When humans (if they ever do) find the cure to death, do you believe it will be a Medicine/Herb or Robot/Machinery? o.O
You can’t have true immortality by any known definition. The entire universe is going to undergo a heat death or collapse in on itself at some point even if it is billions of years from now. We could easily see a dramatic increase in life expectancy because aging is a type of disease and probably treatable with the right breakthroughs.
Many mammals like dogs and cats only life 15 years or so or in their very early twenties at the most. We can live 100 years or more with some luck under ideal conditions. A few animals like tortoises can live much longer. There is no reason to think that researchers can’t hack that problem so to speak to allow humans to live several hundred years or more. However, aging consists of a number of problems that aren’t completely related either. You could become a 200 year old person with an intact brain but still be wheelchair bound because osteoarthritis (wear and tear) has damaged your joints to the point where they still can’t be fixed completely. Accidents are always going to be an issue as well no matter how healthy you are in general.
Anyone can get hit by a drunk driver or have their arm cut off in an industrial accident. You just play the probability of lots of terrible things that can happen day by day but many people lose even when they are very young. Those risks are like a winning streak at a casino. At some point, you are going to crap out if you play the game long enough.
The best hope that anyone has ever proposed is downloading your brain onto some type of computer and becoming virtual yourself. It sounds cool in some ways but nobody today has any idea whatsoever on how to do .000001% of that and biological brains are amazingly dissimilar to computers. They have almost nothing in common so don’t expect to have a USB port hooked up to your skull anytime soon. A power surge could “kill” you anyway if such a thing could work.
What makes you think there’d be a single individual thing that would be “the cure for death”? Death is caused by many, many things, and we already have cures for many of them, but not for others.
There is a present form of immortality, for certain loose values of the term: fame/infamy. Shakespeare will never be forgotten. Neither will Hitler.
Well we originated in the stars, and when we die, we will decay into our constituent compounds, be recycled and disperse throughout the earth. We will do this until our planet dies with the Sun. That stage will return us to the Universe where we will float around until we coalesce with more gases and star dust and perhaps form another “earth” around a new Sun.
And if my luck is anything to go by I may get the dubious delight of doing all this shit again!!
Honestly, I don’t know about that. We tend to forget just how looooong the universe existed before our brief little moment began. What guarantee do we have that, should we survive-on this planet or another-for eons to come, little trolls like Hitler will be remembered? I’m not saying I have my money on history being forgotten-I’m just saying that anything can happen in such a grand span of time, and we can’t even begin to imagine where time and evolution will take this race (again, assuming we don’t kill ourselves in the next hundred–hundred thou years or whenever).
As to the problem of the eventual heat death or collapse of the universe–isn’t there a theory that we are caught in a perpetual big crunch/big bang cycle? I think the discovery of dark matter has kinda thrown the math off on this one, which is a shame, because I kind of like the idea. Well, it’s better than everything just burning out and ending for good, anyway. With the cycle idea, all matter is immortal. Just not any individual consciousness.
I’m not going to quibble, but address what I think the OP meant - I’d say machinery, some variant of the Singularity, but not as soon as the Transhumanist think.
Fame isn’t even needed, really. I mean, there are two things that are lost at death: Consciousness (your mind, sense of self, etc) and agency (the ability to influence the world around you.) There’s probably nothing to be done for the permanent and irrevocable loss of consciousness, but many people have maintained a degree of agency after death. Make a fortune, and endow a charitable foundation with a very specific mandate in your will. Get elected, and get good laws passed (or bad ones, if that’s your preference). Join the bench, and write a decision that echoes down the ages - or be the advocate who talks that judge into writing that decision as best reflects your ideals of justice.
Do something to shape the rules that govern the world after your death, and your agency persists. Not a bad deal.
As for keeping your consciousness - eh, that’s very unlikely. I suppose that, if we could very slowly replace brain cells with nano-machines that replicate their functions precisely, you’d eventually end up with an electronic brain that really was the original person. Unlike a straight-up copy - dump your brain into a computer - this method would ensure continuity of consciousness, which is as good a way as any of ensuring that the entity that ends up living in your electrical brain is “you”, and not a copy.
If you don’t think that actually works - that it’s still just a copy of you, not the original - consider this thought experiment:
1.) There are about 100 billion neurons in the human brain. Kill ten of them - no, not ten billion, just ten. Replace them with machines that replicate perfectly the function of those original ten. Are you still you? (If your answer is no, then do “you” die when you suffer a minor concussion? Go out for a night of heavy drinking?)
2.) Still you? Splendid! Go ahead and replace another ten neurons with nanobots.
3.) Rinse and repeat a whole bunch of times. At no point will any change to your brain be anything less that utterly, mind-bogglingly trivial. At the end of this process, you’ll have a fully electronic brain.
Of course, this isn’t immortality - your badass compu-brain could still be damaged. It could be backed-up, of course - but the backup doesn’t maintain continuity of consciousness with you, and so it isn’t you.
And there’s no reason to think that we’ll ever build this kind of technology, anyway. Shame.