Immortality!!!!!!!

[CalvinandHobbes]

Read somewhere today that immortality through medical advances is just around the corner (10 years or so). So the question begs will procreation become illegal or will immortality become illegal?????????????
Thoughts please.............

[berni_mccoy]

1. Can you starve to death if you are immortal? If not, then no problem. If you can, then is it...

immortality?

[CalvinandHobbes]

5. That was not the question.

[berni_mccoy]

7. Sure it is. The only reason to make either immortality or reproduction illegal is

to manage population explosion over resources. If people could live forever, but still need water and food, then we are going to run out of resources and people are going to starve. If you don't want people to starve, then you have to regulate how many people exist.

[dysfunctional press]

20. delete

wrong place

[MNDemNY]

2. I say forced abortions, cloning, and death panels.

Truly a liberal's paradise.

[Sal Minella]

25. More death panels, more death panels.

We may need two or three just to bring down Joe Biden's mother, judging from the way she sounds.

[FSogol]

3. Let's hold off on immortality until the baby-boomers are gone.

;-)

[Liberal In Texas]

8. When the the Young Republicans disappear?

Dream on.

[MNDemNY]

27. You mean..... the rapture???

Life will be good when the "righteous" have been "risen".

[shadowknows69]

4. The "right" people will have access to it

The rest of us will serve them burgers.

[Sal Minella]

22. Or be burgers.

[shadowknows69]

24. Tuesday is Soylent Shadow day!!!!

[tekisui]

6. I don't think its anything we will ever have to worry about.

[Fumesucker]

9. In society today immortality would be constrained by the accident rate.

I recall reading that around three hundred years or so would be the average life span if accidental death was the only sort.

That's been quite a while so the figures could have changed or I could be remembering it wrong.

The costs and benefits of immortality have long been a subject for speculation in written science fiction. Clifford Simak won both the Nebula and Hugo awards in 1981 for "Grotto of the Dancing Deer" a short story outlining the possible costs of immortality.

http://www.nicholaswhyte.info/sf/gdd.htm

[Libertas1776]

10. I highly doubt that...

and if it were theoretically possible, I imagine it would mean being constantly put through degenerating forms of preservation until the point where you are merely a disembodied head in a jar.

That being said, who the fuck would want to live forever? I mean, seriously. Eventually you're gonna get sick of this little blue marble, and unless there are other planets and galaxies to explore and live on to bide your time, your gonna want to check out eventually and cross to the other side of that great mysterious yonder.

[Fumesucker]

11. What if immortality can only be conferred before puberty?

And freezes physical development at a pre-pubescent state?

A society of immortal children would be interesting to observe.

[berni_mccoy]

13. "A society of immortal children would be interesting to observe" -- well... take out the immortal

and you have our current situation. The kids get it right more often than the adults.

[Fumesucker]

14. You really think so?

Growing up is a process of learning from your mistakes.

As the old saw goes, growing old is mandatory, growing up is optional.

And then there is the other old saw about "Hire teenagers while they still know everything".

Too many of us never grow up.

[YOY]

12. Great so we have a small number (and growing) of the elites that refuse to die.

Accumulating mental diseases (because let's face it we are not mentally capable of handling the concept of living 100+ years in good health without blowing some kind of gasket) while the rest of us wait on them hand in foot.

Sounds like fucking paradise.

[Libertas1776]

15. When protests, uprisings, and revolutions

fail, the grim reaper is basically our last resort, the inevitable equalizer. Sure the elites and dictators with all the power can probably keep death at bay for a good while with all the advanced treatments they can afford, but eventually, like everything else in life, they gotta bite the dust. Immortality can stuff it, I prefer the natural way of things, birth, life, death, repeat and so forth.

[ret5hd]

16. i think it's "birth school work death".

[Alcibiades]

17. This claim is laughable

I don't think it's impossible, but ten years away? Not in my lifetime.

[Libertas1776]

18. I agree

and even if it is theoretically possible for some point in the distant future, it will still have that bad pr from movies like "Death Becomes Her"

Who the hell want's to end up like this :rofl:

[ChoppinBroccoli]

19. It Won't Happen

Immortality will never happen. The only kind of immortality is the kind Ted Williams has achieved.

In thousands of years of EVOLUTION (that's right, I said it), the human life expectancy has only increased by what? 40 or 50 years? Maybe in another thousand years or so, life expectancy will go to over 100, but true immortality will never happen unless you make yourself a cyborg (and then are you REALLY alive?)

[dysfunctional press]

21. it would mean the death of a lot of religions...

why would immortals have to be concerned with their place in the afterlife...?

[JackRiddler]

23. Shall we really saddle the youth of 2130 with Madonna, Bill Gates and the FOX anchors?

The slogan of the uprising can already be predicted:

KILL THE IMMORTALS.

[lunatica]

26. Yeah, but will they all get Dementia?

Drooling and incontinent people stuck in immortal bodies....

And people having to care for them forever...