My comments about economic, social and political matters don't speak to how people should invest in the market, or to who will win the coming election. They speak to the general condition of the economy and the culture over the long haul. As I've observed in print before, plenty of people will get rich, and millions of people have gotten richer, despite the fact that diversion of wealth from the people who primarily produce it is at an all time high. I am the first to acknowledge that it has been fantastic advances in productivity that have made this possible. But that doesn't make the reality go away that the system is increasingly thwarting innovation, overspending its resource base, and appropriating vast amounts of wealth which is used inefficiently, is wasted, or is actually used for contra-productive purposes.

All I have said, in addition to these fairly mundane observations, is that, sooner or later, something's got to give. To some extent this has already happened in that many trillions of dollars of wealth have disappeared, or been reallocated to cover "bad actions" of various kinds. The situation in Europe is actually much worse than it is here, and if it becomes impossible to maintain solvency of large EU nations such Greece, Italy and Spain, then the effect will, again, be felt in the US and elsewhere.

What I have no way of knowing is how much "re-assignable" wealth is present in the system - and just as importantly, if it will be reassigned to cover "bad acts." That' difficult to assess wealth covers a huge range of goods and actions, from the quality of food people eat, to whether they use paper towels or go back to using rags! I've never claimed any special insight in those matters, and for good reason; because the data to make those kinds of "forecasts" simply isn't available.

So, my position is very much like that of someone who warns that "crime doesn't pay." It doesn't - not in the long run, because it is destructive of productivity, and destructive of effective human social interaction. But the BIG question is, what exactly constitutes the "long run?" That's not a joke, and I am mindful that the Soviet Union ground on for 70 years. That's an economist's eternity, and then some. Pepsi Cola made millions betting that Soviet Russia would continue for decades. Do I think Fidelista Cuba is doomed? Absolutely. I also think it is a miserable, oppressive place. But I wouldn't care to give any odds on how long it will survive.

Finally, if all the "non-contrarians" on this matter are concerned with or about is financial gain, regardless of the system's characteristics or "meta-qualities," then I have nothing to say to them and their disappointment in my "judgment" is as understandable as it is mutual.

Umm, here's a suggestion: WHY DON"T YOU JUST ASK ELIZER HOW AND WHY HE MADE THE DECISION? Why speculate?

This post from Max More is the kind of post that I would expect to see voted off of LessWrong. I have not had a substantive conversation with Max More about cryonics, let alone my personal position, psychology, desires or motivations in over 20 years. We did correspond recently, and I have asked Max for permission to make that complete correspondence, minus personal incidentals not material to cryonics, public. He has flatly refused. Why, I do not know, but I do know that that is the only substantive communication he and I have had in decades and that it is completely documented in writing. Prior to that, at least to my knowledge, our relationship was cordial and not marred by any disagreements or conflicts. Nor do we have any confidants or intimates in common. Thus, the question arises, how would Max know anything about whether I am "envious that I'm not running things"? As he says, he doesn't know this, he can only speculate because he has refused to speak with me on these matters.

He then goes on to say something that I find remarkable to be left unchallenged here on LessWrong:

"That depth (of knowledge) and his most excellent writing skills often fool people into believing that his judgment is better than it is"

LessWrong, as I understand it, is a forum where people are mastering the craft and science of evaluating the logic and substance of the arguments put forth by people, including thinkers and writers here and elsewhere - not based on their style, cleverness of articulation, or their speculations. If anyone has questions about the assertions I make, feel free to ask for the evidence. We may not always agree on how to weight it, but the evidence will (hopefully) always be there, and it will be credible. Where I overstep or make a mistake, you will find me quick to acknowledge and apologize.

The first question you need to ask Yudkowsky (and yourself) is a damned difficult one to answer "simply," and that is what are the currently well known, well understood, and well documented BIOLOGICAL differences in outcome that are likely to pertain using the two different approaches in the reasonably optimum case. Reasonably optimum means that the member is experiencing medico-legal death under controlled conditions with competent cryonics organization personnel in attendance, My bet is that only a few people on the planet can answer that question, and that Yudkowsky isn't one of them.

Of course, if you do not believe the degree of molecular, histological or gross damage to the patient matters, within broad limits, then such differences are immaterial. For instance, if you think that several hours of warm ischemic injury, followed by 12 to 24 hours of cold ischemic injury, followed by reperfusion injury, followed by grossly inadequate cryoprotective perfusion/equilibration in the brain resulting in large areas of massively ice injured brain tissue will be easily repairable with Nanotechnology, then you will be largely insensitive to the differences between Ci and Alcor, or a well done cryoprotective perfusion and a poorly done one.

My question for such people is, "Why bother with perfusion at all? The ischemic delays are very damaging. Why not just have yourself packed in dry ice as soon as you are pronounced and get shipped off to CI? It would be about $10K to $15 cheaper and you'd only be faced with Nano-repair of cryoinjury?" No need for Nano, Nano, one Nano will do.

I'm in the final stages of preparing Part 3 of THE EFFECTS OF CRYOPRESERVATION ON THE CAT for publication on Chronosophere. Part 3 is the transmission electron microscopy of the tissues under different conditions of cryopreservation (Part 2 was the histology: http://chronopause.com/index.php/2012/02/14/the-effects-of-cryopreservation-on-the-cat-part-2/). You can look at those pictures of cell and tissue structure and decide for yourself which condition you'd rather be in.

Yes, unquestionably some of the "information" that constitutes your person hood is in your gut, your glands, your immune system and your peripheral nervous system. However, your position would seem to imply that these things, and things much more central to your identity, such as your brain structure, are like unchanging books or artifacts on a museum shelf. They aren't. In fact, by the time you are 80, you will have lost roughly a third of your brain mass and your brain will be a tattered "remnant" of what it once was. You're now losing roughly 80K neurons a day. The practical consequences of this will be a massive transformation of your personality and of your functional capabilities. If that change were to be imposed on you all at once, you would not only be horrified, you likely wouldn't even recognize the resulting individual as the same person. More likely, you'd consider that individual to be a cruel and sadistic parody of yourself.

The point is that your "identity" is a dynamic thing which is badly degraded over time by aging. This is important information to keep in mind, because it provides context for what I'm going to say now. I have known a good number of people who have no stomach or intestines. They could not eat food of any kind. They stayed alive by virtue of total parenteral nutrition (TPN) which provides for all their fluid and nutritional needs intravenously. These people did not undergo any perceptible change in memory, personality or person-hood. At least three such people I've known have also had kidney transplants. That's even more interesting, because we now know that many patients with successful, long term grafts become chimeric with the donor! Donor immune and stem cells colonize the patient! Similarly, any mother is chimeric for each of her fetuses. In fact, in animals, if you injure the mother's heart or brain during pregnancy, the fetal stem cells are the ones which repair the damage - massively remodeling the damaged organs. This chimerism seems to be an evolutionary adaptation to protect the mother against injury during pregnancy.

To my knowledge, no one is upset at the idea that a significant fraction of the stem cell population in such people is ALIEN. And those stem cells are genetically and functionally different from the native ones. Maybe more than the gut, the immune system is an extension of the brain - they interact dynamically and the immune system can and does profoundly effect mood and behavior.

So what is identity? Well, that's complicated, but one thing is clear, it is NOT static and a lot of the changes in the structures which determine it happen all the time as part of life, and you have little or no control over them. Where this intersects whole body vs. neuro is that you have the need (arguably the necessity) to decide just what parts of you are truly essential to your person-hood AND at what cost in risk to survival they can be taken along during cryopreservation.

If you are smart, cool, and rational, you'll try to determine just what parts of you are really you - are really essential to your person-hood. This would be an impossible black box of a task were it not for contemporary transplant and artificial organ medicine. There are tens of thousands of people on dialysis or who get kidney transplants. There are people with no hearts, or new hearts, and people with gut, liver, pancreas and renal transplants. There are countless people with bone marrow transplants and countless others whose spinal cord and peripheral nervous system have been functionally disconnected from their brains. Do these people constitute an acceptable degree of survival for you as persons? If so, I would suggest you delve into the logistics, economics and hard practical realities of cryopreservation that must endure over a period of many decades, or far more likely, a century or two. It is NOT easy to handle, move or care for whole body patients. They are a ball and chain and cannot be moved or evacuated quickly. They are subject to a large burden of state regulation which neuros are not, and they suffer additional injury to the brain as a result of compromises necessary to achieve cryoprotection and cooling.

If you think that those components of you identity present in your body are worth those added risks, then you should go whole body. However, my question is, where is the empirical evidence to support that belief? I've known many, many transplant patients well, and neither they nor I saw any noticeable transformation in their identity. Indeed, the transformation, such as it was, was the return to fully functioning person-hood which resulted from becoming chimeric with another human being or a machine.

No, and that's the trouble! Because, you see, if cryonics were like any other medical procedure, I'd simply point to the STATISTICS and to the MAIMED and DEAD patients. In fact, the errors and screw ups would be a huge public scandal, because people would have SUFFERED and DIED. Indeed, the patients themselves (who were not killed outright) would be hollering to high heaven via every available media outlet. Cryonics patients never complain because they can't.

Because no cryonics patient suffers, or dies, or experiences any other OUTCOME of any kind, your only choice, if you want to understand differences in procedures, quality of care, and so on, is to delve into the complex, technical specifics.

You don't have to learn the details of automotive engineering, metallurgy, and so on, to go pick out a good automobile. All of that huge body of technical and scientific knowledge is effectively INVISIBLE to you as a consumer (as well it should be) because you can look at PERFORMANCE as your guide to making a good buy. All that science and engineering gets reduced to miles per liter, road reliability and, of course, your comfort, convenience and safety while driving it! So "close" are the performance specs between automobiles that a significant part of what makes therm sell and out-compete each other is styling - just how the damn thing looks!

Think about that.

The major problems at Alcor are truly abysmal management, for which the Alcor Board of Directors is to blame, and lack of a professional culture and staff to administer the front end of cryopreservation. The situation is almost identical to one that would exist if the board of directors of a hospital tried to deliver medical services without physicians and nurses, but rather hired "the best they could find" to do these professionals' jobs. Thus, there might be a veterinarian doing cardiac and neurosurgery, a chemist operating the heart lung machine, and so on. The absence of credentials, per se, is not the core issue here, because it is perfectly possible for such individuals to do these tasks and to do them "reasonably" well.

Because cryonics did not become a mainstream medical, industrial, or business activity, it necessarily is in the realm of very small "visionary enterprises," like the early days of flight or radio, or perhaps in the realm of the dedicated (professional) amateurs. A good example of the latter is amateur astronomy, where the people involved are fantastic - mostly level headed, focused, responsible and astonishingly capable. Amateur astronomers have made more brass tacks basic discoverers of heavenly bodies than their professional counterparts, and they have made major contributions to the fundamental science, as well. There are essentially no kooks, and their equipment and facilities are often spectacular and demonstrate fabulous innovation and engineering skill.

The barnstormers at the start of flight were "crazy," extreme personalities, but the fact that they had to fly and thus had to work with real machines which could CRASH and KILL them, kept them on track. However, a careful observer of their history will note that their mortality rate was terribly high. Those that survived barnstorming and doing air mail runs were, in effect, a "filtered product" who represented the best of practical skills, engineering ability, risk taking, and bad-ass courage. In that respect, Lindbergh and Fred Chamberlain had personalities that were extraordinarily similar.

I've had considerable contact with HAM radio clubs and amateur astronomers and there is simply no comparison to cryonicists. Ditto for the pioneering ultralight aircraft guys of 25 years ago. If you spend any time around these kinds of groups, you quickly see that they attract as many dysfunctional, narcissistic personalities, as does cryonics, but 99.9% of the time these people flake away, almost instantly. In the HAM groups it happens during the run up to getting your basic license. It doesn't matter how much physics you know, or how smart you are, most of the test is FCC regulations, proper jargon, and things that you must memorize. The loonies flee!

Having said that, it's been interesting to watch the quality of amateur radio enthusiasts plummet in recent years. This is because the equipment is now all solid state, it is much less expensive, and the days of building you own radios from parts are over. Also, the requirement for Morse code was dropped from the entry level licensing exam.

If you, or I, or anyone else looked at a TV set, or an MP3 player, or even a modern HAM radio and said, "I'm going to build one of those; I can do it just as well as Samsung and much less expensively," we'd likely all just laugh and figure the poor guy was crazy. Nobody tries to do that because it is stupid, just like no one in their right mind says, "My wife needs open heart surgery and those bastards at the Medical Center want $50K to do it! That's ridiculous, I've seen it done on TV and my brother in law is a veterinarian, so we're going to do it ourselves." The hubris required to take such an action, let alone the lack of commonsense, is just indescribable.

Now, if your wife needs surgery, you cannot possibly find a doctor to do it, and you think you can learn the craft well enough to give her fighting chance, well that's another matter - depending upon how you go at it! If you have 5-6 years to prepare, you're willing to do the work and you're willing to kill a LOT of dogs, you can indeed teach yourself the basics and perhaps have a 25% chance of pulling it off - providing it is a SIMPLE surgical procedure that she needs. You can actually do this from books, journals and lots of failed attempts in the "dog lab." When I was kid in the late 1960s, several teens a little older than me (15-16 years old) actually set up and did do cardiac surgery in their garages on dogs, and the animals survived! They built their own heart lung machines (HLMs). Today, such an action would be illegal and it is impossible to imagine teenagers building their own heart lung machines! But, in fact, this really happened.

The first practical HLM was built by the maverick surgeon C. Walton Lillehei, and a colleague, Richard Dewall . Lillihei was the archetype of the founder of almost any daring new profession (in this case, cardiac surgery): he was brilliant, courageous - just an incredible man. He started doing open heart surgery BEFORE the HLM by using another human being as the HLM in a technique called "cross circulation." He'd hook up a volunteer to the patient and use the volunteer's heart and lungs to support the patient while he operated. This was brutally controversial at the time and, of course, eventually one of the volunteers died due to a technical error in the OR! It was almost the end of Lillehei, and he barely escaped criminal prosecution. I mention Lillehei because his first HLM was built from a commercial "finger" tubing pump, with the oxygenator made from PVC beer tubing, a cheap glass frit, some stainless steel pot scratcher pads, and other odds and ends. Their total cost, excluding the pumps, was ~ $15.00: http://i293.photobucket.com/albums/mm55/mikedarwin1967/m8jpg.jpg

It worked brilliantly and was the design template for every HLM up until bubble oxygenators were replaced by membranes in the late 1980s. Now, if you look at the machine in that picture, it is something that anyone with a modicum of hand-skills could build. The pumps were standard, off the shelf industrial finger-pumps used in the food processing industry. So, a kid with some bucks really could build his own HLM - in fact, he could do it today. The difference is, as I previously pointed out, is that he'd be hauled off to jail if he tried to use it. And if you can't use it, why build it?

However, if you really want to master (simple) basic cardiac surgery, it will cost you a fortune in time, equipment, animals and supplies. The only way such a situation would make sense is if you were in a world where there were lots of doctors, medical supplies, equipment and so on, but you and your wife were banned from access to them. Your money wasn't any good and you had to "operate underground," literally. That's the situation cryonics was in and still is in, to a great degree.

The critical difference is that there is today in cryonics no perceived need to "get it right" with animals, or any other feedback-driven test system. It's like the guy I describe above who just decides he and vet brother in law will show up in the garage one day with whatever their idea of what is needed is, and they'll simply operate on his wife! But wait, what happens if they do that? Well, pretty clearly it will be a HORRIBLE MESS, not only will the wife die, but it will be a gruesome fuck up - just unimaginably bad - worse than if she were murdered with an ax. Then what happens? Well, they go to jail, there will be a huge outcry, it will be front page news. In short, they will get subjected to the CONSEQUENCES of their stupid and irresponsible acts.

However, if you are "freezing" your wife, well, who knows how it turned out? Who cares? She looks great! You feel real good about it! And if she does thaw out and rot, well, she was dead anyway, right? So, no harm and no foul. Certainly there are no social or legal consequences for any errors, oversights or failures. There isn't even any way to KNOW that such things might have (or indeed did happen).

THAT IS CRYONICS.

And when good quality people do come along, or people who sincerely want to put their money into cryonics, there is always some damned fool who will tell them how easy it is, how much more quickly THEY will show them results, and on and on and on. If you were doing anything else; running a dog food company, or making women's' handbags, you couldn't get away with that, because the product wouldn't sell and you might even be in court for killing peoples' pets with tainted food. But, not so with cryonics...

Cryonics came reasonably close to crossing the threshold into professionalism with Alcor in the 1980s, but that effort imploded. Jerry Leaf was cryopreserved and I left to pursue more conventional biomedical research (a terrible mistake, in hindsight). Absent a well defined and well established culture of professionalism that included self-correcting feedback mechanisms, Alcor fell back to become something broadly similar to CI. Instead of functioning as a hospital board of directors does, Alcor's Directors became de facto managers - arbiters of the technical details of care, by default. This has been a disaster, not only for those receiving such care, but because Alcor (much more than CI) now serves as a spolier to professionalism. The high tech veneer and the appearance of biomedical competence short circuit any perception that something is seriously wrong, and that things were once, and could again be, much better.

There's no mystery about why I have comparatively few criticisms posted about CI. My reasons for this are as follows:

1) Ci is what it is. What you see is pretty much what you get, and that this is so is evident from the discussion here. The perception of CI as a "mom and pop" outfit is but one example I could cite from this discussion. Ci does not project itself as using a medically-based model of cryonics. It's case histories are ghastly - and anyone who doesn't take the time to read them, or who can't see what the deficiencies are, well, you can't (as I've learned the hard way) fix clueless.

2) I am not a CI member. The reason I am not a CI member can be divined from my written criticisms and by looking over point #1, above. If I were a Ci member, I have no doubt that I would have posted reams of criticisms. Note that I said "posted," because, in fact, I have written reams of criticisms, suggestions, detailed technical advice and countless letters and personal communications on specific deficiencies at CI. I have also generated Power Point presentations and written many pages of material on how CI could improve its capabilities. To their credit, CI has at least listened to these suggestions and critiques; and they are responsive to same. This is not imply that they are receptive. But at least they listen and engage in dialogue. Alcor does not.

3) Since I am not a CI member, and I do not believe CI materially misrepresents itself, or its capabilities, and because they have invited private criticism in the past, I see no need to discuss their deficiencies publicly, beyond the (comparatively) brief remarks I've made from time to time. What would be the point of going further? The only exception I can think of is when CI takes actions that could, or which do materially impact the operation of cryonics as a whole. Some examples of that would be their submission to regulation by the Michigan Cemetery Board, their practice of accepting at need cases absent any defined standards for informed consent, and their practice of having morticians freeze, and if necessary, thaw cryonics "bodies," whilst claiming that cryonics "patients" haven't thawed out since the 1970s.

4) Because Alcor represents itself as a medically-scientifically based cryonics operation I believe that it is not only deserving of the criticism it has received, but of much more. While the care Alcor patients receive is, on average, much better than that available at CI, it is still, in my opinion, grossly substandard, frequently marred by inexcusable iatrogenesis, and not in keeping with the highly professional and medically sophisticated image that Alcor projects on its website, in its literature, and via the media. If anyone is truly interested, I'm wiling to discuss specifics - and in detail. In fact, shortly I will be posting a piece about research priorities in cryonics, which should give some perspective on just how Less Right Alcor has become.

5) The problem is deeper than the specifics at Alcor, it is inherent in cryonics itself. A simple introduction to the root problem can be found here: http://chronopause.com/index.php/2011/02/13/on-the-need-for-prosthetic-nocioception-in-cryonics/

A much more detailed analysis of the problems that have beset and thwarted cryonics can be found here :

http://cryoeuro.eu:8080/download/attachments/425990/Cryonics_Failure_Analysis_Part_2v5.2.pdf

http://cryoeuro.eu:8080/download/attachments/425990/Cryonics_Failure_Analysis_Part_3v5.4.pdf

[Please note that the server hosting the two files above is sometimes unavailable - please try again if you aren't successful.]

This post http://chronopause.com/index.php/2011/05/29/a-visit-to-alcor/ provoked outrage from Max More and in private correspondence, now many months ago, he told me he was working on a response that would demonstrate my criticisms were in error.. Apparently, he is still working on it.

I've posted a more detailed explanation of the problems vis a vis Alcor and cryonics as a response to this post.

Melatonin has a very short half life and is secreted as needed by the pineal gland. It's apparent primary biological function is as a signal transduction/regulatory molecule. It's unclear if this function is what is responsible for its protective effect in ischemia-reperfusion injury (IRI), because melatonin is also a powerful radical scavenger - and in fact, a particularly effective scavenger of the radical species associated with neuronal injury in IRI, such as peroxynitrite. Other factors to consider are the timing, route of administration and dose used in our studies. The drug was given intravenously in a micellized form to speed delivery across the blood brain barrier. This was done at the start of reperfusion. Finally, the effective dose given was very large (and was based on the stoichiometry of the radical species we wanted to scavenge). The drug was also given in conjunction with many others and, perhaps critically, in combination with the rapid induction of mild therapeutic hypothermia ( 3 deg C below normothermia). Next up on my agenda to test was whether the drug combination was effective without hypothermia since it is very problematic to achieve a 3 deg C reduction in body temperature in ~15 min or less! Unfortunately, that study was canned.

The point here is that the application of any such treatment in the setting of a critical illness would require that it be both an integrated and ACCEPTED part of the medical infrastructure. For instance, it was over 30 years ago that Peter Safar, et al., demonstrated that mild hypothermia AFTER cardiac arrest was profoundly effective in reducing ischemic brain injury, and it has been 9 years since ILCOR made post-cardiac arrest hypothermia the standard of care: http://circ.ahajournals.org/content/108/1/118.full. And yet, post-arrest hypothermia is used almost nowhere. So, even if a treatment is approved and demonstrated to be scientifically valid, it still may not see widespread clinical application for a host of reasons.

In looking over the comments here, there are a few missed points that I believe heavily shift the balance in favor of having cryonics arrangements. The first is that the need for "cryonics," in the generic sense, is never likely to go away. While it is true that we can currently envision technologies to repair all of the pathological processes we currently understand, that does NOT mean that we understand all of the things that both can, and will go wrong with us in the future.

Let's assume that aging is conquered tomorrow. Within some definite (but unknown) period of time you are going to fill up your hard drive - or your "soft drive," if you prefer. Humans were not designed to store thousands of years of memories and experiences. And we may be doing just that, if the people with Superior Autobiographical Memory are any indication. So unless you are happy with eventually losing most, or all of your current memories, something will have to change…

A likely consequence of this limitation is that we are going to have to reconfigure our brains. I use this very conservative example, because it speaks to the NECESSITY of doing this. Probably most of the people on LW envision, and even desire, vastly more daring reworks of their identity-encoding hardware and software. That will inevitably carry associated risk. It is very easy (at least for me) to envision major and very complicated screw-ups in cognitive re-engineering that cannot be easily or rapidly sorted out. In fact, this sort of thing happens today on a small, but nevertheless sometimes lethal, and not infrequently very damaging way, when people become psychologically confused, or "existentially damaged." A good example is when seemingly normal people get taken over by ideas, or become ensnared in cults. Is "deprogramming" a treatment, or coercion? Malware, either deliberately designed or accidentally created, which badly damages programs and data are yet another example. So, leaving hardware out of consideration, it seems likely that people will still get very nasty “software” diseases that do a lot of damage in a short period of time, and that require that the “system” (person) be shut down until a solution can be found. Nanotechnology will not solve this problem because the problem is a meta-problem that is intrinsic to complex systems interacting in an open universe.

I also think it will also be a long time, if ever, before damage to "hardware" substrates becomes 100% repairable 100% of the time in REAL TIME. As long as it is possible to envision pathologies that render the individual into a degraded and nonfunctional state, which current technology cannot reverse, then you will need cryonics, regardless of what it is subsequently called or what preservation technology is used.

My next point is that there are a couple of implicit assumptions in the foregoing arguments which are demonstrably not true. The first is that cryonics is a discrete, consumable product, like a bag of crisps, a candy bar, or even a computer or a radio. Or that it is like an automobile maintenance contract, or an insurance policy that pays off when you need it.

It isn't.

All of those products and services can be assigned, with a high degree of precision, a probability as to how they will perform and what your likelihood is of being satisfied with them. They are fully developed products. And mostly, all you need to know about them is present, free for the asking in your culture in the form of "common knowledge," information from friends and family, and, of course, in advertising. You pay your money and that's it. Nobody needs to explain to you, or to or anyone else what a TV or broom are for, how to use them, and what might go wrong with them over time.

This is no way describes cryonics.

So, the first benefit you get by signing up is that you now have a proprietary interest in learning what it is that you just bought; and you will soon become aware that you need to KEEP LEARNING, because cryonics is an undeveloped, immature, and above all, experimental technique. I signed up with the Cryonics Society of New York (CSNY) when I was 15 years old. CSNY is long, long gone and I've been signed up with 2 other organizations that have vanished. If you can’t keep learning until old age or “death” overtakes you, you are unwilling to do so, or you are an idiot, then cryonics is not for you.

And because cryonicists are the most rabid and intense of the life extensionists, you will also soon learn that they are at the absolute edge of emerging science in this area. In other words, you stand to be the first to know about newly developed and developing technology to combat aging. That can either “kill you or cure you, “depending upon how good your judgment is.

Finally, non-cryonicists, because they have the view of cryonics as a developed product (like an automobile or a light bulb) have a similarly inaccurate and warped view of the odds. The odds of the Titanic sinking with the loss of 1517 lives were 100% on 15 April 1912. But, what if the Titanic were to have taken, say, 48 hours to sink? Depending upon how the passengers and crew behaved in that interval, the number of survivors might have gone way up, or way down.

There were a lot of smart people on board the Titanic - very clever and very inventive people. But they were panicked, they were dealing with a panicked mass of passengers, and they had very little time to react. Given 48 hours, and the willing participation of the best minds aboard that ship, how many people need have died, or would have died? Were there ways, other than the optimal loading of the inadequate number of lifeboats that would have saved lives? Would clothing those passengers consigned to the icy sea in multiple layers of clothing saturated in grease, shortening, or oil, attaching them to life-ropes, and rotating them in and out of the lifeboats, have saved additional lives? What kind of makeshift lifeboats or floating platforms could have been made on an expedient basis from materials on the ship, allowing additional passengers to remain afloat out of the freezing water?

THAT is the position of cryonics and cryonicists. The odds are not fixed to those calculated at any given point in time, because you are NOT carting off a discrete product to screw into your lamp, or to process your words, or to play your games on. YOU set the odds of success or failure to an amazing degree. [You also do this, to a tiny degree, for the success or failure of the company that you buy a light bulb or a computer from.] Cryonics is thus an ACTIVIST proposition. Customers can, of course, be customers if they insist. But in cryonics, as in any other market transaction (perfected or experimental) you get what you pay for. In the case of cryonics, the fees required for success are not even remotely reducible to cold hard cash alone. It’s going to all the composure, good judgment and raw intelligence we can muster to escape the sinking ship fate has consigned us to and make it that far shore where we can continue our journey through life, indefinitely.