What's REALLY wrong with this Forum.....

cepheid

Um, no. They want to preserve actual correctness, so that this site retains its utility as a reliable resource for scientific information, something which cannot be said of the majority of other sites on the Internet, which fail to distinguish between legitimate, productive scientific discussion that builds on well-established principles, and crackpottery.

ThomasT

Ok, I can't disagree with this.

Ok, that's a valid point, imo.

Ok, then I'll go with that. It's not suitable for discussion, imho.

Interesting. I've seldom been accused of being logical. Thanks. From now on I think I'll agree with anything you have to say. Insofar as it makes sense to me, that is.

OmCheeto

Phht!

What's wrong with this forum? I'll tell you....

This forum has only 345,995 members. How difficult would it been for some mentor to come and ask me my opinion on whether or not they should lock one of my favorite topics? Not very difficult, that's how difficult.

And grievance with Evo? Bwah! Haha! To grieve Evo for that would be like grieving someone for making me not want to poke ice picks in my eyes.

turbo

I adore Evo, but have a hard time equating that with an urge to stick ice-picks in my eyes. I don't see the equivalence. Sorry.

OmCheeto

I see 4 negatives in the sentence, which in my mind, makes the whole thing positive. It's minimal translation is: "Evo's act made me happy."

Jack21222

In what way is immortality a nonsensical subject? It's an area of active medical research, particularly into telomeres and telemorase.

Perhaps the moderators of this forum would like to contact the authors of this paper to tell them to stop wasting money on nonsense: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9175740

Or how about this letter in Nature? http://health.usf.edu/nocms/publicaf...evelopment.pdf

AlephZero

The nonsense level of the thread and the subject are two different things. The only mechanism mentioned in the thread's OP was "brain emulation".

Integral

I do not see "immortality" mentioned in either of those articles. Perhaps if the topic would have been about telomeres growth and aging it would not have been locked. It is a HUGE speculative jump from those articles to immortality. Recall that our rules forbid speculative discussions.

Jack21222

Those articles are about stopping aging (senescence means aging). Stopping aging and immortality are very closely linked, not a huge speculative jump.

Ryan_m_b

The thread was locked because it is nonsensicle, biological longevity is one thing and if you want to discuss specific papers relevant to that then that is fine but we've had more than enough discussions regarding the Rapture of the Nerds on this forum and we don't need any more.

BTW Jack cellular senescence and aging of an organism are related but different phenomenon. Do you know what happens when cellular senescence is stopped (as it routinely is)? You get cancer. Not immortality. The problems with threads like this is they are rarely founded in any real sort of science. Instead you get crackpots like Ray Kurzweil alternating between advocating mega-vitamin therapy and nano-magic to somehow prevent aging with no discussion of how that would actually happen beyond vague semantics i.e. "this paper deals with cellular aging therefore in 20 years we could keep people as teenagers!!!11!!1"

As we don't discuss moderator decisions publically and the decision has already been given not to entertain this nonsense (if you can create a legitimate thread within the rules using peer-reviewed references and use those references properly then go ahead) I don't see any reason for this thread to continue either.

Evo

I locked the thread because it had to do with crackpot Ray Kurzweil's prediction that humans will become immortal in 2045 (the op's memory of the shows he watched was off by 2 years). I didn't want to bring up Kurzweil, I wrongly assumed enough people would know to what the OP was referring, it's famous (infamous) enough, and it's been discussed enough, it's overly speculative and the threads go nowhere.

Sometimes mentors know what they're doing.

It's been interesting to see member's reactions. Some people got the fact that even without linking it to Kurzweil, that we don't have enough knowledge of the brain to say that we'll be able to transfer it into a computer in 33 years and have it be that "person".

And Om is my friend, whether he likes it or not.

Evo

Oh yeah, from the list of locked threads on previous discussions at the bottom of the one I locked.

http://www.physicsforums.com/showpos...6&postcount=18

The only difference is that the one I locked is even more preposterous in this time frame, combining a human brain with a machine.