> I don’t see why aging can’t be reversible
Aging is loss of information, you can't reverse that. You can prevent it though.
Aging is loss of information, you can't reverse that. You can prevent it though.
It’s interesting to think about the implications of such a technology, if we can swap DNA with another, fresher copy, we should also be able to modify it and make the body do things it wasn’t previously capable of doing. One idea that comes to mind is expanding the range of our senses, or giving our body a better system to repair and regenerate itself beyond what we naturally evolved to able to do so we can have longer life spans with a quality of life that makes it worth it.
It sounds like a bad idea to play god like this, and it probably is, but we’ll never know until we give it a serious try. I remember a while ago a scientist in China modified the DNA of human embryos by using Crispr, the goal was to make them resistant to HIV infection and he was jailed and ridiculed for it.
The search space for new and improved capabilities is endless once we learn how to program DNA like a computer. We are probably at least a century away from this level of control, and probably another century before it becomes socially acceptable to do it at scale.
We have a whole lot of redundancy and mechanisms to restore/repair redundancy. But even so, there's a march of entropy upwards; oxidation, genetic damage, cell death, tissue damage, neuron loss, etc.
We don't have repair mechanisms for everything the body knows how to build, and the repair mechanisms that we do have become less effective to use (and often less safe) as the body ages.
That is another way of saying loss of information and increase of entropy.
We don't understand aging well enough to say this with any confidence.
Very different from saying “aging is loss of information.”