X-Message-Number: 5335 From: Date: Mon, 4 Dec 1995 14:13:03 -0500 Subject: growth problems David Stodolsky (#5330) has some remarks on cryonics growth, pricing, cash-flow, and possible future scenarios and risks. A few comments: 1. I doubt very much that anything very useful can be accomplished by trying to analyze cryonics history to predict future growth or to evaluate the success of marketing methods. First, the numbers are too small to mean much. Second, the results depend too critically on pivots of accident or psychology. Intuition here will probably serve better than scientific-sounding models. 2. I doubt there will be any "cash flow crunch, where they cannot meet demand." In cryonics (as presently practiced, full fee due upon death or shortly thereafter, at latest), payment follows soon after initial services. In the presence of a demand explosion, if any cryonics firm or organization needed a short term loan to expand facilities, lenders would be falling over each other. 3. Could a sudden expansion in demand produce a capacity crunch, with danger to the reputations of cryonics organizations unable to meet demand? I doubt that type of danger. If the public were suddenly to agree that we have been right all along, while the establishment types were dragging their heels, we would scarcely be blamed--even though the psychological is notoriously different from the logical. 4. As to the capacity crunch itself, is that likely? It is hard for me to envision any really sudden (one year) U.S. demand exceeding 1% of those currently dying, which might mean very roughly perhaps 25,000 in the first year of the putative explosion. We could handle that--I won't say "no sweat," but we could handle it, with the help e.g. of some business types like Don Laughlin and other high rollers with toes already in the water (or liquid nitrogen). Bottlenecks? With that kind of demand, forget about vacuum cryostats; we just use foam or powder insulation without vacuum, slap them together in jig time with aluminum or stainless steel or fiberglass liners, and we get large economies of scale. Liquid nitrogen? I'm not sure of the potential elasticity of supply situation here, but again, with large cryostats you need much less nitrogen per patient. Also, you can substitute dry ice for a while if necessary, with an uncertain amount of additional risk to the patient's chances. If storage at - 135 C were used, this would involve more delay in tooling up, but would save still more on nitrogen. Training and service bottlenecks? For those who insist on using a thoracic surgeon to cut the sternum, there might be shortages and higher prices, but there would be plenty of surgeons available with that kind of demand. Morticians could be trained rather quickly. In general, such bottlenecks could probably be widened by a mix of procedures at different prices. Surging demand could indeed produce problems, notably including aroused active hostility in some quarters; but I again I doubt that this is likely to prove more than annoying or unsettling, with local/temporary exceptions. Our "extreme financial conservatism" may or may not be a growth inhibitor, but I wouldn't want to change that. By being less conservative we could spend more on promotion, or on research, or we could reduce prices, but the potential downside is unacceptable. Robert Ettinger Cryonics Institute Immortalist Society Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=5335