It definitely is not cheap. But it’s more manageable if you start young, especially if you’re using life insurance for funding. Or create a separate investment account and add to it every month.
I’d love to see the cost of cryonics fall. Unfortunately, I don’t see that happening soon. For real economies of scale, we would need at least one or two orders of magnitude growth in members. It’s tough to reduce storage costs, although Alcor did it by using Steve Graber’s “Superdewar” design. (I helped by renegotiating the liquid nitrogen charges.) Achieving economies in standby services is difficult. Currently, Suspended Animation’s costs are heavily subsidized by Bill Faloon.
With 100x or 1000x more business, enabling the hiring of full time staff (especially surgeons and perfusionists) and dropping the large annual fee for getting medical personnel, costs for SST should be able to come down. With serious growth, membership charges could go way down. I wrote about this ten years ago, but it should mostly still be relevant: https://www.cryonicsarchive.org/docs/cryonics-magazine-2013-03.pdf
It definitely is not cheap. But it’s more manageable if you start young, especially if you’re using life insurance for funding. Or create a separate investment account and add to it every month.
I’d love to see the cost of cryonics fall. Unfortunately, I don’t see that happening soon. For real economies of scale, we would need at least one or two orders of magnitude growth in members. It’s tough to reduce storage costs, although Alcor did it by using Steve Graber’s “Superdewar” design. (I helped by renegotiating the liquid nitrogen charges.) Achieving economies in standby services is difficult. Currently, Suspended Animation’s costs are heavily subsidized by Bill Faloon.
With 100x or 1000x more business, enabling the hiring of full time staff (especially surgeons and perfusionists) and dropping the large annual fee for getting medical personnel, costs for SST should be able to come down. With serious growth, membership charges could go way down. I wrote about this ten years ago, but it should mostly still be relevant: https://www.cryonicsarchive.org/docs/cryonics-magazine-2013-03.pdf