I have had many Conversations about life extension have been had over the years, and the idea is often met with resistance. People are upset when they hear about an individual whose life has been cut short by an illness, but when faced with the possibility of generally prolonging the entire human life, they react negatively. “Life is too difficult to think about continuing indefinitely” is a common response. But in general, people do not want to end their lives at any time unless they are in enormous pain, whether physical, mental or spiritual. And if you absorbed the current improvements of life in all its dimensions, most of those afflictions would be alleviated. That is, extending human life would also mean improving it enormously.
But how will nanotechnology make this possible? In my opinion, the long-term goal is medical nanorobots. These will be made of diamond parts with integrated sensors, manipulators, computers, communicators and possibly power supplies. It’s intuitive to imagine nanobots as small metallic robotic submarines that move through the bloodstream, but nanoscale physics requires a substantially different approach. At this scale, water is a powerful solvent and the oxidizing molecules are highly reactive, so strong materials such as diamond will be needed.
And while macroscale submarines can propel themselves smoothly through liquids, in the case of nanoscale objects, fluid dynamics are dominated by sticky friction forces. Imagine trying to swim through peanut butter! Nanobots will therefore need to take advantage of different propulsion principles. Likewise, nanobots probably will not be able to store enough onboard energy or computing power to perform all of their tasks independently, so they will need to be designed to draw energy from their environment and obey external control signals or collaborate with each other to perform them. . calculation.
To maintain our bodies and counter health problems, we will all need a large number of nanobots, each the size of a cell. The best available estimates say that the human body is made up of several tens of trillions of biological cells. If we scale up with just 1 nanobot per 100 cells, this would be equivalent to several hundred billion nanobots. However, it remains to be seen what ratio is optimal. It could turn out, for example, that advanced nanobots could be effective even with a cell-to-nanobot ratio several orders of magnitude higher.
One of the main effects of aging is the degradation of organ performance, so a key function of these nanobots will be to repair and augment them. In addition to expanding our neocortex, this will primarily involve helping our non-sensory organs efficiently place substances into the blood supply (or lymphatic system) or remove them. By monitoring the supply of these vital substances, adjusting their levels as necessary, and maintaining organ structures, nanobots can keep a person’s body in good health indefinitely. Ultimately, nanobots will be able to replace biological organs entirely, if necessary or desired.
But nanobots will not limit themselves to preserving the normal functioning of the body. They could also be used to adjust the concentrations of various substances in our blood to more optimal levels than would normally occur in the body. Hormones could be modified to give us more energy and focus, or speed up the body’s natural healing and repair. If hormone optimization could make our sleep more efficient, it would actually be “backdoor life extension.” If you go from needing eight hours of sleep a night to seven hours, that adds as much waking life to your average life as five more years of life expectancy!