Immortality With Nanotech By 2040

Nanotech could make humans immortal by 2040, futurist says

www.computerworld.com...

In 30 or 40 years, we'll have microscopic machines traveling through our bodies, repairing damaged cells and organs, effectively wiping out diseases. The nanotechnology will also be used to back up our memories and personalities.

In an interview with Computerworld, author and futurist Ray Kurzweil said that anyone alive come 2040 or 2050 could be close to immortal. The quickening advance of nanotechnology means that the human condition will shift into more of a collaboration of man and machine, as nanobots flow through human blood streams and eventually even replace biological blood, he added.

That may sound like something out of a sci-fi movie, but Kurzweil, a member of the Inventor's Hall of Fame and a recipient of the National Medal of Technology, says that research well underway today is leading to a time when a combination of nanotechnology and biotechnology will wipe out cancer, Alzheimer's disease, obesity and diabetes.

Meh, everyone gets a dose of nanobots in the future by the age of 2, then 4, then blah blah blah.

Then there will be conspiracy theorists who will say that the shots are there to kill us.


I actually would like this, no more fevers, no more cancer,...

Interesting, but by then we'll be all be dead because we can't have 7 billion + immortals running around on planet earth, can we? Maybe by then we'll be able to colonize the moon or even further on. . .

reply to post by die_another_day


I'm a big fan of Ghost in the shell.

Would like to see this, I could really use some nano tech to cure my asthma.

Unfortunately when it does become available it will only be available to those with lots of $$$.

Ray Kurzweil is an inspiration and a hopeless optimist. I love his talks, but I have to remain skeptical on the breadth of use and time tables for completion. Yeah, I know his argument on exponential growth and human genome project. Nanotech is a bit trickier of a subject though and will, in all likelihood, breach genomic territory - primarily for the cheap and easy to program assembler mechanisms already present in nature. We'll end up using programmable organisms, rather than machines. However, I'm sure nano-tech in and of itself will prove useful in their own way. Specifically I can see it being of use in augmentation interfaces with nerve endings in tissue - as well as self-assembly into larger structures capable of preforming treatments that engineered organisms are just too small to accomplish.



At about 0:16 they start demonstrating the self-assembling pill-bot prototype thing that may one day be able to preform surgeries and remove cancerous growths from the inside of the body in a completely non-invasive manner.

What's to stop the govt. from injecting nanobots to interfere with your perceptions or feelings or make you "behave". If you have bots running around your system it's real easy for somebody to reprogram them to do something else (like rip up your capillaries and veins from the inside so you will blead internally).

What a terrible invention that would be.

All this does is slaps natural selection in the face, really hard.

With the rate of population growth, the population would be over 10 billion. And with nobody dying anymore, that population is bound to just skyrocket.

One of the most fascinating things to me is that what made us humans great is the same exact thing that will destroy us.

Homo Erectus never would've faced this problem.

hoghead cheese:
What's to stop the govt. from injecting nanobots to interfere
with your perceptions or feelings or make you "behave".

What's to stop the government from playing subliminal messages on city busses? Nothing. Does that mean that busses are a bad idea?

If you have bots running around your system it's
real easy for somebody to reprogram them to do something else

Kind of like how it's really easy to reprogram pacemakers? Yep. Sure is. We have hackers reprogramming pacemakers left and right. A day doesn't go by that I don't see a pacemaker burst out of someone's chest.

Schmidt1989:
All this does is slaps natural selection in the face, really hard.

So does medicine. So does surgury. So does every baby born via caesarean section. Every artificial method to promote and extend life, and to prevent death, grabs natural selection by the scruff of the neck and slaps it silly.

What's wrong with that?

With the rate of population growth, the population would be over 10 billion.
And with nobody dying anymore, that population is bound to just skyrocket.

Why do you believe that's a problem?

World population has long since passed the point of sustainability without technology as far as food production goes. Without use of irrigation, mass production and distribution, we'd have a couple billion fewer people than we have right now.

But you don't see people starving to death by the billions. Why not?

Technology.

Do you think we could have nearly 7 billion humans on this planet right now if we were still hunting deer and gathering berries? The difference between then and now is technology.

Worried about food? Take a look at In-vitro meat production
Worried about water? Here's a commercially available device that extracts water from the air.

We don't have a food shortage. We don't have a water shortage. But it's possible we may have a brain shortage.

Originally posted by LordBucket

Schmidt1989:
All this does is slaps natural selection in the face, really hard.

So does medicine. So does surgury. So does every baby born via caesarean section. Every artificial method to promote and extend life, and to prevent death, grabs natural selection by the scruff of the neck and slaps it silly.

What's wrong with that?

Oh I know. I omitted that because I figured it was assumed by everyone already. I do think it's wrong. As much of a technology user as I am (i'm on a computer, aren't I) I can't help but personally believe technology has contributed to the human race destroying itself. We evolved over millions of years to become the elite animals that we are today (and I would never personally doubt that we are the most intelligent, elite species of any creature to ever walk the earth, not for a second), and in such a split second in time, we've destroyed what nature has taken millions of years to create. No, obviously the human body has it's evolutionary flaws, it isn't perfect, but its damn close. In fact its too close. We can do multitask like no other creature before us. An Australopithicus Afarensis's jaw would drop at the site of how easy it is for us to sustain our lives (if we assume it wouldnt somehow be absolutely shocked by the technology that is used to ease our lifestyles).

Anyway, LordBucket, I've given you a star. It's nice to see someone who brings up valid arguments with logic, rationality, and intelligence. That race is dying out here on ATS.

[edit on 10/5/2009 by Schmidt1989]

reply to post by die_another_day


One thing to say about this..

Only for the rich.

reply to post by Schmidt1989

It's nice to see someone who brings up valid arguments
with logic, rationality, and intelligence.

Thank you, but you didn't answer my questions. I don't understand what the problem you're concerned about is.

in such a split second in time, we've destroyed
what nature has taken millions of years to create.

How have we destroyed ourselves? Your previous post expressed concern over population...but personally I'm inclined to think earth could easily support hundreds of billions of people.

According to numbers provided by wikipedia, the United States alone could accomodate over 3 billion people simply by building it as densely as japan. But japan is listed as only the 35th most densely populated area of the world. If you were to develop the US as densely as Singapore, the third most dense location...you could fit 65 billion people here. That's just in the US. With the entire world as dense as singapore you're talking 942 billion.

And that's only working with land surface area. There's plenty more space underground and underwater. If you simply use the available space, realistically, those hundreds of billions I mentioned earlier might be hundreds of trillions.

Yes, you have to provide food and water for them, and clean up after them, but I think those problems are resolvable just as well. You may think of japan and singapore as being densely populated areas, but they're certainly not uncivilized. This is no soylent-green nightmare I'm proposing. Simply using available space with available technology.

technology has contributed to the human race destroying itself.

Again...how? Certainly not through overpopulation. Do you mean spiritually? That we've lost touch with the land? Do you mean by not allowing people to die, we've allowed dysfunctional genes to propagate, and if we were a bit more ruthless we'd be healthier? Do you mean socially we've come to rely on gadgets for communication, and too many people interact over cellphones and the internet, and not enough face to face?

What's the nature of this destruction of which you speak?


[edit on 6-10-2009 by LordBucket]

reply to post by die_another_day


How shallow of an individual do you have to be to want to live "forever"? The older I get the less time I want to spend on this planet full of sheeple. Life on earth for us silly humans was not meant to last forever. We are born, poop happens and then we die, that pretty much sums up life. As cool as nanotech is, I'm just not that big into the end result....the singularity.

Originally posted by LordBucket
reply to post by Schmidt1989

 

technology has contributed to the human race destroying itself.

Again...how? Certainly not through overpopulation. Do you mean spiritually? That we've lost touch with the land? Do you mean by not allowing people to die, we've allowed dysfunctional genes to propagate, and if we were a bit more ruthless we'd be healthier? Do you mean socially we've come to rely on gadgets for communication, and too many people interact over cellphones and the internet, and not enough face to face?

What's the nature of this destruction of which you speak?

Thats precisely what I mean.

If we make the world as dense as Singapore, where to the animals go? Where do the earth's beauties go? Grand Canyon I guess would be filled in with offices... The pyramids of Giza would be torn down to make way for sky-rise apartment buildings. The moon sure wouldnt be as enjoyable to look at if we could see buildings on it, not to me.

And socially, of course! I'm surprised by how many people i've talked to in my life that couldnt tell me what color my eyes were, and I couldnt tell them theirs, either. Because nobody meets face to face anymore.

Of course, this is just me. I always said I shouldve been born either in 1979 (the 80s and 90s music is my favorite) or in 5,000bce.

reply to post by Schmidt1989

If we make the world as dense as Singapore, where to the animals go?

I've never been to Singapore. But I have been to Japan. Did you know that in Japan they have deer parks? As in, parks where deer live. Not zoos. The deer are not in enclosures at all. Both deer and people can come and go as they please.

And, a quick check on google reveals that even the center of super-dense Singapore has parks and trees and lakes

Grand Canyon I guess would be filled in with offices... The pyramids of Giza would be torn down to make way for sky-rise apartment buildings.

My point here is that even densely populated places like japan and sigapore are not all skyscrapers and concrete. There's no need to replace every last inch of natural beauty with apartment buildings.

There's a lot more room on this planet than people may realize.