They’ve vitrified a rabbit kidney. We know tissue can go through this and come out alive. A brain is just a few more steps.
It preserves a lot of biological information in addition to dendrite connections. This information may or may not turn out irrelevant, but if it is relevant that could be a game-ender for plastination that would not be so bad for cryonicists.
You can test for cellular viability and organ function as a way to see if what you try is working. With chemopreservation you are stuck with sterile microscope readings (and simulations based on them) as the only form of feedback. More forms of feedback is better.
Unlike an anti-aging intervation, freezing the brain or kidney is something that can be tested in young animals with immediate results.
Cryonics appears to be inexpensive if done on a significant scale. Even a few thousand patients at a time reduces costs considerably.
Cryonics be used on people dying today. This applies to chemopreservation as well (if anyone gets around to offering the service), but not to anti-aging treatments.
The second most interesting to me is whole body replacement or “brain in a jar” technology. Since it would be a less complex system than the whole body and designed more according to human intuitions, I would expect such a system to be easier to maintain indefinitely than the body itself. The brain itself is a less complex system than the body as a whole, so neural aging seems like it should be less complex than whole-body aging.
It is also easier to perform cryonics on an isolated brain than a whole body, for physical and biological reasons. The exact concentrations of cryoprotectant can be fine-tuned to the brain, and the cooling rate is better for a detached head or brain than a body. Removing cryoprotectants and rewarming at the optimal rate should also be easier. Thus when it happens, it is reasonable to expect the first successful reanimations to be not of whole bodies but individual brains.
Cryonics is still my favorite. Some reasons:
They’ve vitrified a rabbit kidney. We know tissue can go through this and come out alive. A brain is just a few more steps.
It preserves a lot of biological information in addition to dendrite connections. This information may or may not turn out irrelevant, but if it is relevant that could be a game-ender for plastination that would not be so bad for cryonicists.
You can test for cellular viability and organ function as a way to see if what you try is working. With chemopreservation you are stuck with sterile microscope readings (and simulations based on them) as the only form of feedback. More forms of feedback is better.
Unlike an anti-aging intervation, freezing the brain or kidney is something that can be tested in young animals with immediate results.
Cryonics appears to be inexpensive if done on a significant scale. Even a few thousand patients at a time reduces costs considerably.
Cryonics be used on people dying today. This applies to chemopreservation as well (if anyone gets around to offering the service), but not to anti-aging treatments.
The second most interesting to me is whole body replacement or “brain in a jar” technology. Since it would be a less complex system than the whole body and designed more according to human intuitions, I would expect such a system to be easier to maintain indefinitely than the body itself. The brain itself is a less complex system than the body as a whole, so neural aging seems like it should be less complex than whole-body aging.
It is also easier to perform cryonics on an isolated brain than a whole body, for physical and biological reasons. The exact concentrations of cryoprotectant can be fine-tuned to the brain, and the cooling rate is better for a detached head or brain than a body. Removing cryoprotectants and rewarming at the optimal rate should also be easier. Thus when it happens, it is reasonable to expect the first successful reanimations to be not of whole bodies but individual brains.