Artificial Organs

[Silverbullet]

As I have stated.. I believe that Trip lived to the age of 145. Think that by his time Artificial Organs were developed and in use. Trip may have had a few of these which kept him going in addition to what T'Pol did through the Bond. He may have some important ones.

don't believe trip was a Cyborg but he probably did have some Artifical organs.

I think that if one could lve to the end of this century Artifical Organs might be available off the shelf and one could live a few hundred years using them.

SB

[putaro]

Cloned organs will probably be available in the next 10-15 years. The process will probably involve growing the organ by itself, not growing a complete person and chopping them up (ala "Similitude"). It may also be possible to grow organs that do not have antigen markers so that even though they don't share the recipient's DNA they would not be rejected by the immune system.

[Distracted]

I can see cloned organs being available. Cloned tissues are available now, just not complete organs. The current maximum lifespan for the human brain in the absence of disease is believed to be about 120 years. Since cloning the brain would result in a new individual, I'd aim more for a lifespan in the 120's, although we can always hypothesize advances in the maintenance of normal brain function at advanced age which might push the limit up. I personally fully intend to live past 100 in good health.

[putaro]

The current maximum lifespan for the human brain in the absence of disease is believed to be about 120 years.

Probably hard to say at this point since few people live to be 120, but those that do never seem to die from "brain shutting down". Given that we're not growing new brain cells, it's inevitable that the brain would cease to function at some point. However, as our understanding of human physiology and genetics improves it's not too far-fetched to think that we'd be able to stimulate the growth of new neurons.

[Cogito]

Technology is already at the point where we know how to detect and stimulate nerve impulses, and if science gets to the point of being able to keep people alive long enough for the brain to be a limiting factor, I suspect there would be ways to improve that. In fact, given that people are already decoding the optical signal and able to synthesize it, I suspect it won't be all that many decades before somebody thinks about providing an internal 'heads up display' system. And I can imagine that would lead fairly quickly to cybernetic augmentation. I'm not sure if it's on-topic, but a report I saw a couple of decades ago tracked the availability and cost of storage and processing power from the distant past to the then-current day. The rate of growth was increasing exponentially. (That's not technology, but the rate of growth of technology, increasing exponentially.)

We are quickly reaching the point where almost any design / research problem can be solved just by defining the problem clearly enough and brute-forcing a solution by trial and error. The report gave some projected milestones that caught my eye:

Computer can be built which has comparable processing power to a human brain.

'Human brain' computer is available at a cost below $0.01

Computer can be built which has comparable processing power to the human population of the planet.

'Humans on the planet' computer is available at a cost below $0.01

From memory, these were projected to occur roughly twenty years apart. We haven't reached the first one yet but I guess we're just about due, and I don't think we're far off.

[WarpGirl]

According to a quick search the oldest living person ever recorded (excluding people from various religious writings, but mainly the Bible) died at 122. Given 150 years I think you could add on a few decades to the human life-span.

[putaro]

I think that biotech will really take off once we have a working simulator for biological processes (protein folding and on up). One of my roommates back in college was a microbiology PhD student. Experiments would commonly take months to verify a fairly trivial effect. If you could simulate it in an afternoon the rate of advance will go up remarkably.

Another friend designs drug testing regimes. He told me that the simplified view of developing new drugs today is you identify the effect you're after, get a culture that shows the problem, replicate the culture, then you hit the cells with every chemical/drug in the repertoire and see if any of them create the result you want. Then, you try to figure out the side effects of the drug, move on into animal testing, then into human testing. If we actually understood all of the inner workings of our cells, designing a compound to stimulate the cells would be much easier, cheaper and faster.

[WarpGirl]

I'm finding all of this slightly creepy. I have no idea why.

[Cogito]

According to a quick search the oldest living person ever recorded (excluding people from various religious writings, but mainly the Bible) died at 122. Given 150 years I think you could add on a few decades to the human life-span.

I think you're probably right. Over the past 50 years the typical life expectancy in the UK has increased steadily at the rate of about three months per year. That's a couple of decades per century.

[Silverbullet]

sOME TIME AGO i READ THAT WE ARE BORN WITH ALL OF THE bRAIN cELLS WE WILL EVER HAVE. THE nUMBER WAS ABOUT A tRILLLION. GIVEN THAT WITH GREAT CARE THE BRAIN COULD LIVE TO ABOUT 500 YEARS. (NO ALCHOHOL, sMOKING ETC, TO REDUCE THE AMOUNT OF BRAIN CELLS LOST EACH DAY WHICH IS IN THE MILLIONS)

nOT SURE SINCE THAT ARTICLE i READ ABOU 50 YEARS AGO.

Excuse the Caps. REsult of having to battle this damned server every mornin

sb

[Weeble]

Based on SB's restrictions to brain life....I am lucky to be alive.