Hey Spammers, Take That!

Well, after getting sick of comment spam and finally getting myself to upgrade Movabletype to version 3.14, I'm now current, with MT-Blacklist installed and the recent move by Google to help reduce comment spam with a no-follow plugin, but I'm sure spammers won't care and still blast the hell out of sites. Atleast I feel like I've got a fighting chance again.

Yesterday a post on Slashdot came on the question of do you want to live forever?, which really makes you think if living forever would be so great. If scientists got to the point where they could eliminate all diseases and health problems, create a way to reverse aging, there would still be the problem of what to do when people stopped dying. Would murder, accidents and wars be the only way for people to die, or would they be able to fix people no matter what?

I am equally committed to making that age as close to our biologically probable maximum of approximately 120 years as modern biomedicine can achieve, and also to efforts at decreasing and compressing the years of morbidity and disabilities now attendant on extreme old age.

120 years old is not quite forever, but think about it. You could retire at 70 and still live for another 50 years. No wonder Social Security is in trouble, of course maybe if this starts to happen, people will have to wait until they are much older to receive benefits. If someone could really live to be 120, then why not work until they were over 100 years old? It could be possible if all the problems of old age were eliminated.

De Grey projects that 15 years after we have rejuvenated mice we might begin to reverse aging in humans. Early, limited success in extending the human life span will be followed by successive, more dramatic breakthroughs, so that humans now living could reach what de Grey calls 'life extension escape velocity.' De Grey concedes that it might be 100 years before we begin to significantly extend human life.

So basically someone born today might reap these benefits someday, but for now it doesn't look like any of us will, unless maybe you are cryogenically frozen. Ted Williams still might play for the Red Sox again one day.

With the passion of a single-minded zealot crusading against time, he has issued the ultimate challenge, I believe, to our entire concept of the meaning of humanness.

But really, just how human do you want to be?

monkeyinabox said: