Rudi Hoffman: Ten Ways to Avoid Being the Next Cryonics Legal Case
Rudi Hoffman is the man to go to for life insurance to fund a cryonics contract. Last I heard, he had cornered about 95% of the market in this small niche. In light of the recent Mary Robbins case, Rudi has written up a list of choices cryonicists can make to ensure that our hostile relatives don't try to pull us out of the freezer, valiantly (according to some people, apparently) making our neural structures available for consumption by a variety of worms and bacteria. Here's the intro:
Several of my clients and friends have asked me for observations regarding securing their cryonics arrangements even with contrary wishes of friends and relatives. Given the recent Mary Robbins case in Colorado, and multiple previous cases available in some detail on the websites of both CI and Alcor, structuring your affairs in the most secure manner currently has top of mind awareness for many who are serious about their cryonics plans.
The purpose of this article is to provide some insight into how serious cryonicists can structure their affairs to assure themselves they have done everything possible regarding funding and legal structures for their optimal suspensions.
I noticed that Rudi missed one thing that several cryonicists have suggested to me: putting a "certificate of religious belief" in your wallet that makes a concrete statement against autopsy for religious reasons. One friend of mine used a lamination machine to attach this directly to his ID. I am especially concerned about this for young cryonicists because I've heard that when a young person dies under circumstances even the slightest bit unusual, autopsies are common.
As soon as blood starts to coagulate, vitrification becomes impossible, seriously reducing the quality of the suspension. Though I am hopeful that even the most primitive suspensions will lead to revivals some day, it casually seems to me (as a non-scientist) that suspensions involving vitrification will require lower levels of technology for a successful revival.
Since I'm on the topic of cryonics, why not quote Ben Franklin:
I have seen an instance of common flies…drown’d in Madeira
wine…Having heard it remark’d that drowned flies were capable of
being reviv’d by the rays of the sun, I proposed making the experiment
upon these; they were therefore expos’d to the sun…In less than three
hours, two of them began by degrees to recover life...and soon after
began to fly, finding themselves in Old England, without knowing how
they came thither.
I wish it were possible…to invent a method of embalming drown’d
persons, in such a manner that they may be recall’d to life at any
period, however distant. For having a very ardent desire to see and
observe the state of America a hundred years hence, I should prefer to
any ordinary death, being immers’d in a cask of Madeira wine...to be
later recall’d to life by the solar warmth of my dear country!â€
On one occasion, this caused me to remark to Michael Vassar, "do you think there are some people buried in caskets of Madeira wine in the ground that we just haven't discovered yet?", to which he replied, "I doubt it." A pity... I am looking at a quarter right now, and I should think that in the long term, the world would be willing to trade every quarter in circulation (likenesses of Washington) for the actual preserved brain and body of George Washington. Whether he would care to be revived in the present, however, may be a separate question, but if he were, I can only imagine that he would enjoy some level of political influence in US politics.
March 9th, 2010 - 18:28
Wow, with support from Ben Franklin, you’d think cryonics would receive a bit more respect in the United States. Ah well.
March 13th, 2010 - 20:16
“I should think that in the long term, the world would be willing to trade every quarter in circulation (likenesses of Washington) for the actual preserved brain and body of George Washington”
I wanted to say that that’s absolutely ridiculous, but when I actually do the arithmetic, it turns out to be slightly less ridiculous than I initially thought.The last decade’s worth of quarters is more than eight billion dollars; it’s still over a billion if you just meant the metal price instead of the face value. The total number of quarters in circulation is much more than this, but surely it can’t be more than a factor of, I don’t know, five? So say we’re talking forty billion dollars on the high end, or 15% of Microsoft. Now, I still think this is absolutely ridiculous for a single human being, but such sums have been spent in worse ways—look at the Iraq war.