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Comments: 374 +- Idle: Become Your Own Heir After Being Frozen on Tuesday November 17, @12:55AM
Posted
by
samzenpus
on Tuesday November 17, @12:55AM
from the what-could-go-wrong dept.
from the what-could-go-wrong dept.
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humor
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.'"
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You're playing their game (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:You're playing their game (Score:5, Insightful)
On the other hand, it appears that investing my cash in these companies in the business of bilking the terminally optimistic of their earnings *could* be a fine way to ensure my comfortable retirement. Thank you stupid wealthy people!
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The whole scheme is being run by the same banks and insurance industries that have served all of us so well?
Pull the other one.
It's got bells.
Why do you want to come back, anyway. You've wasted 20-35 years of your life in vanity and no real effect, so far. What makes you assume this will change after napping on ice for 150 years?
Then you have an eternity of half-finished Lego projects and failed relationships to look forward to - without every really wondering why you exist at all.
Dead don't inherit... (Score:2)
Frozen meat can be cooked after thawing, so somebody in a dystopian future might benefit...
Re:Dead don't inherit... (Score:4, Insightful)
And yet, they'll still be able to vote. How interesting.
Re: (Score:2)
If you are indeed dead enough to qualify for a payout, then you are presumably too dead to be considered a survivor.
Kinda like trying to let your unborn child inherit your fortune.
1) Dead and unable to claim inheritance because of not being a survivor
2) Alive and unable to trigger a payout
Re:You're playing their game (Score:5, Insightful)
The easy "out" would be that you weren't dead, and you owe them for unpaid premiums.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
But I want to be frozen and for some odd reason put in a space craft and set adrift for centuries. Then finally picked up by a passing earth space craft and unfrozen by a well meaning android and a meddling doctor. Just in time to act like a complete jerk while they are in the middle of sensitive negations with a violent species of aliens who have a major military power.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
id sooner expect them to argue that if youre freezing yourself with the intent of thawing out, you arent actually dead and, as such, are not eligible to collect the life insurance monies.
Completely impossible, reviving after freezing (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Also note, the important part of the brain is the structure. As long as it's kept intact, the memories and personality remain intact as well.
Re: reviving after freezing-impossible (Score:3, Interesting)
Impossible is a big word-- temporize.
"Freezing essentially explodes the cell walls so there's nothing to revive."
Absolutely correct. The damage done in cryogenics happens at the start. It's likely not correctable going down the road with a few hundred years technology. Most substances reduce in volume when frozen/changed to a solid state, Water is a substance which expands on freezing..
The expansion upon freezing comes from the fact that water crystallizes into an open hexagonal form. This hexagonal la
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
We freeze cells and keep them at -80C for future use. Most of the cells turn out to be viable and usable after the freeze/thaw cycle. I realize freezing a body is very different then cells, however, I would hesitate to say freezing a body or head is "impossible".
Mod parent up. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
don't hold your breath (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:don't hold your breath (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, they wouldn't outlaw trust funds. They'd regulate and tax trust funds that were essentially scams to take away any advantage from playing dead.
I'd imagine the scenario would work out this way. This scheme catches on, and a few decades from now trillions of dollars are being managed for the benefit of "dead" people. Then some politician comes up with the obvious idea: let's cut the taxes for the living but shifting the burden to the *dead*. You get revived, and discover that you pretty much can recover your principle, but the interest has been used to create a tax-free socialist paradise for the living. That is *if* the laws allow you to be revived. Imagine the debate we're having about retirement demographics, only now it's *revival* demographics. In twenty years a whole bunch of people are going to be decanted and start drawing money out of the system and throwing their antiquated weight around and generally making life less pleasant for the currently living. Let's put it to a vote: shall we revive everyone's great grandpa and create a new class of economic overlords, or should we keep them frozen and continue to tax them?
Unless you can arrange to vote from the cryogenic "grave", you shouldn't count on taking it with you. You *might* evade death, but you *won't* evade taxes.
Yeah right (Score:2, Insightful)
Uh huh, sure. And we'll all have flying cars, and we won't need to work because we will have created new ways produce food. And there'll be no wars, and free ice-cream.
Key legal obstacle (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Key legal obstacle (Score:5, Insightful)
Shouldn't this same line of logic apply to corporations and copyrights? Because right now, I would say the system is definitely breaking this "rule against perpetuities"...
Re:Key legal obstacle (Score:4, Informative)
There was no way to break these, and so over the course of centuries, the land holdings would become impossibly and uneconomically fragmented. Even if circumstances had radically changed, it could mean that the wishes of your great-great-great-grandfather was basically making you destitute.
Basically that's how the rule against perpetuities came about. Remember, that while a corporation has an indefinite lifetime, it is definitely *alive*. It reacts dynamically to changing circumstances. It continues to exchange title to goods, purchase or provide services etc. Companies "die" during windups or bankruptcies.
Imagine if companies that went bankrupt in 1650 had perpetual trusts on their assets. Whole parts of the world would be unusable because they were "only" to be used for growing cotton or whathaveyou. That's the kind of situation the old "uses" led to.
Re: (Score:2)
The rule against perpetuities is not as ironclad as it used to be in the classic common law times. There are a lot of statutory exceptions and some states have even completely abolished the rule.
I think the bigger problem is to find a way to make your re-created self be the beneficiary. There is absolutely no legal concept of someone dying and then reviving. And usually (although i am not 1oo% sure) if you make yourself the only beneficiary of a trust, the trust will get invalidated as a sham trust.
Oh yes,
hidden treasure then (Score:3, Insightful)
Convert what you can to gold and hide it somewhere, hopefully some place that won't be discovered for the next 1000 years, I guess that would be the difficulty.
I predict that there will be a bank, maybe in Switzerland, maybe some place else, that will provide services helping the folks like that to hide their money, including from the law of other countries, for a percentage of annual interest perhaps.
Gold is worthless... (Score:3, Interesting)
And so are jewels, Confederacy dollars, Reichsmarks and Enron shares and stocks.
Jewels can be replicated today - they are pricey because they are artificially kept pricey.
Gold will probably be attainable from led or even rocks in the future.
Companies and countries cease to exit.
Several things will have (increased) value after a period of time.
One is land.
There is a limited amount of it on the planet. Even if you dry out oceans to make more - "old land" will still have premium value due to being closer to hu
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
the theory being that it's easy to know when the Prince of Wales carks it
Of course, in practice, it would be really challenging to know when the Prince of Wales carks it, because periodically the Prince of Wales becomes the King of England, and one of his sons becomes Prince of Wales. There are in fact only 4 Princes of Wales that died while holding that title (Edward the Black Prince, Arthur Tudor, Henry Stuart, Frederick Louis). In other words, those trusts could be around a lot longer than intended, unless they were listed as basing the timing off of when the current Prince o
There's an easier way (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
I'd like a cheese pizza and a large soda, please.
Re:There's an easier way (Score:4, Insightful)
...and with the way inflation works, your 4.3 billion dollars will buy you half a slice of bread once you've been thawed.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Has there yet been a bank or currency which has lasted that long?
Gold. Plus, if you get gold coins rather than bullion there's a chance that that they will acquire rarity value over 1000 years (due to the milling, engraving etc) over and above the value of the base metal itself and so enhance your rate of return. Ancient coins still have a high value attached to them despite the empires to which they belonged being long-dead.
Re:There's an easier way (Score:4, Interesting)
one slight problem with that
http://www.unclaimedfinances.co.uk/facts-dormant-bank-accounts-government-act.html [unclaimedfinances.co.uk]
In November 2008 the government passed the Dormant Bank and Building Society Accounts Act. One of the major principles of the act is to reinvest unclaimed money back into the community. So what exactly does this mean for those who are looking to reclaim their lost money?
Dormant Bank Accounts and Unclaimed Assets
In banking terms a bank account is dormant if there has been no customer activity within a set time period; usually between three and 15 years. Most banks will write to customers asking if they wish the account to remain active. However, in a number of cases banks will not be able to reach customers due to reasons such as moving home or name changes. Customers can still reclaim money in dormant bank accounts even if the money has been redistributed under the Dormant Bank Account Act.
Remember what happened to Fry (Score:5, Funny)
Just be prepared for what is bound to happen. Your bike will likely get stolen.
hah.. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
A bunch of stupid apes running around using tools they barely understand.
Dude, you just described 95% of America, including yourself.
-FL
Ted Williams (Score:2)
The Future Will be a Beautiful Place (Score:2)
Money rusts (Score:2)
Hah. As if. (Score:2)
Before you decide to put yourself on ice, listen to the "This American Life" podcast.
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=1291 [thisamericanlife.org]
Right.
Let me decompose into wormfood quietly, please.
The Door into Summer (Score:2)
Time to buy some more Hired Girl stock!
Niven (Score:3, Informative)
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned the Larry Niven short story about Gil the ARM and the organleggers.
Cryo has got to be the most brilliant scam ever (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Cryo has got to be the most brilliant scam ever (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, a major economic shakeup or an extended power failure could mean you rot. There's no telling what the future holds. They have kept people in the deep freeze for 30 years and continue to maintain them.
Will these people eventually have their brains scanned into a computer? have genetically modified microbes repair their bodies? I don't know and neither do you. I would say the chances are slim, but they are not zero. On the other hand, burrial or cremation = zero.
It has also been pointed out that the deep freeze method, even with biological antifreeze does cause a good deal of damage on the cellular level. Of course, this is a big problem. But, it still is the best we have. No, it's far from perfect for preserving someone. Sit there are criticize it all you want, but can you offer something better? I assure you, for all it's flaws, it is orders of magnitude less destructive than the alternatives: Formaldehyde fixation, pasteurization, wax impregnation, dehydration - all these are many many times worse in terms of damage.
Here is the ultimate question: Would you rather have a possibility of returning of an unquestionable and undeniable zero, or would you rather have a slim chance? Would you take the chance even knowing that the future, even if you are alive, could be a culture shock or you will find that you don't have any money? Some people are willing to take that chance. It's not entirely illegitimate to consider it.
By the way - entropy is easy to reverse. There's no need for entropy to rise or for it to not be reversible, unless you're in a closed system. We're not in one and I reverse entropy every time I turn on my air conditioner.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
freezing tissue destroys all the cells and turns everything into mush
Right, that's why if you freeze an embryo, you can't revive it and implant it and expect it to develop into a fetus and later a baby. It's just dead, because it was destroyed in the freezing process.
Insurance co. says "YES PLEASE!" (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
The ultimate pyramid scheme (Score:3, Funny)
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.'"
Re: (Score:2)
Re:eternal life: "can" does not mean "should" (Score:4, Insightful)
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*!
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
DNF (Score:2)
By then, we'd be playing DNF on ReactOS or Hurd 3.0, running on our mega-core phones.
Re:eternal life: "can" does not mean "should" (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Re:Money in the future (Score:5, Interesting)
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.