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Remember that maximum human lifespan hasn't really changed in centuries.
Remember that humans couldn't fly for millenia. Remember that space was a celestial sphere thought unbreachable. Remember that sickness was seen as the devil's work.
The march of technology renders these claims pointless. We will solve aging if given enough time, and if we keep on the right track.
Still can't. Humans can only build machines that fly.
Based on pandemic propaganda, it still is, except the Devil is now personified as a Republican instead of a humanoid with horns and tail, or a man of wealth and taste.
This claim is vacuous, though.
There are human-constructed flying objects in all four quadrants of the machine/not-machine//self-powered/human-powered schema.
(Normal aeroplane/helicopter/etc.; pedal-powered aircraft; helium balloon; hang-glider.)
All of those are machines.
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Sure, but they're talking about a technology change.
Before the internal combustion engine, the maximum human travel speed hadn't changed in centuries either.
Not to say that it's likely, but I think you're ignoring the essence of the argument.
The essence of that argument is usually something like "look how much the mean (or median even) lifespan has gone up over the years -- surely people will soon live to be 200". Without this (bad) essence, it's no better than "well we seem to be very smart, surely we will figure out a way to increase the maximum lifespan real soon now" -- which seems pretty unconvincing given that it hasn't budged a bit for hundreds of years.
You can't take the average argument for a position, you have to engage with the argument in play, because it only takes one good argument for something to be right. I can generate several hundred bad arguments for any position you want right now.
Even further, that wasn't the case this time. TheDag explicitly called out a technology change.
Quoting them:
And when talking about what science is coming, they don't talk about past medical advances, but reference AI, presumably some sort of intelligence explosion.
So what technology has increased the maximum lifetime of humans so far? If the answer is "nothing", than why should we think that future technology will do so? Even if we allow rationalist-fever-dream-AIs, they are not gods -- all concrete science so far indicates that maximum human lifespan is really quite a persistent and narrow range.
It hasn't. But technology obviously can fundamentally change human limitations. Before the airplane, what technology had increased the maximum flight distance of humans?
Because there are several examples of biological immortality in nature (just as there are several examples of flight in nature), and we've gotten pretty good at stealing ideas from evolution. We know it's possible for a biological organism to be immortal.
Now, will the first couple thousand people who try such a genetic alteration probably get some weird form of super-cancer? Sure. Probably. But if we're talking of the elite of the elite pursuing their goals, that's not that many bodies. Elites have thrown way more bodies away in pursuit of mere land.
Without running crazy genetic experiments, sure. Do you have an argument for why we will never run those experiments in the future?
As Nybbler pointed out, the maximum flight distance of humans is the same as it ever was -- inventing machines is much easier than altering human biology.
There are all kinds of weird organisms out there -- can you name some with significant features that we have managed to graft onto the human body in any sort of permanent way? Some kinds of fish are very long lived, but pretty well all of them can breath water -- this has been known for some time and many people would like to be able to do that too -- where are we on gills for humans?
If you want to be taken seriously, you first need to provide some evidence not that such experiments might be run, but rather that they might succeed. "Because I say so" or "anything is possible" are examples of things which are not evidence.
Then imagine a small machine that repairs telomeres or something.
I really don't. If you go look at the thread, TheDag advanced that part of the argument. I'm not responsible for other people's arguments.
I just got annoyed by The_Nybbler's bad shutdown that amounted to "It hasn't happened, yet", which is a completely useless statement during a conversation about future tech, both true by definition but not relevant. I might add, that you also engaged in during your first response to me.
I have advanced plausible interpretations, but I've reached my limit, as I'm not the one that advanced this argument, and so I have no real idea what they were thinking.
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