supporters of cryonics happily stop looking for alternate life-extension strategies almost as soon as they discover cryonics
I see no such pattern. Among people I’ve met, there’s a high correlation between support for cryonics and practicing calorie restriction, and a moderately high correlation with attending life extension conferences.
The few people I can think of who may be using cryonics as a reason for losing interest in alternatives are the ones who think cryonics has a much greater than 50% chance of working.
the consensus is that these techniques are likely to offer a higher success rate once they are perfected
The consensus I see is more like “nobody knows whether they’ll work”.
I see no such pattern. Among people I’ve met, there’s a high correlation between support for cryonics and practicing calorie restriction, and a moderately high correlation with attending life extension conferences.
I agree with you to a large extent. It’s plausible that low-tech life extension strategies could have a major impact given rapidly advancing technology. So that the extra few years you buy by eating your vegetables and exercising regularly could easily turn out to be critical.
By contrast, many of the ideas in the original post are not all that plausible. For example I have read that the resolution of a standard MRI is about 1mm. It seems very unlikely that this would be sufficient resolution to accomplish anything worthwhile in terms of recreating a person’s mind. And even if it did, you will still run into the “matter transporter problem.”
I do think that the original poster has a bit of a point, i.e. that people tend to run with the pack in terms of their life extension decisions.
I see no such pattern. Among people I’ve met, there’s a high correlation between support for cryonics and practicing calorie restriction, and a moderately high correlation with attending life extension conferences.
The few people I can think of who may be using cryonics as a reason for losing interest in alternatives are the ones who think cryonics has a much greater than 50% chance of working.
The consensus I see is more like “nobody knows whether they’ll work”.
I agree with you to a large extent. It’s plausible that low-tech life extension strategies could have a major impact given rapidly advancing technology. So that the extra few years you buy by eating your vegetables and exercising regularly could easily turn out to be critical.
By contrast, many of the ideas in the original post are not all that plausible. For example I have read that the resolution of a standard MRI is about 1mm. It seems very unlikely that this would be sufficient resolution to accomplish anything worthwhile in terms of recreating a person’s mind. And even if it did, you will still run into the “matter transporter problem.”
I do think that the original poster has a bit of a point, i.e. that people tend to run with the pack in terms of their life extension decisions.