lol when I was 16-17 I honestly thought De Grey was going to pull it off. Then I realized how ridiculous his claims are. I'm pretty confident De Grey's and Kurzheils claims are going to be epic failures and that living past 120ish won't happen without cloning/head transplants or mechanical support of brains. They should just focus on regenerative treatments for the brain/skull, the body is fucked. Nanotechnology is still constrained by chemistry and laws of physics.
LOL, cryonics does irreparable damage to tissue, you guys are wasting your money. Again, nanotechnology is constrained by chemistry and laws of physics.
I absolutely agree that Kurzweil is WAY off on the singularity timeline. De Grey is also probably off, but likely not by much. But I don't think you have much firm footing to making the sweeping conclusion that their predictions are *absolutely* NOT going to happen and indeed constrained by the laws of physics. In fact, I don't think you have a firm appreciation of what the laws of physics allow; you won't find any reputable physicist who will say on the record definitively that Kurzweil's singularity or De Grey's Methuselarity actually violate ANY laws of physics. The simple reason is that they don't.
As far as nanotechnology, there's a giant gaping hole in your logic.
You say that nanotechnology will never be able to treat our bodies due to constraints in the laws of physics and chemistry... Ummmm...biology itself is a kind of "nanotechnology", everything from mitochondrian to complex networks of neurons are natural machines that obviously don't in any way way, shape, or form violate any laws of physics. Natural, undirected processes caused these nano-machines to come about, why should intelligently designed machines be any less capable?
200 years from now, people are going to be driving really fast automated vehicles, computers will be more prevalent, but that's about it.
I honestly hope you live long enough to laugh at that statement some day.
Heck, I'm not even sure you really appreciate the advances that have been made just in the last few decades. Thirty years ago things that seem like mundane, every day parts of our lives didn't exist: the internet, desktop and laptop PCs in every household, cellphones, smartphones, ipods, DVR, persistent world MMO video games, dahsboard GPS in cars, Google Earth, Youtube (I could go on and on).....and the not so mundane things like working machine-brain interface based prosthetics, the Kepler space telescope (capable of detecting small Earth size planets thousands of light years away), the Large Hadron Collider, humanoid robots which can move/walk autonomously with fluid and complex articulation of limbs, legs, etc (not to mention burgeoning AI), invisibility/cloaking proof of concept, military UAVs, remote surgery via telepresence, etc.... And this is all just off the top of my head.
In 1980, how many of those things would you have predicted to exist in 30 years?
Edited by Xanthus, 08 November 2009 - 01:03 AM.