Vgamer1

Sure. Go read a textbook on cellular metabolism. Hell, read a textbook on organic chemistry. This is sophomore-level stuff. All reactions produce damaging waste. That's why we pee.

 

Slowing, not stopping.

 

Wrong. Some damage is easy to repair, such as when it results in mis-aligned base pairs. But what if it's a bigger mutation, such as a deletion of several base pairs? You cannot detect such a mutation without knowing the original code. That's far too much data for any nanobot to contain, and to fix it by gene therapy would require constant gene therapy for every single bit of DNA in our body. Oh, and let's not forget that there are non-genetic damages too, such as to methylation patterns, nucleosome placement, and associated proteins.

 

It would be like keeping your computer functional by formatting the drive and re-installing everything every 5 minutes.

 

Mokele

Honestly, I'm not a biology or chemistry major. It seems that you are more knowledgeable about the technicalities of this stuff. But to out right say that it is impossible to repair damage isn't right.

Again, I'm not a biology major, but you said that you need to know the original DNA code in order to repair damage? An entire genome is really not that much information. And it wouldn't have to be stored directly on the nanomachine. For example, the information needed could be transferred wirelessly. Or maybe the info could be stored directly on the nanobot, I'm not sure exactly and I don't know how you can be so sure, since nanotechnology is only in it's infancy.

Another possibility is to replace our biological cells with synthetic cells. They already have artificial red blood cells that function in animals and are thousands of times more efficient.

No, it can't. The only way to stop the production of damaging metabolic by-products is death. We can reduce it, but can't stop it, and some damage simply cannot be undone.

Care to support your claims? People are already slowing the aging process through many means such as supplements, calorie restriction, exercise, etc.

The next steps are on their way. Gene therapy and nanotechnology will allow us to actually repair damage to aging cells.

Yes, I believe we will eventually gain an immortality of sorts, possibly within my lifetime. We should eventually be able to put an end to biological aging, though that will be difficult. If computers continue becoming more powerful at the rate they have been doing so for decades, then they will soon be powerful enough to simulate a brain. You might be able to copy your essence, your "soul" to a computer, and an advantage is that this would allow for multiple inactive backups. With a purely biological system, backups would be much harder, so you would be quite susceptible to accidents and murder.

 

In any case, you may be able to achieve immortality today. If you are cryogenically frozen, your body should last for a long time, and if ever we can resurrect you or copy you to a computer, it would help you live long enough for us to develop immortality. Or, you might just be a frozen corpse, I don't really know.

Mr Skeptic, I don't know if this thread is the place to get into this debate, but a "backup" wouldn't really be you if the original you dies, it would just be a copy.

Are you guys familiar with the concept of singularity? It is directly related to the topic of ending biological aging. You should check out the immortality institute: http://www.imminst.org

There's a forum there about these topics.

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Immortality should be illegal. It's the last thing humanity needs.

Are you going to back this up at all? I could argue that immortality would be the best thing for humanity and ultimately humanity's end point. There is the idea (going along with the singularity) that we are approaching a post-human era, one of the features of which is immortality.

No, we can't replace genes and we don't have nanobots. We're close on each, but both are nowhere near actual implementation.

 

Wrong. Cells age due to damage accumulated via metabolism - there is no possible way to stop or cure it.

We can't replace genes yet, but we can modify them. And actually we do have nanobots. They aren't very advanced, but they do exist. Here's an example of nanobots being implemented to treat foot cancer:

http://www.dailybruin.ucla.edu/news/2008/apr/03/sciencehealth-researchers-shrink-cancer-treatment-/

The damage that cells undergo as a result of metabolism can be slowed, stopped, and reversed. It's like keeping up a car and replacing the parts when they break down.

The singularity is near, and when that happens watch out for emergent immortality via digital reduction (or quantum reduction) in some highly advanced computer. Today we are biological blobs of meat; tomorrow we''ll all be interactive files in the National Archive of Virtual Immortality. And those files will be guaranteed to last a billion times longer than your natural biological lifetime. I'm guessing all the people will abandon their churches in search of this high-tech immortality. (It'll be bigger than MSDOS.)

The singularity occurring doesn't necessarily grant us the power to be immortal. I'm not really sure if true immortality is possible at all. Accidents can happen.

I hope you don't want to get into the "but you could backup your consciousness" idea, because I'm having that debate on another forum and it's a bit tiring lol.

Basically, I agree that we can be immune to "aging" at some point so that we'd never die of "natural causes" whatever that means.

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Immortality already has a users manual. We are already well underway with working on making it happen. There are 7 diseases that age our cells and we are busy furiously supporting ways to research them.

 

Its not immortality that we call it per say though, its indefinity. We can never live forever, because you will never know if you will die tomorrow. You could make it to 10 zillion years old, but still die the next day.

brokenportal is right. We're working on "immortality" as we speak, but that doesn't stop the random freak accidents or murders from happening.