Immortality will probably require nanobots keeping DNA from switching itself off. We are programmed to live just long enough to leave a few descendents behind and feed them long enough to keep the line moving.

BTW, skiing on Phobos would be very boring. Tiny gravity means very slow downhill accel.

A gradual replacement of parts of the bio-brain with e-parts would be a middle ground, probably significantly more attainable than a real-time melding, though it’s still probably significantly more difficult than a one-time destructive transfer. You’d still have some issues with integrating the bio-parts with the e-parts (different time scales, etc) but you don’t have to have all of both systems working simultaneously and in parallel while still communicating with each other.

This leads to a number of questions: If the connection isn’t completely seamless, will our brains be able to cope with two or more highly similar “selfs,” one or more of which are running on a much faster time scale? Or will this be more likely to lead to psychosis instead? How do you handle the immense data transfer rates that would be required, and how do you get the information in and out of the brain without disrupting the brain’s activities? How do you integrate two or more personalities who are operating on such radically different time scales?

This is however a rather different scenario than the one proposed by Itskov, who assumes that this would be a one-time transfer without any prior melding. In that case the new e-self might feel that it had a continuum of consciousness, but in all likelihood the bio-self would not perceive it in this way.

Your thesis would work equally well if you were talking about the replacement of horses for transportation: They were once universally used for transportation, and clearly there was a lot of capital invested in horses for that purpose and a lot of people who based their lives around them, but once things like trains, cars, and airplanes were perfected the horses were no longer useful for general transportation (they are still used, of course, in some isolated areas – but this is a diminishing market). The old-school “processes” or “conspiracies” or whatever you want to call them were unable to stem the tide of progress. And so it would be here.

The one thing that does tend to slow research into things like cancer has nothing whatsoever to do with an attempt by some faceless “industry” to maintain their current cash flow at the expense of products that they foresee that could result in the elimination of cancer; rather, it’s that the easiest (and therefore the cheapest and quickest to find) new “discoveries” are going to be things that are similar to existing knowledge in the field, rather than doing the backbreaking and groundbreaking (and immensely expensive) basic research required for a major advance when you don’t have any idea which line of inquiry would be the most profitable. In fact, that’s the idea behind having governments, foundations, and Universities fund basic research – its payoff is often too uncertain and too far in the future for many private companies to afford it. But you can be certain that once the breakthroughs in basic research have been made, private companies and Universities will be right behind them in finding applications.

It copies from source to destination, then deletes source. In human terms, that is not continuity of existence since source gets “killed”.

Drinking the Kool-Aid indeed.

The Avatar isn’t you. It’s another being that has your memories and personality at the moment of its creation, but from that moment on “you” and “it” diverge as different people with different memories and experiences. For example, what if one of us has a religious conversion, or gets married and moves to Portugal? Are we then the same person? No.

The only immortality that counts for me is biological immortality. “I” am indivisible from my physical brain. None of “you” are getting out of that brain alive.

This may or may not be influencing cancer research, but an incentive against a cure is plain to see, and I haven’t heard of us curing anything since polio (and yes I know it wasn’t *technically* cured)

BTW, I don’t think this takes a conspiracy or anything nutty like that. Industries (just like governments, individual businesses, non-profits, clubs, and even the way we run our personal lives) are built on processes (think strong habits involving many people). Incentives which sustain those processes inevitably shape them.

PS. Did you look at http://www.fightaging.org Lots of link to advice on how to extend your remaining years.

But on the other hand, in 20 years medical science will be able to get into the cell nucleus and stop the telomeres from unraveling, and the DNA from suffering transcription errors during cell division. This just might stop aging and even cause the body to rejuve.

Yeah, I prefer having sex with my wife for reproduction as well.

Give Yourself the Peace of Mind Only an Independent Organic Host Provides

Choices, choices, choices…

Lots of stuff is being done to, as you say, “find the code to the program” – and likely it will bear very much fruit over the next 20 years.

Assuming the superintelligence lets/allows you to commit suicide. See Harlan Ellison’s, “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream.” You could be in for a literal implementation of eternal damnation.

Or a healthy Nietzschean outlook.

Why do you think many people choose to have their own biological children? It’s the best they can do at the moment to achieve a somewhat rudimentary copy of themselves. The problem with the West (Eurosphere) is they don’t seem to have enough ego, at least in regard to their personal selves. It hasn’t gone unnoticed that the West is shrivelling, with far fewer that replacement level native birth rates. No mater, people are fungible, import more. They seem to have a very high regard for their culture though and are aggressively trying to spread it, make the world safe for democracy and all that. They literally believe that “the culture” and “the people”, undergirding it, are independent entities. No other culture believes this. Japan is investing in robot developement rather than import Koreans for jobs the Japanese “don’t want to do.”

Why, to continue to manifest one’s will of course. Do you think the current goals and interests of The Ford Foundation are anything like what they would be if “Henry Ford” was still in charge of it?