Inasmuch as that is a fantasy at all, it s a very different, and much less expensive and wasteful one.
I’m curious about the accounting setup. Their unearned revenue column must be a doozy.
And then one of them shaves off his beard and starts playing the trombone, and where the hell will we be then?!
People are not “working on it”, some people, who you apparently heard (Ray Kurzweil, probably, a well known loon) are fantasizing about it.
As things stand, we do not currently know, except in the most general terms, how information is stored in the human brain (people are working on that, but progress is slow and there is a very long way to go). We do know enough about it, however, to make it clear that it would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to do anything resembling “downloading” the information, and even if we could somehow do that one day, it is far from clear how or whether it could ever be “uploaded”, or what it could usefully be uploaded to (short of of a molecule for molecule reconstruction of the original person’s body).
Apparently, the European Union disagrees with you : https://www.humanbrainproject.eu
They are attempting to construct a more accurate software model of the brain, with the data coming from various experiments. 1 billion euro budget.
As for how to revive the cryo patients, well, the practical method that could be attempted in perhaps 20 years involves a saw and many slices. This paper contains a description of the proposed method : http://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/brain-emulation-roadmap-report.pdf
To summarize : a saw that exists today is used to make many, many slices of the patient’s brain. Electron beams will scan the synapses, recording the types and numbers of specific membrane proteins that current day neuroscience thinks store the “state” of the synapse. To do a single brain will require a very large scale effort : about 1 million separate electron beams working in parallel will take about 4-5 years.
Presumably, we’d work out faster ways later. Also, we’d have to start with a clean brain preserved under the best imaginable conditions as the first test subject, which excludes the cryo patients today.
Once we know where the synapses are and what “state” each one has, theoretically, the computing systems of 20-30 years from now would be able to emulate the person in real time. The computer would look like a modern-day supercomputer and would use massively parallel chips derived from graphics processors to simulate the neurons.
The economic reason to do this is obvious. Sure, version 1.0 would cost a colossal amount of money, and it would require a machine the size of a top 10 supercomputer (in 20-30 years) to emulate their mind. However, in theory, a person could be simulated at a far, far faster rate using dedicated hardware designed for the purpose : probably millions of times faster.
If we took the best and the brightest people alive today and could make them think even 10-100 times faster, the kinds of ideas and insights they would have would be probably an unstoppable economic advantage. Imagine Warren Buffet at 1000x, such that he could supervise every part of his business empire personally.
Or imagine the top engineers at Boeing or Intel or other major powerhouses running at 1000x. They would be able to design machines on a scale we cannot fathom.
Early on in the process, before cryonics companies started keeping trust funds and demanding large up front fees, a few people were allowed to thaw and rot.
Cryonics Institute claims it costs them a bit less than $100/year worth of LN2 to keep a single person (whole body) preserved. That means that $10,000, in theory, buys you a century, and $30,000 buys you 300 years.
If a person were cryopreserved and if enough information remains to reconstruct their memories and personality (even if you have to tear their brain apart at the atomic level to obtain it) and if human technology continues to advance and if the people of 100-300 years care enough, then, given those assumptions, a person could plausibly “awaken”.
Note that my post above describes the most practical method we can sketch out today : a very destructive process that rips your brain to pieces, and produces a copy. However, philosophically, a near perfect (and immortal) copy of yourself beats the alternative for many people. Perceptively, your existence would continue…
The spinal cord does store information, however, most people would probably be ok with losing it. If the technology worked, you would awaken, probably as a computer emulation. You might have access to artificial bodies that you would control remotely. These bodies, if they resembled humans, might either contain their own pre-programmed reflexes (basically you control the body with the help of a spinal cord pattern borrowed from another person or a subsystem programmed by someone else) or you might have to relearn everything.
Either way, this isn’t the show-stopper. There are other far more serious issues with cryonics.
You have no idea what you are talking about. The EU brain project is not what you think it is. The publicity for it is mostly hype. As the document you link to says:
Some people, maybe even some scientists, fall for the hype. Other scientists use it cynically to get money out of governments so that they can do real neuroscience research. No-one sane, serious, and knowledgeable thinks we will be “downloading” people’s memories personalities or “selves” in the foreseeable future, if ever.
This statement is almost certainly correct.
This comment falls more into the class of ‘speculation, “handwaving” and untestable claims’. Unlike faster-than-light travel or perpetual motion, uploading does not break any currently known physical laws. It might take thousands of years, but if our technological civilisation continues to make progress, it is likely that researchers will either find a way to do it, or prove that it cannot be done. Neither are possible at the moment.
One thing that seems very likely is that no-one alive today will ever know the truth in this matter, especially not Ray Kurzweil.
It’s one thing to say that one day, humanity will find a way to cryogenically preserve, unfreeze, and revive humans. I’m not saying I expect it for the foreseeable future, but it’s certainly possible that some day something like this exists.
It’s a totally different thing to say, however, that those people who have already been put into a cryogenic tank will ever be successfully revived. When this was done, the companies who did it had absolutely no idea what it takes to preserve a person cryogenically, simply because science has not yet reached a point where we know what to do. Of course, the companies could (and probably did, at least I hope so for their clients) take best guesses, such as adding agents to prevent cell damage. But there is no way to be sure that they did what’s necessary. In the light of this, and given that the clients they froze were already dead at the time, I’d say there’s a sufficiently overwhelming probability against anybody of them ever being revived to call the whole thing a scam.
Perhaps it could still be accomplished by natural methods—just with a different south pole.
(Shipping’d be a bastard, though. Though at least you could save by just sending the head—I mean, any civilization/species that can retrieve and revive a frozen head buried on the Moon shouldn’t have trouble replacing a body.)
Source? Do you know what you’re talking about? I’ve gone to medical school. Have you? The human brain is not magic. This is not downloading, this is tearing it to pieces and obtaining the state variables.
Credible science says this is possible. Not now, not next year, but there is no theoretical obstacle to doing it.
We can already do the analysis on a synapse by synapse level with electron microscopes. Connectomes (a mapping of every connection) will probably be made within your lifetime.
Basically, the state of the art is about where genetic mapping was in the 1980s. At that time, the prospect of mapping an a single person’s DNA - much less the millions of people that we plan to map in the near future - seemed near impossible. It cost several billion dollars to do the first one, because the methods used were very slow and inefficient.
Now, I’m sure you’re going to jump in and point out that current knowledge of synapses is not sufficient to identify all of the state variables. That in no way means it will not be discovered in the future, and the EU project will accomplish some of that.
Alcor went financially bankrupt in the late Eighties. They had a facility in Southern Riverside County, with who knows how many units stored there, full bodies and just heads. It got to the point where the utilities and taxes were no longer being paid, so…
The typical buyer will sign a contract and obtain a term life insurance policy, payable to the cryonics company. The best preservation would be done before the person actually expires, but the law won’t permit that. Even if the body is transported to the facility immediately upon death, decomposition is already occurring by the time the preparation has begun.
IIRC, Ted Williams didn’t quite make it. His family blocked the process.
This isn’t a good idea.
~VOW
What’s a better one? Pray to God there is an afterlife and just die and rot in a hole in the ground?
The problem is, cyronics is not a good idea. The trouble is, the same objective reasoning you use to show why cryonics has a low chance of success (somewhere between negligible to 50%, depending on assumptions) will show that Religion has only a negligible chance of success, no matter what.
So you are choosing between something that might work but probably won’t (cryonics) and something that probably won’t no matter what (religion).
This isn’t a choice. No rational being is going to pick religion over cryonics, even if cryonics sucks.
By choosing to say no to cryonics, you are saying yes to death for almost 100% certainty, and saying yes to having a little bit more pocket money when you are alive.