I’m already imprinted upon space-time. Immortality achieved.
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And you always have been!
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Pass it on to @orenwolf;
Also I’m not sure BoingBoing have as much control over who gets to advertise as one might hope:
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I believe in you Arthur. I always have!
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as @L0ki said, it’s a known problem, but report it anyway.
I feel so strongly about this that I refused delivery of the free football copy of the Sun that came in the post a few years back, despite being a Carlisle United fan. The paper’s history of transphobia and general support of the Tories were only secondary issues for once.
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I’m fairly confident in MWI QM, but I still have such mixed feelings about quantum immortality as a concept. Mostly because it doesn’t really seem actionable I think for a human to stay sane, “live in your own Everett Branch” is a very useful heuristic. It does, however, provide a plausible solution to the Fermi paradox.
[Narrator] : She isn’t.
Spoiler: Aubrey de Gray is not right.
He has interesting ideas that are worth exploring though.
I’m aging right now.
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Good of you to post something on the content of his work. I read his book. It goes into great detail delineating each of these problems from a biochemical/molecular engineering standpoint. He clearly states that we aren’t there yet, but this is what it will take.
For example, for number 2 on the list: a friend of mine just published a paper in Nature. Their discovery is that chromosomal instability (a widespread genetic defect in cancer) leads to metastasis. Loose DNA fragments exit the nucleus, tricking the cancer cell into thinking it is constantly infected with a virus leading to chronic inflammation. In response, cancer cells behave more like immune cells which are activated in response to infection and hijack this chronic inflammation in order to spread to distant organs.
So we are on the path to understanding but nowhere near the goal. A lot further along than even ten years ago.
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My old carrots magically turn into beers, which then magically turn into body fat. It’s uncanny, really.
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You’ve been dying since the day you were born
–James Hetfield
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I’ve been keeping tabs on Grey for a while. I think his argument is sound. It’s really a question of when we solve even half the problems he’s listed that need to be solved and not really if. If we just solve even a couple of the problems like cancer and cellular ‘junk’ molecules then we’d probably see humans live much longer than now (like probably in the low 100s and not with pain or anything). It’s really not one thing that gets solved which makes humans live longer, more healthy, lives. It’ll be a thousand things and each one of them quantitatively superior to what we’re doing now to solve the same or similar problems with our biology. And I’m going to bet those fixes will mostly be just about making bad outcomes of a disease fixable and not about making us into the New Gods or whatever.
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The problem with greatly extending human life is that cements wealth inequality and class divisions. If you had the means to make sure you could take the best care possible and live nearly forever you totally would, on the flipside people with little resources would likely be wholly unable to take the same kind of care. I find this concept of immortality to be not just hubris but dangerous.
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His goal is to cure aging, not make people invincible or immortal.
Looking that up in Wikipedia was surprisingly rewarding:
Aubrey is an English given name. The name is a Norman French derivation of the Germanic given name Alberic, which consists of the elements alf “elf” and ric “power”, with the meaning of “Fair Ruler of the Little People”.[1] Before the Norman conquest, the Anglo-Saxons used the corresponding variant Ælf-rīc (see Ælfric).
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Never mind what it does to pension funds.
It’s why I support life extension only if capitalism ends with natural death. Both can’t be allowed in the same society as you stated. Frankly, I think capitalists being so short sighted means we won’t get it before we finally fall into a kind of socialism or other anti-capitalist economy. Capitalism doesn’t lend itself to Moon shots. It’s a risk averse economic system.
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Fair enough. I was going by the BB headline:
If Aubrey de Gray is right, you could live forever
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To extrapolate, image cockroaches immortal.
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