A hundred grand for one more year

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A hundred grand for one more year<br>Many routine medical procedures are more expensive than preservation

Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston<br>Jul 06, 2026

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Make the case for preserving the brains of the dying, as I do, and one objection turns up without fail. I don’t mean the philosophical ones - whether a revived person would still be you, whether anyone in the future will bother reviving them - though those come up too. I mean the one about the money. “Isn’t this absurdly expensive? Isn’t it just a plaything for billionaires who can’t accept that they’ll die like the rest of us?”<br>The honest start to a response is to admit that yes, right now, if you’re paying out of your own pocket, it’s expensive. Sparks Brain Preservation charges around $100,0001, Tomorrow Biostasis wants about $228,000, and Nectome lists $250,000. So a shot at not dying currently runs somewhere between one and two-hundred-and-fifty thousand dollars.<br>That’s a lot of money. It should be much cheaper, and it saddens and disturbs me that it’s not. Even so, I’d argue, it’s completely reasonable by the standards of existing medical spending in the developed world.<br>First, those prices aren’t what the procedure itself costs; they’re what it costs to run a tiny operation for a few dozen customers a year while inventing an entire medical field as you go. The actual procedural work - clearing the blood, perfusing a chemical fixative, swapping the body’s water for a cryoprotectant so it can be cooled without ice tearing it apart - uses cheap, industrially-produced chemicals and a day of skilled labor. Done in higher volume, I’ve calculated the marginal cost at closer to $13,000, with storage on the order of a thousand dollars a year. Like every new technology, I expect the price to fall as it scales.<br>Second, what actually decides whether $150,000 is a bargain or a rip-off is the chance the procedure works. If that chance is zero, you’re just burning money. If it’s a certainty, then fork out whatever you’d spend to save your own life.<br>How likely is it to work? When we surveyed 334 American doctors last year and gave them an idealised case - an elderly patient preserved within minutes, brain structure confirmed intact down to the synapses - their median guess at the probability of eventual revival was 25%. Your number may be higher or lower, but let’s go with that.<br>If this were a normal calculation of expected costs and benefits, we’d multiply how much we’d be willing to pay for a guarantee of obtaining something by the probability that we actually receive it. There’s nothing exotic about that kind of sum: if I’d pay $30,000 to own a particular car outright, and you sell me a raffle ticket giving a one-in-ten chance of winning it, I shouldn’t hand over more than $3,000 for the ticket (the prize, marked down by the odds of actually getting my hands on it).<br>So feed preservation into the same calculation. Say the most a typical seventy-year-old would spend on a guaranteed return from death is half of everything they own. Median net worth for an American aged 65 to 74 is about $410,000, so call the guarantee worth $205,000. Mark that down by the 25% chance it works, and you arrive at roughly $50,000.<br>But applying this form of calculation to this situation feels absurd. What preservation buys, if it works, isn’t three more years, or ten - it’s an open-ended life, with no natural end date to cap the prize. Yet if you multiply a payoff that large by any probability above zero, you get something indistinguishable from infinity, and infinity times any non-zero probability is still more than everything you have. This is a Pascal’s mugging: a prize enormous enough that any probability, however microscopic, can justify any sacrifice, however ruinous. Almost no one can actually live this way, so let’s drop the multiplication.<br>Instead, let’s flip it around - what expensive medical services do individuals or healthcare systems already pay for, and how does preservation look sitting next to them? Instead of allowing theoretical calculations to push us in absurd directions, we can center ourselves through comparisons to therapies that are already deemed worthwhile.<br>A final note before starting: the unit for this comparison is the cost per quality-adjusted life year: roughly, dollars per extra year of healthy life. Rich countries mostly treat anything under $50,000 to $150,000 per healthy year as decent value (Britain’s threshold sits a bit lower, the US is a bit higher and vaguer on theirs).

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