Why do you think its only a 10% chance your cryonics company will screw up? That has happened before.
I assume you’re referring to the Chatsworth disaster in 1979 where after CSC’s first body in 1967, it ultimately failed and let the bodies thaw. Let’s do some quick figuring. So Chatsworth ran 12 years (1979 − 1967) and had 1 major failure. ALCOR’s first body was in 1976, and it has never failed, so that’s 37 years of operation so far with 0 major failures. CI got its first body in 1977, so that’s 36 years of operation with similarly 0 major failures. This sums to 12+36+37=85 years of operation with 1+0+0 major failures or 1 failure over 85 operation-years.
Xachariah uses the nice round figure of 100 years before revival in his comment, so I’ll just use that. If the risk of failure is 1⁄85, then the odds of going 100 years without any failures is (1-(1/85))^100 or 30% rate of success or a 70% risk of a screwup. And obviously it goes down each year that passes without CI or ALCOR screwing up so badly as to let bodies thaw, so next year it’ll look more like a 68% chance (1 - (1-(1/87))^100) and then 67% and then 66% etc.
I personally don’t expect to need cryonics before 2060, so if we hypothesized that CI & ALCOR make it until then with no Chatsworths, then that alone will drive it down to 42% (1 - (1-(1/(85+((2060-2013)*2))))^100).
And of course 70% is a crude upper bound, because Chatsworth failed early on compared to CI or ALCOR (indicating that the survival curve does not look like a constant exponential risk), those were designed in response to Chatsworth and were intended to avoid the same problem so they aren’t in the same reference class, this weights the groups equally so it ignores how CI & ALCOR have hundreds of bodies rather than the 9 that CSC had, this doesn’t take into account the arrangements between organizations to take bodies if one of them fails, and I haven’t included any other cryonics groups (I haven’t heard of any disasters elsewhere so I assume if there are active organizations besides CI & ALCOR, they must not have failed yet).
Taking these into consideration, 10% doesn’t seem unreasonable to me.
I assume you’re referring to the Chatsworth disaster in 1979 where after CSC’s first body in 1967, it ultimately failed and let the bodies thaw. Let’s do some quick figuring. So Chatsworth ran 12 years (1979 − 1967) and had 1 major failure. ALCOR’s first body was in 1976, and it has never failed, so that’s 37 years of operation so far with 0 major failures. CI got its first body in 1977, so that’s 36 years of operation with similarly 0 major failures. This sums to 12+36+37=85 years of operation with 1+0+0 major failures or 1 failure over 85 operation-years.
Xachariah uses the nice round figure of 100 years before revival in his comment, so I’ll just use that. If the risk of failure is 1⁄85, then the odds of going 100 years without any failures is
(1-(1/85))^100or 30% rate of success or a 70% risk of a screwup. And obviously it goes down each year that passes without CI or ALCOR screwing up so badly as to let bodies thaw, so next year it’ll look more like a 68% chance (1 - (1-(1/87))^100) and then 67% and then 66% etc.I personally don’t expect to need cryonics before 2060, so if we hypothesized that CI & ALCOR make it until then with no Chatsworths, then that alone will drive it down to 42% (
1 - (1-(1/(85+((2060-2013)*2))))^100).And of course 70% is a crude upper bound, because Chatsworth failed early on compared to CI or ALCOR (indicating that the survival curve does not look like a constant exponential risk), those were designed in response to Chatsworth and were intended to avoid the same problem so they aren’t in the same reference class, this weights the groups equally so it ignores how CI & ALCOR have hundreds of bodies rather than the 9 that CSC had, this doesn’t take into account the arrangements between organizations to take bodies if one of them fails, and I haven’t included any other cryonics groups (I haven’t heard of any disasters elsewhere so I assume if there are active organizations besides CI & ALCOR, they must not have failed yet).
Taking these into consideration, 10% doesn’t seem unreasonable to me.