As far as I know, there’s currently no one on Earth who gets paid when another cryonicist signs up, except Rudi Hoffman who sells the life insurance. I’ll go ahead and state specifically that I have no shares in either of those nonprofits (nor does anyone, but they have paid employees) and I do not get paid a commission when anyone signs up (nor does anyone AFAIK except Rudi, and he’s paid by the life insurance company).
BTW, thanks for the reference to Hoffman. Looking at Hoffman’s page about life assurance for non-US people it looks like for me cryonics is much, much more expensive than your estimates—he quotes $1500-$3000 a year. Talking to my friends reveals no cheaper options in the UK and big legal problems. I definitely will not be able to afford this barring a big change in my circumstances :(
Understanding and complying with ownership and beneficiary requirements of cryonics vendors is often confusing to insurance companies, and most insurance companies will consequently not allow the protocols required by cryonics vendors. Understanding and complying with your cryonics organization requirements is confusing and often simply will not be done by most insurance companies.
Don’t let the prices on that page discourage your from doing independent research.
There might be life insurance providers in your areas that would have no problem naming Alcor or CI as the beneficiary and that could sell your enough life insurance to cover all costs for a lot less money than that.
edit: I’ve just had a look, and I could get a 10-year term insurance for $200,000 for about $200/year. Definitely doesn’t have to be many thousands.
The estimate on that page is just that, an estimate. I’m awaiting an actual quote before making up my mind on the matter. Suggest you fill out the quote request form and contact him; if you do, I’d be interested in what you learned. I’m still waiting for word back myself.
In France cryonics is actually illegal, which is more of a challenge. Bodies are to be buried or cremated within 6 days of death; I don’t know if that’s a reasonable window of opportunity for transport. What is the UK’s position ?
The decision tree for cryonics is complex at least. I was briefly tempted earlier today to look into software for argument mapping to expose my reasoning more clearly, if only for myself. Even if I ultimately confirm my intuition that it’s what I want to do, the mapping would show more clearly which steps are critical to tackle and in what order.
Actually the difficulty is going to be in finding the opposition.
I have scoured Google as best I can, asked my friends on my blog for help, and even emailed some prominent people who’ve spoken out against cryonics, looking for the best anti-cryonics articles I can find. It is really astonishing that the pickings are so slim. You’d think there would be at least one blogger with medical knowledge who occasionally posted articles that tried to rebut things that cryonicists actually say, for example; I haven’t found it.
I’m not sure what a broad search for objections really buys you. From my perspective there is a “basic cryonics scenario” and a smallish number of variants. If you pick a scenario which is a good compromise between maximally plausible and maximally inconvenient, you should flush out most of the key points where things can go wrong.
The basic scenario might be something like this:
I sign up for cryonics and life insurance
I keep up with my payments for a few years
I get run over by a car
I am rushed to the hospital and die there
I am transferred to the care of a funeral director in France
the required paperwork gets completed
my body is packed in ice and shipped by air to the US
I am prepared for suspension, sustaining inevitable damage
years pass, during which the facility stays viable
a revival procedure is developed and becomes cheap
surviving relatives fund my revival
I blink, smile and say “OK, let’s go see what’s changed”
I turn out to be the same person, continuous with the old me
that new life turns out to be enjoyable enough
There are shorter alternative scenarios, such as the ones in which you pay for the insurance but never need it owing to life extension and other technology catching up faster than expected, so that you never actually execute your suspension contract. You’d turn up fewer reasons not to do it if you only examined those, so it makes sense to look at the scenario that exercises the greater number of options for things to go wrong. On the other hand, we shouldn’t burden the scenario with extraneous details, such as major changes in the legal status of cryonics facilities, etc. These should be accounted for by a “background uncertainty” about what the relatively far future holds in store.
The backbone of our argument map is that outline above, perhaps with more “near” details filled in as we go back over that insanely long discussion thread.
The research articles are only likely to help us out with the major theoretical issue, which is “How much of your personality is erased through damage done by death, suspension and revival.” Answers range from “all” to “none” and hinge partly on philosophical stances, such as whether you believe personality is equivalent to information encoded in the brain.
All that is definitely part of the decision tree, but seems only a small part of the story. They are things we won’t be able to do much about. The interesting part of the tree is the things we could do something about. As you noted, if cryonics works in principle but is unaffordable or runs into tricky practical problems such as getting your body moved about, you’re no longer weighing just a money cost against a philosophical possibility; you’re weighing the much larger hassle cost of changing your life plans (e.g. moving to the US sooner or later, or setting yourself a goal of getting rich), and that changes the equation drastically.
Here is a sketch of one made with bCisive online, the best of what I have evaluated so far. If you sign up it looks as if I can invite you in to edit collaboratively.
It’s easy to use and I find the visualization useful, but it bothers me that it’s basically just a mind map, you can’t add semantic information about how plausible you find various arguments. Another app with much the same characteristics is Debategraph.
I have tried ArguNet, which is supposed to reconstruct logical structure, but the UI is unusable.
The estimate is a range with a lower end. I may be able to afford it one day, in which case I don’t want to piss him off by mucking him about before then.
There’s some evidence other options may be closer to reach; I haven’t entirely given up yet. At the very least I’ll have cleared a lot of the hurdles that people “cryocrastinate” about, like investigating the options and talking to family, making a later signup more likely.
Let me rephrase. Rudi Hoffman says it costs a minimum of $1500 a year. The quotes I have seen for term life insurance work out to less than $300 a year for a $100K payout and a 30-year period. There is a discrepancy here which is puzzling, and one of the best ways I see to resolve the discrepancy is to ask the man himself, which I have done.
He is taking way more time to respond than I was expecting, which is messing up my feelings about the whole thing. You would help me if you were to contact him yourself and share your info. We don’t know each other much, so I won’t feel bad if you aren’t interested in helping me out. Having said that: will you help me ?
If I get 40 year term insurance now but live to 78, I’ll then be uninsured and unable to afford more insurance, so I won’t be covered when I most need it.
The general idea of term insurance is to ensure that your heirs get something if you die during the n years it takes you to build them an inheritance. The cryonics equivalent of this idea is that you don’t need whole life insurance if you expect over the term of the insurance to save enough money to pay for cryonics out of pocket.
The general idea of term insurance is to ensure that your heirs get something if you die during the n years it takes you to build them an inheritance.
I think the idea is to ensure an income during the term of childhood; when the term ends, one expects that they are capable of supporting themselves. If it were about inheritance, then it would be comparable to cryonics, but I don’t think it is.
From Wikipedia: “Many financial advisors or other experts commonly recommend term life insurance as a means to cover potential expenses until such time that there are sufficient funds available from savings to protect those whom the insurance coverage was intended to protect.” That’s the idea I meant to convey; the above phrasing nicely covers both the “inheritance” and “funding cryonics” cases.
I suspect you are under-estimating your future earnings ability, unless you plan on going into something that pays poorly, like trying to solve existential risk.
I’m still not sure what to get. I hear that whole life is significantly more expensive than term, so the savings from term could be put aside to later pay for the higher premiums? Hmm, but maybe whole life makes more sense. Or since I’m 27, maybe I could get a 10 year term and then switch to whole life.
I hear that whole life is significantly more expensive than term, so the savings from term could be put aside to later pay for the higher premiums?
Yes. In fact, that’s exactly what the insurance company does with your premiums when you buy whole life. Except they take a bunch out for themselves. There’s no good reason to buy whole life when you just could buy term and invest the difference until you have enough saved to pay for the cryofund. Except if you don’t think you will be disciplined enough to regularly invest the difference, and even then, you can have money automatically taken from a bank account into your cryonics account.
Albeit that if the money is in your name, those who might otherwise be your heirs will have a motive to try and stop your cryonic preservation to get their hands on the money.
Albeit that if the money is in your name, those who might otherwise be your heirs will have a motive to try and stop your cryonic preservation to get their hands on the money.
True, but you can set up an irrevocable trust to prevent that.
Yes, I found whole life to be 4-5 times more expensive than term.
I’m currently contemplating going for 40 year term and betting that either the world will end before then, or if not that the Singularity will take place, or if not that cryopreservation will be much cheaper by then.
Magic, thanks! As it turns out, people’s default assumption isn’t that I’ve joined a cult, it’s that this is my mid-life crisis. What I find very odd is that some of this is from people who knew me ten years ago!
As far as I know, there’s currently no one on Earth who gets paid when another cryonicist signs up, except Rudi Hoffman who sells the life insurance. I’ll go ahead and state specifically that I have no shares in either of those nonprofits (nor does anyone, but they have paid employees) and I do not get paid a commission when anyone signs up (nor does anyone AFAIK except Rudi, and he’s paid by the life insurance company).
BTW, thanks for the reference to Hoffman. Looking at Hoffman’s page about life assurance for non-US people it looks like for me cryonics is much, much more expensive than your estimates—he quotes $1500-$3000 a year. Talking to my friends reveals no cheaper options in the UK and big legal problems. I definitely will not be able to afford this barring a big change in my circumstances :(
I would really like someone to expand upon this:
Don’t let the prices on that page discourage your from doing independent research.
There might be life insurance providers in your areas that would have no problem naming Alcor or CI as the beneficiary and that could sell your enough life insurance to cover all costs for a lot less money than that.
edit: I’ve just had a look, and I could get a 10-year term insurance for $200,000 for about $200/year. Definitely doesn’t have to be many thousands.
This extrobrittania video contains some financial details about cryonics in the uk.
The estimate on that page is just that, an estimate. I’m awaiting an actual quote before making up my mind on the matter. Suggest you fill out the quote request form and contact him; if you do, I’d be interested in what you learned. I’m still waiting for word back myself.
In France cryonics is actually illegal, which is more of a challenge. Bodies are to be buried or cremated within 6 days of death; I don’t know if that’s a reasonable window of opportunity for transport. What is the UK’s position ?
The decision tree for cryonics is complex at least. I was briefly tempted earlier today to look into software for argument mapping to expose my reasoning more clearly, if only for myself. Even if I ultimately confirm my intuition that it’s what I want to do, the mapping would show more clearly which steps are critical to tackle and in what order.
Oh, and an argument map for cryonics would be fantastic.
Existing cryonics argument maps: here.
(I’ll update this comment if I find more.)
I’m up for creating a more complete one than can currently be found on the Web.
I’d appreciate some help in selecting some form of software support.
Actually the difficulty is going to be in finding the opposition.
I have scoured Google as best I can, asked my friends on my blog for help, and even emailed some prominent people who’ve spoken out against cryonics, looking for the best anti-cryonics articles I can find. It is really astonishing that the pickings are so slim. You’d think there would be at least one blogger with medical knowledge who occasionally posted articles that tried to rebut things that cryonicists actually say, for example; I haven’t found it.
I’m not sure what a broad search for objections really buys you. From my perspective there is a “basic cryonics scenario” and a smallish number of variants. If you pick a scenario which is a good compromise between maximally plausible and maximally inconvenient, you should flush out most of the key points where things can go wrong.
The basic scenario might be something like this:
I sign up for cryonics and life insurance
I keep up with my payments for a few years
I get run over by a car
I am rushed to the hospital and die there
I am transferred to the care of a funeral director in France
the required paperwork gets completed
my body is packed in ice and shipped by air to the US
I am prepared for suspension, sustaining inevitable damage
years pass, during which the facility stays viable
a revival procedure is developed and becomes cheap
surviving relatives fund my revival
I blink, smile and say “OK, let’s go see what’s changed”
I turn out to be the same person, continuous with the old me
that new life turns out to be enjoyable enough
There are shorter alternative scenarios, such as the ones in which you pay for the insurance but never need it owing to life extension and other technology catching up faster than expected, so that you never actually execute your suspension contract. You’d turn up fewer reasons not to do it if you only examined those, so it makes sense to look at the scenario that exercises the greater number of options for things to go wrong. On the other hand, we shouldn’t burden the scenario with extraneous details, such as major changes in the legal status of cryonics facilities, etc. These should be accounted for by a “background uncertainty” about what the relatively far future holds in store.
The backbone of our argument map is that outline above, perhaps with more “near” details filled in as we go back over that insanely long discussion thread.
The research articles are only likely to help us out with the major theoretical issue, which is “How much of your personality is erased through damage done by death, suspension and revival.” Answers range from “all” to “none” and hinge partly on philosophical stances, such as whether you believe personality is equivalent to information encoded in the brain.
All that is definitely part of the decision tree, but seems only a small part of the story. They are things we won’t be able to do much about. The interesting part of the tree is the things we could do something about. As you noted, if cryonics works in principle but is unaffordable or runs into tricky practical problems such as getting your body moved about, you’re no longer weighing just a money cost against a philosophical possibility; you’re weighing the much larger hassle cost of changing your life plans (e.g. moving to the US sooner or later, or setting yourself a goal of getting rich), and that changes the equation drastically.
Here is a sketch of one made with bCisive online, the best of what I have evaluated so far. If you sign up it looks as if I can invite you in to edit collaboratively.
It’s easy to use and I find the visualization useful, but it bothers me that it’s basically just a mind map, you can’t add semantic information about how plausible you find various arguments. Another app with much the same characteristics is Debategraph.
I have tried ArguNet, which is supposed to reconstruct logical structure, but the UI is unusable.
The estimate is a range with a lower end. I may be able to afford it one day, in which case I don’t want to piss him off by mucking him about before then.
There’s some evidence other options may be closer to reach; I haven’t entirely given up yet. At the very least I’ll have cleared a lot of the hurdles that people “cryocrastinate” about, like investigating the options and talking to family, making a later signup more likely.
Let me rephrase. Rudi Hoffman says it costs a minimum of $1500 a year. The quotes I have seen for term life insurance work out to less than $300 a year for a $100K payout and a 30-year period. There is a discrepancy here which is puzzling, and one of the best ways I see to resolve the discrepancy is to ask the man himself, which I have done.
He is taking way more time to respond than I was expecting, which is messing up my feelings about the whole thing. You would help me if you were to contact him yourself and share your info. We don’t know each other much, so I won’t feel bad if you aren’t interested in helping me out. Having said that: will you help me ?
You should be looking at whole life insurance, not term life insurance.
Let me know if he takes more than a week to reply...
Could you elaborate on why you think that?
If I get 40 year term insurance now but live to 78, I’ll then be uninsured and unable to afford more insurance, so I won’t be covered when I most need it.
The general idea of term insurance is to ensure that your heirs get something if you die during the n years it takes you to build them an inheritance. The cryonics equivalent of this idea is that you don’t need whole life insurance if you expect over the term of the insurance to save enough money to pay for cryonics out of pocket.
I think the idea is to ensure an income during the term of childhood; when the term ends, one expects that they are capable of supporting themselves. If it were about inheritance, then it would be comparable to cryonics, but I don’t think it is.
From Wikipedia: “Many financial advisors or other experts commonly recommend term life insurance as a means to cover potential expenses until such time that there are sufficient funds available from savings to protect those whom the insurance coverage was intended to protect.” That’s the idea I meant to convey; the above phrasing nicely covers both the “inheritance” and “funding cryonics” cases.
I suspect you are under-estimating your future earnings ability, unless you plan on going into something that pays poorly, like trying to solve existential risk.
I’m still not sure what to get. I hear that whole life is significantly more expensive than term, so the savings from term could be put aside to later pay for the higher premiums? Hmm, but maybe whole life makes more sense. Or since I’m 27, maybe I could get a 10 year term and then switch to whole life.
Yes. In fact, that’s exactly what the insurance company does with your premiums when you buy whole life. Except they take a bunch out for themselves. There’s no good reason to buy whole life when you just could buy term and invest the difference until you have enough saved to pay for the cryofund. Except if you don’t think you will be disciplined enough to regularly invest the difference, and even then, you can have money automatically taken from a bank account into your cryonics account.
Albeit that if the money is in your name, those who might otherwise be your heirs will have a motive to try and stop your cryonic preservation to get their hands on the money.
It’s happened.
True, but you can set up an irrevocable trust to prevent that.
It’s a lot easier to just buy a life insurance policy.
Yes, I found whole life to be 4-5 times more expensive than term.
I’m currently contemplating going for 40 year term and betting that either the world will end before then, or if not that the Singularity will take place, or if not that cryopreservation will be much cheaper by then.
Is there an actuary in the house?
Ten days and counting.
Magic, thanks! As it turns out, people’s default assumption isn’t that I’ve joined a cult, it’s that this is my mid-life crisis. What I find very odd is that some of this is from people who knew me ten years ago!