next »

[Blademasterbobo]

one downside to the most realistic looking versions of immortality is that you could still just get shot by someone, which kinda blows. you'd still have to be worried about some religious nut gunning you down because immortality goes against god's will or something similarly nonsensical. i think i'd be afraid to leave the house if i was immortal. it'd suck to have the potential to live forever and then die from getting in a car accident or something.

[Paul Eres]

What? My opinion is stupid because I don't want immortality?

it's okay if you don't want it yourself, that's a personal choice. but to say that others should not be allowed to get it just because you don't want it seems perverse

imagine you are a guy dying of cancer in a room of other people dying of cancer (cancer is an analogy to aging here). it's okay to say 'well, i'm happy to die of cancer' but it's another thing to say to others 'you should be happy to die of cancer too and i'll stand in your way if you want to try to cure it'

[Paul Eres]

one downside to the most realistic looking versions of immortality is that you could still just get shot by someone, which kinda blows. you'd still have to be worried about some religious nut gunning you down because immortality goes against god's will or something similarly nonsensical. i think i'd be afraid to leave the house if i was immortal. it'd suck to have the potential to live forever and then die from getting in a car accident or something.

it will come in stages. the first thing is to cure most diseases that cause death -- heart disease, stroke, cancer, and so on. the second thing is to cure aging in various steps (you won't cure it all at once, you'll cure parts of it one at a time). then after that you can eventually make the body better at repairing itself and self-healing, and perhaps add more protective mechanisms like making the skull so hard a bullet can't penetrate it, or so that a car crash won't mess up your brain or destroy your organs (the bones can be made as strong as diamond or stronger). but even then you can still be killed by all manner of poisons; the body could be made to resist those too. but even after that, nuclear bombs can still get you. there's not much protection from that except to make them illegal. but even after that supernovas and meteors can still get you. for those you could have predictive abilities that are able to predict almost exactly when they're going to strike. but even after that hostile alien empires can still get you

so it goes on for a while, there's no 'perfect immortality', but i'd be happy just with curing aging, the other concerns can be figured out later. aging is the only thing that's *certain* to kill you, accidents and nukes and war and terrorism are things that may or may not happen. but aging is the death sentence you're born with (for now)

as an aside, at the current car accident rate, even if we cured aging and every single other cause of death, including suicide, the average person would only live for about 600 years. that's how common car accident deaths are

[J-Snake]

If you train for longevity properly you will START aging at approx 120 years, or so I heard. Because certain fuse in the cells will run out.

[Paul Eres]

you're thinking of telomeres

[rivon]

That's not a problem. We can expand to mars.

Why Mars? Mars sucks... We can expand to the whole universe when we're immortal and can therefore survive for hundreds or thousands of years of travel by conventional means (unless we create FTL drives earlier).

one downside to the most realistic looking versions of immortality is that you could still just get shot by someone, which kinda blows.

You would have one big advantage - a robotic body which can survive gunshots or which might at least have some security precautions in place which will temporarily pump blood and oxygen into your brain should something happen to the body. Then you can just get a new body.

If you train for longevity properly you will START aging at approx 120 years, or so I heard. Because certain fuse in the cells will run out.

Show me how to train for longevity, lol.

Warning - while you were typing 4 new replies have been posted. You may wish to review your post.

[J-Snake]

That's not a problem. We can expand to mars.

Why Mars? Mars sucks... We can expand to the whole universe when we're immortal and can therefore survive for hundreds or thousands of years of travel by conventional means (unless we create FTL drives earlier).

No mars is awesome, we just suck at it.

[J-Snake]

you're thinking of telomeres

They become shorter with each mitose. Approximately 50 times for a human before he starts aging. But no one knows the human organism can be potentially conditioned to work against it. It is however the actual standpoint.

[Paul Eres]

telomeres are actually not the primary cause of aging. they determine the max number of times a cell can divide, but most of the actually symptoms of aging are not caused by them

in other words, telomeres determine your *maximum* life span, but the stuff like wrinkles, arthritis, memory loss, aches and pains, loss of exercise capacity and strength, loss of hearing, and other aging side effects are not related to telomeres at all

for more info read the sens site / wiki article / documentary i linked to earlier

[J-Snake]

However one observation was that cells with less telomers divide less frequently. What may explain that a younger body looks gradually fresher than an old one. So may be it is just all factors combinined.

[BattleBeard]

What? My opinion is stupid because I don't want immortality?

it's okay if you don't want it yourself, that's a personal choice. but to say that others should not be allowed to get it just because you don't want it seems perverse

imagine you are a guy dying of cancer in a room of other people dying of cancer (cancer is an analogy to aging here). it's okay to say 'well, i'm happy to die of cancer' but it's another thing to say to others 'you should be happy to die of cancer too and i'll stand in your way if you want to try to cure it'

I never said that, I'm just saying that I would not want it, and I'm stating the reasons why others may regret it.

 I want to jump off a roof in the robot body, and then I'll land with one hand on the ground, kneeling, and then stand up, brush it off like nothing, and go on with my day.

[BattleBeard]

I think they should start with animal brains, first. That way, they can get basic understanding before just jumping into human brains.

By this message, I meant making animal brains. They are working on rats, I believe. Didn't they make an artificial cerebellum?

EDIT:: FFFF did not mean to double post, was going to copy and paste to my other post sorry

[Paul Eres]

However one observation was that cells with less telomers divide less frequently. What may explain that a younger body looks gradually fresher than an old one. So may be it is just all factors combinined.

yes, however, also keep in mind that cancer cells divide without the limitation of telomeres: they can divide forever. that's one reason we have telomeres in the first place: to prevent cases where some cells just keep dividing without limit and take over the rest of the body

still i do think that increasing telomere length throughout the entire body will be possible in the future, but it's tricky since you'd literally need to do it to every cell in the body (or at least the majority of them). so you'd need a custom-designed virus or something similar -- it'd work similar to gene therapy. and we don't know if lengthening telomeres would increase cancer rates or not, so it might be better not to risk lengthening telomeres until we've cured cancer

[PompiPompi]

Just because you are going to live forever doesn't mean you will enjoy your life more than now.
For instance, when everyone will have to eat cardboard like biscuit, because eating anything else will be inefficient use of resources to make food.
There will be probably other fun implications for the 100 billion population the earth will have, and the fact you have to take care of everyone equally.

That's not a problem. We can expand to mars.

Yea, because it would be easier to produce food on mars than in earth to an exponential ever growing population.
Magic science will produce infinity(exponential increasing) food as well?
Edit: even if you send immorotals to distant planet they will die of suffication because the whole ship will be filled with babies. XD

On serious note, "going to mars" will probably be only for a few more wealthy or lucky people, the rest of the population in earth will just starve to death and fight for resources.
Unless you can magically make everyone wealthy as well.

[Paul Eres]

if you guys are talking about an overpopulation problem, the solution seems pretty simple to me. just make it a law that people can only have the replacement rate of children. remember that even now, when people are dying, a lot of countries don't have as much children as they need to replace their population. japan, italy, russia, and other countries are shrinking, not growing, because there are fewer children than are needed to replace the dying. by raising the standard of living in the world, the population growth would eventually reach a shrinking rate. even with immortality, there will still be deaths due to accident, murder, and suicide. the rate of death may even exceed the rate of birth. so it's possible that even with immortality our population would go down rather than up