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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
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.
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
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.