As I understand it, the current thinking is that our bodies evolved to degrade over time, so that children would be able to grow up without adults using up all the resources. The real cost factor isn’t necessarily to us, it’s to our kids.
In fact, the big mystery is why humans live so long–you’d expect us to die at about 40 years old, when reproduction gets dramatically harder. (There was a theory of the “grandmother gene”, IIRC, and I’m sure there are other theories out there too).
Nature will figure something out. We still can’t prevent the common cold, we’re worried about immortality? Black Plague Mark II, coming to a planet near you.
That’s just sophistry. They evolved to last 40 years because that’s all they needed - it was just recently (evolutionarily speaking) that humans lived past 40 at all.
And don’t quote me no Methusaleh bullshit.
You don’t know that, and neither does anyone else at this point. Science has a very limited understanding of aging. They can study its effects, and have a variety of guesses as to why it happens, but that’s all they really are at this point. Some organisms live much longer than others, and nobody is really sure why. Trees can live for hundreds or even thousands of years, for instance, and there are bacteria that scientists think may be effectively immortal. Is it possible that they might someday find a way to make people live a very long time? Sure. Within the next thirty years? I sort of doubt it.
Very insightful, friend. Report to Carousel.
Well if we’re gonna Deus Ex Machina this motherfucker up, I’ll bow out with my gay 21st century plausible sci-maybe horseshit. Carry on!
Well, I’m thinking more in subjective terms. Certainly if we asked this hypothetical copy of me “are you LesJarvis?” he would respond in the affirmative. But if our goal is immortality, would my subjective consciousness be transferred along with my brain pattern? Or would it just be another person who happened to have the same brain pattern as me at some point?
Being a hardcore materialist, I’d argue that my subjective consciousness would remain with me, and when I died it would cease to be, so I don’t really see this as a solution to mortality.
The longest living creatures tend to be the slowest moving ones.
It’s not, but that’s not particularly relevant, because we’re talking about the ability to override the basic engineering of the human body anyway.
I think literal immortality is imposible. (If it’s possible it would seem to violate what we know of the laws of thermodynamics; if the entire universe has to break down sometime, how can we avoid that fate?)
However, effective immortality would seem to be. We understand the basic building blocks of the human body. We can synthesize them. Theoretically with enough knowledge we can manipulate them at the most fundamental level. We don’t have anywhere near that knowledge, and I think our rate of knowledge acquisition is slowing down. I also think the larger challenge would be developing a society that could cope with immortality. (Most of our societal constructs are based upon the fact that you’re born, you get old, you die.)
One large question that hasn’t really been suitably addressed (or really addressed at all that I know of) is what happens to the human cognitive process as you accumulate more and more experiences to categorize and store. The brain is currently tremendously underutilized, so there’s untapped potential there, but is it something that can be tapped given time alone, does it take biology as well? Can we adjust to trying to remember 200+ year’s worth of experience when our braims would be seemed to formulate on a 60ish year timespan?
Similarly, I think if the human body was over-engineered for longevity, there would be a cost factor (perhaps the body wouldn’t be as efficient - it would demand more energy per day or whatever).
Why? On what are you basing this assumption? So far as we know at the moment, aging seems to be an accumulation of informational errors, nothing more. This gene gets transcribed slightly wrong and propagates itself. The net effect of that is minimal, but as this happens as a random process 100s of times, eventually you start generating damage. Cells don’t refresh in your organs as well, so they start to break down. When that happens it’s harder to extract nutrients, so getting them to other systems is difficult. Etc… etc… It’s like an exponential decay curve with an innate decay time, and if you halve that decay time you extend the length of the curve a lot.
Socrates was, AFAIK, in good physical and mental health when he was forced to take the hemlock at age 70 or so. St. Augustine lived to age 75 or 76 in the 5th century A.D. As distinguished citizens of what were, in their eras, the elite societies, they were aging about as well as could be expected. In the centuries since, medicine is much better, and our chance of dying of disease along the way (i.e. before age 60 or so), is much reduced, but the upper end of the lifespan hasn’t moved too much past those folks.
You don’t consider 115 much past those folks? My great grandmother is 102. That’s a 33% increase. Unless you want to claim that Socrates or St. Augustine were representative of the norm, this makes no sense. They were outliers, yes? The bar for outliers has shifted way higher in the intervening millenia. And a disproportionate amount of that shift has been in the last century or two of the last millenia.
You call them that now. Remember that in 20 years when the dentist is using one of the first practical nano-treatments to build you a whole new set of perfect, organic-but-better teeth.
That’s one of my predictions for the first useful nanotech treatments… It’s external, it’s easily monitored, and it doesn’t require universal assembly.
Crap. Beaten to the Logan’s Run reference.
[b]RENEW![/b]
Well, sure it will. But then some fourteen-year-old hacker will write a virus that causes everyone to turn inside-out, and then explode. Then all matter will convert to buckyballs.
My favorite immortality-through-better-science-fiction is Frank Tipler’s argument that in 10^10^10^10^…etc years when the Omega Point integrates all energy in the universe into a singularity of computing power (which is, by definition, God) that we’ll all be resurrected anyway. So presumably that’ll reverse the gray goo incidents along the way, too.
Eventually, it basically has to be true; DNA and the resulting organisms are complicated, but not impossible. In our lifetimes? Probably not.
Mouse, I wouldn’t be so sure about the 2nd law of thermodynamics remaining inviolate over a multiple billion year time frame. The species will probably be completely unrecognizable in 1000 years, much less one million times that long.
Is it safe!?!
Yes. and secret.
You are wrong, but it is more useful for the rest of us for you to continue to believe that you are right.
I am reminded of a famous quote by Lenin…
Oh, but on topic, I believe it will prove to be one of those things that – like being able to turn lead to gold – ends up being possible, but not worth the effort.
Older people tend to be less susceptible to change than the young. They also tend to be less capable of growing mentally. As we age, we get less likely to give up things we believe, no matter how much our beliefs fly in the face of the evidence. Youth is required to advance our species and, most importantly, allow us to adapt to the changing conditions in our planet, solar system, and beyond. Without youth, the human race cannot continue; if we live forever, there is no room for youth.
It is vital that we all die eventually for our species to survive.
OK, Rimbo…that’s fine from a species perspective, but individuals don’t care about that. Are you willing to die to save humanity from hard times of overpopulation?
As for the philosopher’s stone, it’s NOTHING like turning lead to gold. The problem with that is the expense is literally not worth it because the value of gold is lower than the cost. What’s the value of your life though? What wouldn’t you pay (if you had it) to live?
I would die ten thousand deaths if I had them so that my son would live and consider it a bargain.
I’m very curious about this question. Someone else mentioned it in this thread, but if some scientific breakthrough existed to stop and perhaps even reverse aging, it would certainly be expensive. How expensive? I don’t know, but I’d like to start saving now! I suppose all my “retirement” savings could be dedicated to the splurge, considering that living forever negates any retirement. As for the argument that youth is necessary for species survival, I’m not so sure. As sentient beings, perhaps extending our lifespans into the hundreds or thousands of years might be better for our species. Suddenly we wouldn’t be quite so uncaring about the long-term effects of our lives upon the environment, because we would have a very pragmatic, self-preserving to clean up our collective act. And that could very well change the way things are going now, in terms of the probability of species survival into the future. The same can be said of space travel. Right now, why should be bother? It won’t benefit anyone alive on the planet right now, will it? But if we had lifespans that were truly long, we’d realize that we need more than Earth to hold and sustain us. And interstellar distances would be conquerable in a lifetime, theoretically. I think a reasonable stance would be that if you choose the immortality path, no procreation for you.