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On September 29 2009 19:42 SilverSkyLark wrote:Show nested quote +On September 29 2009 19:35 DrainX wrote:On September 29 2009 19:34 SilverSkyLark wrote:
Being an immortal would suck though. You could always commit suicide when you got tired of living. Yeah but it's a sin though... who would want to live forever anyway? Poll: Would you want to live forever?( Vote): Yes ( Vote): No
the question should be worded "Would you want the option to die when you please?" Still not completely accurate since you still would be run over by a train or blown to smitherens by terrorists but at least more accurate. And to travis; there is absolutely no evidence that the brain would somehow be more than it's parts, it's more of a theory which we can't disprove yet since we don't understand it in it's entirety. My experience tells me that there won't be a ghost in the machine, there has never been one before when we've gotten a more complete picture of how things work.
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Immortality is possible. There are at least two known species on Earth which are known to be immortal.
Turritopsis nutricula is a hydrozoan with a life cycle in which it reverts to the polyp stage after becoming sexually mature. It is the only known case of a metazoan capable of reverting completely to a sexually immature, colonial stage after having reached sexual maturity as a solitary stage.[2] It does this through the cell development process of transdifferentiation.[3] Theoretically, this cycle can repeat indefinitely, rendering it biologically immortal until its nerve center is removed from the rest of the body.[3]
That's the Wikipedia article on the immortal jellyfish. They can reverse their life cycle and return to the polyp state. Hydras (not the scary zerg unit but the micro organism that looks like a tree) are also said to be immortal. They have "regenerative abilities" and undergo aging "slowly, if at all". I think immortality is an interesting idea which might become a reality within our life spans.
EDIT: Here's the wikipedia site on immortality. Pretty interesting stuff. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immortality
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Russian Federation1381 Posts
On September 29 2009 17:25 VorcePA wrote:News Articlewe could slow down or even reverse the aging process.
Way too good. How the hell can the brain get younger? We still don't know how exactly it's working. This guy is full of shit. Anyway, permanent youth with hormones and stuff working properly with a choice of changing your age... Gimme!
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On September 29 2009 18:03 dekuschrub wrote:
that guys talkin out of his ass.
even if nanotechnology can stop some sort of aging. No one even knows what exactly leads to aging anyway. My professor today was just talking about it can be anything from innate errors in DNA replication to just some other random crap
but i agree that this stuff could def increase life expectancy a ton.
honestly i don't even care.. who wants to be old and helpless for 60+ years...
No one knows what led to aging. Most think, as far as i know, that it was to make space for the young. Most people know that telomeres in cells are basically the culprits. And i think its aso agreed that reproduction is basically the trigger in aging. If we all waited until 50 to have kids, maybe in a couple hundred years our life's expectancy would be raised by 20 years.
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immortality means that you'll just keep aging and become more and more frail.
when they find a way to keep your youth (20-30s level of physique) for an extra 5-10 years, then more people will be interested
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You might approach a 12 years old trying to be the pedo bear and, later, found out she is 80.
o.o
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Mystlord
United States10264 Posts
This news is a "see it once, then forget it existed" kind. Most health news fall under this category unless it's pretty big.
In any case, he's talking about genetic manipulation, which is definitely more than 20 years out, especially on the scale he's talking about.
Now you can probably MAKE an immortal human being by genetically altering the initial cell after the sperm and egg have united, but developed humans are probably out of luck.
Another problem is that immortality might disrupt our normal bodily functions. If cells aren't programmed to die... Then they always exist. If they always exist, then they'll always divide. Problem much? Another problem is that older cells are more prone to becoming cancerous.
One final point. I might sound like an elitist, but if humans become immortal, then we'd not only lose our ability to evolve, but also for the process of natural selection to take place. Weak humans will end up living forever alongside the strong humans, and then you'd get bad genes getting passed on... And then it gets messy.
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intrigue
Washington, D.C9934 Posts
so basically you are displeased with any universal medical advance. sexual selection operates more strongly on humans now than natural selection, and the time frame over which evolution occurs makes it unlikely you will notice a difference anyway.
to 'disrupt normal bodily functions' is a way to describe the entire field of medical research. here we want to stop the mechanisms that account for aging, and of course that includes cancer. also, immortality of an individual is far different from immortality of all cells in the body; i very much doubt that will be the case. i think the real concern is to keep their ability to divide from deteriorating with age. you are concerning yourself over very trivial things.
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On September 29 2009 20:53 29 fps wrote:
immortality means that you'll just keep aging and become more and more frail.
when they find a way to keep your youth (20-30s level of physique) for an extra 5-10 years, then more people will be interested
Who are you to decide what Kurzweil means when he says immortality? If you had listened to what he has to say you would know that this field of research isn't interested in extending life if it doesn't mean hindering complications and slowing down aging.
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On September 29 2009 20:08 pyrogenetix wrote:perhaps the fear that on a long enough time scale the value of everything and enjoyment of everyday occurances drop to or approach zero. however, I disagree and think that most people live out their lives without having enough time or money to experience a LOT of what the world has to offer - all the different cultures, cuisines, lifestyles etc.
You are making a wrong assumption, nothing is objectively interesting or uninteresting, people can find doing the same task interesting constantly, and some clinically depressed can't find anything to be interesting. That is a matter of how your brain ''perceive '' things there is no objective limitation to it. That is one of the things that would also have to be regulated.
On September 29 2009 18:59 travis wrote:
he is wrong because he doesn't understand how the mind-brain works, no one does
so maybe they can keep our bodies living forever, but we are more than our bodies
We have allot of data to see how brain influences the "mind" (I don't believe that it is a separate thing but that is just a semantics since nobody can define mind in any meaningful way). We have studies of people that had damaged they brain, and we are getting better understanding on more precise brain work with PET scans. We also know that substances influence the "mind", and that it is physical so where is that "more", and what it is? Also on what basis you assume the imitations of physical objects?
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On September 29 2009 18:52 intrigue wrote:
and while everybody always just loves to ponder with their bleeding hearts the desirability of a morbid situation where someone literally can never be able to die, how many of you could possibly turn down just 1 extra year of life? assuming an adequate quality of life, of course. 10 years? 20 years? can you imagine how much even the distant possibility of 1 more year means to some of the terminally ill? see, the problem is in the in-betweens, like everything else in our fucking lives. This is pretty much why I never want to see this happen. When presented the option, I'm sure everyone will pick immortality over death (even myself I'll admit), however the logistics of sustaining a race of immortals just seems...impossible. Also, it's not even just problems with overpopulation (since I doubt the technology will progress fast enough to be available to the common man that quickly) but...well, I just don't see any advantages at all for this, except the obvious one of people not dieing naturally.
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Canada9720 Posts
On September 29 2009 19:42 SilverSkyLark wrote:Show nested quote +On September 29 2009 19:35 DrainX wrote:On September 29 2009 19:34 SilverSkyLark wrote:
Being an immortal would suck though. You could always commit suicide when you got tired of living. Yeah but it's a sin though... who would want to live forever anyway?
don't worry about sinning. the government could always setup some ethical suicide parlors
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On September 29 2009 18:03 dekuschrub wrote:
that guys talkin out of his ass.
even if nanotechnology can stop some sort of aging. No one even knows what exactly leads to aging anyway. My professor today was just talking about it can be anything from innate errors in DNA replication to just some other random crap
Actually this is wrong, aging is a combination of 2 things, oxidisation of the cells when oxygen is burnt in our muscles, and the fact that genes can only be replicated in the body a set amount of time, once you reach your limit, you start to go downhill.
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On September 29 2009 21:29 Catch]22 wrote:Show nested quote +On September 29 2009 18:03 dekuschrub wrote:
that guys talkin out of his ass.
even if nanotechnology can stop some sort of aging. No one even knows what exactly leads to aging anyway. My professor today was just talking about it can be anything from innate errors in DNA replication to just some other random crap
Actually this is wrong, aging is a combination of 2 things, oxidisation of the cells when oxygen is burnt in our muscles, and the fact that genes can only be replicated in the body a set amount of time, once you reach your limit, you start to go downhill.
what the hell are you talking about
There are multiple theories of how aging works exactly.
One of the ones that has been proven to be at least partially true is the shortening of telomeres. It is known that people with rapid aging diseases (i.e. get old at 10) have shorter telomeres than most humans. The cutting of the telomeres per replication eventually leads to something called the Hayflick limit, where the cell has reached senesence and can no longer divide. HOWEVER:
Cells with telomerase, an enzyme, do not have this limit. Human stem cells, for instance, have telomerase. Hydras also have telomerase. Thus, their cells can theoretically replicate however.
They are developing telomerase related therapies for aging: the only problem with telomerase is that it is also one of the "triggers" for cancerous growth. So by reactivating telomerase in human cells, you're jacking up the chance for cancer.
Another theory of aging is free-radical theory, which states that atoms with an extra electron cause damage to cells, as well as oxygen based molecules with an extra lone electron. It's not really known how it works too much because of conflicting stories, but it has been shown that reducing free radicals increases lifespan. For instance, there was this guy who was able to exten mice's lifespans by 20% on average by replacing part of their water content with heavy water (D2O), which in turn helps to prevent free radical damage as D2O is much more stable than H2O.
Reproductive theory has been mentioned before, where reproductive hormones cause aging because they are trying to overcompensate for what is lost over time. I"m not too familiar with this one but it's also a valid theory.
There's lots of other ones but I'm too lazy to list them all.
What has been seemingly ignored by most people is that most of these therapies don't make you just be 150: it actually slows down your aging. So by the time you're "80" you'd have the body of a 45 or so year old, etc., allowing for people to a) delay the onset of having children b) remain productive for longer periods of time.
I'm sure that it's fairly obvious that as ecology shows the carrying capacity is reached, there's a slight overshoot followed by stabilization, so does economics drives down the incentives for having children sooner. In addition, as countries get more developed, the average birth rate goes down, so I'm fairly certain we won't see any massive bursts in population as much as we did before.
And imho the guy is a bit of a nutjob, but that's just me.
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How will this be accomplished? Kurzweil thinks that it'll be nanotechnology. LOL, most vague 'scientific' statement ever.
I say we will cure all diseases. You ask how? Biology.
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The esieast way to allow all people on earth to live forever is to kill all people on earth. The ones that are left will have eternal life (0 people, but that doesn't matter).
I haven't heard of such great breakthroughs in nanotechnology yet that I would consider his statement seriously. First get a cure for Aids (that works on more than 1% of humanity), then you can try the more complex stuff. The HI virus is a tiny, simple thing. If you can't even beat that one you can't dream of fixing our cells.
Anyways, if I could live forever, I certainly would want to do that as a biologically 20-30 year old. Being immune to illnesses would be desireable too.
Oh now that I think of it, if my vague idea about how to achieve eternal life is the same as this "scientist's", then eternal life would also mean immunity to cancer and probably a bunch of viral diseases.
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All I'm going to say is that the world as a whole won't manage to get carbon emissions below 1970 levels in 20 years, much less end world poverty. Immortality for the rich and powerful will just complicate things.
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Its entirely possible for human beings to live up to 200 years with the help of specialized nanotech to fight the radicals, but its almost asinine to assume it is possible without keeping your self in shape, eating right, and basically taking care of your body in all areas possible.
But this spawns far greater problems.
1 - Initially only the very wealthy will have acess to such a tech which might spawn another class warfare, where you have super human rich guys that can afford all kinds of medical treatment, brain-computer interfacing for faster learning, etc...
2 - People would start getting so old that there would be less of a need to retire and younger people would have a harder time finding jobs.
3 - Altho old age might not be a cause of death anymore im certain that there is a limit to artificial celular regeneration, and you probably cant go far above the 200 year mark even with futuristic non existing tech because by then it would have wasted all your celular reproductive potential and impeding massive celular degeneration would be like trying to keep the sun from rising.
Now, I would certainly like to live some 150-200 years, id be able to accomplish great things, pilot some space ship, and maybe who knows meet aliens sometime along the way, If I can do all that then what else is there ?
With such a long life spans, and nanotech being able to build amazing complex structures, there would be far less jobs avaible, and what would people do ? We might start becoming very spiritual, having such a vast time to think about wth does being alive really means.
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can you play BW when you're 150? No? I hope I die at 70. :D
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On September 29 2009 22:23 DeSu wrote:
can you play BW when you're 150? No? I hope I die at 70. :D
I think you are entirely missing the point here.
Extremelly well done phisical conditioning, a perfect diet + nanotech dialisis could make you as healthy as a perfectly healthy 50 year old man (and If you know any you know they could play starcraft, their generation is just no bothering with it at all) at the age of 150.
Therefore yes, you could be a progammer for like 100 years, and from the way things are going, its very possible that games are so easy mechanically to play by then with virtual reality interfaces and the not, that it would certainly be well worth it to be living at that time even if you are an old man to play such games ...
Damn now I do want to live a lot ... forever is too much tho.
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