If you could take it with you, what would you take?

DataPacRat

The Scenario: Our protagonist estimates that present-day cryonics has around a five percent chance of leading to a successful revival. Since that's better than the zero percent chance if he doesn't sign up, and he can afford it, he makes the necessary arrangements. As part of those arrangements, he receives a lockable file-cabinet drawer, in which he can put any desired mementos, knick-knacks, or other objects; and which will be protected as securely as his own cryo-preserved body. The drawer is around one and a half cubic feet: two feet deep, one foot wide, nine inches high.

The Question: What should he arrange to have placed in his drawer?

Some of the more obvious options:

* Long-term archival DVDs, such as M-Discs, containing as much of his personal computer's data as possible. With slimline jewel cases, around 400 such discs would fit, which could hold up to around 1.5 terabytes. (Secondary question: Which data to archive?)
* Objects of sentimental value
* Objects with present-day value: cash, gold coins, jewelry
* Objects with predicted future value: collectibles, small antiques
* In honor of previous seekers of immortality: a copy of the ancient Egyptian funerary text, the Book of Coming Forth By Day (aka the Book of the Dead).
* For the purely practical and/or munchkin approach: a weapon, such as a fighting knife or even a pistol

I'd need to know how to relate the scan data to anything resembling high-level thought for them to be useful to me after being woken up.

Also, these scanners would need to be some serious future technology. Anything like today's brain scans would be about as much help for reconstructing personality as low-resolution satellite photograph of a library building would be for transcribing the works of Shakespeare.

I'm not sure the analogy is appropriate. The sat-photos of the library give no information on the works of Shakespeare because the library's rooftop (and the bookshelves, and the book cover, and the pages themselves) obscures the text, and there's no traceable causal relation between the rooftop and what Shakespeare wrote.

However, even with current "off-the-shelf" brain scanners, you can with some training and machine-learning have your scanner recognize specific thoughts, so that whenever you think "Browser" in just the right mental pa... (read more)