I do think that effective biological immortality will be acheived. I don't expect that it will be available to everyone, and I'm not sure that we will be able to appreciate it for long, due to the likely emergence of immortal AIs. I am a biomedical researcher. I expect that most cancers will be cureable within the next 20 years or so, mostly through employing a patient's own immune system against the tumor. This will greatly extend the lives of many people. However, I think that problems like neurovascular disease will be more difficult to solve, and I expect that it will be 40 years or so before therapies that effectively reverse the aging process will be available. I haven't read Kurzweil, although I think that there is a likelihood that non-biological AI will inherit the Earth from us.
Is there precedence for this treatment method? I could imagine so many things that could go wrong with it...I expect that most cancers will be cureable within the next 20 years or so, mostly through employing a patient's own immune system against the tumor.
Yes, Here are two recent review articles on tumor vaccine development:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22809568
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22639169 Its an exciting field. In principle, tumors shouldn't grow in most cases, but the ones that do seem to have an immune evasion program. Its not well understood, but many tumors attract macrophages (as they should) then the macrophages switch to a quiescent phenotype (which they should not). Obviously there are some kind of signaling mechanisms that are akin to Obi Wan waving his hand and saying "These are not the cells you're looking for." The idea behind tumor vaccine is that perhaps its possible to expose immune cells to some component of the tumor (secreted vesicle, cell lysate, etc.) ex vivo, so that the immune cells aren't already compromised by the tumor, and then inject them back into the patient. Some preclinical studies have shown a lot of promise, but I don't know if its been advanced to patent trials anywhere.
Sorry about the delayed reply: That's really interesting, but surprising, do all (or even some) immune cells have that sort of plasticity? I was under the impression that it was just B-cell producing the right antibodies, but then again, every time I hear about the human immune system, I am told it is "especially complex". Edit: Link #1 of yours mentions in the abstract that they describe the mechanism in the paper, but I'm behind a paywall and it's too late for me to connect to a computer / network with access. =/The idea behind tumor vaccine is that perhaps its possible to expose immune cells to some component of the tumor (secreted vesicle, cell lysate, etc.) ex vivo, so that the immune cells aren't already compromised by the tumor, and then inject them back into the patient.
Haha, "especially complex" is code for "I don't really understand it, so I'm going to pretend that its too complex to explain to you." I don't think anyone really understands immunology, even immunologists, they just know a lot more facts than we do. But that's the thing about solutions to problems, if they work, who cares why? Don't forget that the IC engine was developed before the ideal gas law. B-cell immunity is one strategy. Another uses dendritic cells or dendritic cell-derived vesicles to stimulate immunity. Its way too complex for me to explain; you wouldn't understand ;)
As I recall, the AMA did a study whereby they said "okay, let's presume we can cure everything that kills people. What happens to the life expectancy?" I can't find it in the amount of time I'm interested in spending, but the answer was something like "we gain an extra 15 years." There's a real problem with living in a reducing environment. It really fucks with your chemistry.
I'd like to see the study. The body does have means to repair/correct for oxidative damage, and there are mechanisms by which DNA sequences can be corrected. Also, telemeres lost in cell divisions can be replaced, and epigenetic regulation can be modified or reversed. One of the best examples of this reverse aging IMHO is cloning with an adult nucleus. It's incredible that just the cytosol alone of an embryo has enough to motivate an adult cell to revert to developmental mechanisms. Immortalized cell lines are a crude example of making cells continue on. Theortically, there is no component of the body that can't be replaced piecemeal, or any damage that can't be undone. There is truth to the notion that we aren't the same material we were when we were born. The trick is to get the body to make the replacement, and to swap in less corrupted components.
this ax has been in my family for 10 generations the head has been replaced 5 times and the handle 6.
So if you could do me a solid, in 500 words or less, what's changed about the state of the art since Dolly the Sheep? My understanding was that the shortened telomere problem was kind of a full-stop. I'll see if I can find the study. It may take a bit.
To be honest, I'm not very up to date on cloning. I could take a look a it. However, here in cancer research we are very familiar with telomorase running amok, where the ends never terminally shorten. AFAIK one of Dolly's suspected problems was that the telomeres had already substantially shortened, and they either picked up shortening more at that point, or the telemorase wasn't making up for what had already been lost. But all cells can express telomerase with the right cues, and a number of adult cells do. TBH I'd bet that Dolly had a number of other problems due to a previous life that simple nucleic transfer didn't reverse. Biology is crazy dirty. There rarely seems to be one problem or one solution. Typically the best you can do is to get the body to start doing the thing that you want it to, and let it go with broad guidance. My guess is we will figure out some slick ways to add a few decades, and then a few more, then a few more...
I am a ghost. all of this is a misapplication of Moore's "law" and I think the creation of a faulty metric we call technology. We are treating it as a vector when it is better modeled as a branching bush. It full analogy with the ladder of evolution vs the tree.
R. Buckminster Fuller said "I seem to be a verb". I think he meant something like this. I am not this blob of matter; not really. That is a slice, a snapshot of me. I am a pattern, a knot of information, moving through time. An incredibly complex knot, made of many smaller, microscopic knots, working together. My parents, who were similar knots, managed to split off tiny portions of their knots or patterns, and combine them into a new knot (actually they did this a lot, but only a few knots survived for a long time; at least four have still not unravelled. Eventually all knots unravel. Someday we may know enough to prevent it (would that it were so!). All our knots - yours, mine, the cat's - have survived to this day because it is the nature of our knots to tie new knots. This is life itself.
That's exactly the point I made in a debate with theadvancedapes yesterday: Entropy rules the universe. Period. Exclamation point. End of story. The laws of thermodynamics certainly do not lend themselves to immortality. Medically speaking, we can keep putting more fingers in the dike, but its gonna collapse eventually.
That sounds frightening. Could you expand on this?
Do you expect this possibility to come about in the form of humanoid robots who interact like humans and effect the environment? Or rather AI computers which continue to communicate with one-another after all humans are deceased?
What are the ramifications?Non-biological AI will inherit the Earth from us.
I expect that the AI that will outlast us will be mobile. In fact, I think that intelligence is entirely environment-dependent, and for us to recognize AI, it will probably have to be in the form of one that interacts with the physical world. Just like we have physical limits like how fast we can run, I expect that we have mental limitations that do not define the limits of world-affecting intelligence. -Cheetahs can outrun us. AI will eventually outthink us. When non-biological world-affecting AI proliferates, it will no longer be our world. We will be living in someone else's environment, just as other creatures live in ours today. I'm not sure to what degree the AI will consider our condition, however I don't expect that it will remain a priority to theirs. For that reason, I expect that we will disappear over time. I don't think there's much reason to believe it will be a apocalyptic scenario, but I expect the world will change in response to the actions of this new intelligence, and it we will not be able to keep up with it.