the far future.

Consciousness is a difficult question because it is poorly defined and is the subjective experience of the entity experiencing it. Because an individual experiences their own consciousness directly, that experience is always richer and more compelling than the perception of consciousness in any other entity; your own consciousness always seem more “real” and richer than the would-be consciousness of another entity.

Because the experience of consciousness is subjective, we can never “know for sure” that an entity is actually experiencing consciousness. However there must be certain computational functions that must be accomplished for consciousness to be experienced. I am not attempting to discuss all computational functions that are necessary, just a first step at enumerating some of them and considering implications.

First an entity must have a “self detector”; a pattern recognition computation structure which it uses to recognizes its own state of being an entity and of being the same entity over time. If an entity is unable to recognize itself as an entity, then it can't be conscious that it is an entity. To rephrase Descartes, "I perceive myself to be an entity, therefore I am an entity."  It is possible to be an entity and not perceive that one is an entity. This happens in humans but rarely. Other computation structures may be necessary also, but without an ability to recognize itself as an entity an entity cannot be conscious.