Could future technology allow for humans to live forever?

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Could future technology allow for humans to live forever?

Future technology could allow a lot of things. Immortality I wouldnt rule out, there is a species of jellyfish that is effective 'immortal' if we can work out how to splice its DNA with ours, well that could open up all sorts of doors.

The main issue to me more than the science is the ethics, it would be impractical for everyone to be given the life sustaining treatment so how do you decide who gets immortality and who doesnt?

No matter how long you live, the unpleasant fate of the universe will kill you.

No forever. That would violate the basic laws of thermodynamics.

Even the Cosmos won't last forever.

ruveyn

In the Pirates of the Caribbean Pt. III, Jack Sparrow's father, Teague Sparrow, had something to say about this...

Jack Sparrow: "... you've seen it all, done it all, you survived. That's what it's all bout -- surviving, right?"

Teague Sparrow: "It's not about living forever Jackie ... it's about living forever with yourself."

Or, as Vivien from Zebra Girl has said, "After a millennium or two, one's personal problems tend to get solved or grow small ... it's like watching the same TV shows over and over again. Not much surprises me. I've dealt with just about every kinda situation at least twelve times."

It would get kinda boring and frustrating at the same time, knowing how things are most likely to turn out after having watched several generations of people go through the same situations and make the same mistakes trying to solve them.

I've seen "Romeo & Juliet" played out many times over, and each time I want to scream at Romeo, "Don't do it! She's not dead! She's just drugged!" But even if I did, Romeo would ignore me and they'd never let me back in the theatre again.

Nope.

Let's leave the infinite implications of, "forever," out of this.

As far as keeping a human organism alive indefinitely, I do not see great potential for this. We will certainly be able to expand human lifespan, but retarding the aging process is potentially another story. If the shortening of telomeres is integral to aging, and legnthening of telemeres is integral to cancer, then it may well be that any attempt to indefinitely prolong life at the cellular level is going to make the organism more vulnerable to disease And if we cannot stop--or at least ret*d aging, then is there truly benefit in expanding the typical human lifespan?

Now, if we are talking about, "live," in a more metaphysical sense, then we are in the realms of science fiction, and uploading our consciounesses. I leave this to students of AI to discuss.

MIT seems to be a decade or so away from primate experimentation on uploading conscoiusness, the structures they upload today are fairly limited in scope but it is a fully dunctional technology, for your pet worm or mouse that is

Believed when seen.

ruveyn

Not literally forever perhaps but indefinitely yes. I think we could even reach that goal within a couple decades but unfortunately, there's more interest in building weapons than in such a thing. We'd rather spend our money killing other people rather than defeating death itself.

The currently available evidence suggests that ageing (senescence) is not universal.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_immortality

Add a mad professor, and who knows what might happen?

But even if an organism managed to avoid other causes of death, (injury, predation, meteor strikes, the sun turning into a red giant, pop music etc.) the expected heat death of the universe would kill the organism eventually, as ruveyn pointed out.

Shakespeare was right: In the end, everybody dies.

The Cosmos itself will not last forever, so the answer is no.

ruveyn

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?

I sure hope not...

The world is overpopulated already.

Imagine what would happen if nobody died!

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

Really? Well, even if that's true, like I've said, with an indefinite lifespan, you'll still eventually die, something will eventually kill you. Most likely, you'll die in an accident after a few millennia but if you do survive long enough the heat death of the universe will kill you. If our 'finiteness' is what makes our life worth living (Which, I don't agree with at all), 1 million years is just as finite as 80 years. So a million year life would still have meaning no?

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.