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I don't understand why whenever there is a discussion about aging research, people always bring out the problem of us living forever or till the end of the universe. I mean how about just double or triple our lifespan which is nothing wrong and we still have no idea how to do that. I think maybe the reason why so many people is against it is because of religion.

There's a very famous series of books by Isaac Asimov that deals with this problem - The Robots. Basically once humans are able to increase their life span, they become reluctant to take any risks and the become stuck in their own "immortality". It's no different than what the GP says. Weather it's until the end of the universe or just a few hundred years, we still become more risk adverse and less capable of change.

I do not see this as a bad thing. I would rather live happily ever after than take life-ending risks.

That said, I disagree with the premise. Any true form of immortality would virtualize us. As individuals we would be able to take risks as never before. Paragliding through dangerous canyons? Why not? Worst case scenario your fleshy avatar dies, and you wait a few weeks in a virtual utopia as a new one is printed.

And even that is only if we choose to continue to confine ourselves to human qualia. Being virtualized would enable us to experience the universe in whole new ways - who would want to constrict themselves to mere human experiences ever again?

I think this short story explains these concept really well. Don’t worry about the cliche romance backstory - it was written in 1989: http://www.skyhunter.com/marcs/GentleSeduction.html

Gonna be honest - once we have backups, I'm totally intending to go into seriously risky behaviors. So this is 100% the opposite of how I intend to live my life.

The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect [1] describes a post-singularity world where an AI prevents people from dying permanently, and one woman in protest takes up finding creative ways to kill herself (and getting stopped and patched up each time) and turns it into a sport with a following... I'm sure there would be some people that'd take risks to that extreme.

[1] http://www.localroger.com/prime-intellect/ (with the warning that it is pretty gruesome)

So you'll kill yourself doing risky things... and then a clone of your mind will continue your life?

Seems...shortsighted.

Patternism is the only theory of self consistent with materialist reductionism.

Technology can increase our lifespans and it can also reduce the risk of whatever we’re most worried about. People already use technology to drastically reduce the risk of activities that are desirable for various reasons. Obvious examples include prophylactics for sexual activity and seat belts for automobiles.

People take plenty of risks before the tail end of their life span now. Don’t see why that would change if we live a long time.

Double or triple would be fine. I am not religious. The person that I am responding to explicitly said he wanted for life to extend to the end of the universe, so that’s why I am responding with my thoughts about exactly that.

If someone wants to live until the heat death, it’s their prerogative.

1. It won't effect it. Considering that the entire current human population could fit into France or Germany at about the same density as some parts in SE Asia. Not saying this is desirable. But consider how many people could live in the entire solar system? Ultimately in intergalactic space:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQliI_WGaGk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojEq-tTjcc0

2. Any neuroplasticity loss due to biological aging is itself accumulated damage which will have to be repaired as part of life extension.

3. Human evolution is now overwhelmingly the evolution not of genes but of ideas/culture/memes.

4. That's for an individual to decide. At the moment there are plenty of old people who can apparently think of no reason to live but they hide the fact. They are in effect waiting around to die. They eventually go to hospital and care home for a few years before death which entails a fair bit of suffering and costs a lot of money. This is a sad and somewhat cruel situation in my opinion.

5. I bet that the cheapest way to treat things like heart disease and cancer will turn out to be life extension technology (i.e. damage repair). So you may have to decide not to get treatment for things which are currently routinely treated by conventional means. Of course you might still fall down the stairs...

1. Everyone can have one kid and we will merely double the amount of humans. This is because it takes 2 persons to produce one kid. And the infinite series 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8.... sums up to 1.

I would think, that if, living forever in perfect health was as easy taking a shot, a pill, or even drinking from the public water supply ( we might get very creative when distributing the aging cure ), society would probably view dying of natural causes as killing yourself.

> society would probably view dying of natural causes as killing yourself.

Not much differently than we do anti-vax or people who deny themselves lifesaving treatments today.

All of these problems are solved by transcending flesh and blood. Why wouldn't a brain-emulation want to live forever, with just as much zest for life and learning after a billion years as today; and what's stopping us from eventually hosting a googolplex such ems (= plenty of room for raising kids) on "only" the computational substrate of a single Sol-powered matrioshka brain?

If I show you a machine that people step into and are then brought out the other side on a single Sol-powered matrioshka brain then I suppose you would take that offer, however there is a leap between the two states that cannot be conclusively proven. How do we know that the consciousness is in the matrioshka is the person who went in.

> How do we know that the consciousness is in the matrioshka is the person who went in.

If we could solve this today we would already be well on the way immortality! But there are some theories, the most prominent of which is a Moravec Transfer[1]:

> A neuron-sized robot swims up to a neuron and scans it into memory. A computer starts simulating the neuron. The robot waits until the neuron perfectly matches its simulation inside the computer, and then replaces the neuron with itself as smoothly as possible, sending inputs to the computer and transmitting outputs from the simulation of a neuron inside the computer.

> This entire procedure has had no effect on the flow of information in the brain, except that one neuron's worth of processing is now being done inside a computer instead of a neuron. Repeat, neuron by neuron, until the entire brain is composed of robot neurons whose guts are inside the computer.

[1]: https://everything2.com/title/Moravec+Transfer

Ok, but in the black mirror episode I think we should have each neuron's worth of processing done in the Cloud owned by Google. Then they shut it down.

“We have determined that the target audience for this product simply is not big enough. Apologies to all of those housed in our servers. Toodles!”

Certainly, there might be ways of achieving this; but in terms of talking about the continuation of our species as a whole, does it matter if people today can do it? Us flesh-and-blood humans can live out our limited flesh-and-blood lifespan, while raising children who are born as brain-emulations. Nobody has to cross over for “humanity” to eventually attain immortality. It just might not be immortality for us living now.

The trick is to do in gradually, ship of Theseus style.

Those are all good points.

1) By the time we would live that long, we'd arguably be mostly virtual, and spread throughout the universe. So space wouldn't be an issue.

2) Yes, we might be stuck in old ways. But we could tweak ourselves however we wanted. With backups, of course.

3) I'm sure that there'd be lots of biological reproduction, somewhere anyway, so evolution wouldn't stop.

4) Most of the SF that I've read posits that people will spend most of their time in stasis. Or in bobbles.

5) Yeah, it'd be a tough decision to make. But if we got to the point of living that long, one hopes that we'd be doing it in good health. And if felt like you needed a break, you could just sleep for a billion years :)

1. I think its perfectly fine that if you choose to extend your life you also choose to undergo sterilisation. If the state offers this facility, it might put some additional conditions on it - terms of military/community service. There will also be some heavy taxes paid on your wealth and/or a reduced rate of interest.

2. Living till the end of the universe would mean reconstructing your body/brain millions of times. I don't truly see any way around that. There can be 'gaps' of thousands of years between such reconstruction depending on the current resources of human civilisation.

3. It's perfectly acceptable to have both old and new humans in the mix. Natural selection isn't the only factor driving evolution and besides by your logic everyone suffering from medical conditions should be allowed to perish so that only 'fitter' humans reign.

4. The wonder of knowing what human civilisation is like thousands or millions of years from now. Learning hundreds of professions - each to mastery and the limit of human knowledge. An unbroken chain of human history. The ability to gain advice from your ancestors and lend advice to your descendants.

5. Yes, life extension should be a choice. By law, no one should force this on anyone. But again, no one should be forced against it either.

Curing aging doesn't mean you'll live forever. Something will eventually get you. I'd be surprised if the median lifespan were more than a few hundred years once age and age-related diseases are eliminated as causes of death.

What if we gained the technological ability to colonize other planets and make them habitable, it would mean nearly infinite resources and people could still have children, would that not make it worthwhile living forever?

Well if it takes a few centuries to work these out, I'm willing to do the work!