How far are we from immortality?
Recently, it has been going around the world that we are going to have our first-ever-head-transplant! YAY or NAY?
I must say I have mixed feelings about this. Sure, I'm quite happy that the man used as the test subject is having the opportunity of rebirth, and that if it completely works, that more people will have the chances of living a normal life... But what if it doesn't? What are the implications of such a disaster?
Anyways, going more philosophically into it, isn't this (if it succeeds) one step closer to immortality? What if one day we are able to transplant anything at any given time? To completely master stem cells and regeneration and recreation of our bodies and just to be able to cheat on death completely? Do you think this day will ever come?
Humans are so fantastic and so horrible at the same time... I wonder what is in store for us for the next decades and centuries ahead.
Sorry if this all sounds too sci-fi and weird, I watched "Mr. Nobody " today and all thoughts kept popping up on my head, just wanted to hear your opinions on it.
We will be immortal when we shead the human body. Until then we can just prolong death. I am excited for this head transplant as it could improve the life of millions. People calling this quackery are just ass holes. Realistically it's simple to transplant heads, it's just the spinal cord that is the issue. Once that is solved it isn't THAT hard.
I do think life spans will be increased with the advent of custom medications and growing organs. Also, once we can adjust the genes in an embroy we can remove all negative genes. People would live to 80-90 if you removed cancer or other illnesses from newborns.
LOL.
Just a routine procedure huh?
I'm not sure how a head transplant gets humans towards immortality because the brain will still decay no matter how many times you can transplant it. Hypothetically, and I have absolutely no expertise in this except for sitting around taking bong hits in college talking about shit like this, you could perfect a medical technique to transplant a head or even just the brain but the brain tissue itself would eventually end up dying. Life extension, sure, immortality, no. And if you could somehow perfect medicine to the point of keeping brain tissue alive forever (remember immortality's not just a long time) you could most likely keep the rest of the body alive as well. Maybe that's what Kurzweil's talking about with nano-tech in The Singularity.
I agree with TNA, immortality can only occur if you could separate the consciousness (mind, soul, whatever you want to call it) from the physical form and that just gets into sci-fi. Maybe you could transfer it to a computer/machine like that Johnny Depp movie that I never saw or turn into a Transformer-like sentient robot. Or a Star Trek Q, but I don't see how anything like that could result from perfecting a surgical technique even if head transplants were step one of 1000. That takes a button of peyote and even then your immortality only lasts for a few hours.
Kurzweil suggests that humans are rapidly moving toward what he calls "Human Body 2.0," where we start merging with machines. He suggests that nanobots will be omnipresent throughout our bodies, constantly destroying bad cells and improving good ones.
According to Ray, human body 3.0 is where we totally transcend our biology, and people will lack a "fixed corporeal form," existing primarily in the machine due to mind uploading.
There are not too long ago a post about a program some billionaire is running whose ultimate goal is to upload peoples' minds onto computers and hence allow for immortality. I agree that life immortality, that is, true immortality and not long extensions, could only be allowed via uploading your consciousness onto a computer. But we're definitely a far ways from doing that, and there are lots of implications involved especially for those who believe in such things as souls.
Would you guys like to be immortal? I'd personally do anything for immortality.
Interesting perspectives... That Russian billionaire is called Dmitry Itskov, I remember reading something about him as well.
But just as a simple counter argument for TNA and DingDong to prolong this pleasing topic, don't you guys ever consider the small chance that something so extreme could one day happen? Surely, right now in 2015 that sounds something extreeeeemely far away, I completely agree with you guys. But if you were able to meet the first human being ever and tell (or at least ATTEMPT) of all the things we have accomplished up until now, wouldn't that be the same shock as if someone told us, from a distant future, of immortality?
And to NickW1, honestly buddy, one of my worst fears is immortality. More importantly though, I think that if we were to be immortal, the whole concept of what it is to be a human being would change. Think of emotions that drive us like fear, they wouldn't exist! What would you fear if you knew you were immortal? Probably nothing, resulting in a completely chaotic world where everyone would just do whatever they wanted because they knew they were immortal. I can just sit and imagine what society would look like if we were all immortal --if society would even be there--.
On a side question to all of you, do we have a limit of how far we can progress and develop? By that I mean, if we were to build a timeline of all our discoveries & inventions, would that timeline extend to infinity? (as long as humans are alive). Consider this: For someone around the years of A.D 800's, agriculture was abundant, but gunpowder was something new; For someone in the 1800's gunpowder was abundant, but cars were something new. For someone in the 1970's+, cars were abundant, the computer was something new. For someone in the 2000's, computers were abundant, smartphones would be something new... You see where I'm going with this? Will there be, or is there a limit to what we can invent?
I find it odd that you fear a world without fear. At this stage in modern society, yes fear does control people. But consider a world of immortals where suffering (fear) has been eradicated, we would no longer fight or compete for resources.
People would still, however, fight for political control over others.
reminder.
We're already capable of re-writing genetics. Add to that stem cells. Give it 10 to 30 years and we should be good.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/LeCpHugyI80
Coming a long way in agricultural and tech innovation is one thing. To cheat death is another. Then again, someone would have said that a fake pancreas was mythical and look how that turned out.
Prolonging life is a real possibility. We've done it already. Could lead to some stupid advancements where the average life expectancy could be 130+. Posts on WSO in 2220 be like:
'6th year analyst. Made jump to the buy side. Currently a 7th year associate in REPE at a MF. Well on my way to retiring before the age of 75. AMA'
The human race will wipe itself our before it can reach immortality, but prolonging life is going to keep getting more successful. The biggest problem with prolonging life is that it just gets wasted because of cancer and telomere decay (leading to all heifers and other mental decay). What's the point of being able to extend a body's vitality till 250 if everyone's brain is mush or gets killed by 150? Also, the problem of limited resources arises; if everyone lives that long, a comprehensive eugenics plan would need to be in place. I don't think there will ever be a world that simply accepts something like that. Add in advancements to technological Warfare, and I don't think the human race will ever reach the dream of immortality.
I think you nailed it. Population growth, dwindling resources, advanced nuclear weapons, etc. will lead to chaos and destruction.
Hey if you want to be a volunteer and die to help reduce the world population problem, be my guest. For the rest of us, we want to live forever.
This sounds like a conversation cancer cells would have.
Actually population growth is slowing. Humanity reached peak birth rate a few years back. Bill Gates talks about this, and It's very counter intuitive, but the richer a country becomes the lower its birth rate.
If you believe in technological advancement, then you also believe that resources are not dwindling, that we are in fact moving toward a future of abundance. Look at food production for example: we moved from subsistence farming to modern agriculture, and now we're able to modify the DNA of our food producing organisms to generate more, healthier food at a faster pace.
As far as advanced weapons are concerned, yes it's possible we wipe ourselves out with a new genetically modified "super virus" or with nano technology gone haywire, but the world is actually becoming less violent every single year - check out Pinkers "The Better Angels of our Nature" for a detailed overview of this phenomenon.
Agreed.
But at the same time, I feel like those same advancements would enable the human race to stay alive for a long time; by that I mean, either we are all wiped out at the same time, or we will just keep bumping into the Malthusian trap.
Immortality will end in mass parricide.
On a similar note, I was reading somewhere about reaching the Earth-like planets billions of light years away by basically sending a space craft there, which would take god knows how long, and then printing the astronaut when the space craft arrives.
We haven't really gotten any farther in extending the maximum lifespan of a human, so I doubt that anything that relies on the physical preservation of the body will work.
On the other hand if we can figure out a way to digitize the human mind that might work. Assuming trends stay the same, we should be able have computers with the same computing power as the human brain in 2025 http://gizmodo.com/when-will-computers-be-as-powerful-as-the-human-brai…. Maybe soon after we will be able to model the human brain.
Imagine the computer power in 2100's... Crazy to think about that. As for the brain, do you think we could fully model a functioning human brain? What about emotions, subconscious actions, innate features of the human mind...
Jeez I can feel my brain is beginning to malfunction thinking about all of this. lol
I'm more interested in space travel than immortality. Faster-than-light travel would be the bomb-diggity.
Right!? How awesome would it be to travel around the universe and discover everything...ever...
However, do you listen to Neil DgT's podcasts on this? Unfortunately, according to him and other sources, I think finding a way of travelling faster than light, or at least at the speed of it, is quite impossible... Not gonna lose my hopes though! And it would also be pretty awesome if we could find a way to teleport / master travelling through wormholes, then we wouldn't have a need of ever travelling at fast speeds, perhaps even moving at all.
Even if we could travel the speed of light, the speed itself is too slow to travel the universe on a human time scale (people still age going lightspeed, albeit slower--but human society would age hundreds and even thousands of years around the travelers). As you point out, wormholes or other teleportation would be the only way to truly master interstellar travel. That's why I'm not too sad when scientists point out the near impossibility of light speed.
Some of these comments are insane.
We're not as far from it as you may think. If we haven't solved it by the time we get AI, we will certainly get there soon after.
The whole "OMG EARTH IS DOOMED" crowd is predictable and still wrong. You don't think that by the time we have increased life expectancy by 5-7x (or more) and have gotten close to "immortality", we'll have also figured out quite a few other things? We're not even close to over-populated, and birth rates are trending down. Past that, I really don't see that we'll be stuck on this planet for very long either, maybe just another couple hundred years.
Very excited for the future.
Totally agree. People have a tendency to not be able to think "4th dimensionally" (as Doc Brown would say). Same thing with peak oil--people in the 1970s assumed the only remaining oil was the oil that had been found and that was extractable with then current technology. I remember a few years ago in college a student frantically presenting peak oil doom.
Future technology will overcome population hurdles. There are 2 or 3 planets/moon in our solar system that could be terraformed. There are cities on the sea that could be built (see China's military bases). And so on and so forth.
Fear would be heightened the more we extend life.
Imagine the fear of a car accident, getting shot, or what ever else could kill you if you knew your life expectancy without an accident was 300 years. You'd never leave the house.
Immortality is impossible in a physical body. Even if you got transplanted into a computer, you would be pretty worried about power outages.
In similar news, anyone follow the crazy theory that this is all a marketing ploy for Konami and its game Metal Gear Solid 5?
Snake, new body, same eye patch.
This may be a dumb question, but if everyone lived to 80-90, how would we adjust to such a top-heavy population distribution? I take it social security would be one of the first programs to go.
The theory is that we would not simply be living longer, we would be much healthier for a longer period of time as well, so productive working age would be extended significantly.
Beyond that, at some point machines will replace most or even all of human labor, so maintaining a high standard of living would be considerably less expensive.
well time is commodity, the more you have, the lesser value it has, so .... enjoy the limited life you have and maximize your experiences
Even if immortality is achieved, ultimately there will be a rebalancing if we suffer from over-population, global warming or whatsoever. Kind of reminded me of Econ101: Equilibrium
Head transplant on a human wtf lol. Just read up on this. Sounds pretty far fetched to me at this point, they tried it on monkeys before and those poor chimps couldn't move and died within days
http://www.cnn.com/2015/04/03/health/italian-neurosurgeon-says-human-he…
I hate coming in here with pessimism and bursting the bubble, but a question I've asked myself is the following: even if I could live forever in my current physical and mental state, why would I want to? The reason being is that life is exhausting, and although there are some awesome moments, it's a tough existence. By having just one finite life, we make the most out of what we are given and try to relish life for what it is since this is all we have. If I were immortal, I would get super bored out of my mind and not appreciate simple things.
Totally agree. Wouldn't want to live forever in the current state. Let's say the average person could save enough money to retire by the time they're, say, 90 years old. Then what? That's a whole helluva lot of golf from age 90 to ~1,000. "But what about volunteer work?" So hundreds of millions of people will be doing volunteer work? Yeah, that happens at churches, too, when there is an over-supply of laborers--they give people menial tasks to perform. Our brains will turn to mush.
I actually am terrified of the prospect of a society that's not challenged, where a ridiculous number of people are wards of the state or wards of their retirement wealth, etc. I see so many issues with the practical implications of very long lives and robotics taking over most human jobs. Even for the people who are the ownership class rather than the welfare class, things will be very boring and very easy.
By the way, this is kind of interesting. Revelations says that after the end times, people who die at 100 will be mourned as mere youths. Science and religion both say it's coming.
I could not agree more. Aside from the philosophical/moral implications, the actual practical implications are immense. I actually think billionaires who spend money to prolong human life are not spending their money wisely.
We might need to unfreeze Ted Williams head Demolition Man style and get him back into the game.
How Would Immortality Change the Way We Live? (Originally Posted: 02/22/2017)
Deleted.
It would lead to massive inter-generational wealth inequality and violence.
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