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It depends on how close the biological cells are to being immortal. What I was referring to in somewhat sarcastically in another post is that modern senescence research is basically operating from the position that the cell just has, you know, maybe one or two or three things wrong with it, and if we can "just" extend the teleomeres (presumably with just ingesting some substance), and maybe supplement our diet with a couple of substances, and maybe fix cancer or something, we'll be there. There are some reasons to believe this may be true, such as the existence of cells in the wild that seem to be effectively immortal, like certain jellyfish and such. (Nothing terrible close to us taxonomically, but at least they're from planet Earth.) On the other hand, it may turn out that after a couple of quick wins worth, say, 20 or 30 years, that the whole thing devolves into dozens, then hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands of interventions, all complicating each other, a good number of them unique to the individual, as you try to pick up the pieces in your ever-aging organs as they continue to find new and exciting ways to fail. Imagine trying to keep an old car running, but you're not actually allowed to just replace parts, and you have to do all the fixes while the car is on the road, and this is just barely the tip of the iceberg. Senescence research may be one of the worst examples of a light-post problem in human history, as they search for this or that substance that will fix aging but the minimal solution is in fact literally gigabytes worth of information converted into biological machines we can barely even conceive of. If you can read one neuron, you can read two; those problems are not independent. (That's a simplification to some extent, but at this level we'll take it.) If you can understand one protein's function, that doesn't help anywhere near as much with the next one, and the state of the body is roaming through a very high-dimensional space over time, with the interventions all also affecting the next intervention that will be necessary... it can get pretty ugly in there, potentially. Amusingly, the brain is the problem in both cases; biological immortality probably wouldn't be so hard, we could probably solve everything by transplants of freshly-grown organs based on our genetic code... except transplanting a freshly-grown brain in kinda defeats the whole purpose. In the end, both problems may come back to scanning brains one way or another. |