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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

#121

Post by anexprogrammer »

ant6n wrote: post #97
anexprogrammer wrote: post #92

However appealing this might be for some, I hope we "solve" global population growth first. Of course that means we need an ethical, voluntary, way of keeping population in check. Which infers true sexual equality, or you get one child policies as successful as China's. Or we have an exponential increase in lifespan and ever more people chasing those finite resources. So, it's going to be a world very different from…

The trick is not to 'use up' finite resources. There's lots of energy coming from the sun. And matter can and should be recycled.

Oh, I agree. It's just that historically we've not been terribly good at that.

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

#122

Post by rusanu »

adrianN wrote: post #84
rusanu wrote: post #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 tec…

I'm pretty sure that you can replace a significant number of my neurons without changing "me".

What makes you sure? Central nervous system neurons are incapable of regeneration[0], so is anybody's guess what would happen if they did get replaced. And, long term, "significant" has to be "all".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroregeneration

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

#123

Post by DougN7 »

shaurz wrote: post #105

It's funny watching techno-religious belief systems emerge in the West as Christianity recedes. This is literally the replacement of the afterlife. Sorry guys, this ain't gonna happen. One day you will die, get over it and start praying.

I've had the same thought so many other times. We blindly believe the 'clergy' of science despite not having any evidence ourselves of what is taught (other than for the obvious that we experience every day). String theory? Black holes? Gravitational waves???Granted, it's probably true (I'm a believer too), but it's blind faith -- I've never replicated any experiments myself, would have to trust the measuring devices even if I tried to replicate the experiments, so I believe because everyone else tells me to. And that's the hard-core replicatable physics! It gets worse as you move to less mathematical sciences like chemistry, biology, psychology, nutrition, etc.

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

#124

Post by alanwatts »

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.

Raising the standard of living does the trick quite well:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility

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

#125

Post by alanwatts »

jontas wrote: post #102
girkyturkey wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>Limited resources will always keep population in check.

Actually, the opposite is true to a degree. Limited resources increases the birth rate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility

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

#126

Post by RangerScience »

ChicagoBoy11 wrote: post #41
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…

Beyond the reduced risk of death from injury, you also have to account for a change in behavior. I posit that we would all act very differently if we knew our life expectancy to be a few thousand years. I'd venture a guess that we would be a lot more risk-averse. Society would look drastically different.

http://smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=4021

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

#127

Post by JoeAltmaier »

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…

For this reason I'd predict a society of immortal conservatives. No risk is worth taking. Speed limits drop precipitously. Traffic infractions become federal offenses. Interest rates drop to nil.

Everyone would just have too much at risk, to allow anything dicey.

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

#128

Post by soylentcola »

rorykoehler wrote: post #87
vruiz wrote: post #5

I'd like to believe you, but what kills people is not their age, today it's mostly cancer and heart disease. While I'd hope we'll make progress, I doubt those 2 will be just gone in 30 years.

What makes you think we won't cure them? Cancer I think will definitely be cured in 30 years. I haven't been following heart disease so much but chances are we will have huge health breakthroughs by 30 years. I would put my money on there being new/different diseases that kill us in 30 years.

In theory, couldn't a lot of heart disease (if not more general cardiovascular diseases) be addressed by figuring out how to affordably grow new hearts from tissue? I understand that's not something we're capable of doing right now but from my (largely ignorant) perspective, it seems like the issue is "hearts break down over time". The heart is essentially a mechanical part, and unlike neurological systems, there's no qualitative difference between one heart and another aside from how well it pumps blood. When you have a mechanical part that wears out, you replace it. Artificial hearts have issues stemming from the fact that they aren't 1:1 replacements for human hearts but if you could grow a new heart from a person's cells and get to a point where doing so is relatively affordable, could you not swap out an old heart the way you'd swap out a fuel pump that's wearing out?

Compared to stuff like cancer, I feel like replacing hearts is more an issue of cost and engineering rather than developing entire new forms of treatment.

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

#129

Post by JoeAltmaier »

jontas wrote: post #107
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Its been done from time to time, but not as the main theme as far as I know.

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

#130

Post by adrianN »

rusanu wrote: post #122
adrianN wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure that you can replace a significant number of my neurons without changing "me".

What makes you sure? Central nervous system neurons are incapable of regeneration[0], so is anybody's guess what would happen if they did get replaced. And, long term, "significant" has to be "all". [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroregeneration

People can have rather serious strokes that kill large number of neurons without losing their sense of self. Sometimes we remove half the brain

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemispherectomy

That gives me confidence that replacing neurons at a rate that counters natural aging does not significantly alter me.

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