New life through 3d printing.

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http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2014/04/10/ ... d-printer/

Recently I've been thinking. Anyone think it plausible for creating a new body through 3d printing, and just transferring our brain into the empty cavity of this new vessel? That way, anyone can just get a fresh new start. No chemicals messing with how our body looks, everything looking the way we want it to, and enhanced performance eventually. Just print every single necessary body part the way we want it to look, and just leave the head empty for our own brain to enter?

Of course keep in mind I know this will probably be a long way off before 3d printers are that advanced... but they are already trying to replicate the heart, so that's a start. What are your thoughts? How long you think it will take?

I dunno, it'll probably depend on how the Christians react and how lawmakers react in accordance to that.

I think that if nobody raised a barrier to it, it could be within the next 10 or 15 years, whereas if the Christians fought tooth and nail against the idea( i.e. God gave us our body, it would be immoral to create a new one in defiance of him) and laws were passed to stop it, it could be far longer.

I do think that it having applications in a bunch of different fields will help it to gain widespread acceptance.

Personally, i like the idea for a bunch of reasons including the thought that one day i could actually be in a body I'm comfortable with. I also have a terminally ill father that this kind of thing would help immensely, i also think this could keep a few brilliant minds with us for a longer time (i.e Stephen Hawking)

That's my two cents.

You can't just transplant a brain as though it's a single, simple organ. It's not all in the head. The neurons and such run all through your body.

If you tried, the new body would be like a collection of prosthetic devices, which means that it would never feel right or be sensitive enough to do what the real body did. Ask me about my teeth and how wrong it feels, even when they were new and fit properly. Biting into things is indirect and unsatisfying. And everything tastes like plastic. It's so much work for so little return that eating seems pointless.

I can imagine tryijng to get some depth perception for eyes that don't really work right, eye-hand coordination for eyes and hands that can't really work together, muscles all around that don't really respond, skin that feels remote, every sensation would be muted.

The brain is a lot more adaptable than that, Tahitiii. Eventually it will learn. People manage to handle transplanted muscles, often from themselves (reattaching body parts). It's just that, taken up to 11.

As far as building new morphs, I think that's going to come in sometime around the 30s, *maybe* in the 20s. As far as whole-body transplants go, I think we'll be able to manage those within a few years - the main problem is reconnecting the nerve tissue without scarring, and we're making a lot of progress in that regards in order to help paralysed people. Probably only for the rich to start with; we'll see body surfing tourism I expect, when they go over to a poor country to pick out a body they like the look of and pay the impoverished family much money. As a normal health procedure, the supply will be limited - you're looking at people who are brain dead with healthy bodies, and the organs are already in demand elsewhere. Until we can create those from scratch, but there will still be a very limited supply, and you won't be able to be choosy...

But once we can create the bodies organs, and print out a new skeleton, and cloth it with flesh... I don't know whether I'll resleeve then. It's a tempting prospect.

It certainly is possible; Dr Robert White did a lot of experiments in the 1960s (I think) on brain transplantation, which show that moving a brain to a new body is a possibility. Obviously back then they didn't have the technology to connect the brain to the rest of the nervous system, but steady progress is being made on that front. The big issue will be how the brain adjusts to the new body, you might be able to connect it up to all the necessary nerves, but you won't be able to connect it up in the exact same way it was connected to the previous body. It will likely take some time for the brain to adjust its map of the body accordingly, and we might need to advance our knowledge of how to increase neuroplasticity before it becomes particularly feasible. In any rate, it's not something you'd just do one day on a whim; it would much likely be much like the first time you got a new body; it would likely take some years for your brain to figure out what's what and you can walk etc.

Perhaps it is better, then, to replace parts of the body at different times. Say, change your upper torso, then replace your organ systems, then change your lower torso, then remove your legs and replace them with new ones, then your arms (probably at the same time as the upper torso), and at some point in all this work on your head. For a transwoman, the upper torso might be the first part to change (after a bit of head modification such as FFS), to aim for a feminine upper body. Replace the arms at the same time. Later, fix up the lower body and legs, and sort out the reproductive system at the same time. Then it's just the head left to work on, but you'll have to wait for the brain to shrink under hormones before reducing its size.

Yes, there will be somewhat of a mismatch during this, but that's usual for transition...

no thanks, I would rather just naturally die if I had to. Not becoming a cyborg or whatever appropriate term

You'd rather die than have an organ transplant?

This isn't going to happen in our lifetimes. We were born too early.

I'll get back to shivering and crying now.

That's a very pessimistic, and more importantly unrealistic, take on the world.

Trust me. I fully intend to see to it, if no-one else will. Toss money at several dozen bioengineers till I get my way. First I need to acquire the funds, but that shouldn't be too hard...

That does eliminate the main advantage of a single full body transplant; safety. With a full body transplant, no matter how drastic the changes a person wishes to make to their body, it will ultimately only need one major surgery. Doing things piecemeal means submitting to many major surgeries, each with their attendant risks. Where it is probably going to be most useful is in cases in which a person has several major organs in decline; much safer to move the brain into a new, healthy body than have surgery after surgery to replace them when they're on the verge of failing.

A prerequisite to body exchanges is the ability to repair a severed spinal cord. That absolutely must be solved. Similarly, repairing severed face and optic nerves. These are things that are seeing modest progress over time, but no major breakthroughs. These are only a few of the prerequisites: others include fully solving host-versus-graft immunity in transplantation. And these are only prerequisites; actually growing the new body is a massively difficult problem in itself.

I liken optimism about this subject to 1950's-era optimism about computing and artificial intelligence. A whole lot of smart people thought that by 2000 mankind would have created AI, which didn't happen. Current estimates are more like 2100. When the first few aspects of trying to make AI were tackled in the infancy of computing, the full scope of the problem was understood, how many extremely difficult problems there are that must be solved in order to create AI.

Sadly, my pessimism is more like realism - even my layman's level of knowledge of these things is enough to understand why none of this is coming anytime soon. I fully expect a cure for most kinds of cancer before this. Cancer is an easier problem.

Something I hate about myself is that my pessimism is usually correct, making my worldview very bleak. Is it better to be optimistic and wrong or pessimistic and correct?

AI is a lot harder to create. We have the raw computing power for it, we're just held back by on algorithmic side of things...

We really aren't far from being able to repair damaged nerves, although most people don't realise how close we are to using stem cells and cybernetic implants. Could people predict how widely used the internet would become, back in the 70s? Yet there was only a couple of decades from then that it became commonplace...

If you build a body, you might as well build it to be compatible...

The main thing - the only thing, really - holding back head transplants is the spinal cord issue. But, I'm sure we'll deal with that soon. Perhaps modify the head separately?