PSA: Very important policy change at Cryonics Institute

tell a loved one you want to be frozen upon death, and that you would like them to take responsibility for making sure this happens. This takes literally 30 seconds

...and they probably won't do it when the time comes to act.

The history of cryonics teaches us that, while people often contact cryonics companies to freeze their already or soon-to-be dead relatives on their own incentive, it is a much more common situation that the relatives of a person who has already completed all the paperwork and paid for the cryopreservation with their own money try to actively prevent the preservation.

Note also that the non-signed-up people's relatives come from a population many orders of magnitude larger than signed-up people's relatives.

Being on dry ice for two weeks is suicide. That's my take based on intermittent research for the past 12 years and talking to numerous cryobiologists.

This does seem like valuable information, but conversely, 2 weeks on dry ice still sounds extremely harmful for survival odds, so this is probably not a good reason to put off signing up.

I see people saying things like

2 weeks on dry ice still sounds extremely harmful for survival odds

but I'd thought the truth was nearer to

2 weeks on dry ice rather than proper vitrification is so much worse on account of ice-crystal damage that you might as well not bother

Do I have a mistaken idea of how useless mere freezing is for cryopreservation?

This news might also be a reason to not sign up right away, if you think something better (like radical life extension or uploading) will come along in your lifetime. We should discuss this in the comments.

I don't see any possible scenario where this applies, so long as you are insurable. Cost of cryonics through term life insurance is cheap, and the risks of 2 weeks on a slab is huge.

But by all means, if you don't have a cryo plan yet, then have that conversation with your loved one, now.

Question: when people say that two weeks on dry ice is suicide, is the 'two weeks' part significant? Are two weeks on dry ice worse than two days and better than two months on dry ice or is it that the moment you get frozen without cryoprotectant, you're done?

The two-week delay makes sense from a risk management perspective, but it makes this change a really, really bad reason to put off signing up. The only interesting case I see offhand is the one where the person with legal control of the corpse wants them cryopreserved, but the dead person inside does not.

They also will not do anything until you have been on dry ice for 2 weeks after they have been contacted, so not being a member is more risky.

That seems prima facie to be really, really detrimental for the purposes of keeping the informational state unscrambled / recognizable (it may be sensible from a legal / PR POV, but I'm not much interested in that).

In a fun twist, it may well turn out that the "first" reconstituted bodies are worse off (lower-fidelity reconstruction), and you could argue that once mankind (shepharded by an automated sheepdog) reached a stage of thawing the dead, you're better off waiting for the trajectory to continue on, i.e. to stay frozen for a few centuries longer until perfect fidelity is achieved (on the flipside, society may be even less recognizable). One way to do that is to make sure the damage is severe, e.g. by botching the cryonic procedure somewhat, such as staying on dry ice for 2 weeks. Shmart (the 'h' is an artifact)!

This post seems much more appropriate for the Discussion section.

They also will not do anything until you have been on dry ice for 2 weeks after they have been contacted, so not being a member is more risky.

Why this part?

This will increase cryocrastinating by a factor far greater than the number of people actually being cryopreserved because they randomly told a love one about this.

I wonder if cryonauts ever prepare some kind of detailed information packet about their personalities, values, etc. to help a future superintelligence put them back together. It seems like getting a full genome sequence, some personality test data, and maybe some video of you would be very cheap on the scale of current cryonics costs. The genome would be expensive, but prices seem to be falling steadily, so in a few years it might be a trivial expense compared to cryonics.

Does anyone do anything like this?

All you have to do is tell a loved one you want to be frozen upon death, and that you would like them to take responsibility for making sure this happens.

You mean a loved one who is willing to shell out $36,250.

Considering Michael's comment this post might be an information hazard as it will encourage people to cryosticate ("I can always tell a loved one on my death bed").

I suppose that even the people who, in contrast with expert opinion, assign non-negligible chance of success to prompt cryonics with vitrification (e.g. the kind of procedure Mike "Darwin" suggests), will agree that two weeks on dry ice without any form of cryoprotection mean no realistic chances of success.

What does the fact that the Cryonics Institute is offering that implies about their honesty and/or competence?

This is very important news for anyone who is currently cryocrastinating. It means that you can drastically increase your chances of survival without filling out any forms. All you have to do is tell a loved one you want to be frozen upon death, and that you would like them to take responsibility for making sure this happens. This takes literally 30 seconds. Do it now!

Geez. My take: cryonics as it is very probably does not work, consequently the desire to sign up for cryonics is frequently coincident with otherwise low functioning, including the inability to deal with forms.

With regards to dry ice and slow freezing in general: that totally mashes up everything by ice crystals. At the scales involved, you are dealing with positioning of single molecules and very small, identical molecular complexes, and that positioning and state information gets irreversibly lost during freezing. A problem which is yet to be resolved for the whole volume of the human brain, as it is difficult to get vitrification enabling compounds everywhere. edit2: and with regards to dropping heads into buckets of liquid nitrogen or the like, that is still slow freezing. Only micrometre thick slices can be glassified without ice formation. Liquid nitrogen is at -196 Celsius. Think of oil at +200 Celsius, it doesn't flash-cook a big piece of frozen fish, and neither does liquid nitrogen flash freeze a big piece of fish. Even the absolute zero is not very far from room temperature. If you set up a guillotine with a bucket of liquid nitrogen for the head, what's going to happen is that not even the skin would be well preserved.