What If You Freeze Your Brain?

What If You Freeze Your Brain?

What If You Freeze Your Brain?

The Hayflick limit this is the trait that due to the limitation of cell division dooms our lives to end someday when the cell division in our body ceases as living creatures we age antimodern science seeks to delay this moment and extend human life but death is completely inevitable most of all the scary thought is that we permanently lose our consciousness as it will end forever but what if you digitize your consciousness as of yet we're not able to do this no modern computer can even come close to replicating one millionth of what the human brain is capable of but this is not a reason to abandon digital immortality after all you can preserve your nervous system until the time when digitization will become routine to do this you'll first need to freeze your brain already many companies such as nest ohm offer the service for only $10,000 a small price to pay for immortality however in order to preserve not just a piece of gray matter sealed in the box of your skull but directly the consciousness itself you need to preserve the brain connect oh that is the structure of all the connections of your nervous system this means that each neuron and synapse the contact between nerve cells must be in the same condition as before freezing this will not be an easy task but if you want to be around to witness the end of the world and the colonization of other planets then you need to try and make an effort to make sure your brain is well treated with glutaraldehyde this is a special yellowish liquid that can preserve your synapses and prevent them from disintegrating this substance maintains its properties even at temperatures up to seventeen point six degrees Fahrenheit that's about minus eight Celsius but when the brain freezes the temperature can drop even lower to prevent your nerves from ending in collapse you should soak your brain with ethylene glycol a type of alcohol that will help turn your brain into a glassy mass but in this form it'll be able to withstand ultra-low temperatures now that your consciousness is sealed and preserved you need to read all the information from it therefore the next step will be emulation of the brain that is the reconstruction of all your nerve connections on a computer this will take very long time since the person has about 86 billion neurons as well as hundreds of trillions of synapses for comparison a roundworm has only 302neurons and 7,000 synapses didn't just choose this creature as an example and had random either because scientists have already recreated the worms nervous system in a robot the open worm project participants scanned neurons and their connections in a nematode worm and placed the nervous system in a Lego Mindstorms ev3 robot the robot has parts that almost completely correspond to the parts of the body of the nematode as a result the robot began to move like a real nematode without any additional programming creating a digital description of this small nervous system took researchers about 12 years another success that scientists have been able to achieve is the creation of an electronic map of the brain of a fly with a hundred thousand neurons therefore at this pace it might take about three and a half billion years to fully digitize a single human brain with modern computers nevertheless in order to recreate a full-fledged electronic map of your brain regardless of whether you're frozen or not first you would need to die this would be in order to cut each cubic millimeter of the brain into approximately 25,000parts in order to complete this tedious work it's necessary to clear the brain of blood after which it's necessary to cut layers just one micron thick and photograph the connections of nerve cells and the density level of their receptors each layer must then be scanned with an electron microscope that displays all of your neurons then Afterall the information about your brain is gathered it must be transferred into an electronic medium only a supercomputer can handle this alternatively you could choose blue gene whose performance reaches 20 petaflop s-- that is more than 20 quadrillion floating-point operations per second this computer can simulate your brain including each neural column a structural unit of the cerebral cortex each neuron in a column has the same function the column itself consists of six layers each with the thickness of a credit card and with a total number of neurons between 1,000 and 10,000 so far scientists have only managed to simulate just one column of a mouse brain to simulate 10,000 neurons about 8,192computer processors were needed the resulting model took up about 100gigabytes so in comparison the human brain will need at least 1 billion gigabytes of memory and about eighty two billion processors but never mind how much computing power this will require this huge amount of information needs to be stored somewhere according to researchers by 2025 there will be approximately 163 zettabytes on all electronic devices on the planet which is 163 billion times more than on a one terabyte hard drive this brings humanity closer to the so called Birkenstein bound the limit of information that can be contained in certain volumes when using the maximum amount of energy simply put there will be so much data on our planet that all the supercomputers put together simply cannot accommodate it not to mention the countless terabytes of your brain therefore another storage medium is needed scientists believe that individual atoms or fragments of artificial DNA can become a new kind of storage biologists and geneticists at the Wyss Institute at Harvard University managed to put 5.5petabytes of data that is about seven hundred terabytes into one gram of DNA the human genome has hundreds of thousands of DNA strands and consists of approximately 20,000 genes a third of which encode the brain directly in your brain there are about 5000 strands of DNA weighing about one point to picograms or 1.2 times 10 to the negative 12 grams this is not enough to hold one's consciousness but still more compact than digital media therefore it’s much more convenient to record your consciousness in your own genetic material however there is one problem scientists believe that even if we put information into every subatomic particle on the planet with the current speed of data generation in about 345years we'll run out of space even if we delete all unnecessary data such as bad memories unfunny memes and BOTS from social networks it still won't be enough then you have to use the atoms from the entire solar system or even the galaxy but this will require a tremendous amount of energy in addition all these atomic storage media need to be kept somewhere but even if it's possible to overcome all of the technical difficulties and use all the resources of the observable universe the biggest question remains will the digital copy be completely identical to your personality after all your consciousnesses significantly dependent on your physical body hormones which are secreted in other parts of the body that are not even related to the brain largely determine your emotional state even those substances that are produced directly by the brain for example dopamine which influences will and motivation or serotonin which provides good mood be converted through a digital medium another point is that gender appearance and physical skills whether it's the ability to draw play the guitar or snowboard down a mountain slope largely determine your place in society and shape your worldview without all of this there’s a risk of being nothing more than a disjointed dataset now imagine for a second that the technology to digitize your brain is already available today as shown in the famous series altered carbon your consciousness has already been transferred to a computer but you still remain alive or let's even complicate the situation further and suppose there are several copies of your personality each is located in a different place and accordingly will be occupied with different activities you will continue to do your usual business the first copy will start to learn foreign languages the second will go on trip around the world and the third for example will spend its days exchanging funny memes with friends then you die and leave behind three digital views which of them will actually represent you if they've all had different experiences write your thoughts on this in the comments below.