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xxAsk yourself this question - if you could live indefinitely in perfect health with endless opportunities for happiness and prosperity would you? If not, why not? My personal take is I'm going to live forever or die trying. When I first became an immortalist around the age of 12, most people including my parents thought I was being silly or fanciful. They never once asked me how I thought such a thing was possible let alone likely if I played my cards right. The basic argument, first written by <a href="http://www.rawilson.com/">Robert Anton Wilson</a> in Future Magazine back in 1978 is this:
Assuming you are in your 40's or younger now, you can expect to live at least another 30 to 40 years without any further advances in medical technology. That means you will still be around in 2030. But think about all of the medical advances happening now and will become practical in the next 10 years - adult stem cell organ regeneration, genetic therapy, cures for diabetes, alzhiemers and parkinsons, and possiblly even several forms of cancer. By 2020, we are likely to see dramatic advances in nanomedicine, where nanomachines in our bodies will clean arteries, repair cellular and genetic damage and possibly repair/regenerate the telomerase. So by 2020, a combination of advanced genetic therapies, organ and cellular regeneration, lifespans could easily be extended by an additional 40 years, bringing us to 2070. But we are still hanging out in 2020. Between 2020 and 2040, and assuming we don't destroy ourselves in the process, nanotechnology will likely reach full maturity. With fully mature nanomachines our bodies and any damage that would occur from aging or disease could be repaired and even reversed. This means that if you look and feel like a 70 year old in 2030, by 2040 you will look and feel like a 25 year old again. No more aging. This is no joke, as wear and tear on our bodies is just collective damage at the molecular level, now repairable by nano-enabled molecular repair machines. End result by 2040 - indefinite lifespans.
So if you play your cards right, eat, exercise and take care of yourself you will live to see an accelerated return on longevity, where the increase in average lifespan increases faster than we age. So, are you ready and willing to live indefinitely? Now that you could live to see your 1000th birthday, what are you going to do with your life?
Nanobots will augment and ultimately replace our organs and expand our brain, Ray Kurzweil will argue at Time magazine's The Future of Life conference in the LIFESPAN: HOW LONG? HOW FUN? session.
In the coming decades, a radical upgrading of our body's physical and mental systems, already underway, will use nanobots to augment and ultimately replace our organs. We already know how to prevent most degenerative disease through nutrition and supplementation; this will be a bridge to the emerging biotechnology revolution, which in turn will be a bridge to the nanotechnology revolution. By 2030, reverse-engineering of the human brain will have been completed and nonbiological intelligence will merge with our biological brains.
I'm currently deep in the process of writing my first book which addresses many radical technologies we are likely to see and their implications for us personally as people, as conscious beings. I disagree with Bill Joy's article that the future doesn't need us. Quite the contrary, the future is going to need us more that ever. Rather than be replaced by advancing nanotechnology and Artificial Intelligence, these technologies will enhance us. The future is not AI, but IA - Intelligence Augmentation. My first foray into serious writing is more daunting that I ever realized, but if for some reason I never complete the book, I have already written over 200 pages of original material, which I will publish on the net or perhaps under the Creative Commons License.