This is kinda what I feel too :/ You can read articles about people not too long ago saying how those therapies to make them live forever will soon come.. But they are all dead. I am afraid that there is nothing here proving us different :/
A lot of promises, a lot of talk, yet I look outside and I see the desert around where I live, the simple houses made of concrete, people affected by heat and cold.. driving cars and every day life just feels primitive in a way, doing nothing of purpose, nothing which makes sense, nothing that is remotely related to our goal and it's not about me not doing anything, it is about everyone else too, as if it doesn't exist.
I know people will come up and show me how virtual reality is being made (still far from anything useful), artificial organs to save life had been proven (but where are they?). But still, even if they come they are no cure still. You can easily die before getting the organ, be denied of the organ, maybe on the operations table? Still, nothing about our brain. Uploading seems to be only copy and we are far from being able to even speculate anything useful. Nothing to keep our brain and even if we could somehow by 30-50 years stay young forever and defeat every disease (How?!) then there is still trauma and humans. How great that humans are such a great risk to humans. :/
In truth, most of the stuff are big maybes and even if they come and are somewhat useful I don't see them extending life for too long, even if we have artificial hearts, livers, etc the whole system is aging, our blood vessels, our countless of nerves around the bed, muscles and no one talks about them. Our brain is irreplaceable I already said.
People say "look we have iphones, of course we will have immortality soon" but I don't see how iphones and smartphones are all that related to our understanding of the whole human mechanisms. I can understand how better and smaller computer help but it is mostly used for entertainment and less used for what we might want it to. Even if it was, we all know how long research really takes and that is way too long.
It may seem that our only chance to maybe achieve something is through the gamble of cryonics, which is actually no gamble, it is a chance, a try and a hope which may or may not be feasible. We definitely hope it can, it definitely makes sense it could but in truth we simply don't know, that is why I am sure each of us would take it if got to it (which the way I feel seems to be the only way to go :/) and who knows what else.
To screw up some possible nice feelings even more, even if we do somehow manage to survive our current BLURGHness, the universe doesn't seem to be lasting forever and no, the thought of dying even if 5 billion years or I dunno how many trillion or google or more and maybe countless of years surely does not make me happy. One step at a time I know, but truly it just seems as if we are in one big SUCK.
Obviously I will still keep hoping, fearing and never accept death, never accept to die. I just hope I really have a choice :(
nicely put, but you forgot about AGI. MaxLife has a whole proposal which includes everything from 5 to 10 years slowing aging, then genetic engineering, stem cells and SENS to slow it down more, then halt it and then by that time AI's will do the rest, is the thinking, and to cure all diseases? Nanomedicine in the hands of an AI will probably cure 99%. This project called the Manhattan Beach project includes Aubery, Kurzweil and many others and has been a work in progress for 10 years, it just was unveiled. They say nutraceuticals will slow aging in 5 to 10 years.
http://www.maxlife.org/pdfs/mbp.pdfAlso, Luna, you're like 20, ok, I agree research takes eons sometimes, but there "maybe" exponential progress even in medical science, if not, then surely faster, much faster than anytime previous...let's hope Aubrey gets his funding and the research is all open source so every lab team interested can contribute, thus getting past the horrible patent problems of present medical progress. Then there are other countries where there ARE biotech labs working on age related diseases, and who knows what other anti-aging companies will form? You just don't know.
Yes I share your pessimism all the time, but I try to think of the best possible scenario, and the worst one, and you're thinking of the worst one.
If you live long enough to benefit from organ transplants and tissue engineering, then it makes sense that you would be in time for David Kekich's estimate of slowing the whole aging process, which is just 5 to 10 years, according to his proposal. If it takes 50 to 70 years, you'll STILL be around to benefit from that....And if SENS isn't up and running by then, even I would be surprised.
Life is still primitive, obviously especially in certain countries and certain areas, I totally agree, but when you do see the man made things like cities as in New York City and Boston, it's easy to think, wow, we really are more advanced then I might expect. True, this doesn't mean we are there yet with defeating aging, but man, have you ever googled a list of biotech companies, in the U.S. alone? There are oodles, and so many, if not most in the U.S., are half an hour away from me in Cambridge, Mass. I get goosebumps driving by the Whitehead Institute, Genzyme, and so many more I can't recall. What's to say these labs don't start working on slowing aging in the next 5-10 years? Perhaps we need to develop a really solid PR campaign for imminst, and SENS and Methuselah, I am told have very good PR people, I'm going to start volunteering my time for SENS marketing this week.
It's interesting, I was coming out of a cafe yesterday and met my friend Maggie, who says she is religious, I told her about imminst and SENS, and at first she was hesitant saying, "everyone dies, it's natural." I gave her a few solid arguments and by the end of the night she said, "when you find the magical elixir count me in!" I didn't get her hopes up, at all, but just gave her solid information, on the slow but interesting progress in this burgeoning field. When I asked if she knew about Cryonics she said, yes freezing people right? I said, yea, and she pulled a 360 and actually had the insight to say, "I bet if I did freeze myself," they would discover in the future that the process was all wrong, and I would be dead." I said that's exactly what many of us worry about! It's amazing how "smart" some people can be about things they know so little about.
Edited by dfowler, 28 September 2010 - 03:03 AM.
