Prolong How Tall?

JohnRoth wrote:I basically dismissed prolong - the way RFC describes it in the book - as pure handwavium. We know a lot more now than we did 20 + years ago when he was putting his tech bible together.

You'll notice that Mesan Alphas have natural long lives - prolong just gets added on top of that.

Knowing what I know now, and extrapolating a bit, I'd say that life extension and regeneration would have to go hand in hand - life extension would be more a matter of continuous in-place regeneration.

Your point on cancer is, I think, well taken. One of the biggest issues is that DNA replication during cell division isn't perfect; that's why most mutations in children come from the father - sperm have a lot more cell divisions in their lineage than eggs, and they just get dirtier and dirtier as the guy ages. Fixing that would take some pretty interesting redesign of several pieces of cellular machinery.

It's possible that prolong involve a lot of the medical nanotech handwavium.

In Echoes of Honor Allison mentioned that they now have "precisely engineered nanotech" for "genetic insertions".

It might be simpler to design nanobots of one sort or another to do cellular machinery cleanup, re-add telomerase lost in copying, nuke defective cellular copies, etc, rather then trying a pure biological redesign. Even if it was only done periodically as part of normal 1st world medical care that could handle some potential side effects of the biological tinkering.

It couldn't all be from periodic medical corrections however, otherwise the oldest prisoners on Hades wouldn't have been in as good a shape as they were, having been prisoners for all those decades without any routine medical care.


But even that's just putting a name and a vague concept on your handwavium. I'm no biologist, but prolong does seem to thrive on the power of plot (especially the hard cut-off on when it must be administered by), rather that the probably way life extension discoveries will play out.

Prolong isn't genetic modification it is a terapy witch is causing our biological clock to slow down. Honor looked like 20 maybe 25 years old when she was 60,if it will be a genetic modification they're won't be looking so young at the age of 50-90. About cleaning genome it isn't needed as long as they're have good health care for time of pregnancy. Most of mutation is cause or by errors with coding and decoding of DNA and by addictions of mother, drugs, alcohol and other stuff.

Draken wrote:Prolong isn't genetic modification it is a terapy witch is causing our biological clock to slow down. Honor looked like 20 maybe 25 years old when she was 60,if it will be a genetic modification they're won't be looking so young at the age of 50-90. About cleaning genome it isn't needed as long as they're have good health care for time of pregnancy. Most of mutation is cause or by errors with coding and decoding of DNA and by addictions of mother, drugs, alcohol and other stuff.

Do you have textual evidence for that?

We don't know the precise combination of measures that goes into prolong, but some gene therapy must be involved, since it seems to be a self-sustaining, permanent change, with no regular reset appointments after the therapy has been performed.

Lord Skimper wrote:If one is 3-4 times as old and one starts Prolong at an age when one is still growing. How tall would one be? If we start prolong at 14 and grow till be are 19 then multiply the growing years from 14 to 19 by 3 or 4 would one grow to 8, 9, 12 feet tall?

I remember hearing something (can't remember where) that if people did grow this tall, and assuming that their rest of their dimensions grew accordingly, their internal body heat would get high enough to cook their insides, and if their other dimensions didn't grow accordingly I shudder to think of the implications on body mechanics, imagine trying to lift your arm if it was twice as long and your muscles were the same size, that would be a very quick lesson in leverage. Elephants and whales can be that large because of wrinkly skin increasing their surface area and frequent showers (for an elephant) and being submerged in usually freezing water (for whales). So if surviving prolong and have youth for centuries meant either looking very old of constantly living in ice water I'm not sure anyone would go for it.

kzt wrote:Both of you need to stop engaging him on this sort of idiocy. Just put him on ignore.

There are no stupid questions, except those not asked - just stupid answers!

Draken wrote:Human body without tinkering with DNA shouldn't be able to (be) more than 7 (feet high).

Never actually proven & there have been a few people recorded at over 7’. A bumble bee can’t fly – it’s aerodynamically impossible – but nobody’s bothered to tell them that.

biochem wrote:...but cancer seems like it would be a likely risk.

it's nearly 2000PD - cancer was cured ages ago. Get out of the dark ages of pre-D.

MAD-4A wrote:

Draken wrote:Human body without tinkering with DNA shouldn't be able to (be) more than 7 (feet high).

Never actually proven & there have been a few people recorded at over 7’. A bumble bee can’t fly – it’s aerodynamically impossible – but nobody’s bothered to tell them that.

Actually, that's not true. Just, you know, FYI. Please do your part to put a stop to silly urban legends.

As for the maximum human height thing: Sure, you can get very large people. 7 feet, however, is close to the maximum the human body plan can do, and even then only with a limited variability in terms of body weight. Going beyond the "tall and kinda gangly" archetype quickly causes issues in terms of muscle and bone deterioration (The current largest man in the world being unable to walk without crutches, for example).

MAD-4A wrote:

biochem wrote:...but cancer seems like it would be a likely risk.

it's nearly 2000PD - cancer was cured ages ago. Get out of the dark ages of pre-D.

Given that Prolong severely alters the cell regeneration mechanisms, cancer is a very definitive risk that its developers will have to have found workarounds for. Also note that there are a multitude of different causes for cancer; Stamping it out completely is rather unlikely (being able to diagnose it earlier or have better treatment options is another thing though).

Just for reference, the tallest Human being for which we have irrefutable evidence for is Robert Wadlow, "The Alton Giant", who grew to 8'11" before dying at age 22.

See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Wadlow

Probably the best know 'giant' outside of Basketball is Andre the Giant (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andre_the_giant), who was 7'4" and at times over 500 lbs. He died at age 46.

Jonathan_S wrote:

JohnRoth wrote:I basically dismissed prolong - the way RFC describes it in the book - as pure handwavium. We know a lot more now than we did 20 + years ago when he was putting his tech bible together.

You'll notice that Mesan Alphas have natural long lives - prolong just gets added on top of that.

Knowing what I know now, and extrapolating a bit, I'd say that life extension and regeneration would have to go hand in hand - life extension would be more a matter of continuous in-place regeneration.

Your point on cancer is, I think, well taken. One of the biggest issues is that DNA replication during cell division isn't perfect; that's why most mutations in children come from the father - sperm have a lot more cell divisions in their lineage than eggs, and they just get dirtier and dirtier as the guy ages. Fixing that would take some pretty interesting redesign of several pieces of cellular machinery.

It's possible that prolong involve a lot of the medical nanotech handwavium.

In Echoes of Honor Allison mentioned that they now have "precisely engineered nanotech" for "genetic insertions".

It might be simpler to design nanobots of one sort or another to do cellular machinery cleanup, re-add telomerase lost in copying, nuke defective cellular copies, etc, rather then trying a pure biological redesign. Even if it was only done periodically as part of normal 1st world medical care that could handle some potential side effects of the biological tinkering.

It couldn't all be from periodic medical corrections however, otherwise the oldest prisoners on Hades wouldn't have been in as good a shape as they were, having been prisoners for all those decades without any routine medical care.


But even that's just putting a name and a vague concept on your handwavium. I'm no biologist, but prolong does seem to thrive on the power of plot (especially the hard cut-off on when it must be administered by), rather that the probably way life extension discoveries will play out.

Remember that RFC designed most of this in the early 90s. This was before the Human Genome Project as well not to mention 20+ years of additional research. There are so many, many things wrong with the biology in this series that I quit worrying about it a long time ago.

We'll probably have the tech to do precise insertion of changes to DNA within 20 years, considering that we have preliminary versions of it right now - CRISPR, among other techniques.

As far as I can tell, biology is going to be the 21st century science, not physics. I just wish some of the better SF writers would learn enough to make their stories make sense.

As I mentioned upstream, cancer is the inevitable result of accumulated DNA defects caused by inaccuracies in cell division. It seems to occur frequently in tissues with a very high rate of cell replacement. Eliminating cancer probably won't be possible without some pretty fundamental fixes to how cell division works. By itself, that would probably result in some amount of life extension.