lsparrish comments on Optimism versus cryonics - Less Wrong

34 Post author: lsparrish 25 October 2010 02:13AM

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Comment author: lsparrish 26 October 2010 05:04:06PM 1 point [-]

Ok, not so trivial. The isotope breakdown issue might be unsolvable (unless you have nanobots to go in and scrub out the unstable isotopes with?) but I would imagine that to be quite a bit less than you get from solar incidence. Liquid helium cooling doesn't seem like it would cause information-theoretic damage, just additional cracking. Ice crystal formation is already taken care of at this point.

But liquid helium level preservation tech really does not seem likely to be needed, given how stable LN2 already gets you. The only reason to need it is if technological progression starts taking a really long time.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 26 October 2010 11:06:32PM 2 points [-]

If you've got good enough nanobots to remove unstable isotopes you almost certainly have the tech to do full out repair. I don't know if the radiation less than what you get from solar incidence. I suspect that it is but I also suspect that in a general underground environment much more radiation will be due to one's own body than the sun.

Cracking can include information theoretic damage if it mangles up the interface at synapses badly enough. We don't actually have a good enough understanding of how the brain stores information to really make more than very rough estimates. And cracking is also a problem for the cryonics proponents who don't self-identify with a computerized instantiation of their brain.