How far will we progress toward human physical immortality

[Alan McDougall]

As long ashuman history, we humans have dreamt of increasing our life span toward apractical or otherwise goal of physical immortality.

 

If we succeed, there are many pluses and negatives debated about.

 

 

Scientist haveincreased the life span of a human cell, a worm, and rat for example.

 

There does not seem to be any reason why we die as soon as we die, some postulate about a so-called death gene that might be switched off for example etc.

 

I hope I have oosted this thread where it belongs, if not, moderator please move it! ?

 

[imatfaal]

Alan - you might like to have a read about Telomeres on the purely genetic side. On the holistic view there is also reduced calorie longevity - this is still a hotly debated area that some deride as pseudoscience and others are convinced is the real deal. Perhaps most importantly there is the socio-cultural impact - until we have unlimited resources and space we need to consider the environmental impact of longer life; I am no malthusian, but if people stop dying and children keep being born you will sooner or later run into problems.

[Iota]

As long ashuman history, we humans have dreamt of increasing our life span toward apractical or otherwise goal of physical immortality.

 

Perhaps we can do something along the lines of what the 'Immortal' Jellyfish does. Return to our younger selves, then grow up again, and repeat.

 

http://en.wikipedia....opsis_nutricula

 

Edit: Obviously unlikely. But it's the closest thing we have to being immortal on this planet.

Edited August 7, 2012 by Iota

[Alan McDougall]

Perhaps we can do something along the lines of what the 'Immortal' Jellyfish does. Return to our younger selves, then grow up again, and repeat.

 

http://en.wikipedia....opsis_nutricula

 

Edit: Obviously unlikely. But it's the closest thing we have to being immortal on this planet.

 

One of the ideas bandied about is a cure for aging, thus old people could return to youth and live in this state for maybe a thousand years. Another is the prevention of aging by medications as yet unknown , although some are already in the development stages. Cellular aging in the of the human kind researchers Woodring Wright and Jerry Shay announced in 1998, that specially treated cells had resisted senescence (fatal old age) up to 200 divisions, when compared to normal untreated cells that stopped dividing at 65 divisions . If this were extrapolated to whole body in years it would mean a life span of some 250 years. (the Last Mortal generation by Damien Broderick" 1999) I have his book this info is not from the web!

Edited August 8, 2012 by Alan McDougall

[CharonY]

Except of course that de-regulated cell growth and cancer is closely related...

[juanrga]

As long ashuman history, we humans have dreamt of increasing our life span toward apractical or otherwise goal of physical immortality.

 

If we succeed, there are many pluses and negatives debated about.

 

 

Scientist haveincreased the life span of a human cell, a worm, and rat for example.

 

There does not seem to be any reason why we die as soon as we die, some postulate about a so-called death gene that might be switched off for example etc.

 

I hope I have oosted this thread where it belongs, if not, moderator please move it! ?

 

Human beings are living in universe and it is difficult to believe that our universe can be sustaining life forever. According to current cosmological knowledge the Universe is evolving towards a future state where life is not possible.

 

You can consider shorter scales of time. Think, for instance that even if you biologically manage to live forever at Earth, Sun will die and life will be not possible at Earth.

[Alan McDougall]

Human beings are living in universe and it is difficult to believe that our universe can be sustaining life forever. According to current cosmological knowledge the Universe is evolving towards a future state where life is not possible.

 

You can consider shorter scales of time. Think, for instance that even if you biologically manage to live forever at Earth, Sun will die and life will be not possible at Earth.

 

I was thinking of at most thousands of years because this would lead to some real practicle problems if we humans continued to lve longer, which I will address later.

 

We die because of the relentless march of entropy, even the universe must die due to this in the end, be it by heat death or otherwise, such as all the usable enery being used up and dissapated in a closed universe. All the original energy is still within the system but cannot be used.

 

Alan - you might like to have a read about Telomeres on the purely genetic side. On the holistic view there is also reduced calorie longevity - this is still a hotly debated area that some deride as pseudoscience and others are convinced is the real deal. Perhaps most importantly there is the socio-cultural impact - until we have unlimited resources and space we need to consider the environmental impact of longer life; I am no malthusian, but if people stop dying and children keep being born you will sooner or later run into problems.

 

 

Yes, many people and scientist among them are now trying to live longer by taking huge quantities of supplements, highly increased daily physical and mental activities, restricted diets, and such like. No evidence yet that this will increase life span in humans , but some interesting results in animals like rats and mice. Any increase achieved by these methods could at best only result in a limited increase in human life span and an uncomfortable life to achieve these small results

 

Telomeres

 

 

Are these the supposed "Death Genes" that if we could switch off would prevent death.. Cancer cells seem to lack these genes and as a result are nearly immortal, am I right in this?

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

Human (and other) somatic cells without telomerase gradually lose telomeric sequences as a result of incomplete replication (Counter et al., 1992). As human telomeres shorten, eventually cells reach their replicative limit and progress into senescence or old age. Senescence involves p53 and pRb pathways and leads to the halting of cell proliferation (Campisi, 2005). Senescence may play an important role in suppression of cancer emergence, although inheriting shorter telomeres probably does not protect against cancer.^[13] With critically shortened telomeres, further cell proliferation can be achieved by inactivation of p53 and pRb pathways. Cells entering proliferation after inactivation of p53 and pRb pathways undergo crisis. Crisis is characterized by gross chromosomal rearrangements and genome instability, and almost all cells die. Rare cells emerge from crisis immortalized through telomere lengthening by either activated telomerase or ALT (Colgina and Reddel, 1999; Reddel and Bryan, 2003). The first description of an ALT cell line demonstrated that their telomeres are highly heterogeneous in length and predicted a mechanism involving recombination (Murnane et al., 1994). Subsequent studies have confirmed a role for recombination in telomere maintenance by ALT (Dunham et al., 2000), however the exact mechanism of this pathway is yet to be determined. ALT cells produce abundant t-circles, possible products of intratelomeric recombination and t-loop resolution (Tomaska et al., 2000; 2009; Cesare and Griffith, 2004; Wang et al., 2004).

[Joatmon]

Well, a good start would be to change our lives in terms of food and exercise. Today's youngsters can expect to have a lower life expectancy than there fathers!

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/17/health/17obese.html

[ecoli]

Alan - check out the research themes page of the SENS foundation to get a sense of the current, general research areas of anti-aging technology:

 

http://www.sens.org/sens-research/research-themes

[Iota]

Was watching this last night: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWn1vxuV9IQ&feature=autoplay&list=PLDFC62456AB3673C3&playnext=5

 

It has information on anti-ageing gene work. It's kind of speculation, based on potential future science.

 

Numbers 1-7 makes up the documentary, and it's a good watch. It's human evolution throughout time, by the BBC I think.

[dmaiski]

I'm a biologist so the optimist in me would say we will achieve biological mortality soon enough.

 

unfortunately I'm also a pragmatic bastard...

the most likely route, at least initially towards physical mortality is and allays will be cybernetics. at the moment technology research in physics and machinery has outpaced biology research by about 50-100 years depending what scale you want to use, making it far easier to replace body parts with reliable machines then it is with biological components. there is also the great animosity and distrust towards anything GM, this means GM humans and research into this field is severely limited and is unlikely to lead to any great results that will be publicly available results in at least the next 40 years.

 

on the other hand the technological singularity point for computers is predicted to be 2045 at that point machines will outperform humans by such a great factor(1000x the speed and complexity of a human brain) that mental augmentation, at the very least, will become fairly widespread just so people can keep up with what a machine is doing. this generally results in a slippery slope towards full acceptance of the technology and outright implementation(another example of this is the car vs the horse, tv vs radio, steam/combustion vs electric propulsion(still happening today)).

 

Of coerce I've read in some sifi books(yes I read, no its not a bad thing, sifi dose make valid points, think star trek and their awesome automatic doors) a interesting and fairly valid statement "some species had the time to go from biological bodies to full machines and back again" simply put biology is extremely tiny machines working together to make a body(an example: Homo sapien) currently our technology is large and bulky, but eventually it will be made on par or better then the biological counterparts allowing a return to biology(or at the very least some semblance of the such)

 

 

edit

the timeline(according to google)

http://xkcd.com/887/

notable events: 2100 Gillette introduces 14 bladed razor and by that point we have 3 resurrected Jesus running around

 

 

 

 

Edited September 4, 2012 by dmaiski

[too-open-minded]

I would really hope not.

 

Death is present so that their can be room for new.

 

To live forever is grotesque in my eyes.

[dmaiski]

even an immortal species will have a death rate, its called suicide. also if you live forever there will be people that become recluses and leave the working population for a couple of years(skipping forward:cryogenics, other stasis techniques, VR sims)

 

the longer the lifespan of a species the lower its reproduction rate, will you really rush something you can get done 500 years from now?

 

physical immortality is also a perquisite to large scale space colonisation, so we wont really ever run out of "space" for people, we may need to search for more resources and start dismantling other planets.

 

 

[too-open-minded]

Dismantling other planets...

 

See I want to be a scientist because I want to help the human race get off this planet, then I see statements like that.

 

 

 

Sometimes I wonder if I should just find something else because i'm afraid if our species gets into space we will go around screwing up other planets just like we have our own.

 

 

Physical "immortality".... I see your argument. We would at some point need to live longer if were going to be traveling long distances in space. At the same time you would want to keep a steady generation flow and not just waste resources on the old.

[JohnStu]

Being immortal means being eventually out-evolved by a group that refreshes its gene quickly

 

 

[Alan McDougall]

Being immortal means being eventually out-evolved by a group that refreshes its gene quickly

 

 

 

Who will rule this world of very old people with possibly old out dated memories, or would there be a time when death becomes mandatory, or maybe a restriction on children or even a ban, god forbid!

[Iota]

Who will rule this world of very old people with possibly old out dated memories, or would there be a time when death becomes mandatory, or maybe a restriction on children or even a ban, god forbid!

 

Bingo would become a global religion.

[too-open-minded]

Their would be no such thing as a seniors discount

[dmaiski]

really to achieve true immortality you would need adaptive regeneration,

ie a system where any damage is rapidly repaired, and the region that was damaged is optimized to prevent further damage

it would be closer to a controlled version of cancer then it would be to normal cellular function

 

also initial work into true physical immortality would most likely be done with nano-machines, so memory wont really be that much of a problem since memory decay can be prevented, and you can use your whole body as a brain

 

normal immortality "Methuselah complex" is pretty limited in its usefulness, after all what is the point of living for ever if all it takes to kill you is some minor brain damage

 

the t1000 is a good example of a being that really is, for all practical purposes, immortal. anything short of total destruction will not damage it.

a nano-morph is really the ideal immortal being, every "cell" in its body can function as muscle, brain, skin, bone, digestive tissue, and sensory organ.

it allows it to easily replace loss of limb, negate most physical damage (hydrostatic shock probably could knock it down, by disabling large scale organisation temporarily), and back up memories in other area and replace lost processing power by allocating other cells to the process.

 

 

[JohnStu]

I'd rather seek spiritual immortality anyday. The body is merely an mud shell for the real beautiful stuff

[Moontanman]

I'd rather seek spiritual immortality anyday. The body is merely an mud shell for the real beautiful stuff

 

 

What "beautiful stuff"? Do you have any evidence there is anything but the "mud" shell?

[too-open-minded]

I don't want to be immortal, I don't see why everyone has the urge to exist forever.

[Alan McDougall]

I don't want to be immortal, I don't see why everyone has the urge to exist forever.

 

That is easy to say whn you are still young, when you have really faced the awful reality of your own mortality and death like I have you will very promply change your mind. Death is humanities ultimate evil!

[dmaiski]

achieving transcendence...

not that likely, most humans cant even reach 4 dimensional thought let alone use 4d mechanics.

 

and yes transcendence is, basically, moving up 1 or 2 dimensions.

 

 

[Iota]

I don't want to be immortal, I don't see why everyone has the urge to exist forever.

 

Immortality has the perk of choosing when you feel it's the right time to die. As opposed to dying say, at a young age, or before seeing grand children etc. etc.