Peter Ward joined Bob for a conversation on the successes and failures to date of various groups and methods that are aiming to extend our natural expiration dates. What lengths would you go to, to preserve your life for an additional forty years, a hundred or more?
• Why do we age and die?
• how to live to 100, 1000, 10,000 years
• escape velocity to reach immortality
• Aubrey de Grey’s program
• tech billionaires programs
• transhumanists/extropians
• diet, exercise, supplements, stem cells, telomeres, and other aging hacks
• Ray Kurzweil
• cryonics
• nanotechnology
• brain preservation
• mind uploading and digital immortality
• Immortalist movement
Peter Ward is a British business and technology reporter whose reporting has taken him across the globe. Reporting from Dubai, he covered the energy sector in the Middle East before earning a degree in business journalism from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. His writing has appeared in Wired, The Atlantic, The Economist, GQ, BBC Science Focus, and Newsweek.
We age and die for a simple reason…to make room and free up resources for the next generation. If a species lived forever it would never change and evolve to better fit in its environment and wouldn’t be able to change if the situation changed. The human species’ greatest ability is that it can and has adapted to just about every environment. Animals that couldn’t adapt are extinct.
As people age, they get set in their ways and inflexible to change. A species has to change or it will get left behind. Constant change is evolution. The prey animals change to be better able to survive and the preditors change to deal with that change. Mankind made a new direction to go. Not faster, not stronger, or any other physical direction. Instead, we became smarter.
In becoming smarter we mostly eliminated the danger from the other predators. In actuality, we REPLACED them with ourselves. As far as I can tell mankind is the only animal that preys on itself. In doing that we continued to advance even after there was no outside force demanding it.
Immortality may well be the final finish of our species. The war over who deserves it and who shouldn’t get it will be endless until there is only one side left. We will either fall back into a much more primitive state or advance into what may be a meaningless dead end. The first-level nations are currently DEevolving.
Those that are smart and industrious only have one or two kids and are not actually replacing them =selves in the population. Those that are less intelligent do as man has always done and have kids until they were too old to have any more.
In the distant past stupidity was sort of self-regulating. Everyone had a lot of kids and the dumb ones had a lower survival rate. That is not true now. Now to some extent, we encourage the less bright to have more kids and the intelligent just choose not to. Each generation now has a slightly lower overall IQ. We are better educated but that isn’t the same as being more intelligent.
I observe the problem. Do I have a reasonable and worthwhile solution? Not really except to better control our population and regulate people to only 2 kids unless they can show a reason to be allowed more. I can tell you that that would be an awful solution and cause ENDLESS strife…