[extropy-chat] GQ Magazine Interview - Biggest Hope for Immortality

[Damien Broderick]

> 1. "What is the biggest problem about achieving immortality?"

Just a terminological aside: Robert keeps pointing out that we can't get
literal immortality, because eventually the cosmos will perish. That's
strictly true, but I think it's entirely irrelevant to what we're actually
discussing, which is *negligible or repairable senescence or `aging'*.

Obviously we can't stop aging *literally*, since that would mean halting all
atomic activity. We need to remind people that `aging' is just the
traditional word contingently associated with physical decay due to the
breakdown of cellular maintenance mechanisms, accumulated unrepaired damage,
etc. It's a shame the word `senescence' isn't known to most people, but
maybe it will spread as the idea gets better known.

The other problem with `immortality' as a term is that religious doctrines
long ago appropriated it to connote some sort of blissful `spiritual' state
beyond the reach of space and time. There's no need to fight this, if we can
come up with an alternative which means indefinitely extended youthful
fitness of mind and body without loss of memory and accumulated wisdom.

Robert might be right that boredom, cafard, ennui is the likely downside of
extended youthfulness--but that assumes longevous humans will retain our
current limitations, which as most here agree is very unlikely. Moreover, a
person so afflicted could either seek treatment (as the depressed are urged
to do nowadays) or choose to relinquish life. If someone hands you a hundred
billion dollars, but you wonder anxiously whether you should accept it
because eventually you might become jaded by being so wealthy, you can
always give it away... (I'll take it off your hands).

Damien Broderick