You’ve seen instances of quadruple amputees, people losing their lower half and instestines, etc. After playing a bit of Deus Ex I started wondering exactly how much of a person needs to exist for them to survive (not talking quality of life, but just enough to communicate intelligently). How far could you do it with only natural parts and then how far could you go with artificial parts too?
That’s basically exactly what I was getting at. So theoretically, at least with machines, you would only need your head to survive.
Maybe, you’d want to talk to someone like an intensive care doctor really but yeah a lot of your organs can be replaced mechanically these days at least for a while.
Can they really replace the liver and the kidney long term? That would be news to me.
On constant dialysis that you never get unhooked from, I don’t see why not.
If you can just pipe nutrient-rich blood into the brain directly you can probably bypass the entire digestive system. That takes care of the liver, and with the only waste products coming from the body being whatever the brain produces, that should be a pretty light workload for an artificial kidney.
I think dialysis damages the blood from what a web search suggests to me, so I doubt that would work non-stop.
Weird way to think about it, but you could partition up conjoined twins in this way when they share biological infrastructure.