The time has come, in my opinion, for cryoncists to let go of Eric Drexler's "nanotechnology" as an infeasible paleo-future idea from the 1980's, and set it aside into a category near the one we've assigned for flying cars, nuclear powered flashlights and other dubious technological proposals from the 20th Century.
Where does that leave cryonicists on the threshold of our mysterious, far-future year 2011? On the preservation side, we need to push a lot harder for advances in brain vitrification. On the conjectural revival side, we need to investigate connectomics, synthetic biology, organ printing and other real sciences and technologies which show progress in the here-and-now and give indications that they want to go to interesting places. (BTW, organ printing provides an example of "exaptation" as a source of technological progress, as Steven Johnson discusses in his new book, Where Good Ideas Come From. Who could have guessed 20 years ago that the ink jet printer would lend itself to the production of functioning human organs?)
Drexler's ideas have probably harmed cryonics on the whole in the past generation. They have made us complacent and accepting of unnecessary sloppiness in performing suspensions, which many of us have rationalized by the hand-waving about how our "friends in the future" will fix the damage caused by today's fucked-up suspensions with their magic nanomachines.
This simply will not do. Cryonics need rebooting, and this rebooting requires some fresh and empirically defensible thinking, along with a willingness to eat the sunk costs of chasing after mirages like "nanotechnology."
0 comments:
Post a Comment