Suppose Science Made Immortality Into A Reality?

[DelActivisto]

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.

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]

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]

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]

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

When will the population crash?

 

[DelActivisto]

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]

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]

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

 

[BAYLOR]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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

 

[Alexa]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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).