back to article Google will make you live to be 500, claims Ventures president

The president and managing partner of Google Ventures, Bill Maris, has stated that it is possible to live to be 500, according to a lengthy and uncritical article appearing on the cover of the April 2015 issue of Bloomberg Markets. And not only is it possible to live to be 500, but Google is investing in the companies that …

  1. Montague Wanktrollop

    Nanobots eh?

    Well seeing how they made 7 of 9 look I'll have a bucket of them for the Mrs.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Coat

    "Google will make you live to be 500"...

    Correction : Google will make WEALTHY people live to be 500...

    1. phil dude
      Joke

      Re: "Google will make you live to be 500"...

      Further Correction: Google will take your brain and put it in a jar...

      P.

      1. AndrueC Silver badge
        Stop

        Re: "Google will make you live to be 500"...

        Further Correction: Google will take your brain and put it in a jar...

        Or a box. :(

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: "Google will make you live to be 500"...

          Further Correction: Google will take everything that makes you an individual and stick it in their index for sale to the highest bidder.

    2. PleebSmash

      Re: "Google will make you live to be 500"...

      Complete correction: anti-aging nanobots will be cheaper than traditional health care, as they are preventative and could be used to target all of the body's cells. Doctors of the future will mainly be ER doctors, since any gradual damage to your body will be stopped short by nanobots.

  3. Yugguy

    Indeed - and as Holmes commented a long time ago:

    There is danger there—a very

    real danger to humanity. Consider, Watson, that the

    material, the sensual, the worldly would all prolong

    their worthless lives. The spiritual would not avoid

    the call to something higher. It would be the survival

    of the least fit. What sort of cesspool may not our

    poor world become?”

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      "My dear Holmes!" I ejaculated.

      1. K

        i hope your referring to katie?

        1. present_arms

          No he was referring to Sherlock as he ejaculated numerous times in the books and so did Watson as to ejaculate means to exclaim

          1. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

            as to ejaculate means to exclaim

            Thank goodness we have folks like you around to explain other people's feeble jokes.

            Any chance we could all just go back to being obscure and snide? Thanks.

    2. PleebSmash
      FAIL

      Sir Arthur Conan Doyle told me being immortal is bad!

      In 1922, the psychical researcher Harry Price accused the spirit photographer William Hope of fraud. Doyle defended Hope, but further evidence of trickery was obtained from other researchers. Doyle threatened to have Price evicted from the National Laboratory of Psychical Research and claimed if he persisted to write "sewage" about spiritualists, he would meet the same fate as Harry Houdini. Price wrote "Arthur Conan Doyle and his friends abused me for years for exposing Hope." Because of the exposure of Hope and other fraudulent spiritualists, Doyle in the 1920s led a mass resignation of eighty-four members of the Society for Psychical Research, as they believed the Society was opposed to spiritualism.

      Doyle and spiritualist William Thomas Stead were duped into believing Julius and Agnes Zancig had genuine psychic powers. Both Doyle and Stead claimed the Zancigs performed telepathy. In 1924 Julius and Agnes Zancig confessed that that their mind reading act was a trick and published the secret code and all the details of the trick method they had used under the title of Our Secrets!! in a London newspaper. In his book The History of Spiritualism (1926), Doyle praised the psychic phenomena and spirit materializations produced by Eusapia Palladino and Mina Crandon, who were both exposed as frauds.

      1. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

        Re: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle told me being immortal is bad!

        Doyle's credulity is well-known. He promoted the Cottingley Fairies as evidence of the "spirit realm".. Man couldn't think critically to save his life - which is, I suppose, a bit ironic for someone most famous for a literary character who champions observation and deduction.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Unless you happen to earn what the head of google does

    there is no real reason to live any longer... you are just a slave for them enabing them to live as they do. If you are a shelf filer with thr prospect of doing it from 20 to 65 or whatever, do you really want to fill shelves from 20 to 500?

    1. PleebSmash
      Terminator

      Re: Unless you happen to earn what the head of google does

      You won't have a job filling shelves, since that job will go to a robot.

      Face it, it's immortal utopia or bust.

    2. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

      Re: Unless you happen to earn what the head of google does

      I'm not keen on the idea of living for five centuries, at least out of context (i.e., there are conditions under which it seems reasonable), but having to work certainly isn't one of them. I enjoy working. I do it every day, in one form or another. I'm rewarded by the satisfaction of having produced things and solved problems. Also - not insignificantly - by being paid for some of it, but that's not the primary motivation.

      I'm baffled by the way some folks around here seem to think that labor is dreadful. Time to read your Maslow.

  5. Christoph

    You don't need to live to be 500

    If they can just get a few extra years of life, in that time the technology will get better and you can get a few more years. Long before you reach age 500, it will be possible to live for much longer than 500 years. Just keep going.

    And one reason - if we can get lifespans up to a few thousand years, the galaxy is ours. We can cope with the time taken for interstellar journeys.

    1. Yugguy

      Re: You don't need to live to be 500

      Only if we piloted the entire planet somewhere else. Otherwise wouldn't just get REALLY bored?

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: You don't need to live to be 500

        Google will send along a copy of the web, as it existed when we left. That's why they are so busy adding a day's worth of cat videos every second so we'll have something to do on the long trip.

        Unfortunately they'll miscalculate, and still show us ads the whole trip, even though they will be for the same stuff which we won't be able to buy anyway. The ship will arrive at its destination a few millenia later, full of desiccated corpses of people who committed suicide 18 months into the trip.

    2. PleebSmash
      Childcatcher

      Re: You don't need to live to be 500

      Cristoph is right. If the first person to live to 200 is alive today, that person won't have much trouble living 10,000 years, barring bloody murder or cosmic demolition.

  6. ckm5

    Because there aren't enough humans already....

    The human species is already on the verge of unsustainability by virtue of its sheer numbers. Can't even fathom what significantly longer lifespans would imply.

    Also, cf. Steve Jobs - "death is life's best invention"

    Not that I wouldn't want another 20-30 years, but way to screw over all future generations.

    1. PleebSmash
      Facepalm

      Re: Because there aren't enough humans already....

      You assume that the planet can't sustain 10-20 billion people. You ignore the fact that birth rates are in decline all over the world.

      Slowing population growth, advancements in solar and fusion, advancements in hydroponic/aquaponic crop yield, advancements in space propulsion all will help eliminate the unsustainability you're afraid of.

      Your chosen deity offers an opinion on death, not wisdom. If he had stopped to discard his irrational beliefs, maybe he would have lived long enough to change his mind:

      "Jobs’s faith in alternative medicine likely cost him his life.... He had the only kind of pancreatic cancer that is treatable and curable.... He essentially committed suicide." According to Jobs's biographer, Walter Isaacson, "for nine months he refused to undergo surgery for his pancreatic cancer – a decision he later regretted as his health declined."

  7. Doctor_Wibble
    Stop

    Cruel and unusual punishment

    It's amusing to speculate on what I'd do if I could live that long but quite frankly it would mean working for another 300 years at an absolute minimum and that's a worse prospect than an extra 100 years wobbling around on a zimmer frame pretending that it was a brilliant idea.

    And I note that these are *consumers* living to 500, not *people*.

    1. PleebSmash
      Go

      Re: Cruel and unusual punishment

      You won't have a menial job since those will be automated, and you won't be on a zimmer frame since anti-aging technologies will ensure youth from the inside. You are mired in the old ways.

  8. sisk

    Who'd WANT to.

    First, I'd be interested to know how he thinks we're getting around the Hayflick limit without causing rampant cancer, but lets just assume they've worked that little snag out. Now the question becomes who'd want to live 500 years?

    I'm not so sure I'm keen on seeing 70 years, let alone hundreds. For me to be interested in that kind of lifespan we'd have to have a post-scarcity utopian society (which, let's face it, is NEVER going to happen).

    1. PleebSmash

      Re: Who'd WANT to.

      It's not hard, it's nanobots. Even before effective nanobot therapies are produced, senolytics could be used to clear out senescent cells. Your cynicism on the possibility of a post-scarcity utopian society is natural. A long string of failures would tend to suggest that it can never work. But it's technology that makes such a society possible, and technology is advancing rapidly. Divide the cost of energy by 10 while making numerous technologies more resource efficient, and the possibility looks a lot better.

      1. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

        Re: Who'd WANT to.

        It's not hard, it's nanobots handwaving magic.

        FTFY. HTH. HAND.

  9. x 7

    imagine what you'd need in terms of cosmetics at the age of 500.......

    faclift, nip & tuck wouldn't be the half of it.

    And where would you put the extra population?

    1. PleebSmash

      Anti-aging is pro-youth. What you call natural is actually a collection of diseases. Cosmetics won't be required.

      We can put the "extra" population right here on Earth, or send them out to space (no, not with today's technology). Birth rates are in decline.

  10. Steven Roper

    I hope I die before any of this becomes a reality

    If you want a vision of the horror that would be extended life under Google, have a gander at this Youtube video.

    Although it deals with uploading your consciousness to a computer system rather than preserving your organic body, I have no doubt that the "terms and conditions" imposed by our corporate overlords in exchange for longevity would certainly follow similar patterns.

    This is the modern equivalent of burning in hell for all eternity. The oblivion of death is paradise compared.

    1. PleebSmash
      Pirate

      Re: I hope I die before any of this becomes a reality

      Your "corporate overlords" are people just like you. And if they can have near immortality, they'll fear retribution and death that much more.

      What happened to the open source movement? They don't get to take a stab at mind uploading? Maybe you should support freetards and anti-copyright movements before they could become a problem for mind uploading. Or not take a humorous dystopian mind uploading video seriously.

      Regardless, suicide is always an option if you remain staunchly pro-death.

  11. mrjohn

    Google are obviously not fans of Douglas Adams

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4P3pvKmbsg

  12. Philius

    time wasters

    I hate it when someone wastes my time, whether deliberately, by accident or because they found themselves in a situation where wasting my time was a consequence.

    When it comes to technology, wasting competitors time is good, wasting their time means your product stays on the shelf longer, and you make more money.

    That's why "security through obscurity" is so popular. Closed source profiteers depend on it.

    Here are the steps:

    1. think your chosen field into existence

    2. set up a governing body that you elect amongst yourselves

    3. introduce bureaucracy to generate red tape

    4. profit

    If we lived too long then we'd have the patience to get over these hurdles and establishment types would go the way of the dodo.

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