Organ donation vs Cryonics

I think you're probably saving less than 1 life on average by being a donor.

Random guess: you're saving about .5 lives by donating, vs saving .05 of your own life by cryonauting.

Then there's not just the organ donation - there's the money you put towards cryonics that could have been donated towards charity (whether life-extension research, existential risk, or whatever).

If your goal was to maximize your own life no matter what, go for cryonics. Personally, I'm not emotionally entangled with a future life yet. For the time being, (in the event that I die, say, tomorrow) I'd rather donate my organs and life-insurance policy towards something that will do immediate good.

I couldn't find any statistics on how often a donor body is actually usable (but I'd assume vastly less than 100% of those cases, since you have to die of brain death in a hospital and still have cardiac activity)

This sounds like a really important unknown. Anyone else happen to have information?

The money you might put into cryopreservation can save a lot more lives than your organs can. The same of course goes for anything else you spend that money on, like restaurants or movies.

Calculations of life-saving medical procedures should use QALY (quality adjusted life years) rather than "lives saved" as the proper measure. A 90-year old receiving your heart will not produce very many QALY compared with successful cryopreservation and revival.

I suspect that you are overestimating how many people are going to be saved by organ donations from a given individual. A single person is only compatible with certain people. A fair number of the people who die waiting for organ donation are not getting donations in part because of a lack of a compatible donor. You may not be adding substantial compatible donors, especially if you are of a common genetic compliment. Moreover, many (although certainly not all) people who are getting organ donations have other problems, so one needs to ask how much lifespan one is actually extending them by.

There must exist some X such that (signing up for cryonics plus giving $X to the best charity you can identify) equals the social benefit of becoming an organ donor. If you're worried about the social cost of not being an organ donor you could pay $X and consider this part of the cost of cryonics. I suspect that X is negative due in part to the fact that the stigma of cryonics is likely decreasing in the number of people who signed up for cryonics and millions of expected lives would be saved if cryonics had no social stigma stuck to it.

If those organs can be transplanted from one body to another, it seems very well possible, even quite probable, that organs can be re-grown in the future, especially when grown out of your own stem cells (or induced stem cells), as is already being developed. So for me, at a first glance, I don't see any reasons why one couldn't cryo-preservate a body including the brain after other organs (kidneys, heart, whatever) have been transplanted.

Wait, hold the press! There's no reason for the two options to be exclusive. Your brain information could still be preserved while donating your organs after death, if you were in circumstances in which the organs could be harvested while still useful. If you're younger than, say, fifty, this shouldn't ever become an issue, anyway.

http://www.economist.com/node/15543683

You'd be better off spending your life as it stands on something important, or prominent, (academia or business for example) and becoming an advert for Cryonics. If you gain status, then make cryonics, and rationality, less 'weird'.

That way you get to contribute, and stay alive!

I am curious if you could donate your organs while cryo-preserving your brain. I'll send an email to Alcor and ask them.