There’s a related problem that often isn’t appreciated. In general, in the natural environment if the average lifespan is around L, evolution will have no problem creating all sorts of tricks to maximize what it gets out of organs but causes them to fail just around or sometime after L. That means, that if evolution can get an advantage by making things fail late in the process, it will. This is consistent with the Gompertz curve, and it also suggests that optimists like Aubrey de Grey may be massively underestimating the difficulty in extending lifespan. As we get a larger population of very elderly, we’re likely to run into diseases and problems we’ve never even seen before. To reach actuarial escape velocity, we will likely need to anticipate such diseases, and effective treatments, before we even ever encounter the diseases. That requires a degree of understanding of the human body that is well beyond our current level.
If we can 3D-print or grow up organs than the problem mentioned by you gets effectively solved for anything but our brains. That’s why I like organ engineering approach much better than other approaches.
As for brain, CRISPR/Cas9 engineering is a really great approach. It gives us potentially so many degrees of freedom.
There’s a related problem that often isn’t appreciated. In general, in the natural environment if the average lifespan is around L, evolution will have no problem creating all sorts of tricks to maximize what it gets out of organs but causes them to fail just around or sometime after L. That means, that if evolution can get an advantage by making things fail late in the process, it will. This is consistent with the Gompertz curve, and it also suggests that optimists like Aubrey de Grey may be massively underestimating the difficulty in extending lifespan. As we get a larger population of very elderly, we’re likely to run into diseases and problems we’ve never even seen before. To reach actuarial escape velocity, we will likely need to anticipate such diseases, and effective treatments, before we even ever encounter the diseases. That requires a degree of understanding of the human body that is well beyond our current level.
If we can 3D-print or grow up organs than the problem mentioned by you gets effectively solved for anything but our brains. That’s why I like organ engineering approach much better than other approaches.
As for brain, CRISPR/Cas9 engineering is a really great approach. It gives us potentially so many degrees of freedom.