5 ms·

Only if you also eliminate senescence -- cells generally lose the ability to divide over time, and a whole bunch of creeping malfunctions result in us breaking

• lloeki 14y ago
  So, we each have 114 years to transform our bio-bodies into mechanical machinery and/or our minds into digital ether. We're becoming a holometabolous species. We just don't know how to become beautiful, space-faring butterflies yet.
  • lukifer 14y ago
    There's a non-zero chance that we'll move back into asexual reproduction: clone yourself and raise as a child, or fork a copy of your brain into a simulator, or build a new body from synthetic cells and imprint your neural matrix, etc.
  • cstross 14y ago
    That process is probably a lot harder than you think, if you haven't studied the biological sciences. (Analogy: it's not like refactoring code in a high level language, it's like reverse-engineering a heap of spaghetti-coded self-modifying assembly written by a neural network and designed to run simultaneously on several different CPU architectures that have been glommed together in the same box. In other words, it's nightmarishly difficult.) 114 years might suffice to do it. Or to demonstrate that it's a very intractable problem (on the order of Fermat's last theorem) or to prove that it's impossible. Meanwhile, for those of us who are already pushing fifty (like me), it's probably already too late.
    • entropy_ 14y ago
      Fermat's last theorem was proven in 1995 though, uber hard, yes, but not intractable :)
    • lloeki 14y ago
      You missed my point: I'm not saying that from today we have 100+ years to solve the problem, but that once the problem is solved, a given human being biological body will only be a transition.