91–100 of 151 posts
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If people lived forever, why would they ever retire? I imagine you'd take a 5 year sabbatical every 20 years or so and you'd probably even head to school a bunch of times to change careers if you got bored of centuries of the same vocation.
Who is going to hire you? Try getting a job at 62 right now.
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It would be pretty interesting if you had more than 3-4 generations at a time (say a generation is 30 years, then 3 x 30 = 90). I think the significance of a generation is as you say: in human terms, it seems the vast majority of your personality and outlook is formed by age 30. If people lived to be 1000 years old, then you would have 33 different generations at once. At the very least, those 33 different generation…
>People already say that baby boomers have hogged wealth at the expense of their children and younger generations. I haven't investigated those claims in detail but it seems plausible. This generational warfare meme is pushed by, among others, Stan Druckenmiller: http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2014/01/three-card-monte-gene... You'll note that they push both sides at once. Boomers are told that millenials are feckless…
I just hope such medical advances would be available to everyone and not just a privileged few who can afford it.
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It would be pretty interesting if you had more than 3-4 generations at a time (say a generation is 30 years, then 3 x 30 = 90). I think the significance of a generation is as you say: in human terms, it seems the vast majority of your personality and outlook is formed by age 30. If people lived to be 1000 years old, then you would have 33 different generations at once. At the very least, those 33 different generation…
I've always wondered if the average human lifespan is somehow implicitly factored into interest rates. If people lived to 1000+ years old, a small investment made early in life could potentially balloon into incredible wealth given even relatively conservative investments. Obviously political and financial stability could have huge impacts too. I have to imagine multi-century-long held accounts would have an impact
I don’t want just to live longer, I want to live longer while in a relatively good shape. Because if we are to live 30 years more with the physique of a 90 year old man then what’s the point. If on the other hand I could have the physique of a 70 year old man while I’m 100+ that sounds like a good deal.
It's probably significantly lower than that as well if you take out all the accidental deaths that occur in people's 20s.
On a more skeptical note, I'm very doubtful of any claims to predict timelines related to medical or technological advances. We've been trying for a long time and with much better funding to cure/treat things like AIDS and various cancers and only recently have we made significant progress on those fronts.
My general impression of modern medicine based on conversations with friends and family members in the medical field is that, while the cures are getting better, the best course of action is to take a conservative approach to life (avoid smoking, severely limit drinking, exercise and lift weights regularly, stay active, and keep using your brain), as this has much better odds of maintaining a high quality of life as you age than hoping modern medicine will be able to fix whatever's wrong with you.
I can't believe no one thinks this is a terrible idea. Of course I , selfishly, would love to live longer but doing so on a large scale is almost guaranteed to be a disaster. While we're at it why don't we just solve aging, provide infinite food supply, and eliminate predation for deer. That would be a great idea right? No way that would have any negative side effects, right?
Birds are also the only ones that should be flying.
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Another important point is that the relation between children, their parents and the society they live in would be changed in ways that are hard to predict. See, the current assumption (or rather, the assumption that socially still stands but that is already shaken by the current lifespan augmentation) is that once a child is an adult, it won't be long before they will eventually see their parents either die (before…
I can see a post-labour future, where automation has eaten so many jobs, and improved our quality of life so much, that noone really needs to work, you can have a job as a hobby if you want, but most people don't. And as you point out, healthy elders won't retire. In a lot of countries there's talk of increasing the standard retirement age from 65, where it's been for many, many decades, which is a step in the comple…
For example: people need to eat, and they do that much eating at the McD's, and this costs that many socio-dollars, and then eat that many TV dinners, and do that much cooking, with an estimation in socio-dollars of how much time it takes to cook vs. how much to stop by the McD's to grab a burger.
And, let me get controversial: what was the evolution of that global cost as the traditional, implicit people responsible for cooking (women) started working full-time, too.
See, that wave of feminism represents a moment where the distribution of labour, and the shape of it, changed rather dramatically. It's hard to get a decent outlook on the economic effect of that event, which makes it hard to devise some form of public policy that would, at the same time, help our society solve the problems that probably appeared as a result, and to help society make the most of this new workforce.
My wet econodream is that we realize that we collectively spend an absurd amount of cold, hard cash on feeding ourselves, and that we'd save that much cold, hard cash by having a bunch of government-owned "restaurants" simply giving away (within some reasonable limit) good but ruthlessly efficient (in terms of labour, value of basic ingredients, nutricious value, taste, and even general convenience) meals to, like, anyone, at any time.
But we can't take any halfway decent decision at all without data. Which we don't have.
Although it appears that it might be happening.
Slatestarcodex found that database of cost-effectiveness of various public health measures, illnesses and drugs, measured in some acronym that looks seductively close to the philosophical definition of "utility"
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Valproate, valproic acid, and sodium butyrate affect histone deacetylase, which might help rejuvenate brain plasticity. See also: * http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1460-9568.2010.... * http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24831-learning-drugs-r... * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malleability_of_intelligence
Valproate is used as an anti-epileptic and as a mood stabiliser. There are some risks of PCOS for women, but those risks have never been explained properly to me.
Please hurry up. I want to live for thousands of years.
Good to see Peter Thiel on HN.