Immortality???

[Biochemist]

"Kurzweil writes of millions of blood cell-sized robots, which he calls "nanobots," that will keep us forever young by swarming through the body, repairing bones, muscles, arteries and brain cells. Improvements to our genetic coding will be downloaded via the Internet. We won't even need a heart.

 

Although much of Kurzweil's thought is both interesting and of merit, I suspect the notion of "repair" in this context is inaccurate. Most cells (non-cancerous ones anyway) have a finite life span, and essentially stop functioning by DNA design at a preset target. That is, they are not "broken" when they die, they are functioning normally.

 

I suspect that "repair" of this problem would require remediation at the level of the germ cell, not post hoc repair 10 trillion cells later. This would imply that those of us who are already born (as I suspect most of you readers are) are unlikely to live to 1000. But the option is open for our unborn progeny.

 

Just a guess.

[Biochemist]

"You hear a lot about overcoming your fear of death, but how many have overcome the fear of living forever ? "

 

Or, to quote Annie Lennox, "Dieing is easy, it's living that scares me to death."