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Chris Jacob
unfortunately, tissue engineering is at least 10~15 years off from mass availability and then theres the issue of cost, since it probably won't be covered by insurance. :[ i should've been an electrical engineer... #dranthonyatala
@pjp13: Nobody wants to be an electrical engineer... Tissue engineering was a ways off when I was studying it a few years ago, although, I witnessed some pretty badass inventions by my friends, and I designed a pretty sick soft tissue measurement device too. Unfortunately, the design belongs to the college and not me! More on track, my friends designed an organic bone scaffold with osteocytes throughout based on a 3d input. I watched their presentation - pretty amazing. Obviously these things need a million and one approvals, but most don't even know what's available and what's been tried. I'd tell anyone to point the browser to a college website and a biomedical dissertation; anyone would be more perceptive :) #dranthonyatala
As someone who has been on dialysis for the last 2 years and waiting for a kidney / pancreas transplant for the last year and a half (on the active waiting list)... HURRY UP ALREADY! #dranthonyatala
@DustyButt™: Mine does that too, maybe I could just use the second one to get me out of the trouble the first one gets me in. Who needs thinking, anyways? #dranthonyatala
@DustyButt™: That has one of my favorite quoyes of all time in it (around 3:5o) where MrLP says (paraphrased casue the sound on that clip sucked) "There are difficulties between men and women, and so seldom these things work out - BUT LIKE FOOLS we all keep trying anyway" (evil cackle).
So what happens when this tech starts making people regularly live more than 100 years? This sounds like it can basically give an almost-immortality, with the only weak link being the brain(since that is, in essence, you), which seems like it could give rise to some major problems where the majority of the human race has problems with Alzheimer's.
@MarcusMaximus: Ahh, but perhaps within 40 years we will be able to transfer the contents of our brains into ones grown in labs. All arguments about nature aside I think it will happen and I can see there being a black market for "synthbrains." Of course that is just my own convoluted, uninformed vision of the future. #dranthonyatala
@Kinkaid: @Kakkoii: That brings up even more issues. If people are living forever, then the population will explode. The instant that something like that becomes reality, we'll be overwhelmed with the massive amounts of people who are living literally forever and who we just can't feed/house/etc. #dranthonyatala
@MarcusMaximus: Ahh, terraforming my friend. The Human race will finally end up as its own worst nightmare; invading aliens with no respect for what is already living there. But seriously, I'm assuming that when our travel tech matures to the degree that we can actually travel away to other systems and galaxies we will be able to handle massive population explosions.
An alternate solution would be to reduce our need to reproduce or to set the ability by command.
Of course this is all speculative because who really knows what path evolution will take besides the group of geniuses (who probably haven't been born yet) who will guide it? #dranthonyatala
@MarcusMaximus: For a vision of what a world populated by early-stage Alzheimer's patients looks like, just rent, "Idiocracy". Or else they'll just cure that too ;-)
Either way, if I'm around to get some new organs in 20 years, that would be awesome. If a couple of new kidneys, a new heart, maybe a spleen (and for sure a prostate and bladder by then!) keep me going until 2076, I will have seen the bicentennial *and* the sure-to-be-bigger/badder/awesomer tricentennial. Then I'll die just before we all have to grow gills like Kevin Costner in Waterworld. #dranthonyatala
@Kinkaid: hmm... maybe. Or maybe we do the more common "singularity predictions" uploading into a non-biological super-computer that can run a perfect emu of your brain, but at 10x speed. But, being human, we'll still want sex, so you'll need that installed in fancy "surrogate" (a la the film) body.
I'm calling dibs on looking like a young Sean Connery right now. #dranthonyatala
I wish you would have gone on a little bit longer in 10 year increments. I'm particularly interested in what will happen in 40 years because that's about the time I'll be needing a lot of replacement organs. #dranthonyatala
@Mark Wilson: Yeah from the interview it looked like they didn't even really predict anything 5 years ahead so the 10 and 20 were a complete guess. Either way, I think these advancements are great and make me wish I would have remained in the biomedical industry. Thanks for this Cyborg Life series by the way, it really appeals to me to see so much interest in this subject as my undergraduate degree was in biomedical engineering which no one used to care about. #dranthonyatala
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SO SO TRUE! #dranthonyatala
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i fear dentists but i dont fear psychiatrists!! #dranthonyatala
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An alternate solution would be to reduce our need to reproduce or to set the ability by command.
Of course this is all speculative because who really knows what path evolution will take besides the group of geniuses (who probably haven't been born yet) who will guide it? #dranthonyatala
11/12/09
@Kinkaid: Hmmmm? #dranthonyatala
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Either way, if I'm around to get some new organs in 20 years, that would be awesome. If a couple of new kidneys, a new heart, maybe a spleen (and for sure a prostate and bladder by then!) keep me going until 2076, I will have seen the bicentennial *and* the sure-to-be-bigger/badder/awesomer tricentennial. Then I'll die just before we all have to grow gills like Kevin Costner in Waterworld. #dranthonyatala
11/13/09
I'm calling dibs on looking like a young Sean Connery right now. #dranthonyatala
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I feel so honored that this kind of work is coming to fruition in our lifetime.
Thanks for putting this whole "This Cyborg Life" series together. #dranthonyatala
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