I’m really not sure why you feel the need to have a charity to research this—a simple non-profit research organisation could probably rather trivially fund a review of cryonics literature. Alcor and CI both do a great job of citing their sources, and LessWrong has done a review of the anti-cryonics literature (short version: there isn’t any that has an actual basis in science)
Really what it comes down to is, cryonics says “given the current proven technologies, these few assumptions, and an assumed high-likelihood that we’ll therefore also develop X and Y at some point, we can do this.” There isn’t any way to research or test that short of actually developing a de-vitrification process and proving it works. If you’re curious to know whether cryonics really works, you’d have to fund the organisations doing that research.
You need a charity to offer it to people for free so that it doesn’t seem like a scam to them.
I suppose I really don’t follow that reasoning. All Board members are required by Alcor Bylaws to be Alcor members, so you already have some degree of “clearly these people believe in it and are committed to it.” I’m not sure how a charity that was founded exclusively for this reason would come off as the slightest bit more trustworthy. An established third party evaluation, certainly. A number of noteworthy celebrities, perhaps, but they’re known to advocate all sorts of crazy stuff—we don’t want to tip our image even more-so in to “weird crazy cult”.
I suppose mostly, I can’t think of any legitimate group that feels the need to do a “first one is free” policy—it makes me think drug dealers and cults, not medicine and science.
I’m really not sure why you feel the need to have a charity to research this—a simple non-profit research organisation could probably rather trivially fund a review of cryonics literature. Alcor and CI both do a great job of citing their sources, and LessWrong has done a review of the anti-cryonics literature (short version: there isn’t any that has an actual basis in science)
Really what it comes down to is, cryonics says “given the current proven technologies, these few assumptions, and an assumed high-likelihood that we’ll therefore also develop X and Y at some point, we can do this.” There isn’t any way to research or test that short of actually developing a de-vitrification process and proving it works. If you’re curious to know whether cryonics really works, you’d have to fund the organisations doing that research.
You don’t need a charity to research it. It seems you missed my point.
You need a charity to offer it to people for free so that it doesn’t seem like a scam to them. That way they’ll take it seriously.
I suppose I really don’t follow that reasoning. All Board members are required by Alcor Bylaws to be Alcor members, so you already have some degree of “clearly these people believe in it and are committed to it.” I’m not sure how a charity that was founded exclusively for this reason would come off as the slightest bit more trustworthy. An established third party evaluation, certainly. A number of noteworthy celebrities, perhaps, but they’re known to advocate all sorts of crazy stuff—we don’t want to tip our image even more-so in to “weird crazy cult”.
I suppose mostly, I can’t think of any legitimate group that feels the need to do a “first one is free” policy—it makes me think drug dealers and cults, not medicine and science.