Re: Live to 1,000 ??

[Guest guest]

Wendi,

Cloning might not be a problem if it were approached in another way. Right now scientists can assemble the genetic code of some bacteria from scratch. It might one day be possible to build humans and animals as well in the same fashion. That is to say it would be possible to build a fertilized egg from scratch that could be incubated in an artifical womb. Of course that leads to other problems. Doing that would entail a detailed understanding of the genome. Would they create a servant race for the immortal masters, one that loved the life of a slave, or could truly custom babies be created? For that matter would the government control reproduction, creating new batch of people whenever the need arose?

I also don't think that the rich and powerful would necessarily demand the environment be protected. Many of those people already live in private, gated communities. It would not be a great stretch of the imagination to see those places becoming enclosed arcologies where a pristine environment is maintained while the rest of the planet is a filthy ruin. They might even establish such places on islands or floating cities and the like to put physical distance between themselves and the rest of the world. Indeed that has been the more typical model for humanity, where the elites set themselves apart with fine conditions and don't have a care about for what is on the other side of the wall. Buddah had just such a revelation: he was the son of an upper caste family and he knew nothing but luxury. He was so aghast when he went outside the wall and saw the squalor, filth and poverty, that he turned his back on the faith that placed him so far above the others.

[Guest guest]

I know others would

see it as I see it.

I wrote this early

this morning, and was going to add to it before posting it, but will post it

now:

The more I think about this, the more frightening it is. I mean, on one hand it would be

wonderful... but the race would certainly have to stop having children. I mean the planet is already

over-populated!

By the time enough

people started dying and people would be able to have children again (1000

years from now minimum), nobody would know what to do with them! Schools would have absolutely no use

(except higher education, which I think would have a boom) and would be gone

within 50 years, every 10 years declining in number until there are just no

more children to educate. First it

would be a problem keeping people from having children, and after a while it

would be difficult to get people to want to lose the freedom they’ve had

for 1000 years. Nobody would know

what to do for a pregnant woman, or how to help a baby who is sick... I have a

feeling cloning would be the only way to repopulate... which someday would end

up being a problem if the only people left to clone from are clones –

that may not be possible. Educating

children would be a thing of the far distant past and nobody would know how to

do it.

We would have to put

tons of money into the exploration of space to find somewhere else to put

people and get resources from. If

we never find another planet to settle people on or get resources from,

we’d end up like the movie “Soylent Green”. If they do find a planet somewhere,

maybe people could have children. But

the need for birth control would be first and foremost; especially if this

anti-aging process repairs people’s bodies enough to remain fertile

during their entire lifespan!

Also, if this

anti-aging process is very expensive... at first it probably will be, and I

would think the people who could afford it would want to keep it that way...

only the very rich would be able to afford it. The people who can’t afford it

would be a disposable people, treated like garbage. The people who could afford it would

think of themselves as a ‘master race’.... gods... the disposable

people would be their slaves, doing all the work... not unlike what it is now,

but much, much worse I think.

One good thing would

be the earth would be taken care of much better, since the very rich are

usually the politicians or at least funding the politicians! Pollution laws would be much, much

stricter, etc.... if the very rich are the ones who will be alive to benefit

from or suffer the consequences over thousands of years, they’d have to

think about the future of the planet over profits.

Those are just a few

thoughts I’ve been mulling over since I’ve read that article.

Wendi

Re:

Re: Live to 1,000 ??

Tom,

I would

agree that this would be a bad ting for humanity. Science fiction has looked at

this from many angles, and few of them actually turn out well.

Suppose

these treatments are expensive, as they likely would be. That would mean only

the rich and powerful could afford them. Virtual immortality would give them

great power and plenty of time to accumulate ever more. It is highly unlikely

that they would want that power base diluted by having more people come into

it, that is people other than their own bloodline. What we would have is new

monarchy, one focusses not on handing down power to children, but in holding

and expanding personal power for centuries.

On the

other hand, suppose it is cheap enough for everyone to afford. I think the

scientists are a bit overly optimistic that people would not get bored after a

few centuries. I think most people would get bored much sooner than that. While

it is true that the well educated might have an advantage there, the fact is

most people aren't and it would be very wasteful if they were. One does not

need a PhD to run a register at Walmart. That of course brings up the point

that technology could take away all those menial jobs. Perhaps so, but then

what are all of those people to do? There is one story who's name I can't

recall addressed this. It had the whole population living as hermits, with no

real friendships or anything else. That might not sound all bad, but in

practical terms it would be disastrous. It would not be long before there was

no society or culture anymore, just a few billion people who never leave their

apartments. Sounds like a waking world Matrix with everyone shut away and

dependant on machines, until the machines get tired of them.

This

story also addressed the population issue: Three children and you die. It was

assumed that most women would eventually have two children and stop there. Now

and then a few would give in and have a third, at which point they would be

" poisoned " so that after a number of years, but not more than about

50, they would die. That is rather optimistic and does not take into account

accidental deaths.

Then

there is the famous Star Trek episode with the planet so full of people it was

standing room only. That could well be the other extreme. After all, many

people are so short sighted they might claim it is their right to have as many

babies as they want since they enjoy doing so. That would indeed eventually

overpopulate the Earth. Space travel might help, but we would really need faster

than light travel and lots of habitable planets, and no competition for space.

Immortality

would be a terrible thing for many many reasons. Indeed it might even mean a

stiffling of technological advancement. With only the same minds left to create

new ideas, eventually they would start to run dry or fall into ruts. It would

certainly end evolution. It would be possible that would could develop a means

of genetically altering ourselves as adults into any form we chose. Give how

much trouble we have with the " Other " as it is, wouldn't that be fun.

It would probably end up just like today to several orders of magnitude as each

type of person enhanced the traits they already had. This would lead to an ever

greater fragmentation of humanity and again brining up back to probably a

tribal level of people grouped by their new phenotype. I would imagine that it

would not be long after that that wars would spring up between those groups.

At any

rate, a goal of many 200 years would be better. Plenty of time to do a lot of

things. Plenty of time to work hard for 40 years or so and have money to raise

a family, then another 100 plus years to follow one's interests. This might be

sustainable if food technologies could be advanced. Like I have often said,

using vat grown meats and perhaps even plant matter could go a long way toward

feeding people. Also Arcologies and better designed cities could be built to

maximize population density while still providing ample space and privacy for

the residents.

FAM Secret Society is a community based on

respect, friendship, support and acceptance. Everyone is valued.

[Guest guest]

Tom:

> My opinion is that there are plenty of factors that they are not

taking into consideration when once they are able to accomplish

this, both serious and humorous.

> These days " middle aged " women are having babies, but with age comes an

> increased risk of birth defects. Will this be addressed when we are able

> to prevent/repair cellular regeneration?

If they can do one of these things, why not the other?

> With a prolonged lifespan, it would see the number of children

people could have would be increased dramatically. Can the earth

sustain such populations?

Nope.

> Will the earth's resources be able to sustain all these people?

Soylent Green perhaps? ;-)

> What of the third world countries and the poor? Will they be able

to afford this new medicine and medical procedures? I should think

they would all eventually die of disease while the " stronger " race

survives. Is this a good thing?

As a zoologist, you probably know more than me about genetic diversity and

what happens to a species when it decreases.

> If a thousand year old man dates an 18 year old woman, or vice

versa, is this " robbing the cradle? "

LOL! Yep. They may have to raise the " age of consent " to 150. How fun would

THAT be? :-)

> Can we expect a marriage to last 1000 years, or will someone have,

say...20 marital partners in their lifespans?

200 in Hollywood... ;-)

And if you think your family is a pain in the neck now, just imagine if you

had 19 step-dads and 500 siblings!

> Lastly, if you happen to be Christian and believe that what the

Bible says is true, God imposed a 120 year lifespan on all humans

and, last I heard, has not voided that clause. If we try to

transcend it, what will happen?

God will be pissed. (Again!)

> There are other things I could get into. It could happen, but I

think it would be disastrous for humanity.

Who'd want to live to a 1,000 anyway? Soon as I've finished doing what I

came here to do, I'll be happy to get out a s a p.

Hmm, this reminds me of the Californian conman Leonard Orr who seriously

want people to believe that they will live forever if they only say the

correct affirmations every day (and pay him lots of money for the formula)

and that all your physical and emotional problems can be solved by

hyperventilating for $100/hour. :-D

Inger

[Guest guest]

Tom,

I would agree. I think we are also fooling around to soon with the plants as well. Studies are now showing elements of altered DNA in unrelated plants as far as 15 miles from the test patches. The last thing we need is for some weeds to pick up additional resistance to disease and bugs. Likewise this would decrease genetic variability. If a sickness affected those other plants, it could carry over to our crops. The reverse could also be possible. Indeed if terrorists used bioweapons on our food supply it could more readily jump from crops to other plants, perhaps mutating as it did to affect more plants. The mutations might not happen right away either, but by going from species to species perhaps using the GM portion of the code as a vehicle, it might take on new DNA markers and cues from the other species and then move on to infect species related to them and so on.

[Guest guest]

Inger wrote:

>> Hmm, this reminds me of the Californian conman Leonard Orr who seriously

>> want people to believe that they will live forever if they only say the

>> correct affirmations every day (and pay him lots of money for the

>> formula)

and that all your physical and emotional problems can be solved by

hyperventilating for $100/hour. :-D

Wendi

> I'd think so too, but this is University of Cambridge doing this research,

> not a basement lab.

I meant that this _discussion_ reminded me of Orr, not the original article

you were referring to. I was just commenting on some of the comments.

The article was probably written by a PR-consultant in the doctor's name, as

an attempt to get more funding for the project by eliciting public support.

I hate it when they use emotional arguments instead of just sticking to the

facts and letting people form their own opinion.

> That is the part that scares me so much... if they are now saying the

> people who will first to live to 1000 are 60 yrs old now (and people in

> their teens now will live to be 2,000 - 4000!), they must be awfully close

> to starting human trials - if it hasn't began already.

> Though I guess it will take 1000 years to test the hypothesis!

LOL!

That the research is done at a leading University does not automatically

mean that they actually have a clue what they're doing, though. What they

don't seem to understand it that fixing the physical body won't help much if

they can't also fix the etheric body (which is the distributer of

life-energy to the physical body). What happens as we age is that we lose

life-force - it is highest in children and teens - and the physical cells

degenerate as a result of that and of the general wear and tear of living

and environmental toxins, cosmic and EM radiation etc.

An equivalent can be seen in plants. It is in their sprout stage that they

have maximum energetic and nutritional value; at it's bloom it is fairly

nutritional too. After that it goes downhill. If they could figure out a way

to keep that engery up for longer, then, yes, I'm sure we could live longer.

Some are said to already have figured out the trick of doing so - or rather,

having been initiated into the secret in order to do a specific job for

mankind. One account of this is given by the British composer and author

Cyril in his biographical book " The Initiate " from 1919 where the

person he describes kept looking 35 decade after decade while everyone else

kept aging, and another by Swedish author Lennart Lidfors 1997. (I don't

think they used affirmations and hyperventilating, though.) ;-)

Inger

[Guest guest]

If we did manage to create our own human beings, nature would not

allow it to continue if we did it on a widespread scale.

1) By cloning armies of humans we would be making up mass quantities

of people with the exact same DNA, thereby reducing the genetic mix

that we have now.

2) If one of those clones is suceptible to a deadly disease, it

means ALL of them are.

I know for a fact that either of these two things can occur because

they already have.

Not long ago in geologic history, the cheetah was wiped out nearly

to the point of extinction. All the cheetah left alive today stem

from a very few remainders. Thus if you took a cheetah from the

south of Africa and compared its DNA with one from the north of

Africa, their DNA would be as similar as brother and sister.

Cheetah, though populous, have trouble breeding for this reason.

Additionally, scientists do believe that if cheetah were exposed to

some deadly disease, such as that which nearly wiped them out in the

past, they would be nearly wiped out again.

The moral of the story is that human beings shouldn't mess around

with genetics and cloning until they have thoroughly researched,

anticipated, and compensated for everything that could go wrong, and

since no one can predict everything that can go wrong, perhaps the

whole area of cloning should not be explored at all.

Tom

> Wendi,

>

Cloning might not be a problem if it were approached in another way.

Right now scientists can assemble the genetic code of some bacteria

from scratch. It might one day be possible to build humans and

animals as well in the same fashion. That is to say it would be

possible to build a fertilized egg from scratch that could be

incubated in an artifical womb. Of course that leads to other

problems. Doing that would entail a detailed understanding of the

genome.

>

>

[Guest guest]

It's funny how just about everything going on today has been

prophesized before.

H.G. Wells wrote a story called " Food of the Gods " where what you

are describing below turned the world into a place where everything

grew to enormous proportions...except animals and humans already in

adulthood (and those who caused the problem in the first place).

Thus you had babies the size of tall buildings stomping around the

countryside smashing houses and people, and plants and vines grew

and twisted over everything.

I should pull the book off the shelf and re-read it. I cannot

remember how it ends, but the implication is that the " old " world

should simply be allowed to die off because the " new " larger world

was growing too much out of control to allow humanity to have a

place in it anymore.

I pessimistically see the world heading in that direction, or in the

direction prophesized in Huxley's " Brave New World. " I see these two

possible outcomes (and others) happening mostly because people,

even " informed " scientists, put scientific discoveries into real

world applications without taking into consideration ALL the

variables and complications associated with their experimentation.

The way I see it, scientists approach their projects from the

perspective of performing a task: Their job is to invent or

develop " x " , and they leave it up to someone else to make the

decision to put the results of their doings into practice. The

problem is, those who make the decisions about whether or not to

bring something out of the lab and into the world don't have enough

knowledge of what these new developments are capable of doing to

make informed decisions.

And so things already begin to spiral out of control from the get

go. This approach has always had terrible implications for humanity

and the environment, and will continue to do so until people wise up

and put some proper safeguards into effect and have the decision

makers be more educated and understanding of the big picture.

Here is one of the more absurd consequences of poor decision making:

Some pilgrim brought the Dandelion to America because he or she

thought it was a pretty flower. Now they've spread across the

country and have been a thorn in the side of North Americans ever

since.

Then there is the European buckthorn...

And the...

Well, the point is, what will we bring to humanity and the world by

screwing around with genetics?

Tom

Tom,

I would agree. I think we are also fooling around to soon with the

plants as well. Studies are now showing elements of altered DNA in

unrelated plants as far as 15 miles from the test patches. The last

thing we need is for some weeds to pick up additional resistance to

disease and bugs. Likewise this would decrease genetic variability.

If a sickness affected those other plants, it could carry over to

our crops. The reverse could also be possible. Indeed if terrorists

used bioweapons on our food supply it could more readily jump from

crops to other plants, perhaps mutating as it did to affect more

plants. The mutations might not happen right away either, but by

going from species to species perhaps using the GM portion of the

code as a vehicle, it might take on new DNA markers and cues from

the other species and then move on to infect species related to them

and so on.

[Guest guest]

Tom:

> The way I see it, scientists approach their projects from the

perspective of performing a task: Their job is to invent or

develop " x " , and they leave it up to someone else to make the

decision to put the results of their doings into practice. The

problem is, those who make the decisions about whether or not to

bring something out of the lab and into the world don't have enough

knowledge of what these new developments are capable of doing to

make informed decisions.

Precisely! I have a different view: if I invent something, then I am also

moreally responsible for how it is used.

> And so things already begin to spiral out of control from the get

go. This approach has always had terrible implications for humanity

and the environment, and will continue to do so until people wise up

and put some proper safeguards into effect and have the decision

makers be more educated and understanding of the big picture.

Yep. Still waiting for that to happen.

> Here is one of the more absurd consequences of poor decision making:

Some pilgrim brought the Dandelion to America because he or she

thought it was a pretty flower. Now they've spread across the

country and have been a thorn in the side of North Americans ever

since.

> Then there is the European buckthorn...

> And the...

Killer bee! :-)

And what's that plant that escaped the Costeau aquarium and is smothering

all the plant life in the whole Mediterraian?

> Well, the point is, what will we bring to humanity and the world by

> screwing around with genetics?

Problems!

Inger

> Tom,

> I would agree. I think we are also fooling around to soon with the

plants as well. Studies are now showing elements of altered DNA in

unrelated plants as far as 15 miles from the test patches. The last

thing we need is for some weeds to pick up additional resistance to

disease and bugs. Likewise this would decrease genetic variability.

If a sickness affected those other plants, it could carry over to

our crops. The reverse could also be possible. Indeed if terrorists

used bioweapons on our food supply it could more readily jump from

crops to other plants, perhaps mutating as it did to affect more

plants. The mutations might not happen right away either, but by

going from species to species perhaps using the GM portion of the

code as a vehicle, it might take on new DNA markers and cues from

the other species and then move on to infect species related to them

and so on.

FAM Secret Society is a community based on respect, friendship, support and

acceptance. Everyone is valued.