Why can't we preserve a head for long using machines? Where's the failure?
We can oxygenate the blood, we can inject sugars and nutrients and stuff, we can filter the blood of toxins, we can pump the blood and if necessary we probably could preserve the spleen and tyroid too.
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politicall unwillingness for one.
We can't oxygenate, pump, and filter blood reliably enough.
Human heads, you mean? There was that russian guy who experimented on doggos.
>We can't oxygenate, pump, and filter
pumping is mechanical, and we can make artificial hearts that do the pumping for up to 2 years without much issue.
Filtering is reliable enough that dialysis machines are a thing.
patient's life will be worse than the one of a quadriplegic paralized from teh neck down.
This is the limiting factor for pretty much anything, and why war is correlated with extreme technological advancement. When we want to get shit done, it gets done. We never want to get shit done unless it's one-upping that other asshole.
I was actually thinking on elderly people, and I am taking for granted that human-level mobility and dexterity in robots is one or two decades from being a solved problem.
Also making money, money is an incentive for scientific development.
Two years is not a long time. Filterning blood involves more than just dialysis. We can't grow new blood cells practically either. If we could there would be no need for blood donation.
I think in reality it's entirely possible. But aging would prevent immortality.
Can't bone marrow be cultivated? I've read that a similar process is being developed for liver and pancreatic cells.
The human body is an amazing, complex and incredibly fine tuned structure (evolution is good at fine-tuning, it turns out), but if the human body lacks something, that is modularity (evolution is really bad at modularity, it turns out). As far as I'm concerned,, all the body is a mechanism designed for maintaining the brain (screw you, genes). Without modularity, we depend on the body's self-repair mechanisms to keep us healty, and those mechanism are both limited and cannot take advantage of large scale industry.
Plug-and-play pieces? Those can. Sorry for the rant, I'm just pre-emptively answering the question "if you wan't to use bone marrow, and liver cells, why not use a whole body and save yourself the trouble?"
We can culture blood cells, but the process still isn't quite good enough:
wired.co.uk
>>The human body is an amazing, complex and incredibly fine tuned structure
and because of that, we won't have plug and play pieces for quite a while. We don't even know how to grow new organs from scratch.
Aging presents lots of problems long before death though. Those can be paliated if there isn't a whole body to maintain.
Who the fuck would want to live like that?
A videogame addicted person?
But you can't play vidya well without hands
what's stopping you from doing the research yourself?
Well, I couldn't find the specific causes beyond generalities, that russian experiment with the dogs and a new heart transplant device.
All the internet sources I can find talk about organs stored in cold, with saline solutions and lasting days (a week at most). I simply cannot find the specific cause that would make preserving a head with extracorporeal circulation non-viable.
I'm sure you could get a computer to track your eyes, you could play stuff like CivIV or Xcom 2
Dialysis machines use a fuck ton of expendables and are quite large.
You need to keep the spinal cord intact too