Even if you get a very high specific impulse, you still need to pack a lot of reaction mass. You'll also need a lot of supplies (or a biome) because even if you get to 0.1 c, it's still 40 years to get there.
Indeed. If that's the case, the universe is an infinitely big and infinitely boring place.
OTOH, our future uploaded selves may be able to slow down their clock rates and make the trip so much shorter.
And you don't need to leave your dear ones on Earth - just bring forks of them along you (chances are a fork of you will remain on Earth anyway).
We'll still need some form of magical propulsion or, worse, some magical power source. There aren't many things that can keep providing energy for thousands of years. I'm pretty sure fission is a non-starter here and even nuclear fusion designs would need a source of tritium because, after a couple thousand years, there won't be much left of the initial fuel.
If we can, from time to time, merge our memories and refork, this wouldn't be a big issue, as both forks would experience both lives.
I think that, at this point, we wouldn't be that much human anymore.
Looking at current aging research, there's a good possibility we'll see rejuvenation in the next decade or two and it'll profoundly change our society. In 20 years, everyone will be looking 25 years old and pointing at frail people with wrinkly faces and laughing, same way we do today with antivaxxers.
Once that's out of the way, we'll eventually get comfortable with building arbitrarily large objects on orbit, and we could as well build a huge spaceship with an onboard self-sustaining ecosystem and fly that to other stars, the boring way. Yes, it will be a very long journey, but it's possible without the reliance on yet to be discovered new physics.
We ARE good at extreme, surgical and or heavy medicating intervention. Doesn't go hand-in-hand with life extension at all.
Also please do look through the playlist in a sibling comment. Michael Levin's research is truly badass. He has grown tadpoles with an extra working eye on the back, and recently he has regrown an amputated leg on a frog.
There's an astonishing amount of untapped possibilities in biology that are opening up only now as we finally have the right tools.
I bookmarked this thread specifically to watch your links later. I appreciate them and will watch, as I am really interested in the topic.
My hope is that biotech is the next step, but as I mentioned, for now I am highly pessimistic. We can't seem to treat virtually anything in any real sense, despite the experiments you mention. If anything, the progress in prosthetics (including the spinal bypass) has been great, but nothing to do with life extension or genuine recovery of lost functionality without surgical intervention.
Personally, it seems to be me that the closest thing we can do so far as individuals is reduce risk factors and try to stay high on Death Clocks: https://www.lifespan.io/news/grimage-is-the-best-clock-for-p...
Completely unrelated, but this reminded me that we can't seem to regrow cartilage either. This is a huge issue after cancers and cardiac deaths. Any falls, excessive wear and tear, etc all destroy quality of life with the joints. Latest efforts here: https://www.studyfinds.org/arthritis-pain-regrowing-cartilag...
Thing is, medicine/biology is a unique field because it relies quite a lot on advancements in other fields for its tools. You couldn't research cells before microscope was invented. You can't begin figuring out what each part of a genome does before you've sequenced it. You can't begin to research functions of specific proteins before you've solved their structures and got the ability to manipulate their production and/or attach markers to them. And so on, and so forth. Not so long ago the main approach in medical research was basically "try stuff randomly on lab animals and see what has a beneficial effect". Now that we can peek into the internal workings of biological systems we can use a more direct, more engineering-like approach.
It's not rock-solid that this is going to happen for the whole body soon, but some truly breakthrough things are happening right now in this field, nothing like the previous decades.
Even a very big ship can be boring after a sufficiently long time.
Except those people are more likely to be too poor to afford it instead of unwilling to take it.
Then you have the "surfeit of princes" problem.
This isn't just grand political power: imagine being unable to progress in your career because geriatrics above you aren't retiring.
That's just one possible secondary effect. We could enumerate many others.
Just to be clear: I'm not from the US, we do have not a very good but nevertheless somewhat working public health system over here.
In the US, we just will do neither for the majority of Americans. If you're too poor to afford rejuvenation, you'll be too poor to afford other treatments. And you'll just die.
Sure the cost of each treatment might be pennies (although it probably will cost a lot and not have those economies of scale) but total profit is not maximized by a smaller markup. Better to get Gates/Bezos/Musk/other billionaires to give you 90% of their fortunes.
Unless, of course, living a thousand years brings some wisdom with it.
I’m totally ok with a post-scarcity socialist society.