i would only want to be immortal if cutting off my head would make me die. like the elfs

I am not sure about forever but a couple more decades to the average lifespan in a relatively healthy state – yes, please, who do I need to kill for that?

Of all the versions of immortality in fantasy/SF I prefer the one with incarnations where you are the same soul but reborn in a new body. If we’re talking a more plausible version, I used to believe that by now (I’m 30) somebody would come up with something radical to do with getting old, but these days I don’t think that within the next 20 years there might be such a breakthrough.

The technological progress curve is exponential

Eh, maybe in telecommunications or something. Certainly not in say immunology where we have stalled massively since the 70s. Or perhaps I should say vaccine development, as the practical side of immunology. We certainly understand a lot more about why we can’t develop more effective vaccines…

I understand the idea of extending the life time more and more, so that you end up with a sort of effective immortality – where you live just long enough for the next life – extending treatment to come out (as often told by Aubrey De Grey, bless’im) – but I think the rate of scientific progress postulated just isn’t there.

Human concepts of value have no meaning beyond human beings so it makes no sense to assign any objective value to people, or animals, or ‘biodiversity,’ or whatever.

Makes sense if you are, in fact, a human. There is no argument that will persuade a rock to value the same things as I do, nor is there one to persuade every conceivable mind, or a mind of perfect philosophical emptiness. All we’ve got, in the field of sapient minds, is human values, don’t be so quick to discard them just because they don’t generalise to all others.

Case in point for another mind that wouldn’t agree with us: the sci-fi trope of the paperclip maximiser, who values only the existence of more paperclips and will act so as to increase that number at any cost. Such a mind would indeed look at human values and say “No, those goals have worth only in so far as they produce paperclips”, but I don’t think we’re wrong to say that our values are better than that.

I suspect you don’t live as if human values make no sense. Examine your own mind a little more closely and try to see where your instinctive values diverge from what you seem to think is logical – I suspect your instincts have it right. (Another sci-fi trope there, “logical” meaning emotionless. Sometimes a situation demands an emotional response and that is then the logical course of action.)

IceBrain wrote:

And regarding the perils that @Nathan talked about, I don’t think they make much sense if we assume a technologically and not “magic” based eternal life, since having almost god-like powers of organ regeneration would be a precondition; time and entropy alone do a much better job at killing brain cells than the occasional sip of beer, so if you could fix the former, there’s no reason to think you wouldn’t be able to the fix the latter.

Exactly. :)

@ vukodlak:

Right, this seems daunting but it is clear we can’t just do it in one go, and overnight. But the idea is to do this in baby steps. And a lot of that is preventative stuff, and damage mitigation. As in, what can you do for people in their 20’s and 30’s right now to help them save off aging by a decade or two. What can you do for the people in their 40’s and 50’s to at least partially repair the cellular damage they accumulated over their lifetimes.

The idea is that if you buy people an extra few decades of life now, then in 20-30 years they might be still around and healthy enough to benefit the next breakthrough anti-aging treatment and so on.

The technological progress curve is exponential, so chances are that within next few deades medical science will move fast enough to keep up with aging, and eventually will be able to run laps around it.

@ Ron:

Right, but it’s a moot point at the moment because we do not have functional immortality. Once we are close, we can discuss our options.

I mean, when you have a society at the cusp of immortality it is only natural to sit down and have the discussion along the lines of “guys, if we gonna do that we will need to all agree not to make that many babies”. And chances are people will be ok with it. We can agree on laws and regulations to enforce it.

@ Ron:
But that’s no change from the current status. Currently we have exponential growth, with immortality we would have slightly faster exponential growth. Both is unsustainable.

Further: living longer does not directly translate to more children. This would of course look different if you increase life-span to extreme amounts of time. But it’s currently no direct correlation (at sub-150years its more like the other way round i would guess).

The other big problem with imortaility, is that without stopping birth, it would be completly unsustainable, even with FTL supporting an effectivly infinate population is crazy

Interesting. The biological (and consequently technical) limitations to the kind of immortality you describe here (where your various physiological functions remain at or near their peak)… well, they’re pretty daunting. Let me see…

– Telomere shortening. You already touched on this, but a potential pitfall is that our bodies already have a mechanism to combat telomere shortening – and its expression ‘in the wild’ can often lead to cancer. In fact, many cancers have a very active telomere repair mechanism. So even if you figured out how to get telomere repair to work, that would increase the possibility of tumour growth.

– Mutations. As we age, we accumulate mutations through various mechanisms – DNA damage from mutagens and UV, mostly. The number of mutations is a linear function of time but the number of mutations can increase exponentially if one or more of the mutated genes controls DNA repair – and again, this is how most cancers work.

Even if you could use some sort of whole body gene therapy (presumably using a virus, which can infect every single cell in the body, repair the mutation back to its original allele, and then self-destruct) you would have to keep doing this over and over for the duration of your life. If this process is 100% efficient, you would still need to continually screen for new mutations. Somehow. In all tissues. Also, there are some mutations you may wish not to repair – somatic hypermutation in B cells mainly – which allow you to acquire immunity to new pathogens.

– Infections disease. This one is a bugger, because it’s pretty certain that we won’t find a way to get rid of a rapidly evolving bacterial/viral/parasitic biome. Even if you find a way to make our immune responses super-efficient at killing disease-causing microorganisms, it’s still an arms race between evolution on one side and science on the other. Of course, this is pretty much what we have now, but we accept an occasional flu epidemic killing a few hundred thousand people largely because of our coping mechanisms.

Of course, this all may still extend our average lifespan significantly, so probably worth trying for, at least from a biological standpoint. Still, it seems that short of a magic bullet technology (say for instance a way to transfer consciousness to a new, vat-grown, body (although arguably, the whole-body gene therapy would already be magic)) this will be a long, protracted iterative process. And expensive. Which would go towards an interesting set of sociological problems (a new social class of super-rich immortal billionaires, oligarchs and tyrants, which would find the threat of violence a massively overriding worry in their daily lives, almost certainly leading them towards an establishment of private armies and strongholds where they use the promise of access to immortality technology as incentive).

Ursula is certainly a clever author, but in this particular case, she actually got the trope & subversion from Jonathan Swift’s master piece, Gulliver’s Travels, as in fact she alludes to in the story. And in my opinion, he does a much better job at inculcating the sheer horror of living and aging forever.

Would I want to live forever? I don’t know. But I would certainly like the option of doing so! And regarding the perils that @Nathan talked about, I don’t think they make much sense if we assume a technologically and not “magic” based eternal life, since having almost god-like powers of organ regeneration would be a precondition; time and entropy alone do a much better job at killing brain cells than the occasional sip of beer, so if you could fix the former, there’s no reason to think you wouldn’t be able to the fix the latter.

And now off I go to listen to Queen ;)

@ Christopher Wellons:

This reminds me of Glass House by Charless Stross where “memory surgery” is a routine procedure. Had a traumatic experience? Don’t like who you’ve become? Erase parts of your memory and start with a clean slate. Hell, you can even erase bad relationships Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind style. :)

There was also a pretty good short story (I don’t remember the title) about post humans living endless lives in the limitless virtual worlds. It was sort of accepted that after living few decades to few centuries in this or that realm, people would eventually get bored, and move on. So they would throw the last big party, say goodbye to all their friends, then when all guests go home, set their house on fire and leave the realm forever.

They would go somewhere else, pick a new look, reconfigure their personality, give themselves new vices, new tastes and new hobbies and start over in a new place. Sometimes old friends or family members would meet each-other after many life-times apart and have a drink (or whatever you do in a given realm to unwind) and talk about the good-old days – but for the most part it was a meeting between strangers who shared some strands of memory of lives they once enjoyed no longer had any connection to.

Some people erased all, or at least some of their memories after each life was concluded. Most did not feel it was necessary – because by the time they were ready to torch all their possessions and vanish forever, they already done all they could do with that life, that world and that personality.

It was kinda like reincarnation, but not really – you custom tailored what you wanted your new life to be, what kind of experience you wanted to get out of it.