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It's not the lack of cryo arrangements that's the problem. (I've considered cryo myself, but I'm not impressed with the likelyhood of success. Too many fractu

It's not the lack of cryo arrangements that's the problem. (I've considered cryo myself, but I'm not impressed with the likelyhood of success. Too many fracturing events, not to mention the likely extreme costs of recovery post-freezer. But if you're looking for more life, it's your only potential option.) The problem is that we haven't been focusing enough on the real issue: Death. Finding ways to extend human life indefinitely should be our generation's "Space Race." Our Apollo Program. Want to create jobs? Help us find the cure. Instead we obsess over petty things. (And I'm as guilty as the rest.) But regardless, there is one truth we all have to face: We will one day die. Even should you beat the biological death, should you somehow survive the backlash of fellow humans who reject your bid for immortality, you will still fail. Because one day the Universe will either run out of energy or contract back upon itself, at which point you will either starve or be crushed. You have a few billion years to find an answer for that.

davidu 15y ago
I hadn't considered my greatest fear, but now I recognize it: Finding ways to extend human life indefinitely should be our generation's "Space Race." We already suffer from over-population and pollution. Death is a key piece of the demographic shift, and just about every other anthropological process related to the change and evolution of culture and society. Living longer would not increase our society's capability or capacity, it would almost assuredly decrease it, not to mention life would be exceptionally crowded, everywhere.
- cydonian_monk 15y ago
  I never said it would be easy. Life changes. Human life before the Industrial Revolution was considerably different than now. Birth rates would have to fall. We would have to find ways to support more of us on fewer resources. Major sacrifices and changes in lifestyle would be absolutely required. Our species as it is now would likely not survive such a transition. But, as Carl Sagan said: "It will not be we who reach Alpha Centauri and the other nearby stars. It will be a species very like us, but with more of our strengths and fewer of our weaknesses."
- lsparrish 15y ago
  We already have a solution to overpopulation: birth control. Longer lived people have more memories and skills, so of course our capacity would increase -- if not counteracted by neurological senescence. The trick is to regenerate the person to a youthful state, where they can be productive and creative yet retain their knowledge and skills. I don't expect it to be easy, but people in cryostasis can afford to wait a while.
- monkeypizza 15y ago
  >Living longer would not increase our society's capability or capacity, it would almost assuredly decrease it, not to mention life would be exceptionally crowded, everywhere. I think it would improve our capacity. Look at how much investment is put into someone before they can productively give back to the economy - kids take years of being raised, teacher's time, plus years of experience before they start paying their own way. I think life extension would spread that capital cost out over a much longer productive life - right now say years 1-20 you are a resource drain, and the same for years 65-90. So you are producing stuff for society just half of your life (yet, this is enough for a surplus - the quality of goods output today in the world is continuously increasing) If we double lifespan it would double the productive years, so each life would be MUCH more productive. That's not even including the fact that the second (doubled) productive section could take advantage of the first section's experience. So if we doubled each individual's productive lifetime, (by increasing total lifespan by just 50%) it would most likely more than double their total output. Imagine how valuable someone who had 40 years of experience, plus a 20 year old's fast mind would be? [note that by productivity I mean the amount of human / natural resources a person takes up; kids take up parents & teacher's time, older people take up highly trained doctor's time. People who are "productive" are generating more valuable services than they're taking up. So, people spending longer within that middle section would make them even more of a gain for the world]
- xmmm 15y ago
  I fail to understand how overpopulation or any other negative consequence of eternal life can be worse than death. Death is final. Other things we can deal with.
- jcfrei 15y ago
  birth rates in all modern western countries are declining, in a few to the point where reproduction is not guaranteed (eg. fewer than two children per couple). I believe this trend will likely continue to the point where we don't reproduce and instead (hopefully) cease to die.
veyron 15y ago
Why is death a bad thing? Not in the "I want everyone to die" sense, but I personally find my mortality a motivating force (to get things done quickly and avoid procrastination :)
- jpulgarin 15y ago
  Bad things can have good externalities. I, for one, value the productivity increasing side-effects of my mortality much less than the fact that it means I will die.
ams6110 15y ago
If we find (an affordable) way to extend human life indefinitely, then at some point individuals are going to be faced with the choice of voluntarily "stepping aside" (or whatever polite term we might come up with) or stop having children. I don't think either would be in most people's nature, which doesn't seem to lead to any pleasant consequences I can think of.
- AngryParsley 15y ago
  The question is not "if" but "when." Biotech and medicine are only getting better. At some point we'll be able to reverse aging, then we'll have to deal with the consequences. To prevent overpopulation, people can either have kids or live incredibly long lives. Not both. I bet once indefinite life extension becomes feasible, something along these lines will happen: Everyone who had serious philosophical conundra on that subject just, you know, died, a generation before. The Bitchun Society didn't need to convert its detractors, just outlive them. (from Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, by Cory Doctorow)
  - georgieporgie 15y ago
    To prevent overpopulation, people can either have kids or live incredibly long lives. Not both. Space travel would alleviate that restriction.
    - AngryParsley 15y ago
      True, but we'd hit that limit too. Space travel would allow cubic growth at best (expanding at c in all directions). Populations typically grow exponentially.
- xiaoma 15y ago
  Actually, everyone could still have one child each. Each successive generation would be 1/2 the size of the previous and the population would approach a limit of approximately two times what it currently is since 1 + 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8... = 2.
abhaga 15y ago
On the contrary, given the serious lack of natural resources facing us on mother earth, our space race should be - "the space race". We might have just enough time to figure out how to start living on Moon or may be Mars before we collapse into self destructive fighting for natural resources.
- javert 15y ago
  Actually, the natural resources are mostly extremely abundant. Plus, industrialized nations lose population (birth rate < death rate). So industrializing the whole world as quickly as possible is probably a good way to stabilize the total global population.
fl3tch 15y ago
By "death", I assume you mean senescence: the natural biomolecular attrition that inexorably leads to organismal death absent of outside causes. It is true that turtles can live for almost 200 years and some plants can live for thousands of years. If we are essentially, biochemically the same, we could in theory overcome our biochemical "bugs" to achieve negligible senescence. So, we'd live forever. Unfortunately, that's a hard problem because we didn't design the system -- unlike computers and programing languages -- and we're trying to reverse engineer an insanely complex system created by the massively parallel process of natural selection acting on random mutation. And we're hampered by things like IACUC. Computational capacity may double every 2 years, but a mouse still has a generation time of 3 months, just like it did a million years ago. That's why biomedical progress (frustratingly) doesn't progress at Moore's Law, and you can't just throw money or engineering talent at the problem. So yeah, focus on "death" as a biochemical problem, but "focusing on death" won't solve the problem at the same pace as focusing your engineering talent on a human engineering problem. The natural sciences are much more stochastic, and there's no clear path to immortality.
- usaar333 15y ago
  Continuing on this point, it might be a hell of a lot easier to create an artificial brain (or at least AI as clever as a human) than reverse engineer a biological system "designed" to expire.
  - fl3tch 15y ago
    I see we're reading from the same playbook. It would be cleaner to abandon biology, but how do you design something smarter than yourself? Is it easier? Nobody has a clue since we've never purposefully created human intelligence or AGI. (Our replicators have, but they're responsible for this mess in the first place)
  - cydonian_monk 15y ago
    I agree, and I think a convergence of the two would be even easier - some way to replace an active biological brain (neuron by neuron) with one synthetic. Similar to artificial hearts, etc. Maybe it starts as treatment for strokes or similar brain damage, to work around the irreparable portions of the brain. As long as each neuron behaves and is networked identically to the one replaced (which might require some guesswork in cases of severe damage), it should result in an identical system. So why create a synthetic if you can convert an organic? Probably more likely than us creating a 'real' A.I. anyway.
usaar333 15y ago
I agree biological immortality is a lofty goal, but it is orders of magnitude harder than space race. At least with getting people into space, the basic techniques (launch rocket, orbit earth) and constraints were figured out. Devil was in the endless details. Humans still barely understand how aging works, much less how to theoretically stop it. Sure there's hypotheses here and there, but no unified description or strategy to stop the process.
- cydonian_monk 15y ago
  The one thing we understand the least is us. Sounds like endless potential for research opportunities. A real challenge. Maybe the project doesn't result in effective immortality. But the space race didn't result in only getting to orbit or only landing men on the Moon. The side benefits would be as beneficial as the final goal.
- jcfrei 15y ago
  I disagree. While we could figure out how to travel to the moon in a very short time (think 60 years from the wright brothers till neil armstrong), anything beyond mars might well be far beyond our capabilities. this is much due to the fact that any chemical reaction based propulsion is so inefficient, that travelling beyond mars would be extremly costly and consume a large part of our earthly resources. If we would promote nuclear reaction based propulsion devices I might get hope again - but those are politically difficult to promote (because of very reasonable concerns about their dangers). nonetheless I'm pretty optimistic about the possibilities of genetic reengineering. a lot of that research is really constrained by those ancient (aristotelean) laws concerning stem cell research.

davidu 15y ago

I hadn't considered my greatest fear, but now I recognize it: Finding ways to extend human life indefinitely should be our generation's "Space Race." We already suffer from over-population and pollution. Death is a key piece of the demographic shift, and just about every other anthropological process related to the change and evolution of culture and society. Living longer would not increase our society's capability or capacity, it would almost assuredly decrease it, not to mention life would be exceptionally crowded, everywhere.

cydonian_monk 15y ago
I never said it would be easy. Life changes. Human life before the Industrial Revolution was considerably different than now. Birth rates would have to fall. We would have to find ways to support more of us on fewer resources. Major sacrifices and changes in lifestyle would be absolutely required. Our species as it is now would likely not survive such a transition. But, as Carl Sagan said: "It will not be we who reach Alpha Centauri and the other nearby stars. It will be a species very like us, but with more of our strengths and fewer of our weaknesses."
lsparrish 15y ago
We already have a solution to overpopulation: birth control. Longer lived people have more memories and skills, so of course our capacity would increase -- if not counteracted by neurological senescence. The trick is to regenerate the person to a youthful state, where they can be productive and creative yet retain their knowledge and skills. I don't expect it to be easy, but people in cryostasis can afford to wait a while.
monkeypizza 15y ago
>Living longer would not increase our society's capability or capacity, it would almost assuredly decrease it, not to mention life would be exceptionally crowded, everywhere. I think it would improve our capacity. Look at how much investment is put into someone before they can productively give back to the economy - kids take years of being raised, teacher's time, plus years of experience before they start paying their own way. I think life extension would spread that capital cost out over a much longer productive life - right now say years 1-20 you are a resource drain, and the same for years 65-90. So you are producing stuff for society just half of your life (yet, this is enough for a surplus - the quality of goods output today in the world is continuously increasing) If we double lifespan it would double the productive years, so each life would be MUCH more productive. That's not even including the fact that the second (doubled) productive section could take advantage of the first section's experience. So if we doubled each individual's productive lifetime, (by increasing total lifespan by just 50%) it would most likely more than double their total output. Imagine how valuable someone who had 40 years of experience, plus a 20 year old's fast mind would be? [note that by productivity I mean the amount of human / natural resources a person takes up; kids take up parents & teacher's time, older people take up highly trained doctor's time. People who are "productive" are generating more valuable services than they're taking up. So, people spending longer within that middle section would make them even more of a gain for the world]
xmmm 15y ago
I fail to understand how overpopulation or any other negative consequence of eternal life can be worse than death. Death is final. Other things we can deal with.
jcfrei 15y ago
birth rates in all modern western countries are declining, in a few to the point where reproduction is not guaranteed (eg. fewer than two children per couple). I believe this trend will likely continue to the point where we don't reproduce and instead (hopefully) cease to die.

veyron 15y ago

Why is death a bad thing? Not in the "I want everyone to die" sense, but I personally find my mortality a motivating force (to get things done quickly and avoid procrastination :)

jpulgarin 15y ago
Bad things can have good externalities. I, for one, value the productivity increasing side-effects of my mortality much less than the fact that it means I will die.

ams6110 15y ago

If we find (an affordable) way to extend human life indefinitely, then at some point individuals are going to be faced with the choice of voluntarily "stepping aside" (or whatever polite term we might come up with) or stop having children. I don't think either would be in most people's nature, which doesn't seem to lead to any pleasant consequences I can think of.

AngryParsley 15y ago
The question is not "if" but "when." Biotech and medicine are only getting better. At some point we'll be able to reverse aging, then we'll have to deal with the consequences. To prevent overpopulation, people can either have kids or live incredibly long lives. Not both. I bet once indefinite life extension becomes feasible, something along these lines will happen: Everyone who had serious philosophical conundra on that subject just, you know, died, a generation before. The Bitchun Society didn't need to convert its detractors, just outlive them. (from Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, by Cory Doctorow)
- georgieporgie 15y ago
  To prevent overpopulation, people can either have kids or live incredibly long lives. Not both. Space travel would alleviate that restriction.
  - AngryParsley 15y ago
    True, but we'd hit that limit too. Space travel would allow cubic growth at best (expanding at c in all directions). Populations typically grow exponentially.
xiaoma 15y ago
Actually, everyone could still have one child each. Each successive generation would be 1/2 the size of the previous and the population would approach a limit of approximately two times what it currently is since 1 + 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8... = 2.

abhaga 15y ago

On the contrary, given the serious lack of natural resources facing us on mother earth, our space race should be - "the space race". We might have just enough time to figure out how to start living on Moon or may be Mars before we collapse into self destructive fighting for natural resources.

javert 15y ago
Actually, the natural resources are mostly extremely abundant. Plus, industrialized nations lose population (birth rate < death rate). So industrializing the whole world as quickly as possible is probably a good way to stabilize the total global population.

fl3tch 15y ago

By "death", I assume you mean senescence: the natural biomolecular attrition that inexorably leads to organismal death absent of outside causes. It is true that turtles can live for almost 200 years and some plants can live for thousands of years. If we are essentially, biochemically the same, we could in theory overcome our biochemical "bugs" to achieve negligible senescence. So, we'd live forever. Unfortunately, that's a hard problem because we didn't design the system -- unlike computers and programing languages -- and we're trying to reverse engineer an insanely complex system created by the massively parallel process of natural selection acting on random mutation. And we're hampered by things like IACUC. Computational capacity may double every 2 years, but a mouse still has a generation time of 3 months, just like it did a million years ago. That's why biomedical progress (frustratingly) doesn't progress at Moore's Law, and you can't just throw money or engineering talent at the problem. So yeah, focus on "death" as a biochemical problem, but "focusing on death" won't solve the problem at the same pace as focusing your engineering talent on a human engineering problem. The natural sciences are much more stochastic, and there's no clear path to immortality.

usaar333 15y ago
Continuing on this point, it might be a hell of a lot easier to create an artificial brain (or at least AI as clever as a human) than reverse engineer a biological system "designed" to expire.
- fl3tch 15y ago
  I see we're reading from the same playbook. It would be cleaner to abandon biology, but how do you design something smarter than yourself? Is it easier? Nobody has a clue since we've never purposefully created human intelligence or AGI. (Our replicators have, but they're responsible for this mess in the first place)
- cydonian_monk 15y ago
  I agree, and I think a convergence of the two would be even easier - some way to replace an active biological brain (neuron by neuron) with one synthetic. Similar to artificial hearts, etc. Maybe it starts as treatment for strokes or similar brain damage, to work around the irreparable portions of the brain. As long as each neuron behaves and is networked identically to the one replaced (which might require some guesswork in cases of severe damage), it should result in an identical system. So why create a synthetic if you can convert an organic? Probably more likely than us creating a 'real' A.I. anyway.

usaar333 15y ago

I agree biological immortality is a lofty goal, but it is orders of magnitude harder than space race. At least with getting people into space, the basic techniques (launch rocket, orbit earth) and constraints were figured out. Devil was in the endless details. Humans still barely understand how aging works, much less how to theoretically stop it. Sure there's hypotheses here and there, but no unified description or strategy to stop the process.

cydonian_monk 15y ago
The one thing we understand the least is us. Sounds like endless potential for research opportunities. A real challenge. Maybe the project doesn't result in effective immortality. But the space race didn't result in only getting to orbit or only landing men on the Moon. The side benefits would be as beneficial as the final goal.
jcfrei 15y ago
I disagree. While we could figure out how to travel to the moon in a very short time (think 60 years from the wright brothers till neil armstrong), anything beyond mars might well be far beyond our capabilities. this is much due to the fact that any chemical reaction based propulsion is so inefficient, that travelling beyond mars would be extremly costly and consume a large part of our earthly resources. If we would promote nuclear reaction based propulsion devices I might get hope again - but those are politically difficult to promote (because of very reasonable concerns about their dangers). nonetheless I'm pretty optimistic about the possibilities of genetic reengineering. a lot of that research is really constrained by those ancient (aristotelean) laws concerning stem cell research.