”It takes about 1025 bits to store the molecular structure of the brain,” says Merkle. ”The processing power to repair the brain alone might be 1037 switching operations (1031 floating-point operations)—the equivalent of 100 million copies of today’s fastest supercomputer running flat out for three years. With Moore’s Law doubling computer power every year, we’ll have that kind of computational power in a single supercomputer in about 26 years,” he adds. ”Give it another 10 years and the price will drop from $100 million to $100 000. Somewhere around 2050, that much computational power will be readily available to individuals.” And it doesn’t matter if Moore’s Law slows down, Merkle says: ”A person at the temperature of liquid nitrogen can literally wait centuries.”
That loose deadline was a selling point for Merkle when he first investigated life-extension technologies for himself and his wife. Cryonics offered the only potential solution that wasn’t tied to a person’s lifetime.
But is it a solution—or a pointless gamble? In The Skeptics Dictionary: A Collection of Strange Beliefs, Amusing Deceptions, and Dangerous Delusions (Wiley, 2003), retired philosophy professor Robert Todd Carroll wrote: ”A business based on little more than hope for developments that can be imagined by science is quackery. There is little reason to believe that the promises of cryonics will ever be fulfilled.”
Stephen Barrett, a retired psychiatrist in Chapel Hill, N.C., who operates the Web site Quackwatch, a health-care consumer-advocacy network, agrees. ”The odds are pretty close to zero that people who are pronounced dead would have any remaining brain function or restorability. Brain cells die fairly quickly and would have to be regenerated in sufficient order and numbers to restore functionality. And then you’d have to restore the rest of the body. The obstacles are so enormous, it’s a foolish investment. You’re better off putting the money toward improving your life today or doing something worthwhile for others.”
This article originally appeared in print as "Die Another Day."
