Up front, I’ll say that I am not signed up for cryonics, and have no particular plans to. (Yes, I know this means that I will almost certainly be permanently dead within 50 years.) Nobody else at the meet-up was signed up, although some expressed a vague intention to do it one day.
Anyway, an argument in favour is not only that you are likely to wake up (if you wake up at all) in a favorable situation, but you can look forward to a greatly extended lifespan, since making living bodies last longer seems like an easier problem than resuscitating corpsicles frozen with the crude technology of today. This multiplies the utility by a huge amount.
Despite that and other arguments, and a personal desire to live a healthy life for as long as possible, I remain unenthusiastic about devoting a substantial proportion of my resources to the project (not just money—you cannot buy cryonics like you can buy a picture to hang on your wall, you need a plan for the actual suspension). Small probabilities of stupendous outcomes fail to move me even if their product is greater than the cost. You can play the figures like a guitar and get any answer you want.
A downside that I haven’t seen much attention paid to, although it does get mentioned from time to time, is the problem of having the organisation that has the care of your corpsicle surviving long enough, and taking good enough care. You can’t freeze a social structure and put it in a vat for a century—it has to live through all the time that you don’t. What are the chances?
A downside that I haven’t seen much attention paid to, although it does get mentioned from time to time, is the problem of having the organisation that has the care of your corpsicle surviving long enough, and taking good enough care. You can’t freeze a social structure and put it in a vat for a century—it has to live through all the time that you don’t. What are the chances?
There’s a flip side to that, which is that a cryonicist who takes the idea of reanimation seriously must also take the idea of future stability more seriously. Unlike any other living person they have reason to anticipate the long-term results of today’s political stances, investments, and social developments in terms of actual sensory experiences. I’m not sure if this actually translates to increased rationality, but seems like should.
That surprises me, too—about 1% are at least 200 years old, though I don’t know where the 2 million in the database come from. That seems very low for all the companies in the world, or even in the developed world.
Up front, I’ll say that I am not signed up for cryonics, and have no particular plans to. (Yes, I know this means that I will almost certainly be permanently dead within 50 years.) Nobody else at the meet-up was signed up, although some expressed a vague intention to do it one day.
Anyway, an argument in favour is not only that you are likely to wake up (if you wake up at all) in a favorable situation, but you can look forward to a greatly extended lifespan, since making living bodies last longer seems like an easier problem than resuscitating corpsicles frozen with the crude technology of today. This multiplies the utility by a huge amount.
Despite that and other arguments, and a personal desire to live a healthy life for as long as possible, I remain unenthusiastic about devoting a substantial proportion of my resources to the project (not just money—you cannot buy cryonics like you can buy a picture to hang on your wall, you need a plan for the actual suspension). Small probabilities of stupendous outcomes fail to move me even if their product is greater than the cost. You can play the figures like a guitar and get any answer you want.
A downside that I haven’t seen much attention paid to, although it does get mentioned from time to time, is the problem of having the organisation that has the care of your corpsicle surviving long enough, and taking good enough care. You can’t freeze a social structure and put it in a vat for a century—it has to live through all the time that you don’t. What are the chances?
There’s a flip side to that, which is that a cryonicist who takes the idea of reanimation seriously must also take the idea of future stability more seriously. Unlike any other living person they have reason to anticipate the long-term results of today’s political stances, investments, and social developments in terms of actual sensory experiences. I’m not sure if this actually translates to increased rationality, but seems like should.
A surprisingly large number of firms have lasted for centuries, even in war-torn countries like Germany:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies
2% for a century. Multiply that into the chances of cryonics working.
That surprises me, too—about 1% are at least 200 years old, though I don’t know where the 2 million in the database come from. That seems very low for all the companies in the world, or even in the developed world.