On Tue, Jun 22, 2004 at 08:59:43AM -0400, John Klein wrote: > (For one thing, we'd all have children more slowly. Either of our own > accord, or by law. And if we were immortal we'd have to stop having them > entirely at some point. Which is /another/ section of our culture that > would vanish.) People will still die of accidents and suicide and such. Unless we get backups, in which case lots more things can change. > @> We do, after all, live in the present. > And this is just plain wrong. What' right, then? > Depends. Presumably you're talking about the "don't shrivel up and turn > into a cricket" variety of immortality, which is difficult to believe in. It's the shrivelling up and turning into a cricket which kills you. The only way to get 'immortality' -- lack of death by natural causes -- is to stop or fix the shrivelling up. > their small size), but is that at all realistic? And how much point is > there in living a thousand years if you can only remember a hundred of > them? We don't remember a lot of our lives in detail as it is. Lots of daily details just aren't important. Skills and big events events and who to trust are important. Live for 1000 years and you can cultivate many skills, and have good historical perspective, and not be re-learning the wheel as each new generation of scientists much. Sure, you don't remember exactly what you did >from age 700-850, but so what? Maybe the long life would be pointless without prosthetic memories, but maybe not. Certainly there's some finite capacity, only so many skills you can keep fresh, so much of who you are that you can remember... though that might not matter either; individuals changing over time into different individuals isn't any more pointless than individuals dying and being replaced by new individuals. But it'd be nice to find out. -xx- Damien X-)