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Comment by kaybe | Hacker News Reader

Ah, but cancer is always the same thing, body cells going amok. The reasons are manifold and a lot of research is going on there, but the result is, broadly speaking, the same. (Of course you get different kinds of tumors..) It's hard to see how it can ever be eradicated for good since it's kind of part of the system and does not neccessarily have external causes (though in most cases is does).

And then there are other diseases we have no cure for yet, which are not cancer, such as Alzheimers and aids. We can eradicate those, I believe.

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I don't really think it can be fixed either. Trying to cure all cancers is like trying to engineer a car that never, ever breaks for all eternity. Even if you left this hypothetical perfect sports car in the garage, the belts and tires and tubes would start to degrade eventually.

Better to try to replace each part as it breaks with an upgrade! That's my immortality plan- when my hearing breaks, get an implant. When the hip goes out, in goes a titanium one. You mind starts slipping? We're going to need some sort of prosthetic neurons, I'm thinking carbon nanotubes you inject into you spinal fluid and which self-assemble inside the brain. Eventually, enough meat has been replaced with tech that my mind can make the complete jump to software and at which point I shed this frail human form and proceed to explore the universe via self-replicating probes... Well, that's the plan anyways.

But either way, to beat cancer, you going to need to fundamentally redesign the human form.

ps (Elon Musk, if you are reading this, please contact me. I'm really don't want to die and I'm willing to act as a guinea pig towards that end)

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of biology.

You think that you have organs, but really, you have cells. When those cells break in a particular way, cancer results. 99.999% of those cancers are terminated. The rest can kill.

Preventing cancer is a matter of adding 9s to that statistic until death is implausible. Then, we run up against other senescence factors: our cells can only divide so many times, garbage accumulates that can't be purged, etc.

It's plausible to imagine a world where we no longer die of cancer, adding 10-20 years to the average lifespan. People will start to die of obscure diseases caused by genes no longer being present in their DNA.

So we work on fixing that. It's difficult, of course.

I want to add that we actually get cancer all the time (like, every day), but our bodies kill it successfully. That's why people with AIDS or bad nutrition get more cancer: they are not able to fight it anymore.

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