328 | Mary Roach on Replacing Parts of Our Bodies

Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. A few weeks ago, as I'm recording this, there was some kind of global summit. I'm fuzzy on the details. I didn't really do a lot of research for this intro, but the point is that there was a conversation between Vladimir Putin, who's the president of Russia, and Xi Jinping, who is the leader of China. that was caught on what seems to be a hot mic. In other words, the microphone was turned on, but the speakers didn't actually know that they were being recorded or broadcast, and so they were more candid than they would otherwise be. You might think that they'd be talking about global geopolitic or trade agreements or something like that, or even political philosophy. But no. Putin and Gee were talking about Bio engineering.

And the possibility of immortality, or at least longevity, ultra longevity. They were saying how advances in biological science were making it possible to replace organs, and if you could go at this rate, you might end up living for 150 years or even more. subtext being that they would like to live for one hundred and fifty years or even more. And of course That's a little Contestable, that claim. I mean there's no contestation to the fact that bioengineering and biology more generally are absolutely leaping ahead by leaps and bounds. We're learning a lot, but there's no actual breakthrough that so far has dramatically increased the upper limit on human lifespans. In fact, uh this is an issue more generally with sort of the techno optimist way of thinking about the world. And I say this as someone who is very much attracted to the techno optimist way of thinking about the world, and to someone who does understand the difference between something being literally incompatible with the laws of physics and

in which case you should just give up on it, versus something just being really, really hard, an engineering problem, as we call it. And many biological things are sort of engineering problems. But it's Too easy. To imagine taking biological things and just making them arbitrarily better. That turns out to be really hard. It's not that it can't be done. We do it, we're getting better at it. But biology is very, very, very complex compared to physics, mechanical engineering, even chemistry, things like that. So today's guest, Mary Roach, is one of our

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