From: Kris Ganjam (cckris@mxyzptlk.atc.missouri.edu)
Date: Tue Oct 21 1997 - 18:26:06 MDT
On Oct 22, 9:39pm, Joao Pedro wrote:
> Reason's Triumph at: http://homepage.esoterica.pt/~jpnitya/
...
>One other way to cheat aging is to build a spaceship, travel fast enough
>through space and return
>home when a few centuries have passed on Earth while only a few years passed
on >the spaceship! Okay, it's a bit too crazy and the resources needed would be
>huge, not to mention the
>technologies, but I'll try anything.
Does angular velocity produce relativistic time dilation effects? Would it be
possible to get your head and/or body to spin/orbit fast enough to time warp
into the future without the centrifugal force turning it to pulp?
> Your neurons might die because of the death
> of the cells that support them (the glial cells) and since you won't
> transplant these cells, you would still die.
Would continually supplanting a brain with, say fetus neurons, permit some sort
of biological uploading/augmentation, where the fresh neurons make up for/mimic
the ones that are dying off in the adult brain? The brain does appear to have
a fair bit of redundancy worked into its structure, so given some time to
integrate themselves with the old neurons, the new ones may be enough for a
transparent transition from one generation of neurons to the next.
> Even that we do find a way to correct
> all the errors in the genome that cause aging, it will be very difficult
> to save us (I'm writing an article about that, BTW). There are a few
> theories but none is currently technically possible, which means that if
> we did find the genetic causes for aging (by far our best hope to
> control aging) we would still age and die. What do you think about it?
Assuming we can engineer designer restriction enzymes/ligases with the ability
to cut and paste DNA segments with high specificity, and that a
distribution/communication system can be set up to apply these operations to
all of the cells in a body, implementing the newly found bug-fix/patch to some
disease should be straightforward. Eventually, this should lead to an
optimized and perhaps minimal genome which will allow standarized (platform
independent?) disease patches and/or body subsystem upgrades. This technology
should arrive much before nanotech, as much of the enzyme machinery is already
in place. Designing the genetic patches and predicting their side effects is,
of course, the hard part, but nanotech faces the same hurdle. Are
object-oriented protein languages & compilers far off?
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Kris Ganjam Advanced Technology Center
cckris@showme.missouri.edu http://www.atc.missouri.edu
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