Cryonics reduces suffering | Hacker News Reader

Cryonics reduces suffering

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4 pointslsparrish3 comments

Of course, the premise of cryonics is that at some point in the indefinite future, civilization will take far more heroic efforts to restore injured and frozen people to health. What it achieves is pushing those costs into the future. Either medicine will advance far enough that healing the frozen people becomes a reasonable act of social generosity, or they never get unfrozen, in which case cryonics is equivalent to plain old death, plus some relatively small costs for preserving the body.

So, it sounds like cryonics is worth it if you think the probability of being revived and cured in the future is high enough to outweigh the marginal increase in costs over having your body buried or cremated.

That's not a premise of it at all, if you ask me. For all we know reanimation may in fact be much less costly to the given future society than current medical efforts are to current society. Anyway the default expectation should be that it is a hard to develop process, but easy to apply to many patients once developed. It could be as simple as pushing a button or throwing a switch, once developed.

Fewer patients in existence would make it less likely to be worth the initial investment in the process if the cost is large -- a classic scaling problem. Imagine if operating systems or web browsers were only used by a few people in the world; it would not be worth investing nearly as much effort into them as we do. It is also much cheaper to store many versus a few patients for long periods of time, at least if we are counting costs on a per patient basis, because of the square-cube law and its effects on heat transfer to and from large versus small bodies (dewars).

Furthermore, when patients go into cryostasis they always place money into an investment fund where it generates interest. The decision to invest that money instead of spending it wastefully during their lifetime or on prolonging their dying moments is one that benefits the people of the future steadily over a long period of time. All this talk about pushing the load onto the future or depending on future generosity is therefore silly. Yes, people in the future do have to cooperate in a prisoner's dilemma by not killing the patients and stealing their investments, but that's simple non-defection of the sort we routinely expect from peers (you probably won't kill me and steal my stuff). We aren't expecting any extreme sacrifices on their part, as long as the trust funds are not overwhelmingly evil about their investment strategies.

I think I worded that unclearly, and we pretty much agree. What I meant was that hopefully the costs of healing a bunch of people will be so much lower in the future that people won't see any reason not to thaw out some frozen folks who would once have been considered terminally ill, even if there were no financial incentive to do so. Obviously I hope that everybody who gets frozen also has sizable long-term investments which work out well and make them loads of money, and I find that the most likely scenario, but I'd rather not depend entirely on it. Crazy black swan events have been known to wreck even really good plans. (This is also the thing that appeals to me about the plans for building enormous tanks that can keep their occupants cold for prolonged periods without maintenance, in case something goes badly wrong for a while.)

You make some really interesting points about scaling. Cryonics could aggregate together demand for cures to rare problems, which would change the economic incentives for medical R&D. I hadn't thought of that, but you're right.

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