Longevity: Extending Human Life

[Cosmin]

Originally Posted by Spartan_X

I don't believe that anyone is being honest when he says that he wants to die only because of old age. Even when you're 100, if you still live a good life, why would you want to die ? Only reason i can think of is ... believing that by dying you will go to meet your long-dead relatives in heaven.

It's not that much different than saying "next year I'll start exercising". Well, why not now? Of course, most likely, next year you WON'T start exercising.

So all these people that now say that 60 or 70 or 80 is enough for them should perhaps postpone calling an age until they're actually 60, 70 or 80.

This being said though... I certainly don't want to be in some pod orbiting Earth (or whatever other planet), that I'm certain of. No matter how connected I will be in that pod, I want to also have the option to be physically present on Earth or other planets that we might have access to by that time and have some "old school" interaction with people and these environments, in addition to whatever remote connectivity I might have, so pretty much I'll still need a body.

If pods are good enough for VelesHomais and others, that's also fine, but I'll need want a body.

[Tepes]

If we ever find ways to extend healthy human life, we need to seriously reconsider everyone's right to have as many children as s/he wants.

I believe that, in this case, foregoing reproduction (at least until food production technologies dramatically improve) is a small sacrifice to pay for eliminating the suffering of death. Furthermore, it's much easier for a rejuvenated older person to continue doing what he's good at and contributing to society, than for society to wait 20+ years for a child to grow up and learn before contributing something useful back.

[ArtZ]

Originally Posted by VelesHomais

Read my post above. Trillions of other men greedy for longevity could be stored in orbital storage units.

Of course. Especially after learning how to live without food.

[VelesHomais]

Originally Posted by ArtZ

Of course. Especially after learning how to live without food.

By that time we will find a way to supply our neurons with electric charges that sustain their functionality.

[VelesHomais]

Originally Posted by Tepes

If we ever find ways to extend healthy human life, we need to seriously reconsider everyone's right to have as many children as s/he wants.

I believe that, in this case, foregoing reproduction (at least until food production technologies dramatically improve) is a small sacrifice to pay for eliminating the suffering of death. Furthermore, it's much easier for a rejuvenated older person to continue doing what he's good at and contributing to society, than for society to wait 20+ years for a child to grow up and learn before contributing something useful back.

Well, the way I envision it, that is separating the nervous system and sustaining it indefinitely while connecting it to external devices for interactions, there won't be any classic reproduction, sex is going to be purely recreational and experienced in a very different way (but will feel the same, even better)

The genes responsible for instinctive need for an offspring could simply be turned off. Or you could, say, clone your brain, randomly mix up some of its DNA, much like how it happens in nature, and raise your child in some virtual setting, though you would have to choose not to upgrade its intelligence, otherwise there wouldn't be the need for it to be raised. This is all, obviously, very subjective, controversial and concerns far future, but something that is interesting to consider.

[CanadianDemon]

Originally Posted by Tepes

If we ever find ways to extend healthy human life, we need to seriously reconsider everyone's right to have as many children as s/he wants.

I believe that, in this case, foregoing reproduction (at least until food production technologies dramatically improve) is a small sacrifice to pay for eliminating the suffering of death. Furthermore, it's much easier for a rejuvenated older person to continue doing what he's good at and contributing to society, than for society to wait 20+ years for a child to grow up and learn before contributing something useful back.

We have enough food, in fact we have a surplus of it. It's just that some places can't buy it while others can.

[ramanujann]

Cool project

http://2045.com/

An ambitious long-term project lead by Russian media mogul Dmitry Itskov to build robotic avatars by 2020, brain transplants by 2025, and artificial brains by 2035. The project launched in 2011 and an office opens in San Francisco in summer 2012.

[VelesHomais]

Unrealistic dates, add 20 years to each stage

[Сталин]

Nice, I hope we can extend our lives sooner.

[ramanujann]

Originally Posted by VelesHomais

Unrealistic dates, add 20 years to each stage

Considering my age I don't have problem adding even 40-50 years
Then I would like my brain to be transplanted to a robotic body and live for ever

[inefekt]

Originally Posted by VelesHomais

Unrealistic dates, add 20 years to each stage

Whenever I see predictions of future technology ie in X years we will see Y, I think it's safe to double X to get a more accurate prediction. It's especially true with scifi movies. Obviously the need to sensationalize is what drives Hollywood so they tend to grossly overestimate our ability to perfect future technology. Back to the Future is a perfect example, hoverboards in 2 years? Yeah I don't think so, perhaps in 30 years if it's possible at all.
As for extending human life, well we're far too populous as it is so the last thing we need is to be lowering death rates while birth rates soar. It'll be to the detriment of every other species we share this planet with.........well even more so than it already is.

[VelesHomais]

Actually SciFi overestimates some aspects of technology and underestimates others. SciFi in general is highly primitive, because it is fueled by nothing more than imagination. An imagination that leads everyone to believe in a specific future, with hovering cars and with aliens fighting other aliens in spaceships while zooming through the galaxy. The reality is very different and is more interesting, than any crap that any writer can come up with.

As to sustainability of one's nervous system for an indefinite amount of time - that will have no detrimental impacts on anything, only positive ones. By the time when it is possible, 50 years from now, or so, we will have fusion power and like I said earlier, we could store these automated units with perpetually maintained nervous systems of individuals in orbital storages or on the Moon.

It is possible to make accurate predictions, if you approach the subject scientifically and systematically, like Ray Kurzweil and Michio Kaku do. Or what Jules Verne, for that matter, did. Unfortunately, there are very few people like that, and the general population will keep on dreaming about hovering cars that will never come, but far more amazing metamorphoses will go unnoticed, dramatically transforming our lives every few years now.

[inefekt]

Originally Posted by VelesHomais

Actually SciFi overestimates some aspects of technology and underestimates others. SciFi in general is highly primitive, because it is fueled by nothing more than imagination. An imagination that leads everyone to believe in a specific future, with hovering cars and with aliens fighting other aliens in spaceships while zooming through the galaxy. The reality is very different and is more interesting, than any crap that any writer can come up with.

As to sustainability of one's nervous system for an indefinite amount of time - that will have no detrimental impacts on anything, only positive ones. By the time when it is possible, 50 years from now, or so, we will have fusion power and like I said earlier, we could store these automated units with perpetually maintained nervous systems of individuals in orbital storages or on the Moon.

It is possible to make accurate predictions, if you approach the subject scientifically and systematically, like Ray Kurzweil and Michio Kaku do. Or what Jules Verne, for that matter, did. Unfortunately, there are very few people like that, and the general population will keep on dreaming about hovering cars that will never come, but far more amazing metamorphoses will go unnoticed, dramatically transforming our lives every few years now.

Ray Kurzweil is a nut who's just sh1t scared of his own mortality

[VelesHomais]

A nut who is a brilliant inventor and now a director of Google's department of engineering? Not to mention his algorithm based predictions have been proven by time to be accurate for decades now, give or take a few years. I wish more people were as nutty as him.

[Dmerdude]

Can't believe no one has posted this guy:

[trekie]

Originally Posted by VelesHomais

Unrealistic dates, add 20 years to each stage

add 50 years to that...

[Tepes]

Not that unrealistic if the engineers manage to squeeze that ARM inside cell phones into the size of a blood cell. If Moore's Law will hold and nanites become possible, doctors will be able to repair the human body at the cellular level.

Of course, it might be a while before the technology will be available at your local hospital. You can bet Kurzweil, if he lives till then, will have access to such technology at least 10 years before us regular folks.

Also, increases in life expectancy in the last 200 years or so are mostly accounted for by the reduction of child mortality. Modern medicine did next to nothing to increase lifespan for people having reached middle age. Cellular repair by nanites is probably a must for extending human life.

[luife100]

My guess is that human inmortality will be possible some day, I don't know when and perhaps we are far from get it, but we've enough time, we are not in a hurry, It could be in 5 decades, it could be in 5000. At least some mayor catastrophe we are going to reach inmotality. And it will become a human right such as food right now. Even for the people who could "die" in an accident, it'll exist "backups" as it exist right now on the videogames (when you get die, you just return to the safe point). The only death people would be because of human beliefs or spritual reasons. But by evolution and natural selection that people would eventually disappear.

That accomplishment will change our lifestyle. Right now, the universe's exploration is almost for the joy of doing that, but when human life spectancy reachs 300 hundred years, It would be crucial to get more habitable space. First, humans are going to strongly control the world's birthrate, and maybe it would be necessary some weird methods like sleep a lot of persons until we handdle how to deal with that amount of people, but when we get to live in the moon or mars, it'll become clear that the only long term solution is to conquer the space. Besides, I think it'll be another strong reason, our religions are going to change, the more we explore the space, the more we understand how speciall we are, how vulnerable, so we are going to reach the space because we'll think that it's our mission, that's why we exist. We are going to conquer the space because of very similar reasons to conquer the world.

And I'm not considering contact with aliens, which will bring us a lot of new posibilities, new knowledge, wars, etc.

[VelesHomais]

What makes you think that when we transcend the biological constraints of our species that we'll still preserve the instinct to reproduce? I would assume that a vast majority would disable this instinct, as well as majority of other irrelevant instincts by that time.

Not to mention that we will be able to easily store and sustain quattuordecillions of nervous systems in autonomously sustaining units throughout the Solar System, living out their lives in blissful virtual realities for billions of years. It doesn't make any sense to forecast potential problems with immortality by imagining that everything else will remain the same.

[VelesHomais]

Originally Posted by ramanujann

Considering my age I don't have problem adding even 40-50 years
Then I would like my brain to be transplanted to a robotic body and live for ever

Same

By the way, the B, C, D stages would all come at the same time, sometime during the middle of this century. Also the proper term is an Android and if the organizers of that project don't even know that, then it's probably a scam to fool people into investing into them.