Re: [DIYbio] Fwd: [tt] Geneticists Discover a Way to Extend Lifespans to 800 Years

On Wed, Jan 30, 2013 at 03:43:46PM +0000, Cathal Garvey wrote:
> I'm neither for or against post-humanism as a goal for some, but I
> personally value the integration of my mind and body. I can forsee
> technologies that extend my lifespan, and I can forsee others that
> augment the limitations of biology that will not yet have been
> surmounted: I'd like to leverage these to live, as a human, for as long
> as I'm comfortable and productive. Perhaps afterwards, in our sing-song
> imaginary post-scarcity future, I'd consider uploading.

I agree. So far, approaches like SENS and cryopreservation are our
only options.

> For now though, we were griping about limitations on achieving a
> human-body lifespan in excess of ~120 years or so. My basic point was

Validated supercentenarians are all petering out at about 116 years
(but all in reasonably good health, so you're not emulating
Smeagol there).

> that I think it's certainly possible to create a body that regenerates
> indefinitely, but that certain parts of humanity require an unchanging
> element, such as a dependably constant neural network.

I would say that if you can achieve effectively indefinite lifespans
with biology alone the actual limits of humanity wouldn't show up
for several hundred of years if not kiloyears. At such time scales
the human condition will have moved on, obviously so you will
be unlikely to run into resource exhaustion limits of biology.

> You could probably engineer neurons that carefully supplant themselves
> over time, perhaps by asymmetric cell division to create an embryonic
> neuron within an existing one, which grows and branches to fill out the
> existing space before the mother cell undergoes apoptosis completely.

I think you'll do fine with just random regeneration. The engram
will lose fidelity over time, so your oldest memories will degrade.
This is something we constantly deal with today, so I don't think
it's much of a limitation.

> This would be wholly unnatural, and would therefore require a bucketload
> of incredibly complex work, but it's the only avenue for

I wish http://sens.org/ all the luck in the world, and hope that DYIbio
people with ambitions in that direction contact them, and figure out how
they can help.

But, realistically, most of us who read this won't be able to profit
from any of these advances, if any.

> persistence-of-brain that I can currently think of that doesn't involve
> simulation/uploading of dying matter.

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