Humanity is misdiagnosing infectious diseases. Statistically speaking you have a few dozen HPVs and say 0.7 HSVs infecting you. Like, permanently, your immune system can’t destroy them, they lay dormant in immunno-privileged areas.
How many other viruses do we misdiagnose as “not there” when really they just act in an undetectable way? hundreds? thousands? millions? I don’t think there’s a good estimate out there
Bacteria and fungi that cause superficial infections enough to an immune reaction to leaving you with localized genetic and structural damage?
Like yeah, the cause of death is now more vague, it’s because the guy was fat and had tumors, and part of being fat and having tumors is just the way the human degrades… but to think that none of it is caused by the trillions of organisms that enter your body every day and our body’s reaction to it? I find that unlikely.
It’s just that we eliminated all “obvious” infectious disease, but even that will not stay as is. The current prevention measures are just an evolutionary pressure and it’s combined with all of us no longer being selected based on our ability to react to infectious disease. I think it’s not unreasonable to predict an uptik in this is the trans hummanist future comes to pass, and if it does, then it will be a long time before we’re rid of deadly disease, even if the signal is now weaker and more confounded.
Overall mortality mortality and morbidity rates don’t lie. You can’t do enough creative accounting to hide vast amounts of infectious disease mortality within a much longer healthy lifespan.
(And yes, it’s healthier on average, even counting obesity. Painful disability was more common in the past.)
The nice thing about sequencing is that eventually it’ll be feasible to take a slice of your tissue and identify everything that’s not you. Easier to make progress at that point.
Replacing your cells with nanotech cells that bacteria/viruses/prions/etc can’t crack, and which have very solid checksum/error-correcting codes to prevent things like nanotech cancer… you’re safe against any non-intentionally-designed attack. (To say nothing of the abstraction layers possible with uploading.)
“Normal” transhumanist technologies aren’t perfect, but they are barely epsilon-susceptible to natural infectious diseases.
Humanity is misdiagnosing infectious diseases. Statistically speaking you have a few dozen HPVs and say 0.7 HSVs infecting you. Like, permanently, your immune system can’t destroy them, they lay dormant in immunno-privileged areas.
How many other viruses do we misdiagnose as “not there” when really they just act in an undetectable way? hundreds? thousands? millions? I don’t think there’s a good estimate out there
Bacteria and fungi that cause superficial infections enough to an immune reaction to leaving you with localized genetic and structural damage?
Like yeah, the cause of death is now more vague, it’s because the guy was fat and had tumors, and part of being fat and having tumors is just the way the human degrades… but to think that none of it is caused by the trillions of organisms that enter your body every day and our body’s reaction to it? I find that unlikely.
It’s just that we eliminated all “obvious” infectious disease, but even that will not stay as is. The current prevention measures are just an evolutionary pressure and it’s combined with all of us no longer being selected based on our ability to react to infectious disease. I think it’s not unreasonable to predict an uptik in this is the trans hummanist future comes to pass, and if it does, then it will be a long time before we’re rid of deadly disease, even if the signal is now weaker and more confounded.
Overall mortality mortality and morbidity rates don’t lie. You can’t do enough creative accounting to hide vast amounts of infectious disease mortality within a much longer healthy lifespan.
(And yes, it’s healthier on average, even counting obesity. Painful disability was more common in the past.)
The nice thing about sequencing is that eventually it’ll be feasible to take a slice of your tissue and identify everything that’s not you. Easier to make progress at that point.
Replacing your cells with nanotech cells that bacteria/viruses/prions/etc can’t crack, and which have very solid checksum/error-correcting codes to prevent things like nanotech cancer… you’re safe against any non-intentionally-designed attack. (To say nothing of the abstraction layers possible with uploading.)
“Normal” transhumanist technologies aren’t perfect, but they are barely epsilon-susceptible to natural infectious diseases.