These are too much fun. Maybe you should consider yourselves lucky that I don't succumb to them every day!
1. Chivalry.
In her informal history of 14th Century Europe, A Distant Mirror, Barbara Tuchman had very little good to say about the code of conduct called chivalry. She deemed it poisonous to both social stability and relations between the sexes. Granted that the aspects of it upon which she focused were somewhat less than savory, at least according to Christian standards...but back then, a fair fraction of the nobility was persuaded that a nobleman could buy his way out of such piddling little sins as adultery. It was a fantasy in which the Church of that era had a pecuniary interest.
Chivalry in our time means something different. This rather poignant article makes the differences plain -- and emphasizes why American men shouldn't let the code decay into desuetude:
Let's start from the simple truth that as a group, men are stronger and more aggressive than women. Yeah, I know, sexist pig, stereotypes, yadda yadda. Deal with it. Pick 15 random men and 15 random women, match them up one on one, and you're going to find 12 or more men still standing. That's just the way it is.So, women are naturally going to feel about as nervous as a long tailed cat in room full of rocking chairs whenever she is surrounded by a group of men, even if she knows them. It will be even worse if they are strangers. She has no way of knowing whether they will take advantage of the power differential in order to take advantage of her. So what can we do, as men, to allay her very reasonable fears?
Actions always speak louder than words, so saying it isn't enough. We have to show it. And that's what this [i.e., chivalrous conduct] is all about.
When I open the car door for my wife, which I do every time, (What, you don't?) I'm not placing her on a pedestal above me, nor am I insinuating that she is incapable of opening the car door herself. What I'm demonstrating is that I am voluntarily using my strength for her benefit. I'm signalling by my actions that I have control over my strength and my aggression, and that I will use them for her, not against her. In the same way, when I carry the groceries in, or her shopping, or perform any other function that she could do as well on her own, I'm reinforcing that basic message. When I stand when a lady enters the room, or wait for her to be seated before I sit, I'm not idolizing her; I'm showing her respect so that she can relax her natural caution.
Of course, this goes both ways. She signifies her understanding and acceptance with a gracious ‘Thank you,' and possibly a warm smile. It has nothing to do with sexual flirtation, but acknowledges that I am a man, and that I have demonstrated that I can be trusted.
Yeah, I know, Hopelessly out of touch and old fashioned. But here's the problem. In our rush to be all modern and trendy, we've tossed out social mechanisms that evolved culturally over centuries without replacing them with an equivalent means of communicating these vital messages.
Is it any wonder now that women are distrustful of men? Is it any wonder that men are no longer willing to be gentlemen?
The author, Rich Hailey, has shown more insight into proper conduct, relations between the sexes, and the natural order of things than the entire never-to-be-adequately-damned feminist movement. Yet it's guaranteed that those who most need that insight are the ones least likely to accept and absorb it...if they bother to read it at all.
I tried to illustrate that aspect of chivalrous conduct in Freedom's Scion:
"Up for a longish walk?"
"Hm? Where to?"
"Morelon House." The encounter with Barton Kramnik had goosed the innate wildness that [Althea] seldom allowed free rein. She decided to give it its day. "There are a couple of things I'd like my new friend to see."
"Oh?" Martin's smile turned tentative. "Not things you could show me here and now, I take it?"
"Well, I could," she allowed, "but it might shock the other patrons. Besides, I think my new friend has a couple of things I'd like to see." She widened her eyes to their widest. "And feel."
He regarded her soberly for a long moment. "You're quite sure you want me to be that good a friend?"
She opened her mouth, closed it abruptly.
—It's called chivalry, Al.
Hm? What are you talking about, Grandpere?
—Comes from an old word for 'horseman.' It refers to the gentleman's code. A gentleman would never encourage a woman he admires to put herself out for him, much less at risk of heartbreak, disease, or an unplanned child. Beside that, you've let him know that you're rich. He wants you to have every chance to rethink your offer.
Hm. It's not like he twisted my arm.
—Irrelevant. A gentleman...strike that: A good man tries to protect the women around him from anything that might endanger them, including their own flights of fancy. This appears to be a good man. Very.
I hardly need to be protected, Grandpere.
—But he doesn't know that, does he?
Ah. Gotcha. A little reassurance would be in order, then?
—Just so. Proceed deliberately, but with confidence.
Count on it.
"Martin," she murmured, "I'm not a virgin. I've had regular injections of Inconceivable these past thirteen years. I've got an immune system that can't be beat. And if I even thought you might be trying to 'play' me, I wouldn't invite you home; I'd rip off your head and drop-kick it into the river. So: yes or no?"
He glanced at the restaurant door, looked back at Althea, and squeezed her hand. "Okay, let's be off."
They were.
A strong woman doesn't spurn the chivalrous gestures of a strong man; she accepts them for what they signify and treats the giver according to his deserts. Would that we still understood that such courtesies are not a denigration, but a gift -- and one all too seldom given!
2. A Brilliant Homilist.
A fellow I work with told me something interesting about one of his parish priests: that Father Joseph (I think that's his name) has a literal following. That is, a great many of his "home" parishioners will go to wherever he's celebrating Mass, including a distant parish where he's been asked to assist for the weekend, just to hear his homilies. Today I found out why.
Father Joseph expounded on two of the day's Bible readings: the first from First Kings, wherein Elijah prays to the Lord to restore life to the recently deceased son of a widow; and the second from Luke, wherein Jesus restores life to a widow's son a few miles from Jesus's birthplace in Nazareth.
Father Joseph enumerated several of the reasons conjectured for Jesus's willingness to revivify the young man, and then touched on one that few scholars or homilists have deigned to consider: compassion for a woman Jesus knew personally. The place of the miracle was close enough to Christ's "home town" that He very probably knew her, and was moved to pity by her loss. In those days, a woman alone faced a harsh and probably foreshortened existence. Jesus, being as fully human as He was divine, could hardly have avoided feeling human compassion for the bereaved widow, just as Elijah did in the earlier time of First Kings.
Among the partial views one can take of Our Savior is that of him as God, or that of Him as a great human preacher. Only in combination do we get any sense of the Whole -- and in my hearing at least, only Father Joseph has ever troubled to elucidate that view of Our Lord.
It strikes me as fitting that Father Joseph, a humble and self-effacing man, should be followed from place to place. The Church needs many more priests like him.
3. A Puzzle.
Imagine along with me, if you please.
Some very evil people have created a nanite -- i.e., a biotechnological machine on the scale of a single (large) molecule -- with the following properties:
- It is self-replicating.
- It attacks human spermatozoa to remove a particular group of genes -- the ones that give rise to intelligence and sentience in the human male -- but otherwise leaves the sperm intact and capable of fertilizing an ovum.
- It regards all sufficiently simple organic chemicals as food stock for its operations and reproduction. ("Sufficiently simple" being well below the level of living human tissue.)
Nasty crap, eh? No, I don't know of anyone who's made such a thing. You may rest assured that if I did, I'd personally blow him to Hell and burn all of his works to inert ashes. But such an abomination is a key player in Freedom's Scion, and also in its sequel, tentatively titled Freedom's Fury. And now I have to come up with a plausible counteragent!
I might manage to solve this conundrum on my own, but I might not -- and so I'd appreciate help from my imaginative Gentle Readers. He who provides the neatest and most plausible solution will be credited with the idea when the book is published.
Any takers?
(Georges Perec, author of A Void, called this sort of problem a "lipogram:" a literary puzzle the author poses to himself or to other writers. I had no idea I'd done such a thing to myself until just a few days ago. That'll learn me.)
Regarding the puzzle - could an exceptional immune system, regarding these things as invaders, destroy them? My guess is that the nanites are too small to be noticed, being not even as big as a single cell.
ReplyDeleteFor what it's worth, this same puzzle has been on my mind since I read Freedom's Scion. It makes for quite a constraint on future action.
It's a tough problem, H. Since a nanomachine is on the order of a virus, a super immune system might have a chance against it...but maybe not, if the nanite had been engineered to defeat that sort of counteraction.
ReplyDeleteI think the solution might have to be a hunter-killer nanite that targets the invader and disassembles it, then dies...but I remain open to suggestions, as that sort of warfare between nanomachines would have some nasty side effects.
Barring some kind of chemical or radiation therapy that can destroy the nanites without unduly harming the human host, the only possibilities I see for targeting the nanites themselves would involve other nanites or synthetic antibodies as some form of vaccine. As you've already said, a nanite war could be very nasty for the unfortunate battleground. Perhaps Hope's intelligence, together with the planet's native toxicity to life forms familiar to humans, could be of use here? Coordination for that option would be difficult, though, since the only person able to communicate cannot be allowed to set foot on the planet.
ReplyDeleteProtecting the nanites' target is the other obvious option, and given the advanced state genetic/biological engineering on Hope, I see three options at "first" glance:
1. Modified sperm cell membranes (either the outer membrane or the membrane of the cell nucleus) that are impermeable to the nanites while still permitting egg fertilization;
2. Modified, possibly changing or mutating, cell membranes making the cell or the cell nucleus "invisible" to the nanites (similar to the way HIV renders itself invisible to our own immune system);
3. Some kind of lymphocyte/spermatozoa graft that gives the sperm the ability to identify, isolate, and destroy the nanites within the sperm cell itself.
How you would retrofit this kind of protection to the already living, though, remains a mystery. Some kind of RNA gene-splicing therapy in situ? It's been a while since I read about such things.
I might have to "get Godelian," H. That is, I might have to have the geniuses over at HalberCorp, in collaboration with Teodor Chistyakowski, design a nanite that doesn't destroy the anti-sentience nanites, but rather seek out their self-defense and replication mechanisms and neutralize them. That being accomplished, wait 120 days; that's the length of time it takes to replace every cell in the human body. At that point, all the nanites in Althea's body would be guaranteed to have been flushed out. Inasmuch as she's unusually strong and sturdy, she should be able to endure the fever brought on by the conflict. (A little "willing suspension of disbelief" will be necessary here, I think.)
ReplyDeleteLarger problems arise with regard to saving the derationalized men of Loioc. They're hardly on Althea's plane when it comes to surviving physical stress. That will be a three-pipe problem for certain. It might be necessary to use one of the ideas you suggested, which would effectively give rise to a new Homo Sapiens Loiocensis unable to breed with the prior species. I'll have to give it a lot more thought.
The "best" part of the whole thing is that all the development and testing must be performed on the Relic -- and probably on the outer surface of the Relic, away from all living systems, at that. But this is SF, so I'm expected to throw in a few curves of that sort, right?
directed energy weapon. high energy level emp would harm electromechanical systems but leave the biological systems unharmed. It would have to be on a level not really seen today since the induced current is proportional to the length of antenna which in this case would be on the nano scale.
ReplyDeleteThere are so many options when artistic license is involved. How about an antibody that evolves to either destroy or modify the nanite? It could slowly evolve over time if this is beneficial to the plot, or it could only work in partial ways. Conversely, the antibody could work on the affected spermatozoa, so as to either render it inert, or to change it in some way that makes it apparent once fertilization takes place, or even adds it's own modifications to the damaged cell, intentionally or unintentionally, for better or for worse. While you're at it, the evolved antibody could have other unintended consequences too. Of course, a self-replication error in the original nanite would be too obvious, wouldn't it?
ReplyDelete--
Brownhouse
Those are clever ideas, Brownhouse. Concerning what's "beneficial to the plot," the plot is just taking shape now -- and the particular approach I choose to deal with the evil nanite will be very important to its ultimate shape.
ReplyDeleteThe evil nanite's self-replication facility does constitute a vulnerability, if it can be corrupted. Godel's Incompleteness Theorem suggests that the specific point of attack should be the subsystem that verifies that the offspring are exact replicas. I'll have to give that a very hard think.
Keep 'em coming!
So I thought about the nanite problem last night. You've set yourself quite a pickle.
ReplyDeleteDisclaimer: I've not yet read Freedom's scion, as I am still working my way through "Which art in Hope". Hate coming into a trilogy in the second book.
Also, these are somewhat random thoughts, unedited, so please excuse their jumbled nature.
Comment broken into two halves, as the comments are limited in length.
The concept of a vaccine as we know it will not work, at least in the male population, as the testes are an immunologically privileged site, as are the brain, eye, and fetus. There is a very basic Wikipedia article that describes this, but in general the immune system recognizes sperm as foreign (in the same way that a lung transplant is foreign), as they are produced well after the phase of development that allows the immune system to recognize "self" vs "foreign". A vaccine would create antibodies...that would then sit in the blood stream and do nothing. A vaccine could work in the female population, which I presume would be asyptomatic carriers.
This "blood-testes barrier" is both active and passive, in manner similar to fortifications around a city: you need both the wall and soldiers to man it for true protection. There are tight junctions around the egress points that lead to the testes, as well as active repression of the typical inflammatory reaction. One complication to this treatment --and indeed to the nanite itself-- is that entry of same could break down the barrier and lead to inflammation of the testicles, potentially wiping out all of the sperm in an autoimmune-style reaction. Unless the nanite were specifically designed to leave this junction intact, you would expect noticeable symptoms in terms of swelling of the testes upon infection. You would also need the nanite to have only local effects, as otherwise it would also break down the barriers in the eye and brain, leaving the unlucky soul with sympathetic ophthalmia and/or meningitis.
In order for the nanite to be so specific, it would be required to use some combination of cell surface receptors to identify its target. These are proteins that hang off the cell and in many ways serve as its identification or address. Modern methods of flow cytometry use these cell surface receptors to identify various white blood cells and discriminate between certain kinds of leukemia, for example. This raises a potential weakness in the nanite, because it is almost guaranteed that there will be someone out there without the proper cell surface receptors for identification. For example, HIV uses CCR5 as a recognition site to enter CD4 cells; there are a few individuals that are CCR5-delta32 mutants, which makes them completely immune to HIV. (I'm told said individuals used to wear t-shirts advertising this fact, as that implied that sex with them was lower risk. But I digress.)
Another factor that may come into play is the concept of a hapten. This is best explained as the mechanism of heparin-induced thrombocytopenia (HIT). Heparin is a very small molecule (actually it's a chain of sugars) that is too small and simple for the immune system to recognize. However, heparin in the blood stream can bind to many things, not just its target. In the case of HIT, heparin binds to the platelet, and the combination of heparin/platelet forms a new antigen that is recognized by the immune system, when neither one by itself is recognized. We see this as a dramatic drop in platelet count, as the immune system can't be specific enough to remove the antigen without also killing the platelets. THere may be a role in the story for a cure that has side effects that are either life threatening or leave the person in question handicapped. No such thing as a free lunch.
THe concept of someone having a "super" immune system that would correct for this virus immediately reminded me of the "Legacy virus" from the X-men comic book. THis virus killed all mutants, and then later switched to killing all humans. The Wikipedia article on Legacy virus, section on "Television" reports that one means of stopping it was to give it to Wolverine, who then created "a new kind of antibody" to fight it off. Deus ex machina was never my favorite method of resolving conflict in a story, let's not use Mutant ex machina, please?
ReplyDeleteOnce the nanite has performed its genetic neutering, it's hard to see how that would be reversed without a different nanite coming into play. I don't know if you plan on having the Evil Nanite die off after it does the dirty deed, or hang around to guard the genes and prevent further messing. Should it also have a guard function, that would significantly increase its size and complexity. If this were the case, then perhaps the best approach would be not to defeat the nanite mano-a-mano but instead reprogram it to reverse what it did.
Ruminating on that, the nanite almost certainly does not carry a full copy of the genes it targets, but similar to PCR technology, only needs a starting and stopping location, with the presumption that everything in between is to be excised. Once the excised DNA is floating around, there are a slew of cellular mechanisms that quickly destroy it, which also destroys the information needed to correct the issue. Any corrective nanite would have to have a full copy, and would therefore be much larger. Also, once corrected, there is nothing stopping the Evil Nanite from re-excising the same DNA.
Another question is to determine whether or not you can (or even want to) fix this at all, from the point of view of the story. Would it be sufficient to treat the carriers-- method unclear at this point --and then do something to those who are affected by the nanite to either render them sterile, or make it very obvious that they have the disease? If you are feeling particularly wicked, perhaps some type of nanite that, oh, changes the skin color of those so affected. I understand from other comments that you invoke the new formation of the state, and it's always nice for a statist to have an underclass to manipulate. Shouldn't (false) promises of a cure provide all the manipulation needed to sway some substantial fraction of the males to your side? after all, those initially affected will be symptom-free and in command of all their faculties, it's their sons that will be affected. '
As to a cure, I suffer from not having read the story. I don't know if you have chosen airborne, droplet, contact, sexual, or blood-born transmission. The method of transmission will determine where it hides out and will likely dictate the cure. I guess I should stop commenting and get to reading.
Wow! Dr. Grouch, you have provided me with a wealth of important information. I'm not nearly as knowledgeable about medical or biological matters as I am about physics and engineering, so your input is a treasure trove for me.
ReplyDeleteAs you will read in Freedom's Scion, the Loioc nanite is water-borne. Ingestion of any liquid that contains it sets off the infection and the self-replication mechanism. (Another thing to which I gave no space in the book was how the self-replication mechanism limits itself to prevent the fatal over-running of the host. Damn, so many afterthoughts! Well, that's science fiction for you.) So the nanite can be isolated by "drying it out and keeping it dry," though I haven't yet thought about a technique for seining it out of a liquid habitat.
Keep it coming, Gentle Readers. This is getting good!
antibodies can target things 1)of regular, ordered structure 2)of substantial size relative to the antibody (say, from 20 nanometers up, more or less. It's basically a thermodynamic problem - - you need enough binding area that the energy of binding can tilt the equilibrium towards the bound state, and away from alternative bound states and entropically favored unbound/disordered states. ). So nanites would definitely be targeted by the immune system IMO whether you would like them to be or not, unless they were somehow disordered or chemically featureless.
ReplyDeleteA vaccine would work, probably even a normal immune system (I. E. their designer would have had to deliberately made them to evade the immune system in the first place.) How about a 'vaccine' that works by rearranging the targeted DNA sequence into a functional analog that is not recognized by the nanites, I. E. a virus of some sort that recombines an infected host cell so that the genetic material is still functional, but evades the recognition machinery of the nanites? It (or another virus) could also be used to 'cure' the Loioc males. (well, barring the encyclopedic knowledge of the intricacies of testicular immunoproperties given above...)
lots of good interesting solutions, IMO, especially if you combine with a social lethargy and lack of vitality of the Loioc due to complacency. maybe they forgot how their own nanites work, have been stagnating intellectually since their 'expwriment', etc. will keep thinking...
sorry, 20 angstroms, not nanometers. Anyway 20 atoms across, give or take. Generally not smaller than that.
ReplyDeleteApologies up front for the stream-of-consciousness approach to the thoughts below. Just brainstormin', is all.
ReplyDeleteInteresting. When I read that this was waterborne, my first thought was, "oh, that'll be easy then". At least for prevention. Treatment I'll get to later.
"Waterborne" eventually translates itself into "fecal/oral transmission", which happens for a surprisingly large number of viruses. The most famous, and the reason I thought this relatively easy, is polio. The polio vaccine does not affect the brain or nerves--blood-brain barrier-- but instead acts to increase the amount of antibodies that line the mucous membranes in the body. A specific subtype, IgA, has responsibility to guard all the areas that contact the outer world, which generally includes mouth/stomach/gut, and lungs. As mentioned by Scott above, certainly an antibody could recognize the nanite, and as long as the antibody can get to the same place the nanite can, it should act. Won't be perfect--nothing is-- but it should dramatically decrease transmission.
Polio was wiped out as humans were the only known reservoir . This stuff sounds like it permeates the environment, and if able may also infect all animal life that uses water. Shouldn't act on those animals. Also, less likely to be inside plants, the biology there is just too different. Well, unless designed to also be in plants, depending on the level of evil genius of the designer. If it doesn't go into plants or animals, then again this is just a public health issue (presuming there are few enough people affected that the population can survive). There has to be some way to kill it before it gets into people, so this just means the waste water treatment facilities need to up their game. That, combined with the vaccine designed to prevent entry through the gut membrane, would take care of business.
Frankly, it seems to me that a society that has a process that can arrest aging would consider this a trivial problem. The degree and specificity of genetic wrangling needed to fix aging would be orders of magnitude beyond what we are contemplating here. What would prevent a set of doctors from fixing such an easy problem? So I thought about my mindset here, especially after your comment on engineering. It's easy for me--and indeed most of the commenters above--to think of this more as a disease and less as a group of artificial robots. Perhaps it's a better approach to think of this as a swarm of communicating robots that exhibit complex behavior, utilizing distributed quantum computing, communicating via some form of quantum entanglement, that can actively resist efforts to fix the already affected DNA. Perhaps they can even communicate with a "home base" or perhaps the entire swarm has unintentionally become a form of distributed intelligence that is quite capable of outwitting those pesky humans. That would add another intelligence to the mix, as you already have one living in the magma underground.
Which also suggests how to fix the issue. The key to breaking this would be to disrupt the communication between them by collapsing the quantum resonators they use to protect the entangled states of the quibits. Then they lose the ability to fight back in an organized fashion, and like barbarians before the Roman legions, are swept from the field.
Again, I haven't read the book yet--about halfway through the 1st one--but it seems that those who created this should have also considered the possibility that they would be affected, and may have engineered a back door--perhaps some pill that is a small molecule that binds to the side, and either reprograms or shuts it down.
Again, I haven't read the book yet--about halfway through the 1st one--but it seems that those who created this should have also considered the possibility that they would be affected, and may have engineered a back door--perhaps some pill that is a small molecule that binds to the side, and either reprograms or shuts it down.
ReplyDeleteConsidered the capabilities that this nanite must have. It has to survive the environment, ie heat, cold, UV light, wet and dry, bacteria in the environment. Then it has to survive stomach acid, pass the IgA and mucosal barrier. Then it has to not activate the innate immune system, survive the "first pass" effect in the liver, and somehow evade the acquired immune system reactions as it will have to pass through the lymph nodes. It also needs to be able to coordinate its own replication, and produce enough numbers to take out all the sperm at once. It then needs to have some means of passing itself on.
To do the above, I think it needs to be able to switch its surface receptors in a planned fashion. THis is not unprecedented in biology; most famous example is malaria, which changes its cell surface receptors wholesale about every 3 days or so, which prevents the adaptive immune system from ever identifying it in time to mount a response. (It's inside the immune system's OODA loop). But the ability to change those receptors could make it look like anything it wanted.
I thought about a possible life cycle for this nanite. I would propose that some small, inadequate number of nanites are ingested via water, uses "set 1" of cell surface receptors to get into the mucosal system. All blood from the gut is shunted to the liver for detox; this thing could use the liver as a staging ground. It goes to the liver, uses "set 2" of surface receptors to get inside liver cells. It then replicates to the degree needed to take down the sperm (and also enough to put some nanites in the bile system to continue its life cycle) and breaks out of liver cells to move en masse to the testes. (so far, I have just recapitulated the life cycle of malaria). It then uses "set 3" of surface receptors to penetrate the blood-testes barrier, and "set 4" to move into the sperm to do the dirty deed.
It then would take up residence in the sperm and defend against further attempts to repair the damage. Perhaps it only checks once a month. Either way, with the ability to change its surface receptors, it would never be able to be consistently targeted by antibodies or any other part of the immune system. And with an ability to communicate and compute as a distributed intelligence, operating well within the OODA loop of the immune system, it would be devilishly hard to beat. Hard enough, perhaps, to make it a real challenge to doctors who can fix aging.
It would also seem that making this nanite an obvious man-made device might raise in the population the same feelings that you pointed out in the body of this blog post, that is, an intense desire to make anyone who would make such a thing dead, their family dead, and for good measure break down their home, burn it, and sew the ground with salt. Also, making it look less like a robot and more like a bacteria/rickettsia/virus would go a long way to keeping the doctors in the mindset of "bug" and not "swarm of intelligent robots". Various parts of the cell could be appropriated by this nanite to make the things it needs. For example, a modification of the heme protein--the ring that holds the iron in hemoglobin--could be used as the quantum resonator for communication, for example. About the only thing you could not hide would be the actual brain itself, which I will assume will be a quantum computer. THese, however, should be made tiny enough that they would only be detectable if you were specifically looking for them.
Also, you have mentioned that it splices out the DNA, which would be a very obvious fingerprint for anyone looking. Instead, one could use variations on epigenetic phenomena in order to prevent transmission of certain genes without leaving that fingeprint. Epigenetics refers to changes in DNA expression that do not affect the sequence itself. Examples include methylation of the proteins surrounding the genes, which prevent the enzymes that typically copy those genes from gaining access to the DNA. This nanite could lock down those genes via cross-linking, methylation, or some other permanent chemical change to the DNA that would not affect the sequence itself. Again, another sneaky change that would defy the typical investigation.
ReplyDeleteMy last thought was another means of inducing class warfare with this disease. If things became very obvious, that something was wrong with the current state of reproduction, those who have had the life-extending treatment could just stop reproducing for however long it takes to fix it. What's 100 years if you live for 1200? However, this spells the death of the species for all those who have not had the life-extending treatments, and facing the possibility of watching your kids/grandkids come out as something more akin to dogs than man would be all that would be needed to insist that you and yours get those same treatments. Of course, they cost money, and you don't have it, but there is this guy on the corner preaching that "the rich need to pay their fair share in this time of crisis..."
Oh, and the doctors of the future will also need to find a way of disrupting the quantum resonators of the communicating swarm without messing up the electron transport chain in the mitochondria. It's no use having perfect DNA in the sperm if they can't swim. Alternatively you could use some form of the current assisted reproduction technology to take the genetically intact sperm into an egg. There are no mitochondria in the head of the sperm, just in the tail, so it would have no effect on the offspring.
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