Experts say humans can live to 1000.. would you want to?

reply to post by Atlantican


They can already clone stem cells, which btw means that we no longer have to get them from aborted fetuses.

Well, it all depends. If my physical body were restored/maintained at where it was when I was, say 35 or 40, or younger, then yes I wouldn't mind, keep living and learning and having fun when I can.

But if my body is going to keep aging, or even be stuck where it is now, then not just no but HECK NO. I already have some level of chronic pain and things that don't work like they used to, and it takes a lot of the joy out of life.

My husband is a little older than I am, and he says "If I were to wake up in the morning and didn't feel all my assorted pains, I'd think I was dead." Who wants that for another 900+ years?

This might sound like a stupid question so forgive me, but are cloned stem cells identical to regular ones, or do they differ in a way that makes them less effective?

(not one liner...)

From my understanding we duplicate our bodies every seven years on average, although I don't think we duplicate all cells. I believe that we don't regenerate bones cells or brain cells so often. The big problem is that our brains start to die off in our forties. That would have to be the big technological challenge to people living long lives.

I didn't feel that I fully matured until my thirties, and jsut as I was really getting my act together, I start to have to deal will getting old and having to slow down. It doesn't seem fair.

Of course I would go for it! Why not?

The world is too big to explore in just 70-80 years.

But hell! if I do live to be hundreds of years old where would I get

money after retirement? Or do we have to postpone retirement to 450 rather than 60 years old?

Originally posted by prototism
I retract my original statement, and add:

I don't see how this is possible, nor do I see how it's benefits would outweigh it's negatives.

I don't want to live forever. We aren't meant to. Every accomplishment (material or otherwise) to have in life will diminish in value.

[edit on 11/12/2008 by prototism]

On the contrary, I believe that the goals we undertake would rise in scale. They would be grander accomplishments than we have today even.

I for one am intrigued at how the mind would adapt to seeing things on a much larger timeline.

I mean just imagine how much further through the universe we could travel!

[edit on 12-11-2008 by HunkaHunka]

Originally posted by rapinbatsisaltherage
This might sound like a stupid question so forgive me, but are cloned stem cells identical to regular ones, or do they differ in a way that makes them less effective?

(not one liner...)

I know this doesn't answer your question, but keep in mind that an Ant colony has a definite life span, and as a colony goes through all the stages a regular organism goes through, including adolescense and maturity.

The Colony lives to be around 15 years, while each ant may live only a fraction of that. The ants themselves don't change, yet the colony itself does.

If you want more, check out organized complexity, or a great book called Emergence "The secret life of ants, brains, cities, and software"

Originally posted by jakyll
there's no reason we shouldn't be able to prolong life..... but for 1,000 years, that seems unlikely unless you could completely regenerate every cell in your body.

ohhh like piccolo.. right after 2nd stage cell fights him when he has one arm... n he re-generates it..
#.. GOOD POINT... I WANNA GO TO NAMEK!!!

LOL sorry.. my bad... 5 somethingTH hour awake.. kinda losing it..
id choose to live for a thousand.. #.. id take 5000... id watch my wife.. kids... everyoine die... id go for it

Originally posted by thefreepatriot
reply to post by prototism

 

trust me we could live 1000 or even more.. if you knew you could live 1000 and you don't do it wouldn't this almost be akin to suicide?

Sin in suicide is just something they tell you to keep you from doing it. I mean, how can they tax a corpse? Can't squeeze blood from a stone right? Well a corpse can't exactly work it's life away to fund Corporate Executives' little excursions, now can they? I would be willing to bet that no matter how you check out, the end result is the same, and you end up in the same wherever when you do die, suicide or not.
Religion is a tool created by a few powerful people to keep the masses in check. There's no profit to be had if everyone is offing themselves because life isn't worth hanging around for.
I mean, couldn't you just hear the Rockefeller's if 90% of the world committed mass suicide? "Son of a b*tch!! There goes my nest egg!! Now who am I going to bamboozle?"

Originally posted by SLAYER69
It's funny that you posted this

My friends and I were just discussing something similar the other night with regards to the old testament where supposedly they lived for hundreds of years

and that the life expectancy keeps going up

my question was what stage of aging is increased?

Like do we go through puberty for like 60 years?

or do we age normally until we hit 80 then live all old and feeble for another 700 years?

[edit on 12-11-2008 by SLAYER69]

i sat down and worked out the ratio of childhood to adulthood to old age in a cat and if humans had the same ratio we should either be breedign by the age of 4 or not reach old age till age 150 or something and in the meantime have full health and be able to have babies every year

so - question is? did aliens who made us fiddle with our mitochondria so that they can only reproduce so many times before we have to die?

and - are we mature enough for our scientists to give us back those extra years we should have been living all along?

yes I would like to live 100 years but only if i could take the regular 20 years to grow up and be a child and then have a very short time of old age and in between have 970 years of peak health and peak abilities

if the TREE OF LIFE is the DNA strand, then perhaps someone tinkered with the original human DNA, spliced it and added a terminator codon series that wasn't there originally. maybe science has found this tinkered with area and is realizing that a small modification could stop the termination. i know when a woman goes into menopause it causes a terminator chain reaction. it's a slow termination but it's coded.

Not quite sure if we're equipped to live for as long as 1,000 years, but...

My sister had to take a Anatomy/Phisiology course recently, and her teacher who is apparently well educated and up to date on her information, was saying that today we can reasonably expect to live up to 150 years old or so. (Maybe not today's elderly, but the younger generations I guess!)
I think it might be cool if quality of life was able to be upheld, the world is too big to fit everything into 75-80 years !

Shannon

Ok, sorry, but I didnt read all of the responses, so pardon me if I "clone" (pune intended) someone else's comment.

I have seen this research on Science channel, or maybe Discovery, and it all sounds well and good. They believe they can turn off the aging gene(s) that signal cells to stop replicating, thereby extending life for hundreds, even thousands of years, in theory.

I see a few problems with this:

Congress and Senate will immediately need strict term limits. If you think they can ruin a country in 12-20 years, imagine what they could do in 200-500 years. Frightening!

Population explosions will ruin this planet. The human population is currently only enough to actually fill less than half the liveable landmass space on the planet, and still cities are overcrowded, forests are being clear-cut, waters are being polluted, the air is near toxic in many places, and so on. The next limits will have to be put on procreation. People will all but have to be sterilized after one, perhaps 2, births.

Global welfare will go through the roof. Knowing that living safely could net you a thousand year lifetime only serves to further the laziness and lack of desire for many. This compounds hundreds of times over when you think that you no longer have to rush to prove your worth in the world and you are looking at a tremendous bottleneck in progress. A huge majority of otherwise aggressive learners, thinkers, creators, developers, and more could very well become docile in their progressive pursuits simply because they have, very literally, all of the time in the world.

Some positives:

Cosmic travel would be a more aggressive option, since someone who is healthy and can live for a thousand years is very likely to make it across the galaxy and back.

The minority of creators and developers that do not become lazy in their pursuits could create, prove, recreate and expand on countless new technologies and discoveries.

I wouldnt mind, personally, getting a couple hundred years under my belt, but I am not sure I would want to go from the world I grew up in to the world that I fear awaits us in the next millineum.

Experts say "the elite" can live to 1000

Fixed

So now that the elite can live 1000 years... expect some serious population reduction....
85% reduction?

reply to post by Dermo



Dermo, I wouldn't want to live a 1,000 years in this body, the way I feel now a 100 years will be awful. I will just go when Gods ready and step out into eternity
with a perfect body.......

I think physically you could keep the body alive forever.
But the soul would not want to be stuck in it.
I think healthy people who just "die" of natural causes no specific medical illness just want to move on.
That kind of says to me wherever it is they move on to, must be damn better than here.

reply to post by Dermo


As long as I didn't age mentally and physically past a certain age I would absolutely do this. If they needed subjects I'd volunteer right now.

Hello everyone, I'm still a bit new here to posting (been lurking for over a month), but I can't help but jump in and voice a concern over this.

I just don't see how this could be a healthy thing, for humans to live well beyond a normal, healthy lifespan. (I'd say 150 years should be the max), due to the fact that we wouldn't be able to have children too often, due to overcrowding, overpopulation, depletion of natural resources, as one poster stated very well.

The problem with having less children would be a big problem for the human race in general. It would slow down genetic mutation (the good kind) and human biological evolution, to a crawl, possibly even a standstill. If this current generation were to see this change on longevity, we can pretty much count on all human biological evolution to be the same for many, many hundreds of thousands of years. There's no telling what our evolution may have missed out on due to lack of passing along DNA on a consistent basis.

Maybe I'm misinformed on this, but this seems like it could become a real issue of us being unable to adapt in a timely manner to our environment should it ever have a drastic change.

considering most humans can barely move at 100 years of age, you'd have to be in a life support pod that artificially exercises your muscles to keep the blood flowing as well as constant whatever to keep your organs alive to live up to 250 yrs old... the bad thing about medicine, our natural lifespan rarely exceeds even 60 years. our natural life span with medicine can be as long as we want... some people think it is a good thing that humans don't die of diseases like they used to and medicine is generally seen as a moral justice considering it saves lives. But it isn't just saving lives, it is extending them and continuing on another life of another consumer. I wouldn't deny another human the right to live on with medicine I am just saying that it the only way it has "helped" us is that it lets the amount of consumers pile up and grow more than it shrinks

[edit on 12-11-2008 by MoothyKnight]

This post human stuff is only useful to an atheist. The science is interesting but application wise there is no point in the scheme of things.