X-Message-Number: 6710
From: 
Date: Wed, 7 Aug 1996 20:55:44 -0700
Subject: SCI.CRYONICS Prometheus and Nanotechnology

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In  #6696 On Tue, 06 Aug 1996 Will Dye <> Wrote:


                >I guess you could call me a nanotech "true believer". I see
                
                >no _direct_ justification of the Prometheus project, because
                
                >the certainty that nanotech will be developed as (Drexler)
                
                >projected is so high that our efforts would be far better
                                >spent supporting Foresight than Prometheus.  
                  
                  
I'm a true believer in Nanotechnology too, I've supported Foresight as well
as Prometheus and will continue to do so, but of the two I think Prometheus
is more important. Nanotechnology already receives a lot of finical support,
and there is no doubt it will get vastly more in the future. It will take
trillions of dollars to develop Nanotechnology but I don't think there will
be much trouble finding the money because there are a huge number of short
and mid range applications this research will find along the way. A million
dollars a year for 10 years would not help Nanotechnology much, perhaps it
would advance the date of the singularity by 15 minutes. It's different for
Prometheus, the amount of money spent on organ preservation research is
ridiculously tiny and the amount spent specifically on brain preservation is
almost zero, so Prometheus should get a lot of bang for it's research bucks,
the money could make a real difference.


I think it's a certainty that Nanotechnology will be developed sooner or later,
but that doesn't mean that Cryonics is a sure thing, much less that my own 
survival is assured. If the information about an individual is just not in 
the frozen brain but has been destroyed in the  freezing process, then even 
Nanotechnology can't help. Personally I think, because of the redundancy of 
the brain and the vast power of Nanotechnology, that there is a good chance 
the damage caused to the brain by current methods can be unscrambled in the 
future, BUT I don't know that for a fact. Memory is probably encoded as 
Long Term Potentiation of the neurons, but we don't know that for sure or if 
there are other memory mechanism . With all these unknowns we can't be sure 
what sort of damage we are causing or if it can be repaired. For something 
this important I want to be certain.



                                            John K Clark      
                                            
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