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.
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.