I never read the book, but during the last couple years I became more attentive to things in life. Nothing special, but just the general flow of life so to speak. I started noticing an interesting pattern. There is pretty much always exists a single solution to any problem. A core solution. A polymorphism in programming could be an example of what I mean. Say you have a program with a bunch of similar entities and a ton of if/else statements handling the logic for various cases. Conditions keep growing with each new entity. The code becomes messy as you fight the language trying to "cure" your program. Then you introduce an interface and suddenly everything becomes more clear and things just _make sense_. Your conditionals slowly disappear, the logic gets simpler and the code is now flat.
I keep noticing similar patterns pretty much everywhere in life and somewhat confident that the same core solution exists for aging as well.
Shot in the dark (coming from a MS in Biomedical Engineering): circadian control to stabilize the body’s metabolic activity to lessen the “wear and tear” of the body’s condition to intensely survive for but a cosmic microsecond. Once we can “hack” ourselves to de-couple the body away from its heliocentric regularity, we can “slow aging”.
After all, ex vivo cellular immortality exists. I think it’s the hormones that ruin everything.
That's interesting. I've always suspected that "curing" something as fundamental as aging would change some basic aspect of what makes us human. Per your comment about hormones, imagine that if you want immortality, you have to never have had testosterone or estrogen in your body. That person would have a vastly different human experience than everyone else. It sounds like it would make a pretty cool scifi story, as a matter of fact.
The human genome is full of harmful mutations. While many are widespread and some are shared by everyone, we each still have our own unique collection of them. I often wonder how much longer we'd live with every obviously harmful mutation reverted.
It's probably not black and white, some of those harmful mutation may have necessary benefits in some other function. It's like drinking a poison that will kill in the long term but you need to live in the short term.
I keep noticing similar patterns pretty much everywhere in life and somewhat confident that the same core solution exists for aging as well.