Planning for Preservation in the Age of AI

Nectome liked my earlier essay, and reached out to hire me to write more about their project, and about cryonics more broadly. This is the first such piece.A friend of mine, just a few years older than me, was diagnosed with cancer a few weeks ago. It’s only Stage 1 and in an area where it can probably be treated well with surgery. She was wise enough to seriously plan for the possibility, and that “just in case” really paid off. Still, her situation could get worse in the coming weeks. It’s a sharp reminder of the specter of death, and the uncertainty we live with, even when relatively young.Many years ago, I served as an official witness when this same friend signed up for cryonics. She and her husband joined the growing group of my friends and family who have plans to try and survive, in some way or another, to see a glorious future. More recently, I’ve been pleased to learn about how Nectome offers a substantial upgrade to that plan, and others in my community — my friends, my wife, my parents — have shared my (cautious) optimism there. But whether we take advantage of Nectome’s services or more traditional cryo, I think there’s reason to hope.And what a hope! Three hundred and fifty years ago, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek was the first person to ever see a microbe. Looking through primitive microscopes at pond water, he opened the doors to new vistas of scientific understanding. And yet, the germ theory of disease — much less a rich understanding of the biochemistry and physics of life — was still hundreds of years away from becoming consensus. Imagine waking up from cryopreservation in the comparably distant year of 2364, like three characters on the Season 1 finale of Star Trek: The Next Generation. In such a future, surely their cancers could be cured, their flesh mended, and the frailty of age dispelled by medical science and technology that makes our current era seem like the late 1600s!What might that distant future be like? Might we travel the cosmos? Live wi