One interesting future alternative to permafrost would be storage in shadowed areas of the Moon. It's probably not going to be feasible anytime soon, but it's fun to think about. TLDR: If you can get the people and setup equipment there it would probably work pretty well, but the inaccessibility that's part of what makes the Moon a desirable location is also what makes it so hard to do that.
Pros:
- Temperatures and conditions could be made much more stable than on Earth. There's no weather or groundwater or climate change on the Moon. There are permanently shadowed pits, craters, and possibly caves on the Moon that stay at consistent temperatures. There's a good chance there are some in the range you mention near the poles. If not, one could probably be constructed with current technology, assuming you could get the excavation equipment there (SpaceX seems to be planning to launch tunnel bores on Starship at some point, so this isn't as crazy as it sounds).
- Anyone preserved there would be safe from almost any catastrophe on Earth. Even in the event of a complete collapse of civilization, the preserved people could in theory be found and eventually reanimated by future societies. The main exceptions I can think of would be a hostile takeover by an AI that intends to colonize space, an asteroid/comet/etc. impact large enough to pelt the Moon with debris, or if someone decides to nuke the Moon (which is a real thing the US planned to do at one point) and picks an unlucky spot.
- Even if Moon colonization really takes off, it's unlikely for the site to be disturbed. Someone would need to go well out of their way just to get there, and there would be little incentive to do so.
- There are no animals or microbes (assuming the bodies are sterilized), which means less potential for decay.
- There are likely good candidate locations (and maybe even natural pits) not that far off from the lunar South Pole, the target of NASA's Artemis Program. It might be possible to piggyback on a supply mission and drive everything there with a remote-controlled rover.
- There are probably some eccentric rich people out there who would want to be buried (if not preserved) in space. They might be willing to pay a high premium to fund test missions and research if it means they're one of the first to go. Maybe Elon will think it's a cool idea and give you a ride. He seems to think cryonics has some potential.
Cons:
- Most obviously, the Moon is hard to get to and it will never be as easy as preserving people on Earth. In the near-term, there are only a handful of organizations that could reliably send things there, and there's a risk that none want to work with you. People may need to be stored on Earth for long periods of time until a mission is ready.
- The preserved people would have to be transported and stored in a way that protects them from dust and the vacuum. They may also need to be heated or cooled during flight, which means more equipment to send with them. Doing this with any kind of frequency would require making this an unmanned mission, which means remote-controlled rovers that need to work on the first try. There's a lot that could go wrong.
- SpaceX would have to meet all of Elon's ambitious (to put it lightly) Starship price per kg targets for this to be even remotely affordable. Their 2028 target is $100 million per metric ton for lunar payloads (https://www.spacex.com/humanspaceflight/moon), which would put this out of reach for all but the ultra-wealthy, especially when factoring in test runs. Economic feasibility just for getting things to the Moon is likely 15+ years out even in the most optimistic scenarios.
- If something goes wrong in the near- to medium-term, there's probably not much that can be done. Even if there are permanently stationed Moon bases by that point, it's unlikely they would want to spend scarce resources and risk their crews' lives on a maintenance mission. The site needs to be self-maintaining or require no maintenance to begin with.
- There are various tail risks, including rocket or landing failures, asteroid impacts, cosmic rays damaging insufficiently shielded equipment or preserved brains, the site getting forgotten somehow and destroyed by future lunar industry or geoengineering, and probably many unknown unknowns about conditions on the lunar surface.
- Stable Earth orbits or Lagrange points, if temperature can be figured out
- Asteroids or other celestial bodies which might have more favorable conditions than the Moon (counter-intuitively, these can actually be easier to get to despite being farther away)
Why is your preservation's full market price worth 250k USD? when and how do you expect it to change?
I read parts of the Alcor 2010 financial article you linked and saw that the estimate there is $76000 for a new cryopreservation, plus $620 per year for cryopatient storage (plus $1600 per year on everything else needed to keep the company afloat). But Alcor's method relies on keeping patients in a much lower temperature, which presumably requires a much more expensive coolant and dewar, compared to your newer method.
Do you have an estimate for Nectome's one-time costs for the process, and an estimate for Nectome's maintenance costs? Are they significantly different than Alcor's right now, and will they be significantly different if the company scales up to 1000 paying members, or 100,000?
I think you may be thinking of Alcor's head-only option which is currently $80,000; a better comparison is Alcor's whole-body option which (as of today) is $220,000 according to https://www.alcor.org/membership/pricing-and-dues/
I think it's possible, in-fact likely, that the price can be lower with scale. Right now we're pricing it so that we can do appropriate advertising, legal, and other slack per-preservation (like converting to permafrost, etc).
It makes sense for your company to ask for a similar or higher price, based on scale differences, but what I was curious about is the "raw cost" of the process (internal cost, not external price). Since the temperature control is so different, I would expect the ongoing preservation costs to be lower than Alcor's. The one-time "surgery" I can't compare since I lack understanding, but I imagine it to be similar, imagine the cost to depend on labor much more than on material cost for chemicals.
So if my assumption is correct, it implies that Nectome's method could eventually be cheaper *for the cryonics org* compared to the popular method, and thus more competitive/incentivized.
- Alcor is spending about $180 per year per body on liquid nitrogen ($620 figure above includes space and electricity as well), while Nectome can spend much less, e.g. $100/$10/$0.27 (depending on how well they scale), because no LN2 is needed and the temperature is not so low
- Max estimated $30k needed to be allocated to the nonprofit fund for eternal care, vs e.g Tomorrow Bio's saying they pay $120k to the Tomorrow Patient Foundation per patient.
- Estimated $50k for a new cryopreservation, compared to Alcor's 76k (as of 2010, likely higher now?)
- Overall estimate says it costs $80k so a price of $250k gives a large profit margin -- sensible for a startup that will spend much of it on research, marketing, legal, etc
- $100k (the discounted price offered this month) is a very good deal, and still barely profitable for Nectome, especially considering investment/inflation. $20k+discount is a better deal in many ways.
I think that some permafrost today will not be a good candidate because of warming, but there's other permafrost that I can expect to last 100 years, and I'd be targeting that. The exact best permafrost location is something that's on our research list for next year but if you have ideas I'd love to hear them!
theoretically would 5k USD in 12 months buy the card and pay for a preservation and so on in 40 years?
I have many questions I want to ask Aurelia so please contact via email :-)
One interesting future alternative to permafrost would be storage in shadowed areas of the Moon. It's probably not going to be feasible anytime soon, but it's fun to think about. TLDR: If you can get the people and setup equipment there it would probably work pretty well, but the inaccessibility that's part of what makes the Moon a desirable location is also what makes it so hard to do that.
Pros:
- Temperatures and conditions could be made much more stable than on Earth. There's no weather or groundwater or climate change on the Moon. There are permanently shadowed pits, craters, and possibly caves on the Moon that stay at consistent temperatures. There's a good chance there are some in the range you mention near the poles. If not, one could probably be constructed with current technology, assuming you could get the excavation equipment there (SpaceX seems to be planning to launch tunnel bores on Starship at some point, so this isn't as crazy as it sounds).
- Anyone preserved there would be safe from almost any catastrophe on Earth. Even in the event of a complete collapse of civilization, the preserved people could in theory be found and eventually reanimated by future societies. The main exceptions I can think of would be a hostile takeover by an AI that intends to colonize space, an asteroid/comet/etc. impact large enough to pelt the Moon with debris, or if someone decides to nuke the Moon (which is a real thing the US planned to do at one point) and picks an unlucky spot.
- Even if Moon colonization really takes off, it's unlikely for the site to be disturbed. Someone would need to go well out of their way just to get there, and there would be little incentive to do so.
- There are no animals or microbes (assuming the bodies are sterilized), which means less potential for decay.
- There are likely good candidate locations (and maybe even natural pits) not that far off from the lunar South Pole, the target of NASA's Artemis Program. It might be possible to piggyback on a supply mission and drive everything there with a remote-controlled rover.
- There are probably some eccentric rich people out there who would want to be buried (if not preserved) in space. They might be willing to pay a high premium to fund test missions and research if it means they're one of the first to go. Maybe Elon will think it's a cool idea and give you a ride. He seems to think cryonics has some potential.
Cons:
- Most obviously, the Moon is hard to get to and it will never be as easy as preserving people on Earth. In the near-term, there are only a handful of organizations that could reliably send things there, and there's a risk that none want to work with you. People may need to be stored on Earth for long periods of time until a mission is ready.
- The preserved people would have to be transported and stored in a way that protects them from dust and the vacuum. They may also need to be heated or cooled during flight, which means more equipment to send with them. Doing this with any kind of frequency would require making this an unmanned mission, which means remote-controlled rovers that need to work on the first try. There's a lot that could go wrong.
- SpaceX would have to meet all of Elon's ambitious (to put it lightly) Starship price per kg targets for this to be even remotely affordable. Their 2028 target is $100 million per metric ton for lunar payloads (https://www.spacex.com/humanspaceflight/moon), which would put this out of reach for all but the ultra-wealthy, especially when factoring in test runs. Economic feasibility just for getting things to the Moon is likely 15+ years out even in the most optimistic scenarios.
- If something goes wrong in the near- to medium-term, there's probably not much that can be done. Even if there are permanently stationed Moon bases by that point, it's unlikely they would want to spend scarce resources and risk their crews' lives on a maintenance mission. The site needs to be self-maintaining or require no maintenance to begin with.
- There are various tail risks, including rocket or landing failures, asteroid impacts, cosmic rays damaging insufficiently shielded equipment or preserved brains, the site getting forgotten somehow and destroyed by future lunar industry or geoengineering, and probably many unknown unknowns about conditions on the lunar surface.
Other fun alternative locations:
- Stable Earth orbits or Lagrange points, if temperature can be figured out
- Asteroids or other celestial bodies which might have more favorable conditions than the Moon (counter-intuitively, these can actually be easier to get to despite being farther away)
hi I am looking to correspond with Aurelia song is that possible :-)
Why is your preservation's full market price worth 250k USD? when and how do you expect it to change?
I read parts of the Alcor 2010 financial article you linked and saw that the estimate there is $76000 for a new cryopreservation, plus $620 per year for cryopatient storage (plus $1600 per year on everything else needed to keep the company afloat). But Alcor's method relies on keeping patients in a much lower temperature, which presumably requires a much more expensive coolant and dewar, compared to your newer method.
Do you have an estimate for Nectome's one-time costs for the process, and an estimate for Nectome's maintenance costs? Are they significantly different than Alcor's right now, and will they be significantly different if the company scales up to 1000 paying members, or 100,000?
I think you may be thinking of Alcor's head-only option which is currently $80,000; a better comparison is Alcor's whole-body option which (as of today) is $220,000 according to https://www.alcor.org/membership/pricing-and-dues/
I think it's possible, in-fact likely, that the price can be lower with scale. Right now we're pricing it so that we can do appropriate advertising, legal, and other slack per-preservation (like converting to permafrost, etc).
It makes sense for your company to ask for a similar or higher price, based on scale differences, but what I was curious about is the "raw cost" of the process (internal cost, not external price). Since the temperature control is so different, I would expect the ongoing preservation costs to be lower than Alcor's. The one-time "surgery" I can't compare since I lack understanding, but I imagine it to be similar, imagine the cost to depend on labor much more than on material cost for chemicals.
So if my assumption is correct, it implies that Nectome's method could eventually be cheaper *for the cryonics org* compared to the popular method, and thus more competitive/incentivized.
Update: There's a lot more financial info about the behind-the-scenes costs in Max Harm's detailed breakdown of the company (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3i5GMhpGbDwef9Rns/nectome-all-that-i-know) and that definitely includes answers to my questions.
Summarizing some second-hand information:
- Alcor is spending about $180 per year per body on liquid nitrogen ($620 figure above includes space and electricity as well), while Nectome can spend much less, e.g. $100/$10/$0.27 (depending on how well they scale), because no LN2 is needed and the temperature is not so low
- Max estimated $30k needed to be allocated to the nonprofit fund for eternal care, vs e.g Tomorrow Bio's saying they pay $120k to the Tomorrow Patient Foundation per patient.
- Estimated $50k for a new cryopreservation, compared to Alcor's 76k (as of 2010, likely higher now?)
- Overall estimate says it costs $80k so a price of $250k gives a large profit margin -- sensible for a startup that will spend much of it on research, marketing, legal, etc
- $100k (the discounted price offered this month) is a very good deal, and still barely profitable for Nectome, especially considering investment/inflation. $20k+discount is a better deal in many ways.
What do you think about climate risks to permafrost?
I think that some permafrost today will not be a good candidate because of warming, but there's other permafrost that I can expect to last 100 years, and I'd be targeting that. The exact best permafrost location is something that's on our research list for next year but if you have ideas I'd love to hear them!