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Immortality

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T

teh_pwn

"Saturated fat causes heart disease as much as Brawndo is what plants crave."
In this thread, sane people will admit to wanting to be immortal, and crazy people that have rationalized mortality through a quarter or half life crisis will insist that ceasing to exist will bring meaning to their life.

Still though, immortality can never really be obtained. Even with aging cured, which will probably happen within our lifetimes (the real question is can the damage be reversed fast enough before we die of age), you will eventually die in an accident or natural disaster.
 
T

teh_pwn

"Saturated fat causes heart disease as much as Brawndo is what plants crave."
madara said:
Cure cancer. Cure centuries old MS. Until then it the equivalent of the flying car. Its great to dream but just dont waste your day away worrying about things you can't control.
Click to expand...

You cannot cure cancer anymore than you can cure aging. You could develop very complex interventions, but cancer is primarily a disorder of everyday bodily function. Very likely caused by modern foods that increase IGF-1 and insulin constantly, which favors cancer cell growth.

http://cebp.aacrjournals.org/content/14/1/195.full.pdf+html
http://www.annals.org/content/122/1/54.full.pdf+html

Aging also increases your odds, as it reduces bodily function in basically every way. If you cure aging and you're permanently a young adult (but with even less signs of aging), your risks of every disease would be way down.
 
S

StuBurns

Banned
de Grey really has done an excellent job of convincing people he isn't completely out of this mind.

I promise anyone who is excited by his mistreatment of mice, you will not live to be a thousand years old.
 
S

Shanadeus

Banned
teh_pwn said:
In this thread, sane people will admit to wanting to be immortal, and crazy people that have rationalized mortality through a quarter or half life crisis will insist that ceasing to exist will bring meaning to their life.

Still though, immortality can never really be obtained. Even with aging cured, which will probably happen within our lifetimes (the real question is can the damage be reversed fast enough before we die of age), you will eventually die in an accident or natural disaster.
Click to expand...
That is certainly a possibility, the longer you live the higher the greater the chance of physical damage to your physically immortal self.

And the sad thing is that even if this could be circumvented we'd still have the inevitable change to your personality that will essentially mean death.
 
T

TheVampire

Banned
dragonballs.jpg
 
MetalAlien

MetalAlien

Banned
It can have perks. Seriously though, extended life is fine but we gotta figure out how to stop uncontrolled births before we can ever worry about living forever. Too many babies!

galactus.jpg
 
D

DeaconKnowledge

Member
Only reason I would ever want this is to engage in multiple long term relationships. Otherwise, immortality would be meaningless. we need the highs and lows.
 
T

TL4E

Member
I think radical mood enrichment that can creatively augment the intensity of our experiences would make the prospect of immortality sound much more exciting.

As an experiment, ask yourself if you want to live forever when you're in a relatively bad (and then good) mood. Most people would agree that if you're feeling good, then you don't want life to end, but if you're feeling like shit you'd be repulsed by the idea of being stuck alive forever.

crazy monkey said:
:lol no you will not achieve it ever , every thing has expiry date
Click to expand...
What about hydra and the immortal jellyfish? They have no technical "expiration date."
 
T

teh_pwn

"Saturated fat causes heart disease as much as Brawndo is what plants crave."
crazy monkey said:
:lol no you will not achieve it ever , every thing has expiry date
Click to expand...

We don't have programmed aging any more than iron is programmed to rust. Just natural selection didn't care to select against inadequate DNA repair and intracellular junk.
 
S

StuBurns

Banned
Natural selection doesn't have a will, those things are not of value in the reproductive sense so they are ignored, it is why we have so many deadly late onset illness, they kick in past the point of reproduction so they don't affect selection.

However if humans were to live healthier longer, their reproductive span would last longer and they could reproduce more, which is a positive in the selective sense.
 
Hari Seldon

Hari Seldon

Member
Immortality for the general masses is impossible until we achieve at least Type I+ or Type II status. There are only finite resources and energy on this planet and it cannot support trillions of people, even if most of those people are in some type of AI somewhere. That is massive amounts of energy that is not possible. Maybe some of the ultra rich can achieve it sooner.
 
C

crazy monkey

Banned
TL4E said:
I think radical mood enrichment that can creatively augment the intensity of our experiences would make the prospect of immortality sound much more exciting.

As an experiment, ask yourself if you want to live forever when you're in a relatively bad (and then good) mood. Most people would agree that if you're feeling good, then you don't want life to end, but if you're feeling like shit you'd be repulsed by the idea of being stuck alive forever.


What about hydra and the immortal jellyfish? They have no technical "expiration date."
Click to expand...


they can die because of illness and disease , will you stay in vacuum tube for not to get ill. They also get eaten by animals, change in weather kills them, how is that immortality?
 
T

Trent Strong

Banned
teh_pwn said:
In this thread, sane people will admit to wanting to be immortal, and crazy people that have rationalized mortality through a quarter or half life crisis will insist that ceasing to exist will bring meaning to their life.

Still though, immortality can never really be obtained. Even with aging cured, which will probably happen within our lifetimes (the real question is can the damage be reversed fast enough before we die of age), you will eventually die in an accident or natural disaster.
Click to expand...

.
 
B

BladeWorker

Member
teh_pwn said:
In this thread, sane people will admit to wanting to be immortal, and crazy people that have rationalized mortality through a quarter or half life crisis will insist that ceasing to exist will bring meaning to their life.

Still though, immortality can never really be obtained. Even with aging cured, which will probably happen within our lifetimes (the real question is can the damage be reversed fast enough before we die of age), you will eventually die in an accident or natural disaster.
Click to expand...
I won't be able to afford to be mortal, so there.
 
LAUGHTREY

LAUGHTREY

Modesty becomes a woman
Until heat death of the universe happens and existence ends. I'd be more afraid of dying after living for billions of years than 60-80.
 
D

djtiesto

is beloved, despite what anyone might say
~Devil Trigger~ said:
i'd go with Immortality, and act like a Watcher
Click to expand...

I'd go with Immortality and act like a Witcher.

immune to disease, so I'd be banging tons of girls and collecting trading cards
 
S

Shanadeus

Banned
LAUGHTREY said:
Until heat death of the universe happens and existence ends. I'd be more afraid of dying after living for billions of years than 60-80.
Click to expand...
That's certainly a possibility, or you'd get tired of living after such a long time period that it'd be easier to die than dying after 60-80 years.
 
S

Szu

Member
After a while, I might start to get a bit cranky. Eventually, I'll be in a perpetual state of anger toward people to get off my lawn!!!!!!!!!!
 
J

JGS

Banned
TekkenMaster said:
Definitely sign me up.

If everyone had it, however, we would have to outlaw having children until we colonize other planets.
Click to expand...
The thing is you can force place people to colonize if they're immortal. Their not going to die anyway. Actually if you're immortal, you could just move to Mars.
 
K

Kai Dracon

Writing a dinosaur space opera symphony
zoukka said:
There are thousands of reasons why anyone can't become immortal, ever. Not counting technology.
Click to expand...

There are thousands of reasons why the human body can't travel faster than natural running speed over the surface of the Earth.

There are thousands of reasons why people cannot talk to one another at distances longer than shouting range.

There are thousands of reasons why men can't fly.

There are thousands of reasons why you can't be doing what you're doing right now: using your fingers to make words that millions of people somehow receive and understand on every corner of the globe - nearly instantly.

Sentience exists to break the universe.
 
S

Shanadeus

Banned
Jean-Pierre Melville said:
At birth man is offered only one choice - the choice of his death. But if this choice is governed by distaste for his own existence, his life will never have been more than meaningless.
Click to expand...

Great words.
 
S

Shanadeus

Banned
b33f said:
Samsara. Only the borrowed body dies. Our mind wanders on and inherits another form of life.
Click to expand...
Isn't that basically reincarnation?
And if you lose your memories then you're essentially losing what make you up, so it'd basically be no different from death.
 
D

dinazimmerman

Incurious Bastard
Kaijima said:
Sentience exists to break the universe.
Click to expand...

No, it doesn't. Human beings are sentient simply because sentience has aided us in our survival. Sentience has no grand cosmological purpose. Human beings have invented lots of cool stuff, but they've never gone beyond what is physically possible.

I think it's fairly obvious that living forever is physically impossible. Even if we've eliminated disease, stopped the aging process, and acquired unlimited resources, it's certain that each one of us will die of an accident one day as long as the probability that each of us will suffer a fatal accident at any given moment never becomes zero during the course of our lives (consider a series of Bernoulli trials, in which the probability of success is always p and the probability of failure is 1-p: the probability that you will experience success in a finite number of trials is 1, even if p=1x10^(-99999)). It doesn't matter how intelligent or technologically advanced we are; I'm positive that we'll never make that probability equal to zero for anybody.
 
S

Shanadeus

Banned
Goya said:
No, it doesn't. Human beings are sentient simply because sentience has aided us in our survival. Sentience has no grand cosmological purpose. Human beings have invented lots of cool stuff, but they've never gone beyond what is physically possible.

I think it's fairly obvious that living forever is physically impossible. Even if we've eliminated all disease, stopped the aging process, and acquired unlimited resources, it's certain that each one of us will die of an accident one day as long as the probability that each of us will suffer a fatal accident at any given moment never becomes zero during the course of your life. It doesn't matter how intelligent or technologically advanced we are; we'll never make that probability equal to zero for anybody.
Click to expand...
With back ups of your mind it doesn't really matter if one instance of you gets destroyed in accidents. And with enough backups the odds of them all simultaneously (as you can easily replicate them all again so long as at least one copy remains) getting destroyed in an accident will be astronomical.
 
D

dinazimmerman

Incurious Bastard
Shanadeus said:
With back ups of your mind it doesn't really matter if one instance of you gets destroyed in accidents. And with enough backups the odds of them all simultaneously (as you can easily replicate them all again so long as at least one copy remains) getting destroyed in an accident will be astronomical.
Click to expand...

If your mind is no longer functioning, you're dead, even if you've made backups.

Also, "astronomical odds" still guarantee that you will die from an accident in a finite amount of time.
 
N

Naked Snake

Member
Goya said:
If your mind is no longer functioning, you're dead, even if you've made backups.
Click to expand...

Your original self dies, but then your backup mind is "brought to life" and lives on. I think arguments like "but it's not really you anymore" are way too egotistic and it's just nitpicking.

Your personality, your memories, your knowlege... basically everything that makes you who you are, are restored and carry on living. So "you" in that case is not dead as far as I'm concerned.
 
T

TurboLibre

Member
Naked Snake said:
Your original self dies, but then your backup mind is "brought to life" and lives on. I think arguments like "but it's not really you anymore" are way too egotistic and it's just nitpicking.

Your personality, your memories, your knowleges... basically everything that makes you who you are, are restored and are able to carry on living. So "you" in that case is not dead as far as I'm concerned.
Click to expand...

Still, your current consciousness would be dead. You're not suddenly going to wake up as one of these backups because you have the same personality or memories. That pretty much makes those backups useless as far as I'm concerned. I want to live on, I don't care if something exactly like me lives on.
 
F

Fusebox

Banned
I'd do it in a sec, there's always so much exciting shit on the horizon I want to see how it pans out.

Don't you want to see what TV's and PC's will look like in 100 years? And at that point, won't you still want to see what TV's and PC's will look like in 100 years past that?

Sign me up!
 
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