The Quest For Immortality

CBS News-60 Minutes ^ | 1/1/2006

[Neville72]

(CBS) How’s this for an offer you can’t refuse: how would you like to live say, 400 or 500 years, or even more and all of them in perfect health? It’s both a Utopian and a nightmare scenario but there are those who say it is well within the realm of possibility.

Though we live longer and healthier lives than our grandparents, 100 is more or less the outer limit because, catastrophic disease aside, we just plain wear out. But 60 Minutes correspondent Morley Safer talked to one scientist who says that’s old-fashioned thinking, that sometime in the next 20 to 30 years or so we’ll be able to recondition ourselves for the first steps towards immortality.

[Iris7]

This whole business is nothing but the Siren's song. OK, "marketing", the sale of sizzle instead of steak. People will buy any darned thing.

Old quote, forget from whom, "Humans are not rational but rationalizing animals."

[ConservativeVoice]

ping

[Bubba_Leroy]

I remember in the mid 1970s reading an article in Science Digest about the advances being made in the sciences of longevity and how in 20 or 30 years scientests will have figured out how to stop it. I'm sure that similar articles can be found in publications from the 50s, 30s and earlier.

[NaughtiusMaximus]

The ancient Chinese aristocracy became obsessed with the quest for an elixer vitae which would enable the consumer to extend his life expectancy. Many of these fanciful draughts enabled their consumers to quickly answer the question "Is there an afterlife?"

[Durus]

Kurzweil bothers me. He is so enamored with creating a "singularity" in the future he ignores the grave examples of those that have tried to create it in the past. Singularity, or more accurately, Utopia, are very dangerous things to quest for.

[darth]

The quote is from Lazarus Long, Robert Heinlein's fictional character, who by the way was over 2500 years old when he uttered it. In the future, humans will live longer, more productive lives. Healthy old people will be quite able to work for a living and will not need an old age pension. They also will spend a fraction as much on preventive measures as the reactive measures (coronary bypass surgery, nursing home care, etc.) that we spend now. If you don't want to live a longer, healthier life, that's your personal choice. However, I have a lot of things left to do and need at least another 50 years to do them. I was an early adherent to radical life extension therapies and have spent over $80,000 on them over the past 27 years. If they work on me like they work on lab rats, I'll have that additional 50 years.

[Durus]

Ok you've got me curious. What does 80k buy you?