The Quest For Immortality

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/12/28/60minutes/main1168852.shtml


(CBS) How’s this for an offer you can’t refuse: how would you like to live say, 400 or 500 years, or even more and all of them in perfect health? It’s both a Utopian and a nightmare scenario but there are those who say it is well within the realm of possibility.


"The aging process is really a buildup of side effects of being alive in the first place," he says.

De Grey has identified the biological processes he thinks are responsible for aging, including the mutations that cause cancer and the gradual buildup of useless, toxic junk.

What does this accumulation of junk within the cells lead to?

"It depends on the tissue. In the eye, there is a type of junk that accumulates in the back of the retina that eventually causes us to go blind. It's called age-related macular degeneration. In the arteries, you have a different type of cell which accumulates a different type of junk that eventually causes arteriosclerosis," he says.

Might be able to add a few decades to human life, but eventually things like the Hayflick limit are going to come into play, and that's much harder to get around.

I would not like to live that long.

Don't think even pseudo-immortality will be reality until the day we find a way to store human memories digitally. That way we would be able to 'transplant memories' into a new body.

Or rather, a full-body transplant. I don't think this will be a reality until we find a way to legalise cloning, though.

>>3
well the alternative is not very appealing

You'd think every billionaire out there would be heavily invested in life extension research.  There's no excuse for Bill Gates to die anywhere near the standard lifetime; you'd think his 50 billion dollars of equivalent wealth would be enough to find a great way to extend life by another 100 years.

At least 100.

>>5

wut? going to heaven?

>>8
I wish, then there'd be no discussion because you'd never really die then

this is a warning once you gain imortality the first 100-200 years are fun but then you get bored

>>10
thanks yoda

>>10
I can live with that

>>10
What, you immortal? I completely disagree with you.
You could watch the entire change of history have our present time be someones history class. You'd have all time in the world to perfect your skills, your favored craft. You could watch the change of species, evolution. You'd have all the time in the world to watch or do something.

being able to live past 100 years would be excellent.  its not like you are not able to die, whenever you want to kick the bucket you just let go of the treatments keeping you alive.  hayflick limit off the top of my head might be solved with stem cell replacement, and such like that.  not really familiar with the dynamics, but it seems like stem cells might be the answer to that question.

yes thats intresting but the poin is its alot of time
100-200 is prefecting your craft and boring ourself silly
200-infinity trying to find something intresting to fill your time with(will probably lead you to cause havoc on the world trying to find something to fill your time with)
evolution dosen hapen overnight
(what are you gona do with the 30000 years you have to wait)

can you guys imagine the progress human kind would make if brilliant scientists didnt have to die and knowledge didnt have to be constantly relearned?  assuming these scientists wouldnt lose their interest, 1,000 years of uninterrupted research is probably like 100,000 years of constant dying and relearning of information.  (numbers out of ass)

>>16
Science is already progressing more quickly than society can handle. Baby steps.

Either way, the amount of information the human brain can contain is pretty limited, so even when you lived forever you wouldn't be able to remember more than the past century or so.

i dont really think that being old will be a problem for our generation.
we r not retarded like our grandfathers so we are pretty good at having fun without having to be young :-)
you r sitting behind the computer all day long working, playing games, trolling forums, watching anime, reading manga etc.
we ll be able to do that when we are 70, and we ll have more time for it :-)
maybe in the future we wont need bodies at all, at least not carbon based (or organic)

Count me in, unless can't stop wrinkling and the such... I want to bang every girl from now until forever!