
2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal - mrkmcknz
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2048299,00.html
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andyl
A car is a machine made from a bunch of parts. If you could upgrade those
parts bit by bit, a car could run forever.

You could look at the internet as a single machine made from a bunch of parts.
Those parts are distributed all over the place - but still. And unlike a car,
the parts of the internet do get upgraded bit by bit. The internet has been
running non-stop for decades, with no end in sight.

You could regard dna-based life as a kind of machine - one machine, whose
parts are the organisms which carry dna. These parts are distributed all over
the place, and are continuously upgraded through evolution. The dna in every
organism results from an unbroken chain of upgrades that goes back billions of
years.

So by this definition, there are machines that go on without end. And if you
could change your perspective, drop your identity as a human organism, and
instead say "I am dna-based life", then you are already immortal. Congrats! :)

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SudarshanP
[http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2603&#...</a><p>"Here lies
humanity... Do not resucitate"

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DanielBMarkham
Ever since I read Tipler's wildly speculative book The Physics of Immortality
<http://amzn.to/MarYjA> (affiliate link) I've been a fan of this line of
reasoning.

Critics say it's all pseudo-science, and they're right. but pseudo-science is
not necessarily a bad thing. There's really not much difference in some smart
guy thinking through what might happen in 50 years and some other smart guy
speculating on how man might have lived 120K years ago based on a couple of
bones and an arrowhead. Educated creative speculation is fun. It's not
physics, but it's fun.

Having said that, my money is on 300-500 years as the time frame for
consciousness transfer and the beginning of the singularity. These are just
really difficult problems, and it's always very tempting to project out some
great breakthrough within your own lifespan. My money is on a lot of "little"
breakthroughs in both biology and information technology that take us in ways
we can't predict right now, but which converge in some sort of Omega Point
immortality. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega_Point>

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lukev
I think it's a bit premature to prognosticate consciousness transfer when we
don't even have a good understanding (or even a definition) of what
consciousness _is_.

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markyc
"[..] by then we'll be able to transfer our minds to sturdier vessels such as
computers and robots"

Even theoretically, how would it be possible to separate the "mind" from the
body?

~~~
confluence
Same way you deploy large distributed systems - replace tiny sections, test,
and progressively move across like a virus, slowly assimilating the previous
version (your neurons). Once you get 100% replacement - you are uploaded, and
you are technically separate from your body.

To be clear - this is merely theoretical - which is a fancy way of stating
that all this singularity stuff is still pure fiction (at least for the time
being).

~~~
ramblerman
But then you didn't move, you copied.

So there would be 2 of you now?

~~~
Xcelerate
There's something interesting called the no-cloning theorem
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-cloning_theorem>). Basically, it says it is
impossible to copy an unknown quantum state. This could have implications on
"copying" vs "moving" human identity (whatever that is) around.

~~~
anthonyb
That's assuming that your brain uses quantum state to encode information,
which is far from proven.

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z92
Future scientific predictions have an extremely high rate of over-estimating
based on treands of the time, and then missing the real big things that
actually will matter in the future.

I won't spoil my mind assuming immortality is even a distant possibility.

~~~
gouranga
I'd rather die. That's a big thing to say but without motivation to do things
before you die, humanity will descend into chaos.

~~~
Udo
And you still can, even after this "immortality tech" is available. Nobody
forces you, just don't hold the rest of us back when it's time to join the
revolution ;-)

Seriously though, you guys are going to die out. You know that, right?

~~~
gouranga
When there is a price on immortality, we will all die or be killed.

Humanity is notoriously self levelling.

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Cushman
Sigh.

Not that I don't love the idea of revolutionary technology, but the very idea
betrays what seems to me a fundamental misunderstanding:

Man, as in man _kind_ , already _is_ immortal. We seem to stand a decent
chance of outliving our star, anyway.

The desire for one individual, by which we really mean the one ephemeral
brain-state that happens to exist at this moment, never to cease to be seems
positively juvenile. For life to be, change must happen; for change to happen,
that which is must end. Demanding that thought continue to happen according to
my design is a selfish idea of the mind that shouldn't make intuitive sense to
anyone with a materialistic conception of consciousness.

~~~
philh
> one individual, by which we really mean the one ephemeral brain-state that
> happens to exist at this moment

No we don't. What we really mean is hard to pin down, but it's not that (at
least not in this context). I have friends, and every ten minutes they're in a
different brain state; but they're still the same person, more or less, and I
would be sad if they were to die but I don't get sad when a particular brain
state ceases to exist.

~~~
Cushman
There are discontinuities in brain state we are willing to accept: sleep, drug
use, travelling the world for a year. There are those we are not: Death,
Alzheimer's, radical personality change.

Have you ever known someone who got in a relationship, or went to a foreign
country, or took a job that seemed to really change who they were? Has that
ever made you sad? What do you think it means to grow apart?

You don't want your friends to die, but you _also_ don't want them to change
so much that they aren't your friends any more. Death is a very great and
permanent discontinuity, but nothing else about it makes it special.

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k-mcgrady
It'll be interesting to see how many people would actually want to become
immortal. For example a lot of religious people would be against it as they
want to go to heaven or be reincarnated when they die. If you were trapped in
poverty with no obvious way out you may not want to live forever. Even taking
those factors out of your decision living forever isn't, I don't think,
something a lot of people really want and it would introduce incredible
challenges for mankind to overcome (population size).

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chris_wot
That's what I got told when I visited my clairvoyant last week! What amazing
predictive powers they have.

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jakeonthemove
2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal... unless, of course, we get hit by a
solar flare, asteroid or some local disaster :-).

But seriously, we should create some redundancy or protection for our
technological foundation before connecting to the Matrix...

~~~
Spearchucker
2044: The Year of the Zombie Apocalypse...

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carsongross
"The nineteenth century decided to have no religious authority. The twentieth
century seems disposed to have any religious authority"." --GKC

