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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

#221

Post by crusso »

cgriswald wrote: post #220
crusso wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. 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 wh…

Earlier, you said:

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

I feel that you're moving the goalposts on me by talking about the initial stages when some might make it to 150. My comments were regarding what you originally said above, not what you might have meant and tried to clarify in later comments.

I agree with you that at first we might solve some problems that extend life some years here and there but still be left with other semi-debilitating issues.

But once you're talking about all of the issues needed to be solved to reach 1,000 years, the technology will have to be far far far beyond the ability to repair some scarred skin.

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

#222

Post by snowwrestler »

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…

> To say that we cannot do that is to say that Science itself is too weak a method to overcome the level of complexity presented by advanced biological organisms.

That's not what science does. Science is the process by which we learn about natural processes. It doesn't overcome anything.

To invoke "Science" in this way is to treat it like a religion, like an all-powerful god. I mean, you even capitalized it.

Kurzweil, De Gray, and many others do this too. Either they don't actually know what science is, or they are cynically feeding a misperception of what science is. Either way, it's bad.

The process of using scientific knowledge to achieve human goals is generally known as engineering. And the heart of engineering is dealing with constraints. We have no idea, today, what constrains human life spans. Therefore we have no scientific reason to believe that we can ever use engineering to extend them significantly beyond what they are today.

We do know that all lifeforms have a limited lifespan, and most animals' are shorter than humans. That's a big clue that the constraint might be something fundamental and not easily overcome.

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

#223

Post by snowwrestler »

paulddraper wrote: post #148
shaurz wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No technology has ever extended life. The so-called gains in life expectancy have only come about by reducing the causes of early mortality and slowing down the diseases of ageing.

I don't see the difference.

Today you can be healthier at 1, 20, 40, 60, and 80 than you could have been 100 years ago.

However, just like 100 years ago, you will almost certainly be dead by age 100. For certain by 120.

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

#224

Post by snowwrestler »

adrianN wrote: post #84
rusanu wrote: post #70

Oxygen[0] by Nick Lane makes a pretty compelling argument why this will not happen. With perfect health you can at best achieve ~120 years age. I think this paper A unifying view of ageing and disease:the double-agent theory[2] covers some of the arguments in the book. To give a simplified view, the big obstacles are a) a technology capable of repairing damaged mythocondrial material in a living organism and b) a tec…

I'm pretty sure that you can replace a significant number of my neurons without changing "me".

To the contrary, "you" are constantly changing as your existing neurons reconfigure themselves. Replacing them would have at least the same effect.

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

#225

Post by vram22 »

snowwrestler wrote: post #222
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…

> To say that we cannot do that is to say that Science itself is too weak a method to overcome the level of complexity presented by advanced biological organisms. That's not what science does. Science is the process by which we learn about natural processes. It doesn't overcome anything. To invoke "Science" in this way is to treat it like a religion, like an all-powerful god. I mean, you even capitalized it. Kurzweil…

> capitalized it.

Good point. A related point, which occurred to me a while ago after reading various reports of scientific discoveries vs. other reports of how some things have not been figured out yet, is that there seemed to be a tendency to mention scientists by name for individual discoveries, but for the non-discoveries, people tended to write something like: "[Ss]cience has not yet discovered $THING or explained $PHENOMENON".

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

#226

Post by hoechst »

If a scientist working in the field writes about this, backing his assumption with research papers and actual work that's being done in the field: I'm listening.

If a futurist writes about this, mostly backing his assumption by repeating alterations of the phrase "because of technological progress": I'm expressing my skepticism on hn.

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

#227

Post by jandrese »

jerf wrote: post #179
jandrese wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagine absurdly conservative politics and a completely ossified power structure. How are you supposed to advance if your boss has 500 years more experience and will be in that position for another 8000 years? I mean in the current world rich assholes do eventually die and sometimes their replacements are better (or worse, but in a way that destroys their power base). Do you really want to live in a world where the…

Still not creative enough. If everybody realizes there's no way to advance because of the old people, everyone will react to that fact. Something will happen. Actually, lots of somethings, with varying levels of success and failure. But there certainly will not be 99.9% of the long-lived human race just sort of sitting around for centuries at a time going "Oh well, guess I'm going to be a loser for the next thousand…

A lot of people in the world know that the Kim family is strangling North Korea, but you don't see people rising up to overthrow them. Imagine a world where Kim Il-sung was effectively immortal. Imagine a world where the monarchies of the middle ages could last a thousand years or more. Without something to shake up the status quo every once in awhile the situation tends to stagnate, even if it is a bad situation.

It is possible that human mentality would change if we had to start thinking about longer timescales like this, but that seems optimistic.

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

#228

Post by beeboop »

reasonattlm wrote: post #27
r721 wrote: post #9

"The latest possible date a prediction can come true and still remain in the lifetime of the person making it is defined as The Maes-Garreau Point. The period equals to n-1 of the person’s life expectancy. This suggests a law: Maes-Garreau Law: Most favorable predictions about future technology will fall within the Maes-Garreau Point." http://kk.org/thetechnium/the-maesgarreau/

"Trust but verify" is a good way to lead one's life. Ideally, we'd never take anyone's word for anything, and have the time and means to dig up supporting evidence for any position or statement that we encounter. But who has the time for that? We have to organize our busy lives around blocks of selective ignorance, portions of human knowledge and culture wherein we choose to take statements at face value, or follow t…

You say you've spent a ton of time reading about this, but don't actually say what your conclusions are. I know it's sort of counter to your point, but I would be interested in hearing your opinions on how soon we will start seeing significant increases in longevity.

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

#229

Post by cgriswald »

crusso wrote: post #221
cgriswald wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. 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 wh…

Earlier, you said: 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 I feel that you're moving the goalposts on me by talking about the initial stages when some might make it to 150. My comments were regarding what you originally said above, not what you m…

I was responding to a commenter who suggested that you'd spend 850 years in the body of a 150-year-old. I was objecting to that idea, but conceding that there might be some unpleasantness left over. I only clarified the timeline of that unpleasantness when you objected.

To be clear, I wasn't only talking about scarred skin, but any consequence of aging. I was using excess skin due to rapid weight loss as an example of this type of comorbidity, in which one problem must be dealt with separately from another problem. It may be true that extending lifespans to 1000+ years will require technologies which will also resolve all other age-related issues. It may even be likely. But there is no principle that says it must be so.

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

#230

Post by r721 »

beeboop wrote: post #228
reasonattlm wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Trust but verify" is a good way to lead one's life. Ideally, we'd never take anyone's word for anything, and have the time and means to dig up supporting evidence for any position or statement that we encounter. But who has the time for that? We have to organize our busy lives around blocks of selective ignorance, portions of human knowledge and culture wherein we choose to take statements at face value, or follow t…

You say you've spent a ton of time reading about this, but don't actually say what your conclusions are. I know it's sort of counter to your point, but I would be interested in hearing your opinions on how soon we will start seeing significant increases in longevity.

That was their old post copypasted:

https://www.fightaging.org/archives/2009/12/the-maesgarreau-...

You can ask there, or search through that blog.

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