only human arrogance (which the subject of this thread possesses a surfeit of) would lead one to think we’re entitled to immortality of any kind.
it’s a religion unto itself.
Human arrogance is actually what led us to think that we were entitled to control fire and everything that came after that. I am nowhere as optimistic as the subject of the thread on the matter, but the steady march of progress and technology should lead to extending our* life spans by substantial, maybe even indefinite amounts.
*by “our” I mean humans as a species, I am not all that optimistic that we will live to see it, maybe our kids or grandkids.
I’m afraid most of you will drive SamuelA off if you don’t stop being so mean to him. He’s Gulliver and we’re all little Lilliputian brained players shaking sticks at modern technology. All he wants you to do is listen and learn.
A scientific renaissance is upon you and you mock him. No wonder the last one took 300 years to complete.
It’s actually a bit annoying, as I am a fan of futurism, I like to think about what may lay down the road for our children, and maybe even ourselves.
The problem is is that there are two issues there, timeline and actual feasibility. Some of the technologies expressed may end up working out, some of them may not. We will not know until we try. And we will not know how long it will take for us to get to the point of trying until we get there.
The issue I have with Sammy here is not that he is a fan of future technologies, most of what he has predicted is conceivably possible, it is that he is very adamant that those technologies will emerge in the time and manner in which he states that makes his posts a bit on the insufferable side.
Well, that and the reliance on nanobots to fix everything.
This^^. He seems to assume the simple exponential growth curve with no hiccups or obstacles or human objections along the way. And a short time constant.
In a few posts he’s acknowledged that he’s ignoring all that stuff, but recognizes it’s an intractable drag on adoption.
Then comes the next post blithely predicting a Singularity on Tuesday and the rest of us go :smack: and wonder if we’re talking to a teenager.
Wait until you find out he was one of Kelly Johnson’s senior project engineers.
Then you’ll be sorry. All of you. 
For your reading pleasure, Sammy will tell you how to get bad guys out of a building.
https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=20687740&postcount=14
No, no shaped nuclear charges yet.
I cited my sources. I also have personal experience I didn’t mention. I didn’t say how to do it. I said from the sources* I have seen*, generally the commander on the ground is going to want to blow the bad guy’s fortress to rubble. This is reasonable and you end up with this if the fighting goes on long enough. (image from ww2)
Modern weapons do not change much other than making it possible to be a little more selective on what you blow up. We don’t have the hunter-killer nanobot fogs yet, and I don’t think they’ll be ready by next Tuesday…might take a little longer…
No, no. I’m with you here. Blowing fortresses to rubble with nanobot frogs would be so effing cool.
Obviously we’re not having a productive back and forth here. It doesn’t appear that either of us can ever change the other’s mind no matter what facts or logic is brought in.
With that said, I’m going to just point out 3 reasoning errors you have made here :
a. Have you ever seen a severely demented patient? Death is relative, not absolute. I would argue that a human being that only has enough brain function left that they continue to breathe is about 99% dead. If they barely remember their own name, but not their present time, place, any recent events, or how to speak many other words, they are somewhere around 90% dead. These percentages are estimates but if we could objectively measure how many neurons are left functioning we could probably actually come up with a measurable scale for this.
Even if you disagree with me on everything else, if you really work at Stanford, you must be smart enough to see that you’re incorrect about this. Your worldview just doesn’t fit what actually happens. What makes a person more than a sack of meat with a pulse is their mind, and if their mind is mostly destroyed, they are mostly dead.
I am aware that our brains have redundant neural pathways, so you could not use a linear percentage. If a person lost exactly 50% of their neurons but the losses were smoothly distributed throughout, they might seem almost normal because of the backup neural paths.
b. What I was trying to express when I compared the two cases was information transfer.
case 1 : the person says a few last words to their family. Basic concepts like “I love you, Steve is a murderer”, touching stuff. How many bytes of information is that? Not many.
case 2 : the very last-last words are missed, but their brain is frozen. It will later be sliced and destructively scanned, 50 years hence. Petabytes of data are recovered from it.
The person’s descendants will know far more about their relatives than you or I ever do. All I have are vague stories, heavily distorted from retelling. I know my grandaddy saw ww2 but don’t know if he saw combat. I suspect an enormous amount could be recovered. Maybe not enough to actually ‘bring them back to life’, but vast amounts of data.
So from my worldview, my instinct says that case 2 is better. I am not saying we should force this on people without their consent…though for small children, it should be subject to the same laws we have regarding withholding of medical care…but you, if you are really Stanford material, should at least be able to see why I have this view and how it is a reasonable view to have.
c. We are all going to die, yes. Would you agree there’s a significant difference between dying at 30 and dying at 75? Because if we applied your defeatist logic to this, we should go back and time and tell Alexander Fleming to put away his tools, there’s no point, even if he invents a treatment for bacterial infection, everyone thus treated is still going to eventually die.
I’d say there’s a similar difference between dying at 75 and possibly surviving for centuries or longer. Maybe it isn’t possible to achieve that…but if it were possible, does your top of the line education give you the reasoning ability to see how it would be worth pursuing if you thought it was feasible?
So why not just embed explosives in regular frogs or frog-robots and skip the nanobots?
Because Trump has small hands and the frog robots will frighten him.
On the other hand, some people are just a sack of shit with a pulse.
They would need to be flying frogs for this to really work. Radar guided flying frogs with special stealth skins and vertical thrusting nanojets in their nanoasses.
This is why you’re on my ignore list. What are you contributing here?
Right, and the logical step to take after that is to ask "is there any way with the technology we have now to do something so we don’t have to be the last (or second to last) generation to die? Because if you concede that it’s inevitable that human ingenuity will find a way to defeat aging and certain death, and then in such a society, take many safety measures to reduce to near zero most homicides and accidental deaths, it makes you feel really shitty if you think you’ll end up dying 10 years before there’s a treatment for aging.
And then you realize that it just might be possible to solve the problem now. Maybe. To reuse your fire analogy, maybe you don’t need a complete theory of lightning and spontaneous combustion. Maybe you can just rub 2 sticks together really fast. Maybe, since liquid nitrogen seems to preserve every other living thing, if it’s real small and frozen really fast, maybe there’s a way to preserve your whole brain well enough that you could fix the damage done later. Maybe we as a society could be researching this on a large scale instead of giving tax cuts to the rich*.
*Which I find obscenely short sighted. Who benefits most from reliable medical care that allows for indefinite lifespans? Rich billionaires, of course. Aging and death is the only thing that threatens them and their lavish existence. So why aren’t there foundations with a trillion dollars of donated money working round the clock on every promising avenue of human life extension?
If every billionaire was long-sighted enough to donate half their fortune to longevity research, each one individually would face no discernible degradation of their lavish lifestyle. Even being a 500-millionaire is pretty damn nice. And they might make progress. It’s a bet that might not pay off - but they shouldn’t be defeatist about it. Even if it’s just a pill + immune cell transplants that gets them to 110, that’s a very large, personal reward for their investment.
I certainly do not concede that. I do think that we will mange to extend our lifespans a bit, and I wouldn’t be surprised if in a few generations living into your hundreds becomes as common as making it to your 60’s now, and with better health.
There are some other medical concerns that may not be so easily waved away. Pushing past 150 is going to require more than just simple advances in medicine, it’s going to need complete retooling of our cellular machinery.
Is dying 10 years before immortality comes about any shittier than your parents dying 10 years before it comes out either? Or how shitty is it if we can create new humans with aging “removed” from their DNA, but that treatment doesn’t work on already living people?
Someone always has to be the last one to die for any cause.
And I don’t know that it is inevitable that humanity itself will make it another 3 years, much less with the growing technology that is required to make any sort of increased lifespan.
What research? Dropping things into a cold dewar doesn’t need much practice.
I might suggest that we try liquid helium, at least for initial freezing, as that would make it freeze faster and lead to less crystallization, but that’s pretty much it, research done.
Without the technology to revive such a person, we will not know how well we did, so there literally is no point to research, as there is no way to check the results of the experiments.
Good point, if life extension was so easy, then why do the ultra-wealthy not pursue it?
Maybe because it is not all that feasible, even with nearly unlimited resources for research. That alone should tell you something, that those with the resources to do what you are saying aren’t doing it. That may just mean that all the wealthy and ultra wealthy people are stupid.
I have many questions about the ethics of some of our wealthiest citizens, but I do not ever think that they are stupid.
Somehow I think that it’s gonna be a bit more invasive than a pill and immune cell transplants.
Can’t get much stupider than this, folks. :rolleyes:
I’m implicitly assuming we’ll develop a form of superhuman intelligence, whether that be actual “conscious” machines like the popular conception or just really amazing data analysis software that is capable of active design and control of robotic systems. The software doesn’t just sit there and make recommendations, it can issue commands to massive arrays of robotic waldos to order prototypes constructed, experiments performed, and so forth. Humans oversee but their efforts are incredibly amplified.
Since this stuff actually is starting to work, and I genuinely think we’ll go from solvers that can approximate animal motion badly (like the stuff at Boston Dynamics) to superhuman motion control (robotic systems that can move more efficiently and correctly, given the same joints and actuator specs as the animal they are modeled on, than the actual animal or human can) in a decade*. A little after that we’ll have robotic systems that can look at a tray of parts in a factory and put together most objects better than human technicians. *maybe a lot less, this is a planning problem that new research has hit superhuman levels very rapidly on a number of problems.
I feel my assumptions are quite grounded, I am not talking about anything that you wouldn’t know about if you were paying attention.
We don’t need actual sentient AI to revolutionize our study of biology. What you would need to do to crack this problem is perform experiments on a colossal scale, with all the data feeding into an increasingly accurate predictive model. To summarize the way I’m picturing it, there’s a factory full of hundreds of thousands of individual robot cells. Each one has a cell culture or a sample of a biological protein or a tissue sample, etc. Each machine is performing a specific experiment to reduce the machine’s uncertainty about how that biological particular component works. All this data is going into a predictive model, which is really just a very large array of neural network weights, and each experiment’s results change the weights. So if then query the model “what happens if this drug is given to patients with this genetic profile” it can actually give an accurate answer. Other solvers which act as planners are trying to design new drugs. They query the model to find out what the model thinks the proposed molecule will do, and winnow down the drug candidates to ones that have a reasonable chance of working. (then there is the usual escalation to trials in cell cultures, then animals, then maybe mockups of human beings which are separate containers of living tissues made of cloned organs, then finally actual living human trials)
I do not know what the end findings of this kind of effort would be, but it does seem plausible that eventually all the organs of the human body could probably be replicated and transplanted. At that point, the only reason you’d die of old age is your brain itself was failing, and with drugs you could probably block at least all the mechanisms that cause dementia and make it to at least 120 in your Frankenstein body of replacement parts.
Humans are overseeing but the actual lab experiments are all robotic, since you can record an exact sequence of the actions taken from the robot’s telemetry and replicate it autonomously elsewhere, in a different facility, to confirm.
This is the kind of effort you would need to make real progress. In a rational civilization, since the same technology would have also automated all the farms, mines, factories, stores, and transportation, our civilization would have the spare human capital to do something like this.
You know, if we were rational beings who did what was best for us personally and our peers*. Everything I talk about is technically feasible…but like LSLguy points out, I can’t even attempt to model what stupid thing our civilization would do instead.
*since if all the essentials for human life can be produced without more than a tiny amount of human labor, what other topic is worth cracking besides aging and death? Every other topic can wait until you have centuries to spare. But INSTEAD, we might use all that spare production capacity to elevate 0.1% of our population to Feudal lords, protected by armies of robotic private security and living in vast palaces built autonomously, while the majority of the population starves or lives in extreme poverty…
And those same Feudal lords might decide to, instead of investing resources in making sure they at least personally get to live in their palaces to the age of 120, they might instead invest all their resources into more physical security…