I do quite of bit of reading about the future, and by the future I mean the next 50 years. I read primarily about the advances that the brightest minds of past and present believe will come to pass in technology (computing, the internet, virtual reality, genetics, nanotechnology, a unified theory of everything), sociology (women’s suffrage, civil rights, gay rights, environmentalism, culture jamming), economics (artificial fiscal controls, prosperity, globalization), and spirituality (atheism, existentialism, I Ching, consciousness, synchronicity).
I am 20 years old, a non-smoker, and I had the good fortune of being born into a family that could support me until I could make my own life. Simply going by the odds I should live another 55 to 65 years; but I happen to believe that I stand a very good chance of living indefinitely. Am I wrong?
Why do you think you’ll live forever? I can see where you’re coming with the genetic advances and everything but that whole thing is at such an elementary stage that they can’t possibly help those who are already old and perhaps dying. You’re 20 so you might get lucky. You might be able to slap another (perhaps, though highly unlikely) 20 years on your life. if anything at all. Coming from a family that is well off, won’t add to your lifespan. Coming from a family that isn’t riddled with genetic diseases may help. =) All I’m saying is, just because there are seemingly great advances, they may not be able to do everything as soon as we’d all like. They JUST finished mapping the human genome right? (I may be wrong.) Right now they’re focusing on diseases to cure. Like cancers, parkinson’s, etc. They aren’t working on the elixir for life yet.
Do you intend to keep getting spare parts for everything on your body that wears out? Your organs just won’t hold out for ever. They’re not designed to. Heart, liver, lungs, kidneys. One of them is bound to fail you.
Will your brain be able to keep up and avoid severe neurological problems like Parkinsonism or Alzheimer’s?
I think you’re biggest worry now, if you are 20, is to make sure that you don’t die in an automobile accident. That’s the most likely way for you to go in the next 20 years of your life.
I am placing my bets on man’s fear of death, and the science of medicine.
With the mapping of the human genome (an even that has taken place and is widely regarded as the first major step towards functional immortality), the advances in cloning technology and the leaps in bounds in brain transplants, I am hopeful that my lifespan will be less determined by statistics and more by the size of my pocketbook and my relative usefulness to society. My fear being the determining factors for the latter of those two.
BobT - whyfor do you think I watch cloning so closely!! … I need cloning to ensure 100% matches on organs for my body. The brain thing is a different issue. We need to be able to capture the soul, the electrical nature of your brain and nervous system and be able to transfer that, so you can incorporate brain transplants with mind transfers.
Candi757 - I also look to advances in food technology, medicine, quality of life increases, etc. to prolong my life long enough to ensure that I can take advantage of other advances, which further increase my life, letting me live long enough to take advantage of additional technology, … repeat as necessary!!
According to the February 2001 issue of Wired magazine:
The cover of the issue has the sensationalistic claim that a human being will be cloned within the next 12 months.
If the article is accurate, it’s more the ethical issues that are holding up human cloning rather than technical aspects. Cloning animals is purported to be a relative piece of cake these days. If true, and if the emotional issues are put to rest, you, or a representation of you, could conceivably live indefinitely.
So I guess it comes down to what you think “you” are. If there’s a highly accurate duplicate of you, is that still you?
I don’t really see why someone would want to live indefinitely, but I have a less sunny perspective than some folks.
I want to live forever because the alternative is nothingness … as I lack beliefs in anything beyond death, death is for me, the end. Anything to postpone that, remove that as an option, etc., is alright with me!!
As far as I can tell, I am here for two reasons only, to reproduce and to ensure my own survival … and so I go.
As an immortality enthusiast, I feel compelled to say something. Many people who are faily young today do stand a good chance of living for centuries. We have an understanding of what causes animal cells (and therefore tissues and organs) to “age”, and the gene that could conceivably halt and reverse the aging process. While gene therapy methods are still fairly unreliable, researchers have had success of changing the fur color of lab mice using gene therapy. Therefore, it may be very soon that one could undergo a gene therapy treatment that adds a genetic fountain of youth into every cell of one’s body. Neat.
I read in the paper a few days ago that some researchers have what appears to be a “vaccine” that protects against Alzheimer’s Disease. It’s still in the animal testing stages, though. Neat.
In my opinion, cainxinth, you stand a very good chance of living indefinitely. Of course, indefinitely doesn’t mean forever. Even if you manage to stop aging when you’re 30, you might get hit by a bus when you’re 33. Just hang in there and look both ways before you cross the street.
Cloning isn’t a solution in and of itself, since the real issue is cellular senescence, or the aging of individual cells (or, the number of times a given cell can divide), and cloning currently doesn’t help with that. The famous sheep Dolly, for example, has old cells even though she’s a young sheep: her cells are equal in age to Dolly’s age plus her mother’s. She’ll probably have a short life.
Human cells divide about 100 times before they stop. When your cells stop dividing, you suffer the effects of aging and in due course die. But they’re making great strides in understanding telomeres, which are the parts of our DNA that tell cells how and when to divide, and once they’ve cracked that nut things will be looking much better for us immortalists.
Purd Werfect doesn’t know why we’d want to live forever. This attitude boggles my mind. Think about the next hundred years, and the next thousand, and the things that are likely to happen:
Artificial, thinking life forms.
The colonization and terraforming of Mars and the Moon.
The discovery and robotic exploration of extra-solar, Earthlike planets.
Millions of excellent books, movies and music.
The Grand Canyon. The Rift Valley. Antarctica. Angel Falls. The Prado. Detroit’s Fox Theater. Fairfield, Ohio. Every other place on Earth. These are all places I will visit.
Why would anyone want to live forever? Because life is wonderful! There’s so much to see and do! So many fascinating people to meet! I can’t do it all in a meager threescore and ten.
Are hopeful immortalists still having their bodies frozen in liquid nitrogen? Has there been any progress on this fron? or, is it more likely that our brains can be downloaded onto CDROMs, and stored for future implantion into cloaned bodies?
I don’t want to come back as myseld, I’d much rather inhabit an Arnold Swartznegger bodie!
Five, you make some excellent points. There are many wonderful and fascinating things to see and experience in life, and there’s little doubt that many more are to follow. It’s enough to know that if those future events in your post come to pass, someone will be around to see them, it just won’t be me. 'Twas ever thus. But there are folks, myself included, who find a great deal of emptiness or pain in life at times. I don’t say this asking for sympathy, I’m simply trying to explain my perspective. I’ll go on living until something stops me, and I’ll enjoy it at times as well, but I don’t have a great urge to go to extremes in an attempt to extend my lifespan.
Lazarus, I also feel that there is no afterlife, and indeed nothingness is what death will bring. But I don’t mind that. If I sound down on life, I’m really not. I just think my current likely lifespan is enough.
You are taking my question in too narrow a vein. The majority of your responses regard genetic advances because we are just now entering a decade that will see rapid advances in that field of study. But I haven’t based my belief in immortality solely on genetic research. To be perfectly frank, I have no idea which if any of the ology’s and ism’s I’ve mentioned will result in my sustained existence. But what I do believe is this: that a way will be found, and there is an excellent possibility that I will have the supreme privilege of being there to see it happen.
Secondly, I would want to live forever in perfect health if given the opportunity. Why? I was never one to believe in self-imposed limits. Evolution started with single celled organisms, and slowly (very slowly) worked its way through the food chain to us, the thinking beings. And once we, the pinnacle of that evolution, took our fates into our own hands by developing technology, starting with the first primitive wood tool, a new evolution began, the artificial evolution. Biological evolution never intended for TVs, VCRs and washing machines; those are species inherent to a technological evolution. And unlike biology this evolution moves a whole lot faster. It took millions of years to get to the top of the pyramid with Homo Sapien-Sapiens; it only took a few thousand years to get to computers and eventually artificial intelligence. My point is this, I happen to believe that we (anyone alive at this very second on this planet) are the luckiest people who have ever lived because we were born at the start of a golden age. But you never know, I could be wrong; plenty of things could throw a monkey wrench in the works, a meteor, Godzilla, George W. Bush’s cabinet, and so on, but even if I don’t get to see what eternity is like, even if I am hit by a bus tomorrow, I still feel blessed just for having been given the chance.
Finally, I mentioned my age, my health, and the fact that my family was able to support me merely, to point out that of the 6.2 or so billion people alive today I am among the most fortunate. A 95-year-old man with Parkinson’s and a child born in the third world tomorrow stand a far greater chance than I of missing the boat. This unfortunately is a fact; happily, the very technologies that I believe will play a role in realizing immortality will also improve the quality of life for people of all ages, races, and creeds along the way.
I mean has anybody really thought about the impact on the ecosystem is we start living longer. How long do you think humans would survive if everybody started living for centruies at a time with out curbing the birth rate. China already has to do that. How would you like to be told you are only able to have 1 child or worse none. We already have over 6 billion people and it is growing at an alarming rate. Even if we do start colonizing other planets, we are living indefinatly how long will it take for us to over populate them and damage their fragile ecosystems. We should ge one thing straight. Humans are not good for planets.
There is another thing to consider. The economic and political unrest it will cause. The first people who will be able to afford such “luxuries” as a 3 hundred year life span will be the rich. Although there are many really nice rich people most of them are corrupt bastards. Do we really want someone like Bill Gates being able to live forever. Then you will get lower class people trying so scrape for food because there will not be enough of it and resenting all people with money who are getting stronger and richer and smarter everyday because they are not dieing. This would explode the gap between the rich and the poor so much that it would have to cause unrest.
The last point I would like to make is kind of a philosophical one, but do you really think you would enjoy everyday as much if you and an infinate amount of them? Would you be as driven to accomplish anything if you knew that you would have forever to accomplish your goals? The human race is driven by a need to be successful during your life. Would things grow as fast if you could always be successful tomorrow?
For those of you who want to read a predictive novel on the subject (i’m sure that there’s a real title for this kind of book but this is the best you’re going to get out of me) read “The First Immortal” by James L. Halperin. It tells of the life of a person who becomes the first person to become immortal. It goes into many of the the potential scientific and legal problems and solutions and explains everything with ease during a (somewhat) moving storyline
etgaw1 I’m amazed that you think that the world of 100 years from now will be so similar to that of today. If I have faith that we can end death, I certainly have faith that we can end suffering as well.
Can I take this thread in another direction? Is that called “hijacking”?
As a medical professional I have seen many of my patients die, some of them painfully, some of them peacefully. (My dad was of the latter, and I am thankful for that).
What I have always wanted to know was: what is it that happens psychologically to get someone to the point where they welcome death? Excruciating pain? Certainly. But I think there is “something” that gets a person ready. In the hospital where I work, the common phrase is “Well, he/she was just worn out.” Okay, I buy that. One gets so “tired” of hurting that they will welcome the “nothingness” of death, as some of you so aptly state it.
I wish I could have been able to ask my father what was going through his mind during those last few hours, but he was on a morphine drip, plus how do you ask a question like that? (“What’s it like to die, Dad?”)
I do not mean to sound morbid, but at 51 I cannot imagine just “giving up” on myself and wanting to “let go”. I love my life and the things I have heretofore been able to accomplish. Okay, so many people don’t “let go” gracefully and really wanna live, but for those who say it’s time, what brought them to that point? Just the pain?
If anyone can make any sense out of my rambling, I would appreciate any insights you may have.
If everyone was immortal, no one would die. If we ran out of food and started dying out, we’d reach a point where we’d have a small enough population for everyone to survive, and it’ll repeat.
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What ecosystems? The Martian ecosystem? There isn’t one.