326
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2024
326 points (97.4% liked)
Technology
59366 readers
1179 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
It's possible in the sense that you can get near identical genetic replicas of the parent organism.
But the side effect of this process is in line with historical experiments of inbreeding. Most notably, you get a high instance of progeria, which is the opposite of what you want when aiming for life extension.
It is an unsolved problem. Whether it is solveable (either theoretically or practically) is an unanswered question.
But there's a real possibility that "anti-aging" is, at its heart, a war against entropy that we can't win.
The best we can do may be to archive the information of a subject and pass it on to an inheritor. And we've already got a good handle on that, by way of schools and libraries and making babies.
Or maybe not. Maybe there's a trick to indefinite cellular repair and replacement. It's just not anywhere on the horizon. If it exists, the closest we've come so far is hypothesis. Nothing we've tried has successfully undone aging, even at a single cell level.
You're going to need to provide some citation on that one because I see no evidence that this is a fundamentally unsolvable problem. It's not a mathematics issue, it's a scientific one. As far as I can tell there's no biological reason that organisms need to age and die, (see lobsters) so it isn't a war against entropy because entropy isn't biological aging. They have nothing to do with each other.
All of the above you would know if you weren't intent on being a disingenuous twit.
I linked to the podcast which has citations to the research in the show notes.
Take it up with the Second Law of Thermodynamics and Decay Theory of Immediate Memory. You're trying to turn a human into a Ship of Theseus, but at best all you're doing is imperfectly copying and replicating the information therein. We run into the same problems with computer memory, and the only real working solution is to make multiple perfect copies at discrete intervals as backup.
That's simply not possible at the cellular level at this time. Nor would backup/restore of cellular data be a practical solution, particularly as it regards the human brain, any time in the foreseeable future.
You're doomed to die, just like everything else that's existed to date.
That's not how the laws of the thermodynamics works. Biological immortality is perfectly possible and we see it all the time in nature please look it up.
Cellular decay is a consequence of entropy. The solution to decay is replication. But replication is imperfect because of errors in the process. You're still dealing with decay, only this time it is in information.
Point to the immortal organism.