I put the odds that we will have nanobots in our bloodstream killing cancer cells and regulating our chemistry to avoid a lot of metabolic problems, repair injuries, and so on, at a pretty high number. I put the odds that we will figure out how to put a living human into some sort of suspended animation and bring them back into regular animation at some sort of reasonable odds. I put the odds that if we did our best effort to freeze a living person now without damage that we would be able to eventually revive them at maybe 10%. The odds that we will be able to revive a person frozen or otherwise preserved after they are legally dead, that’s getting down towards time-machine to the past odds, since I think you are freezing after important parts of the information are lost.
Conditioned on having the technical ability to revive the frozen, that might raise the odds of eventually being revived towards 10%. There are a lot of things that might keep revival from happening other than it not being possible technically.
If you’re talking about people frozen after four plus hours of room temperature ischemia, I’d agree with you that the odds are not good. However, somebody with a standby team, perfused before ischemic clotting can set in and vitrified quickly, has a very good chance in my book. We’ve done SEM imaging of optimally vitrified dead tissue, and the structural preservation is extremely good. You can go in and count the pores on a dendrite. There simply isn’t much information lost immediately after death, especially if you get the head in ice water quickly.
I also have quite a high confidence that we’ll be seeing WBE technology in the next forty years (I’d wager at better than even odds that we’ll see it in the next twenty). The component technologies already exist (and need only iterative improvements), and many of them are falling exponentially in cost. That combined with what I suspect will be a rather high demand when the potential reaches the public consciousness, is a pretty potent combination of forces.
So, for me, I lose most of my probability mass to the idea that, if you’re vitrified now, something will happen to Alcor within 40 years, or, more generally, some civilization-disrupting event will occur in the same time frame. That your brain isn’t preserved (under optimal conditions), or that we’ll never figure out how to slice up and emulate a brain, are not serious points of concern to me.
I put the odds that we will have nanobots in our bloodstream killing cancer cells and regulating our chemistry to avoid a lot of metabolic problems, repair injuries, and so on, at a pretty high number. I put the odds that we will figure out how to put a living human into some sort of suspended animation and bring them back into regular animation at some sort of reasonable odds. I put the odds that if we did our best effort to freeze a living person now without damage that we would be able to eventually revive them at maybe 10%. The odds that we will be able to revive a person frozen or otherwise preserved after they are legally dead, that’s getting down towards time-machine to the past odds, since I think you are freezing after important parts of the information are lost.
Conditioned on having the technical ability to revive the frozen, that might raise the odds of eventually being revived towards 10%. There are a lot of things that might keep revival from happening other than it not being possible technically.
If you’re talking about people frozen after four plus hours of room temperature ischemia, I’d agree with you that the odds are not good. However, somebody with a standby team, perfused before ischemic clotting can set in and vitrified quickly, has a very good chance in my book. We’ve done SEM imaging of optimally vitrified dead tissue, and the structural preservation is extremely good. You can go in and count the pores on a dendrite. There simply isn’t much information lost immediately after death, especially if you get the head in ice water quickly.
I also have quite a high confidence that we’ll be seeing WBE technology in the next forty years (I’d wager at better than even odds that we’ll see it in the next twenty). The component technologies already exist (and need only iterative improvements), and many of them are falling exponentially in cost. That combined with what I suspect will be a rather high demand when the potential reaches the public consciousness, is a pretty potent combination of forces.
So, for me, I lose most of my probability mass to the idea that, if you’re vitrified now, something will happen to Alcor within 40 years, or, more generally, some civilization-disrupting event will occur in the same time frame. That your brain isn’t preserved (under optimal conditions), or that we’ll never figure out how to slice up and emulate a brain, are not serious points of concern to me.