On Sun, May 19, 2013 at 10:14 AM, John Clark <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Sun, May 19, 2013 at 4:19 AM, Jason Resch <[email protected]> wrote: > > > Even without solving protein folding problems, regenerative medicine is >> predicted to enable us to regrow any organ "on-demand" by 2025. >> > > Organs on demand will certainly happen eventually and I hope it happens by > 2025, but of all the sciences medicine's rate of improvement is by far the > slowest. People throw around the word "breakthrough" all the time but, > although there have been lots of incremental improvements, medical science > hasn't had a real breakthrough since the introduction of antibiotics 60 > years ago. In fact I'd say that it wasn't until after about 1900 that > doctors started doing more good than harm. > I wonder if this is true even today, when we see studies such as these: http://www.bmj.com/content/320/7249/1561.1?tab=responses The 1960's saw physicians in Canada go on strike and the mortality rate dropped. Los Angeles physicians associated with a USC hospital went on strike in the 1970's and the mortality rate dropped. Physicians went on strike in South America (Columbia?) later that same decade and the mortality rate dropped. Physicians have now gone on strike on 3 different occasions in Israel --in the 1950's, again in the 1970's or 80's and now in the the year 2000. In all 3 occasions the mortality rate has dropped, on one or two occasions by 50%. Conclusion? I'm sorry to say, but conventional, allopathic, (drug and surgery happy) physicians remain very, very dangerous to our health (recall the May, 1998 JAMA article reviewing deaths caused by Rx medications given to American hospitalized patients? 106,000 deaths caused by Rx drugs each year on average, making Rx drugs in American hospitals the 5th or 6th leading cause of death! We badly need science-based alternative medicine, don't we. > It's frustrating, we know astronomically more about how the body works now > than we did 60 years ago, but translating that knowledge into cures for > diseases has been difficult. If it turns out that medicine is moving too > slowly to keep your body operational then cryonics would be your best bet, > in fact your only bet. Given a choice between little chance and no chance > at all I'll pick little chance every time. > > > And within 30 years an average thumb drive will have the capacity to >> store an entire brain scan in sufficient detail to serve as a backup of you. >> > > Actually I think a thumb drive with that capacity will come considerably > sooner than 30 years > Thumb drives are around 30 GB today. I was using an estimate of ~50 PB to encode a map of every neural connection, but there may be more efficient ways to represent this or it may be highly compressible. In any case, it will take about 20 doubling for thumb drives to reach this size. Much less so for the equivalent "hard drives" of the future. The company I work for has sold several storage systems with capacities great enough to store a human connectome, but they are more expensive than what it costs to cryrogenically freeze oneself today. I think you are right that this fact will change in much less than 30 years, and will become exponentially cheaper going forward. > and before organs on demand becomes common; having the technology to > extract that information from your brain to fill that thumb drive is > another matter. > True, nanotechnology seems like the best option to extract this information non-destructively. > > > I think mind uploading to non-biological substrates is the more likely >> future for most individuals as opposed to spending eternity in a fragile >> limited inefficient physical body, >> > > That's almost certainly true. > > > in which case solving protein folding is of little importance, >> > > Not so, if you knew how protein folding worked you could make some pretty > neat protein machines which would be a invaluable stepping stone to the > development of full fledged Drexler style Nanotechnology. And without full > fledged Nanotechnology there is probably no way to extract all the > information in your brain so you can be uploaded. And without > Nanotechnology there would certainly be no way to revive somebody who has > been cryogenically frozen, and maybe not even then. > That is a good point, protein folding may be a viable means to cheaply and efficiently build nanotechnology, but it is also quite limited in the types of machines it can build, and the size of machines built by protein folding will be larger than what a general purpose nanotechnology will ultimately allow. Jason -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
