Poncedeleon.png

Ray Kurzweil says that immortality is probably only 20 years away for the human race:

I and many other scientists now believe that in around 20 years we will have the means to reprogramme our bodies’ stone-age software so we can halt, then reverse, ageing. Then nanotechnology will let us live for ever…Within 25 years we will be able to do an Olympic sprint for 15 minutes without taking a breath, or go scuba-diving for four hours without oxygen…Heart-attack victims — who haven’t taken advantage of widely available bionic hearts — will calmly drive to the doctors for a minor operation as their blood bots keep them alive.

Imagine. Immortality! Everybody on earth staying on earth forever and ever, never retiring from their jobs or coming to a natural conclusion of their life stories. I’m sick of you people already.

58 replies on “Immortality!”

  1. Um… immortality kind of blows if I have to keep working crappy jobs for ever and ever and ever and ever…. How could you ever save for retirement if your retirement is eternity?

  5. @1

    Well, isn’t the point of retirement to relax before you die? So, if you can’t die, you wouldn’t permanently retire. You could always take sabbaticals with savings and resume working in order to fuel that cycle for eternity. But, even then the idea sounds pretty crappy, monotonous an exhausting on a psychological level.

  6. If humans achieve immortality, there is no way we can continue to reproduce. The Earth’s resources are already stretched thin enough. Take death (caused by old age and illness) out of the equation and I predict the human species will be extinct within 5-10 years (from starvation). That is my very scientific, expert opinion.

  10. What is more likely is that we will extend “normal healthy adult” life, whatever the hell that means, by the use of hormones, stem cell tissue and other stuff. It won’t be non-organic, mechanical technology, but more along the lines of bio-engineering. We can look to some current Hollywood types for examples of the beginnings of this. The more cancers we manage to treat successfully, the better our chances get too.

    The big trick is to avoid being killed in a car wreck, being shot, or otherwise murdered. Not sure we have a cure for that one yet.

  11. That sounds horrible. I think Kurzweil would be better served by reading up on how to accept death and to recognize that it’s the only thing that gives life meaning.

  15. What do I do with my mutual funds if immortality becomes a reality? Go into 100% income when inflation hits double-digits? I’ve been busy spending money thinking I’m gonna die in five years.

  17. Hey, if I can live into my eighties with the body of a twenty year old, I’m all for it… after that, I’d probably end it myself. I would also hope that a condition of immortality would be sterilization- not only to curb the inevitable population explosion, but to also prevent birth defects from shacking up with distant descendants you haven’t kept track of.

  20. Man, immortality would totally suck, because there’s no way there’s enough interesting stuff in the entire universe to fill more than 80 or 100 years.

  22. Well, that’s the real crux, isn’t it. Not how long you live, but what kind of quality-of-life you’ll have while doing it.

    Still, there’s a part of me that really would like to be around 1,000 years from now – I mean, if Nixon’s head-in-a-jar can be attached to a fully-functional giant robot body by then, I’d be happy to settle for just an average-sized one.

  25. Um, “widely available bionic hearts”? OK. Artificial hearts cost many millions of dollars to implant and recover from, and give you typically a couple of years of extra life. I’m glad Kurzweil isn’t running health care reform.

  27. (I should point out that stem cell therapies have actually worked, but we are still in the clinical trial stages and the yields are very very low, we literally need a pound of flesh from your tummy to make it work and it’s going to take until say 2016 before you’ll see anything)

  28. Ever notice that in the movies where immortality is possible, there are no kids, and they seem to have done away with the pesky need to buy and sell things. Everyone who is immortal is like Regency era gentry, living off annuities and spending time visiting each other. How many billions of us have to die so that a few lucky immortals can live peacefully on this planet ad infinitum.

  30. This is practically and metaphysically terrifying.

    Practical: How you decide who lives forever and who dies? If the answer is “Everyone lives forever!” then where do you put everyone?

    Metaphysical: Suddenly, you have to choose whether to die. If you ever give up in exhaustion, is that suicide? If you never die, are you missing out on another world or are you making a definitive nihilistic statement that to exist in this time and space for all eternity is all there is to the universe? What if it’s not and you passed up the possibility of passing on to to new worlds?

    I’m not sure if I want him to be right or want him to be wrong, but in any case, you have to imagine that his prediction will come to pass sooner or later.

    If it’s later (like, say, 35 years from now), then you have to wonder – is immortality not a birthright of the blessed saved, but an accident of the timing of consciousness? Could some of us miss out on living forever simply by having been born ten years too soon?

    Scary, scary stuff…

  31. I decided that @17 deserves the win. Although we call that being an Oscar-winning actor or Nobel Prize winner, when you’re 80 living with the body of a 20 year old.

  34. @25 Ah yes- why would artificial organs and medical knowledge improve in the next 20 years? Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go write a program in BASIC on my Apple IIe.

  35. @30: Practically: If you’re going to play with the idea of immortality through nanotechnology, it’s not much further of a stretch to invoke cheaper space travel through nano(or other)technology. The universe is a big place.

    Metaphysically: No one lives forever. Even if medically, we eliminate all disease and ill health, eventually you’ll get shot or run over or blown up or thrown into a black hole. As for being born too early, it’s not like nobody died of polio just before we developed a vaccine. People have been born too early through all of human history.

    It doesn’t look scary to me. It looks awesome.

  36. All we have to do first is somehow invent magical nanotechnology!

    Oops: “Students in U.S. middle and high schools are lagging in science and math learning. A recent study released by the Biotechnology Industry Organization cites disheartening evidence showing a decline in American students’ interest and aptitude in the sciences. Only 28% of high school students taking a national standardized test for college admission, reached a score indicating readiness for college-level biology study.”

    I guess we’ll need to invent artificial brains first to do the thinkin’…

  43. @17- Ever read “Time Enough for Love” by Robert Heinlein? Basically some guy is immortal, and dedicates himself to sleeping with his own relatives. Including (thanks to the miracle of time travel and scifi genetics) his mom and his identical twin daughter/sisters.

    It’s fucking creepy as hell and the character is an obvious stand-in for the author.

    Point being, immortal people with sleep with their relatives.

  46. Ray Kurtzweil is full of shit. I once saw him give a presentation on life expectancy where he had a graph with three data points: one during the 1918 swine flu pandemic (very short lifespans), one during WWII (medium short lifespans), and one in present day (long lifespans). And Voila! Life spans are increasing faster all the time!

  47. I do think this is possible. BUT here’s the problem- assuming we are still living in a world of capitalism and currency, only the richest, most elite will become immortals. Why would anybody believe that this technology will be shared with everybody? So, the rich will probably horde away this technology for themselves, they will become gods, game over for the rest of us, assuming they remain greedy bastards who need to eventually control everything. Then they will figure out how to colonize other planets, they will be extending their consciousness /intelligence through computer technology we can’t even imagine, and will move on to dominate the universe.

  49. Suicides amongst seniors is skyrocketing. I may get the immortality cure just in time to lose the will to live.

    I wonder how they’re going to solve the killer virus problem and the memory loss problem.

    Cool idea, though.

  51. The beauty part about being immortal vis-a-vis the population “problem” is that our life-spans are really the only thing keeping us from exploring space. If time were not a factor, we could be startrekking it all over the place. How cool would that be?

    Re: the population problem: Numbers of people is not the problem. It’s the greed of a few bastards who keep all the land for themselves and have, via the industrial revolution, convinced the rest of us that we must live in anthills on top of each other. It has been estimated that all the humans who ever lived (including those alive now) number approximately 20 billion. All of these people could fit in the State of Texas without about 116 people per acre!

    The Earth has 36,652,096,000 acres of land area. If we remove Antarctica and the Sahara desert from the equation (2,880,000,000 and 2,124,800,000 acres respectively) there’s enough land for everybody now living to have 4.5 acres each. If we set half of that land aside for community farming use, conservation, recreation, etc. there’s still 2.25 acres per person to live and relax on. This means the Earth could comfortably accommodate 14,000,000,000 people on an acre each. Most comfortable homes in the US are on yards of roughly a quarter that size and housing 2-4 people each in family groups. Thus if we can comfortably fit 4 people on a quarter acre, we could feasibly accommodate 224,000,000,000 people on the planet and STILL HAVE HALF THE LAND SURFACE FREE!

    With those numbers in mind, ask yourself why you’re not frothing-at-the-mouth angry that there are people starving on this planet and crammed into slums and living in sub-standard housing. Where is MY 40 acres and a mule?!

  52. Kurzweil’s been threatening to port us all into software for the last 20 years. (He did invent the Talking Book & the Kurzweil synthesizer line though…)

  53. Fuck immortality. I just want to not get old. (I’m looking 50 in the face right now – well, next week – and aging is very much on my mind.)

  54. Besides, there’s a lot more money in making people look younger longer than in keeping them alive indefinitely. I’d much rather look 25 for 50 years more than live forever.

  56. @51, The problem is that you are looking at land area and not possible land use. Most places with low population density are that way for a reason – they don’t have enough water, or are too mountainous, or take a lot of resources to heat/supply food to, etc.

  58. I wonder how we’ll cope with all the displaced people from the 7 degree F increase in world temperatures that will make 90 percent of Florida be under water by 2050, or all the coastal areas of Central America ….

    My guess is it’s not going to be fun.

Comments are closed.