Given the sky-high utility I’d place on living, I wouldn’t expect to see the numbers crunch down to a place where a non-huge sum of money is the difference between signing up and not.
So when someone says ‘if it were half the price maybe I’d sign up’ I’m always interested to know exactly what calculations they’re performing, and exactly what it is that reduces the billions of utilons of living down to a marginal cash sum. The (tiny?) chance of cryonics working? Serious coincidence if those factors cancel comfortably. Just smacks of bottom-line to me.
Put it this way—imagine cryonics has been seriously, prohibitively expensive for many years after introduction. Say it still was today, for some reason, and then after much debate and hand-wringing about immortality for the uber-rich, tomorrow suddenly and very publicly dropped to current levels, I’d expect to see a huge upswing in signing up. Such is the human being!
Sorry, should have given more context.
Given the sky-high utility I’d place on living, I wouldn’t expect to see the numbers crunch down to a place where a non-huge sum of money is the difference between signing up and not.
So when someone says ‘if it were half the price maybe I’d sign up’ I’m always interested to know exactly what calculations they’re performing, and exactly what it is that reduces the billions of utilons of living down to a marginal cash sum. The (tiny?) chance of cryonics working? Serious coincidence if those factors cancel comfortably. Just smacks of bottom-line to me.
Put it this way—imagine cryonics has been seriously, prohibitively expensive for many years after introduction. Say it still was today, for some reason, and then after much debate and hand-wringing about immortality for the uber-rich, tomorrow suddenly and very publicly dropped to current levels, I’d expect to see a huge upswing in signing up. Such is the human being!
I agree with all of this.