Can you really use life insurance to pay for something that is supposed to keep you “alive?”
And how confident are you that the same will be true if cryonics actually work? The potential clawback if it turns out you didn’t actually die (which is a thing that has happened in other “presumed dead” cases) seems like a bit of a risk.
Good question! The answer is yes, you really can. Basically, as far as the law is concerned, a cryopreserved person is as dead as anyone else, and you being legally dead is all that matters for the insurance payout. To date there have never been any problems where a person’s cryonics life insurance failed to pay out because they weren’t recognized as dead (I can’t remember where I read this but I swear it was on either Alcor or CI’s website).
If it’s somehow definitively demonstrated that it’s possible to revive a person who’s been cryopreserved, then I don’t know if life insurance would still be a valid way of funding cryopreservation. However, in that world, a lot of other things would change as well. I imagine cryopreservation would become more mainstream, and we’d be in a state of significantly more advanced medical technology, such that cryonics itself might be obsolete. In other words, that’s not something we need to worry about at this point in time.
As for the risk of being cryopreserved when only “presumed dead”, cryopreservation procedures only ever start after the patient is pronounced legally dead by a medical professional (or other qualified professional). Cases of spontaneous revival after legal death are vanishingly rare, such that I really don’t think this is something worth worrying about.
Can you really use life insurance to pay for something that is supposed to keep you “alive?” And how confident are you that the same will be true if cryonics actually work? The potential clawback if it turns out you didn’t actually die (which is a thing that has happened in other “presumed dead” cases) seems like a bit of a risk.
Good question! The answer is yes, you really can. Basically, as far as the law is concerned, a cryopreserved person is as dead as anyone else, and you being legally dead is all that matters for the insurance payout. To date there have never been any problems where a person’s cryonics life insurance failed to pay out because they weren’t recognized as dead (I can’t remember where I read this but I swear it was on either Alcor or CI’s website).
If it’s somehow definitively demonstrated that it’s possible to revive a person who’s been cryopreserved, then I don’t know if life insurance would still be a valid way of funding cryopreservation. However, in that world, a lot of other things would change as well. I imagine cryopreservation would become more mainstream, and we’d be in a state of significantly more advanced medical technology, such that cryonics itself might be obsolete. In other words, that’s not something we need to worry about at this point in time.
As for the risk of being cryopreserved when only “presumed dead”, cryopreservation procedures only ever start after the patient is pronounced legally dead by a medical professional (or other qualified professional). Cases of spontaneous revival after legal death are vanishingly rare, such that I really don’t think this is something worth worrying about.