Speaking of the devil.

I had a strange conversation with someone I know well this morning. Apparently this friend, another cryonicist, has bought into the hyperinflation propaganda and expects a social collapse which might necessitate the shooting of entire families who try to loot your supplies, and similar Mad Max/survivalist/zombie-uprising scenarios. We also discussed the currently popular survivalist shows on the Discovery Channel.

If life in the U.S. got to that point, it would make cryonics pointless, if not impossible. I prefer Thomas Donaldson's scenario where we don't necessarily have to share the fate of the rest of society. An intelligent, feasible plan to disengage cryonics from failed civilizations so that we can keep people in suspension, and get suspended ourselves, seems preferable to spending your last weeks or months sitting on a diminishing pile of MRE's and useless gold coins with your assault rifle. (Contra the Austrian economists, gold won't do you any good if the production of necessary commodities has collapsed.)

Coincidentally I've started to read an abridged version of Edward Gibbon's famous book. From Gibbon's perspective in late 18th Century England, he argued that the European elites had an option to protect them from social collapse which the elites of the declining Roman Empire lacked:

If a savage conqueror should issue from the deserts of Tartary, he must repeatedly vanquish the robust peasants of Russia, the numerous armies of Germany, the gallant nobles of France, and the intrepid freemen of Britain; who, perhaps, might confederate for their common defence. Should the victorious Barbarians carry slavery and desolation as far as the Atlantic Ocean, ten thousand vessels would transport beyond their pursuit the remains of civilized society; and Europe would revive and flourish in the American world which is already filled with her colonies and institutions.

What would correspond to that now for Americans? Australia? New Zealand? The Southern Cone nations? A number of science fiction writers have postulated that civilization survives and continues to function in the Southern Hemisphere after nuclear wars and other disasters destroy it in the Northern Hemisphere, so could cryonics organizations, following Donaldson's vision, relocate to a sufficiently friendly and developed Southern country if necessary?

As for "hyperinflation," I don't see the mechanism for getting that much paper money into circulation, especially because most transactions happen electronically these days and almost everyone I know has lost net worth and income. The union-busting that started under the Reagan Administration has similarly eroded the automatic cost-of-living raises unionized workers used to take for granted and which helped to ratchet up inflation in the 1970's. (If anything, wages currently want to fall to clear the job market.) People who talk about hyperinflation as a real possibility for the U.S. in the 2010+ decade sound to me like they still live mentally in 1975.