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Life prolongation


GUS

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  • 3 months later...

Since i've stumbled across hypgoraphy....i really woulndn't mind living forever. THis is because i've finally realised how MUCH there is out there for me to learn!...let alone discover! I mean, just familiarising urself to all the hypographies on this site wuld take u a good few months rite?? So i'm sure i can do with a couple more hundred years to learn all that i want to..

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  • 3 months later...

I would love to live to be in my 1000's, but finding ways of living longer is adding to a MAJOR problem we have-OVERPOPULATION of earth. Of course the way to control population is to have less babies. I believe China is doing this already. So, while for my PERSONAL self, I am for "unatural" life prolongation, for the good of earth, I am against it. Just my .000000002 cents.

 

Noah

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I am reading a quite interesting sci-fi novel by Greg Bear called "Vitals" which is a story about the possibility of life prolongation by tampering with our genes and mitochondria...I for one wouldn't mind living for a few hundred years but since I am one of those people who can't throw things away I'd have to own an entire country to find space for all my stuff so by then the rest of the world would probably be better left without me.

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Unfortunately, our bodies are made of certain types of material that just has a difficult time lasting forever. Our heart tissue works really hard each and every day, and it's difficult to keep it in the groove for so long! One way to prolong life might be to always keep trying to replace old tissue with younger, more vital stuff.

 

This could be difficult, though, since you would have to continuously monitor the status of every component of your body for, presumably, hundreds, maybe even thousands of years. One missed check-up at Speed BioLube could mean certain death. (How many times have you missed the 3,000 mile lube job for your car?)

 

What if we gave up on our body all together after it whithers away? How could we still "stay alive"? Risking getting too philosophical here, we might consider a technology that could maintain not our entire body, but at least the part that matters most to keeping the "I" in ourselves alive: the brain. Keep your brain active and those neurons firing, and it doesn't matter if you heart tissue has rotted, or your fingers don't twitch anymore. If you really found it necessary to walk around to be happy for thousands of years, then you could even replace all that stuff with mechanical elemtents.

 

Even if this sort of technology were available, would you even want to "stay alive" without the rest of your natural body in tact? Could you be happy only as an active brain on a stick? (Let's assume your active brain was connected to input/output devices that allowed you to interact with the world around you... so, you could still talk and see, and have access to all of your senses, but the only 'original' part left is your brain.)

 

Matthew

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Yeah, I like trying to keep up with current technologies, and they have got some awesome stuff in the biotech I guess you would call it. Artificial eyes, artificial limbs controlled by your thoughts just like a normal limb, artificial hearts, and the coolest (to me), nanotechnology. If you watch Star Trek, you probably know what/who the borg are. It is neat/scary that we are developing stuff like that. We can now control a rat with a romote control like a RC car, and I have seen where they are developing stuff to link peoples minds together, chips that to implant in you to enhance your muscles. At this rate, when I am old I might be the King Borg (chills going up spine).

 

Noah

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Anyone read Greg Bear's (yeah, him again) books "Eon", "Eternity" and one more which I can't remember? In this book series dead people's minds are simply uploaded into giant computers where they live their "lives" as digital entities...and can be summoned up whenever needed.

 

It's kinda cool when it is fiction, but quite horrifying when you consider the scope of it.

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  • 11 months later...
  • 1 month later...

It is the brain(memory + function) that couldnt handle 1000 yrs. The mind continues eternally as it is not restricted by any physical dimension. All religions that use meditation to cultivate the mind believe in reincarnation.Look into the story of Arthur Flowerdew and his visions of Petra

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The technological advancements in regenerating tissues and organs will definitely have an impact for the prolonging of life. But it's all relative to the awareness of a consciousness that has to die. We live for about 80 years and feel that this is not enough. 5000 years ago, humans lived to about 40. Do we feel privelidged in living twice as long as our 5000 year old ancestors, probably not. If we extended our life into 200 years ( roughly twice our current expectancy ), we would still feel anxiety at the notion of giving up 200 years worth of knowledge and experience, in fact it might seem worse. I doubt the housefly feels its life is short, I doubt the turtle feels its life is long. It's just your time here, and it should never be enough.

As far as placing our vital information into computerized receptacles, how would one ever be certain that it was in fact the true consciousness and not a very thorough AI simulation.

I'ts not about the quantity of life, it's about the quality!

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It is not entirely correct that human lifespan has become much longer than before. What has become longer is the average life expectancy. Early humans had a lifespan of around 50-60 years. 5000 years ago I'm not sure, but we know Socrates died at 71 (470-399 BC) and many famous people grew much older than that.

 

Recent studies have shown that it might be impossible to extend a human life span beyond, say, 140 years. The body simply deteriorates. We were not built to last very long!

 

So transient's comments about transferring the consciousness into a computer is probably the only, er, real possibility to extend our existence. Anyone here who did NOT see the Matrix?

 

Tormod

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Socrates came from one of the worlds more advanced civilizations, athens in its golden days. Life would have been very easy for the regular athenian citizen, especially one who devoted themselves to contemplative learning. However, older humans were not able to enjoy this type of existence on average, and so had a much shorter lifespan. If there are built in timekeepers in our body, they are only the result of lengthy psychosematic physical conditioning on a cellular level. This too, can be bypassed with the correct regenerative technology. Mankind has always made it a point to prove his limitations wrong.

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Yes, Socrates came from an "advanced civilization". The regular athenian citizen was by no means the average person in Greece, however. Yet the lifespan in those days was far more than 40 years. Even though Socrates might have led a good life, it does not make him superhuman. He had the same type of genes that all his contemporaries had.

 

There are indeed built in timekeepers in our bodies. They are attached to the end of each chromosome and are called telomeres. Each time a cell divides, they are shortened a bit.

 

Last week's New Scientist has an interview with a scientist who believes the human lifespan can be extended, but she aims at 150 years. I have not seen research which suggest anything above that. What they try to do is to avoid the reduction of the length of the telomeres. Yet our organs still would need serious help to work for much more than 100 years, considering the average lifespan is less than 80 years.

 

For evolution to provide us with longer lifespan without our intervention, it would probably take many thousands of years to get much longer than it is. So it is reasonable to think that people for at least the last 10,000 years have had about the same life span as we do today.

 

The telomeres issue is big in cloning - because the telomeres of the cells they clone is already shortened. So the newborn clone is as old as the sheep it was cloned from. That is why cloned animals all die young.

 

Tormod

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The average athenian citizen still lived in athens, which was easier than being a desert nomad. Life expectancies vary with the factors that affect them. It's predictable to live longer in a society that has medical technology and better nutritional systems, not to mention defenses against predators and adverse weather conditions. Lifespan has more to do with lifestyle than genetics, and lifestyles have changed significantly for an overwhelming populace of the Earth very recently.

 

The ever-decreasing fuse endcaps to genetic strands seems interesting, but also seems like yet another mechanism to be tampered with. As far as its effect on cloning, there are always a few kinks to be worked out with new inventions.

 

The real problems are the legislation of such extended life applications until it becomes widely available to the average citizen. In the beginning, such life-extending technology or medicine would be very expensive, barring all but the extremely wealthy or politically important its benefits. Or maybe it would never be made available to the general public, in this case there would always be something that slips through the cracks...

 

World-wide riots between the haves and the have-nots.

 

Too many reprecussions to factor with any degree of accuracy, but what is predictable is that it will one day soon be a real issue.

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