Science is Goddamn Awesome.

[Merusk]

Gene therapy uses virus to Pwn Leukemia in to remission.

Fucking. Awesome.  I can only hope it's viable by the time I get cancer.  I've already decided I'd rather die than go through what my dad did for only a few extra years and the gift of bankruptcy to my surviving family.

[Teleku]

This seems awfully similar to the plot of a movie I once saw.  Schild was very excited about it......

[Morat20]

Between stuff like that and the advances in tissue engineering (there's a guy out there with a bladder grown from his own cells, he's had it like five years now), I'm a lot more happy about old age than I was.

Now if they can make tiny viruses that eat the crap clogging up people's arteries and shore up vein and artery walls, we're really talking...

[TheWalrus]

Holy moly. Wrong section, I shan't shit this one up. Goody for scientists, they're kickin names and takin ass.

[pxib]

Pretty brutal, in that it functionally convinces your immune system to kill itself... but lymphoblasts shouldn't normally be in the bloodstream, so any chance they won't reinvade the marrow after a transplant is a good one. Certainly no more brutal than chemotherapy or radiation, which just kill your immune system outright.

T-cells deal with most cancers before they start, and it's only tenacious ones that cause trouble so this is a promising natural possibility. Here's hoping the results are repeatable, remission is rare, and that there's possibilities for similar therapies outside this narrow diagnosis.

[Khaldun]

I really think we're only going to go beyond incremental therapeutic progress when we can do some pretty fundamental medical nanoengineering or genetic therapy. You can kill cancers in people where the cancer is an idiosyncratic, one-off event but it's also very very clear now from the long-series epidemiology that some people are genetically programmed to produce cancers no matter how often they're examined or how aggressively they're treated.

[Xuri]

We should stop focusing on fighting cancer and viruses and start focusing on growing entire new bodies on the back of mice or something, then simply transfer people's consciousness to those new bodies and ditch the old, sick ones. How hard can it be? :P

[Ghambit]

We should stop focusing on fighting cancer and viruses and start focusing on growing entire new bodies on the back of mice or something, then simply transfer people's consciousness to those new bodies and ditch the old, sick ones. How hard can it be? :P

Technically, if we solve the problem of bridging nerves (which tissue engineers are getting closer to solving) we should be able to plop someone's head onto another's body and voila.  It was done in monkeys years ago, just couldn't solve the nervous issue.
We already have prospective gene therapies that'd take care of the rejection problems.  (having a body reject a head would be very bad)

[Paelos]

(having a body reject a head would be very bad)

That's why we tell science just the tip, just to see how it feels.

[Ironwood]

This seems awfully similar to the plot of a movie I once saw.  Schild was very excited about it......

Was there a requirement to register our presence in a sexual way ?

[Merusk]

We should stop focusing on fighting cancer and viruses and start focusing on growing entire new bodies on the back of mice or something, then simply transfer people's consciousness to those new bodies and ditch the old, sick ones. How hard can it be? :P

The problem there is the mind fills-up.  We have limited storage space, even if it's yottas of yottabytes.  We need cybernetic memory implants as well.

[Morat20]

We should stop focusing on fighting cancer and viruses and start focusing on growing entire new bodies on the back of mice or something, then simply transfer people's consciousness to those new bodies and ditch the old, sick ones. How hard can it be? :P

Technically, if we solve the problem of bridging nerves (which tissue engineers are getting closer to solving) we should be able to plop someone's head onto another's body and voila.  It was done in monkeys years ago, just couldn't solve the nervous issue.
We already have prospective gene therapies that'd take care of the rejection problems.  (having a body reject a head would be very bad)

I have no idea why I'm all for the idea of millions or trillions of tiny machines -- all of which probably will run on Windows Nano 2028 and be absolutely hackable -- running around my body fixing stuff and changing stuff, but the idea of cutting off my head and slapping it on a new body horrifies me.

And not just for the Franken-scar.

[01101010]

I'm thinking something more like a transfer of the consciousness or the 'soul' from one bio-mechanical vessel to another once the first breaks down.

[Reg]

If you can do that, why not go entirely virtual at that point?  Live inside a computer in an environment you make for yourself and get used to thinking thousands of times faster than the meatbags around you. 

[Nebu]

If you can do that, why not go entirely virtual at that point?  Live inside a computer in an environment you make for yourself and get used to thinking thousands of times faster than the meatbags around you. 

That would be a great idea for a movie. 

[Reg]

Heh, I never said it was an original idea.  I just meant that once you have the technology 01101010 describes you must have the tech to go further as well.

Actually, the first time I read about the going virtual idea idea was in Frederik Pohl's Gateway series back in the '80s.

[Merusk]

First time I read it was in The Winter Market by Gibson, later revisited with the character Mona Lisa in Mona Lisa Overdrive.

The narrator in Gibson's short story deals with most of my weirdness about the idea.

[Ghambit]

If you can do that, why not go entirely virtual at that point?  Live inside a computer in an environment you make for yourself and get used to thinking thousands of times faster than the meatbags around you. 

Technically we may already live in a universe like this.   

[cironian]

And most likely built by the lowest bidder.

[Ghambit]

And that's the way all intelligently iterative "virtual" systems would work, ironically.  "God" would not program in the most expensive routes to task resolution.

[Ingmar]

The problem with all of these ideas is that the 'transferred' intelligence is actually just a copy; the original body is effectively committing suicide.

[Nevermore]

I always had that theory about Star Trek transporters.  Yeah, it makes a perfect copy of you but it also disintegrates the actual you.

[proudft]

To make matters worse, since the copy is perfect, it thinks everything worked fine.  "Go ahead!  Works great!"

[Nevermore]

That's why they still use it, no one realizes that they're stepping into a disintegration chamber!

[Morat20]

The problem with all of these ideas is that the 'transferred' intelligence is actually just a copy; the original body is effectively committing suicide.

There was a book -- um, guy that wrote Hyperion -- where a sort of fallen civilization travelled around by old transport tech. Called "faxing". Sadly, they did NOT know what a fax machine was.

As for transporters, that's probably a copy (although if you're actually turned into energy, that energy beamed down and reassembled, are you really? And after the first time it happens, do you really care?). Conciousness transfer or uploading? Depends, I'd guess.

Nobody really has a grasp on consciousness (other than to say a lot of what we think we decide consciously we don't), and some of the processes are quantum level. It might be an actual 'transfer', it might be a copy. Obviously one is death and a copied resurrection, one isn't. (Then there's the multi-universe concept and quantum immortality, which says it doesn't matter. Somewhere out there, somehow, there's a version of you that doesn't ever die. Ever. Hurt, injured, crippled -- but awake, alive, conscious and never quite dying. Which again, makes transporters not really matter. You'd perceive a uniform stream of consciousness...)

I'm pretty fond of the implications of being able to copy yourself. What happens when you differ enough you can't merge? When a me-copy decides it is it's own person?

[Reg]

I've always wondered about the implications of a very slow copy job on your mind.  What if there were nanos that would replace neurons in your brain with much longer lived artificial cells as the live neurons died?

You wouldn't notice any change but in a few years you'd be wandering around with an artificial brain that could easily be transferred into a clone body when your original wears out.

To me, that wouldn't feel like dying even though it's no more the original "me" than a quick upload to a computer would be.

[MahrinSkel]

The problem with all of these ideas is that the 'transferred' intelligence is actually just a copy; the original body is effectively committing suicide.

To a sufficiently strict value of continuity, you die every time you become fully unconcious.  Don't think about it too hard, you won't be able to sleep.

I prefer soft transcendance to uploading, transfer more and more of the storage and processing out of your wetware over years, until the lack of the massively parallel goo just means certain kinds of thinking slow down.

--Dave

[Margalis]

I always had that theory about Star Trek transporters.  Yeah, it makes a perfect copy of you but it also disintegrates the actual you.

There was an Outer Limits episode about this. A woman goes into a transporter to travel to a distant world, then it seems to not have worked so she steps out of it. It turns out she actually did transport to the other world, her original body was supposed to be destroyed and the malfunction was that it was not. Then the creature that invented/runs the transporters demands that she be killed.

Also the creature was a dinosaur.

[Samwise]

There was a book called Waystation (I think it was by Clifford Simak?) with a similar premise -- the transporter would beam information to a remote station to build a new copy of you, and the old you would be automatically anesthetized and dissolved in acid.

[Simond]

The problem with all of these ideas is that the 'transferred' intelligence is actually just a copy; the original body is effectively committing suicide.

Most of the human body commits slow suicide all the time. How much of 'you' is the same 'you' as a decade ago?

[Strazos]

The Michael Crichton book "Timeline" explored this a bit too.

[Morat20]

The problem with all of these ideas is that the 'transferred' intelligence is actually just a copy; the original body is effectively committing suicide.

Most of the human body commits slow suicide all the time. How much of 'you' is the same 'you' as a decade ago?

Makes me wonder about sleeping. Are you still you in the morning? What about after a coma? Being knocked unconscious? Sure, all the lizard brain stuff keeps working -- but the important "you" stuff isn't firing on all cylinders.

Or heck, after a seizure (those are fun. Afterwards, there's thirty minutes or so when you're wandering around, answering questions -- if incoherently -- that you  have no memory of. At ALL)?

[Ghambit]

You are not really you anyways.  The most "you" is akin to the rider on an elephant.  The rider being your consciousness or conscious choice.  The notion of "you" is slowly being proven to be mere fluctuations in quantum foam that can exist sans body anyways.

[Teleku]

Have we used up all the weed for this conversation yet?  Should I run out and get some more?

[Xuri]

My quantum foam fluctuates, ergo sum.