If we could greatly extend the human lifespan, would people eventually become immortal?

If we could greatly extend the human lifespan, would people eventually become immortal?

[ 30/September/22 ]

That does not seem to be an option in this universe, though it may be possible to very closely approximate it.

It seems very probable to me, as someone interested in this subject for over 50 years, initially from a biochemical perspective, then later from systems/thermodynamic suite of perspectives, that we live in a universe that is built upon constrained uncertainty, and is deeply complex. That means that some degree of risk is necessarily eternal (for a vast collection of systemic reasons).

Thus while we can potentially reduce risk, we cannot entirely eliminated it.

It seems potentially possible that some individuals could live for millions or billions of years, but it is not possible to remove all sources of risk, and thus we must eternally remain mortal in the strictest of senses, in that there will remain some degree of risk of death by some set of circumstances beyond our knowledge set (and however vast that knowledge set is, the logic is consistent that there must be more that we simply don’t know that we don’t know – infinities contain that unsettling characteristic – necessarily).

So while I have (since completing undergrad biochemistry in 1974) expected to have a reasonable probability of living a very long time (many thousands of years), I am also clear that it is a very complex suite of issues that must be addressed to make that possible, and those include biological, cultural, economic and systemic factors – and will require very advanced AI to address effectively. On current trends it seems likely that the first generation of effective treatments should be emerging about 2026 (and there are a lot of uncertainties in that – it could be a decade longer than that – if key economic factors are not addressed soon).