There is no reason that human beings cannot live forever. Gompertz Law is not a law of physics, but a law of observation similar to Moore's Law. Medical and safety technology are also advancing exponentially. Barring a catastrophe that blasts us back to the stone age, one growth curve will eventually overtake the other.
The article uses a cops and criminals analogy to explain how our bodies degrade over time. Technology can allow us to produce artificial cops and conditions that make things more difficult for the criminals. The Methusaleh Foundation [1] is working on pieces of this problem right now, with a cash prize. There are many other research institutions working on different aspects of immortality. Once medical nanomachines become a practical reality we might be able to turn the work of Gompertz on it's head within a generation.
Many people, myself included, find the idea of effective immortality to be disconcerting. But all of the arguments have been made and rebutted: Just because we can't imagine immortality doesn't mean that isn't a good thing, if we were born into a world without death we wouldn't give it up for any of the advantages of mortality, we would have more productive time to solve the problems of overpopulation, etc and so forth.
If our species is able to continue on its current path then death is going to, well, die. The tragedy is that none of us will live to see it. That doesn't mean that we can't consider the implications and start preparing an infinite future for our descendants.
Unfortunately, medical technology is not even remotely advancing exponentially. The rate of new drug approvals is decreasing (and costs are rising); we are appallingly bad at turning biochemical knowledge into medical technology.
Now, I know you weren't talking about drugs as such, but they are a reasonable proxy for our ability to understand a biological system and then intervene. And the state of the industries that try and do this, strongly suggests that we haven't got a clue.
Just to lay the pessimism on a little thicker, we may even be lucky to stay where we are, given the spread of antibiotic resistant bacteria.
Never mind immortality, I'd be happy to know that we still have working antibiotics when I roll up to hip replacement age!
> The rate of new drug approvals is decreasing (and costs are rising); we are appallingly bad at turning biochemical knowledge into medical technology.
Why should we measure medical technology at the rate of new drugs developed? What about the speed of DNA sequencing advancing faster than Moore's law? What about Organovo's recent claims on 3D printing organs, with vascular system in place, by next year? What about advanced prothesis that can provide touch senses to the user? Or even visual or audio prothesis, made possible with advancements in brain-computer interfaces?
Your argument basically boils down to saying that the rate of CPU clock speeds developed in recent history is indicative of an overall slowdown in computer science. Clearly there are other paradigms that need to be explored before we can say that Moore's law is no longer relevant, let alone all of computing.
Yes, the average of all medical tech is going to always lag behind computing for ethical reasons. And that of course, there are ways we can improve medical testing using stem cell research. But to say that we're at risk of moving backwards because one or two particular areas are in serious need of optimization is a bit far-fetched.
> Why should we measure medical technology at the rate of new drugs developed?
Well, I'd stand behind the assertion that it is a reasonable approximation to our ability to understand and modify a biological system. But, I'll happily concede that this is not the only game in town. Your point about tissue engineering is well made, this is highly exciting and should provide some real benefits. But there is a awful lot of hard biology to master here; so while I really hope that we see some rapid initial progress, long term exponential growth here is going to be just as difficult as it is elsewhere in biology.
> But there is a awful lot of hard biology to master here
I honestly think most of it can be skipped. The age-old adgage that "a ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure" is totally obsolete with respect to longevity science. Once you've gone past your DNA's "expiration date", it's easier to repair damage than prevent it.
Drug development also hinges on the false belief that invented drugs are the most effective (ginger worked better for my wife's morning sickness than any drug she was allowed to take, including morning sickness meds) at treating a condition.
DNA sequencing and GMOs would allow us to rapidly implement the medical grade production of substances we're trying to chemically mimic with drugs. It will also allow for easier production of these compounds so we can even test some of them in the first place.
>Which is why we desperately need companies to be able to make any medicinal claims at all about their products without being forced to substantiate them.
You didn't merely make the bald-faced assertion, you were very rude about it with your snide "ftfy".
I've studied this stuff for years. I understand your status quo view, that thinks that good intentions are a substitute for philosophic rigor. Your view doesn't stand up to rational scrutiny, and it's holding all of mankind back.
>that thinks that good intentions are a substitute for philosophic rigor.
On the contrary, I think that scientific rigor is a good substitute for the free market when it comes to profiting from scientific advances. You can argue that the system in place is flawed and politically biased and perhaps it is, but the alternative is to treat cancer treatments and heart medication the same as vitamins and crystal therapy.
What profound innovations are being held back because of people like myself who demand that certain claims meet a standard of proof before hitting the market?
I don't think you know what scientific rigor is. If you did you'd realize it doesn't operate well under threats of force by bureaucracies.
In any case, this is a complex issue that can be examined and debated from various perspectives, but you're just coming in here to pimp the status quo, as if that's useful. Your kind has already won by a landslide, there's no particular point in bullying people who think you have made a mistake. A person with an actual scientific mindset might be curious about new ideas, not pretend they know everything, and bully anyone who comes to the table with new information.
By the way, you're making various presumptions about my view that are false. I never said anything in support of medical fraud or crackpots. And again, this is the kind of sloppy reasoning I've come to expect from your side of the aisle. Your arguments won't stand up to scrutiny, ergo you fabricate straw men. This in itself demonstrates something to suspect in your viewpoint.
>If you did you'd realize it doesn't operate well under threats of force by bureaucracies
Isn't science itself a form of bureaucracy? Or is peer review also a "threat of force?"
>I never said anything in support of medical fraud or crackpots.
You did, though. Your original statement implied that regulation of medicine itself was the problem. There is ample evidence to suggest that quack science and chicanery would flourish in an unregulated environment, because the overriding principle would no longer be an attempt at scientific plausibility but profit. And rigor costs money.
This is one of those situations where I feel the presence of government is a net benefit over the absence of it. Whether that government is qualified or operating credibly is a different matter.
As I said, this is a very complex issue, I can't hope to address all your points here but let me try to address an important one.
You are equating science with government enforcement of majority opinion. Think back to the time of Galileo. Why would you want to make this equation?
You want to think that times are different now, that the majority is wiser than it used to be. Why should that be so, exactly?
Imagine that leaders in the software industry could prescribe what languages were "safe" and what weren't. Imagine what that would do to innovation. Isn't it better to let people decide for themselves?
You fear that lack of regulation would lead to unnecessary harm and death. Yet, what of those who are intelligent enough to know the risks and wish to try new things, knowing the possible consequences? What of the cancer patient who is sure to die in 3 months, who wants to try a new experimental drug, but is legally barred from doing so? How can you justify this tyranny?
You wish to protect the ignorant from their own bad choices, but does this make them more intelligent or less? And what of those who are smarter than you, who know better than you, and who you have banned from doing things to help themselves? What of the future people who would have benefited from what they could have learned, that you prevented them from learning?
These are the types of questions you need to be asking yourself. You also need to stop pretending that fraud is allowed on a free market. It is not.
>Think back to the time of Galileo. Why would you want to make this equation?
Science isn't an enforcement of majority opinion, and that's not the equation i'm making. I'm asserting that the scientific process is an implicit good, in that it requires claims to be provable, and that experts exist to validate them, and that forcing companies which profit from scientific endeavors to present proofs of their claims is also good.
I don't think one can draw a very strong parallel between the world of Galileo and today, anyway, if that were still the case then Charles Darwin and Edwin Hubble would have been burned at the stake. Just because a premise is unpopular and the scientific mainstream rejects it doesn't necessarily imply it has merit on the basis that the scientific establishment exists to hinder progress.
>Imagine that leaders in the software industry could prescribe what languages were "safe" and what weren't. Imagine what that would do to innovation. Isn't it better to let people decide for themselves
I believe this is, in fact, what many industries and the government do - setting rigorous coding standards which include allowing certain languages, and is one of the reasons mission critical systems are not written, for instance, in Node or PHP. I also believe the entire field of cryptography is more or less based on not blindly trusting everyone who comes up with a clever substitution cipher and just hoping for the best. Note that the parallel here between computer science and medicine is where the application directly affects human lives - nobody really cares about "innovation" in webapps, for instance (except maybe for implementations of crypto) but you're probably not likely to kickstart a new operating system for a surgical robot or spacecraft.
>Yet, what of those who are intelligent enough to know the risks and wish to try new things, knowing the possible consequences? What of the cancer patient who is sure to die in 3 months, who wants to try a new experimental drug, but is legally barred from doing so? How can you justify this tyranny?
I can justify it because your question implies that this treatment necessarily works. What if this new experimental drug is complete nonsense? What if the drug company opts to falsify its studies, or hide its side effects, or market it towards treatments for which it is ineffective or dangerous?
> And what of those who are smarter than you, who know better than you, and who you have banned from doing things to help themselves? What of the future people who would have benefited from what they could have learned, that you prevented them from learning?
People like Jenny McCarthy and Dr. Andrew Wakefield who "know better" than to vaccinate children against disease? Or people who "know" AIDS doesn't really exist? Or everyone who "knew" during the plague years that disease itself was caused by bad foul odors, so they surrounded themselves with perfumes and dropped like flies?
If and when this knowledge can be validated, verified, and reproduced then it's science. But you appear to be conflating opinion and belief with science, when those things exist in opposition to one another.
Furthermore, the scenario here is where someone is informed of the risks/benefits, and they want to take part of a treatment plan you disapprove of. The first thing you do is dishonestly preemptively categorize it as crankishness, as if being different than the status quo ipso facto makes it nutty. This is revealing in itself. But on top of that is the fact that IT IS NOT YOUR BODY. So not only are you dishonest, you are grossly immoral.
Why do you keep speaking of the "status quo" as if the scientific method were just a function of inertia and a lack of imagination, or mere politics without any necessary relationship to objective truth? I don't believe at all that being 'different' makes something unscientific. It not being grounded in good science, however, does. I define 'nutty' in this regard as being, simply, unverifiable. Again and again you seem to presume that the establishment is "holding back" innovation yet not once have you given an example of an obviously valid innovation which is being held back.
And you would be correct in stating I was immoral if I were actually arguing that people have no right to do what they like to their own bodies, in fact I believe the opposite. And although I believe your premise is founded on a strawman and a misrepresentation of what science is, in insisting upon the edge case, I won't ignore it.
Let this theoretical person who knows more than "the establishment" do what they like. I believe such people can actually prove their theories and like Galileo and others, will eventually win out. However, their right to do what they wish with their body does not, and must not be extended to an insistence that science, and medicine, accommodate every possible belief, practice or concoction without scrutiny.
The scenario you pose is intractable because it is precisely the claim of quacks and charlatans that the scientific establishment is holding back, dismissing and suppressing their discoveries. What then, are we left with if no set of common standards should exist for science, and no means to enforce them, to differentiate between real, possibly revolutionary claims and spurious ones? Are we simply to let people take whatever bill of goods they're sold and if they're not smart enough to understand the intricacies of DNA testing or nutritional science or genetics then too bad for them?
What i've been, rather consistently I believe, stating is that private enterprise doesn't have the right, nor do scientists in fact, to do what they like to your body without following strict protocols or having a basis for doing so. Human medical experimentation has a particularly nasty history, and it's regulated for very good reasons. I've been neither dishonest nor immoral in this regard.
If we can expand life expectancy by 30 years, we would effective double if not exponentially increase the rate of progress. This is because it takes scientists and engineers about 30 years to mature into their field and find their niche, counting from childbirth. Another 30 years before their are close to retirement age. If people were healthy into their 90's, you'd have unbelievable masters of their craft working at high levels for an additional 30 years.
On the other hand look at fields like programming, where due to ageism and such, you've got a shorter career than a pro football quarterback before you get replaced by a cheap new grad. So you'd have genius grade programmers working at walmart as people greeters from age 30 to age 90, contributing to open source and stuff. This has both good points and bad points.
Another interesting one to think about on the other side, is its not entirely unusual for academics to spend a large fraction of their working years as minions before getting a professorship and tenure and a serious paycheck... imagine having to do grunt work twice as long as now.
I don't think this would be an issue, since to have a world where people live longer, you also need to have fewer kids. You can only practice ageism if you have a surplus at the young end.
That is an excellent point, although lets say an average grad is remains employable for the same 1/4 of his working years, thats still in absolute terms more years for the unemployable 3/4 of his working life. Assuming we'd continue working the same fraction of our lives, and not continue to retire at 60-something and then remain retired for the next 440 years.
I'm not sure I buy that. There seems to be a half-life effect for people working in one field; after some period of time, call it 20 years, a significant proportion of them have either changed fields dramatically, or have become stagnant.
On the other hand, the possibilities of cross-pollination....
Well then, I can happily inform you that depending on just how physics works out, we might just get a solution to that whole "heat death of the universe" problem. Too early to tell, precisely, but I've heard some neat things about new child-universes forming inside black holes such that they torque space itself and generate non-conserved new mass-energy.
Any value of forever large enough that we need to find someplace to put our excess memories outside our original brain is still getting into "forever" territory from the perspective of our current lives.
People already do this. The traditional forms of memory storage are known as "diaries" and "photo albums". It is universally acknowledged that without their aid, your brain will overload and lose the information you wanted to preserve.
But despite all this, no one thinks of human life as lasting "forever", or anywhere close to it.
The irony is the only things I can't forget are the ones written down or photographed. I never need to look at them, but if they weren't written down it would have vanished.
It's like I have a form of telepathic cloud storage. So long as the physical information exists, I can always remember it and will never look. So some is potentially in a Schrödinger's cat state as I never know if my wife actually threw the note out or not as I'll never need to go look for it.
Usually people who worry about how long others live (mainly those who issue life insurance policies) use the "extended" Gompertz-Makeham Law (which is, basically, the Gompertz Law extended with an age-independent component - the lightning bolts).
One thing I have a hard time wrapping my head around is how the lightning bolt deaths (the Makeham component) will be dealt with by society if "immortality" becomes a reality. As it is now, we accept that people gets killed (i.e., gets their date of death advanced) by e.g. traffic, but how will that change?
It will cause people to become much much much more conservative and safety oriented.
You already see this in practice - you can't buy real chemistry sets, kids are never left alone, safety equipment for riding a bike, etc, etc, etc.
Basically everywhere people say "When I was a kid we used to xxxx", and today they don't. It's a direct result of accidents slowly becoming the primary cause of death.
>It's a direct result of accidents slowly becoming the primary cause of death.
Unintentional injuries were responsible for 39.4 deaths per 100 000 in 2011 [1], behind heart diseases (191), malignant neoplasms (185), chronic lower respiratory diseases (46), and cerebrovascular diseases (41).
The age-adjusted unintentional injury death rate "was relatively unchanged, from 38.6 deaths per 100,000 population in 1985 to 37.7 deaths per 100,000 in 2004" [2].
EDIT: while unintentional injury death rates have held their ground, overall death rates have been in decline. Hence, unintentional injuries are rising as a proportion of deaths (though they have a good distance to cover before they can tap on disease's shoulder).
>you want to check the accident rate relative to the non-accident rate
You are right - that the "risk of dying decreased by 60 percent from 1935 to 2010" in the U.S. [2] while the unintentional accident death rate remained constant so, yes, the fraction of deaths caused by accidents would have increased. My mistake.
>You should check statistics only for under age 30.
Injury deaths for ages 0 to 29 actually average 36 per 100 000 per year, less than the population average of 39. Granted this is a quirk of injury death rates being lowest for 4 to 12 year olds (average 6 per 100 000 per year) - this is the only age group for which injury death rates are below 10 per 100 000 per year. It then climbs to a local maximum of 75 at age 21, a level not seen again until age 74. A second local minimum occurs at ages 30 to 34 (average 56 per 100 000 per year) and a third at 56 to 67 (average 51 per 100 000 per year).
And presumably the non-accident death rate below 30 is even lower (relative to the population average).
Basically if an under 30 dies it's becoming more and more likely that it's a result of accident rather than anything else. And this causes people to become more and more cautious. i.e. it used to be that people had a real chance of death anyway, so taking a (physical) risk is not that big an increase in risk, but now it's a larger relative risk.
When I was a kid, I should have lost my fingers for playing with fireworks. Roman candle wars, bottle rocket barrages... in hindsight I'm surprised we all made it uninjured to graduating highschool.
Depends on the type of immortality. This is your body, you are stuck with it (elf) will be one thing. This is your body, when you wear it enough we will transfer your mind in the new one - it will be something entirely different.
The movie "In Time" is an interesting view on how the world would evolve if that were the case. It's one of my favorite movies and it provides a perspective I'd never imagined.
I can accept everything about being human, except for death, so this is a challenge I've wanted to take on since I was quite young, but was afraid to directly face. Now I really know that I need to start moving more in that direction. Somehow. I'm already in bioinformatics, but wasn't very focused on any subdomain of biology, so there's a lot to catch up on. I'm excited about Calico, but there's so little information available that it's hard to know if there's going to be any way for someone with just an MS in bioinformatics to wedge their way into helping with that effort (though I'm going to try!).
It would just suck to fail at figuring it out (result: death) and it might also suck to succeed (crazy fundamentalist shoots me in the head, result: death) but indefinite procrastination is probably the most assured way to die and be unfulfilled on top that... so it's worth having a go. Maybe I should work on cryopreservation instead, and leave the living forever bit to someone else to figure out?
>I can accept everything about being human, except for death, so this is a challenge I've wanted to take on since I was quite young, but was afraid to directly face.
Glad to read this. The enterprise will be very difficult, but your heart (or brain) is in the right place.
> Just because we can't imagine immortality doesn't mean that isn't a good thing
Note that the counter is also true.
> if we were born into a world without death we wouldn't give it up for any of the advantages of mortality
One of the things I periodically complain about, with regards to the US manned space program, is the cultural believe that no one must die. Take a look at the progress of aircraft technology in the last century, and the number of aircraft pioneers that died gruesomely.
Now imagine what you wouldn't do, if you were effectively immortal.
I would take some issue with the space program comparison, in that if you're going to live forever, then rather than putting up with a space shuttle that kills the crew roughly 1 in 50 launches, you have an infinite amount of time so launch that dude 1000 times unmanned to debug it fully before you send the first humans up.
Another curiosity might be if your average dude lives 500 years you may very well start launching 475 year old astronauts in that a tragedy will only cause as many lost life years as launching a 50 year old dude today.
Your first paragraph is more-or-less my point. You have an unlimited amount of time to make it safer now. Unfortunately, you don't have an unlimited budget, so the result is that you don't launch anything. Except meetings. Lots of meetings.
Anyway, what happens when you have trouble finding qualified crew because no matter how much work you put into it, it'll never be "fully debugged?" (When you're doing something new, there's not any good way to tell if the barrel is full of bees, other than sticking your head in it.)
"Unfortunately, you don't have an unlimited budget,"
Actually you do, if you model NASA as a jobs program and take an infinite amount of time.
Slowing time down by a factor of ten would have a huge number of economic effects aside from NASAs budget, but presumably you could take ten times as long to R+D and then launch 1/10th as often with no impact on progress per lifespan.
One problem from the SS program is it promised all things to all people so that would give the same jokers ten times as many chances to make ridiculous specification promises. So the new design constraints would have to be smaller than a Cessna 172, and HTOL instead of vert takeoff and the payload would be 100 times what it actually could carry, etc, at which point they'd probably find a way to blow it up 1 in 50 times again.
"There is no reason that human beings cannot live forever"
There are plenty. Mainly, every machine has an expiration date.
Unless we go the "Ship of Theseus" way, but even then one thing remains, the brain.
Let's go for a much simpler analogy: Is there a way a car can be used forever? By replacing every part, maybe, it still precludes "total loss" events.
"Oh, but we can have micromachines fixing our body" sure, great, this will be helpful, but not everything can be 'micro-fixed'
The lightning bolt theory is not "wrong" per se, but it is a small part of the causes of mortality, and it certainly doesn't explain the sharp fall, but it is the main responsible for middle of life causes of death
Your body already does this though. Cells die and are replaced all the time, even neurons. You aren't you from seven years ago nor 14 years ago and you're still barely you from last year. I'm not really sure why this argument even enters into the equation, if I replace all my parts and still think the same I'm essentially still me (In an awesome robot body).
Because over time the replication of cells becomes imperfect, I'm not going to try and explain it because I don't feel like I truly understand it but that's the essential bit, after around the age of 35-40 your cells stop replicating perfectly and errors start building up which eventually lead to the actual cause of death, things like organ failure or cancer.
Thanks for catching the typo, I don't look these posts over well enough sometimes.
"The second law is an empirically validated postulate of thermodynamics" [1]
And
"Empirical evidence (also empirical data, sense experience, empirical knowledge, or the a posteriori) is a source of knowledge acquired by means of observation" [2]
I'd hate to die, for so many different reasons. Why can't we all just keep on living? Any change of immortality in the coming 60-odd years? Or is that just not far enough into the future? Are we doomed to die?
Here is why you're being downvoted: human longevity is an extremely difficult, multifaceted problem. Research doctors are not even trying to slay a dragon but a hydra: combat one way to die of old age and another one pops up.
Lastly, attempting to forecast "chance of immortality in the coming 60-odd years" is asking a question that relies for its answer on extremely controversial ideas. Particularly, attempting to answer requires us to forecast whether the rate of advancement in ageing research is speeding up or slowing down. This is hard, and can be affected by a bunch of different factors: funding breakdown in non-corporate research, Great Stagnation Hypothesis, breakdown in public acceptance of science, economic decline in some places, economic growth in some places, public uptake of anti-aging ideologies, attitudes towards the retirement crisis we're already facing even before anti-aging research comes in. Oh, and then we face the issue of whether we can or are improving our quality of scientific findings through better research training or data science/machine learning techniques. And then we get to the really out-there stuff "immortalists" are often secretly thinking of and can't stop yacking about: the chance that we manage to create Friendly Artificial Intelligence and trigger a Singularity, thus rendering us all immortal utopian transhumans before many of us on this board even hit retirement age.
TL;DR: I have no bloody idea, but I still regard contributing to my Roth IRA as a pretty sensible move.
EDIT: The one trend I'm willing to say I observe is that average life expectancy is a fairly good tracker of social and economic development, even once you've gotten over the infant-mortality hump. If you want to be immortal, you should encourage society to act in ways that result in longer average lifespans and also to fund anti-ageing research in hopes of achieving the fabled "ageing escape horizon" where medical science advances faster than you die.
How about a simplification: chance that computational technology will increase by 3 orders of magnitude in 30 years: almost 100%. Chance that increases in computational power lead to increases in biological breakthroughs: 100%.
Therefore, we should not measure the current rate of anti-aging research but rather project it exponentially in some fashion to match the likely trajectory. This has been true for DNA sequencing for example.
>chance that computational technology will increase by 3 orders of magnitude in 30 years: almost 100%.
Define "computational technology". If you mean something along the lines of storage space or parallel processing power, I'll grant you that. We're probably not getting another 1000x increase in processor clock-speeds (serial processing power), though.
>Chance that increases in computational power lead to increases in biological breakthroughs: 100%.
This is exactly why I mentioned data science/machine learning. These are the tools we use to turn increasing amounts of computer processing power into significant, reproducible scientific advancements.
Besides, if I want to be ludicrously optimistic and base everything on computing I could simply yell, "Chance of solving the FAI problem in 30 years: almost 100%! EVERYTHING WILL BE FINE, GUYS!".
Your point about sequencing is a good one, but this is the only area of biological research clearly improving exponentially...
Without being too argumentative, I'd put the odds of increases in computer power leading to biological breakthroughs at much less than 100%! I'd be surprised if it was as much as 5-10%.
What areas of biological research are fundamentally limited by computer power? I can think of a few where more power would be nice to have, but none where that power would be transformative.
The possible exception is the example you mention---DNA sequencing--but the problem there is that the rate of growth of sequence information is greater than More's rate; slightly ironically, this field really needs computer scientists to help develop new algorithms much more than it needs computers...
But your question is specifically about computational power. Any area that requires modeling or methods that must be over-simplified in order to run on today's hardware are candidates for benefit from computational power. That seems to leave a lot of room: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modelling_biological_systems
But I will grant that development of new algorithms is also important. It's just that computational power itself assists in the discovery of new algorithms via the development of better research platforms.
Any time ^_^. The first step is to come out and say that longevity research is a scientific project, not a mystical one (there's no Truth of This Universe saying we can only live 80-something years no matter the scientific might we throw at the problem). That also carries some acknowledgements we need to make: biological immortality being discovered in 2060 will do you no good if you died of a heart attack in 2030, so eat healthy, exercise, and de-stress if you're really so devoted to long life!
The question really is: what aspect of you do you want to preserve? You will most certainly change over the years. You now will be very different from you in 100 years. Your immortal you in 500 years might be as different from your current you as your grandchildren. Do you really care more about your own existence in 500 years than about the existence of your grandchildren in 100 years?
The solution to immortality is to embrace the idea that you won't stay the same anyway and that instead of caring so much about your host body, it might be more efficient to preserve what you value in other forms: e.g. your genome and values in your children or your ideas in books. If you write down your thoughts into a book today, these thoughts are more likely to be preserved for 500 years than if you were immortal and relied on your memory.
> Your immortal you in 500 years might be as different from your current you as your grandchildren. Do you really care more about your own existence in 500 years than about the existence of your grandchildren in 100 years?
As somebody with no kids ... yes.
This is a strange argument since at no time between now and 500 years from now will there be a point where I want to grow old and die. So asking me if I care about 500 year old me is irrelevant, I don't want to die.
Love? I want to live too, very much so. If it came to risking my life to guarantee the safety of my son, I'd do it in a heartbeat. I'd give my life to save his if it came to it. I'd probably do the same for my Mom or Dad too so I don't see it as a "perpetuation of the species" thing at all.
Well, to be honest, I'm not going to run around sacrificing myself for just anybody. And I'd definitely not just going to jump into such a thing without thinking there aren't any other options. And it'd only be a close loved one. A distant friend would be a tough call. A stranger? Probably not.
It seems almost borderline Sociopath to not love at least somebody that you'd be even willing to consider sacrificing yourself for. Have you ever been tested? (not trying to be insulting, genuinely curious)
Yeah, I didn't really mean willy-nilly sacrifice on-a-dime.
No, I've never been tested for "sociopathy" (I cannot imagine that this is something that a lot of people do), and I'm not sure that I wouldn't sacrifice myself for somebody else, but regardless of my personal feelings on the matter, regardless of whether or not it is sociopathic, isn't it still a little silly?
No, not really. If a car is barreling toward my son, and I can only push him out of the way by jumping in front of the car and getting hit myself (but pushing him free of it), I'd do it, and wouldn't consider such a sacrifice silly at all if I witnessed another doing it.
Now think about the reverse: Several people see you watch somebody you know and personally love get hit by a car, and notice you could have saved them and one of them asks you about it. Would you feel bad at all saying "Yeah, I could have jumped out and saved him, but I would have died and that would be silly?"
I could see myself being pressured into feeling bad about not sacrificing myself (societal pressures/norms and all of that), but it really doesn't make sense to me to feel bad, and I sort of hope that I wouldn't. After all, why should I effectively doom myself to save them? Why should I feel bad? Why should I trade my life for theirs?
The answer to these questions seems obvious to many people, but I don't get it. Why is this virtuous? Why is this sensible? Why is this rational?
Why should one care about themselves more than others? There's nothing intrinsically valuable about the self. Accumulating resources or accomplishments? Sounds pretty pointless to me.
Well, you're saying that there's no point (intrinsically) in self-sacrifice. I'm saying there's no point (intrinsically) in self-promotion. So the value judgement is relative.
Nah, that's way scarier. Looking at the sweep of history, I can take comfort that my mortal shell won't last long enough to witness much more of the damn stuff, but I'm terrified that my thoughts and values are simply going to be swept away in a tide of blood and a return to a more miserable human condition.
Another question: what happens to a brain that stores so many years of memories? If there are serious complications, and I'm pretty sure that there are, chances are that they're going to be next to impossible to solve, unless some serious alteration (more brain capacity or memory erasing) happens.
I'm also assuming that any life expanding treatment would tackle senility issues (maybe with brain-repairing nanomachines? Who knows). If not, it would be far, far less useful.
If only it were merely technically and scientifically super-difficult.
The biggest hurdle is cultural and social, as many comments show. The first step towards ending death is to consider the fight possible and positive. But we are still deep in deathism, "Death is inevitable (with current science), ergo death is good". The biggest case of sour grapes or Stockholm syndrome ever, the most awful meme.
The sociological problems of immortality are more difficult than the technical problems. The entire sweep of human history has rested upon the same solid foundation: death takes everyone eventually. Kings fall down as dead as peasants, and the dirt nap of a saint lasts as long as a sinner.
Imagine what would happen if the people who held certain beliefs never died off. Imagine the result if large estates never passed to any heirs, or debts never cancelled. Imagine copyrights that never expire, since the authors never die. The young, vital, and innovative do not prosper, since they are forever dominated by their elders who become increasingly conservative and risk-averse. Money and power do not pass from one generation to the next.
The problem is only made worse if biological immortality is itself an expensive product that is only accessible to the wealthy. Down that path I can imagine dozens of dystopias.
I used to raise that objection when debating immortalists. What got me to stop raising it was the realization that in the form of business corporations or multigenerational trusts, we already have those problems.
It's almost comforting, knowing you already live in Dystopia.
Given that my logical conclusion was for the mortals to murder every immortal they can expose as an existential threat to themselves and their progeny, it is hardly surprising that I would also like to forcibly dissolve perpetual-duration corporations and trusts, particularly those chartered for "any lawful purpose".
You shouldn't have stopped raising the objection. You should have trusted your logic. As yet, corporations have no free will of their own, being directed by only semipermanent boards and managers. When you have a full-blown immortal, with its own interests and decision making abilities, the problems of those perpetual legal structures magnify.
Note that this also means it would be wise for the lifespan of artificial intelligences to be tied to that of specific humans.
At some point in the future, we as a species might be able to handle immortality in a more reasonable fashion, but for now, everyone should get the same deal from Death: one lifetime, with a beginning and an end.
Actually, my logic is not to let immortal corporations exist with single immortal decision makers. My logic is, "if we want to go for immortality, we need to get rid of capitalism." This is simply yet another reason, on top of many, that we need to get rid of capitalism.
Evil Plan:
1. Smash capitalism.
2. Futuristic scientific research and technologies.
3. Civilization worth being immortal in.
4. Actual immortality.
5. Go directly to the "FUN" square of the board. Enjoy.
If any of these steps results in death, well, I'm actually pretty ok with that. I want goodness more than I want to personally be alive.
Maybe if we didn't have the absurd excuse of "the tyrant is evil, but at least he'll die someday" we would be more inclined to do something, instead of sheepishly obeying and letting time pass.
The tyrant can build a fortress to slaughter 99.999999% of attackers and be safe until a million men or more oppose him at once, but no stronghold can protect against death itself. And as long as he fears death, the fortress can be invaded in sufficient numbers through the personal physician's private entrance.
Besides that, if I and the tyrant were both immortal, I think I would still prefer to wait, at least until my odds of success were better.
Don't think of it as doom, though. If you look around you, pretty much any Life, itself, involves the cycle: start -> do something -> finish.
Do your absolute best to do the best for yourself, and others, while you are Alive. Life is the most precious substance in the Known Universe, and believe it or not: you are in control.
So, think about it not at all, or often, but know this: you will reach the end, no matter what. You're in the 'do something' stage right now.
I get what you are saying and totally agree. However, now I am stuck between choosing between what is good for ME and what is good for OTHERS. What is more important? My life being good or leaving others in a better place when I'm gone? Should I just live for myself until I'm 45, than start giving back?
There is a school of thought called Vedanta that I learned about from reading Alan Watts. It holds that all is "oneness" or "connectedness" and that the lines that appear to separate ourselves from each other are merely illusions and that helping yourself is helping others and helping others is helping yourself.
At first read, this sounded like hippy dippy nonsense to me. But then I started seeing "practical" manifestations of this in my life over and over again.
For example, I did a bunch of Pro Bono web development for a non-profit because I liked the non-profit. Besides the good feeling I got from helping a worthy charity and the thanks and friendships I gained from the people who worked there, I also ended up getting three web consulting gigs.
I gave a friend some money to start a creative project and their level of happiness has increased. And that happiness level is contagious and I find myself feeling some of that happiness spill over onto me whenever I hang out with them.
And when I started eating right, exercising, and following my goals and dreams, I was happier and that happiness spilled over to all around me. And as I became more successful, it opened up economic opportunities for those around me to take part in my business and to partner with. And it inspired those around me to follow their dreams. And that's spilling over to the people around those who were helped by me in an outward circle.
In a very grounded way, I'm really starting to believe there is something to this connectedness idea.
> However, now I am stuck between choosing between what is good for ME and what is good for OTHERS. What is more important?
Question of the ages, that is. I tend toward contributing toward the general good as best I know how. But I came to that conclusion through a fair bit of contemplation, some selfish living (which still continues in degrees), and philosophical and religious thought. (And I'm still no Ghandi, I can play the part of "self-centered asshole" pretty well, and regularly.) In short, it's a journey you get to take all on your own, no one else will figure it out for you.
Keep in mind, too, that the two choices you laid out are not at odds with each other. As a personal example, I volunteer at an animal shelter. My wife and I walk homeless dogs, pick up their poop, and take some to training classes if it would make them more adoptable. For dogs that have been there a while, we'll take them on field trips to the park, maybe stop by Wendy's for a burger and fries. We'll each put in at least 100, sometimes over 200 hours/year there. We give the shelter arse loads of money (yea, high tech salaries!) We do it because we believe if we (society) have domesticated the animals, we have a responsibility to see that they are taken care of and treated humanely. Damned noble of us, eh? Except I find it to be a hell of a lot of fun to hang out with the mutts, teach them commands so that they're civilized members of society, go run around in the mud at the park, and ultimately see them get adopted. It ain't all selfless.
Dishing up food at a homeless shelter? Makes you feel good, right? That you're doing the "right" thing? It's still about you, because of how it makes you feel, or that you think that you are doing what's "right". Ultimately you should be removed entirely, and it's done because it's what the world needs right now. I'm still a long way from that ideal, but I keep trying. In the mean time at least some effort is expended toward making the world a little better, whatever the motivation may be.
Alas, you have to decide for yourself, but I can tell you my personal decision is to be as good a person to myself as I am to others, roughly in that order, with some compensation for personal privilege, perhaps, in the late-night fridge visits. That has improved things immensely in my life.
If I had to choose a society with all young people, all old people, or a healthy mix of each... i'd choose the later. Young people provide new thinking, they're essential to society. Old people provide foundation, and wisdom, they're essential too. We live on a planet with finite resources, to support the right mix, we should accept that its just not RIGHT to live forever, even if it were possible. I'd like to live until i'm 100, and I hope science makes it so i'm just as productive at 100, as I am today.
If society included lots of immortals, they'd be pretty driven to make sure that we're not stuck living on a planet with finite resources. There are plenty of untapped resources laying on the ocean floors and deeper into the Earth's crust than we typically mine today, and lots more off-world. Those are all technologically within our grasp today, they're just not cost-effective. But if we had to support an immortal society, the ROI terms change: it becomes reasonable to invest in an infrastructure that will take a few centuries to pan out, because people will live to see it completed and get the benefits from it.
Re: finite resources - Constraining the human race to a single planet puts a pretty small upper bound on our species' potential.
Humans evolved a desire to explore and adapt to new environments as an evolutionary advantage, this advantage doesn't need to be bound to one tiny little ball floating in space.
I assume there are only 3 sustainable paths for the human race. The first, is the norm. We continue as we are, we don't adjust to climate change etc in time. Society eventually collapses under the magnitude that it has swelled up to. We enter a second "dark age". The second, is we find a way to to sustain with the resources we have on this planet alone. Population finds a balance, and we go on living another 5000 years, just like we did for the first... except now technology plays a bigger role. The third, is we expand to space and limits become boundless.
The only scenario where we can think about super long life spans is the later. My point is, this is like deciding how to spend your millions of dollars before you've made them. My personal opinion is that the singularity is as close to inevitable for as long as we as a society choose to pursue technology. To me the likely scenarios are either A or C, and it really depends on which happens first... an environmental collapse or the singularity.
We haven't made any progress in lengthening the maximum human life. We can simply help more people so that they live closer to the maximum, so it's highly doubtful that we're anywhere near extending life beyond the 100-120 limits of our bodies.
Consider, for example, that work on artificial intelligence started in the 1950's. We've made lots of progress in 60 years, but it's definitely not a solved progress, despite the incredible progress.
I don't think it's such a black and white issue. Apart from some nerd rapture/uploading the brain scenario (which I find preposterous, just IMO) true immortality is just not possible. Even discounting the extreme view of the heat death of the universe, I don't think even the most careful people would live to be more than a couple thousand years. Most would probably die of something in 2-3 hundred years - war, famine, disease, natural disasters, or just even dangerous activities (driving, skiing, hiking, skydiving, etc) would at least on average, keep a steady rate of deaths.
But I agree with trying everything we can to extend the life as much as possible. I just feel in the end, a 500 year long life would represent a pretty lucky person.
edit: just FYI though, I'm not a hater; I'm even a futurist and a tiny bit of a transhumanist.
I suspect that when a car accident means a loss of 450 years of life instead of 45 years we'll probably end up requiring cars to be ten times safer, or roads to be inherently safer, or since we have all the time in the world, maybe no need to ever drive above 10 MPH other than recreational use.
This is a problem often not discussed about the utopia of a world filled with self driving cars... its very hard to make an AI that can handle 85 MPH on a crowded interstate, but once "everyone" has a self driving car, we'll probably just lean back and watch TV/movies/podcasts or do desk work or whatever so going 10 MPH is fine, at which point its not so hard of an AI problem anymore. So there's a hump to break thru after which the tech gets a lot simpler and lower risk.
Also the nature hike at the park is a wee bit less risky than hiking Mt Everest. Given an infinite amount of life, I think you'd see a lot more patience, and nothing kills people like impatience.
This is a problem often not discussed about the utopia of a world filled with self driving cars... its very hard to make an AI that can handle 85 MPH on a crowded interstate
Aging is a much harder problem than getting self-driving cars to 85 MPH.
In fact, 85 MPH would be pretty safe with (a) high-quality cars on the road, (b) low speed variance, and (c) efficient lane use (German-style, no passing on right, no camping in the left lane). 85 isn't safe in high traffic under current conditions, but that's because there are enough cars that can't handle it, and your 85 + someone else's 60 = speed variance (which is more dangerous than raw speed).
The superior reaction time and efficiency of self-driving cars could easily get to the point where they can drive faster than typical humans can safely go.
One note (that has nothing to do with driving speed) is that any society that can prolong life will be technically far ahead of where we are now. I think this is an important note. You'd be insane to want to live for 500+ years in current conditions, with economic scarcity and plenty of unsolved, rare health problems-- one of which would inevitably take you down. Immortality is completely undesirable without humanitarian advancement; the question is whether it's desirable with the extreme technical advancement (and, one hopes, political progress) that it would require.
True but there is the opposing force where if you live ten times longer, and you don't have to do the driving, its just as "effective" to sit in the back of some kind of conversion van going 5 MPH playing video games or reading or sleeping than to drive at 50 MPH.
There is a justification for raising speed limits even if death rates increase slightly because the aggregate total loss of life at 55 might be higher than at 65, assuming loss of life due to sitting around driving is as bad as loss of life due to being dead is equal. On the other hand if you live "forever" and you're not doing the driving anyway, then its hard to justify going more than 10 MPH or so. At which point its probably about 8 times less bandwidth required at 10 MPH than 80 MPH.
Its also more economical WRT gas or solar electricity use or whatever propellant solution.
Or at least a right to a dignified and peaceful death.
I do think a society that 'solves' death would need some way of identifying when life prolonging therapy should be withheld and that this should not just be a function of income.
In effect our current "do not resuscitate" clause.
Life expectancy only a few hundred years ago was about 40 years. Its about 78 years in the US currently. Human longevity is extremely difficult problem but there is no physical law stating that you can't live up to 200 or 500 years. Biological science is advancing at an extremely rapid rate and its possible that we may see doubling of life expectancy in next 50 years.
How much of that life expectancy 100 years ago were affected by child mortality? We haven't really doubled our longevity, we just took care of some things that lead to a lot more children reaching adulthood. The bulk of that might have been pretty simple, like better hygiene.
Are you suggesting modern medical science not helping people live longer by treating Cancer, Organ Transplants, Bypass surgeries etc ?
I am seeing so much pessimism on HN , it seems unlikely that majority of people here are hackers.
I don't particularly want to die, but knowing it's going to happen makes life a whole lot more interesting. For me, the looming finitude of life keeps my inclination to procrastinate in check - Why do today what can be done tomorrow? Because otherwise the things to do add up faster than the tomorrows on which to do them.
On the other hand, there's what you could call the Homer Simpson reaction[1]. If you know you're going to die, and you don't even know if it won't happen soon, you might be discouraged from doing things with a longer time frame.
Definitely going to die if you're not a multi millionaire or billionaire. Why would common folk ever receive immortality therapy?
I firmly believe we're just a hologram, an experiment, with only one defined condition in our environment, death. Our overlords have watched us evolve and under the condition of death, and once we solve it, we will have won.
Definitely going to die if you're not a multi millionaire or billionaire. Why would common folk ever receive immortality therapy?
For the same reasons they often get life-saving treatments? Why would the people who own the therapy refuse to be handsomely paid by common folk and/or the State for providing it?
Of course, it won't come cheap. Maybe a 500 year loan per treatment?
Biological immortality does not mean immunity from accidents or homicide. Hugh Hixon, at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, calculated the half-life of a biologically immortal population at 1 654 years [1].
If we lowered fatality odds to 1 in 100 000 per year (no accidents, Sweden's homicide rate) this figure inflates to 69 315. It's an interesting illustration of how the effects of randomness will not be muted, just shifted.
But the key question is how long do we have to live before we're going to bed at night and backing up all our memories for the day to the cloud. So if we get hit by a bus we just wake up in a few weeks in a rapidly grown body?
I know people will say it won't happen, but are you going to let a 650 year old mind die with its cumulative knowledge and wisdom? Nope, you'd get them a new goddamn body.
As a cancer biologist, I can tell you that at least some of these assumptions don't hold true. Acute Myeloid Leukemia is driven entirely by "accumulated lightning bolts". Every time your blood stem cells divide, a small number of replication errors occur randomly in the DNA. If one of these cells accumulate two to three of these mutations in the wrong genes, you will develop AML. The longer you live, the more likely it is that this will occur. Bottom line, everyone who lives long enough will eventually get cancer.
While I agree that these plots are interesting, it's dangerous to read too much into these without thinking more deeply about the vast number of ways that there are to die, many of which will have strikingly different age distributions.
Kinda late, but I thought that there are typically corrective measures that try to prevent oncogenes from kicking off. The key difference between "accumulated lightning bolts" and the final model chosen is that "accumulated lightning bolts" assumes a more or less fixed rates of lightning bolts, while the final model essentially that the rate of lightning bolts will increase over time, which corresponds well to an interpretation of long-term decay of corrective measures - such as replication error detection systems.
I think the key point is that systems for retaining homeostasis (so second order systems I guess) are themselves subject to degradation.
There are some cancers driven by things like mismatch-repair defects, so that the amount of DNA damage grows very quickly over time, but these don't cause the majority of cancers. In liquid (blood) tumors, especially, these are very rare - The predominant mechanism is just the accumulation of random defects due to cellular division.
On the other end of the scale are things like automobile accidents, where incidence peaks in teenage years and decreases thereafter (with a possible second peak as vision and reflexes deteriorate in the elderly). My point is that neither of these fit the neat curve drawn by the author. When everything is lumped together, the curve fits, but trying to draw broad conclusions about mechanisms from that kind of aggregate data is foolish.
And if we solve cancer and age related deterioration, everyone will eventually die in an accident. But the fact remains that the deaths that dominate life expectancy statistics behave in the way described.
4.5 year old blog post that I didn't find any interesting information on. For example:
Exponential decay is sharp, but an exponential within an exponential is so sharp that I can say with 99.999999% certainty that no human will ever live to the age of 130. (Ignoring, of course, the upward shift in the lifetime distribution that will result from future medical advances)
The author makes a hugely controversial statements saying that no human will ever live past 130 and then says, "of course, ignoring the most important variable".
Anyone interested in this topic might want to check out:
That's exactly why we want to live forever, so a Sunday afternoon spent lazily listening to the rain on the window and dozing doesn't feel like a waste.
Having taken care of some elderly, and watched others pass, my impression that living forever appeals more to the young than the old. Some of it may be their bodies breaking down, some of it may be losing old friends and loves, but most of the folks 75+ seem to be ready when the time comes. Certainly more ready than their kids.
But still... To quote the Rolling Stones, "What a drag it is getting old."
However, if they have the body and mental acuity of a 25 year old at 75+ and so do their friends, they might not be as ready for it. And not need people to take care of them.
All of your argument is null and void if you take out the "dying" part.
It's like saying "Nobody goes 100 miles in a day because they can't walk that far, so nobody is going to want to ever have a car/bike/airplane" also walking that far tears up your feet so a car is silly."
My stepfather passed away two weeks ago, and my mother is worried that she'll live as long as the women in her line; roughly 90+. To her, that's a nightmare of infirmity and worry. Will she have enough money? Will she be independent, or have to rely more on caregivers? She's only 80, so she's got a good decade or more to think about these things.
I think if she wasn't alone and in declining health, she'd be glad to live longer.
A reliability engineer might say that as a first approximation, the time-till-failure of the human animal (really just an electro-mechanical-chemical machine) has a governing equation which is a linear combination of many Weibull equations [0] and Arrhenius equations [1]. Mechanical failure is known to be governed by Weibull, and chemically-driven devices fail according to Arrhenius.
From this claim it isn't hard to cook up superexponential-ish results over certain timescales by tuning the fitting parameters and combination coefficients. But that doesn't mean the underlying failure physics here are truly superexponential.
But as a better approximation, human death may be governed by a system of differential equations with primarily stochastic coefficients and plenty of strongly nonlinear operators. So after our biomedical engineers remove the first few bottlenecks at ~105 years old, these curve shapes might change dramatically to reflect the true complexity of the underlying physics.
In response to the the morbid web calculator at the bottom of the article, I made this a few years ago: http://javasaur.com/deathCalculator.html that provides similar information, but takes into account current age and gender. It uses US actuarial tables (so this assumes that you're living every year as if it were 2007 or whatever year it was I used...)
Great article. For me personally, the issue is not so much dying but aging. Seeing your hair thin, your eyesight deteriorate, your memory weaken and your energy decrease with time must be a profoundly depressing experience -- one of the major reasons why the old in general are more solemn than the young, I think.
These changes are still in the future for me (thankfully), but I imagine they will happen some day if I live long enough.
I think a world in which people would keep remain mentally and physically fit, but simply die (maybe from a lightning bolt type event) at some point, would be much better than one in which your body and mind slowly fade with time.
I'd be happy with medical advances that let you keep the mind and body of a 25 year old till you're 80 and then simply die one day. Unfortunately, some period of old age and infirmity seems to be present no matter how much lifespan extends.
I don't really want to die, but if there was no end, I would keep wasting my time and life forever. Now I feel a sense of urgency to do something - and a short life with purpose feels better then eternity of boredom and procrastination - that's just my personality though.
Pertains to Cryonics, which is our best bet for immortality until we solve the aging issue (i.e., we hopefully stay cryopreserved until immortality is achieved.) At least with SENS/The Methuselah Foundation/Calico now getting attention and a bit of funding, there's hope here. One day, perhaps governments will consider aging "force" or "harm" and do the number one job government should do: protecting people from it (by funding research to prevent it.)
That one's a bit... silly. It's a surprisingly religious sentiment for Mr. LessWrong.
Yes, I have heard the shpiel. However, from the shpiel I've heard, cryonics is currently a faith-based ticket to God Only Knows Where. Very few people actually believe whole human beings can be resurrected from cryopreservation, and it's certainly never been actually done even in animal experiments, so why should anyone sign up?
Well then, the cryonicists say, let me tell you about neuro-cryo, which is cheaper. We can totally plausibly claim the information content of your brain is preserved in cryopreservation, or possibly brain plastination says gwern. Anyway, point being, you sign up, and it will result in a future friendly superintelligence reading your brain out into a computer to resurrect you someday...
To which I say, hold the fuck on you just skipped a whole lot of freaking steps there!
Hanson and Yudkowsky make the point that it's the best we've got (in one article, they put the chance of success at 5%), and that the alternative right now is nothing. Considering the relatively low cost, it's a gamble worth taking.
For the record, I've been signed up for a long time.
Edit: as for the tone, Yudkowsky has had the inspirational, secular techno-futurist new-age-ish sounding hope thing going for ages, as you probably know. It doesn't surprise me (and probably doesn't surprise him) that very reasonable people sometimes mistake it for the anti-skeptic / superstitious / actual new-age nuttery / cult types. I think part of the problem here is a kind of Poe's Law effect: if a rational, informed, intelligent person talks seriously about the likelihood of FAI, superintelligences, cryo, etc. in a positive, hopeful way, they're instantly mistaken for a nutcake.
>Hanson and Yudkowsky make the point that it's the best we've got (in one article, they put the chance of success at 5%), and that the alternative right now is nothing. Considering the relatively low cost, it's a gamble worth taking.
No, I would say that leaving money or life-insurance to my family when I die is worth more.
Besides, if someone developed a better, more evidenced "immortality treatment", I would want to have the money for that. Pascal's Wager is simply not acceptable for real life just because you wave your arms and go "Futuristic super-science!" instead of "Magic!"
>Yudkowsky has had the inspirational, secular techno-futurist new-age-ish sounding hope thing going for ages, as you probably know.
People would mistake it far less for cultishness if he didn't follow the optimistic futurist tone with prophecies of doom and requests for money in order to supposedly fund saving people from previously mentioned prophecized doom.
Which is a fucking pity, because there's so much there worth liking, but they kinda ruin it with the cult behaviors.
Your body is a cannon, meant to shoot DNA into the future. Once it has fulfilled that purpose, and possibly done a bit to nurture the next generation(s) of your / your tribe's DNA (or harm the DNA of others), your body serves no more purpose.
There doesn't seem to be any obvious upper bound on this behavior.
I have a Harvard professor two centuries ago around 1800 in my ancestry. His DNA would still be serving a useful purpose to his descendants if he was teaching/advising my kids today in 2013, or if he was teaching/advising my descendents in early 2300 for that matter.
I would imagine being young in a post 500-year-lifespan society would be very suffocating if your first few decades had a student:teacher ratio flipped around from current numbers to 20 teachers per student rather than current 20 students per teacher.
The resources you consume, versus the reproductive edge your provide to your offspring. Specifically, if you're competing for resources they could have used in their own reproduction.
The most successful DNA will be when a group of people launch their descendants off into the galaxy to avoid the Red Giant death in our solar system. We're all rats on one slowly sinking ship, right now.
A lot of techno-utopia assumptions come into play, such as a culture powerful enough to extend life to 500 years probably has no resources left to compete for other than the momentary attraction of a fertile member of the opposite sex, although even that could probably be worked around in a lab (cloning or something?). If we discover something tomorrow I'd have to eat my words but I'm assuming it would require "star trek era" tech to pull this off.
> I can say with 99.999999% certainty that no human will ever live to the age of 130
That is unfortunate. I grew up in the 80s (the 8 bit µ processor era), always had a very positive outlook on life, and thought 127 was the perfect age for me to die.
I often wonder if all our life's earnings will eventually be used in upgrading our bodies. Could future be like 'In Time' or something parallel to that?
That would either require that technology was only barely keeping most people alive or a vastly more restrictive legal regime (because as much horror as people express at patents, you are talking about 20 years not being such a long time anymore).
Currently, "can we" is indeed a question. It is followed by the question, "Oh dear God in Heaven, why would you do that!?". I mean, seriously, there are large numbers of computer security breaches each week. Now what are you going to do if those computers are substrate for people? Hell, it's even worse if they're running people using cloud computing: one attack on a datacenter could let you obtain root access to dozens or hundreds of living human minds.
And then we have to decide on scheduling and resource-sharing algorithms. Oy gevalt.
Though actually, trying to devise a secure system architecture for running real people would be a hilariously evil joke-project.
This is a very interesting approach to describe the mortality rate as a function of age. I wonder how this theory ties in with more established theories of aging, such as the Evolutionary Theories of Aging (ref. http://www.genetics.org/content/156/3/927.full)
We already know why cancer rates increase with age: cancer is a result of several cumulative cellular mutations. Obviously, the chance of these mutations all occurring in any given cell increases with the number of cell divisions that occur, i.e. the length of time the person lives.
If people lived to, say, 150 or 300 years, 500 years, I wonder how hard it would be to convince people to risk their lives in war? I wonder if people would be more careful with the environment if they knew they'd actually have to live with their treatment of the environment?
On the other hand, leadership positions strongly attract psychopaths and sociopaths, and at least some segment of the population will think, eh, I'm going to live for 500 years, I can afford to give President Palin a mere four year chance, and next thing you know we're launching missiles at who knows who for no particular reason, or they're launching missiles at us.
My point being a 500 year lifespan allows a "survival of the craziest" to likely result in truly awful people naturally ending up in positions of leadership. Every nutcase having his 4 years of fame instead of just some of them, or just 15 minutes of fame for some of them.
It could be really bad. And not just politically, imagine the typical CEO psychological profile under centuries of those selection pressures instead of mere decades.
"if they knew they'd actually have to live with their treatment of the environment"
Imagine a 500 year old hoarder.
This whole discussion is enjoyably ripe with possible sci-fi or fantasy novel plots, very interesting.
It bothers me that 8 is the "magic number." Did Gompertz simply round? I find it hard to believe that the real number is not 7.7 or 8.3, and those would have vastly different effects. Why should evolution mark itself by whole rotations around the sun?
The article uses a cops and criminals analogy to explain how our bodies degrade over time. Technology can allow us to produce artificial cops and conditions that make things more difficult for the criminals. The Methusaleh Foundation [1] is working on pieces of this problem right now, with a cash prize. There are many other research institutions working on different aspects of immortality. Once medical nanomachines become a practical reality we might be able to turn the work of Gompertz on it's head within a generation.
Many people, myself included, find the idea of effective immortality to be disconcerting. But all of the arguments have been made and rebutted: Just because we can't imagine immortality doesn't mean that isn't a good thing, if we were born into a world without death we wouldn't give it up for any of the advantages of mortality, we would have more productive time to solve the problems of overpopulation, etc and so forth.
If our species is able to continue on its current path then death is going to, well, die. The tragedy is that none of us will live to see it. That doesn't mean that we can't consider the implications and start preparing an infinite future for our descendants.
[1] http://www.mprize.org/