Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

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Cloning humans at scale. For parts, research, and life extension.

Once we get comfortable with the ethics of cloning, we can create decephalized humans for widespread tissue/organ transplant and unprecedented biological research on actual human systems.

Grow headless humans in artificial wombs. Or pig wombs until the tech catches up.

Surgically remove the brains. Or deactivate certain genes during development. Artificial innervation, hormone/metabolome, and muscle stimulus.

Whole-head transplants from live humans to new bodies could double human lifespans. Suddenly cancer and heart disease are no longer issues.

Cloned humans can have universally compatible HLA histocompatibility. No tissue rejects. No life altering immunosuppressants.

We could rejuvenate immune systems from depleted thymuses. Perform negative selection of the host.

It'd be game changing.

Maybe 300 year lifespans.

If we can reverse the clock on neurons by fixing the metabolome and immune system, we might end death to anything but accidents and suicide. Then AGI and brain uploads...

Immortality. It's within reach.

Slow down echelon. We're here debating if it's a good idea to clone a woolly mammoth. It's going to take decades until we as a society even start to contemplate the ethics of immortality

You have to be able to transfer consciousness into a new empty brain. 80 year old brain in a 29 year old shell is still going to get strokes and Alzheimer’s

Nuclear and mitochondrial DNA damage, buildup of intracellular and extracellular damage, inflammation, a dysfunctional metabolism, etc. are all implicated in aging. This would remove at least two of those from the equation.

It's unclear what the restorative impact of a younger circulatory and immune system would be. Older cells may undergo elevated clearance and be regenerated.

We could develop drugs that target telomere loss. Cell turnover could fix more. CRISPR for the most common gene breakages.

Instead of saying we can't, say maybe we can.

Even if we couldn't use brainless cloned humans to immediately increase lifespans, we could have a nearly limitless supply of organs, tissues, blood, etc. It would also function as the best medical research platform in the world.

Strokes aren't inevitable in everyone. We can already tell which lifestyle factors are likely to result in one, and correct them should the person be willing. Alzheimer’s is trickier but recent research has shown promise, finding potential environmental links for instance.

Preserving the brain is preferable to consciousness transfers, unless you're looking for functional immortality.

MTA from dying in a fatal incident is ~600 years for an average person. Source: an exercise we did in a university using statistics for all kinds of fatal accidents provided by a national statistics agency.

Glad I'm going to die before this insane, depraved stuff becomes a reality. Hope they don't develop tech to reanimate me.

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