Several thousand mutations can radically extend lifespan.
Since the biological body is dragging us into the grave, let’s maximally reduce the burden of flesh by moving to an artificial body with a brain transplanted into it. Then we would only need hundreds, not thousands, of mutations and significantly fewer therapies of other types — compared to maintaining our constantly aging body as a whole.
I don’t understand why exactly this effect. Isn’t the difference in species-specific lifespan much more indicative here? Including the varying ability to influence and change the lifespan of different species by targeting different mechanisms?
Everything boils down to the definition of aging — a decline in the organism’s viability with age. This encompasses the lifelong changes (evolution) of the 240 types of cells in our body. It includes the adaptation of these cells through transdifferentiation. It includes the loss of irreplaceable cellular components. It includes the replacement of various structures with connective tissue, hypertrophy, and many other natural life processes. And much more besides — including the formation of vicious cycles, such as pathological cell senescence → disruption ...
So the hard questions remain. Is aging curable in any meaningful sense? Is it even the kind of thing that can be cured? Could a disruptive discovery change the whole field? And if such a discovery is possible, where is it most likely to come from?
In my opinion, aging is a decline in the organism’s viability with age. Each species has its own set of causes, which can be ranked by their degree of influence. Most of these causes are already well known.
The shorter an organism’s natural lifespan, the easier it is to extend its life, and the fewer causes act sim...
Why can cyborgization provide radical life extension?
Human biology is programmed on average for 80–85 years of life. Thousands of natural processes — such as the evolution of cells into functionally harmful variants (cancer, anormal senescent cells, clonal hematopoiesis etc.), cellular adaptation through transdifferentiation (for example, into myofibroblasts), replacement of bone marrow with connective tissue, loss of vascular elasticity, and countless more — progressively disrupt the structure and function of the body, ultimately leading to pathology and ...
"Full natural body has problems in donors availability, and won't be a subject for universal immortalism"
It seems to me that as soon as it becomes clear that immortality is possible — and especially once there are practical, real-world examples — a significantly larger amount of intellectual and material resources will be poured into solving the problem. This is the “first successful case” effect.
And then new technical solutions will emerge for the problems that we currently have to solve head-on, in the most direct and difficult way.
1. There are indeed many problems. But what position are we actually in?
On the one hand, we have a head that is falling apart on a perfusion system. On the other hand, the entire body — along with every system (immune, cardiovascular, endocrine, respiratory, etc.) and every organ (liver, kidneys, heart, lungs, etc.) — is also falling apart in much the same way as the head, each with its own specific issues requiring individualized therapy. As these systems and organs deteriorate, they accelerate the destruction of all the others, including the brain.
That i...
What is radical life extension?
To date, the human lifespan record has not exceeded 123 years. By around age 100, changes in the body significantly reduce a person’s ability to survive, and the age at death of the world’s oldest person has not increased since the 1990s. These observations suggest that maximum lifespan is fixed and subject to natural limits.
In addition, over the past 20 years, developed countries have seen a sharp slowdown in the rate of increase in average life expectancy, indicating that modern medical technologies and other measures for m...
The strategy is good and necessary. This is essentially all we can do right now. Even if the effectiveness of this approach hits a ceiling at 90 years due to a strong increase in the number of causes of death and their combinations, which are difficult and very expensive to overcome with technology. At least we will see when medicine becomes powerless and can offer not treatment, but replacement.