X-Message-Number: 31654
Date: Wed, 29 Apr 2009 16:58:43 -0400
From: 
Subject: Re: Membership Growth: Alcor and the Cryonics Institute

On 28 Apr 2009, at 11:00 AM, David Stodolsky wrote:

> >  Year__Alcor_____CI
> >
> > 2000____41_______42
> >
> > 2001____39_______62
> >
> > 2002____44_______63
> >
> > 2003____50_______76
> >
> > 2004____52_______63
> >
> > 2005____73_______100__CI-CRYO_CI-SA
> >
> > 2006____28_______76____40______20
> >
> > 2007____24_______69____37______22
> >
> > 2008____37_______58____36______19
>
>
> This data is noisy. The only thing that is significant (at p<.05 or   
> even at p<.10) is the CI membership data. What it shows is that the   
> increases in new members/year peaked in 2004 and then started  
> dropping  at an accelerating pace ... The ALCOR data show the same  
> result as trends.
>
> The only factor that I can think of that could account for this was   
> the political situation in the US. The Bush Gang pumped billions of   
> dollars into 'faith-based' organizations and ran a religiously-based  
>  hate champaign, which emphasized the importance of religion in   
> people's minds and led to increased religiosity worldwide. As the   
> Badger data shows, religiosity is the best predictor of interest in   
> cryonics.

I think that the growth of the Internet has been the most
prominent factor in the history of CI Membership growth.
I think that this reached its peak in 2003. There was a
definite flattening of number of users per 100 inhabitants
in the "developed world" in 2004.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Internet_users_per_100_inhabitants_1997-2007_ITU.png

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Internet_usage

   It would be more relevant to see user growth rates specific
for the countries where CI gets the most members:
United States, United Kingdom, Australia and Canada,
but I can only find statistics for Hong Kong:

       2002 182%
       2003 377%
       2004 172%
       2005  68%
       2006  29%
       2007  21%

Most statistics that I can find deal with byte traffic
per day, which is not as relevant as the growth rate in
number of new users.

Key events often mentioned in association with Alcor's Membership
growth are the publication of ENGINES OF CREATION (1986),
the OMNI magazine essay contest (January, 1994), the
1988 Dora Kent case publicity, the publication of THE
FIRST IMMORTAL (1998) and the 2002/2003 Ted Williams
publicity. Steve Bridge says that the OMNI contest
led to 3,000 information requests, but only 20 new
Members. The 20 new Members additions were lost in
the 1994 exodus of Alcor Members going to CryoCare.

And as I mentioned earlier, the largest growth
spurt in CI history (100), and the second largest
in Alcor history (73) happened in 2005 in association
with a NEW YORK TIMES article about Alcor that contained
only a brief mention of the Cryonics Institute in the
ninth paragraph:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/13/business/yourmoney/13freeze.html

The raw data for Alcor and CI is below:

http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/stats-members.html

http://cryonics.org/statistics_details.html

and here is my written summary of the historical
backdrop:

http://www.benbest.com/cryonics/history.html

-- Ben Best

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