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Could future technology allow for humans to live forever?

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Tensu
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08 Oct 2012, 10:45 pm

donnie_darko wrote:
Tensu wrote:
I sure hope not...

The world is overpopulated already.

Imagine what would happen if nobody died! 8O

Wouldn't be a world I'd consider worth living in.


Malthusians have been proven wrong time and again. Whenever the human population grows, we adapt. The twentieth century population explosion prompted us to create the Green Revolution. In this century, we are indeed reaching a limit, but somehow our biology as a species seem to 'know' that as birth rates are plummeting pretty much everywhere. The American birth rate is now at sub-replacement level, if it continues to go the way it is, and we stop immigration, theoretically speaking North America will be empty within a few hundred years.

If our live span was extended, menopause would extend later as well, so the number of children born per year would decline even though the death rate would decline and the total fertility rate would increase. The population would likely actually grow more slowly, because people would space out their children longer. Of course, if people didn't die, we'd never have negative population growth, but it would buy us sweet time to find a place for all those new people to live, for example in outer space or even underground or in a terraformed Sahara or something.


That makes me feel a little better, but for the record, terraforming the Sahara would destroy the Amazon Rainforest.



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08 Oct 2012, 11:05 pm

ruveyn wrote:
No forever. That would violate the basic laws of thermodynamics.

Even the Cosmos won't last forever.

ruveyn


The energy gradient gets smaller and smaller but never disappears. Conservation of energy is also important in thermodynamics. It cannot be destroyed, no matter how small and inaccessible it gets. The kinds of computation that can happen hundreds of trillions of years from now will be different in every way from what we can understand. That universe seems like a cold, empty, inhospitable one compared to where we live, but I suspect whatever things were alive moments after the big bang probably looked at our universe now as a "heat death".

I'm not sold that there is any end to our universe. Unless we determine that the Big Rip is going to happen, in which case yes, we're right f****d.



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09 Oct 2012, 3:44 am

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There’s a reason humans peg-out around eighty: prose fatigue. It looks like organ failure or cancer or stroke but it’s really just the inability to carry on clambering through the assault course of mundane cause and effect. If we ask Sheila then we can’t ask Ron. If I have the kippers now then it’s quiche for tea. Four score years is about all the ifs and thens you can take. Dementia’s the sane realization you just can’t be doing with all that anymore.


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JNathanK
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09 Oct 2012, 4:14 pm

The most fundamental aspect of our selves already lives forever, and this thing called death is part of an advanced technology to prevent stagnation so that consciousness doesn't get bored with being the same thing for eternity. Its sort of like how the on off switch allows you to switch games in your video game console.



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09 Oct 2012, 4:54 pm

JNathanK wrote:
The most fundamental aspect of our selves already lives forever, and this thing called death is part of an advanced technology to prevent stagnation so that consciousness doesn't get bored with being the same thing for eternity. Its sort of like how the on off switch allows you to switch games in your video game console.


BS.



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09 Oct 2012, 6:49 pm

JNathanK wrote:
The most fundamental aspect of our selves already lives forever, and this thing called death is part of an advanced technology to prevent stagnation so that consciousness doesn't get bored with being the same thing for eternity. Its sort of like how the on off switch allows you to switch games in your video game console.


Are you familiar with the series of videos on youtube called spirit science? You talk like you would be.



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10 Oct 2012, 4:36 pm

Paracosm wrote:
Why would you want to?

The value of an individual life comes from it's finite existence. If you lived forever then why, introspectively, would you appreciate a thing?



That is quite the deathist perspective, and you can go ahead and take value in a few short decades all you want. Some of us take value in extending life as long as possible, and we will continue to do so. And personally I see no logical evidence to support that life will somehow have "less meaning" if we live longer than if we don't. The only possible argument for that is a religious argument which has no philosophically compelling argument either making it just as invalid. The way i see it: death is the end, death bad, life good.


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TheKing
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10 Oct 2012, 4:39 pm

GGPViper wrote:
JNathanK wrote:
The most fundamental aspect of our selves already lives forever, and this thing called death is part of an advanced technology to prevent stagnation so that consciousness doesn't get bored with being the same thing for eternity. Its sort of like how the on off switch allows you to switch games in your video game console.


BS.


Agreed ^^^


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