X-Message-Number: 17161
From: 
Date: Tue, 31 Jul 2001 16:18:00 EDT
Subject: Nano repair and computing power

I see two ways to see cryonics:
1/ The Alcor way: Frankly, cryonics is unworkable today and frozen corpses 
will remain so. The less we have the better. The only usefulness of current 
cryonics suspension is to advance the technology until we have a working (ie 
reversible) cryopreservation.

2/ The cryonics Institute way: Cryonics is a gamble on future technologies, 
mostly in the nano tech domain. What we can do now is freezing to keep 
biological informations. That information is scrambled by the freezing 
process, to get it only a little less so is not worthy, the difference is not 
significant. Anyway, we will need a powerful nano repair technology to get 
out of the fridge.

When most nano supporter think about nano repair, I feel they think in fact 
about micro surgery done by micrometer sized robots. That technology may 
indeed be produced as a spin off from micro electronics device making. It 
would be useful in cryonics to repair cracks in frozen bodies for example.

That would be fine, but it fall short of the requested capabilities to get 
out of the frost. The main problems are at molecular level, we must reshape 
badly folded proteins or membrane molecules. This is a quantum problem, and 
to solve it, the nano system must be able to compute all the intermediate 
steps between the actual structure and the retrofitted one. 

The problem: even the biggest supercomputer today can't solve that problem of 
a single molecule.

What about the billions of molecules to repair? What about putting the 
computer on a molecular scale system?
Don't tell me the Moore law will solve that, we are here the back against a 
wall: The computer can't have many atom in it, because it is on a device not 
larger than a molecular complex.

Any ideas about that problem?

Yvan Bozzonetti.

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