I wonder if cryonauts ever prepare some kind of detailed information packet about their personalities, values, etc. to help a future superintelligence put them back together. It seems like getting a full genome sequence, some personality test data, and maybe some video of you would be very cheap on the scale of current cryonics costs. The genome would be expensive, but prices seem to be falling steadily, so in a few years it might be a trivial expense compared to cryonics.
Under what conditions would it matter? If a reconstruction of me isn’t accurate enough to tell how extroverted I am, for example, then a “25%” on an accompanying form isn’t going to help much. If you don’t know what a picture looks like, “the average color is 0x295a5e” isn’t enough information to help.
A full genome sequence might be enough information to be slightly useful, but cryonauts have trillions of those already frozen. ;-)
If the future denizens are capable of restoring a cryogenically frozen person to life they shouldn’t need our help with the DNA sequencing. After all, we can do that with fairly good reliability today on mummies and bog men so our Walt Disneys shouldn’t be too hard to get a decent sample out of.
The epigenome, on the other hand, is a stickier issue; there’s a lot of proteins vital to gene expression which are not going to fair well in either the initial freeze or long-term storage. Once we get reliable sequencing of that I’d say that sort of info would be much closer to what you’re thinking of.
I wonder if cryonauts ever prepare some kind of detailed information packet about their personalities, values, etc. to help a future superintelligence put them back together. It seems like getting a full genome sequence, some personality test data, and maybe some video of you would be very cheap on the scale of current cryonics costs. The genome would be expensive, but prices seem to be falling steadily, so in a few years it might be a trivial expense compared to cryonics.
Does anyone do anything like this?
Under what conditions would it matter? If a reconstruction of me isn’t accurate enough to tell how extroverted I am, for example, then a “25%” on an accompanying form isn’t going to help much. If you don’t know what a picture looks like, “the average color is 0x295a5e” isn’t enough information to help.
A full genome sequence might be enough information to be slightly useful, but cryonauts have trillions of those already frozen. ;-)
If the future denizens are capable of restoring a cryogenically frozen person to life they shouldn’t need our help with the DNA sequencing. After all, we can do that with fairly good reliability today on mummies and bog men so our Walt Disneys shouldn’t be too hard to get a decent sample out of.
The epigenome, on the other hand, is a stickier issue; there’s a lot of proteins vital to gene expression which are not going to fair well in either the initial freeze or long-term storage. Once we get reliable sequencing of that I’d say that sort of info would be much closer to what you’re thinking of.