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Cryonics Megafacility


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#1 Luke Parrish

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Posted 02 October 2009 - 02:55 PM


I've been thinking a lot lately about the idea of creating a very large facility for cryonics storage. The main reason for this is that a larger vessel costs less per unit volume. Whenever you increase the diameter of a sphere or cube by 10, the surface area (which is what determines how much heat enters) goes up by 100 times, but the volume (storage space) goes up by 1000 times. So keeping 1000 times as many patients frozen only costs 100 times as much -- it is 1/10th of the cost per patient. Storing one thousand patients is 10 times as cheap (per patient) as storing one, and storing a million patients is ten times as cheap as storing a thousand.

Suppose your long-term costs are $200/month for neurosuspension in a small dewar. Store 1000 heads and you can store the lot for $20,000 per month, which is $20/month each. Store a million and it costs them each only $2/month. And that savings is from geometric efficiency alone...

In addition, you can add extra insulation with less proportionate effect on surface area. If you have an inch of diameter added as insulation, that is 10% of a 10-inch diameter vessel, and adds 10% greater surface area. Make that vessel 100 times bigger and you're talking 0.1%. The cost of an inch of insulation is brought down by making the vessel bigger. Thus you can choose a cheaper form of insulation (e.g. spray-on polyurethane foam), or simply use more of the really good stuff (layers of reflective mylar suspended in a vacuum).

Another advantage is that liquid nitrogen need not be used, at least not throughout the vessel. The ideal temperature for storing vitrified biologicals is not LN2 temperature, but actually slightly above it, at -130C. Cooling lower than that can cause more cracking. But all that aside, practically speaking you could save a lot of money by running a large facility at a slightly higher temperature, as less heat would leak in. The time buffer created by LN2 could be reblicated by having large amounts of thermal mass. LN2 could also be kept inside the vessel in a smaller storage tank under a slight amount of pressure, as a backup in case of catastrophic loss of coolers.

There are disadvantages to building a larger facility. For one thing, it is harder to keep it in a secret location. This could make it a bigger terrorist target, particularly if we were to construct comething like a billion-person tank. On the other hand, security is yet another thing that could be increased dramatically at a reduced cost per patient.

The biggest obstacle I can see is that in order to pay for it, you need a heck of a lot of people to be signed up for it. They would most likely have to be paying for it before they die, because you need enough money to fund it as soon as it goes into operation.

#2 advancedatheist

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Posted 02 October 2009 - 03:13 PM

Luke, I admire your enthusiasm and energy and all that, but have you bothered to do a Google news search on the keyword cryonics this morning? Cryonics might not even exist legally in the U.S. in a few months, if the wrong chain of events has started.

#3 Mind

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Posted 02 October 2009 - 07:02 PM

Link here.

Ted Williams' head was "abused"? A lot of missing info here.

Hasn't this Johnson story been brewing for a while. It seems pretty transparent that he has an axe to grind. It doesn't seem like this is cracking the news cycle. However, I suppose you never know if it will reach the ear of a politician who is a baseball fan.

#4 Mind

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Posted 02 October 2009 - 07:03 PM

Luke, also see this thread about Timeship.

#5 niner

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Posted 03 October 2009 - 12:52 AM

Luke, that's a pretty good idea. I think there will be a limit to the size of the spherical tank, though, because the capital cost of the tank and a structure to house it will go up in a more complicated way as a function of the size of the sphere. In other words, it's easy to build things up to a certain size, then you move into a new realm where the construction methods need to change, then costs increase smoothly to another point where construction methods would need to change again. If people could be convinced of the futility of full suspensions compared to neuro, (IMO, of course) that could save a lot of cost as well. You could get a LOT of heads in a relatively small sphere.

#6 Luke Parrish

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Posted 03 October 2009 - 10:30 PM

Luke, that's a pretty good idea. I think there will be a limit to the size of the spherical tank, though, because the capital cost of the tank and a structure to house it will go up in a more complicated way as a function of the size of the sphere. In other words, it's easy to build things up to a certain size, then you move into a new realm where the construction methods need to change, then costs increase smoothly to another point where construction methods would need to change again. If people could be convinced of the futility of full suspensions compared to neuro, (IMO, of course) that could save a lot of cost as well. You could get a LOT of heads in a relatively small sphere.



That's true. The average human head is about 5kg and the average body is about 70kg, and a kg is about a liter. A cubic meter is 1000L. Since they aren't perfectly square, we might have to double the amount of volume or so. So say 100 heads or 10 bodies in a given cubic meter. To store a billion bodies, you need something with 100 million cubic meters capacity. A billion heads is only 10 million cubic meters capacity. The world's biggest building is Boeing's plant in Everett, Washington, at 13.3 million cubic meters.

So yeah a billion-person dome would be a truly gigantic undertaking, which would need a heck of a lot of money to pay for, even if they are all neuro. Somewhere in the $2-4 billion range, perhaps. (But gosh, what a monument.)

"Boeing selected its Everett factory, home of 747 production, as the site of 777 final assembly. To accommodate production of its new twinjet, Boeing doubled the size of the Everett factory at the cost of nearly US$1.5 billion[24] to provide room for the addition of two new 777 assembly lines.[22]" http://en.wikipedia....wiki/Boeing_777


I'm not sure how scalable the monolithic dome construction model is. They use an inflated airform to create the dome shape. According to the dome calculator the volume of a dome with 250m height and 500m diameter is 32,724,810.62m^3 (so it would hold around 3 billion people in neuro form), and the surface area is 392,698.4^2. This is quite a bit bigger than any monolithic dome, or even any inflated balloon, ever created so far. (For reference, 500m is about 1500 feet, about the size of the largest cranes ever built.)

Cost depends on what the typical heat leakage is for a given square meter. If it's $100/month worth of energy or LN2, that would be about 40 million dollars per month to keep it going. So your cost per patient (in the 500m model) is about 4/3 cents per month, or 16 cents per year... Actually it might be more like 25 cents if you take into account heat leakage through the floor. But I'm betting that total insulation thickness increased by a few feet would bring the ongoing cost per square foot down considerably.

Magnetic supports for vacuum insulation could actually be feasable, since superconductors work at LN2 temperatures. Automated stacking and retrieval equipment could use superconducting electromagnets. The equipment will need to stack about 150,000 heads per day... There are about 3600 minutes in a given day, so a metric cube of 100 heads every 2 minutes should be adequate.




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