As a final comment, I disagree that storing all patients in one system is a good idea. Too many eggs in one basket is never good when you’re trying to maximize the probability that each patient will survive.
Why? Several baskets certainly make sense if you’re trying to maximize the probability that at least a few patients survive, and might make sense if you assign significantly negative utility to higher variance in your probability distribution about survival percentage. If you just care about the mean, why would more baskets be better?
(a) Because a single, large target is very inviting for people to try and break deliberately, but if there are N small targets spread out all over the place, the effort required to inflict a lot of damage is extreme, especially if each grave is under 5 meters of concrete and in a remote location.
Also, the idea of killing “the elitists” by rupturing their collective cryograve seems more righteous than going to Jack Smith’s grave and specifically killing Jack. It seems more like murder that way. So the optimal solution is one person per grave.
(b) because graves can use slightly different technology, and in the time between when you set the scheme up and when civilization or just cryonics companies collapse, you can see which designs actually fail, and rescue the patients inside them. A large population of say, 100 graves, with 10 examples of each design type will yield information about what works best as the worst ones break. Then over time you should become more confident in the remaining designs that have zero instances of failure.
It seems to me that, for someone to conceive of their actions as “specifically killing Jack”, they have to believe that cryogenics works. If they don’t, they’re not killing Jack, they’re just vandalising his grave, and he was clearly a weirdo. This doesn’t necessarily invalidate your points; I’m just saying that you should be careful not to project your own beliefs onto future opposers-of-cryogenics, or you will defend against the wrong attitudes.
I think that people who deliberately wanted to smash cryo facilities would do so because they were jealous, i.e. they thought that there was a chance that it would work. This is especially the case if civilization is going pear shaped and they feel that the cryonauts are getting a lucky escape, and there are rumors of “the elite” escaping to the future that way, etc etc.
If you don’t think cryo works, you don’t have a motive to expend lots of effort smashing cryo facilities. So the only protection required against people who think it won’t work is that the facility is so remote they’ll never bump into it.
I think you’re Rokomorphizing an awful lot. You just need to be in a state of mind where smashing a cyro container seems cool, something that can score points with your friends, and where you think you can get away with it.
And in particular, where smashing cryonics facilities will infuriate the people who care about them, even if you don’t believe cryonics will work.
I don’t have a feeling for whether anti-cryonicism will ever get to that point. My feeling is that the sort of vandalism I’m talking about is extremely impulsive, and just not having cryonic storage near where people live is enough to greatly improve the odds that there won’t be random vandalism.
You probably mean security guards. Note that decent security is going to add something to the cost of cryonics.
Absolutely, and this conversation has prompted me to consider how best to handle such factors to ensure my head has the maximum chance of survival.
However, this gets to the scarier possibility—government policies opposed to cryonics. Any ideas about the odds of that happening?
Now that is really scary. Also beyond my ability to create a reliable estimate. I wonder which country is the least likely to have such political problems? Like, the equivalent of the old style swiss banks but for heads.
It’s hard to predict that far ahead, though Scandinavia is looking attractive—the people there don’t have a history of atrocious behavior, and there’s cold climate available.
The nightmare scenario is a hostile world government, or similar effect of powerful governments—think about the US exporting the war on drugs.
I hate saying this, but the only protective strategies I can see are aimed at general increase of power—make money, develop political competence (this can be a community thing, it doesn’t mean everyone has to get into politics) and learn how to be convincing to normal people.
For what it’s worth, the Vikings were very peaceable and property-respecting in Scandinavia—I’m sure we’re all familiar with Saga-era Iceland’s legal system, and the respect for property was substantial even in the culture (why was Burnt Njal’s death so horrifying? because besides burning to death, it destroyed the farm). And even outside they weren’t so bad; you can’t raid a place too quickly if you raze it to the ground.
The nightmare scenario is a hostile world government, or similar effect of powerful governments—think about the US exporting the war on drugs.
And the even bigger risk of such political singletons would be that they probably aren’t too keen on allowing development of technological singleton needed to pull off the reanimation.
I hate saying this, but the only protective strategies I can see are aimed at general increase of power—make money, develop political competence (this can be a community thing, it doesn’t mean everyone has to get into politics) and learn how to be convincing to normal people.
Agree again. Unfortunately most of the ways I can imagine to attain the necessary power take more financial resources and skills than developing an FAI.
Could you expand on what you mean by a political singularity?
In this context, exactly what you mean by ‘hostile world government’. By ‘singularity’ I refer to anything that can be conceptualised as a single agent that has full control over its environment. For example, a world government would qualify assuming there were no independent colonies (or aliens) within realistic reach of our solar system.
Few entities with absolute power is likely to be inclined to relinquish that power to another entity. Don’t tell big brother that you are going to make him irrelevant!
I came up with the intended meaning but it required context. I think that overarching world government or the like would probably be more clear. This seems like an example of possible overuse of a “singularity” paradigm, or at least fondness for the term.
This seems like an example of possible overuse of a “singularity” paradigm, or at least fondness for the term.
Or a spelling error when referencing a somewhat credible authority. I didn’t use ‘overarching world government’ because it would be clear but convey the wrong meaning.
It might just be my own ugh field talking, but can you think of long-lived institutions that haven’t had broad public support that continued their mission effectively over time. Even stuff like the catholic church has had periods where it wasn’t really following its mission statement.
Or do you think you can get broad-scale public support? I’d rate that plausible in less theistic countries,
Cryonics doesn’t need broad public support, it just needs to not be substantially attacked.
If we can get it filed under weird harmless hobby which has enough of a lobby that it’s not worth fucking with, I think that would be probably be enough.
If violent rage against cryonics starts building, that’s a hard problem. At the moment, I don’t know what to do about that one, except for the usual political and propaganda efforts.
I don’t know if it’s possible to get many people to actually sign up for it unless the tech for revival looks at least imminent, so public support would have to be based in principle—probably property rights and/or autonomy.
Long-lived institutions without broad public support? The only thing I can think of is Talmud study, and I don’t know if that would count as an institution.
If we can get it filed under weird harmless hobby which has enough of a lobby that it’s not worth fucking with, I think that would be probably be enough.
Okay we gain money and power now. What happens in 70-100 years when we aren’t around to wield it. Will our descendants care upon our behalf? How do we create self-sustaining social systems?
I’m not interested much in Cryo for myself (although I wouldn’t mind getting frozen for Science). But these kinds of questions matter for things like existential risk reduction that is time dependent. Like meteor deflection or FAI theory when the science of AI is getting close to human level (if it is a long hard slog, and can’t be done before we figure out how intelligence works).
I don’t know if it’s possible to get many people to actually sign up for it unless the tech for revival looks at least imminent, so public support would have to be based in principle—probably property rights and/or autonomy.
If we could get it to be a status symbol to be signed up for cryonics people will flock to it. You want to make it visible as well. Perhaps having your dewar as a coffee table or something.
Long-lived institutions without broad public support? The only thing I can think of is Talmud study, and I don’t know if that would count as an institution.
Freemasons? Although it is hard to tell how well they keep to their mission statement they might be an example of a long-lived institution that does keep their mission.
Okay we gain money and power now. What happens in 70-100 years when we aren’t around to wield it. Will our descendants care upon our behalf? How do we create self-sustaining social systems?
Good question—you obviously can’t control the future of an institution, all you can do is improve the odds.
And this isn’t something where I have actual knowledge, so anything I could say would be pulling it off the top of my head.
I don’t think the “who’d care about the early adopters?” question is a real problem—if you can get the thing going at all, it’s going to have to have a lot of regard for promises and continuity.
How would you feel if, a couple hundred years from now, there actually was a Cult of the Severed Head, with silly initiation rituals and charity fundraisers and a football team, but most of them just figured all this ‘corpsicle’ nonsense was really just symbolic, and spent most of their time arguing about which version of Robert’s Rules of Order they should be using and how to lure people away from the Rotary Club?
Wiki says that the origin of freemasonry is uncertain. Do you have better sources? Was the purpose of freemasons to help them cut rock? Or was it just a group of people who shared something banding together to help each other? E.g. freemasonry was never about cutting rock to use a Hansonianism.
I’m not suggesting we copy freemasonry whole cloth. Simply that we need to look at what social organisations survive, at all.
Freemasonry was literally never about stone work. The stone work and ideas of architecture are used as an analogy for a system of morality, as I understand it.
However, this gets to the scarier possibility—government policies opposed to cryonics. Any ideas about the odds of that happening?
This has happened at least once in British Columbia. See this article. As far as I am aware this is at present the only location which specifically singles out cryonics although there are other areas where the regulations for body disposal inadvertently prevent the use of cryonics.
This kind of stuff makes me boil with anger. Some bureacrat busybody inserts garbage about irradiation into a law at the last second, and there’s nothing we can do to get it out? Is there some kind of international law against defamation? Because that is exactly what this is. And the stuff they prattle on about it taking advantage of patients in a vulnerable state is total nonsense. What they’re doing—pressuring patients into not cryopreserving—is taking advantage, and in a particularly grotesque and unconscionable manner.
Ironically, if I were to send them a letter or call them about this stupid law they’d take it as me being a foreign busybody. This is stupid. They’re the ones harming BC’s global reputation by keeping such idiotic laws on the books.
Some bureacrat busybody inserts garbage about irradiation into a law at the last second, and there’s nothing we can do to get it out? Is there some kind of international law against defamation?
On the contrary—as a general rule, in English-speaking countries, legislators enjoy immunity from any legal consequences of anything they say or write in the course of their work. This is known as “parliamentary privilege,” and goes far beyond the free speech rights of ordinary citizens. In particular, they are free to commit libel without repercussions, as long as they speak in official capacity.
In the U.S., this is even written explicitly into the constitution (“for any speech or debate in either House, [the Senators and Representatives] shall not be questioned in any other place”).
Life is not fair. Don’t expect other people to not randomly screw up our prospects, up to and including causing our deaths.
The solution is for us rationalists/transhumanists/future-oriented folk to become richer, better organized and more numerous so that there are more resources available to prevent more things like this from happening.
Yes, agreed that there is a class of vandal of that form. However, it’s not hard to put a cryo-grave high in the mountains of northern Canada, buried under a protective shell of 10 meters of earth and 3 meters of reinforced concrete. The casual thug wouldn’t know where it is, wouldn’t be able to get there if he did know, and wouldn’t be able to get at it if he were there.
The more worrying class are people who are strongly motivated to get liquidate cryopatients.
a cryo-grave high in the mountains of northern Canada, buried under a protective shell of 10 meters of earth and 3 meters of reinforced concrete.
Putting a big gravestone on top would be a good idea. If the cryo organization fails, it’s too easy for all paper and digital records of the grave to be lost. In that scenario, a gravestone will make it more likely that the grave will be rediscovered before the liquid nitrogen boils away.
It’ll still be safe from random vandals if it’s underground in a remote location, and in the case of anti-cryonics fanatic vandals, there’s nothing you can do to keep them from finding out where all the graves are.
If the cryo organization fails, it’s too easy for all paper and digital records of the grave to be lost.
Well… maybe. That’s an interesting problem. One solution is to just expect that as technology increases, ability to find stuff increases.
Another is to make some kind of hint or signal that only a highly advanced civilization would find, like writing a message down in atomically small writing on many tiny pieces of metal, and scattering them around the planet, or encrypting the location with a very strong encryption.
Another is for the grave to be “smart” and to broadcast that it is getting to the end of its lifetime.
Even better, just people reading this discussion in the future would think “hey, let’s check Canada for cryonauts”
Hello, people of the future! Please unfreeze us, and give us warm soup! We’ll be very grateful! Thanks much.
Seriously, though, I wonder about the ability of future archeologists to dig through historical Internet information. At the moment, the only attempt to create a thorough historical archive of the Internet is the Wayback machine, and since (I estimate) that the growth of the Internet is accelerating faster than the cheapness of reliable long-term storage, they’ll either have to get lots more funding or start being more selective about what they archive.
In terms of the ability to maintain information of interest to future archaeologists through a straight-up global disaster, the Internet isn’t any better than paper. Maybe we need to start looking into cuneiform printers...
I think that getting the grave found at the other end is a less serious problem than building it to last. If they have nanotech, they can explore the entire surface of the earth in great detail, including doing an ultrasound scan of the entire crust. Also the thing would have a magnetic signature, being metallic. And if you were really concerned, you could build in a powerful permanent magnet, which would make it even more detectable. You could even use temperature differentials to power a weak radio transmitter, but honestly that’s probably making it too easy to find. Better to have a whole host of slight anomalies.
If the cryo organization fails, it’s too easy for all paper and digital records of the grave to be lost.
You could handle this by having each separate cryonic organization exchange data about locations of grave sites. The probability that they will all fail is much lower than any single one failing. Moreover, the most likely situations resulting in such large scale failure will be situations where the human economy is so damaged that replacing the liquid nitrogen will not be feasible.
What do you think about a honeycomb like structure that has individual cells for a single person, but is bundled together enough to get a lot of the insulation benefits of being big?
When you consider the pool of potential patients (over a given century) is in the billions, a few million per location does not necessarily constitute putting all your eggs in one basket. And the process of making it mainstream enough for this to happen could have a huge positive impact the sanity waterline.
I’m thinking about actually proposing this to cryo-companies, so we have to deal with the real world, where there are tens of patients per decade, not billions.
With only a few dozen patients, I don’t think you will see appreciable economies of scale. The whole idea seems to me reliant on at least a few thousand patients becoming available within a short period of time (or prepaying).
My calculations indicate that you could have a system that lasted for 200 years for just $500,000, though with a scale of perhaps 100 units being built this would go down by a factor of 2-3 and the reliability would go up.
At r=2.9 meters, the size is about in the 10,000 neuro patient range. (V~=102m^3, patients per cubic meter is about 125). You might only fill it part way though if you are aiming for maximum duration, as the less cryogen is displaced the longer the system stays cold. Even so, this could probably hold every cryonicist currently in existence.
Though it’s reliability, not just cost that matters. If there were fewer patients per grave, (e.g. 10 per grave), then the reliability goes up (see my previous comments to this effect)
Still, filling it to 50% of its volume would only bring down refill time by 50%. And you only can fill to a certain percentage with patients as they are irregularly shaped. I suppose the real question is whether cost or hands-off reliability is the biggest concern.
I think that with 10 patients, such a system would cost $100k each, which is pretty good. With many such systems scattered around the remote, cold parts of the world, the probability of any fraction of systems being vandalized goes down, and the information gained about how such systems fail comes in quickly as a few of them fail (e.g. vacuum leaks).
Why? Several baskets certainly make sense if you’re trying to maximize the probability that at least a few patients survive, and might make sense if you assign significantly negative utility to higher variance in your probability distribution about survival percentage. If you just care about the mean, why would more baskets be better?
(a) Because a single, large target is very inviting for people to try and break deliberately, but if there are N small targets spread out all over the place, the effort required to inflict a lot of damage is extreme, especially if each grave is under 5 meters of concrete and in a remote location.
Also, the idea of killing “the elitists” by rupturing their collective cryograve seems more righteous than going to Jack Smith’s grave and specifically killing Jack. It seems more like murder that way. So the optimal solution is one person per grave.
(b) because graves can use slightly different technology, and in the time between when you set the scheme up and when civilization or just cryonics companies collapse, you can see which designs actually fail, and rescue the patients inside them. A large population of say, 100 graves, with 10 examples of each design type will yield information about what works best as the worst ones break. Then over time you should become more confident in the remaining designs that have zero instances of failure.
It seems to me that, for someone to conceive of their actions as “specifically killing Jack”, they have to believe that cryogenics works. If they don’t, they’re not killing Jack, they’re just vandalising his grave, and he was clearly a weirdo. This doesn’t necessarily invalidate your points; I’m just saying that you should be careful not to project your own beliefs onto future opposers-of-cryogenics, or you will defend against the wrong attitudes.
I think that people who deliberately wanted to smash cryo facilities would do so because they were jealous, i.e. they thought that there was a chance that it would work. This is especially the case if civilization is going pear shaped and they feel that the cryonauts are getting a lucky escape, and there are rumors of “the elite” escaping to the future that way, etc etc.
If you don’t think cryo works, you don’t have a motive to expend lots of effort smashing cryo facilities. So the only protection required against people who think it won’t work is that the facility is so remote they’ll never bump into it.
I think you’re Rokomorphizing an awful lot. You just need to be in a state of mind where smashing a cyro container seems cool, something that can score points with your friends, and where you think you can get away with it.
And in particular, where smashing cryonics facilities will infuriate the people who care about them, even if you don’t believe cryonics will work.
I don’t have a feeling for whether anti-cryonicism will ever get to that point. My feeling is that the sort of vandalism I’m talking about is extremely impulsive, and just not having cryonic storage near where people live is enough to greatly improve the odds that there won’t be random vandalism.
Also guns. People with guns.
According to Mike Darwin one cryonics facility (don’t remember which, sorry) has already been shot at from the street.
For being a cryonics facility? Is there enough evidence to determine if it could’ve been just a random drive-by?
I’m afraid all I know about it is a brief remark from Mike Darwin somewhere in this sequence of videos:
http://www.youtube.com/user/KoanPhilosopher#grid/user/B6A98520CF2F56AC
You probably mean security guards. Note that decent security is going to add something to the cost of cryonics.
However, this gets to the scarier possibility—government policies opposed to cryonics. Any ideas about the odds of that happening?
Absolutely, and this conversation has prompted me to consider how best to handle such factors to ensure my head has the maximum chance of survival.
Now that is really scary. Also beyond my ability to create a reliable estimate. I wonder which country is the least likely to have such political problems? Like, the equivalent of the old style swiss banks but for heads.
It’s hard to predict that far ahead, though Scandinavia is looking attractive—the people there don’t have a history of atrocious behavior, and there’s cold climate available.
The nightmare scenario is a hostile world government, or similar effect of powerful governments—think about the US exporting the war on drugs.
I hate saying this, but the only protective strategies I can see are aimed at general increase of power—make money, develop political competence (this can be a community thing, it doesn’t mean everyone has to get into politics) and learn how to be convincing to normal people.
While I don’t expect future Vikings to raid cryonics facilities, I feel this statement should have been qualified somehow.
For what it’s worth, the Vikings were very peaceable and property-respecting in Scandinavia—I’m sure we’re all familiar with Saga-era Iceland’s legal system, and the respect for property was substantial even in the culture (why was Burnt Njal’s death so horrifying? because besides burning to death, it destroyed the farm). And even outside they weren’t so bad; you can’t raid a place too quickly if you raze it to the ground.
And the even bigger risk of such political singletons would be that they probably aren’t too keen on allowing development of technological singleton needed to pull off the reanimation.
Agree again. Unfortunately most of the ways I can imagine to attain the necessary power take more financial resources and skills than developing an FAI.
Could you expand on what you mean by a political singularity?
And it’s my impression that merely ordinary amounts of wealth can make a difference to politics if they’re applied to changing minds.
In this context, exactly what you mean by ‘hostile world government’. By ‘singularity’ I refer to anything that can be conceptualised as a single agent that has full control over its environment. For example, a world government would qualify assuming there were no independent colonies (or aliens) within realistic reach of our solar system.
Few entities with absolute power is likely to be inclined to relinquish that power to another entity. Don’t tell big brother that you are going to make him irrelevant!
I find “political singularity” to be very unclear, and I’m curious about whether other LessWrongians came up with the intended meaning.
I was paraphrasing Bostrom from memory, and meant singleton. The relevant section is up to and including the first sentence of ‘2’.
I came up with the intended meaning but it required context. I think that overarching world government or the like would probably be more clear. This seems like an example of possible overuse of a “singularity” paradigm, or at least fondness for the term.
I suspect the intended word was singleton
Which has less overloaded meaning.
That’s the one. Edited.
Or a spelling error when referencing a somewhat credible authority. I didn’t use ‘overarching world government’ because it would be clear but convey the wrong meaning.
Ah ok. This makes a lot of sense. Political singleton makes a lot of sense.
Why do you hate saying this, out of curiosity?
Because getting good at that sort of thing would mean getting past gigantic ugh fields at my end.
It might just be my own ugh field talking, but can you think of long-lived institutions that haven’t had broad public support that continued their mission effectively over time. Even stuff like the catholic church has had periods where it wasn’t really following its mission statement.
Or do you think you can get broad-scale public support? I’d rate that plausible in less theistic countries,
Cryonics doesn’t need broad public support, it just needs to not be substantially attacked.
If we can get it filed under weird harmless hobby which has enough of a lobby that it’s not worth fucking with, I think that would be probably be enough.
If violent rage against cryonics starts building, that’s a hard problem. At the moment, I don’t know what to do about that one, except for the usual political and propaganda efforts.
I don’t know if it’s possible to get many people to actually sign up for it unless the tech for revival looks at least imminent, so public support would have to be based in principle—probably property rights and/or autonomy.
Long-lived institutions without broad public support? The only thing I can think of is Talmud study, and I don’t know if that would count as an institution.
Okay we gain money and power now. What happens in 70-100 years when we aren’t around to wield it. Will our descendants care upon our behalf? How do we create self-sustaining social systems?
I’m not interested much in Cryo for myself (although I wouldn’t mind getting frozen for Science). But these kinds of questions matter for things like existential risk reduction that is time dependent. Like meteor deflection or FAI theory when the science of AI is getting close to human level (if it is a long hard slog, and can’t be done before we figure out how intelligence works).
If we could get it to be a status symbol to be signed up for cryonics people will flock to it. You want to make it visible as well. Perhaps having your dewar as a coffee table or something.
Freemasons? Although it is hard to tell how well they keep to their mission statement they might be an example of a long-lived institution that does keep their mission.
Good question—you obviously can’t control the future of an institution, all you can do is improve the odds.
And this isn’t something where I have actual knowledge, so anything I could say would be pulling it off the top of my head.
I don’t think the “who’d care about the early adopters?” question is a real problem—if you can get the thing going at all, it’s going to have to have a lot of regard for promises and continuity.
They don’t cut rocks anymore. Like, at all.
How would you feel if, a couple hundred years from now, there actually was a Cult of the Severed Head, with silly initiation rituals and charity fundraisers and a football team, but most of them just figured all this ‘corpsicle’ nonsense was really just symbolic, and spent most of their time arguing about which version of Robert’s Rules of Order they should be using and how to lure people away from the Rotary Club?
Wiki says that the origin of freemasonry is uncertain. Do you have better sources? Was the purpose of freemasons to help them cut rock? Or was it just a group of people who shared something banding together to help each other? E.g. freemasonry was never about cutting rock to use a Hansonianism.
I’m not suggesting we copy freemasonry whole cloth. Simply that we need to look at what social organisations survive, at all.
Freemasonry was literally never about stone work. The stone work and ideas of architecture are used as an analogy for a system of morality, as I understand it.
Wikipedia suggests that the theory that freemasonry evolved from stonemason’s guilds is considered at least plausible.
This has happened at least once in British Columbia. See this article. As far as I am aware this is at present the only location which specifically singles out cryonics although there are other areas where the regulations for body disposal inadvertently prevent the use of cryonics.
This kind of stuff makes me boil with anger. Some bureacrat busybody inserts garbage about irradiation into a law at the last second, and there’s nothing we can do to get it out? Is there some kind of international law against defamation? Because that is exactly what this is. And the stuff they prattle on about it taking advantage of patients in a vulnerable state is total nonsense. What they’re doing—pressuring patients into not cryopreserving—is taking advantage, and in a particularly grotesque and unconscionable manner.
Ironically, if I were to send them a letter or call them about this stupid law they’d take it as me being a foreign busybody. This is stupid. They’re the ones harming BC’s global reputation by keeping such idiotic laws on the books.
/rant
Isparrish:
On the contrary—as a general rule, in English-speaking countries, legislators enjoy immunity from any legal consequences of anything they say or write in the course of their work. This is known as “parliamentary privilege,” and goes far beyond the free speech rights of ordinary citizens. In particular, they are free to commit libel without repercussions, as long as they speak in official capacity.
In the U.S., this is even written explicitly into the constitution (“for any speech or debate in either House, [the Senators and Representatives] shall not be questioned in any other place”).
Life is not fair. Don’t expect other people to not randomly screw up our prospects, up to and including causing our deaths.
The solution is for us rationalists/transhumanists/future-oriented folk to become richer, better organized and more numerous so that there are more resources available to prevent more things like this from happening.
Yes, agreed that there is a class of vandal of that form. However, it’s not hard to put a cryo-grave high in the mountains of northern Canada, buried under a protective shell of 10 meters of earth and 3 meters of reinforced concrete. The casual thug wouldn’t know where it is, wouldn’t be able to get there if he did know, and wouldn’t be able to get at it if he were there.
The more worrying class are people who are strongly motivated to get liquidate cryopatients.
Putting a big gravestone on top would be a good idea. If the cryo organization fails, it’s too easy for all paper and digital records of the grave to be lost. In that scenario, a gravestone will make it more likely that the grave will be rediscovered before the liquid nitrogen boils away.
It’ll still be safe from random vandals if it’s underground in a remote location, and in the case of anti-cryonics fanatic vandals, there’s nothing you can do to keep them from finding out where all the graves are.
Well… maybe. That’s an interesting problem. One solution is to just expect that as technology increases, ability to find stuff increases.
Another is to make some kind of hint or signal that only a highly advanced civilization would find, like writing a message down in atomically small writing on many tiny pieces of metal, and scattering them around the planet, or encrypting the location with a very strong encryption.
Another is for the grave to be “smart” and to broadcast that it is getting to the end of its lifetime.
Even better, just people reading this discussion in the future would think “hey, let’s check Canada for cryonauts”
Hello, people of the future! Please unfreeze us, and give us warm soup! We’ll be very grateful! Thanks much.
Seriously, though, I wonder about the ability of future archeologists to dig through historical Internet information. At the moment, the only attempt to create a thorough historical archive of the Internet is the Wayback machine, and since (I estimate) that the growth of the Internet is accelerating faster than the cheapness of reliable long-term storage, they’ll either have to get lots more funding or start being more selective about what they archive.
In terms of the ability to maintain information of interest to future archaeologists through a straight-up global disaster, the Internet isn’t any better than paper. Maybe we need to start looking into cuneiform printers...
I think that getting the grave found at the other end is a less serious problem than building it to last. If they have nanotech, they can explore the entire surface of the earth in great detail, including doing an ultrasound scan of the entire crust. Also the thing would have a magnetic signature, being metallic. And if you were really concerned, you could build in a powerful permanent magnet, which would make it even more detectable. You could even use temperature differentials to power a weak radio transmitter, but honestly that’s probably making it too easy to find. Better to have a whole host of slight anomalies.
You could handle this by having each separate cryonic organization exchange data about locations of grave sites. The probability that they will all fail is much lower than any single one failing. Moreover, the most likely situations resulting in such large scale failure will be situations where the human economy is so damaged that replacing the liquid nitrogen will not be feasible.
What do you think about a honeycomb like structure that has individual cells for a single person, but is bundled together enough to get a lot of the insulation benefits of being big?
When you consider the pool of potential patients (over a given century) is in the billions, a few million per location does not necessarily constitute putting all your eggs in one basket. And the process of making it mainstream enough for this to happen could have a huge positive impact the sanity waterline.
I’m thinking about actually proposing this to cryo-companies, so we have to deal with the real world, where there are tens of patients per decade, not billions.
With only a few dozen patients, I don’t think you will see appreciable economies of scale. The whole idea seems to me reliant on at least a few thousand patients becoming available within a short period of time (or prepaying).
My calculations indicate that you could have a system that lasted for 200 years for just $500,000, though with a scale of perhaps 100 units being built this would go down by a factor of 2-3 and the reliability would go up.
At r=2.9 meters, the size is about in the 10,000 neuro patient range. (V~=102m^3, patients per cubic meter is about 125). You might only fill it part way though if you are aiming for maximum duration, as the less cryogen is displaced the longer the system stays cold. Even so, this could probably hold every cryonicist currently in existence.
Though it’s reliability, not just cost that matters. If there were fewer patients per grave, (e.g. 10 per grave), then the reliability goes up (see my previous comments to this effect)
Still, filling it to 50% of its volume would only bring down refill time by 50%. And you only can fill to a certain percentage with patients as they are irregularly shaped. I suppose the real question is whether cost or hands-off reliability is the biggest concern.
I think that with 10 patients, such a system would cost $100k each, which is pretty good. With many such systems scattered around the remote, cold parts of the world, the probability of any fraction of systems being vandalized goes down, and the information gained about how such systems fail comes in quickly as a few of them fail (e.g. vacuum leaks).
Not graves!