21–30 of 123 posts
What makes you think no one wants to die? No one knows for sure if there's anything on the other side, but I definitely don't want to stick around this world forever. Immortality would be a curse.
Obviously nobody really wants to be immortal and one day outlast the solar-system and eventually be left floating around in space for trillions of years.
Steve Jobs:
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.
Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
Steve Jobs is the single worst example that the OP could've picked as a candidate for cryopreservation, as it goes against everything he (and I) believes in.
When you're healthy, living forever sounds great. When you've experienced a few minor illnesses and a bit of short-lived pain, such as a broken limb or two, living forever still sounds great. I had a (thankfully temporary) condition that resulted in chronic pain for about a year. It wasn't terrible pain, but pain that never goes away wears you down in a way that horrible, but short-lived, pain simply doesn't. After a…
> I can completely understand why extending their lives was not desirable to them. I think its presumed that life extension would also come with improved health. What kills you is decline due to chronic conditions. Target that and stop the declined and you gain both long-life, and healthy life.
These visionary geniuses and hackers' most brilliant breakthrough was the realization of the inevitable fact that sooner or later, we all die. The trick is in channeling that truth as a motivator. We must strive to achieve as much as possible today, because there might not be a tomorrow. Steve Jobs: No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destinat…
It's not the lack of cryo arrangements that's the problem. (I've considered cryo myself, but I'm not impressed with the likelyhood of success. Too many fracturing events, not to mention the likely extreme costs of recovery post-freezer. But if you're looking for more life, it's your only potential option.) The problem is that we haven't been focusing enough on the real issue: Death. Finding ways to extend human life…
If we find (an affordable) way to extend human life indefinitely, then at some point individuals are going to be faced with the choice of voluntarily "stepping aside" (or whatever polite term we might come up with) or stop having children. I don't think either would be in most people's nature, which doesn't seem to lead to any pleasant consequences I can think of.
I bet once indefinite life extension becomes feasible, something along these lines will happen:
Everyone who had serious philosophical conundra on that subject just, you know, died, a generation before. The Bitchun Society didn't need to convert its detractors, just outlive them.
(from Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, by Cory Doctorow)
These visionary geniuses and hackers' most brilliant breakthrough was the realization of the inevitable fact that sooner or later, we all die. The trick is in channeling that truth as a motivator. We must strive to achieve as much as possible today, because there might not be a tomorrow. Steve Jobs: No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destinat…
So, do you think if you had offered Steve Jobs an extra 1000 years of life, he would have said no?
It's not the lack of cryo arrangements that's the problem. (I've considered cryo myself, but I'm not impressed with the likelyhood of success. Too many fracturing events, not to mention the likely extreme costs of recovery post-freezer. But if you're looking for more life, it's your only potential option.) The problem is that we haven't been focusing enough on the real issue: Death. Finding ways to extend human life…
It is true that turtles can live for almost 200 years and some plants can live for thousands of years. If we are essentially, biochemically the same, we could in theory overcome our biochemical "bugs" to achieve negligible senescence. So, we'd live forever.
Unfortunately, that's a hard problem because we didn't design the system -- unlike computers and programing languages -- and we're trying to reverse engineer an insanely complex system created by the massively parallel process of natural selection acting on random mutation. And we're hampered by things like IACUC.
Computational capacity may double every 2 years, but a mouse still has a generation time of 3 months, just like it did a million years ago. That's why biomedical progress (frustratingly) doesn't progress at Moore's Law, and you can't just throw money or engineering talent at the problem.
So yeah, focus on "death" as a biochemical problem, but "focusing on death" won't solve the problem at the same pace as focusing your engineering talent on a human engineering problem. The natural sciences are much more stochastic, and there's no clear path to immortality.
It's not the lack of cryo arrangements that's the problem. (I've considered cryo myself, but I'm not impressed with the likelyhood of success. Too many fracturing events, not to mention the likely extreme costs of recovery post-freezer. But if you're looking for more life, it's your only potential option.) The problem is that we haven't been focusing enough on the real issue: Death. Finding ways to extend human life…
At least with getting people into space, the basic techniques (launch rocket, orbit earth) and constraints were figured out. Devil was in the endless details.
Humans still barely understand how aging works, much less how to theoretically stop it. Sure there's hypotheses here and there, but no unified description or strategy to stop the process.
It's not the lack of cryo arrangements that's the problem. (I've considered cryo myself, but I'm not impressed with the likelyhood of success. Too many fracturing events, not to mention the likely extreme costs of recovery post-freezer. But if you're looking for more life, it's your only potential option.) The problem is that we haven't been focusing enough on the real issue: Death. Finding ways to extend human life…
If we find (an affordable) way to extend human life indefinitely, then at some point individuals are going to be faced with the choice of voluntarily "stepping aside" (or whatever polite term we might come up with) or stop having children. I don't think either would be in most people's nature, which doesn't seem to lead to any pleasant consequences I can think of.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So, do you think if you had offered Steve Jobs an extra 1000 years of life, he would have said no?
Do you think he would have said no to a lightsaber? Or to a two-headed pony?