methuselah lived 900 years,
methuselah lived 900 years,
but who calls that livin when no gal will give in
to no man who's 900 years
Can we live 1000 years?
31–40 of 111 posts
Re: Can we live 1000 years?
#32Saying 1000 years is too much is a just a matter of perspective. A few thousands years back, I am sure most people died at around 40. To them living 100 years would be way too much. 1000 is nothing. We will adapt to it and still find ways to be miserable and need more time to do the things we want to do.
Re: Can we live 1000 years?
#33I wouldn't want to. I can barely tolerate family reunions now, no need to make them fill a stadium.
Re: Can we live 1000 years?
#34It would slow down technical innovation. People grow accustomed to their surroundings and find newer technology suspicious and unneeded. That's why leaps in innovation are most easily embraced by the generations born with them (ie., current teenagers using computers for communication where their parents use phones). If people can live 1000 years, that would cause overcrowding of the Earth. So if we don't expand to ot…
If we can get to the point where we're reversing aging, I think we can safely assume reversible sterilization. Use an economic solution (really simplified here): When you receive anti-aging treatment, you're temporarily sterilized. Each person then gets 1 credit for a child. 3 credits are required to bear a child. One can purchase or sell their credit for children as one would like. For the first time in human histor…
You could have a law, if you take anti-aging meds you must leave the planet.
Re: Can we live 1000 years?
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
If 20% of the population becomes mufti billionaires a billion will not buy what it used to. Compound interest works in large part because capital has value. As the world becomes rich the value of wealth will go down relative to the value of peoples effort. Basically over the extremely long term expected ROI should go down if people start living into extreme old age. Granted some people will always balance this out wi…
I don't know that wealth necessarily implies a lower return to capital. More people are wealthier worldwide right now than at any point in history -- the poorest American makes old European royalty like paupers. (Lives two to three times as long, too.) But what does the return on capital look like in 2008 versus 1408? It is much, much higher. People, in aggregate, have trillions to invest right now . The market finds…
>But what does the return on capital look like in 2008 versus 1408? It is much, much higher.
No it isn't. See table 2 here: http://74.125.47.132/search?q=cache:K7gncYlDrYQJ:www.econ.uc...
Think of it this way: there is only so much wealth being produced in the world. Increasing lifespan by itself does not increase wealth (unless it increases the proportion of people who are of working age, but at most that would less than double it). So, if a large proportion of people are going to be equivalent to today's millionaires or billionaires, where's all this wealth going to come from?
Re: Can we live 1000 years?
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
If 20% of the population becomes mufti billionaires a billion will not buy what it used to. Compound interest works in large part because capital has value. As the world becomes rich the value of wealth will go down relative to the value of peoples effort. Basically over the extremely long term expected ROI should go down if people start living into extreme old age. Granted some people will always balance this out wi…
I don't know that wealth necessarily implies a lower return to capital. More people are wealthier worldwide right now than at any point in history -- the poorest American makes old European royalty like paupers. (Lives two to three times as long, too.) But what does the return on capital look like in 2008 versus 1408? It is much, much higher. People, in aggregate, have trillions to invest right now . The market finds…
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that you don't sound like you know too many of the very poorest Americans. They are in debt, or completely insolvent, living a life of vagrancy, homeless, family-less, mentally disturbed, and diseased, often terminally. Kings lived lives of prestige and luxury.
Re: Can we live 1000 years?
#37What's the ultimate end game of living for ever? Who's read Asimov's "The Last Question" http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html Imagine you can live to 1000 or more, at what point does your brain run out of space for memories? When you're finally out of room in your memory buffer do you just turn it into a FIFO queue? So you could collect a whole bunch of information you like (like favorite books, music, movies,…
So your assumption is life is pointless so kill yourself? Are you going to be the first person to test this laughably pessimistic hypothesis?
I'm a thousand times smarter than my pet rabbit, I've yet to even try suicide because its patently moronic. If human beings were a thousand times smarter than they are today then there's a high probability that less people will commit suicide as they'll finally be smart enough to realize it's not a solution to a problem.
Human culture is so diverse that even in 1000 years you'd barely manage 5 years in each country on the planet. I mean just look at how different human culture is today than it was 1000 years ago. We're talking the difference between Monarchy and Democracy in the entire western world.
There's no law of conservation of information, there's no finite limit to the amount of data in the universe. It's not like once a thousand books have been written you're stuck with them, there's going to be more and more unique information as the universe ages. A being with an infinite lifespan is going to have a lot of time experiencing all there is for humanity to offer before it even has to create something itself, even then it could likely explore the universe to find another culture to experience. I'm sure if you're going to live forever and spent 10,000 years experiencing humanity, it might not seem too long to take a quick 100 year jaunt to another star system to spend 10,000 years experiencing alienity.
Re: Can we live 1000 years?
#38so the question is. what happens at 1000 that kills us, and why aren't we solving that problem? WTF didn't anyone see this coming? might as well just die now if it's all going to be the same...
ISTR that, on average, people would live to be 1000 on average if they died only from accidents/violence rather than disease and old age.
The age distribution would be different. With the simplifying assumption that everybody's chance of dying in a given year is the same, the mortality rate would be proportional to number of people alive, which means that 1000 years would be a half-life. So you'd see 1/8 of the people living to be 3000 or more years, 1/16 living to be 4000, etc.
Re: Can we live 1000 years?
#39What's the ultimate end game of living for ever? Who's read Asimov's "The Last Question" http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html Imagine you can live to 1000 or more, at what point does your brain run out of space for memories? When you're finally out of room in your memory buffer do you just turn it into a FIFO queue? So you could collect a whole bunch of information you like (like favorite books, music, movies,…
So your assumption is life is pointless so kill yourself? Are you going to be the first person to test this laughably pessimistic hypothesis? I'm a thousand times smarter than my pet rabbit, I've yet to even try suicide because its patently moronic. If human beings were a thousand times smarter than they are today then there's a high probability that less people will commit suicide as they'll finally be smart enough…
I wouldn't just kill myself for several reasons, but the two top ones are:
First, I am afraid of death.
Second, I am mortal and my death is a certainty, there is quite literally no point in rushing it.
So there you have one emotional instinctive reason and one logical one. And I have to agree with you suicide is moronic.
And perhaps 1000 years is not nearly enough time to become bored. But how about 1000 000 years? More?
My question was about the veeeeeeeeeeeeery long run, do you think you'll find life interesting for ever?
Re: Can we live 1000 years?
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
So your assumption is life is pointless so kill yourself? Are you going to be the first person to test this laughably pessimistic hypothesis? I'm a thousand times smarter than my pet rabbit, I've yet to even try suicide because its patently moronic. If human beings were a thousand times smarter than they are today then there's a high probability that less people will commit suicide as they'll finally be smart enough…
I wouldn't just kill myself for several reasons, but the two top ones are: First, I am afraid of death. Second, I am mortal and my death is a certainty, there is quite literally no point in rushing it. So there you have one emotional instinctive reason and one logical one. And I have to agree with you suicide is moronic. And perhaps 1000 years is not nearly enough time to become bored. But how about 1000 000 years? M…
For that one, look away from The Last Question, and toward Galapagos, by Kurt Vonnegut. I think, as long as we're talking about finite time, life would have to be pretty incredibly bad to make me want to end it.