So, has anyone else pointed out to them that immortality would only last as long as the food supply? Which wouldn’t last very long at all if all these people stopped dying? Then starts the food wars, and so amount of pretty skin will save you from the napalm bombings.

And that’s just the renewable resources. Forget that oil is only going to hold out for maybe 50 more years. Lord knows when we’ll run out of trees to cut down, or material to mine.

I consider the relatively high levels of apathy and nihilsm present in our current society to be a form of insanity.
Oh dear.
What sort of medication can I look forward to?

I think human immortality would be a great thing, as long as it’s invented around the same time as an FTL drive that allows us colonize other worlds.

Also, ponies are pretty! I want one of those too.

Forget that oil is only going to hold out for maybe 50 more years.

Informed opinion seems to be that we’ve already passed the peak, so there’s that down the toilet already. And, of course, with oil going, all those petrochemical-derived fertilisers will go too, so the badly-depleted soils won’t be able to put forth anywhere near the yield they’ve had up till now.

And that’s saying nothing of the soils that have just desertified and blown away altogether, or those that have been poisoned by dryland salinity (kind of a biblical punishment, that one, sowing the fields with salt).

But then again, Some Guy, they (the rich folks who’ll be living forever) could always eat the poor people.

And hasn’t this guy ever read Bug Jack Barron? Man, that one gave me nightmares for a while when I first read it.

There is an old Vonnegut short story, where the discovery of the means for immortality resulted in the extermination of 95% of the human race so that the immortals would have enough resources to last forever. That, and infaticide was required except when someone was willing to commit suicide so that a baby could live. Lovely.

Life isn’t precious to these dilrods, they’re so scared of death they don’t live, just fantasize about not dying, ever.

[T]hey (the rich folks who’ll be living forever) could always eat the poor people.

I believe the phrase you’re looking for is: “Eat the rich, & some transhumanists on the side, please.”

Maybe they’ll kill enough “poor people” from non-white countries w/ their “experiments” to give them some breathing/eating room.

As far as sci-fi goes, someone in the ’70s, (I’m thinking either Ron Goulart or Larry Niven, though how I could confuse the two…) had a series of short stories in a not too distant future in which organ transplants were easy & kept you going. The penalty for jaywalking, etc. was death, followed by harvesting of organs for the nasty old people who got such laws passed.

M. Bouffant:

“The penalty for jaywalking, etc. wingnuttery was death, followed by harvesting of organs for the nasty old people who got such laws passed. people like commenter palau who need a kidney.”

There. I fixed your post.

If only…

I’m gonna take a stab in the dark here, but I’m betting that stem cell research is a no-no for this guy (gotta protect all those unborns) while paying poor people to undergo harm for the sake of research on immortality is just fine and dandy.

Excuse me if I’m wrong, but the whole topic is so distasteful that I’m not about to poke around his site to confirm my hunch.

Cheers,

“There is an old Vonnegut short story, where the discovery of the means for immortality resulted in the extermination of 95% of the human race so that the immortals would have enough resources to last forever. That, and infaticide was required except when someone was willing to commit suicide so that a baby could live. Lovely.”

I’m sorry to say that anyone who thinks The Fountainhead is great literature probably isn’t all that turned off by the idea. Hell, if Ayn Rand was still kicking around, you know she’d be all about turning Sub-Saharan Africa into a mutant testing ground in the War on Death.

Only the gods could fly. Oh all right, so it’s the gods, the birds, the insects, some mammals, and some fish.

Go ahead, get technical, sheesh.

If I’m spending enternity with people like that, apathy and nihilsm are inevitable.

St. Nick on a stick. what kind of website is that? A bit more from Aubrey de Grey (There’s a fucking elitist twit if I’ve ever judged one by his name.):

“I take the view, quite simply, that Hippocrates has had his day…the psychological effect of possibly causing harm…skews the objective cost-benefit analysis of a given treatment…I believe that the 10:1 (at least) ratio of lives lost through slow approval of safe drugs to lives lost through hasty approval of unsafe drugs is no longer acceptable.

“…[Laws and regulations will change.] People will die as a result; the 10:1 ratio mentioned above will probably be reduced to 2:1. And people will be happy about this change, because they’ll know it’s wartime, and the first priority–even justifying considerable loss of life in the short term–is to end the slaughter as soon as humanly possible.”

Ah yes, “it’s wartime.” I’ve heard that somewhere before. End slaughter w/ slaughter. “It became necessary to destroy the village in order to save it.”

The author: Arnold Kling is an adjunct scholar with the Cato Institute and the author of Crisis of Abundance: Re-thinking How We Pay for Health Care, published by Cato.

Also: Selling kidneys for fun & profit.

It Seems To Me™ that everyone’s friend McMegan has linked to or posted there. No surprise.

Good one, I thought of that Dr Who creature immediately on seeing the first photo.

Xenos – there’s a similar situation in the wonderful manga comic Battle Angel Alita, soon to be ruined forever in a guaranteed-to-be-crappy James Cameron movie adaptation. The wealthy achieve immortality through a nanomachine-based process called “Methusalization”, and children are generally abandoned or subjected to more sci-fi-esque fates such as being harvested for organs or enlisted into child-only bloodsports. With immortality, the new generation becomes “a threat rather than a promise”.

M. Bouffant, that was Larry Niven, he of the organleggers and harsh punishments for just about any social transgression. Some writers seem disturbingly apt at predicting trends in public opinion and social thought, and that’s what I love about science fiction.

Niven also had something to say about rich folks having themselves frozen until a cure for their diseases could be found. He pointed out that future populations were unlikely to shrink, and so, far from being lords of all they surveyed, the newly-awakened found themselves unsuited for ‘modern’ life and unwanted. Hah. Serves the buggers right.

There was also one by an author whose name escapes me, called The Marching Morons. In this rather black comedy, the newly-resurrected denizen of the past has to help the ruling minority (aka the smart people) come up with some way to reduce the population of the vast overbreeding majority (aka the dumb people). Sails close to the edge at times, but does poke holes in several of traditional sci-fi’s favourite tropes.

Lord. Wingers watch that movie “The Island,” and think “hmm, that sounds like a pretty good idea to me.”

Good one, I thought of that Dr Who creature immediately on seeing the first photo.

A fellow in Cambridge, Mass.,
Had testicles made out of brass;
He slipped like a ghost,
Through Bradrocket’s posts,
And JPEGs shot out of his ass.

So, has anyone else pointed out to them that immortality would only last as long as the food supply? Which wouldn’t last very long at all if all these people stopped dying? Then starts the food wars, and so amount of pretty skin will save you from the napalm bombings.

Ah, but you’re forgetting that much of this same crowd is convinced that, within the next fifteen years or so, we’ll be able to synthesize anything using our alternative-energy powered nanite manufacturing pods. I think we had a commentator on this site (on a non-transhumanism thread, no less) that claimed that that very combo would eliminate the need for governments in our lifetimes.

Never underestimate the boundless optimism of the futurist.

How do we defeat death? Do we kill it?

Death’s a pretty patient sort. All those busy little nanobots are gonna fuck up some time, and when they do, well…

My money’s on Ted Williams’ head staying frozen.

Why is it that the people I least want to become “transhuman” are the ones most likely to be promoting it?

We could have a stable society with zero pop growth, even with near-immortality, provided you could extend fertility–but it would require a “wait queue” for having a baby(wait for someone to kill themself or die in an accident, then a “spot” opens up for another human being to exist).

You’d also need to have an extremely efficient resource distribution system, a source of near-limitless clean renewable energy(solar? fusion? bio-something or other? zero point/vaccuum energy?), and probably in vitro “vat meat” if people still want to eat animals. Needless to say, to prevent massive societal conflict, the anti-aging treatments would have to be free and universal.

Oh, and did I mention the federal world government?

Okay, that’s it. I’m renting “Death Becomes Her” again tonight. I love the part at the end where Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn fall down the steps and their legs break off.

So, has anyone else pointed out to them that immortality would only last as long as the food supply?

The solution is obvious: tax cuts.

There was also one by an author whose name escapes me, called The Marching Morons.

C. M. Kornbluth – Teh Great Gazoogle is your friend.

And that second picture? That’s how I imagine Immortal Giant-Sammich Daffyd looking in a couple thousand years. Probably still writing shitty novels, too.

I’ve dialogued with bloggers who practice Calorie Restriction for the purported life-extension benefits. It’s been cordial but frustrating; we keep talking past each other. They come off a lot like fundamentalists, which is basically what they are: people who are following a rigid set of rules in order to achieve immortality (in their case, literal, physical, and right now).

When I suggest that there are other factors to health besides getting 100% of their RDAs with as few calories as possible, I hit a brick wall. As informed as they are about certain aspects of health and longevity, they ignore other factors in morbidity like depression and education level–things they can’t as easily ‘do something’ about. They believe that only calories and nutrition matter.

To me, their strenuous dedication to their diets is manifestly unhealthy. They literally believe that sneaking a french fry here and there takes measurable time off their lives and might cause them to miss “escape velocity” by a tragic few days. They must be marinating in stress hormones. I have not been successful in getting them to consider this. For them, there is only one answer: more self-discipline! Anyone who disagrees is either in denial or someone who has some kind of bizarre hostility towards their health and thinness. (Like the “child-free,” they tend to feel persecuted for their lifestyle.)

I don’t feel angry at them or want to ridicule them. Their fear is so deep and real. I hope they achieve their dream, but like all dreams, I know it won’t turn out the way they imagine. Meanwhile, what will happen to the rest of us?

How do we defeat death? Do we kill it?

Pfeh, he’s probably not more than a CL 35 monster.

To me, their strenuous dedication to their diets is manifestly unhealthy. They literally believe that sneaking a french fry here and there takes measurable time off their lives and might cause them to miss “escape velocity” by a tragic few days.

It’s kind of maniacal, but why argue with them about it? If they want to use less food that’s okay. We may all be using less food involuntarily at some point anyway.

Having traveled a little over half my journey already, I have to say that I don’t want a longer than standard life-span.

I’m all for the kind of medical improvements and disciplinary habits that help make the final decades of my journey a little more comfortable – maintaining weight, minimizing bone loss, a little exercise to keep in shape. I also appreciate any assistance that makes it possible for me to look in the mirror to comb my hair without suffering a blow to my self-esteem.

But other than that – meh. A couple more decades past the extended warranty period? I don’t understand the desire for that.

Quatesh “And that’s saying nothing of the soils that have just desertified and blown away altogether, or those that have been poisoned by dryland salinity (kind of a biblical punishment, that one, sowing the fields with salt).

you forget the obvious. We can always move north.

Koo, whoo-koo-koo-koo-whoo-koo-koo!

But other than that – meh. A couple more decades past the extended warranty period? I don’t understand the desire for that.

We need those extra years if anyone is ever to max out every class in WoW with full sets of epic gear. Especially if we’re gonna squeeze ten full seasons of Friends into that busy schedule. Not to mention Buffy!

“Having traveled a little over half my journey already…”

Well, that’s what you think.

As an economist, I immediately think in terms of paying people to undergo risky therapies

Not that animal testing doesn’t have ethical issues, but what makes rebuilding tissues with nanobots so fundamentally different from testing cancer treatments that we can’t use the guinea pigs first?

He seems a little eager to take the Dr Mengele route, no? What’s the hurry, buddy? Death creeping up too quickly? It almost makes me question whether this is about the “greater good of humanity” at all, and not just “my life means more than yours”. Pretty easy to sacrifice other people.

I’ve got it, since we absolutetly have to have this in his lifetime, maybe he could volunteer! Oh no, wait, as an economist he must realize that he is much more valuable to society as a long-living high-wage-earner.

Defeat Death?

Death’s got a pretty good batting average so far. what is it, 100 percent? Everything that ever has lived, has died.

As pointed out above, Death plays the Long Game.

Ah yes, Kornbluth’s Marching Morons. After devising a scheme to ship every inferior off the planet, the 20th century huckster finds himself being subjected to the same treatment.

So what makes these transhumanist dweebs think the future master race will have any tolerance for keeping their useless likes around?

What tremendous dipshits.

saddened–

I like the idea of immortality “right now.” Done!~Reminds me of something (who remembers?) I thought about writing, with the great title “Thus Far I Am Immortal!”

Also, The War on Death sounds promising.

Bear in mind, all, that the main problem with mortality isn’t death. It’s aging. Everyone and his brother says, sooner or later (literally), that it sucks to get old. I believe it. Wisdom-shmisdom, when a good sneeze causes you to pull a muscle and it takes two weeks to stop hurting, Maurice Chevalier singing “I’m Glad I’m Not Young Anymore” doesn’t cut it.

Let alone something worse.

I could groove on a few more years, man. For by 1983, a man I had ceased to be!

They come off a lot like fundamentalists, which is basically what they are: people who are following a rigid set of rules in order to achieve immortality (in their case, literal, physical, and right now).

There are SO many people like this, with various differences in the what the One True Diet is. My ex-roomate spent most of her salary on organic produce and various extracts and essences from Whole Foods, convinced that if she remained pure in stomach she didn’t need health insurance, because she would never get sick.

Of course she would occasionally fall from grace and binge on fries and pizza, but then she would repent and make it up to the nutrition gods by proselytizing all the more fervently among her family and friends.

Can we get Megan’s opinion on this?

I’d pay to know it.

However, those citizens who are squeamish about de Grey’s proposal to expose more people to harm now in order to reduce harm to others in the near future probably would not feel any less squeamish just because those who undergo the experiments are well paid.

I like how ethical got lumped right in with squeamish. Why bother paying people? Why not just lie to them about the whole thing? Why not use the mentally disabled or the handicapped? Why not just use children? It is for the good of humanity right? What a bunch of fucking cobagz.

Maybe falling in love with Heinlein books at a young age had a detrimental effect on me, but I have a lot of sympathy with the transhumanist types. Upload my brain to a computer? I’m there! Physical immortality in the body I have now? Implausible, unlikely and no thanks.

Oh, and if you think people should be experimented upon to further study “risky therapies,” I think you should be at the front of the line.

Shouldn’t they be blaming the Almighty for building them bodies that wear out after less than a century? The landmark case Chambers v. God should set some precedent in this area.

Imagine being able to waste time in comments here for eternity. I ever tell you about that Althouse thread? Ann Althouse. You know. You don’t? Let me explain.

Unlikely, MCH. If you’re a dedicated transhumanist, your conception of “the Almighty” probably lies well outside mainstream notions of God and jurisprudence.

“Imagine being able to waste time in comments here for eternity.”

Heeellllp! I uploaded my brain to this computer and I can’t get out.

Imagine being able to waste time in comments here for eternity.

Imagine it? Dood, I’m living it!

The face on the skin frame reminded me of Woody Allen in Sleeper holding a pistol to the nose (the only remaining body part) of Dear Leader.

What’s the second picture from?

BTW, Kornbluth was great, everyone should own the NESFA Press edition of his collected works, but PZ Myers has a good case (scroll down) against “The Marching Morons.”

There is a “natural order” to things after all. When we become machines we might all start speaking with a Received Pronunciation (RP) accent.

What greater shock could befall a down-to-earth Yorkshire*** couple than to find their son suddenly speaking with a grand RP accent? This is what has happened to Mr and Mrs McCartney-Moore from York, whose 10-year-old son, William, speech-impaired after brain surgery, eventually spoke again, but with a voice like Brian Sewell’s.

*** – first thirty seconds is of Geoffrey Boycott, well-known cricketeer, Yorkshireman and wife-beater.

Does this mean that all English people naturally speak RP underneath but have added a regional accent filter!

I would pay good money for a Roy Edrosobot.

Imagine being able to waste time in comments here for eternity.

Cool! I could tell you about my new pot pie recipe!

mikey

With apologies to Monty Python and Larry above:

In the past only the gods could fly. And the birds. OK, in the past only the gods and the birds could fly. And the insects. I’ll start again. In the past only the gods, the birds and the insects could fly. Maybe bats too. Damn. In the past only the gods, the birds, the insects and the bats could fly. *What about those baby spiders?* Alright. In the past only the gods, the birds, the insects, the bats and some kinds of infant arachnids could fly. And that is why immortality is inevitable!

Cool! I could tell you about my new pot pie recipe!

I made that joke two centuries ago.

“What’s the second picture from?”

That’s a character from Dr. Who, but I don’t know uh whom.

The flat creature is “Lady Cassandra O’Brian.?17”, the last ‘true human’ in the Universe who kept extending her life through more and more radical surgeries.
Wikipedia Entry

I made that joke two centuries ago.

Yeah, but mikey’s pot pie really sits around the house. No, wait… that’s not… mmmmm, pie!

Mmmmmm, vat meat.

Isn’t wanting to be like the gods the very definition of hubris?

Death is a highly useful friend to humanity. Without it, fundamentalists of another age – perhaps cavemen who objected to starting new fires when they could just carry a burning stick from camp to camp – would hold sway over our social development today.

Forget flight; we’d still be arguing about whether crop failure – and this is assuming we’d have progressed to agriculture yet – was due to sorcery or to an angry fertility god.

It’s only when old things die – trees in forest fires, for example – that new things can grow unimpeded. Without death, there would be no physical evolution and nor would there be much social change.

This idiot speaks of weighing evils – harm now through unethical experimentation on other people or harm later through his having to die (OMG Nos!1!) – and yet he thinks nothing of creating a new stress on finite resources without first solving the existing distribution and replenishment problems.

Forget living forever; lots of kids around the world are simply concerned with surviving to the age of majority. Why doesn’t he apply his, um, intellect to addressing that problem?

Spooooky.

Political fanatics tend to be megalomaniacs — imposing their vision on a poor, imperfect world. It’s their way of achieving immortality.

The “Singularity” types just embody this (so to speak) on a pure level, wanting to enjoy their strange, inhuman anarcho-libertarian world for all time, treating the rest of humanity as an appendage at best.

It would be frightening if their sci-fi visions had any basis in real science. Today its just dorks wanking over SF novels and message boards.

DU

Breasticle, believe me, you will get absolutely nowhere with a CRONie trying to argue that death has any constructive natural purpose. I tried. They see that as false consciousness–i.e., we only think that way because we don’t know any better, *or* we are too lazy and undisciplined to do the work of slowing our own aging process. To them, there is not and cannot be anything positive about the downward curve of the life cycle. To them, it is unnatural and horrific and must be stopped. It’s that simple.

Well, SAD, they can impugn my motives to their mortal hearts’ content; they’re still wrong, regardless of what they claim.

“It would be frightening if their sci-fi visions had any basis in real science. Today its just dorks wanking over SF novels and message boards.”

Sadly, no. Real scientists ( and Sciffy dorks) have been talking about this for decades.

“Oh my stars and garters”??

Is that you, Grandma?

As an economist, I immediately think in terms of paying people to undergo risky therapies.

As a deranged, amoral scientist, I immediately think in terms of trading poor people to the Grays in exchange for their advanced technology. The Grays get slave labour for their desert planet… we get quantum computers that can run 5 games of Minesweeper at the same time. Seems a fair swap to me. This is no time for scruples. Or qualms.

Imagine George Bush and Dick Cheney living forever. I’ll take death please.

The thought of an eternity surrounded by Glenn Reynolds and Megan McArdles, not to mention their even-less-attractive camp followers, should be enough deterrence for any sensible person. But after half a century among humans, I’ve come to believe there is some widespread genetic variance, distributed at about the same ratio as handedness, that predisposes the vast majority of us to a greater or lesser degree of Religious Inclination. For most of human history, any individual’s particular expression of their natural RI polyvalence was restricted by the cultural norms of his or her birth-tribe or socioeconomic status. People had the choice of devout, whole-hearted belief in the regional General Universal Theory of Everything (GUTE) – earth mother, sky father, the divine right of kings, supply-side economics – or of just learning to perform the rites well enough to ensure the necessary harvest succession and neighborhood peace of mind. Those in the minority born with no Religious Inclination, like kids born left-handed, were usually lectured or beaten into submission to the right frame of mind. Most people, most of the time, were content to live in the broad middle GUTE range, neither burdensomely devout nor difficultly iconoclastic… the social equivalent of modern “non-practicing Christians” or “mostly Republican voters” or “secular humanists”.

But in modern first-world societies, there is no single accepted General Universal Theory of Everything. Even individuals born into the most isolated self-selected communities, like the Amish or the Upper West Side, are eventually exposed to an infinite smorgasbord of philosophical choices. Those of us born on the high-GUTE-seeking “devout” end of the Religious Inclination spectrum don’t have the relative ease of a society where, for instance, Isaac Newton’s extraordinary scientific accomplishments and his studies in esoteric Christian theology were considered equally valid habits of mind. The strain of choosing one self-sustaining GUTE among the many available leads to some very weird biographies – David Horowitz, for instance, pivoted from rigid Marxist to rigid Neoconservative with no sense of irony; he said that if he’d been born a century earlier he’d have been ‘the most committed Talmudist in the local temple’. And some people born to a “non-religious” background end up embracing the Singularity, or Calorie Restricted Immortality, or CSICOP, or Libertarianism, or Cheney’s personal supervision of the detonation of the World Trade Center, with a dedication worthy of Savonarola… or Torquemada.

Sidelight on C.M. Kornbluth: It’s not mentioned in Kornbluth’s Wikipedia biography, but I remember both Frederick Pohl and Damon Knight saying one of the great tragedies of Kornbluth’s life was the fact that his two children were born “mentally defective” or “damaged”. I don’t know if any more specific information has been made public, but given both Futurians’ stress on Kornbluth’s brilliance and his “eccentricity”, I’ve wondered if the kids might have been autistic. Ironic if the man responsible for “The Marching Morons” turned out to be another victim of the syndrome Hunter S. Thompson used in a metaphor about the Kentucky Derby and his own family tree: “You breed fast & a little crazy to fast & a little crazy for a few generations, you end up with very fast and very crazy…

But in modern first-world societies, there is no single accepted General Universal Theory of Everything.
I think that situation is called ‘Modernism’. A lot of people don’t seem comfortable with it.

It I ever see a book in the shops with “Anne Laurie” as the author, I for one will be buying several copies.