Lets say you save a couple hundred thousand dollars. You pay 100k to a cryogenic lab and put 100k in an inflation-safe investment earning, say 2% real. You sleep for 200 years until they have the technology to revive you. Wake up and boom, now you have millions (in today's money).
Another plus, there MIGHT even be flying cars by then.
Well besides the possibility of you permanately dieing, humanity killing itself in those two hundred years, and other minor problems, what happens if the money is worthless? Besides that sign me up. /end of joking sarcasm.
Problem is, you'd be considered dead and your assets would go to your heirs. I guess you'd have a right to them when you came back alive, but by then it'd all have been squandered in Vegas by your nephew or 3rd cousin.
Maybe you could create some kind of foundation with a board of directors to maintain it but who knows if that would make it 200 years.
Would suck if they woke you up in the middle of a great depression and investments were at a 200 year low...
In a similar vein, I've considered putting money away, then spending 7 years living on a PhD stipend while my investments doubled.
Yeah, the question was instigated by comments on living abroad. I may not want to retire abroad, but I wouldn't mind living in an extremely cheap locale for X years while compound interest does its thing. I'd probably want to end up in a more expensive locale because I assume (possibly incorrectly) that medical care in the absolute cheapest countries is not very good.
For my Estates exam, I wrote a hypothetical about how you could arrange your trust to provide for your future undead self. I did not get a very high score.
Actually, even better. Send $1000 to my side-business called "Time Machine Investment Corporation." The $1,000 will be invested until such a time when time machines become commonly available. At this point the money will be used to buy a time machine and a representative of TMI, Inc. will warp back to the present with the details of all future lottery numbers, stock market history, etc.
Since this information is clearly more valuable than $1,000 and nothing can logically fail in this scheme, you could consider it a form of time-arbitrage. Don't delay, invest today!
Disclaimer: Past performance is no guarantee of future returns, blahblahblah ...
So I give you $1000, and the time machine shows up. I win!
or...
I give you $1000, and no time machine shows up. This is evidence that you breached our contract. I sue you for expectation damages (the amount I would have gotten, had you performed your end of the bargain), probably millions. I win!
Where do I sign up?
That scenario is covered by the blahblahblah in the disclaimer ;)
Ohh, you got me with your legal mumbo-jumbo!
"$100 placed at 7 percent interest compounded quarterly for 200 years will increase to more than $100,000,000 — by which time it will be worth nothing."
- The Notebooks of Lazarus Long, Robert A Heinlein
This is certainly an LOL thread.
Whenever someone mentions cryogenics, all I can think of is Ted Williams' frozen head and the scandal is caused with his son a couple years back.
I think you'd be better off investing in artificial body parts, like this guy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FidWyvQA-R0&feature=player_embedded
Would suck if they woke you up in the middle of a great depression and investments were at a 200 year low...Classic
Or with billions worth of electric bills from running the freezer, thus canceling out the compound interest gains.
Too easy! Needs more trials and tribulations, otherwise you wont appreciate the sweet ERE.
@jacob: Surely if it's a time machine, you mean "Disclaimer: FUTURE performance is no guarantee of PAST returns, blahblahblah ... " ;)
One can set up a dynastic trust in certain states that is good for 365 years, so the legal structure for this to happen is in place.
As a thought, if 1000 people did such a thing, in 200 years there would be 1000 frozen corpses, each with a multimillion dollar trust. Would members of the future society be more motivated to figure out how to get money out of the trust, or more motivated to figure out how to revive a frozen corpse and allow the revived person to spend the money...
I'll invest in the time machine instead-- that's where the real money is anyway.
Ok, I solved the problem of managing your trust while you are frozen. First, you'll have to upload your consciousness to a robot brain. The robot will make sure your trustees act in accordance with their duties, and kill all humans if something goes wrong.
Wait...
dragoncar - As long as the robot is controlled directly by you without any ability to interpret or disagree with your orders, it would not be violating the three laws of robotics. I'm not so sure you'd want to kill ALL the humans though.
A serious reply: the probability that cryogenic conservation - and more importantly getting people out of cryogenic storage alive - will work in our lifetime seems too small to bet our life on it.
On the other hand, if I have enough money, I WANT to get an arrangement for cryogenic conservation at my death. Why? I kind of like existing and an extremely small chance to cheat death is better than none.
There may also be the problem that depending on which type of government will emerge in time, you might end up being reawakened only to become a slave to work in a mine. Even if the mine is on Mars and you were traded for a flying car, it would still suck.
I like Jacob's Time Machine Investment Company idea ...
... all you need is to build a website and to find a bunch of idiots on the internet ... both of these points don't seem too hard to do...
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