3 ms·
By "death", I assume you mean senescence: the natural biomolecular attrition that inexorably leads to organismal death absent of outside causes. It is true tha
by fl3tch 15y ago
By "death", I assume you mean senescence: the natural biomolecular attrition that inexorably leads to organismal death absent of outside causes.
It is true that turtles can live for almost 200 years and some plants can live for thousands of years. If we are essentially, biochemically the same, we could in theory overcome our biochemical "bugs" to achieve negligible senescence. So, we'd live forever.
Unfortunately, that's a hard problem because we didn't design the system -- unlike computers and programing languages -- and we're trying to reverse engineer an insanely complex system created by the massively parallel process of natural selection acting on random mutation. And we're hampered by things like IACUC.
Computational capacity may double every 2 years, but a mouse still has a generation time of 3 months, just like it did a million years ago. That's why biomedical progress (frustratingly) doesn't progress at Moore's Law, and you can't just throw money or engineering talent at the problem.
So yeah, focus on "death" as a biochemical problem, but "focusing on death" won't solve the problem at the same pace as focusing your engineering talent on a human engineering problem. The natural sciences are much more stochastic, and there's no clear path to immortality.
- usaar333 15y agoContinuing on this point, it might be a hell of a lot easier to create an artificial brain (or at least AI as clever as a human) than reverse engineer a biological system "designed" to expire.
- fl3tch 15y agoI see we're reading from the same playbook. It would be cleaner to abandon biology, but how do you design something smarter than yourself? Is it easier? Nobody has a clue since we've never purposefully created human intelligence or AGI. (Our replicators have, but they're responsible for this mess in the first place)
- cydonian_monk 15y agoI agree, and I think a convergence of the two would be even easier - some way to replace an active biological brain (neuron by neuron) with one synthetic. Similar to artificial hearts, etc. Maybe it starts as treatment for strokes or similar brain damage, to work around the irreparable portions of the brain. As long as each neuron behaves and is networked identically to the one replaced (which might require some guesswork in cases of severe damage), it should result in an identical system. So why create a synthetic if you can convert an organic? Probably more likely than us creating a 'real' A.I. anyway.
- thehotdon 15y agoExactly! Why would anyone want to live forever in a human body, when they could just build themselves a kick-ass robot body instead.