this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2024
322 points (97.4% liked)

Technology

58492 readers
3962 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] SplashJackson@lemmy.ca 2 points 10 hours ago

Just like in the classic movie Bicentennial Man

[–] Zip2@feddit.uk 7 points 15 hours ago

Plenty of meat bags walking around now without a fully functioning brain. Can we use those?

[–] sumguyonline@lemmy.world 3 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

There's a trick most of the population can do to "youth up". Rewind decades of biological age for your entire body. The answer is out there. Start with the jungle people that even in old age have hearts like 20yr olds.

[–] Sam_Bass@lemmy.world 4 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago) (2 children)

they tried that a few years back via a quadraplegics brain transplant to a normal body. he died on the table. not likely to change that with cloning

[–] echodot@feddit.uk 6 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago) (1 children)

I've just looked it up and there has never been a full brain transplant, so I don't know what you're on about.

[–] T156@lemmy.world 0 points 15 hours ago

They might have confused it for a head transplant?

Although neither patient was alive at the time of the transplant.

I don't know if a full brain transplant would be feasible, or even a good idea. Not only would none of their senses and motor nerves work for weeks while the brain and nerves re-established themselves, but they would be walking around in a dead person's face, body and speaking with their voice. That seems genuinely horrific.

[–] SynopsisTantilize@lemm.ee 1 points 17 hours ago (1 children)
[–] Sam_Bass@lemmy.world 5 points 17 hours ago (2 children)

go look at images of old telephone wiring like when POTS was still the main method.multiply those rats nests of wires by a billion and shrink that them down to the molecular size and you might see the issue

[–] Excrubulent@slrpnk.net 2 points 11 hours ago

I cut a big nerve in my thumb years ago, and apparently plastic surgeons fix that sort of thing.

They reattached the nerve bundles, but I was told the sheathes could be realigned, but the nerves would have to grow back from the point of the cut all the way to the skin.

At first one half of my thumb was entirely numb, and over the course of well over a decade I'd get pins & needles as bunches of nerves would finish regrowing, except attached to random channels in the nerve bundle, so my brain had to completely remap all those signals to what they actually meant. Also extreme nerve pain near the cut whenever it was bumped, I assume because many nerves just didn't grow successfully and remained near that site.

It felt super weird because hot, cold, pain & touch were all mixed up, but eventually my brain sorted them out. It still feels a little weird, especially near my nail, but I haven't had a pins & needles experience for a few years.

The problem with doing that with a neck is that it would take wayyy longer and the chances of the patient dying from complications due to no brain signals working right... yeah I don't see medical science fixing this unless we can regrow nerves in a much shorter span of time.

[–] ouRKaoS@lemmy.today -1 points 11 hours ago

Just enhance a few times and it will be easy!

[–] ArugulaZ@lemmy.zip 27 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Good lord, just let people DIE. Imagine what a rotten place this would be if people with outdated mindsets continued to control the world decades or even centuries after their expiration dates. People were already angry about 80 year old presidential candidates... what happens when they're 120, or 150?

[–] skeezix@lemmy.world 7 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

For $10 a month you can get the brain implant without ads.

[–] SendMePhotos@lemmy.world 1 points 17 hours ago

You know... I'm just gonna check this DNR box.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] captainlezbian@lemmy.world 27 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I’d rather not enact the highest stakes ship of Theseus

[–] mindaika@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 5 hours ago

You don’t want to save your old brain chunks and put them back together to see if you can make on old version of you?

[–] kritzkrieg@lemm.ee 10 points 1 day ago

Probably the best description I've seen of this lmao

[–] Gestrid@lemmy.ca 5 points 21 hours ago

Something something Doctor Who Cybermen.

[–] Fedizen@lemmy.world 22 points 1 day ago (4 children)

No thanks. We don't need rich people living forever.

[–] roscoe@lemmy.dbzer0.com 13 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Might be the only way to get them to give a shit about the environment.

[–] Fedizen@lemmy.world 14 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (3 children)

I doubt it. They will just dump shit further away. If their solution default is to make things "somebody else's problem" there's no reason to believe they will stop thinking that way.

load more comments (3 replies)
load more comments (3 replies)
[–] aesthelete@lemmy.world 1 points 17 hours ago

What's that I smell, is it the doctor for doctor death season 5?

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 8 points 1 day ago (3 children)

If you want a bit of a deeper dive, Sean Carroll's Mindscape gets into the science of aging and known workable remedies/treatments.

The good news is that Billionaires will not be living forever any time soon.

The bad news is that we've got a cellularly defined terminal limit and there's nothing we can do to simply reset the clock. "Cloned Bodies" for animals are dysfunctional bordering on nightmarish. The human brain's plasticity isn't something you can renew with a pill or a potion. Blood Boys don't work. There aren't trivially replaceable components in the human body.

[–] echodot@feddit.uk 1 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

"Cloned Bodies" for animals are dysfunctional bordering on nightmarish.

That's nothing to do with the back that clone is impossible and just that cloning is hard. You are acting as if it is an unsolvable problem.

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world -1 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago) (1 children)

clone is impossible

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.

You are acting as if it is an unsolvable problem.

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.

[–] echodot@feddit.uk 1 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago) (1 children)

But there's a real possibility that "anti-aging" is, at its heart, a war against entropy that we can't win.

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.

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 1 points 3 hours ago

You’re going to need to provide some citation on that one

I linked to the podcast which has citations to the research in the show notes.

All of the above you would know if you weren’t intent on being a disingenuous twit.

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.

[–] Fedizen@lemmy.world 6 points 1 day ago

Its wild this research is even being attempted, its borderline unethical to experiment on otherwise healthy people.

I fully don't expect immune system driven aging to be understood until the Thymus better understood. DNA reproduction and telomere related aging will not be addressable until cell to cell signaling is finally mapped, and methylation activation/deactivation can be targeted.

Most likely some kind of cloned brain tissue can help reduce age-related cognitive decline and some diseases. Imo we'd get far more out of targeting specific diseases than going after aging.

I'd be fine with billionaires getting it first. As much as I'm not a fan of late stage capitalism, I refuse to cut off my nose to spite my face; they got A/C, feather beds, cars, baths, and all sorts of other luxuries long before us plebs got them. Let them beta test the stuff, and by the time the economies of scale pick up enough for it to be affordable to the rest of us, the kinks will be worked out.

Of course there's always the possibility of a cartel withholding it from the masses, but that's what the second amendment and guillotines were invented for.

[–] xia@lemmy.sdf.org 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Brain updates? Now with integrated thought-crime prevention using AI-safety training data.

[–] SendMePhotos@lemmy.world 1 points 17 hours ago

Psycho-Pass is an anime based on exactly that.

[–] 100_kg_90_de_belin@feddit.it 18 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Millennials and Gen Z: *bond over their death wish Scientists: *ETERNAL LIFE

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] Maggoty@lemmy.world 59 points 1 day ago (27 children)

As long as it's made mandatory to cover with insurance so it's available to everyone. The last thing we need is an immortal ruling class.

[–] TheFriar@lemm.ee 12 points 1 day ago

Let the death of Saburo Arasaka be a lesson to us all: even 150+ year old bastards can get choked the fuck out

load more comments (26 replies)
load more comments
view more: next ›