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Comment by pfannkuchen | Hacker News Reader

Obviously the real driver of aging is that there was no selective pressure to keep the organism working after sufficient semi-clones were brought online, and keeping an organism functional is a hard problem.

The solution is to gain the ability to simulate the organism that results from a particular DNA sequence, understand the design problems in the organism, fix the problems, then alter human DNA to include the fixes.

We aren’t going to find a simple fix, sorry everyone.

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But if the organism lived longer it would keep pumping semiclones. And if organisms are basically huge self-sustaining feedback loops, why won't they keep sustaining ... forever until some pressure forces them to decay

Because the semi clones are a full process reboot. Rebooting is an easier way to solve the problem of continuing to exist into the future.

Sexual reproduction, which increases fitness? So theoretically the offspring are more fit clone producers so competing with them is bad, M’kay?

But who invented fitness? Theoretically a self-sustaining chemical reaction can go on forever, and it is energetically less costly to search ways to sustain it even further rather than rebooting the whole organism from start. The invention of death must have happened before the beginning of evolution. Which reminds me that our quest for immortality is the end of it.

You can search the space of evolutionarily adjacent entities faster by semicloning once and letting the fittest of those semiclone further, compounding the mutations. Such a strategy will likely out-compete a slower searching one into extinction.

There are trade offs for living longer. For example, children of older fathers are more likely to have birth defects.

There are almost certainly easier solutions that at least mitigate the problem even if it doesn't fully solve the problem. A similar problem might be type 1 diabetes, where an issie with the immune system causes the body attacks the cells which produce insulin. There is no cure for type 1 diabetes. However, now that we understand some of the mechanisms, we can monitor blood sugar levels and artificially regulate them so what was previously a fatal disease is now manageable. If we can figure out similar mechanisms with aging, we can treat it even if we can't completely "cure" it.

There is selective pressure for aging because populations of organisms that don't age cannot evolve to adapt to new environments.

Theoretically possible, but aging looks a lot more like gradual system failure than “feature on top of immortality”.

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