Can those living today live forever?

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This reminds me of that movie Jacob's Ladder. Maybe we would become a different species through the warping of consciousness curved like spacetime.

Jacob's Ladder was not a sci-fi story, but I'd love to hear how you've interpreted it as such.

Instead of a dangerous drug, spacetime would do the warping...

How?

You are the one that came up with the concept. Maybe suspended animation could prevent the temponauts from ending up like the characters in the movie?

Yeah, or like the characters from Event Horizon (depending on interpretation).

Unchanged? Whose idea was that?

Anyway, as you seem to want to refuse the experience, you presumably won't be around to be told how much fun it has been.

I am not familiar with Event Horizon, have to check into it.

Live forever with AS!? Hell no.

haven't you noticed yet that there's a <chuckles> *cure* on this forum?

A few comments...

There are two movies called Jacob's Ladder.
The one I saw was about a dieing Vietnam soldier who had been exposed to
a nerve agent called BZ which presumably causes Paranoia and Psychedelic Hallucinations,
and he was in a coma, experiencing a terrifying unreal nightmare.

My own perceptions of the potentiality of extreme longevity predate many sci-fi and
scientific ideas about how to achieve it. For example, potentially buggy technologies
just as autonomous and possibly self-replicating nanotechnologies are "yucky" to me,
and I don't have any desire to be "assimilated by the Borg", I don't believe in uploading
my self into a computer, etc.

There is a debatably short but undeniably straight line to indefinite life extension.
In other words, life extension is both the process and the goal itself. In other words,
If I had exactly what I was looking for, I could start extending my life immediately.
Methods like the ones in the previous paragraph seem to me like concepts of
constructing a HUGE life support system, or like holding together what's falling
apart with a truckload of duckt tape. But I am a minimalist, able to do incredible
things (make advanced technologies) with fewer parts than people assume are
necessary.

I am focused on the elements that affect lifespan.

That sentence has multiple relevant meanings to me, most of which I am sure
will be overlooked. The ideas are simple but obscure because the thoughts
are not common. For example, it should be obvious that the fountain of youth
provides water. In considering the fountain of youth as a credible candidate
for life extension (AS AN EXAMPLE) you may need to suspend disbelief to even
notice that it provides water. Or has anyone wondered what could cause
water to extend life before now? The idea of the fountain of youth may have
originated in REVELATION 21 and 22, if not earlier. Since Methuselah died 969
years old on the day of Noah's flood, there is an implication that the flood water
is somehow different than the water that Methuselah drank. And this would be
the reason for looking for life-extending properties in water. Also, where did
the flood water come from? The sky? If so, then the AIR has more or less water
than it used to have. If the earth had no oceans, maybe the air and water were
mixed together before the flood. So it is interesting to ponder what kind of air
Methuselah breathed also. That is a reason to look for life-extending properties
in air. And so forth...
Test all simple possible causes of failing to outlive Methuselah. How are we different?
One must first accept the possibility of indefinite lifespan to be able to seek it.

My guess: 100 years as a white man, 50 years as a black man, cut five or ten for a woman? Now, adjust that for life experience. Knock off a couple of decades for combat duty? (I've never been there.) Other post-traumatic stress? The typical life of an Aspie?

Last edited by Tahitiii on 07 Oct 2008, 12:24 am, edited 1 time in total.

Oh no. I couldn't give up my AS. Then it really wouldn't be me, living forever... it would be some other thing. I don't mind some change, but having my AS ripped out would be a bit too extreme.

NB, ValMikeSmith, I find it quite difficult to read your posts, with all those spurious line feeds embedded, so that I see an odd word or so wrapped to the next line down on alternate lines. Spare a though for people who do not use a screen width identical to whatever it is you are using.

Even when I managed to read your last post, I couldn't work out quite what you were saying - although I suppose it was something to do with myths from the past, rather than any view to the future.

I don't want to live forever. It would be nice to live a long time, though... two hundred, three hundred years, maybe. To see the world change, history forming, technology and society changing... it would be fascinating. I know you can do that in a limited sense in just seventy years; but a lot of those changes are limited because people are traditionalists and like to keep things mostly the same. It takes a change of generations to change the way we live. History is interesting; but it's already set in stone. The future is still an unknown quantity, and I find that exciting.

The future is not set.