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'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 pattern the headset will detect it (and fire up your web browser or something). So there is some correlation somewhere.

So a more appropriate analogy would be if you tore out all the pages of Shakespeare, and laid them out next to eachother on the rooftop, and then had a bunch of low-res satellite photographs, but also more importantly, of various types of video recordings from moving satellites all pointing at that text. With enough pictures and videos, emphasis on number and diversity of viewpoints / moving pictures / different imaging techniques, you'll be able to eventually reconstruct quite a significant portion of the text if you had correspondingly amazing image-reconstruction technology.

(we can already do some pretty amazing things in that area from one single blurry picture to readable text, so imagine with the kind of future tech that reanimates dead people and massive visual datasets with varying angles and recording technologies...)

Still, it's true that it might not provide much information. But it also might provide more than enough. It also might provide a helpful little bit more. It's something that's pretty hard to estimate, and I would stake my chances on more data rather than less if I've got the money available and am going to get frozen anyway.

That'd be help for the people doing the reanimation, not the reanimated you?

Being a bit weird, I might actually prefer a cryonic preservation where the people reanimating me get basically zero information beyond my physical remains, and will need to bring me back and ask me if they want to know my name. That way I'd know that whoever gets brought back will probably have their mind-state pretty closely causally connected to the one I had going in the suspension, assuming they will have a mind at all. Having lots and lots of lifelog information seems like it... (read more)