Financial Guidance for Cryonics Planning: The Affordable Immortal
Cryonics is the only presently viable backup plan for people who will age to death prior to the advent of sufficiently comprehensive rejuvenation therapies. The available evidence suggests that a sufficiently rapid and well-accomplished low-temperature preservation of the brain following clinical death will preserve the fine structure that stores the data of the mind. Preserved individuals have the luxury of time to await the advent of future technologies of restoration and repair.
Setting up a membership with one of the non-profit cryonics providers such as the Alcor Life Extension Foundation or the Cryonics Institute and paying for the procedure via life insurance is affordable and fairly well documented. It is less work than buying a house, but perhaps still a little intimidating: it isn't something one can just do offhandedly. Some effort and agency is required. Rudi Hoffman has been helping people organize life insurance to pay for cryopreservation for a long time now. He is the recognized expert in this narrow field, and I'm pleased to note that he has now digested that knowledge into book form in The Affordable Immortal.
My mission in this book is two-fold. First, to cover some of the ideological assumptions which underlie cryonics as an emerging technology. Second, to propose that cryonics is financially feasible for you, if you are fairly healthy and have some reasonable financial resources. Here are a few ideas I would like you to consider.
Cryonics is a legitimate though currently unproven medical technology. Assuming this, you may want to be in the cryonics "experimental group" and not in the "control group." This choice may be affordable for you through the leverage of life insurance. If cryonics does indeed work and you are revived, it will probably be in a really spectacular and fun future. There are resources and people to help you in your research and decision making. I am one of those people.
Yes, it just may be possible for you to beat death and taxes! This book is written to explain why that sentence is not as unlikely as it may seem. I acknowledge that this is a mind-stretching claim, and I welcome your skepticism. This book will explain how and why most individuals might reasonably incorporate the amount of money required for cryopreservation into their budget. This is generally accomplished through the financial leverage of life insurance, where a relatively small amount of premium paid to an insurance company blossoms to an enormous amount of money on pronoucement of "death".
At that point, when an individual is pronounced "dead" by current legal (not necessarily medical) standards, any life insurance policies are fully collectible and will be paid out. What this means, in practical terms, is that nearly everyone reading these words, and I do include you, dear reader, now has the financial ability to afford this potentially life-preserving technology.
Link: https://www.amazon.com/Affordable-Immortal-Maybe-Death-Taxes/dp/1986985369
It is interesting what would be the legal status of the inherited estate for those twaled "undead".
Do we have legal precedents of people provided legally dead who emerge after a few years?
"Do we have legal precedents of people provided legally dead who emerge after a few years?"
Are we talking about the Undead here? :)
I was rather having in mind a year where a person is gone missing and pronounced dead, the heirs take ownership of the estate and years after the original owner is found alive..
@Cuberat, I think it is a good question for which I would wish to have an answer.
Regarding the book I plan to read I am sure it gives an excellent framework considering the experience of the author. I wonder though about differences you might have in different geographies, say non-US.
The question about the rights of uploaded/resuscitated people is a really good one. The short answer is that the cryonics community has thought pretty hard about it, and they're trying to put together both legal resources as well as financial structures to take care of any people who happen to be recovered in the future.
One of the ideas I've heard is to create a trust that's run by cryonics friendly people, with the trust having the mission to protect, provide for and integrate resuscitated people back into society. Keep in mind that in the worst case, where recovered people don't have any legal rights, the only option may be for the trust to "own" the recovered people and claim them as property. As owned property, the trust would be able to provide legal protection via ownership.
On the other hand, in the best case recovered people would have full rights, and the trust would be able to focus on helping the newly recovered.
It's a thorny problem without much legal precedent at this time, but it is one that's actively being looked at.