I’d be substantially more confident in cryonics if it were actually supported by society with stable funding, regulations, transparency, priority in case of natural disasters, ongoing well-supported research, guarantees about future coverage of revival and treatment costs, and so on.
Even then I have strong doubts about uninterrupted maintenance of clients for anything like a hundred years. Even with the best intentions, more than 99.9999% uptime for any single organization (including through natural disasters and changes in society) is hard. And yet, that’s the easier part of the problem.
I think this is too many nines. If you have to last 100 years, say, and LN takes over a month to boil off and let the patients thaw, then it’s more like 99.9% uptime.
>if it were actually supported by society
So, I agree with this, but I want to make a clear distinction between a supposed “current default” state of the world/society, vs. what can/will actually happen. When Peter Thiel is asked to predict the future, he responds something like that he doesn’t think it quite makes sense to predict parts of the future that depend on our choices, and it makes more sense to think of it as deciding than predicting. Part of the point of my post is to point out that an important strategic consideration is, “If we all had Hope in this, then would it succeed?”, sometimes more important than “If I act in causal best-response to the current default, what can I get?”. Does this make sense to you? This is maybe the main point I want to get across.
I’d be substantially more confident in cryonics if it were actually supported by society with stable funding, regulations, transparency, priority in case of natural disasters, ongoing well-supported research, guarantees about future coverage of revival and treatment costs, and so on.
Even then I have strong doubts about uninterrupted maintenance of clients for anything like a hundred years. Even with the best intentions, more than 99.9999% uptime for any single organization (including through natural disasters and changes in society) is hard. And yet, that’s the easier part of the problem.
>99.9999%
I think this is too many nines. If you have to last 100 years, say, and LN takes over a month to boil off and let the patients thaw, then it’s more like 99.9% uptime.
>if it were actually supported by society
So, I agree with this, but I want to make a clear distinction between a supposed “current default” state of the world/society, vs. what can/will actually happen. When Peter Thiel is asked to predict the future, he responds something like that he doesn’t think it quite makes sense to predict parts of the future that depend on our choices, and it makes more sense to think of it as deciding than predicting. Part of the point of my post is to point out that an important strategic consideration is, “If we all had Hope in this, then would it succeed?”, sometimes more important than “If I act in causal best-response to the current default, what can I get?”. Does this make sense to you? This is maybe the main point I want to get across.