I am something of a cryo-skeptic because I think at best all you will get is a copy of the person who was frozen. I am much more interested in SENS-style rejuvenation efforts. But I am curious about the source of your (and Sam Adams’) skepticism. Are you of the opinion that it would be impossible to set all those frozen molecules in motion again, or impossible to make a living copy of the frozen original? Do you doubt that the important information (memory, personality...?) survives the freezing process?
Contemporary science and technology are showing that nature permits atoms to be manipulated with extraordinary precision. Of course, your molecular structure is a lot more complex and dynamic than that of Carbon Monoxide Man. But then we would hardly need to get every atom back to exactly where it was, in order to make something a lot like you. We would just need tissues grown from cells containing your genome, and then arranged in a structure grossly resembling your current body. The brain is presumably the place where certain fine details matter the most. But I really don’t see what is to stop us from growing a decerebrated body in your image (having first synthesized a copy of your genome a la Craig Venter), and then carefully filling its skull, layer by layer, with synthetic neural tissue made in imitation of the microstructure of your frozen brain, assuming that we have it available.
That is a procedure for making a copy of you; but I would tend to think that something which reanimates the frozen carcass is also possible, albeit more difficult to describe. These things are very high technology by current standards, but how to do them is not an unfathomable mystery. It’s of a level of difficulty more akin to constructing an inhabited space station that will orbit Neptune. A big engineering challenge.
I am something of a cryo-skeptic because I think at best all you will get is a copy of the person who was frozen. I am much more interested in SENS-style rejuvenation efforts. But I am curious about the source of your (and Sam Adams’) skepticism. Are you of the opinion that it would be impossible to set all those frozen molecules in motion again, or impossible to make a living copy of the frozen original? Do you doubt that the important information (memory, personality...?) survives the freezing process?
Contemporary science and technology are showing that nature permits atoms to be manipulated with extraordinary precision. Of course, your molecular structure is a lot more complex and dynamic than that of Carbon Monoxide Man. But then we would hardly need to get every atom back to exactly where it was, in order to make something a lot like you. We would just need tissues grown from cells containing your genome, and then arranged in a structure grossly resembling your current body. The brain is presumably the place where certain fine details matter the most. But I really don’t see what is to stop us from growing a decerebrated body in your image (having first synthesized a copy of your genome a la Craig Venter), and then carefully filling its skull, layer by layer, with synthetic neural tissue made in imitation of the microstructure of your frozen brain, assuming that we have it available.
That is a procedure for making a copy of you; but I would tend to think that something which reanimates the frozen carcass is also possible, albeit more difficult to describe. These things are very high technology by current standards, but how to do them is not an unfathomable mystery. It’s of a level of difficulty more akin to constructing an inhabited space station that will orbit Neptune. A big engineering challenge.