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Comment by hanniabu | Hacker News Reader

What are the implications?

a lot less work to achieve desired outcome. nonsurgical means of tissue repair, replacement, or rejuvenation.

Do you just inject stem cells into the affected area?

thats a simple approach, application of a pseudo tissue similar to skingrafting is another, implantation of 'scaffold' protien construct, implanted with stem cells is another. e.g. 'ghost' organs or tissue, grafting.

a somewhat complex approach is to "wipe" [dedifferentiate] in situ stem cells in vivo, allowing surrounding tissue signaling to program stem cells and induce a developmental path.

keep in mind i am being simple for the sake of understanding.

Can anything go wrong with these approaches? Like what is the rejection rate, is there even a rejection rate? Curious, I know nothing!

to keep it simple, this is just scratching the surface of what is there.

teratogenesis is a major hurdle to the tech.

to a large extent it is induction of a process that is autonomously regulated.

consider, the gotchas involved in reusing materials to produce structure.

or the complexity involved in changing the nature of a large multinational conglomerate of corporations.

the difficulty lies in 're-vectoring' an assembly to alter process that is dynamic and has many possible responses to one specific change, dependent on past event, multiplied by each cell in the respondent cohort.

assembly theory, and informatic complexity apply here, overtop the biological phenomenon.

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rejection rate is ideally not a consequence when these stem cells originate from the recipient.

the tech of topic deals with genetic manipulation, and is simplistic as DNA is not the only component having influence. cytoplasmic factors, as well as the state, and point of process are informatic and determinative.

Thank you for explaining it to me!

Apply stem cells directly to the forehead.

You would probably want to induce differentiation in vitro before injecting to make sure it turns into the right cell type but stem cell therapy hasn’t worked out particularly well.

One of the easiest problems to understand is that the cellular potential for infinite replication is what causes tumors/cancers too.

Immortal trillionaires.

Hey, only if they stay trillionaires!

Of course, it will be Stem Cells as a Service. Or SCaaS.

Although that may be a sound business model, one must question the ethical implications surrounding it.

With that said, that's not too different from existing cancer treatment drugs.

Stem Cells as a Medical Service, or SCaaMS

Everyone can be a trillionaire if they are immortal.

Not really. Anyone could but not everyone. You need people to uphold the Ponzi scheme of capitalism to funnel money to the trillionaires.

Edit: I’d really love to know what these damn down voters are thinking. You literally think everyone can just be a trillionaire? Where is the value being produced? Where is the money coming from? Trillionaires passing each other money around???

Capitalism has lifted billions out of poverty. It is not a zero sum game. People will invent new things and new industries. There are infinite possibilities to discover and all of those are new products and services and experiences to build.

All the commodities humans need for huge increases in per capita wealth are plentiful throughout the universe. NASA wants to explore an asteroid that just by itself is worth $10 quintillion because of all the precious metals in it. That isn’t even the biggest one discovered. There are going to be endless asteroids and entire planets like these.

And there will be endless planets that can be settled and colonized and terraformed.

I do wonder about that valuation, though. Unless they only manage to extract the value so slowly it doesn't flood the market, wouldn't the "precious" medals just become less precious? At least the ones where the value largely comes from scarcity?

This example has nothing to do with this specific asteroid, but it makes the general point: If the amount of gold available doubles over 50 years, the market could probably handle it. But if it goes up 2x per year for 50 years? The price craters.

Yes the prices would plummet but that means wealth per capita increases in real terms. Producing the goods and services that depend on those cheaper commodities will become much cheaper. If we get to a world where everything of value today costs $1 to produce tomorrow, that’s a much wealthier (non zero sum) world.

Print enough money and everyone's a trillionaire!

(I say that in jest, but it's awfully typical of how governments do seem to solve problems. "Trillionaires can buy whatever they want, so let's print enough money for everyone to be a trillionaire!" is awfully similar to "People with college degrees have higher lifetime earnings, so let's make college free so everyone can have a college degree!")

I haven't downvoted you, but you are overlooking the forest for the trees.

Compared to the richest person alive in 1923 or 1823, or 1023 for that matter, we have a lot more at our disposal. In this sense, we are much richer than them. You could be the King of England and if you got cancer, it was lights out, no exception for His Majesty. Going still back in history, even Genghis Khan had to defecate in a desert and wipe his behind with his own fingers, though he ruled of majority of Eurasia at some point.

Contemporary people aren't all trillionaires, but they certainly enjoy a much higher standard of living than tycoons of yesterday.

Or anyone, in Zimbabwean dollars.

I think the concept of money will change drastically if we ever achieve immortality for any meaningful portion of society.

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