The cost of universal cryonics

0.5% of planetary GDP to be a post-death society?

You're not post-death until you can both revive them and stop them from dying again (which will cost a lot more than just 0.5%). If all you do is revive them to be normal living humans again, then per the Gompertz curve, you buy very few years until something that hits the brain results in effective information-death.

I can't begin to imagine how you take your data to be an argument that cryonics is too costly.

It's not too costly for me, but I strongly suspect it is too costly for politicians, bureaucrats, and the "average man" given the current level of evidence. I also strongly suspect we are quite some way away from reaching the level of evidence that would require; although I dearly hope that some day we actually can manage a post-death society.

I would go for that myself. Alzheimer's has shown up in my family medical history now (namely, my father), so I have to take that into consideration for my personal plans.

I define the goal of cryonics as turning death from a permanent off-state into a temporary off-state. I think it defeats the purpose of cryonics for cryonicists under current conditions to try to live as long as possible before their suspensions. We still don't have ways to protect the aging brain; rising health care costs could easily wipe you out financially; and you could wind up in a situation where someone hostile to cryonics has to assume power of attorney for you and will keep you from getting suspended any way, despite a lifetime of cryonics advocacy, as happened to Marce Johnson. No, better to enter the off-state a decade before any of that happens, and hope that future medicine can figure out how to reverse you from it.

There would be considerable increases in security expenses for hospitals which would perform the procedure.

I am skeptical of this analysis for several reasons:

1. For better or worse, skilled personnel providing the service would be protected from malpractice to some degree by the very nature of the procedure. It's simply too hard to prove that harm occurred by all possible future standards. Even if malpractice is a possibility, the penalties would tend to be lower.
2. The $25,000 for cryoprotectant sounds unrealistic unless there are no competing firms producing comparable cryoprotectants. That Alcor pays this at present seems to be a result of the fact that M22 is produced and consumed on a very small scale. Nonetheless, an insanely high profit margin for companies developing less toxic cryoprotectants could be a very good thing for cryonics quality. Cryoprotectant toxicity is an incredibly important area to develop for the purpose of not only cryonics but also for organ preservation and the advent of true suspended animation.
3. Responding rapidly to cardiac arrest is something we pay for already with the existing health care system in developed countries that have EMS. If cryonics provides motive to extend EMS infrastructure to undeveloped countries, that is useful for other reasons -- it would save lives in the ordinary sense of the term. It should not be considered an additional expense of cryonics except in situations where EMS would not be deployed.
4. A society that takes cryonics seriously would feel very differently regarding assisted "suicide". It would be something encouraged (and voluntarily pre-arranged) for situations when the brain and personality is seriously threatened. This would result in extraordinary savings not only by eliminating the need for emergency response and standby for cryonics, but coincidentally by reducing the burden (which is intense both financially and psychologically) in terms of caretaking. Not to mention that the patient would actually possibly survive.
5. Monolithic domes are cheap to construct, and well suited for cold storage warehouses. This is not the same thing as cryogenic warehouses; the engineering requirements are more stringent, but their use as a cold storage room at -135C does not seem implausible. The first of such cryogenic warehouses to be constructed would be more expensive than the last due to development requirements for a robust cryogenic storage system. I do agree it would realistically be kept to a smaller scale than national or continental -- municipal seems reasonable. The warehouses would need to have an automated pack-and-place mechanism for easy storage and retrieval, which could be maintained externally. Patients would be stored in crates which can be added in through the top and moved into place by an automated crane. Retrieval of specific patients would require that all crates stored on top or in front of them would need to be moved, but should be feasible if necessary. Other kinds of cryogenic goods could be stored in the same warehouse temporarily in similar crates until enough patients are accumulated for it to pay for itself.
6. Large scale facilities would cost less because they do not need to be kept at liquid nitrogen boiling temperature, only at the glass transition temperature. The heat sink effect of the large amount of thermal mass comprising the structure and other patients would prevent it from fluctuating without the necessity of LN2 boiloff. Patients would also benefit from this in terms of reduced or eliminated cracking effects.
7. The only energy (heat) source in the plant would be the crane. There could however be explosive potential depending on how the building was kept cool. If there is an LN2 pipeline or tank involved, that would be something that needs to be engineered very carefully. This is potentially an argument in favor of (multiple redundant) electric coolers. On the plus side, cryogenic engineering is a fairly mature field and LN2 storage is commonplace at hospitals. I don't think the required level of precautionary spending would be nuclear plant levels.
8. Monolithic domes are extremely stable against tornados, hurricanes, and earthquakes. Additional earthquake proofing could be added below ground to help ensure that patients are not jostled too much, as is done for hospitals, but my guess is we're talking a few million dollars for tens of thousands of patients if not better.
9. You mention halving the neuro storage cost. But logically you are either saying that storage costs would go to half across the board, or that full-body costs go to half that of a neuro. If neuro is 1/7th of full body, this implies that the cost is 1/14th, which is pretty significant.
10. Whether we like it or not, the wealthy, to maintain their place in the status hierarchy, would tend to spend dramatically more than the publicly-funded or middle class, just as is the case with medicine today. Spending several million on a cryopreservation with a tiny chance of working better is not a big deal for a billionaire, any more than buying a private jet would be. To some degree this subsidizes the infrastructure and research for the less privileged classes.

Finally, it bears emphasis that even if you're right and the costs do tend to rise dramatically from the causes you are suggesting, most of them imply much better cryonics. The worst cryonics then would be better than the best cryonics today. Furthermore they would naturally evolve into a suspended animation style cryonics as soon as reversible suspension is developed, ensuring that hardly anyone "dies" of aging, cancer, etc. once that milestone is achieved. As it stands, if true suspended animation were discovered tomorrow, cultural (and financial/organizational) inertia would keep most people who could benefit from signing up for it for decades to come. Thus in terms of cost per unit value delivered, I would still maintain that universal cryonics scales very well.

Thank you for the very insightful response!

The main trade off, I think, is whether we view cryonics as a medical procedure or a universal human right. Your numbers seem spot-on if we're trying to prevent every single death, and pessimistically assuming that cryopreservation must be done immediately after death.

If instead this is simply a medical procedure for those that can be saved (such as current treatments for heart attacks - rushed to a hospital, but without any special standby), or something that people routinely volunteer for when their health is failing, then you'll be eliminating a large chunk of those costs.

Equally, if vitrification is shown to be effective even a few hours after death, then much of the expense from urgency disappears.

It's also worth noting, as Isparrish pointed out, cryonics can simply move money around that's already being spent - a heart attack patient is going to be rushed to a hospital regardless of whether or not cryonics is an option. Maybe people will be less blase about death thanks to the prospect of immortality, but right now people risk death due to heart attack, smoking, and a myriad of other ostensibly preventable causes. On the other hand, if they're less blase, they're probably also willing to spend more on it :)

Quoting the Alcor article from my post:

"An attempt was made to get round-the-clock nursing staff at a cost of $37.50 per hour (market rate), so that someone duly authorized by the State of California would be available to pronounce legal death, allowing the suspension to start without the 20 to 40 minute delay that would have occurred while the on-call hospice nurse drove over to pronounce legal death."

This suggests to me that, at least with current techniques, response time is actually quite important. While about 50% of the population dies already in a hospital, and another chunk has 911 called only to be pronounced dead, there is also a sizable portion of the population which dies quietly at home. It is that last category which would still require a fair amount of expense.

If there's new developments that allow cryonic suspension to start hours or even days after death without issue, then transportation expenses can probably be eliminated. At that point you can probably also discount labor another 50%, since you wouldn't need to ensure 24/7 staffing, and a backlog wouldn't be a horrific situation. However, until that development occurs, transportation seems to actually be one of the most critical and expensive issues facing modern cryonics. Both Alcor and CI charge rather heavily for that transportation / standby service.

You are entirely correct about not adjusting for inflation. I seem to have left out the footnote explaining that this was intentional, as CI currently charges $28,000 for whole body, so it felt unfairly pessimistic to adjust that.

The calculators I did use suggested $6000 in 1990 would cost $9880.15 in 2010. (http://www.westegg.com/inflation/). $6K -> $16K seems unexpectedly steep to me, just based on life-time experiences, but I will definitely concede that either way, my numbers are intentionally overly-optimistic :)

However, it is also possible that cryopreservation costs could increase as more sophisticated methods are developed and used. In addition, Alcor has traditionally eschewed profits in an effort to keep cryonics affordable. More traditional medical institutions might adopt higher prices to enhance profitability.

While higher prices might lead to lower adoption rates, there is the opposite possibility, that more sophisticated procedures would be trusted and recommended more by physicians. Also it seems plausible that a higher degree of profitability would lead to a better marketed product.

Why is that the figure used? 150,000 is the number of people who die every day - how is that relevant to the calculations in this article?

Hmmm, you are entirely correct. I ran the numbers as log (150,000) / log (2), and got 17. This was on the assumption that Alcor probably doesn't handle more than a single patient in a day.

More conservatively, I should have probably assumed Alcor handles ~10/year (based on 2010 figures). At that point we get 0.025 per day, which is about 5 additional doublings. So it looks like a fairer number would have been 22 doublings, assuming that this rule holds true. Thus, my padding to triple was probably slightly pessimistic, given the assumptions I made.

Which is fortunate because 17 increases by 10% would give us a total increase of just over 5x, but 10.5 increases by 10% give us a 2.7x increase, or (as in the article) a tripling if we're generous.

Either the two mistakes cancel each other out, or there's a typo, or some clever math trick I'm not aware of.

I'm also inclined to argue that government run monopolies are all inefficient, but to different extents, and so using them to estimate costs is highly questionable.

This is getting into politics, but...

There have been many empirical studies examining the efficiency of government bureaucracies versus business in a variety of areas, including refuse collection, electrical utilities, public transportation, water supply systems, and hospital administration. The findings have been mixed. Some studies of electric utilities have found that publicly owned ones were more efficient and charged lower prices than privately owned utilities. Several other studies found the opposite, and yet others found no significant differences. Studies of other services produced similar kinds of mixed results. Charles Goodsell is a professor of Public Administration and Public Affairs at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University who has spent much of his life studying bureaucracy. After examining these efficiency studies, he concluded: “In short, there is much evidence that is ambivalent. The assumption that business always does better than government is not upheld. … When you add up all these study results, the basis for the mantra that business is always better evaporates.”

Source.

"a lot of America's ridiculously expensive healthcare is a result of inefficient use of resources, and dodgy incentives, and such things. "

Given Alcor is based in the US, and has to rent time and labor from the medical profession writ large, I'd suggest that overcoming those obstacles would indeed result in a fairly substantial savings for them. Alcor is small enough to suffer rather heavily from inefficient use of resources - they do maybe 10 vitrifications per year, but have to have the staff and supplies ready to go 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

Also, the idea that doubling your size decreases costs by 10% is plausible, but dubious over 17 doublings.

I'd honestly conclude "insufficient information" here. The history of computers in the last few decades makes a mere tripling in productivity look excessively pessimistic. On the flip side of the coin, equipment and labor costs run in to hard limits. I can certainly see a 200% productivity increase being optimistic, but I can also see it being pessimistic. Since I don't know, it felt safest to just run the numbers as current research suggests, without adding new assumptions :)

That said, the best defense I can give for those numbers is that I was trying to be optimistic, because my starting assumption is that there's no way you're going to finance universal cryonics in today's political climate. I didn't want to throw myself up against an easy version of the problem :)

It seems like investing money with no risk or work involved can't beat inflation in the long run, and therefore you'd need to keep spending money over time.

No, capital really does produce value. Or, at least, it enables others to try to make money while you collect rent.

I believe the strategy for eliminating risk from the equation in the long term is to diversify, so one investment failing does not cause the entire pool to be lost. Overall a diversified fund that invests in real capital should generate real compound interest over the rate of inflation.

In addition to what others pointed out, storage is also the area that scales best from economies of scale - a single huge facility will have significantly less external heat to contend with, due to a smaller surface area, and thus significantly cheaper costs.

In addition, real-estate costs themselves tend to drop due to economies of scale, and as you grow large enough you can probably set up large remote storage facilities well outside of urban areas, and simply have smaller facilities locally that do a "preserve and ship".

The funding Alcor does also produces twice as much interest as is required to beat inflation, so there's a good margin of error even if inflation rises.

There are certainly risks, but if you had the sort of social buy-in required to spend 0.5% of the world GDP on this sort of project, I think inflation would be the least of your concerns. Natural disasters, major warfare, and severe economic collapses are much more likely to be risks, and unfortunately those are not trivial to mitigate.