The Sunchoke

Apparently it’s that moment when publishers see fit to shine light (or blow heat) onto the topic of biogerontology.

Well and good.  Now the question to be asked is not, “Is it possible to radically extend human lifespan?”  In my view, anything not specifically outlawed by the laws of physics (as we understand them) is in the end necessary to keep the shadow game up and running.  There are prophecies that need fulfilling, after all.   And there’s nothing in the second law of thermodynamics that says keeping a body running indefinitely — let’s drop ‘forever’ as a metaphysical conceit — is impossible.  Just very hard perhaps.  Fine, then, our cathedrals no longer aspire to the sky, but show themselves on the gels and microarrays run everyday around the world.  The effort is there.   How hard this task will be does not allow easy prediction.

So what’s the end result?  Let’s imagine a scenario, conservative by the standards of Aubrey de Grey/Ray Kurzweil and their clique, that future technologies extend the human lifespan to several hundred years.  Now, the limiting cases are 1) these treatments are widely available and hence adopted OR 2) the treatments are extremely expensive and judged ‘elective’ and hence only available to a small fraction.  Now, the first essentially demands the radical restructuring of society as we know it to avoid a Malthusian outcome.  I don’t think you have to be a Maoist to agree that the only way (short of colonizing other planets) to hold off a total catastrophe in this scenario would be to have strong (read: involuntary) limits on human reproduction.  Malthus may have been wrong, but at some point the planet’s carrying capacity does come into play.   De Grey apparently admits as such (listen to the link above for a take on this) though he adds some kind of utopian spin whereby we all agree to such restrictions voluntarily.  A total joke, obviously, in any real scenario, which in this view resembles Brave New World or Children of Men much more than our present-day.

I think we can agree the second outcome is the more likely of the two, as currently even life-saving HIV drugs are in short supply for those who can’t get insurance coverage or pay the exorbitant fees for them.  This possibility, the “conservative” one, means that the human race splits in two, bringing inequality to its apex.

So whence medical ethics here?  Western medicine has as its goal the delay of death for as long as possible.  There is a point where life-preserving technologies may be withheld, but not in general, and death is not included in our conceptions of medicine.  This gap is brought to its extreme when we consider the actual possibility of immortality.  Is immortality a medical or cosmetic procedure?  What if curing cancer (for instance) implies life extension.  Is it ethical for only those at the top of the pile to have access then?  Or in the other case, must we commit collective suicide to ensure some kind of equality?  There is no answer within the present constellation.  Medical ethics will eat itself.

That darn old angel of history.  My almost-favorite blog, the healthy skeptic, is gone.  Or so it seems.  Everything is pulling up 404s.  Sad.  It was there I learned of the bankruptcy of the energy-meridian theory and the book on this, The Dao of Chinese Medicine.  What a book.  What a website.

We keep running faster but time and the machine are running too, and the angel recedes.   I guess we hold them inside us, time and the machine that is.

in the New York Times, “There is no known biological mechanism to explain how non-ionizing radiation might lead to cancer,” that it’s a lie incorrect.  And for those of us who are not theoretical physicists:

Looking at photos of the Detroit Riots, it’s obvious the city was punished in the sense that the response to the riots was to make the city a desert. Thus we can read the effect of the Civil Rights movement in the US in terms of the Law (not just the legislation typically associated with it but also the reaction of expanded incarceration, the “War on Drugs”) and Geography (white flight, cycles of gentrification and decay in the urban areas, abandonment of industrial areas by the investing class), to name two.

Looking at the photos also gives another feeling, one connected with the palpable “end of history” that is piped in.  The serenity of the present-day vacant lots has no reference to the wound which ultimately created them.  What’s weird about history is that it actually happened and it actually had an effect, when everything is saying the opposite (except of course, when it comes to 9/11).   Thus ghosts do exist.

One year later, almost.  Yep

along with its color and film are indicators of health and disease.   So I read and how can it not be true?

Major developments since last coherent message tossed ashore: none.

My thoughts are not me.  I am not my thoughts.

We get what we need to meet the faces we meet in the mirror in the street.  Writing is like chewing and it takes a while to get going.

Coming