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jkaufman comments on Brain Preservation - Less Wrong
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Many times, unless you weasel pretty strongly with "any understandings of the workings behind". Science fiction has been around a long time. Mary Shelly, writing in 1818 and aware of Galvani's experiments with electricity and frogs, conceived of applying this to reanimation of the dead. Jules Verne, writing in 1865, conceived of traveling to the moon with a space cannon.
I think you'd have to stretch the meaning of scientific understanding pretty far to claim that the 19th-century writers speculating about reanimating the dead with electricity understood what they were talking about.
Besides, if I'm remembering Frankenstein right, there's no clear method of reanimation given but it's at least partly occult: Shelley name-drops several famous alchemists. She might have been inspired at some level by Galvani's experiments, but the procedure involving a dramatic lightning storm and "give my creation life!" is a cinematic invention -- and arguably has a certain occult flavor in its own right, given all the associations with divine fire that lightning's picked up in culture.
What about: "you'd have to stretch the meaning of scientific understanding pretty far to claim that early 21st-century people speculating about reanimating the dead with uploading understood what they were talking about."
I could easily see the people who figure out whole brain emulation saying the same of us.
Nah. I can see the scanning procedure needed for whole brain emulation turning out to require some unspecified technology that's way too difficult for 21st-century science, or Moore's Law running out of steam before we reach the densities needed to do the actual emulation, but either one would be a Verne-type error; I can't see a category error on the order of electrical impulse => true resurrection happening unless we're very badly wrong about some very fundamental features of how the brain works.
I agree with Nornagest's interpretation regarding whether people in the 19th century had any idea what they were talking about with respect to reanimating the dead. With regards to space cannons, those turned out to be unworkable and we never made them at all. The gap from "maybe we could get to the moon with some sort of space-rocket" to actually making spaceships was much shorter.
There are plenty of cases where speculative technologies have turned out to be unworkable and were never actually put into use, but that's an error of a different kind than speculating that a specific technology is hundreds of years off.
Still, there are projects of space rockets as early as 1881 (Nikolay Kibalich), and maybe earlier. Tsiolkovskiy has published his formula for estimating required amount of fuel in 1897, 60 years before first artificial satellite.
In 1822 there were some designs of Babbage's Difference Engine. His designs dated by 1847-1849 were implemented and worked - a century and a half later. First Turing complete computer to be built was apparently ENIAC... in 1946.
So, for primary wishes of humanity, one century from working blueprint to implementation (of a more efficient plan) is not unprecedented. Of course, we don't know whether our current cryonics is theoretically enough for preservation....
Due to lack of ways to calibrate, "hundreds of years" cannot be taken as a precise prediction, of course. On the other hand, "we have a general idea" cannot be taken as a prediction, either. After all, fusion power plant could turn out to be simpler than reviving cryonics patients.