Alcor Costs as of 1990 (http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/CostOfCryonicsTables.txt) seems like a reasonably reliable source of information. … gives a simple cost of $18,908.76 for neurosuspension (not whole body). Maintenance costs are given as $66.08 annually, which would require a $6600 investment to yield suitable interest. Call it $25K total.
You’re using costs from 1990, but as far as I can tell, you didn’t adjust for inflation?
This calculator says that $25K in 1990 equals $44K in 2011 when using the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers, or $65K using the medical costs index.
$65K is 2.6 times $25K, so going by the medical costs index, the $6000 per patient would correspond to about $16,000 in today’s money.
You are entirely correct about not adjusting for inflation. I seem to have left out the footnote explaining that this was intentional, as CI currently charges $28,000 for whole body, so it felt unfairly pessimistic to adjust that.
The calculators I did use suggested $6000 in 1990 would cost $9880.15 in 2010. (http://www.westegg.com/inflation/). $6K → $16K seems unexpectedly steep to me, just based on life-time experiences, but I will definitely concede that either way, my numbers are intentionally overly-optimistic :)
I’m kind of curious as to what a worst-case estimate would be. What is the maximum we should expect to pay per patient at a rate of 150,000 cryopreservations around the world?
I’d say the most reasonable figure to use for that estimate would be current market rates. I can concoct scenarios where the price goes up, but none of them strike me as particularly plausible. And, of course, a hypothetical worst case will quickly wind up with “it’s impossible to do cryopreservation on that scale.”
For a more reasonable bad-case, I would assume that a prompt cryopreservation is essential, that the whole body must be preserved for revival to be possible, and that legal issues prevent any form of cryopreservation before a legally pronounced death. As such, it’s essential to retain the current ridiculous amounts of standby labor that goes in to modern pricing—otherwise thousands of lives are lost any time the system gets flooded by a disaster, and anyone who dies outside an urban area is just plain out of luck.
Furthermore, Alcor and CI rely heavily on volunteer labor, often paid well below market rates. Let’s assume that even though medical equipment is tightly regulated and has a lot of expenses related to testing and certification, there’s still some economies of scale that cryopreservation benefits from. I’d say that even in a bad-case scenario, it’s unlikely (but not impossible!) for this to offset the increased labor charges.
The current market rate for CI is $88K if you want standby and transportation services. Alcor charges $200K for the same service. Call it maybe $100K per person.
$100K 150,000 people/day 365 days/year = $5,475,000,000,000 (~5.5 trillion), or about 10% of the world GDP.
If we instead use Alcor’s current market rate of $200K per person, you’re looking at 20% of the world GDP instead.
Honestly, probably one of the worst-but-plausible cases is simply “cryopreservation continues to require legal declaration of death”, since then you never reap the reduction in other medical expenses—if you can cryo-preserve the terminally ill and those who are wasting away, you get some huge societal reductions in medical costs to offset these expenses.
I’d also consider it likely that, no matter what, funeral costs will be vastly lower, which will probably save you a decent chunk of the cost of cryopreservation in wealthier countries. The US spent $15 billion on funerals, but I don’t know how well this maps to the rest of the world. I think one could probably reasonably assume at least $100 billion in savings, as it’s fairly cheap to throw a cryo-preservation party compared to a funeral or cremation. When you’re looking at $5,500 billion, this is not a terribly significant savings, alas :)
In the interests of avoiding the planning fallacy, we could probably think of some reasons to go a bit bigger.
For example, it might be that more expensive yet more effective procedures are developed that cannot in good conscience be left out (due in turn to advances in what we know about biology, i.e. that today’s cryonics is worthless). In that event we might envision the cost as reasonably expanding it to say $500k per person, or around 50% of the GDP.
Do we know any ways to increase the world’s GDP by 50%?
You’re using costs from 1990, but as far as I can tell, you didn’t adjust for inflation?
This calculator says that $25K in 1990 equals $44K in 2011 when using the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers, or $65K using the medical costs index.
$65K is 2.6 times $25K, so going by the medical costs index, the $6000 per patient would correspond to about $16,000 in today’s money.
You are entirely correct about not adjusting for inflation. I seem to have left out the footnote explaining that this was intentional, as CI currently charges $28,000 for whole body, so it felt unfairly pessimistic to adjust that.
The calculators I did use suggested $6000 in 1990 would cost $9880.15 in 2010. (http://www.westegg.com/inflation/). $6K → $16K seems unexpectedly steep to me, just based on life-time experiences, but I will definitely concede that either way, my numbers are intentionally overly-optimistic :)
I’m kind of curious as to what a worst-case estimate would be. What is the maximum we should expect to pay per patient at a rate of 150,000 cryopreservations around the world?
I’d say the most reasonable figure to use for that estimate would be current market rates. I can concoct scenarios where the price goes up, but none of them strike me as particularly plausible. And, of course, a hypothetical worst case will quickly wind up with “it’s impossible to do cryopreservation on that scale.”
For a more reasonable bad-case, I would assume that a prompt cryopreservation is essential, that the whole body must be preserved for revival to be possible, and that legal issues prevent any form of cryopreservation before a legally pronounced death. As such, it’s essential to retain the current ridiculous amounts of standby labor that goes in to modern pricing—otherwise thousands of lives are lost any time the system gets flooded by a disaster, and anyone who dies outside an urban area is just plain out of luck.
Furthermore, Alcor and CI rely heavily on volunteer labor, often paid well below market rates. Let’s assume that even though medical equipment is tightly regulated and has a lot of expenses related to testing and certification, there’s still some economies of scale that cryopreservation benefits from. I’d say that even in a bad-case scenario, it’s unlikely (but not impossible!) for this to offset the increased labor charges.
The current market rate for CI is $88K if you want standby and transportation services. Alcor charges $200K for the same service. Call it maybe $100K per person.
$100K 150,000 people/day 365 days/year = $5,475,000,000,000 (~5.5 trillion), or about 10% of the world GDP.
If we instead use Alcor’s current market rate of $200K per person, you’re looking at 20% of the world GDP instead.
Honestly, probably one of the worst-but-plausible cases is simply “cryopreservation continues to require legal declaration of death”, since then you never reap the reduction in other medical expenses—if you can cryo-preserve the terminally ill and those who are wasting away, you get some huge societal reductions in medical costs to offset these expenses.
I’d also consider it likely that, no matter what, funeral costs will be vastly lower, which will probably save you a decent chunk of the cost of cryopreservation in wealthier countries. The US spent $15 billion on funerals, but I don’t know how well this maps to the rest of the world. I think one could probably reasonably assume at least $100 billion in savings, as it’s fairly cheap to throw a cryo-preservation party compared to a funeral or cremation. When you’re looking at $5,500 billion, this is not a terribly significant savings, alas :)
In the interests of avoiding the planning fallacy, we could probably think of some reasons to go a bit bigger.
For example, it might be that more expensive yet more effective procedures are developed that cannot in good conscience be left out (due in turn to advances in what we know about biology, i.e. that today’s cryonics is worthless). In that event we might envision the cost as reasonably expanding it to say $500k per person, or around 50% of the GDP.
Do we know any ways to increase the world’s GDP by 50%?
Wait a few years.