X-Message-Number: 15206
From: 
Date: Thu, 28 Dec 2000 23:05:20 EST
Subject: nanocryofab

Laymen think they are at a disadvantage in reading or thinking about 
"science," but this is partly wrong. In looking ahead, laymen can often do 
BETTER than specialists, as the late famous pollster George Gallup found. 
This is attributed to the forest-and-trees phenomenon. The specialist knows 
too much about the immediate difficulties, and has a career time horizon at 
most--whereas the layman can step back, look at the big picture, and form a 
better judgment.

When I wrote THE PROSPECT OF IMMORTALITY in 1962, I was basically a layman in 
most of the disciplines related to what we now call nanotechnology. I had not 
even heard of Feynman's 1958 paper, "Plenty of Room at the Bottom." Yet it 
was obvious to me that--to a near certainty--it would become possible, 
eventually, to make any repairs to a human body, if necessary on a 
cell-by-cell or even molecule-by-molecule basis. 

(I was not smart enough to realize that the computers necessary for this 
could be tiny; I envisioned the atom-moving tools as tiny, but the computers 
controlling them as large. Mainly for this reason, I thought repair of a 
brain might take centuries, whereas now Drexler and Merkle and others have 
shown it should only take weeks at most, once we have a mature 
nanotechnology.) 

My reasoning was based on generalities, such as the fact that our 
bodies--even though evolved by accident and representing only a minute 
fraction of the possibilities, even working without the wheel--could 
nevertheless fabricate and repair down to the nano scale on many types of 
biological system. If blind and purposeless Nature could do so much, surely 
we can do much more, and on a vastly accelerated time scale.  

With this ponderous preliminary, let me now offer, to new readers especially, 
another quick bird's eye view of reasons to be optimistic about revival of 
cryonics patients--even those frozen by the crudest techniques. (And yet 
again, no, this is not complacency nor a reason to neglect research or relax 
our efforts to improve cryopreservation.)

First, we can virtually guarantee that a person much like you could 
eventually (in the relatively near future, centuries at most) be FABRICATED 
from scratch. By using your DNA, or/and that of your relatives, your remains 
if any, your personal records including the memories of those who knew you, 
and our future detailed understanding of the workings of the brain and how to 
"read in" memories and personality, future technicians could build a person 
to specifications, including someone very similar to yourself as you are now. 

Furthermore, the construct would not have to be born and develop in the 
ordinary way; it could be assembled and activated as an adult with a mental 
history--although of course in practice that would be ruled out on 
humanitarian grounds; we are not going to create people with false memories 
or use them as laboratory animals. This is merely a preliminary thought 
experiment.

No doubt you have anticipated the next step, which is simple. If someone very 
like you could in future be built from scratch, then repairing or rebuilding 
you from frozen remains will certainly be much easier. You could be repaired 
while still frozen, and then thawed and activated. (Repair in the liquid 
state is not ruled out either, but repair while frozen is conceptually 
easier.)

The caveats are obvious, and relate to some of the "philosophical" 
discussions in this forum. We don't yet know which parts/aspects of the brain 
are the "vital" ones, so we don't yet know how to tell for sure if the 
revived patient is "really" the "same" as the person who was frozen, or the 
person before deteriorating during terminal illness or during a post mortem 
warm ischemic period. 

But we live with similar--or worse--uncertainties all the time. The point is 
that success--or some degree of success--is not only a reasonable 
expectation, but almost certain. 

Robert Ettinger
Cryonics Institute
Immortalist Society
http://www.cryonics.org

Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=15206