WayneLigon
Adventurer
Depending on how old you are, even money that it'll happen within your lifetime. Heck, I just passed 50 and I'm pretty sure it will happen within mine.
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Longevity gene hacked, worms live 5 times longer
- Thread starter Kramodlog
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Depending on how old you are, even money that it'll happen within your lifetime. Heck, I just passed 50 and I'm pretty sure it will happen within mine.
Not to you, though. Gene alteration happens to embryos, not grown adults. And even if it happened to grown adults, it'd be a very select few for a couple of hundred years at least. I'm afraid you'll die of old age at the usual time. Don't get your hopes up!
You're mainly right, though. Kids being born right now can expect to live past 100 (not through this process though). I expect it's the next couple of generations who will start to see the benefits of this.
We're the unluckiest generation ever. We'll be one of the last to have to die of old age. In a thousand years people will look back and think how much it sucked to be us, just a short distance form immortality but we had to die before we got to it.
Kid to mother: "What they all had to die?"
Mother: "Yes, everyone. They got about 70 years, then they had to die."
Kid: "What? ALL of them? They HAD to die? No choice?"
Mother: "Yep. Life was a death sentence. It was a truly dark age. A day when DEATH was the fate of everyone."
Kid: "Man, if I thought I had to die, no choice, I'd go insane."
Mother: "They pretty much all did. When you're older you can watch some vintage news footage. But it's all rated R for Ridiculous, so you'll have to be 18."
Yeah. That's a big friggin' issue. Though I don't know what societal psychological shifts it would involve - maybe folks would stop having kids and populations would plummet. Maybe not. Immortality may well require a degree of transhumanism which could have all sorts of paradigm shifts on what we consider entrenched concepts. Much, much less than a radical alteration in our very race has created enormous changes in culture and behaviour before. It won't be our problem to solve, though.
You're right about immortality, but longevity isn't such a stretch. All those population problems don't need people to never die, they only need people to die a bit less than they do now (or even at the same rate).
As for intergalactic travel - yeah, we're not gonna break light speed. No wormholes or warp drives. Subliminal all the way. Though accelerating to a decent percentage of light speed only takes a year or so at 1G acceleration using boring old rocket technology, so the nearest stars (a few light years a way) are feasibly within a lifespan - the issue there isn't physics, it's engineering. Carrying the fuel. A resource issue, primarily. Like you say, back-and-forth, though, isn't going to happen.
Other galaxies? Nope. Never gonna happen. Not unless someone suddenly discovers magic.
WayneLigon
Adventurer
"Man will never reach the moon regardless of all future scientific advances. --Dr. Lee DeForest, "Father of Radio & Grandfather of Television."
"There is no likelihood man can ever tap the power of the atom." --Robert Millikan, Nobel Prize in Physics, 1923
"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." --Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943
"I have traveled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won't last out the year." --The editor in charge of business books for Prentice Hall, 1957
"But what .. is it good for?" commenting on the microchip. --Engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM, 1968
"This 'telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us," --Western Union internal memo, 1876.
That's logical fallacy if ever I saw one. "I found some people in history who were wrong about things, so you must be wrong too"? At that point, why would we ever offer an opinion about anything? Plus you haven't cited the hundreds of millions of people in history who predicted stuff and got it right.
If you disagree with our opinions or predictions, it'd be great to hear why. But "some folks got stuff wrong in history" is just a conversation ender.
If you disagree with our opinions or predictions, it'd be great to hear why. But "some folks got stuff wrong in history" is just a conversation ender.
WayneLigon
Adventurer
So is the attitude that 'we'll never do so and so'. I think of stuff like the speed of light as a speedbump along the way, a problem we'll eventually solve. People believed fervently that we'd never fly or that people would die if they travelled more than 70 miles per hour, and they were proved wrong as we learned more.
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