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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

#201

Post by sammydavis »

paulddraper wrote: post #191
habitue wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not the commenter you're replying to, but maybe they meant that we've only reduced early causes of death like disease etc, but not done anything to affect our internal biological processes that cause aging. As an example, reducing skin cancer by staying out of the sun keeps you from prematurely aging, but it doesn't stop your hair from turning white and your wrinkles from forming.

Heart disease, obesity, and arthritis are sometimes reversible, partially thanks to better medical care. Oh, and cancer.

Drugs that change our metabolism can affect how much damage something does to your body, and you die because your body systems fail or degrade. So fixing some causes and symptoms should be able to increase your possible lifespan. Just like we can increase the lifespan of some simple animals, we could increase our lifespan through physical means. There's no magic spirit inside you that can only last 120 years, as far as anyone knows.

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

#202

Post by ChicagoBoy11 »

neuromancer2701 wrote: post #50
ChicagoBoy11 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

That's not the right way to think about this.

Let's take binge-drinking, for example. Let's suppose that each binge-drinking episode has a .0001% chance of causing a fatality. That is trivially low.

However, in order to consider the trade-offs involved, you have to think about the expected value of your life in either scenario. So you must compare E(life | no drink) with E(life | drink).

These are practically the same, but where they differ is that in the drink scenario, your expected value is broken down into two scenarios -- one if you die as a result of the binge drink, and one if you don't. So you can break E(life | drink) into

99.999(E(life + d)) + .001d, where d is the added enjoyment you get from that one night of binge drinking.

The comparison, then, is ultimately whether E(life) >=d

You can tell from this that what really matters is the ratio of d to E(life), the enjoyment you get from drinking that one night, compared to your overall enjoyment of your ENTIRE subsequent life. As we extend your life expectancy, as long as we assume that life is a good thing, we make the value of your subsequent life higher and higher. This, in turn, should make any rational actor be less willing to take on risks that would cut it short.

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

#203

Post by sammydavis »

DougN7 wrote: post #123
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…

Come on, science is not the faith part! Things that are observable and testable are clearly science. Things that are just ideas, ideas that are not verifiable (like string theory which don't predict anything) are not science, it's just ideas. Just like saying god created me, prove it wrong. If I make up some equation that I say I believe with evidence is true, that's not science.

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

#204

Post by sammydavis »

mc808 wrote: post #138
harperlee wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it's in their best interest to assume it wont happen. If I correctly predict, as an actuary, the demise of the industry, I don't win anything. If I can calculate a superprecise premium for my insurance product based on this being true, I have an expensive product that underperforms the competition, and management is not happy. Whereas if I ignore superlong trends, I get to earn my salary, probably until I retire…

If actuaries can collectively predict the future, then term life insurance premiums should show a strong trend down as we approach the point where longevity increases significantly (adjusting for income, inflation, etc). From a few seconds of googling, they seem to be flat or increasing. It might be good to look back in 100 years and see if they got it right.

Predicting the future of lifespan based on the last 100 years is reasonable. That sensible system can't predict a black swan or revolutionary idea; suppose wereduce the chance of heart attacks by 90% by treating your blood chemistry. That's not impossible, also not possible today. But that would expand life expectancy.

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

#205

Post by sammydavis »

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…

Thanks for your thoughtful insight. Battery technology for electric cars appears to be on a slow doubling rate but hopefully faster than 20 years. Maybe 10% improvement per year (72/10 = 7.2 years to double then). Kurzweil doesn't say information tech doesn't double every 2 years in general, just I think that it's rate is somewhat steady. It's at least very exciting to think about progress continuing (however it is defined). 30 years to immortality is what every futurist should predict any time they publish a paper, because as an about 50 year old, that feels achievable.

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

#206

Post by crusso »

cgriswald wrote: post #168
onion2k wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why would you think that you'd have to tolerate scarring in a world that could fix DNA and implant it as easily as we run shell scripts to change our UNIX environments?

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

#207

Post by sammydavis »

elorant wrote: post #43

The important question to answer is whether those advancements will be available to everyone or just the rich. In the case of the latter economic inequality will go ballistic.

They will likely cost billions for the first person, 100s of millions for the next, and keep getting cheaper. Think cell phones, now so cheap your pencil could have one inside for almost nothing in a few years.

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

#208

Post by crusso »

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…

We have many examples whereby societies that become "comfortable" see decreasing birth rates leading to negative population growth. As mortality pressure decreases, the urgency and drive to hurry up and have children decreases.

There's no reason to believe that if we all suddenly could live forever that we wouldn't dramatically slow down how quickly we had children.

Talk to any family about why they're stopping to have children. You'll normally get answers along the lines of, "Well, we're not getting any younger." What if you know that you're not getting any older either?

Personally, if my wife and I hadn't been pushing into our 30's and worried about having a couple of kids before we were too old, we would have waited indefinitely.

Who knows... maybe we might not even have been married? If you have 1,000's of years ahead of you, do you saddle yourself with one person for an eternity?

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

#209

Post by kayoone »

soylentcola wrote: post #128
rorykoehler wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 n…

Well, today hearts are replaced by perfectly healthy hearts of other people and yet life expectancy after such a procedure is not great and patients have to take meds for as long as they live. Also cardiovascular performance is much reduced. So as long as this is not working really well, i guess growing hearts and replacing them is still a long way off. Also there are other kinds of common cardiovascular disease like coronary heart disease which can't be fixed by replacing the heart.

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

#210

Post by 1812Overture »

jsnathan wrote: post #146
dahart wrote: post #106

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 fear…

> 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. Oh but they will. Most certainly. It's a question of when , not if. The body is nothing but a very quirky, very complex bit of machinery. Our task is to scientifically probe that complexity until we have such a great understanding of i…

>It is therefore to predict that scientific progress will come to an unexpected, screeching halt, some time in the next decades.

Until we have complete nuclear disarmament, this doesn't seem like a far fetched scenario.

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