I don't actually think the program described below is a good idea. Take it more as a plot setting for a hard science fiction world if you want.
I want to live forever. Failing that I want to live for longer than 80 years, and in good health till just before I die.
Lots of people want the same and, are trying to work out how to make our body stay healthy longer. This is difficult, because all of our various body parts start failing around the same time for different reasons. I hope they succeed, but I wouldn't want to put all my eggs in one basket.
So are there other options which avoid this issue?
One is uploading. From what little I've heard, I'm not hopeful they'll get there in time.
The other is to transfer your brain from a decrepit dying body to a healthy young one, whenever your poor health starts to bother you. This won't cure brain disease, but will at least mean that even if you do get dementia, your bones won't be aching all the time. I also suspect a young body would drastically reduce e.g. alzheimers development by e.g reducing inflammation, improving oxygen and nutrient support, clearing out toxins etc.
So a full brain transfer might let us live to 150 in mostly good health, as opposed to our current situation of 80 years, health getting steadily worse throughout.
Ok.
What would the process of a brain transfer look like?
First we'd need to clone unconscious versions of ourselves, and keep them alive and healthy till at least age 11 when the skull will be large enough for our adult brain, but ideally till 18 to avoid... issues.
Then we'd have to remove the brain from our current body, and attach it to the new body, keeping it alive the whole time.
What new technologies would we have to develop to solve this?
Human Cloning
While we haven't cloned humans yet, cloning is a well understood technology. There are specific barriers that make cloning primates more difficult than say sheep, but I would be surprised if these problems wouldn't be solved with a concerted effort. At this stage its an engineering problem more than a wide open hypothetical problem.
Keeping an unconscious human alive and healthy
We know how to make someone brain-dead. We also know how to make someone unconscious, both permanently and temporarily. There are people who have woken up after decades in a coma, and medically induced comas can last months if necessary.
However there are particular challenges here:
We want to start this in utero, before the fetus ever develops consciousness.
The fetus must develop normally into a healthy adult human.
We need to keep all the parts of the body healthy. That means the clone should be able to breathe without assistance, and ideally should be able to eat and drink normally to keep teeth, mouth and digestive system working well.
We need to keep the body strong. We have some machines that exercise comatose patients, but they generally just slow down muscle atrophy, they can't build new muscles.
I have no idea if this is merely an engineering problem, requires new insights, or is fundamentally impossible. If anyone knows more, I'd love to hear.
Transferring the brain
We know a lot about organ transfers. We know how to keep an animal brain alive for hours even once removed from the head. The tricky bit is reattaching it afterwards.
We know how to reattach blood vessels and tissues. The difficult bit is nerves:
The brain has one spinal chord and 12 pairs of cranial nerves. All will need to be reattached to the new body.
We don't actually have a good way of repairing spinal cord injuries, however this is a highly active area of research. I expect this problem is reasonably likely to be solved in the next 30 years or so.
Some cranial nerves can already be repaired (sorta, we just encourage the body to grow new ones to replace the old one), but others can't and are also active areas of research.
Rejection will not be a problem, since the recipient is a clone. We've already tested this extensively with identical twins.
What would a society look like where this was normal?
We would have gigantic warehouses storing and keeping healthy ranks upon ranks of clones. Every 10 years or so we'd start a new clone from each person, so that there's always a clone of about the right age available. We'd dispose of the clones once they reach 40, so there'd be about 4 clones per person. At 5 square metres of floor space per clone, this would take up 20m of floor space per person. An average western city has about 50m of floor space per person, so the facilities to grow and handle these clones would take up about a third of our cities, and a huge percentage of our work force.
People would use their clones as surrogates, both for their actual children, and for their children's clones. They'd also likely use them for blood and organ transfers and medical testing.
Whenever someone suffers a grievous injury, or feels like their bodies getting too old and creaky they'd transfer into their clone who's between the ages of 18 and 28. In an emergency, when no such clone is available, they'd transfer into a younger or older clone. people would only die when their brain stopped working.
Rich people would have dozens of clones "just in case". Poor people might not have any, or the state provided health care system might guarantee a minimum of one clones every 30 years or so.
Is this ethical?
I'm usually a high decoupler. If nobody's hurt by this, why would it be bad?
In this case I remain a bit squeamish. Firstly we don't understand consciousness well enough to know if the clones are feeling anything. And there's be strong incentives to come up with BS arguments that they don't regardless of the truth.
Secondly I expect that even if we get there in the end, we'd have to make a lot of mistakes in the process, effectively torturing a lot of baby humans. A true omelas situation.
OTOH getting rid of old age is good. The question is, is it worth the cost?
Even if you think so, the majority of people are not high decouplers, and will be horrified when the program first starts. Any attempt to get this off the ground will likely lead to very bad things for societal cohesion, which is in and of itself a reason not to do this. Spend your weirdness points elsewhere.
I don't actually think the program described below is a good idea. Take it more as a plot setting for a hard science fiction world if you want.
I want to live forever. Failing that I want to live for longer than 80 years, and in good health till just before I die.
Lots of people want the same and, are trying to work out how to make our body stay healthy longer. This is difficult, because all of our various body parts start failing around the same time for different reasons. I hope they succeed, but I wouldn't want to put all my eggs in one basket.
So are there other options which avoid this issue?
One is uploading. From what little I've heard, I'm not hopeful they'll get there in time.
The other is to transfer your brain from a decrepit dying body to a healthy young one, whenever your poor health starts to bother you. This won't cure brain disease, but will at least mean that even if you do get dementia, your bones won't be aching all the time. I also suspect a young body would drastically reduce e.g. alzheimers development by e.g reducing inflammation, improving oxygen and nutrient support, clearing out toxins etc.
So a full brain transfer might let us live to 150 in mostly good health, as opposed to our current situation of 80 years, health getting steadily worse throughout.
Ok.
What would the process of a brain transfer look like?
First we'd need to clone unconscious versions of ourselves, and keep them alive and healthy till at least age 11 when the skull will be large enough for our adult brain, but ideally till 18 to avoid... issues.
Then we'd have to remove the brain from our current body, and attach it to the new body, keeping it alive the whole time.
What new technologies would we have to develop to solve this?
Human Cloning
While we haven't cloned humans yet, cloning is a well understood technology. There are specific barriers that make cloning primates more difficult than say sheep, but I would be surprised if these problems wouldn't be solved with a concerted effort. At this stage its an engineering problem more than a wide open hypothetical problem.
Keeping an unconscious human alive and healthy
We know how to make someone brain-dead. We also know how to make someone unconscious, both permanently and temporarily. There are people who have woken up after decades in a coma, and medically induced comas can last months if necessary.
However there are particular challenges here:
I have no idea if this is merely an engineering problem, requires new insights, or is fundamentally impossible. If anyone knows more, I'd love to hear.
Transferring the brain
We know a lot about organ transfers. We know how to keep an animal brain alive for hours even once removed from the head. The tricky bit is reattaching it afterwards.
We know how to reattach blood vessels and tissues. The difficult bit is nerves:
The brain has one spinal chord and 12 pairs of cranial nerves. All will need to be reattached to the new body.
We don't actually have a good way of repairing spinal cord injuries, however this is a highly active area of research. I expect this problem is reasonably likely to be solved in the next 30 years or so.
Some cranial nerves can already be repaired (sorta, we just encourage the body to grow new ones to replace the old one), but others can't and are also active areas of research.
Rejection will not be a problem, since the recipient is a clone. We've already tested this extensively with identical twins.
What would a society look like where this was normal?
We would have gigantic warehouses storing and keeping healthy ranks upon ranks of clones. Every 10 years or so we'd start a new clone from each person, so that there's always a clone of about the right age available. We'd dispose of the clones once they reach 40, so there'd be about 4 clones per person. At 5 square metres of floor space per clone, this would take up 20m of floor space per person. An average western city has about 50m of floor space per person, so the facilities to grow and handle these clones would take up about a third of our cities, and a huge percentage of our work force.
People would use their clones as surrogates, both for their actual children, and for their children's clones. They'd also likely use them for blood and organ transfers and medical testing.
Whenever someone suffers a grievous injury, or feels like their bodies getting too old and creaky they'd transfer into their clone who's between the ages of 18 and 28. In an emergency, when no such clone is available, they'd transfer into a younger or older clone. people would only die when their brain stopped working.
Rich people would have dozens of clones "just in case". Poor people might not have any, or the state provided health care system might guarantee a minimum of one clones every 30 years or so.
Is this ethical?
I'm usually a high decoupler. If nobody's hurt by this, why would it be bad?
In this case I remain a bit squeamish. Firstly we don't understand consciousness well enough to know if the clones are feeling anything. And there's be strong incentives to come up with BS arguments that they don't regardless of the truth.
Secondly I expect that even if we get there in the end, we'd have to make a lot of mistakes in the process, effectively torturing a lot of baby humans. A true omelas situation.
OTOH getting rid of old age is good. The question is, is it worth the cost?
Even if you think so, the majority of people are not high decouplers, and will be horrified when the program first starts. Any attempt to get this off the ground will likely lead to very bad things for societal cohesion, which is in and of itself a reason not to do this. Spend your weirdness points elsewhere.