On the meaning of life and the long-term merits of technologic improvement

[Trading]

Specialist says that we will see first a head transplant to an artificial body than to another human body: http://www.livescience.com/50074-head-transplants-wont-happen.html

On the controversial neurosurgeon claiming he will do a head transplant to another human body before the end of 2017:
http://www.alphr.com/science/1001145/what-are-the-chances-of-a-human-head-transplant-working
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/science-or-science-fiction-how-an-italian-doctor-hopes-to-perform-first-human-head-transplant-a7007676.html
http://europe.newsweek.com/we-ready-human-head-transplant-423757

[Trading]

All facts occurring on our life under light are reflected and "conserved" by photons (the basis of light). Many of those photons are reflected to space.
 
Our all life (even some occurring on the privacy of our homes, when there is light) might be out there on the universe.
For someone that loves History, the idea that all our History and pre-History is out there and "could be seen like a movie" is interesting.

Alpha Centauri is the closest star system (it has 3 stars) to Earth. It's at 4.37 light years (the light at 300,000 kms per second takes 4.37 years to reach it) from Earth.

Therefore, the light reflected by Earth that is reaching it now parted Earth more than 4 years ago. Any "intelligent species" on a planet there (there seems to at least one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_Centauri#Planets) would see Earth as it was 4 years ago. With a "powerful enough telescope", they could even see us.

Of course, they had to have a telescope working on completely different principles than, say, the projected James Webb Space Telescope, able to "pick" most of the stranded and relatively few photons reflected by Earth (being a planet, those photons are lost on the middle of the ones emitted by the Sun).

Someone on a planet 5000 light years away from Earth with the same "powerful enough telescope" could see and record all human history.

Since (as far as what modern Physics says) it's impossible to travel faster than light (and "wormholes" are still science fiction) we couldn't go there faster than light and "grab" those stranded photons. But as a science fiction possibility is an interesting idea, if indeed we could travel faster than light.

I confirmed that this idea was already an old idea:
https://www.quora.com/If-we-aimed-a-telescope-at-a-planet-that-was-light-years-away-and-it-hit-a-mirror-aimed-perfectly-at-Earth-could-we-see-into-our-past

Another possibility would be for the light reflected by Earth to be intercepted by a black hole on the right angle in order to be turned 180º (or on the necessary one) and sent back to the place Earth is now. That light could then be captured by our "powerful telescope":

See Holz and Wheeler, Retro-Machos: in the sky?, The Astrophysical Journal, 578:330–334, 2002 October (published at https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1086/342463/pdf;jsessionid=64EA46FFE08D91BFA15CEF374C3F5F64.c5.iopscience.cld.iop.org

http://rein.pk/gravitational-lensing-to-observe-ancient-earth/ (still available at https://archive.is/MCgtn).

[Trading]

Can the generations alive now really trust on science to postpone death for a long period?

Better don't hope too much.

The time of the simple scientific problems ended. Now, a genius working alone won't be able to do much, like in the past.

As humankind goes deeper and deeper, each scientific problem increases extraordinarily in complexity. Current times are times of big teams of scientists banging their minds for years trying to solve a problem.

Isn't just a question of money. Humankind has been burning billions on serious scientific issues for years (cancer, nuclear fusion, increasing the output of solar panels, understanding the human brain, aging, cryonics, etc.) with small results.

Other issues, only after decades of investigation are giving some results (AIDS, genetics, stem cells, space exploration, robotics, artificial intelligence).

Some went as far as saying we already are more or less at the top of scientific development (John Horgan, The Final Frontier: Are We Reaching the Limits of Science?: http://discovermagazine.com/2006/oct/cover; he is author of a famous book on the issue: The End of Science).

Others on more reasonable terms, taking in account the increasing on complexity, say we are risking reaching a stalemate on scientific development by 2050, unless we double or triple the financial and personal resources dedicated to investigation.

The so-called revolutionary nature of modern society because of scientific development as been exaggerated. Technological development had must more social consequences back on the XIX century.

[BADecker]

All that technological improvements mean is that somebody will be able to use technology to control someone else easier. Government will use technology to make government people rich at the expense of poor ignorant people who don't have technology.

One of the few pieces of technology that might help poor people from being plundered is a good gun in their hands.

[duts_bg]

 feel that the issue of the meaning of life is analogous to the issue of the definition of chaos. As we know, there is no definition of chaos, because at the moment that someone formulates such definition, chaos ceases to be chaos. Similarly, at the moment that someone formulate the meaning of life (do not forget that it covers not only humans), it will become meaningless.
 

[ObscureBean]

Theories, philosophy, religion and science all have one thing in common that makes solving the riddle of life impossible: they tackle the 'problem' as a group.
Death is an intimate affair. As a matter of fact it is the most intimate affair anyone will ever experience from their time on earth. When you're born you're physically linked to your mother but when you die you are completely alone.
No need for textbooks or professors here, the only question that can help each and everyone solve the age old riddle is: "Why do I fear death?" The answer to this intimate question is unique to each and everyone
Ultimately your death is the culmination of how you lived your life.

[Trading]

Questioning our fear (or, at least, a negative feeling about it) of death is like asking why we don't like to be dumped by a girlfriend (unless we are tired of her).

If one doesn't have negative feelings about death, this means one doesn't love life.

Someone can realize everything he wanted on life, but, if he still loves being alive, death will be a tragedy.

Someone that doesn't fear or dislikes death, as the end of his own life, is someone who loves nothing or anyone, not even himself.

No one likes unhappy endings. Therefore, all happy stories about life have to be relatively short ones.

Romances and princess tales always end on the marriage. But, actually, they don't end there, but on a funeral.

[BADecker]

Did you see the "Up Like Trump" post here - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1135598.msg15069587#msg15069587 ?  Seems that there are a lot of "me" people protesting against some of the things that Trump is suggesting.

The only time the meaning of life has any significance is when "we" willingly use the "me" to help the "we." And the "we" we help first is our family, and then our neighborhood, and then those far away.

If the media uses the word "we" as a human race thing, it really doesn't have any meaning, because nobody interacts with the whole human race. If you are trying to speak for the whole human race, go with "42" from Doug Adams's  Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrases_from_The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_the_Galaxy:

In the radio series and the first novel, a group of hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings demand to learn the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything from the supercomputer, Deep Thought, specially built for this purpose. It takes Deep Thought 7½ million years to compute and check the answer, which turns out to be 42. Deep Thought points out that the answer seems meaningless because the beings who instructed it never actually knew what the Question was.

EDIT: In the Wikipedia article(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrases_from_The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_the_Galaxy), Adams as noted as saying regarding "42"

The answer to this is very simple. It was a joke. It had to be a number, an ordinary, smallish number, and I chose that one. Binary representations, base thirteen, Tibetan monks are all complete nonsense. I sat at my desk, stared into the garden and thought '42 will do' I typed it out. End of story.

What's interesting about this is, we live in a universe controlled by cause and effect. Pure random seems likely, but it has never been found. So, what caused Adams to select 42?

[BADecker]

Look at what God said when He created the earth, etc. From the beginning of Genesis in the Bible:

...

"God saw that the light was good..."

...

"And God saw that it was good."

...

"And God saw that it was good."

...

"And God saw that it was good."

...

"And God saw that it was good."

...

"And God saw that it was good"

...

"God saw all that he had made, and it was very good."

...

In other words, God looked at everything that He created and made, and He saw that it all was very good. God saw that it was all very good.

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God made man in his own image. From Genesis 1:26,27:

26 Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”

27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.

When we want to use software to make or download an .iso program, we say that we make an "image" of the program file on our computer. This image is not the fully operational end-program. Yet it has the potential to be, because it is an image of the fully operational end-program.

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Solomon, who was probably the wisest man ever, wrote in Proverbs 25:27:

It is not good to eat too much honey, nor is it honorable to seek one’s own honor.

Some translations say "glory" rather than "honor."

This brings us to the point of why mankind exists.

God looked at his own honor and glory in the creation. Now, remember. Mankind was made in the image of God. This means that both man and God have some similarities, share some qualities. So, perhaps in some ways, if God had not made man, it would not have been honorable or glorious for Him to look at the creation that He made... to look at His own glory and honor.

What does man have to do with maintaining God's honor and glory in this? One of the major purposes of mankind is to praise, honor and glorify God for all the wonderful things He has done. Thus people, who are similar to God in some ways, use their God-likeness to uphold God's honor and glory. Yet, because it is God who made mankind, it is God upholding His own honor and glory in a wondrous, fabulous way... through mankind.

Then, when mankind turned away from the thing that we were supposed to be doing, God didn't destroy us. Rather, God sent the Savior, Jesus, so that mankind could be saved, when there was no apparent reason or even desire for saving mankind, but so that God's glory and honor could become even greater. Mankind now has even more reason to glorify God. Not only did God make man, but He saved man when man turned against God!

This whole creation is all about the honor and glory of God. And there is a whole lot of pleasure and joy right along with the honor and glory.

[Trading]

You mean god felt lonely and insecure and decided to create the universe and men in order to be adored?

So, besides being an entity with clear anger management problems (just see the punishments from Yahweh on the Old testament), god also has an inferiority complex? (the need to be worshiped)?

[Felimon]

Time will come human technology will cure aging and death. We think we are modern but we belong to the ancient. You don't see what human is capable to do. Give humanity another 100 to 500 years.

[Cybertron00]

Time will come human technology will cure aging and death. We think we are modern but we belong to the ancient. You don't see what human is capable to do. Give humanity another 100 to 500 years.

I agree with you. I also think that in the future humans are capable to travel trough time. Maybe humans have some teleportation machines too that can be used in travelling from one country to another. 

[Trading]

No need to wait 500 years. Things might be going faster than what I expected on fighting aging.

This was old news, but a remarkable achieving:

On 2012, a telomerase genetic therapy was able to successful rejuvenate mice.

According to a scientific paper, the treatment "had remarkable beneficial effects on health and fitness, including insulin sensitivity, osteoporosis, neuromuscular coordination and several molecular biomarkers of aging. Importantly, telomerase-treated mice did not develop more cancer than their control littermates (...). Finally, telomerase-treated mice, both at 1-year and at 2-year of age, had an increase in median lifespan of 24 and 13%, respectively".
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22585399 (abstract)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3494070/ (full text)

But this is more recent:

On September, 2015, the CEO of a genetic company (well, she just used what was discovered by others) took the same therapy. She went to Colombia to escape American regulations.
She is still alive (https://www.facebook.com/BiovivaSciences) and is claiming that the telomeres of her white blood cells increased from 6.71kb on September 2015, before her took the therapy, to 7.33kb (http://bioviva-science.com/2016/04/22/promising-results-from-the-first-human-gene-therapy-against-aging/).

This allegation can be explained by different means:

a) She didn't take any gene therapy, her telomeres still have the same length (the increase is decisive to allow cell multiplication) and this is just a publicity scheme (trying to get some desperate customers).

b) She indeed took it, but the therapy is armless (and worthless) or, at least, armless on the short-term, and her telomeres still have the same length.

c) The increase on her telomeres is accurate (she claims she made an independent measure of her telomeres before taking the treatment), the treatment is safe and positive and things will move way faster than what was expected.

A reasonable account can be read here: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/542371/a-tale-of-do-it-yourself-gene-therapy/
Also http://www.geekwire.com/2016/bioviva-liz-parrish-reports-progress-controversial-gene-quest-reverse-aging/

[Trading]

More news on fighting aging:

Scientists create mice with hyper-long telomeres without altering the genes
"The cells with hyper-long telomeres in these mice appear to be perfectly functional. When the tissues were analysed at various moments (0, 1, 6 and 12 months of life), these cells maintained the additional length scale (they shortened over time but at a normal rhythm), accumulated less DNA damage and had a greater capacity to repair any damage. In addition, the animals presented a lower tumour incidence than normal mice."
"The next step that the CNIO Telomeres and Telomerase Group is already working on will be to "generate a new species of mice in which the telomeres of all the cells are twice as long as those in normal mice", explain Blasco and Varela. "Then, we will be able to address some of the important questions that remain unanswered: would a mouse species with telomeres that are double in length live longer?"
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2016-06-scientists-mice-hyper-long-telomeres-genes.html

Less relevant:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v530/n7589/full/nature16932.html
Naturally occurring p16Ink4a-positive cells shorten healthy lifespan

[Trading]

   Enjoy your luck to be alive like if you had a chance on a trillion of quadrillions to be born, since your actual odds were even worst than these.

   Make the most of life like if it was a single drop of water tumbling on your thirsty lips on an infinite desert.

   Value every day of it as if you were on a death row, because you are; you just have a wonderful cell and no one told you yet when it's going to be your turn.

[Dassi]

I wanna add some,
Just think about future. If you don't hold place in people's hearts and minds; you will be completely forgotten in 300 years. Even everyone remembers you will be dead. So actually, life race in many ways is meaningless because we die physically also die when we don't get remembered.
Technology plays good role in second stage, uploading people into pcs. So there may be no real death.

Even 300 years from now, the technology that uploaded people into pcs will be obsolete and forgotten. But really, there is life after death...

[RealityTruth]

Enjoy your luck to be alive like if you had a chance on a trillion of quadrillions to be born, since those were more or less your odds.

Make the most of life like if it was a single drop of water tumbling on your lips on an infinite desert.

Value every day of it as if you were on a death row waiting for your turn, because you are; you just have a wonderful cell.

There's 0% luck and 100% of God's creation to be alive.

[Trading]

There isn't any sense on classifying as extinct a species (or subspecies) that evolved into another one (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction).
Doesn't make sense because the species is still alive, since its descendants are alive.

Also doesn't make sense because since evolution is gradual, it's impossible to mark the exact point where the subspecies was converted into another one, so it's impossible to identify the last individual of it and, therefore, when "extinction" occurred (actually, even the classification of outevolved species is very problematic because of this; think on all the discussions on the classification of certain fossils as Homo Habilis, Homo Rudolfensis or as Australopithecus; as more fossils are found this problem will increase).

Moreover, extinction has terrible consequences that outevolution hasn't.

Being outevolved is inevitable and positive. It means that the species is alive and is adapting itself successfully to its environment.

In contrast, extinction is a catastrophe. It means that the species ended completely and lost any meaning to life (read the OP).

It's absurd to say that the Homo Erectus or the Homo Heidelbergensis are extinct (as we see on most papers on evolution or encyclopedias' articles, like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_heidelbergensis or at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_erectus), since we, under all accounts (in relation to the Homo Erectus, from his African subspecies, sometimes called Homo Ergaster), descend from them.

It would be preferable to qualify these species that evolved into us as outevolved or something similar. They were outevolved by their own descendants, us, but not extinct.

We could discuss if the Neanderthals can be qualified as extinct, since they didn't evolve into us, rather were absorbed by us, as dominant species, and left only tiny parts (2-4%) of their genes on each one of us that are not from African recent origin.

However, since those 2-4% are not identical, in reality taking in account all traces of their genes on us, it seems more than 20% of their genome is still alive (https://www.washington.edu/news/2014/01/29/neanderthal-lineages-excavated-from-modern-human-genomes/).

In any case, since we have their genes and, therefore, we are their descendants, even their absorption by us doesn't allow qualifying them as extinct. They are an absorbed species, not a extinct one.

[Daniel91]

Enjoy your luck to be alive like if you had a chance on a trillion of quadrillions to be born, since those were more or less your odds.

Make the most of life like if it was a single drop of water tumbling on your lips on an infinite desert.

Value every day of it as if you were on a death row waiting for your turn, because you are; you just have a wonderful cell.

There's 0% luck and 100% of God's creation to be alive.

I agree that we are all created beings but still our creator, God, gave us freedom and free will to choose our life.
We can live in the harmony with creation and our creator, God, and such way of life will bring us happiness, joy and love, and eternal life in spiritual world.
If we choose not to live according to god's will, our way of life will not bring us happiness, joy and love and we will not have ternal life in spiritual world.

[Gronthaing]

There isn't any sense on classifying as extinct a species (or subspecies) that evolved into another one (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction).
Doesn't make sense because the species is still alive, since its descendants are alive.

I think where it is known that one species was replaced by a descendant species is called pseudoextinction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudoextinction the wiki gives the example of dinosaur and bird species. Problem is it is not always easy to know that is what happened. Or if both descend from a common ancestor or something.

Also doesn't make sense because since evolution is gradual, it's impossible to mark the exact point where the subspecies was converted into another one, so it's impossible to identify the last individual of it and, therefore, when "extinction" occurred

Evolution may not be always so slow. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phyletic_gradualism is more what you describe. Small changes accumulating over time. And where a species ends and a new starts is not well known. But there is also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuated_equilibrium and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuated_gradualism don't know if they are more accepted. But those theories say new species appear when drastic changes occur. When members of the species reach a new environment and quickly adapt to it. Or when catastrophes happen for example. This can end in more extinctions and not pseudoextinctions.