For the question I’m defining immortal as not dieing of old age or age related complications. In other words I’m asking how likely are we to figure out how to control aging?
Since a break through could come tomorrow or a 1,000 years from now lets try to extrapolate based on trends.
From a scientific standpoint I imagine it is much easier to engineer children that age very very slowly (or not at all) than it will be to take “natural” already born humans and gift them with immortality.
The thing about me or you being immortal is it’s only going to happen with dramatic augmentation to our current bodies; my question is how much can you change my body before it stops being me? My current brain isn’t immortal, even if you found a way to house it in a perfect cyborg shell of some sort eventually my brain would age and die. You could perfectly model the human brain and create one synthetically then transfer all that is my life’s experience into it–but would it transfer “me?” I think not, you could find some sort of technology (maybe some sort of nano-restorers) that could work at my primitive brain cells to give them eternal existence and maybe then I could be viewed as truly immortal.
But I think the problem is there has to be a hard limit on how much my current brain can really do. Eventually after I’ve lived for fifty thousand years how much of my existence will my brain really be able to remember meaningfully? Certainly the human mind doesn’t have an infinite storage capability? I wonder what immortality would be like in this state because millennium from now I’d probably entirely forget my life as a “normal” human and everything that made that life meaningful. In that case I think the “me” of now simply would eventually have to cease existing even if my brain lived on forever.
I’d say not very likely. There’s no one thing that needs to be done to stop ageing, AFAIK - there’s various genetic and environmental factors at work. While I believe it remotely possible it may still be within this generation’s span that we get a handle on the genetics of it (telomere renewal and the like,) I don’t think it likely that we will be able to counter all the environmental factors.
I think, also, that you’ll find the maximum human age hasn’t changed all that much in modern times, but I’d love if someone could counter that with cites.
Possibly some sort of DNA-rewriting “virus” might make it relatively non-invasive and essentially invisible.
I think it’s a huge (maybe even ‘outrageous’) step to go from people living a few years longer to people living forever.
Yes, we have better diet, better healthcare and know more about taking care of ourselves. But there’s no sign of anything to defeat death.
It’s like the Olympic 100 metres. Athletes run it faster each year (although the improvement is slight).
But nobody says “When will athletes develop the ability to teleport?” :eek:
It’s not really the same thing. Teleportation of large objects is a much more extreme advance. Asking “When will we be immortal” is more like asking “when will all the athletes be cyborgs ?” Asking when athletes will teleport is like asking when we will be able to walk through solid walls.
As for me; I suspect that the present generation will be able to achieve immortality by cheating, and having themselves put in suspended animation to wait out the necessary advances in medical science.
As for when those advances will come, it’s unpredictable. I do find the accelerated aging found in clones interesting, because it indicate that there’s a built in component to aging - it’s not just a matter of wearing out. Perhaps we can figure out how to do the opposite by researching why that happens.
However; I’d like to point out that it’s not actually necessary for immortality to be discovered in this generation’s lifespan. It’s only necessary for the various advancements in life extension to happen faster than people age. Twenty years extra life might get you to the discovery of treatments that give you 100 years, which might get you to immortality ( for example ).
This is crucial. Even if you can stop the cellular aging process, you still have to worry about the other things: plaque in the arteries, deteriorating liver and kidney function from use of medications like ibuprofen and Tylenol, osteoarthritis, various cancers which inevitably arise if you live long enough, etc., etc. It’s no fun living forever if your body is turning to shit. Basically, we would have to cure all chronic and progressive diseases and conditions before immortality would be a viable option.
This is pretty much what Aubrey de Grey argues for – here’s a (very informative) TED talk by him on the subject, where he also gives an outline of what problems are left to be tackled, and how they are best approached, in his opinion.
Also, ageing, as far as I know, doesn’t seem to be a biological necessity – at least one organism, the hydra, is currently thought to not undergo senescence and thus be biologically immortal.
Death by old age has always, for all of recorded history, occured at around age 70-or-80-something, with the occasional outlier younger or older. Longer life expectancy nowadays is entirely due to more people making it to that point without dying of something else first, and not at all due to the actual age of death by old age increasing.
Extrapolating is always risky business, but if there’s anything you can safely extrapolate, it’s a constant function. Old age has always occured at the same point, for thousands of years, so the best bet is to assume that it’ll still be at that same point 50 years from now.
Not a good argument, since modern ( and future ) medical science hasn’t been around for most of human history. We couldn’t fly for most of that time, either.
Well, the OP did say “based on historical and current trends”, and those trends are pretty clear. If we do manage to make significant progress on extending age of death (a possibility I am not ruling out), it will be bucking those trends, not continuing them.
A matter of interpretation. Medical science is doing things that were previously impossible to achieve all the time; that’s a trend too.
I’d also be interested in seeing the increase in age of the oldest living human. The first site talks about someone 118, I don’t remember anyone being provably that old when I was a kid.
It makes sense, because with improved medical techniques things that would have killed an elderly person before are not today. My father had a heart attack 4 years ago at 89, and got a double stent in a procedure unknown 20 years ago. (They went through his arteries and never opened his chest.) While he is in good health, it is unlikely he could have survived standard open heart surgery.
Although interestingly enough, some studies seem to show that the risk of death due to further aging flattens out or even becomes a constant in extreme old age. In other words, someone who is 100 isn’t really much more likely to die of age-related conditions than someone who is 95. This suggests that one thing we don’t have to worry about is that life extension would lead to ever-increasing decay, like the Greek myth of Tithonus.
For an interesting approach to this, read Raymond Kurzweil’s *The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology *
I noticed that recently looking at French mortality tables. Until recently, they didn’t extend past 99. IOW, there was no life expectancy indicated past 99, and everybody was assumed to die at 100 at the latest. I had not noticed the second part, hence believed, according to the tables, that life expectancy was dropping quickly past 90 (while in reality it was mostly because people living past 100 weren’t taken into account, so at 99 you couldn’t have more than 1 year to live, and your life expectancy was only some months).
Recently, I looked again at mortality tables. Now, life expectancy is given until 105 and takes into account people who live past 105. And I was surprised to discover that the situation was exactly the opposite of what I used to believe. The life expectancy of very old people seems indeed to “flatten out”. It’s barely lower for a 102 yo than for a 98 yo. Past a certain age, it seems like you risk of dying within the year, for instance, is high, of course, but doesn’t change much anymore.
I looked at the tables again, and for instance the life expectancy of a 97 yo french woman is 3.1 years. 5 years later, when she’s 102, her life expectancy only dropped to 2.8 years. Thsi stagnation seems to begin around 92-95. Before that, people lose around half a year of life expectancy each year. To give the exact figures (age :life expectancy)
88 : 5.76
89 : 5.32
90 : 4.93
91 : 4.56
92 : 4.23
93 : 3.93
94 : 3.66
95 : 3.42
96 : 3.24
97 : 3.10
98 : 3.00
99 : 2.94
100 : 2.90
101 : 2.89
102 : 2.89
103 : 2.83
104 : 2. 61
I assume there are some statistical anomalies due to the limited sample like the same life expectancy for a 101 and 102 yo woman, but still it shows that the risk of death indeed doesn’t budge much past 95. After that you’ve about three years left on average, regardless how old you are.
Of course, that’s French statistics, but I’ve no reason to assume there’s a significant difference in other industrialized countries.
I think it’s possible that we’ll cure death in my lifetime (I’m 35). I can’t assign a probability to that, though. Conquering some forms of aging, that seems more likely than not.
Take cellular regeneration and tissue engineering.
Watch this video and tell me that we do not live in a new age of miracles.
Body parts growing back. GROWING BACK. And people walking around with bladders made in a lab, from their own cells. (Bladder was a great first choice for what organ to make, because it’s very important yet relatively simple in structure and function. )
So just from that, we can easily imagine a time, say 15 years from now, where all major organs are replacable. Boom, there goes organ failure as a cause of age-related death.
But what about cancer? Anti-tumour drugs are getting more and more sophisticated. We are drawing closer every day to finding that golden divider, the thing that makes a cancer cell definitely different from a healthy normal cell, and we’ll be able to make the perfect chemo, that kills cancer and nothing else.
Then cancer will be as treatable with meds as high blood pressure. And of course, if it damages an organ, we’ll replace it.
So boom goes cancer right there.
Now, the brain problem is a biggie. You can’t just replace a brain. 
Plus, I worry that there’s a limit built into the brain’s file system, where your memories simply cann’t get above a certain size, or the brain loses its ability to index them and the whole DB just plain collapses. Possibly our OS would prevent this by lossy-compression-ing our memories into oblivion.
So you wouldn’t descend into madness, but you would remember absolutely nothing about large stretches of your life. Creepy! Better keep that LJ updated!
Anyhow… I think immortality in our time is quite possible, and a radical leap forward in life expectancy is probable.
So hang in there folks!
An eventual cure for aging (not other causes of death) seems to me to be biologically possible, but I would seriously doubt that Aubrey de Grey is anything but a kook when he predicts that it will be in our lifetimes. We are just beginning to scratch the surface of this problem and it is in all likelihood a very complex problem. Plus, if we all stop aging, there can be only one, and that will mean a blood bath.
yes, but think of the entertainment value !
