Doesn’t this seem to imply that cryonics aren’t that farfetched? If 20,000yo cells that are badly damaged can be almost-revived from being on ice, couldn’t a well-frozen brain and body be restored?
Obviously there is some difference betweeen thawing a few cells in the substrate of another organism; and reviving a whole being, but the chance doesn’t seem to be zero.
My layperson understanding of it would be that reviving a cell would be like finding a house 2,000 years from now that is preserved well enough that you can get the lights to turn on if you hook up the power. Getting a brain to turn on would be like finding an entire modern city that’s preserved in similar fashion. I may be wrong, but I think it’s a massive jump in complexity.
They're not even attempting to revive a frozen mammoth, if that's what you mean. Each tissue type would have to be thawed properly, and we don't have the tech to do that. https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-have-found-a-way-to-... Anyway these things weren't flash-frozen, so most cells were probably torn apart as the ice crystals formed.
The real question is the same as with teleportation (since it was brought up already) - it's probably not "you" anymore from YOUR perspective even if they do revive "you". As in, it's an identical consciousness, but reset, to where "you" died when frozen, from your perspective.
Reviving cells is not same thing as reviving an organ along with its interdependencies. Perhaps we can revive a cell, with some luck get a stem cell from it, then develop eggs and sperms from it, fertilize it in a dish and then grow it in an artificial womb to create a new animal. With few iterations we might be able to get the original species back.
That in my opinion is a better way than actually reviving a person or brain.
I suspect that scanning cells and then emulating cleaned versions of them will be practical before direct frozen brain reanimation. Thus, if you get your brain cryogenically frozen for 70 grand, you may "wake up" 200 years from now in a robot or android body. (The interest on your parking tickets will be yuuuge.)
You not only need to make every cell on the frozen brain to thaw properly and go back to work, but you'd need to preserve all the connections between them in order to have the person back.
They attempted to use parts of a frozen cell, not to revive it. What they describe would be closer to cloning then anything else. I wonder here, what is the current cloning rate of success for the procedure they tried here but with fresh DNA? Is there enough experience with that to make sense taking on damaged cells now?
Obviously there is some difference betweeen thawing a few cells in the substrate of another organism; and reviving a whole being, but the chance doesn’t seem to be zero.