Will science make human beings biologically immortal in future?
16
84
330
9999
88%
chance

Please provide the reasons why you think "yes" or "no" response to this question.

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Alma 12:21-27: "...but it was appointed unto men that they must die; and after death, they must come to judgment,..."

The same (Book of Mormon) passages relate to the problem of how immortality, if we aren't prepared, would have made men miserable, for "this life became a probationary state, a time to prepare to meet God."

So, we're going to have to wait for that miracle on more than just earth-bound sciences.

bought Ṁ10 of NO

Of course no one knows the definitive answer to this question, so this question must resolve to a probability, rather than a definitive YES/NO. So, "Biological Immortality," is defined as, "living a super long time," like Hydra Jellyfish, which are essentially organisms composed of large amounts of stem-cell like cells which can constantly divide and replenish, so they are hypothetically immortal, though obviously they die due to natural causes. So human livers are already biologically immortal relative to other cell types in our body, because they constantly replenish, whereas the rest of our cells stick around for much longer. There's also HeLa cultures, originally from a single human's cancer cells, which have been replicated for about 80 years and likely will continue to be replicated, "forever." But the question isn't about a part of a human or a lab environment, "human beings," - presumably means, "the vast majority of humans," or, "a large group of humans." While consensus in popular online research seems to point toward biological immortality being achievable in the next 50 or so years, this does not take into account the extreme cost of replicating biological lab achievements to a wide environment. So while a super isolated treatment may occur in a lab environment in the year 2070 at a high probability, it would probably take another 20 years before it's generally accessible in a narrow sense (sort of like with the replication of Dolly the Sheep in the 1990s, and then 20 years later, everyone having access to 23&Me, or mRNA vaccines originally being researched in the 1960s, but not being widely available until 2020). So beyond that, it may take another 20-50 more years before biological immortality transitions from being something like a treatment, "oh yeah I had bioImmort on my heart last year, best thing I ever did, I feel great," might be something someone says in 2090 to...huge portions of the population having access to that, at presumably an expensive cost, in the year 2120 or 2140 or so. Of course, it could be way harder to achieve biological immortality than anyone is making it out to be, as clickbait pop-pseudoscience articles are much more popular than just telling the truth, which is, it's much harder to achieve than we wish, meaning, it won't be possible for 1000+ years of research, or if you were to assign probabilities to things, it's likely 5% or less that it happens by 2140 and 95% that it happens by the year 10,000. So here's the catch, that all sounds wonderful, but...at the same time, the chance of human extinction runs at estimates anywhere from 20% on the high end by the Future of Humanity Insitute in Oxford by the year 2100 to 3% by Metacalculus https://www.metaculus.com/questions/578/human-extinction-by-2100 ... so it's reasonable to believe that if we're at a run rate of a 3% chance of extinction per century, which, assuming that since we're depleting the earth's resources, that probability likely goes up every century, even on the low end, we're probably at a 10% chance of extinction by 2200, so maybe a 7% chance of extinction by 2140, with only an around 5% chance of achieving wide-scale biological immortality, we are about 1.4X more likely to go extinct than to achieve biological immortality, which makes intuitive sense if you think about it...the ruination of mankind is typically selfishness, the tragedy of the commons is a real thing...basically, we're just going to be more likely to wipe ourselves out rather than improve ourselves to that level, in the long range. Also, we don't even have to go extinct to fail to achieve biological immortality for a large swath of humans, we just have to achieve a state of civilization that can't support scientific and engineering advancement, e.g., the old saying, "I don't know what WW3 will be fought with, but I know that WW4 will be fought with sticks and stones." So, you can add an additional probability on that side of the scale, e.g. not necessarily that extinction has to happen, but just a massive amount of societal collapse to the point where the average person is living in the year 1400 again...except there are also nuclear weapons and instructions on how to make them lying about. So basically, this market, sitting at 88% is WAY overvalued, or it's just assuming that a lab environment would be fine. I don't think a lab environment is sufficient to answer the question, so I'm placing a bet against, I think the market probability should be much lower, perhaps sitting at around 50/50 or even 30% rather than closer to 90%. Really? 90%? Do people really think that there's a 90% chance that we're going to achieve a sci-fi concept before we blow ourselves to smithereens? C'mon - did you not see the pandemic and how civilization altering and resource constricting that has been? That was just a small sample of what can easily happen to humans.

Can this market ever resolve NO?

Immortal is a pretty strong word. What kind of life-span counts as “immortal”? 10^5 years? 10^10 years?

How would digital or synthetic humans resolve this market? What if no one bothers fixing mortality in biological humans because the design has too many fatal flaws, or something along those lines?

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