Well if we "cure" aging, it will have the awkward consequence that every life must end with an accident, disease or suicide.
Can Aging Be Cured?
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Re: Can Aging Be Cured?
#12Is aging a disease? :)
Its a cause of death. We like to avoid those. And we know multicellular organisms exist that can maintain their telomeres and avoid senescence.
We are almost certainly going to be able to genetically engineer that into future people at some point, among a lot of other useful things. Dunno if we are going to manage to get gene therapy that can alter living humans so drastically before they die, though. And who knows when it will happen, just that it almost certainly will, unless we blow ourselves up.
Re: Can Aging Be Cured?
#13Well if we "cure" aging, it will have the awkward consequence that every life must end with an accident, disease or suicide.
Or not taking the cure.
Re: Can Aging Be Cured?
#14I wake from nightmares worlds where "aging" is cured but "forgetting" becomes broken.
Do you have a deeper point—which I'm missing—or is this FUD?
This is me reading between the lines -- so maybe not the parent commenter meant at all! -- but I think the point is that all sorts of grudges, prejudices, and regrets naturally expire through generational turnover, and in a world without aging that natural expiration won't be there to help society put the past behind us.
Re: Can Aging Be Cured?
#15In a way, we've already "cured" aging. On average, we live a lot longer than many of our ancestors. We can check many diseases and conditions that would normally kill elderly people. The problem is like cancer, in that it's not one thing, but a multitude of things. (And cancer itself is among that multitude!)
Not many people, outside of healthcare workers and AIDS patients know of cytomegalovirus, but most of the population has it. What most people don't know, is that if we could otherwise have a life expectancy of 200 years, many of us would be dying from cytomegalovirus. (Simplified version: it takes up memory slots in our immune system, but at a slow enough rate, we die of other causes before that can happen.)
I suspect that "curing" aging will consist of extending the average lifespan a decade at a time, as we cure dozens of different conditions. Something as complex as a human body is always going to have some unforeseeable epiphenomenal mode of failure, given enough time. We know from thermodynamics and the Halting Problem that everything is bound to break down, and that we won't be able to predict all of the ways it can happen.
(For a given degree of complexity in any turing complete mechanism, maybe an overwhelmingly correct heuristic for the halting problem is a piece of paper with the word "Yes" printed on it.)
Re: Can Aging Be Cured?
#16Well if we "cure" aging, it will have the awkward consequence that every life must end with an accident, disease or suicide.
Or not taking the cure.
Which can be decomposed into not taking the cure by choice (suicide) and being deprived of it forcibly, which can be further decomposed into negligence (accident) or malice (murder).
Re: Can Aging Be Cured?
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or not taking the cure.
Which can be decomposed into not taking the cure by choice (suicide) and being deprived of it forcibly, which can be further decomposed into negligence (accident) or malice (murder).
That's like saying shooting yourself in the head is just an allergic reaction to lead.
Re: Can Aging Be Cured?
#18In a way, we've already "cured" aging. On average, we live a lot longer than many of our ancestors. We can check many diseases and conditions that would normally kill elderly people. The problem is like cancer, in that it's not one thing, but a multitude of things. (And cancer itself is among that multitude!) Not many people, outside of healthcare workers and AIDS patients know of cytomegalovirus, but most of the pop…
Thermodynamics doesn't say that "everything is bound to break down, and that we won't be able to predict all of the ways it can happen".
I guess you're referring to the second law of thermodynamics. It says that the entropy of the universe tends to increase. This is predictable and the lack of "negentropy" won't be an issue for a long time. The heat death of the universe is supposed to be on the order 10^100 years from now, so is not very relevant when talking about curing aging.
Re: Can Aging Be Cured?
#19Step one: Buy a gun.
Re: Can Aging Be Cured?
#20In a way, we've already "cured" aging. On average, we live a lot longer than many of our ancestors. We can check many diseases and conditions that would normally kill elderly people. The problem is like cancer, in that it's not one thing, but a multitude of things. (And cancer itself is among that multitude!) Not many people, outside of healthcare workers and AIDS patients know of cytomegalovirus, but most of the pop…
We're now learning how to "reset" the immune system.
1. Collect immune system "seed' cells.
2. Wipe out the existing immune system with chemo therapy drugs and other violence.
3. Inject the collected cells and let them build a new fresh immune system.
You now have lost all your immunities and will need to be revaccinated for everything. But any autoimmune disease like MS you had is probably also gone.
http://www.nih.gov/researchmatters/january2015/01122015reset...