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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

#161

Post by dahart »

reasonattlm wrote: post #152
dahart wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kurzweil and DeGrey are arguing that it's already happening. It is not, there is no evidence to date that we've moved longevity in a meaningful way, nor that technology is involved in anything other than improvements in health and medicine and environment, further delaying death. To be clear, I'm not saying it can't ever happen, I'm saying that DeGrey's and Kurzweils claims that it is happening and will come to pass…

De Grey is most certainly not arguing that it is happening, he is arguing that it can happen with sufficient investment in the right lines of research. A digest of his position is that the science is way ahead of the will and interest to develop that science into therapies. What he is doing, via advocacy, fundraising, and personally funding research with most of his net worth, is to move the needle on getting therapi…

My mistake conflating DeGrey's arguments with Kurzweil's.

I can't speak to what should have been researched and wasn't, but I know DeGrey has an uphill battle getting attention, for whatever reason. http://www2.technologyreview.com/sens/docs/estepetal.pdf

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

#162

Post by dalke »

macintux wrote: post #145
dalke wrote: post #118

> According to Ray Kurzweil, as soon as something becomes an information technology, it starts progressing according to Moore's Law My field of chemical information - a subfield of cheminformatics - has been an information technology since the 1800s. It was the Big Data of the 1940s and 1950s, many of the pioneers of information retrieval worked on chemical data (Luhn, Mooers, Taube), and the term "information retrie…

Probably should have obfuscated the link.

D'oh! Didn't see that.

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

#163

Post by cgriswald »

tmm wrote: post #112
saiya-jin wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

overpopulation? not enough resources? first let's solve these, so we can have number of humans exploding (exponentially, maybe). if done incorrectly, this might end up in quite a disaster

Why would it? People always seem to assume that with extremely long lifetimes, humans would still reproduce at roughly the same age as they do now. I just don't believe that would be the case. So many things change with lifetimes that long and it seems more likely to me that the human timeline would adjust to the new lifetime. Physically maturing into an adult may take the same amount of time, but now it's a tiny fra…

Does an increase in longevity by itself imply an increase in reproductive years?

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

#164

Post by Joof »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #142
technofiend wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a great number of books that explore this subject. Robert A. Heinlein's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methuselah%27s_Children is an early treatment. As you say at least one society (I'm sorry I don't remember the book) became increasingly risk-averse and added to an ever-growing list of death penalty crimes to feed the organ banks. Rather than utopia my fear is that would be closer to the truth.

I don't see death penalty happening in a society where a lifetime could be thousands of years. Its just too harsh, with so much to lose. Perhaps sentencing would grow to centuries.

Murder becomes a much harsher crime as well.

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

#165

Post by cgriswald »

paulddraper wrote: post #154
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…

Population growth has been declining since the 60s. UN estimates are that we'll peak at 10 billion. Besides that it's already happening, reducing population growth isn't necessarily a good thing, in econimic terms of aggregate "utility." Is there a difference between preventing birth and causing death?

That estimated peak is based on existing and projected death rates. Even Japan's population would grow if death from old age and age-related disease ceased.

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

#167

Post by JoeAltmaier »

Joof wrote: post #164
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see death penalty happening in a society where a lifetime could be thousands of years. Its just too harsh, with so much to lose. Perhaps sentencing would grow to centuries.

Murder becomes a much harsher crime as well.

Yes! The ultimate crime, surpassing even Treason. Perhaps death would be too easy for a Murderer. They would have to face perpetual imprisonment, thousands of years of confinement, to sufficiently punish them.

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

#168

Post by cgriswald »

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.

Some of the treatments are expected to also reverse the effects of aging, so you wouldn't live for 1000 years in the body of a 150 year old. Although I suspect it won't be neat and clean. So if you're born into a world with aging treatments, you might live for 1000 years in the body of a 25 year old, but if you age and then get the treatments, even though you might have the body of a 25 year old, you might have some scarring or other effects left over (like an obese person who loses weight very quickly and has extra skin).

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

#169

Post by brianbarker »

adrianN wrote: post #31
JackuB wrote: post #19

Biologists hate him! This programmer discovered Philosopher's stone with this one weird trick! Anyway: Yes, we will do great advances in health care, but will we _cheat_ death? Will those advancements be available? Is this something we _should_ do as a society? Technological determinism/solutionism (as presented in the article) is a really shoddy idea. It ignores so many things and assumes that progress is an arrow a…

Why would you not want to stop people from dying?

Living to be 1000 sounds great until you realize some of the awful people in this world would be right there with you..forever.

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

#170

Post by morgante »

IncRnd wrote: post #157
morgante wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The probability of dying every year stays the same, but the probability of dying in one of those 9,000 years is cumulative.

If that is how you calculate probabilities, what happens between 4,000 and 9000 years? Are you undead for 5,000 years?

No...

If you were just born, then you will probably die by age 4000. But if you are 3999 then you will almost certainly live to age 4000. Your probability of reaching a certain age is always contingent on your current age.

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