Organs can now be grown!

[Maitre]

--snip--
The bladder is a very simple organ. It consists basicly of the same kind of cells in a ball shape.
--snip--
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That was going to be my point. Growing skin might be something on the horizon as it is also a relatively simple organ.

On another note, there already is a caste that has access to luxury surgery. Elective cosmetic surgery is a toy to some of the affluent. If they don;t like the effects of age, they go in one day for a procedure, then take a vacation. When they come back, all their friend marvel at the good a few weeks away did them.

On a third note, I saw an interesting show last week (Go PBS!). It showed a graph of the number of impact craters on the moon (as a proxy for the number that would be expected on the earth), and the number of species emerging on earth. The basic relationship is that a huge spike in impacts begins about 450 million years ago, which coincides with a huge jump in the number of emergent species. Basically, the question was did life result from the additional chemicals brought from space, or were these impacts the type of stress that drives natural selection. I'm not trying to answer that, but it seems to me, humanity has come to a point where evolutionary pressure on our species is practically nil, despite our ability to apply evolutionary pressure to every other species on the planet. We are indeed becomming weaker as a species, and we are preventing the weak from dying off (remember the corollary to only the strong survive is all the weak must die). Whether this is virtuous or not is an issue for smarter people than me. I'm just wondering if my ancestors did anything other than sanitize phones (2 points if you get the reference).