X-Message-Number: 5335
From: 
Date: Mon, 4 Dec 1995 14:13:03 -0500
Subject: growth problems

David Stodolsky (#5330) has some remarks on cryonics growth, pricing,
cash-flow, and possible future scenarios and risks. A few comments:

1. I doubt very much that anything very useful can be accomplished by trying
to analyze cryonics history to predict future growth or to evaluate the
success of marketing methods. First, the numbers are too small to mean much.
Second, the results depend too critically on pivots of accident or
psychology. Intuition here will probably serve better than
scientific-sounding models.

2. I doubt there will be any "cash flow crunch, where they cannot meet
demand." In cryonics (as presently practiced, full fee due upon death or
shortly thereafter, at latest), payment follows soon after initial services.
In the presence of a demand explosion, if any cryonics firm or organization
needed a short term loan to expand facilities, lenders would be falling over
each other.

3. Could a sudden expansion in demand produce a capacity crunch, with danger
to the reputations of cryonics organizations unable to meet demand? I doubt
that type of danger. If the public were suddenly to agree that we have been
right all along, while the establishment types were dragging their heels, we
would scarcely be blamed--even though the psychological is notoriously
different from the logical. 

4. As to the capacity crunch itself, is that likely? It is hard for me to
envision any really sudden (one year) U.S. demand exceeding 1% of those
currently dying, which might mean very roughly perhaps 25,000 in the first
year of the putative explosion. We could handle that--I won't say "no sweat,"
but we could handle it, with the help e.g. of some business types like Don
Laughlin and other high rollers with toes already in the water (or liquid
nitrogen). 

Bottlenecks? With that kind of demand, forget about vacuum cryostats; we just
use foam or powder insulation without vacuum, slap them together in jig time
with aluminum or stainless steel or fiberglass liners, and we get large
economies of scale. 

Liquid nitrogen? I'm not sure of the potential elasticity of supply situation
here, but again, with large cryostats you need much less nitrogen per
patient. Also, you can substitute dry ice for a while if necessary, with an
uncertain amount of additional risk to the patient's chances. If storage at -
135 C were used, this would involve more delay in tooling up, but would save
still more on nitrogen.     

Training and service bottlenecks? For those who insist on using a thoracic
surgeon to cut the sternum, there might be shortages and higher prices, but
there would be plenty of surgeons available with that kind of demand.
Morticians could be trained rather quickly. In general, such bottlenecks
could probably be widened by a mix of procedures at different prices.

Surging demand could indeed produce problems, notably including aroused
active hostility in some quarters; but I again I doubt that this is likely to
prove more than annoying or unsettling, with local/temporary exceptions.

Our "extreme financial conservatism" may or may not be a growth inhibitor,
but I wouldn't want to change that. By being less conservative we could spend
more on promotion, or on research, or we could reduce prices, but the
potential downside is unacceptable.

Robert Ettinger
Cryonics Institute
Immortalist Society


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