Re: Aging and life expectancy

Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
09 Dec 1999 02:48:55 +0100

Jeff Davis <jdavis@socketscience.com> writes:

> It's interesting to note that if your heart, liver, kidneys, etc. function
> at 99% of the minimum necessary to sustain life, then, well,... you die.
> 100%, you live, 99%, gonners.

Yes, but the important question is: how far are we from those limits? Normally the liver has a lot of extra capacity and regrows amazingly well. There are people who live ordinary lives with 75% of their heart muscle dead (the trick is to have the right parts of the heart in order), and you need to loose quite a few percent of the neurons of a brain system to get observable effects. The body is quite fault tolerant.

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Anders Sandberg                                      Towards Ascension!
asa@nada.kth.se                            http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/
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