Overall, I can’t recommend this much but it might do a good job getting people aware of these issues who don’t currently know anything.
Can’t say I’ve really seen it—not a cable subscriber here (I may correct that for this episode through other channels of media propagation) -- but this meshes with my impression of the general level of scientific expertise found in the Science Channel.
I’m curious: at any point did it mention, at all, that none of the technologies mentioned as being used on Savage for life extension are particularly radical in nature, or that they all have a basis in currently ongoing research? Obviously this holds true of the SENS project to filter senescent blood cells (interesting anecdote: I know the guy who built that particular project’s first prototype device for filtering senescent cells from mice. One of the challenges they had to overcome was the small quantity of blood; he did this by designing the device to be reciprocating rather than cycling. He also keeps a neodymium magnet in his office which is weighted in pounds. It’s encased in a massive block of foam. He also has a hobby of adding new heat-absorbing materials to obsolescent electronics in order to see how much overclocking he can get out of them—he once related to me that he got an old 200 MHz up to 3 GHz… for thirty seconds. No, he isn’t me.).
I’m more interested in the things like the ‘cybernetic’ neuroprosthesis (obviously referencing Theodore Berger’s work), the cloned organs (obvious reference to multiple projects doing individual tissue cloning—there’s even a company that is now selling cloned human skin that has blood vessels, IIRC.), etc., etc..
I’m curious: at any point did it mention, at all, that none of the technologies mentioned as being used on Savage for life extension are particularly radical in nature, or that they all have a basis in currently ongoing research
They were sort of ok about this part. Almost every technology which they mentioned (including the blood filtration) they explicitly said “based on research at the end of the 20th century” or “based on research at the beginning of the 21st century” and then had a very short (generally no more than 10-15 seconds) clip of the actual research, such as one of the actual blood filtration machines. One funny thing was how all the advanced futuristic technology was all shiny and had a blue glow to it and other standard scifi bits while you could tell at a glance what was real footage because it looked a lot more like, well, real machinery.
Can’t say I’ve really seen it—not a cable subscriber here (I may correct that for this episode through other channels of media propagation) -- but this meshes with my impression of the general level of scientific expertise found in the Science Channel.
I’m curious: at any point did it mention, at all, that none of the technologies mentioned as being used on Savage for life extension are particularly radical in nature, or that they all have a basis in currently ongoing research? Obviously this holds true of the SENS project to filter senescent blood cells (interesting anecdote: I know the guy who built that particular project’s first prototype device for filtering senescent cells from mice. One of the challenges they had to overcome was the small quantity of blood; he did this by designing the device to be reciprocating rather than cycling. He also keeps a neodymium magnet in his office which is weighted in pounds. It’s encased in a massive block of foam. He also has a hobby of adding new heat-absorbing materials to obsolescent electronics in order to see how much overclocking he can get out of them—he once related to me that he got an old 200 MHz up to 3 GHz… for thirty seconds. No, he isn’t me.).
I’m more interested in the things like the ‘cybernetic’ neuroprosthesis (obviously referencing Theodore Berger’s work), the cloned organs (obvious reference to multiple projects doing individual tissue cloning—there’s even a company that is now selling cloned human skin that has blood vessels, IIRC.), etc., etc..
They were sort of ok about this part. Almost every technology which they mentioned (including the blood filtration) they explicitly said “based on research at the end of the 20th century” or “based on research at the beginning of the 21st century” and then had a very short (generally no more than 10-15 seconds) clip of the actual research, such as one of the actual blood filtration machines. One funny thing was how all the advanced futuristic technology was all shiny and had a blue glow to it and other standard scifi bits while you could tell at a glance what was real footage because it looked a lot more like, well, real machinery.