Close your blockquote. "Loose shit" is what I believe the regulars around here say. Far be it for me to be presumptuous, though, Mr. Ace.

You mean if I can hold out another 25 years I get to spend a millennium as a 73-year-old? Pinch me.

Ace, a few thoughts:

-- First off, you're right that the key to the future is in one word, but that word is "smegma."

-- After watching that one Friday the 13th where Jason gets frozen and woken up in the future and brought back to life as an Uber-Jason (I call him "GannonJason") by the nanobots, there's this scene later in the movie where the humans try to fool him into thinking he's back at Camp Crystal Lake by turning on the holoprojector and beaming an image of these two nubile coeds who are eager for premarital sex and then rather than chasing down the real humans Jason stops and kills the two coeds only the thing is they're not real they're holograms so he's got the two holo-coeds bundled in a sleeping bag he's slapping around on the ground like a wet sock so hard that if those holo-coeds were real girls they'd be turned into mush.

It's a pretty cool scene, and all thanks to nanotechnology.

-- I've seen Stacey Cosgrove's rack, and trust me pal, you weren't missing much. Oh, don't get me wrong, nice rack, but she had hairy flapjack nipples, like JeffB does.

Cheers,
Dave at Garfield Ridge

"-- I've seen Stacey Cosgrove's rack, and trust me pal, you weren't missing much. "

Eughh. Not just yuck, but eughh, there's a commenter that actually knew the girl Ace is talking about and in fact discusses it on his weblog.

And i say this as a young-blooded American male.

Also, an interesting idea, the haikube: http://www.brown.edu/Students/OHJC/ma8/papers/haikube.htm

NF--

So, which brand of "stupid" do you prefer?

1. The stupid that says that I not only actually know this Stacey Cosgrove that Ace speaks of, and I've seen her naked;

*OR*

2. The stupid that says Stacey Cosgrove isn't just an invention of Ace's imagination, and I was playing along for the sake of The Funny.

Pick a number. If you have trouble typing, it's binary-- I'll take no response means #2.

Cheers,
Dave at Garfield Ridge

Dave:

It's going to be hard to quit smoking, but if it means in 25 years I can slap around some nubile holo-projected coeds who are eager for sex, I'm on board. I'm quitting.

Tomorrow.

Better still, I want to slap Stacey Cosgrove around. Dave, can I count on you to give me her phone number?

Wow, this will surely solve the social security crisis. Raising the retirement age to 750 in the year 2030 or so and we'll have about 650 years of no new retirements, think of the nice little nest egg we can accumulate!

73? Fuck that noise. In 25 years' time I'll be 60. And I will still be able to get my freak on, you betcha. It's right at the point at which my pension plan kicks in. I will be golden. I'm getting hammered every night from now until 2030 in expectation of the rapture.

Forget Stacey, I've got a better idea. I'll slap Lauraw around. I'll spank her good in a unisex restroom, and maybe then she will stop impugning my masculinity.

Oh wait. I forgot that she carries pepper spray.

Never mind.

Michael - Take the pepper spray from her, and tan her ass good. When both cheeks are bright red, give them a good shot of pepper spray.

LauraW will either say " Thank you Michael, sir! You are indeed a manly man." or "I will goddamn kill you when I extricate my head from the ceiling panel I launched myself into.., fairy, twerp, monster, *spit*, *spit*."

Take the pepper spray from her, and tan her ass good.

ROFLMAO

Um, OK, if you say so -- I'll give it a try. Maybe I better bring my wife along. I may need backup.

I don't think we've thought this through.

Won't it become overcrowded if young families keep having kids? I mean people can't keep making babies if they're jostling for space with baby faced geezers who won't move on. You know, when I die and when I'm gone there'll be one child born and this world will carry on and all that will be out the window.

One of the few things that makes Hollywood types tolerable is knowing that the people that you hate won't last forever. Do we really want a century of Julia Roberts movies? Do we care to see Madonna get a second wind? A Boyz II Men reunion as Men II Boys?

Will you need a license to have a kid? Or will it be like Logan's Run where we have Carousel every Friday to ensure that not everybody is able to overstay his welcome?

Well this certainly solves the population/food problem - just euthanize all the undesirable/slacking 200+ year old geezers and apply the "Soylent Green" solution to them.

Just gotta get the population to buy into defacto canibalism some time in the next 50 years or so. Given the current trends, its unfortunately not that far out of line...

Who the hell wants to live that long? Death is wonderful.

I'd like to live as long as there are interesting things being discovered and things to do.

Oh yay, just what the world needs, thousand-year-old humans. And come on, you know that it won't be the interesting, fascinating, funny people that will get the rejuvenation therapy. It will be the rich dullards with lots of money and no personality, and (as caspera pointed out) the tiresome, godawful celebrities.

Yup, that's right, ace -- unless you somehow suddenly become to the beloved funnyman of the American Idol-worshipping teevee audience, you're gonna die at eighty (or ninety or fifty, whatever) years like the rest of us proles. But we'll have Richard Gere for fucking ever. Frankly, it's looking more and more like Earth is overdue for the next big asteroid hit.

Funny post, I was laughing at the Reynolds comment!!

Forget immortality I was simply eager to cut a deal to go back 10 today if that meant I had to give up maybe 15 or 20 on the back end.

But are you actually telling me my body will funtion again like it did at 25 or 28 when I'm 50 or 60?

The immortality thing is no gift like Hanks in the Long Green Mile. But being able to feel the way you did at 25 when you're 50 or 60 that would be a freekin gift - Cocoonesque.

Since your bodies timeclock and hormones as well as tiny capillaries and nerve endings will never function as they did when you were younger this seems like a nice pipe dream for just about....... maybe 2 seconds.

You should hold out more hope for Spok and Scotty coming back in a time machine with their cure all laserbody devices.

Mike

I can't wait to say, "I am Connor McCloud from the Clan McCloud, and I am immortal!" and mean it.

But by all means, we should ban this research immediately. We don't want to screw up FDR's sacred Social Security system.

Functional immortality is still a pipe-dream. We won't see it. Our grandchildren might.

Best we can hope for is about 140 years.

You might be interested to know we have only very recently discovered why men live longer than mice. It has nothing to do with "accumulating junk proteins"; that's a 1970s hypothesis popularized by Larry NIven's "A Man Out of Time" and other fiction, but since pretty well discredites. Why do men live longer than mice? We have protein encoding for the creation of antioxidants that slow down cellular-level damage from free radicals.

It's now believed that the simple accumulation of cellular damage, the result of which is cascading loss of information that all cells need to perform their incredibly complex operations, that causes aging. This cellular entropy will be very hard to fix; you're talking about a process roughly equivalent to debugging a decillion terabyte program. Oh, and the data is stored in three dimensional amino acid base pairs, and you have to keep the program running while you fix it or the person dies. Good luck.

And we're only beginning to understand how the data is encoded three-dimensionally; the supercomputer Blue Gene was built for this specific purpose. We're not anywhere close to being able to fix any of it. It'd be like asking a Stone Ager to fix a microprocessor.

Of course, it's far easier just to create a new organism from scratch than to continue fixing the old one in the face of entropy. Which is why nature does exactly that.

Oh, come on- if you lived that long, chances are you would turn into some pretentious jackass like Elrond (or, God help you, Louis from "Interview with a Vampire") and write crap poetry about what a terrible burden it is to be immortal, attractive and rich. Let's die while we're still young enough to laugh at fart jokes.

In the "immortal" words of Ira Gershwin:

Methusla lived 900 years, Methusla lived 900 years,

But who calls that livin', when no gal will give in,

to no man what's 900 years?

It Ain't Necessarilly So, - from Porgy and Bess
October 10, 1935
Music by: George Gershwin
Lyrics by: DuBose Heyward and Ira Gershwin

Let's die while we're still young enough to laugh at fart jokes.

I'm not big on fart jokes, but I could live to be a 1000 years old and still chuckle at the word "Retard."

So-- bring it on.

STOP THE PRESSES!!!

Do we really want a century of Julia Roberts movies?

Do we care to see Madonna get a second wind?

Can you imagine 500 years of Maddona?

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!

the possibility of arresting or even reversing the aging process by modifying the body's DNA, .

Pre-high school, I tried to build a laser out of a coke bottle, a cardboard tube, vinegar, bicarb of soda, aluminum foil and a flashlight bulb. Oddly enough, it didn't work, and I never saw Stacey Cosgrove's nipples (although I did fuck her like a viking).

Where do I sign up for knocking sexually obsessed co-eds around? Do I need to bring my own sleeping bags?

Oh, and I also tried to build a particle accelerator in my bedroom, which didn't work either.

That last post was me, too fricken dumb to post comments now...

Explain this radio thing again to me ace.

25 years is a bit too optimistic for such innovation. Try at least 50-75 years. That being said "bridge" technologies that will pop up in the next 25 years will plausibly allow people that are relatively young today to make it to the 50-75 year mark.

You mean if I can hold out another 25 years I get to spend a millennium as a 73-year-old? Pinch me.

That's not teh way it works. Initial efforts will focus on arresting aging (like via modificatio of the Insulin pathways and stuff like that), but the eventual culmination of this technology will be smart nanobots that actually replace many of your bodies functions and do them better (like the delivery of oxygen to tissues via the blood, or the function of your heart, a pretty fragile organ), and the ability to repair damaged DNA.

So when you are 70, you'll actually function as a 20 year-old. Maybe even look like one as well.

Hehe! I'd be 62 years old. Just think, 1000 years of yearly prostate exams! Yay!

I know a lot of attention gets focused on nanobots, but I think it's much more likely they will be designed organisms or viruses carrying gene modifications as opposed to mechanical artifacts. Our cells already have genes to repair damaged DNA and others to help prevent damage; I think scientists will find it easier to design new genes to assist and enhance these processes.

Blood substitutes will certainly happen; athletes already use EPO for enhanced oxygenation now.

Will we see "bridge" technologies? I hope so, but have my doubts about anything beyond more effective antioxidants. It's funny: when you think about it, medical science has done virtually nothing to extend the lifespan of already healthy people.