These two stories were near the top of a Google News search on "Immortality" today. First there's this beautiful story on the mprize blog on the latest effort to maximize our immortality odds. Then there's this rather sad one on the Pope's reasons (silly on their face, but perhaps calculatingly resonant with the masses at large) he opposes biological immortality. I'll try to post more in depth thoughts on these stories later. But in the meantime readers are welcome to comment on them.
"I'm pleased to note that the Immortality Institute folk will be offering incentive prizes to participants in the Longevity Meme Folding@Home team on a quarterly basis going forward:
The Longevity Meme has teamed up with the Immortality Institute to offer a quarterly prize to people who contribute to the Stanford Folding@home distributing computing project - aimed at curing disease through understanding the basics of protein folding.
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Winners will be determined by how many points are accumulated over the course of three months as reported at the Stanford Folding@home statistics site. The first quarter of competition begins at 12:00 a.m. Eastern daylight time (U.S.) April 2nd and ends at 12:00 midnight, Eastern daylight time, on June 30th.
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Futures are built, one brick at a time, on the self-organizing collaboration of many interested people. Those collaborative communities are built of many, many overlapping modest goals and projects, just like this one. I hope you'll consider joining in, contributing to the Folding@Home project, and through this effort, learning more about the greater goals of longevity science, curing age-related disease, and ultimately repairing the damage of aging."
http://www.gulf-daily-news.com/Story.asp?Article=211150&Sn=WORL&IssueID=30356
"During a homily in a church near St Peter's Square yesterday the pontiff was reflecting on the goals of science and wondering whether a pill against death would be a good discovery. In the view of the Pope, the world would be full of old people and there would be no more space for the young. The 80-year-old pontiff says it's better not to hope for biological life that can be made to last forever."
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