The choice of a lifetime.....

Also, how awful will death be in a world where it's not expected. If you're expecting to live forever, but a 20yr old still gets hit by a bus.

Every death will be terrible, no natural winding down in to a slumber, every death in theory would be result of an accident.
 
..............and your great, great, great, great grandfather is still living off the family inheritance. ;)
 
nkata said:
..............and your great, great, great, great grandfather is still living off the family inheritance. ;)
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Well no, because in the scenario outlined by the OP, anyone taking the cure for aging would never have children therefore no one that was capable of living long enough to see their great, great, great, grandchild born would be capable of reproduction. Are you talking about someone having children and then taking the cure? If so, that's missing the point of the question posed in the OP.
 
balky12 said:
People think the same of me! I then just go into how medical advancement, imo, has weakened the gene pool.

It's sometimes funny to watch their heads explode.
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Completely agree, but the gene pool IMO has already been weakened by the social and economic considerations of multiplying.

Chavvy genetics have been thrust into the gene pool at such a rate that a lot of the DNA kicking around today is probably garbage. Garbage that will be the staple diet of a lot of this generation and the next.

Responsible people make responsible decisions like:

1)Can we afford a child?
2)Are we in a stable family environment to bring up a child?
3)Can we provide that child with all that he or she needs?

Chavs dont let such issues bog them down.

Its a war of attrition guys, and we are losing! :D
 
Nitefly said:
My reasoning for it being 'impossible' is that the human genome, your base code at birth, is probably absolutely riddled with 'errors' that contribute cumulatively to aging. It doesn't ever have to be a deleterious mutation - a gene that promotes sexiness at the expense of long life is going to be selected for (a somewhat crude simplification but that's the jist). We just aren't built to do it - it's intrinsically internal, not dependant on external factors, hardwired in the greatest of senses. So to stop aging, you'd effectively have to fiddle DNA before a person was even born. By fiddle, I mean completely select each allele one by one and somehow create something that actually works (practically impossible considering two beneficial alleles can be deleterious in certain combos). Plus calculating the cumulative impact on various alleles (hundreds of thousands despite limited obvious phenotypes) is super, super difficult. I just can't see it happening tbh - doesn't make sense!

Do love a good bit of senescence - truly fascinating subject.
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A good counter-argument, but I'm not convinced that the cause of aging is known to be (a) genetic and (b) not due to copying errors. Having said that, your argument would still apply if that was true of just part of the cause of aging, so I'm thinking that I was probably wrong.
 
kaiowas said:
A process to stop aging is a long way from eternal life. Just because you're no longer being affected by the aging process won't protect you from illness. Hardly anyone dies from "old age" anymore it's always some kind of illness or disease and until we have a cure for everything that won't change.

A "cure for aging" will just allow those obsessed with their appearance to still look young in the same way that surgery does now.
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"old age" isn't an official cause of death, so nobody dies of "old age" any more. Not in this country, anyway.

Aging reduces the effectiveness of your immune system, so it's very relevant to death from disease.

An illustration:

When they are 30, person A is infected with a virus that causes a serious disease. It makes them ill for a couple of weeks, pretty much bedridden for the first week. A's immune system kills the virus without killing A, so they recover fully.

When they are 80, person A is infected with a virus that causes exactly the same disease and is identically serious. No better, no worse. But A's immune system is now much worse due to aging and the virus kills them.

What actually killed A? The virus? That was the immediate cause of death and that's what would be on the death certificate, but if their immune system hadn't been weakened by age then A would have survived. So it could be said that age is what killed A. It's certainly very much relevant to their death.
 
adolf hamster said:
We cant have no kids at all, as folk would still die in wars/accidents etc.

What would most likely happen is a cap on maximum age and kids, and a choice for an individual, say you get 500 years and every kid drops 100 off what your allocated.

Unless we start colonising the stars neither will happen, earth is getting rather crowded and there will be a point (wether we've reached it or not yet i dont know) where earth simply cannot sustain the population
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That point depends on how efficiently we manage resources and produce and distribute the necessities of life.

If we want everyone to have the average standard of living in a wealthy country using our current technology for managing and producing resources and our current political and social structures, we've already passed the point of maximum population.

If we want everyone to have a tolerable standard of living with the theoretical optimum efficiency in resource management, production and distribution, we're nowhere near the point of maximum population.

My guess is that we'll be able to cobble stuff together to sustain quite a lot more people by improving resource management and production through improvements in technology and some socio-political changes. Humans are pretty good at devising workable last-minute solutions. Not so good at planning ahead so last-minute solutions aren't needed.
 
stuman said:
but you could save for 30 years. then retire, and still have the ability and energy to not sit on a saga bus tour of yorkshire.

then when the money does run out, go back to work and go again. you can literally reinvent yourself.
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I doubt if it would be that pleasant. I would expect resources to be limited enough to make it impossible for most people to save enough money to do that.
 
sanaxe1 said:
I think it will be limited to only the rich and powerful people. It will lead to rich people living for hundreds of years and amassing more and more power and money leading to a new class system.
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Of course. It's already happening on a cosmetic scale. These rich folk who are 60 throw money at surgery and now they look like they're 40.
 
Freefaller said:
To be honest I wouldn't want to live for ever. Quite happy to accept my mortality, it's actually not something that scares me, my soul is prepared and I'm comfortable with the fact that my life in this guise is temporary.
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This

As souls we're immortal, transmigrating from one body to another. It wouldn't just be a matter of morality but natural order and so forth.
 
Nitefly said:
I've not seen the show but I'd have thought it would be impossible to stop aging. We're not 'designed' to live - we're designed to pass on our genes. Doesn't matter if we all keel over and die when we're 30 if our genes are passed on (some subtle 'mateiaxg' effects aside). Interested to see what could reverse the effects of millions of years of genetic drift. Probably 5 twix fingers a day. Who knew?!
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We're not "designed" at all.

Curing ageing is clearly extremely difficult, but I see no reason it couldn't one day be done. If it happens within my lifetime, I'll be first in line for the treatment. Not because I fear death, but because I want to see as much of the future as possible.
 
balky12 said:
People think the same of me! I then just go into how medical advancement, imo, has weakened the gene pool.

It's sometimes funny to watch their heads explode.
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Rifte said:
Completely agree, but the gene pool IMO has already been weakened by the social and economic considerations of multiplying.

Chavvy genetics have been thrust into the gene pool at such a rate that a lot of the DNA kicking around today is probably garbage. Garbage that will be the staple diet of a lot of this generation and the next.

Responsible people make responsible decisions like:

1)Can we afford a child?
2)Are we in a stable family environment to bring up a child?
3)Can we provide that child with all that he or she needs?

Chavs dont let such issues bog them down.

Its a war of attrition guys, and we are losing! :D
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You both have a weirdly shortened idea of how quickly large-scale changes like that would take.

And regards medicine weakening the genepool, evolution doesn't care about "good" or "bad". That's the teleological heresy. Evolution just adapts to whatever environment it finds itself in. Introducing medicine doesn't make us weaker, it enables us to prioritize other things. Would humanity be "losing" if Stephen Hawking died young and Hulk Hogan lived to old age? Or is humanity "winning" by having the capability to put intelligence and other qualities ahead of the number of white blood cells?

Simple question: Between two hypothetical nations, one in which people died arbitrarily due to viruses, disability, etc. but people had slightly better immune systems; and another nation in which they had slightly worse immune systems but no fewer people died because they had medicine and were also slightly smarter (because selection pressure is a zero sum game and if you remove one selection pressure like disease resistance, the void is filled with something else), which society do you think is objectively smarter.

And if intelligence doesn't work for you, pick something else evolution would select on like looks or height or promiscuity. They all work because as I said: once you remove or reduce an evolutionary pressure, evolution doesn't stop or slow down, it simply prioritizes something else. Essentially, your arguments are the Broken Window Fallacy writ large. You're arguing its good to prioritize something we don't need to prioritize, because you don't recognize that it is prioritization, you think it's just something in isolation that doesn't take away from other things we could be having as our guiding evolutionary drives like looks, intelligence or longevity.

I'll give a specific example on that last one, btw. Our cells have telomeres. They shorten with each replication. If a cell replicates out of control, the rapid exhaustion of the telomeres usually prevents it from going rogue and it dies out. (When a mutation stops that, you get a cancer). The shortening of telomeres provides a resistance to many things that would otherwise become cancer but it also contributes to our aging. A clear and specific example of prioritization of resisting sickness over another desirable trait (longevity). How many others are out there? That's why your argument is flawed.
 
h4rm0ny said:
You both have a weirdly shortened idea of how quickly large-scale changes like that would take.

And regards medicine weakening the genepool, evolution doesn't care about "good" or "bad". That's the teleological heresy. Evolution just adapts to whatever environment it finds itself in. Introducing medicine doesn't make us weaker, it enables us to prioritize other things. Would humanity be "losing" if Stephen Hawking died young and Hulk Hogan lived to old age? Or is humanity "winning" by having the capability to put intelligence and other qualities ahead of the number of white blood cells?

Simple question: Between two hypothetical nations, one in which people died arbitrarily due to viruses, disability, etc. but people had slightly better immune systems; and another nation in which they had slightly worse immune systems but no fewer people died because they had medicine and were also slightly smarter (because selection pressure is a zero sum game and if you remove one selection pressure like disease resistance, the void is filled with something else), which society do you think is objectively smarter.

And if intelligence doesn't work for you, pick something else evolution would select on like looks or height or promiscuity. They all work because as I said: once you remove or reduce an evolutionary pressure, evolution doesn't stop or slow down, it simply prioritizes something else. Essentially, your arguments are the Broken Window Fallacy writ large. You're arguing its good to prioritize something we don't need to prioritize, because you don't recognize that it is prioritization, you think it's just something in isolation that doesn't take away from other things we could be having as our guiding evolutionary drives like looks, intelligence or longevity.

I'll give a specific example on that last one, btw. Our cells have telomeres. They shorten with each replication. If a cell replicates out of control, the rapid exhaustion of the telomeres usually prevents it from going rogue and it dies out. (When a mutation stops that, you get a cancer). The shortening of telomeres provides a resistance to many things that would otherwise become cancer but it also contributes to our aging. A clear and specific example of prioritization of resisting sickness over another desirable trait (longevity). How many others are out there? That's why your argument is flawed.
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Thanks for the Darwin lesson bud.

My point wasn't about evolution......fundamental genetic changes that takes a long time. My point is about social devolution, and the epidemic of that on society (especially in the UK it seems)- perhaps my use of the word DNA implied otherwise.
 
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