I don't know why but I just love being able to read all of this fascinating information in such a compact form, just amazing! Heading back over to read the rest now!
...you don't find it uncomfortable or distressing to be confronted with the dry facts and hard-limits of the 1.5Kg squishy-pink prison we're all trapped-inside and all condemned to die inside?
> “Not at all,” said the medtech. “Think of all the work he represents on somebody’s part. Nine months of pregnancy, childbirth, two years of diapering, and that’s just the beginning. Tens of thousands of meals, thousands of bedtime stories, years of school. Dozens of teachers. And all that military training, too. A lot of people went into making him.” She smoothed a strand of the corpse’s hair into place. “That head held the universe, once.”
Quite the opposite for me it kinda just makes it seem even more amazing that it exists and works at all and how much humans have worked out about it!
There's some interesting regenerative medicine avenues (Michael Levin's stuff, planarian worms don't die from old age) that I have some hope might eventually slightly reduce the 'condemned to die' side of the picture for humans also.
And many of those numbers aren't static. They change.
The Theory of Bounded Rationality emerged as a reaction to growing awareness within the chimp troupe, of the numerous limitations of that chimp brain. Its a useful tool when coping with complex ever changing reality.
It's so delicate, too. Drop the squishy pink thing and its ancillary support-meat on a random part of Earth and most likely it drowns in an ocean, freezes on a mountainside, dries out in a desert, or starves in a wasteland.
That's leaving aside the other 99.99999999% of the universe where it chokes on vacuum or is blasted by radiation.
And even in a perfect habitat with an ideal genotype and phenotype, its functional lifetime is a mere century bookended by billions of years of nonexistence.
