Interesting little bit of fun I saw on Fark:

http://www.rednova.com/news/display/?id=127158

Are we 20 years off from having the tech to live forever barring massive injury/etc? Basically reversing the effects of age, if not actually repairing the body from more serious damage?

It seems a LOT of threads and news are covering this idea lately. Is this optimism for an aging baby-boomer population? Or is this actually based on scientific advancement?

-Note, this thread isn't for the social/religious ramifications, only the technology needed to make this happen
-Also, this is assuming we can still die from explosions, accidents, massive disease, etc.

It's always just twenty years away, isn't it? In twenty years:
"...we'll have fixed that pesky neutron problem with nuclear power."
"...meals will all be in pill form."
"...we'll have cured all diseases."
"...we'll have settlements on the Moon."
"...we'll have flying cars."

I'm still waiting for my flying car, damnit!

There's no cure for the worst disease of all time...

Human stupidity.

No matter how many thousand years old you live to be, it'll get you. Somewhere, sometime, you'll do something stupid. And when you do, it'll kill you. Whether you choke on a chicken bone, eletrecute yourself doing your own wiring, or just plain walk out in front of that bus you never saw...

As for living forever from aging. NAH! We're not carefull enough. Our diets alone seem to kill faster than natural aging. Something down the line would eventually break that we wouldn't yet know how to fix. (Take neurons. When one dies, none grow back... so when you kill brain cells, they're NOT coming back, and there IS a finite number. Give that a few extra decades and you'll have people who's minds are starting to seriously break down like an old hard disk drive. Of course, we've got strange diseases that do that for us already, I'm just talking about natural brain failure.)

Hard to say. Depends on the laws, I'd say - eg., is it immoral for only those who can afford it to get to live 100+ to forever years?

What about the rest of us? What about healthcare and such?

Now, to those who say, "But, I wouldn't want to live forever." I say, well, fine. Die. But don't get in my way, 'cause that's where I'm aiming.

If you allow for people to live forever without death from old age, you must give them the choice of when to end it. So, will suicide ever be moral?

Side note: I've seen the way minds degenerate with age, even in the healthy ones. It's not from a degeneration in the brain, as most people would think, but in the accumulation of too much data and information. They take long times to sort through their thoughts - their memories - and are often slow on replies. How much worse will this become with basically infinite life-span?

It's like the Goddess Megumi I created for Zeropoint. When you can live forever, your mind can afford to have the speed of a Tandy 1000

"is it immoral for only those who can afford it to get to live 100+ to forever years?"

You're kidding me, right?
Is it immoral to have large houses or cadillacs? Sweet mother of Pete, health is not something you can "equalize" with any more fairness than income! The only thing you can do is deny those with more health, just like Canada's taxes deny those with more money, the right to have what they got themselves through clean living, smart investment, or good luck. To complain that rich people get more health... *shakes head* They pay more TAXES, too, you know, and that's what supports the current system.

Ugh.
Now can we please go back on topic?

Keep in mind, everyone, that this is for the SCIENTIFIC possibilities. Ethical and Religious discussions...well...you know where to put them. ^_^

To become a bit more focused....the concept of Nanites is certainly seeming the way to go. But there is lots of talk of engineered cells/viruses to make changes.

Any thoughts or articles on either method?

Dude, engineered viruses ARE nanites.

Dude, only if you compare a Horse and Buggy and a Motor Vehicle straight across.

This isn't saying a nanite can't be made of biological material, but it needs to be engineered as such. Custom viruses are basically an existing virus with different code shoved into it's nucleus.

Regardless, you have a small entity entering the body to preform repairs the human body doesn't do normally, or not quickly enough. One could do it with physical modifications, one does it via DNA resequencing. Unless we get to the point where a Nanite can copy and paste DNA, they don't work the same way.

Yeah- but tiny robots are so much cooler!

Exactly.

I'm waiting for the day when I can finally say "We are Borg. Your technological and biological distinctiveness will be added to our own. You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile."

Bah, we still need to find intelegent life for that to happen.

However, red blood cells saying that to a skin-cell would certainly be spooky.

well for one glorious month or so if you started with five borg on earth you could have fun assimilating friends and neighbors.

then we'd all resume functioning as a perfect collective, with priority one being pouring all effort into research on the following:
-sustainable energy sources
-sustainable sustenance (crops take space and effort. we should be able to grow nutrients more easily.)
-space colonization and exploration, to spread our perfection throughout the galaxy.

hmm, this is sounding better and better...

The Borg mostly function on self-sustaining systems. Using replication technology, as the fiction goes, they are able to take atoms of material and recombine them into nutrients and minerals necessary to sustain life. We would need the nano-bots to run effectively forever, so we would need a self-sustaining energy resource before we could reach that stage. Once we reached that stage, combined with the subject of the article, we would be able to travel throughout the cosmos at whatever velocity we wished - even sub-luminal velocities - because we wouldn't age and deteriorate, right?

hehe sub-luminal, i like that.
correct Daemon. one of the things that Voyager took off on (and i know, Voyager was a bad show and a terrible bastardization of the Borg) was the fact that the Borg only sent a couple scout ships to the Federation/Alpha Quadrant in TNG; but they'd already infested and conquered much of the Delta quadrant, which was closer to their point of origin. The phrase 'resistance is futile' is (discounting Voyager's deus ex machina) true because the Borg are instilled with infinite patience. They will build for as long as it takes.
Does anyone remember Lexx, where that one guy with the flying robot arms merged with the Shadow creature and became a megalomaniacal evil entity, so his robot arms started to make more robot arms? it was a sub-plot for much of a season that parts of the universe were just disappearing. eventually, Lexx was the only thing left. They beat him by tricking him into concentrating his mass too close together and getting trapped in his own gravity, causing the Big Crunch (Lexx's Light Universe has a cyclical history, if the Oracle is to be believed). That's what the Borg have in mind, only without the emotional haste and stupid mistakes: to slowly but surely assimilate everything, bringing about true peace and perfect sharing of all knowledge and resources. if they have to travel for hundreds of years to do it, then so be it.

All I know is that if I'm going to be a Borg someday, I want one of those cool, laser-pointer eye attatchments that Picard got.

i dunno, it was just a red penlight.. i liked the hologram eyepatch. didnt Hugh have one of those?
the swiss army arm was cool too.

Hugh...Hugh...was he the one Geordi was friends with?

yeah, the mis-pronunciation of the word 'you'... thus giving star trek the bottom-of-the-barrel award for Worst. Name. EVER.

Ah, right, yes. He did have to hologram eye. Heh. That was pretty cool.

Hey! I thought ST:Voyager was cool.

Personally, I think Star Trek his its prime at TNG. I could never get into Deep Space 9, although I will say I found Voayger at best slightly enjoyable, and at worst, watchable.

I haven't yet mustered the courage to touch Enterprise.

TNG was the best. DS9 was great for those of us into crazy political things, but not so much of a space drama as regular fans liked. Voyager was one long joke. Enterprise is pretty cool, more like the original "cowboy show in space" feel like STO.

Hugh: Amen. I felt so bad for Geordi's actor when he had to say those lines.