X-Message-Number: 6391
From: John de Rivaz <>
Newsgroups: sci.cryonics

Subject: Re: Humans use [religion] to remain sane in the face of death; myself, 
I use cryonics
Date: Sat, 22 Jun 1996 11:01:37 +0100
Message-ID: <>

I have crossposed this from <alt.atheism.moderated> so that other readers 
of sci.cryonics can join in the debate there if they wish.

In article: <4q7rcl$>   (Dave Sill) 
writes:
> Cryonics Myth #23: It Costs a Fortune
> 
> Fact: The going rate for neuropreservation is about $50,000, and it's
> typically funded by an insurance policy that costs a <40-year-old man
> in good health about $35/month--much less than a pack-a-day smoking
> habit.
> 

Actually it costs a lot less than that if you go with the Cryonics 
Institute. They charge $28,000 for a full body, and you can py by insurance 
and also by a trust. My recomendation is to buy a term policy for say 20 
years and to invest a fixed sum every month for 20 years. At the end of the 
20 years your fixed sum every month will provide the 28k and probably 
more.

You may recall the mention of technological advance in this thread. You can 
use that to pay for your suspension. Invest your monthly payments into a 
unit trust or mutual fund that specialises in technology stocks. Over ten 
or twenty years you will see a 15 to 20% compound growth. The Cryonics 
Institute don't guarantee to keep prices constant, but they have over the 
past decades and therefore in real terms they are falling. If you invest 
$1000/yr into the technology fund, work out how many years at 15% growth it 
will take to get to $28k. After another couple of years (to allow for 
market fluctuations - investments can go down as well as up) you can cease 
the term policy!

Now suppose I am wrong about the growth of technology. Not very likely I 
kow, as scientists see so far because the stand on the shoulders of giants, 
ie past advances. If I am wrong your investment will do badly, but then 
cryonics is unlikely to succeed.

Therefore if I am wrong you will not be there to observe it. Therefore I 
cannot be wrong!!!

Using technology investment, the cost for a young man to arrange cryonic 
suspension is negligible, because he can use his intuition about technology 
to fund the bulk of its cost. $100 at 15% compound will grow to $28k in 
40.3 years. That is a single investment of $100, never mind monthly 
payment. A child enthused by cryonics could do this! And technological 
growth may well be more than 15% compound over 40 years.

In article: <>   (Jim Perry) 
writes:
>   I'm quite capable of believing some day we'll have the
> technology to do all sorts of neat medical stuff including reviving
> corpsicles, but I find it a much greater stretch to believe that any
> future society is going to consider it a good investment to revive
> people who had themselves frozen in the early 21st century

People down the ages will be going into cryonic suspension. The last to be 
suspended will be under the best technology, so they will be the first out. 
They will have friends in the preceding batch to be suspended, and these in 
their preceding batch and so on down to Bedford, the first man to be 
suspended.

Also humans are, from an government authoritarian point of view, quite 
irrational in preserving individual life. From a collective viewpoint 
perserving individual life is counterproductive. It weakens the gene pool 
and the Darwinian selection process. Dogs, for example, instinctively pass 
each other diseases, by sniffing and licking each others' faeces. This 
strengthens the species by reducing, by extermination, the reproductive 
ability of those with poor immune systems. Unless humans develop a Nazi 
viewpoint that caring for the sick is bad, they will revive cryonicists 
when possible. So far all attempts at introducing national socialism have 
failed and it is likely that they will fail in the future.

In article: <4qb74n$>   (Niall 
McAuley) writes:
> 
>  (Dave Sill) writes:
> >Cryonics Myth #23: It Costs a Fortune
> >
> >Fact: The going rate for neuropreservation is about $50,000,
> 
> *cough* HOW much ? Think what your kids could do with 50K !
> Instead of selfishly squandering what *is* a lot of money
> at infinitesmal odds so that you might exist in the future,
> why not invest this money in some project to improve that
> future for your descendants ?
> 
> >To lump
> >cryonics--a technology requiring nothing but continued technological
> >improvements of the magnatude we've seen for the past 100 years--with
> >religion--an irrational belief in the supernatural--is unconscionable.
> 
> I agree. Religious people sincerely believe the comfort they offer.
> Cryonics is just a con job, ripping off the estates of those they
> have suckered. Money for old rope.
> -----
> Niall
> 

Surely this argument extends to any expenditure. Thereofre no generation 
spends anything and hand it down to the next.

You may as well say "we won't take a cruise on retirement because we feel 
the compuslion to hand the money down."

Cryonics is not "money for old rope". Before you can make this statement 
you need at the very least to read <sci.cryonics> for a while and see how 
hard the providers of cryonics services work, often as volunteers. Better 
still, visit a cryonics facility. If cryonics was a government regulated 
medical procedure, it would be twenty times as expensive.

-- 
Sincerely,     ****************************************       
               * Publisher of        Longevity Report *
John de Rivaz  *                     Fractal Report   *
               *          details on request          *
               ****************************************
In the information age, sharing can increase world wealth enormously,
because giving information does not decrease your information.
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