any ideas?

only the obvious paradox: "There are no absolutes"

...and, it's obverse, "everything changes," or "this too shall pass." The only thing certain is that it won't be certain tomorow. Of course, that all hinges on your frame of reference. It's fairly certain that one day _you_ will die. (Paradoxically, the biggest change possible...) That's not true for your descendants, though. It's possible that if bioscience is advanced enough in a few hundred years your great great (great, etc...) grandchild might not have to croak. The future always holds more possibilities than you can posibly imagine, constantly overwhelming any barrier to change you might try to think up. Don't sweat it. Ride the wave.

Oh, I wouldn't want to NOT die. Imagine the earth with non-perishable people. I shudder. But I guess since we're in the realm of future, maybe we'll have other planets to inhabit (fuck up). Hey! I swore! Do I have to put a dollar in the swear jar? So right now, death is the only absolute? I would concurr. Not every place has taxes.

Here's an absolute for you: I am absolutly the STUPIDEST person on the face of the freaking earth. How 'bout that??

No you aren,t Gee,you are Unique,and you march to your own drum,and everyone wants to hook-up with that march.You are THAT good.

You're sweet, J.

isn't she though

. . . somehow i don't think that you can 'kill' engergy. reborn or some other option, . . .?

Well, the obvious consequence of immortality is the choice between massive overpopulation (and we're headed that way already) and infertility and stagnation. The Generation Gap is how societies evolve, how old predjudices. A society of immortals, frozen at our present level of thinking...assuming that we were truly immortal, torturing each other endlessly...would give Dante nightmares. Or even a society in which those who could afford protection were immortal, and the rest would live forever unless killed...an eternal ruling class. Or worse (and more likely in this age of Managed Care and Medicine for Profit Only), a society in which the Proliteriat changed, grew, and the wealthy never died, and could be rescuscitated from even the most grievous injury. Hideous. No, I'll take my immortality the old-fashioned way (Breed like a fucking rabbit, ZPG be damned), thank you. P.S. and a semi-relevant aside: I know reproducing is not politically correct these days, but I feel that my genetic code deserves to be carried on and I intend to reproduce myself. To any who would condemn reproduction...I respect your right to your opinion...It means more for my kids.

Jeez, I seem to be the only optimist when it comes to immortality. I think immortality would radically change people's conception of life. An immortal population wouldn't necessarily be an "old" population in the way we think of it. In our current conception, age generally brings on a "calcification" of the intellect, but that doesn't need to be the case. If the body was kept young, couldn't the mind be kept young? Also, immortality does not need to be something provided to a select few. The current line of thought is that the best way to acieve it will be through some form of nanotechnology, like a few strains of "helper viruses." Think of it: infectious immortality! That would be very difficult to contain, making it as egalitarian as the common cold. There are so many possibilities. I can't see why people so often focus only on the negative ones.

If people lived forever, we'd probably have to stop breeding, so we'd have room to turn around. Unless we expanded forward from Earth, in which case we'd have a couple more years before we had to stop breeding. I'd miss babies. However, it would be nice to see age become a little less important than it is now. How do you see immportality, Antigone? Do you picture a bunch of 20something year olds walking around with the wisdom of a few centuries, or would our bodies continue to age and fall apart? Most people when they think of it, imagian themselves in the prime of their life, but what if you became immortal when you were 80? I'm not sure I'd want to be old for forever.

I like to live in a world of make believe......Star Trek comes on every night at 11pm...ahhhh my utopia, traveling galaxies in a comfort class star cruiser, though not immortal is seems ........well.....you know.....comfortable.........longing for a captains chair

just to reiterate, do you think 'energy' can be . . . destroyed ?

I don,t know if this has anything to do with anything,but a friend of mine saw a show on t.v.,all these great minds got together,Steven Hawkings,those kind of minds.My friend said they were talking about fractuals,he said there is no end to anything,it has something to do with math.He said it scared him,that it looked like when your on acid and the visions keep morphing and that we never really end.Anybody see ths or hear about it?

fractals are infinite mathmatical equations (in laymens terms). And in regrads to computers, my friend had a pirate fractal program that was being passed around a few years back. Some of the programs took 3 days to load up, but once they did it appeared as a psychadelic array of colors and patterns on the computer screen. We just left it running in our dorm room for days. The Japanese Fighting fish in the tank next door to the monitor seemed to like it as well, foir a while anyway. I think we sent him to the fish funny farm. When the lights were out except the monitor with the trippy always-changing patterns, he could see his reflection in the tank and would be flared up for hours on end ready to fight. He eventually jumped to his death on that dirty dorm room floor.

The most interesting book on science I ever read was a book written in '88 called Three Scientists And Their Gods: Looking for meaning in an age of information. It was given to me by a religious guy who assumed it was one of those "reconciling god with religion" books. It wasn't. It was profiles of 3 different scientists and they way their work had influenced the way they saw the universe. The first one was the most interesting to me - a guy named Ed Fredkin ('puter guys might know the Fredkin Gate or Fredkin Prize.) He has a theory that the ultimate reality isn't matter or energy but information, and the universe is basically an infinite data-processing machine. Wild and unproveable, but it captured my imagination. The other two are Edward O. Wilson and Kenneth Boulding. Wilson is an insect biolgist (famous for his study of ant societies and the man who discovered pheremones)and the founder of sociobiology - the study of the way genetics shapes society and, if you got the time, human destiny. Boulding, last of the three profiles, is the only one who is actually religious in any way. He studies the effects of information technology on society. He sort of brings everything together. Anyway, it's a good book for layman. It's really a funny book (using cheeseburgers to help explain the 2nd law of thermodynamics, etc.) and the writing really carries you along even through knotty explanations of complexity, cellular automata and shit. It's not in print anymore, but you can probably find it in the library. This is my favorite passage from the book: "Now for the bonus question: What does it mean that some fairly reasonable (as these things go) attempts to extract purpose and meaning from evolution bear results remarkably like longstanding doctrine of world's great religions? Is it just a coincidence? Fredkin probably would say so. Wilson probably would say that it has something to do with pragmatic criteria of selection in the genetic and cultural evolution that gave birth to religion. Boulding probably would smile enigmatically and say something vague and suggestive. Personally, I don't know what to think. But I think about it alot."

And any anthropologist (I am not an anthropologist, but I was raised by them) would probably tell you that a mythology is the attempt on the part of a society to explain its environment. Well, by those standards science qualifies. And I would tell you that, based on the anthropological definition of mythology, what you are seeing is a continuation of a pattern of the mythologies of our culture reflecting the same biases in the conclusions that the priests draw from them. I'm not sure how clear this next bit's going to be. I would also, were I feeling particularly arrogant and dogmatic in my relativism, point out that perhaps your confusion comes from your assumption that the epistemology of science is somehow better than those that have come before it...or, well, maybe it is (it is, of course, superior by its own standards, but that is hardly meaningful), but even if it is (it may or may not be. I do not believe in an ultimate morality), the conclusions of the priests of this new mythology are no more exempt from the cultural influences that were brought to bear on the priests of the last one, or the one before that.

Alright . I'll bite. Nope, energy can neither be created or destroyed, yes? Now that I've stepped in it, what's your conclusion? And, Gee, I guess my idea of immortality is that we'd have a choice as to what kind of body we could have. After all, if we could control aging we could probably manipulate other things as well. So, hopefully, it would all be about a greater degree of choice. And, fractals... They're objects of infinite complexity. The "frac" part comes from the fact that their dimension is a fraction. A line is a one dimentional object. It only has length. A plane has two dimensions, length and width. Well a fractal has some dimension in between two whole numbers, like 1.5. (Actually, this isn't always true, but it's a good approximation.) The infinite complexity comes in because the fractal shape tries to "cram" itself into a smaller dimension, resulting to too much infomation being stored in too small a "space." What's really cool about them is that in some fractals this complexity takes the form of infinitely repeating patterns. You can see a pattern, then zoom in on a small part of that pattern and see the patern repeat. It leads me to the possibility that, if the universe is fractal in nature, there could be other representations of us or our consciousnesses at a different level of "size" in the universe. Sort of gives new meaning to the idea that we were made in god's image. (This statement coming from an avowed agnostic, even!) Once I learned about fractals I never looked at the world the same way again. They're everywhere: in waves, in plants, in the patterns on your skin. Everywhere. Their discovery, and the corresponding discovery of chaos mathematics, has got to be one of the most significant scientific discovery of this century. It's some neat shit!

I can tell you i know very little about chaos theory, much less quantum physics...however, the sheer simplistic concept is amusing to toy with. The idea that our lives each have millions of endless possibilities, circumstances and facets, say like when Jean Luc Picard gets trapped in a parallel universe, (usually by the evil Cue). Or better yet the episode in which there is a disrutpion in a quantum energy field and all of the parallel universes collide and hundreds of Starship Enterprises are looking right at another. In that sense are we immortal? Their is still a ticker, so to speak on all of those other existences...........pardon the TV Baby's version of it. Nonetheless, I don't necessary believe it to be true. Quantum physics are hardly proveable, yes? Just theory. I like to think, I AM ABSOLUTE, that I AM THE ONE FOR SURE. I can't bank on others, but I can feel my heart, I can..........you name it....I can. I am the absolute till the physics of my carbon based machine wear out. My body is not absolute, but, in spirit I am, MY existence NOW is. What I set forth today, tommorow and yesterday was an absolute. Nevermind success, nevermind failure, whatever the outcome, it was MY absolute. (stepping down) ok, i think I get it..............i need a drink to think about all that..... what happened to the sex threads

Antigone - I don't see that. I mean, I dislike the idea of drinking some magic potion when I'm 80 and all of a sudden my body reverts to it's perky 20's. What if I wasn't perky in my 20's? The way I see it, it might be possible to Stop the aging process (uh, in theory. No scientific mojo backing me up here.), but to reverse it seems unlikly. Waffels - uh...of all the comments made on this entire page, what do I pick up on right away? ---> Isn't it "Q"?

right, sorry, you must be a TV Baby too....

Q is not evil, he's amoral. There's a difference.

just like i'm not evil. i'm just morally challenged.

indeed you are

Quantum theory is quite provable, my Belgian friend. That's what particle accelerators are for. Although, I must admit, I have to trust the scientific type people on that, not being a physicist myself. (I could never stand most physicists. For some reason the science attracts arrogant people...) And, Gee, maybe if you weren't perky in your 20s you could take a potion that would perkify you to the level you would have been if you were a perky 20 year old. Or, something like that. What I mean is that more choice would be involved. Did you know that by the end of this year all of the human genetic code will be mapped out? That's an incredible amount of information! And with that information will soon come the ability to manipulate our genes directly: we'll be able to program our genetic code like a computer in under a century, I believe. With knowledge comes power, and with power comes choice, including the choice to let nature take it's normal course. But, you're probably right that this won't help us much. Age might damage the body too much. But, for our children and grandchildren, it might just mean immortality, and even more.

"You will never be happy if you continue to look for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life." -Camus Fuck god, science, absolutes, everthang. Drink cold, crisp Martinis in the night air while listening Mingus really fucking loud. Better git it in your soul.

I like you whoever you are, Mingus in the bass years or Mingus on the ivory's? eitherway, that sounds reeeel good right about now

I was under the influence of Mingus on bass - Mingus Ah Um ('59).

I have this amazing disc with Max Roach on drums and the Duke on the keys and Charles on the bass, man that fucker rips.........

damn right. but then, i love bass. i mean i really love bass. i have a bass fetish. it is the music of my soul.

i am a drummer as well, I hear ya, halleluja

bass and drums, baby. everthin' else is just...icing. gotta go. they're threatening to tow my car.

"bass and drums, baby. everthin' else is just...icing." That's going up on my wall, man.

Anyone see the special last night on ABC about time? looks like a great series, 7 more episodes.Titled: "Nightline:Brave New World with Robert Krulwich" on Thursday 10pm ABC, Eastern. "They Might be Giants" had a great black and white video/tune during this episode. (The Amish a slowly buying cell phones.)

Speaking of bass, remember the Driveways, Two drummers, five bass players, that's it. vocals.

this fucker has to work for ABC, stop it with the incessant plugs already....

Where is Ted Koppel, I've got to buy him some lunch. Right Now. spread out

science throws out the old explanations in favor of new and better ones. that is the difference between it and mythology/religion.

when science finds out it has been wrong, it accepts the new and more elegant solution. from what I remember of cosmology class, tycho brahe could predict the positions of the planets, but his explanation was convoluted. later copernicus could do the same, but his ideas about a heliocentric system made better sense. I think mythology/religion got pissed and killed him or made him repent or something, but I heard on his latest trip to poland, the pope apologized and said his countryman, not his church, was right all along. when mythology/religion finds out it has been wrong, it fights back in anger. it puts john scopes on trial, it labels copernicus a heretic, it starts "creation science" organizations. science is not a religion or mythology. (although the religion of modern science - worship of the Grant - sometimes leads it into unholy unions, we can't put the idea of science on the same level as that of mythology/religion).

who's the guy who played with mold and discovered penicillin's antibiotic effects? today, as I recover from my first-ever bladder infection, I would like to personally canonize him. thank you, thank you, thank you!

I'd forgotten what grade-school reports sounded like. stolen from: http://hillside.coled.umn.edu/tesseract/Max/report.html (St.) Alexander Fleming was Scottish. He moved from Scotland to London. He fought in a war that took place in South Africa. He lived from 1881 to 1955. He was the inventor of penicillin. He discovered penicillin in 1928. He was a bacteriologist. He came up with penicillin when he was trying find a way to kill bacteria. Before he discovered penicillin he came up with lysozyme, something that kills the germs that aren't very serious and do not cause diseases. Alexander Fleming found out about penicillin accidently. When Alexander Fleming first saw penicillin it did not look like the medicine we have these days, it looked like some blue mold. Fleming knew it could be a kind of medicine because he noticed that around the mold the bacteria had disappeared. The blue mold that Alexander Fleming saw in his dish destroying bacteria was penicillin. Penicillin was completed in 1940 by some other scientists in Britain. After penicillin was completed, Alexander Fleming collected 25 honorary degrees, 26 metals, 18 prizes, 13 decorations, a membership in 87 scientific academies and societies. He was knighted in 1944, then in 1945 he received the noble prize for physiology or medicine. Penicillin was the first antibiotic drug and it was first used to cure soldiers in World War II. Penicillin is almost completely harmless, even in large doses. Bibliography Penicillin: Sir Flemings Moldy Dish Penicillin Kaye, Judith., The life of Alexander Fleming New York ': 1993. Tames, Richard., Alexander Fleming New York: 1990.

Cyst, you are saying that science makes more sense in terms of the epistemology of science. You are also assuming that other mythologies are static. They are not. When things are proven wrong by the epistemology of a mythology, they are changed. F'rinstance, let's use the Church...when the current Pope thinks something previously believed is wrong, it is replaced, changed. Papal infalliability is part of the epistemology of the Church. Just as empirical observation is part of the epistemology of science. Both of them have built in assumptions. I'm sure you can see the Church's assumptions. Most people are not afraid to confront the flaws of the previous way of thinking. However, science assumes: The accuracy of our measuring devices and our senses. The idea that, if something has happened one way before, it will do the same again. The simplest explanation is most likely to be true. Science also assumes our ability to figure out the laws of the Universe with any degree of accuracy. It also assumes that what we learn will be meaningful. Now, I'll take science over religion any day, but then, I was born in the 20th century, so I am biased. And the fact that I, personally, having born and bred to it, prefer science, does not make it infalliable as a way of looking at the world.

we live longer now so we have more time to try to remember what "epistemology" means; therefore, science is better.

Lifespan is a very good scientific way of judging a way of living.

yeah. it comes up a lot in mythology/religion too. the greek gods lived forever and the really great mortals like perseus and hercules could be put up in the heavens forever, if only as constellations. john 3:16 and all that. the longer the better seems to be the consensus. and I don't think that most religions and mythologies are really that quick to change, as science is. scientists are always looking for new discoveries, trying to change the standard paradigms for better ones.

Look, according to the scientific way of thinking, we live longer now. But according to its own way of thinking, we lived forever when we had the Church. Science is not as dynamic as you think...hence the resistance of the old line to Einstein's ideas, and the resistance of the next line (including Einstein) to quantum physics, and the resistance of the scientific community to chaos theory, which has not been using it, even though they acknowledge its plausibility. Neither is the Church as static as you think. It just evolves by schism and new sect. I would, all things considered, say that science does move faster than the Church. Does that make it inherently better? You have stability on one hand, and flexibility on the other. I have stated my preference, but I am not so arrogant as to claim that it is the Absolute Only Truth.... There is no Absolute Only Truth, just a bunch of subjective experiences, whether individual or cultural.

Forgive me, but I'm slow. Back to immortality: if people were immortal, what would happen to them when the sun dies and the earth is burned away?