GBurch1@aol.com wrote:
> Second, with emergency medicine improving all the time, the circumstances
> under which even a young person might die and still be a good suspension
> candidate are not completely out of the question.
I'd go a lot further than this. First off, accidents that destroy the brain
are fairly rare, so even if you die young your odds of getting a
halfway-decent suspension are pretty good. It is pretty hard to die in a
way that prevents your body from arriving at a hospital within an hour or
less - just don't get yourself killed while you're off camping in the middle
of nowhere.
Second, and more important, most people have an excessively narrow view of
what constitutes an adequate suspension. Remember, if cryonics patients are
ever revived at all, that means we're positing nanotech advanced enough to
repair any kind of physical damage. The only thing that matters in that
situation is whether the information that defines your memories and
personality can be recovered from your brain tissue.
Now, what people tend to overlook is that the problem of deducing the
original information content of a scrambled brain is isomorphic to the
problem of deducing the information content of an encrypted message. Given
modern cryptographic techniques and abundant computing power, that means
that no non-random form of damage can prevent a successful revival. A
completely random encryption is unbreakable, and so is a completely random
source of damage. However, very few types of physical injury produce truly
random changes at the molecular level. If the history of cryptography is
any guide, we should expect that even the most subtle kinds of regularity
can be used to reverse the effects of even the most radical perturbations.
What does this all mean in English? Basically, that burning your brain
destroys information, but dropping a rock on it doesn't. Most of the damage
sources that cryonicists agonize over, like freezing damage and ischemic
injury, are very regular in nature and hence should be very easy to reverse.
So, your odds of getting an adequate suspension are very high no matter how
you end up dying.
Billy Brown
bbrown@transcient.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jul 27 2000 - 14:03:57 MDT