X-Message-Number: 26562
References: <>
From: David Stodolsky <>
Subject: Re: Stodolsky's Suggestion
Date: Sat, 9 Jul 2005 19:56:00 +0200

On 8 Jul 2005, at 06:57, Mike Perry wrote:

>
>
>> average yearly income [of members, I take it] $10,000 [averaged over
>> employed as well as others such as children, assuming they too  
>> joined].
>> one-tenth of income goes to the church [$1,000/member].
>> payments over 100 years
>> new members are uniformly age distributed
>> current trends in life-span improvement continue (1/4 year per year)
>> membership doubles yearly [this is the toughie if you ask me!]
>> suspensions cost $50,000
>> half of income is overhead or other functions
>>
>
> Overall, I see this as one more thing to think about--*could* work, or
> *could* fail miserably.

If it worked at all, then the risk of financial failure (Gambler's  
Ruin), under a given set of assumptions, can be calculated. This risk  
would be highest in the initial phase.

Is there someone who already has a spreadsheet set up to do these  
types of calculations? It would be very similar to those used for  
insurance and investments.


> I really think you'd be hard pressed, though, to
> double the membership each year for very long. That's a *very* fast  
> growth
> rate!

This assumes that each member brings in one new person a year, which  
probably is near realistic in the middle phase of growth. Last time I  
looked at the question,  cryonics memberships and suspensions were  
doubling every three years, which isn't bad considering all the  
financial and psychological barriers. I don't think the risk of  
failure is very sensitive to this parameter, however.

I would expect that memberships in a church would increase much  
faster in the start up phase. Seed capital could be used to promote  
the concept in a few densely populated areas and some minimal size  
would be reached before a local group could request further support.  
Thus, the growth would be extremely high, but the absolute membership  
might be low, say a hundred or so.  Another possibility is viral  
marketing via the Internet, which can lead to very high rates of  
growth. In recent years, we have seen how new companies or concepts  
can become household names in only a few years (Google, Skype, blogs,  
podcasting, etc).

Growth would be expected to slow as all members of certain  
populations were absorbed. However, this would likely be a very long  
run aspect, well after the the church and cryonics were accepted.


dss

David Stodolsky    Skype: davidstodolsky

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