Selected messages from the Cryonics Institute Yahoo Group Forum and occasionally Cryonet http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Cryonics_Institute/
CI ONLINE DISCUSSION GROUP
CIYG DIGESTOne of our Members phoned today wondering how to post messages to the CI Members Yahoo Group (what John Bull calls the CIYG). If you are able to access this message on the CIYG and if you are able to send an e-mail message to anyone, you should be able to submit a message to the CIYG. Just compose your message as an e-mail message and send the message to: Cryonics_Institute@yahoogroups.com
Ben Best
From Marta Sandberg
Kennita Watson wrote: I just spent an exhilarating weekend at the Frozen Dead Guy Days, talking to hundreds of people about cryonics. One or two of them mentioned being daunted by the prospect of overwhelming change, but by far the objections to cryonics that I heard the most often involved views of the afterlife, to the effect of either "I'm going to paradise" or "I'm going to be reincarnated".
I have had similar reactions when I talk to people, but I have also learnt that the first (or second or third) reason they give for not choosing cryonics is probably not the true reason.
If you keep on talking to them and knock down the straw men they put up My cryonics arrangements are paid for by life insurance and the insurance cost less than $300 per year . . . heaven can wait, I don't intend to live forever only until I choose to die . . . if you don't like the
future you can always commit suicide, if you don't try you would be dead anyway.
One of those answers is fear of a strange future and lots of people have said that I am brave because I have chosen cryonics. Of course, the future is perceived as even more frightening if all your friends and relatives will be dead when/if you wake up. Let me add one more thing. Somehow or other, people perceive the future as even more frightening because you are not SURE you will actually wake up. Go figure.
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CI PRICING
From Dennis Kowalski:
Inflation is only one factor in pricing supply and demand is what really drives prices...lets suppose there was less liquid nitrogen on hand then in the 70's....there is in fact more. lets suppose there was a much greater cost to store one person as it relates to overhead...ie the facility and the property that it sits on and all the equipment and personnel divided by one person. Now divide those resources by 1000 fully funded patients and you can see how Cryonics actually becomes more efficient and even costs less per person..
.This is why mass produced cars are cheaper then handmade concept cars. There comes a point of diminishing returns. You don't want to overgrow to quickly...This can cause problems and ruin companies. Eventually, you get so many patients that you will need to expand the facilities and operations as a whole and either you take some of the excess cash from the savings of mass production and profit and expand or raise costs.(expenditures) But raising costs is not an absolute. Some things actually raise slower then inflation and even come down in price think of an Intel 486 chip compared to 1991 and now.
The million dollar question is....It depends on what you think is best for the solvency of CI........more customers and more total money through lower prices and increasing membership and political clout through more numbers of potential voters and also the bandwagon effect as more and more people jump over to cryonics........or higher prices now or in the near future to add more money early in the game to try and invest with and use on attorneys fees, lobbiest, public relations, and marketing etc.
Its not just as simple as lets raise costs because everything else is going up and that’s life...a lot of companies have screwed themselves and lost opportunity by not being more creative in how they obtain profits......look at apple who thought that by producing apple computers with apple software they could have it all (cornering the PC hardware and software market) Then along came Microsoft who offered a cheaper software version that ran on anyone’s hardware or IBM clone. Msoft gave a choice to the PC user and the user didn't care if apple had a better system...they wanted choices and the ability to shop different PC's at different prices.
CI should have high end products (vitrification with door to storage Cryocare) and marketing that competes with and pushes ALCOR... but we should not forget the service and product to the little guy who might only consider Cryonics if it were cheaper as in the 28,000$ memberships. (or even cheaper)
The companies who offer the most choices to their customers are the companies that survive in the long run. They learn what the customer "really" wants and not what "they" think the customer wants. Flexibility allows for adaptation and product competition drives improvement. Evolution at work.
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From Dan Hitt:
I think at some point, it presumably will have to go up just because of inflation. But it is a tricky issue, because lots of older people are on fixed incomes. Luckily we have some very smart leaders who hopefully will be able to finesse this.
Now, for the web site issue, I’m not real sure that it is a problem. Maybe Ben could do another survey? :)
The web site loads fast in lynx, and in firefox the pictures look ok to me. If higher quality photos make it load slower that would be a minus, I think.
A disclaimer here is that I almost never look at the web site, so Jappie's opinion is no doubt more informed than mine.
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From John de Rivaz:
I do agree that Alcor offers generally a more affluent image. But who is paying for it? The members, of course. And how can they tell the difference once they are cryopreserved? The more expensive it is, the fewer people get cryopreserved, both taking the world as a whole and for individual families. A single man can possibly afford to fly business class, but if a similar man with a family wants to take his family with him they may only be able to go economy class. If there is no economy class, then such people can't take their family and may well not fly at all.
The big difference between CI and Alcor disappeared when Ben Best managed to negotiate the Suspended Animation contract. I cannot really see an order of magnitude difference between CI + SA and Alcor, both financially and organizationally.
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From Robert Ettinger:
I have looked again at the CI web site and Alcor's, and I just don't see the alleged superiority of Alcor's. Incidentally, we have had offers from professional site designers to improve ours, but all they did, as I recall, is change the fonts.
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From Ben Best :
The CI website was mainly created by David Pascal using AOL Press software. In the last few years the site has been updated and maintained by John de Rivaz and me. Both John and I write HTML by hand and have little interest in canned packages and the unreadable
code they generate to produce glitzy-looking pages. My emphasis has been on content rather than appearance, and I am pleased with the content I have been able to add to the CI website. I very much like the functionality of our site contents page: http://www.cryonics.org/refs.html
I have this page book marked and anyone who wants to make good use of the CI website should do the same.
I agree that the CI home page looks somewhat "hoaky", as Dennis described it: I have begun putting monthly status updates on the home page, which has increased its utility, but not done much for its appearance.
If any of our Members with web design expertise wants to volunteer to improve the appearance of the CI home page or has other help for improvement of our website, this would be very welcome. Otherwise, I'll give thought to paying a professional for a homepage "facelift".
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Russian Cryonics Activity
From Danila Medved
The brain of a cryonics patient Mrs. Fedorenko is currently stored in dry ice by her grandson with the annual costs estimated around $500. The cost of setting up the storage was below $300. Storing more brains/heads/bodies in one place increases the efficiency.
At KrioRus (kriorus.ru) we estimate our starting liquid nitrogen costs to be below 500$ (with just two neuro patients stored in a dewar) and as low as $50-100 potentially. I suspect that cryostats can be more efficient and we may switch to them once there is sufficient demand, meaning that liquid nitrogen costs for neuro patients can get as low as $10-20 per year.
As one cryonics survey published in JET
http://www.jetpress.org/volume3/badger.htm indicated, lowering the price is one of the most important factors for increasing cryonics popularity. If a suspension can be arranged for $1000, that can change things dramatically.
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"Rick " wrote:
I have two questions directed to CI:
(1)If my skeptical sister says to me "how is CI going to know you are dead in time to freeze you before you decay," what is the best answer? Could you provide a typical story of how the death is noticed and responded to quickly?
(2) What are the statistics on how long a CI member is typically legally dead before CI has a chance to preserve them? I ask this partly because I don't know how I’m going to die and I'm curious what the typical case is. How many die in ways that makes it easy to preserve
them immediately after death? (One of my relatives died in his house and no one noticed he was dead for about ten days.) Another question I wonder about, which has nothing do to with CI per se, is: In general, how many people in the USA die in a predictable fashion - like in a hospital - compared to how many die unpredictably- like immediate death in a car accident. In other words, what is the chance of having a predictable death that is easier to deal with in terms of cryo-preservation?
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From Robert Ettinger:
Ben will probably provide some information, but the following should be
noted:
1. A typical patient is not the same as a typical member/patient. Some of our patients are death-bed or post mortem cases, likely to be under less favorable conditions. If you become a member and make your arrangements while still competent, your chances will be better.
2. Most people, I believe, die with warning, typically in a hospital or hospice (or in a hospital under hospice care). Hospice generally means less red tape and more favorable conditions.
3. There will always be some very unfavorable cases, such as someone dying alone and undiscovered for days, but if you plan ahead there are many ways to
reduce the risk.
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Ben Best wrote:
All of these questions seem so related to me that I see no reason to answer them separately. The typical CI patient is not a good guide to your chances because we also take post-mortem cases. If you have
made arrangements ahead of time your chances are obviously better than those of a post-mortem case. You want to compare yourself to CI Members who have made arrangements in advance, not with post-mortem cases. We have case reports for our last 5 patients (and one dog) on our website:
http://www.cryonics.org/refs.html#cases
Most people die in a hospital or in a hospice, so legal death does not come as a surprise. Even so, there is often a delay of at least an hour even in a hospital situation. The truth is, only about 20% of cryonics patients deanimate under what I would call good conditions. I have been struggling to deal with this situation with alarm systems of various kinds, and you can read my reports on this subject on the CI website:
http://www.cryonics.org/personal_alarms.html
I do believe that within a few years the technology will be readily available to provide more rapid notification of cessation of vital function. I have also suggested cooperative housing for cryonicists.
Concerning the subject of the typical conditions of deanimation in the USA, this is also a question which I have tried to investigate thoroughly. Only about 5% of deaths are due to accident -- most
often motor vehicle accidents. For more detailed information see the page on my website dealing with causes of death: http://www.benbest.com/lifeext/causes.html
This is currently the most popular page on my website -- getting about 4,000 hits per week. If you type "causes of death" into Google, my page comes up second only to the US government's Centers for Disease Control (CDC).
Marta Sandberg wrote:
Some of us live a long way away. I would guess it would take the better part of a week before my body could get to Detroit even under the best of circumstances. That is why I had planned on my funeral director doing the washout and sending me to USA in dry ice.
If you anticipate a long delay, how ‘long’ is ‘long enough’ to make it better to do the washout locally and go down to dry ice temperatures (even if this is done my ‘amateurs’) rather than ship the chilled body to USA?
Ben replied:
Sorry, Marta, but at the current level of technology there is no getting around the fact that your quality of cryonics treatment will vary inversely with your distance from your cryonics service provider (every thing else being equal). I have struggled greatly with this problem and have found no satisfying alternatives to our current protocol.
Any kind of perfusion or absence of perfusion and shipment below freezing
temperature means freezing damage to blood vessels and tissues. It is not possible to perfuse after blood vessels have been damaged by freezing. It is not possible to vitrify you in Australia and ship you in liquid nitrogen -- there are no facilities for liquid nitrogen shipment. After vitrification, shipment must always be below glass transition temperature (below -120°C).
Perfusion in glycerol results in no less than 20% ice formation even under ideal conditions. Glass transition temperature of glycerol is -114° C, which means that there is a great potential for devitrification freezing if shipping in dry ice (-79°C). Straight freezing with or without a blood washout means lots of freezing damage.
Shipment to CI for vitrification perfusion in Michigan in water ice might seem best if we could replace blood with a good organ preservation solution that would minimize cold ischemic damage. However, Dr. Pichugin has concluded that there are no organ preservation solutions which are notably superior to hepariniz-ed blood for protecting brain tissue from cold ischemic damage. A blood washout by a local funeral director would most probably cause reperfusion injury. An attempt to do a blood washout replacement through the femorals might not be of great benefit to the brain due to circulatory problems, even if a good pump is used. A blood washout/replacement from the carotids could damage those vessels and interfere with our vitrification protocol in Michigan. Additionally, time spent doing blood washout/replacement means a delay in cooling and possibly a delay in shipment.
So cold ischemic damage by shipment in water ice with your blood heparinized is the least bad alternative. If you anticipate that you are terminal, try to move to Michigan.
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A recent Cryonet post inquired about the Life Extension Society.
LES is mostly dormant. We meet once or twice a year, and if it's an especially productive meeting, we actually get a quorum. Occasionally, when we're at the top of our form, we even manage to schedule a place and time for the next meeting. We are far short of the critical mass necessary to accomplish anything, and even front page newspaper stories about us in the City Paper and the Washington Post didn't attract enough new members to make a difference.
Keith F. Lynch
Hiya Keith and Henry,
As an adjunct to DC LES, Ben Goertzel and I hold monthly "Future Salons" (which are in association with the Acceleration Studies Foundation) in Bethesda, MD (10 miles North of DC) to which you guys are always welcome. There are usually around a dozen or so attending w/ speaker+topics which usually relate quite closely to Life Extension.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/dcfuture/
Forever, Bruce Klein
Immortality Institute
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James Swayze wrote:
I was wondering. Is it reasonable to assume that manual application of CPR might not in every case be as diligently applied or as consistent and applied for as long as a machine? In this case I would expect that the pumping action to distribute the heparin could be inadequate to reach deep within the brain, assuming that thorough perfusion of heparin throughout the brains tissues is desired.
Ben replied:
Yes, a machine is better, and yes, more is better. Those who can afford Suspended Animation Standby and Transport are highly recommended to get them. An Ambu Cardiopump is better than straight manual and any machine is better than manual. If you can come up with ways of getting more CardioPulmonary Support (CPS), by all means do so. CPS will not only circulate heparin it will reduce ischemic damage -- especially in the first stages of cooling. More is better. Get what you can get however you can get it.
Where is the best location point for injection of the heparin?
The carotid is fine. If the funeral director has trouble locating the carotid, cutting away some skin to locate the vessel will do no harm.
Would one wish to aim for near to the brain, such as in the carotid? Or is this too close and risks causing hemorrhage damage to the brain tissue?
The carotid toward the bottom of the neck would be good in case there is vessel damage injecting the heparin (possible, but it shouldn't happen).
I don't see why there would be hemorrhage damage.
If choosing to inject in the carotid could the injection hole, now unable to heal between then and when vitrification begins, damage the vessel for further perfusion with vitrification solutions?
An injection hole should seal. If it does not, we can seal it manually.
How about injection straight into the heart?
Often suggested, but Andy has not heard of it being done. It is not necessary, and the carotid is better for ensuring maximum delivery to the brain (rather than arms or torso).
What amount of heparin is recommended? I've seen differing amounts
recommended. My bracelet says 50k units. Is this too much, too little?
That is consistant with our funeral director guidelines, insofar as you are large:
http://www.cryonics.org/funeral_guidelines.html
Simply finding a decent vein to inject into can be difficult for some patients, especially in very old or otherwise compromised veins. Then we must add to this difficulty the lack of blood pressure to plump the veins in a life challenged body. Mine are exceedingly difficult even while living and phlebotomists have been forced to find something on my wrists and forearms as my arm crooks inside the elbow seem to have the veins buried extra deep. For different reasons my femorals are not a good choice. In other words, for me at least, the carotid may be the only best choice.
From: Cryonics_Institute@yahoogroups.com on behalf of Brian A. Stewart [Brian_A_Stewart@juno.com]
Subject: [Cryonics_Institute] Re: meeting other cryonicists
Well, I currently live in Racine, WI, which isn't all that far away, but am at this time up at the State Patrol Academy at the Fort McCoy Army Base for Department of Motor Vehicles training for my job. I am going to be up here for the next three weeks, and can't make it down to Racine any of the weekends during that time (State Exam in Madison for Driver Examiner jobs this coming weekend, a friend's wedding in LaCrosse the next....)
I am just starting the process of signing up.
Brian wrote:
>
Hello CI members,
> Just writing to see if anyone is still interested in
> getting together in Chicago,IL. Let me know.Looking
> foreward to meeting a fellow cryonicist soon.
>
> Sincerly,
> Paul Battista CI MEMBER
> email:pbatt72@...
>
To: Cryonics_Institute@yahoogroups.com
Hi Brian,When you get some free time, let me know if you want to get together. It would be
meeting other cryonicists soon.
Sincerly,
Paul Battista
From: Cryonics_Institute@yahoogroups.com on behalf of krt590 [tidwellk@sbcglobal.net]
Sent: Monday, May 08, 2006 10:22 PM
Subject: [Cryonics_Institute] Area contacts
Greetings:
I am looking for members who live in the Dallas-Waco-Temple-Austin-San Antonio axis along I-35. My name in Ken Tidwell and I live in Temple, Texas. I, along with my wife, am 65 years old, retired (sort of) and we are looking for people who want to discuss cryonics, or any other
subject under the sun. We know that there was a least one of us in Austin, who is no longer available for comment. Where there's one, there has got to be more.
Ken Tidwell