I think there's some basic assumption that we disagree on but haven't identified explicitly yet. In order to try and do that, I want to ask you: do you disagree with any of the following statements, and if yes, could you tell where and why?
- an example of nanotechnology exists and works, it's called "life"
- this particular technology is in principle able to do the tasks required to revive a properly cryopreserved person, even though it does not do this now
- it is real for humans to learn in time how to make this technology do that
- current preservation techniques store enough information to revive a human using sufficiently advanced nanotechnology
(4) unknown, knowable but only in a very far future (if at all).
So, in short nanotechnology is just like every other technology, it has laws and limits and does not automatically allow us to do everything we would like it to be able to do.
For an analogy: we know that the ribosome + DNA complex creates proteins. But we are still bound in terms of expression by what cells as a concept are capable of.
So even if we can imagine life created at will and even if we can imagine all kinds of amazing creatures there is absolutely no way of knowing whether or not we will ever have the technology to direct things in such a way that these desires and imaginations will come true. Compared to the suggestion that we can resurrect a dead person creating a fire breathing dragon out of Condor and Komodo Varan DNA with some basic chemistry thrown in for pyrotechnics is childs play.
It is at its heart the difference between science and science fiction.
That's why we will most likely not have a space elevator (we know of no material strong enough for the filament) and that's why there will never be a ringworld.
Now for those things we have very clear physical limits that we have identified and we know that these limits will be for all practical purposes unsurmountable.
In the case of cryopreservation 'all bets are off', the gap between where our current understanding is located and the required advances means that we are essentially postulating that people in the advanced future will become gods.
That's a leap too far in my understanding of how human progress has worked to date.
So if I understand you correctly - you're saying that we don't know today the constraints of that particular problem, so we can't make a good guess for the feasibility of (2) and (3). Therefore current culture around cryonics is vastly overstating the chance of success, to the point that it starts looking to you like a scam.
I guess the main point of difference is our estimate of how likely is that those yet unexplored constraints will let us reverse cryopreserving. I seem to have more hope for that than you do, but I admit, at this point it's probably a bit of a guesswork.
You got it perfectly. At some point bets about what is possible in the future become meaningless and this is way past the ability of science to extrapolate what will one day be scientifically possible or declared to be impossible.
Thanks for the exchange, off to bed here (4:39 am...).
> Thanks for the exchange, off to bed here (4:39 am...).
You're welcome, and thank you as well. Also going to bed (03:49 AM here, and I was supposed to be coding up my thesis... I guess it's time to turn on the noprocrast again).
- an example of nanotechnology exists and works, it's called "life"
- this particular technology is in principle able to do the tasks required to revive a properly cryopreserved person, even though it does not do this now
- it is real for humans to learn in time how to make this technology do that
- current preservation techniques store enough information to revive a human using sufficiently advanced nanotechnology