Is this even possible?

If "I" is immortality divided by the 100th root of 1 million then times it with the number of atoms x has, them naybe x = ???

Possibility: Maybe
Time: Far away in the future

Maybe gene alternation will save us from death. ;)

If "I" is immortality divided by the 100th root of 1 million then times it with the number of atoms x has, them naybe x = ???

Yeah, right, whatever :rolleyes:

Immortality is possible, but not yet

Is this even possible?

If "I" is immortality divided by the 100th root of 1 million then times it with the number of atoms x has, them naybe x = ???

Possibility: Maybe
Time: Far away in the future

Maybe gene alternation will save us from death. ;)

Can you rephrase that in a form that comes close to making sense? :confused:

meh eventually you'll be burned to a crisp or frozen to death as the universe as we know it goes away.

There is a foundation named the Methusala foundatioin dedicated to having clinical immortality possibly within our lifetimes.

I don't think humans will ever achieve 'Immortality' in the classical sense: your self-awareness perpetuated and sentient until the universe expands and cools to absolute zero (or whatever the doomsday-scenario-of-the-month is).

That is not to say that I believe in the existence of a soul, a somewhat energy-less dealie floating around forever :nono:

But I can't imagine that humans would ever achieve the sort of technical alchemy required to mechanistically reproduce all the information in a specific person's brain. And if that doesn't happen, but we figure out some technique that's simliar, I'm not sure it would be the same as immortality.

As for biological immortality, until we manage to harvest the energy and matter resources elsewhere in the solar system, the quest for biological immortality will, perversely, be the last nail in our coffin. We can't sustainably provide for our current level of population intesity. I shudder to think how our energy demands would explode if people stopped dieing! :eek:

I don't think everyone would be immortal if we ever figured out how to do it.

Look at the world today.. not everyone wears designer jeans. Heck, a lot of us don't even have access to food & shelter.

Not everyone could be immortal as it would require machines to replenish cells and what not.

I don't think humans will ever achieve 'Immortality' in the classical sense: your self-awareness perpetuated and sentient until the universe expands and cools to absolute zero (or whatever the doomsday-scenario-of-the-month is).

That takes 10^100 years. That's practical immortality.

That is not to say that I believe in the existence of a soul, a somewhat energy-less dealie floating around forever :nono:

But I can't imagine that humans would ever achieve the sort of technical alchemy required to mechanistically reproduce all the information in a specific person's brain. And if that doesn't happen, but we figure out some technique that's simliar, I'm not sure it would be the same as immortality.

You don't believe in Afterworld?:p

As for biological immortality, until we manage to harvest the energy and matter resources elsewhere in the solar system, the quest for biological immortality will, perversely, be the last nail in our coffin. We can't sustainably provide for our current level of population intesity. I shudder to think how our energy demands would explode if people stopped dieing! :eek:

We should stop breeding then. And accept suicides. Imagine what we'd be. A race of forever-living creatures, who can achieve levels of perfection never witnessed or even realised before. One could read every book, watch every film and hear every song there is, and learn every bit of knoledge:drool:

I would like to live a hell of a lot longer in great physical shape and youth.

If it means my feeble old body being strapped into a machine, I might pass.

Living forever? That would get boring, as the end of the universe may take a long, long bloody long while. And who knows what could happen, we might never manage to any farther off this floating rock than we have.

If we manage to take our soul and store it in a machine we wiìll have immortality
We need only a body(clone?) which in put our soul to sourvive the death

Little bit difficult....

If we manage to take our soul and store it in a machine we wiìll have immortality
We need only a body(clone?) which in put our soul to sourvive the death

Little bit difficult....

Tom Cruise will get right on that..

Yeah, sure, immortality. As if we didn't have enough huge problems with our aging population as is.

Tell me, if we become immortal, how long should we work to get a pension big enough to last us through the end of times?

Yeah, sure, immortality. As if we didn't have enough huge problems with our aging population as is.

Tell me, if we become immortal, how long should we work to get a pension big enough to last us through the end of times?

It's logical we will create the potion of eternal youth to compensate the aging problem

But I can't imagine that humans would ever achieve the sort of technical alchemy required to mechanistically reproduce all the information in a specific person's brain.

The human brain doesn't all that much data, hard drive space equivalent to a human brain would run around $2000. (10TB)

Of course, the human brain doesn't operate via uncompressed binary storage like hard drives, but even the storage space for 100x the capacity of the human brain would "only" cost around $200k, and I imagine good compression algorithms could fit everything into that.

Remember this is immortality not invincibility. Most of us wouldn't make it 2000 years before a freak accident killed us.

Is this even possible?

If "I" is immortality divided by the 100th root of 1 million then times it with the number of atoms x has, them naybe x = ???

Possibility: Maybe
Time: Far away in the future

Maybe gene alternation will save us from death. ;)

Eyes hurt, :cry:

I want to be inmortal some day and float arounds in space and seeing everything dissolve, but then again who doesn't?

Inmortality will never be achieved and I'm very glad it won't. Kids, don't break the cycle of life and death, do not try immortality at home :nono:

I disagree and believe that a limited immortality could be achieved, and rather quickly.

I'm referring death via disease or old age or genetic mutation. We're already very close to recreating our internal organs (aside from the brain), and its these organs whose failure occurs before our brain fails.

So, the first step towards an artificially longer-lifespan is the replacement of our organs with substitutes. We have artificial subsitutes already, and organic ones are at most 2 decades away.

Maybe this takes even longer. Well, that's okay, because we can keep bodies preserved through vitrification now. This process is used for kidney transplant today, and it works without harming tissue. And since we can now keep blood flow to the brain active after the heart stops means that our brain can be maintained.

Nanotechnology is progressing rapidly. It probably isn't that much of a stretch to assume that within 100 years we'll have nanobots in our body. At that point, we'd stop being completely organic beings.

The next hurdle is the transfer of our memories/being/etc. This may be a philosophical one, as it relates to the notion and existence of a soul.

The kicker is this: Cyronics, the ability to stop brain-death via vitrification, is affordable in today's world for anyone who is young, middle-class, and is willing to plan. Most Cyronically preserved folks are middle class.

[Disclosure: I have an account whose expressed purpose is for Cryonic preservation for myself and my wife]

The human brain doesn't all that much data, hard drive space equivalent to a human brain would run around $2000. (10TB)

Of course, the human brain doesn't operate via uncompressed binary storage like hard drives, but even the storage space for 100x the capacity of the human brain would "only" cost around $200k, and I imagine good compression algorithms could fit everything into that.

We could probably store it on a 200gb hard drive, but would we be able to uncompress the data and make sense of it? I doubt it.

We could probably store it on a 200gb hard drive, but would we be able to uncompress the data and make sense of it? I doubt it.

So can i copy and paste my brain?

So can i copy and paste my brain?

Stick it in a Xerox machine and off you go.

I disagree and believe that a limited immortality could be achieved, and rather quickly.

I'm referring death via disease or old age or genetic mutation. We're already very close to recreating our internal organs (aside from the brain), and its these organs whose failure occurs before our brain fails.

So, the first step towards an artificially longer-lifespan is the replacement of our organs with substitutes. We have artificial subsitutes already, and organic ones are at most 2 decades away.

Maybe this takes even longer. Well, that's okay, because we can keep bodies preserved through vitrification now. This process is used for kidney transplant today, and it works without harming tissue. And since we can now keep blood flow to the brain active after the heart stops means that our brain can be maintained.

Nanotechnology is progressing rapidly. It probably isn't that much of a stretch to assume that within 100 years we'll have nanobots in our body. At that point, we'd stop being completely organic beings.

The next hurdle is the transfer of our memories/being/etc. This may be a philosophical one, as it relates to the notion and existence of a soul.

The kicker is this: Cyronics, the ability to stop brain-death via vitrification, is affordable in today's world for anyone who is young, middle-class, and is willing to plan. Most Cyronically preserved folks are middle class.

[Disclosure: I have an account whose expressed purpose is for Cryonic preservation for myself and my wife]

Don't you see any economical hurdles with having limited immortality?
Retirement funds, pensions, length of your worklife, impact of the economy of millions of people getting rich because of 100-year-old savings accounts having accrued a lot of money...

I dunno, to me the sociological/economical aspect of the whole thing seem more important and problematic than the technological ones...

Don't you see any economical hurdles with having limited immortality?
Retirement funds, pensions, length of your worklife, impact of the economy of millions of people getting rich because of 100-year-old savings accounts having accrued a lot of money...

I dunno, to me the sociological/economical aspect of the whole thing seem more important and problematic than the technological ones...

I take it that if people find a way to live forever, it would mean that aging has been cured and retirement is an idea of the past. That would also pretty automatically change the way people spend their money, as the incentive to save it for the pension would be lost.

The biggest problem I see is that if people start living some hundred years, it would be essential that birth rates drop really significantly, for obvious reasons..

I guess there would be a radical solution for that problem: a nanobot-network that controls pregnancy. It would work in a way like: A woman can only become pregnant when she wants that and as long as the worlds population is below X.

Anyway, X must not necessarily be constant. I could imagine technologies that would allow a nice growth like:
-agriculture in space
-virtual life in some kind of matrix-style machine that supports us with energy - could be built nearly anywhere in the solar system
-space exodus with hibernation - some machines travel to a nice planet within 200 years and terraform it. A spaceship carrying about half a billion frozen humen starts at the same time, but arrives after 10000 years
(I never liked the idea of colonizing a planet just because you could ;) )

In order for immortality to be acheivable we would either have to constantly replace body parts or completely redesign the way our cells work, operate and divide, which, is a very long way off. The main factor in "aging" are free-radicals(a waste product of cell energy production, or, perhaps a defect that the whole human race has developed) destroying our gene structure so that when a cell divides it divides "wrong" so to speak, eventually leading to our slow eventual degeneration into death. There are other factors, but essentially it all leads down to stopping things from damaging our gene structures so that they dont replicate "wrong", which, unless we put someone in a bubble, redesign our cells and somehow pretty much keep them on some inhuman diet, then no, immortality is pretty possible. The only other option is just to keep replacing entire parts, but that means replacing, at some point, all the tissues in your body(not at once, just that if you want every peice of you to not age at all, it will need a full healthy newer tissue with no damage to the gene structure, which is the tissues you have at birth pretty much). This wouldnt really stop you from aging, so much as keep you in the constant age that you decided to use tissues from. Meaning you would be a little wierd. Depending on what age you get your tissues "documentted" at, you could be constantly stuck between 20 and 25, with you skin being your 23 year old skin and your bones being your 23 year old bones just aged for two years. These, of the top of my head are the only ways I can really think that immortality would be possible.

Don't you see any economical hurdles with having limited immortality?

I dunno, to me the sociological/economical aspect of the whole thing seem more important and problematic than the technological ones...

Not really. Likely the birthrate would decrease dramatically, but I don't foresee the economic implications since such a trend would be gradual. Looking at how the world has coped with a doubling of life expectancy in the 20th century, seems to have coped allright. Birthrates are way down in developed countries. Standards of living are up.

I take it that if people find a way to live forever, it would mean that aging has been cured and retirement is an idea of the past. That would also pretty automatically change the way people spend their money, as the incentive to save it for the pension would be lost.

The biggest problem I see is that if people start living some hundred years, it would be essential that birth rates drop really significantly, for obvious reasons..

Yup.

I guess there would be a radical solution for that problem: a nanobot-network that controls pregnancy. It would work in a way like: A woman can only become pregnant when she wants that and as long as the worlds population is below X.


I don't see that as an issue. As people become wealthier they tend to have less children. I would expect birth rates to decline a good degree. There would still be death due to accident / war / unforeseen plagues.

@@Harbringer

In order for immortality to be acheivable we would either have to constantly replace body parts or completely redesign the way our cells work, operate and divide, which, is a very long way off.
--Organ transplant is a reality today for many organs. We now have artificial hearts/ lungs, and can transplants hearts/lungs etc. This isn't a long way off. Sure, it buys another say, 20 years of life, but that's a 25% increase in Life Expectancy.

The main factor in "aging" are free-radicals(a waste product of cell energy production, or, perhaps a defect that the whole human race has developed) destroying our gene structure so that when a cell divides it divides "wrong" so to speak, eventually leading to our slow eventual degeneration into death.
--Or probably be easier to retrofit an already existing bacour cells copying their DNA wrongly. We'd need some way to repair this on a nano-level. We've got nanobots already but they're primitive. Pteria.

The only other option is just to keep replacing entire parts, but that means replacing, at some point, all the tissues in your body(not at once, just that if you want every peice of you to not age at all, it will need a full healthy newer tissue with no damage to the gene structure, which is the tissues you have at birth pretty much).
--I believe that these can be grown off of stem cells. Even my genetically inferior 40 year old genes would be good enough...I'd just have to go in every 20 or so years for a tune up , right?

Looking at how the world has coped with a doubling of life expectancy in the 20th century, seems to have coped allright. Birthrates are way down in developed countries. Standards of living are up.

I was under the impression that in developed countries, the whole retirement thing was a timebomb that no one has managed to solve.

I was under the impression that in developed countries, the whole retirement thing was a timebomb that no one has managed to solve.It's a timebomb because all these people are eventually going to get too old to work. So preventing ageing would actually be a solution to this problem.

Maybe gene alternation will save us from death. ;)That would not be enough. We'd have to completely revamp EVERYTHING. Scrap DNA and use something else altogether...

@Jericho Hill
Organ transplants are indeed very possible but its noy your organ your getting, its someone elses, and we would would run out of transplantable organs if everyone was using them to live longer.

The nano bots and the growing stem cells jazz are very possible, but AFAIK we are a very very very long way of from being able to make a nano bot do that, plus, cells are constantly being damaged, the rediculous amounts of work and nano bots you would need would probably just be completely innefective and clutter up the blood stream. I dont really know, I would have to think about this more. As for growing stem cells, I think were talking about the same thing, but I think you just didnt understand that I was talking about using stem cells to replicate your old organs, but again AFAIK, were a pretty far stretch off from "programming" them like that.

But I think really this is all pretty pointless, who the hell wants to live for more than one hundred years?

I Do..................

I Do..................

Actually what Im really interested in is what effects that would have on the brain, such as mental truama and such.

@@Harbringer
Organ transplants are indeed very possible but its noy your organ your getting, its someone elses, and we would would run out of transplantable organs if everyone was using them to live longer.
You're ignoring the stem cell work being done right now, that shows viable cloning of personal organs being at most a decade away.

The nano bots and the growing stem cells jazz are very possible,
Nanobots are the end of the journey, not the start. Seems likely that replacement parts come first, maintenance being more difficult occurs later.

But I think really this is all pretty pointless, who the hell wants to live for more than one hundred years?
Some of us wouldn't mind. I like watching the world evolve.

It's a timebomb because all these people are eventually going to get too old to work. So preventing ageing would actually be a solution to this problem.

Errr.. so instead of working for 40 years, I would work for 120 years?

This kind of immortality would suck.

Not if you like your job, or mebbah we'd all switch jobs from time to time.

What would prevent you from retiring at 65 anyway and living off the interest (of the money you've saved up) ?

What would prevent you from retiring at 65 anyway and living off the interest (of the money you've saved up) ?

Well I think if everybody does that - if everybody ends up richer and getting richer - then we might have an inflation problem.

But people are currently unable to properly save, and rather ask advice on what new sport car to buy in college. :rolleye:

*memorizes date so he can explain to his grandkids that they were saying the same thing 40 years ago, "Just 10-20 more years" "We'll have clinical immortality within our lifetimes [or not...]"*

Might be possible. Maybe NOT in our time, but some scientists some 3-4 years ago discovered a...

IF YOU WANT TO KNOW, REPLY

i'll bite, i want to know.

There is a certain enzyme in the blood called...

Telomerase

It's important because...

Bite again!

Telomerase only adds a repeated sequence to the end of DNA, as during each replication, some is lost. Normal cells can only go through about 50 rounds of replication before they die, because of this. We have stem cells to do that job, which replicate to produce another stem cell and another 'normal' cell, so we can keep on producing new cells.

Telomerase does not stop mutations occuring and it is also highly expressed in cancerous tissue, one reason why they can keep on dividing uncontrollably.

Secondly, telomerase is in cells, not in the blood.

With induced Telomerase, human cells, WITHOUT the help of the stem cells, can undergo UNLIMITED replications considering the fact that telomerase is continuously induced over a period of time.

Not everyone could be immortal as it would require machines to replenish cells and what not.

Not necessarily. Just manipulate the body a bit to make the cells live healthier, longer and replicate as fast as they do when we're in our prime (20's) or perhaps similar to a time when we're growing (possibly late puberty, hopefully without the side affects :lol: ).

Well I think if everybody does that - if everybody ends up richer and getting richer - then we might have an inflation problem.

But people are currently unable to properly save, and rather ask advice on what new sport car to buy in college. :rolleye:

This is about immortality, but I must quibble. You're confusing real net wealth gain with inflation. "Real Wealth" increases are post-inflation, so inflation isnt a concern

Back on subject.

And yeah, thats how i see it happening tank guy

Not necessarily. Just manipulate the body a bit to make the cells live healthier, longer and replicate as fast as they do when we're in our prime (20's) or perhaps similar to a time when we're growing (possibly late puberty, hopefully without the side affects :lol: ).

Regardless that wouldnt make you immortal, just live longer....mayby not even that.

I think better cell replication would make live longer, yes. And I WANT to live longer. Like, a thousand years.

Assuming immortality = not dying, you could cryogenically freeze yourself and cast yourself out into deep space, unable to die for billions of years.

Assuming immortality = not dying, you could cryogenically freeze yourself and cast yourself out into deep space, unable to die for billions of years.

I'm sure that's what everyone means when speaking of immortality...

What we should really be thinking about is being immortal AND Looking young - I'd shudder to think at what someone would look like at 8495 years old.

What we should really be thinking about is being immortal AND Looking young - I'd shudder to think at what someone would look like at 8495 years old.

If we did achieved immortality I am sure we would have gone through the steps of a longer life by actually slowing down the ageing process.

So the 8495 year old could look like a 40 year old or slighty older/younger.

I think anything with infinite on it is not a term to be used with realistic expectations . But i do believe there will be discovered ways (and they certainly exist)to replenish cells ,increase lifetime and slow down cell death. How soon ? Dunno that but we already have some nice bits of knowledge which is nothing compared with what we can have.

Humans (especially males) can already add years to their lifespan, as well as increase vigor and productivity by engaging in hormone replacement therapy starting at about the age of 45-50. (Will depend based on natural hormone levels, some could start earlier and others wouldnt have to until well above 50)
It already has been proven that maintaining high physiological (note - PHYSIOLOGICAL!!) levels of testosterone and somatropin will add years to your life, decrease risk of cancer, improve immune system efficiency and increase well being and libido. As well as maintain higher muscle mass than a male deficient in above hormones.

Unfortunately the anti steroid propaganda spreading false facts and prohibitive cost of such therapy have been a major roadblock so far.

Assuming immortality = not dying, you could cryogenically freeze yourself and cast yourself out into deep space, unable to die for billions of years.


What? :confused: If you freeze yourself, then you're not immortal. Immortality is being very old without dying (or not old, let's say middle aged).
Yeah you will not die, but who knows? Someone might mess in your container and blow it up including you! :lol: