Maybe we are the last human generation to die?
Bummer.
woooo… imortality. The way to live forever. No, tuck everlasting even got some values for that matter. Unless you live the greatest life on the planet for the timeless of all times.
This reminds me of A Picture of Dorian Gray. For those of you who haven’t read it, a boy gets a portrait done and wishes that he could forever look as the painting does, and the painting could age. By some way, it happens. He does all these horrible things and nobody believes such a pretty face could do such cruel things. By having his sins show upon the paining, he has no sense of remorse, for nothing really effects his life. Since there are no consequences, he comes to hating his life and kills himself by stabbing the painting. I highly doubt lengthening youth would have these effects on people who don’t have serious psychological problems though.
I have this vision of people who look like the Crypt Keeper from “Tales from the Crypt” all walking around and in line at the bank and stuff is a little unsettling.
It’s interesting that someone mentioned Tuck Everlasting. (Although I can’t figure out what that person is trying to say otherwise.) In the movie, William Hurt’s character, commenting on his family’s magical inability to die, laments to Winnie, the girl who has discovered them and has learned their incredible secret: “We’re like rocks. We just exist.”
The film is impressive for how much it gets right. One particularly memorable line, spoken by Hurt, itself ought to be immortalized: “Don’t fear death,” he urges Winnie: “Fear the unlived life.” Tuck and family ought to know.
Man is nothing if not a being in constant process.
Speaking of immortality… one of my very favorite passages from TF deals with this very topic:
You know how people long to be ethernal. But they die with every day that passes. When you meet them, they’re not what you met last. In any given hour, they kill some part of themselves. They change, they deny, they contradict - and they call it growth. At the end there’s nothing left, nothing unreversed on unbetrayed; as if there had never been an entity, only a succession of adjectives fading in and out on an unformed mass. How do they expect a permanence which they have never held for a single moment?
(any errors mine)
Gosh, I would love to live indefinitely. There’s so much I want to do! :dough:
Gosh, I would love to live indefinitely. There’s so much I want to do! :dough:
Okay, why would you want to do anything, if you were immortal? I mean, my whole understanding of value is based on benefits to my life. The think that would worry me about immortality, well, apart from the while Cryptkeeper look, is that I don’t know what my central purpose could be, if I were immortal. I can see the appeal of living 500 years or more, but actually being immortal? I think being immortal means being immoral.
I think being immortal means being immoral.
I would think _a_mmoral would be more accurate.
Okay, why would you want to do anything, if you were immortal?
I didn’t mean I wanted to be immortal. I was using JMeganSnow’s definition of “living indefinitely” from the last page (Post 2): that I had the choice to live as long as I found value in living.
I didn’t mean I wanted to be immortal. I was using JMeganSnow’s definition of “living indefinitely” from the last page (Post 2): that I had the choice to live as long as I found value in living.
I would also want to live indefinitely. Keep replacing my body parts as they wear out. Use stem cells to replace dying brain cells. Hook me up to artificial hearts, kidneys and livers. Replace my knee joints and hip joints. I am in favor of the maximum deployment of biomechanical and medical technology to allow me to live longer.
That is a lot different from being immortal, which is an impossible concept for living creatures. I wouldn’t want it; I couldn’t get it; it is a metaphysical impossibility. The Twilight Zone had an episode that made that point. The immortal person repeatedly and unsuccessfully tried to kill himself. Ironically, once he became immortal, he found his life was no longer worth living.
Given that life is the standard of the Objectivist ethics, I am somewhat puzzled by the apparent ambivalence of some (presumably Objectivist) individuals on the incredible prospect of the indefinitely-continued successful achievement of precisely the ultimate end that all moral human action is directed toward.
Leaving aside the question of the metaphysical impossiblity of literal indestructibility, the interesting point here is that there is every reason to expect that, given an appropriate level of scientific advancement, human beings will be able to achieve practical immortality.
To begin with, the aging process is not a metaphysically unalterable curse of the human condition; it is not imposed on us by the natural order of things or by the will of some deity. It is rather a biological process with fully intelligible causal mechanisms, mechanisms which in recent years we have made spectacular progress toward understanding on the evolutionary, genetic, and physiological levels. When we understand them sufficiently we will be able to intervene and control them. We are already able to acheive dramatic lifespan extension in model organisms, including mammals, by both environmental and genetic interventions. The lifespan of rodents has been extended by 50%, that of roundworms by 600%. The essential plasticity of aging is the most exciting and overwhelmingly unavoidable finding in the recent history of aging research. If Man is left free to pursue this monumentally important area of scientific inquiry and to apply its findings to the service of human life, then in the not-so-distant future we will begin to treat aging from a medical standpoint as we would any other degenerative, invariably fatal disorder, i.e. we will cure it.
Similarly, there is absolutely no reason to accept the idea that we will be forever vulnerable to the onslaught of those pathetic, piddling, contemptible little microbes and specks of aberrant molecules that currently have the affrontery to destroy human life on a vast scale. Nor is there any basis for assuming that we will not be able to take charge of the proliferation of our own bodies’ cells, or to maintain our cardiovascular system in good working order.
These are all merely technical biomedical challenges that we can be certain will eventually succumb to the scientific conquest of nature, should that pursuit survive the hostility of the present culture.
We can have certainty on this question because none of the requisite technological advances involve some arbitrarily-postulated discovery of hypothetical laws of physics, none of them await the uncovering of unknowable revelations that contradict known science–rather, the existence of solutions to these problems of biology is a necessary implication of our current knowledge of the causal mechanisms by which these various insults bring about the death of the human organism. There of course remain vast obstacles in applying this knowledge practically, but here one might point to the virtually miraculous rate of progress we’ve witnessed since the birth of modern science some few centuries ago, next to the endless millennia of squalor and carnage that came before.
So now that aging and disease have been eliminated, all that remains to dispatch us is injury. But here too we will hardly be resigned to accepting the terrible fragility of the human body. The seriousness with which people take accident as an insuperable barrier to a radically-extended life seems premised on the idea that humans are doomed to remain as delicate as they are now, so that one unlucky trip onto a hard surface can wipe you out of existence. But the physical durability of the human machine will be fully as amenable to reengineering as will be its immune system. Tougher materials can be incorporated. Wound healing can be improved. And medical technology will be better able to repair the damage that does occur–that at this early stage we already have such things as organ transplants, regenerative medicine, and functional thought-controlled prosthetic limbs is suggestive. Moreover, the technological devices we deal with will become safer. I for one am confident that humanity will devise a saner means of transport than via daily hurtling head-on several feet past hundreds of massive speeding metal vehicles directed by strangers of unknown capability, sobriety, or emotional state. And importantly, if we are to make it to a society in which anything like this level of science can continue to exist, then we will be living on a radically more-rational planet, and the threats of random crime or of foreign barbarians with explosives or of nuclear-armed dictatorships will not be significant. About the only things left are perhaps stray meteoroids (we’ll shoot them) or the death of the Sun (we’ll move).
My point here is that, however unfathomably distant some of these advances may be, there can come a time in human existence when the risk of death is truly negligible, and this for all intents and purposes would be practical immortality. The mere metaphysical possibility that some extraordinary cataclysmic event could still kill you would not mean that any actual individual’s life could not continue long into the indefinite future. This would unequivocally be a magnificent achievement.
For me to want immortality (or living indefinitely, whatever), it requires three criteria:
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Never aging.
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Ability to die if I so desire.
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Cognition never diminished.
In this particular context, the nanobots seem fit my criteria. Therefore I would definitely take it without hesitation. Complete control over your body can only be a good thing.
My question is whether these nanobots can have further applications other than helping you live indefinitely. For instance, if it can build and resupply cells to your body, it could reasonably mean it could also alter things like your strength, speed, body mass, and possibly even your appearance and/or intelligence.
My point here is that, however unfathomably distant some of these advances may be, there can come a time in human existence when the risk of death is truly negligible, and this for all intents and purposes would be practical immortality. The mere metaphysical possibility that some extraordinary cataclysmic event could still kill you would not mean that any actual individual’s life could not continue long into the indefinite future. This would unequivocally be a magnificent achievement.
I agree.
I can’t foresee myself wanting to live forever, but I can say with certainty that I’d rather the choice be in my hands than subject to nature. I enjoy my life far too much - and death, not to mention the aging process, are two things I wouldn’t mind missing out on.
I also admit I’m hanging on for commercial space travel. 
That reminds me of a class I had where we discussed the mechanisms of aging in baker’s yeast. I think it is partly still a hypothesis what we talked about in that class, but it really is quite interesting and there seems to be a whole lot of experimental data to back this idea up.
What currently seems to be the prime reason human beings age (giving us an upper age limit of about 120 years) is the fact that human cells can divide approximately 60 times. Most likely because of the nature of the division process, this has the consequence that a group of new cells will divide 60 times, and at that point all the cells will stop dividing and die off, instead of just the “oldest” ones in the bunch. My professor said that they think something accumulates in these cells that ultimately shuts down the division process, although they do not yet know what exactly this is. There are some indications, however.
From what they currently know, it looks like the silencing of genes is the weak link in the aging process. This control mechanism is necessary to keep cells differentiated, as it determines which genes will be active and therefore which proteins are expressed in that cell. Because most of the human genome is transcriptionally silent (i.e. the genes aren’t active), it is especially crucial for us. The main weakness in human cells seems to be the telomeres, the ends of our chromosomes. In previous years scientists believed it was the length of the telomeres that mattered, or that the reason human cells stopped dividing was that the telomeres weren’t present anymore. However, it looks now as if the problem is more that the silencing of that region starts to break down which causes regions of the DNA to become transcriptionally active when they are not supposed to be.
An organism that is used as a model to study aging is baker’s yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae). This yeast reproduces by ‘budding’, which means that a new yeast forms on the outside of the first one. The big advantage this has is that you can track under a microscope which yeast is the mother, and which is the daughter (so to speak). This allows you to seperate the newer and the older yeasts, and therefore to know how long any particular cell lives. Most yeast strains have an age limit of about 20ish divisions. Now, the interesting thing is that for yeasts the daughter cell can also divide twenty times on its own. This is a clear difference between this organism and human cells, because it means that a colony can live indefinitely. Another big difference in yeast is that almost all of the genome is being transcribed at a certain point in time. The only three regions that are silenced are the telomeres, the sequence that determines the sex of the yeast, and the sequence where ribosomal RNA is produced.
The main weakness in this system of silencing for yeast is the ribosomal RNA sequence. This part of the genome consists of approximately 120-140 repeats of the same sequence. Repeated sequences in DNA are inherently unstable because one of the repeats can circularize and ‘jump’ out of the DNA. They found that in aging yeasts there were many more of these circular pieces of DNA present compared to the new ones. The reason the new yeasts were born with 20 divisions left to go, was that these circular pieces of DNA remain with the mother (which, apparently, doesn’t happen in human cells with whatever mechanism exists there that determines aging). However, this process of circularization only occurs when they genes are transcriptionally active; the better they are silenced, the less it occurs.
The next thing they did was study mutants that had mutations in the genes that encode for the proteins responsible for the silencing of this area. Indeed, some of these lived anywhere from half as long (in generations) to twice as long as normal yeasts. I think that so far, they’ve managed to get mutants that live for about 40 generations. Translated back to human terms, it would already be really nice if you could double our current age limit of about 120.
Now, the hypothesis of how these circular pieces of DNA cause the cell to stop dividing after a certain point is that transcription factors and other proteins necessary for the cell bind to these DNA molecules instead of to where they are supposed to bind. This means that at some point the amount of circular DNA becomes large enough that the rest of the cell is deprived of these essential proteins, and they think that this is what causes problems in human cells, as well. Indeed, if the areas of DNA around the telomeres were no longer silenced effectively in older cells it would draw away proteins from other parts of the DNA, which would ultimately make division impossible.
The main difference between human aging and yeast aging is that different parts of the genome seem to be most vulnerable, but there is good reason to believe that at least in essence the aging process is highly similar, even though the specifics may vary per organism. It definitely offers interesting prospects for the future!
It’s interesting that someone mentioned Tuck Everlasting. (Although I can’t figure out what that person is trying to say otherwise.) In the movie, William Hurt’s character, commenting on his family’s magical inability to die, laments to Winnie, the girl who has discovered them and has learned their incredible secret: “We’re like rocks. We just exist.”
The film is impressive for how much it gets right. One particularly memorable line, spoken by Hurt, itself ought to be immortalized: “Don’t fear death,” he urges Winnie: “Fear the unlived life.” Tuck and family ought to know.
Man is nothing if not a being in constant process.
Tuck Everlasting is one of my favorite movies specifically because of how it deals with this theme. The Tuck family, however, is not universally nihilistic in their attitude about immortality (again, a form of immortality that is a metaphysical impossibility) the younger Tuck loves his life, travels the world over and over again, and tries to get the girl he loves to join him on his journeys. He is the emodiment of a rational lover of life, not Tuck Sr. The elder son was perpetually depressed about it because he lost his wife and children, the mother was portrayed as rather indifferent to it, she appeared to just like her life and content to keep living it. When Tuck talks Winnifred out of immortality, it must be kept in mind that in the original story, Winni was much younger, and so he might have been trying to say whatever he could to talk her out of it, lest she be a child forever.
One could live indefinately and still live a vibrant and rich life. To imply the choice is between ‘fearing death’ and ‘living life’ is a false dichotomy. Look to the younger Tuck sibling for a model on how a rational life loving person would respond to ‘immortality’
As long as my life is worth living, I’ll take every extra minute of it I can get.
I have no reason to believe that hte act of living longer will make any portion of my life “less” worth living.
As long as my life is worth living, I’ll take every extra minute of it I can get.
Yeah, but seriously, how do you decide if it’s worth living? In the context of a being which exists regardless of his efforts, where you can’t die, what is the meaning of “worth it”?
Yeah, but seriously, how do you decide if it’s worth living? In the context of a being which exists regardless of his efforts, where you can’t die, what is the meaning of “worth it”?
I’m not arguing the immortality angle. I’m arguing the life extension angle.
As soon as someone comes up with a pill for true immortality, I’ll consider the consequences. Right now I consider that one of those too-fantastic hypotheticals upon which reasonable philosophy gets very little added value for the amount of time everyone wants to spend discussing it.