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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.'"
he could wake up in 100 years the richest man in the world
Or he could wake up in 300 years in sick bay with no money at all.
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"
David Pizer wakes up in the future and calls his accountant to find out how his account is doing. "Good news!" the man says. "Your ten million dollars has grown to almost one billion dollars!" David is ecstatic and they talk a minute more. Suddenly the phone chimes. "Please deposit one hundred million dollars for the next three minutes..."
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!
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 rule against perpetuities should probably stop this in most states. The point of it is to keep property from being tied up and being useless for long periods of time. I think it's probably a moot point until they actually manage to unthaw someone and then keep them alive for more than a second or two.
What?
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.
In "When the Sleeper Wakes," a guy is in a coma for a thousand years, wakes up and his money has taken over the world. Highly recommend it, but that's because I like Wells a lot.
Although the moon is smaller than the earth, it is farther away.
"Terry: Welcome to the world of tomorrow!
Lou: Why do you always have to say it that way?
Terry: Haven't you ever heard of a little thing called showmanship? Come, your destiny awaits!"
Futurama Pilot
Proof by very large bribes. QED.
Reminds me of this little sequence from Red Dwarf:
Holly: They're from the NorWEB Federation.
Lister: What's that?
Holly: NorthWestern Electricity Board. They want you, Dave.
Lister: Me? Why? What for?
Holly: For your crimes against humanity.
Lister: You what?!
Holly: Seems when you left Earth, three million years ago, you left two half-eaten German sausages on a plate in your kitchen.
Lister: Did I?
Holly: You know what happens to sausages left unattended for three million years?
Lister: Yeh, they go mouldy.
Holly: Your sausages, Dave, now cover seven-eighths of the Earth's surface. Also, you left seventeen pounds, fifty pence in your bank account. Thanks to compound interest you now own 98% of all the world's wealth. And because you hoarded it for three million years, nobody's got any money except for you and NorWEB.
Lister: Why NorWEB?
Holly: You left a light on in the bathroom. I've got a final demand here for one hundred and eighty billion pounds.
Lister: A hundred and eighty billion pounds!! You're kidding!
Holly, wearing glasses, nose and moustache: April Fool.
Lister: But it's not April!
Holly: Yeah, I know. But I can't be waiting six months with a red-hot jape like that underneath me hat.
groklaw, wired and slashdot. The holy trinity of work based time wasting.
You can't take it with you. So Arizona resort operator David Pizer has a plan to come back and get it.
Does anyone else think this sounds like a bad horror movie?
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.
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.
... You've been frozen for 150 years, but your Cryo company went under about 80 years ago. Actually that company has been bought and sold a number of times. You actually spent a few weeks in a meat locker in Chicago until a new facility could be found. Unfortunately we were legally obligated to dip into your "inheritance" to pay for emergency cooling and relocation. You still have a few dollars left, but after converting them into American Yen, it looks like you will have to go back to work. Mr Pizer? Are you listening to me? Ah... yes, where is the rest of your body? Well, you see after the last market crash the Cryo industry was forced to make a few, um, cutbacks. What now? Well, Mr. Pizer, you've lucked into a wonderful Brave New World, you know. You've been assigned to the circus with all the others. You'll be pulled by trained monkeys round the ring on a special cart along with the other heads. It doesn't pay all that well, but it will keep the feeding tube flowing and cover any back taxes owing. And it does make the children laugh! Mr. Pizer? Now don't be angry with me Mr. Pizer...
Is this sig nificant?
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.
signature not found
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%...
As Robert Heinlein put it: "If you invest a substantial sum of money at a good interest rate, compounded monthly, it will eventually be worth nothing."
Oh well, what the hell...
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.
Teller: OK, you had a balance of 93 cents... ... $4.3 billion.
Fry: Alright!
Teller: And at an average of two-and-a-quarter percent interest over a period of 1000 years, that comes to
Proof by very large bribes. QED.
Them: What's a nigger, pale boy?
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
Oh, give me a clone
Of my own flesh and bone
With its Y-chromosome changed to X
And when it is grown
Then my own little clone
Will be of the opposite sex.
(Chorus)
Clone, clone of my own,
With your Y-Chromosome changed to X
And when I'm alone
With my own little clone
We will both think of nothing but sex.
Asimov and Garrett
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
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.
Not so sure this is flamebait (I mean it is but...)
Heinlein explored this basic concept (with a timewarp from a nuke) in Farhams Freehold.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
You heard me... Tax the icicles.
It's different because it might really work.
Yes! Mod parent up!
IANAD, but I am a med student. People are always worried about "viruses from space" coming to destroy us because our immune systems "won't be able to handle it". This is a crock of bullshit. Our immune systems are extremely effective at handling any foreign substances. The dangerous ones are those that have specifically evolved to trick our immune systems. The body (through an extremely complex & inefficient process) can generate antibodies to practically any pathogen.
Though, the grandparent may have a point that diseases of the future may have evolved (like HIV family viruses have) to trick our immune systems. Observe, however, that the most effective parasites do not kill their hosts. All the viruses that kill us are viruses *we* wipe out. There are thousands of bacteria living in our stomachs and viruses elsewhere in our bodies with which we have established harmony (most of the time).
I guess if you plan on skipping out on one of life's certainty's, you may as well plan on skipping the other!
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
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!
The Replicator Industry Association Off America will sue them all
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.
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.