vaguelyaware.com

wired has a news article about some genius scientist that wrote about living forever.

maybe wired just totally misrepresented the guy’s suggestions or left out a huge part, or maybe this genius left out a huge part or maybe i have been mislead from what i have read on the topic.

Wired:

Kurzweil writes of millions of blood cell-sized robots, which he calls “nanobots,” that will keep us forever young by swarming through the body, repairing bones, muscles, arteries and brain cells. Improvements to our genetic coding will be downloaded from the Internet. We won’t even need a heart.

From what I have read, the problem isn’t in damage to any of the muscles arteries or cells, and if the nanobots were to take that approach they would be repairing cells that our body is naturally going to replace. Such redundancy would eventually lead to the demise of our natural healing functions and kill us probably very shortly.
As far as i can tell, the reason we age is a breakdown in the DNA of every cell. When each cell replicates it creates a new cell with a mutation of the old cell’s DNA - much like the mutations that caused the evolution of the species. the mutations do not neccecarily have an impact on the next few generations, but once you have a few million generations with mutations the cells will realize a certain impact. I am not sure why there is not some sort of internal natural selection process that would increase the liklihood of only the stronger cells replicating, maybe there is? maybe it is flawed? maybe it works perfectly and we humans are not designed to live as long as we already do.
so does Kurzwell’s brilliance seemed flawed to you as well? isnt this guy supposed to be uber-smart?

“All the genes we have, the 20,000 to 30,000 genes, are little software programs,” Kurzweil said.

What he neglects to mention is that the ‘little software programs’ share very few sililarities to the digital platform. Software is replicated bit by bit, without change per copy. Most copy procedures have integrated checksumming to make sure that every copy is an exact duplicate of the original, there is NO tolerance for ‘mutation.’ The human genes are made to mutate. that how the species improves and evolves. software programs evolve by people adding more code or fixing the old stuff. i gotta say, im not impressed. it is an interesting idea but i think the guy needs to lay off some of the supplements, cuz he is wrong in my opinion. maybe it is wired’s interpretation of his book, which would be disappointing.
it is interesting to see the scientific community jumps all over this like it is great, where are all those activists whining about the morality of living so long? and the big name competing scientist that is going to formally expose the faults in his idea?

disclaimer: im not saying im smarter, but im not going to beleive it just because some award winning genius says so. im just asking, ‘is he right or wrong?’