Cryonics is properly considered as and "end of life" issue-- living trusts vs. wills etc.

Cryonics is properly thought of as a sub category of "end of life" issues. To that extent, all the cryonics organizations have failed their membership in leading the generation of ideas with regards to that aspect of cryonics. The living will is the essential feature of end-of-life planning. The discusison of that isn't prominent in cryonics but it ought to be. Too bad for cryonics that it was basically taken over by a type of mindset that ignores reality in this way.

Cryonics is much more associated with death than we've seen evidence of in discussion and publications. I'm very unhappy about that. I was interested in "thanatology" when I was 14 years old-- so I know young teens must be thinking about death in general. Cryonics is a response to death-- and so other end-of-life issues like living trusts vs. wills are a proper part of that.

The issues surrounding the precise definition of death and the examination of the process of death and cell death is interesting to be sure. And certainly cryonics is about maintaining cellular and subcellular integrity during that dying process. However, that is not death. Death is at the end of that process where recovery is essentially beyond reasonable expectation and all hope is lost. Cost of maintaining life support must be factored in to the definition. If it costs a million dollars a day to keep a person legally alive, then death is probably going to be more likely. There probably isnt' anything wrong with factoring in political and economic definitions of death.

Retirement communities for cryonic members should have been in place a long time ago. The high net worth individuals attracted to cryonics have fundamentally failed the cryonics mission by failing to put something into place that competes with remote standy. There is no forgiveness for this failure. In the end, the cryonics community will pay the price-- mankind will the price-- and the garbage pile of, say, perpetual trusts will be just another anomalous footnote in the scraphead of history.

Legacy and posterity are part of the end-of-life issues that cryonics has failed miserably at exploring... more coming.