After the decades from the post–World War II surge of innovation to the 1970s, driven by massive public investment and accompanied by widespread optimism and a moral drive toward scientific progress, a slower and more uneven progress has been observed, shaped by social choices and political climates. The narrative of “exponential growth” has often been more apparent on paper — through metrics like Moore’s law — than in genuine breakthroughs such as the discovery of the Higgs boson or high temperature superconductors (HTS). Too often, resources have been diverted toward military competition and geopolitical dominance rather than long-term scientific exploration without immediate utility. This historical context matters, because resilience in preservation — whether of brains or of data — depends not only on engineering but on the willingness of societies to sustain infrastructures through periods of stagnation, conflict, or shifting priorities.
Environmental risks
Brain preservation facilities could face earthquakes, flooding, fires, and infrastructure collapse from various causes. Salem (where many of SBP’s brains will likely remain) is located near the Cascadia Subduction Zone, one of the most dangerous seismic areas in the world. By contrast, Alcor deliberately moved to Arizona to minimize seismic and climatic risks, while CI in Michigan faces only moderate seismic exposure.
Digital archives like Zenodo are hosted at CERN in Switzerland, a relatively low-risk seismic region, but their data centers are not underground bunkers. Their resilience comes from redundancy and distributed backups rather than location alone.
Systemic risks
For brains: continuity of preservation protocols is critical. Today SBP primarily uses chemical preservation at –20 °C, which depends on stable refrigeration and power supply. Only a portion of brains remain cryopreserved in liquid nitrogen, where risks involve continuity of LN2 deliveries and secure containment. In both cases, systemic fragility arises from prolonged outages, supply-chain disruptions, or governance failures.
For data: cyberattacks, prolonged blackouts, or even global conflicts. Redundancy helps, but no system is immune to systemic collapse.
Pragmatic resilience and the “exponential growth” narrative
Jordan Sparks once wrote:
“If things go really badly, we just shut down all services and the company itself goes into a sort of hibernation mode. The building would just sit there with no activity. Volunteers would top off the LN2 every few weeks for the handful of patients who are cryopreserved. But I seriously doubt it will be centuries. If I survive another 50 years, then we're only looking at less than another 50 years after that before revival will likely be possible. Remember that technological progress will probably continue to be exponential.”
This statement captures both pragmatism and optimism: the idea of a “hibernation mode” as a survival strategy, and the reliance on exponential technological progress as a guarantee of eventual revival. Yet here lies a critical issue: such information should not be scattered across Reddit comments or forum threads. It would be reassuring if SBP made public the protective and mitigation criteria it has adopted, to strengthen both member confidence and the credibility of the project. Transparency is not a luxury; it is a prerequisite for trust.
The importance of addressing the unforeseen
The word “unforeseen” should also include risks that go beyond familiar environmental or systemic threats. These risks cannot be reduced to earthquakes, floods, or blackouts; they encompass broader challenges such as:
- Technological stagnation: History shows that progress can stall. After the post–World War II surge of innovation, the decades since the 1970s have often seen slower, more uneven advances. Moore’s law gave the illusion of exponential progress, but genuine breakthroughs in energy, medicine, and fundamental science have been less frequent.
- Geopolitical shifts: The last fifty years illustrate how fragile the balance can be between peace, dignity, and freedom on one side, and expansionist ideologies on the other. Indeed, human rights and the centrality of rationality in law and culture are increasingly being challenged today.
- Social inertia: Future generations may not accelerate progress; they could amplify stagnation through complacency, distraction, or misplaced priorities.
- Global pandemics: As demonstrated by COVID‑19, biological risks can disrupt economies, slow scientific progress, and strain social cohesion.
- Extreme scenarios: Nuclear attacks or similarly catastrophic events. These may seem remote, but resilience planning must include them if credibility is to be maintained.
Constructive proposals to SBP
- Explicitly address unforeseen risks, including systemic outages, supply-chain disruptions, environmental events, geopolitical instability, and even extreme scenarios such as nuclear attacks.
- Clarify contingency strategies such as “hibernation mode,” but in formal documents rather than scattered forum posts.
- Acknowledge the uncertainty of technological trajectories, and explain how resilience is ensured even if exponential progress slows or halts.
- Reassure members whose brains are or will be already preserved by committing that their preservation will benefit from future scientific and technological advances. (For example, if future studies demonstrate that lowering storage temperatures below –20 °C can be combined with methods that prevent cracking or avoid instability of the aldehyde-based perfusion compound, then SBP would progressively lower storage temperatures, even if this requires purchasing more powerful refrigeration units. This would extend durability beyond the ~100 years currently anticipated for uploading, while minimizing long-term damage from aldehyde fixation.)