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Comment by grues-dinner | Hacker News Reader

The same magic that keeps some people on quasi-life support for sometimes decades already.

You could imagine entirely curing cancer, heart disease, frailty and infection but not brain degeneration, for example.

Curing everything else except frailty also seems invidious, though with sufficiently good brain-machine interfaces perhaps that would be less of a problem: you can just float in anti-impact gel from 100 and 200 and mentally roam the wreckage of the internet! If AI takes over knowledge work, how you pay for your life support and data connection may become an issue.

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Weird that you say that because these life support systems are exactly what I had in mind as evidence to the contrary. Without such an external life support system attached keeping you alive, there's not going to be some drug that holds your body together in a zombified form. Whatever treatment sustains the health of your heart muscle will surely be equally helpful to all the other muscles in your body, as would whatever keeps your circulatory system and all the other tissues in all your other vital organs in working order. The alternative would be to encase the body in ever increasing layers of machinery, which is definitely not what anyone talking about life extension means.

> Whatever treatment sustains the health of your heart muscle will surely be equally helpful to all the other muscles in your body

I'm not sure that's a foregone conclusion. Loads of interventions put extra pressure on other body systems (often, but not always, the liver and kidneys). Sometimes to the extent that even if you may "manage" the original complaint, it comes at a substantial cost to overall health. And heart muscle is pretty special anyway, so it's quite possible it's a separate treatment to skeletal muscle problems.

And pretty much any system failing can kill you so if long term life extension comes from targeted treatments per problem, you need to hit bones and cartilage, muscles, skin, nerves, brain, GI tract, kidneys, liver, immune system, endocrine system, lungs, etc etc, but also not overstress any one with the treatments of the others and also handle almost-inevitable cancers.

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