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If you're alive in 30 years you might be in 1000 years too

haakonsk.blogg.no

61–70 of 230 posts

Re: If you're alive in 30 years you might be in 1000 years too

#61
post #36

> So if you've made it to 150, you're "over the hump" (a long time ago), and then there's simply no limit to how long you can live. Even if we accept that life-extending and rejuvenating technologies will progress as described, and that all diseases will eventually be either curable or eradicated, there's still the risk of death from accident (or murder). In England and Wales in 2010, about 0.025% of the population d…

"there's still the risk of death from accident (or murder)."

Yes, everyone already knows that. I wouldn't worry about living for 1000 years if you're alive in 30 years, the human races spends much more time discussing the inane. Someone yells the equivalent of "squirrel" and down the rabbit hole we go...

Re: If you're alive in 30 years you might be in 1000 years too

#62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

raises an interesting philosophical question: If one would commit murder and the victim has already lived 500 years is it then as much a crime as if the victim were 25 yro? e.g. Assuming not everyone could afford the technology and you have a 30 yro killer who lacks the funds to rejuvinate committing murder on somebody much older. Would that even be a crime or could it be argued that a 2nd class citizen has only trie…

We punish based on intent, not on victim type.

No we don't. Most legal system have some concept of aggravating circumstances if the victim of a particular offense is a certain age, a certain profession, etc

Re: If you're alive in 30 years you might be in 1000 years too

#63
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your argument is "we don't want more old people because I disagree with them ideologically." Shoddy at best.

If you re-read the post, that's actually not his argument.

He's saying that the older someone is the more their ideology defines them, which is itself probably inaccurate. And he says that that "could be a problem."

Re: If you're alive in 30 years you might be in 1000 years too

#64
post #36

> So if you've made it to 150, you're "over the hump" (a long time ago), and then there's simply no limit to how long you can live. Even if we accept that life-extending and rejuvenating technologies will progress as described, and that all diseases will eventually be either curable or eradicated, there's still the risk of death from accident (or murder). In England and Wales in 2010, about 0.025% of the population d…

raises an interesting philosophical question: If one would commit murder and the victim has already lived 500 years is it then as much a crime as if the victim were 25 yro? e.g. Assuming not everyone could afford the technology and you have a 30 yro killer who lacks the funds to rejuvinate committing murder on somebody much older. Would that even be a crime or could it be argued that a 2nd class citizen has only trie…

You already have that philosophical question now: 1 year old VS 99 year old.

Re: If you're alive in 30 years you might be in 1000 years too

#65
post #4

I don't mean to be a pessimist but this entire article boils down to describing Moore's law, and saying that medical research will advance quickly because it uses computers as well. Seems a little shoddy.

Not to mention that most in the know seem to agree Moore's law has come to an end, as all exponential growth must at some point in the real world.

If this kind of simple-minded extrapolation worked, we would all be flying personal vehicles that could break the sound barrier right now, and would take vacations on the moon.

Re: If you're alive in 30 years you might be in 1000 years too

#66
> Moore's Law, which states that the number of transistors on an area doubles every two years ... [and] will probably also hold true after it is no longer possible to increase the number of transistors per area. At that point another technology with significantly greater potential will take over for transistors.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but haven't we already "maxed out" Moore's Law? Aren't hardware manufactures already running into problems at the quantum level because of how small and packed transistors are already? That would be why we've "maxed" CPU speed at around ~3-4GHz.

Re: If you're alive in 30 years you might be in 1000 years too

#67
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you not want to stop people from dying?

Cancer articles have been trending on HN lately.

My father is a clinical oncologist/researche who is approaching "voluntary" retirement age. He's incredibly depressed about it given the sudden boom in successful research in the field. I believe the reason of the trend isn't just sudden interest, but quantity of production as well.

Re: If you're alive in 30 years you might be in 1000 years too

#68
One of the better societal aspects of Richard Morgan's Altered Carbon was the concept of "Meths" - super rich people who could effectively afford to live forever by inserting their consciousness into new bodies (or "sleeves" to use Morgan's terminology). One of the downsides of this was that, since the rich lived effectively forever, they only accumulated more and more wealth in greater and greater quantities, and limited the trickle down to other people.

Re: If you're alive in 30 years you might be in 1000 years too

#70
Oxygen[0] by Nick Lane makes a pretty compelling argument why this will not happen. With perfect health you can at best achieve ~120 years age. I think this paper A unifying view of ageing and disease:the double-agent theory[2] covers some of the arguments in the book.

To give a simplified view, the big obstacles are a) a technology capable of repairing damaged mythocondrial material in a living organism and b) a technology capable of repairing neural cells w/o replacing them (that is if you want to preserver 'you', not just your body). That is assuming that our current understanding of senescence[1] is even mildly accurate.

[0] http://www.amazon.com/Oxygen-Molecule-World-Popular-Science/... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senescence [2] http://www.nick-lane.net/double-agent%20theory.pdf

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