Biological immortality

This is a spinoff from the space colonization thread.

What do you think of biological immortality — that is, the halting of the aging processes in human beings?

Do you think that it is possible, in line of principle? Do you think that it would be desirable? Do you think that it will be developed soon enough that you hope to experience it yourselves?

As for me, I definitely believe that it is possible, and also that it would be desirable — yeah, it would require a number of societal changes, but that's nothing we cannot pull off, and the rewards are worth it.

However, I think that wishful thinking may have us severely underestimate the difficulty of the task. It's notoriously difficult to predict scientific progress, but I would be surprised if something like that would be developed before 2080—2100, at least.

What about you?

I think it would be undesirable.

• First, it means you can only die an unnatural death — violence, illness, etc.
• And then, there's the overpopulation problem.

Until you go senile at age 90.

Preventing the breakdown of the human body is one of the most valuable things we can do with science, and I fully support it.

Yes, it would force changes on society. For example, to avoid overpopulation one would have to reduce procreation to near zero. So what?

But, eventually, you would die: you can only cheat Murphy's Law for so long...

Well, yeah. Okay, let's say so: It's the closest possible thing.

I don't have time for a detailed post, but here's something to chew on: we have already managed to make it least a few human cells immortal. Sure, they are cancer cells, but they do demonstrate that yes, human cells are capable of effective immortality under the right conditions. Now to figure out how to make the entire organism immortal.

technically stem cells can also multiply unlimited until they specialise

I've already discussed the implications of living forever in another thread, so I'll just dump a quote that I've kind of cherry-picked. That thread was about what follows after death (my answer: nothing,) so the word choices and tone of my post, as well as, to some degree, the point of view it takes, might seem a bit off. Bear with me.

So basically, even if death by natural causes was possible to avoid, I think people would choose to die after some centuries.

edited 1st Feb '12 6:00:25 AM by BestOf

Humanity is not ready for immortality yet. Of course, this is one of those things we won't be ready for until it happens, so that's no excuse not to introduce it.

However, I am certainly opposed to implementing immortality until we can get a handle on our reproduction, otherwise we hit the Malthusian wall (and I very much doubt a single Science Hero will be able to save us this time). If we're to introduce immortality on a large scale, we would probably need to socialize reproduction entirely unless we can predict the death rate and set a target for replacement.

Why exactly would I need to imagine infinity? I mean, do people imagine their limited lifetime all the time now? No, rather they simply live through the years, and with biological immortality, too, people will live through the years, the centuries, the millenia. in fact that would be a further advantage: There would be no need to look at the big picture of your life. You live forever, unless an accident or crime befalls you, so you can start over at any point!

My point was that everything that gives your experiences any meaning would eventually become just background noise, much like breathing is for you now. No matter what you do, it won't feel like anything. That's how I imagine life would be like if I had lived thousands of years.

Nothing would feel important if you've experienced it dozens or hundreds or thousands of times before. The first several hundred years would probably be very fun, and the several centuries after that, you might still feel like you're alive every once in a while, but eventually, everything feels like routine. Anything you could possibly imagine would feel so insignificant that you couldn't even be bothered to concentrate, no matter what it is.

The point of imagining infinity is that that's how much utter boredom awaits you if you're to live for thousands of years.

edited 3rd Jan '13 7:39:32 AM by BestOf

Halting the process of biological ageing wouldn't cause one to face "infinity." Unless you lived in a bubble then there are still other forms of illness and destruction that will kill you, this process would in theory just considerably extend the natural human lifespan.

Best Of, that's actually a benefit of biological immortality, truth be told.

You get to live as long as you want, and then end your life on your own schedule when you've seen everything there is to see and want to end it peacefully.

This would be ideal for me.

I know this; I just told you my opinion about the (un)desirability of living forever to answer the part about immortality. You know, the one from the OP.

*Goes to re-read the OP*

OK. It wasn't in the OP. Well, shit.

Oh, well, anyway, I think extending the human lifespan is a very good idea in principle, but if it goes on too long, life will become so pointless for those who have been around for what actually is just too long that the main cause of death will be suicide. Not that I have a problem with suicide when it's essentially a form of euthanasia, as it would be here.

edited 1st Feb '12 7:06:28 AM by BestOf

Yeah, I can see how true immortality would have the kind of problems that you mention. Which is why the religious doctrines which advocate it also talk about radical transformations of the nature of the universe and of that of humankind, by the way.

But in the case of biological immortality, I do not think that the sort of euthanasia that you describe would even be necessary.

According to Wikipedia, the mortality rate for 20 years old in America is about 0.0009: in other words, nine out of every 10,000 twenty years old will not survive another year because of incidents, diseases and so on.

If we assume that this is going to be the "natural" mortality rate for our "immortalized" humans, this is simply a Bernoulli process: the probability that someone dies at age n will be (0.9991)^(n-1) * 0.0009, and the average lifespan will be 1/0.0009 = 1111 years.

Which probably is not enough for most people to get that much world-weary, I think — in fact, if biological immortality is achieved, I am pretty sure that lots of people will start taking way more precautions than they currently do, in order to extend this lifespan even more.

edited 1st Feb '12 7:41:13 AM by Carciofus

People taking more precautions because of the higher stakes... That's a very good point, actually. And people living for about one millennium? I can imagine that that would still be interesting if one can keep their curiosity alive.

I think it's very much possible, but I doubt humanity could adapt to it fast enough. Overpopulation would explode.

The variance would be quite higher than it is now, though.

Out of 100 people, for example,

• 91 would live to be 100 years old;
• 63 would live to be 500 years old;
• 41 would live to be 1000 years old;
• 17 would live to be 2000 years old;
• 1 would live to be 5000 years old.

So there would be far more uncertainty than there is now, where first-world people can be reasonably confident that they won't probably die before 65 nor live after 95.

This might make people even more focused on improving their chances, I believe...

I would see this as a very preferable state to what happens, especially given that I believe that when you die, there's nothing, you just rot in the ground, which is, ironically, the end of life scenario I would least want to happen. Due to these things, I would like it if I would only die if I was killed.

I want to be sick and fucking tired of life when it ends, not just live for x years, then die.

I'm totally for biological immortality. I'm for literal immortality, if we can do that.

Even assuming there would eventually come a point where there would be nothing more to experience (which is not necessarily true; maybe there are infinitely many things to do as well), and even supposing that running out of things to do meant you were bored, which I don't think follows, would that really be enough to die for? To cease existing forever just because you're out of new things to do?

I think it's far more probable we figure out ways to edit our own memories, if that problem ever comes up.

edited 1st Feb '12 1:52:23 PM by BlackHumor

I don't think how it's possible when there's entropy.

Also, the environmental degradation factors may actually lower life expectancy.

I think we'll have figured out a way to save our planet or colonise others by the time we reach life expectations that measure in the thousands of years.

For the memory editing thing, I actually agree that it is more likely that we'll figure out how to do that than it is that we can live until we're bored of everything we can imagine. My original post about a boredom-induced death wish was about an eternal life-after-death, so I didn't take into account things that we could do to our own memory (as it was kind of assumed that whatever lived "after death" had nothing to do with the brain.)

There's a fairly interesting theory going around that has to do with living forever and editing our memory. It goes like this:

• If we accept that there are infinite Universes, everything that we can imagine has happened in at least one of them.

• So there has been at least one Universe where life has evolved and existed for so long that they figured out a way to be immortal.

• So they had to come up with a way to avoid being bored all the time after they're done experiencing everything.

• So they built a Universe-simulator into which they could plug their brain and be re-born without being aware of the reality outside the simulation.

• This simulated reality eventually reached the point where the residents became practically immortal, got bored with life, and built a simulator of their own.

• Repeat.

Now, if we assume that the Universe has had infinite time and space in which things can happen, it could be argued that it's so likely as to be almost inevitable that we would be living in such a simulation. So if we accept infinity directly, we don't even have to assume the Multiverse.

I personally don't consider it very likely that infinity exists as a reality in the Universe. As for the Multiverse, well, I don't think just any kind of Universe can exist. Even if there's a Universe for every combination of universal constants (which would mean there's a whole lot of Universes out there,) only a very small portion of the combinations would be such as to allow life, and most of those would not be such that near-infinite life and computing power could be reached. So there's a very small chance that we're living in some alien Matrix.

Still, it's a fun idea to play with.

People taking more precautions because of the higher stakes... That's a very good point, actually. And people living for about one millennium? I can imagine that that would still be interesting if one can keep their curiosity alive.

I don't see why you think you're in a position to tell the difference between a thousand years and a million years. There's simply no evidence for how the human brain would adapt to even 200 years.

edited 1st Feb '12 2:27:44 PM by Clarste

Well I'm basically extrapolating from what we know of the experiences of people who have lived until now.

Basically, when you experience something significant as a child, it feels all the more important because it'll be a big event in relation to the total amount of experiences you have in your memory. When you've acquired more experiences and bigger ones, the ones from your childhood will, if repeated, become insignificant. I'm pretty sure I felt some rather strong feelings the first couple of times I was able to pour myself a glass of water (without having to ask for someone to give me the glass from the cupboard) and when I first went to school. Now, doing neither is any special.

Now instead of an event, let's take a process. For many people my age and younger than me, the Arab Spring protests have felt very important and we've gone through a huge amount of thoughts and emotions while following the events. I did the maths in another thread, but basically, for someone who has lived since 0 c.e., the entire lifespan of the USSR would've felt about as significant (compared to the whole range of their memory) as the Arab Spring so far has felt to us.

Now, I know that that comparison isn't entirely accurate, as the USSR participated in so many events that in their own right were much bigger than the fate of a single country (which is the highest stakes we've seen in the Middle East so far.)

If you were to live for (say) ten thousand years, a century would feel to you like a half a year does to someone who's 50.