people living to be 180 years old

WellCookedFetus said:
There is a difference between scientific speculation and science fiction.
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It's a pretty blurred difference. Serious science fiction is about what might, or will, be possible in the immediate future. If you mean fiction which goes outside the established laws of science, invoking such ideas as superluminal spacecraft and time machines, then you're obviously beyond realistic speculation. Technologies like those might as well be magic; I suppose that's where fantasy begins.
 
Science fiction requires a plot and characters which distort a scispec in that things needed to be setup to make a valid plot with conflicted. In many scifis only a particular technology is advanced, or political and social polices have not advance with a technology. All of this provides an environment for a good plot. Take the movie GATTACA: in it mainly only genetic engineering of embryos is the primary technology focused and all other techs are left relevantly vague and less developed, society is totally warped by this one aspect of biotech. In scispec many other technologies would be mentioned and exist in interaction with the focus technology, scispec biotech predictions are not limited to designer babies but to the genetic and cybernetic augmentation of adults making the issue of designer babies producing a upper class a invalid point as anyone with the money can enhance them self’s not just their children. So the make a scifi predictions must be distorted to make interesting plots and characters.
 
UUmm, but what of todays biotech will have us living that long? I cant think of anything. You can live a bit longer if you starve yourself. Or even longer if youhappen to have the right genetic heritage and are careful with yourself. But outside of secret labs, theres nothing available now that will ensure we live any longer than the current average.
Anyway, post humanism as it stands just now is like nuclear fusion 20 or 30 years ago. A nice idea, but it lacks the technological know how. Moreover it is to a large part a replacement of "god" with "incredibly impossibly intelligent humans in computers". I'm rebelling against it in Science fiction, because theres shedloads of it out there just now, and its very hard to say how likely it all is.
 
Telomerase inducers, stem cell tissue replacement, artificial organs, synthesized organ, xenotransplantation… ect all of these are technologies expected to be available in 50 year tops, and combined would greatly extend life spans even double or triple them.
With the rate cancer treatments are going cancer will be as lethal as the common flu within 50 years as well.
 
WellCookedFetus said:
Telomerase inducers, stem cell tissue replacement, artificial organs, synthesized organ, xenotransplantation… ect all of these are technologies expected to be available in 50 year tops, and combined would greatly extend life spans even double or triple them.
With the rate cancer treatments are going cancer will be as lethal as the common flu within 50 years as well.
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There'd have to be some sort of brain enhancement along with the physical improvements, or people might be senile before they reached the middle of their long lives. I suppose stem cell tissue replacement might help; a cybernetic memory bank implant would allow perfect recall, as well as accomodating a century or 2 of images.

Cancer may well be beaten before too long; one hopes, however, that the common flu (and other classical maladies) won't become MORE deadly due to the emergence of drug-resistant varieties. We are forcing rapid evolution on the bacterial and viral kingdoms.
 
All life evolves Darwinian, technology though evolves Lamarckian. In time even the fast evolving bacteria or virus will be no match to are even faster evolving medical Technology. Technology has been progressing at an exponentially rate with no end in site.
 
I hope you're right about medicine inevitably winning out. Perhaps technology is ultimately limited by the laws of physics, in that there are only so many possible, usable processes in the Universe. It might be that technical civilisations millions or billions of years old have reached some kind of asymptotic plateau in their advancement, if not in their expansion.
 
ironically lots of viruses and bacteria have no problem to outpace the 'lamarckian evolution of technology' with their old-fashioned darwinian evolution.
 
Yes, they can now, but our technology evolves exponentially, they have a limited rate of evolutionary development. Just like projecting that are exponential use of oil will soon outstrip are linear oil mining rate. Eventually nature will be no match to all the stuff we can through at it.
 
Technological progress has been exponential over the last couple of centuries; no exponential acceleration can continue indefinitely though. Even forgetting the asymptotic plateau I theorised earlier, humans can only design and build at a certain speed. I mean, exponentially speaking, we will one day be making leaps equivalent to the vinyl-CD advance in less than a day - or less than a minute! Can't happen, obviously.
 
Yes humens are limited, funny thing is though that we have been using technology to overcome our limitations allow for no slow down, For example computers have been doing more and more of the calculations and menial takes required in research, eventually in order to reach even higher development rates non-cyberneticly augment humans can and will be cut out of the picture, and research and development will be done by AI and cyberborgs with mental capacities able to expanded virtually indefinitely, in this way we could and make scinetific leaps that took humen decades in minutes even sec.

Technology is a different story, limited by the time require for the physical construction of things technologies will be slower to develop physically, leading to a time were even after the first prototype is developed its out-dated scientifically.
 
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