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Comment by mirimir | Hacker News Reader

Yes, but you're missing the other aspect of life extension: control over effects of aging. People become "old farts" because of physical and cognitive decline. Consider evidence from rapid-aging disorders. So by preventing and repairing damage, there are no "old farts". And you get the advantages of both youth and age.

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You would still loose:

- new DNA combinations entering the mix. They are quite damn important.

- beginners minds. Without it, systems will be stuck in what we assume are the best fit.

- disrupters. Newcommers, by lack of experience, misunderstanding or just because they are not blinded by the status quo have the tendency to change things.

Basically, even if you don't have "old farts", our system will get old.

There is a reason why nature promoted renewal of individuals inside a long living but dynamic group and not long living individuals inside a static small group.

Re new DNA combinations, do you have evidence? CNS development is a higher level of natural selection, involving on-the-fly variation. Rather like the immune system. There arguably hasn't been much biological evolution over the past few thousand years. Certainly not enough to account for modern civilization.

We all become disruptors when we switch fields.

Every mass extinction, a new DNA set is gaining traction.

That's quite a jump in time scale. The overall lifetime of the human species is miniscule, relative to the timing of mass extinctions.

Of course. But once we are immortal, the timescale changes.

Fair enough :)

But on that scale, why would we be limited to flesh? I'm reminded of Sobornost practices in Hannu Rajaniemi's Jean le Flambeur trilogy. Basically, make numerous copies of a mind, introducing more-or-less random changes, and select on some set of criteria. I mean, why is natural selection limited to biological systems?

It's not. We could in the end create our own pool for it. Would we be wise enough to do it?

Well, if a few billion people were doing it, at least some of them would get useful results. We might get lots of [insert name of "famous" person] variants, however.

You get beginner's minds whenever someone who had a lifetime of experience doing A starts trying to do B.

Absolutely not. You get somebody trying to do B the A way. Not with a blank page. That's the problem.

But isnt that also interesting? They either fail to do B the A way, or they realize what things from A are applicable to B. In the latter case, we may all benefit from this cross pollination.

You don't get absolutely blank pages in any field, even now. Until somebody knows enough to contribute, they've been shaped tremendously by their teachers.

> - new DNA combinations entering the mix. They are quite damn important.

Get a DNA profile done, throw up some random (or interesting) changes, simulate them. If you like it and have the balls, make a virus that implements it.

That supposes you know what DNA combination you need. But the whole purpose of diversity is to have a backup plan for things you don't know.

True, but it allows you to test and fix things that are predictable, something that current evolution does not.

If you want to prepare for unknown unknowns like we do now, then simulate a mating between you and X other people and implement them resulting DNA. Be your own biological child.

> - beginners minds. Without it, systems will be stuck in what we assume are the best fit.

Couldn't we solve this by having an individual go through a mind erasing procedure every 100 years or so?

Death is the word you are looking for.

Death isn't the problem; aging is. Death without aging seems like a good solution.

It could be a partial erase.

People would still die, and new people would still need to be made. Granted, at rates far lower than today - but old age is only one cause of death (usually an indirect one).

You're missing out on the effect that children will have in that system. Children will still be there, to keep the population stable, and because some people do like to have children, though maybe not as many as in today's system. And you're also forgetting the old people will die off, just not as fast as today, and not from old age: instead, they'll be dying from accidents and murder. We already lose a LOT of people these days just from car accidents (30k/year in the US alone last I checked).

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