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Comment by XorNot | Hacker News Reader

The problem here isn't the idea, it's that absolutely no one has done any useful precursor research.

Discussing replacement bodies is pretty rich when spinal cord injuries prognosis is still lifelong paralysis.

And if I were to extend that thought a little further: we're more likely to develop useful and less invasive rejuvenation technology then to try and do surgical body transplants because the technology you'd need to fix spinal cord injury - which is mandatory - would have a lot more overlap and applicability to in situ tissue repair anyway.

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> Discussing replacement bodies is pretty rich

Reconnecting spinal nerves does not look impossible. But I don't see any other feasible way for people whose heads are cryogenically stored to have bodies again, except cloning a new body for them.

In general, the idea of producing a body that lacks the brain but has everything else intact is very rational. Its doubtless creepiness may wane with time.

I still expect that growing particular tissues and whole organs (like liver, or kidneys, or bone) will end up being a faster route to cloned organ replacement. In particular, a body takes like 20 years to grow to the "finished" state, and a separate organ could grow much faster.

> But I don't see any other feasible way for people whose heads are cryogenically stored to have bodies again, except cloning a new body for them.

Well the first step would be to understand how to undo the damage caused by freezing. We’re arguably further away from this than we are from any other part of the process. We might never be able to do this, freezing might just be too lossy.

I suppose we can postpone this problem for another 100 years.

Haha. As far as I’ve heard the frozen head companies have a pretty terrible track record. The odds of them keeping the heads frozen continuously for 100 years are not good.

Reconnection does not look impossible. But it will be extremely hard.

I think what is much more intractable is actually massive amounts of axons you'd need to reconnect, and you'd need extremely good classification to connect the right axons from host body and brain together. I think the only way to do it is to coax the new body/brain combo into self-repair.

>But I don't see any other feasible way for people whose heads are cryogenically stored to have bodies again, except cloning a new body for them.

https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/jadensadventures/images/0/...

Go no farther than Futurama! Its very first episode sort of tackles the issue.

> But I don't see any other feasible way for people whose heads are cryogenically stored to have bodies again, except cloning a new body for them.

As an old (at least decades) concept towards solving this, there could be a translation interface layer between the part of the brainstem still attached to the brain, and the body into which it's going.

Aside from the technical challenges, it'd probably best have its translation vocabulary built from recorded signals of the primary body. ie recordings of actual daily movement, taken prior to surgery

> In general, the idea of producing a body that lacks the brain but has everything else intact is very rational. Its doubtless creepiness may wane with time.

I'm old enough that I remember when artificial hearts and heart transplants were considered creepy. Now they're considered heroic and vital life-saving treatments.

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