[336f5]

> that your estate will be able to afford the procedure -- before the company you've entrusted your brain to either makes a mistake or collapses

You've misunderstood the business structure of modern cryonics. A cryonics org like ALCOR is actually two organizations: one is a commercial organization which charges for storage and for the messy business of cryopreservation, and the second is a nonprofit trust which 'owns' the vitrified brains, pays the rent, conservatively invests the rest, and which will pay for the revival procedures if/when such are invented. When the commercial organization collapses, the nonprofit will simply have to have the dewars transferred somewhere else (it takes something like weeks for those things to boil down to a dangerous level; LN2 dewars are really cool!); and I believe there have already been transferrals of cryopatients in the past.

When you die, your life insurance is paying much of that out into the trust fund. There's not much question of 'whether your estate will be able to afford the procedure', since that's what the trust is for. It's not your estate's business at all.

[hugh4]

The nonprofit can also collapse, though.

Is it likely to happen? Honestly I have a very hard time imagining the probabilities. Financial collapse versus deliberate destruction versus horrible accident versus actually getting revived? They all seem unlikely, but once your brain is in deep freeze, its fate is one of those.

[336f5]

> Is it likely to happen?

It's hard to estimate, but nonprofits in the West have OK long-term track records and the cryonics double-organization model has worked well since it was created in the aftermath of Chatsworth (which demonstrated why the commercial side must be separated). Arguably, it only needs to work for another century, and it's not like it's that hard to keep some funds conservatively invested, pay rent regularly, and react once every few decades to a problem.

[hugh4]

I guess there's a fifth possibility: that people in the future learn enough about brain function to figure out that it's literally impossible to reboot a dead brain.

I'm no neurologist but wouldn't be surprised if there's information in the brain which is encoded in ways other than which neuron is connected to which. Like, firing patterns.

[amalcon]

The business structure is irrelevant. There are either enough resources to maintain the procedure or not. If there are not enough resources, what legal entity technically owns those resources is irrelevant.

[cbr]

"that your estate will be able to afford the procedure" reads to me as being about revival? Which ALCOR etc don't attempt to cover.

[336f5]

> Which ALCOR etc don't attempt to cover.

Maybe you should reread my comment.

[cbr]

Your parent wrote:

"You're essentially making a bet that someone will find something useful to do with a frozen brain -- and that your estate will be able to afford the procedure -- before the company you've entrusted your brain to either makes a mistake or collapses."

The procedure your parent was talking about is revival, not cryopreservation. Your comment talks in detail about why you think ALCOR's corporate structure makes them unlikely to collapse, but the money in ALCOR's trust is only enough to keep people frozen, not to cover revival.

(ALCOR does claim that the patient care trust will be enough to cover revival, but (a) revival could potentially be very expensive and (b) ongoing maintenance expenses have been using up the money generated by the trust and this seems likely to continue).

[336f5]

> ALCOR does claim that the patient care trust will be enough to cover revival

So you understand exactly how it's supposed to work and what I was talking about, and you were playing dumb by claiming to misinterpret my comment. Thanks.