Quote from: Spaceman_Spiff on March 22, 2015, 08:05:06 PM

Then why did you call the desire for eternal youth naive? Why not state clearly what your opinion on the matter is?

Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, it was taken for granted that humans would soon be colonizing the Moon and other planets, and space travel woudl become as banal as air travel in those days, and that getting out to space should be the first priority of mankind, etc.. I recall a Life Magazine timetable, provided by space specialists, that predicted of humans landing on Mars by 1980.

Well, that was a naive prediction, of course. With better knowledge of the limitations of human physiology and of space travel technology, that schedule had to be pushed to an indefinite future.

But, mainly, knowledge of the true character of the Martian environment, the experience of all those years of manned space programs, and the development of robotic vehicles, have caused many people to realize that the wish itself was naive. People asked themselves, why do we exactly want to land and live on Mars; and the answers were no longer as easy as they were in the 1970s.

Scientific research? Robot vehicles can do it better and much cheaper (for one thing, we do not need to bring them back). Ensuring mankind survival from a catastrophe? A space colony will, for many generations, be infinitely more fragile than humans on Earth. Political independence? A space colony will be unable to survive without lots of support from Earth. Freedom? Life in a space colony will be like in a penal colony, only worse. Making money? There seems to be nothing out there that would be worth mining and bringing back...

So, it turned out that, in the 1970s, we did not quite know what "colonizing space" meant. Once we understood it better, the wish largely cooled off. It is quite possible that, in a more distant future, technology will be developed that will make us again want to colonizing space and the planets; but today that no longer a common dream.

Sure, there are still a few enthusiastic scientists and amateurs who keep pursuing that dream, and some state and private projects that cater to them. Even for those enthusiasts, space flight seems to be more like a stunt, a nerd's version of climbing Mt Everest, than a dream of living their life in space.

This disillusionement stared already after the first few Apollo landings, when the scientific returns decreased and public got bored. The manned Space Shuttle still made sense at the time, but after the two disasters it came to be seen as a bad idea, and it was allowed to die without offspring. When the International Space Station project started, there were already many who saw it as a colossal waste of money, that would not bring any significant return, economic or scientific; that would be wasteful even for the purpose of perfecting the technology of manned space travel. And I believe they were right. NASA was developed basically to realize the Apollo project, but the ISS project was developed basically to justify the preservation of NASA's budget (and the revenue of the manned space industry).

So, I think that the wish for eternal youth is naive in that same sense. Not that it is impossible or somehow "wrong", but that it is based on a fuzzy and probably wrong idea of what "ethernal youth" really means, and why we should want to have it. Do we wish to live forever as we are, or should we want to become something else? Do we want to to be children forever, or to grow up? Do we want to live forever as dinosaurs, or to become monkeys? How can we change radically, while remaining the same individuals?

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But then I don't get why you keep hammering on the 'evolution choose this length of life' argument. Yes people grow to be more or less 70-80 years old these days, so what? I might be misinterpreting your words again, but your arguments sound somewhat teleological to me.

But natural evolution did define the average length of human life, just as it defined it as 12-15 years for a cat, or 100-150 years for a Galapagos turtle. There is nothing teleological there; that lifespan was obviously the best one for our species in our native environment (and note that it is pretty universal -- there are no environments or human populations where people are old at 20, or still young at 200).

Natural selection also resulted in all parts of our bodies and minds being designed to last only that long, because it would be a waste of resources to make them more durable, or self-repairable beyond that.

The fact that technology so far has only doubled our average lifespan (largely by eliminating predators and diseases, and by providing abundant healthy food) actually shows that the obstacles to life extension, even in the biological sense only, are rather formidable. Again, it is not just a matter of preventing the shortening of telomeres...

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By the way, I never said I had any respect for Silbert

Sorry, by "you" I meant the bitcoin community in general.