Cryonics

[ciphergoth]

I'm considering signing up with the Cryonics Institute. Are you signed up? I'd be interested to hear your reasons why or why not. It does of course sound crazy, but when you press past that initial reaction to find out why it's crazy, I haven't heard a really satisfactory argument yet, and I'm interested to hear what people think. There are many reasons it might not work, but are there reasons to think it's really unlikely to work? How likely does recovery need to be for it to be worth it?

Comments

[lizw.livejournal.com]

Er, and in case it isn't obvious, the reason a policy that promises to pay £30,000 may only pay out £3,300 on average basically boils down to "very careful actuarial calculations" - they basically expect you to live beyond 78, and they expect a proportion of people to lose the paperwork, stop paying the premiums, die of causes that are excluded, and so on and so forth.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

So I should expect that I'm also much more likely than not to be among that great majority for whom they don't have to pay out? That makes it sound like less of a good deal.

For this purpose, I'd need insurance that pays out no matter how old you are when you die. That doesn't seem like something anyone would offer to me, but I've been told otherwise...

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

You should certainly expect that the insurance company will make considerably more on the deal than you pay them. They will budget for a profit even after all their costs. This is how insurance works - there's no
magic that turns small sums into large ones, it's just risk pooling. The expectation value for the holder of an insurance policy is less than its cost to the holder. Or the insurer goes bust, which is the another way things go wrong.

The other thing you're missing is inflation. £30k now will pay for a budget freezing but it certainly won't in 40 years' time, unless we have had cataclysmic deflation.

[lovingboth]

An indication as to how much is made from term life insurance is the way that when we did it around JA's birth, the first 15 months of premiums went to pay the commission. So the insurer gets no money for more than the first year of a 18 year policy and still expects to profit.

[lizw.livejournal.com]

That kind of insurance does exist - it's called "whole life insurance" - but it's considerably more expensive.

[lovingboth]

This train of thought had occurred to me. Looking it up on a comparison site, for a 39 year old in London, £100k whole life is about £85 a month now.

If you want the payout to be indexed with inflation, the cheapest company offering that a) ignores RPI increases of less than 1%, b) won't increase by more than 10% - so a few years of 1970s/80s level inflation will wipe out most of the value - and c) will up your premium by twice RPI. Another one will increase both cover and premiums by 5% a year.

If you want it to index better than that, you're looking at about £240 a month.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

What comparison site did you use? Thanks!

[lovingboth]

I can't remember. The companies it came up with were all 'household names' so I'd expect them all to be fine.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Any guesses? I've tried three sites (moneysupermarket.com, uswitch.com, moneynet.co.uk) and all three have a fixed field for how many years of cover you want; I can't figure out how to get information about whole life insurance from any of them.

[lovingboth]

(Checks browser history)

bestdealinsurance.co.uk

It defaulted to term insurance, but you can tell it you want whole life.

[lizw.livejournal.com]

Just to be clear, I should note that whole life insurance may get you round a practical problem, but the same legal problems apply as with term insurance.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Many thanks again for all your advice here. I shall try and find out what other cryonics people in the UK have done, and if I find something that seems workable and affordable I'll ask for advice again - cheers!

[lizw.livejournal.com]

You're welcome - happy to help in any way I can.

[lizw.livejournal.com]

Actually, while we're on the financial side of this, another thought: it occurs to me that you need to think not only of the cost of the actual cryopreservation and revival, but the cost of the presumed new medical treatment for whatever you were suffering from when you "died", plus the cost of living after revival. Your skills will be out of date, and you won't be able to rely on waking up in a legal system or economy where revived people (or anyone at all, necessarily) will be entitled to a pension or benefits or education grants. So it seems to me you'd need to have made some sort of investment pre-death (or via instruction in your will) that you think would plausibly produce, during the time you expect to be suspended, enough money to live on at least for the time it would take you to retrain, after allowing for inflation. Even that assumes that you'd be employable at all (think age discrimination, disability discrimination if the process doesn't leave you functioning perfectly, prejudice against people seen to have "cheated" death, etc); you might need to have enough of a fund to meet your living expenses for the rest of your life. How do CI suggest people address that?