X-Message-Number: 12014
Date: Sat, 26 Jun 1999 11:00:48 -0700
From:  (Pat Clancy)
Subject: Re: Why Cryonics Isn't Popular (Maybe)

>
>Message #12002
>From: "Peter C. McCluskey" <>
>Date: Thu, 24 Jun 1999 22:05:27 -0700
>Subject: Why Cryonics Isn't Popular (Maybe)
>References: <>
>
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>
> That sounds like a good explanation of why cryonics sounds alien to
>many people, but I don't agree that a century is a realistic forecast.
>I'd guess that the vast majority of heart problems and cancers will
>be curable in something like 15 to 30 years.
> I also see reasons to suspect that uploading frozen brains will be
>possible in 20 to 40 years (although it will take more than just a
>good timetable to make this sound unalien).
>

What reasons? I think that the possibility of uploading a brain in 40 years
is about as likely as the possibility that we'll have HAL in 2001. (And I'd
put the possibility of either happening _ever_ at less than 50%.) In fact
I'd be willing to make a rather large wager on the matter. Science has no
idea of what the underlying basis of consciousness is, and I think it's
doubtful that in a mere 40 years that little problem will be solved. And
then assuming that this underlying basis is even something that can be
"uploaded", and that the act of freezing doesn't destroy so much
information as to preclude that, then the engineering problem could easily
be beyond any technology that might be developed over the next 10,000
years, or ever.
(By the way I'd like nothing better than to be proven wrong.)

Pat Clancy

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