How do you feel about human augmentation?

Fascinating insight. Tell us more.

 

I can see your point, but completely disagree with it. I'd rather see my loved ones live than worry about some worthless sack of crap in power.

 

interestingly one of the most difficult organs to make fully artificial and self contained is the heart. As far as I can tell no one's ever made one that doesn't need some kind of external assistance to run.

 

And those people won't even have to see a doctor to die out..... They won't be able to afford one.

 

Indeed. Clinical immortality by itself sure wouldn't be that great. You'd have to find ways to prolong/increase neuroplasticity and otherwise roll back the most cumbersome aspects of aging, like decaying joints and fading audiovisual senses. And if you can do that, it's not that many steps to outright de-aging people, which is gonna be weird as hell if it's even possible.

 

The problem with aiming for eternal life is that you can never prove that you've achieved it.

 

You might be thinking of the pancreas.

 

No Heart.

I'm yet to see one version that doesn't require external assistance.
If there is a version that doesn't need this why isn't it being used a lot?

 

There's a joke from the Mass Effect universe that nobody is entirely sure what the actual lifespan of the Krogan is because no matter how old they get, they never die of old age. They get old and slow down to the point that they MIGHT eventually die from some sort of organ failure or combination of diseases, but what usually happens is they just get too old to keep winning fights and they are eventually killed by someone or something else. It's theorized that a krogan who gave up on fighting and lived a peaceful life would probably live forever, but since none of them ever DO this, they typically live 900 to 1100 years.

 

The total artificial heart they use for transplant candidates -- the real-world version of Picard's implant -- runs on a power cell that the patient has to wear on a backpack pretty much 24/7. IOW, power density is really the limiting factor in this technology: an artificial heart will need to either tap the body's own chemical power sources (e.g. ATP/glucose) or it needs a power source small enough to actually fit inside the body and stay there without needing to be regularly removed/replaced/recharged.

 

Yeah that is the big issue. Smaller power sources that can't be made with today's technology. Picard's heart probably has some kind of nuclear source for power.

 

Or it's powered by the small amount of power generated by Picard's body.

 

I've got a skipping hearbeat (potassium helps)--and I'd love a replacement. Artificial hearts are stroke magnets for now--so no thanks.

 

That seems perfectly reasonable in the world of TNG by then bioelectric power generation would be easy peasy.