Positive time preference is not the constraint it once was:
You can’t take it with you. So Arizona resort operator David Pizer has a plan to come back and get it.
Like some 1,000 other members of the "cryonics" movement, Mr. Pizer has made arrangements to have his body frozen in liquid nitrogen as soon as possible after he dies. In this way, Mr. Pizer, a heavy-set, philosophical man who is 64 years old, hopes to be revived sometime in the future when medicine has advanced far beyond where it stands today.
And because Mr. Pizer doesn’t wish to return a pauper, he’s taken an additional step: He’s left his money to himself.
With the help of an estate planner, Mr. Pizer has created legal arrangements for a financial trust that will manage his roughly $10 million in land and stock holdings until he is re-animated. Mr. Pizer says that with his money earning interest while he is frozen, he could wake up in 100 years the "richest man in the world."
…To serve clients who plan on being frozen, attorneys are tweaking so-called dynasty trusts that can legally endure hundreds of years, or even indefinitely. Such trusts, once widely prohibited, are now allowed by more than 20 states — including Arizona, Illinois and New Jersey — and typically are used to shield assets from estate taxes. They pay out funds to a person’s children, grandchildren and future generations.
The chilling new twist: In addition to heirs or charities, estate lawyers are also naming their cryonics clients as beneficiaries. If they come back to life after being frozen, the funds revert back to them. Assuming, that is, that there are no legal challenges to the plans.
That is from The Wall Street Journal, January 21 2006, p.A1. Of course if you take the St. Petersburg Paradox literally, you should chop off and freeze your head for a very long time; there is some chance of enormous wealth at the end.
Addendum: Here is the full article.
The chance is zero. None of these idiots is going to be reanimated. It’s not like the world has need for more of them. Further,I cannot imagine a less urgent area for bio-medical research. At some point their heirs (perhaps the state under guise of its pressing urgency) will turn off the refrigerator, cremate the remains and take the money.
Come on folks, learn to deal with the fact that when you die you will be dead (physically at any rate, no opinion is expressed herein on religious doctrines) and your things will belong to others. You can give them away wisely or unwisely, but you can’t take it with you.
P.S. the article did not say whether the frozen had filed an estate tax return or whether they were still paying income taxes.
On the bright side, dead people owning stuff would be a good way to increase the world’s capital.
Even at the tempreture of liquid nitrogen lots of molecules are going to slowly fall apart in the brain.
So no, you can’t bring someone back from the dead via cryonics. Even if technology advanced enough to
reanimate your body, you, your mind, your personality, your memories, would be gone. That information
would have long since been lost. So if they did bring you back your personality would be have to be
downloaded from their early 21st centuary rich sucker file. Look out the window. See that little kid
playing out there, the kid whose name you don’t even know? He has feelings, thoughts and dreams just like
you and he lives in the same time period. That little kid is closer to being you than any hypothetical
reanimated corpse in the future.
Someone should sick consumer affairs on these cryonics companies.
If the comments on this pro-free market blog express this much hostility to (or envy of?) financially successful cryonicists (calling them “idiots” and “rich suckers”), then who needs left-wing blogs?
I’m not personally interested in cryonics, but I do think the common reaction ammounts to screeching insanity. It sure seems like a less vain and far more sane approach to death than the typical one of expensive burials and flat out denial of mortality via religion and the like.
None of you cryonics detractors know the least bit about cryonics. Cryonicists are not fools. First off, the people who work at cryonics orgs for the most part are like monks or priests in some respects. Cryonics taps into the hardwired religious wiring of the brain. So this the cryonicicsts who work at cryonics organizations have a religious feeling about cryonics. THey would not steal–not if they want to be revived themselves.
Mr. Brak, your comments are seriously mistaken. Very high quality brain preservation by vitrification has been published in Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/annals.html
Even more stunning micrographs are at
http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/braincryopreservation1.html
Cursory checking of the most elementary online cryobiology references would lead to paragraphs like:
“Cryopreservation allows virtually indefinite storage of biological material without deterioration over a time scale of at least several thousands of years [31], but probably much longer.”
Long-term molecular stability of tissues below the glass transition temperature of water (approx -120 degC) is a basic fact of physics. Without translational motion to move reactants together, there is there no chemical change. At liquid nitrogen temperature, water can only vibrate in place.
In addition to Kurzweil, Thorp, et al, there are some other very clever people that support cryonics
http://www.cryoletter.org/
Even back in 1988, Arthur C. Clarke put the odds of cryonics working, as a purely technical problem, at 90%.
—Cryoguy
Interesting links cryoguy. I was under the impression that cryogenics companies didn’t do this
type of preservation. If they do then they are a little more trustworthy than I thought.
Two hundred years ago, anyone without a heartbeat was considered dead. Now we can revive many such people, and we even remove hearts and reinsert them. Fifty years ago, anyone without brainwave activity was considered dead. Now we can revive many such people, and even halt and restart brainwave activity deliberately.
The premise of cryonics is that death has not occurred until the brain’s structure has been destroyed (by fire, decomposition, or disease) to such a degree that it cannot be reconstructed by any future technology. A mature nanotechnology, able to manipulate the atoms of the brain one at a time, and artificial intelligence, able to perform Sudoku-like interpolations of apparently-missing information, could perform any needed repairs. Other technologies as yet unguessed-at may prove superior, but these are sufficient, and on the horizon (within 25-100 years, by many estimates).
As for leaving money to myself: perhaps some means could be found of subverting my wishes and plans in that regard, but I don’t consider the risk of such subversion sufficient cause to reject cryonics. I would rather be alive than dead, poor or not. Even the chance that cryonics might not work is not cause (IMHO) not to try, because if it doesn’t, I’ll never know.
I look forward to the adventure that is the future.
So, how many members of the GMU Economics faculty have arranged to be cryogenically frozen? Just Robin, or are there more?
Adam wrote: “all we need is a stock-market crash, a political revolution, or just a law invalidating these sort of trust funds. I think one of these is pretty likely to happen within any 100 year period.”
The odds on seeing that money again are longer than that. Just leave your money with somebody you don’t know, and tell him that you will be away for a very long time in a place from which you might not return and that while you are away you will not be in communication with him.
Now, what are the odds that the money won’t be stolen over the space of a century?
The answer is as always:
“For of men it may generally be affirmed, that they are thankless, fickle, false, cowardly, greedy, devoted to you while you are able to confer benefits upon them, and ready, as I said before, while danger is distant, to shed their blood, and sacrifice their property, their lives, and their children for you; but in the hour of need they turn against you.”
Niccolo Machiavelli (1469–1527). The Prince.
XVII. Of Cruelty and Clemency, and Whether It Is Better To Be Loved or Feared
http://www.bartleby.com/36/1/17.html
And that Mr. Plus is why I am not a left-winger.
Cryonics seems creepy because it appears to operate on the wrong side of the line between life and death. Fundamentally cryonics is medicine– an attempt to save lives, and is not any more creepy than any other kind of medicine. It’s because cryonics is only allowed to begin when conventional medicine gives up and attaches the legal label “dead” that cryonics seems creepy. It’s all the social taboos involving “the dead” that are creeping you out.
Of course if cryonics works, then these people were never really dead. In fact, neither were all the other millions of people that medicine throws away like garbage after a few minutes of cardiac arrest. Mass murder by primitive ignorance and medical neglect; Now THATS creepy!
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