Living forever

[Guest Gorzilla]

Has anyone got and ideas for immortality ... i have

[Tesseract]

Has anyone got and ideas for immortality ... i have

Would you care to share?

[Guest Gorzilla]

Well first i would freeze by body and put my brain into suspended animation then i would create a clone of myself and implant a piece of equipment that would allow someone to control the clone from another location. i would then implant a control into the original me brain to allow that to control my clone and each time my clone died i would create another:)

[Sayonara]

How are you going to create a clone of yourself if your body is frozen and your brain in suspended animation?

[Dave]

Why would you want to live forever anyway? I'd settle quite happily for a slightly extended lifespan, but I certainly don't want to be immortal.

[Guest Gorzilla]

i will have some1 to help me and then when they help me ahieve this i will give them immortality in return muhahaha

[Dave]

Don't think you've quite thought this through

[Phi for All]

I'd settle quite happily for a slightly extended lifespan, but I certainly don't want to be immortal.

In Contact, Carl Sagan suggested life in a zero-G environment would greatly increase your lifespan due to less stress on the body caused by gravity. Is that true? Zero-G would be really cool once you got used to it. I grew up with a trampoline, so I'm sure I could get into the bendiness of it.

 

The action/reaction thing and keeping your food down would be the hard parts, I suppose.

[Dave]

Don't astronauts suffer from bone marrow damage (or something to do with the bones) after prolongued exposure in a zero-g environment?

[ydoaPs]

thier bones become lese dense, because they don't have the effects of gravity holding them down.

[Dave]

Also, if you were born in zero-g, you wouldn't have this problem, but you would grow at a quite abnormal rate and you'd probably die if you were exposed to a field above 0.3g or so.

 

That's according to a sci-fi book I read anyway.

[J'Dona]

For a pretty complete description of the different problems associated with being in zero-gravity for a lenght of time, take a look at the last half of this article: http://www.permanent.com/s-centri.htm

 

Some might be adapted to if you were born in space, but humans evolved to live in a 1-g environment so I wouldn't have thought that they'd last as long... the list includes:

fluid redistribution

fluid loss

electrolyte imbalances

cardiovascular changes

red blood cell loss

muscle damage

bone damage

hypercalcemia

immune system changes

interference with medical procedures

vertigo and spatial disorientation

space adaptation syndrome

loss of exercise capacity

degraded sense of smell and taste

weight loss

flatulence

facial distortion

changes in posture and stature

changes in coordination

 

In relation to the original post though, the main reason that people wouldn't want to live forever is that they would get bored. I suppose that with the field of genetic doctoring open after one or a few more generations (cloning to pass the time) you cold explore all sorts of lives and not become bored for a long time (change gender! Even species!)

 

Of course, you'd have to think of the ethical side of it, and the political. Only the rich could afford these procedures, and I think we can all figure out that having rich, immortal people running the poorer, mortal ones isn't an ideal solution, if you know what I mean. It's not something that should just be ignored though. The first people to become clinically immortal in the future could very well be alive today (if I sound dark, please don't take it that way. I'm not taking it seriously either)

[-Demosthenes-]

I don't think that there is a problem with 0 gravity if you always stay in 0 gravity is there?

[bloodhound]

no. but some inertia will always create artificial gravity [edit]meant effects of gravity[/edit]

[Phi for All]

OK, J'Dona's list of 0-G side-effects took the luster off that idea (not your fault, J). I can be dizzy, clumsy and flatulent on my own, thanks.

 

Immortality would suck anyway unless you could stay youthful forever. How about this instead: you age until about fifty, then go backwards, regaining your youth and vitality, until you peak out at the beginnings of full maturity, around 19 or 20. You'd have the wisdom of an 80-year-old and the body of youth, the best of both worlds.

 

Then you just have to watch out for disease, accidents & stupidity.

[NavajoEverclear]

wow thats a pretty good idea for preservation, but you'd need to transfer you mind to a different medium. Maybe find a way to translate all your neural patterns into a computer type form. Would this take more or less space than the original brain? I don't know how small computer circuits are these days.

[Phi for All]

you'd need to transfer you mind to a different medium.

Why? The whole idea is you have all your wisdom and experience in a body that can take advantage of it.

[NavajoEverclear]

Brains die. It doesn't matter if the electrical impulses are stored somewhere else, so long as it can have access to a real brain temporarily (well the permenant brain will always have access to a brain, but only temporarily to one particular brain, as it will eventually die.). Of coarse the permenant (computer based) brain to would be directly connected to a human brain, and the brain would constantly relay all its physical interactions back to be stored in the permenant brain.

 

Also, it would only cause truama to try to transfer the cumilated memories of the permenant brain into the human brain. The human brain would have to have remote access to the full brain. Therd also have to be a way to prevent the permenant memories from overloading the human brain, as it roams through the database.

 

Come to think of it that would defeat the purpose of being individually imortal. It would simply be immortal memories, at access to sequential progression of humans.

 

............ so the only functional option to preserve individual immortality is to switch over COMPLETELY to computer brain, and deny the human brain any power over the body.

 

Which would cause huge ethics problems, could you grow a body without a brain, and if not, what would happen to the brain in the body that you have to ovveride control from? It wouldn't nessisarily have to die tho. Which brings up a new question. What kind of experiences could a brain have without connection to the body?

[Phi for All]

Ah, but if we're fantasizing that the body begins to rejuvenate itself after fifty years, why not the brain as well? This way the memories and experiences are retained and the reflexes sharpen as you need them in a body that's becoming ever more youthful.

[mooeypoo]

I think the best question for it all is WHY being immortal.

We live our lives, and expand our thoughts, resources, technology, science -- everything DUE to the fact we're NOT immortal. Everything due to the fact TIME actually MATTERS.

 

Being immortals is something I wouldn't wanna be.

 

Live longer? maybe. Immortality? Never. And I wouldn't wish it for humanity either.

 

~moo

[Dave]

The overpopulation would worry me slightly (if nobody died)

[jordan]

I think mooey was getting at this, but being immortal wouldn't just mean living like we do today but forever. Most of what we do today is based on the fact that we don't live forever. So lifestyles would change a lot. Procrastination would be huge, for one. Why do today what you can put off for the next thousand years.

[Dave]

I think that would definately depend on the type of person we're talking about (i.e. whether they're motivated or just plain lazy).

 

Plus, after a thousand years of doing nothing I'd be pretty bored. You'd need something to keep you occupied.

[Phi for All]

Live longer? maybe. Immortality? Never.

This is the way it would start out. I want to live a little longer. But it would get to the point where 120 years wasn't long enough, 150 or 200 would be better. Or 250. We don't always accept status quo. We're human beings.

 

But it would increase incrementally, along with the attendant problems, but like anything that changes a little at a time, we'd figure out the pitfalls.

 

The worst thing would be sudden immortality. It would be like suddenly having all the cheap power we could ever need, like a safe cold-fusion generator the size of a toaster for a dollar, available tomorrow. It would throw the whole world into chaos for quite a while until society figured out what to do with all the unnecessary power plant jobs and obsolete enrgy-generating products.

[AL]

A professor from Tulane University named Frank J.Tipler makes an argument for immortality called "Omega Point Theory." This is not just some random quack like that Alex Chiu guy who sells those immortality magnet rings over the 'net.

 

Tipler's site can be found here:

http://www.math.tulane.edu/~tipler/summary.html

More about his theory can be found here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega_point

 

Personally, I'm very skeptical of his arguments -- especially since there's some theology/religion attached to it. Plus the theory is contingent upon the Universe having enough critical mass that it will eventually collapse again in a Big Crunch, which is something that has yet to be proven definitively.