We have created the Roadmap to Immortality – a timeline of events that will lead to indefinite human lifespan extension. Some of these evens can happen simultaneously, some separately, some even already happened. I invite everyone to express their opinion, add to the Roadmap, make it more detailed. We need more authors, please, join!
The pdf can be found here – Roadmap_immortality_ENG
Maria Konovalenko 
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Why the hell do we want to extend the lifepan of humans to indefinite long?
When are we going to learn to embrace death and live our lives fully?
The mere concept of biological immortality and never getting out of this earth is a total nightmare to me. Am I alone in this?
What would you do with overpopulation anyway?… Unless only the richest are able to extend indefinitely their shallow and meaningless lives, we would have to substitute natural death with mass killing in order to hace decent space and resources to live.
Sorry, the whole idea is hilarious to me.
1st. If we have the technology to make people live forever. What makes you think that we won’t have technology to settle other planets/solar systems?
2nd. Why do you assume all rich people have shallow and meaningless lives? That’s just rude. Do all poor people have deep and meaningful lives?
3rd. No we wouldn’t, the Universe is very large, it will take quite some time to run out of “space” (pun intended?). And by the time we do, most immortal sentient beings will have probably transferred themselves to a completely energy states which will clump together into massive hive minds of learning and thinking.
To answer this question you would first have to decide what number of people equals overpopulation. If overpopulation exists it has to be a finite number. I don’t know why you would suppose we would have to kill a mass of people to have decent space and resources to live. The alternative is to not replenish the population when a person expires. You have reached a paradox where you seem to think it’s bad if only the richest people are able to afford effective treatments for cancer, parkinson’s, alzheimer’s, macular degeneration, stroke, heart disease etc. and then you also find it disagreeable if the majority of people also receive treatments for these diseases. If that is the case then you must be in favour of age related diseases because they are apparently keeping the population in check and it also keeps medicine away either from the richest people or the majority of people.
Feel free to die Carlos, but don’t include me in your mind games. I intend to be around for the heat-death of the Universe.
Well good luck with that!
If you embrace death then you’re not living life to the fullest. Being immortal means you’re living as much life as possible. That would be living life to the fullest.
Why is immortality a nightmare to you? If you want to get off this planet immortality might be the ticket. Once we’re immortal we can get off this planet, visit others, get off those planets, and never cease exploring the universe.
No, it’s not the same to live long that to live to the fullest. Avoiding death as much as possible doesn’t necessarily mean to live intensely. It’s intensity what I’m talking about, not just duration.
Well the concept of biological immortality isn’t really feasible, however extending the healthy lifespan of a humans is the purpose of medicine whether it’s related to aging or not. To ask the question, “Why the hell do we want to extend the lifespan of humans indefinite long?”, is the same as asking, “Why do we want to cure cancer, parkinson’s, alzheimer’s, macular degeneration, stroke, heart disease etc.”? This is because logical conclusion of this is when all diseases of aging are effectively treated then you extend healthy lifespan indefinitely.
According to your attitude, you show all signs of being suicidal. Please search for help.
Suicide hotline: 1-800-784-2433
I make the presumption that by the time we’ve attained a means to extend our own lives indefinitely, we’d have already leveled the playing field to a certain degree by elevating areas of the world that are, at the moment, in the throes of poverty, which is, of course, a large contributor to high birthrates. Standard of living up, birthrate down. But more fundamentally, if humanity is a species without death, then the evolutionary need to propagate for survival would probably wither. In the long run, at least. And the idea of “never getting out of this earth” is a little closed-minded. There are billions of planets out there.
I admit that my initial comments were a bit too blunt. But I have a clear intention about the subject.
I’m not against this kind of scientific developments. I’m not against science. I’m a computer scientist myself, specifically in the area of AI, and I appreciate very much the work of science. But I think that what science will teach us eventually is ironically that there is no real trascendence in scientific and technological progress. Human trascendence, or singularity if you wanna call it that way, will ultimately be spiritual, not technological… It doesn’t matter what religion you believe in, or if you practice a religion or not, sooner or later you will find out that awareness is not an emergent phenomenon, but rather that material existence emerges from awareness. We got it all backwards.
In any case, I just don’t think biological immortality is possible. We have to stop treating death like some kind of error, death is a natural force and it permeates all of material existence, thus making life possible and dynamic. Look at the fruit; it is born, it grows, it matures, then it starts to die. Why does the fruit die? is it because of disease? No, it dies because it was born, it’s that simple. And it’s the fate of all organic life.
I know science will extend the average lifespan of human beings by reducing disease, that’s quite good. But immortality? I’m sorry, but it ain’t gonna happen.
And yes, I’m very sure that death plays an important role in giving our lives meaning. It’s precisely the force that keep us awake and willing to move and not waste time. If we had all the time in the world, the idea of wasting or using time would lose meaning, so we would never be living to the fullest this way. Living to the fullest comes precisely from grasping the totality of the fact that we are beings who are going to die.
You are right in saying biological immortality is definitely not possible because even if one were to witness the heat death of the universe that is not immortality. Immortality is absence of all death. You are correct in this assertion but when the concept of, “immortality”, is exchanged with, “indefinite lifespan based on treating all age related diseases”, the topic gets confused. I agree completely with the absurdity of immortality.
The comparison between fruit and humans would be good if it were the 2nd century and we had no biological knowledge. You are under the impression that there’s some mysticism between dying of age related diseases and biology, there isn’t. Diseases of aging occur because of an underlying accumulation of damage in long lived cells that happens through life that causes pathology and then death. Fruit decays because it’s separated from the tree and essentially dead, the same way you might amputate a part of a person. It can be reattached if biological processes haven’t passed a certain point or it will decompose like a piece of fruit.
The philosophical argument for the purpose of death (at least in aging) is not relevent. If you think death is relevent and plays an important role then you must hold one of the two positions. 1. All things that cause death play an important role (unnatural death which includes death by physical trauma and accident and natural death which is complications from all biological diseases or states) or 2. Some of the things that cause death play an important role (either natural or unnatural death).
If this is the case then your argument can be partially summated as whether you are in favour of age related diseases or not (I’m ignoring unnatural death because I agree immortality is not feasible). None the less we have reached a paradox where a person could be in favour of the natural cycle of life as it stands (dying from age related diseases) and also in favour of effectively treating those diseases.
It’s not the cause of death what’s relevant, it’s the mere fact that you might die anytime and you don’t know when.
Although most human beings live already as if they’re immortal and death is a “bad luck” thing that won’t happen to them, those who are really conscious of their death as a true fact, know that there is no time to lose.
I’m not against or in favor of disease, disease is just part of nature. Even we human beings are some kind of disease or plague to other life forms… Technologic advance has been eliminating diseases and creating new ones since ages. We’re not moved as much as we’d like to think.
The problem with my point is that it is based on personal belief which is based on personal experience: eventually we have to die, and that’s a good thing, but mostly if you’re prepared.
So, I see life as a training ground for us to be prepared for death.
As long as we live our lives only fleeing from death, we live in fear and despair, in constant anxiety because of that time that is running up. But when we are ready to die, when we accept that it is our unalterable fate, life becomes an infinite gift, a continuous miracle.
So I’m not putting down this scientific agenda, but it won’t gets us any kind of trascendence, much less “immortality”. We’re still doing the same: fleeing from death, fleeing from pain, looking for pleasure, we’re like little robots, there’s no end to it… Unless we start paying attention to our true selves by means of meditation, and learn to live fully aware and in gratitude, whether it’s in pain or pleasure, whether it’s in health or disease, whether we’re making love or at the very moment of our death.
To become warriors, that’s the purpose of all. And we become warriors by enhancing our awareness and being in total control of our actions and points of perception. Technology is there to grant us tools, but if we become used by our tools, we’re lost.
Immortality is by definition impossible so it’s redundant to say so. Eventually we will have to die, but the only reason you think it’s a good or necessary thing is because it’s unavoidable and most people have developed this coping strategy to try and say it is a positive thing to die.
It is possible (in theory) to intervene in the underlying process that kills most people in life (age related diseases). Therefore you can not abstain from a personal belief on whether disease are a good thing or a bad thing. If you assert and accept it is part of nature then you are in favour of it because acceptance is favour. This would be the same as saying malaria or tuberculosis are part of nature. Are cancer, alzheimer’s and parkinson’s disease also part of nature?
I understand that you’re talking more about the transcendant technological singularity point of view on “immortality” and I do agree with your feelings on it. I think it’s a lot of daydreaming and ignores the prior steps that would be required before anything like would become apparent i.e. treating age related diseaes. The chart present in this post is indeed a misnomer.
It seems to me that the point of view of extending life indefintely is simply in contradiction with your own personal philsophy. If this were extended to medicine then no medical advances would be made or would be made much more slowly.
I am not in favour of age related diseases, they are not part of nature because humans have the ability to transform nature of their own humanity. In future when effective treatments for age related diseases are found it will not be because of an unproductive personal view (at least for research) that death from diseaes plays a neccessary and important part of life.
There is nothing that tells us immortality is not possible. Not a single law. Plus we have examples like the “immortal” jellyfish that has unlimited lifespan and dies only from external cause. It’s not indestructible, however it can be immortal in the perfect conditions.
Well, “immortality”, strictly defined, means life that is forever i.e. indestructible. The problem is really an issue of semantics and what we accept immortality to mean. If we take immortality as the ability to live forever then it is not possible. If we take immortality to mean death only from unnatural causes then that is possible. However using the word immortality usually confuses the argument which is why I like to use the word “indefinite” followed by a qualifying statement.
Dear Carlos, you are an idiot.
Your friend,
A person who actually isn’t a defeatist
Finally, a supporter of life extension on a life extension blog!
Hey, I’m a fairly new futurist (I stumbled upon FutureTimeline in December 2011 and have regularly been keeping up with medical and technological advances ever since); someone I know linked me to this image, and it’s a very uplifting roadmap that I’m sure I’ll continue looking at regularly throughout the years. It seems as though the world of the 2020s, 2030s, and 2040s will be much warmer and safer than the world of the 2010s (though there will be a fair amount of progress made during this decade also). Some questions, though.
– The ‘Victory Over Infections’ road promises regulation of immunity in the 2030-2035. Does this mean fine-tuning your immune system that you no longer get sick? Being sick can certainly be miserable, it would be great if colds and flus and of course much more serious illnesses became resigned to the past.
– Under ‘Social Changes,’ the first anti-aging drugs are predicted to be registered in the 2015-2020 range. When might these drugs actually be released? Any idea how much the aging process would be slowed down by using these first generation drugs?
– Genome regulation to stop aging is promised for the first half of the 2030s, with outright reversal and restoration of youth promised for the second half. This is great, of course, but how expensive will these procedures be? I hope that they won’t be too terribly expensive, and that my parents (aged 64 and 60) will be able to take advantage of them. I don’t see much appeal in an indefinite lifespan unless my family’s able to enjoy it with me.
– Do you have any predictions for when Lupus might be curable? My sister has a moderate case of the illness, she was diagnosed with it 23 years ago.
It’s a real shame these comments degenerated into whether immortality was a good/bad thing rather than about the actual post. Brendan is the only one I think to offer a serious comment about this content.
The roadmap is amazing, although a little difficult to read because of its size, but real food for thought.
I’m surprised that people aren’t more interested in the implications of this to directly benefit them and their families. Such as developments in artificial limbs and organs, new surgical techniques, gene therapies and overcoming diseases such as cancer and influenza.
As Ray Kurzweil says “live long enough to live forever” – try to stay ahead of the curve because things are changing now.
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I support this publication, and immortality is really possible today being discovered by Allen Omton and Serge Dobrow
Thank you very much for this great information! “Roadmap to Immortality”
Immortality & Science forum: https://bilimyurt.com
please accept thanks