If IVF got to the ‘combine egg and sperm’ stage and they knew that they didn’t know what to do next so they froze it in liquid nitrogen, waiting for appropriate methods to come along, I wouldn’t think it terribly unlikely that it would, in the end, work.
The worse a job we do up front, the harder it is in the end. If we figure that they will eventually get really really atomically good at scanning, then the only question is, ‘is the information still there’. That’s where the 80% (or higher) figures come in. Also, some of the high end estimates aren’t about present tech but about best possible tech. Like, I’m around 98% sure that some cryo-like technique would work to preserve the information so that an arbitarily powerful but physically possible future entity could recover it. I’m noticeably less sure that our present techniques work (but still pretty confident).
If IVF got to the ‘combine egg and sperm’ stage and they knew that they didn’t know what to do next so they froze it in liquid nitrogen, waiting for appropriate methods to come along, I wouldn’t think it terribly unlikely that it would, in the end, work.
The worse a job we do up front, the harder it is in the end. If we figure that they will eventually get really really atomically good at scanning, then the only question is, ‘is the information still there’. That’s where the 80% (or higher) figures come in. Also, some of the high end estimates aren’t about present tech but about best possible tech. Like, I’m around 98% sure that some cryo-like technique would work to preserve the information so that an arbitarily powerful but physically possible future entity could recover it. I’m noticeably less sure that our present techniques work (but still pretty confident).