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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 techni
by 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 agoThe 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 agoI 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.