Hijacking this to pick your brain. Do you think head transplants on to repeatedly cloned bodies could work as life extension? Even without genetic improvements to increase longevity, I can imagine switching bodies every 20-50 years becoming mundane with nearly modern surgical techniques provided we can reconnect the nervous system. Related to this, do you think parabiosis would work without all the body switching? I don’t know if this is in your wheelhouse exactly but you mentioned mentioned a replacement body and this has been on my mind for a while.
Do you think head transplants on to repeatedly cloned bodies could work as life extension? Even without genetic improvements to increase longevity, I can imagine switching bodies every 20-50 years becoming mundane with nearly modern surgical techniques provided we can reconnect the nervous system.
Yes, I think head transplants could extend lifespan pretty significantly if you can do them safely (they’re currently super dangerous), but I don’t think it would extend lifespan indefinitely. The brain itself ages, so unless you have a means of gradually replacing brain tissue a la Jean Hebert, you’re not going to get to indefinite lifespan extension.
Related to this, do you think parabiosis would work without all the body switching?
I mean… would you WANT your circulatory system hooked up to that of someone else? Sounds gross, weird and extremely inconvenient to me, even if you’re the one benefitting.
I can see blood transfusions if you can make artificial blood. But I can’t see parabiosis ever being a thing unless it’s in some exceptional circumstances.
but I don’t think it would extend lifespan indefinitely.
I think the big question about head transplants for me is how it interacts with the process of aging, given that body systems are heavily intercorrelated and damage in one system will damage other systems (and vice versa with healing).
Intuitively, I would expect it to work statistically in one of two ways. In the pessimistic case, the brain keeps aging on the normal Gompertz schedule, and even a perfect head transplant can never buy you more than a decade or two before any of your head-located diseases kill you; it corresponds to shifting the aging mortality spike down somewhat, but it is still going to spike soon. (In this scenario, the trauma and cost of a head transplant might rule it out for a lot of elderly people: you might die on the operating table or afterwards, and it doesn’t buy you much time.) In the optimistic case, the near-reset of the body to the pink of youth will eliminate all of the aging acceleration from the rest of the aging body and heal the brain and by changing the exponent, potentially buy you drastic increases in lifespan by flattening the spike, and 50 or 100 years might suddenly be statistically plausible. At which point you might as well consider it an indefinite lifespan extension because who knows where medical technology will be in 100+ years?
It’s not that I want to be fully conjoined with another person, so much as I might prefer that to death in the medium term to get me over the hump to longevity escape velocity. Also, I kind of always imagined it more like a dialysis machine. We don’t grow a whole person so much as a big pile of organs sans brain that is genetically you (or just compatible enough to not cause rejection issues) and get hooked up to that for a while. Maybe medically induce a coma for a few months out of the year, maybe it will be quick and easy to connect/disconnect and you can be plugged in while sleeping or doing desk work. People always object to my life support clone/flesh pile idea but again, better than dying imo.
Hijacking this to pick your brain. Do you think head transplants on to repeatedly cloned bodies could work as life extension? Even without genetic improvements to increase longevity, I can imagine switching bodies every 20-50 years becoming mundane with nearly modern surgical techniques provided we can reconnect the nervous system. Related to this, do you think parabiosis would work without all the body switching? I don’t know if this is in your wheelhouse exactly but you mentioned mentioned a replacement body and this has been on my mind for a while.
Yes, I think head transplants could extend lifespan pretty significantly if you can do them safely (they’re currently super dangerous), but I don’t think it would extend lifespan indefinitely. The brain itself ages, so unless you have a means of gradually replacing brain tissue a la Jean Hebert, you’re not going to get to indefinite lifespan extension.
I mean… would you WANT your circulatory system hooked up to that of someone else? Sounds gross, weird and extremely inconvenient to me, even if you’re the one benefitting.
I can see blood transfusions if you can make artificial blood. But I can’t see parabiosis ever being a thing unless it’s in some exceptional circumstances.
I think the big question about head transplants for me is how it interacts with the process of aging, given that body systems are heavily intercorrelated and damage in one system will damage other systems (and vice versa with healing).
Intuitively, I would expect it to work statistically in one of two ways. In the pessimistic case, the brain keeps aging on the normal Gompertz schedule, and even a perfect head transplant can never buy you more than a decade or two before any of your head-located diseases kill you; it corresponds to shifting the aging mortality spike down somewhat, but it is still going to spike soon. (In this scenario, the trauma and cost of a head transplant might rule it out for a lot of elderly people: you might die on the operating table or afterwards, and it doesn’t buy you much time.) In the optimistic case, the near-reset of the body to the pink of youth will eliminate all of the aging acceleration from the rest of the aging body and heal the brain and by changing the exponent, potentially buy you drastic increases in lifespan by flattening the spike, and 50 or 100 years might suddenly be statistically plausible. At which point you might as well consider it an indefinite lifespan extension because who knows where medical technology will be in 100+ years?
It’s not that I want to be fully conjoined with another person, so much as I might prefer that to death in the medium term to get me over the hump to longevity escape velocity. Also, I kind of always imagined it more like a dialysis machine. We don’t grow a whole person so much as a big pile of organs sans brain that is genetically you (or just compatible enough to not cause rejection issues) and get hooked up to that for a while. Maybe medically induce a coma for a few months out of the year, maybe it will be quick and easy to connect/disconnect and you can be plugged in while sleeping or doing desk work. People always object to my life support clone/flesh pile idea but again, better than dying imo.