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OpEd Piece on Extended Life Expectancy
daksis writes "CNN has posted an OpEd piece from the New York Times that raises some interesting issues. With the current advances in biology, we as a society are facing the real possibility that "immortality" could some day be the norm. What sort of social impact can we expect when/if life expectancies are measured in centuries?"
Queens University in Belfast did a studying linking your major in college with your life expectancy. Scientists and Engineers live the longest next to pre-med. Sweet.
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--E.C. Stanton
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That's actually been shown to be false, although it used to be believed. Neurons are born throughout life, particularly in certain parts of the brain- there are stem cells in the human brain.
Indeed, indications are that depression is caused by insufficient neurons being produced; antidepressants seems to increase survival of the new nerve cells, as well as raising serotonin levels.
What are you going to do with all those years? Can you seriously imagine what it would be like to work for 200 years, as opposed to 65? That's more tha 3 times the current retirement age!
Well, if you can save up enough money you can live off the interest indefinitely. About a million bucks is in the ballpark.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"The first red flag went up when you have this guy saying that inside of a century you'll have people able to live 5,000 years. This article already has the faint odor of that cult that supposedly cloned a human.
Second red flag: Assuming that if you can extend the life of roundworms by six times you can do the same for humans. Bzzzzt.
Third red flag: Sure, our organs may give out. But scientists are now breeding special kinds of pigs that may be able to grow replacement hearts and lungs What, are we cars now? When an organ starts acting flaky we go down to the corner store, buy a new one, open the hood and drop it in? So in order to live however ungodly amount of years they say, we have to piece ourselves together when something goes out? And that's just organs, what about stuff like bones? Something tells me that if you lived 600 years by these guys' terms, it'd be such a hellish existance you would WANT to die.
Here's another Quote of the Day: Consider dogs. DNA tests show that all modern dogs evolved from wolves and were initially bred by cavemen who knew nothing about the genome. Yet the dogs were rapidly transformed into everything from toy poodles to Great Danes. If we begin to reshape our own genetic code, we could presumably achieve even greater variation among our human descendants.
I'm sorry. Homo Sapiens didn't appear until around 130,000 years ago. The first dog species appeared 40 million years ago. Modern dogs as we know them are evolved from a species that appeared 7 million years ago. I'm afraid diversification of dogs happened long before man appeared. Certain traits of dogs were exaggerated by selective breeding, but mankind certainly wasn't responsible for creating everything from rat dogs to St. Bernards in the short space they have walked the earth. Evolution takes time. Lots of time. Try again.
-R
Most people that make any significant contributions to their field do so before they're 30.
-... ---
Interesting bits on the neurons and depression... if you happen to know of any texts geared toward the layperson on this, post them if you would.
Well, if you can save up enough money you can live off the interest indefinitely. About a million bucks is in the ballpark.
Depends... that relies on several things. First, that you can beat inflation with your returns, and by a healthy margin. In most of the industrialized world this hasn't been a big issue for the past 50 years, but it's far from a certainty. If inflation goes above 3-4% it becomes much harder to maintain the percentages (yeah, some of your investments will also rise in returns, but not all of them, and odds are not enough of them to make up the gap). Second, that the economy is stable enough to provide high returns for the majority of the time period. You can afford to lose money some years, or spend more than your gains, but it has to turn around fairly shortly (5-10 years). Otherwise the damage you do to your principle will get too large to overcome easily.
In general it's advised to live off 5% or less of the principle. The stock market has a long term (over ~90 years) return of 11%, so use that as a basis. That doesn't include inflation though, or localized downturns, so cut that in half to counteract them. A $1M principle will give you a yearly income of about $50k -- which is a pretty darn good living wage, even for a couple (at least currently). How much you actually need to live off of, however, depends on factors like how much debt you have (including mortgage and other long term debts), how many kids you have, and how you want your lifestyle to be (at $50k/yr for two people you're not going to be dining out a ton or driving new cars very much). It would, however, let you live without working and doing pretty much whatever hobby you wanted... within reason.
Here's an interesting and much less fluffy interview with the guy quoted at the top of the piece.
QED
Well not EVERYONE. I'd still get in a plane piloted by Chuck Yeager. Bob Hope and George Burns were very spry until their last few years of life.
In the USA, life expectancy increased 60% from 1900 to 2000. In Italy, 80%. In Japan, 80%. In Mexico, 120%.
Most of the increase in life expectency between 1900 and 2000 in the western world came before penicillin. Yep washing our hands after going to the bathroom and not drinking foul water or eating spoilt food accounts for most of it. There were people who lived a century long before modern medicine, they were just real lucky not to get diarrhea and die. But how many 5000 y.o. are there still around?
Ever heard of Galileo, Hawking, or Einstein?
Yes, and it was Einstein who said in 1942 "A person who has not made his great contribution to science before the age of 30 will never do so."
When Albert first published his special theory of relativity in 1905, it did not include the famous E=MC^2. He added it to another publication of it later that year. He was 26.
In 1971, Stephen Hawking suggested the creation of mini black holes following the big bang. These mini black holes might contain billions of tons of mass, but have the volume of an elementary particle. In 1971, Stephen Hawking was 29.
Galileo conducted his famous experiment where he dropped bodies of different weights from the tower of Piza sometime between 1589 when he was appointed chair of mathematics at the University of Piza as a result of his theorems pertaining to centers of gravity, and 1592 when his anti-aristotlean veiws caused him to lose this post. Galileo was born in 1564, making him somewhere between 25 and 28 years old during that time.
Your mentioning of three great men who made significant contributions to science before the age of 30 proves that it is possible, but the grandparent poster is still right. Most scientists at least, who make very important conttributions to their field do so before the age of 30.
What most people forget is that all these numbers are for life expectancy at birth. When the infant mortality is high, it is very easy to bring that life expectancy up 100% by fixing the infant mortality problem.
Reducing deaths during childbirth brings the average life expectancy up another notch while doing zilch for men. Avoiding world wars does the same for men, and is of little use (numerically only, of course) to women.
That is to say, the real life expectancy (average age of adults at natural death) did not increase much during the last century; 30% I'll take, but hardly more.
the process at hand can be described by the :P
Poisson distribution or Gamma distribution(hint:
these are not linux distros). Poisson is discrete
and can be used to describe processes where you
have some event e with some small
probability p(e) for a finite number of trials
n, so it would work for a maximum life time
of a million years but not immortality. e would be
"survive a year". then, if you have some good
estimate for p(e) (ask your local life insurance)
you can look up the formula, fill in the values
and compute your p(becoming 600 years) or
p(becoming at least 600). You can model the same
with gamma distr., but as a continuous process.
finding p and n such that E(life
length) = 600 is trivial and left as an exercise
to the reader...
statistics is fun, go learn some
the most sexp i get is my paren-mode.
Humanoids have been around for about 6 million years. Even before direct domestication, dogs used to hang out around humans. Why? We tend to leave out lots of tasty leftovers, and dogs are basically scanvengers. So, for millions of years, dogs and humans have been living alongside each other, and the dogs that managed to not piss off the humans survived. So dogs have had _some_ effect on canine evolution for about 6 million years. (The inverse is also true; dogs have been effecting human evolution for the same time period. Even non-domesticated dogs hanging out around your camp can warn you of approaching danger. Effectively, dogs and humans have co-evolved to be compatible with each other.)
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Robert Heinlein (the greatest SF writer of all time, so PFFFT!) made this a major theme of many of his later works -- most likely, he was worried about his own impending death. The first in this series was of course the Novella Methuselah's Children. The theme was dealt with most explicitly in "Time Enough for Love", and to a lesser extent in "I Will Fear No Evil." Heinlein (as a result of impending dementia I think) spent many of his later books tying everything together, so the subject is touched on in The Cat Who Could Walk Through Walls, Number of the Beast, etc.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
Take a look at the book The Okinawan Diet. A lot of Okinawans live to 100, and they stay pretty fit, too. For Y2K celebrations they put on a demo match between a 35-year-old boxing champ and a 95-year-old karate master. The old guy won by knockout. He modestly told interviewers that his opponent was just too young and inexperienced to win.
Then there are all the old Tai Chi guys...I've got a biography of one, describing how at about age 80 he attempted a backflip, landed on his head, and walked off muttering that he wasn't a young man anymore.
Crappy diet and exercise habits will ruin you, but age itself ain't so bad.