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Immortality Only 20 Years Away.

post #1 of 12
9/23/09 at 9:23am
Thread Starter 
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/s...scientist.html

I got dibbs on being The Kurrgan.
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post #2 of 12
9/23/09 at 9:30am
I think there's already a thread with this dude's ideas, but a large chunk of the scientific community refer to Kurzweil's wishful thinking as one of the most creative (and public) midlife crises ever.
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post #3 of 12
9/23/09 at 10:06am
Great, and here comes 2012 to screw it all up.
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post #4 of 12
9/23/09 at 10:17am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Phil View Post
I think there's already a thread with this dude's ideas, but a large chunk of the scientific community refer to Kurzweil's wishful thinking as one of the most creative (and public) midlife crises ever.
This. I mean the dude wants to clone/rebuild his dead father and is pretty clearly terrified of death.
He's actually a fascinating psychological study.
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post #5 of 12
9/23/09 at 10:48am
He's like the Ron Popeil of transhumanism. Don't get too excited.
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post #6 of 12
9/23/09 at 11:11am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ryan Bean View Post
This. I mean the dude wants to clone/rebuild his dead father and is pretty clearly terrified of death.
He's actually a fascinating psychological study.
Someone make this man watch Creator!
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post #7 of 12
9/23/09 at 11:49am
Kurzweil is undeniably a weird, eccentric dude with serious hang-ups, and his plan to "resurrect" his father is bonkers. He also might be right about many of his predictions. And he's not alone in his speculation along these lines.

Intel's CTO thinks human-level intelligence in machines in likely: http://www.networkworld.com/news/200...w.html?hpg1=bn

There's a graduate studies program at the NASA Ames Research Facility called Singularity University. Kurzweil is the chancellor, but the board includes a Nobel winning physicist, among others: http://singularityu.org/

The New Yorker (The New Yorker!) just ran this amazing and lengthy piece on Synthetic Biology: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2...a_fact_specter

Quote:
The ultimate goal, however, is to create a synthetic organism made solely from chemical parts and blueprints of DNA. In the mid-nineties, Craig Venter, working at the Institute for Genomic Research, and his colleagues Clyde Hutchison and Hamilton Smith began to wonder whether they could pare life to its most basic components and then use those genes to create such an organism. They began modifying the genome of a tiny bacterium called Mycoplasma genitalium, which contained four hundred and eighty-two genes (humans have about twenty-three thousand) and five hundred and eighty thousand letters of genetic code, arranged on one circular chromosome—the smallest genome of any cell that has been grown in laboratory cultures. Venter and his colleagues then removed genes one by one to find a minimal set that could sustain life.

Venter called the experiment the Minimal Genome Project. By the beginning of 2008, his team had pieced together thousands of chemically synthesized fragments of DNA and assembled a new version of the organism. Then, using nothing but chemicals, they produced from scratch the entire genome of Mycoplasma genitalium. “Nothing in our methodology restricts its use to chemically synthesized DNA,” Venter noted in the report of his work, which was published in Science. “It should be possible to assemble any combination of synthetic and natural DNA segments in any desired order.” That may turn out to be one of the most understated asides in the history of science. Next, Venter intends to transplant the artificial chromosome into the walls of another cell and then “boot it up,” thereby making a new form of life that would then be able to replicate its own DNA—the first truly artificial organism. (Activists have already named the creation Synthia.) Venter hopes that Synthia and similar products will serve essentially as vessels that can be modified to carry different packages of genes. One package might produce a specific drug, for example, and another could have genes programmed to digest carbon in the atmosphere.
Quote:
I wondered how much of this was science fiction. Endy stood up. “Can I show you something?” he asked, as he walked over to a bookshelf and grabbed four gray bottles. Each one contained about half a cup of sugar, and each had a letter on it: A, T, C, or G, for the four nucleotides in our DNA. “You can buy jars of these chemicals that are derived from sugarcane,” he said. “And they end up being the four bases of DNA in a form that can be readily assembled. You hook the bottles up to a machine, and into the machine comes information from a computer, a sequence of DNA—like T-A-A-T-A-G-C-A-A. You program in whatever you want to build, and that machine will stitch the genetic material together from scratch. This is the recipe: you take information and the raw chemicals and compile genetic material. Just sit down at your laptop and type the letters and out comes your organism.”

We don’t have machines that can turn those sugars into entire genomes yet. Endy shrugged. “But I don’t see any physical reason why we won’t,” he said. “It’s a question of money. If somebody wants to pay for it, then it will get done.” He looked at his watch, apologized, and said, “I’m sorry, we will have to continue this discussion another day, because I have an appointment with some people from the Department of Homeland Security.”

I was a little surprised. “They are asking the same questions as you,” he said. “They want to know how far is this really going to go.”
Quote:
“Do you know how we study aging?” Endy continued. “The tools we use today are almost akin to cutting a tree in half and counting the rings. But if the cells had a memory we could count properly. Every time a cell divides, just move the counter by one. Maybe that will let me see them changing with a precision nobody can have today. Then I could give people controllers to start retooling those cells. Or we could say, Wow, this cell has divided two hundred times, it’s obviously lost control of itself and become cancer. Kill it. That lets us think about new therapies for all kinds of diseases.”

Synthetic biology is changing so rapidly that predictions seem pointless. Even that fact presents people like Endy with a new kind of problem. “Wayne Gretzky once said, ‘I skate to where the puck is going to be.’ That’s what you do to become a great hockey player,” Endy told me. “But where do you skate when the puck is accelerating at the speed of a rocket, when the trajectory is impossible to follow? Whom do you hire and what do we ask them to do? Because what preoccupies our finest minds today will be a seventh-grade science project in five years. Or three years.

“We are surfing an exponential now, and, even for people who pay attention, surfing an exponential is a really tricky thing to do. And when the exponential you are surfing has the capacity to impact the world in such a fundamental way, in ways we have never before considered, how do you even talk about that? ”
Quote:
The industrial age is drawing to a close, eventually to be replaced by an era of biological engineering. That won’t happen easily (or quickly), and it will never solve every problem we expect it to solve. But what worked for artemisinin can work for many of the products our species will need to survive. “We are going to start doing the same thing that we do with our pets, with bacteria,” the genomic futurist Juan Enriquez has said, describing our transition from a world that relied on machines to one that relies on biology. “A house pet is a domesticated parasite,” he noted. “ It is evolved to have an interaction with human beings. Same thing with corn”—a crop that didn’t exist until we created it. “Same thing is going to start happening with energy,” he went on. “We are going to start domesticating bacteria to process stuff inside enclosed reactors to produce energy in a far more clean and efficient manner. This is just the beginning stage of being able to program life.” ♦
Here's a working research scientist who believes the human brain could be functionally modeled and simulated within 10 years: http://www.physorg.com/news171565512.html

Here's Kurzweil himself giving a talk at Google in July: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43zo82W7aPI

Here's Vernor Vinge, who is credited with coining the modern understanding and terminology of the Singularity: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHqNl44JWD8
And here's a persuasive piece from him: http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/biomedi...he-singularity

I've read Kurzweil's books. His data and his arguments regarding exponential change are pretty persuasive, to me. Is he a bit nuts? Probably. But he's also probably a genius.

Sure, one should be skeptical. But I certainly think it behooves people to keep these possibilities in the back of their minds.
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post #8 of 12
9/23/09 at 11:59am
Quote:
Venter and his colleagues then removed genes one by one to find a minimal set that could sustain life.
I think one of the results of that study was that organisms are also the product of assumed "junk" genes.

It's been a while since I read on that, but that's what I remember about it.
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post #9 of 12
9/25/09 at 7:05pm
I read some were this year that DNA computing is now over 17k Base pairs, and will be over one million Base pairs in twenty years. Is it might be possible for reverse the effects of aging and other disease in twenty years. It may also be possible to make anyone into a superman with in 20 years, but Dead is dead. Some people just need to stop trying to kick the dead horse.
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post #10 of 12
9/25/09 at 7:41pm
Quote:
"Nanotechnology will extend our mental capacities to such an extent we will be able to write books within minutes.

"If we want to go into virtual-reality mode, nanobots will shut down brain signals and take us wherever we want to go. Virtual sex will become commonplace. And in our daily lives, hologram like figures will pop in our brain to explain what is happening.
http://paleo-future.blogspot.com/
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post #11 of 12
9/25/09 at 7:45pm
Nice link.

Quote:
Francis Keally thinks that our future cities will spread out over great areas like monstrous eagles. One hundred years from today we shall have no batteries of skyscrapers to point out to our trans-Atlantic visitors. On the contrary our future cities, because of the aerial eye, will be flat-topped, and two out of every three buildings will serve as some kind of landing area for a super-auto gyroplane or a transcontinental express. What towers there are will be built at a great distance from the airports and will serve as mooring masts for giant dirigibles. The architects of our future aerial cities may have to go back to places like Constantinople and Fez for their inspiration of these future flat-topped aerial cities where one finds a low horizontal character to the entire city, occasionally broken here and there by a praying tower or a minaret.
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post #12 of 12
9/25/09 at 7:51pm
Quote:
What towers there are will be built at a great distance from the airports and will serve as mooring masts for giant dirigibles.
Shit, I hope Bruce Willis doesn't kick the bucket in the next 20 years, we need to keep him nice and cyborg-immortal so that in 100 years time we'll actually get that Die Hard on a Dirigible movie on track.
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