How far away are we from man living for eternity?

[Stu Monty]

During the course of this thread I have read some interesting science stuff and produced some interesting mental scenarios involving the pop band Eternal (from the peroid which featured Louise, if you want to know; and I'd expect it's the sort of thing any right minded person would want clarifying).

 

I approve of this thread.

[Guest The Big Green Bastard]

Mmmm biscuits.

 

 

Mmmm piss.

[Lupin]

It wasn't linear, if it was linear the people who thought it was years off would have been correct. It was the exponential growth that people weren't getting onto. People are often wrong about what they think we can't do.

 

Here's a couple of quotes for you:

 

"Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible."

 

Lord Kelvin, British mathematician and physicist, president of the British Royal Society, 1895.

 

"To place a man in a multi-stage rocket and project him into the controlling gravitational field of the moon where the passengers can make scientific observations, perhaps land alive, and then return to earth - all that constitutes a wild dream worthy of Jules Verne. I am bold enough to say that such a man-made voyage will never occur regardless of all future advances."

 

Lee DeForest, American radio pioneer and inventor of the vacuum tube, in 1926

 

And yes i do understand how complex the task is. Just because i think it can be achieved, doesn't mean i think it's easy.

 

But those tasks you mentioned are linear - dependent only on tackling problems in basic lateral physics - namely lift, thrust and gravity - and also all essentially mechanical in nature.

 

The changing of the nature of bio-chemical-organic existence and keeping it together is a whole other set of problems on so many levels it requires a restructuring of life, the means of life, the psychology and the social consequences before you so much as look at the impossible task of persistently maintaining constantly decaying compounds and tissues on a sub-cellular level and the inexact brew therein which creates the indefinable spark that is life.

[stevebaby]

I'd love being immortal. Could travel to the stars, man.

Eventually you would acquire every single morsel of knowledge in the Universe.

Then you'd get bored, and kill yourself.

(Not you personally btw)

[Mel Wood]

Immortality blows.

 

Man, I wish I'd never found that goddamn lamp. Stupid fucking genie. I just had to blurt it out, didn't I? "I wish I were immortal!" Half the time they can't even make you immortal, but Sim Allah Bim of the Seven Winds just snapped his fingers and said "It is done." Damn, was I stoked. I don't even remember what my other two wishes were. Doesn't make a damn bit of difference now.

 

Oh, it was awesome for a while. I was all jumping off buildings and shit, getting shot and electrocuted, eating glass, the whole extreme sports gambit... I did it all. Nothing could kill me! Then all my friends and family started dying. That really sucked for a while. I made new friends, but they died, too. After six or seven times through with that, I figured friends weren't really worth it. I lived like a fucking hermit. Pfft... how long did that last? Two, three thousand years? Four, tops. Yeah, I started talking to people again. Made new friends. They died, too, but I was over it by then.

 

Mankind did some really amazing shit over the next couple hundred million years. That was awesome to see too, at first. I went to all sorts of planets, watched them move stars and build dyson spheres, they even cured themselves of all known disease and started living longer. It was soooo nice to have some friends that didn't just die after a hundred years or so.

 

But then they started evolving. People were turning into pure energy left and right. I couldn't do awesome shit like that, stuck in my immortal body. So I made my way back to Earth to see how they were doing there, but it turned out to be long since abandoned. So I was stranded on this worthless rock I'd seen a million times over with nothing to do. Yeah, the planet had changed quite a bit since I'd last been there, but I still wasn't occupied for more than a million years or so. After that it was boring as hell. I remember once I just sat on the edge of a cliff and waited for whatever continent I was on to drift into another one. Jeez.

 

But it seemed to keep getting hotter. Now, my immortal ass can stand any temperature you could throw at it, but that doesn't mean I wasn't uncomfortable. Shit, it was hotter than two rats fucking in a wool sock. Pretty soon, the oceans were boiling. Now that is a sight to see. I even went swimming in it. Real smart, you fucking genius. I lost track of time, and before I knew it, the oceans were fucking gone and I was sitting at the bottom. Everywhere I went trying to get back up, BAM! continental shelf. Took me a thousand years to find a way back up. The whole thing was desert by that time anyway.

 

Then there was this galaxy that was fucking huge in the sky. It got so big, it took up the whole damn sky. After a while, you couldn't tell its stars from the normal ones. Then all the stars, new and old, started moving around in all these weird patterns. It was some show, let me tell you. Most interesting thing I'd seen in a while. But just as it was getting good, the goddamn sun exploded.

 

Now, the sun exploding itself was an even cooler sight than all those extra stars. It got really damn big. Hotter than hell, but worth it. And then BANG! Fucker started exploding. It kept going off for probably a billion years. It was awesome at first, but, shit... give it enough time and anything is boring. By the time it was done it was like night all the time and the sun wasn't all that much brighter than the other stars in the sky. Not to mention that it was cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey now.

 

So I waited. And waited. I memorized the stars and came up with names for all of them. And I waited. It was so fucking cold, I didn't move around that much. I couldn't even tell you how long it was, cause it was too damn cold to think. Shit, how I waited.

 

But then the damnedest thing happened. There was this huge, deafening roar. The sky was on fire. It started getting hot again. The wind got stronger and stronger until I was flying. Then came the loudest fucking sound I've ever heard in my life, and I found myself flying up and away from the Earth itself. When I finally got far enough away, I figured it out. Must have been an asteroid or something. Big fucker, though, there was a sizeable chunk of planet missing; a lot of it was still glowing red hot.

 

Now let me tell you, I thought it was cold on solid ground with no sun, but that was nothing. Empty space is fucking cold. That and not being able to breath... damn, that was an unpleasant time. I drifted away from what was left of the solar system. After I while I could see the giant cloud of shit left over from when the sun exploded. But then I just kept going. Man, it was a long time. Trillions of years, probably.

 

I landed on planets or even in stars from time to time. If I was on a planet, I was never there more than a billion years or so before another fucking asteroid came and threw me off of it. When I landed in stars (hotter than fuck), I just had to wait until it exploded and sent me off in some other direction. It really sucked.

 

But eventually I drifted out of the galaxy altogether. Of course it was nothing like that big pinwheel they told us it was in junior high. Just a big irregular blob. Just drifting and drifting, still couldn't breath. I passed other galaxies. Even from where I was, I could see stars exploding in the close ones. That was cool for a while. But I guess they were all running out of stars or something, the galaxies kept getting dimmer.

 

About the time the last galaxies were going out, I started to feel like I was going faster. A definite sensation of acceleration. I started spinning around. I don't know around what, but I could tell I was spinning from the few galaxies left out. I started to feel like I was stretching out, too. And then I couldn't see anything at all. Not too long after that I just felt crushed and stopped moving. Just saying that doesn't do it justice. I couldn't even move myself anymore. I felt like someone had crammed me inside a fucking shoebox or something.

 

This went on for a long fucking time. And I just kept feeling smaller and smaller and smaller. When suddenly I was free. Well, I wasn't being crushed anymore. But I still couldn't move and still felt tiny as fuck. And I still couldn't see anything.

 

But that's where it ended. Nothing has happened since then. Nothing. And that was a really fucking long time ago. I've already rethought every thought I ever had a googol times. That's not even an exaggeration, I counted. Yeah, I counted to a googol. That's how long I've been out here.

 

Man, this fucking sucks. Immortality blows.

[Stu Monty]

Quality stuff.

[Thants]

Woah 7 greens. I rep good.

[Liquid football]

But those tasks you mentioned are linear - dependent only on tackling problems in basic lateral physics - namely lift, thrust and gravity - and also all essentially mechanical in nature.

 

The changing of the nature of bio-chemical-organic existence and keeping it together is a whole other set of problems on so many levels it requires a restructuring of life, the means of life, the psychology and the social consequences before you so much as look at the impossible task of persistently maintaining constantly decaying compounds and tissues on a sub-cellular level and the inexact brew therein which creates the indefinable spark that is life.

 

I think we're getting our wires crossed here, i was talking about the exponential growth in processing power. Despite this trend that was obvious to a few "nutters", many were confidently predicting it was going to take a stupidly long time to map the genome.

 

The actual point i made though, was about you being a little one-sided when talking about the people who incorrectly predict that we can do something. All i'm saying is that there are just as many who incorrectly say "no we can't", that's all.

 

The life extension argument basically boils down to: it's very hard. I'm agreeing with you, BUT i think think there's a fairly decent chance that some breakthroughs will be made in my lifetime.

 

We don't need to make people immortal, we need to buy people time, in order to buy them more time and so on. It isn't inconceivable to think that we could manage to slow down the aging process, maybe only very slightly, during the next 50 odd years.

 

You just can't predict the kinds of tools we'll have at our disposal in 25 years time - in 35 years - 50 years. To hold your head up and confidently state what we WON'T be capable of in 50 years is foolish.

[Guest Ulysses Everett McGill]

In the end

 

There can be only one