Eternal life through science

[GenesisNemesis]

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?

I would hate if someone like Trump could live forever. That'd be an actual Hell.

 

[SLD]

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.

You’re probably right. But I fail to see why we can’t conquer all diseases plus control aging. What’s stopping us from a scientific perspective? We’ve already made a lot of progress in regards to aging research. Doctors and biochemists are unraveling the mysteries of various diseases every day. New cures are found all the time. Will they forever fail?

Oh, things may break. But why can’t we build bones stronger than before? Granted, if you’re blown to bits by a bomb, or an airplane plunges deep into the ocean, you can’t recover what’s left. Our value on life may change dramatically.

 

[Jarhyn]

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

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.

But it's much easier to send a couple robotic chassis in a shielded atmosphere-free can with 3-4 backup drives whose hibernation process is as easy as shutting off the clock and storing the image that drives it into the NVM.

Repairing biology is spending a thousand dollars to clean a numismatically worthless penny. There's no point. Just make a new body and shove the important bits into that one.

 

[aupmanyav]

IMHO, eternal life through science has slightly better chance than eternal life through religion.

Just make a new body and shove the important bits into that one.

That is what we do when we become parents.

 

[Spacetime Inhabitant]

Mathematically, the problem of extended life and new humans being born being a problem, is a "start-up" dilemma.
Imagine if humans naturally had a lifespan of 300 years for the past hundred thousand years (we probably would still be a pre-industrial society in this scenario), then with normal birthrate of two (actually 2+ to allow for deaths other than from ageing) children per couple, the overall population would not increase.

 

[Jarhyn]

Just make a new body and shove the important bits into that one.

That is what we do when we become parents.

So, I take at least a fair bit of issue with this approach, because it seems intrinsically involved with a particular form of child abuse.

The thing is, people all too often want to make their children clones of them, seeing children as a form of personal continuation when they are not. NO child is their parent and NO parent should expect them to be, and the attempt to do so is the common source of 'the generational curse'.

Parents should not be about shoving any bits of yourself into a child, but rather putting them near the greatest variety of ideas and thoughts, exposing them to more and better truths and trying to make the child be the best new individual possible, a synthesis that is pointedly unlike yourself.

If a child is to eventually become like their parents, that will happen all on its own, for better or worse.

As it is, I never met my birth father before this year, and I still ended up more like him than the couple that raised me, but quite a bit better balanced.

 

[ideologyhunter]

Can you imagine the procrastination that would be fostered if the lifespan increased sixfold or tenfold??? I still have issues of National Geographic that plunked in my mailbox in 2010...copies of The Week from 2016...I still haven't read the whole Bible, because who can read dense hallucinatory stuff like Daniel, Jeremiah, and Isaiah? Is it possible I'd read all 66 chapters of Isaiah's fulminations, at age 650? Also, can you imagine the oldsters talking about the music the teenagers are into? It's bad enough when my frame of reference is the psychedelic rock of 55 years ago. Imagine if I was telling youngsters that the noise they call music is nothing next to the Hit Parade of 599 years ago.
And don't even get me started on cleaning the baseboards and getting to the dust behind the furniture.
Also, half of us probably want to figure out when ED would start to get bad. Those could be some very long centuries.

 

[SLD]

Mathematically, the problem of extended life and new humans being born being a problem, is a "start-up" dilemma.
Imagine if humans naturally had a lifespan of 300 years for the past hundred thousand years (we probably would still be a pre-industrial society in this scenario), then with normal birthrate of two (actually 2+ to allow for deaths other than from ageing) children per couple, the overall population would not increase.

Society progresses one funeral at a time.

 

[aupmanyav]

Just make a new body and shove the important bits into that one.

That is what we do when we become parents.

So, I take at least a fair bit of issue with this approach, because it seems intrinsically involved with a particular form of child abuse.

I did not mean that. Development of the child will come at a later date. The important things that we give them is Y-chromosome and X chromosome.
Nothing more important than that.

 

[Elixir]

to truly engage in interstellar travel we might need to have 2,000,000 years

I hope the software knows how to deal with asteroid strikes. Over 2 million years the chances of a mass extinction-causing asteroid strike is at least 2-3%, and at least a couple hundred of the 100m+ variety can be expected, if I am to believe the wonks who think about that stuff.
Some thing/person has to be around to harden the facilities, right? Or one unlucky hit and it's all over?

 

[bilby]

Also, can you imagine the oldsters talking about the music the teenagers are into? It's bad enough when my frame of reference is the psychedelic rock of 55 years ago. Imagine if I was telling youngsters that the noise they call music is nothing next to the Hit Parade of 599 years ago.

 

[steve_bank]

Going by the science today if you want to live a long and healthy life.

1. No tobacc0, alcohol or drugs. Now that we have long term data pot is being shown to be unhealthy.
3. Don;t eat junk food, no soda. Healthy diet.
4. Keep your weight down.

 

[bilby]

2. Avoid stress; Don't worry too much if one of the points is missing from a numbered list, for example.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

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.

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

Of course things break. That's why all my drives are some form of RAID. (And none are RAID 0.)

 

[Loren Pechtel]

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.

If we choose to occupy meat that's exactly how I think it will work.

I will nitpick, though, in that I suspect that backup isn't the answer. All too often companies discover the hard way their backups were no good, the only way to be sure is to restore onto test hardware, but that creates two you's. Thus I think we will turn it over--during sleep there will be a period where the state is frozen and you are copied forward into a new you. Yesterday's you is the backup, only brought out of freeze if somehow the today you is destroyed.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

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

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.

But it's much easier to send a couple robotic chassis in a shielded atmosphere-free can with 3-4 backup drives whose hibernation process is as easy as shutting off the clock and storing the image that drives it into the NVM.

Repairing biology is spending a thousand dollars to clean a numismatically worthless penny. There's no point. Just make a new body and shove the important bits into that one.

I can't remember the set of stories but I'm thinking of some advanced aliens that had very poor medical science because they knew (correctly) that they would be reincarnated. When you know you're coming back why fear death?

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Going by the science today if you want to live a long and healthy life.

1. No tobacc0, alcohol or drugs. Now that we have long term data pot is being shown to be unhealthy.
3. Don;t eat junk food, no soda. Healthy diet.
4. Keep your weight down.

5. Exercise.

I question how valid the pot one is, though--is it causing the health issues or are those with issues more likely to use it?

 

[DBT]

Clones and copies of you come back. With the information that is 'you' stored, there is nothing to stop there being any number of you running around.

 

[Jarhyn]

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.

If we choose to occupy meat that's exactly how I think it will work.

I will nitpick, though, in that I suspect that backup isn't the answer. All too often companies discover the hard way their backups were no good, the only way to be sure is to restore onto test hardware, but that creates two you's. Thus I think we will turn it over--during sleep there will be a period where the state is frozen and you are copied forward into a new you. Yesterday's you is the backup, only brought out of freeze if somehow the today you is destroyed.

Eh, I have no problem with being two humans instead of a single human.

One of the greater magic tricks that I hope to be able to pull off at some point is "multi-me", where I'm the same person existing at different places and times through a complex interplay of delayed self-reference.

I am open even today to the prospect of meeting myself, not formed by the exact same experiences but suitably similar ones had by a suitably similar archetype such that we are both OK with considering the pair of experiences together sufficiently "me".

It's not something I even expect others to really understand? Ideally, I'm enough of a hoarder that I would like at least one example of any unique origin to remain, but beyond that, I'm not particularly put out with the concept of parallel existence and collective self. As it is, I'm already gnostically a collective self in that I acknowledge I'm not even really "alone" as "myself" within the context of the brain in my skull.

 

[pood]

The many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics posits that there are already untold numbers of “you,” endlessly bifurcating since your birth. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, you can never meet any of them.