Also famines are political problems to start with. We have more then enough food. Getting it to people reliably is the issue - i.e. there's usually a plethora of other issues like an active war.
It also isn't an economically isolated enterprise: Ukrainian grain shipments traversing into Europe via Polish roads and not heading to Africa via their ports caused a bunch of price crashes which became political flashpoints.
The issue is that simply saying you're going to deliver food aid is elliding pretty much the entire problem. You cannot simply deliver food aid, because to do so you might have to fight and win an entire war against one or several insurgent groups or governments.
You could turn up reliably and distribute quite a lot of food, and yet at the end of the day find there's still a famine.
The problem here isn't the idea, it's that absolutely no one has done any useful precursor research.
Discussing replacement bodies is pretty rich when spinal cord injuries prognosis is still lifelong paralysis.
And if I were to extend that thought a little further: we're more likely to develop useful and less invasive rejuvenation technology then to try and do surgical body transplants because the technology you'd need to fix spinal cord injury - which is mandatory - would have a lot more overlap and applicability to in situ tissue repair anyway.
Reconnecting spinal nerves does not look impossible. But I don't see any other feasible way for people whose heads are cryogenically stored to have bodies again, except cloning a new body for them.
In general, the idea of producing a body that lacks the brain but has everything else intact is very rational. Its doubtless creepiness may wane with time.
I still expect that growing particular tissues and whole organs (like liver, or kidneys, or bone) will end up being a faster route to cloned organ replacement. In particular, a body takes like 20 years to grow to the "finished" state, and a separate organ could grow much faster.
> But I don't see any other feasible way for people whose heads are cryogenically stored to have bodies again, except cloning a new body for them.
As an old (at least decades) concept towards solving this, there could be a translation interface layer between the part of the brainstem still attached to the brain, and the body into which it's going.
Aside from the technical challenges, it'd probably best have its translation vocabulary built from recorded signals of the primary body. ie recordings of actual daily movement, taken prior to surgery
> But I don't see any other feasible way for people whose heads are cryogenically stored to have bodies again, except cloning a new body for them.
Well the first step would be to understand how to undo the damage caused by freezing. We’re arguably further away from this than we are from any other part of the process. We might never be able to do this, freezing might just be too lossy.
Haha. As far as I’ve heard the frozen head companies have a pretty terrible track record. The odds of them keeping the heads frozen continuously for 100 years are not good.
Reconnection does not look impossible. But it will be extremely hard.
I think what is much more intractable is actually massive amounts of axons you'd need to reconnect, and you'd need extremely good classification to connect the right axons from host body and brain together. I think the only way to do it is to coax the new body/brain combo into self-repair.
If you read the article you'd find that what they are finding are not microplastics - they're stearates[1]
These are soap-like chemicals used as mould release agents on gloves, but what also means are chemically similar to plastics when analyzed by some techniques and under a microscope will spontaneously form micelle-structures which look very similar to microplastics (you can't exactly get in there and poke them).
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