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Old 11-05-2006, 04:36 PM   #5
Kitsune
 
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Join Date: Mar 2005
Location: At the Stern, Raising the Black
Default Re: Immortality in THS

Agemegos wrote:
Quote:
By medical standards, a half-percent risk of death is colossal. Ethical standards committees would ban the treatment, hospitals would refuse to let it be performed, juries would find against any doctor who performed it. There might even be legislative bans. Which means that on top of the cost of treatment there is the cost of getting to a sympathetic or lax jurisdiction.
In a way you could see aging as an illness: it slowly destroys body and mind until you die from organ failure. Its only that all human beings suffer from it, that is all. Considered that way, you have two choices: to either undergo a treatment that will restore you with a likelihood of 99.5% to perfect health again...or to watch your body decay - which results in death with 100% certainty. It's hard to imagine how any ethical standard committee could truly justify the ban of cellular rejuvenation as a service to humanity. (But I would be fascinated to see them try).
For any society that practices "rejuvenation for all" the noticeable effects would also be beneficial: the number of (biologically) young perople would increase dramatically, while really decrepit old people may all but vanish. Considering the gains, namely a wholly new young body without any ailings, the risk of less than 0.5% is really not too great. And even if death should claim you, your end would be during nanostasis and therefore painless and comparatively dignified. This should be quite comparable to the end as it was in earlier days: waiting for death in an increasingly frail husk of a body, with more and more ailments, more and more often in hospital until, one day, you don't leave it anymore. The whole process can be very lenghty, tormenting and...undignified.
So, I would think that the cellular rejuvenation treatment, despite its 0.5% failure chance (in which case possibly still the creation of a Ghost or a Fragment could be attempted) would be seen as vastly beneficial. Any government banning it in any free society might have a hard time doing so.
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