There really are people who think life was better in the good ol' days, and who think that messing with Mother Nature is really wrong.
Nanotechnology will mess with Mother Nature, more than anything we've done before. It has the capacity to completely rebuild our bodies, one atom at a time. Some scientists think a baby born today could potentially live forever. Listen to Ray Kurzweil and Dr. Terry Grossman:
Immortality is Within Our Grasp
"Do we have the knowledge and the tools today to live forever? If all science and technology development suddenly stopped, the answer would have to be no. We do have the means to dramatically slow disease and the aging process far more than most people realize, but we do not yet have all the techniques we need to indefinitely extend human life. However, it is clear that far from halting, the pace of scientific and technological discovery is accelerating.
According to models that Ray has created, our paradigm-shift rate - the rate of technical progress - is doubling every decade, and the capability (price performance, capacity, and speed) of specific information technologies is doubling each year. So the answer to our question is actually a definitive yes - the knowledge exists, if aggressively applied, for you to slow aging and disease processes to such a degree that you can be in good health and good spirits when the more radical life-extending and life-enhancing technologies become available over the next couple of decades.
Longevity expert and gerontologist Aubrey de Grey uses the metaphor of maintaining a house to explain this key concept. How long does a house last? The answer obviously depends on how well you take care of it. If you do nothing, the roof will spring a leak before long, water and the elements will invade, and eventually the house will disintegrate. But if you proactively take care of the structure, repair all damage, confront all dangers, and rebuild or renovate parts from time to time using new materials and technologies, the life of the house can essentially be extended without limit.
The same holds true for our bodies and brains. The only difference is that while we fully understand the methods underlying the maintenance of a house, we do not yet fully understand all of the biological principles of life. But with our rapidly increasing comprehension of the human genome, the proteins expressed by the genome (proteome), and the biochemical processes and pathways of our metabolism, we are quickly gaining that knowledge. We are beginning to understand aging, not as a single inexorable progression but as a group of related biological processes. Strategies for reversing each of these aging progressions using different combinations of biotechnology techniques are emerging. Many scientists, including the authors of this book, believe that we will have the means to stop and even reverse aging within the next two decades. In the meanwhile, we can slow each aging process to a crawl using the methods outlined in Fantastic Voyage.
In this way, the goal of extending longevity can be taken in three steps, or Bridges. Fantastic Voyage is intended to serve as a guide to living long enough in good health and spirits - Bridge One - to take advantage of the full development of the biotechnology revolution - Bridge Two. This, in turn, will lead to the nanotechnology-AI (artificial intelligence) revolution - Bridge Three - which has the potential to allow us to live indefinitely. "
If this doesn't make the hair on the back of your neck stand up, I don't know what will. We understand most of what we have to learn and most of what we have to do to achieve immortality. It could happen.
Sad thing is, as we get closer to it, people will be against it. And they won't just say, 'Thanks, but it's not for me.' They'll be saying 'It's a crime against nature and nobody should be allowed to use it.'
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