# Suppose Science Made Immortality Into A Reality?



## BAYLOR (Sep 17, 2017)

Medical science makes the ultimate medical/scientific breakthroughs in which not physical immortality is possible but so is eternal youth and perfect health. WHat effect do you think this new an unlimited time would have on us and as individuals and as society both short term and long term?

How long would you want to live?


----------



## Montero (Sep 17, 2017)

Huh. Well. In terms of lifespan - until I got permanently bored. 

And having said that, are you talking eternal life working as a shop assistant with no pension ever due to lifespan making it uneconomical, or eternal life where you are able and can afford to try to do all the things you've always wanted to do - learn to paint, travel, climb Everest etc.

In one sense vampire books have already touched on this. Carrie Vaugn, in her Kitty series where Kitty the Werewolf is a radio show host has a vampire calling in to talk about working the night shift in a supermarket and how his eternal life sucks. Barbara Hambly in her series has a few very long lived, cautious vampires of varying intelligence and one of them has massive piles of books he is reading.

Other than that, I will mention the elephant in the room - birth rate. If death rate goes to zero or near to it, then kids will have to become a replacement only rarity.


----------



## farntfar (Sep 17, 2017)

Unless, at the same time, we find a way to expand out into the universe.
So maybe procreation is only banned until the technology for space travel is created.

Generation ships are not required. If everyone is immortal, we can have 100 or 1000 year spaceflights. 
But then in flight boredom would be even more likely than on earth boredom, so the ships are going to have to have some pretty good in-flight entertainment.


----------



## Overread (Sep 17, 2017)

We already have an exponentially growing population without immortality. The only way wide spread common immortality could become a reality would be if childbirth were significantly reduced and our resource base increased to cope with an ever increasing population.

The other aspect would be tax and ownership. At present death (And death duties) tends to put a stopper on people owning everything; companies try but even they can come unstuck. However immortality would leave a huge potential for a few people to eventually control everything without any pass-down to a new generation. Indeed you could well see a lot of hostility, even at a local level. New generations wouldn't be able to gain recognition or even acceptance so easily because older generations would still be hanging around.


----------



## farntfar (Sep 17, 2017)

I refer you to my previous statement.

Of course it then requires that said technology is available to the poor as well as the rich. But I think this is a fairly minor worry. Don't you?


----------



## DelActivisto (Sep 17, 2017)

I have a story idea with this in mind. Esssntially I envision that it causes all world religions to die, and people fight over who gets to live the longest. Because that's often the case for new and improved medical science. When it is first released, or if it requires very advanced machinery, it is often only the wealthy who wind up affording it. So I imagine an even sharper class distinction occurring, where the rich live forever and foist upon the masses a cruel system of leveling up enough to earn mortality. 

Well, sounds a bit like Hell, doesn't it?


----------



## Overread (Sep 17, 2017)

I'd see immortality possibly killing religion for the long-livers; but in your description I'd almost expect the lower classes to embrace religion even more strongly as a sign of how wrong it is to live so long. 

Something like that you'd get a lot of people who'd want to undergo treatment; but just as many who'd reject it; consider it wrong and evil and who would even fight against it (and those who'd used that viewpoint to further their own agenda as it would be a means to power within the lower ranks)


----------



## Biskit (Sep 17, 2017)

farntfar said:


> Unless, at the same time, we find a way to expand out into the universe.


Even then you're going to hit limits.  

1: Surplus population is going to need to be pushed off Earth somehow, but they can't really stop at the nearest viable place to live, because in almost no time yet more surplus generations are going to be heading out.  So, either the newest migrants have to 'hop over' the earlier generations, or push them further ahead.  

2: All of these out-bound migrants are going to steadily strip the Earth of resources.

3: The 'expanding sphere' of immortal humans will be making ever more immortal humans, and pushing them outwards - the whole process is going to be exponential, and potentially exhausting local resources long before the surplus population can be moved on.

It's basic maths - if you have a theoretical system like that, growing with no checks on the growth, and growing faster the bigger it gets, the progress is exponential.  

As for how long I would want to live...
Since any system like that will have to have limits imposed, my betting is I would want to live longer than the rules will allow.
Unless that exponential growth wipes out chocolate, then they might as well come and shoot me now.  (Or next weekend, because I do still have some chocs left from my birthday.)


----------



## DelActivisto (Sep 17, 2017)

Overread said:


> I'd see immortality possibly killing religion for the long-livers; but in your description I'd almost expect the lower classes to embrace religion even more strongly as a sign of how wrong it is to live so long.
> 
> Something like that you'd get a lot of people who'd want to undergo treatment; but just as many who'd reject it; consider it wrong and evil and who would even fight against it (and those who'd used that viewpoint to further their own agenda as it would be a means to power within the lower ranks)



Perhaps, perhaps... but immortality is one of the primary tenets of the "big god" religions. Give people immortality in the objective world, and what reason do they have to believe any longer?


----------



## Overread (Sep 17, 2017)

Aye but religion is also about purpose as much as it is about a sense of immortality. It also gets tied to morality and the "right" way to live life. So there's ample reason for religion to survive even if people live "forever". Also note that if the advert says "forever" it might well take a LONG time before people believe its forever. Almost everything in life has an end; even if you can live forever you're still mortal - you can still walk under a bus and wind up dead. So its not quite god-like yet. 
Of course couple it with personal shields - and lots of other futuristic tech and you could well end up with near-godlike. Heck take it further and if your social divide is big enough those on the bottom could well end up so separated and outclassed that they'd be far closer to peasantry - lacking education to be aware that the god-like immortals are anything but humans (esp if they've lots of technology - a slightly different visual appearance through being from a much older gene-pool and also through the likely rise in plastic surgery and bionics.


----------



## Mirannan (Sep 17, 2017)

DelActivisto said:


> Perhaps, perhaps... but immortality is one of the primary tenets of the "big god" religions. Give people immortality in the objective world, and what reason do they have to believe any longer?



Excellent reasons. Why? Because there are two varieties of immortality, and the OP describes the weaker one. The two forms are "lives until killed" and "can't die no matter what". There are always accidents, and some of them can be lethal - even if medicine is a lot better than now, or even if you are stuffed with nanomachines that can rebuild you after you've been run over by a road roller (for example). In the second case, there are two reasons. One is that rebuilding your body doesn't necessarily mean restoring all the complicated network of neural connections and synapse strengths that comprise your mind. The other is that many types of damage can destroy the body completely.

Even if you assume mind uploading and restoring from backup into a manufactured body - well, backups can fail. Even if you have a dozen backups stored in different types of media, using different operating systems, scattered all over a sphere a hundred parsecs wide - still, there is the potential for all the backups to be destroyed, whether by hugely unlikely accident or malice. And when that happens (admittedly a VERY long time later) you'll be in the same position as someone who dies tomorrow.

I envisage a strain among all religions imagining immortality of the soul (whatever that is!) as the "backup of last resort" by some entity much greater than human, with the proviso that you don't get to come back to the physical universe we all know. (Or at least it's very unlikely - I believe there are 9 resurrections in the Bible, and some of those are probably fictional or not really resurrections. Coming out of a coma, maybe.) I don't know about other religions. Reincarnation doesn't count because it is usually said you don't remember past lives.

In other words, "immortal and unkillable" is impossible in physical law.

I do, however, think that physical immortality (even of the weaker sort) would weaken religion because fear of death is one of the major reasons for people to be religious at all. (Not the only one, before some devout person objects!)


----------



## Overread (Sep 17, 2017)

Here's another thought - memory. Even if immortality came with no mental degradation, the mind can only make so many connections; which runs on the assumption that the mind will also then forget things to make more space (stupidly simplistic understanding that is likely totally inaccurate but works). As a result you could well have many "immortals" who can only remember things that are stored in some form of digital format - at which point if its not real memory many might come to question themselves.

Almost a reverse; they are not seeking immortality through religion but instead their mortality and history.


----------



## Danny McG (Sep 17, 2017)

Yes Yes Yes - go for it. 
Everyone wants it deep down, two millennia as a sewage worker? So what! Given the option of forty five years followed by twenty years getting feeble then dying of old age it's a no brainer.
Resources and can the world sustain you?
Then start smoking and eating lots of fatty foods right now - by living healthily you are already trying to delay death for a few years. If offered a drug to give you another good decade you'd snap it up.
 Eight years later you are offered a more developed one that'll give you another thirty years? Of course you take it. 
Twenty years down the line you are offered fifty years, by this time population is growing and scarcities increasing because everyone is taking longevity drugs - are you gonna say no and be the exception who dies?
Eventually you'll be offered several centuries at a time, then it's "oh no, think of the planet?" - No Way!
You'll be in the queue outside your doctor's for your hard earned dosage while pushing emaciated beggars out the way.
Give your long life up? For the likes of them?


----------



## ctg (Sep 17, 2017)

BAYLOR said:


> WHat effect do you think this new an unlimited time would have on us and as individuals and as society both short term and long term?



First of all there would be too many Mondays and for some that would be enough. But the thing is with the longer lifespan is that to some reproduction would drop down with one having so much time in the hand that you might not even think about little ones until you're two hundred and forty. Then it would the question of personal preferences, big family or one offspring. 

I bet for many that one child would be enough and maybe you would be producing one per century than try to make as many as you can. Maybe with enough of advancement you might even consider clones or even trying to sleep for a millennia - just to get a change to scenery. After all immortality is incredible naive profession. One could try to master all skills with that amount of time, but the chances are you would forget as much as you've learned because of the biological limitations. Teeth for example would be gone in first century, and you'd be wearing dentures for god awful long time. Not talking about all bone degretation, nerve damage and so on. Therefore immortality or rather longevity has to go hand in hand with the regeneration because otherwise you're buggered. 



BAYLOR said:


> How long would you want to live?



Six hundred years. If they would prove the cryogenics then I think that would be possible to achieve even with our lifespan, you just would sleep a lot of that time.


----------



## R.T James (Sep 18, 2017)

I'd say we'd have a feudalistic system ran by elitists which would probably cripple any thought. Technological decline and probably literacy would happen as political instability occurs as factions are placed up against each other and once the violence escalates the new immortal class, No doubt in positions of government or equal power would issue martial law.

This would lock down the cities, and many people would have no means to fight back. Those who would question the rule of the immortals would be unpersoned and those who stood up would be smacked down and killed. 

Pretty soon you'd have a massive divide between the immortals the serfs.  You'd probably have a few underground factions saving knowledge which no doubt the immortals would make it illegal for one who isn't one of them to have such knowledge.

Sounds like a great future. Where I can sign up?


----------



## Vertigo (Sep 18, 2017)

This topic has been discussed here several times before. However as it's a topic I'm much interested in some thoughts:

Population: fairly obvious and already discussed above. But I'd add that we're unlikely to be able to change the fact that women are born with their full complement of ova; after around 50 years there are none left. So technology (eg freezing of ova - but how long can they be frozen for? Decades, centuries?) would have to be used to allow pregnancy after that. And that would allow direct control of those births. Ultimately you would have to have a system of one death one birth. I challenge anyone to do the figures on interplanetary or interstellar colonisation; whilst they may be good at removing all humanity's eggs from one basket they will never be able to cope with even today's rate of population growth. Just how long do you thing it would take to shift a billion people off planet?

Bodies worn out: Depending on how immortality is achieved there are many components of the body that could be a problem. For example teeth and bone joints worn out. So either we have to figure out how to get them to self repair or the immortal person might eventually end up more cyborg than human.

Memory: We really do not understand how memory works and we may never do so. The popular SF trope of editing your memory to 'make space' will probably never happen as the one thing we are pretty certain of is that memory is not managed as some simple linear sequential thing like computer memory. So do we reach a point where we simply can't learn anything new or do we constantly forget stuff to make room for new?

Work: as someone commented above, most of us won't want to spend a lifetime cleaning sewers. So we'll need the ability to completely change jobs. And, even after retraining into a completely different role, will we, after say 200 years, really want to go back to 9 to 5? Maybe not an issue if the much fabled post scarcity society is finally achieved (see also below).

Ennui: how many different jobs can you do, how many different adventures can you have, how many times can you fall in love before boredom sets in?

Hierarchy: whether it's family, military or business immortality makes progress almost impossible. Nobody dies or retires so no new opportunities open up for rising stars to fill. The prince/princess will never become the king/queen.

Risk: do we become risk averse because death means the loss of not decades but centuries? Or maybe ennui results in the opposite happening.

Religion: A few have mentioned religion above however one topic not mentioned (I think) is that most religions, to a greater or lesser extent, see death as being the time of final judgement. It is very possible that religious fundamentalists (and I believe there will always be a significant number of these) will see immortality as 'dodging' that final judgement and they are likely to take matters into their own hands...

Just a few thoughts to be going on with


----------



## Edward M. Grant (Sep 18, 2017)

Vertigo said:


> Bodies worn out: Depending on how immortality is achieved there are many components of the body that could be a problem. For example teeth and bone joints worn out. So either we have to figure out how to get them to self repair or the immortal person might eventually end up more cyborg than human.



The leading edge of longevity research right now is the removal of senescent cells, which has been proven to cause mice to regenerate, and is expected to do the same for humans (I believe the first serious human trials are starting very soon). It probably won't fix all the body parts that can break, but, for example, teeth have been restored in the lab with stem cells. So we may just have to go in for an annual service like a car to fix up anything that's wearing out. Beyond that there are things like reversing the hardening of arteries, which will also have to be done, rejuvenating the immune system, and cleaning out whatever bad thing is accumulating in the blood that makes young mice age when you give them a transfusion.

But we're going to become cyborgs, anyway. As people have pointed out, we have a limited memory capacity, so that at least will have to be upgraded by electronic means. I suspect we'll eventually have so much electronic stuff attached that the human brain will become a legacy component and eventually we won't notice when it goes away.


----------



## DelActivisto (Sep 18, 2017)

Edward M. Grant said:


> The leading edge of longevity research right now is the removal of senescent cells, which has been proven to cause mice to regenerate, and is expected to do the same for humans (I believe the first serious human trials are starting very soon). It probably won't fix all the body parts that can break, but, for example, teeth have been restored in the lab with stem cells. So we may just have to go in for an annual service like a car to fix up anything that's wearing out. Beyond that there are things like reversing the hardening of arteries, which will also have to be done, rejuvenating the immune system, and cleaning out whatever bad thing is accumulating in the blood that makes young mice age when you give them a transfusion.
> 
> But we're going to become cyborgs, anyway. As people have pointed out, we have a limited memory capacity, so that at least will have to be upgraded by electronic means. I suspect we'll eventually have so much electronic stuff attached that the human brain will become a legacy component and eventually we won't notice when it goes away.



And then you also get to explore the classical science fiction tropes, such as what is a human soul, what is one anyhow, and what makes us human, and will we still be human with that many cyborg enhancements?


----------



## BAYLOR (Sep 18, 2017)

Overread said:


> Here's another thought - memory. Even if immortality came with no mental degradation, the mind can only make so many connections; which runs on the assumption that the mind will also then forget things to make more space (stupidly simplistic understanding that is likely totally inaccurate but works). As a result you could well have many "immortals" who can only remember things that are stored in some form of digital format - at which point if its not real memory many might come to question themselves.
> 
> Almost a reverse; they are not seeking immortality through religion but instead their mortality and history.



Which means that in time all your original core memories would fade away and be replaced new memories which, would mean that eventually you would cease to be you and would become in effect a different person.


----------



## DelActivisto (Sep 18, 2017)

BAYLOR said:


> Which means that in time all your original core memories would fade away and be replaced new memories which, would mean that eventually you would cease to be you and would become in effect a different person.



Do our memories make us who we are or are we who we are due to who we are due to nature/nurture?


----------



## Overread (Sep 18, 2017)

And then comes some really strong reasons for religion or even great confusion when some of those very early memories surface when you could be hundreds of years old. Almost like being reborn again. Or the painful sorrow of finding old memories in photographs or an old hard-drive or memory backup - memories that once were fresh but now that the person can't recall at all.

Indeed I could see some suffering some pretty strong depression as a result of living too long.


----------



## BAYLOR (Sep 18, 2017)

DelActivisto said:


> Do our memories make us who we are or are we who we are due to who we are due to nature/nurture?



I do think our memories are large part of the person we become.


----------



## DelActivisto (Sep 18, 2017)

Overread said:


> And then comes some really strong reasons for religion or even great confusion when some of those very early memories surface when you could be hundreds of years old. Almost like being reborn again. Or the painful sorrow of finding old memories in photographs or an old hard-drive or memory backup - memories that once were fresh but now that the person can't recall at all.
> 
> Indeed I could see some suffering some pretty strong depression as a result of living too long.



Sure, but that happens to people even now. I've got lots of pictures of me as a little kid doing things that I barely remember doing. Many adults, after some time, have plenty of things that they've forgotten, particularly if they have memory problems or dementia setting in.

Additionally, I don't know if anyone is actually quite sure how much the human brain can hold. We tend to store only pertinent memories. Things like phone numbers infamously get deleted after as little as a few seconds in my case, to minutes or days for other people. Some people have ironclad memory and can tell you what they had for breakfast last week. I definitely can't tell you that, and possibly it's because I deliberately store other information that I deem pertinent - such as certain phrases to delete from my story, or a financial docket or something.

So probably what would happen is we would ultimately remember our whole life, just not in picture perfect clarity. I remember all the hardships I experienced farming, for instance, but can't tell you very well on any given day what happened.

Keeping journals works for me, though. I can usually jog my memory pretty quickly with journal entries, because what happens is I'm actually taking different memories and amalgamating them into a representation of that specific event. It's not even necessary to remember the event at all if that journal entry can just jog it real quick. It's like using the same file on. A computer for multiple different purposes. You've only got one font file for each font, for instance, but that font is stored in various forms all over the computer.


----------



## Overread (Sep 18, 2017)

True, but there's certain memories or at least inklings of memories that are the kind of things people want to and expect to remember. A degree of forgetting things is indeed normal; but I think it would have an extra sting to it when you can't remember your first significant other; can't remember your siblings etc... As said above you could almost be reborn with the amount of history that one forgets. 

That leaves a lot of holes and gaps in ones life; ripe for some pain at forgetting so much. Furthermore ripe for abuse too now I think of it; people claiming to be long lost friends - similar immortals (or even mortals) who abuse that imperfect memory. 


A lot of this touches on the aspects raised in series like Ghost in the Shell with regard to memory and what makes us alive. Indeed th questions are quite similar to those who ponder on if a totally digital copy would be alive or not; or if cyborgs with little to no flesh left are really "alive" or not.


----------



## nixie (Sep 18, 2017)

I for one don't want to live for ever. As a dream it would be wonderful but in reality it would be a nightmare. Children would be a rarity, only the privilege few allowed to breed. Over population would probably lead to culling.


----------



## Parson (Sep 19, 2017)

nixie said:


> Over population would probably lead to culling.



And isn't that a horrific thought!!  I certainly wouldn't want to live forever in a body that was slowly breaking down. It sounds like a good illustration of eternal punishment.


----------



## BAYLOR (Sep 19, 2017)

I think that were I given physical immortality , my biggest fear would be the worse person I might end up becoming.


----------



## Mirannan (Sep 19, 2017)

Parson said:


> And isn't that a horrific thought!!  I certainly wouldn't want to live forever in a body that was slowly breaking down. It sounds like a good illustration of eternal punishment.



And this isn't exactly a new trope. The Greek legend of Tithonus comes to mind. (Although I confess that I couldn't remember that name without a bit of Internet help.  )


----------



## Vertigo (Sep 19, 2017)

Think about our brains, and memory in particular, in evolutionary terms; in general evolution is not renowned for being wasteful, so I would be very surprised if our brains have more memory capacity than is need to live out our genetic lives (ie to around 50 odd years old). What genetic advantage would there be to having any additional capacity? And without genetic advantage mutations simply don't reinforce and become permanent traits. So even if we can stop the loss of our mental capacities I don't see how we can increase them.


----------



## nixie (Sep 19, 2017)

Would make an amazing futuristic horror story.
Science has eliminated death in humans, enforced sterilisation too stop over population and draining of resources. People then want their pets to live for ever, the animals become insane their brains can't cope with the changes, once beloved pets are now monsters no one is safe.


----------



## AlexH (Sep 19, 2017)

More people would never get anything done, because they'd think they have unlimited time. Maybe the people who're quite the opposite would make up for that and we'd have other huge advances in technology.

On the same topic, I highly recommend the film The Man from Earth if you haven't seen it. There's a long-awaited sequel due out this year.


----------



## Edward M. Grant (Sep 19, 2017)

nixie said:


> Children would be a rarity, only the privilege few allowed to breed.



There's an empty galaxy out there. Once we get off this planet, we won't need to worry about overpopulation for a very long time.

As for sterilization, we're maybe ten years away from being able to grow a kid in a vat from a few skin cells (the biggest impediment is not the technology, it's 'medical ethics' laws). So that won't stop anyone.


----------



## Overread (Sep 19, 2017)

Immortals - you may live forever, but condition is that you serve aboard a ship heading into deep-space to colonise a new planet. Gets around the problem of hyperspeed and overpopulation - for a while.


----------



## Vertigo (Sep 19, 2017)

Edward M. Grant said:


> There's an empty galaxy out there. Once we get off this planet, we won't need to worry about overpopulation for a very long time.
> 
> As for sterilization, we're maybe ten years away from being able to grow a kid in a vat from a few skin cells (the biggest impediment is not the technology, it's 'medical ethics' laws). So that won't stop anyone.


I've said it before and I'll say it again; the numbers just don't work. Yes there is a (possibly) empty galaxy out there but the problem is getting people off Earth. Current figures I have seen say we have globally around 131 million births per year and around 55 million deaths. So the difference is around 75 million. So just to keep pace we would need to shift 75 million people off planet per year; that's over 200 thousand per DAY. So we have to get 200,000 per day off planet into space ships (which also have to be built), that's a million people every 5 days to get loaded into colony ships. How big would the colony ships be and how many of them would we need? And all just to keep the population steady as opposed to reducing it. It's just not realistic to believe it can be done without radically reducing our birth rate first.


----------



## Parson (Sep 19, 2017)

Vertigo said:


> I've said it before and I'll say it again; the numbers just don't work. Yes there is a (possibly) empty galaxy out there but the problem is getting people off Earth. Current figures I have seen say we have globally around 131 million births per year and around 55 million deaths. So the difference is around 75 million. So just to keep pace we would need to shift 75 million people off planet per year; that's over 200 thousand per DAY. So we have to get 200,000 per day off planet into space ships (which also have to be built), that's a million people every 5 days to get loaded into colony ships. It's just not realistic to believe it can be done without radically reducing our birth rate first



But aren't we headed in that direction anyway? It seems that every time I look at the the population charts the population growth is slowing more rapidly than anyone thought likely.


----------



## Vertigo (Sep 19, 2017)

Parson said:


> But aren't we headed in that direction anyway? It seems that every time I look at the the population charts the population growth is slowing more rapidly than anyone thought likely.


Possibly, but is that going to be the case if people are no longer dying of natural causes?


----------



## Stewart Hotston (Sep 19, 2017)

My first trilogy - the first book of which is called A Family War deals with exactly this issue as one of its central themes.


----------



## Parson (Sep 19, 2017)

Vertigo said:


> Possibly, but is that going to be the case if people are no longer dying of natural causes?



I believe so, if in the VERY UNLIKELY case of immortality, it is logical that people would see little if any need for children. I suspect that the biological urge to reproduce would be at the very least seriously muted. For evidence I would point to the fact that as people become more educated and self centered the less likely they are to have children. --- If you had all the time in the world it wouldn't be surprising that people would become even more self-centered.


----------



## Edward M. Grant (Sep 19, 2017)

Vertigo said:


> I've said it before and I'll say it again; the numbers just don't work. Yes there is a (possibly) empty galaxy out there but the problem is getting people off Earth.



The Earth's population is about to crash, because there's no need for so many people in a post-industrial world. And few of the survivors will ever get off it.

But, once they are in space, the galaxy's the limit. Just pick a direction, and go...

And by the time we reach the edge, even intergalactic travel may not stop us. If you're immortal, you won't much care that the trip will take a million years, so long as you can build a starship which can survive that long.


----------



## BAYLOR (Sep 19, 2017)

nixie said:


> Would make an amazing futuristic horror story.
> Science has eliminated death in humans, enforced sterilisation too stop over population and draining of resources. People then want their pets to live for ever, the animals become insane their brains can't cope with the changes, once beloved pets are now monsters no one is safe.



That would make a great novel.


----------



## DelActivisto (Sep 20, 2017)

Overread said:


> True, but there's certain memories or at least inklings of memories that are the kind of things people want to and expect to remember. A degree of forgetting things is indeed normal; but I think it would have an extra sting to it when you can't remember your first significant other; can't remember your siblings etc... As said above you could almost be reborn with the amount of history that one forgets.
> 
> That leaves a lot of holes and gaps in ones life; ripe for some pain at forgetting so much. Furthermore ripe for abuse too now I think of it; people claiming to be long lost friends - similar immortals (or even mortals) who abuse that imperfect memory.
> 
> ...



Maybe. I believe we are partly the events which happen to us. I believe we're also our nature, that impossible to quantify thing that makes us who we are, our soul if you will. Some of it's not even our main genetics, but our epigenetic code. These are suspected to transfer things a few generations at a time, usually. Sometimes, memories seem to be able to be transferred. This is very interesting. It means when people have children, they are creating them via genetic encoding, but also they're transferring a little bit of who they've *become *onto their child.


----------



## LordOfWizards (Sep 23, 2017)

DelActivisto said:


> Do our memories make us who we are or are we who we are due to who we are due to nature/nurture?


 Both, I say. 

But if I live too long, I might get really bored and start killing people. Well, not just anyone, but rather start at the top of the list of Jerks like Donald J. (for Jerk) Trump, Sheriff Joe Arpaio, Eric Trump, Mitch McConnell, Donald Trump Jr., Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Sarah Palin, Rex Tillerson, Jeff Sessions, Steve Mnuchin, Scott Pruitt, the list goes on and on. Since the biggest Jerks in the world seem to rise to the top of the rubbish, They would most likely live the longest. 

In other words, I wouldn't want to live too long in a world like the one we have now. I'm not generally a negative person, but these a##holes that are in charge scare the meadow muffins out of me.


----------



## LordOfWizards (Sep 23, 2017)

Parson said:


> But aren't we headed in that direction anyway? It seems that every time I look at the the population charts the population growth is slowing more rapidly than anyone thought likely.


 @Parson, and Everyone, please check out this link. Worldometers - real time world statistics Vertigo is correct.


----------



## BAYLOR (Sep 23, 2017)

LordOfWizards said:


> @Parson, and Everyone, please check out this link. Worldometers - real time world statistics Vertigo is correct.



When will the population crash?


----------



## DelActivisto (Sep 24, 2017)

BAYLOR said:


> When will the population crash?



That actually might not happen. It happens with wild populations and is termed population overshoot, I believe. But with us humans we're apt to come up with some new invention that helps us keep razing the environment and keep surviving.


----------



## LordOfWizards (Sep 24, 2017)

Not sure what the word "crash" means in this context. It's crashing all the time really. Look at the slaughter and/or decimation of peaceful citizens in Syria, in Africa, North Korea, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, etc. The list goes on. And despite all of this senseless, brutal violence, crimes against humanity, the population shows no sign of abating.


----------



## nixie (Sep 24, 2017)

Can we keep to the topic in hand without reference to current situations of the world at large.


----------



## BAYLOR (Sep 24, 2017)

nixie said:


> Can we keep to the topic in hand without reference to current situations of the world at large.



Apologies 

I think it's reasonable to say that physical Immortality , would be a mixed bag at best.


----------



## Dennis E. Taylor (Sep 24, 2017)

I've said this before, but a lot depends on the technology, costs, and risks involved in producing the immortality. If it's cheap but dangerous (one in five users turns into a big ball of cancer), then you'll get one result. If it can't turn back the clock but freezes you at your current physical age, you get another. If it has to be reapplied every ten years, you get another. If it's incredibly expensive (actually expensive, not just priced for all the market will bear) you get another. If it requires something rare, so that no matter how much money you throw at the problem, only about a hundred people per year can be processed, you get another. If it turns you blue, you get another.

Anyway, hopefully you see my point. There are so many possible outcomes to this. You could unleash a hundred writers on the subject, and get a hundred different futures. In fact, it'd make a great anthology, IMO.


----------



## Alexa (Sep 24, 2017)

Before immortality, we should wait and see when the first human will celebrate his/her 15o birthday. We are not so far. The oldest woman died at 122 years, 164 days.

A longer life should have no healty problems or big changes in appearance. Why live longer or be immortal if you look like your grandfather/grandmother anyway ?


----------



## LordOfWizards (Sep 24, 2017)

nixie said:


> Can we keep to the topic in hand without reference to current situations of the world at large.



I'm not sure I can "keep to the topic in hand without reference to current situations of the world" since the current situations in the world play an enormous part in the way I answer this question. I'm not trying to deliberately rebel, especially against a moderator, but I have strong feelings about this topic that compel me to suggest more specificity, i.e. "What if Science Made Immortality Into A Reality tomorrow?" my answer would be very different than if "What if Science Made Immortality Into A Reality 100 years from now?" 

I read a lot of Science Fiction that includes the notion of "re-lifing", or "regeneration", and so on. In the stories it works, because the author has left out the possibility of living forever whilst being poor, depressed, or any number of other conditions which would really take the fun out of longevity. 

The current situation on the planet is not something I would want to continue living with no matter how long you extend my life. So that's why I bring up these things. (Sad state of affairs around the world, Politicians appearing to make things worse not better, etc.) Sorry if I can't get in to the pure scientific ramifications without considering the environment in which it takes place, but that's how I feel. 

If you would like me to stop posting on this thread, send me a PM, and I will gladly comply.


----------



## Brian G Turner (Sep 25, 2017)

It's not that @LordOfWizards , we just want to avoid discussion on threads turning too close to current events - specifically, anything relating to American, British, or European politics.


----------



## Vertigo (Sep 25, 2017)

Alexa said:


> Before immortality, we should wait and see when the first human will celebrate his/her 15o birthday. We are not so far. The oldest woman died at 122 years, 164 days.
> 
> A longer life should have no healty problems or big changes in appearance. Why live longer or be immortal if you look like your grandfather/grandmother anyway ?


I remember round about the turn of the century there was a French woman reached 120. What struck me most strongly about that was that she would have been retiring at the _start of the second world war_ and yet was still going strong in the year 2000.


----------



## Alexa (Sep 26, 2017)

So the solution for immortality is work less, retire early and live happy many, many, many years ?


----------



## Alexa (Sep 28, 2017)

Apparently the secret for a longer life is to eat fish, tomatoes and olive oil. In other words, mediterranean. As Japan has of lot of centenary people, I would daren to confirm the seafood, as the best solution for immortality.


----------



## DelActivisto (Sep 28, 2017)

Alexa said:


> So the solution for immortality is work less, retire early and live happy many, many, many years ?



My plan is to invest heavily, become famous writing novels and retire when I'm 35. We'll see how that goes. I might wind up as an activist or a politician, though. I just can't get enough hate as a regular person.


----------



## Edward M. Grant (Oct 4, 2017)

Alexa said:


> Before immortality, we should wait and see when the first human will celebrate his/her 15o birthday. We are not so far. The oldest woman died at 122 years, 164 days.



120-or-so seems to be a hard limit on human lifespan for some reason. However, those who live past 100 tend to die from one specific health problem, and there's at least one company working on curing that. So 150 may not be far off for someone with good genes.

But a number of organizations are working on rejuvenation by removing senescent cells, so we may not need good genes to reach 120 before long... and may look a lot better when we do so.


----------



## Parson (Oct 4, 2017)

At this point your odds of contracting one type of dementia or the other doubles with every decade past 50. If that holds, the odds of living with dementia past 120 begins to approach certainty. Living a long time with dementia is not something I would desire. In fact I believe death would be preferable to that.


----------



## Danny McG (Oct 4, 2017)

Probably (in my opinion) the best sci fi story that looks at this concept..
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (short story) - Wikipedia


----------



## Edward M. Grant (Oct 4, 2017)

Don't know about dementia, but the mechanism behind Alzheimer's seems to be pretty well understood at this point. If I remember correctly, it's due to an accumulation of junk in the brain, and just another thing to clean up, like arterial plaque and artery wall hardening. I wouldn't be surprised if dementia is similar.

I suspect a much bigger issue is lack of capacity in our memories, so we'd have to toss out most of our old memories to make space for new ones. Though that can be worked around by adding external storage to the brain (as we've effectively been doing for thousands of years now since the first caveman bashed a picture of his successful hunt into his cave wall with a pointy rock).


----------



## tinkerdan (Oct 4, 2017)

I'm not sure memory would be an issue since the common thought is that we only use a small portion of our brains--as it is. Though there might be some argument to there being a portion that might be inaccessible.

Analogous to the computer I bought for work once that had 4 gigs of memory and when I had the OS downgraded to XP it could only access 2 of those. So we'd require some sort of upgrade to access the presently inaccessible.

One thought is that if we could live long and remain perfectly healthy the rest of the perceived problems might be easily solved. I'm just not sure that we'd ever reach the point of perfect health and the whole concept of the definition of what perfect health might be comes into play along with other subjective issues. It's likely at some point that anyone who doesn't conform to some 'standard' will be deemed a throwback who has lost the capacity for perfect health and needs to be put  out of their misery. So, I'm just not sure that perfect health = mental stability; although there would likely be a segment of society that would spout that philosophy and at some point I might question the mental stability of those who spout such nonsense. 

One reason the Earth abides and survives is that humanity has to constantly refresh itself with new generations. If we lived forever I'm afraid we'd destroy the Earth long before we'd find a way off Her withered smoldering carcass.


----------



## Biskit (Oct 4, 2017)

tinkerdan said:


> I'm not sure memory would be an issue since the common thought is that we only use a small portion of our brains--as it is.


From some of the documentaries I've seen recently, that notion seems to be out of favour - we use all of it, but just now it's not clear on the how.


----------



## Dennis E. Taylor (Oct 4, 2017)

We use 100% of our brains. We just don't use all of it at the same time. If we ever did, we'd probably cook it.

And memories in the human brain are stored holographically. There isn't one neuron for horse. The concept of horse fires a number of neurons that have been 'trained' to fire at the concept. Any particular neuron will have multiple connections, each of which has its own training (or combination of connections for some concepts). A single neuron can remember a horse, your favorite book, the color of your mother's hair, etc. But such concepts have to be re-refreshed occasionally or they fade.

And the more memories you pack in, the greater the number of concepts any specific neuron has to be trained for. Eventually, memories that haven't been used in a while might be trained almost identically to newer ones that are coming in, and although they aren't technically 'overwritten', they are hard to distinguish from other, unrelated concepts.

This part of memory processing is the same way expert systems work, and is fairly well understood. What is not so well understood yet is how any particular concept is indexed, and how the decision is made in the first place about which neurons should be trained.


----------



## Parson (Oct 5, 2017)

Edward M. Grant said:


> Don't know about dementia, but the mechanism behind Alzheimer's seems to be pretty well understood at this point. If I remember correctly, it's due to an accumulation of junk in the brain, and just another thing to clean up, like arterial plaque and artery wall hardening. I wouldn't be surprised if dementia is similar.



Alzheimer's is a type, the most common type, of dementia. But the last I'd heard was that the stuff that accumulates in the brain which causes Alzheimer's is not necessarily related. Some people with "stuff" in very high amounts had no obvious symptoms while some who did not have the "stuff' showed the signs of dementia.


----------



## Biskit (Oct 5, 2017)

tinkerdan said:


> One reason the Earth abides and survives is that humanity has to constantly refresh itself with new generations. If we lived forever I'm afraid we'd destroy the Earth long before we'd find a way off Her withered smoldering carcass.



Weird - I read this last night and it hardly registered.  Skimming through the thread again today and I hit this - what a remarkably depressing thought, and all the more so because it's right on the mark.


----------



## Dennis E. Taylor (Oct 5, 2017)

Biskit said:


> Weird - I read this last night and it hardly registered.  Skimming through the thread again today and I hit this - what a remarkably depressing thought, and all the more so because it's right on the mark.



I dunno. One comment I hear regularly from climate denialists is "So what? By the time it goes bad, I'll be gone." I wonder, if people knew they'd be around in a hundred years, if they might pay a little more attention to the long-term effects of their actions.

Failing that, in a hundred years when they're sitting in the consequences (whether pollution, climate change, or over-population), they might be more inclined to work to fix things if they will personally be around to reap the benefits.


----------



## Parson (Oct 5, 2017)

Dennis E. Taylor said:


> I dunno. One comment I hear regularly from climate denialists is "So what? By the time it goes bad, I'll be gone." I wonder, if people knew they'd be around in a hundred years, if they might pay a little more attention to the long-term effects of their actions.
> 
> Failing that, in a hundred years when they're sitting in the consequences (whether pollution, climate change, or over-population), they might be more inclined to work to fix things if they will personally be around to reap the benefits.



That makes sense to me. In fact I think that there are a lot of people who think that, but don't have the balls to say it in public.


----------



## Biskit (Oct 5, 2017)

Dennis E. Taylor said:


> Failing that, in a hundred years when they're sitting in the consequences (whether pollution, climate change, or over-population), they might be more inclined to work to fix things if they will personally be around to reap the benefits.


Maybe so - it's just that changing attitudes seems to be easier from one generation to the next rather than within a generation. (Except where you have a fine tradition of keeping feuds, or their equivalent, alive.)


----------



## Edward M. Grant (Oct 5, 2017)

Parson said:


> But the last I'd heard was that the stuff that accumulates in the brain which causes Alzheimer's is not necessarily related.



OK. I haven't read any stories about it for a few months, so I guess research is still progressing!


----------



## BAYLOR (Oct 6, 2017)

tinkerdan said:


> I'm not sure memory would be an issue since the common thought is that we only use a small portion of our brains--as it is. Though there might be some argument to there being a portion that might be inaccessible.
> 
> Analogous to the computer I bought for work once that had 4 gigs of memory and when I had the OS downgraded to XP it could only access 2 of those. So we'd require some sort of upgrade to access the presently inaccessible.
> 
> ...



What is the average lifespan of a species ? 10 million years ?


----------



## DelActivisto (Oct 6, 2017)

BAYLOR said:


> What is the average lifespan of a species ? 10 million years ?



Depends on how you define "species." Arguably, humans were a different species just 200,000 years ago. Other species remain basically the same for 50 million years.


----------



## Vertigo (Oct 6, 2017)

DelActivisto said:


> Depends on how you define "species." Arguably, humans were a different species just 200,000 years ago. Other species remain basically the same for 50 million years.


The biological definition is fairly precise: "a group of living organisms consisting of similar individuals capable of exchanging genes or interbreeding." But yes I think some species changed little over long periods whilst others changed a lot over short periods. Probably depends mainly on how stable the environment is as any particular time. Stable and there's probably relatively little change, unstable (think global warming, meteor strike or maybe breakup of Pangaea) and probably individual species will be quite short lived.


----------



## BAYLOR (Oct 6, 2017)

Vertigo said:


> The biological definition is fairly precise: "a group of living organisms consisting of similar individuals capable of exchanging genes or interbreeding." But yes I think some species changed little over long periods whilst others changed a lot over short periods. Probably depends mainly on how stable the environment is as any particular time. Stable and there's probably relatively little change, unstable (think global warming, meteor strike or maybe breakup of Pangaea) and probably individual species will be quite short lived.



The  modern Coelacanth looks much like it did 70 million years ago when it was thought to be extinct.


----------



## hej (Oct 6, 2017)

R.T James said:


> I'd say we'd have a feudalistic system ran by elitists which would probably cripple any thought.



Right.

Only the wealthy could afford it initially. Naturally, they would build ever greater empires and attain further, political control. We've already seen something like this in family dynasties.

Still, I think disruptive technologies would still occur as they do now. Look at Linux, Google, and Facebook -- and the youth of their founders when they started. Old age and experience is not helpful for thinking outside the box.


----------



## hej (Oct 6, 2017)

Dennis E. Taylor said:


> I've said this before, but a lot depends on the technology, costs, and risks involved in producing the immortality. If it's cheap but dangerous (one in five users turns into a big ball of cancer), then you'll get one result.



I think five in five would eventually have cancer. Think of it. Hundreds of years without skin, breast, prostate, etc. cancer is possible -- but increasingly unlikely.

So, immortality depends on curing cancer, imho.


----------



## hej (Oct 6, 2017)

Parson said:


> At this point your odds of contracting one type of dementia or the other doubles with every decade past 50. If that holds, the odds of living with dementia past 120 begins to approach certainty.



Dementia strongly correlates with aging. So, one crucial aspect of any immortality would have to be perpetual youth.

Moreover, even without dementia, increasing decrepitude is a serious problem. If someone can no longer walk, likely their organs are not doing too well either.

So, maintaining spry biology is inextricable from any reasonable concept of immortality.


----------



## hej (Oct 6, 2017)

Edward M. Grant said:


> Don't know about dementia, but the mechanism behind Alzheimer's seems to be pretty well understood at this point. If I remember correctly, it's due to an accumulation of junk in the brain...



A friend of mine's research was on this subject.

The 'junk' is amyloid plaques -- which often, but not always, correlate with Alzheimer's.

Check out this lengthy list of resulting diseases,

Amyloid - Wikipedia


----------



## hej (Oct 6, 2017)

Science already has two examples of immortality. I'm not sure what to make of these, so I'll simply post a couple wikipedia links with brief comments.

HeLa - Wikipedia

Helen Lane died of cervical cancer. As was normal at the time, doctors took her cells without asking her family for permission. Their immortality is a problem, because they often infect other cultures in laboratories that work with them.

Turritopsis dohrnii - Wikipedia

I believe this organism to be of at least equal interest. It has not only the capacity for immortality, but also the ability to revert to youth!

I think that, with that return to an earlier life stage, it must _necessarily_ forget what it has encountered. Phrased differently, as an organism matures, it adapts to its environment. If it 'un-matures,' it must 'un-adapt' -- i.e. forget.

I wonder how many people would trade much of their memories -- in effect release a good deal of who they are -- to reattain their youth.

I find the concept unsettling, at the very least.


----------



## Biskit (Oct 6, 2017)

hej said:


> Old age and experience is not helpful for thinking outside the box.


But it brings you much closer to not-thinking inside a box.


----------



## DelActivisto (Oct 6, 2017)

Vertigo said:


> The biological definition is fairly precise: "a group of living organisms consisting of similar individuals capable of exchanging genes or interbreeding." But yes I think some species changed little over long periods whilst others changed a lot over short periods. Probably depends mainly on how stable the environment is as any particular time. Stable and there's probably relatively little change, unstable (think global warming, meteor strike or maybe breakup of Pangaea) and probably individual species will be quite short lived.



It is a precise definition, but like many things, in practice it winds up being far stickier. For instance, you can have two butterflies that live in different areas. They look almost identical. They are obviously very closely related. They are still considered separate species because when they interbreed, their offspring become increasingly infertile for some reason. So they are separate species even though a cursory glance would probably throw them in the same species, and they can technically mate with each other. 

And also from that example, we look at whether or not their ancestor would have been a different species. Was their ancestor mostly like one butterfly or the other, or were they different enough to be a common ancestor, but that species is now technically extinct because it morphed into these other two species? That ancestor is at once dead and alive in a way then. Or the common ancestor is the same, and the second butterfly species is a slight offshoot.


----------



## Immortality (Jul 31, 2021)

Hello everyone, pleasure to meet you I’m Immortality and you will see why in a moment. I was going to mention this in another thread but because its against the rules, I could not.

So, I am writing a rather large *Immortality* *FAQ* ( technically it’s a *Pro*-*Immortality* *FAQ)*, but I’m still working on the name of the FAQ, for now it’s just *Untitled* *FAQ.*

There are many people here against immortality and pose great questions , ideas, comments, etc. which I can answer, because well your wrong and I have read a lot about both immortality and anti-immortality, reading the anti-immortality stuff made me cringe every time I read a new book on anti-immortality , because your wrong on so many levels. You will see why when I’m finally done with my FREE UNIVERSITY INTERNET FAQ. If you want to know why you are wrong Dr. Aubrey de Greys Book ‘Ending Aging’ book is a good start.

Anyway this is a certifiable University of Connecticut FAQ ( hey, don’t knock us we are considered a public ivy and it’s not easy here ) . Before I can post it on the internet I think I need the deans permission, but I’m sure he will grant it ok.

So, I need your help, you have posted much against immortality, but I need way more information then that, tell me more why you are anti-immortality. Please give me as many reasons why you are against immortality. That’s all I need, the more reasons your against immortality, the better my free internet university FAQ will be. Thanks for your help. None of your usernames will be used in the FAQ, unless you would like to be included in the FAQ. Only your reasons why you hate,  dislike or your concerns and thoughts, etc. on why you are against immortality will be addressed . In this case in the form of a question, and I will answer it. So you will be completely anonymous.

Thanks for doing this. Bring on your reasons, questions and concerns , thoughts, or whatever on why you are not for immortality, be as brutal as you can , got it. Thanks so much. This is going to be a really great FAQ ( well, even if I’m completely logical , which I will be , if your deep down against immortality for whatever reason none of my FAQ is going to change your mind, because you are stuck in mortality thinking , you got a problem, it’s the the pro-aging trance. Still I hope you love the FAQ when it goes live on the internet) because of your help ,so I thank you so much for this.

Bring it on...


----------



## BAYLOR (Jul 31, 2021)

Immortality said:


> Hello everyone, pleasure to meet you I’m Immortality and you will see why in a moment. I was going to mention this in another thread but because its against the rules, I could not.
> 
> So, I am writing a rather large *Immortality* *FAQ* ( technically it’s a *Pro*-*Immortality* *FAQ*, but I’m still working on the name of the FAQ, for now it’s just *Untitled* *FAQ.*
> 
> ...



The *Twilight Zone Long Live  Mr Jamison*   written by Charles Beaumont   highlights  why Immortally wouldn't  be such a desirable thing.  The main character,  Mr Jamison  who was 3000 years old was afraid to die and sought  out an alchemist who was able to grant him  Immortality .  Unfortunately , he outlived family and friends  and realized that living forever wasn't such a good thing after all  Long unending  ing life had made him weary  to the point here he wanted to die.  Jamison  figured out rather late,  that only death gives any kind  meaning or purpose  to life.   

Unending life in this world would eventually become hell on earth.


----------



## AllanR (Jul 31, 2021)

BAYLOR said:


> Unending life in this world would eventually become hell on earth.


Sometimes I think that is just sour grapes....if I can't have it it must be bad!


----------



## Montero (Jul 31, 2021)

Immortality said:


> There are many people here against immortality and pose great questions , ideas, comments, etc. which I can answer, because well your wrong and I have read a lot about both immortality and anti-immortality, reading the anti-immortality stuff made me cringe every time I read a new book on anti-immortality , because your wrong on so many levels. You will see why when I’m finally done with my FREE UNIVERSITY INTERNET FAQ. If you want to know why you are wrong Dr. Aubrey de Greys Book ‘Ending Aging’ book is a good start.
> 
> Anyway this is a certifiable University of Connecticut FAQ ( hey, don’t knock us we are considered a public ivy and it’s not easy here ) . Before I can post it on the internet I think I need the deans permission, but I’m sure he will grant it ok.
> 
> ...



Hmm. The "you're wrong" bit is not exactly conducive to debate. You do then invite people to give their reasons for being against immortality but it does have the sound of "hey give me material for my blog so I can use it to show how wrong you are".

Just wanted to highlight I am not entirely comfortable with how you've phrased what you've said - we love a well reasoned, supported by proven data debate on here and leading in with "you're wrong" is not exactly friendly. Maybe you are just being provocative to get attention but it does come across as not entirely open to reasoned debate.


----------



## Elckerlyc (Jul 31, 2021)

Evolution exists by the lucky circumstance that organisms breed and then die. We would not exist without evolution. And evolution has not evolved into creatures that lives forever. (Well OK, except for the Turriopsis dohrnii. But I refuse to be a jellyfish.) Nor will it ever, because even evolution itself is aiming for survival.
If we lived in a perfect world, without conflicts, war, crime, jealousy, greed, and your everyday *sshole around the corner, than yes perhaps immortality might be seen as something desirable, though it would become a challenge to not being bored after 10,385 years of perfect weather in a perfect setting with awfully, perfectly nice people all around you. You will start kicking ass. And be expelled from paradise.

Now, if however you do believe in creation, or a evolution ruled by divine interference, then we should ask ourselves why death was made part of this design. I can't claim to know the answer to that, but am sure it _was_ included by design. And to be honest, I cannot imagine how life and this world would have evolved with the succession of many, many generations. Can't eleaborate more about this without crossing the border into forbidden territory.

Do I wish to live forever? No.
Do I wish to be young again and do all the stuff that I, for loads of different reasons, did not when I was young? Yes, definitely. After that I want to go out with a bang.
Do I believe in an afterlife? Yes, and hope to be there, despite of what I said above. I think it will be totally different from what we can possibly imagine.


----------



## Vertigo (Jul 31, 2021)

I think, as I mentioned on the other thread and as @Elckerlyc alluded to, that the question is very dependent on whether your are talking about the world of today or a post-scarcity world.

If you are talking about the world of today then stagnation becomes an issue; most people wish to advance themselves in their chosen career but, unless you are in a rapidly growing business (and ultimately not all businesses can be such), then you need the people above you to be promoted before you can be, and so on up the line. In a world of longevity people will not retire so people will not advance. Fancy spending the next ten thousand years cleaning the sewers? There are ways around that, so maybe everyone 'retires' on a pension at 100 and has say a decade of sabbatical to learn a new trade but not everyone is going to want to go back to school at 100!

You're going to need to figure a way of getting our memory capacity massively increased. Evolution has designed it to deal with our current lifespans. If those lifespans increase significantly then our memories will need to do so as well (unless you are happy with only remembering your last one hundred years.

The idea of ennui can also not be so glibly dispensed with. I could find many lifetimes worth of hobbies to entertain myself but could I put up with 9 to 5 working for several hundred years never mind several thousand? That is a question that cannot be answered without actually experiencing it. I'm 64 now and I could not imagine going back to another 50 years of the workplace grindstone. 

The population issue is a huge one. To get a stable population you could only have children to replace deaths due to accident or other illnesses. This would require a very small birth rate which would also require special enclaves for families with children in order for them to grow up in a socially sensible way.

Edited to add: Let me just add one more point here. I think all issues that people come up with against immortality may be fixable. But, even assuming we manage to come up with the technologies to deal with the physical ones (worn out joints, teeth, memory etc.), we must still deal with the social ones. And, whilst there are always going to solutions to those, they are not trivial solutions. And, looking at our ability to deal with global warming for example, I'm far from convinced that the chances that we, as a species, can manage to do so are particularly high. Just because something is possible does not mean it is either inevitable or desirable.


----------



## BAYLOR (Jul 31, 2021)

Vertigo said:


> I think, as I mentioned on the other thread and as @Elckerlyc alluded to, that the question is very dependent on whether your are talking about the world of today or a post-scarcity world.
> 
> If you are talking about the world of today then stagnation becomes an issue; most people wish to advance themselves in their chosen career but, unless you are in a rapidly growing business (and ultimately not all businesses can be such), then you need the people above you to be promoted before you can be, and so on up the line. In a world of longevity people will not retire so people will not advance. Fancy spending the next ten thousand years cleaning the sewers? There are ways around that, so maybe everyone 'retires' on a pension at 100 and has say a decade of sabbatical to learn a new trade but not everyone is going to want to go back to school at 100!
> 
> ...



If you lived long enough  you would ultimately lose all of your core memories . In other words,  over time extended , you would likely cease to be you.


----------



## Vertigo (Jul 31, 2021)

BAYLOR said:


> If you lived long enough  you would ultimately lose all of your core memories . In other words,  over time extended , you would likely cease to be you.


I suspect you are right!


----------



## Elckerlyc (Jul 31, 2021)

That could be seen as a way to fight the issue of boredom! You forget, you change, you have a whole new life to experience...

Two months ago, in the 100-Word Anom Challenge, the theme was 'Immortals.' For the challenge I wrote (but did not enter) a story in which the immortals were enforced to undergo a body-swap every 1000 years, which did include animal body-forms as well, with all the handicaps (or abilities) that came with that particular body. Intelligence, memories and speak remained. Will your life remain interesting if your partner turns into a tortoise?


----------



## AllanR (Jul 31, 2021)

Elckerlyc said:


> That could be seen as a way to fight the issue of boredom! You forget, you change, you have a whole new life to experience...


A freind once stated she liked that she didn't remember books a year or two after reading as she could read it again as if it was new.


----------



## Wayne Mack (Jul 31, 2021)

First, I think we need to define what constitutes immortality. Is it the possibility to live forever or is it the absolutely banishment of death? Does it include the ability to regenerate organs, etc. or continue living with the results of injuries?

If there is the possibility to live forever with the possibility of still being killed, it might tend reduce the amount of risk taking one would choose. If one would not die but continue to live with the consequences of injuries, that might also reduce the amount of risk taking. This might lead to a societal rejection of war, but might also reduce the level of protest that people would be willing to engage in. If people would have to live forever with constant pain or live with others with dementia, there might be a philosophical debate on whether individuals should be put to sleep as is sometimes done with pets.

There would also be financial aspects. With no end of life, one will never have enough money to retire. There will be an ever growing workforce. If the overall job market does not show the same level of growth, the result would be growing levels of poverty.

How would pre-adulthood adapt biologically? Would childhood and the onset of puberty be greatly delayed? Would childbearing years be extended indefinitely? If so, would having children (at least to the extent that these things are ever planned) be deferred as there is always time? The result cold be either a dearth of children or exceedingly large families.

Another dimension might be whether immortality is available to all or only a select few, either due to biology or financial well being or political connections.


----------



## Ursa major (Jul 31, 2021)

Elckerlyc said:


> But I refuse to be a jellyfish.


Have you fully taken into account the fringe benefits...?

​


----------



## Dave (Jul 31, 2021)

Wayne Mack said:


> First, I think we need to define what constitutes immortality.


Indeed, are we just talking spare part surgery or backing up memories electronically? With the former, you could still die from freak accidental death or being too far away from surgery. Even with the latter memories may degrade over a long length of time.


Elckerlyc said:


> Evolution exists by the lucky circumstance that organisms breed and then die.


And so cells have an inbuilt clock that makes them age. It's something we don't yet fully understand, but would seem likely to very difficult to switch off, precisely because it is so fundamental to how life has evolved. (We are trying because it is responsible for Cancers, dementia and a host of other old people's diseases.)


Vertigo said:


> I could not imagine going back to another 50 years of the workplace grindstone.


*"No <swear words> way!"*

I work part time, self-employed and freelance now, and you'd never get me to go back to 60-80 hour working weeks again while still never having enough time; constantly at the beck and call of employees, whatever the time of day, while stressed out by ridiculous requests from "the man," and from not climbing the corporate ladder quick enough; always constantly tired, and with disturbed sleep and eating patterns from working shifts, and from commuting in cattle truck trains, or stuck in a car in endless traffic jams, that never end.  

No, I'll leave that to younger people to do, and I'll enjoy my semi-retirement. The idea of having to do that for another 50 years, never mind for another 1,000+ years would not make me excited about immortality.


----------



## Valtharius (Jul 31, 2021)

My attitude on the transhumanism stuff is roughly this: I'll believe it when I see it.


----------



## Wayne Mack (Jul 31, 2021)

Elckerlyc said:


> Evolution exists by the lucky circumstance that organisms breed and then die.


I am not sure either is necessary. I believe evolution only requires mutation and some external pressure that favors that mutation.


----------



## Immortality (Jul 31, 2021)

Montero said:


> Hmm. The "you're wrong" bit is not exactly conducive to debate. You do then invite people to give their reasons for being against immortality but it does have the sound of "hey give me material for my blog so I can use it to show how wrong you are".
> 
> Just wanted to highlight I am not entirely comfortable with how you've phrased what you've said - we love a well reasoned, supported by proven data debate on here and leading in with "you're wrong" is not exactly friendly. Maybe you are just being provocative to get attention but it does come across as not entirely open to reasoned debate.


You’re right. Sorry, really. I most definitely didn’t mean to come across that way. I apologize.


----------



## Elckerlyc (Jul 31, 2021)

Wayne Mack said:


> I am not sure either is necessary. I believe evolution only requires mutation and some external pressure that favors that mutation.


I think this should be answered by an expert on such matters. I am not one, but do suspect that external factors only causes variations. It favours certain already existing properties. It does not cause mutations, as in create new species. If my cells were to mutate it probably would be called cancer.
It seems unlikely to me that, if I were to live forever, I would at Infinity's End have mutated, solely by natural factors, into something unrecognizable. Essentially I will remain a two-legged, one-headed male called Elckerlyc.
But correct me if I'm wrong.


----------



## AllanR (Jul 31, 2021)

mutation requires replication, otherwise it is transformation.
dictionary.com: *Biology*. Also called break . a sudden *departure from the parent type* in one or more heritable characteristics, caused by a change in a gene or a chromosome.


----------



## Dave (Jul 31, 2021)

Wayne Mack said:


> I believe evolution only requires mutation and some external pressure that favors that mutation.


Well, you don't get much mutation without sexual reproduction, and natural selection only works if that reproduction is prevented, not only, but certainly, mainly by death. So, I can't really see how breeding and death aren't important.

When DNA replicates there is always a chance of mutation. A mutation is just a transcription mistake. Most commonly these are SNPs where a single nucleotide is replaced with another or STRs where short sequences of DNA are repeated. In the vast majority of cases these have absolutely no effect on the gene phenotype - the expression of the gene. If there is an effect it will generally be negative, simply because the gene no longer does what it used to do, for example, make some important enzyme. I think Marvel comics have a lot to answer for.


----------



## Immortality (Jul 31, 2021)

Wayne Mack said:


> First, I think we need to define what constitutes immortality. Is it the possibility to live forever or is it the absolutely banishment of death? Does it include the ability to regenerate organs, etc. or continue living with the results of injuries?
> 
> If there is the possibility to live forever with the possibility of still being killed, it might tend reduce the amount of risk taking one would choose. If one would not die but continue to live with the consequences of injuries, that might also reduce the amount of risk taking. This might lead to a societal rejection of war, but might also reduce the level of protest that people would be willing to engage in. If people would have to live forever with constant pain or live with others with dementia, there might be a philosophical debate on whether individuals should be put to sleep as is sometimes done with pets.
> 
> ...


I was thinking of just biological immortality myself, so you could still die from getting hit by a car, getting shot, etc., etc. but for the sake of the FAQ it should cover EVERY kind of immortality, otherwise it will be too short, so mind uploading, etc. etc. will all be addressed too. Everything should be addressed which is why I love all your replies.

Thanks everyone so far for all your concerns, questions, etc. about your issues with being immortal. You might see me on other forums asking the same thing about this *Immortality FAQ . *I made a list of all your concerns, questions, etc. about immortality and it’s quite a bit of questions,  but still not enough to make a fleshed out FAQ. This FAQ needs to be as thorough as possible.


----------



## BAYLOR (Jul 31, 2021)

Immortality said:


> You’re right. Sorry, really. I most definitely didn’t mean to come across that way. I apologize.



You did get a pretty good discussion going on the topic of Immortality .


----------



## Immortality (Jul 31, 2021)

BAYLOR said:


> You did get a pretty good discussion going on the topic of Immortality .


Haha...yeah, I didn’t realize so many people were going to be that interested.


----------



## Danny McG (Jul 31, 2021)

Elckerlyc said:


> Will your life remain interesting if your partner turns into a tortoise?


I turned into a sloth some years ago and my wife finds it interesting (she must surely sit up half the night dreaming up the merciless stream of insults)


----------



## Wayne Mack (Aug 1, 2021)

Dave said:


> Well, you don't get much mutation without sexual reproduction


Viruses use asexual reproduction and mutate quickly.



Dave said:


> natural selection only works if that reproduction is prevented, not only, but certainly, mainly by death.


Assuming immortality, a new variation can become dominant by: being more attractive to mates, by have a longer breeding duration, by having larger broods at birth. Although death may be necessary to take the old population to zero, the percentage of the old population can rather quickly be dwarfed by a more successful new population.


----------



## Wayne Mack (Aug 1, 2021)

The little discussion on evolution sparked another concern about immortality, what happens to a society if its offspring have evolved? If early human ancestors with, perhaps, a lower mental capability lived forever how would they coexist with a more evolved species? Would they be slaves? Pets? Isolated communities?

Even without evolution, how about adaptability to technical change? I see parents struggling to use computers and ignoring smart phone capabilities. How would someone born 2,000 years ago navigate today's world? Would they keep up or give up and live in isolated technology-level zones?


----------



## Immortality (Aug 1, 2021)

The great Nick Bostrom kind of beat me to it with his ‘Transhumanist FAQ’ . Available for free :



			https://www.nickbostrom.com/views/transhumanist.pdf
		


It answers a lot of the questions and concerns related to immortality you all have. I’m going to work in the writing forum section of this website to see how I can distinguish my FAQ from his FAQ and be original and stand out. If you have any ideas or suggestions, please let me know. He graduated from Oxford, is on the faculty and wrote a great book. So I’m not even close to that, but I want to be. In fact it may be impossible for my FAQ to surpass his. I suppose since mine will be more focused on immortality, it may be slightly different, but I don’t want any crossover, but it seems like there will be inevitable crossover with my FAQ and his. He’s the man. Darn it! What am I going to do? Perhaps I can zero in on specific questions related to immortality that I can make it completely different? Or tell me the truth and be honest , do you think me creating a free internet ‘Immortality FAQ’ ( with a pro-immortality stance, which will try to convince the world of the benefits) just like him, do you think he is just too good for me and already made a better FAQ then I ever could? Or is it a matter of self-esteem and working hard to distinguish my FAQ from his as best I can?


----------



## Dave (Aug 1, 2021)

Wayne Mack said:


> Viruses use asexual reproduction and mutate quickly.


You must have missed the "much" word in my sentence that you quoted. DNA viruses do not mutate very quickly. RNA viruses do. 




__





						Viruses and Evolution
					

The battle between the human immune system and pathogens involves continual mutation, adaptation, and evolution. Influenza viruses and HIV provide unique examples of these processes.




					www.historyofvaccines.org
				



But that is irrelevant to the discussion anyway as viruses aren't alive.


----------



## Elckerlyc (Aug 1, 2021)

There is one aspect which, as far as I can see, hasn't been mentioned yet. That of family life.
There has been discussions about the concerns that immortality necessitate a limiting or even a ban on newborn life. Simply because an unlimited on growing population is not sustainable (unless we, next to the ability to reach immortality, had the technology to populate the Milky Way.)
But even without ban, I don't assume that immortality will change anything regarding fertility. Or rather the duration of being able to get pregnant. I don't think that women would be very delighted by the prospect of bearing children for the next 10 million years. (But I could be wrong, though, being a dimwitted male. - btw are there women participating in this thread?)
Anyway, the point I wanted to make is this: The world, life itself, is for the most part based on family life. Generally speaking (and yes, I know there are lots of alternatives and exceptions - I myself am single and always have been, but not by choice) you start out as a child, hopefully in a stable family, next you partner up with someone you love and raise children for yourself, until after that you turn into a grandparent and looked upon to be a babysitter. Until the grandchildren (and their parents) don't need you anymore for this task and contacts diminishes and turn into visits on Sundays, every 2 or 3(?) weeks.
All that disappears when either childbirth is abolished or restricted to your first 100 years of life. After that... comes what? Emptiness? Being single I can honestly say that, though I enjoy life, I'm glad our lifespan is limited.
But of course, personal experience are just that. What say you?


----------



## Montero (Aug 1, 2021)

A few thoughts on the theme.
My choice has always been to not have children. Happy to briefly interact with other people's children (well behaved ones who don't try and cover me in jam or crayon or scream near my ear or kick my shins). I wouldn't feel any loss from living without kids as I already largely do.
There has been communal child raising - I seem to remember it was tried in Israel.
As I child I grew up with several older relatives in the house - and that was fun - I heard a lot of stories about their grand parents and gained a sense of continuity and history.
I think that those who wanted to interact with kids would try to do that, and those who don't wouldn't. One of the potential problems if there are only a few kids and lots of people want kid time, is the kids grow up feeling really special and are then entitled pains in the arse when they reach adulthood and have a long adjustment period when they find they are less special.
In addition to sff and history, my interests include gardening and wildlife watching and campaigning for more areas for wild life. I do get a nuturing type satisfaction from plants growing, and wildlife having somewhere to live and grow.


----------



## Vertigo (Aug 1, 2021)

Montero said:


> I think that those who wanted to interact with kids would try to do that, and those who don't wouldn't. One of the potential problems if there are only a few kids and lots of people want kid time, is the kids grow up feeling really special and are then entitled pains in the arse when they reach adulthood and have a long adjustment period when they find they are less special.


I feel that children growing up in the absence of other children would result in severely maladjusted adults. My belief is that in this scenario the family would have to move to a 'family enclave' until the children reach full adulthood.


----------



## Montero (Aug 1, 2021)

Thinking about people getting bored with a really long life - my late father probably wouldn't have done. He was always interested in what was going on around him, spotting something he thought needed fixing, energetic, curious, driven - and that was well into his eighties. He was still interested by the birds on the bird table outside his window at the nursing home, tracking what they got up to.
I think if I could have the health of my youth back I'd be fine for a long time - the trouble at school was having to specialise. I wanted to do art and music as well as science but had to pick one of three - and went with science in part because my father pointed out it was the more certain living, it was something that needed resources to learn and that I could do art and music later, once I had a job and a place of my own to live in.
Funnily enough, the art and music hasn't much happened yet - so having extra lifetimes to do all this while being at the top of my game physically would be wonderful. Providing my income continued.
But that is entirely from my viewpoint - and as I've mentioned earlier and others have, would have concerns regarding the health of the planet, overpopulation and the like.


----------



## Vertigo (Aug 1, 2021)

Montero said:


> Thinking about people getting bored with a really long life - my late father probably wouldn't have done. He was always interested in what was going on around him, spotting something he thought needed fixing, energetic, curious, driven - and that was well into his eighties. He was still interested by the birds on the bird table outside his window at the nursing home, tracking what they got up to.
> I think if I could have the health of my youth back I'd be fine for a long time - the trouble at school was having to specialise. I wanted to do art and music as well as science but had to pick one of three - and went with science in part because my father pointed out it was the more certain living, it was something that needed resources to learn and that I could do art and music later, once I had a job and a place of my own to live in.
> Funnily enough, the art and music hasn't much happened yet - so having extra lifetimes to do all this while being at the top of my game physically would be wonderful. Providing my income continued.
> But that is entirely from my viewpoint - and as I've mentioned earlier and others have, would have concerns regarding the health of the planet, overpopulation and the like.


I agree with this in that I could easily fill two, three, a dozen, twenty lifetimes without boredom - but thousands? I'm not so sure. Except as has been pointed out I'll probably have completely forgotten the first ones by then! That said that would, I suspect, get me thinking about how pointless it all is; "Have I done this before? Maybe? What's the point?" To be fair though, it's impossible to predict that one until the occasion should arise. I think it was Neal Asher, but might have been Banks, that suggested that if someone had got through their first 300 years of life without giving up from boredom then they probably never would. Something along those lines anyway (maybe with reference to the Old Captains of Spatterjay).


----------



## Danny McG (Aug 1, 2021)

Talking of boredom, why this 'need' to do stuff to alleviate the ennui?

I was living alone after divorce from my first wife many years ago.
After a few months I was told at work that if I didn't take 5 weeks accrued leave I'd lose it.

Five weeks lying on my sofa with the radio quietly playing in the background, doing nothing all day....it was great!
*Nostalgic sigh*


----------



## BAYLOR (Aug 1, 2021)

When im bored , I play  Skyrim. It's fun to wander and have an adventuring  in that realm . Sometimes , I wish it was real place.


----------



## Astro Pen (Aug 1, 2021)

We would sit around the monkey enclosure and make bets on how long it would be before they typed the lords prayer.
Once that bet was won I expect someone would open a new book for typing _Hamlet_.  Because,  you know,  guys and sport.


----------



## Wayne Mack (Aug 1, 2021)

Elckerlyc said:


> you start out as a child, hopefully in a stable family, next you partner up with someone you love and raise children for yourself, until after that you turn into a grandparent and looked upon to be a babysitter. Until the grandchildren (and their parents) don't need you anymore for this task and contacts diminishes and turn into visits on Sundays, every 2 or 3(?) weeks.


An alternative to this pattern would be the multi-generational household. For immortals, this might grow to multi-generational neighborhoods or even cities. Likely, it will be necessary for the young to occasionally strike out on their own to prevent extremely huge family structures.


----------



## hitmouse (Aug 1, 2021)

Dave said:


> Well, you don't get much mutation without sexual reproduction, and natural selection only works if that reproduction is prevented, not only, but certainly, mainly by death. So, I can't really see how breeding and death aren't important.
> 
> When DNA replicates there is always a chance of mutation. A mutation is just a transcription mistake. Most commonly these are SNPs where a single nucleotide is replaced with another or STRs where short sequences of DNA are repeated. In the vast majority of cases these have absolutely no effect on the gene phenotype - the expression of the gene. If there is an effect it will generally be negative, simply because the gene no longer does what it used to do, for example, make some important enzyme. I think Marvel comics have a lot to answer for.


Mutation happens all the time irrespective of reproduction, sexual or asexual. 

Mutation increases the variety of the gene pool. Reproduction propogates this through the generations. Natural selection favours some mutations which confer environmental advantages. Sexual reproduction has some advantages in this respect, but it is not essential: witness the propogation of Covid variants.


----------



## Dave (Aug 2, 2021)

hitmouse said:


> Mutation happens all the time irrespective of reproduction, sexual or asexual.
> 
> Mutation increases the variety of the gene pool. Reproduction propogates this through the generations. Natural selection favours some mutations which confer environmental advantages. Sexual reproduction has some advantages in this respect, but it is not essential: witness the propogation of Covid variants.


I can't understand why people keep quoting me out of context and then saying something I never said as if I said the opposite to it. 

Yes, cells can mutate without dividing/reproducing such as by carcinogenic chemicals or viruses, but that mutation will not get passed on anywhere without mutation of the somatic cells or without reproduction. In short, you can't give your cancer to someone else (only your susceptibility). 

Yes, cells absolutely do need reproduction to propagate mutations. Sexual reproduction developed precisely because it mixes up the genes more and so is better at propagating variation within the gene pool. So, sexual reproduction propagates variation better than asexual. It is a device to give more variety by spreading mutation.

No, sexual or asexual reproduction don't cause the mutations themselves, but the mutations occur as transcription errors during the cell division, so without cell division during reproduction you are not going to have this mutation, and therefore to say reproduction is not necessary is like saying you don't need to kick a ball to play football.

So, I still maintain that the statement: 





Elckerlyc said:


> Evolution exists by the lucky circumstance that organisms breed and then die.


is a perfectly acceptable thing to say. Natural selection can only work it fitter individuals survive to reproduce at the expense/death of the less fit individuals. That is the basic premise of Darwin's theory. The "death" part and the "reproduction" part are vital to it, and the "breed" part makes it more likely.

As for viruses, I don't see the relevance to this conversation. Yes, they show that mutation can propagate without sexual reproduction but no one said it couldn't. I certainly never said that.

Therefore, the actual point made by @Elckerlyc but ignored by everyone only discussing the mechanics, was that with Immortality, Evolution would halt. I agree up to a point. Is that a bad thing or a good thing? I don't know, but it is definitely a "thing"!

However, if we ever have genetic engineering to a level at which we can endow Immortality, then we will certainly also have it to a level where we can create designer babies free from genetic diseases and with added "favourable" genes. Whether Eugenics is a good or a bad thing is not a discussion that would be allowed on this board, and is certainly not one for this thread, but I'm just saying that Evolution of our species might still continue but in a more "managed way." It would not be a question of the science and technology but only a question of ethics. Eugenics has had a particularly bad press in recent history but societies can change, and change their values and ideals over time.

I suggest that we instead move on the second question @Elckerlyc posted of family life and structure. That is much more interesting to explore.

I think the idea of multi-generational household or even entire city quarters is an interesting one, reminiscent of Scottish Clan kinship groups that gave a sense of shared identity and descent to members, and a share of the heritable estate. Such groups could replace governments and corporations in the administration of law and order, commerce and political power.

I wonder also about the sanctity of life, and how precious human life would be considered to immortals. I've recently become a grandfather for the first time. I forgot how fragile, exposed and dependent human babies are. Both the birth rate and the death rate in industrialised countries have fallen considerably. Birth and death are already more unusual. What if they became very rare? How would that change our societal attitudes?


----------



## Elckerlyc (Aug 2, 2021)

Thank you @Dave for not ignoring the points I made.  

A few minor thoughts.


Dave said:


> Therefore, the actual point made by @Elckerlyc but ignored by everyone only discussing the mechanics, was that with Immortality, Evolution would halt. I agree up to a point. Is that a bad thing or a good thing? I don't know, but it is definitely a "thing"!


Whether this is a good or a bad thing is hard to say. Any evolutionary changes will only be noticeable and relevant on the long run. Off course, 'long run' may be a very relative time-span set off against Immortality. But if Evolution does halt, we will never know what we could have gained if Life had run its natural course. Unless only part of humanity acquires immortal lives, while the rest (the poor buggers) are denied or can't afford the Treatment, in which case they will still fall under the law of evolutionary rule... and eventually evolve into something which will make the Immortals turn green of envy. Either way, you might miss out on something monumental!
Having said that, all this falls flat when gaining immortality is the result of Eugenics. In that case adaptations are theoretically endless (and largely individually, I assume) and only limited by ethics, which, in its turn, is an adaptable and also individually set of rules evolving as time goes by. It is however limited by humankind's imagination, whereas Nature may still surprise us.

On family life. All our experiences and expectations are based on our limited lifespan. In say a 100 years years you go through all phases, from child to parent to carer/grandparent to patient in a home for elderly care. All there different roles will shift. You will still be agile and at your height of mental abilities when your 100,000 years old. Will you know your great^n grandchild? Do you care? 
The idea of multi generational households is interesting, but I wonder how strong the bond between the members will be. Will you still feel a connection with someone, equally agile and keen as you are, but 100 generations removed, though in direct line. Perhaps, but the strong bond that is so important too many of us, throughout our lives, that of child - parent - grandparent - death, will be long passed and perhaps even meaningless terms.


----------



## Venusian Broon (Aug 2, 2021)

Elckerlyc said:


> Thank you @Dave for not ignoring the points I made.
> 
> A few minor thoughts.
> 
> Whether this is a good or a bad thing is hard to say. Any evolutionary changes will only be noticeable and relevant on the long run. Off course, 'long run' may be a very relative time-span set off against Immortality. But if Evolution does halt, we will never know what we could have gained if Life had run its natural course. Unless only part of humanity acquires immortal lives, while the rest (the poor buggers) are denied or can't afford the Treatment, in which case they will still fall under the law of evolutionary rule... and eventually evolve into something which will make the Immortals turn green of envy. Either way, you might miss out on something monumental!



Studies of fossils and other means showed, I believe, that the average mammalian species 'lasts' about 3 million years. I.e. goes extinct or evolves into other seperate species. I'd expect normal non-immortal humans would probably have the same trajectory, maybe more, maybe less.

The thing is that even if you could make a static immortal human being, the universe is constanstly changing around about such a being. Unless we drastically change our sun or system, it's increasing energy output will cause all Earth vegetation to die out in about half a billion years. (Basically Earth heating up leads to increasing removal of CO2 in the atmosphere, until there will be not enough to sustain green life. Once that goes, there goes the oxygen...)

So that means that these immortals will either have to do some very serious stellar engineering or relocate to artificial habitats or other star systems that provide the relatively narrow range of conditions that they are used to.

Which brings up an interesting crossroads. Do immortals change the universe to make it 'static' and only suitable for them, or do they 'teleologically evolve themselves' to adapt to the conditions they find? (One assumes that if we have 'cracked' death we might be able to change our bodies to withstand alien biospheres and extreme conditions. - see for example some of the adaptions that Bruce Sterling talks about in his Schisimatrix stories.)

I suspect if it were possible (I have a long list of objections and problems with the basic idea, so this is just moot, in my eyes) it would be a combination of both.

Actually, being immortal and able to occupy any habitat or change any system of mass into earth-like conditions, makes us look like the bad guys. We'd probably consume the universe like a plague.


----------



## Immortality (Aug 2, 2021)

Ladies and gentlemen, this is great stuff for my ‘Immortality FAQ’ thank you so very much. If you have more concerns, opinions, critiques, thoughts, questions, etc. on immortality please now move them over to the thread below if you can, it will just make it easier for me, because it’s a writing forum. I’m sure they will allow you to post more on the subject of immortality for the sake of my FAQ , post everything there from now on. Obviously, if it’s unrelated to my Immortality FAQ you can continue to write on this thread. As I will be using this new thread from now on in order to write a hopefully great Immortality FAQ, that will be edited well and in good form, thank you. I hope to get writing help from that part of the forum :

Immortality FAQ vs Nick Bostroms Transhumanist FAQ

Best,
immortality


----------



## BAYLOR (Aug 2, 2021)

Im thinking  that without our core memories, what would be the point of living forever?


----------



## Montero (Aug 2, 2021)

If you are enjoying each day, each week, maybe that is good enough. Bluntly, anyone with dementia becomes increasingly disconnected from their memories but many still have quality of life. Terry Pratchett continued working.


----------



## BAYLOR (Aug 2, 2021)

Montero said:


> If you are enjoying each day, each week, maybe that is good enough. Bluntly, anyone with dementia becomes increasingly disconnected from their memories but many still have quality of life. Terry Pratchett continued working.



I wouldn't want to live that way.


----------



## Elckerlyc (Aug 2, 2021)

I would assume that if somehow immortality becomes a reality and aging of the body is prevented, that this also goes for your brain cells. No deterioration of your mental abilities, as is now the case once you passed into your twenties. No diseases that can affect your brain 

If not, the whole idea of immortality becomes a horror story.


----------



## BAYLOR (Aug 2, 2021)

Elckerlyc said:


> I would assume that if somehow immortality becomes a reality and aging of the body is prevented, that this also goes for your brain cells. No deterioration of your mental abilities, as is now the case once you passed into your twenties. No diseases that can affect your brain
> 
> If not, the whole idea of immortality becomes a horror story.



Indeed.



In remember a bit in the dystopian science fiction film* Zardoz* among a group called the Eternals , there was  a faction  of them called The Apathetics , These were  Immortals who were so weary of immorality and long life that  they mentally shut down ,  sat or stood there staring,  vacant ,  unmoving , unable to respond to anyone or anything and worse,  unable to die. Just unending existence to no purpose.


----------



## Montero (Aug 2, 2021)

Yes it is interesting that there is quite a large number of people assuming that immortality only fixes diseases of everything except the mind.
If the brain degraded to the point that autonomous functions ceased then you wouldn't be immortal anyway.


----------



## BAYLOR (Aug 2, 2021)

Montero said:


> Yes it is interesting that there is quite a large number of people assuming that immortality only fixes diseases of everything except the mind.
> If the brain degraded to the point that autonomous functions ceased then you wouldn't be immortal anyway.



The body would die without the brain.


----------



## Elckerlyc (Aug 2, 2021)

A little story I once wrote, but never used:

“There are issues with Cut & Collect.”
“You mean, with Death?”
“Yes, him. He Cuts life threads and then forgets about what he was doing or tries to Collect the wrong soul. With nasty results.“
“What’s wrong with him?”
“The symptoms would indicate the onset of dementia.”
“Is that even possible? We’re immortal!”
“Well, he _is_ the oldest amongst us, by far. He won’t die, probably.”
“Poor sod. Not remembering who you are for the remainder of eternity.”
“That’s not the real issue.”
“Not?”
“When Death is no longer capable, who of us can Cut and Collect?”
“...”


----------



## Vertigo (Aug 3, 2021)

Yes I would assume that if we can successfully engineer our bodies for immortality then we can also prevent degradation of the brain. But we weren't talking about brain disease, dementia etc., or at least I wasn't, I was talking about the capacity of our memory; our brains are not infinite in size and therefore not infinite in capacity. Once that capacity is reached what happens? Can we no longer add any more long term memories? Or do we dump older memories and reuse the freed up capacity? If it's the former then we're stuffed so let's assume the latter. Consequently we will loose our older memories not through illness but through living. Let's face it we don't really understand how our mind stores information, we have some ideas about where information is stored but not, as far as I'm aware, how it is stored. So I suspect we are a lot further away from backing up our memories than we are from longevity.

So I never suggested we would forget through some sort of illness but rather because we don't have infinite storage in our brains. As I understand it we don't forget stuff because our brains are degrading but because we don't continually reinforce our memories by going over every single thing stored in our brains. And, without that reinforcement, those memories are simply lost and, presumably, that capacity is reused. Which is maybe where our sometimes muddled memories of events comes from.


----------

