Aug 6, 2005

What are you made of?

In a few years, this will be no longer a philosophical question. With DNA sequencing prices plummeting, the new age in medicine is approaching. Another milestone in the quest toward immortality... just as Ray predicted.

It's coming'...

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Immortality, my friend, is very easy.

All you need to do is to attain the speed of light. When you do, time effectively stops flowing for you, thus granting you immortality.

Of course, you need an infinite amount of energy to accelerate to c, but hey, life's imperfect.

Anonymous said...

Unless you're massless, that is. If that's so, then you've already achieved c and are dualistic .

P.S.: It must be very hard to type while oscillating.

Anonymous said...

I'm curious. If your vehicle reaches c, yet your body can only handle .99999999c, then what happens to you?

Anonymous said...

Well, that's not something that's likely to happen. You can not reach c (neither can your vehicle). It is the limit, which only massless particles (f.e. photons, whose particle character is debatable) can achieve. The thing is that as you accelerate, your mass increases; slowly at first, but more rapidly as you approach c, which in turn means you need a bigger impulse to keep accelerating at the same rate. Read up here.

Ad 'handling': your body is perfectly capable of handling any velocity. There's no difference if you're striding down the street, driving a race car, strapped in a hypersonic jet or flying a spacecraft at relativistic velocities. You wouldn't notice any difference, either.

There is a practical limit, though; if you're going too fast, even the tiny atoms of interstellar hydrogen are going to start punching holes in your precious spacecraft.

 
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