My name is Kai Micah Mills. I’m one of the founders of CryoDAO and one of the co-initiators. We started CryoDAO because cryopreservation is an extremely underfunded field, especially in some of the more exciting areas like brain cryopreservation, which is one of our primary focuses at CryoDAO. There’s practically no money going into it—only very small amounts. A lot of us who came together for this have our own organizations, some with cryopreservation facilities, but there really needed to be a dedicated organization to fund this kind of moonshot research, which right now is getting almost no resources. When we did our initial fundraising for CryoDAO, we raised about $3 million at the beginning of the year. The first sentence on our fundraising page was, “Our goal is to solve death.” We didn’t hold back on the narrative.
How can CryoDAO raise $2 billion?
Especially in an industry like crypto, where people are very open to big ideas and radical technologies, there’s a significant overlap with those interested in radical technologies and those in crypto. We wanted to use our experience in the crypto field to move some of the vast amounts of money there away from things like meme coins and towards funding real scientific research. I genuinely believe that funding science and achieving breakthroughs through crypto could be the key to raising significant amounts of money, including the $2 billion goal. By driving the narrative that cryonics is not just about preserving life but about fundamentally solving death, we can attract the attention and funding needed to reach this goal.
What competes with cryonics?
In a very literal sense, cryonics competes with other end-of-life options like burial and cremation. Eventually, I would love to see cryonics become at least a default option that people can choose at the end of their lives. Ideally, we would stop burning and burying humans and discarding life—I find that practice disgusting. However, the biggest competitor to cryonics is death itself. This is the number one competitor to life, not just cryonics. People don’t walk around identifying as “deists,” but most people are, whether they realize it or not—they’re organized around an acceptance of death. This acceptance, and the idea that death can even be a good thing, is probably the most dangerous competitor to cryonics and to life itself.
What could be a multiplier for cryonics?
Cryonics is very much outside of mainstream institutions and organizations right now, and there are pros and cons to that. But if we’re looking at a multiplier effect for cryonics, I think we really need to get cryonics into hospitals. For example, when you go to the dentist for a root canal, you don’t need to understand the procedure in detail—you trust your dentist to do it. The same should be true for cryonics. In the pet world, people generally follow their veterinarian’s recommendations. I believe that getting cryonics into hospitals would be the most powerful effect we could achieve. However, the exact timing of this, especially in human hospitals, is difficult to predict. There’s a lot of work to be done, not just scientifically but also logistically and politically. But I believe the time will come when people start refusing to go to hospitals that don’t offer cryonics. These hospitals will be the only ones where you’re not risking permanent death during a procedure. Even if hospitals don’t want to add cryonics, they will eventually be forced to, just to stay competitive.
How long do you want to live?
Eternally. Forever. Nothing less.
