Kontextmaschine

26th November 2022

Question reblogged from Ring Like Crazy, Ring Like Hell with 594 notes

3dspacejesus asked: Do you believe that curing death or mastering cryonics will happen within your natural lifetime?

binary-bluejay:

kontextmaschine:
binary-bluejay:
kontextmaschine:
prudencepaccard:
kontextmaschine:
slartibartfastibast:
kontextmaschine:
No. Immortality has been “just a few improvements on the current state of the art” away for approximately ever.
Don’t tell the most recent immortality cult about this. It would break their clichéd little hearts.
Yeah the funny thing is how the “state of the art” consistently refers to whatever field’s particularly prominent and cutting-edge at the time.
It’s been alchemy in medieval Europe and ancient China, electricity in Revolutionary France, extremely low-temperature liquid circulation in the rocket age, data storage in the computer age, now it’s biotech because of course it is.
In 16th Century Spain with the whole Fountain of Life thing it was fucking western hemisphere cartography.
“In 16th Century Spain with the whole Fountain of Life thing it was fucking western hemisphere cartography” holy shit this is 100% right
This post was one of the ones that “made me” early on
Incredibly stupid to equate biotech with any of these other things but go off I guess.
the current thing is different, you see
Kontext, you’re an idiot. An entertaining one! But you are a clown and nothing you say is worth taking seriously.
“How on earth could the field working on developing a mechanistic understanding of biological systems be different in it’s contribution to how we manipulate those systems than fucking alchemy”
If humanity does make meaningful advances in extending the human lifespan beyond where it is currently, it will absolutely be attributable to advances in medicine, biotechnology, and molecular biology.
Establishing your prior from base rates is important, but you do then have to actually look beyond the base rates.

Like, I assure you, alchemy, 19th century electricity, post-war physics and computronics were all master life sciences of their day, understood as the keys to understanding life, and our world and lives today heavily rely on insights and innovations derived from all of them.

And yet.

Tagged: same as it ever was