Reply To: Toshiba's "Micro Nuclear Reactor" – it's not fusion, but it's here now

[wolfram]

Rezwan wrote: The cost…”Kurzweil ingests “250 supplements, eight to 10 glasses of alkaline water and 10 cups of green tea” every day and drinks several glasses of red wine a week in an effort to “reprogram” his biochemistry.[45] Lately, he has cut down the number of supplement pills to 150.[46]” I want PIE! Do or die! The red wine sounds OK.

yeah, kurzweil’s method is expensive [em]and it doesn’t work.[/em] Should we say that all nuclear fusion is going to be exhorbitantly priced based on how expensive ITER is, or heaven forbid, NIF?

Longevity is so under developed at the moment that predicting some of it’s inherent properties and then assuming your predictions have to be true is intellectually dishonest. Consider the various possibilities, Will it work equally well on all specimens? few treatments work universally as it is now. What kind of cost will it be? will those costs be amenable to economies of scale? what parts of our biological system does it interact with? There are so many parameters wiggling about that we could fill books with speculation and collect no data.

I mean I could postulate a particular brand of immortality (gain an increase to your life span proportional to the amount of life span of the person you murder) which is totally ethically reprehensible, and I could equally well postulate one that is much more acceptable (vaccine against natural death that, as an unavoidable side effect from gene repair mechanisms, renders you sterile). Both are completely fictional, both have completely different arguments about whether or not they are good.

For an interesting collection of thoughts people have already had on immortality, consider http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Immortality

We can see that some effort has already been put into characterizing the various types of fictitious states of human longevity, obviously types 1 and 0 are physically impossible due to A.) entropy and B.) a lack of authorial intent in the universe, type 6 would kind of suck, type 3 or 2 is probably the goal of the transhumanists, types 9 and 10 are ethically dubious. I could go on and on.