Immortality. Fact or Fiction?

[Dan]

mdwh2 wrote:
I'm sure that the retirement age will go up if people are capable of working for far longer (or there'll be no retirement at all if people can live forever).

Society would be so different so there might not be employment and retirement as we know it.
If I had unlimited time to learn stuff why would I buy things that I could make myself?

1)As for cryogenics, the book Why call them back from heaven? by  Clifford D. Simak is something to thing about.
I would never let my body( or head) be frozen, because I don´t want to be a Soylent Green burger:-)

As for genetics thats a long way of in the future.
2)"Stopping the clock": I have read somewhere that they succeded with this in some kind of worm, who lived twice or thrice as long as normal. Humans are a bit more complicated than worms.

3)"Replacement clone": This has the same problem as "Transfer mind to computer" we need to know exactly how the brain and body works and then why not use method 2?
Also this method would have enormous ethical consequences!
Don´t you know why Supermans homeplanet was destroyed? :-)

4)"Transfer mind to computer":see 3 above
 And why the hell would you want to be a computer in the first place? Imagine getting a computervirus! :lol:

5)"Cheap taiwanse parts"(Noname Robocop:lol:): If the asian firms that makes consumer electronics, computers and cars today went into the prosthetic market, Replacement organs would be very cheap so eventually everybody could afford it. It couldn´t extend the life off your brain but maybe it would give us another 50 years to add to the 70-80 we already have.
And as a bonus it would help everybody injured in accidents or wars as well.


I don´t see how we could become immortal but with method 2 and 5 our lives could be extended. An accident which destroyed the brain would still kill us. There is also they question on how long the brain would function with method 5 it would still age and with method 2 I wonder how we would experience our extended life. Would we simply think slower or if not, how much memories could our brain handel?

[Dan]

gizz72 wrote:
Greetings,

>Cheap taiwanse parts...

Thant reminded me of 'NEUROMANCER' when you can sell your body parts just to log-into 'cyberspace' for hacking. I think that's not far fetch, since we already have a pace maker. Just don't make the batteries go low, charge it! :lol:

I beleive the human brain can live more than 2 centuries. If I recall, during the old biblical times, people lived 200 years or more. The modern version would be, we are placed in a jar with electrodes stiking in(Not a pretty site though:-(). Attatch in a main frame which connectected in a humungus array of servers just keeping us all alive, while we 'think' we'er in a dreamworld.... Wait have I seen this before? :-)

Regards,

Gizz

Mona Lisa Overdrive by Gibson perhaps? :-) That Virek guy?

And the pacemaker is fairly lowtech compared to that  cochleaimplant, an earimplant they use these days which sends the signals directly to the auditory nerve .