Cryonics , Cryptography, and Maximum Likelihood Estimation by Ralph C. Merkle Xerox PARC , 3333 Coyote Hill Road, Palo Alto, CA, 94304. This paper was published in the Proceedings of the First Extropy Institute Conference, held at Sunnyvale, California in 1994. Some changes have been made to this version. A more general overview of the technical feasibility of cryonics is available at http://www.merkle.com/cryo/techFeas.html Introduction Most people, if they think of cryonics at all, think of Woody Allen in Sleeper , Sigorney Weaver in Aliens , or Mel Gibson in Forever Young . The hero, after spending decades or centuries in the deep freeze, thaws out gradually and somewhat painfully. Rather stiff from the cold, the warmth of the new era slowly penetrates into their chilled limbs until they at last stretch and look about the world with renewed interest and vitality. Not! All in all, our hero is not going to simply thaw out and walk off. And yet the literature on freezing injury, on ischemia, and on the other damage likely caused by a cryonic suspension forced me to conclude that cryonics would almost surely work: how can this be? Molecules and people Fundamentally, people are made of molecules. If those molecules are arranged in the right way, the person is healthy. If the're arranged in the wrong way, the person is unhealthy or worse. While a surgeon's knife does indeed rearrange molecular structure, it does so only in the crudest fashion. The living tissue itself is what really arranges and rearranges the intricate and subtle molecular structures that underlie life and health. When the tissue is too badly damaged, when intracellular levels of ATP are too low to provide the energy the tissue needs to function, when its own internal structure is disrupted, it can no longer heal itself. Today's surgical tools, gross and imprecise at the cellular and molecular level, can no more aid in this process than a wrecking ball could be used to repair a Swiss watch. | |
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