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

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

#101

Post by soohyung »

chrisdotcode wrote: post #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 alre…

No. That's not quite true. Yes we are very close to maxing out Moore's Law but so far we've still kept up. If I remember correctly there's a completely different reason for CPU speed not being higher than that (maybe the physical limit to transistors themselves?). We are still increasing the number of transistors per chip and not exactly scaling horizontally - after all we are fitting 4 CPU cores onto a chip that previously only fit a single one.

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

#102

Post by jontas »

girkyturkey wrote: post #52
totony wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You wouldn't want population growth to outgrow your capacity. Also, usually, the longer someone lives, the more their ideology defines them. Could be a problem too

I completely agree. There is no way to keep our population in check. After all, it is the natural life cycle. Order would be unbalanced.

Limited resources will always keep population in check. When population growth outstrips available resources, war (or some other catastrophic event that reduces population, eg. famine, drought, disease, etc.) is inevitable.

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

#104

Post by JauntTrooper »

onion2k wrote: post #74
dghf wrote: 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…

Getting to 150 and then stopping ageing means you'll live the next 850 years of your life in the body of a 150 year old. That doesn't sound fun.

It's better than the alternative though.

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

#106

Post by dahart »

Unfortunately, no, this is pure wishful thinking.

Using life expectancy is a misleading argument, and I believe intentionally so. Life expectancy is a function of early mortality. Longevity is the average age at death of people who die only of old age, and it doesn't vary much and hasn't for thousands of years. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longevity

Ray Kurzweil and Aubrey De Grey are playing on the hopes and fears of people to make arguments about the fountain of youth that won't come to pass. I wish they would, but they won't.

The part that bothers me is that Kurzweil, at least, knows his argument is wrong, it is clear that he's intentionally misusing the data and knows it. Take a look at the very last graph and paragraph in this piece, for example: http://www.kurzweilai.net/the-law-of-accelerating-returns.

Kurzweil uses data from 1850-1920 and then conveniently skips all the years between 1920 and 2000. That is not possible to do accidentally, it is a misleading abuse of statistics. Unfortunately for Kurzweil, if you look at the data between 1920 and 2000, it paints a completely different picture, one of life expectancy asymptotically flat-lining.

Kurzweil also appears to conflate life expectancy with longevity, he says "In the eighteenth century, we added a few days every year to human longevity;". That statement is false. We added to human life expectancy, not longevity. And the gains were due to reductions in infant mortality and violence, and improvements in medicine and general health.

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

#107

Post by jontas »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #100
adventured wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The part where you think we're very far away, may be because a breakthrough is most likely going to be revolutionary when it occurs. Rather than a small increment, it'll be a substantial leap (even if it's not recognized at that moment). On the order of the transistor. I'd be very skeptical that it will be noticed that it's possible, around the time that leap forward is about to occur. History indicates the exact opp…

A breakthrough may not be of any use to those already around. Likely a genetic manipulation would allow newborns to have a longer lifespan (many mammals have different lifespans already; it may be programmable). Adults may have changed in ways that make it ineffective. So we'd grow old among a rising generation of immortals.

> So we'd grow old among a rising generation of immortals.

Sounds like the premise of what would be a very interesting sci-fi book.

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

#108

Post by mfoy_ »

ant6n wrote: post #95
neuromancer2701 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why wouldn't we be more risky if we knew we would live for 3000 years. Instead of 5-10 years of drinking and partying we would have 100-200 years of extended "college" years. There no pressure to get your stuff together if you know you can mess around for a couple of centuries and still have time to get your life in order.

Even if you can stay at 150 for 850 years, if you want kids, you might want to start somewhere in the first century.

And then after a millenium your great grandchildren will be relatively as old as you are (Say 900 to 1000, at that point how does aging affect someone?)

Also, how would your memory hold up? Would you even be able to really remember anything that happened over a century or two ago?

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

#110

Post by talideon »

Qantourisc wrote: post #64
DyslexicAtheist wrote: post #45

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…

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

No need to go so extreme when a more plausible scenario is a 15 year old vs a 65 year old.
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