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.
Go read a few Philip K. Dick novels and see if you change your mind. Take current examples of selfish actors with essentially unlimited funds (billionaries, big business, whatever gets your goat) and envision the world after 1,000 years of uninterrupted influence. It's easy to envision a dystopia where caste returns and you're born into a wage slave job at .
If you're alive in 30 years you might be in 1000 years too
211–220 of 230 posts
Re: If you're alive in 30 years you might be in 1000 years too
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 sam…
Re: If you're alive in 30 years you might be in 1000 years too
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
raises an interesting philosophical question: If one would commit murder and the victim has already lived 500 years is it then as much a crime as if the victim were 25 yro? e.g. Assuming not everyone could afford the technology and you have a 30 yro killer who lacks the funds to rejuvinate committing murder on somebody much older. Would that even be a crime or could it be argued that a 2nd class citizen has only trie…
> If one would commit murder and the victim has already lived 500 years is it then as much a crime as if the victim were 25 yro? Yes.
Re: If you're alive in 30 years you might be in 1000 years too
#214http://krusekronicle.typepad.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/...
Doesn't look quite so good now, does it.
Re: If you're alive in 30 years you might be in 1000 years too
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Just as one example, I think it is far more likely that an anti-age treatment would prevent the formation of wrinkles than that it would remove existing wrinkles.
Re: If you're alive in 30 years you might be in 1000 years too
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does an increase in longevity by itself imply an increase in reproductive years?
We're in "hypothetical" territory there. So it could go either way.
In the case of men, sperm quality declines with age, so a man is more or less fertile his entire life, but that may not hold true in the case of extreme longevity. If this decline in sperm-quality is due to age damage, then an age treatment may also improve sperm quality. But this is not guaranteed and may require its own specific treatment.
Women produce all the eggs they will ever produce before they are born. Menopause occurs when a woman runs out of eggs. So in the case of females, an anti-aging treatment is unlikely to extend her reproductive years beyond the current age of menopause (although it may make pregnancy safer and more viable during the latter half of her reproductive years). Like sperm, a woman's egg quality also declines with age, creating further difficulty.
So the idea that women will put off having children for a couple centuries seems to be a nonstarter lacking other advances as well, but it may be a possibility for men.
Re: If you're alive in 30 years you might be in 1000 years too
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 sam…
I couldn't follow your math, but the english conclusion seems illogical. Even if it is, assuming humans to be rational actors isn't a terribly good assumption.
Re: If you're alive in 30 years you might be in 1000 years too
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Why would you think that the effects of aging would all automatically disappear? Eventually, sure, you might be indistinguishable from someone born a hundred years after aging treatments, but that may take a specialized (or more advanced) treatment. Just as one example, I think it is far more likely that an anti-age treatment would prevent the formation of wrinkles than that it would remove existing wrinkles.
By the time we can go in and reinvigorate teeth, bones, all the internal organs, all the cells in the brain... restoring patches of skin will likely be trivial.
Solving the problem of aging generally means solving an avalanche of specific problems - one of which is the rejuvenation of skin.
Re: If you're alive in 30 years you might be in 1000 years too
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would you think that the effects of aging would all automatically disappear? Eventually, sure, you might be indistinguishable from someone born a hundred years after aging treatments, but that may take a specialized (or more advanced) treatment. Just as one example, I think it is far more likely that an anti-age treatment would prevent the formation of wrinkles than that it would remove existing wrinkles.
Because your comment was regarding our having the technology needed to allow someone to live 1000+ years. In order to allow that, we'll need to have mastered manipulation of literally every cell in the body. By the time we can go in and reinvigorate teeth, bones, all the internal organs, all the cells in the brain... restoring patches of skin will likely be trivial. Solving the problem of aging generally means solvin…
This is not correct. The core concept is that we will develop individual solutions which solve pieces of the longevity problem. Living to 150 may only require solving one of them. Living to 1000+ may require what you propose (although that is not clear either) but in the intervening time period between the initial solution and the ultimate solution you cannot assume all other physical aspects of an aged individual will simply vanish.