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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.'"
Three words for you my friends: tax evasion scam.
Good night.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
Duh, he'll just wake up in a few hundred years after his consciousness is transferred into the memrouy wiped body of a convict, and recieve RNA memory injections and learn to pilot interstellar world seeding ships.
- "Scientia non habet inimicum nisp ignorantem"
There was a horror comic in the early 80's that has a story that I still remember.
A rich man who was dying had enough money to develop the technology to put himself on ice until medical technology was advance enough to cure his disease. He wakes up about 50 years later to find out that medical technology did indeed advance greatly over the years. But there was no cure for his disease. Instead, he was revived so the doctors could harvest his limbs for the veterans of the last World War who lost their arms and legs. Since he was beyond cure, the doctors figured his limbs were still useful to humanity. Advance technology rendered the rich man a basketcase.
The banks yes, but also everyone that uses the same currency as him. Taking that much money out of circulation should help increase the value of the bills in your wallet right now.
Computers allow humans to make mistakes at the fastest speeds known, with the possible exception of tequila and handguns
The banks yes, but also everyone that uses the same currency as him. Taking that much money out of circulation should help increase the value of the bills in your wallet right now.
Bingo! I had a friend once who saw the movie Dead Presidents and he could not understand that printing money and giving it away would be a bad thing. On a side note, I was shocked recently when I found out that the US government or Alan Greenspan or whatever does this very thing.
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
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.
That mistaken assumption is what caused me to take so long to take the plunge.
I'm a grad student, I make 20k/year, and I have a cryo contract. As a full-time student I pay $199 annually and my life insurance policy ($90k coverage) premiums cost about $1k per annually. If I wanted to, I could have taken out a term life insurance policy and I'd be paying in the low hundreds, but since by definition this is an arrangement you'd want to make for the duration of your life, I thought it would be better to lock in a good whole life insurance rate while I'm still young and healthy. Plus my policy has a safety margin of $10k over the $80k neurosuspension fee.
And that's me, a starving PhD student. Some of you people with real jobs can fund your cryo policy, and toss some money into a trust fund for yourself, and have some left over for charity and heirs.
Cryonics is a long-shot, but unlike many other beliefs about life after death, it doesn't contradict the observed laws of physics. I don't ridicule those beliefs or take any action to restrict them, no matter how alien to my way of thinking they may seem. I therefore expect a free and pluralistic society to reciprocate this courtesy toward my own beliefs.
Seriously, if the technology worked as planned, what would you do after being thawed? Go back to grade school to catch up on the basics? Would any of your skills be useful to anyone? Unless you were a popular historical icon, who would want to bother with you? An archeologist or historian?
Add to all of this the fact that the population of Earth is already expanding at an alarming rate.
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The estate could claim that his state of inanimation does not constitute death and that the freezing process is part of a long medical procedure.
Of course his greedier heirs would then have themselves frozen with orders to be revived when he wakes or is declared dead!
If he spent that money, the companies and people he bought products from would be richer (as would all their suppliers), and he would get a product that he enjoyed more than the idea of having that much money in the bank. Win-win.
The economy doesn't work if no one spends money.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Do you have any idea what you are talking about? The rule against perpetuities applies to future interests in any property--land, objects, or money. Upon your death, you can not set up a trust to devise all of your estate to your descendants 200 years down the line, none of whom have been born yet.
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The rule against perpetuities, in most states, has an exemption for reversions to the original grantor. Furthermore, the original grantor fills in all the gaps created by grants that violate the rule against perpetuities. This means that it would present no bar to a person's estate retaining money even hundreds of years in the future. That said it would likely raise some very interesting legal issues.
Furthermore, many states have recently effectively eviserated the old common law rule against perpetuities so, while it is an interesting and mind bending exercise for first-year law students, there is little real applicability of it today (or so my Property professor told me...)
as a signed up Alcor member, please allow me to disabuse you of some of your mistaken ideas:
1. "all that money": Alcor is the best cryonics organization in the world. And there are only two...
But Alcor is a nonprofit, and no one working there makes much money at all. In fact, almost everyone working there is either poor or independently wealthy.
Also Alcor does not take in enough money to even cover its expenses. Most members are middle class, but some can afford to donate large sums, which is how Alcor stays solvent.
2. Cryonics, for cryonicists, ties into the hardwired religious-epiphany-ectascy circuitry in our brains. You know that many people (most?) get a rush from religion? Well, that same religious feeling is what makes cryonics tick. It gives us an "out" just as does religion. Except of course our "out" is something that depends on real world physics and human nature.
So, cryonicists who work at cryonics organizations are sort of like monks.They do it for the love of cryoncis, and in the hope that if they can build up cryonics enough so that society accepts it and we get a lot more members, we can make it a self sufficient enterprise.
So if cryonicists working at Alcor do something bad, they screw up their own chances to be revived in the future.
Do you now understand one of the major strengths of cryonics?
eat shiat and bark at the moon
Some woman is going to find a way to marry this guy while he's under and bleed him dry...unless of course there's a constitutional ammendment defining marriage as between a fully animate man and a fully animate woman.
"There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell them." ~ Louis Armstrong
Or he could wake up in 300 years in sick bay with no money at all.
Wasn't there a Niven short story on this topic? I don't have the reference handy, but a guy with some terminal disease had his body frozen, expecting that a future generation would thaw him out when a cure had been discovered.
Thing was, he was revived thousands of years later, and while they had long since found a cure for his disease, he suddenly found himself with no money or rights. Hundreds of years before, the courts had established it was unfair to the economy (I think) to let a clinically dead person retain a bank account (which was still accumulating compound interest) and so had those accounts turned over to the State. Similarly, it was decided a dead person has no rights, as he has not participated in government.
So this guy wakes up to discover he's being tested/trained to be a space pilot, by way of paying back his debt to society. Or something.
Kind of puts a new perspective on things: What makes you so darn sure that future generations will want to thaw you out, and why should you expect to just pick up where you left off?
The joke was originaly from a radio sketch comedy show from the early 80s called 'Son of Cliche', with the Red Dwarf writers and Chris Barrie among the cast. Barrie was the original Dave Lister.
I think the big problem in cryonics is that after 5 minutes of hypoxia, synapses start to degenerate. I really think this is a significant information loss, not something repairable. Even if you could put some of the neurons back together, you will have a hard time figuring out which neuron is connected to which and with what strength.
Perhaps your body could come back, but unless you are frozen pretty much immediately upon onset of lethal hypoxia, the brain you come back with will not be much like your own.
The food replicators actually make sense, even if they are more energy intensive than cooking your own food. The replicators mean you don't have to keep large food stores on the ship which can rot. I don't know for certain what the stock material for the food replication is, but I'd imagine it's easily stored in small areas, and with the same material can be used to make steaks or self-sealing-stembolts, so it's very utilitarian. You also get a large variety of meals that can be prepared, which can help keep morale up on long missions, compared to how the crew would feel about having their selection of 6 flavors of rehyrdated gruel 3 times a day. There's also the part of not needing kitchen facilities or cooking personel on the ship. We've all seen how the Enterprise is a ship full of officers and no enlisted personel. Consider that most of the menial tasks on the Enterprise are automated; cooking, cleaning (The enterprise has been called a "self cleaning ship" in a few episodes), probably other things like laundry and stuff too. I'm don't have any experience with naval operations, but I think that modern ships have mainly enlisted men doing all the drugdery necessary for ship operations like cooking cleaning, and the like. With the enterprise having those things automated, they need fewer enlisted and thus have room for more officers for things like the dozen or so science departments on the enterprise.