Sparks Brain Preservation
A Non-profit Organization
This page describes some potential future technologies that could be used for Biological Revival. Also see Biological Revival Molecules. This page is organized with the easier technologies toward the top, and time spans are given in an effort to compare complexities. But, of course, any predictions are guaranteed to be spectacularly wrong. The technologies below won't happen exactly as described, but similar technologies might develop, and they could do so without violating any laws of physics. Whole Brain Emulation (WBE) is an uncomfortable topic for some people, so it's covered on a different page. This page sticks to Biological Revival.
70 years
Stem cell researchers are currently making slow progress in regrowing new tissues and organs. Scientists should eventually figure out how to routinely guide cells with high precision by using physical manipulation, chemical signaling, scaffolding, nutrient supply, stimulation, reprogramming, etc. Mature tissue engineering technology would be capable of replacing organs, limbs, bones, skin, teeth, etc. A society that had mature tissue engineering would also be capable of building artificial wombs, growing meat for food in factories, and many other fantastic technologies. Most diseases could be cured by the replacement of the malfunctioning organs. Cancer could be curable in most cases by removing the cancerous tissue with wide margins and replacing it with newly grown tissue. Diseased or damaged brain tissue could be replaceable if done incrementally to take advantage of brain plasticity. This technology would also allow brains to be kept alive artificially, without a functional body, mostly for the purpose of emergency medicine. Tissue engineering is easily envisioned and eagerly anticipated by many scientists and the public.
The application for brain preservation is that this tissue engineering could grow an entire new body around an existing repaired brain. But tissue engineering would not be capable of repairing a preserved brain in the first place. That would take significant further progress.
90 years
The brain could be destructively scanned, layer by layer, using some combination of microscopy, microrobotics, and molecular tagging. It could be "repaired" in software, and then a new brain could be rebuilt from scratch using new molecules. This seems absurdly complex to us because it would involve the controlled movement of about 10,000,000,000,000,000,000 molecules, but it's just an engineering problem that's well within the limits of physics, and it's very plausible that this could eventually be accomplished. This is the lowest level of technology that would allow biological revival.
100 years
Again, each layer could be scanned. But instead of destroying the layer, manipulating arms could grab the atoms and move them over to another site where the brain was being rebuilt. In this fashion, the repairs could be made by actually fixing the original molecules. This is the lowest level of technology that would allow biological revival using the original molecules.
never practical
A frequently described brain repair scenario is to use nanorobots that swim through the body and make the repairs with manipulating arms, but this is not a realistic repair scenario. A swimming nanobot would need to be far more advanced than the technologies described in the sections above. This would require massive advancements in technology and many additional years. There are fundamental problems that would be difficult to overcome. First of all, the entire nanobot would need to be small enough operate entirely within a cell. The manipulating arms and working tips on such devices would be massive compared to the molecules they were trying to repair. The tips would be operating by feel, requiring a tremendous amount of manipulation and tunneling just to characterize the damage in the first place, let alone make the delicate repairs.
Nanorobotic swimmers are frequently confused with a similar technology called medical microbots, which would be much easier to build and are actually likely to be part of medicine. Microbots would be much larger than nanobots, and some would even be large enough to be visible. They would be in our gut, sinuses, peritoneal cavity, mouth, nose, superficial fascia, and skin pores. Think of all of these as operating outside of cells to help the cells externally. None of them would be capable of going into cells to manipulate molecules. These medical microbots would be useful in medicine, but would not be nearly advanced enough to help with revival or repair of a preserved brain. The damage would be far too small and too extensive.
The scan and rebuild approaches would have huge advantages over swimming robots of any size because of operating on a large flat surface. The manipulator arms could be arbitrarily large and could make use of a much lower level of technology. In the end, there will simply never be a need for nanorobotic swimmers in brain repair. Even if they were eventually feasible -- a very big if -- their cost and performance could never be competitive with scan and rebuild technology. Even as the nanorobotic swimmers got closer to reality, scan and rebuild technology would also be getting faster and more sophisticated, easily able to stay well ahead of the swimmers in capability.
Revival could take place by a number of different technologies. Regrowing a new body would be by far the easiest of any of the technologies listed.