How Far Can Liposuction Go Using Nanotechnology

[JoeRoccoCassara]

A big set back is that liposuction takes out just fat cells. Nanotechnology can remove 90% of all the lipids with 100% of each individual lipocyte and adipocyte cell, and then liposuction could be performed simply to cut out 75% of the now empty fat and adipose tissues.

 

This would force a person of a 50% body fat to muscle mass ratio to 6% or 3% body fat to muscle mass ratio. What this would look like is, for example; instead of liposuction doing this:

 

http://www.smartplasticsurgery.com/sanfrancisco/liposuction_sanfrancisco_1a.jpg

 

http://www.sfcosmeticsurgery.com/photos/liposuction/images/lliposuction19b.jpg

 

It would do this:

 

http://desmond.imageshack.us/Himg196/scaled.php?server=196&filename=superliposuction.jpg&res=medium

 

http://desmond.imageshack.us/Himg545/scaled.php?server=545&filename=superliposuction12.jpg&res=medium

 

And this wouldn't just be done over certain parts of the human body, but from the forehead to the cheeks to the chin to the finger tips to the toes. Even internal fat tissue would be completely wiped out to 6%. On top of that every single fat gene could then be deleted from one's chromosomes permanently, disabling fat storage permanently; which wouldn't be a problem because nourishment is available 100% of the time in an industrialized society.

 

The excess skin cells could be removed by nanobots as well, tightening up the skin at the same time that fats are removed.

 

Admittedly the flaw is that the patient might be so scrawny that when the fat is removed they might end up looking worse. However, this wouldn't even be a set back for muscle growth if the nanobots also deleted both variants of the myostatin gene as well as all of the myostatin protein sites surrounding muscle tissue throughout one's entire body.

 

If this happens, the human body will have been completely changed to be capable of building 100% lean muscle, without the ability to gain any weight from fat. Which would be an appropriate response just for the excess availability of food during the agricultural revolution, not to mention the industrial revolution and the recent irrelevancy and underpayment of most labor jobs.

Edited April 2, 2012 by The Transhumanist

[CraigD]

The idea of loosing lipid-eating nanites in your body as an alternative to exercise and diet to get achieve a “sculpted”, body-builder’s physique is certainly a very transhuman one, but I’d be very wary of such little robotic beasties, because I’m very protective of at least one class of lipids in my body: the myelin sheaths around my nerves, about 75% of which are made of lipids pretty chemically indistinguishable from that in my un-buff muscles and various flabby parts.

 

I think I’ll stick with exercise and diet, when I want to slim down and bulk up. In addition to making me look prettier, it’s fun. Though nobody can say what getting made over by nano-body-building-bots would feel like, I’ve a feeling it wouldn’t feel as good as a nice endorphin high. :)

 

By definition, liposuction is removing fat mechanically, using suction. If you could engineer nanoscopic robots to remove lipid molecules, I’d think that rather than leave them under your skin, requiring the same incisions, suction tubes, scars, risk of infection and deadly aneurism that present day liposuction surgery does, you’d have the little ‘bots handle getting them neatly and safely through your skin.

 

Fun as it is to imagine such things, we should be mindful of the very real possibility that the nanites we’re imagining here, popular as they are in the scifi of the past few decades – “Drexlarian nanotech”, to give it a name – may prove practically impossible. There’s far from a consensus that the problems of storing energy or supply power to “free-swimming” robots small enough to act like biological cells, or how such small, un-anchored machines could move through a body, etc., can be solved, and a number of convincing arguments that they can’t be. I’m personally convinced that continued miniaturization of microsurgical machinery will make less and less traumatic surgery possible, but think this technology won’t much resemble the fictional “nanites”/“nannies” of STTNG or Schlock Mercenary.

 

There are countless online articles discussing the infeasibility of Drexlarian nanotech. The wikipedia article Drexler–Smalley debate on molecular nanotechnology is a pretty good one, with links to others.

 

… On top of that every single fat gene could then be deleted from one's chromosomes permanently, disabling fat storage permanently; which wouldn't be a problem because nourishment is available 100% of the time in an industrialized society.

Nourishment is certainly NOT available 100% of the time to a substantial number of people in industrialized societies from the beginnings of the industrial revolution to the present day. More, just because you’ve never lacked for food in your life to date, it’s unwise IMO to assume you never will. It certainly has happened to me.

 

I think it would be stupendously unwise to disable the metabolic resources millions of years of evolution has given us for any reason. The suggestiong of do it for unnecessary, cosmetic reasons – to “look ripped” – leaves me flabbergast!

[belovelife]

i would have to agree

[JoeRoccoCassara]

There have been times in my 40 hour work weeks as a mover where I had plenty of opportunity to experience hunger, but in the future labor jobs will be gone, and fast food industries will be so culturally omnipresent that practically anywhere one works he can buy a plethora of different foods their for hardly any money at all. Food is so cheap. Remember the food industry is worth many trillions, one of if not the biggest industries in the world.

 

I think it would be stupendously unwise to disable the metabolic resources millions of years of evolution has given us for any reason. The suggestiong of do it for unnecessary, cosmetic reasons – to “look ripped” – leaves me flabbergast!

 

By the time 50% of Americans, that's half, 50/50, are CLINICALLY obese, I would have to say that perhaps it isn't a bad idea considering Ray Kurzweil is predicting armies of nanobots that can replace all the cells in entire organs long before that happens. Although if Drexlarian nano tech is truly impossible, than there is no way to transform the rare physiques and conditioned athleticism of world class athletes into a commodity that is as easily obtainable as a hot dog.

 

However, Ray Kurzweil disagrees with you. If Drexlarian nanobots can replace many of our organs by 2029?

 

Immortality in 20 years

Edited April 5, 2012 by The Transhumanist

[CraigD]

… On top of that every single fat gene could then be deleted from one's chromosomes permanently, disabling fat storage permanently; which wouldn't be a problem because nourishment is available 100% of the time in an industrialized society.

Nourishment is certainly NOT available 100% of the time to a substantial number of people in industrialized societies from the beginnings of the industrial revolution to the present day. More, just because you’ve never lacked for food in your life to date, it’s unwise IMO to assume you never will. It certainly has happened to me.

There have been times in my 40 hour work weeks as a mover where I had plenty of opportunity to experience hunger, ...

By “you’ve never lacked for food”, I didn’t mean “you’ve never experienced hunger”, but “you’ve never been unable to get as much food as you wanted”.

 

We humans, uniquely among the other great apes, are, due to our highly evolved metabolic systems, able to survive long periods (30+ days) with little or no food. I think artificially removing this ability would be foolish, because regardless of how our socio-political systems are now and in the future, unexpected situations where food is not available may occur. Examples include vehicle breakdowns when traveling in remote places, loss of delivery services following severe storm or earthquakes, and financial problems, such as being unemployed and without saved money at the same time that charitable and government welfare food is unavailable where you area.

 

... but in the future labor jobs will be gone, and fast food industries will be so culturally omnipresent that practically anywhere one works he can buy a plethora of different foods their for hardly any money at all. Food is so cheap. Remember the food industry is worth many trillions, one of if not the biggest industries in the world.

It’s certainly possible that, in the future, advanced automation will eliminate all human labor jobs. I don’t, however, think this is by any means certain, in either the near of far future.

 

I wonder, if all labor jobs were eliminated by automation, why would this trend stop in this employment sector? Why not eliminate all service and professional jobs, as well? If a substantial fraction of jobs are eliminated, how would the many unemployed people have any money to buy a plethora of foods, regardless of how cheap they were. Why, if food industry companies, which as you mention are at present worth a lot of money to their owners and investors, could realize greater profits with higher prices, would food necessarily always be cheap?

 

It’s far from certain that profit-driven, scarcity-promoting market systems will persist far into the future. I believe that, when all present-day sociopolitical factors are considered, we must conclude that they will persist at least into the near future. The main factor causing this is, I think, that most people don’t believe our present day laws, which promote these market systems, should be changed to oppose them. Abundance-based market systems (also know as resource based) are attractive to many people, including you, Transhumanist, and me, but to many other people, they are abhorrent examples of “socialism”. Although it not impossible, I don’t think a majority consensus that agrees with our position is likely.

 

Although if Drexlarian nano tech is truly impossible, than there is no way to transform the rare physiques and conditioned athleticism of world class athletes into a commodity that is as easily obtainable as a hot dog.

It doesn’t follow that if Drexlarian nanotech (which, for clarity sake, I define in this context as small non-biological robots that carry their own or use locally available energy, and are able to “swim” freely in body fluids and tissues) is impossible, microsurgery on a cellular scale that could, for example, “build” the body of a world class athlete, is impossible. Free-swimming “nanobots” are only one conceivable approach to performing surgery on this scale.

 

I wrote about and discussed one such alternative (and, unsurprisingly, Ray Kurzweil and living forever) back in 2005, in Nano Bots, characterizing it as

... surgery takes on a new character, with the surgeon no longer manipulating a single endoscopic appliance, but instructing a computer system to follow a program involving millions of movements, image captures/analysis, and intrusive actions.

For my optimistic prediction of a technology like I describe being developed by 2015 to be correct, I’d expect to see more about it in the professional biomedical literature than I have, so I expect my prediction is either entirely wrong, or over-optimisitic. I’ve yet to find any technical argument that it’s physically unfeasible, though, so remain optimistic that it may yet happen. Maybe by 2025? ;)

 

However, Ray Kurzweil disagrees with you. If Drexlarian nanobots can replace many of our organs by 2029?

 

Immortality in 20 years

I wouldn’t be much of an extropian myself if I didn’t know and have affection for Kurzweil’s ideas, but I wouldn’t be a reasonable, skeptical person if I didn’t acknowledge that much of his writing and speaking is speculative and intentionally provocative, at the expense of being safely realistic, and also note that speculative claims that “immortality is only 20 (or some other similar period) away” have been being made for well over 20 years.

 

At the risk of conceit comparing myself to Kurzweil, I’ve been one of those guilty of such claims over the past 20 years. The lesson here, I think, is to always be skeptical of science/technology predictions, roughly in proportion to the number of years in the future the prediction gives.

[JoeRoccoCassara]

For every genetically perfect specimen like

born, there are a million of us born either semi-perfect, or, in rare (for now) cases seriously genetically flawed individuals such as myself who do experience a lot of misery because of the way society is formed. Capitalism and politics are for the 1% and the genetically symmetrical.

 

Yet Carl Sagan disagrees when he writes that "We are children equally of the earth and of the stars,"; of society can't implement that then the 1% who inherit most of the pleasure will continue to shrink. Apparently you believe that the human body is too complex to be changed in order to increase the 1% to 100% surgically, furthermore Jacque Fresco will attest that even if 100% were actually proficient cognitively than there wouldn't be enough to go around due to the poor scarcity-promoting, energy-wasting monetary and industrial-political systems.

 

And now you claim that the majority of the semi-perfect and imperfect specimens who slave for their perfect masters are so closed-minded that they are incapable of inter-comparing as deeply as you and I and therefore cannot even interpret what a total technocracy or a Type I Kardeshev Civilization is to any remote accuracy. Because the definition of "Socialism" is hardly accurate for describing a super energy-efficient civilization where the dilemmas of over-population and unequal education are solved through a universally supplemented education, this supplementation arriving through the implementation of cognitive and longevity augmented individuals, augmented through technological innovations in surgery.

 

Maybe apart of us really truly don't want to believe how good the world is, a "skepticism" brought on by the harshness of social Darwinism. For a Type I civilization to exist the genetic evolutionary process of "survival of the fittest" must be ended for those who claim to be "civilized".

Edited April 6, 2012 by The Transhumanist

[hardy5]

Good read

[RenaEsteem]

A big set back is that liposuction takes out just fat cells. Nanotechnology can remove 90% of all the lipids with 100% of each individual lipocyte and adipocyte cell, and then liposuction could be performed simply to cut out 75% of the now empty fat and adipose tissues.

 

This would force a person of a 50% body fat to muscle mass ratio to 6% or 3% body fat to muscle mass ratio. What this would look like is, for example; instead of liposuction doing this:

..,

 

And this wouldn't just be done over certain parts of the human body, but from the forehead to the cheeks to the chin to the finger tips to the toes. Even internal fat tissue would be completely wiped out to 6%. On top of that every single fat gene could then be deleted from one's chromosomes permanently, disabling fat storage permanently; which wouldn't be a problem because nourishment is available 100% of the time in an industrialized society.

 

The excess skin cells could be removed by nanobots as well, tightening up the skin at the same time that fats are removed.

 

Admittedly the flaw is that the patient might be so scrawny that when the fat is removed they might end up looking worse. However, this wouldn't even be a set back for muscle growth if the nanobots also deleted both variants of the myostatin gene as well as all of the myostatin protein sites surrounding muscle tissue throughout one's entire body.

 

If this happens, the human body will have been completely changed to be capable of building 100% lean muscle, without the ability to gain any weight from fat. Which would be an appropriate response just for the excess availability of food during the agricultural revolution, not to mention the industrial revolution and the recent irrelevancy and underpayment of most labor jobs.

 

It might be extremely hard to get this done, so I truly don’t look at it to take place over the following 25 years or so.

You would need to be cautious with regards to where the nanotech bots stop attacking the fat, as if they traveled all over the body there are parts that would be responsive to fat loss. The complexity of the bots created t odate is really quite simplistic as compared to a task like this.

 

There has been current discussion about the barrier of the body’s immune responses targeting nanobots, since they are so small.

Edited May 14, 2012 by RenaEsteem