Jun 24 2009
Immortality in Three Easy Steps
Ray Kurzweil, America’s most visible futurist, has been in the news a lot lately. He’s the subject of a new documentary film, “Transcendent Man“, and he’s recently launched Singularity University, dedicated to combining and furthering the fields he believes will be key to our exponential trajectory toward becoming one with our computers, an event commonly referred to as the technological singularity.
Kurzweil is generally respected for his inventions (you’ve seen the synthesizers) and for his keen prognostication (fall of the Soviet Union, victory of Deep Blue), but his views on aging make many scientists uneasy. Specifically, he believes that immortality will be possible in our lifetime via the following roadmap:
1. Live to 2045 however you can. Kurzweil, who would be in his late 90s at that point, takes 150 supplements each day to “reprogram his biochemistry”, slowing the aging process as much as possible.
2. Within a few decades, nanotechnology will be advanced enough to halt or reverse aging and treat most of the afflictions that have death as a side effect.
3. Around 2045, computers will be completely integrated with and within us, making us immortal. Having access to their binary innards, they will be able to improve on their own designs, causing technological progress to explode.
What do you think: underestimated visionary or kook living out a very public midlife crisis?
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| 134 responses so far |
So if I live until 2045, I am all set for life!! http://bit.ly/11RIbN
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If you’re interested in this kind of stuff, definitely check out the Wikipedia articles on the Singularity and Transhumanism
A lot of smaller minded people like to call this religion for atheists, but anyone with half a brain can see the logical basis of these ideas. Since natural selection has stopped due to human interference, the only ethical and logical means of improving our species from this point is using out own technology to do so. The future is going to be a very interesting time.
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Not that have a leg to stand on arguing with this guy over his predictions, but I am pretty sure he’s made a nice lil business for himself selling these supplements.
I’ve also started thinking about everything that can possibly go wrong with immortality and thinking that maybe death is a reasonable alternative after all.
I’m pretty sure I can make it to 2045 anyway, so we’ll just see what happens. Supplements still probably aren’t a bad idea.
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“A lot of smaller minded people like to call this religion for atheists, but anyone with half a brain can see the logical basis of these ideas.”
No, anybody with half a brain can see that the logical basis for these ideas is *deeply flawed* and mostly just wishful thinking. The only reason some people don’t see this is likely because they *want* to believe in it, and aren’t really trying to question it. That’s why people call it a religion.
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By doing all that shit to his body, he is probably drastically decreasing the probability that he will survive to 2045. He’d be better off living at the edge of starvation. Maybe he does that too. I think the best prediction of Ray’s immortality comes from the current actuarial tables.
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he’s so full of shit. and btw, who wants to live forever anyway ? so fkn selfish. just do more in the time you’ve got. most people do fuck all in their lives. new life is the way! ideas are immortal; we individuals don’t matter as much as the network.
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OK, I’ll ask the obvious question. What happens when no one dies?
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I love Ray, really. I even own one of his fancy-ass synthesizers (a K2600XS). But, I say he’s full of shit on this one.
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“the logical basis for these ideas is deeply flawed”
Care to elaborate? The time-scale Kurzweil may have for them to come to fruition may be *generously* optimistic, and I take issue with a number of his other ideas, like that "mind uploading", but to say that the *logical basis* for these ideas is *flawed*? I think *that* is wishful thinking. There are a million ethical arguments you could use against transhumanism. There are a million practical arguments you could use. But the logic is very much sound.
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Kurzweil says we expand out into the rest of the universe.
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#1 be rich
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What’s wrong with mind uploading? If you can replace all of the components in your brain with digital counterparts utilizing a step by step approach, this is no different than the Ship of Theseus paradox. Once you are digital, it’s not much more of a step to get to brain downloading. At the very least a copy of your brain could live on the internet and gather information that could be merged into your physical brain.
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“Live to 2045 however you can.”
So we all just need to focus on that for now. NO ONE DIE BEFORE 2045 REDDITORS!
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Maybe he just doesn’t eat. You gotta think you might be full after swallowing that many supplements.
This comment was originally posted on Reddit
It’s a very interesting question, and could go in many possible directions. *Assuming a similar population and wealth distribution and psychology to that of contemporary society, likely government-sanctioned reproduction licenses would be required. You would probably end up with a GATTAGA-like situation where only those with the best genetic outcomes would be given permission to breed. This, of course, does not rule out sex altogether, it’s merely a matter of controlling fertility. In less industrialized countries, they would probably not require these kinds of controls as they would also not have very wide access to the kinds of treatments and/or technologies required to attain immortality. *Assuming a completely transhuman society, one would expect the business of reproduction would become a centralized affair, so that the individuals would be free to work at whatever tasks they specialized in. The concept of gender and sexual preference would lose meaning, and it would be likely eliminated altogether. And that’s just covering the reproductive issues, not to mention the psychological problems. For instance, we don’t have the capacity for unlimited memory storage, so cybernetic enhancement would probably be required for memory extension. For immortality to really work out for humanity, you would probably have to completely redesign the human body.
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I’ve noticed a correlation between taking interest in life expectancy and being old. In my experience, the *much* older crowd is even likely to equate longevity with quality of life, too. The young never talk about life expectancy. So here’s the rule that I invented (no basis in fact or anything else, just amusing): You become officially old when you start thinking about how long you’ll live.
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Step 1: Don’t die.
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2 – Don’t die.
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Without the physical brain there is no consciousness. You can’t just replace it bit by bit and hope you trick your ’spirit’ into staying, the matter that makes up your brain *is* your consciousness, or what generates it, and so replacing it might leave you with something *resembling* you in every single way, but it will be someone/thing entirely separate. It’s the same problem with teleportation and cloning; you end up with exact duplicates, but the original individual is gone. Now, if your brain matter was stored offsite and you could connect to different bodies or networks, that is highly more realistic.
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On a giant human pyramid.
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While the link is broken, I think it’s still appropriate to say that Ray Kurzweil is a douchebag and I don’t really care what he says.
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I’ve also thought about immortality, and something about that concept seems wrong. When trying to think of waking up everyday forever, my brain just can’t handle it. Has anyone else tried to picture what it would be like to live forever? I mean, close your eyes and just imagine that concept.
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Please to explain how living (productively) forever is selfish.
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Step 2: Repeat step 1.
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Who needs to live forever? My great grand parents didn’t live forever, and they aren’t complaining.
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Kurzweil’s not the first to come up with this kind of idea (minus the supplements). Anyone read Negroponte’s "Being Digital"?
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1. Don’t die. 2. Cryonics pattern insurance 3. Invest heavily in nanotech and WBE (Whole Brain Emulation) research.
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“For immortality to really work out for humanity, you would probably have to completely redesign the human body.”
This may be true, but for immortality to be generally available and allow for normal reproduction, we are going to need to have similar leaps in space migration and hospitable planet settlements. There’s simply no room left here on planet Earth. If reproduction is severely limited to allow for this type of immortality, it would, I believe endanger the human race in the long run. Nothing is fool proof and if some pathogen arises that most/all are susceptible too, say bye-bye…
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Depends on which arguments we’re talking about. For instance, his arguments about technological advance are pure wishful thinking: He looks at the past, and then assumes things will continue. There is no actual argument there to refute in the first place. His arguments about AI look a little bit like they’re based on some kind of logic, but he plays fast and loose with definitions (that is to say, he defines nothing, such as what "intelligence" is supposed to even mean). Even if we accept his simplistic idea of what intelligence entails, the argument still doesn’t hold: He says that if we can just make an AI that is more intelligent than us, it can then make another AI even more intelligent, and we’ll have an exponential development of intelligence. This is rests on the hidden assumption that "making an AI of intelligence X" is some kind of linear process. It should be easy to see that making an intelligent AI can get a lot harder the further you go: Say that we create an AI that is twice as intelligent as us. This in no way means it can make an AI twice as intelligent as *itself*. Perhaps the problem suddenly gets harder, and it can only create an AI 2.5 times as intelligent as a human. This AI in turn can only manage 2.6 times. And after an infinite number of cycles we’re still not past a factor of 3. That is, just because a series is strictly increasing does not mean it is exponential. It can stop at any point. And once again, that is *if* we accept this horribly simplistic view of "intelligence" as some kind of one-dimensional variable.
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This argument is correct to a point – if you were to make an exact duplicate of your brain and simultaneously "switch off" your current brain while "switching on" your new one, your stream of consciousness probably wouldn’t transfer to the new brain. However, if you slowly *replaced* the current brain with a new one (say, cell-by-cell over the course of years) that was functionally equivalent, it would make sense that your stream of consciousness would be unaffected. Whether the new brain used neurons or circuit boards is really not that important, so long as they have the same output. This process happens regularly in your body as it is, with cell replacing cell, and yet your consciousness remains.
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Well, would you especially like to die today? I know I wouldn’t, and I doubt (barring anything horrific happening in my life) that I ever will – the human desire to keep on living and enjoying life is just too powerful. While the abstract concept of living forever may seem overwhelming, I doubt there would ever come a day when you would say "Jee, I’ve had enough of life. I am going to kill myself from boredom.". And besides, if you ever did come to such a point, you could just kill yourself (assuming you don’t have any ethical problems with this).
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grelthog is essentially making the same point that I am. The Ship of Theseus paradox speaks of a piece by piece replacement of the components in a ship. At the end, none of the original Ship exists any longer, but it is still the same ship – or is it? I think in the case of consciousness, it the continuous stream that matters. You have many subconscious processes going on in your brain at all times, some that change or are replaced completely. If you changed the processes slowly enough, it would be no different than the changes you go through as you advance through your life. Essentially what I’m saying is that if you are correct, I’m not the same consciousness I was years ago, and as far as I’m concerned, when I go into a computer it won’t be any different than that.
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What’s the evidence that natural selection has stopped for humanity?
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I’m ok with licencing people to have kids, (in an immortality situation only, not currently) as long as it’s done on a meritocratic basis, rather than a political or economic basis. In other words, those who are the smartest, strongest, most creative, etc can have children, not those with the most connections or money. Of course, that’s an even more far-fetched scenario than immortality.
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I just re-read my copy of the The Age of the Spirutal Machine, and his predications for 2009 was a bit optimistic, I bet the same goes for his 2045 predictions. I wont go into all the things he predicted for 2009, since someone else have: http://thefix-online.com/features/looking-back/
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Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom contains a fun hypothesis of immortality. Rather than ‘die’, many people just hybernate for years or centuries (or until the heat death of the universe) on end. A copy of them wakes up, determines if life is interesting enough to live, if not, they basically kill themselves and let their original copy continue to sleep.
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Fusion better be working before immortality or our food and energy supply is fucked.
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To be immortal is to spend eternity in this form. Is that really what you want?
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Basically, natural selection means that whoever is most suited for the environment will have more offspring, passing their genes on. Since the large majority of people (in industrial countries), live long enough to have as many kids as they want, genetics doesn’t come into play as much, except in maybe fertility (even then, there are drugs that get around it) Cultural factors are much larger than physical factors in determining how many kids someone has. So, we’re experiencing more of a "cultural selection" than a natural one. Less education, more poverty= more kids. This isn’t natural selection, however, since education and wealth isn’t something you physically pass on to your offspring.
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because, assuming limited resources, you’re living at the expense of someone else (someone younger who would replace you when you died).
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Temporarily.
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There’s a limit to the number of people who can be alive at once? I wasn’t aware.
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I don’t think anyone really wants to live forever, but I think we’d all like the option to live as long as we want while feeling at our peak.
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I’m pretty sure that to sustain immortality we’ll have to spend eternity in some *other* form. And we’d conceivably have a great deal of control over what that form is.
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Population control. Its on the way, immortality or not.
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Velociraptors on hoverboards make that nigh impossible.
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we need to move to another planet so we can have rampant sex and live like crazy disgusting animals.
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So at some point you’ll want to kill yourself. No problem. That’s your choice. That’s what I want, a choice on whether or not to die. I don’t want to be dead because it’s a biological function.
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Whoever wrote that article has no idea about current affairs. "Warfare is dominated by unmanned intelligent airborne devices. Many of the flying weapons are the size of birds, or smaller." Not only are there unmanned flying drones, there are also ground-based robots used in military now. These UAVs give the military unprecedented advantages in the field. "There would be a significant reduction in the size and weight of personal computers below that of the notebooks of 1999—a banality, except that “significant” in this case means that PCs could now be embedded in clothes and jewelry." How big is your Iphone? It is faster than most computers in 1999 (Pentium) "Rotating memories (like hard drives, CD-ROMs, and DVDs) would be on their way out, in favor of “purely electronic” memory." 10gb flash drive is so cheap, nobody uses CDs or DVDs to carry information anymore. "“Smart paper”-quality will be standard in computer visual displays." Amazon Kindle uses something like that. It can also do decent text-to-speech.
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Why would I want to have children if I can live as long as I want? Hell, I don’t even want kids now.
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But we don’t yet know where it stops, if it even stops at all. Sure, there’s a good possibility that we’ll run into a roadblock of some sort, but there’s no reason to assume it will be anytime soon. And more than likely there will be workarounds. Just like we’re approaching the operational limits of silicon for processors, but carbon and other materials will allow us to continue to increase computing speeds.
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Here are the possibilities: Immortality becomes possible: 1. you are alive and become one of the first immortals. hooray for the suppliments and vitamins. 2. you died. oops. at least you won’t know what you’re missing. Immortality is impossible: 1. you live for a little bit longer because you took some vitamins and didn’t get cancer or super-AIDS. 2. you died a little earlier, but you can’t even laugh and say "I told you so Kurzweil"
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“Since the large majority of people (in industrial countries), live long enough to have as many kids as they want…”
Actually that is natural selection. Humans are smart enough to plan for a life of plenty, assuming favorable socioeconomic circumstances, and hence they have lots of offspring. So many of us survive not because we’re going around natural selection but because we live in a world favorable to us right now. In 25,000 years, when a new Ice Age starts, it will be a different story… > genetics doesn’t come into play as much Actually yes they do. If you can’t properly reproduce or are born with genetic defects that will kill you before you reach sexual maturity, your genes won’t transfer over. And don’t forget sexual selection and predation. Not everyone ends up married with kids and there are millions of people who die from violence and crime before they can reproduce.
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Just because someone is a douchebag (and Kurzweil is) it doesn’t mean he or she is not worth listening to. Thomas Edison was a douchebag, Henry Ford was a douchebage, Steve Jobs is a douchebag. Obviously, none of them have ever contributed anything of value to the world.
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Fair enough. You go ahead and be selfless and die. I’ll be selfish and alive.
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*WHICH IS FUCKING AWESOME!*
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Use gotos!
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Do you even know what he is taking? There is a lot of research behind it.
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I don’t care what other people think, I want to live forever.
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Love. Now insufficient humans specimens still breed and produce their ugly, asthmatic, diabetic, cancerous, obese offspring.
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Consciousness is an illusion. It’s one that I enjoy very much and I’m sure I’ll continue to enjoy it as soon as I’m a digital copy of myself.
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Go read 2 B R 0 2 B.
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Ah, but see, the environment is not fixed, not on an evolutionary time scale. Genetics may not come into play as much, not on the time scale of our perceptions. But we are constantly facing new contagious diseases and its not always possible to develop cures fast enough to prevent large portions of the local population from dying off. Are those that survive not the lucky winners of the game of natural selection? Furthermore, we have very little cultural factors that can respond to cataclysmic natural disasters. When will the next one occur? Who knows but it will occur. Can we conclude that natural selection is not working at the moment? I’ve never been entirely convinced.
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I agree, it’s working, just on *mute*, I’d say. My argument is that we’ve pretty much min-maxed our current environment and that it’d take a large-scale disaster or a change of environment for natural selection to cause significant changes in the physiology of people.
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Harry’s 3 easy steps to real immortality * make a horcrux * gather the deathly hallows * make a philosopher’s stone
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I read your comment, then looked up that book in Wikipedia. Found out it was creative commons, so I picked up my iPod Touch and downloaded it instantly, and for free, with the Stanza app. I’ve been reading it for 10 minutes and I had one of those, "Holy shit, we live *in* *the* *future*" moments.
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How is this guy gonna live to 2045 when the world ends in 2012?
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Douglas Hofstadter: " If you read Ray Kurzweil’s books and Hans Moravec’s, what I find is that it’s a very bizarre mixture of ideas that are solid and good with ideas that are crazy. It’s as if you took a lot of very good food and some dog excrement and blended it all up so that you can’t possibly figure out what’s good or bad. It’s an intimate mixture of rubbish and good ideas, and it’s very hard to disentangle the two, because these are smart people; they’re not stupid."
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Perhaps, but we have also gotten to the point where *we* change our *environment* and not the other way around. This is also a big reason why we have "stopped evolving."
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<?php
live:
$me->live(); // don’t die
goto live; ?>
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He has a large supply of duct tape and Twinkies, the only two essentials to survival and happiness.
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You OK with eugenics? Because that is the next progression after the sperm meets egg licenses.
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Welcome to life.
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Welfare.
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for everyone on here that seems to doubt that we will at some point live forever some things to consider: we regularly construct artificial organs in the lab at this point. They are simple organs, yes.. But it is still incredible and the science has come such a long way in the past 50 years. Immortality seems far fetched now, but living 2000 years doesn’t seem that impossible, and who knows what will happen in that length of time.
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Well, like I said, in an immortality situation only. If it’s a choice of limiting who can have kids or everyone slowly starves to death, I’ll choose limiting kids. Hopefully, it’ll be more like the Ender books, where we start colonizing other planets so that those who want to have kids can chose to do that and Earth doesn’t get all over populated.
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There’s no reason to assume *anything*, but that isn’t stopping Kurzweil. And more specifically, there is *absolutely* no reason to assume an exponential growth, which is exactly what he does.
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$php $is $a $sin
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He addresses the issue of the limits of computation in *The Singularity is Near* (which I have not yet finished reading, so take my comment with a grain of salt). We are currently reaching the limits of silicon computers. Similarly we reached the limits of vacuum tube computing in the 60s. Quantum computing is still in its infancy but it’s not unreasonable to assume that we will have quantum computers in the future, which will most likely follow Moore’s law (as all computing devices before it have) and eventually it will reach the limit of quantum computing (which may be the ultimate hard limit). Same with AI. It will eventually reach an asymptote but even an AI three times more intelligent would be a remarkable achievement (and probably enough, along with quantum computing, to achieve immortality).
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We go to Mars.
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Reminds me of *Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom*.
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It’s a cool story, yes? I like the post-scarcity economy driven by Whuffie.
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All organisms change their environment.
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"…where only those with the best genetic outcomes would be given permission to breed." GATTACA, forgot one important thing- somatic cell therapy. People are working on this now. Adults will most likely be able to reprogram themselves. If you want your genes improved just take the pill/shot/virus etc.
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Consciousness is nothing but an illusion, if we are able to map our brains down to the smallest of neurons then consciousness will arise and this "new you" will be identical to the "old you" in every sense.
This comment was originally posted on Reddit
You mean how like, the woolly mammoth created air conditioning instead of evolving to remove its coat? Or how whales made farms instead of having to navigate the globe for food? Totally.
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Remember, transhumanism is nothing more than the process of attaining post-humanity. Your question can be better phrased as, "What happens when we alter ourselves past humanity and that species becomes immortal?", because really, humanity will likely continue on in a similar way as it has been. Posthumanity, on the other hand, will do something new. Personally, my opinion is, if we go the "immortal digital consciousnesses" route, all individuals will gradually merge into a superconsciousness, with reproduction being obviously unneeded.
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Most Redditors are either pirates or ninjas, and neither group has a very long life expectancy. No singularity for us! AAAAArrrrr.
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It’s not so much stopped, it’s just that artificial means of modifying ourselves has stepped up to a rate well beyond what evolution can match.
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in this argument, having children is selfish: you’re choosing to have children rather than allow someone to live. You’re assuming reproduction and finite resources.
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Most likely only a small portion of humanity (and their descendants) will be able to afford immortality. The rest of us will just have to die off to make room, I suppose.
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It’s pretty crazy to think whether some of us will form collective consciousnesses, or some will opt to remain individuals. Some might want a physical body, others remain in digital form with an avatar. Or perhaps both. It seems the seeds of division will be tempting given that we can freely chose how to recreate our identities and form new "groups", and our concepts of governance will either need a revolution or will simply dissolve. It simply blows my mind what the possibilities could be.
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War.
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No, I don’t know what he is taking. I read his book "The Singularity is Near." I use that as a basis to declare him irrational, but I’m open to data. Show me that Ray survives longer than I do and, well, 10,000 other samples, and I buy the grape koolaid.
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No, but thanks for the reference.
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MrX Says Immortality in Three Easy Steps | ::the open end:: http://tinyurl.com/kqcd4r
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I think its funny that where I live at least (Canada) those with a certain history can’t buy or own guns, might not be eligible for a drivers license etc. but can still bring a child into this world. No, I personally don’t think everyone should be able to have a child.
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Agreed, but I dibbs staying on earth unless they find some other amazing planet to go to.
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That’s a stolen concept. Illusions depend upon consciousness to exist, therefore consciousness can’t be that which requires consciousness to already exist.
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Dyson Spheres are more promising in the short term.
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You make the false assumption that the tech required to do it will be insanely expensive. That might be true, possibly even likely to be, but it’s very possible that once the knowledge is obtained that it’ll be impossible to prevent everyone from having because it could be simple.
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I don’t think a lot of people should be doing a lot of shit they do but I’m not self-righteous.
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Work on getting rid of NASA if you ever want to colonize anything off the planet.
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I think personal freedoms should be championed also, but there’s a point where a personal freedom will detract from someone else’s personal freedom and therefore, should be limited. For instance I think you should have the freedom to hunt, but there should be regulations so some yahoo doesn’t go out and get more than his fair share, which in turn decreases my freedom to hunt. In the developed world we currently don’t have to worry about population because procreation by choice isn’t even matching death rate in most counties. But in the distant future if letting everyone have kids and live long lives means that we are overpopulated, the environment is over burdened and living conditions are worsened, I would support limiting kids (unless we can send some off planet). This is very hypothetical, but one day these problems will need to be addressed, especially if we are "immortal". So which personal freedom will prevail in your mind, the right to live forever or the right to have children?
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That’s what I thought too, at first. Then I realized that in an overpopulated society, when you form babby you aren’t just doing something to yourself, you’re fucking over everybody.
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God damn, I’m only 18 and I’m already old. That doesn’t bode well for my life expectancy.
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“I’m not the same consciousness I was years ago”
Actually, you are. Your brain matter is some of the only matter in your body that does not regenerate itself over time.
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Except it will be someone else.
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What if we just make immigration really hard? If people are going to take steps towards further reductions to the replacement rate, don’t they deserve any positive consequences of this action? Of course, smaller increases will compound even more with increased lifespan. Increases in life expectancy that outpace the passage of time won’t rule out mischance and disease naturally. Few people currently die of cell multiplication failure. System failure can be expected to occur at a higher rate than tissue failure.
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And how exactly will this person be different from you?
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Different matter arranged in an identical fashion. It’s like having two toasters of the same model. They’re identical, but they’re not the same toaster.
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With that explanation, no two things would ever be identical, even the smallest of atoms. However, let me ask you this, what makes a GE toaster a GE toaster. Similarly then, what makes you you?
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*As dethbunny snorts his raucous laugh and sloshes down his grog, the shine of a katana appears in the shadows.*
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The matter that makes up both of us is very old, as you can rearrange the particles, but you can’t destroy them, or create new ones. There’s nothing new in this universe, everything created is just built of something that has been there since the beginning of the universe. What makes up me, specifically my neural matter, which is not renewed like most of the rest of the cells in my body, is a chance arrangement of these ancient particles arranged whilst I was in the womb, and expanded during my earliest years of life. If you were to make an exact copy of my current arrangement of neural matter with other matter, you would have a copy comprised of a different set of particles. Identical in design, but lacking the original particles that define the original. So you would have someone who thought like me, talked like me, had all the life experience I did, but was someone entirely different. They would be a copy, completely separate from the original.
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Check out — http://bit.ly/10Niz4
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In a given area there are finite resources, supporting a finite number of people.
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Not that I’ve done it, but from what I’ve heard having children is anything but selfish! You are living for your children at your own expense. Call me old-fashioned, but I like that old people die and new generations replace them. It means we keep some things the same, through learning & culture, but we can respond to change because young people do things differently.
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They may be the same matter, but they aren’t doing the same thing. As you learn, neurons change how they are talking to each other, changing who you are. I think it makes more sense to say we are the result of our brain cells communicating with each other more than the braincells themselves.
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There is no top in space. On a pyramid in space, there will most likely be four tips, I suppose you could be one of those. (Assuming the pyramid will be a tetrahedon, other forms of pyamids woudn’t be fair. They would have a distinct tip, but in space that would still not be the top.)
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Consider a number so large, that while not infinite, is incalculable. This is the number of resources and space available in the universe to potentially support people.
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Sorry but that’s bullshit.
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It’s the "fair share" part that fucks up the world we live in. That’s a bullshit term if I ever heard one. It’s the idea that if I have collected three of something I should have to give two to the mob. Fuck the mob.
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All I was trying to get at is that you are a champion of freedom. In the far distant future these two rights will conflict. Either I won’t fuck with your ability to live a ridiculously long life by seeking regenerative medicine, or I won’t fuck with your right to have kids. Something has to give in this unlikely scenario. The earth has finite resources and an exponential growth of people (if death was eliminated) would quickly exhaust them. Again this is purely theoretical regarding the distant future.
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oh totally, I was talking about earth. but yeh, let’s populate the universe now! come to think of it, it’s mostly old dudes holding us back with that.
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isn’t that what death does for us ?
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Well, I was pointing out that the argument is flawed because it assumes children are better than adults when there’s no reason to assume that and a few simple ones (more so when it comes to immortality) saying the opposite. But, you’ve just fallen for the same bullshit that parents (who happen to be the vast majority) spout off. Do you really expect people that have committed themselves (usually accidentally) to raising a kid for the next 18 years to say "nah, piece of cake. kinda wish I hadn’t though"? Or think of it this way, throughout history completely average people have repeatedly and successfully raised kids. Not that hard, not an accomplishment. It may be the pinnacle of _their_ life but that’s an inevitable outcome of it. Personally, I can’t fathom why someone would want a kid. And no one’s been able to explain it other than "you just can’t understand the kind of love I feel for my child", yet I can make the same claim about the love I feel for my wife. Judging on their actions, no way they feel the same way about their spouse.
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If the smart people lived forever, they’d do all kinds of cool things with the perpetual continuation of their work.
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It’s the same person, but they become individuals as soon as their experiences diverge.
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Do you remember those old cartoons that predicted that we’d have flying cars by 2000? Where are my flying cars? How can we possibly expect to master life and death when we can’t master physics?
Thanks for expounding.
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[...] will somehow slow down or reverse the aging process, and then integrate with computers so much so, we’ll become immortal. It’s simple, easy and missing about a few hundred steps that will be needed to overcome all [...]
How about learning the secrets of immorality from those who have already found it?
My research on several immortals living among us today can be found on my main website http://Ben-Abba.com
It is lot easier than taking lots of supplements, cheaper, and more fun too!