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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jeremy Ackerman-Yost" data-source="post: 242939" data-attributes="member: 4720">We begin deteriorating in our twenties, but until the advent of society and medicine, we died between 25 and 35.  So the idea stands.  People forget that evolution is no longer acting on us as individuals, so the standard rules get skewed quite a bit.  The vast majority of other animals die shortly after female reproductive senescence.  (btw- we also used to go into puberty much earlier and fewer oocytes survived.  Therefore, human females were probably reproductively incapable by 35)  There's also a certain amount of evidence that puberty is responsible for the onset of many of the "aging processes", not to mention that androgens and estrogens are implicated in many, MANY cancers.  So, the most effective way of extending the lifespan is to delay puberty.  Which we've been doing a bit at a time for a few thousand years now.  Of course, it's becoming earlier and earlier again thanks to estrogen mimics in industrial plastics and certain chemicals (DDT, for example).  (OT- You want to avoid breast cancer?  Stop microwaving your food in plastic containers.)There's a big difference between cloning life and reproducing a SPECIFIC brain.  Millions of cells in your body and cloning themselves right now (and thereby bringing down the wrath of the religious right, you despicable heathen you)  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> Nanotech won't be able to "improve" our brains' ability to process information until we figure out how that processing takes place.  And we're a LONG way from figuring that out.  We may be able to improve transmission speed between nuclei, or something like that  But knowing how little we know about the processing within a given structure, I'd be wary of manipulating it.  We don't even know what the salient factors are.   It would be a total shot in the dark.</blockquote>

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