Do you want to live forever?
photograph of me playing Pippin, closest I could find to a Peter Pan like character
The technology to allow this to happen will likely come within all of our lifetimes. In 500 years, barring acts of god, you could be speaking (assuming we haven't transcended spoken word) to a class of students (assuming we still teach anymore vs download information) about the advent of the cellphone.
What is consciousness?
I think that is the greater question. If I get teleported using quantum entanglement from one location to another am I still me on the other side of the universe? When I am put back together, even if it is perfect, am I still there?
Back to living forever
Can a human brain even store 200 years worth of information? 500 years? How much info do we store? I literally did a google search for that and this was the first article that popped up. Like any other article in this vein we just do not know.
One of my PCs went nuts a few days ago. The Ethereum blockchain had bloated out to 90 gigs and there wasn't enough space left on the drive to run Windows (this would never happen with MacOS). Would a human being do this? Would our brain compress memories further or would we seize up?
As we extend life further and further would we even be able to see these problems before they happen?
Who will have access to this?
I hate to be cynical but clearly this tech is going to be available to the wealthy first. It'll also be available to the guinea pigs. Does anyone remember the Eric McCormack TV pilot from the 90s about society after immortality, Island City? They turned it into a made for TV movie. Kind of a cool idea I always thought.
Elysium also covered another point of view on this. The wealthy create and have a paradise and the rest of us languish on Earth.
I guess artists have always played with this romantic vision of the future.
Would I take the pill if it was offered?
Yea, I think I would. I don't know that living for hundreds of years would be interesting all the time. Barring nuclear war or a tree falling on you... Maybe the tree falling would be seen as interesting at year 453. Who Knows?
Would you take the pill or shot if offered? Is this the natural progression of our evolution as a species?
This post was inspired as I was reading this article on Telomere extension
Very interesting friend.
Thank you! I checked out your posts as well. When I have more time tomorrow I'm going to read your post about earning steem from watching videos :-) I want to push my Steem Power up!!!
The idea of "living forever" is a tempting one to most of us, but I would like to see physicians and scientists work on extending a high quality of life into later years rather than focusing on duration.
Would you rather be a senile 200-year-old who is stuck in bed all day? Or be 80 years old and still just as physically and mentally "youthful" as a young adult?
I already have grand parents who are as whip quick as a young adult. I'd love to see that stretched to 200 :-)