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It just so happens that your friend here is only mostly dead. There’s a big difference between mostly dead and all dead.
 ~ Miracle Max from The Princess Bride

I read a Wired.com article about a new brain peeling machine and several seemingly unconnected ideas came together in my head. Here’s the short version (links to referenced articles are after the jump):

Pascal’s wager states that since we can’t know if there is a God (and eternal life) we should make an attempt to believe because the consequences of being wrong are high. Now bring it into present times with a different wager. Since we can’t know if a frozen dead human can, or can’t, be repaired and resuscitated by future technology, we should be frozen after our death. If you can afford it, you’ve got nothing to lose.

Freezing a freshly dead human isn’t the same as chucking a pound of ground beef into the freezer, but in both cases, damage happens during the freezing process. How much, and if it’s ultimately repairable — who knows? There’s also ongoing freezer/storage maintenance and the risk that the only copy of you will be damaged in accidental thaw, a natural disaster, or other problem.

I’ve been assuming that only a head would need to be frozen and specifically only the brain needs to be preserved. Future nano-whatevers and year 2708 technology can recreate your body (or a better one) from your DNA.

Things get better with the brainpeeling machine. Take one freshly dead human and peel and map their brain to the smallest detail needed to reproduce it accurately later. Now you have a big collection of 1’s and 0’s that can be stored instead of frozen brain meat. You can make multiple copies of the brainmap to protect against natural disasters and human error.

This introduces different risks — mapping destroys the original, so if the conversion process is faulty there could be problems. Perhaps those scientists of 2708 can correct for low resolution mapping or transcription errors. It might be similar to how the faulty optics of the Hubble space telescope were corrected in post-processing or how an old recording can have pops and scratches removed.

Maybe by the time that mapping is advanced enough to capture all the details, it won’t be destructive or invasive. It might be a high-resolution MRI-like scanner that can map the connnections and structures. The original can be frozen as a backup to the backup. Maybe the scan will be taken while you’re alive….

Go to a cocktail party, coffeehouse, or dorm lounge where you can argue the details and impossibilities of it all with your friends. Like I mentioned, there are some reference articles following the jump.
(Continued)