X-Message-Number: 12087 Date: Thu, 08 Jul 1999 00:10:57 -0700 From: Mike Perry <> Subject: Future restoration Thomas R Mazanec, #12078, writes: >Do you people think that technological progress in any field >(especially suspension and revival) will ever flatten out? >Will we someday, probably millenia from now, be able to >say that we have gone as far as we can and anyone suspended by >sufficiently >"crude" methods will NEVER be restored, and so can be buried, cremated, >or whatever, or will we have to keep such early "corpsicles" on ice >forever, just in case someday we have a breakthrough? I think that, long before "millennia from now," we will have the ability to map solid structures at the atomic level, in 3 dimensions. This would include frozen humans or human brains. It may require "disassembly" or tearing down the structure piece by small piece and, if desired, rebuilding as we go along, as a given part is mapped. From the map it should be possible to assess the prospects for restoring the original organism. (Or perhaps some other approach will be used. At least this one seems a possibility if nothing better can be found.) Hopefully, many or most frozen humans will be straightforwardly restorable--though we don't know. The tougher cases will be those for which *some* significant identity-critical information survives but not enough to restore a "whole" individual--you must tolerate some amnesia, say, or resort to educated guesswork to fill in missing information. But I think some significant information is likely to be present even in the poorer cases of cryonic preservation. I don't see these as simply being discarded (buried, cremated) but at least their information will be mapped, then probably used in one form of reconstruction or another. It is a philosophical issue whether the map--the information--would be sufficient for any reanimation or reconstruction or whether you also need the original remains. With just the information, for example, you could replace carbon atoms with similar carbon atoms, etc., and obtain the functioning person in replica form. That would be good enough for me, but some others have misgivings. At some point, however, it seems clear that the frozen remains will have served their purpose and if still around could be discarded, though perhaps they will be sent instead to a maintenance-free, cold storage center in deep space. Mike Perry Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=12087