As am I... though I am surprised they list a donation of only $100.

This deserves recognition, up voted.

Me as well.

This is appreciated; Thank you.

What is it exactly that's so valuable about a person that justifies spending $30000 worth of resources to preserve it? Their "identity", whatever that means? Their personality, even though it's probably a dime a dozen? Their acquired knowledge that will be outdated by the time they are revived? What is it that we want to preserve?

What is it that is lost when a person dies, that cannot be regained by creating a new one? I'm not in favor of creating new ones, but new ones are created all the time anyway, so why not learn to live with them? Why do we need to do everything the hard way?

I'd like to donate, but at the moment I may have to direct discretionary time and money towards saving Kim Suozzi: http://www.reddit.com/r/atheism/comments/ydsy5/reddit_help_me_find_some_peace_in_dying_young_im/ The lack of interest in the prize puzzles me.

Why would you be puzzled when you have answered your own question?

Behavior like that has deepened my skepticism of the cryonics crowd - there are glaring discrepancies between professed beliefs and actual behavior.

Has Suozzi's story been confirmed by CI yet?

saving Kim Suozzi

saving?

and they seem uninterested in trying to improve the science of preserving their own brains

Maybe they don't want to spread the flour on the dragon

Some very wealthy cryonicists want to tie up fortunes in speculative revival trusts, yet they depend on financially inadequate cryonics organizations to keep them in suspension against foreseeable adversities, and they seem uninterested in trying to improve the science of preserving their own brains. I don't understand this business model.

Think pyramids, only you don't need thousands of slaves and a truly inconvenient amount of sandstone.

I'm one of the volunteers at the Brain Preservation Foundation. Although sooner is always better, there isn't a specific reason why now is better than 2 weeks in the future. If you need the money for an emergency fund, I'd wait to donate.

The page describing the need for our current fundraising campaign is here: http://www.brainpreservation.org/content/letter-president-brain-preservation-foundation

As Bakker's Prince of Nothing-verse books say (which I have lost the last 5 days or so to reading), "Measure is unceasing".

These first tests, while perhaps the most valuable (as the initial observations of anything usually are), are - hopefully - only the first; if your donations do not change whether the first ones happen, they may change whether the second batch does.

(Even in the extraordinarily unlikely scenario where all the techniques produce perfect preservation according to the first test, one would still want periodic tests to check that the techniques are still being done right.)

"The Brain Preservation Foundation was incorporated in Delaware on August 27, 2010. We hold Section 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status as a not-for-profit scientific research organization. Your contributions are fully tax deductible. Thank you."

http://www.brainpreservation.org/content/donate

According to them, approximately $25-50k - less than the cost of a single cryosuspension. This should be easily fundable with token contributions from people who have expressed an interest in brain preservation.

A world in which people who sign up for preservation avoid death if and only if they're lucky enough to have signed up after, say, 2030, feels weirder than a world where the rational are rewarded, the irrational punished

It feels weirder, but has many precedents. Many 'bubbles' can be profitably interpreted as people being 100% correct about their vision of the future - but messing up the timing (see http://www.hoover.org/publications/policy-review/article/5646 and http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21575737-lessons-americas-long-history-property-booms-betting-house for examples). I used this in another comment, but consider the case of an investor in the ill-fated Pets.com: was the investor right to believe that Americans would spend a ton of money online such as for buying dogfood? Absolutely, Amazon is a successful online retail business that stocks thousands of dog food varieties, to say nothing of all the other pet-related goods it sells. But the value of Pets.com still went to ~0. Many startups have a long list of failed predecessors who tried to do pretty much the same thing, and what made them a success was that they happened to give the pinata a whack at the exact moment where some cost curves or events hit the right point. (Facebook is the biggest archive of photographs there has ever been, with truly colossal storage requirements; could it have succeeded in the 1990s? No, and not even later, as demonstrated by Orkut & Friendster, and the lingering death of MySpace.) You can read books from the past about tech visionaries and note how many of them were spot-on in their beliefs about what would happen (The Media Lab was a good example of this - I read it constantly thinking 'yes, you were right, for all the good it did you' or 'not quite, it'd actually take another decade for that to really work out') but where a person would have been ill-advised to act on the correct forecasts. Or look at computers: imagine an early adopter of an Apple computer saying 'everyone will use computers eventually!' Yes, but not for another few decades, and 'in the long run, we are all dead'.

If cryonics turned out to be worthless for everyone doing it before 2030 while perfectly correct in principle and practical post-2030, it would simply be yet another technology where visionaries were ultimately right despite all nay-saying & skepticism from normals but nevertheless jumped on it too early.

When a knife drops, a fraction of a second divides a brilliant save from an emergency-room visit. They don't call it the 'bleeding edge' for nothing.

Well, a number of things have gone not-as-planned, but it did help to make a public commitment here, and I've (finally!) donated an order of magnitude more than I did last year, along with the corresponding employer match. Last year's donation drive is over, but I expect they'll still have science to do.

I look forward to seeing the results.