I’m going to die anyway. What difference does it make whether I die in 60 years or in 10,000?
Longevity of 10,000 years makes no sense, since by that time any acute risk period will be over and robust immortality tech will be available, almost certainly to anyone still alive then. And extinction or the extent of permanent disempowerment will be settled before cryonauts get woken up.
The relevant scale is useful matter/energy in galaxy clusters running out, depending on how quickly it’s used up, since after about 1e11 years larger collections of galaxies will no longer be reachable from each other, so after that time you only have the matter/energy that can be found in the galaxy cluster where you settle.
(Distributed backups make even galaxy-scale disasters reliably survivable. Technological maturity makes it so that any aliens have no technological advantages and will have to just split the resources or establish boundaries. And causality-bounding effect of accelerating expansion of the universe to within galaxy clusters makes the issue of aliens thoroughly settled by 1e12 years from now, even as initial colonization/exploration waves would’ve already long clarified the overall density of alien civilizations in the reachable universe.)
If one of your loved ones is terminally ill and wants to raise money for cryopreservation, is it really humane to panic and scramble to raise $28,000 for a suspension in Michigan? I don’t think so. The most humane option is to be there for them and accompany them through all the stages of grief.
Are there alternatives that trade off this that are a better use of the money? In isolation, this proposition is not very specific. A nontrivial chance at 1e34 years of life seems like a good cause.
My guess is 70% of non-extinction, perhaps 50% with permanent disempowerment that’s sufficiently mild that it still permits reconstruction of cryonauts (or even no disempowerment, a pipe dream currently). On top of that, 70% that cryopreservation keeps enough data about the mind (with standby that avoids delays) and then the storage survives (risk of extinction shouldn’t be double-counted with risk of cryostorage destruction; but 20 years before ASI make non-extinction more likely to go well, which is 20 years of risk of cryostorage destruction for mundane reasons). So about 35% to survive cryopreservation with standby, a bit less if arranged more haphazardly, since crucial data might be lost.
Longevity of 10,000 years makes no sense, since by that time any acute risk period will be over and robust immortality tech will be available, almost certainly to anyone still alive then. And extinction or the extent of permanent disempowerment will be settled before cryonauts get woken up.
The relevant scale is useful matter/energy in galaxy clusters running out, depending on how quickly it’s used up, since after about 1e11 years larger collections of galaxies will no longer be reachable from each other, so after that time you only have the matter/energy that can be found in the galaxy cluster where you settle.
(Distributed backups make even galaxy-scale disasters reliably survivable. Technological maturity makes it so that any aliens have no technological advantages and will have to just split the resources or establish boundaries. And causality-bounding effect of accelerating expansion of the universe to within galaxy clusters makes the issue of aliens thoroughly settled by 1e12 years from now, even as initial colonization/exploration waves would’ve already long clarified the overall density of alien civilizations in the reachable universe.)
Are there alternatives that trade off this that are a better use of the money? In isolation, this proposition is not very specific. A nontrivial chance at 1e34 years of life seems like a good cause.
My guess is 70% of non-extinction, perhaps 50% with permanent disempowerment that’s sufficiently mild that it still permits reconstruction of cryonauts (or even no disempowerment, a pipe dream currently). On top of that, 70% that cryopreservation keeps enough data about the mind (with standby that avoids delays) and then the storage survives (risk of extinction shouldn’t be double-counted with risk of cryostorage destruction; but 20 years before ASI make non-extinction more likely to go well, which is 20 years of risk of cryostorage destruction for mundane reasons). So about 35% to survive cryopreservation with standby, a bit less if arranged more haphazardly, since crucial data might be lost.