What Happens When Your Own Limb Is Almost Good Enough? 34
derekmead writes: While the media might focus on prosthetics, the technology and techniques involved in limb salvage have advanced tremendously, too, spurred in large part by America's recent military conflicts. Now, when a soldier or civilian faces a brutal limb injury, they have choices—save the limb, or amputate. Be a limb salvage patient, or an amputee. Reconstruct the limb you were born with, out of the pieces you have left over, or lose that limb altogether. And that choice is, increasingly, a really difficult one.
In Will Reynold's case (Score:2)
Who needs legs? (Score:3)
I think I would have taken amputation.
Case in point: You don't need legs to skate [youtube.com] or surf [youtube.com] or do gymnastics [youtube.com] or swing like Spider-Man [youtube.com].
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Or to dance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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I think I would have taken amputation.
Case in point: You don't need legs to skate [youtube.com] or surf [youtube.com] or do gymnastics [youtube.com] or swing like Spider-Man [youtube.com].
Well, no.. but they're handy for stopping, though..
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You can change your mind and take amputation later
Ability to change your mind is a great idea..... especially if you can grow an entirely brand new body and have your mind transferred to the new body through a simple process, with your choice of keeping or changing your physical appearance, that would be ideal.
It would be even better if this mind transfer could be done almost entirely in "software", so only select physical parts of your brain actually need to move at a time, and essentially, your min
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Well, you can't really do any of that stuff, but you can change your mind and go for the amputation later, as GP said...
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After the transfer, what are you going to do with your old body?
Have sex with it, then eat it.
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You can change your mind and take amputation later
Ability to change your mind is a great idea..... especially if you can grow an entirely brand new body and have your mind transferred to the new body through a simple process, with your choice of keeping or changing your physical appearance, that would be ideal.
It would be even better if this mind transfer could be done almost entirely in "software", so only select physical parts of your brain actually need to move at a time, and essentially, your mind and body will be completely replaced with new cells, but you'll retain every memory and all knowledge and such you had before, even if your newly built body is 30 years younger than the one you are changing mind from.
I'm sure this will be a matter of routine within twenty years or so. You'll be able to 3D print a new body and download your mind/personality into it as easy as installing an operating system from a thumb drive.
As a bonus, our new cyborg bodies will be powered by cold fusion so we'll be able to live on Mars (or in Interstellar Space) indefinitely without needing any external life support or human contact.
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It takes proper training to be able to even use current gen prosthetics.
And both scenario's are coupled with a lot of pain and hardship: nerve damage, ghost limb syndrome,
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Not that easy.
You have your body part, however you live your life in pain with reduced ability. Or get an prosthetic which your can regain more mobility with less pain.
I have seen people with prosthetic limbs and not just athletes, they move around as well as we do and you may not notice an issue until you see the prosthetic.
Both options kind of suck (Score:2)
Limb salvage --- likely to never be 100% of what it was before.
Amputee --- now you have non-biological components to maintain that are probably not as robust as what you were born with.
I'm really hoping Option 3. will come out before too long. Use technology to construct and grow new organs, skin, bones, muscles, nerves, and other biological components to replace damaged ones..... in other words, build an entirely new limb, if a limb was lost. Build an entirely new ear, or eye, mouth, kidney, stomac
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The non-biological components are definitely more robust. You can just plug in new ones. Even do upgrades. The first thing I'd do after the amputation is dedicate a bunch of time to learning as much about prosthetics and 3D printing as I could. "Doctor heal thyself" would be a pretty good thing to dedicate the rest of my life to.
They obviously wouldn't be as dexterous as a full recovery. So staying biological for a spell first to make that attempt would be good first.
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Bullshit, your biological components are a lot more robust. The average llifespan is 80 years.
Show me one mechanical machine (heart) which can do that without some offline mainten
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This unfortunately is a subject I became intimately familiar with about 2.5 years ago and yes a third option would have been nice :p
Long story short, I found myself in emergency surgery with a surgeon telling me there was no way they could save my leg and that it had to be amputated. Not something you ever imagine being faced with. I woke up in intensive care with both my legs, after making sure they hadn't removed the wrong one. Turns out they decided to give it a go and see if they could save my leg anywa
Battlefield surgeons of the future (Score:3)
Someday there will be little robots that swarm out after an explosion to quickly gather up all the people bits, identify which bits belong to which person, 3D print any missing or uselessly damaged parts, and glue them all back together, all within 5 minutes before the brain starts to suffer from hypoxia.
Imagine getting blown to bits one day, then the next day you're right back on the front line.
Maybe they could put a few of these into airliners also, made out of the same stuff as the black boxes.
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That seems like a huge social expense, given how good humanity is at self replicating, with such a huge surplus population as we have. That swarm of robots could be doing so much other for so many, who hadn't managed to get themselves blown up. Maybe detecting and stopping the bombers, for instance.
Watching House taught me one thing... (Score:1)
... chop the damn useless thing off!
Drone Assassins. (Score:1)