MagnaCool--Habitable Exoplanet!

[Guynemer]

Originally posted by Arcite
So, in the next 50 years we should be able to extend our life expectancy to atleast 120 or more. This doesn't even take into account advances in cryonics or biomedical implants.

Honest to God:

If, 50 years from now, life expectancy is >= 120, I will give you all of my worldly possessions. Every scrap of clothing, every red cent, every book, every hair off my head (by then, won't be many).

I could not be more certain of this not happening.

[Geronimo]

Originally posted by Guynemer


Honest to God:

If, 50 years from now, life expectancy is >= 120, I will give you all of my worldly possessions. Every scrap of clothing, every red cent, every book, every hair off my head (by then, won't be many).

I could not be more certain of this not happening.

If I had to bet I would bet that the life expectancy 50 years from now will indeed be under 120 years. But 50 years! where in the hell do you get that kind of dogmatic certainty about 50 years out?

[Emetri]

Yes Geronimo, I put it to you that if you honestly think that true immortality can ever be achieved, you're completely out of your mind.

But as you so astutely hinted at, it's all a matter of individual belief really. We're all vigorously exercising that part of our anatomy I mentioned earlier. Or perhaps you'd like to substantiate the basis of your.. faith?

Just because the world records for running and jumping have been steadily progressing, it does not follow that our best athletes will one day be taking off and circling high above the stadiums to the cheers of the audience. It's completely outside of their capacity. Anyone who insists this could eventually change is out of his mind.

[Geronimo]

Originally posted by Emetri
Yes Geronimo, I put it to you that if you honestly think that true immortality can ever be achieved, you're completely out of your mind.

But as you so astutely hinted at, it's all a matter of individual belief really. We're all vigorously exercising that part of our anatomy I mentioned earlier. Or perhaps you'd like to substantiate the basis of your.. faith?

Just because the world records for running and jumping have been steadily progressing, it does not follow that our best athletes will one day be taking off and circling high above the stadiums to the cheers of the audience. It's completely outside of their capacity. Anyone who insists this could eventually change is out of his mind.

I think I see a misunderstanding.

By "true immortality" do you mean that at least some people endowed with such "true immortality" might at some point live forever without dying? In that case I agree that "true immortality" is impossible. Odds will catch up with them eventually so they will almost certainly die of some violent misfortune long before the world all around them eventually becomes uninhabitable for various reasons.

We were never discussing such "true immortality. We were merely speculating about a world where biological senescence can be manipulated.

[Emetri]

If we can extend "violent misfortune" to include the cessation of vital bodily functions due to old age, I fully agree.

If, as i suspect, you prefer the more traditional meaning of the phrase, I must insist that you're just chasing a pipe dream. Sorry.

[Geronimo]

Originally posted by Emetri
If we can extend "violent misfortune" to include the cessation of vital bodily functions due to old age, I fully agree.

If, as i suspect, you prefer the more traditional meaning of the phrase, I must insist that that you're just chasing a pipe dream. Sorry.

The human species as a whole does not age. Only the soma does. Since it is demonstrably possible for a biological entity such as the germ line to not inevitably degrade over time why are you so convinced that the soma could not likewise be maintained?

A woman can have an egg 30+ years old and it gets fertilized by sperm from a guy in his 60's and the child born shows no signs of ravages of time on his biological material.

The entire adult body completely rebuilds itself over and over even in the total absence of mitosis or meiosis. How do you know it is impossible in principle to intervene in that process to counter various problems associated with senescence?

[Seeker]

Well getting offtopic here but the problem with 120 years in human biology is that it is a magic number in terms of our telomeres and cell division. Experiments that seemed helpful with various therapies intitially haven't panned out, although the recent results with mice have been promising.

Anyway, the thing that interested me was life extension for the purpose of space travel. Given vast distances, and the fact that the latest theoretical mauling of the latest incarnation of the many many incarnations of Alcubierre's notion does NOT look promising, life extension looks like the only realistic possibility for interstellar travel.

Anyway, the results in mice lately convince me that we'll at least get a couple of extra decdes outta this.

[Guynemer]

Originally posted by Geronimo
where in the hell do you get that kind of dogmatic certainty about 50 years out?

I've spent my entire life trying to become a doctor. Research happens slowly. If we have a cure for cancer in 50 years, I'll be very pleasantly surprised. Without it, no way does our expectancy get above 100, let alone 120. And even with a cure for cancer, some other problem will present itself that will require many decades to solve.

[Odin]

Originally posted by Emetri


No, I'm saying it can't be done, which should be quite obvious to most sane people. Those who have their heads severed and frozen just in case something pops up not included. If I had anything to say about it, they'd have "Foolish worm-depriver" stamped on their foreheads, in ever-so-slightly acidic ink.

60 years ago one could say going to the moon was impossible and not be mocked. Oh, and ever heard of that head of the US patent office that claimed that "everything that can be invented has been invented" back in the 1890s?

Your short-sightedness is astounding.

[Odin]

This thing is probably what I've heard called a "Panthalassic" world. terrestrial planets significantly larger then earth will probably be completely covered in oceans deeper then any on Earth and have crushingly thick atmospheres unless some freak event early it the planet's history evaporates much of the volatiles into space. It might have sea life, but it ain't habitable to us land-lubbers.

[Geronimo]

Originally posted by Guynemer


I've spent my entire life trying to become a doctor. Research happens slowly. If we have a cure for cancer in 50 years, I'll be very pleasantly surprised. Without it, no way does our expectancy get above 100, let alone 120. And even with a cure for cancer, some other problem will present itself that will require many decades to solve.

Has your experience in medicine tended to reinforce in you a kind perception of opaqueness of the functioning of the human body? I would think that given the apparent willful lack of responsiveness of the human body to various treatment ideas that have been developed in the last few decades for a vast constellation of conditions you may simply have become deeply cynical about medical progress in general.

The reason the rate of progress in medicine is so much more glacial than the apparently rapid expansion in knowledge and understanding of the human body surely relates to the difficulty in trying to develop relatively few generalized treatment solutions to incompletely characterized individual conditions.

The key to rapid progress will be acquiring tools that allow very specific and complete information about the conditions to remove the opacity that so easily monkey wrenches treatment efforts.

Currently for a given patient how much knowledge can you have about the specific etiology of the cancer they have? not much! the methods available are pretty crude.

How complete of a molecular description of a patients cancer can you currently obtain? How diverse is the set of tools you could apply to treat the cancer if that complete description were available? The answer to both is "not much".

It is no surprise that current progress against cancer has been so modest. The question is what makes you so certain we will continue to have to rely on such blunt tools 50 years down the line?

In 50 years it's entirely possible that bioinformatics will allow rational drug design on demand based on complete molecular descriptions of a condition. Nothing even remotely comparable is possible today. But current rates of progress in molecular tools and bioinformatics are more than sufficient to allow for such possibilities decades down the line.

[Guynemer]

Hey, don't get me wrong. In no way am I saying that a life expectancy of 120 is out of theoretical reach. I just don't see it happening in 50 years. 500, maybe. 50? Not on your life, or mine.

[Seeker]

Also, don't get me wrong, I'm proposing this for one particular individual astronaut or group of astronauts not about the average man.

[b etor]

oooooooooh i wanna move there!

[Vesayen]

Originally posted by Ãskallin
Imagine spending your whole life on a spaceship going somewhere just because your parents were stupid enough to sign up for it...
I would be pissed of at my parents if they did something stupid like that.

People are now living their entire lives in front of computer screens. I think they could cope.