----- Original Message -----
From: "Gary McMurtry" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Tuesday, October 09, 2001 1:21 AM
Subject: Re: More jolly Space Station news
>
> I would just like to add to the long thought train that Robert has
> been delivering that we never know where the next bold new idea comes
> from. It could be from that gal or guy next door. This simple fact
> makes any single life a very precious one indeed.
>
> Just how many joint replacement surgeries would a 2000 to 6000 year
> old person have to survive to maintain any semblance of mobility,
> Robert? I'm just over 50, and so far the left knee, ankle and spleen
> have either been fixed or removed. Maybe I'm just accident prone or
> lead an active life. To overcome aging, one would have to completely
> reorder the developmental biology of an organism, evolved over
> millions of years. I think that's a very tall order. Brain
> transfers to younger bodies ala Shelley's Dr. Frankenstein would be
> far easier.
That wouldn't work either. Consider Gahan Wilson's morbidly funny story
"Harry's Golden Years", in which a billionnaire keeps having his
increasingly senile old brain transplanted into new bodies -- with the
result that he ends up as a handsome young man who also happens to be a
drooling idiot. What Robert is talking about, though, is countering the
physical aging process completely -- including osteoarthritis (which is a
function of the aging process, rather than simple mechanical "wear and
tear"). It would still mean, though, that at some point the brain would
completely fill up its capacity for stored memories, thus causing you to go
insane in another way unless some way was found to edit and remove some
memories. (And, again, the odds that the Space Station's studies would lead
to immortality -- as opposed to the huge number of other medical studies one
could conduct for its $90-150 billion total cost -- are very small indeed.)
Whre the value of the average human life is concerned, though, no matter how
gruesome it looks, we HAVE to come up with some kind of socially accepted
official figure -- or else we end up spending an infinite amount of money to
keep people from being hit by cars when they cross the street. As I
understand it, economists say that the figure that the voters of most
democracies converge on is about $4 million per life.
==
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