Quote:
Originally Posted by QuantumIguana
I'm highly skeptical - at best - of this article, but the problem isn't with thermodynamics, it with the complexity of the system. We could keep a car running forever, barring a catastrophic accident, replacing one part at a time as it wore out. It just ceases to be economical to do so. We just don't know enough about the human body, and while nanotech has great promise, the more grandiose claims are a long way away, if they are even possible.
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Nope. First of all you can't simply exclude catastrophic events (accidents, being killed in storms, wars, etc.) from the equation. Lets say you essentially end human aging and eliminate natural causes as a source of death. Ok, well, then we have to assume accident becomes the primary source of death. Right now, the average person has a much better than 1 in 100 chance of dying in an accident (1 chance in 84 of being killed in a car). For the sake of the argument, I will say that improvements to the human body cut the chances of dying in an accident down to about 1 in 200 over a 75 year span (a nice round figure for current human life expectancy). Now some thumb nail calculations show that that provides roughly 1 in 15000 chance of dying in any given year. Now granted, you do have good odds of making it to see 1000 (slightly less than a 94% chance), but only about a 52% chance of seeing 10,000 and only 0.1% chance of seeing 100,000. Now granted 10,000 years is a long time, but it sure isn't immortal. Isn't probability and statistics fun?
Oh, right, and I forgot that catastrophic events are a type of entropy.
Of course this also ignores the problem of what we do with all the people. The single biggest reason for the exploding population of our planet is the fact that so many of us now live so much longer. Now imagine a world where even limiting births to one child per woman still leads to a soaring population. Wars and famine will almost certainly result... and thermodynamics will again make sure entropy triumphs.
Finally of course, sooner or later there will be no available energy left in the Universe... assuming matter isn't ripped apart by the expansion of the Universe, or that it doesn't decay into free floating quarks.
True immortality is impossible in this Universe (heaven and hell, if they fit in your belief system as they do mine must exist somewhere else).
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Bill