I’ve had many conversations about life extension over the years, and the idea is often met with resistance. People get upset when they hear about a person whose life has been cut short by a disease, but when confronted with the possibility of generally prolonging all human life, they react negatively. “Life is too hard to consider going on indefinitely” is a common answer. But people generally don’t want to end their lives at any point unless they are in immense pain – physical, mental or spiritual. And if they were to absorb the continuous improvements of life in all its dimensions, most such conditions would be alleviated. That is, prolonging human life would also mean vastly improving it.
But how will nanotechnology actually make this possible? In my opinion, the long-term goal is medical nanorobots. These will be made of diamondoid parts with built-in sensors, manipulators, computers, communicators and possibly power supplies. It’s intuitive to imagine nanobots as small metal robot submarines chugging through the bloodstream, but nanoscale physics requires a substantially different approach. At this scale, water is a powerful solvent and oxidant molecules are highly reactive, so strong materials such as diamondoid are needed.
And while macroscale submarines can propel themselves smoothly through fluids, fluid dynamics in nanoscale objects are dominated by sticky frictional forces. Imagine trying to swim through peanut butter! Nanobots will therefore have to use different propulsion principles. Likewise, nanobots likely won’t be able to store enough energy or computing power on board to perform all their tasks independently, so they will have to be designed to draw energy from their environment and either obey outside signals or cooperate with each other to do that. calculation.
To maintain our bodies and otherwise combat health problems, we all need a large number of nanobots, each about the size of a cell. According to the best available estimates, the human body consists of several tens of trillions of biological cells. If we expand ourselves with just 1 nanobot per 100 cells, this would amount to several hundred billion nanobots. However, it remains to be seen which ratio is optimal. For example, it may turn out that advanced nanobots can be effective even at a cell-to-nanobot ratio several orders of magnitude greater.
One of the main consequences of aging is the deterioration of organ performance, so a key role of these nanobots will be to repair and improve them. Aside from expanding our neocortex, this will mainly involve helping our non-sensory organs to efficiently place or remove substances into the blood supply (or lymphatic system). By monitoring the supply of these vital substances, adjusting their levels as necessary and maintaining organ structures, nanobots can keep a human’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 maintaining the body’s normal function. They can also be used to adjust the concentrations of various substances in our blood to a level that is more optimal than what would normally occur in the body. Hormones can be adjusted to give us more energy and focus, or to speed up the body’s natural healing and repair. If optimizing hormones could make our sleep more efficient, this would essentially be ‘extending life behind the door’. Going from eight hours of sleep a night to seven hours adds as much waking life to the average life as five additional years of life!