lsparrish

Well as I see it there are three general technical routes for recovery: You get preserved good enough that advanced biotech is plenty good enough. Regrowing a body below the neck could probably be done all with "wet" nanotech i.e. bioengineering. Organs would be replaced with "printed" ones, stem cells would fill in the cracks and gaps in the neural tissues, cryoprotectants would get sponged out the moment you start to devitrify to minimize toxicity, ischemic cascading effects would be halted with specially designed enzymes, etc. It could be you don't have to be preserved quite that well even, if "dry" nanotech turns out to be feasible at some point. (Think 300 years in the future, not 20 minutes into the future -- there are huge technical barriers to this kind of technology compared to biology, which already exists.) Cells could be repaired in place while still frozen in liquid nitrogen under a vacuum, slowly progressing over weeks (or years) until you have a healthy body to thaw out. Scanning brain pattens into a computer and running you as a simulated being might eventually turn out to be possible. The essential information processing power of neurons would need to be replicated, either digitally or by some kind of analog device. Then you would make use of an extremely sophisticated electron microscope or fMRI to make a detailed map of the brain. This could happen while you are in LN2, or you could be fixed using some future equivalent of formaldehyde and warmed back up. Some kinds of scan might be destructive of the original tissue whereas others might not be. Whatever mechanism is used, while we may hope for it to be soon, it could be thousands of years in the future. It all depends how quickly science progresses in the various areas and what turns out to be physically possible. Younger people like me can hope that vitrification will get better and better over the course of our lifetimes. Perhaps we will reach a point of perfect brain preservation.

Most of the tech needed doesn't need to be invented yet. We just have to prevent the bare minimum of damage to keep from being irrevocably dead -- whatever that may be.

What limits are you referring to? Or are you saying this is a general rule? How do you know there are no exceptions in the physical universe? Do we have concrete reasons to assume it is not possible to create computers that calculate infinitely fast and take up an infinitesimal amount of volume? I imagine the human universe (using the word metaphorically) is going to change drastically. But I agree that most of the astronomical universe wouldn't be affected very quickly due to the speed of light barrier. On the other hand, a few billion years later it could look very different. Interstellar colonization using very small ships (bullets?) accelerated near the speed of light would be more realistic than large colony ships. Also, parts of the universe that are traveling away from us at high relativistic speeds might not ever be affected, or might take billions of (their) years to be affected. If the singularity involves infinite progression inward -- smaller and smaller computing devices -- outward expansion into the universe might be brought to a halt by the fact that it is unnecessary. It might even be considered distracting or disruptive. Entities would be unable to communicate in real-time over vast distances. Increasing rates of subjective time could make this more and more of a problem. Another direction it could take would be the simulation of new universes. Of course there would be crude virtual reality universes, but there could also be realistic large-scale physics simulations. A lot depends on where the actual limits of computation would be. If the limits are infinitely bounded, we could end up in charge of new Big Bang universes, or perhaps copies of the existing universe -- effectively giving us the ability to manipulate time and go faster than light (in the simulated universes).

Technology is advancing at a pretty fair clip at the moment. One of the more dramatic examples is computer processing power, which doubles in speed per unit cost every year and a half. Some people think that at some point, self-improving artificial intelligences will be invented. Alternately, or perhaps simultaneously, human minds will be emulated or "uploaded" in a way that lets them experience years of subjective time in just seconds of physical time. These will be able to discover the answers to scientific questions much faster than we baseline humans are able to. Inventing new ways to make themselves faster, smarter, and more sophisticated will become possible. From the perspective of physical time, this could be seen as a "singularity", an event which happens at an ever-increasing rate. So the questions: Is this a realistic scenario? Why or why not? If it happens, what might the universe look like afterward?

Hi, my name is Luke, I like science.