Increased Lifespan Through Cloning?

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Theoretically you could lengthen your life by cloning yourself.

Your second self would be like one of those cars up on cinderblocks you see infront the homes of rednecks.

You could clone your second self. Keep him/her locked up in the basement.

And as you age you could whack off parts of this person and transplant those parts onto yourself to replace you own failed organs.

This cloned person would gradually shrink (like those cars on cinderblocks) as you canibalized his parts. But your lifespan would be extended.

But there would be two problems.

Your clone might get uppitity and kick your ass. He might even start harvesting your organs.

Problem two- with current state of cloneing there is a problem. The problem is that you wouldnt gain anything by cloning because your clone would be ((biologically speaking) your own age. So his organs would fail in tandem with your own.

If you clone a new born mouse from the cells of a seven year old mouse- that newborn mouse has cells that are already the equivalent of seven years old.

The clones tend to croak of old age about the same time as the original animal.

Nobody knows why this is, and we dont know how to get around it yet.

The simple idea of clones as copies of yourself has problems.
Methuselah lived 969 years in a different atmosphere which had more or less
water and oxygen and pressure. Thus people do not often live over 100 today
because the air is different. Just as the year counts the age of Jesus, it once
counted from the time of methuselah and both people are equally accurately
dated in history. (We can or do know when they lived accurately enough.)

Cell repair or rejuvenation or replacement with renewed cells would preserve
brains. As for copies, none of us have very many of the same molecules we
had years ago. We pist them away and got new ones from food. So what I'm
saying is we don't have our original brain matter now, so a copy is not inherently
a stranger, but very nearly impossible to copy memory, unless new cells replaced
dead ones in the brain and learned memories from other older living cells. Because
of the way brains remember, one dead cell does not cause one thing to be forgotten,
and it's more like cutting up a hologram and using one piece to make a new
hologram. The single piece contains the whole image at lower quality but it is
possible for an original sized copy from the piece to contain as much information
as the original cut-up hologram, partly because the lost material is replaced and
partly because the lost information is the same pattern as the saved information.
Amnesia is not a loss of information but a loss of access to it, usually, especially
if the amnesia ends and memory returns.

It is uncanny to consider immortality coming from Dr. Frankenstein's lab,
with surgery and brain transplants and copy-clones and cyborg brain downloads.
It seems more likely to me that we die of a deficiency of something that gives us life.

Telomeres can be reset to rejuvenate cells unless the DNA is damaged then
the immortal cell becomes cancer, so the DNA would have to be either verified
or the mechanism for killing cells with bad DNA would have to be working.

Human beings are more interested in killing each other than living forever now
so we will wait until that changes before we seek and find eternal life.

I am sure that my knowledge of biology is relatively limited and others here can
correct my errors on that topic and ignore my "un-scientific" statements if they are
so inclined.

Then there's what Schlock Mercenary calls "the Continuity Flaw"...

Your knowledge of history, climatology, ecology, and geology are similarly limited, so I'm going to follow your advice here and just ignore the entire post.

A clone is not you. An identical twin sibling is the same thing as a clone, and they would have their own personality. As far as transfering memories goes, that is not currently possible, and I am not sure if its even possible with pets as you say.

However you could use cloning to prolong life at the expense of other life. Say you were 20 and cloned your self, by the time you are 40, you clone would be 20, you could kill that clone and surgically swap as many of those 20 year old parts into your 40 year old body as possible.

If a 100% mind transfer or copy was possible, then yes it would be another you, but not the same instance of you. Say you copied your self and then died, you still die. Also the copy of you would have no idea it was a copy and would swear it was you the original, like in the 6th day when Arnold found what he thought to be his clone living in his house with his family was actually the real him, and he was a clone.

The zygotes of identical twins are biological clones. However in the course of development in the womb difference occur because the identical zygotes are not subject to exactly the same conditions. After birth, even more differences occur. We are the unique product of our personal histories as much or even more than we are the product of our genome.

ruveyn

I don't know.

This is metaphysical. Is what we are detailed in DNA or is there something more that must somehow be "transferred" for our essence to go from our original body into our cloned body?

You can't test this with animals, because an animal can't articulate its memories.

Even if you did it to a human, and the clone believed it was the original, would YOU really live on or just a version of you that thinks it's you...meaning your life is just as finite as it was in the first place.