Eternal life through science

It seems to me that life is simply a matter of good chemistry. We understand biochemistry intimately but there are still mysteries to unravel. But can we get to the point where we can cheat death altogether?

We’ve seen it some extent in movies where a computer diagnoses an early tumor and cures it immediately.

But we can’t regenerate nerve cells. We can’t cure paralysis. Many other problems can’t be cured yet either, general aging. My mother’s death at 92 was just pretty much a simple degeneration all around. When she got pneumonia one winter, she went downhill fast. Without any movement for several weeks, she lost all muscle mass and eventually her lungs were discovered to be failing her.

Hard to see how that has a cure. Wasn’t any particular disease, just a general loss of everything.

But maybe we can control aging. Limit it considerably and even reverse some of the effects. Maybe then we could live for thousands of years. Although I did read that after 650 years an accidental death is likely.

What would we do with the extra years? I wonder if we could then travel the stars? We might get bored sitting on a space ship for tens of thousands of years. Civilization would have to radically change. Mating would have to be carefully controlled.

Why would anyone want to live forever, or even for hundreds of years? And what about new people? Obviously if all or most of us are living for hundreds of years or whatever, there’s be no room for new people. What’s the point?

pood said:

Why would anyone want to live forever, or even for hundreds of years? And what about new people? Obviously if all or most of us are living for hundreds of years or whatever, there’s be no room for new people. What’s the point?

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As I said reproduction would have to be carefully controlled and only allowed when someone dies.

As to why, well, I suspect that most people would want to live significantly longer lives in general, but sure there would be suicides of people who have had enough.

But I for one would love to see if I could travel the cosmos even if it did take a long time. As long as there was sufficient company of people to enjoy the trip with. We could find things to do along the way. A large space ship with sufficient capacities and things to keep us busy would be acceptable.

I’d probably want to spend my first few hundred years exploring earth first though. Maybe a few trips out to Saturn and other planets as well.

SLD said:

As I said reproduction would have to be carefully controlled and only allowed when someone dies.

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Literally Orwellian.

My thoughts on the matter have evolved over the years, from simply being a singularitatian looking to live forever, to having a goal to live only another 200 years.

My expectation is that digital immortality will come with sacrifices, and that the majority of us who attain something similar to it will be those of us most ready to give up a permanent "body" in exchange for an existence as a set of switches. The future of human eternity is not going to be on earth.

At best, ancient and immortal humans will find themselves living at the Lagrange points of our system, commuting to the nearest planet, and/or renting a drone body to visit, to return home to the relative safety of an otherwise empty region of outer space and eating pure sunlight with a community of such peers.

In such an environment, with overclocking, humanity could have years of experience and education to every terrestrial day.

To that end, technological immortality will be far LESS resource intensive on the earth, especially once the tether finally snaps and humans can shed their earthbound existence.

At that point we would no longer be human but something else, and I very much look forward to the experience of it, of being able to completely re-architect myself.

Still, 200 more trips around the sun at the distance and speed, generally, of our planet I think will be enough for me to have experienced as much as I care to.

Even then when I spin down 200 years from now, I plan on leaving a record of my existence and a way to be called back in case anyone cares about me by that point.

I don’t think any of this is ever going to happen. These techno-dreams are highly reminiscent of mid-20th century fiction and prognostications of Mars and moon bases and travel to the other planets and even the stars by no later than the early 21st century. That didn’t pan out, and I don’t think this stuff will either. What’s much more likely is that climate change coupled with the emergence and re-emergence of pathogens taking advantage of the changing climate, many of them deadly to humans, will cause civilization to go into eclipse by about mid-century or a little beyond. The evolutionary biologist Daniel R. Brooks talks a lot about this prospect. See this MIT discussion, for example

Of course, we should bear in mind that predictions of dystopia are just as defeasible as predictions of utopia

pood said:

Of course, we should bear in mind that predictions of dystopia are just as defeasible as predictions of utopia

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I don't imagine it will be a utopia. There will be problems and disasters and scares and living and building in outer space is hard, and very few people will be willing or able to make the personal sacrifices necessary to realize such a dream.

I am one of very few people who have ever openly considered completely shedding their current form factor, I suspect. People have gone to great lengths to imagine a future where they get to keep their body when they travel the stars. There is some hesitation to become something a little more Lovecraftian, and I don't blame them.

I plan to be off the surface of the planet by the end of the next 10 years, though. It depends a lot on the advance of image technology, GPU (NPU?) technology, and humanoid robotic chassis development.

We're so bloody close to having the pieces to put together, but we're also so bloody close to a period of troubles that will delay it that it's a coin toss which happens first.

Jarhyn said:

We're so bloody close to having the pieces to put together, but we're also so bloody close to a period of troubles that will delay it that it's a coin toss which happens first.

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It does seem we are in a race between a (possible) technosingularity and a (possible) civilizational collapse due to climate change. It’s the theme of a novel I’ve been working on. Why, though, would you want to be off the surface of the planet in the next 10 years?

pood said:

Why would anyone want to live forever, or even for hundreds of years? And what about new people? Obviously if all or most of us are living for hundreds of years or whatever, there’s be no room for new people. What’s the point?

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It's the feeling of control over the uncontrollable that people find most seductive, I think. Few are mature enough to fully cope with the idea that whatever projects we've invested ourselves in, whatever relationships we have cultivated, they can all be suddenly and arbitrarily taken away.

I saw warehousing when I was in a nursing home and assisted living.

People kept alive by meds and treatments unable to care for themselves waiting for death. It leads craziness in some. Some ridnk or smoke pot all day, as some do in my building.

I just had my annual checkup and discussed my medical directive which says do not resurrect and no heroic life saving measures.

I will be doing a living will that says no life support.

When you go you go, that is all there is to it.

pood said:

Jarhyn said:

We're so bloody close to having the pieces to put together, but we're also so bloody close to a period of troubles that will delay it that it's a coin toss which happens first.

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It does seem we are in a race between a (possible) technosingularity and a (possible) civilizational collapse due to climate change. It’s the theme of a novel I’ve been working on. Why, though, would you want to be off the surface of the planet in the next 10 years?

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Oh, I don't see climate change as the intractable problem here... I mean yes, what I see as a problem will drastically change the climate, but what I see happening is a delay in our race against climate change springing from the rise of global populist nationalism triggering wars, turning what should be a technosingularity leveraging imaging technologies and available delta-V to escape and build "The Great Work" instead towards a weapon that will scour the planet.

I say 10 years because that's the timeframe I expect we have until the climate change emergency you discuss will start. The applications to fully leverage bleeding edge imaging tech will be about 5, and in about 7 years we will be at the point of having big enough GPU or NPU units. Give it another 3 years to experiment with re-hosting, and I think we're gonna be about there.

I want to set my goal at 10 years because of I don't, someone else will be trying to beat me to it. I want to be the world's first techno-lich, or at least the first such example that doesn't turn out poorly. I've been making plans for decades for when I get enough money to hit the ground running on that. I don't really see me having much more than 10-15 years though before the climate collapse and the chaos starts. I need to be gone before society is beyond the point of escaping. It'll be "easier" without conventional life support, but I'll also have to have waited for successful Spacebound resource drones and possibly refinement. Again, that's going to take another decade or more to develop.

So, I'm mostly just waiting, studying what I need to know about how to build AI, trying to figure out how to bridge Verilog to AI expressions to make "compiled AI", taking jobs that teach me various information about sensor technologies, hardware, systems design, and math, and hoping my grandparents die before their dementia makes them decline any further.

Still, it relies on a lot of moving parts that will grind to a halt if there is another war in that time frame.

pood said:

Jarhyn said:

We're so bloody close to having the pieces to put together, but we're also so bloody close to a period of troubles that will delay it that it's a coin toss which happens first.

Click to expand...

It does seem we are in a race between a (possible) technosingularity and a (possible) civilizational collapse due to climate change. It’s the theme of a novel I’ve been working on. Why, though, would you want to be off the surface of the planet in the next 10 years?

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People who dream of humanity leaving the Earth and living amongst the stars are a vital part of keeping us inspired to make things better here on Earth; But their dream is always going to founder on the fact that in our truly vast universe, the Earth is (and will likely always be) the only place that is even remotely pleasant to live.

Shit, even big areas of the Earth aren't very comfortable.

We evolved in tropical and subtropical regions of the Earth, and are sufficiently adaptable as to be able to live very comfortably in temperate climate regions too, and to survive in desert, tundra, and even arctic conditions.

But we can't adapt to living where terrestrial bacteria, plants, and animals are unable to survive to sustain us. We can't adapt to even slightly different amounts or mixtures of atmospheric gases, or to a lack of liquid water, or even to sustained microgravity.

The Earth is literally the only place we are going to live for the forseeable future, and to successfully depart it to colonise the solar system (much less the stars), we will need to stop being human.

Hence the popularity of post-human stories such as that of the technological singularity. But such stories are just a way to sustain our preferred fiction of ourselves as the leading actor of existence.

Humanity may evolve into myriad new species, technological or biological; But we won't be around to see it, any more than the earliest mammals that scuttled around the feet of the dinosaurs were ever going to experience travelling by train, or ownership of a smart-phone, or landing on the Moon. Their distant descendants did; But they themselves never came close.

Hoping (and even genuinely believing) in a technological cure for aging, and/or an ability to upload our consciousnesses, to indefinitely prolong our lives is a fantasy that itself has evolved - we used to have faith in eternal life after death for our souls (most still do), but then dualism was exposed as a fantasy in its own right, so those of us who have (correctly) discarded it are left with the bleak certainty that we are mortal and brief, and that we are all mere extras who step off the stage and into oblivion no sooner than we stepped out into the limelight.

Some of us are OK with that. Life is short, and no matter how much we wish, we will never know what happens to our descendants after we are gone. Our series will be cancelled, and all the cliff-hangers left unresolved. It's inevitable; It might one day cease to be inevitable, but not in any of our lifetimes (though we may be right to feel that we are tantalisingly close).

Maybe our great-grandchildren will have indefinitely lengthened lives. Probably not, but maybe.

Meanwhile, dreaming of a better future doesn't seem like a particularly bad way to spend some of our (very limited) time.

See: Macbeth, the way to dusty death, struts and frets, etc. …

I doubt we will ever gain immortality this way. Things will break. You keep things around by replacing the stuff that fails. If we attain it it will be by upload, not by removing aging.

Loren Pechtel said:

I doubt we will ever gain immortality this way. Things will break. You keep things around by replacing the stuff that fails. If we attain it it will be by upload, not by removing aging.

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But then, of course, the things we upload to will break also, and so … In the end, entropy will get us all.

pood said:

In the end, entropy will get us all.

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But what fun it will be in the meanwhile?
Pass. ymmv

A thousand years of youth and vitality may be a good deal.

Loren Pechtel said:

I doubt we will ever gain immortality this way. Things will break. You keep things around by replacing the stuff that fails. If we attain it it will be by upload, not by removing aging.

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Exactly. A changing image that can be serialized to a static image by the host structure means that it doesn't matter if the body breaks, because the "soul", the image itself, can't be destroyed merely by eliminating a single instance.

It would be the death of a single day, or whatever time since the last NVM backup.

Probably no more than a week. Just have some redundant hidden copy pay the cost for a new NPU, and off you go again.

The best part is that if we understand well enough to engineer a whole human meatsuit, we can just attach the phylactery to the new meat and bam, you've got a solution for aging: you "drive" a "lease".

At that point, every part can fail without that actually being the end of you.

DBT said:

A thousand years of youth and vitality may be a good deal.

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Yes, but to truly engage in interstellar travel we might need to have 2,000,000 years of youth and vitality. Again, it’s only a matter of maintaining the right chemistry. Entropy can be overcome with sufficient energy. Repairs can be made to broken systems.

We could also hibernate for a very long time. That might preclude boredom.