[michaelt]

When it comes to cryopreservation the thing I find infeasible is the idea a provider would bother with the preservation, under the incentives of capitalism.

If someone pays millions of dollars to a company that promises to freeze their corpse for 200 years, the company can simply freeze the corpse for a decade or two, take the millions of dollars as dividends and executive bonuses, then declare bankruptcy. The dead can't sue.

[jaccola]

With enough money, at least here in the UK, it is possible to set up structures that endure for one sole purpose for many generations.

It was quite common for rich Victorians to donate their grounds/houses to be used for the public good and still today they are owned by the original trust and money from the trust can only be used in a certain way etc... we have many parks because of this (that otherwise could have been developed to extract money).

Obviously the longer the technology takes to develop, the higher the chance something goes wrong; though the concepts of trusts have existed for some 800 years so if it takes only 200 years, I think your chances are good!

[michaelt]

Isn't the UK also the home of the "Rule against perpetuities" [1] specifically stopping dead people from exerting control over the ownership of private property? To stop some duke in the 1600s setting inheritance rules for "their" land 6 generations into the future?

There may be exceptions to the rule against perpetuities for charities, but I don't imagine any sane court would consider keeping a corpse frozen to be a charitable activity.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_against_perpetuities

[DennisP]

One way to mitigate that would be to put the money in a trust which pays the preservation company a monthly dividend. If the trust stops paying, the company can sue it. If the company goes out of business despite its ongoing revenue, the trust can try to find someone else to take over the storage. We already have trusts that manage wealth for multiple generations.

[umpalumpaaa]

This is exactly how Companies are doing it… they put the money in a trust and pay for the ongoing costs by using interests from that trust.

[vintermann]

And how can you trust the trust? We also have plenty of trusts which are questionably aligned with their makers last wills, among them the Nobel peace prize (Nobel didn't just want the prize to go to anyone working for any kind of advancement of peace. He had a very particular instrument for peace in mind, namely peace conferences, which I don't think any laureate has arranged for fifty years.)

I think we have too many trusts already. Let the living decide what's important in life, not the dead.

[DennisP]

That's why I said "mitigate" rather than "completely solve." Incentives are aligned better with two entities who check each other and earn ongoing fees, instead of giving a lump sum to a single entity.

And the Nobels might not be awarded exactly as originally intended, but they are still awarded every year. Nobody has swiped the funds for executive bonuses, as the commenter above suggested.

[IAmBroom]

The fact that we are talking about bodies supposedly preserved in a state of suspended animation, not yet really dead, refutes your premise.

[vintermann]

Not sure what premise you mean. But I'm pretty sure not even the cryo-optimists pretends those people are not dead.

[michaelt]

Let's say there was a power cut and the backup generator failed. The corpse is gone.

What happens to the money in the trust?

[DennisP]

Whatever you define when you set it up. Donate to charity, give to your descendants, etc.

Preferably the company would also have liability, giving the trust standing to sue. Then the trust spends some of their money on the lawsuit, and if they win, applies the proceeds as above.

[jewel]

The way I think you'd set this up is you'd create a trust with the millions and then the trustees would pay the company its monthly fee from the trust's funds.

With enough funds, the trust should be able to both pay for your preservation and grow its balance. You'd even be able to inherit the remaining funds when revived.

Of course in practice there is still the possibility of the trustees being corrupt.

[adastra22]

These aren’t companies doing the patient storage. It is non profits setup and run by people who are signed up themselves.

[FridayoLeary]

It's basically the same thing. What's stopping them from eventually losing interest or the non profit getting hijacked. I personally think the whole thing is a huge waste of money and i can imagine some guys in 50 years will think so too.

[adastra22]

That they and the people they care about are stored there. This is a far stronger incentive than any profit motive.

[michaelt]

Wasn't OpenAI a non-profit?

[adastra22]

The second part of that sentence was the important bit.

[IAmBroom]

And since all things under that umbrella are exactly the same...

[IAmBroom]

The novel When the Sleeper Wakes is based on a situation where a tax loophole meant that one particular suspended-animation quasi-corpse inherited (eventually) over half the property on Earth. His trust becomes a de facto world government, and his body, fully cured of its fatal flaw, lies in state in a sort of mausoleum/temple/seat of government.

And one day he just wakes up.

[nyeah]

Yeah, even the living can't collect much from a bankrupt corporation.

[gonzalohm]

That's a good point, but the funds could be automatically released over time instead of a lump sum payment

[netsharc]

There's a news story about such a company where they basically throw the bodies in a chest freezer, or stuffed many of them together in one unit, etc. Nightmare fuel...

I have doubts that such a company could keep the power on for the next 200 years, with an increasingly unstable planet (climatically and politically).

Maybe sending your body in a lead coffin into the coldness of space is a better preservation method, maybe that's why the loser billionaires are so interested in going to space..

[pndy]

Some 20 years ago French Planete documentary channel (back then that channel had some good stuff - often shocking, unlike Discovery that slowly marched towards flashy popsci, aliens and WW2) was showing this piece about cryonics, and there was a segment about company that did indeed went bankrupt. Bodies of their clients due to unpaid bills de-thawed and started decomposing. And since that happen there was nothing else that families could do but just bury their beloved ones.

Some of the experts speaking argued that it's impossible to preserve and then revive human bodies with available technology because ice crystals do irreversible damage to body tissues.

[IAmBroom]

Yes, the ice crystals destroying the integrity of a large portion of the cells throughout the body remains a tiny chink in the whole plan.

Fortunately, "future technology" handwaves all problems away.

[hollerith]

The ice crystal problem got solved decades ago.

[FridayoLeary]

If that's the case why aren't we doing more to encourage them?