Aubrey de Grey. The future will look back at today like we were savages for not innovating faster to cure aging.
Aubrey de Grey is most likely going to be remembered like the guy saying machine vision is a weekend project before any serious research took place.
Even if I don’t live forever, maybe my kids will. That will meet my success criteria.
Longer lifespans is already a goal, but aging is unlikely to be “solved” in in the next 100 or even 1,000 years. People took much longer than that to figure out how to fly and we have been trying to solve aging for as long if not longer.
Consider buildings age as do diamonds. To fix aging we need to get bodies to do things like regrow teeth and replace the circulatory system. Growing extra lungs to replace lungs being filled with junk etc etc. When we start syncing redundant brains, that’s when we can start ending aging.
Re brain syncing, the early tentative experiments are ongoing https://www.cnet.com/news/elon-musk-neuralink-works-monkeys-...
Significant life extension will likely be built off the same accumulation of knowledge, not some rainforest frog extract the ancients could have refined. The only way I can imagine we don't have this in 1000 years is if someone's nuke finger gets twitchy.
Want to accelerate research? Make "The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant" required reading/watching for all schoolchildren: https://youtu.be/cZYNADOHhVY (That this might be controversial is itself interesting.)
Yet, for the first person to ride a hot air balloon took ~2000 years in 1783. Some of this came down to advances in material science, but far less than you might think.
If my brain has been downloaded (for lack of a better word) into another, am I living on in that other body or does someone else have my memories?
I've often wondered this about Star Trek-style teleportation. Are those red-shirts really moving instantly from one place to the other or are they being incinerated on a coloured circle and cloned somewhere else?
but the best evidence you have that you are the same entity as yesterday's "you" is that you remember some events from the day. the teleportation paradox is no harder to resolve.
And I'm really creeped out right now. I was about to type this example too and then didn't at the last.
As a side note - My mind tends to race at night. Life has me so busy during the day that when I'm trying to sleep is the only time I get to do much thinking. Thing is, because I'm already tired I never remember much of it the next morning other than "I had a really good think about something last night". Given that I'll not remember, and no-one else will have known, it does seem philosophically compatible and biologically possible that the current me is in effect "dying" every night to make way for a "rebooted" version tomorrow. This is not inconsistent with what we know sleep to be.
The only difference is that there's still only one me.
With the transporter analogy, though, the physical matter is reconstructed at the other side from different matter, which means its a copy. The film "The Prestige" covers this difference brilliantly if you've ever seen it.
Finally, if this comment makes no sense, it's because I'm in bed and my mind is racing.
According to quantum mechanics this is exactly what is happening
It's already at the point today where real estate and other relatively scarce resources are much more available to and owned by the wealthy who then use this to extract rent from the younger generations. Give those people another 80 years or so to do play the game and we will all end up in hock to them. You'll be born in debt to someone who was born a century or more before you.
> The color blue makes me feel sad
Downvoted! I love the color blue.
Edit: and now I'm being downvoted for this observation. Maybe Alanis Morissette would say this is ironic
Offer me immortality and I shall go explore the stars.
Oh is that all?
Like my Gammy said, “If ifs and buts were candy and nuts, we’d all have a merry Christmas.” And if you gave my Gammy immortality, she would’ve just smoked more cigs and played more nickel slots.
Imagine he were right (he's not, for myriad reasons), and he found a way for everyone to live to be 500.
He's made clear statements about ceasing pro-creation in favour of extending life spans well beyond what we experience now.
What of all the people who would have lived a full life but would never get the chance because of people like him?
Savage indeed.
It's the year 2400 and recent developments in technology mean that a person (let's say John) can choose to live for 500 years, in favour of a chain of offspring.
John makes this choice.
John's father Harry would have made that choice had the technology been available, and would have enjoyed a longer life in favour of fathering John.
The only reason John exists is because the technology was not available to Harry - so what right did John have to exist that his unrealized offspring would not also have? (Given that their reasons for existing/not-existing are the same).
To discuss Johns hypothetical rights when he came into existence at point B makes sense. At point C he never did so its meaningless to discuss his rights. At A its possible to discuss B in context of B but impossible to be indebted NOW to entities in contexts in which they don't exist.
The breakdown is where we reason from B to A and assign every hypothetical being that could have possibly arisen the privileges of an actual existing person in A. B's possibilities are only reasonable in context of B.
To imagine otherwise we are stuck with accepting the murder of a googol potential slightly different children that could have resulted rather than the relatively few we had. Only slightly less absurd we could be morally obliged to have as many children as possible even if the result is that they are on net less successful and more miserable to avoid the greater loss of existence.
Reason it out yourself and consider the plethora of absurdities.
That's not the point, though.
John's kids are hypothetical. But so is John. As is Harry.
As is a 500 year old Aubrey de Grey.
Rights are what people decide they and others should or shouldn't be entitled to based on a consensus of what most of us consider to be, you know, morally right.
If there was consensus on the rights of people yet to live (who may or may not ultimately be born) there wouldn't be differing views on pro-life/pro-choice - and the terms would likely not exist.
To come back to the crux of your argument, though - I don't believe our John is any more responsible for a single potential offspring that doesn't come to pass than a father is for every sperm that doesn't fertilize an egg. That would be, as you've said, absurd.
My point was that suspending the natural cycle of life in a way that prevents pro-creation is, in my view, morally wrong. Something I imagine we disagree on.