This is the most important work.
Imagine if we can get to a world where the difference between not having health insurance and having insurance means either you wait for your body to naturally regrow a limb or your insurance covers a more quickly lab grown one.
Imagine a world where organ transplant wait lists aren't a thing.
Imagine a world where Ukrainian landmine victims are walking on new limbs.
We can have this, but instead our best minds are fucking around with optimizing web ads, or they're figuring out how to tweak assembly lines that shit out McDonald's Happy meal toys.
Limb regeneration is useful for more than just landmines.
Does the kind of comment you made really contribute to the conversation?
america moment
I'm not sure what's wrong with that.
> Yes I'm trying to frame it in terms the audience of HN can understand.
> I'm not sure what's wrong with that.
What's wrong is that it's orthogonal to the problem, so it risks creating a pointless discussion about health insurance instead of focusing on the technology. The key problem is the ability to regrow limbs is not yet within our technological reach.
Having (or not) health insurance won't get you another pair of legs if you walk on a mine. Maybe you'll get very fancy prosthetics, but it will not be flesh and bone.
In a world where this is known technology, even if the costs may initially put it out of reach of people without insurance, should it just be a gene edit AND we have the ability to gene edit like we now have the ability to 3d print, the cat will be out of the bag, and it will be like people buying 3d printers to 3d print guns in countries where gun ownership is forbidden, or people ordering drugs on the dark web: it may be illegal, but people with addictions (or here, without legs) may not really care about the legality.
Or they will just do a road trip to Mexico, like how it is for dental work.
Health insurance is rarely the #1 issue: I think even Europeans do similar trips when they want something immediately instead of accepting long waitlines or some procedures not being officially available in their country. The only difference is they don't go to Mexico but to Turkey, the Balkans or Eastern Europe.
What we need is more technology, and fewer legal limitations, like how it was pointed out last week about how the FDA risk aversion costs human lives in a way that's impossible (or extremely hard) to measure.
We're very lucky the Trump administration (and a few others around the world) decided to bypass the regular vaccine safety process during operation warp speed: regardless of what you think about Covid vaccines, we now have mRNA vaccine technology, which is already being tested for many other things.
Is that an accurate interpretation of your comment? What am I missing?
EDIT: done, also I see we may have similar opinions given how you submitted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34327992 about 3d guns in Canada
We currently live in a wonderful technological future where we can transplant organs AND we still do not have universal health coverage.
The future will be very much the same, and material inequality will very likely increase in the near future.
From a humanist perspective the best we can do is empower individuals with endogenous technology that minimizes their dependency on rent seekers and the innate ability to regenerate limbs and organs fits the bill nicely.
Can we? I think a necessary step towards this direction is a complete genetic model of the human body, which we haven’t even the ability to compute until very recently (if at all).
I feel like we need to solve the bioinformatics thing before we’re able to gcc new body parts. Which I think is incredibly solvable, though ofc it’ll take decades.
PS: those adtech folks are destroying the planet by boosting consumption
An interesting question would be how long does it take a baby to gain the mass of a limb?
Another interesting question would be how fast can an adult gain weight?
Another interesting question would be if it takes a person 18 years to reach 6' and 160lbs and then they stop growing, how long would it take them to grow another foot or two if they didn't stop growing?
I don't mean to ascribe intention to nature, but rather state that social systems which get far enough for its members to discuss it freely on the internet likely converge on this feature.
One could argue that eternal life unlocks the next phase of a civilization, but I am unconvinced that humanity is even properly equipped for the level of technology we have today, much less tomorrow.
> I am unconvinced that humanity is even properly equipped for the level of technology we have today, much less tomorrow.
If you had 1,000 years to figure everything out, you would be more than properly equipped. Instead we all have to operate with this arbitrary 80ish years to just barely figure anything out and then most of us die before we can do anything with the knowledge. It is a horrible and unfair system. Imagine if Einstein were still around today and was able to keep building on top of the knowledge he had before. Surely in that time he would have gotten things done that the vast majority of people could not begin to imagine.
This sounds nice and idealistic on paper, but like a hellscape in reality. A ratio of 1% good people does not a society make.
Why would you want that? Sounds like a terrible society to live in. Imagine if Einstein still existed, sure, but also imagine if a hundred serial killers or Hitlers still existed.
I've heard it said that corporations solve this problem. Death doesn't serve this purpose any more.
It also prevents good people from remaining alive forever :(
(read the whole thing carefully)