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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

#151

Post by [deleted] »

tomswartz07 wrote: post #37
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…

On a lighter note, I can imagine that the size of the ego which accompanies the type of person that lives to 9,000 years old would more than likely encourage someone to poison or strangle them.

[deleted]

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

#152

Post by reasonattlm »

dahart wrote: post #149
jsnathan wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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 therapies towards the clinic.

So things like the senescent cell clearance approaches presently under development at Oisin Biotechnologies and UNITY Biotechnology could have been built (with greater cost and slightly different components) ten or fifteen years ago, to pick one example. It was known that senescent cells were an issue, with a great deal of evidence to support that position.

The same goes for glucosepane cross-link clearance. That could have been picked up by any part of Big Pharama a decade ago, had anyone bothered to follow the lines of research that pointed in that direction.

And so on.

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

#153

Post by jontas »

alanwatts wrote: post #125
jontas wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That refers more to individual behavior. What I mean is that, simply, if the world runs out of food, people will die until the population reaches a level that can be supported by the available resources. I don't see how any other outcome is possible. This happens on a smaller scale in areas where food distribution is problematic.

The only way around this is advances in technology that improve food production/distribution, but if this were to occur, then population would no longer outstrip resources and a new balance would be reached.

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

#154

Post by paulddraper »

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?

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

#155

Post by wang_li »

Benjammer wrote: post #135
btbuildem wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. Only the wealthy would have access to this technology, the poor would still have normal life expectancy. Society would look the way it does now (stratified), just more so.

Check out the book Altered Carbon if you want a sci fi series about pretty much this exact scenario.

Even better is the Beggar's in Spain Trilogy.

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

#156

Post by [deleted] »

nness wrote: post #80
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…

If each year your chance of dying is 0.025%, and there's no relationship between subsequent years, wouldn't the chance remain 0.025% even after thousands of years? (since what we're talking about is the probability of independent events.)

[deleted]

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

#157

Post by IncRnd »

morgante wrote: post #91
nness wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If each year your chance of dying is 0.025%, and there's no relationship between subsequent years, wouldn't the chance remain 0.025% even after thousands of years? (since what we're talking about is the probability of independent events.)

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?

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

#159

Post by arethuza »

crusso wrote: post #150
arethuza wrote: post #16

As someone who turned 50 this year - immortality being available in 30 years sounds pretty good to me! However, I seem to remember a similar argument being made in a book I read at high school, which obviously wasn't yesterday. The Mighty Micro , published in 1979, talked about the imminent creation of UIM's (Ultra-Intelligent Machines) by the 1990s and that these would, naturally, lead to such rapid advancements in…

Yeah, I'm almost your age. When I was in high school, I had naive confidence that medical science would advance quickly enough to prevent my getting "old". I even remember a speech from a principal when I was in middle school, claiming that most of us in my class would live to well over 100 years. I believed him. Despite that optimism and my very healthy diet and exercise regimen, I deal with increasingly deteriorati…

"decrease in reaction times"

I seem to find that playing online games does wonders for this...

Only thing that really annoys me at the moment is my eyesight - I'm quite shortsighted and wear contacts to do things like skiing. Trying to navigate a new ski area (just back from the vast Portes de Soleil) with a map is now getting quite tricky as I can't read stuff up close with my contacts in....

Also I seemed to develop the rare blue/black colour blindness which my wife wasn't happy about.

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

#160

Post by cushychicken »

koralatov wrote: post #96
cushychicken wrote: post #68

One of the better societal aspects of Richard Morgan's Altered Carbon was the concept of "Meths" - super rich people who could effectively afford to live forever by inserting their consciousness into new bodies (or "sleeves" to use Morgan's terminology). One of the downsides of this was that, since the rich lived effectively forever, they only accumulated more and more wealth in greater and greater quantities, and li…

The Meths differ from the modern-day superrich only in that they live on to continue concentrating wealth, rather than passing it on to their offspring to continue as has been the case throughout human history. I quite enjoyed the book, and the idea of sleeving was pretty interesting and well-explored. It was kind of sad to see that most people worked their whole lives to save enough to re-sleeve simply so that they…

It's been a few years since I read it - probably about time I gave it another go.

On a side note, I just found out today that Netflix is apparently making it into a series. Neat!

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