/sci/ - Science & Math

[Anonymous No.3547640]

Immortality thread.

Dammit, Aubrey. Be faster in your research!

[Anonymous No.3547651]

Give him money.

[Anonymous No.3547665]

>>3547651
Sorry, bro. I'm saving for the possible future therapy which wil probably be very expensive.

[Anonymous No.3547682]

cryonics is your only chance at immortality. a very small chance but nonetheless a chance.

they have to freeze you before brain death though or there's no point. so you have to call the cryonics team and they show up by your hospital bed waiting for your heart to stop then freeze you quick before your brain dies.

you can get your whole body frozen or just the head. just the head is cheaper and they figure the kind of technology required to unfreeze you without damage could also build you a new body anyways.

in the future i want to be a computer inside a spaceship. and there will be people inside me and i will help them will help them with their problems and run the ship and watch them have sex inside of me. and eventually i will have a new flesh body i can remote control and i'll be able to feel stuff through it and smoke space weed.

[Anonymous No.3547684]

If you want life extension and biological immortality to arrive sooner then the first thing you need to do is murder Aubrey.

Why? He's an embaressment, the idea of increasing life expectancy and beyond is considered feasible among scientists but there is no public interest in this beyond new age bullshitters and researchers do not receive the resources they need thanks to pseudo-scientists like Aubrey.

Make sure that he does not achieve biological immortality and it will send an important message.

[Anonymous No.3547691]

hey it's that crazy guy from Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman

[Anonymous No.3547692]

>>3547682
I don't think there will be a technology that would extract information from a dead, frozen brain

[Anonymous No.3547693]

>>3547682
you're retarded
go away

[Anonymous No.3547700]

immortality is being done through finding the gene that causes aging and shutting it off, right?
is that what this guy is doing or what

[Anonymous No.3547704]

>>3547700
>implying fixing telomerase will fix aging
>implying neurons and muscle cells divide often (neurons do occasionally, muscle cells less so)

[Anonymous No.3547706]

>>3547700

From a genetic viewpoint, the body is not a piece of static machinery that continues to function perpetually; it requires a steady stream of genetic maintenance as the years roll by (steady cell turnover to defy oxidative stress, an active immune system to keep cancerous cells at bay, etc). So, at the risk of gross oversimplification, you basically need specific anti-aging genes to keep you from aging.

However, according to evolution, genes are only selected upon if they confer a reproductive advantage, something an anti-aging gene that keeps the body functioning well beyond its reproductive years does *not* do. Such an anti-aging gene would not be subjected to evolutionary pressure, and therefore would not be selected upon and passed down. What that basically means is, your genes think that maintaining an old, sterile body is useless, and would allow you to rot and die while they go off to take care of your younger and more virile offsprings.

[Anonymous No.3547708]

>>3547700
lol no. He's trying to invent a therapy that would remove various waste from the body that accumulates over time.

[Anonymous No.3547718]

>>3547704
so then what would stop aging?

[Anonymous No.3547729]

>>3547718
http://www.sens.org/sens-research/research-themes

[Anonymous No.3547734]

>>3547718
Aging is the natural way things function. To stop aging you would have to basically freeze someone forever.

Almost every reaction has a small possibility of damaging something around it, like with oxidative species, bad hormones resulting in bad messages, etc.

To stop aging you would have to completely understand the body and replace it's functions with functions that don't produce destructive byproducts but work on the same scale or use the same materials. It's not going to happen.

Anti-aging stuff would also get very bad very quickly because the human mind and nervous system only has so much capacity for change. If you managed to live longer, you'd also have to severely increase neuroplasticity, and probably every 20-30 years you'd have to take amnesia drugs because your mind wouldn't be able to cope with any new information. Worse yet, if the neurons in the mind become too dense, they can fail to reproduce information completely (dysplasia that occurs in certain musical genres is the best example)

[Anonymous No.3547744]

>>3547693
stop being mean, a true scientist would include a concise sentence briefly outlining the critical error in the central point of the argument and leave it at that

[Anonymous No.3547746]

>>3547708

Not quite. He's applying engineering principles in order to maintain cell machinery, enhance the removal of waste and also prevent and repair damage caused by the body's normal operations.

Metabolism causes damage. Over time the damage accumulates to cause pathology, such as eye deterioration, weak bones, mental impairment etc. By repairing the damage as it is done, you prevent pathology from occurring.

[Anonymous No.3547747]

>>3547734
Luddities gonna ludd

[Anonymous No.3547750]

Aubrey de Grey is full of shit. Anyone who takes him seriously should feel bad. Him and Kurzweil, snake oil salesman and false prophets

[Anonymous No.3547751]

>>3547734
so basically,
anti-aging stuff would only work if you could increase the storage ability of the brain or you would be overloaded with information and become retarded?

shit sux, i thought this shit was gonna make me live forever and learn everything.

[Anonymous No.3547764]

>>3547751
Actually, learning new stuff through your whole life makes you less prone to being an old retard.
See: universities professors

[Anonymous No.3547770]

>>3547764
yeah but 70 years is too little time to really learn a lot of stuff.

[Anonymous No.3547773]

>>3547751
Look: we are creatures of evolution. Despite our "intelligence" and ability of understanding ones existence we are bound to the fuck and reproduce cycle. That is our only primary goal as far as evolution is concerned. Whether theres an end goal to it remains to be seen.

Anything made for anti aging at this point won't help you. Only by modifying genes of newborns pre conceptions will they get a chance to live forever. You and me are dead men walking, literally.

[Anonymous No.3547782]

>>3547773
well, i guess i should just kill myself if I get to be 50 and there is no anti-aging shit available for commercial use.

[Anonymous No.3547781]

>>3547773
Stop being so pessimistic asshole

[Anonymous No.3547784]

>>3547773
Evolution != Natural selection. The latter is one tool of the former. It's an effective tool in an unorganized, chaotic system, but given that we're beginning to discretely organize information, our self-guided progression is still evolution-- through a much more expedient means.

[Anonymous No.3547798]

>>3547773
then we must augment our evolution

[Anonymous No.3547800]

>>3547750
Truth. They distract from more feasible solutions to solving these problems in favor of fantastical and completely retarded speculation.

[Anonymous No.3547804]

>>3547798
Excuse that I have forgotten the infinite power of nano-augmentation technology.

[Anonymous No.3547809]

>>3547800
then what is the more feasible solution.

[Anonymous No.3547838]

>>3547798
Actually with nanotech its possible tiny nano medi bots will potrol your body and treat you at a nano level. However again: this will either be so ridicilously expensive only the super rich will be able to afford it (and then you'll have evil rich assholes living forever, do you really want that?)

[Anonymous No.3547842]

>>3547682
Does the brain not die when your head is cut off and frozen? That seems like the kind of thing that would kill a brain.

[Anonymous No.3547847]

>>3547838
>you'll have evil rich assholes living forever
it's gonna happen whether we want it or not

[Anonymous No.3547851]

>>3547842
Brain cells rot/die if there's no blood supply/oxygen. If you can freeze it in a way where ice crystals dont form and dont damage the tissue then there's no reason you would die. It's possible to be kept alive head only but it's unethical as fuck (russians have kept heads of dogs alive this way by filtering the blood with machines and whatnot).

[Anonymous No.3547857]

>>3547838

We don't even know how everything in the body works but we will have nanobots patroling and repairing it...exactlllyyyyy...

grow up dude

[Anonymous No.3547887]

>>3547857
What...? Do you not know how to read?

[Anonymous No.3547892]

>>3547809
Like all ideologies, they are based on an ounce of logic but then go off the trail after this, Aubrey's famous list of the problems of ageing to be solved is an adequate synopsis but he refuses to accept the advice from experts about the limitations of his proposed solutions. He seems to confuse the limitations imposed by reality with some sort of conspiracy against him.

The solution is not to beat a dead horse, the solution is to put the old tired worn out ideas on ice and try to advance in other areas then come back to it later once you've ironed out the technical details. It's like Babbage's calculating machine, if he had transistors he'd become Bill Gates but alas electronics were not advanced enough in his time.

[Anonymous No.3547911]

sounds like a lot of faggots cannot use spiral power.

evolution has destined people to rot and die?

fuck evolution

decide your own path (yo)

[Inurdaes !V1sPhobos. No.3547929]

>>3547911
Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann was the shit.

[Anonymous No.3547960]

Let's hope if some life extending device or therapy is developed, that it'll be cheap enough for all the souls in Africa and Latin America.

[Anonymous No.3547966]

>>3547782
Same here, bro. I also don't want to live longer than my early 60s.

[Anonymous No.3547972]

>>3547692
>>I don't think there will be a technology that would extract information from a dead, frozen brain

I don't think you understand. The brain is frozen so fast that every cell in your brain was left in the exact same state it was in prior to freezing. So if you froze the brain after it died that would be useless. But if you freeze the brain before brain death not so much. Every chemical reaction between neurons is frozen in place.

The problem is that in freezing many but not all of the cell walls burst despite all the antifreeze they run through your veins and arteries. So unfreezing leaves a useless mush. The hope is that future technology will be able to repair or replace the cell walls so you can be unfrozen and all the chemical reactions that made up you are more or less still in place.

That kind of technology to freeze a person is already in place, hundreds already wait in cryonic suspension. The technology to unfreeze them is still centuries away. And it's a longshot. Human civilization could falter, the building you're stored in could break down. So many things could go wrong.

But if you actually do your fucking research next time before typing some automatic dumbfuck response you'll find that scientists won't say it's impossible.

Being an atheist myself as unlikely as cryonics is to work, if I have the money, fuck it, worth a shot.

[Anonymous No.3547976]

>>3547960
oh god. immortal Africans? They'd probably still breed as fast as now. all of Africa starves and kills all the animals then resorts to cannibalism

[Anonymous No.3547981]

>>3547708
I'm inclined to agree that waste accumulation is the biggest cause of aging, and atherosclerotic deposits and protein clumps in the brain are the biggest offenders.

[Anonymous No.3547987]

How about we only allow people to be made immortal first if they are made unable to reproduce.

[Anonymous No.3547990]

As for the future of cryonics there are better freezing technologies in the pipeline.

Sushi can be frozen without the cell walls bursting and this is done so on a regular basis in Japan. Powerful magnetic fields allow the water to reach a state cold enough to suspend cellular activity while at the same time not turning to ice.

Just recently scientists have begun using this technique to store human teeth. The idea being you get your wisdom teeth removed and in the future when you start to lose your teeth you have two real teeth to put back in. You can buy this already, it's already on the market.

And the exciting thing is those same scientists say they're already working on freezing entire organs using the same methods. With the hope being that you could freeze an organ donors heart and use it months or even years or decades later. And they say they can likely pull it off, and soonish.

[Anonymous No.3547996]

>>3547972

> Every chemical reaction between neurons is frozen in place.

How the hell do you know that. What evidence do you have that the neurochemical reactions would behave like that in the face of rapid cooling?

[Anonymous No.3548001]

>>3547990

Now if they say they will soon be able to freeze entire human organs and then later unfreeze them. Well the brain is an organ.

Now I would not mind being frozen like this until such time as I can be unfrozen and downloaded into a computer. Like they did with that rats hypothalmus into a row of IGM bluegene supercomputers.

However at the moment to turn a piece of brain into software you have to slice it up into thin pieces and scan all the neurons with a microscope and simulate them within the computer. But if you were to remove say a small part of someones brain, scan it into software, then reunite that software with the organic brain... so this gradually piece by piece till the entire brain is converted. Then you wouldn't really die. It would be a gradual transition piece by piece into the computer.

[Anonymous No.3548006]

He doesn't even know how to shave. You expect him to know how to conduct research?

[Anonymous No.3548009]

>>3547987
How about you kill yourself you obnoxious little shit

[Anonymous No.3548011]

>>3547996
A central premise of cryonics is that long-term memory, personality, and identity are stored in durable cell structures and patterns within the brain that do not require continuous brain activity to survive. This premise is generally accepted in medicine; it is known that under certain conditions the brain can stop functioning and still later recover with retention of long-term memory.

Guyton, Arthur C. (1986). "The Cerebral Cortex and Intellectual Functions of the Brain". Textbook of Medical Physiology (7th ed.). W. B. Saunders Company. p. 658. ISBN 0-7216-1260-1.

"We know that secondary memory does not depend on continued activity of the nervous system, because the brain can be totally inactivated by cooling, by general anesthesia, by hypoxia, by ischemia, or by any method, and yet secondary memories that have been previously stored are still retained when the brain becomes active once again. Therefore, secondary memory must result from some actual alterations of the synapses, either physical or chemical."

[Anonymous No.3548014]

>>3548011

Memories perhaps, but are we nothing more than a bundle memories? Could it be that the ongoing reactions are important?

[Anonymous No.3548029]

>>3548009
>>How about you kill yourself you obnoxious little shit

Calm down for a minute and think about. According to UN projections the human population will be at a whopping 10 billion by 2050. At which point it may MAY start to stabilize and hold at that.

Now imagine all these people suddenly living for centuries, millenia, pumping out fresh children as often as they like.

Massive starvation and suffering and overcrowding and environmental catastrophe would result as the population skyrockets. Eventually even with all of that the population would still stabilize. How? Not by death from old age but by death from disease and starvation. Death and suffering on a mass scale.

So as you can see it is far more humane just to stop having fucking children if you want the immortality treatment. If you want a kid so bad adopt one.

The problem with people like you is knee jerk reactions and an inability to think ahead to the longterm.

[Anonymous No.3548039]

>>3548029
>inability to think ahead to the longterm.
>thinks we will be constrained to live on earth forever.
>inability to think
>assumes that immortality treatments will be affordable and available to everybody
facepalm.jpg

[Anonymous No.3548045]

>>3548014
Consider the following:

In June 2005 scientists at the University of Pittsburgh's Safar Center for Resuscitation Research announced they had managed to bring dogs back to life, most of them without brain damage, by draining the blood out of the dogs' bodies and injecting a low temperature solution into their circulatory systems, which in turn keeps the bodies alive in stasis. After three hours of being clinically dead, their blood was returned to their circulatory systems, and the dogs were revived by delivering an electric shock to their hearts. The heart started pumping the blood around the frozen body, and the dogs were brought back to life.

While most of the dogs were fine, a few of the revived dogs had severe nervous and movement coordination damage, causing them to be mentally disabled, and demonstrating behavior that was deemed "zombie" like. This has been pushed further by the media which named them "zombie dogs".[3] There is concern that this technique, if used on humans could result in brain damage similar to those suffered by some of the dogs in the experiment.

But most of the dogs were fine. Despite being frozen.

[Anonymous No.3548067]

>>3548039
>inability to think ahead to the longterm.
>thinks we will be constrained to live on earth forever.
Assumes we'll spread across the stars terraforming everything in sight with resources and plenty for all. Sure it's possible but there's no guarantee. And immortality technology could quite probably happen before interstellar colonization technology.

>inability to think
>assumes that immortality treatments will be affordable and available to everybody

maybe they wont be. but maybe they will eventually. we just don't know yet. cars and computers used to be owned only by the very rich. immortality treatment could prove similar, or maybe not.

so whos making assumptions now?

[Anonymous No.3548089]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/6197339.stm

A Japanese man has survived for 24 days in cold weather and without food and water by falling into a state of "hibernation", his doctor has said.

Mitsutaka Uchikoshi, 35, went missing on 7 October after going with friends to climb Mount Rokko in western Japan.

He had almost no pulse, his organs had shut down and his body temperature dropped to 22C (71F) when he was found.

[Anonymous No.3548105]

>>3548045
Sounds similar to that Soviet or German or whatever experiment where they used machinery to keep a dog's head in "normal" condition, as long as the machines circulated the fluids.

[Anonymous No.3548165]

>>3548105
pretty sure that soviet one was debunked though. just soviet propaganda trying to scare americans into thinking soviets are lightyears ahead and make soviet people feel superior

[Anonymous No.3548170]

>>3548165

God, soviets were so fucking pathetic.

[Anonymous No.3548217]

>>3547640

I`m personally hoping on technology to keep my alive until a method for immortality comes along. Though it likely won`t be public anyway.

They`ve already reversed aging in mice, so at least that`s something.

[Anonymous No.3548468]

>>3548217
yeah they can extend the telomeres in mice. but if the same thing was done on humans we'd get all kinds of cancer. still, it's a start, now all we need is a cure for cancer. and some way to repair other accumulated genetic defects

[Anonymous No.3548483]

This dude is barking up the wrong tree. Calorie restriction has been shown to prolong life, but it will never lead to immortality. We need to find some way to filter out the free radicals in our body, so we can naturally heal ourselves. There is nothing in our genetics which causes us to age, it is all down to these free radicals.

[Anonymous No.3548495]

>>3548483
>There is nothing in our genetics which causes us to age, it is all down to these free radicals.
lol no. Stop reading newage bullshit and learn some science.

[Anonymous No.3548504]

>>3548165
whyw ould they do that? they already did that with shit like inventing the satelleite, performing the ffirst open heart surgery and ICBM

[Anonymous No.3548520]

>>3548483

[Anonymous No.3548827]

>>3548483

[Anonymous No.3548897]

Who wants to live forever, anyway.

You wouldn't want to live in a society where this is possible, either.

Afterlife is good enough to give a sense of purpose.

[Anonymous No.3548932]

>>3548897

The opposite is true. An afterlife puts less importance on this life.

[Anonymous No.3548977]

>>3548897
>afterlife as an excuse to be a good boy

Stop treating life as a childs playroom. Man up and find purpose. If you lived life as shit in hopes of an afterlife, then discover there isn't one, congrats on wasting your life. But if you enjoy your life now and every day of it, afterlife or not, you win big time.

[Anonymous No.3549060]

>>3548897
>Afterlife is good enough to give a sense of purpose.

i'm sorry but i'm just not capable of lieing to myself. there is no evidence to support a belief in the afterlife.

[Anonymous No.3549100]

>>3547838

If it costs 1 billion dollars, there will only be 1 thousand or so people on Earth who can afford it. That's a mere 1 trillion or so dollars, and that's before expenses.

If you charge 1 million dollars for it, and there are about 1.5 million people who can afford it, then you make 1.5 trillion dollars.

If you charge $100,000 for it, and 1.5 billion can afford it, then you make 150 trillion dollars.

Unless there was a conspiracy to keep it from everyone else, it would be in the anti-aging supplier's best interest to drive prices down as much as possible.

[Anonymous No.3549101]

Your body cells wont ever be immortal. Period.

DNA replication has a built in "timer" where, because of the very nature of copying the double-helix, the ends get slowly chopped off bit-by-bit until the actual parts of the DNA that encode the cell will be cut off and the cell will die. The "timer" exists in the form of a buffer of meaningless base pairs attached to the ends of DNA strands.

Any kind of immortality would have to come from some kind of consciousness transfer or somehow creating brand new cells without the need for traditional cell division.

[Anonymous No.3549127]

>>3549101
You haven't gotten yet that immortality research involves getting rid of those "timers"?

Because some organisms don't have them, and others don't have them the same way we do, so the idea is that it's possible we don't actually need them.

[Anonymous No.3549135]

Our society isn't ready for immortality. I think it's best we hold it off till later, society needs to evolve before technology does.

[Anonymous No.3549138]

The only people scared of death are the ones who haven't achieved anything worthwhile that will last.

[Anonymous No.3549148]

>>3549138
>implying the only reason to live is to impress other people
LOLno.

[Anonymous No.3549152]

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See you there :)

[Anonymous No.3549157]

>>3549148
Can't help that you're a whiny hedonist who'll never achieve anything besides fulfilling his basic needs like some lowly animal.

[Anonymous No.3549166]

>>3549157
>blah blah blah pseud-nihilistic bullshit
Whatever man, I'm enjoying living and I intend to continue doing so.

[Anonymous No.3549169]

>>3549135
real life isn't ferngully

[Anonymous No.3549174]

>>3549166
Shouldn't you be out looting an electronics store?

[Anonymous No.3549178]

>>3549174
?
Because I like living, I'm a chav looter?

[Anonymous No.3549183]

>>3549157

>>Can't help that you're a whiny hedonist who'll never achieve anything besides fulfilling his basic needs like some lowly animal.

Caring about what people think of you is just an attempt to satisfy one of our basic needs (Social approval).

You're nothing other then a pretentious, self-deluding ape.

[Anonymous No.3549184]

>>3549178
Pretty much the same as one in mentality, yes.

[Anonymous No.3549188]

>>3549101
Those timers are called telomeres. Theres a gene in humans and mice that replenishes telomeres however it shuts off after childhood. That gene was recently switched on again in mice by scientists and the mice actually "grew younger".

That gene could actually be switched on again in humans. That technology would be available for humans within our lifetimes if there was any point. The problem is cancer. Unlike a mouse a human being can't handle constantly replenishing telomeres without getting cancerous as fuck. So basically for immortality we'd have to cure cancer.

But even that wouldn't do it I don't think as there are other factors in aging then just telomeres, such as the kind of genetic mutations that naturally occur over a lifetime the cells would need some way to self repair. and other shit.

I maintain that your only chance at immortality is the very unlikely to work cryonics scheme. Read the full thread for details about that before posting some dumb comment on it.

[Anonymous No.3549189]

>>3549184
lolwut