4 thoughts on “Life Extension”

  1. If such ‘software’ changes were made possible, your life expectancy would still probably be greatly limited by other factors, such as mandatory experimental procedures for all…

  2. “mandatory experimental procedures for all”
    Or other government actions or inactions.

  3. On the one hand, our control over biology has undergone a quiet revolution in the past 10 years. We can now more or less make DNA to order, and “program” simple cells to do certain things.

    On the other hand, despite our vast databases of millions of genes and their variants, we still have a limited idea of what most of them do. Calling DNA “software” is like calling the universe a “clockwork mechanism”, in that it is a deterministic (? yes, bad interpretations of quantum mechanics aside) autonomous state machine. The complexity of even a single cell is outrageous (look at some microscope videos of their functioning). Our computers struggle to predict what any given protein will do when in a wet environment, and there are millions of them with millions^2 variants.

    So, while something like this is probably *possible*, the idea alone isn’t going to get us there.

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