On Fri, Feb 5, 2016 spudboy100 via Everything List < [email protected]> wrote:
> > > Now, are there better methods for immortality, survival-wise, but its all > a matter of opinion. > > There's a new attempt by a group of neuroscientists, that came on today, > in Discovery magazine, that deals with non-cryogenic brain preservation. I > glanced through the article, but, have no details on the method. That idea has been around for a long time and Alcor has looked into it, but as of today they don't offer it and neither does anybody else; and there is a reason for that. The advantage of chemically fixing the brain is that the long term maintenance costs are less than cryonics because you don't have to keep things cold, but it turns out that such costs are only about 25% of the total costs of cryopreserving a patient because liquid nitrogen is only about as expensive as milk. And it's not like a brief power failure will thaw out the frozen brains, Alcor has done tests and even with zero power and zero maintenance their dewars are so well constructed that it would take about 4 months before the brains got dangerously warm. To chemically fix a brain you need osmium tetroxide and other chemicals that are very expensive, hard to handle, toxic and potentially dangerous to the crew doing the preservation unless extreme safety precautions are taken. And with Cryonics, unless we're talking about many millions of years, as long as things remain cold pretty much all the damage that is going to be done has already been done by the time the brain reaches liquid nitrogen temperatures. I'm not worried about damage caused during thawing because that won't be done with existing technology; the information will probably be read out by disassembling the brain from the outside in while it remains in solid form. I don't know if chemical fixation would remain as stable over the centuries as freezing, my hunch is that cryonics has a small edge over fixation in this regard but I could be dead wrong, maybe it's a big edge. And I don't want to be dead. Another advantage cold has over chemicals in preserving the brain is that if the distribution of cryo-preservative isn't completely uniform and doesn't reach certain parts of the brain things might not be hopeless because at least it still gets frozen, so you still might be able to get information out of it if your technology is good enough; but if the chemical fixative doesn't reach a part of the brain that part rots away and things are far far more serious. Perhaps someday chemical fixation will improve and prove to be superior to cryonics but as of today Cryonics is the only option anybody offers. John K Clark > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
