Tech Based Youthful Immortality
- Thread starter Dave1001
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I think this is a very important and interesting question. The two main problems are creating or repairing body parts and the effects of aging on the brain and while the former sounds like it's possible in the next 50 years, the latter sounds rather more tricky.
I'd guess that creating replacement body parts would be easier than trying to repair them. Once all the parts can be created, not only does this allow aging of all but the brain to be avoided but it also cures most forms of cancer, heart disease, etc. The public demand would be massive, however, which brings its own problems and then questions about a shortage of surgeons and then questions about robotic surgeons doing the work instead and so on.
All interesting questions, though.
I'd guess that creating replacement body parts would be easier than trying to repair them. Once all the parts can be created, not only does this allow aging of all but the brain to be avoided but it also cures most forms of cancer, heart disease, etc. The public demand would be massive, however, which brings its own problems and then questions about a shortage of surgeons and then questions about robotic surgeons doing the work instead and so on.
All interesting questions, though.
Not only do I not think I deserve longevity or immortality, unless minds could somehow remain always lively, inquiring, and interested, I can't imagine many horrors worse than physical immortality. No thank you, I'll return my borrowed chemicals to the planet when I'm done with them. Others better than I will follow.
Bronze Dog
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The soulless minions of orthodoxy have been suppressing it for years. I should know: I'm hooked up here Ghost in the Shell style.
roger
Penultimate Amazing
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Well, what's your number? I'm assuming that it's over 30-40 years, if you avail yourself of modern medicine. Would you like 200 years? 300? 1000?
Me, I'd like a few 10s of thousands of years at a minimum. I can always turn myself off if it gets too bad.
luchog
Neo-Post-Retro-Revivalist
Amen.
Personally, I've always thought that the sort of people who are scared or intimated by the thought of physical immortality and youth are those who lack imagination, motivation, and vision. I would welcome it if it was available. Just imagine the sorts of things that one could accomplish over that space of time.
Foster Zygote
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Immortality would also bring a grinding halt to human evolution. I would like a long, healthy life but I guess as a parent I now better understand the need to make way for following generations. Plus it would get rather crowded after a while.
Steven
Our default genetic programming may also be to want to die within 130 years. We're programmed to have generations of about 35 years to promote genetic population change at a certain rate (much slower than flies, faster than giant turtles), and I suppose to live a little longer in the case of men to propogate longer if you're an "alpha male" of your cohort, and for men and women to help care for a couple generations of offspring beyond one's procreative years. Thus I think it's interesting that exceptions like me (and some other folks on this thread) have a desire for our conscious awareness to persist for periods greatly beyond the limits genetically programmed into our bodies.
Imagine the autobiographies:- "My first 150 years as a double glazing salesman".
The social implications:- No labour shortage and minimum wage $1 a day.
The housing crisis.
Living at home with your parents till you could afford to rent an apartment , aged 70.
The wars.
Thank you, no.
The social implications:- No labour shortage and minimum wage $1 a day.
The housing crisis.
Living at home with your parents till you could afford to rent an apartment , aged 70.
The wars.
Thank you, no.
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These and similar arguments are all so easily refutable as inevitable outcomes that I think smart folks who promote them probably have a programmed biological/genetic disposition towards living less than 130 years.
Angus McPresley
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Agreed. To all those opposed to an extended lifespan, I have a question. Your 100th birthday rolls around, and still feel as young and healthy as you were when you were 30. Will you kill yourself? By what means?
I'm opposed to a vastly extended lifespan. A few years, a couple decades, fine. Centuries? No.
This question seems to include an unstated assumption that when I was thirty I was "young and healthy." In fact I've been in moderate to severe pain the entire time since I was about seventeen, eighteen years old, in the mid-1970s. Non-stop unless you count the times when my right leg, foot, and hip experienced excruciating "pins and needles" numbness for a few days at a stretch. Frankly the pain is preferable. Pain I can relegate to a back corner of my consciousness so it's not overwhelming most of the time.
This omits health problems that have appeared since the 1970s, one of which is almost as bothersome as the leg trouble but considerably more dangerous.
Yes. My insides will do the job by the means that they've been working at for decades. The loss to the world will be minimal, far outweighed the advantages of my no longer being around to consume increasingly scarce resources.
I'll be interested in reading your refutations of those arguments.
I would like about eighty years but am unlikely to make it.
Given that I've accomplished little of value in what life I've had so far, I can't imagine that stretching that life out over centuries would add anything useful to the world. I'd expect the opposite, in fact: the less likely death is, the less urgency actually to accomplish or achieve anything. One could always do it next century, or the next, instead.
Can you, though? Suicide is unpopular, and strong forces want to keep you from having that option. They'd rather rely on their religious convictions than your wishes. I distrust such people but they do seem to be in power.
Is there really a need on this board for me to write a refutation to a claim that it's inevitable that the minimum wage will decline to a 2006 $1 U.S. and that the planet will experience severe overpopulation if tech based healthy imortality became an option for everybody? I think pretty much any of us can propose solutions to those negative eventualities besides the default solution (if it even is a solution) of maintaining the 130 hard lifespan limit.
Are you against healthy immortality becoming a widely available option due to these hypothesized negative outcomes? If so, I'm interested if you think you're genetically predisposed to maintaining a 130 year lifespan limit (at least for yourself) or if you think you arrived there solely by weighing all the possible advantages and disadvantages to allowing folks the option of healthy immortality.
Just thinking
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Can you imagine given the medical miracle of living 10,000 years (by injection?) and then getting hit by a bus that afternoon.
Doctor: It looks like we can save him -- but he'll be in a vegetative state for the remainder of his years.
Doctor: It looks like we can save him -- but he'll be in a vegetative state for the remainder of his years.
The refutations are economic in nature, and fairly self-evident if you spend a few minutes thinking about it.
Obviously the birth rate must be controlled if the death rate is going to be reduced. The simplest (and fairest) way to do this is to make sterilization a prerequisite for the immortality treatments. If you want to live forever, no more kids, except perhaps on a lottery basis as needed if the growth rate drops below replacement levels. I don't think the kind of people who would go for immortality would have any problem with that at all.
That alone would solve pretty much all the other problems listed.
I'd also welcome the possibility of living thousands of years, although I don't think the technology will quite arrive in time to help anybody alive today. I suspect we'll be among the last few generations to live less than a century. Bummer, huh?
Maybe, maybe not. I'd have liked to see them stated by the person who brought it up though. *shrug* And who knows? Maybe the refutations could be refuted. That's what discussion's about, yes?
Obvious but I think there's a lot more than economics involved in this. I cannot imagine that most people would consent to sterilization in exchange for such treatments, nor can I believe this could be enforced. Consider the problems population growth already provides, even with naturally limited lifespans. The only nation I know of [there might be others] that routinely employs sterilization in order to control population is China; it's not generally voluntary, it's mandatory; and the practice is widely viewed as a severe violation of human rights.
What I would foresee is short-sighted people wanting to fill the planet with immortal offspring, political and economic considerations determining who would be chosen to receive immortality, and opportunities for the worst sort of tyranny.