Do you think that genome tech will arrive in this lifetime?
- Thread starter Lark
- Start date
Honestly, I think it will. No one can know for sure, but bio science seems to be making technological advances in leaps and bounds. I think I agree with Ray Kurzweil in his theory that information will reach a point of speed at which humans will need to augment things to keep up, sort of the intersection of technological capabilities and biological capabilities, which he calls the Singularity. If we do reach that point, I think there will be a very strong push to develop technologies such as genome tech and others, and many of the arguments against it will break down.
They have not only caused laboratory mice to live 4 times longer than normal, they have actually reversed aging in them as well. I believe the technology already exists. The question is though, what happens to already dwindling resources when people start not dying from old age?
And so the problem. Not everyone can live forever, the world simply cant sustain it. So...I suspect that if we all live another 20 years or so, were going to see many people with money not die.
http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/4480020
And so the problem. Not everyone can live forever, the world simply cant sustain it. So...I suspect that if we all live another 20 years or so, were going to see many people with money not die.
http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/4480020
This brings me to one of my older questions here. Would it be considered suicide if you refused treatment that would allow you to live forever?
They have not only caused laboratory mice to live 4 times longer than normal, they have actually reversed aging in them as well. I believe the technology already exists. The question is though, what happens to already dwindling resources when people start not dying from old age?
And so the problem. Not everyone can live forever, the world simply cant sustain it. So...I suspect that if we all live another 20 years or so, were going to see many people with money not die.
(read panels from right to left)
"All your hopes and dreams of humanity, and the expectations of technology, and its benefits to mankind, will not come in your lifetime"
- o_q
- o_q
The rich elite live forever. Children are forbidden, and when they do exist they're sent to the combat chambers to kill each other off - combat is used as a means of disposing of unwanted people in this world.
The singularity is interesting, I've examined a lot of the pro and contra theories, from the put your brain in a bot silliness to consciousness in hard drives and the nature of memory and simulation.
I'll be honest that the whole cyberpunk thing I think is a terrifying prospect, people being all terminator like or creatures like that in that old seventies movie with people stranded on a space station with a hulking great robot which kills their cat first and then attempts to kill them (a guy has to sacrifice himself with a bomb to destroy it).
I sort of see genomic and regenerative medicines as an alternative, I'm not sure if I saw it in bicentenial man or elsewhere (I know these are all references to fiction BTW) but there was a movie in any case in which people could choose to live as long as they wanted because they could periodically regenerate all their cells (it may not have been bicentenial man now that I think about it).
What movie was that? It sounds familiar. There was this movie I am thinking about with these two smaller robots...kind of box shaped. Man some of those movies were awesome.
They have not only caused laboratory mice to live 4 times longer than normal, they have actually reversed aging in them as well. I believe the technology already exists. The question is though, what happens to already dwindling resources when people start not dying from old age?
And so the problem. Not everyone can live forever, the world simply cant sustain it. So...I suspect that if we all live another 20 years or so, were going to see many people with money not die.
I think that's a great discussion.
Malthusian thinking about population is wrong, named for Thomas Malthus who thought increases in numbers would cause social collapse, because not every individual consumes at the same rate, or as Cobbett, a radical tory if there is such a thing, railed against it no one complains about the increase in gentry, ministers and others of a high rank.
However, if it were to be a problem, really, what about telling people with each regeneration there were strings attached? Such as limitation of family numbers, then personal sterilisation, then limitations upon earnings etc. etc.
The thing about people with money, the legacies, constructing an an apparent fuedalism may be a good thing if it meant a mature discussion about the distribution of wealth and resources, finally, but I suspect that for the majority of people they're still going to care less about the overclass than they do the underclass, mainly because of who they have occasion to have dealings with on a daily basis and who they dont.
And they arent really being made anymore, an associated discussion is probably that tech has reached the boundary of imagination, a lot of the things imagined in Star Trek and elsewhere are actually in existence today, even the communicators in TMNT or other media, are all here but no one has any idea what's next.