Zkribbler
Deity
Immorality is a curse unless it is coupled with eternal youth.
Immortality
- Thread starter zazazuzu
- Start date
Immorality is a curse unless it is coupled with eternal youth.
FriendlyFire
Codex WMDicanious
Solving the DNA decay factor will mean reverse aging, as your body will regenerate itself back into youthful state of around 30s and maintain itself in that state.
I'd imagine in the future human will be able to tailor DNA for intelligence, physic, removal of DNA diseases as well
The other way for immortality is cybernetics though research into this is well behind
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H4run
Deity
Yes the feeling of eventually left by someone you love can be somewhat heal with the constant vigor to live; seeking new adventure, gaining new knowledge, learning new language, which all of it can be done if you are physically youth forever.
Perfection
The Great Head.
I'm working on my list of insults just in case I ever become immortal.
There are people that can remember every day of their life.
60 or so found so far: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/feb/08/total-recall-the-people-who-never-forget
Somehow I feel happy that I can easily forget a lot, can filter... can remember better what went well, is really dear to me.
I always try to keep my backpack empty enough to move on with travelling... with engaging in new interests on my way.... but getting older not that much time (and energy) left for many more dreams to pursue
IDK how that all works (for normal forgetting people) if you really get very old.
Besides the bigger effect of "all the time a little bit of dying from fading memories"... will our desire to be socially more hungry... to have unfounded dreams continue ?
60 or so found so far: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/feb/08/total-recall-the-people-who-never-forget
Somehow I feel happy that I can easily forget a lot, can filter... can remember better what went well, is really dear to me.
I always try to keep my backpack empty enough to move on with travelling... with engaging in new interests on my way.... but getting older not that much time (and energy) left for many more dreams to pursue
IDK how that all works (for normal forgetting people) if you really get very old.
Besides the bigger effect of "all the time a little bit of dying from fading memories"... will our desire to be socially more hungry... to have unfounded dreams continue ?
I never saw this movie. Maybe I should remedy that.
Ephemeral: Doesn't last forever. Temporary (even though "temporary" might be a long time by our current standards; a star that lives for billions of years is still ephemeral).
Immortal: Lasts forever. Never dies, at least by natural causes.
There's a Doctor Who story in which a young teenage girl becomes immortal. The Doctor meets her in medieval Scandinavia, makes her immortal to save her life, and when they meet up millennia later (from her point of view), she's still young, still in no danger of dying, but what the Doctor didn't realize is that the human brain only has so much memory capability. Ashildr (her original name) has lived so long that she's even forgotten her own name. She keeps notebooks of the major events in her life, but decides it's pointless to try to remember most things because she'll just forget in a few centuries. So she changes her name to Me. As time goes on for her, she and the Doctor meet one last time, at the end of the universe.
The initial passage of the decades and centuries is shown in a rather poignant way (in my opinion; you can see the time-lapse of the years as the world turns and the constellations revolve around the pole star):
TheMeInTeam
If A implies B...
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It'd be a good thing, don't see how loss of human life/experience has any upside.
We'd be forced into some practical questions though. You'd need some hedge against overpopulation (likely strict regulation on reproduction for anybody immortal), and/or the ability to safely send people to other planets (immortality would make sub light-speed colonization feasible, if you could keep the ships intact and avoid issues with radiation/energy supply).
Regarding "biological immortality" vs "immortality", I'm going to presume this isn't being solved with fantasy universe magic so immortality in our existence is probably "just" biological. As in if you suffer severe trauma, unexpected bad disease, etc you'd still die.
There's also the question of what to do if someone who's lived 500+ years (or arbitrary time amount) wants to stop living. We actually don't know how people would tend to feel after centuries, so that'd be a bridge to cross if we're ever advanced enough for it to matter.
Finally, sooner or later humans would still hit the barrier of the heat death of the universe (assuming we manage to get off earth when the sun goes red giant). From what I've heard universe expansion isn't overcoming gravity at the level of galaxies, so people probably wouldn't die by getting torn apart, but entropy will still catch up eventually.
We'd be forced into some practical questions though. You'd need some hedge against overpopulation (likely strict regulation on reproduction for anybody immortal), and/or the ability to safely send people to other planets (immortality would make sub light-speed colonization feasible, if you could keep the ships intact and avoid issues with radiation/energy supply).
Regarding "biological immortality" vs "immortality", I'm going to presume this isn't being solved with fantasy universe magic so immortality in our existence is probably "just" biological. As in if you suffer severe trauma, unexpected bad disease, etc you'd still die.
There's also the question of what to do if someone who's lived 500+ years (or arbitrary time amount) wants to stop living. We actually don't know how people would tend to feel after centuries, so that'd be a bridge to cross if we're ever advanced enough for it to matter.
Finally, sooner or later humans would still hit the barrier of the heat death of the universe (assuming we manage to get off earth when the sun goes red giant). From what I've heard universe expansion isn't overcoming gravity at the level of galaxies, so people probably wouldn't die by getting torn apart, but entropy will still catch up eventually.
In the Netherlands euthanasia is currently outside the really restricting cultural taboo sphere. Meaning more openly discussions of ordinary people not overwhelmed by ideological positions.
From there: there are older people that do want to stop living for many reasons.
Besides the physical inconveniences... (and IDK but perhaps also the fatigue of physical and mental state)... the tredmill of daily work not there, the daily relation of a marriage gone, not really socially engaged anymore, etc. A kind of fullfillment..
In the Old Testament of the Bible the usual phrase is: "Then ... up the ghost, and died in a good old age, an old man, and full of years; and was gathered to his people"
onejayhawk
Afflicted with reason
At the end of time, one expects the company of immortals.
That's also Dr. Who. It's interesting that the imortal Viking girl is played by Maise Williams, a.k.avArya Stark.
J
That's also Dr. Who. It's interesting that the imortal Viking girl is played by Maise Williams, a.k.avArya Stark.
J
yung.carl.jung
Hey Bird! I'm Morose & Lugubrious
Just as a sort of preface, consider this:
We all know the effects of aging, grey hair, forgetfulness, physical ability, cancer, cells decaying and so on. This is what I call physical ageing.
But there is another form of ageing few people pay attention to. Do you sometimes get this feeling of tiredness when you've seen something "novel" recycled over and over? Do you sometimes look at the innocence and the sort of wonder that children perceive the world with? This is something that fades with age. It's different for everyone, sure, and no human being completely loses his or her curiosity. But at some point, especially with the internet, you will reach a stage where you've seen almost anything (not in a literal sense, new stuff happens all the time). Ideas build on previous ideas that build on previous ideas. At some point many activities feel like a farce. Even me being very young still I grew weary of watching TV, I just cannot do it anymore, it's a tedium. The internet has desenticized me completely. Spend a few hours on r/earthporn and you will never want to look at another picture of beautiful nature ever again. It's not even important whether you've actually observed the phenomenon before, but you definitely feel like "I've seen this before". This process I am describing is kind of similiar to ageing, except it happens almost entirely seperate from the actual ageing process. You could call it weariness, but really it feels more like a spell fading off. As things reveal themselves to you, as you grasp the underlying mechanisms of life, death and human interaction, your view of the world changes. Permanently. Irreversibly.
This distinction is absolutely fundamental to the discussion at hand so I'll share my opinion. We are dealing with three seperate, but related phenomena here:
1 Biological immortality aka bio-indefinite mortality: a state in which the rate of mortality from senescence is stable or decreasing, thus decoupling it from chronological age. Various unicellular and multicellular species, including some vertebrates, achieve this state either throughout their existence or after living long enough. A biologically immortal living being can still die from means other than senescence, such as through injury or disease.
This is not, in my eyes, immortality as it's used in everyday language, it is essentially an immunity to aging if you want to negate its definition.
2 Immortality. Qua definitionem immortalit means undying, unable to die. However that is, imho, not a good definition as it comes with lots of baggage and philosophical problems (like the one of a neverending cosciousness.. how can a cosciousness emerge, but then never fade? or the problem of defining "being alive" when we barely even know the philosophical implications of both physical death and the "death" of consciousness.) So, in order to have more usable and meaningful definitions I propose the following definition that seperates immortality from mere biological immortality: The state of immortality is achieved when a body is completely exempt from physical death, i.e. braindead. This way we avoid the problem of consciousness and transition to the third state..
3 Invulnerability. Invulnerability makes no assertion on being able to die or not, rather it deals (mostly) with the sphere of force. A person that is immortal may still be hurt, disfigured, and is subject to all kinds of forces. An invulnerable person might still die, be locked in place and age, but not bleed, catch a cold, or split in two. The combination of Invulnerability and Immortality would form a transcendent being that, imho, is not a human anymore, as pain, ageing, death and basic physical needs are an essential part of the human condition (much like how an AI wouldn't be intelligent in the same way humans would, or only to the degree that our human-ness is ingrained in it, because an AI doesn't have the same kind of empiricist, embodyment experience we have.)
So, to engage your OP:
I think it is probable that humanity will reach a state of biological immortality at some point, maybe in our lifetime. I don't see this as a good thing at all, because I value death for a couple of reasons:
a) Death is the great egalitarian utopia. We're all united in that we have to die, even the richest, most powerful humans.
b) This infuses a certain respect towards human life that simply would not be present otherwise, it makes us value our health, our time, our being alive.
c) Death is the number one tool of societal change. Without death society would change slowly, it would crust up, the people in power have an easier time staying in power. That's always a bad thing in my eyes.
d) The intergenerational contract instantly breaks down the moment we discover biological immortality. The implications for our brand of 21st century turbocapitalism are scary.
e) Generally speaking those that come later are screwed. This is even the case today with both milennials and zoomers having to deal with climate change, impossible housing prices, water pollution, debts and so on.
f) But we will run into problems we never had before. Ressources on earth are extremely limited, especially living space vs nature, clean water, energy, clothing and food, education..
g) As many people have stated before, biological immortality, as with all technologies, will at the beginning only be available to a select caste of incredibly wealthy people. They will make use of it to accrue even more advantages, they might purposefully keep the technology expensive for their own gain, there's infinite scenarios. It's one thing to send your kid to an expensive college, it's another one to make your kid a literal god on earth.
h) As horrible as this sounds, from a capitalist perspective the value of a human life (both as an object and as a potential member of the workforce) shrinks when there are more human beings around. The freeest of all free markets shows this pretty concincingly: The dark web, where you could, for a few hundred bucks, buy either a professional assassin or a literal slave.
i) Human life always includes suffering (it should!), therefore we can safely conclude that immortality would mean infinite suffering. You could argue it also means infinite happiness, but imho that is wrong. Happiness is very situational (a banker losing 5 million of his 6 million savings account and jumping out a window vs a factory worker that wins the lottery for 250k. It means the world for both.) What I am saying is that happiness always adjusts to your current circumstances until it's no longer happiness, but being content, and then it goes from being content to being normal, and after some time normal can feel like a drudge. Suffering doesn't work the same way. Don't ask me how it works.
Luckily we may never reach either immortality nor invulnerability, and frankly there is no need to. With modern surgical practices we might aswell be. We aren't untouchable, but whatever happens to us, someone can fix you up.
They are, according to Wiki. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_immortality How long someone actually lives is irrelevant to biological immortality.
But, of course, I am no marine biologist and the lobster was just an example. there is a species of jellyfish that apparently forms multiple monads into one organism that can disband or form at will and it doesn't age. The point was there is a difference between not ageing and not being able to die.
some people develop grumpy-old-manism in their early 30s bro. I don't think it can be cured. It's like 19th century priests thinking they can "cure the gay" with electro shocks. those things are beyond our measures. we can only "cure" them so to speak by developing as a society.
We all know the effects of aging, grey hair, forgetfulness, physical ability, cancer, cells decaying and so on. This is what I call physical ageing.
But there is another form of ageing few people pay attention to. Do you sometimes get this feeling of tiredness when you've seen something "novel" recycled over and over? Do you sometimes look at the innocence and the sort of wonder that children perceive the world with? This is something that fades with age. It's different for everyone, sure, and no human being completely loses his or her curiosity. But at some point, especially with the internet, you will reach a stage where you've seen almost anything (not in a literal sense, new stuff happens all the time). Ideas build on previous ideas that build on previous ideas. At some point many activities feel like a farce. Even me being very young still I grew weary of watching TV, I just cannot do it anymore, it's a tedium. The internet has desenticized me completely. Spend a few hours on r/earthporn and you will never want to look at another picture of beautiful nature ever again. It's not even important whether you've actually observed the phenomenon before, but you definitely feel like "I've seen this before". This process I am describing is kind of similiar to ageing, except it happens almost entirely seperate from the actual ageing process. You could call it weariness, but really it feels more like a spell fading off. As things reveal themselves to you, as you grasp the underlying mechanisms of life, death and human interaction, your view of the world changes. Permanently. Irreversibly.
Are you implying that there are different sorts of immortality? 'They' aren't the same? Huh?
They've managed to survive for around 500 million years? Lol.
Again, you're seeming to indicate that there are two different types of immortality. Since you're the proponent of this radical new theory, could you flesh it out and explain it more?
At last we're in agreement. Immortality would be Hell on Earth, as far as I'm concerned.
Lol. The topic has been discussed since primates fell out of the trees, stood upright, looked up and noticed the sky.
This distinction is absolutely fundamental to the discussion at hand so I'll share my opinion. We are dealing with three seperate, but related phenomena here:
1 Biological immortality aka bio-indefinite mortality: a state in which the rate of mortality from senescence is stable or decreasing, thus decoupling it from chronological age. Various unicellular and multicellular species, including some vertebrates, achieve this state either throughout their existence or after living long enough. A biologically immortal living being can still die from means other than senescence, such as through injury or disease.
This is not, in my eyes, immortality as it's used in everyday language, it is essentially an immunity to aging if you want to negate its definition.
2 Immortality. Qua definitionem immortalit means undying, unable to die. However that is, imho, not a good definition as it comes with lots of baggage and philosophical problems (like the one of a neverending cosciousness.. how can a cosciousness emerge, but then never fade? or the problem of defining "being alive" when we barely even know the philosophical implications of both physical death and the "death" of consciousness.) So, in order to have more usable and meaningful definitions I propose the following definition that seperates immortality from mere biological immortality: The state of immortality is achieved when a body is completely exempt from physical death, i.e. braindead. This way we avoid the problem of consciousness and transition to the third state..
3 Invulnerability. Invulnerability makes no assertion on being able to die or not, rather it deals (mostly) with the sphere of force. A person that is immortal may still be hurt, disfigured, and is subject to all kinds of forces. An invulnerable person might still die, be locked in place and age, but not bleed, catch a cold, or split in two. The combination of Invulnerability and Immortality would form a transcendent being that, imho, is not a human anymore, as pain, ageing, death and basic physical needs are an essential part of the human condition (much like how an AI wouldn't be intelligent in the same way humans would, or only to the degree that our human-ness is ingrained in it, because an AI doesn't have the same kind of empiricist, embodyment experience we have.)
So, to engage your OP:
I think it is probable that humanity will reach a state of biological immortality at some point, maybe in our lifetime. I don't see this as a good thing at all, because I value death for a couple of reasons:
a) Death is the great egalitarian utopia. We're all united in that we have to die, even the richest, most powerful humans.
b) This infuses a certain respect towards human life that simply would not be present otherwise, it makes us value our health, our time, our being alive.
c) Death is the number one tool of societal change. Without death society would change slowly, it would crust up, the people in power have an easier time staying in power. That's always a bad thing in my eyes.
d) The intergenerational contract instantly breaks down the moment we discover biological immortality. The implications for our brand of 21st century turbocapitalism are scary.
e) Generally speaking those that come later are screwed. This is even the case today with both milennials and zoomers having to deal with climate change, impossible housing prices, water pollution, debts and so on.
f) But we will run into problems we never had before. Ressources on earth are extremely limited, especially living space vs nature, clean water, energy, clothing and food, education..
g) As many people have stated before, biological immortality, as with all technologies, will at the beginning only be available to a select caste of incredibly wealthy people. They will make use of it to accrue even more advantages, they might purposefully keep the technology expensive for their own gain, there's infinite scenarios. It's one thing to send your kid to an expensive college, it's another one to make your kid a literal god on earth.
h) As horrible as this sounds, from a capitalist perspective the value of a human life (both as an object and as a potential member of the workforce) shrinks when there are more human beings around. The freeest of all free markets shows this pretty concincingly: The dark web, where you could, for a few hundred bucks, buy either a professional assassin or a literal slave.
i) Human life always includes suffering (it should!), therefore we can safely conclude that immortality would mean infinite suffering. You could argue it also means infinite happiness, but imho that is wrong. Happiness is very situational (a banker losing 5 million of his 6 million savings account and jumping out a window vs a factory worker that wins the lottery for 250k. It means the world for both.) What I am saying is that happiness always adjusts to your current circumstances until it's no longer happiness, but being content, and then it goes from being content to being normal, and after some time normal can feel like a drudge. Suffering doesn't work the same way. Don't ask me how it works.
Luckily we may never reach either immortality nor invulnerability, and frankly there is no need to. With modern surgical practices we might aswell be. We aren't untouchable, but whatever happens to us, someone can fix you up.
They are, according to Wiki. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_immortality How long someone actually lives is irrelevant to biological immortality.
But, of course, I am no marine biologist and the lobster was just an example. there is a species of jellyfish that apparently forms multiple monads into one organism that can disband or form at will and it doesn't age. The point was there is a difference between not ageing and not being able to die.
some people develop grumpy-old-manism in their early 30s bro. I don't think it can be cured. It's like 19th century priests thinking they can "cure the gay" with electro shocks. those things are beyond our measures. we can only "cure" them so to speak by developing as a society.
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Lexicus
Deity
Yep, I found it funny that that article Kyriakos posted made no mention of telomerase. Lobsters basically don't experience senescence BUT they have to shed their skins and grow new ones periodically, and eventually the energy cost of this becomes so great that they die by exhaustion during a moulting, or they fail to moult and are basically suffocated inside their shells (or the shell becomes infected and they die that way).
Kind of nightmare fuel tbh. IMO it's certain that lobsters made some kind of deal with the devil at some point: immortality....with a catch.
yung.carl.jung
Hey Bird! I'm Morose & Lugubrious
Honestly this is one of the most interesting posts I've read all year. Lobster are fascinating (and so are you, Lex 
).
).
Lexicus
Deity
Honestly this is one of the most interesting posts I've read all year. Lobster are fascinating (and so are you, Lex
I read about lobsters and telomerase a while ago, I can't remember where (might actually have been in a Facebook post about Jordan Peterson, the wannabe lobster man).
I don't understand it fully but telomerase is some kind of protein that tells our cells to keep dividing. For some reason most organisms stop producing it after a certain period and its absence is linked with senescence (and it is tied to cancer as well, cancers seem to produce telomerase when and where it normally wouldn't be produced IIRC).
I assure you, I'm not that fascinating and don't actually know anything, I just badly parrot what I read on the internet
Lexicus
Deity
BTW: regarding your arguments, I mostly agree with you. OTOH I have never seen any convincing answer to the argument-by-analogy that aging is no different from any other cause of death that we today would regard as "primitive" in some sense: I think of my own exasperation with anti-vaxxers, for example, and imagine other people being exasperated at my anti-anti-aging position and I can't really tell the difference between them.
Ferocitus
Deity
It's reported that they can.
Exactly how does a person remember things before they have language?
Who is checking that the claim is correct? The researchers cannot know if it's a correct claim or not.
Pathetic, unscientific claptrap that's typical of so many psychological studies.
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There are things I used to be excited about that no longer excite me. For instance, Star Trek. When I go to TrekBBS, I rarely talk about Star Trek anymore, unless it's a favorite topic or character or some argument comes up that I'm invested in. People are soooo excited by DiscoTrek, and what a "novel" thing it was to give Spock an adopted human sister. Well, sorry, folks, it doesn't make me do anything but yawn. Fanfic writers gave Spock an adopted human sister 50 years ago, in several different series of stories. Been there, done that, I'll read the fanfic versions, thank you. They're more true to TOS than this poorly-written, badly-acted mess on TV.
One thing I've found to be important is to not let anyone tell me to give something up because it's "childish." I've done that a few times and regretted it. So now I collect stuffed animals, indulge in coloring books, and haven't sold my juvenile mystery books (well, I did sell some of them, but kept my favorites). What people like is what they like, and as long as it's not illegal or harmful, go for it. Back when I was in high school one of the neighbor kids would come over and ask me to go to the playground "to play Smurfs." We'd build little Smurf houses, roads, and have a great time. And I didn't consider myself too old to play "Drop It/Got It" on the merry-go-round (those have been removed from playgrounds here now, because they're "too dangerous").
Part of this lack of enthusiasm for new things is because we have the beginnings of a Star Trek-style library computer/holodeck at our fingertips. Even in the '90s, if I wanted a new book, I'd have to go to a real bookstore or a real library, rather than a fanfic site or Amazon. Fanfic had to be expensively ordered via snailmail, using a money order, rather than eBay and PayPal.
We had to wait for stuff back then. Now you can get whole seasons of TV shows, whole series of movies, just at the click of a mouse. Not that this is a bad thing, but it means that the current generation has no idea what it was like to not have this.
They are also delicious. Clearly the ones that end up on dinner plates aren't immortal.
caketastydelish
Deity
- Joined
- Apr 12, 2008
- Messages
- 9,722
I’m on my phone where replying/formatting is hard but the OP said on the first page that humans “will achieve immortality in the very near future.”
I’m pretty skeptical of this. First, I don’t think we are that close to curing aging (though I could be wrong).
Secondly, and more importantly, there’s plenty of ways a person can die that don’t involve aging. At some point, it is imminent.
As to when/if we reach that point? As long as 1) people who stop aging don’t have children to prevent overpopulation and 2) People can kill themselves whenever they’ve lived so long they got bored, then there shouldn’t be a problem.
I’m pretty skeptical of this. First, I don’t think we are that close to curing aging (though I could be wrong).
Secondly, and more importantly, there’s plenty of ways a person can die that don’t involve aging. At some point, it is imminent.
As to when/if we reach that point? As long as 1) people who stop aging don’t have children to prevent overpopulation and 2) People can kill themselves whenever they’ve lived so long they got bored, then there shouldn’t be a problem.
Ferocitus
Deity
The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics prohibits the "immortality" of an organised system.
Next!
Next!
I don't know about lobsters, but one would expect (far) simpler organisms to be "immortal", cause they don't have that many organs to regenerate anyway. Maybe something as simple as a type of worm, or a clam like the one in the link 
Not that worms are likely to survive in the wild; iirc they are the main food of a vast category of predators.
Re human ageing, apart from biological factors psychology plays a role too. Living for 1000 years would be tougher, i think, even assuming you can not actually age much. Ferocitus' point about being familiar with the state of things in the world is very good; can you even imagine children not suffering from depression if they guess how things are from a very early age?
Not that worms are likely to survive in the wild; iirc they are the main food of a vast category of predators.
Re human ageing, apart from biological factors psychology plays a role too. Living for 1000 years would be tougher, i think, even assuming you can not actually age much. Ferocitus' point about being familiar with the state of things in the world is very good; can you even imagine children not suffering from depression if they guess how things are from a very early age?
