If you add up the annual military budgets of the top six countries with the biggest armed forces, you'll come up with a figure of about 1012 dollars a year. Approximately 50 million people die every year. Dividing the first figure by the second gives a ratio of $20,000 per death.
The Cryonics Institute, the low-budget cryonics service provider, charges about $30,000 for keeping someone in cryonic suspension.
The two figures don't lie that far apart, and in fact diverting resources away from the complete waste and destruction of military spending would go a long way towards improving living conditions and lowering the incidence of avoidable deaths in our troubled, confused world. That would bring cryonics within the affordability of more and more of the world's inhabitants.
Off topic, but I just noticed something about your blog; you talk about wanting an engineering-based solution to death, but never bring up anti-aging research. This seems a bit odd to me. Cryonic preservation is the second worst thing that can happen to you. Better than dying, but isn't it better to avoid getting old in the first place?
ReplyDelete@Abyssal:
ReplyDeleteThomas Donaldson points out the problem with this idea:
Why Cryonics Will Probably Help You More Than Antiaging
Basically we don't have an efficient way of knowing if "anti-aging" treatments work because humans already live so long in the first place. I read predictions back in the 1970's that we'd have "400 year life expectancies," or something to that effect, by now, despite the logical absurdity of that statement. Scientists have no way of knowing if someone can live to 400 years old until it happens, if ever, a few centuries from now.
But we can conduct experiments in brain vitrification and derive useful information from them in a matter of days or weeks. So I think we should focus on that as the best use of our resources.
If instead of using thousands of tiny individual containers, we were to use a few large cryogenic warehouses, the cold storage cost would go down considerably. Heat flow is based on the surface area, and you have less of that per unit volume with larger volumes.
ReplyDelete@Luke:
ReplyDeleteNo doubt all kinds of clever engineering could reduce costs. I want to cultivate relationships with technical problem solvers outside of our usual circles to find people who can help us with those challenges. I suspect metro Phoenix has underused resources like what I have in mind. For all I currently know, some coffee shop in Tempe, near ASU, hosts a regular meeting of the kinds of minds we need to provide several of cryonics' missing pieces.
For example, I would like to see cryonics organizations form fruitful, and from hindsight logical, relationships with people who have useful expertise, like NASA's expertise in helping to rescue those Chilean miners.
I wholeheartedly agree about cultivating relationships with more different kinds of people. There is so much untapped inventive potential out there.
ReplyDeleteAmazing story about NASA BTW -- the whole chilean miner saga (not to mention the gulf coast oil spill) demonstrate that most people aren't as heartless, pessimistic, or shortsighted as their reaction to cryonics suggests. Rather it's just a matter of complex preconceptions and phobias that prevent from seeing the topic clearly.