What does the future have to look like for high confidence that your business will still be around in 20 years? 50 years? 100 years?
I have been signed with Alcor for almost 20 years. What is the case to switch, irrespective of the science and process (those matter, but what is the business survivorship case)?
I think Nectome’s business case is very strong and that preservation is going to become a new global tradition soon. I think within the next decade we’re going to see very impressive uploading results which will validate that our preservation method works (whether you want to be uploaded or not, compelling uploads that start with aldehyde fixation show that the information was successfully preserved). At that point I think 0.1% − 1% of people will seriously consider preservation, and Nectome will be very successful.
In the case where it takes a long time for preservation to become popular, Nectome will also be fine: we’re already making pre-sales and have a plan that works for a variety of demands.
That being said, I also think there’s a lot of scenarios where Nectome goes out of business, but the people who’ve been preserved are still maintained:
Nectome goes out of business, preservation becomes popular: If preservation becomes a new global tradition, then there will be whole political classes that vote based on the treatment of preserved people, because people they love are preserved people. I hope that one day we’ll have a separate legal category for preserved people that respects the profound loss of future potential it would be if they were destroyed, and instead treats them like we treat people in a medically-induced coma today. And in that case, Nectome would be subject to strict regulations concerning long-term care. If Nectome went out of business, it would be like a hospital going out of business that had several patients in medically-induced comas. It would be legally required to move preserved people without disruption of care. I think this future is actually very likely, despite the low numbers of signups for traditional cryonics over the years, because I expect compelling results in uploading in the next decade to dramatically increase people’s willingness to consider preservation.
Nectome goes out of business, preservation remains unpopular: I think Alcor got it right when they designed their system for long-term care of people. They use a separate company to actually hold preserved people, so that if Alcor (the entity doing perservations) goes out of business, Alcor (the separate entity holding preserved people) continues its operations. Startups fail all the time because they take risks and are doing new things. But graveyards fail much less often, because they get initial endowments and have very predictable costs and few people to pay. So Nectome has two components, one that works more like a startup and one that works more like a graveyard, and it’s less likely for the graveyard-like part to go out of business even if the startup-like one fails. (Note that while I’m using graveyard as an analogy we don’t consider Nectome to be in any sense an actual graveyard.)
All parts of Nectome fail, what happens?: Ultimately we have a big advantage in that long-term care of people preserved with Nectome’s methods is fairly easy. We store people at −32°C which is readily available commercially. Preserved people are stable at room temperature for some amount of time, I’m quite sure it’s longer than a month based on our own accelerated aging experiments so far, but I think in reality it’s probably years or even decades. Preserved people each come with an endowment that covers long-term storage, so in the event that all parts of Nectome failed I think that many companies offering cold storage would be interested in taking up a storage contract because it would be profitable for them.
No money AND no Nectome: Say there’s a war or some major upheaval and both Nectome and most / all of the money is lost. In that case, as Nectome’s last corporate act, we’d move people to permafrost storage who wanted preservation at all costs and were willing to lose chain of custody over it, and cremate the rest.
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What about your Alcor membership? Keep it! We don’t do memberships at Nectome, instead people just buy preservations when they need them, or in advance. Two considerations on this:
I’d add a rider to your life insurance policy that enables you to get paid the full amount of the policy if you become terminally ill. I can get you the exact language if you want, I’ve got it on my life insurance. Insurance companies don’t charge much for this and it’s immensely helpful for doing preservations. If you do this and keep your Alcor membership, then if you die suddenly Alcor gets you. If you have the ability to plan ahead you can use Nectome.
You might consider buying a preservation pre-sale before we open. They’re transferrable and we’re selling them at a substantial discount. Details here.
It’s not set up yet but we are broadly going to model it after Alcor’s long-term patient care fund. Non profit. They survived for decades; no sense in changing something that isn’t broken.
I’m a little confused by what you mean by ‘savings’?
Are you talking about the amount we set aside for each person, the total amount in the endowment dedicated to long-term care, whether that amount changes over time, something else? Looking forward to getting you a complete answer!
There’s no endowment currently because we haven’t preserved anyone yet.
With each preservation, we’ll set aside enough money to cover 100 years of storage at the time of preservation and those funds will be invested in something like index funds. I don’t think that we will actually need 100 years of storage, but a 1% drawdown should be conservative and long-term sustainable, especially since we expect advancements in refrigeration technology, the preservation technology itself, and energy production (like fusion power) to reduce the cost of preservation maintenance over time.
Our constraint regarding the endowment is that it needs to be true that the whole arrangement with the endowment is appealing enough that another company would be interested in assuming responsibility for continued care of preserved people because it would be profitable, in the case where for some reason we had to hand off long-term care to another entity.
The preservation endowment will grow with each preservation and be highly dependent on sales, but I think we will be getting to thousands of preservations per year in a few years and that will translate to > $10 M in the endowment in total at that time.
Some people voted this down with disagreement but didn’t voice the disagreement. I am curious about which part they are disagreeing with. Is it that they see the story as implausible, or imagine a case that isn’t covered, or something else?
So I guess the process would be like, you’re ready to use Nectome with MAiD, so you take out your life insurance policy, pay Nectome, and then use MAiD, all in a short timeframe, otherwise there’s a period where you don’t have an insurance policy for Alcor, and could die without MAiD. Sounds risky. Alternatively, have 2 full insurance policies, but that increases the cost significantly.
We want people to be preserved and we’ll work things out to make sure people don’t have weird gaps in coverage like what you’re describing. As part of getting set up with us you can name a specific emergency services provider in the event you can’t be preserved by us, and we’d forward the payment if that came up.
In practice it would be pretty rare for someone to die right before they went through with MAiD, but it’s good to plan ahead.
Specifically, if someone had an Alcor membership, paid us to preserve them, then died a day before we were going to preserve them but after they had paid us, and had specified beforehand that they wanted Alcor to preserve them in that case, then we would call Alcor ourselves and get the person preserved emergency-style (and we’d be in communication beforehand in any event so everyone was on the same page).
You can probably take out a loan to pay Nectome and MAiD, then pay back the loan with life insurance a couple of weeks later once you’re already preserved.
Most life insurance policies have a 1-3 year exclusion time where if you commit suicide during that time they don’t pay out. But if it’s a long-standing life insurance policy, past that exclusion window, it does pay out even in the case of suicide, with very few exceptions.
MAiD is special because you count as having died of whatever your underlying disease is. It’s not legally suicide. Your death certificate says you died of cancer or whatever your terminal illness was, and Oregon’s gone to some lengths to make a clear distinction between MAiD and suicide. In fact, Oregon law actually specifically prohibits insurance companies from penalizing you as if you’d committed suicide if you make use of MAiD. So in principle even if you did MAiD within the suicide exemption window of a typical life insurance contract, it would still have to pay out. In practice I don’t know of any case law where it’s actually come up. But check out ORS 127.875 §3.13. Insurance or annuity policies, which says:
The sale, procurement, or issuance of any life, health, or accident insurance or annuity policy or the rate charged for any policy shall not be conditioned upon or affected by the making or rescinding of a request, by a person, for medication to end his or her life in a humane and dignified manner. Neither shall a qualified patient’s act of ingesting medication to end his or her life in a humane and dignified manner have an effect upon a life, health, or accident insurance or annuity policy.
What does the future have to look like for high confidence that your business will still be around in 20 years? 50 years? 100 years?
I have been signed with Alcor for almost 20 years. What is the case to switch, irrespective of the science and process (those matter, but what is the business survivorship case)?
I think Nectome’s business case is very strong and that preservation is going to become a new global tradition soon. I think within the next decade we’re going to see very impressive uploading results which will validate that our preservation method works (whether you want to be uploaded or not, compelling uploads that start with aldehyde fixation show that the information was successfully preserved). At that point I think 0.1% − 1% of people will seriously consider preservation, and Nectome will be very successful.
In the case where it takes a long time for preservation to become popular, Nectome will also be fine: we’re already making pre-sales and have a plan that works for a variety of demands.
That being said, I also think there’s a lot of scenarios where Nectome goes out of business, but the people who’ve been preserved are still maintained:
Nectome goes out of business, preservation becomes popular: If preservation becomes a new global tradition, then there will be whole political classes that vote based on the treatment of preserved people, because people they love are preserved people. I hope that one day we’ll have a separate legal category for preserved people that respects the profound loss of future potential it would be if they were destroyed, and instead treats them like we treat people in a medically-induced coma today. And in that case, Nectome would be subject to strict regulations concerning long-term care. If Nectome went out of business, it would be like a hospital going out of business that had several patients in medically-induced comas. It would be legally required to move preserved people without disruption of care. I think this future is actually very likely, despite the low numbers of signups for traditional cryonics over the years, because I expect compelling results in uploading in the next decade to dramatically increase people’s willingness to consider preservation.
Nectome goes out of business, preservation remains unpopular: I think Alcor got it right when they designed their system for long-term care of people. They use a separate company to actually hold preserved people, so that if Alcor (the entity doing perservations) goes out of business, Alcor (the separate entity holding preserved people) continues its operations. Startups fail all the time because they take risks and are doing new things. But graveyards fail much less often, because they get initial endowments and have very predictable costs and few people to pay. So Nectome has two components, one that works more like a startup and one that works more like a graveyard, and it’s less likely for the graveyard-like part to go out of business even if the startup-like one fails. (Note that while I’m using graveyard as an analogy we don’t consider Nectome to be in any sense an actual graveyard.)
All parts of Nectome fail, what happens?: Ultimately we have a big advantage in that long-term care of people preserved with Nectome’s methods is fairly easy. We store people at −32°C which is readily available commercially. Preserved people are stable at room temperature for some amount of time, I’m quite sure it’s longer than a month based on our own accelerated aging experiments so far, but I think in reality it’s probably years or even decades. Preserved people each come with an endowment that covers long-term storage, so in the event that all parts of Nectome failed I think that many companies offering cold storage would be interested in taking up a storage contract because it would be profitable for them.
No money AND no Nectome: Say there’s a war or some major upheaval and both Nectome and most / all of the money is lost. In that case, as Nectome’s last corporate act, we’d move people to permafrost storage who wanted preservation at all costs and were willing to lose chain of custody over it, and cremate the rest.
----------------------------------------
What about your Alcor membership? Keep it! We don’t do memberships at Nectome, instead people just buy preservations when they need them, or in advance. Two considerations on this:
I’d add a rider to your life insurance policy that enables you to get paid the full amount of the policy if you become terminally ill. I can get you the exact language if you want, I’ve got it on my life insurance. Insurance companies don’t charge much for this and it’s immensely helpful for doing preservations. If you do this and keep your Alcor membership, then if you die suddenly Alcor gets you. If you have the ability to plan ahead you can use Nectome.
You might consider buying a preservation pre-sale before we open. They’re transferrable and we’re selling them at a substantial discount. Details here.
What’s the structure, finance, and governance for the graveyard-like part of Nectome?
non-profit? perpetual board?
what fraction of the cost is put into a trust for long-term preservation?
It’s not set up yet but we are broadly going to model it after Alcor’s long-term patient care fund. Non profit. They survived for decades; no sense in changing something that isn’t broken.
Will you have much savings early on?
I’m a little confused by what you mean by ‘savings’?
Are you talking about the amount we set aside for each person, the total amount in the endowment dedicated to long-term care, whether that amount changes over time, something else? Looking forward to getting you a complete answer!
The total amount in the endowment, and plans about its changes over the next several years, please.
Gotcha!
There’s no endowment currently because we haven’t preserved anyone yet.
With each preservation, we’ll set aside enough money to cover 100 years of storage at the time of preservation and those funds will be invested in something like index funds. I don’t think that we will actually need 100 years of storage, but a 1% drawdown should be conservative and long-term sustainable, especially since we expect advancements in refrigeration technology, the preservation technology itself, and energy production (like fusion power) to reduce the cost of preservation maintenance over time.
Our constraint regarding the endowment is that it needs to be true that the whole arrangement with the endowment is appealing enough that another company would be interested in assuming responsibility for continued care of preserved people because it would be profitable, in the case where for some reason we had to hand off long-term care to another entity.
The preservation endowment will grow with each preservation and be highly dependent on sales, but I think we will be getting to thousands of preservations per year in a few years and that will translate to > $10 M in the endowment in total at that time.
Some people voted this down with disagreement but didn’t voice the disagreement. I am curious about which part they are disagreeing with. Is it that they see the story as implausible, or imagine a case that isn’t covered, or something else?
So I guess the process would be like, you’re ready to use Nectome with MAiD, so you take out your life insurance policy, pay Nectome, and then use MAiD, all in a short timeframe, otherwise there’s a period where you don’t have an insurance policy for Alcor, and could die without MAiD. Sounds risky. Alternatively, have 2 full insurance policies, but that increases the cost significantly.
We want people to be preserved and we’ll work things out to make sure people don’t have weird gaps in coverage like what you’re describing. As part of getting set up with us you can name a specific emergency services provider in the event you can’t be preserved by us, and we’d forward the payment if that came up.
In practice it would be pretty rare for someone to die right before they went through with MAiD, but it’s good to plan ahead.
Specifically, if someone had an Alcor membership, paid us to preserve them, then died a day before we were going to preserve them but after they had paid us, and had specified beforehand that they wanted Alcor to preserve them in that case, then we would call Alcor ourselves and get the person preserved emergency-style (and we’d be in communication beforehand in any event so everyone was on the same page).
You can probably take out a loan to pay Nectome and MAiD, then pay back the loan with life insurance a couple of weeks later once you’re already preserved.
Do you get life insurance on MAiD? I’d be very surprised.
edit: well, the google AI agent says yes you actually do! Color me impressed. Guess they trust the legal checks on that.
Most life insurance policies have a 1-3 year exclusion time where if you commit suicide during that time they don’t pay out. But if it’s a long-standing life insurance policy, past that exclusion window, it does pay out even in the case of suicide, with very few exceptions.
MAiD is special because you count as having died of whatever your underlying disease is. It’s not legally suicide. Your death certificate says you died of cancer or whatever your terminal illness was, and Oregon’s gone to some lengths to make a clear distinction between MAiD and suicide. In fact, Oregon law actually specifically prohibits insurance companies from penalizing you as if you’d committed suicide if you make use of MAiD. So in principle even if you did MAiD within the suicide exemption window of a typical life insurance contract, it would still have to pay out. In practice I don’t know of any case law where it’s actually come up. But check out ORS 127.875 §3.13. Insurance or annuity policies, which says:
Thanks for the answer. I’ll read your research and think about whether it makes sense.