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Comment by xwdv | Hacker News Reader

Someday, I predict humans will be able to undergo a similar process. Our main obstacle is building a suitable cocoon structure that could hold a human for the duration of the metamorphosis. Essentially what we do is trigger a process that can rembryonize the body and break down the excess material into base elements. This stew of embryo and nutrients then goes through a process of regrowth over the course of 9 months until the human has become a newborn baby again, with some core memories retained. Once born, the baby learns to walk and talk all over again until they are as functional as before the metamorphosis.

The obvious advantage of this process is you can regenerate a body if your current one is no longer suitable, due to disease, degeneration, or even dysphoria.

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To me this reads as a really complicated form of physician assisted suicide. I also think the marketability of this would be complicated, as most adult people would want to start over in their teens or twenties, not as a baby.

Starting as a baby gives you a better chance at building a foundation for the kind of lifestyle you want when you reach your teens or twenties. Those baby years will go by quickly anyway.

It isn’t really suicide because your consciousness isn’t extinguished, you just end up unconscious for a bit while you restructure.

Who is going to raise a baby with the mind of an adult?

Well this would be included in your payment for the service, a day care type home for regenerated humans. Maybe covered by insurance even.

Family? Are we so broken that it doesn't pop out as an obvious choice? In China (lived there 10 years) I feel like many would accept this without even a moment's hesitation.

No, like putting that aside, because I assume that it’ll exist. I’m thinking more along the lines of, how do you satisfy the emotional needs of an adult who is trapped in a body that is not responsive to them? If I behaved like I do as an adult to my parents and teachers but I was a child I’d spend my entire youth in the timeout corner.

You'd have to pray your caregivers give you food that you actually like before you get teeth and the ability to walk.

So the scenario plays out: you get too old to have fun, so you metamorphosize back into a baby, which your now-adult children have to take care of. This is just as labor-intensive as care for the elderly you would have been, but now they have to go through the psychological horrors of knowing their mother/father is now a child in their care, adding to their load of possibly already trying to raise a family of their own?

Advertisers? Sponsoring baby content makers, baby athletes, baby celebrities... babies with six packs wearing designer diapers, riding their hipster e-strollers. Shit's dystopian, man.

Paul Atreides and the Fremen.

Porn companies.

If you start as a baby your body is too small and weak to get anything on your own, so the foundation of your life is actually built by the people taking care of you. How could you customize being helpless to suit a later presumed lifestyle? I also struggle to see how all the content stored in an adult brain could be transferred to a smaller-sized baby brain, when the brain grows as your body matures.

Or a horrifically fascinating take on religious belief in reincarnation.

If reincarnation is real, isn't that already happening? Granted, it is not the same exact base material that gets rebuilt in a baby, but in a way the dead body gets decomposed, eaten by other animal and join the soil through feces or get cremated and join the soil/water. Then after sometime, someone gets pregnant gets nutrient form the soil (plants, fruits, grass fed beef...) and a baby is built. Obviously some of the individual base parts will go to other creatures too.

We only miss the memory, that which makes us individual human beings. I wonder where the hell does it go. That's is marvelous to me. Where does the memory go?

If memories are just a side effect of where certain chemicals flow along pathways, then along the lines of your comment...

A river is like a memory: water generally flows the same way down them, some days stronger some days drier, and the more they are used, the more they shift their course.

Memory is just a word for the human experience of localized state. There is a universal state that we experience a small piece of as we live. Though our experience of it ceases when we die, the state of the universe continues its natural course, with no loss of continuity, just a phase shift.

The experience of human life is like a river. At first we are small mountain trickles, barely aware of our existence. As we make our way through the middle of our lives, we are self-important rivers, providing an ecosystem to those around us, sometimes with others flowing their experience into ours, and sometimes as we give our experience to others; some amount evaporating to who knows where and some amount being replenished by rains, growing ever larger.

Towards the end, we either become stuck in lakes, or we are like large idle bays, full of experience, most of us moving now with less fundamental "purpose." Lake or bay, eventually we disperse back to the ocean of existence.

Where does a stack of stones go after it is toppled?

Maybe in the old days. These days you'd just reincarnate as decomposition bacteria and then live out your life in a pool of formaldehyde and human jerky chunks inside a sealed casket.

There are those cool liquefaction burial places though that will dissolve you in a strong acid (or base?). Your family is left with some you juice that they can flush down the toilet (or drink in a cocktail, I suppose).

Maybe the Tibetans and their sky burials with vultures eating your fresh meat is the way to go.

Aquamation. It's basically like when murder victims get dissolved in a bathtub full of lye, except they charge you a ton to do it, and market it as a gentler alternative to cremation, because it uses less heat.

Interesting idea, but I wonder how DNA error correction is going to function over artificially extended lifespans

Reminds me of Bruce sterling’s holy fire a bit

This idea is a major plot point in one of my favorite webcomics: https://www.genocideman.com/?p=483

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