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Cryogenics is here now and widely used. Where do you think they get liquid helium from? Cryocoolers, cryostats, and cryogenic vacuum pumps have been in full mass production since at least the early 70s. Superconduction has been used for real world applications since before 2000.
"Mind uploading" has existed ever since the invention of writing; it's just gotten more efficient.
Cryogenics is probably the easiest of the three to achieve. Biological immortality will require solving a large number of complex problems. I'm not sure about mind uploading; there may be some quantum mechanical issues we haven't discovered yet.
Cryogenics is probably the easiest of the three to achieve. Biological immortality will require solving a large number of complex problems. I'm not sure about mind uploading; there may be some quantum mechanical issues we haven't discovered yet.
There is a thriving cryogenics industry that has been established over the last 40-50 years.
Even back in the mid 80s I worked at a plant that had a huge LN2 tank outside. I remember when superconductivity was still fairly new in the late 1960s. LIquid helium has been around for at least 25 or 30 years.
This discussion kind of reminds me of my friend who was informed by one of his mechanical engineering professors that "some day, we can expect to see the use of fiber reinforced plastic in automotive suspensions" and replied "Yes, my Corvette out there in the parking lot has a fiber reinforced plastic rear transverse leaf spring right now."
Not sure what exactly you mean by "mind uploading". A lot of what goes on in our brain is a direct result of hormones and other chemicals that are produced external to our brain. And a lot of the processing of our brain is to run our bodies, and that in turn affects the way we think. We might be able to upload our memory, but what happens to it then? Are you saying upload and then download into a new body? Or are you saying our cognition would be uploaded? But our cognition is not independent of our bodies. So I am going to say that our cognition and consciousness will never be "uploaded". Perhaps some memory will be able to be stored externally but not sure what use that is. Backup?
Cryogenic store and recovery of a human I think is possible. People have fallen into very cold water, died, and have been revived hours later. So it seems possible to extend that arbitrarily long some day.
Immortality will never happen. I think we will extend our life expectancy significantly, maybe by 50-100 years, but never to infinity. There are so many reasons why we age and we cannot control most of them.
Cryogenics is probably the easiest of the three to achieve. Biological immortality will require solving a large number of complex problems. I'm not sure about mind uploading; there may be some quantum mechanical issues we haven't discovered yet.
That depends on how they do it. There are some people who argue that we won't be able to freeze and unthaw people until after we've achieved biological immortality because currently freezing people destroys their cells. The hope is that in the future people will have the technology to re-build their cells...like demolishing a house but keeping some pictures, and the architectural drawings, and the pieces...which is why many people only have their heads frozen.
I don't know which of the three would happen first. I might see biological immortality happening first...but I don't know that would be easiest. It might be the hardest. I think people would want that the most of the three though, and that might help push it to the front of the line.
Not sure what exactly you mean by "mind uploading". A lot of what goes on in our brain is a direct result of hormones and other chemicals that are produced external to our brain. And a lot of the processing of our brain is to run our bodies, and that in turn affects the way we think. We might be able to upload our memory, but what happens to it then? Are you saying upload and then download into a new body? Or are you saying our cognition would be uploaded? But our cognition is not independent of our bodies. So I am going to say that our cognition and consciousness will never be "uploaded". Perhaps some memory will be able to be stored externally but not sure what use that is. Backup?
Cryogenic store and recovery of a human I think is possible. People have fallen into very cold water, died, and have been revived hours later. So it seems possible to extend that arbitrarily long some day.
Immortality will never happen. I think we will extend our life expectancy significantly, maybe by 50-100 years, but never to infinity. There are so many reasons why we age and we cannot control most of them.
Genetic engineering and nano-machines in the bloodstream to wander around the body repairing individual cells to take care if the inevitable damage that genetic engineering alone can't handle is my assumption for how that would work
but that depends on how far into the future we're talking about. All three of these might very well be those sorts of "god level" technologies we can't achieve until our descendants would appear like gods to us, somewhere far into the future.
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