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Become Your Own Heir After Being Frozen
destinyland writes "A science writer discovered it's possible to finance your cryogenic preservation using life insurance — and then leave a huge death benefit to your future thawed self. From the article, 'Most in the middle class, if they seriously want it, can afford it now. So by taking the right steps, you can look forward to waking up one bright future morning from cryopreservation the proud owner of a bank account brimming with money!' There's one important caveat: some insist that money 'will have no meaning in a future dominated by advanced molecular manufacturing or other engines of mega-abundance.'"
Given the assumption that cryogenic revival will be possible, this may work in principle-- but the insurance industry doesn't exactly function on immutable code-like rules that can be hacked for fun and profit.
It's much more a game-- and moreover, the game is owned by the insurance industry. You're just playing it. And if you figure out a particularly good trick to beat the house, they're either going to rationalize why certain technicalities mean they don't need to pay you (and thus 'easy money' becomes 'try to drag deep-pocketed defendants into court'), or they'll simply change the rules before you're revived, and you won't have been able to do anything about it because you were dead.
From a what-do-you-have-to-lose perspective, sure, it's worth a shot. But this simply can't be a dependable part of estate planning.
There are few things I consider impossible but reviving people after simple freezing is one of them. There's massive damage and it's still not cold enough to arrest decay. Even if you could freeze a body without damage you'd still need to be near absolute zero to arrest most of the breakdown. Freezing essentially explodes the cell walls so there's nothing to revive. Cloning is pointless because it's a middle aged twin at best with none of your memories and no you can't just program them in like a computer the memories are actual structures in the brain that involve growth. I'm not saying there won't be a way to place a body in stasis I'm saying current freezing technologies are at best a joke and at worst a scam.
The future will likely disallow this kind of inheritance. The main problem with cryogenics right now is that it is not possible to undo the damage caused by the cryogenic procedure. People who have invested in companies like Alcor have done so in the belief that a solution will soon be available. As soon as that happens the world will see a new set of laws that take care of all these loopholes. I would image that they will make sure you don't wake up with an advantage you do not deserve x years into the future. It will be more about people wanting to experience the future than benefiting from it
On the other hand, people in their 20s often pick up and go somewhere they know nobody, where the culture is very different and they have to pick up a whole new set of assumptions. It's called "college".
I think people in general are far more resilient than you give credit for, especially with the benefit of what would likely be advanced counselling methods.
Perhaps it's not to your liking, that's fine. Some people are more embedded in their world than others. I think I would manage fine, a whole new world to learn would be fascinating! Besides, you could likely still make the decision at that time that you didn't want to continue, no need to make it *now*!
The fact that no one understands you doesn't mean you're an artist.
Before coming to my senses, I used to be a law student. Trusts, including estates, was probably my favourite subject. The main vehicle for transmitting wealth between generations is trusts, because they are reliable and well-understood.
However, in Australia, and other common-law countries such as the UK, Canada and the USA, trusts have a limited life-time. The basic principle is that the dead cannot rule the living. It's called the "rule against perpetuities". If trusts could last forever, more and more of the world's resources would be tied up in trusts with narrow aims and the eventually all the world would be divided between trustees and beneficiaries. So goes the argument, anyhow (this is different from conditional gifts and foundations, by the way, before you start yammering about scholarships and charitable organisations).
The lifetime of a trust is specified at its creation. In the old days you could make it $DEATH_DATE_OF_SOMEONE + 21 years. So you'd have stuff like "For the life of the Prince of Wales and 21 years", the theory being that it's easy to know when the Prince of Wales carks it. More recently, most jurisdictions have introduced legislation allowing an optional ability to simply fix some time period, usually up to 80 years.
And that's the problem. If you go into cryo-storage for 81 years, then on awakening you may find that your trust was dissolved and the benefits distributed to your descendants. And until it's proved that you can really come back from death via cryogenic storage, I'd be amazed if the courts changed their stance. Because too many people would try to break the rule against perpetuities by being "frozen".
Of course, IANAL, this isn't legal advice, YMMV yadda yadda.
Classical Liberalism: All your base are belong to you.
Just leave 93 cents in the bank. After 1000 years accruing interest you'll have 4.3 billion dollars.
I do suggest changing your PIN number though, just in case.
#DeleteChrome
Just be prepared for what is bound to happen. Your bike will likely get stolen.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
Your cryogenic machine will be unplugged by some of the 78 trillion inhabitants of earth and your body will be used for food. Power shortages will have already rendered your flesh ripe and unpalatable, but you will be consumed regardless.
But worry not, your fortunes would have been confiscated by the corrupt state, and were you to be revived, you would owe a small fortune for the "maintenance" of your rotted corpse, despite the fact that your machine has too been cannibalized for it's parts and scrap.
Had you awoken in the future, you'd have felt you left a virtual paradise, for a poisoned and hellish war zone, your debilitated body and mind only barely aware that the band of rogues that revived you only did so for profit, and are holding you hostage, with yourself as the source of ransom. When it's found you are without value, your decayed body will be allowed to die it's second and final death.
Of course it is a bad scam preying on old people. But there are many such scams. The brilliant thing about cryogenics or whatever they call it is that the scammers can never be discovered. Let's face it it will not be possible to revive those poor dead people for a long time and probably forever. Even if micro biology advances it will not be possible because freezing tissue destroys all the cells and turns everything into mush. They need more than micro biology they need someone to reverse entropy, and good luck with that.
But anyways, let's imagine, for the sake of argument that it does become possible to revive those ppl. Even if that happens it will be far far in the future. And then of course when the people discover that everything has been stolen and there is no money in those funds, the perpetrators will be looong gone. Of course it is likely that by that time someone will have stopped paying the bills, the freezers would be switched off and some unlucky municipal government will have a hundred thousand rapidly thawing severed human heads to deal with.
One word: Fembot.
Once a reasonable facsimile of a real woman happens (nowhere near there yet), the tables will likely be turned, and in a big way. And no this isn't some sort of weird geek fantasy talking.
Thing is, men and women behave differently. A male human being has to mature a whole hell of a lot before he begins to sexually appreciate a woman as more than a collection of pretty smells, nice curves, and a warm vagina. We guys (not universally, but on average) are driven sexually by our five senses (esp. vision) more than anything else. Women OTOH are driven by far more factors, and look for these factors far sooner than guys do. This is why a male sex robot is fairly useless (unless someone pops the Turing route a whole lot sooner than anyone expect, that is), while a fairly dumb female sex robot would happily be useful to an unfortunate majority of the male population.
Objectively, it would have a cheaper ROI, you can treat 'em like objects (guys have a history of that with real women anyway), and when you get bored with one, you can get another. There are faults with the theory, though. If you're turned on by, say, a woman's intelligence, you're going to be like most of the women out there - sorely disappointed. Besides, my missus wouldn't let me get one anyway. :)
Back to TFM's topic? Why take the risks of sending your wealth to your (probable) unrevivable corpse? Just have some of your stem cells frozen, then let 'em make a close of you, and give the money to the copy of you (it won't be you, but hey - at least your DNA can still have some fun with the dough). It's cheaper (way the hell cheaper), far more certain with today's technology than necro-cryogenics, and a handful of cells would take a lot less space than a whole frickin' corpsicle.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Life without meaning? A new world with a new culture and new politics and new sciences and new games to learn?! Are you kidding! That would be the greatest thing ever.
Make new friends. Form a new family. Only this time if they can resuscitate a head then I'm probably nearly immortal so I have at least 10k years before I'm statistically killed in an accident. That's more than enough time to learn a few hundred lifetimes of insights.
So what you're saying is that if your family and friends all died in an accident you would want to die with them and no live your life? If you were orphaned and adopted by a foreign family you think life wouldn't be worth living or have meaning?
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And yet, they'll still be able to vote. How interesting.
Life is not for the lazy.
So say I run an insurance company. Someone comes to me and says they'll give me a pile of money on the condition I give them a huge payout after they return from the dead. I know that the odds that they'll be back someday are essentially nil. So basically, they want to give me free money. YES PLEASE!
As a general rule, you shouldn't be surprised that insurance companies will insure you against X, if X is impossible.
This is not about putting you in ice and letting you freeze to death. It's cryogenics: dumping enough LN2 fast enough to freeze the cells without exploding their walls (as ice water doesn't get to form macroscopic ice crystal structure), and essentially stopping your organism cold in its tracks. AFAIK there are no decay processes at LN2 temperatures, and the little amount of chemical reactions that still occur should not affect the outcome.
Theoretically, recovering the organism to its standard 36.6C should suffice to restore it; it is done with single-cell organisms successfully. But we don't have a technology to heat up a body of human volume fast enough and uniformly enough to achieve that. With freezing, it doesn't matter if one part of the body goes to 80K and another to 110K in 3 seconds. It does matter if your brain goes to 30C on the edges or to 50C in the center though. There's also a bunch of other unknowns but as long as we can't bring a mass of 70 or so kg of mostly water in irregular shape from 70K to 310K in 0.1s with precision of +-3K throughout the whole volume, they are moot.
There's also the other approach, neatly described in Transmetropolitan: far-future freezing.
First off, you don't freeze the whole body, just the head. The body is buried.
Second, you keep it long enough that nanotechnology gets developed that can rebuild an organism from scratch. A thousand years is not out of question.
Next, the freezing damage gets repaired by nanobots, any damage so heavy that can't be rebuilt from existing tissue structure or DNA, gets rebuilt using "generic" data for "that genotype of a human". The rest of the body is rebuilt or regrown as a clone.
Next you wake up and promptly die from culture shock. After which you are revived again and remain alienated from the society forever.
Oh, and all your fortune and savings were lost in the Great Depression and following Revolution of 2642.
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