That’s definitely on our shortlist of materials to produce. I’d also be excited to share around anything you write! I think a lot of people would be interested to hear from someone who’s bought a card.
CharlieT
Karma: 240
To be clear, our price for a preservation accounts for an endowment that can store people indefinitely (100x yearly costs is just an easy way of calculating that) + a revival budget. I also think we have much better options than throwing people out even in a disaster scenario, which we get into in this post.
In terms of erasing information: I agree that destroying information is theoretically impossible. In a degenerate case, even cremation doesn’t truly destroy any information. The key question is how difficult the information is to retrieve, and in many traditional cryonics cases, I think the answer is “incredibly difficult, even for superhuman AI.”
You’re obviously correct that most young healthy people don’t die in MAiD-compatible ways. We’re also planning a post on why we think preservation should be interesting to people with short AI timelines, but if nothing else, many of us have parents and grandparents whose risk profile looks different from our own. This is one reason we’ve set up our preservations to be transferable: most people IME don’t want to buy for themselves, they want to buy for someone they love.
Yep, definitely. Aurelia is very enthusiastic about an information-theory model of human preservation. This is going to be the topic of one of our upcoming posts.
Another one tonight! https://luma.com/6vcnafy9
If you’re interested in discussing the questions raised in this post, please join us now for our fireside chat!
If you’re reading this later, no worries—we expect these to be recurring weekly events. Check out our calendar to find the next one.
We’re going to have a fireside discussing this and related questions on Friday evening! I’d love to have you come and discuss.
Yep, sorry, still on the agenda. She’s been needed in the lab pretty much nonstop.
That’s something we’re very interested in as well, since of course we’d like to expand internationally as we grow. If I recall correctly, Aurelia has spoken with a couple of Buddhists who believed in reincarnation and were excited about preservation.
In general I’ve been surprised by the broad base of appeal the idea of preservation has, including among religious people.
It’s 100k for a full pre-sale, or 20k for a discount card. The discount card is good for a free preservation if you wait 10 years to use it; if you use it sooner than that, you get a pro-rated discount based on how long you held it.
Details available here. The 20k option has been, as we expected, popular with a lot of people here; it’s intended to be a very cheap option for young people who plan ahead.
I’ll add it to our list of potential posts!
Thanks Anna! (Anna here is Nectome’s lab manager and is, of course, correct on the science.)
Given the full intention of reanimating the person in question, what’s the distinction between this and a medically induced coma?
This is a really interesting question, and one we’ve discussed a lot! I think it would be a very reasonable legal ruling to say that this counted as a kind of long-term medically induced coma. But no one has made that legal argument yet, and we’re committed to complying with the law as it stands.
I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts on our new post! We get more in-depth about outside review of the science there.
There’s a very important legal distinction, which leads to some moderately inconvenient practical constraints. (Disclaimer: I’m neither a lawyer nor one of the science guys; if I’ve made a mistake here Aurelia will step in to correct me.)
When preserving an animal, it’s OK for us to administer euthasol, wait for the animal to be solidly unconscious, and then begin the surgical process of connecting the pumps that perfuse fixation chemicals. In terms of timing, this is great. It means that we can switch smoothly from the heart to the pumps, like you would during a surgical heart bypass. That’s a pre-mortem procedure.
With humans, on the other hand, there are (reasonably enough) a lot more restrictions on what’s legal to do. You can’t just hook someone up to a heart bypass and administer drugs that would stop their heart, even if they’re terminally ill and consenting. (You can imagine a world where there was a legal carveout for preservation, but it’s a new technology and no one has seriously considered building such a legal carveout.) Instead, you need the terminally ill client to orally consume MAiD medication. Preservation procedures can only begin once legal death is declared. It’s still possible to perform a quality preservation under those conditions, but it imposes a much stricter timeline.
Oh, I love these. Thanks so much for doing them! (Off to make myself some imaginary money...)
[Designating someone else to be preserved] is built in by default. [Designating someone else to control them as if they’d bought them] isn’t present by default but is the sort of thing we’re happy to work out on an individual basis if it’s important to you.
We definitely intend them to be resellable assets and expect to see a secondary market. If some early supporters buy extra 100k preservations and flip them for 200k in six months, we’ll be very pleased about that.
I’d give over 25% that if someone who’s signed up with us told us now that they had a month to live, we’d be able to accelerate timelines enough to preserve them.
For dogs we’d just need enough notice to make sure our vet has availability and our chemicals are in stock. Cost varies depending on the size but I’d ballpark somewhere very roughly around $50k, obviously happy to talk more details about particular animals.
Sure, happy to bet; I’d want to operationalize carefully. There’s a few different questions here and I expect the timelines to vary a little. In particular, I expect that if we have a terminal customer we go out of our way to accelerate things—setting up for preservation in our lab instead of a nicer facility where people are happy to bring their families, for instance. I’m less certain than that about when we cut the ribbon on the final location, complete our self-imposed certification process, and so forth, just because there’s a lot more moving parts.
I’d say 75% confidence on July 2026, 90% confidence on December 2026. Most of the uncertainty is around the timelines on annoying finicky regulatory stuff, like zoning on our location and making sure we’re in full compliance with rules on final disposition of bodies.
(Aurelia is really excited about this question and wants to sit down and give it a thoughtful answer, so it’s been waiting on her having a solid block of time to respond.)
As Max points out, we could use more people working at Nectome! We’re particularly interested in people with skills in the following areas:
legal
social media and marketing
high-ticket direct-to-consumer sales
branding
graphic design
project management
Please reach out to us at hello@nectome.com if you have any experience with the areas listed above, or pass this message along to someone you know who does.