Will technology ever give us a real afterlife?

Even if I trust the poll respondents' answers, I still don't understand this post.

You seem to imply that the half who do not want longer lives are the only "rational" people, and expect the results of the poll to be your evidence for that. That's dumb.

 

Consider the estimated age of the Earth. What percentage of that age would you have liked to have lived? Now consider the concept of eternity. Would you like to live for a gazillion years? How about a gazillion gazillion years? What would you be able to do in that time if everything continued to evolve but you were to stay the same as you are now?

Consider the short span of American history. If you had been born in 1630 Virginia would you be able to cope in 2013 America?

 

Eventually it will become possible to download a persons consciousness into a Quantum Computer.

Or it will eventually become possible to Genetically Engineer a Human Body to continue to repair itself and not age as we are VERY close to changing or re-engineering the Gene responsible for aging.

AboveAlpha

 

That's some interesting speculation but it's not very realistic.

Would humans be able to think if they didn't age? Thinking takes time. So as you are thinking you are growing older. Before you know it you have a vast store of thoughts that took a life time to get. So if you were to stay a certain age would you be able to continue to think new thoughts?

 

Hate to dash your dream, but one day you will die. Even if you manage to download your consciousness into a computer and was able to live in the Internet, you still won't live forever. If we don't destroy our planet ourselves, the sun will one day become a red giant and engulf the Earth. Even if you travel among the stars, the universe is going to keep on expanding and expanding at a faster and faster rate until molecules themselves are ripped into individual atoms and eventually to the quarks themselves. At that point, matter will cease to exist.

 

You are not quite getting this.

We have identified the genes that are responsible for Human Aging.

When a person ages it is because our cells which replace themselves by splitting via Mitosis...after a certain point will not reproduce as the original cells because as we get older our cells degrade as the Genome that exists in every cell splits into two does so in a making a copy from a copy manner.

We right now can engineer the cells to reproduce by Mitosis and split into exact copies of each other without any degrading of genetic information...although we can do this to achieve about a 20 year increase in human life span and this has been done in other animals to extend their lifespans by 3 to 5 times their normal length.

AboveAlpha

 

It’s fascinating, isn’t it?
And it’s where the ‘tradional’ idea of an afterlife enters, in which mind/consciousness can exist independently of matter.
Apparently ever since quantum physics the idea that consciousness is not dependent on matter but maybe even the other way around is not as outrageous as it used to be to a purely scientific mind (Personally I won’t even pretend to understand quantum physics, but: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind–body_problem , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Hopwood_Jeans )
However, quantum physics or not: some people believe in this idea, some don’t. But whether one does or not, the universe and its forces are just awe-inspiring.