We Don’t Have To Die

You are mostly the mind (software) that runs on the brain (hardware) in your head; your brain and body are tools supporting your mind. If our civilization doesn’t collapse but instead advances, we will eventually be able to move your mind into artificial hardware, making a “brain emulation”. With an artificial brain and body, you could live an immortal life, a life as vivid and meaningful as your life today, where you never need feel pain, disease, grime, and your body always looks and feels young and beautiful. That person might not be exactly you, but they could (at first) be as similar to you as the 2001 version of you was to you today. I describe this future world of brain emulations in great detail in my book The Age of Em.

Alas, this scenario can’t work if your brain is burned or eaten by worms soon. But the info that specifies you is now only a tiny fraction of all the info in your brain and is redundantly encoded. So if we freeze all the chemical processes in your brain, either via plastination or liquid nitrogen, quite likely enough info can be found there to make a brain emulation of you. So “all” that stands between you and this future immortality is freezing your brain and then storing it until future tech improves.

If you are with me so far, you now get the appeal of “cryonics”, which over the last 54 years has frozen ~500 people when the usual medical tech gave up on them. ~3000 are now signed up for this service, and the [2nd] most popular provider charges $28K, though you should budget twice that for total expenses. (The 1st most popular charges $80K.) If you value such a life at a standard $7M, this price is worth it even if this process has only a 0.8% chance of working. Its worth more if an immortal life is worth more, and more if your loved ones come along with you.

So is this chance of working over 0.8%? Some failure modes seem to me unlikely: civilization collapses, frozen brains don’t save enough info, or you die in way that prevents freezing. And if billions of people used this service, there’d be a question of if the future is willing, able, and allowed to revive you. But with only a few thousand others frozen, that’s just not a big issue. All these risks together have well below a 50% chance, in my opinion.

The biggest risk you face then is organizational failure. And since you don’t have to pay them if they aren’t actually able to freeze you at the right time, your main risk re your payment is re storage. Instead of storing you until future tech can revive you, they might instead mismanage you, or go bankrupt, allowing you to thaw. This already happened at one cryonics org.

If frozen today, I judge your chance of successful revival to be at least 5%, making this service worth the cost even if you value such an immortal future life at only 1/6 of a standard life. And life insurance makes it easier to arrange the payment. But more important, this is a service where the reliability and costs greatly improve with more customers. With a million customers, instead of a thousand, I estimate cost would fall, and reliability would increase, each by a factor of ten.

Also, with more customers cryonics providers could afford to develop plastination, already demonstrated in research, into a practical service. This lets people be stored at room temperature, and thus ends most storage risk. Yes, with more customers, each might need to also pay to have future folks revive them, and to have something to live on once revived. But long time delays make that cheap, and so with enough customers total costs could fall to less than that of a typical funeral today. Making this a good bet for most everyone.

When the choice is between a nice funeral for Aunt Sally or having Aunt Sally not actually die, who will choose the funeral? And by buying cryonics for yourself, you also help move us toward the low cost cryonics world that would be much better for everyone. Most people prefer to extend existing lives over creating new ones.

Thus we reach the title claim of this post: if we coordinated to have many customers, it would be cheap for most everyone to not die. That is: most everyone who dies today doesn’t actually need to die! This is possible now. Ancient Egypt, relative rationalists among the ancients, paid to mummify millions, a substantial fraction of their population, and also a similar number of animals, in hope of later revival. But we now actually can mummify to allow revival, yet we have only done that to 500 people, over a period when over 4 billion people have died.

Why so few cryonics customers? When I’ve taught health economics, over 10% of students judge the chances of cryonics working to be high enough to justify a purchase. Yet none ever buy. In a recent poll, 31.5% of my followers said they planned to sign up, but few have. So the obstacle isn’t supporting beliefs, it is the courage to act on such beliefs. It looks quite weird to act on a belief in cryonics. So weird that spouses often divorce those who do. (But not spouses who spend a similar amounts to send their ashes into space, which looks much less weird.) We like to think we tolerate diversity, and we do for unimportant stuff, but for important stuff we in fact impose strongly penalize diversity.

Sure it would help if our official medical experts endorsed the idea, but they are just as scared of non-conformity, and also stuck on a broken concept of “science” which demands someone actually be revived before they can declare cryonics feasible. Non-medical scientists like that would insist we can’t say our sun will burn out until it actually does, or that rockets could take humans to Mars until a human actually stands on Mars. The fact that their main job is to prevent death and they could in fact prevent most death doesn’t weigh much on them relative to showing allegiance to a broken science concept.

Severe conformity pressures also seem the best explanation for the bizarre range of objections offered to cryonics, objections that are not offered re other ways to cut death rates. The most common objection offered is just that it seems “unnatural”. My beloved colleague Tyler said reducing your death rate this way is selfish, you might be tortured if you stay alive, and in an infinite multiverse you can never die. Others suggest that freezing destroys your soul, that it would hurt the environment, that living longer would slows innovation, that you might be sad to live in a world different from that of your childhood, or that it is immoral to buy products that not absolutely everyone can afford.

While I wrote a pretty similar post a year ago, I wrote this as my Christmas present to Alex Tabarrok, who requested this topic.

Added 17Dec: The chance the future would torture a revived you is related to the chance we would torture an ancient revived today:

Assume a random ancient person is somehow revived today, put under your power, and you have substantial info about their ancient life. What is the chance that you would torture them?

— Robin Hanson (@robinhanson) December 17, 2021

Answers were similar re a random older person alive today. And people today are actually tortured far less often than this suggests, as we organize society to restrain random individual torture inclinations. We should expect the future to also organize to prevent random torture, including of revived cryonics patients.

Also, if their were millions of such revived people, they could coordinate to revive each other and to protect each other from torture. Torture really does seem a pretty minor issue here.