An elixir of life [has been made [mice only]].

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
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An elixir of life [has been made [mice only]].

I was watching a show the other day in which scientists showed how they could age or reduce age in mice using a component already in their genes. They said they would be able to do the same for humans and reverse ageing.

Lets say that we live to see its widespread use, how will it change the way you live?

To add, it seems that nano-fibres will rid us of all disease for good too. then hedonism wouldnt be dangerous, and well, we have all that time? Why not smoke weed, drink and shagalot? Really what else is there to do ~ even if we added all the more cultured stuff, there would be plenty of time to do all and anything.

Or maybe a Buddhist [or ‘x’] temple for a long, long, long, time?

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What does one do when he believes that he has no need?

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The good goal is to use the abundant energy and time for protecting animals and the planet from asteroids and disasters etc.

4

You still have mostly the same needs, eat, sleep etc.

I know this may sound horrible and it is, but I am more worried about the people I don’t want to live forever/long time. Probably those who will be able to afford it first, and choose who they don’t want to live forever due overpopulation, required space etc.

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…sounds like a weapon in that scenario ^^^ and would probably be used as such too - reminds me of one too many science fiction films I’ve watched, and science fiction always becomes science fact.

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There is no “probably” about it. The total resolve to aging was predicted to be complete around this time, maybe a few more years. They didn’t wait for the completion before choosing the Chosen. And in the USA, that start around 1950.

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I would think that a time will inevitably come, whereby we will have to face the moral question that, shouldn’t everyone get the elixir? And there is more of ‘everyone’ than the few in power, surely one wouldn’t wish to risk death once young again?

Then you have the moral problem, where; to give starving people seemingly endless lives would be somewhat torturous?

Surely the moral and necessary path would be to ensure that everybody has at least the basic comforts. There is an easy way to do that; give all money’s the same basic digital values. Then people from poorer nations will be able to trade equally with the richer nations.

…but I suppose it could equally be achieved given enough charity, and to target the money’s where it is most fundamentally needed. Or just more charity, but much more, that would make peoples lives better perhaps? I don’t know, it seems like there’s an awful lot of people in the world who should be getting better standards of living. Thus we have to ask if charity can achieve these things? Quickly!

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I bet Richard Branson has invested in it, he seems to have first dibs at everything lately… he doesn’t seem to be ageing at all these last few years. :open_mouth:

:astonished:

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Ok long life, small world, limits on assets, I can see boredom wreaking havoc and hell. Sure I would love a longer life but, I want a quit button too.

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Reminds me of the movie Zardoz.

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It will never happen, because the biological systems will always trump the social systems. Man’s innate capacity to deal fair, has never been able to come up to the scientific advances. The use of the fruits of science hold intangible and non reductive imbalances, which have never been successfully overcome except in some utopian visionary mind of singular thinkers.

If immortality could be achieved, the unanswerable questions involved would be too numerous to list. However here are some major ones:

 1. If, only a selective part of the population would be qualified, who would thy be and who would choose, under what criteria?

  2. If all populations would be selected, irrespective of their differences, then who would foot the bill?

   3. If populations would be guaranteed an infinitely extended duration of life, how would population control enter the picture? Or, conversely, would further generation become irrelevant and people would simply stop having children, or be forced to abandon it, by forced sterilization?

   4. Given an infinite time to learn, everyone would have genius type intelligence, whereby scientific progress would escalate toward unheard levels.  In fact, creation it's self would be understood, and recreation of other worlds become a real possibility, FOR ALL PEOPLE.

    5. In fact we would there from on become gods, and as gods, people would be faced with the impossible identity problem of categorizing them as more or lesser gods.  They would become bored with their heavenly existence, and would need to create little theaters of life, by

creating men of lesser being, thereby entertaining themselves, and relieving their boredom by a nostalgic reminder of where they themselves came from.

 Now here is where the real problems come in.  We know from the classics that gods can be jealous and engage each other in conflicts and wars in heaven, on account of their petty jealousy, which they would probably never be able to completely eradicate.  So a certain amount of laxity and tolerance, (men call them hypocrisy) would need to be built into their ethics.

 6. Now the new world order, would not resolve the problem of competitive envy, therefore with this scenario in mind, it  would be inconceivable, that any god would emerge, other than a ruthless dictator, with ruthless and absolute powers of suppression of any other potential candidate.  Therefore a democratically governed society of gods, or near gods would be most probably, an insurmountable problem for all practical purposes.  Therefore a socially just system would need to evolve where all immortals  would be totally equal in this probably sexless, uniform system, where work would be obsolete, and progress would phase into becoming a hobby, with no thought of any use for research into development.  

 The total re integration of all gods into one god, then would be the last phase, including all those timeless gods past present and future.  

  Since presently with the limited time we have on earth we can supposedly achieve the same thing by adhering to the tenets of the teaching of the All Mighty, why can't we just stay as we are, and achieve the same thing by a simple exercise of faith?


   7. For the above reasons, the expenditure of debates ad infinitum may gridlock and short any succeeding generation's choice of the matter, because i am sure some masters of the universe will foreclose upon what they think is counter productive to future generations, if at that time, they still would be allowed to beget.  Progress at that point may suffer a reversal, due to above concerns of the dubious capacity of the mind(including human and mechanical mind), to program such problems.  

 In any case, at some point in this scenario, a critical point will be reached, with far flung consequences, and a universal congress will need to address these issues.  I fear by this time, human beings will no longer be recognizable as such, and my feeling is that life will be altered to a totally virtual reality where recognition will become obsolete, replaced with a purely para cognitive society.
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And yet, I find no actual problem with any of that.

I guess maybe you have to be there, in order to know what comes of being there.

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It is not a problem, it’s a series of challenges which need to be overcome. Right now we are in the middle of it, having come so very far from the visions of such thinkers as HG Wells, Jules Verne and others. It’s incredibly fast, and no one comes out and says there is a problem with it, it simply is what it is. The challenges ahead may be formidable. Even now, James, people are preoccupied by the brazenness of science to try to find the very smallest particle there is, fearing the idea, that perhaps, at some critical point there will be unforeseen consequences.
Consequences are never a factor in progress, because , You are right, they are never realized until the set of events which pre-determine that consequence arrives, it is unknown. However , it may be that more accurate prediction can anticipate critical points in mapping possibility and consequence.

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That is certainly the case. And that is my point.

Society today and the limits of what you are allowed to know of reality are being, as they always have been, hidden. Reality is a secret. That is why Babylon was intentionally destroyed. That is why they ask questions of which the answers are often obvious. There is a strategy in hiding reality from others … and serious catastrophic consequences.

In order to know if something is wise to do, one must first know truth. If he presumes a truth that isn’t actually accurate, he surmises wisdom that isn’t actually wise. The temptation is then to hide the truth, “just in case while we secretly surmise the truth and predict wisdom”. It is the act of presumption, lust, and hubris. It leads to insanity. But it also leads to grand power over others because “knowledge is power”, especially the knowledge of how to keep the truth hidden and unknowable by others.

Someone discovers a means to live forever. Everyone, not in the know, then worries of all of the possible consequences of such a state. It isn’t because “no one knows”, but because some have kept knowledge very obscure from others and in so doing, have themselves been deceived. But then again, a very, very few, did not attempt to obscure truth from others or obtain power through deception. And for those, the real truth is more clear and consequences more predictable and certain.

But who is whom? Who does one believe when such games are played on such a vast scale? Do you believe those who say that we must keep it all secret so as to maintain control of it all? Or do you accept the proposal to more openly, but constructively resolve the reality of it?

It boils down to “who do you trust”.

I personally find that immortality isn’t actually an issue at all, and is in fact, almost the whole point to living in the first place. If one isn’t attempting the continuance of life, he isn’t alive.

But the fear of other people not being in one’s own control is strong and not entirely unjustified. Facing reality, the real truth, requires very careful learning of it, else the wrong temptations overcome the partially ignorant, making them far worse than the wholly ignorant, making them the “Niphilim” (monkeys with high tech explosives).

Thus there is a need for “controlled debate”. But with whom and to what degree of control? Until one knows the real truth, one cannot know to what degree it must be hidden nor from whom?

The Freemasons have fallen to this issue (as well as all secretive orders). The Freemasons use specific markers to identify who can be trusted and to what degree with which information. And that is fine until what has been called “The Devil” arrives on the scene, who proceeds to subtly cause those with good markers to become untrustworthy and those with bad markers to become the more trustworthy. By that strategy, The Devil then controls who succeeds and who doesn’t by causing those using trust to suppress truth and the lives of those deemed untrustworthy. The truly trustworthy come under attack by those who seek to only befriend the trustworthy. If the Devil doesn’t like white males, white males are tricked into appearing untrustworthy. The Freemasons then find themselves short of members and dying out. The markers become the means of deception and control.

I have been a part of that game all of my life. And to a degree everyone has. And when I say, “there is a way to fix all of it”, why should anyone trust me? How is anyone to even assess what I say when their prior knowledge is no more than disguise and obfuscation in order to hide the truth and tempt mis-belief? The solution is not in “who to trust”, but rather “who to logically debate and in what limited environment”. And the trust isn’t in the person, but in one’s own ability to honestly discern truth amidst the vast dark clouds of obfuscation that have covered the Earth for thousands of years while debating the angels challenging ones ego.

Truth and thus wisdom as to what to do with new powers is hidden from those lacking the courage to of humility. Only the truly humble can predict critical consequences with any degree of certainty. And in a world of deceit, where do you find those people? Certainly not in mainstream media, popular science magazines, or university lectures. :sunglasses:

Reality is a secret, revealed only the most humble (and usually un-trusted with bad reputations). :-$

And btw, I used the Stopped Clock Paradox as a type of indicator for me in order to see who, if anyone, was actually qualified to be a real scientist. A real scientist doesn’t take anyone’s word for anything (Nullius in Verba). The SCP smacks in the face of today’s science. Today’s science cannot answer the paradox and it reveals that today’s science cannot be truth. Physics forums do not even allow the subject to be presented. It takes someone who is truly humble and honest in order to dismiss the mass of indoctrination and even realize that the paradox exists (or someone who is obstinately against the mainstream). To answer it takes even more, far beyond the cloud that has been used to mask reality from your eyes and mind.

15

obe

I think that the ways of the old gods were more to do with man than the gods themselves. If we lived even a few hundred years, imagine the wisdoms man have never reach, that we could obtain.
Wouldn’t we grow weary of vanity, jealousy etc?

I think maybe man would move past such lesser attributes, eventually. Maybe humanity would go through a hedonistic time for a while first though.

Same problems with the notion of resurrection is there not?

_