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well if social security wasn't ed up enough before, its really screwed now.
http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog...ight.html#more
Cambridge University geneticist Aubrey de Grey has famously stated, “The first person to live to be 1,000 years old is certainly alive today …whether they realize it or not, barring accidents and suicide, most people now 40 years or younger can expect to live for centuries.”
Perhaps de Gray is way too optimistic, but plenty of others have joined the search for a virtual fountain of youth. In fact, a growing number of scientists, doctors, geneticists and nanotech experts—many with impeccable academic credentials—are insisting that there is no hard reason why ageing can’t be dramatically slowed or prevented altogether. Not only is it theoretically possible, they argue, but a scientifically achievable goal that can and should be reached in time to benefit those alive today.
“I am working on immortality,” says Michael Rose, a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of California, Irvine, who has achieved breakthrough results extending the lives of fruit flies. “Twenty years ago the idea of postponing aging, let alone reversing it, was weird and off-the-wall. Today there are good reasons for thinking it is fundamentally possible.”
Even the US government finds the field sufficiently promising to fund some of the research. Federal funding for “the biology of ageing”, excluding work on ageing-specific diseases like heart failure and cancer – has been running at about $2.4 billion a year, according to the National Ins ute of Ageing, part of the National Ins utes of Health.
So far, the most intriguing results have been spawned by the genetics labs of bigger universities, where anti-ageing scientists have found ways to extend live spans of a range of organisms—including mammals. But genetic research is not the only field that may hold the key to eternity.
“There are many, many different components of ageing and we are chipping away at all of them,” said Robert Freitas at the Ins ute for Molecular Manufacturing, a non-profit, nanotech group in Palo Alto, California. “It will take time and, if you put it in terms of the big developments of modern technology, say the telephone, we are still about 10 years off from Alexander Graham Bell shouting to his assistant through that first device. Still, in the near future, say the next two to four decades, the disease of ageing will be cured.”
But not everyone thinks ageing can or should be cured. Some say that humans weren’t meant to live forever, regardless of whether or not we actually can.
“I just don't think [immortality] is possible,” says Sherwin Nuland, a professor of surgery at the Yale School of Medicine. “Aubrey and the others who talk of greatly extending lifespan are oversimplifying the science and just don't understand the magnitude of the task. His plan will not succeed. Were it to do so, it would undermine what it means to be human.”
It’s interesting that Nuland first says he doesn’t think it will work but then adds that if it does, it will undermine humanity. So, which is it? Is it impossible, or are the skeptics just hoping it is?
After all, we already have overpopulation, global warming, limited resources and other issues to deal with, so why compound the problem by adding immortality into the mix.
But anti-ageing enthusiasts argue that as our perspectives change and science and technology advance exponentially, new solutions will emerge. Space colonization, for example, along with dramatically improved resource management, could resolve the concerns associated with long life. They reason that if the Universe goes on seemingly forever—much of it presumably unused—why not populate it?
However, anti-ageing crusaders are coming up against an increasingly influential alliance of bioconservatives who want to restrict research seeking to “unnaturally” prolong life. Some of these individuals were influential in persuading President Bush in 2001 to restrict federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. They oppose the idea of life extension and anti-ageing research on ethical, moral and ecological grounds.
Leon Kass, the former head of Bush's Council on Bioethics, insists that “the finitude of human life is a blessing for every human individual”. Bioethicist Daniel Callahan of the Garrison, New York-based Hastings Centre, agrees: “There is no known social good coming from the conquest of death.”
Maybe they’re right, but then why do we as humans strive so hard to prolong our lives in the first place? Maybe growing old, getting sick and dying is just a natural, inevitable part of the circle of life, and we may as well accept it.
"But it's not inevitable, that's the point," de Grey says. "At the moment, we're stuck with this awful fatalism that we're all going to get old and sick and die painful deaths. There are a 100,000 people dying each day from age-related diseases. We can stop this carnage. It's simply a matter of deciding that's what we should be doing."
One wonders what Methuselah would say about all this.
well if social security wasn't ed up enough before, its really screwed now.
I doubt anyone makes it to 1000.
Too many people getting stabbed by meat thermometers in movie theaters.
Nanomachines are the future of human life.
Dramatically slowing down the aging process is inevitable.
If the human mind can imagine it, it is only a matter of time before it is tangibly achieved.
oh and....
We'll find some way to it up.
Some people will be out of a job.
That milestone has already been achieved many times over. Joan Collins has been estimated to be over 900,000 years old, thus disproving Mouse's theory of the earth's age.
We need to be looking at ways of eradicating the human population, not this.
planet Earth won't even make it to another 1000 years. Not even 100 IMO
It's always the minorities that get screwed. Silly minorities.Some people will be out of a job.
What do you base this on?
Didn't Abraham live for like 800 years?
I believe many of the people written about early in the Old Testament of the Bible supposedly lived 900+ years. Personally, I think whoever translated that section of the Bible did a poor job translating numbers or in ancient times, people couldn't count for .
Don't think it will ever happen, forget about 1,000 years, people would be lucky to make it to 100. By the time most people reach 60 or 70 they're falling apart health-wise. Even at the 40s people are already going downhill at a pretty fast rate.
back in the day the select few were transcendents and didn't eat processed foods...900 years was a piece of cake...figuratively speaking.
Why would people want to live that long? I don't even want to make it to 40.
I've always dreamed of augmenting myself like the characters in Deus Ex and living a couple extra hundred of years.
Most immortal stories are about the immortals wanting to die though. I'm sure that'd happen to everyone eventually.
yeah, but the earth was created in 7 days.
they need to solve memory loss first alzheimers...
Just a few hundred years ago, people where lucky to make it to 35 years of age.
When I went to scary Jesus camps as a kid, we were actually told that in the days of biblical yore the atmosphere had a thick layer of water that blocked out the UV, which is what enabled people to live for centuries. I wish I was kidding.
I just hope it's not Bret Favre.
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