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Edited on Tue Apr-13-04 04:11 AM by cryofan
That term "neuroarchaeology" pretty much says it all. If you could get your "brain information" to a sufficiently advanced civilization without undergoing too great a degradation, voila--resurrection. The problem is that the brain begins to degrade soon after death. The cells of the brain are highly suspectible to a form of "eating themselves alive" known as "apoptosis".
Apoptosis occurs when a cell is starved of oxygen (like when you die and stop breathing/pumping blood to your brain cells (called "ischemia")). After 24 hours of ischemia at room temps, apoptosis has rendered your brain to a state of near-liquidity--a soupy, featureless mess. IOW, a day or so after you "die", your brain information has completely been obliterated. If, that is, your brain is just kept at room temps.
To restate, once apoptosis has its way with your brain, even if you could get your brain to some super civilization 1000 years from now, even they could not use neuroarchaeological techniques to resurrect you--there would be nothing left for them to work on; no information from the brain structure is preserved for them to work on.
However, HOWEVER, if, IF, you could lower the temp of your brain soon after you die, apoptosis would slow down very much, and you would have several days, or even more time, before apoptosis reduces your brain information to a soupy consistency. However, after a few days/weeks/months, even if you can hold apoptosis at bay by lowering temperature, other processes begin to degrade the brain structure. These other processes are known essentially as "rot".
So, what to do? You can reduce temps to say, 35 degrees F in order to stop apoptosis, but after a couple of weeks, the brain starts to rot anyway, eventually causing loss of all brain information.
So the problem that presents itself now is, now that you have staved off apoptosis, what longterm solution stops rot? The answer is cryopreservation in liquid nitrogen, after a suitable washout with a suitable cryopreservative (antifreeze). The cryopreservative stops the formation of ice crystals which could severely disrupt the brain structure, thus potentially causing loss of brain information.
So, you cryopreserve the brain, and store it in liquid nitrogen gas (LN2). Storage in LN2 lowers the brain temperature to about minus 400 degrees F.
Once the brain is in LN2, and is at approximately -400F, all chemical processes virtually stop. The brain then remains virtually the same, preserving the information for 10,000 years or more. 10,000 years is plenty of time for that super-civilization to develop, one which has developed advanced techniques of neuroarchaeology. They pull your brain out of the LN2, study your brain, recover the information, and, voila, you are alive again, with your brain stashed suitably in an advanced SuperBody which gives you virtual immortality. Nice work if you can get it, etc.
---------- QED.
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