Immortality is a strong word so let’s just define it in this thread as the ability to either:
1- To keep a human body and brain in good working order indefinitely
2- To have the “consciousness” transferred to another body (or a computer simulation.)
[SIZE=1]*Yeah, cliche sci-fi stuff so hopefully you get my gist. *[/SIZE]
I’m going to go ahead and estimate it at 0.00001%, or 1/100,000. I’m mainly counting on a sustained rise in computing power to enable us to use incredibly wasteful approaches to the problem along the lines of Folding@home or genetic algorithms which use bruteforce methods (IE: randomly trying 10 billion combinations until one works).
Go nuts with guesses, gut feelings, methodical calculations and potential prophecies if you want. Just remember to include a percentage too, eh :)?
It’s not clear if nano-bots can really be built and programmed for cellular repair, but if they could…it won’t be like antibiotics or vaccines. We’d be seriously close be being able to cure everything except sudden traumatic injury and diseases whose infection or damage vector isn’t known.
I don’t think it’s likely (and my 10% is almost certainly optimistic), but we don’t know it to be impossible yet, and the technology isn’t a massive leap, given how rapidly it’s advanced in the last century. Brain download is a possibility, too, but seems less likely still.
Nothing short of that’s going to do it, though – even a complete “cure for cancer” wouldn’t really raise life expectancies that much. (If we could search, I’d find the thread where someone had a cite claiming mere days, on average).
No way. They aren’t going to have ingrown toenails set completely right by that time. There are a great many illnesses that I bet would have to be cured or very thoroughly remediated before even 200 year lifespans will happen.
This guy thinks the world’s first person to live to 1000 years old coud be alive right now. I hope so; at my current rate I’ll need that long to finish painting my living room.
There is a decent chance that successes in aging science could slow down the aging process enough to meaningful to my kids and grand-kids. I am 34 and may catch the benefits of some pioneering steps if and when I am elderly. However, what we call aging isn’t just caused by one thing. Some of it is programmed into cells but other parts of it are just wear and tear. Cellular anti-aging treatments won’t completely fix old sports injuries for example. Major organs like the heart and liver can build up damage from abuse mostly unrelated to aging as well. It would take a bunch of different breakthroughs in science and medicine to address it all.
The other question was about downloading whole brain storage to computers. I went to graduate school in behavioral neuroscience. The chance of that happening borders on just about zero for any given time-frame. First of all, the state of behavioral neuroscience is still some primitive as to be considered pathetic even though the best and brightest have been studying it with full intensity for decades. Progress is being made at certain levels but it is SLOW although, paradoxically, the journal articles seem like they are coming off of a high volume assembly line. The subject is just too complicated.
Secondly, computers are one of the devices in the known universe that are most unlike any organic brain. They simply don’t have much in common at all so asking if one can be uploaded and downloaded back and forth is like asking if we could use a Commodore 64 to upload a mighty oak tree to later be downloaded back down onto different landscapes. The concepts just don’t translate directly.