[ExI] Future Bodies

[William Flynn Wallace]

Say, Bill here to add a point or two from my book on the far future:

It seems to me that the main causes of aging are the errors that occur when
a cell produces a new cell.  The errors accumulate along with mutations
despite patchwork efforts by our fix-it squad (some proteins?) to fix them
and so new cells gradually get worse and worse (think skin cells) and are
more and more susceptible to cancers.

If future people can fix that pretty well we should be able to live for
hundreds of years.  But would we want to?  I am thinking, at age 72, of all
the people I have known who have died already, which has included most of
my friends.  Like the Man from Mars in Stranger in a Strange Land who was
worried about the accumulation of sad memories, I wonder if suicide will be
the main cause of death when our bodies are redesigned to near perfection.


On Thu, Jan 16, 2014 at 3:46 PM, Kelly Anderson <kellycoinguy at gmail.com>wrote:

>
>
>
> On Wed, Jan 15, 2014 at 4:35 PM, Ben <bbenzai at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>> Anders quoth:
>>
>> "If humans decide to maintain a building it can last indefinitely."
>>
>> Yes.  I'd like to paraphrase that:
>> If humans decide to maintain their bodies they can last indefinitely.
>> (with a little rearrangement to make that possible).
>>
>> I'm of the opinion that human bodies should be more like cars (not in
>> form, but conceptually).  Nobody expects to have to take a chainsaw to the
>> bonnet when they need to change their battery.  Cars are designed to be
>> opened up and worked on with no harm to the superstructure.  We should be
>> the same.  Evolution dictates differently, but we're all about transcending
>> evolution, aren't we?
>>
>> Things like Aubrey de Grey's SENS are a step in the right direction, but
>> don't go far enough, imo.  We need to be bolder, and take the 'engineering'
>> concept much further.  Rather than just figuring out how to keep the body
>> the same, but lasting longer, I reckon the way forward is to redesign the
>> body to make it easy to replace faulty parts, improve it, actually realise
>> the ideal of morphological freedom, and eliminate the scourge of unchosen
>> physiology.  And make major surgery a LOT less ouchy.  And quicker.
>>
>> I don't really see much value in learning to simply shore up the kludges
>> that evolution has landed us with (backwards eyes with lenses made of
>> *protein*, ffs!, a skeleton virtually guaranteed to give us back problems
>> after a few decades, that bloody stupid laryngeal nerve, a thymus that
>> curls up and dies after a few short years, etc., etc...).  Imagine what any
>> half-decent engineer would come up with if asked to design a body for an
>> intelligent, self-aware, curious, fun-loving being.  I doubt it would
>> resemble our current vessels all that much.  It certainly wouldn't go all
>> wrinkly, painful and stupid after a few decades.  And it would be *easy to
>> maintain*, dammit!
>>
>> My thinking on this is still at a fairly early stage.  Comments,
>> constructive criticism, etc., all welcome.  (don't bother if you're going
>> to say things like "Nature knows best", "Don't mess with god's plan", etc.
>>  Because,  you know, nature actually does a pretty shitty job (just good
>> enough to have kids, then you're in the bin!), and there is no god).
>>
>
> Yeah, you wouldn't catch me saying that. Just to be clear here, are you
> talking about changing the whole thing, or just swapping out for artificial
> hearts and such? Or is it still too fuzzy?
>
> I would like something that I could take on or off as easily as I get into
> or out of a car. That would allow me to be uploaded most of the time, and
> embodied only when I really needed to be.
>
> -Kelly
>
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