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What theory says that human lifespan has no limits with technology assistance? Anything involving replacing biological systems with artificial ones is not reall

• nabla9 1y ago
  If you had full understanding of human cell and how they contribute to homeostasis, you could reprogram the cell to rejuvenate them endlessly without turning into cancer (many cancers have unlimited lifespan). You would also need to find ways to remove all cruft that gradually accumulates even in healthy body, like heavy metals etc.
  • brabel 1y ago
    How do you know that you could? That’s the question! If we did understand biology perfectly it may be that we would then prove no organism can live forever and reproduction is the only way.
    • XorNot 1y ago
      Because there's absolutely no reason to believe that's the case? Like I don't know what the point of this argument is: maybe it's impossible. Sure, great. Okay. But you know...let's actually find out, because it looks very possible if hard from our current vantage point.
      • ecb_penguin 1y ago
        [flagged]
        • bigDinosaur 1y ago
          [flagged]
          • ecb_penguin 1y ago
            > This is perhaps the single worst form of argument I've ever seen. It's because you didn't understand it > 'how can a cancer cell live indefinitely but other cells cannot' Cancer cells are damaged cells mutating without regard for function. It's pretty obvious that there is a difference between "living indefinitely in a mutated form devoid of original function" is different from a cell performing a specific function
        • exe34 1y ago
          Do you believe this limit on lifespan is a uniquely human condition? or do you believe that it's impossible for any animal whatsoever to have a long lifespan (let's say 400 years for the sake of argument here).
          • Qem 1y ago
            https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenland_shark https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenland_shark
            • exe34 1y ago
              yes precisely. that's why I picked 400 years
          • ecb_penguin 1y ago
            > Do you believe this limit on lifespan is a uniquely human condition No > or do you believe that it's impossible for any animal whatsoever to have a long lifespan Let's pick an arbitrary timeframe and declare that as long No, I don't think anything is impossible when you pick dates "for the sake of argument"
            • exe34 1y ago
              if you claim to think that 4x your current max-ish lifespan isn't long, then you're not having an argument in good faith, are you?
      • brabel 1y ago
        > Because there's absolutely no reason to believe that's the case? The fact we haven't seen an organism live forever is strong evidence that that's the case. You're the one making the case without any evidence!
    • wizzwizz4 1y ago
      Reproduction is not physically special. If it is physically possible to create a new organism with a longer lifespan than its parent (which it is), then it is physically possible to extend the lifespan of an existing organism. This may be impractical, but we cannot prove that no organism can live ≈forever, because it's not a physical impossibility. (Assuming a source of power remains present: it looks like the universe won't last forever, so we can trivially assert that no organism can live forever.)
      • brabel 1y ago
        > it is physically possible to extend the lifespan of an existing organism. This is not at all guaranteed until we actually manage to do it. And that's exactly what we're discussing, you can't just say "but it must be possible". There's no rule of the universe that says it should, and given life has been around for 4 billion years and there's no single species (specially animals which is what we really should consider here if we're talking about human lifespan) that manages to live for more than a few hundred years, I think that's strong evidence that life is approaching a fundamental limit here. Someone else said "maybe that's enough" - well, why?? Maybe 100 years is already quite enough then??
        • wizzwizz4 1y ago
          Take the existing organism apart, fix all the problems, put the organism back together. No laws of physics prevent this, so by the totalitarian principle it's physically possible. Principles of engineering might make it impractical, and even if it is practical we might never discover how to do it, but it's possible.
    • fluidcruft 1y ago
      Reproduction doesn't create whole new cells from nothing (except in the ship of Thesius sense). It's existing cells getting reprogrammed to do new things. Reproduction does result in new matrix/scaffolding being built but the cells build that (and can rebuild it if so directed). Of course some things "we" care about exist exclusively in the matrix (configurations of neurons, learned behaviors, memories, etc) so that could well be a limit for those parts of the body where we care primarily about preserving the matrix. Anyway my point is that "reproduction" doesn't create whole new life, it's just a continuation.
      • brabel 1y ago
        > Anyway my point is that "reproduction" doesn't create whole new life, it's just a continuation. Then you're just arguing that we're already immortal, after all we reproduce, but I don't think that's what we're talking about when we talk about longevity. Longevity is the continued existence of a particular being, not its continuation through descendants.
        • fluidcruft 1y ago
          The point is that a fundamental assumption that "reproduction" does anything that can't be done by regeneration is just a hunch that so far isn't actually supported by anything in microbiology. The existence of reproduction is irrelevant to the question.
    • Retric 1y ago
      Some cells are literally hundreds of millions of years old. That’s not forever and it required a very specific environment, but biological degradation on that timescale can be effectively zero.
    • BobaFloutist 1y ago
      I mean I also feel like people would be pretty happy with the average lifespan of a tree, or a Greenland Shark, etc. Also, some few (fairly primitive) animals are "biologically immortal," for example, lobsters (which are motile and vaguely resemble us more than, say, sponges and jellyfish) don't experience senescence. That being said, I think we have a long way to go if we want to make any progress at all, and I doubt I will live to see it.
  • pfortuny 1y ago
    You know what a chaotic system is, don't you? That goes for a simple double pendulum. There is no "full understanding" of a complex system.
• kelnos 1y ago
  I won't touch on whether or not you're still you as you replace your biological components with artificial ones. But who says that's the endgame? Presumably an advanced enough medical technology could remove the internal byproducts of aging, and get your cells to stop dying / running out of steam / going cancerous. Obviously we have no idea how to do that, and maybe we never will, but it seems plausible.
  • szundi 1y ago
    [dead]
  • jajko 1y ago
    You can replace almost whole body and its still you as the mind. But once you replace brain then its just a copy, you can't literally move biolectrical complex that makes us into silicon in any possible way. And brains age like the rest of the body, telomeres issue applies too. The best possible outcome would be watching your digital copy having digital life, while you yourself wither away regardless. More akin to having a child than oneself preservation. Not really something special, having physical children still beats this.
    • Tadpole9181 1y ago
      Ship of Theseus it. Slowly replace the brain bit-by-bit, taking breaks in between. For each component, use three in a democratic redundancy (for future maintenance). I wouldn't personally do that unless I was already dying. But, I see no reason believe it wouldn't preserve the soul. Your organic brain is already doing it all the time on a small scale.
• api 1y ago
  We know it’s possible for living things to be functionally near immortal. We also know germ line cells can give rise to new organisms which can give rise to germ line cells in an unbroken chain effectively forever. This is quite far from making a human immortal but it shows that there appears to be nothing in physical law or intrinsic to biology that prohibits it. Therefore it is possible. Star travel and terraforming Mars are also possible. Possible does not imply anything about difficulty. We don’t really know if radical life extension or borderline immortality are fusion hard, quantum computing hard, or starship hard.
  • Intralexical 1y ago
    > We know it’s possible for living things to be functionally near immortal. Not in any sense that's applicable to humans. The often-cited animal examples, like greenland sharks, tortoises, and lobsters, are slow-moving ectotherms with "cold" metabolisms. Adjusting for watts per unit mass of biochemistry, they might "live" less in all their centuries than you do in a single decade [0-3]. In that sense they're only "long-lived" in the same way a tree is long-lived. Yeah, it might not die. But it's also not doing much that produces wear and tear, misfolded proteins, scar tissue, plaque buildup, etc. Microorganisms and cnidarians, which can be truly immortal, are even more divergent. For example a common form of "immortality" involves periodically regenerating body parts by reverting to stem cells. IIRC regeneration is ancestral to all animals, but mostly lost in mammals. Humans can actually already regenerate to a limited extent [4]. But how are you going to regenerate an entire primate nervous system (which "immortal" animals don't have), without losing everything you are? In fact, the use of regeneration to achieve "immortality", and even that only rarely and in very simple animals, suggests it may not be possible at all for living organisms to live indefinitely in the same body. Otherwise, why would evolution waste calories rebuilding a whole body? I suspect some systems-theoretic effect like the Red Queen hypothesis [5], but on a micro scale. Change is the only constant, and immortality implies trying to stay the same when the only thermodynamically favorable options are to grow or decay. 0: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-76371-0 1: # Greenland shark metabolism over entire lifespan sh -c "units '((30mg/oxygen)*(mol/g))/hour/(1000/1000^0.84*kg) * (434kJ/mol) * 200year' MJ/kg" 2: # Greenland shark lifespan metabolism, alternate estimation sh -c "units '192kcal/day*200year/126kg' MJ/kg" 3: # Human metabolism over 1 decade sh -c "units '150W/100kg*10years' MJ/kg" 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regeneration_in_humans 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen_hypothesis
• stocksinsmocks 1y ago
  If you could put your mind in a robot, is it still you? What if you get a knee replacement? What if you infuse a young persons blood? What if you put on a contact lens? Fun questions, but I’m not sure the answer changes what we will do much.
  • somenameforme 1y ago
    Two issues here - the first is that relatively new discoveries like the bidirectional gut-brain axis, and the major effects it has on you, pose a technical issue to traditional thought experiments like brains in a vat (or robot as it may be). The second is that this also doesn't really answer the question. Your brain, like everything else in your body, degrades over time. It's not like it becomes immortal if you just stick it in a robot, if that were even possible.