If an American signs up for cryonics and pays their ~$300/year, what are their odds of being revived? Talking to people at LessWrong meetups I've heard estimates of 1 in 2. My friend George Dahl, whose opinion I respect a lot, guesses "less than 1 in 10^6". Niether has given me reasons, those numbers are opaque. My estimate of these odds pretty much determines whether I should sign up. I could afford $300/year, and I would if I thought the odds were 1:2, but not if they were 1:10^6. [1]

In order to see how likely this is to work, we should look at the process. I would sign up with a cryonics company and for life insurance. I'd go on living, enjoying my life and the people around me, paying my annual fees, until some point when I died. After death they would drain my blood, replace it with something that doesn't rupture cell walls when it freezes, freeze me in liquid nitrogen, and leave me there for a long time. At some point, probably after the development of nanotechnology, people would revive me, probably as a computer program.

There's a lot of steps there, and it's easy to see ways they could go wrong. [3] Let's consider some cases and try to get probabilities [4]:

Update: the probabilities below are out of date, and only useful for understanding the comments. I've made a spreadsheet listing both my updated probabilities and those for as many other people as I can find: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/...

0.03	You mess up the paperwork, either for cryonics or life insurance
0.10	Something happens to you financially where you can no longer afford this
0.06	You die suddenly or in a circumstance where you would not be able to be frozen in time (see leading causes of death)
0.04	You die of something like Altzheimers where the brain is degraded at death (Altzheimers is much more common than brain cancer)
0.01	The cryonics company is temporarily out of capacity and cannot actually take you, perhaps because lots of people died at once
0.02	The life insurance company does not pay out, perhaps it's insolvent, perhaps it argues you're not dead yet
0.02	You die in a hospital that refuses access to you by the cryonics people
0.02	After death your relatives reject your wishes and don't let the cryonics people freeze you
0.10	Some law is passed that prohibits cryonics (before you're even dead)
0.20	T

...

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