Do you think a world with immortality would be a world without children?

Onwards to Star Trek future with 3d printer replicators ^^

Nuclear fusion or bust.

Fusion certainly has a place in that, but solar is.. effectively infinite, and ultimately free. Main problems there are effective storage mechanisms, which I trust we will find. Fusion does certainly have an advantage on that front - providing power at varying demand levels more readily.

There's billions of years worth of fusion fuel lying around too. Also it works at night .

True, and it is a great option in many cases for mass production and on-demand. However, there are cases where people won't want a fuel source that can potentially explode. Even fusion has some risks, and also generates some low level radioactivity. Possibly best to not have one in your garage. A hybrid approach is always going to be best.

Only one I'm on the fence about is wind, as it can cause a lot of unintended consequences with birds and the noise they generate. But those also seem like solvable problems.

I would not mind a fusion reactor in my garage right now.

Pffft. A little radiation never harmed anyone.



Also, since fusion requires very specific temperatures and pressures, I'm pretty sure it won't explode. If I remember right, worst case scenario is a radioactive hydrogen(?) leak that dissipates 20 metres past the perimeter fence. So just build it out in the middle of nowhere.

Which reminds me, Australia has a lot of middle of nowhere, and ~20% of the world's uranium. What do we do with it? NOTHING. Friggin backwards government... "We're gonna be the best country, our people are the best people. But coal is the future and if you're gay you can't marry because the definition is "man and woman", no I don't care that divorce laws completely ignore the second half of that definition vote for me you pleb".

/rant.

Also, the best wind turbines are flying wind turbines:



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airborne_wind_turbine

Geers - of course coal is the future of Australia. You have Gina Rinehart to thank for that.

But yes, the risk of catastrophic fusion failure appears to be pretty low. I just generally am a big believer in making sure we utilize as many options as possible.

BURN THE WITCH.

Actually, after thinking that through... It would be hilariously ironic.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_emerging_technologies#Energy

I probably just ruined your plan for the day but at least you'll learn lots! I did! Even I'm not crazy enough to think of flying wind turbines.

The risk of that technology not being available before we are all dead and gone probably is bigger xD

Don't worry, it's only ten years away!*

*and has been since 1952 but shhh.

I agree. Solar is not perfect. Wind is not perfect. fusion isn't perfect (it'll have the same trouble as uranium fission: it's the plant that's so damn expensive, not the fuel). The best bet is a clever mix.

Privatize dat shiz yo.

Still hatin' the Australian government for not looking into 4th gen nuclear fission. There's nobody to vote for. Labour and Liberal just meander around and do nothing, and the Greens are terrified of anything that isn't solar or wind and shat themselves when they hear the word "nuclear".

Death from old age is no accident of nature. I believe that it is actually part of our design, and as such overcoming that particular intrinsic design will prove both impossible and unwise if it were possible.

As if THAT would stop humans xD

You're partially right.

Human breeding age is about 15-16. But let's be generous and say 20. Double that is 40. Which is about how old people used to get. Old enough to have your grandparents see you grow up and then they die to make way for the next generation. The reason we start degrading after 25 is because nature never had an incentive to select for longevity. So it's not by design, rather by lack of it.

We're already seeing the effects of longer lives: we get kids at a later age, making our parents older, our grandparents even older than that. The normal lifecycle is stretched.

You people are really optimistic.

Personally I feel like humanity would just fall back on it's favourite pass time, war.

Assuming that immortality doesn't also equal invulnerability, war would still be happening and between 2 sociality that would lead to a constant flux as new people are needed to replace the dead.


Probably resulting in being lead by the oldest of us, as they try to survive the other ancients of our species.


War is terrible, like more bad then I can comprehend, but humans have a truly disgusting knack for building a civilisation with and around it.


So yeah, not much would really change in war, but peace might become kinda dangerous for a peoples survival for a whole bunch of reasons.

I remember reading quite particularly that the worst case Fusion reactor failure would be a forced electronic shutdown, because the reaction cannot sustain itself without power being fed into the reactor. It's not like a fission reactor, where they use hydraulics to work against gravity. Fusion reactors are massive lasers pointing at eachother in a magnetically sealed box of titanium and goo. It goes critical, it instantly shuts down and no explosive reaction is attainable.

It really is fail-proof - unless you hit it with a nuke or something.

I've read a bit into this immortality thing in fiction, both fantasy (elves being immortal compared to other races) and Sci-fi (certain technological advancements giving immortality). There are quite a few scenarios drawn up by different authors, but the general consensus I've read has been that whoever survives the big war between two immortal factions will be smart enough to not fight anymore.

And, one of my favorite quotes about immortality:

"When you can have whatever you want at the snap of a finger or the utterance of a word, the destination matters not, only the journey to it."

I think we can safely say there is a party of power-players who want the idea of immortality to just not happen. Mostly because it gives them some serious control over people. I mean, what's the point of Social Security and all those old-age health-care welfare programs if no one ages and the non-handicapped will always stay in the workforce? There's a lot of money in keeping this immortality stuff DOA.

There are several animals that live for extremely long periods of time and one species of jellyfish can revert itself to a youthful state completely.

So what you're saying is... War. War never changes.
amirite?

Well yeah but then it wouldn't be the reactor exploding now would it? There's also another reactor design:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokamak


If we get immortality, the next step is obvious: Go to other planets. Since age isn't a problem, FTL isn't mandatory for nearby stars. The real question is how many rounds of Bingo can seniors endure before dying of boredom?

I'm thinking you'd have to partner with Steam to stay entertained.


AndNetflix.

On a streaming basis.