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I don't allow myself to want that which is impossible. Doing so would only frustrate me.

You have a plan for extending human life by ten years? Sure, that seems awesome; if the details are good enough I'd be willing to donate to fund that.

You have a plan for extending human life indefinitely? That's so implausible I'm not going to even look at what it is. Chasing that dream looks a lot like gambling away your savings - worse, your lifetime - chasing after that one big win that's never going to come.




"You have a plan for human flight? That's so implausible I'm not going to even look at what it is. Chasing that dream looks a lot like gambling away your savings - worse, your lifetime - chasing after that one big win that's never going to come." - lmm's great-grandfather, 1902.


I'd hardly've said that that 100+ years after the Montgolfiers had already done it.

The physics of flight had been understood since Newton; powered flight (which I suspect is what you're getting at, though again that had been done in 1901) was just a matter of making a light enough engine to combine with existing flying technology. There were a long series of incremental steps along the way, e.g. a powered but tethered aeroplane had been flown in something like 1850.

A better analogy for saying you can solve all human ageing would be saying you had a way to cure all diseases before the germ theory had been invented, or claiming you knew how to make a child inherit the best traits of both parents before Mendelev.

I don't think preventing ageing will always be impossible. But it's a pointlessly distant goal to have at the moment.


Who said anything about a plan? It's just an hypothetical question.




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