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Comment by cclogg | Hacker News Reader

Me too, but I am secretly hoping Elon Musk or somebody figures out how to let this generation live infinitely via mind transplants or organ re-generation. Come onnn!!!

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I'm under the impression that, pardon the sad thought, we'll be the con'd era. The last before major shift in medicine. We'll dream about it, maybe put our fingertips on it, but we'll go before it's there.

You can always freeze your head and wait until they can give you a new body.

Not only assuming this will be possible, but that in the future capitalism will be somehow suspended and they will start digging heads out of the morgue to resurrect for no reason.

That's not what I meant. Besides does the morgue even keep bodies forever? I don't think so.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2268011/Kim-Suozzi-2...

Or wait for him to finalize head transplant procedures http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/06/head-transplant-ita...

Granted I can provide a body...

I'd be interested to see how many people would actual avail of a service like that. Religious people who believe in an after-life probably wouldn't but I'm sure a lot of others wouldn't either. Steve Jobs quote "Death is very likely to be the single best invention of life because death is life's change agent." appeals to me and people with that perspective probably wouldn't want to live infinitely.

>Religious people who believe in an after-life probably wouldn't but I'm sure a lot of others wouldn't either.

Once the certainty of death leaves, people will become a lot less religious. As Woody said, we're looking for distraction, and religion is a good distractor: "don't worry about death, there's this wonderful afterlife."

>Religious people who believe in an after-life probably wouldn't

Perhaps not the very devoted, but for the rest, I'm sure they would. Just as they will avail themselves of healthcare services if they get cancer, wear seat belts, avoid flying with dodgy airlines, and a myriad of other ways they seek to avoid death.

Life extension is not forever. Eventually, temperature, mass, kinetic energy, lack of sustenance, or chemical reactions will catch up to you in the form of accidental death.

Indeed. Based on current mortality statistics[1], only 2% of us would manage to live 10,000 years without succumbing to accidental death of some kind, and the number that would make it 100,000 years is just vanishingly small.

EDIT: This is more a consideration with respect to "cure for ageing"-type advances, not so much the mind-uploading scenario.

[1] http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/acc-inj.htm

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