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Engineering An End to Aging
Reason writes "Biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey has put forward a biological engineering plan to end human aging and co-founded the Methuselah Mouse Prize in recent years. Now he is finally getting some of the public recognition he deserves in an excellent David Stipp article at Fortune Magazine. If you ever wondered exactly how to go about engineering away the 50 million deaths due to aging that occur each and every year - and how to bring about a sea change in the scientific establishment - then this is the place to start. As an added bonus, I don't think you'll find a more succinct (and utterly British) answer to overpopulation objections to life extension than the one at the end of this article!"
People should not be allowed to live without aging. The world is already overpopulated as is, we don't need to prolong it anymore. I say live a healthy, happy, and productful life, then don't worry about death because you have lived a good life. Too many people will result in depletion of resources and overpopulation... I would prefer not to have that life for my grandkids one day.
The best way to predict the future is to invent it. -Alan Kay
As to the question of life becoming so long that it loses its meaning, De Grey has a response that's truly guaranteed to silence critics: If you don't want to try it, you can simply reject rejuvenation therapy and fade away.
Bingo. It seems like there are always people who whine every time the subject of immortality comes up -- overpopulation, interfering with the divine plan, or just, "I wouldn't want to live forever. I'd get bored." To which the proper answer is: you can always die. If you feel that you're selfishly using up too much of the planet's resources, or that God doesn't want you to live past a certain age, or the ennui of your endless existence is too much to bear (oh, the angst!), fine -- please kill yourself now.
But of course people don't do this, because it is inherent in the nature of life to want to live. People who think a 200- or 1000- or 50000-year lifespan is nightmarish will still struggle, at the end of their lives, to hold on to whatever years or months or even days of life they have left. We rage against the dying of the light because the urge to live is part of our every cell.
So, for those of you who think this kind of research is a terrible thing, an affront to God and man -- please go off somewhere to die quietly. And those of us who choose to live will drink a toast on your graves.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
that means we could send people on super-long space exploration voyages, provided we can also engineer an end to 0-gravity boneloss
Happy Trails!
Erick
http://www.busyweather.com/
I recently saw Ray Kurzweil give a talk. His new book, coming out in October, will be titled How to Live Long Enough to Live Forever. He touched on several topics that will advance longevity. Much was about nanotech and how it will become part of our bodies. He says in the past few years, he's gotten about 10 years younger in 'absolute age.' Neat Stuff.
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They Are Vermin Feeding On Each Other's Feces.
I Hate \.
Low Caloric diets have long been fabled to extend life (with mixed results). This so far has been the most promising way of extending life, although depending on how you look at it, it's not really extending human life but allowing us to reach our potential. Think of a wild animal with the eating/lifestyle habbits we humans have. Don't think turtles would live so long smoking and eating McDonald's. (Me not good at html linky stuff) http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A255 64-2004Apr19.html
http://webapp.abclocal.go.com/kabc/health/032304_h s_low_cal_diet.html
http://www.youngagain2000.com/lowcalorie.html
I boycott signatures
Aging is a response to mutations which naturally build up over time. Most aging is the slowing down of metabolism so as the reduce cell activity in order to reduce mutations. If you bypass this slowdown, then mutations will build up faster. Entropy will then win in the end anyhow and one will die of cancer.
The only total solution I see is some kind of nanoprobes that cleans up DNA/RNA errors in potentially each and every cell. Only then we can turn up the metabolism to 20-year-old levels. But, that is a long way off.
Table-ized A.I.
My mom is 81 and she's busier than she's ever been although physical constraints are starting to slow her down. My grandmother died very alert, aware and reasonable active at age 100 and said she was ready to go, but it had mostly to do with the fact that her friends had all been dead for a long time by then.
Some people would look forward to a longer life because they find some meaning in their lives and others, I am sure, don't and probably would not partake of these treatments. I suggest that you folks who are not familiar with Robert A. Heinlein's novels several of which concern, among other things, longevity issues. Take a look at "Time Enough for Love"(1973).
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
no one wants to die .. well some do, but living forever is a dream since people has awaken to be thinking thingies ...
... eg in a big city poor people share a few square meters of apartment with 10 others while the rich own endless properties with golfcourses or other unproductive land (no i do not think everything should be used as agricultural land, but owning a few hectares of forest would help pollution as opposed to a deforested golf course )
...
..
.... i might be sick though ...
... and i am a vegetarian ... i think people will kill for the opportunity to live even 30-50 years longer ...
however that planet is overpopulated or at least badly distributed
and, who is going to afford to be re engineered or their kids re-engineered to live forever?
not the people who work in shitty dangerous environments for nothing, but the ones who can interestingly get out of harms way even with diseases like cancer, aids and other ilnesses that kill the rest who cannot afford to be alive
i feel that if XY moviestar or president can heel from nasty stuff, the only reason others cannot do that is because our governments do not want it
and back to aging: why would you give the opportunity for the poor masses to live longer, spare longer, get out of poverty and stop doing the dirty stuff for you, while you could just live forever and make sure they reproduce into their own hamster wheel to keep you served ?
I am the kind of person who suspects that some diseases were released on purpose to keep control of overpopulation
ps: every time i see a vampire movie i start thinking if i would take the opportunity for the small burden of drinking blood and living at night
I haven't RTFA yet, but I'll comment anyway. From what I learned in med school so far, you're not allowed to state that the cause of death is "old age" on a death certificate. What I'm trying to get at is, most people don't "die of old age" as the slashdot blurb seems to imply above. Usually it's a problem such as hypertension, atherosclerosis, diabetes, etc. So the person submitting the story should have said "Engineering an end to problems/diseases that arise from old age." There is nothing wrong with aging per se, it's the health problems that are more probable to occur at old age that kills you. I realize it's a matter of semantics, but in such an age-phobic society (i.e. the US), I feel that things like this have to be voiced to stem other social problems such as "age-ism." Moreover, all the money spent to extend the last few years of life is overtaking needed health expenditures in other areas -- such as child healthcare and universal coverage. It seems that 90% of healthcare costs are being spent to extend life just another 10% or less. I'd rather support expenditures in areas such as hospice.
Linux at home
We get more willing to look past materialistic pursuits as we age because by the time we're older, we realize what is really important in life is the people and the relationships in it.
By the time we realize it, life is over, and we need to hunker down to prepare for uncertain health in old age.
I wonder what the world would be like if my grandparents were still around and healthy and vibrant as say.. 40 year olds? I wonder what the world would be like if the wisdom and compassion that accumulates with age was allowed to be expressed by vibrant and energetic elderly instead of being locked up in the shadows we become?
Really what we are talking about here a child understands and we fatalistically complicate things with our hopelessness that anything can be done about aging..
Life is good.
Death is bad
and anyone who suggests that the suffering and death of millions is desirable and that the "negative" changes to our world that would come about by extending life couldn't be dealt with should take a real hard look at what they are saying...From what I've been able to see so far.. our world could do with a few changes.
br
The force that keeps the world moving anc changing is youth.
The world belongs to the young--as you grow older you grow less adaptable and more set in your ways. This isn't true of everyone, but MANY. This is the definition of Conservative.
If the older filthy rich Americans running the place right now don't die (SOON) then I really question if we are going to have a future any of us would care to live in.
Sociological consequences aside, there's no reason to think that we won't find a cure for aging eventually. A thirty-five year old couple can conceive a perfectly healthy, perfectly youthful baby... how is that? The genes they used to create this new life were copied from 35 year old cells--cells that have been damaged by oxidation, cells that have probably lost a significant amount of their protective end-sections (IANAG--I forget what the ends of the DNA molecules are called, but they basically act as a buffer to prevent harmful mutation. Over time, though, they get shorter and disappear.)
Reproduction itself flies in the face of aging. Consider, too, that some species (such as turtles, I believe?) are basically immune aging. How can you be so pessimistic in the face of such things? No, give us enough time and I'm sure we could find the cure, though it might be availible only to our genetically-engineered children. If we still haven't found a cure in a century or two, it will be because we don't want to find a cure, because we're afraid of the consequences such a thing might bring... NOT because it's a hopeless fantasy.
With diseases like Alzheimers we at least have an idea of what causes it, and we know what changes happen to the brain as it progresses.... I think it's only a matter of time before it can be prevented. However, I daresay that theories about where and how exactly memories are formed and stored in the brain are mostly wild speculation. We know the roles that certain regions of the brain play in memory, and there are some good abstract models (such as the Phonological loop and the Visuospatial sketchpad) but we are a very long way away from knowing how these are done at the hardware level of the brain.
The sending of this message pretty much inconveniences everyone involved.
If the human race is stupid enough to discover the secret of immortality and then not bother to ever leave this horribly cramped blue-green sphere, we deserve to go extinct.
As far as using up the resources of the entire universe is concerned, I think we'd probably experience heat death before that happens.
Calling natural deaths a "human holocaust" or "greatest catastrophe humankind has ever faced" is a little misleading. To say that losing less than 1% of the population of the world to natural death is worse than losing over 3% of the total population every year to the Black Death (not to mention all of the people dying natural deaths as well) seems a little off. Same thing with the Great Indian Plague, to have 3% of the world die completely unexpectedly seems a little more horrific.
After seeing the stats and reading the claims it was kind of hard to take the rest of the article seriously.
If I had points right now, I'd mod you insightful. The prospect of great minds being able to study not only sciences but arts as well harkens back to the Da Vinci "renaissance man", who could draw from all his knowledge and inspiration to create a synergy of new and groundbreaking ideas. If and when people are able to invest such time in many disciplines, we may just see another intellectual spark, such as in ancient Greece, the Renaissance or the Age of Enlightenment. During such a time, perhaps people will begin to realize that all disciplines are interconnected, or as a Zen proverb says, "All ways are One in the end".
Losers choose to abuse the use of "loose".
You fail to take into account how memory may work (or not) once the normal life span has been surpassed. Part of learning is knowing when you've made mistakes before and not making them again. If you can't remember what you did wrong, you're doomed to do it again and again. How ironic would it be if longer life spans were counteracted by longer periods of sleeping/dreaming in order to keep our memories straight?
As with anything else, solving one issue (aging) raises even more (health care?!?!, memory, boredom, etc.)
Would the Japanense who dislike Americas for the atmoic bomb ever get over it? Death solves many problem including this one.
Perhaps if human life was eternal, we would be less inclined to drop atomic bombs. In a strange sort of way, I think the value of life becomes more important when people live forever. Kill someone now and you take away 60 years, kill someone in the future and you have stolen an eternity.
-Colin
The current record holder for the Mouse prize won by placing his mouse on a very strict diet. This isn't the South Beach Diet. The mouse was fed the minimum amount of calories to sustain it's life, and other systems that would normally fail were artifically supplemented in a way least likely to cause celluar damage.
The mouse winner played the Free Radical game. This is _NOT_ Healthy living. If you did this, you wouldn't be strong enough to walk, and barely enough to bring air into your lungs.
There are people out there that count their calories so closely they can perdict a 5yr added life bonus by decreasing the amount of waste products metabolism produces. Many are now suffering from delbitating illness like Osteoporosis.
So yes, Science does hold the answers to everything. It's not a miracle, it's _science_. We're a machine, we can be maintained like one.
-Malakai
A Dragon Lives in my Garage
I think you'd find that you could "completely relearn it" rather quickly. That knowledge is not so much "gone" as it is "hiding".
Sleep is just a poor substitute for caffeine, anyway. -Bob Lehmann
May be a bit off-topic - but why is this guy being singled out. As far as I can see he has contributed very little to the field. Why doesn't Fortune write about Elizabeth Blackburn who pioneered telomerase studies (and was recently kicked off the Presidential council of Bioethics - the only real scientist) or the researchers he associates with who work on aging as their day-job.
A very American attitude to credit the money rather than the brains.
Back on topic though - my personal opinion is that all this research is a bit doubtful. My problem is that they are based on relatively short-lived organisms or tissue culture where DNA damage may indeed be important. Very hard to extrapolate to humans I think, where many of the accumulated errors may be on the level of the organization between cells (scarring is a trivial example) and not inside cells. Still it is very interesting research...
Don't you think people like the Pope or Queen Mom have very good advisors already ? I once looked at the homepage of some rich american family who is hosting funds for other rich families(1) and they do have in fact some medical research foundation.
Making this kind of research public increases the chances that some of it will trickle down into the normal population.
IMHO, this kind of research should not be focused just on living longer, but on the quality of life. One should be able to work longer years and have fun longer years. Spending more time in a home for the elderly just isn't going to cut it.(2)
And another point, draft and military service should be required from the old not the young.
(1) I forgot the name it is probably among my 1000s of bookmarks, makes me wonder how many bookmarks you could collect in a longer lifespan.
(2) Unless, of course, I can read my beloved slashdot every day.
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
"IF YOU'RE AN ENGINEER, COMPUTER SCIENTIST, ETC: learn some biology. I started making really well-received contributions to biogerontology after I'd been reading the literature for TWO MONTHS -- no kidding. Maybe I was lucky, but maybe it was just that scientists really need input from people with a different training and mindset. Don't take the easy way out of thinking that you can't help because you haven't got the right expertise."...says SENS
As pointed out by Richard Dawkins in his brilliant book The selfish gene death of age is nothing more than just a spinoff of evolution. The bar of age just seems to be there because people were able to reproduce already and that fact alone makes genes successful that might proof fatal inside older bodies.
If we would reproduce beyond the age of 80 then evolution would HAVE to select the genes that are vital for longevity (is this the word? german here.). He also claims that it would be theoretically possible to raise the bar by passing a law that would forbid reproduction before the age of 40, then 50 and so on. Of course this is utopical but if you look at it it makes pretty much sense...
I know that at the time Bladerunner was made that Ridley Scott had some scientific advisors help verify the screenplay, specifically for this speech. At the very least the principles of the dialogue are supposed to be accurate, at least according to understanding of molecular biology in the early 80s.
John Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"
What I mean by that, is live the one life you have like you realise you've got a limited lease! The problem with most people is that they waste a lot of time (doing unfullfilling things) and live AS IF they ARE immortal. Suddenly they discover they are old, they've wasted the opportunities that they had, they are suddenly too aware that they've not got long left and then they start crying "oh give me another ten years/day etc.. I promise to make good use of these extra years.."
You don't find this kind of attitude in much evidence in extreme sportsmen/sportswomen.. why? Because they are doing stuff they LOVE and they are all too aware that each day could be their last and so they DON'T casually put things off (forever).
The idea that the murder rate will increase because of increased lifespan is contradicted by the fact that most murders are committed by young males.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
You're missing the point of longer life spans - longer-term thinking! A survey of today's woes would show short-term thinking for short-term gains. In the short term one can get away with a win/lose strategy, because of the low number of iterations of implementation. In switching to the long term, a win/win strategy prevails. Using the super rationality of the win/win strategy, with a strong tit for tat, would become the optimum strategy. With a longer life span, you'd be laying in the bed you made for a looooong time. Better socially, economically, and politically to changes your ways!
Think for a minute what kinds of risks you take in your everyday life: driving fast, crossing busy roads, parachuting, going to war?
Would you change what you do if you could live 1000 years barring accidental death? What about 10,000? Or 100,000? Or if you could live forever?
Would you go fight in Iraq for USA if you knew you had 1000 years of life ahead of you (meaning you would live much longer than USA is likely to exist)? Would you go blow yourself up with the hopes of ending up in heaven, if you knew you could live forever here on earth?
I would imagine that a lot of people would become a lot more risk averse if they potentially faced a lot longer lifetime.
Well, I've got to admit it, the /. crowd has really disappointed me this time. Normally, I can count on seeing some insightful comments on any given topic, but this particular subject has (to date) generated a mighty poor showing.
Even weeding the victims of "Star Trek Syndrome" (the unfortunate tendency to consider technological advances in isolation) out of the mix, I don't see much sign of intelligent life here. There are exceptions: MythoBeast's reply, in particular, shows an awareness of the more fundamental issues.
For the record, the capability to engineer functional immortality in the human species is a question of "when", not "if". Assuming that we can maintain a technological civilization, it seems inevitable within the next two centuries. The real question is: "How are we going to deal with it."
Consider: the technology is going to cost a fortune to develop, but will probably be cheap to reproduce, self-replicating and inheritable. I base these statements on the assumption that the mature form of the technology is a combination of gene-tweaking and nano-or-bio-technology-based house-cleaning agents. Given, this, and the implied capability that goes along with it, the beneficiaries of this technology will not have to worry about being fat, ugly, or old, and the only diseases they're likely to be plagued by are the ones designed in laboratories. All of which implies that the primary causes of death in a society with access to such technology would be reduced to three: accident, violence, and suicide (considering going off your longevity regime as a form of suicide).
What does that really mean? All of our cultural institutions (and it doesn't make any difference whose culture you're talking about; by "our", I mean humanity's), all of our societies are shaped by the knowledge of death. By implication, ALL of these societies will lose their viability in the face of Universal Functional Immortality (UFM). The problem is, we've got nothing to replace them. And its not just UFM; consider all the other technological trends and you potentially have a world in which everyone could be young, health, beautiful, immortal and idle, the latter because all of the forms of purely physical labor have been automated. Ironically, I suspect the development of A.I.s sophisticated enough to create this "utopia" will take much longer than finding a way to put the brakes on the aging process.
It's not just our culture; the structure of our brains is shaped by death as an environmental constant. Much of what we consider "human nature" is likely "hard-wired" as a mess of evolutionary spaghetti-code. Fixing aging is one thing; changing human nature is another. Unfortunately, that nature did not evolve in an environment where really long-term thinking was a survival trait. We run by simple rules: survive, reproduce; monopolize resources; minimize change within our environment. As individuals we exhibit a wide variety of thresholds at which we consider these imperatives to be satisfied, but they drive us all.
What happens when immortals with no physical wants try to satisfy these urges? How do you build a society, starting where we are now, that won't self-destruct or go into stasis? Or is the technological singularity simply inevitable?
Come on, show me that you're part of that "top 25% of the I.Q. curve".
Not just bias. All other forms of emotional baggage would build up too. It would be interesting to see what happens to depressed people when they have to deal with 500 years of insecurities, negative experiences and anger. So many things would build up that every subject would trigger some kind of emotional pain. If the medical field moves this far forward, psychology and other mental health related fields (which are already really far behind) will have to catch up before we have a planet full of immortal psychotics.
The nicest things about very very wealthy people is that eventually they have to confront their own mortality, and usually this changes them to think about "humanity" rather than "themselves". Death is why we are moral creatures.
I'd almost go as far as to posit that this article is an elaborate joke.
Why, exactly, is death a problem? Just pause a moment and really think about why death is a problem, for you.
Life doesn't work without death. In the end, that fact should be very life-affirming and comforting to you. Look around outside and realize that even horrible deaths contribute inifnitely to the natural world.
People weren't meant to live in fear of death.
Exactly. Unfortunatly I can't find the reference for this, but it came up when discussing a similar issue recently along the lines of 'how long would you like to live?'. My understanding is that actuarial statistics indicate that if we were granted genetic immortality free from disease practical immortality would be limited to around 300 - 500 years as in our current state of society you'd most probably be involved in a fatal accident before you reached this age.
I find this interesting as most people assume when discussing increasing lifespans that all that is involved is a matter of medicine and genetics. Of course it could be assumed that in such a society fewer accidents are fatal, but personally I rather doubt it. Seems to me that if you could live a long time in a reasonable state of health by the time you reached 150 with the body of a 30 year old you'd be looking for all sort of novel experiences, and inevitably novel experiences involve risk. And that's in addition to the normal risks of living - I've been driving for 25 years and during that time I've had a couple of very close near misses. I'm sure if I'd been driving for 250 years (or the equivalent) the probability of one of the expected 20-odd near misses being fatal must be very high indeed.
"Why, exactly, is death a problem? Just pause a moment and really think about why death is a problem, for you. Life doesn't work without death. In the end, that fact should be very life-affirming and comforting to you."
Maybe to you. Death is a problem for me because I enjoy life so very much. Death will put a very definite and wholly unwelcomed end to the fun. So far, my life is working just great without death, and I'd like to keep it that way. Do I fear death? NO. I resent it.
I know full well that immortality is impossible, given entropy. That pisses me off. But if longevity is the best the universe has to offer, give me the maximum. I take first rate care of the equipment (at 51, I can still run a mile under 6 minutes, bench my body weight for reps, and cycle all day at 18 mph avg in rolling country), so I think it's perfectly reasonable for me to hold biomedical scientists responsible for doing their part to keep me alive and healthy at least long enough to get tired of it. "Accepting death" is a defeatist attitude that I just cannot abide.
(uh-oh...I seem to have gotten a little worked up)
My other machine is a lever.
This phenomena is well studied in the form of non-charismatic dictatorships. When power is inherited, it gets diffused via several mechanisms. For instance:
1. The kid doesn't know how to weild the power and loses respect.
2. The kid disagrees with the parent about how power should be weilded.
3. Power is divided among several siblings (this is especially true about money), and some of it is lost due to lack of appreciation for it.
Of course, none of that stopped the Plantagenets from ruling England for over two hundred and fifty years, but I suspect that immortality would have extended this reign, probably to the current day.
Wake up - the future is arriving faster than you think.
4. Quit snacks. Period. Learn to live on your three meals a day, with the *occasional* treat.
I agree with most of what you said, except for these two. Just about all nutritionists (who aren't trying to sell some kind of fad diet at least) agree on the type of foods we should eat, which you covered. However there's a lot more disagreement about how much and how often we should be eating them.
Certainly what you suggest is one valid diet. However there have also been studies showing that eating smaller meals more often can work well (maintains the metabolic rate at a more steady level.) There are of course the studies that show that reducing calories by a lot (to 2/3rds of your recomended allowance i believe?) seems to promote longevity and general health. However they've also found that fasting for medium periods of time (between 24 and 48 hours i believe) and than eating a lot of food at once can provide some of the same benefits. (I'm unsure of the exact details, but it seems to trick your body into thinking it's starving, and thereby inducing the same effects as the low calorie diet.)
So in effect everyone agrees on what you should eat, and they mostly agree that you shouldn't eat more than your RDA, and probably not much less than 2/3rds your RDA (i believe) but there isn't any real agreement to how those calories should be split up. So if three meals a day with no snacks works for you, that's great. However if someone feels good having a (healthy) 250 calorie snack every two hours but no real meals, that would probably work too. Or they could have one 2000 calorie meal every day, and no snacks.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Ok, here it is
The implication is that certain people will go to extraordinary lengths to kill themselves if you take away ordinary mortality. A person might fill their need by riding motorcycles too fast and suffering the consequences. A person whose life is already hard will have their misery quotion filled already and won't seek it out.
Some people always are getting addicted to something, some people are always sad and sabotaging relationships. Misery is a constant. If we don't get it naturally, we'll find it.
This reminds me of the Genesis account of the antedeluvians. They had hundreds of years to perfect their natures, for good or ill. Look how that turned out. Even if it's just a cute oral tradition, the idea of the perfectability of man's nature is worth reviewing.
Who's up for a Charles Manson with 800 year lifespan? Heck, I can't say I wouldn't want to kill a few annoying *****s if I only had to spend 20 years out of 800 in jail. A true life sentence would really suck though. People would be sure to commit really high grade aggravated murder in order to insure the death penalty if they got caught. Some half-baked theory huh, and it's only wednesday.
Why do I have this? I don't smoke.
The real cause, as you pointed to, is in regions with high death rates. In fact, the only strong corollary that has been statistically linked to a birth rate is the death rate of the area.
This can be seen by the fact that Europe has the lowest death rates and has the lowest birth rates--the native populations are declining in many European nations. The also holds true for the United States, Japan, et alii. --it is pan-culture, pan-race, pan-religion.
The trick then would be finding a way to use this to extend the life-expectancy of the developing peoples--and the requisite "quality of life".
Of course, if you can do that you'd be able to solve most of the global problems anyway.
--
It's the same with men as with horses and dogs:
nothing wants to die
Thom Waits, "The Fall of Troy"
That's a good point, but your analogy could be carried even further. Suppose you do all that preventative maintenance. Suppose your car has a lifespan of several decades. Despite your care, the world keeps on changing. The government issues new environmental laws. Technology improves creating newer safer cars. Sure, you could probably incrementally upgrade your car ever few years, but this could never compare with the efficiency of simply buying a new car. Sometimes starting from a clean slate is easier than trying to fix a flawed design.
And I think that's the point a lot of people miss. If it was beneficial for our species to be immortal, don't you think evolution would have found a way to do so? The human body is too complex to make wide sweeping changes at the peek of its maturity, thus the need for a "rebirth", a biological rebooting if you will.
Of course, you could argue that in our day and age, the problems solved through procreation can be solved just a well with modern technology and medicine. This may be true, but still, don't be so quick to discount what has taken several million years to unfold.
I agree with parent poster, and have same remark to make to grand-parent.
I'm a high performance athlete, and aside from the fact that I *have* to eat three humoungous meals a day without fail (or else I'll lose wait almost instantly), I need to keep eating fruits and other nut type things throughout the day to keep my hunger level down.
Mind you, it's never to the point of gauging myself, but as an athlete, I should never ever hear my stomach rumble because it's empty. Never. That just simply means I'm at the point of starving and my body starts digging into reserves, which unfortunately for me, quickly means muscle breakdown (I have a very lean body).
From what I just said, some people will say I'm lucky of such a diet and metabolism, but I have just as many problems as anybody else: I *have* to eat three balanced meals a day, and I *have* to keep my carb intake healthy and steady or else my health will immediately suffer - the only difference between a person a slow metabolism, and someone like me that has the metabolism of a bumble-bee is the consequences: they will get fat, I will lose all my muscle.
Sure, it's a transition. It's a transition from existence to nonexistence. Personally, I like existing, and I find it hard to imagine being excited at the prospect of not existing.
They all offer a common response to a common unacceptable fear.
We humans are capable of abstract thought; whereas other animals pretty much dwell only in the eternal present, we find ourselves planning for the future pretty much all the time. We see the people around us age and then die, and with our power of abstract thought, we recognize that we are also at risk of dying in this manner.
Perhaps the most important function of abstract thought is to anticipate danger in order to avoid it. We anticipate the possibility of death by being hit by a bus, and avoid it by looking both ways before crossing the street. We anticipate death by pneumonia, so we dress in warm, dry clothing in the winter. We anticipate death by poisoning, so we throw away that tainted meat instead of eating it. We anticipate death by old age, so we seek a way to avoid it, and we're driven to the brink of insanity when we realize we can't find a way to avoid it.
One of the common ways of coping with a problem is to pretend it doesn't exist. Psychiatrists refer to this as "denial", and it's considered an unhealthy delusional state.
Developing an internally consistent set of delusions takes a lot of time and effort; it's a lot simpler to borrow a set from someone else, and sharing a common set of delusions also provides a sense of community and an external affirmation of the delusions. Gather together a large enough community sharing their delusions, and you can start to call that community an "organized religion".
As for the notion that aging and death are "natural", sure, that's true. They're as natural as smallpox and bubonic plague.
If people had the opportunity to live much, much longer, perhaps they'd start taking a much longer view - and such things as colonizing the galaxy might not seem so outlandish.
:)
For myself, I know that I'd love to have a few extra centuries to look forward to, if for no other reason than getting off this damned planet
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
I think if we achieved immortality society as a whole would quickly become extremely conservative, in the sense that people living now would have to think what to do in 300 years time, and that wrecking the planet is not such a good idea.
Right now people don't care because they think they'll be dead when all the accumulated environmental degradation really hit. All the messages about passing the buck to one's children really doesn't register with most people.
Also people living longer might become conservative in the general sense. It's hard to adapt to new ideas, etc.