Posted on 03/06/2015 5:59:42 AM PST by C19fan
Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of PayPal, plans to live to be 120. Compared with some other tech billionaires, he doesn’t seem particularly ambitious. Dmitry Itskov, the “godfather” of the Russian Internet, says his goal is to live to 10,000; Larry Ellison, co-founder of Oracle, finds the notion of accepting mortality “incomprehensible,” and Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, hopes to someday “cure death.”
These titans of tech aren’t being ridiculous, or even vainglorious; their quests are based on real, emerging science that could fundamentally change what we know about life and about death. It’s hard to believe, though, since the human quest for immortality is both ancient and littered with catastrophic failures. Around 200 B.C., the first emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang, accidentally killed himself trying to live forever; he poisoned himself by eating supposedly mortality-preventing mercury pills.
(Excerpt) Read more at newsweek.com ...
I always think of boob jobs when I hear “Silicon Valley”.
I think one of the biggest challenges would be to decide when enough was enough and it was time to pull the plug. Because I'm convinced that that day would come eventually to everyone. Life might not prove so exciting when you have unlimited time to do everything. It's its very finite-ness that makes every second valuable.
I’m thinking more like the Cylons of (re-imagined) Battlestar Galactica.
About ten years ago, I thought that a medical extension of human lifespans to 500 or 1,000 years would be not only possible, but maybe even inevitable......
Imagine how evil the world would become if your "favorite" dictator was able to live that long........
Interesting, I just looked at the post you linked to.... you have been thinking on the same lines, as well.
With time travel, being like Wowbagger the infinitely prolonged. Insult everyone in the universe in alphabetical order.
I don’t think social security will sustain my immortality.....
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In Sunday school (many moons ago) I was taught that God confused the languages of the people due to their "pride" in attempting to reach heaven by building a tower in Babel.
I've since understood the deeper meaning. Men can accomplish many things that they should not. The following verse from Genesis 11 is quite chilling to me.
5 But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. 6 The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. 7 Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”
That’s only an issue if the technology is available to everything. As long as it is extremely expensive and only the very wealthy can afford it, it’s not an issue.
Bingo - my mind wandered to, “God had other ideas” and your post nailed it.
If practical immortality is reached, you would work until you had enough money and then “retire”.
“I’ve already done you.”
7 Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”
The rate of change in the world is already approaching a pace that human beings can not deal with, mentally nor emotionally.
It will get FAR worse. The rate of change is only increasing - and exponentially so.
Get up early, work at an office job, go home, eat, go to bed, repeat...forever?
No thanks, I’d rather go see Jesus.
My point exactly.
Having overcome both language and distance barriers, men can once again do anything they put their minds to. With the moral corruption that is so prevalent these days, it is chilling to imagine what (more) we’ll see in our lifetime.
I hope that my mortality providing software isn’t Window-based. I’d hate to have to be re-booted a couple of times a day.
Also you can’t assume that other areas of technology wouldn’t take care of the problem, either by increasing resources, decreasing the need of them, or being able get off the planet viably.
Freegards
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