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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.
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/
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.
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?