[extropy-chat] Wills, Death (and taxes) - cryogenics to tissue storage

Tue Feb 27 20:10:02 UTC 2007

On Tue, Feb 27, 2007 at 02:25:06PM -0500, B.K. DeLong wrote:

> Besides the grim fact of contemplating one's death in the early
> morning on the way to work, I was curious as to what sort of

Eliminating the daily commute would do one heck to your longevity,
statistically. In some unspecified mid-term future, I expect to live way out
in the sticks (but with a good network connection -- geostationary
relay doesn't do), and work from home. Speaking of which: are here
any serious AdSense & Co users? I would like to talk to you, probably
offlist.

> paragraphs and points H+ folk are putting into their Wills. I jokingly
> threw out the ideas of "freezing my brain" and tissue storage much to
> her annoyance and chagrin.

Uh-oh. I see some potentially grave (haha) problems in your future,
provided you go first. If you're serious about it, I recommend you
both should talk. (I've got a comparable problem, actually, since my
wife doesn't care one fig about immortality -- she's not annoyed about, 
though, she just agrees to disagree about it being a good thing.
I just asked. I think I got it exactly right). 

> I have a fear of death, I've realized - I'm not scared of going to
> Hell or just "afraid" but as one who has a brain that spins like a
> harddrive 24/7, constantly researching, learning and reading....I
> don't want to miss out. I've imagined the future and I can't imagine
> just....dying. At a minimum let me download my consciousness into a
> collective virtual astral plane where it can wander in perpetuity in
> and out of others knowledge....

Sounds good to me -- send me the specs. We'll see what we can do.

> Cryogenics? Brain storage? Tissue collection for later regeneration?

You're probably not interested in a clump of cells, or even a genome, but
the process conveniently denoted by others by the shorthand "B.K. DeLong".
As such your best options are currently: not dying, and then, well, cryonics.
(Not cryogenics, though of course there is no cryonics without cryogenics,
because it takes some serious cooling to get from a warm corpse to a solid block
of cryogenic water glass at below -130 C -- but if it was just the cooling
part, that would be soooo easy. Unfortunately, there's some serious critical
care medicine trapped in cryonics, dying to get out).

> What are being putting in their legal documents? What are reasonable

CryoNet is full of folks you will gladly give you a hand with paperwork.
Rudi Hoffman seems to help out a lot http://www.rudihoffman.com/cryonics.html

> cost solutions that won't take away from a child or spouse's
> inheritance from an unexpected death? What needs to be considered in

There's nothing without cost. Even if you're doing it as life insurance,
of course you could make your heirs the beneficiaries, instead of Alcor
or CI.

http://www.alcor.org/FAQs/faq01.html#cost

Q:  How much does cryonics cost?

A: Most people pay for cryonics with life insurance, and since the actual cost of that depends on your age and health, to find out your specific cost you would need to shop for life insurance. Alcor offers two options: for whole body preservation you would need a minimum policy of $150,000, and for neuropreservation you would need a minimum policy of $80,000. (Neuropreservation is explained in the Technical Questions section.) Other funding options are available besides life insurance, including trusts, annuities, and prepaid cash or equivalent (for details see Funding Methods). Alcor members also pay annual dues, as explained in the Membership Questions section. 

I would go with the neuro option. Not only is it cheaper, and
you're easier to transport in a crisis (whole-bodies will be converted
to neuros, in case of an emergency transport), there's actually a
trade-off in preservation quality for your brain.

Notice that all current providers (CI and Alcor) have some heavy inconsistencies
in suspension quality (I had to put it politely). I hope things will get (much) better
eventually, but right now dying (even with a best-case location) is something you
should definitely stay away from.

> case of catastrophic failure of a cryogenic freezer, destruction of a

The things are built not not have that particular failure mode.
Once you're in the dewar, in reasonably good shape, your largest worry
is long-term financial stability of your provider, and of course, whether
the process work, and whether postpeople will be motivated enough to
apply it to get you back.

> storage facility or loss of a DNA print backup?

I don't know why you would worry about your DNA, that is even less
than your identical twin, which at least was raised in roughly the
same environment and seen the same input -- though here you'll see
a runaway divergence with age.

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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