Comment by bananaflag
21 hours ago
The argument was that senescence is as natural as child mortality, and thus naturalness is not a reason not to fight against it.
21 hours ago
The argument was that senescence is as natural as child mortality, and thus naturalness is not a reason not to fight against it.
I don't think that argument holds water? According to WHO, 8 in 10 neonatal deaths are caused by substandard care, not "natural" causes: https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/child-morta...
No matter what standard of care you receive, senescence will gradually kill you even with therapies or treatments to slow it. It's a part of the built-in natural lifecycle that humans can't avoid; it's not analogous to the treatment of incidental injury like pneumonia or sepsis.
> No matter what standard of care you receive, senescence will gradually kill you even with therapies or treatments to slow it.
That doesn't mean that it can't be entirely reversed. We already know that senescence is not a completely required part of life itself, or even of eukaryotic and/or multicellular organisms - as we have known examples of organisms that don't experience it. For example, jellyfish don't experience senescence (they go through a revolving cycle of polyp - jellyfish that can go on forever as far as we can tell). And even if true permanence is out of reach, we also know of animals that live for hundreds of years, and of plants and fungi that live for thousands or tens of thousands of years.
So, having a way to make something like a human (though possibly quite different from what we call a human, to be fair) live for at least a few hundred years if not much more is a very difficult but certainly solvable bioengeneering problem, not some philosophically impossible feat.