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It doesn't matter. Cancer will get them anyway: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/05/sunday-review/why-everyone-seems-to-have-cancer.html http://www.nytimes.com/20

It doesn't matter. Cancer will get them anyway: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/05/sunday-review/why-everyone-seems-to-have-cancer.html http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/05/sunday-review/why-everyone.... Unless they figure out a way to digitize themselves in which case maybe something else will get them. Mutation is the engine of evolution so in essence the folks looking to live for 500 years are trying to get rid of "the engine of evolution". Lofty goal when put that way.

Brakenshire 12y ago
The whole of modern civilization is a way to power down the engine of evolution - for instance, short-sighted people or someone who catches a nasty infection surviving to have children. If you take moral cues from natural selection, you're going to face the creation of a very bleak world.
- dkarapetyan 12y ago
  It's not about morality. It is the fundamental nature of the cell to mutate. The fact that multicellular organisms have managed to get this far is quite amazing but you'd be foolish to think those cells are anything more than selfish self-replicating mutation engines. So really at the end of the day all life extending research is about changing the fundamental nature of the cell which is an impossible goal.
  - TeMPOraL 12y ago
    Why impossible? A cell is but a complex nanoscale machine. There's nothing fundamental about it that says it's The Right Way. But if you mean the fundamental nature of evolution process, its mathematics, then well - we don't have to change it, we just need to harness it. Just like we didn't change the explosive nature of gasoline, we harnessed it for our purposes. We're no longer in the domain of gene-based evolution anyway - our minds are smarter than it, and thanks to our ability to write things down, we advanced into cultural-level evolution, which works orders of magnitude faster than the biological kind. There is no law of nature that says we can't just decide we like living and then enforce our will on nature.
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  Not only to power down the engine of biological evolution - also to outpace it. There is no fundamental difference between DNA-based process and "writing things down and passing them to the next generation"-based process, except that the second one is orders of magnitude faster. Humans are no longer in the domain of biological evolution.

Brakenshire 12y ago

The whole of modern civilization is a way to power down the engine of evolution - for instance, short-sighted people or someone who catches a nasty infection surviving to have children. If you take moral cues from natural selection, you're going to face the creation of a very bleak world.

dkarapetyan 12y ago
It's not about morality. It is the fundamental nature of the cell to mutate. The fact that multicellular organisms have managed to get this far is quite amazing but you'd be foolish to think those cells are anything more than selfish self-replicating mutation engines. So really at the end of the day all life extending research is about changing the fundamental nature of the cell which is an impossible goal.
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  Why impossible? A cell is but a complex nanoscale machine. There's nothing fundamental about it that says it's The Right Way. But if you mean the fundamental nature of evolution process, its mathematics, then well - we don't have to change it, we just need to harness it. Just like we didn't change the explosive nature of gasoline, we harnessed it for our purposes. We're no longer in the domain of gene-based evolution anyway - our minds are smarter than it, and thanks to our ability to write things down, we advanced into cultural-level evolution, which works orders of magnitude faster than the biological kind. There is no law of nature that says we can't just decide we like living and then enforce our will on nature.
TeMPOraL 12y ago
Not only to power down the engine of biological evolution - also to outpace it. There is no fundamental difference between DNA-based process and "writing things down and passing them to the next generation"-based process, except that the second one is orders of magnitude faster. Humans are no longer in the domain of biological evolution.