how to live forever...

[Sam988]

Originally Posted by chaostheory

i personally have no interest in having my physical body live forever. People don't seem to take into account that this means no matter how crippled or injured one may become, that death is not an option. Noone ever said you'd live forever in perfect health, never get sick and never become injured. They just assume that this immortality makes you injure-proof. What if you got in an accident and became paralyzed or would suffer in pain...and then never die? Would you want to live forever then?

Let's think for a moment, ok? If we figure out how to live indefinitely, that obviously means that we will have figured out how to stop and eventually revert aging. That means that you won't live forever as a creepy 80 year old, but rather as a 20 year old.

About being a victim to accidents/diseases that haven't been cured yet, yes i agree with you, that could bring some problems, with we will be able to have implants (if not completely natural, bionic but human-like) of any part of the human body. Yes maybe some kinds of diseases/handicaps will take longer to be cured, but eventually they will, and if you have indefinite time to wait, since you would be living indefinitely, then just wait It's not like you'd have to be like that forever, you would be like that just enough time so someone can find a way to cure/fix you.

[JimOfferman]

Originally Posted by Sam988

Your phrase should be like this to be more complete: "I can't imagine you would prefer to live in a world that is devoid of children and where everybody looks like 20 years old (or look like whatever age they want to look like) and where nobody dies of old age.

Nope, still not buying... I'll trade my 20s looks for the chance to see children grow up any day. Call me old fashioned

Jim.

[Mayo]

Originally Posted by JimOfferman

Nope, still not buying... I'll trade my 20s looks for the chance to see children grow up any day. Call me old fashioned

Jim.

Love kids, although the can be pain in the a## i still like having kids. Imagine having the the kids in your 20's and seeing grand-grand-grand-grand.... grand children couple of hundred years later...

[Mayo]

William Gibson: Count Zero


THEY sent A SLAMHOUND on Turner's trail in New Delhi, slotted

it to his pheromones and the color of his hair. It caught up

with him on a street called Chandni Chauk and came scram-

bling for his rented BMW through a forest of bare brown legs

and pedicab tires. Its core was a kilogram of recrystallized

hexogene and flaked TNT.

He didn't see it coming. The last he saw of India was the

pink stucco facade of a place called the Khush-Oil Hotel.

Because he had a good agent, he had a good contract.

Because he had a good contract, he was in Singapore an hour

after the explosion. Most of him, anyway The Dutch surgeon

liked to joke about that, how an unspecified percentage of

Turner hadn't made it out of Palam International on that first

flight and had to spend the night there in a shed, in a support

vat

It took the Dutchman and his team three months to put

Turner together again. They cloned a square meter of skin for

him, grew it on slabs of collagen and shark-cartilage polysac-

charides They bought eyes and genitals on the open market

The eyes were green.

He spent most of those three months in a ROM-generated

simstim construct of an idealized New England boyhood of

the previous century. The Dutchman's visits were gray dawn

dreams, nightmares that faded as the sky lightened beyond his

secondfloor bedroom window You could smell the lilacs,

late at night. He read Conan Doyle by the light of a sixty-watt

bulb behind a parchment shade printed with clipper ships He

masturbated in the smell of clean cotton sheets and thought

about cheerleaders. The Dutchman opened a door in his back

brain and came strolling in to ask questions, but in the

morning his mother called him down to Wheaties, eggs and

bacon, coffee with milk and sugar.

And one morning he woke in a strange bed, the Dutchman

standing beside a window spilling tropical green and a sun-

light that hurt his eyes. "You can go home now, Turner

We're done with you You're good as new


He was good as new. How good was that? He didn't know.

He took the things the Dutchman gave him and flew out of

Singapore Home was the next airport Hyatt.

Have to read this cool peace of novel once again, although my best stories from Gibson are Neuromancer and Burning Chrome short story & of course Johnny Mnemonic.

Most body replacement techniques like growing skin, grown ear lobes, grown bladders are reality... soon enough entire body will be possible to be grown in a laboratory, all excerpt the brain... we will never be able to salvage brain until the nanorobotics comes into place. Until we will have choice to salvage consciousness into "spare" nanomachine brain we will be consciously mortal, unconsciously we will of course always be immortal beings.

[Andrew Brunelle]

There was a book I read that addressed the whole concept of immortality, from a purely physical sense, saying that if we were immortal, then everything would become trivial. Whole empires rising and falling would be nothing in the great vast infinity. In a spiritual way, it is far different, because of the veil we put over ourselves when we incarnate. From a purely physical point of view, I would find living forever would just make it so easy to procrastinate. There would be no urgency to anything, so therefore, what would be the point of doing anything? No matter what, you'd still be here. I just hope you wouldn't get life in prison.

[AddictiveX]

I'd prefer an extended life to living forever I think, I dont think the body could cope with the thought that it would last forever. each persons lifespan is their own 'forever'

x

[manzima]

Originally Posted by Andrew Brunelle

From a purely physical point of view, I would find living forever would just make it so easy to procrastinate. There would be no urgency to anything, so therefore, what would be the point of doing anything? No matter what, you'd still be here. I just hope you wouldn't get life in prison.

It all depends on how we view life and what we want to do with our lives.
If we are creative we can create much more things when the life span extends and we can learn much more things too. Those who believe in incarnation say that we reincarnate just to learn more or learn the lessons we failed in the previous lives. If things are really so, why not be here as long as it takes to learn what needs to be learned? What is the true purpose of going and coming many times?
Also our urgencies make us get too emotional to really take time to understand our life experiences. Why not take time to enjoy every experience and learn more from it? Is a hectic life better than a more peaceful and confident one?
How about being able to see changes on a large scale? Now we want to know how life started and how we became humans and there does not seem to be any reliable witness of these events. What if the first human had been living until now?
I see more advantages in a very long life than in a short one. Maybe it is because I love learning and searching!

[williamhessian]

Originally Posted by Mayo

You'r talking about Mount Everest...

how about traveling into space with your own astral body..

Astral Dynamics | Site Index

BTW only an idiot goes into needless certain death(like going with 1000ccm motorbike 150-200mph on the freeway endangering other human life), to really feel alive you should be brave enough to save someones life and get certainly killed in the process... that is the point of risking life, not the cheap thrill but the higher cause!

haha. good point.

i personally don't see what anyone would get out of climbing mount everest. its like making up a meaningless task to accomplish. but that is just my personal opinion. risking your life does not equal living your life to the fullest.

[williamhessian]

Originally Posted by JimOfferman

Nope, still not buying... I'll trade my 20s looks for the chance to see children grow up any day. Call me old fashioned

Jim.

okay Jim. you enjoy kids. that's great.

but if you think about human beings as a whole, think about how much time and energy goes into teaching each kid the same damn thing. it would be a lot more logical for us to go on living and learning, instead of dying and having kids have to relearn what we've all already learned.

we could be making progress, instead of repeating ourselves.

i have no problem with kids, but we would appreciate them a lot more if there were less (only the amount to make up for the dead). Plus, we already do a bad enough job giving kids the attention they deserve (keep in mind im talking as a whole not individually- because ive seen both the positive side and the negative side).

it only takes two kids for us to be able to say there are still children on the earth.

[Mark Lapierre]

Originally Posted by JimOfferman

I would rather have hoped my choice of words would instead have communicated my admiration for evolution as a process.

I completely agree with your explanation on purely scientific terms. Scientifically speaking, then yes, evolution is strictly driven by accidental/incidental mutations to organisms resulting in more advantages traits and thus becoming more fit for survival.

However, I am not speaking as a scientist.

Jim, I'd like to apologise for not considering your words in the manner they were intended. It's hypocritical of me to except you to be accurate to my satisfaction when I don't do the same for others (not to mention it being selfish). So while it seems you didn't take offense I'm nonetheless sorry for how I approached this discussion.

Originally Posted by williamhessian

With the knowledge of death, comes the desire to avoid it.

I agree.

Originally Posted by williamhessian

we may have the chance to change all of that, and actually survive death. Yet still, there are those of you who choose death over life. And use the words "accepting it" to describe it. I consider that "giving up".

I suspect much of it is driven by spiritual beliefs. The belief that there is something after death. And yet I read that the people who display most fear just before dying are those who are religious (usually Christian). But since I don't remember where I read that, take it for what it's worth.

Originally Posted by JimOfferman

I accept that my eventual demise is the price I pay for living. I understand that my life needs to end some day, so that there may be more life after I am gone.

(After all, if we'd all live forever, pretty soon we'd have to stop producing babies...)

I can understand that, but I personally refuse to accept those limits. Of course that doesn't mean I'll go having babies even if it means disastrous over-population, but I would do what I could to allow us all to cope with the population increase.

Originally Posted by JimOfferman

People who have accepted death do amazing things, like climb Mount Everest or venture into space. I have a hard time seeing that as giving up on life.

I don't understand why you equate acceptance of death with doing amazing those amazing things?

Originally Posted by Buddy

Nonsense. Death of the material body is inevitable. To NOT accept this is delusion and denial.

Depends on the timescale. Death of my body within the next 50 years is not inevitable. What we're pondering here is what it would be like if technology allowed that timescale to be extended 100 to 1000 years. Not necessarily indefinitely.

Originally Posted by Mayo

BTW only an idiot goes into needless certain death(like going with 1000ccm motorbike 150-200mph on the freeway endangering other human life), to really feel alive you should be brave enough to save someones life and get certainly killed in the process... that is the point of risking life, not the cheap thrill but the higher cause!

Sure, valid example of stupid thrill seeking. But what about a master mountain climber, one who has trained for decades, gradually increasing his ability to the point where climbing a difficult mountain is no more dangerous than crossing a busy street (when the traffic light grants him right of way)...

Originally Posted by chaostheory

i personally have no interest in having my physical body live forever. People don't seem to take into account that this means no matter how crippled or injured one may become, that death is not an option. Noone ever said you'd live forever in perfect health, never get sick and never become injured. They just assume that this immortality makes you injure-proof. What if you got in an accident and became paralyzed or would suffer in pain...and then never die? Would you want to live forever then?

What Sam said. But also, I suspect that life extension would be a choice. No one would force life-extension on someone who would only suffer more.

Aside from that, the ethics of euthanasia would have to be re-evaluated if life expectancy was much greater than it is today.

Originally Posted by JimOfferman

Nope, still not buying... I'll trade my 20s looks for the chance to see children grow up any day. Call me old fashioned .

Why not try for both?

Originally Posted by Andrew Brunelle

There was a book I read that addressed the whole concept of immortality, from a purely physical sense, saying that if we were immortal, then everything would become trivial. Whole empires rising and falling would be nothing in the great vast infinity. In a spiritual way, it is far different, because of the veil we put over ourselves when we incarnate. From a purely physical point of view, I would find living forever would just make it so easy to procrastinate. There would be no urgency to anything, so therefore, what would be the point of doing anything? No matter what, you'd still be here. I just hope you wouldn't get life in prison.

I have to ask if you read the previous replies where we addressed these issues? I'd like to hear your response to our responses to similar objections made by others before.

Originally Posted by williamhessian

i personally don't see what anyone would get out of climbing mount everest. its like making up a meaningless task to accomplish. but that is just my personal opinion. risking your life does not equal living your life to the fullest.

It's a physical challenge. Why do people run around a track many times? Or swim up and down a pool?

btw Will, I'm just quoting you because it's relevant to my point, but I'm not directing my criticism at you (well, not just you... just so you know... )

I think many people grossly misunderstand so called "extreme" sports. It's as if they think an average person one day decides to sail around the world, then goes out to do it. These people train extensively for years... Decades even. We don't consider a pilot to be risking his life, nor ourselves when we take a flight somewhere, yet there we are, thousands of meters above the Earth... What about martial artists who throw punches and kicks at each other with bone breaking force? How is that any different to an extreme bicyclist who might break a few bones if he's not careful. Also see my previous comment about the master mountainclimber.

[JimOfferman]

Originally Posted by Mark Lapierre

Jim, I'd like to apologise for not considering your words in the manner they were intended. It's hypocritical of me to except you to be accurate to my satisfaction when I don't do the same for others (not to mention it being selfish). So while it seems you didn't take offense I'm nonetheless sorry for how I approached this discussion.

Thanks, but no apology was necessary. I wasn't offended in the least. It only served as a reminder that the same words have different meaning to different people.

I can understand that, but I personally refuse to accept those limits. Of course that doesn't mean I'll go having babies even if it means disastrous over-population, but I would do what I could to allow us all to cope with the population increase.

Understood. If humanity finds a way to extend life, it will also have to find a way to deal with over population - be it by colonizing other planets or by some other method to reduce our numbers.

I don't understand why you equate acceptance of death with doing amazing those amazing things?

I don't equate acceptance of death with doing amazing things per se. I was pointing out that the kind of people who do those amazing things have likely conquered their fear of death (seeing as death is a very real possible outcome of their ventures). It was purely meant as an argument to counter the "you should fear death" stance that was posted a bit earlier in the discussion.

Why not try for both?

Again, I have no desire to live (in my current physical form) indefinitely, so let's just say I would prefer children over a vastly extended lifespan. That is, I wouldn't trade having children in the world for extended lifespans... if we could, as a species, keep death at bay and at the same time solve our over-population problems, then all the better.

[Erki]

Originally Posted by Sam988

Let's think for a moment, ok? If we figure out how to live indefinitely, that obviously means that we will have figured out how to stop and eventually revert aging. That means that you won't live forever as a creepy 80 year old, but rather as a 20 year old.

What's so wrong with aging anyway? What makes a 80-year old creepy and 20-year old supreme? It's interesting too that while (some) people accuse youth of being bad, they also think of elders as somehow substandard. Young people go to nursery/childcare/school up to certain age, so they can become "useful". On the other end, old people go to retirement, maybe even live in retirement homes, when they have become "useless". In the middle, somewhere, business happens.

Originally Posted by williamhessian

but if you think about human beings as a whole, think about how much time and energy goes into teaching each kid the same damn thing. it would be a lot more logical for us to go on living and learning, instead of dying and having kids have to relearn what we've all already learned.

Why do we need to "waste" energy, teaching kids some stuff anyway? Firstly, they would learn what they need and what they want anyway, without anyone's teaching. This would then be aided even more by the absence of danger of life - they can explore whatever they want, and they would still come out of it alive. And what's that thing with kids "having to" relearn things? Wouldn't we adults then also have to relearn things? Kids have to relearn plenty in today's world too, with all the new tech miracles popping out all the time. In fact, it looks like it's more the older people who have slight trouble getting around the modern life.

Originally Posted by williamhessian

we could be making progress, instead of repeating ourselves.

I took this quote out of context, yeah, but it's a good quote I think. My question is: if we live forever as a 20-year old, where's the progress? Being a 20-year old body all the time seems more like stagnation to me.

[Erki]

Originally Posted by Sam988

Well if the told a guy in the middle ages that in 500 years we would have the technology to destroy the world many times over (atomic bombs) he would think we were insane to produce such a technology. But we can't deny it's positives, and we wouldn't go back prior to the discovery of atoms even if we could.

I would.

Originally Posted by Sam988

So my point is that the technological benefits always exceed the technological drawbacks such as the possibility of destroying all human race. We already have the technology to destroy it all but we didn't do it, so i don't think that further technological advances with further dangers will destroy us.

We haven't destroyed it in a big and fast way with the bombs, but the destruction is taking place in our environment, and I don't mean just the nature.

[manzima]

Originally Posted by chaostheory

i personally have no interest in having my physical body live forever. People don't seem to take into account that this means no matter how crippled or injured one may become, that death is not an option. Noone ever said you'd live forever in perfect health, never get sick and never become injured. They just assume that this immortality makes you injure-proof. What if you got in an accident and became paralyzed or would suffer in pain...and then never die? Would you want to live forever then?

Hi everybody!
What are we talking about now?
Do we believe in the Law of Attraction (LOA)?
Do we accept the idea that we create our reality through our thinking and that we can change our thoughts to change our life?
Suppose we agree on that for a moment.
Then why would you create a crippled or injured body? To have other people take care of you? Then it is your choice!
If you have a serious reason to get sick or injured then go ahead and get sick and injured to satisfy your needs, it is your choice!
Why would you create thoughts of becoming paralysed, in pain and suffering? Is that what you really want to create for yourself and your beloved ones? Then go for it and enjoy, it is your creation!

Why do you think if you decide now to live forever "death is not an option" anymore? The body we use on this earth is a material thing that can break down for many reasons. Whether you believe in the LOA application in living forever (or at least as long as you want it) or not, at any given time your body can burn, die from food or water shortage, disease, poison, drowning, asphyxiation, bad accident, suicide and many other ways you choose.
If you want to live for a very long time you can change your thoughts so that you will avoid any circumstances that may threaten, weaken and deteriorate your body. Whenever you choose to go forever many opportunities will help you just do that.
Both choices are available to you right now. Which one is good for you this very moment? It is your choice!
If you and me decide to get on the path of living forever, that would not become a universal unbreakable law for everybody. It would be a law for you and me until we change our thoughts and beliefs about it.
We attract things that make up our lives. Things do not happen to us just by chance. We create them consciously or unconsciously, automatically. And we can create new things we really want when we learn how to do it the best way!

[openeyes]

Originally Posted by Erki

What's so wrong with aging anyway? What makes a 80-year old creepy and 20-year old supreme? It's interesting too that while (some) people accuse youth of being bad, they also think of elders as somehow substandard.

[...]

My question is: if we live forever as a 20-year old, where's the progress? Being a 20-year old body all the time seems more like stagnation to me.

To me it's largely an issue of functionality. With the very young, at least you can look forward to watching them gain new abilities, entering the world at large. With the old, you watch them lose abilities. I'm experiencing the latter with my two grandmothers and my dad. I'd have loved to know my dad when he was in his 20s/30s, able to lift the back of a Volkswagen on his own, but he was already 38 when I was born.

I'd have enjoyed walking with any of them when they could move closer to my pace without concern for falling down. Most of them don't have many new stories to share, just old memories from decades ago that they can only repeat over and over. Their main joy at this point is having people stop by to visit, and I often do so, but not for long. Their lack of movement makes me want to go out and do even more.

None of them enjoy being isolated from the world, no longer being able to do all that they used to do. They'd all jump at the chance (if they could jump) to be able to easily get into/out of a chair, to drive themselves, to walk around a park without pain, and be able to remember where they've parked and what bills they've paid, much less be able to run and climb trees again.

Stagnation need only result if people in healthy, highly functional bodies only had the experiences of average 20 year olds. A healthy body should expand options rather than reduce them. I use my body to do things most people never do, and greatly enjoy it.

[Erki]

Yea, that's the bad thing about aging. I don't want my(or anyone else's) health and abilities to deteriorate with age. Or at least, not by much.

To me, it seems that the problem with society and its views is not that death is accepted, but that people seem to equate old age with bad health. While I accept that as people age, their abilities deteriorate, I don't think they have to go down so much. It's acceptable to me that an 80-year old is not so flexible and their muscles don't have as much power as a 20-year old, but it's not so acceptable that that person has to take medications daily so that s/he can continue her/his life.