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Comment by grishka | Hacker News Reader

Frankly, I believe that any form of mind upload or consciousness transfer is a much harder problem than both rejuvenation and interstellar spaceflight.

Looking at current aging research, there's a good possibility we'll see rejuvenation in the next decade or two and it'll profoundly change our society. In 20 years, everyone will be looking 25 years old and pointing at frail people with wrinkly faces and laughing, same way we do today with antivaxxers.

Once that's out of the way, we'll eventually get comfortable with building arbitrarily large objects on orbit, and we could as well build a huge spaceship with an onboard self-sustaining ecosystem and fly that to other stars, the boring way. Yes, it will be a very long journey, but it's possible without the reliance on yet to be discovered new physics.

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That's insane optimism to me. We don't even know how to get a nail to re-attach to a nail bed. We can't put some crystals on a tooth. We can't create a single hair follicle. We have zero non-surgical ways to repair arteries. Etc, etc, etc. We have made zero progress in anti-aging other than controlling blood pressure and identifying harmful chemicals in an environment.

We ARE good at extreme, surgical and or heavy medicating intervention. Doesn't go hand-in-hand with life extension at all.

We're now capable of programming cells to produce arbitrary proteins at will, how cool is that?

Also please do look through the playlist in a sibling comment. Michael Levin's research is truly badass. He has grown tadpoles with an extra working eye on the back, and recently he has regrown an amputated leg on a frog.

There's an astonishing amount of untapped possibilities in biology that are opening up only now as we finally have the right tools.

Right, CRISPR is ok, but they haven't figured out that many real applications. This approach to vaccines has actually been around forever.

I bookmarked this thread specifically to watch your links later. I appreciate them and will watch, as I am really interested in the topic.

My hope is that biotech is the next step, but as I mentioned, for now I am highly pessimistic. We can't seem to treat virtually anything in any real sense, despite the experiments you mention. If anything, the progress in prosthetics (including the spinal bypass) has been great, but nothing to do with life extension or genuine recovery of lost functionality without surgical intervention.

Personally, it seems to be me that the closest thing we can do so far as individuals is reduce risk factors and try to stay high on Death Clocks: https://www.lifespan.io/news/grimage-is-the-best-clock-for-p...

Completely unrelated, but this reminded me that we can't seem to regrow cartilage either. This is a huge issue after cancers and cardiac deaths. Any falls, excessive wear and tear, etc all destroy quality of life with the joints. Latest efforts here: https://www.studyfinds.org/arthritis-pain-regrowing-cartilag...

We can now treat a lot of conditions we couldn't before. People used to die all the time of infections or any number of other conditions we now consider fully curable. Medicine as we know it is a relatively young science compared to physics or mathematics for example. We can treat most bacterial infections. We can manage most virus infections. We can perform life-saving, high-precision surgeries. We couldn't do any of these things just 100 years ago — that's nothing on a historical timescale.

Thing is, medicine/biology is a unique field because it relies quite a lot on advancements in other fields for its tools. You couldn't research cells before microscope was invented. You can't begin figuring out what each part of a genome does before you've sequenced it. You can't begin to research functions of specific proteins before you've solved their structures and got the ability to manipulate their production and/or attach markers to them. And so on, and so forth. Not so long ago the main approach in medical research was basically "try stuff randomly on lab animals and see what has a beneficial effect". Now that we can peek into the internal workings of biological systems we can use a more direct, more engineering-like approach.

At least there is such a thing as growing tissues from stem cells. Nothing at all in the category of "uploading" one's consciousness anywhere exists. Not "uploading a memory", not "uploading a thought process", those are abstract concepts we've made to describe what the extremely strange organs that brains are do, anyway, and we're nowhere near close to understanding its biology much less replicating what it actually does with a machine.

Any chance you could link to some stuff that's making you so optimistic about rejuvenation on that timeline?

https://old.reddit.com/r/longevity has a lot of links to various articles and papers, and I also collect relevant videos and talks into a playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLvA7pB41pDk27XOjqbXi...

Look up the stuff David Sinclair is doing with his team. They are already rejuvenating and regrowing severed optic nerves with Yamanaka factors in mice and are preparing to start human trials.

It's not rock-solid that this is going to happen for the whole body soon, but some truly breakthrough things are happening right now in this field, nothing like the previous decades.

That doesn’t solve the issue that the passengers will need to live on the ship for a thousand years, even if their relatives will be on Earth for twice as long.

Even a very big ship can be boring after a sufficiently long time.

> pointing at frail people with wrinkly faces and laughing, same way we do today with antivaxxers.

Except those people are more likely to be too poor to afford it instead of unwilling to take it.

Or, worse, the young will never get any power because the old will not relinquish control.

Then you have the "surfeit of princes" problem.

This isn't just grand political power: imagine being unable to progress in your career because geriatrics above you aren't retiring.

That's just one possible secondary effect. We could enumerate many others.

Oh yes. That's a very clear concern. I'm reacting to the "people who decline will he like antivaxers" comment. But it seems far more likely people will be priced out as opposed to voluntarily refuse treatment.

This logic is flawed. It would be much more economically sensible to just rejuvenate everyone regularly instead of doing what we do today — try, and eventually fail, to manage all the conditions related to old age. Since aging affects literally everyone, this huge scale would drive the cost of that intervention down to pennies.

Just to be clear: I'm not from the US, we do have not a very good but nevertheless somewhat working public health system over here.

> It would be much more economically sensible to just rejuvenate everyone regularly instead of doing what we do today — try, and eventually fail, to manage all the conditions related to old age.

In the US, we just will do neither for the majority of Americans. If you're too poor to afford rejuvenation, you'll be too poor to afford other treatments. And you'll just die.

Sure the cost of each treatment might be pennies (although it probably will cost a lot and not have those economies of scale) but total profit is not maximized by a smaller markup. Better to get Gates/Bezos/Musk/other billionaires to give you 90% of their fortunes.

They’ll sneer at the masses without eternal youth anyway.

Unless, of course, living a thousand years brings some wisdom with it.

I’m guessing we have to choose between capitalism and eternal youth.

I’m totally ok with a post-scarcity socialist society.

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