Despite science only having the freezing part of the cryogenic process down, attorneys for uber-rich anti-death advocates have invented a new type of trust aimed at hoarding their wealth for when they finally exit suspended animation.
As Bloomberg Law reports, estate planners are hard at work creating so-called "revival trusts" for rich people who get frozen after their deaths, so that if cryonic revival technology ever actually becomes viable, they can access their wealth hundreds of years after they die.
"The idea of cryopreservation has gone from crackpot to merely eccentric," explained Mark House, an estate lawyer who works with the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, a cryonics facility that boasts 230 people already on ice. "Now that it’s eccentric, it’s kind of in vogue to be interested in it."
While that assessment is likely in the eye of the beholder, Alcor, which is billed as the largest such facility in the world, has about 1,400 paying members preparing to be cryogenically frozen upon their deaths.
With thousands of people around the world either planning to enter "cryosleep" or having already had their corpses placed in such facilities, there's money to be made in the business of body-freezing right now — even if nobody knows how to actually revive frozen bodies from the dead.
Indeed, industrious estate attorneys like House require clients to have at least $500,000 to place in their cryonics trusts so that fees don't drain them over time. Like with all dynasty trusts that are passed down through multiple generations, beneficiaries and executors are named for these revival trusts, too.
As yet, though, there's legal red tape in the way of extending the wealth of the wealthy. Because resurrection from cryosleep is not a thing that exists yet, there isn't yet any legal way to reverse a death certificate if is revived from the ice, either.
To work around this glaring logistical issue, estate planners working in this burgeoning field advise that the person creating these funds name a trust protector — be it an individual, an organization, or some other entity — who has the power to determine whether they've been revived or not.
And what constitutes revival, exactly?
"Some people will say they consider revival only if they’re the same person they are today with all their memory intact," Peggy Hoyt, a Florida-based estate planner, told Bloomberg. "Some people are content to say that a human clone would be equivalent of revival. Others said they don’t care if they have a body if their brain is uploaded to a computer."
Epistemology aside, the people paying for these services have high hopes for the future of their wealth.
"I really want to figure out a solution," enthused Steve LeBel, a retired hospital executive in Michigan who told Bloomberg that he's actively looking for ways to access his money after his natural death. "Otherwise I’ll be in there with my fingers crossed, hoping there’s money left over, 200 years from now, to pay for the resurrection process."
What the world will look like in 200 years is anyone's guess — folks rich enough to shell out for cryosleep and revival trust planning are clearly hopeful they'll enjoy the best of what it offers.
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