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We will be able to live to 1,000

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Re: We will be able to live to 1,000

#71

Post by crystalis »

joubert wrote: post #64
crystalis wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is childbirth a right? Would you accept a trade of a parent's life for a child's life, perhaps with a time delay? There's also several financial methods that could be used to prevent undesirable wealth accumulation.

You, and nobody else, own your body. I.e., nobody should be able to say you're not allowed to have children.

You've simply asserted that, though.

I own my own body, does that mean nobody should be able to say I'm not allowed to, say, defecate? What if I'm positioned directly above them?

Simply being able to do something doesn't make it a right.

(I, and nobody else, own my car. I.e., nobody should be able to say I'm not allowed to max out the speedometer?)

Re: We will be able to live to 1,000

#72

Post by colonelxc »

ugh wrote: post #22
rmorrison wrote: post #4

I don't see how humanity could handle something like mass distribution of a magic treatment that allowed people to live to 1,000. The world would quickly get over crowded, resources would dry up, world wars would follow, and who knows what else.

But people die! Wouldn’t you want to stop that if you could? I don’t know how you could consider death some sort of necessary evil. That seems like a pretty cynical and cruel view to me. Think of all the intelligent, experienced and capable people who die every day (or are slowly losing their intelligence due to aging). Wouldn’t it be great if Shakespeare were still alive? Newton? Darwin? Einstein? Crick? Death is wa…

His argument is that there would be overcrowding. Then, we potentially wouldn't be able to sustain the large population... then people would die from lack of food/water. This can probably be overcome with new technology, much like in Asimov's robot books (the "Cities").

Anyways, while death from old age is sad, I think premature death is worse. The 5 year old kid with leukemia, the car accidents, wars. There are tons of things that kill people before they can live a "whole life" which I think we should work on first (not that we can't do both).

Hopefully with some of these aging technologies, quality of life for the 'elderly' would also improve. I would hate if I couldn't play sports for 90% of my life.

Re: We will be able to live to 1,000

#73

Post by dkarl »

jrockway wrote: post #39

Can I bet on the opposite side of this? I bet that nobody who is 60 now will live to 1000. Don't get me wrong, I would like to live to 1000... but I would be pretty surprised if my kids live past 150. I will be surprised if I live to 100. It's sad to think about, but our bodies wear out over time (cosmic rays and whatnot), and we don't have the technology to repair them efficiently yet. People still die from the flu!

You'll have to wait fifty years to collect. How confident are you that you'll live that long?

Re: We will be able to live to 1,000

#74

Post by FlorinAndrei »

benofsky wrote: post #44

Ignoring any claims that the man is a crackpot and any other problems one might have with the science. Does anyone really want to live to 1000? I think you might get a little bored :-/

"Does anyone really want to live to 1000? I think you might get a little bored"

Boredom is infinitely better than nothingness.

Re: We will be able to live to 1,000

#75

Post by MikeCapone »

jpablo wrote: post #10

There's a book by Asimov, Please Explain, that has a list of science questions. I remember the very last question is about "what point does getting old has?". He argues that without aging and dying, populations will stop getting better and will stagnate. It seemed very appropriate to link here, but I couldn't get a link. Other than a Spanish translation :-(.

Curing the diseases of aging might cause problems, but what we must ask ourselves is: Are those problems bigger or smaller than the problems caused by the diseases of aging in the first place?

If your problems aren't worse than 100-150k people dying per day after a prolonged period of frailty and suffering, causing suffering to their families and friends too and costing tons in healthcare, then I'd say it's worth it.

However long you live, you live one day at a time. If you are happy today and in good health, you'll want to live until tomorrow, and so on. But if for some reason you want to stop taking the rejuvenating therapies or throw yourself off a cliff, that's your choice. Let's just not make the choice for everybody else and all future generations by not developing these therapies...

Re: We will be able to live to 1,000

#76

Post by mikedmiked »

jules wrote: post #11
MikeCapone wrote: post #2

We might or might not defeat the diseases of aging anytime soon, but if you want to help the people who are trying to make it happen, consider donating to the SENS Foundation (money goes directly to research): http://www.sens.org/ Sadly, because aging isn't considered a disease by the FDA and other regulatory bodies, there is actually very little research being done on it if you take into consideration the fact that…

Before donating you should ask yourself whether Aubrey de Grey is a crackpot or not. I'm not sure myself. Can somebody shed some light on this?

I've met him and he seems like a crackpot. Extremely nice, gentle and loveable; but a crackpot.

Re: We will be able to live to 1,000

#77

Post by ibagrak »

While I was interning at Google in 2006 I heard the guy speak in one of the Google Talks there. Going to the talk I thought this would just be some outrageous crackpot theory, but he seemed very thoughtful and the approaches he talked about sounded very sensible (although I knew and still know too little about the subject to invalidate his claims).

Re: We will be able to live to 1,000

#78

Post by ubernostrum »

benofsky wrote: post #44

Ignoring any claims that the man is a crackpot and any other problems one might have with the science. Does anyone really want to live to 1000? I think you might get a little bored :-/

I've always preferred the idea of immortality on the installment plan -- get frozen/stored/whatever, then woken up every couple hundred or couple thousand years, do stuff, go back into freeze/storage/whatever.

Which, at least for me, is less about avoiding death (which doesn't actually scare me all that much) and more about just getting to see what sort of cool stuff the future holds.

Re: We will be able to live to 1,000

#79

Post by gte910h »

mechanical_fish wrote: post #41
gte910h wrote: post #6

When I donate to research, I like to see what the "partial failure result" is. One of the neat thing about sens research is that if you happen to even get one or two of the parts of damage fixable or even moderated, then you have a much less inactive old age period, even if no actual longevity is gained. I find decrepit old age to be one of the biggest issues of our time (who cares if grandma is 80 if she can move li…

prolonging the useful life of the workforce is a big worry Not in my world. The world where we are at the tail end of the largest recession in two or three generations, with danger of double-dip; we have lots and lots of surplus productive capacity, productivity just keeps going up, and unemployment is between 10% and 25% in the US depending on how you count it.

Raise taxes, do make work projects.

The growth of productivity will always be an issue.

Re: We will be able to live to 1,000

#80

Post by danielford »

jpablo wrote: post #10

There's a book by Asimov, Please Explain, that has a list of science questions. I remember the very last question is about "what point does getting old has?". He argues that without aging and dying, populations will stop getting better and will stagnate. It seemed very appropriate to link here, but I couldn't get a link. Other than a Spanish translation :-(.

That's an explanation that rests on group selection, which tends not to be taken very seriously by most biologists. Similarly, group selection explanations of why we age are held only by a handful of researchers in the field of aging.

Most biologists in the field of aging hold that aging is the result of the decreased force of natural selection with age. This is somewhat difficult to explain even with diagrams, but I'll try anyway.

Let's imagine three forms of a gene. One causes you to die at the age of eight, another causes you to die at eighty, and the third never causes you to die. We would expect that the form of the gene that causes you to die at eight would be removed from the population very quickly, since anyone who has it will die before they can reproduce and pass it on. In contrast, the gene that causes you to die at eighty will be rather prevalent, since by that age you'll have already passed on your genes to your progeny. In fact, it will probably exist at about the same frequency as the gene that didn't cause you to die at all.

This is the mutation accumulation theory of aging. Because natural selection acts more strongly early in life, we tend to accumulate genes with mutations that are detrimental later in life. There's also a variant called antagonistic pleiotropy, where you have genes that have a beneficial effect early in life having a negative effect in old age.

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