The terminal error of the germ theory of disease is that we don’t have a clue as to how much of it works.

The terminal error of electricity is that we don’t have a clue is as to how much of it works.

The terminal error of flintknapping is that we don’t have a clue as to how much of it works.

The only terminal error is the assumption that humanity cannot advance by increasing the area of our understanding. The entire legacy of technological development is developing an understanding of areas that we previously didn’t “have a clue” about. The fact that you posted that from an internet-connected computer instead of hooting it from primeval shrubbery argues against the premise of the post.

Celebrity Skin Cells
Hold all my calls, Miss Tessmacher

And if I can use the issue to tar the incumbent administration, so much the better.

His argument in a nutshell (pun intended), is that since there is no reason why every cellular component can’t be renewed and replaced, there is no reason why the entire organism cannot be maintained forever.

The terminal error that he (and much brighter folks like Ray Kurzweil) make is that metabolism is a monumentally complex, interactive, nonlinear system and — this is the important part — we don’t have a clue as to how much of it works. Of equal importance, the difficulty of reverse engineering the living cell is much, much greater than people like de Grey and Kurzweil are willing to admit (or perhaps truly don’t realize). This is because the cell was never engineered in the first place, it was evolved by random variation followed by natural selection. As a result, many of the interconnections between the cell functions these folks plan to reverse-engineer are not ‘logical’ in the way that the human mind is logical.

Laurie Anderson has a line in a song that goes: “Paradise is exactly like where you are right now… only much, much better.” I don’t know if she originated that quote, but I am sure she gets the irony.

The double irony that folks like de Grey and Kurzweil absolutely do not get is that - by the time ‘we’ have the technology to achieve immortality, ‘we’ won’t be ‘us’ anymore. Much nearer term advances in nanobiotechnology and bioengineering, which I have written about for the last few years, will insure that whatever it is that finally achieves immortality,

it won’t be like us
see like us
or watch TV like us.

Adjacent to the transhumanist community, Alan Harrington’s book The Immortalist” is worth reading. Gore Vidal said that it is “the most important book of our time.” (Great Britain: Panther Books Ltd, 1973)

It is true, as many of us transhumanist futurists have stated over the years, that the cost of the sciences and technologies for developing life extension will come down due to market demand over the coming years, but we do need to be thinking about those who (1) do not have access to information to gain knowledge about living longer; and (2) how to pursue cost-effective means for aggressively bringing the price down rather than waiting for the consumer market to drive it down.

Natasha Vita-More