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Wealthy 'Cryonauts' Put Assets on Ice
Carl Bialik writes "'You can't take it with you. So Arizona resort operator David Pizer has a plan to come back and get it,' the Wall Street Journal reports. Pizer is one of about about 1,000 members of the "cryonics" movement who plan to put their bodies on ice soon after death so that in the future, medical advances can save them. A small, wealthy subset of these cryonauts is exploring ways to leave their money to themselves. 'With the help of an estate planner, Mr. Pizer has created legal arrangements for a financial trust that will manage his roughly $10 million in land and stock holdings until he is re-animated,' the Journal reports. 'Mr. Pizer says that with his money earning interest while he is frozen, he could wake up in 100 years the richest man in the world.'"
Before anyone says that this guy is greedy and should give the money to charity, I'd like to point out that there's little chance that he will come back to life unthawed, and if he doesn't spend the money it makes us all just a tiny bit richer.
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
Reminds me of the Star Trek Next Generation episode where they wake up people who were frozen. The doc cured them, and one guy wanted to check on his stocks. They thought he was nuts, because why would you need stocks when you could just ask the replicator for anything you wanted?
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
I'd suspect that the legal status of someone that's, well, legally dead would be rather iffy. And for good reason- why should we set aside economic power for inactive (and potentially never-to-be active) members of our society? I think the burden of proof that this should be possible lies on them.
There's also things such as Adverse Possession that could throw a wrench into things. I'd recommend that any 'cryonauts' conceive of any post-death, pre-revival arrangements to be tentative at best.
This scheme was mentioned in at least one of Niven's books. It didn't work - surviving family members took the estate to court to get at their rightful inheritance. I think that's a pretty likely outcome. Another likely outcome is that the estate management will embezzle it (it's not like you can watch them closely when you're dead). It's also possible the government might decide to seize it, if it's a tempting enough target.
The one cool thing about freezing yourself that no one seems to mention is the process, if successful, will seem instant to you regardless of how many hundreds of years you're out for. Thinking of it that way makes it seem way more appealing. It's like a crude form of time travel.
So... Even if we do get enough advances medically to do this, tell me why on earth would we /want/ to revive someone so selfish and materialistic as to want to do this?
Sorry, couldn't help myself.
The difficult part would have to be deciding when to cut one's losses with life and be frozen. Persumably, if he waits until he's actually dead, it might be too late...
;-)
"I figure I have a better than even chance of coming back," he says. *laughing* based on WHAT?? Just goes to show - wealth doesn't corrolate with intelligence.
(personally, I reckon his chances are more like 42%...
I would imagine that in a hundred years time or more that the normal abundant viruses and other microorganisms that are bent on destroying the human body would probably take out his immune system immediately upon reanimation or drying out or whatever you want to call it. Of course you could put him a 'bubble' or quarrantine but if you don't have an evolution of antibiotics, his system would most likely shut down upon an infection.
The cold and flu that you and I shrug off today would kill our great grandparents (at an age of young adulthood) in an instant because of sex and diversification. Just a natural evolution process.
Viruses evolve and his immune system won't, that's the point of having kids. Hell, the next batch of kids may be immune to this current avian flu and we ourselves may be immmune to some ancient avian flu.
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
"First one to revive me gets half my fortune."
The upside is that your remaining money must be worth something, since it was a large enough bounty to bring about your revival.
Perhaps rich people are the ones worrying about preserving their assets for the future, but I don't want people to get the impression that you have to be rich to be a cryonicist.
Maybe not, but the OP has a point: if and when you wake up, will it do you much good to wake up a) broke, and b) without a marketable skill? You'll be about as useful to the new society as a buggy driver is to ours. Worse, you'll probably have a huge medical bill--while you've paid for the suspension (although how can they guarantee the rate?) you couldn't have possibly paid for the cure that will bring you back, as they can't at this point know how expensive it'll be to give you the cure, since it doesn't exist.
Really, that sounds great. You might wake up someday, but you'll be broke, jobless, a relative idiot, nowhere to live, no friends or family, and maybe will have a crushing medical bill. Thanks, but I think I might prefer to stay dead.
--
$tar -xvf
The cold and flu that you and I shrug off today would kill our great grandparents (at an age of young adulthood) in an instant because of sex and diversification.
That's completely not true. You don't think that people's immune systems in any given generation just luckily happen to be attuned to exactly the germs which will be around during their lifetimes? The immune system is extremely adaptable and will effectively attack nearly any foreign menace. We don't have to rely on it evolving to match specific germs that go through a million times as many evolutionary generations as we do.
(As a side note, it's typically not advantageous for infectious agents to evolve to kill their hosts anyway, except under crowded and unsanitary conditions where they can spread very quickly. Many germs could well evolve to be less deadly as world sanitation improves.)
You're probably thinking of the (extremely plausible) argument that the main evolutionary purpose of sex is to "change the locks" against such parasites. But the point of this is more that a genetically uniform population would be vulnerable, so lineages that could vary their genetic makeup would gain an advantage; not that genetic change is the primary line of defense against parasites. Luckily for all of us, it isn't.
It's different because it might really work.
When the Pharohs were placed in their reincarnation devices (The pyramids) they tried to take it all with them, too. I expect the results will be similar for the modern day people who are trying to cheat death. I don't believe that our current level of technology can preserve a body well enough to fix it at some future date and I don't believe that the current infrastructure is reliable enough to keep a body frozen for 100 years much less several. In fact, I doubt the current bunch of frozen dead guys will hold up as long as the Egyptians who were mummified thousands of years ago. My money's on them all quietly ending up in some medical waste bin somewhere within 40-50 years time.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Nobody lives forever... nobody SHOULD live forever... and if thats wrong and there is some rare person who actually deserves to live forever, it's certainly not YOU. Having accumulated weath doesn't make you deserving - if anything, it probably rules you out.
This space available.
in the comming years it will be natural for future slashdotters to be able to handle the complexities of nano and biotech programming of nanotech assemblers and nanosensors and be able to do a lot of "matter" hacking even though there will
No it won't. Replicating nanobots are pure sci-fi, and nano assembly is going to stay industrial for at least the next 100 years. Slashdotters are not going to be able to create a woman out of sand anytime soon.
we should be able to advance nano/bio in the next 10 years to be able to demonstrate age halting/reversal in mice (the M-prize), and then, soon in people.
Halting age is not the problem. Fatuige is. People could easily live until 150 if their body did not slowly succum to acumulated wear and tear. Free radicals will turn your brain to putty long before you ever had a hope of reaching 200.
It may be hard to do, but, remember, they went to the moon in 9 years using slide rules and mainframe 32 bit computers with core memory
That's because it was possible to go to the moon. Most of the stuff you mention is about as feasable as a perpetual motion machine.
May the Maths Be with you!
Generally states limit the lifetime monies held by nonliving entities (trusts) to living beneficies or one generation thereafter. Family/dynasty trusts like the Rockefellers or Kennedies have to renewed each generation.
To be blunt, the even the dead cant avoid taxes forever. The concept of the dead and unborn owning assets is alien to current law.