I had many conversations over the years about life extension, and the idea is often met with resistance. People get upset when they hear about an individual whose life has been shortened by a disease, but when confronted with the possibility of extending all human life in general, they react negatively. “Life is too hard to think about going on forever,” is a common response. But people generally don’t want to end their lives at any point unless they’re in tremendous pain—physically, mentally, or spiritually. And if they absorbed the ongoing improvement of life in all its dimensions, most such afflictions would be alleviated. This means that extending human life would also mean a huge improvement in it.
But how does nanotechnology actually make this possible? From my point of view, the long-term goal is medical nanorobots. These will be made of diamondoid parts with on-board sensors, manipulators, computers, communicators and possibly power supplies. It’s intuitive to think of nanobots as little metallic robotic submarines floating through the bloodstream, but nanoscale physics requires a significantly different approach. At this scale, water is a strong solvent and the oxidant molecules are highly reactive, so strong materials such as diamantoid will be needed.
And while macrosubmarines can move smoothly through fluids, sticky frictional forces dominate fluid dynamics for nanoscale objects. Imagine trying to swim through peanut butter! Nanobots will therefore have to use different propulsion principles. Likewise, nanobots are unlikely to be able to retain enough onboard power or computing power to perform all their tasks independently, so they will have to be designed to draw energy from their surroundings and either listen to external control signals or cooperate with each other. calculation.
To maintain our bodies and otherwise face health problems, we will all need vast numbers of nanobots, each about the size of a cell. The best available estimates say that the human body consists of several tens of trillions of biological cells. If we spread by just 1 nanobot per 100 cells, that would be several hundred billion nanobots. However, the question remains as to which ratio is optimal. For example, it might turn out that advanced nanobots could be effective even at a cell/nanobot ratio several orders of magnitude larger.
One of the main effects of aging is the degradation of organ performance, so a key role for these nanobots will be to repair and augment them. In addition to expanding the neocortex, this will mainly involve helping our sense 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 needed, and maintaining organ structures, nanobots can keep the human body in good health indefinitely. Eventually, nanobots will be able to completely replace biological organs if needed or desired.
But nanobots won’t be limited to maintaining normal body function. They could also be used to adjust the concentrations of various substances in our blood to more optimal levels than would normally be found in the body. Hormones could be tweaked 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.” Going from needing eight hours of sleep a night to seven adds as much alertness to the average life as five extra years of life!