Slashdot Mirror
Live to be 1000 Years Old?
An anonymous reader writes "The BBC has a long article by wonderfully be-whiskered Aubrey de Grey of SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence) on how we may all live to be 1,000 years old... as this is the balanced BBC they are also running the
opposing view."
A number of people in biblical times lived well into their 200s or 300s. This is well-documented in The Bible. 1000 years doesn't sound like so much of a stretch now.
My mommy told me the secret....eat your veggies!
Don't take life so seriously. No one makes it out alive.
I personally would rather live 50 good, full years, and die gracefully, than live 1000 years dependent on all sorts of pills and not really living life.
Only Old People... Oh, wait.
dying is only for... Wait, I guess this meme is dead now. Good riddance.
There is a reason for people dying when they do. There would be major overpopulation if people were to live that long...
I'm not sure I'd want to live to be 1000. Bad enough to see the fall of the Commonwealth but to actually see the Abyss take over. I just don't think I could take it.
Yeah, I love Trance. Wanna fight about it?
... in my lifetime that I can see the Red Sox win the world series!
Can we have eternal youth as well?
If I live to be 1000 the technology behind underpants would finally be out of date.
How long until they raise the retirement age to 980?
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
No, sorry, this is most likely another hoax!
Seriously, given the likelyhood of an accident getting you, imagine the sort of life people would have to live to average living to 1000. Even if you could offer people a constant youthful physique and extreme longevity, how many of us are really going to make it to even 200? Unless you live your entire life underground in a room with little windows, never venturing forth into the world, something's going to get you. While this means that a huge number of /.'ers are relatively safe, the rest of us are still going
to get ourselves killed going over the handlebar on our bikes or crashing
our cars or walking in front of a bus or hitting trees skiing or etc.
Aside from that, try to imagine the social, scientific and political stagnation that would occur from having old people not dying. Try to picture the economic devestation among young people (you think following the boomers sucks...), the lock-in of power among a few Very Oldsters... If people do start living to 1000, I think our real duty would be to start hunting them.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I'm 6-0-4?
...when this technology is developed? Will it be shared freely with every person on the planet, or will you have to be one of the wealthy elite of a first-world-nation in order to be immortal? If the treatment is universally shared, what will be done about overpopulation of the planet? With birthrates where they are now, and no one dying of old age we'll need to move billions of people into space.
Urge to post... fading... fading... RISING!... fading... fading... gone.
We can't... only he can.
Remember, there can be only one.
I personally am not expecting to live to a 1000, but I'm sure that in a few generations people will be living much longer.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
"The right to choose to live or to die is the most fundamental right there is" Ha ha
I thought the rebuttle was pretty lame... several stories of past interest in immortality that failed...
I am sure mankind has thought about flight for just as long, but in 50 years we went from flying a couuple hundred yards to the SR-71.
love is just extroverted narcissism
...with that beard, how does that guy do any lab work? Wouldn't his hair get in *everything*? :P
"People" using "unnecessary" quotes should be "shot".
All I have to do is get my billions by the age of 40. Then I have 960 years of excellent retirement to look forward to.
You need to restart your computer. Hold down the Power button for several seconds or press the Restart button.
As much as I never want to die, and I really really don't, living to a 1000 years old seems a tad bit excessive. After awhile, the risk of being alive is diminished and we no longer have a rush to do things. With a deadline of a 1000 years (more than ten times the above average we have now), it gives new meaning to putting stuff off till tommorow. Much of the excitement that makes life so worth living will be lost.
And I suppose when we start having people living till 1000, they'll come out with treatments to help you live to 10,000. etc etc etc.
What I'd really like to know is if the treatment will be a simple once a day pill or a three hour long invasive therapy I have to go through every morning (much like showering).
-Teiresias
I didn't read the article, of course, but would you really want to be slaving away for so long, feeding the upper class?
Or how many losses could you cope with? Imagine that your significant other dies in a crash, 50 years later your child is killed, and another one commits suicide? And then your second significant other leaves you.
I dunno, maybe I'm too pessimistic, but it's not all rosy if everyone can live that long...
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
What happens if someday, somehow scientists are able to make people live 1000+ years?
On it's face it's a good thing, but can/will our food supply chain support that? What would the sociological impacts be?
So you live to be 1000 or whatever but surely after a couple of hunderd years you would get bored and would feel that you've seen everything. SO what do you do then?
Of course space travel might be possible then but you would then be stuck on a ship for a couple hundered years getting bored there instead
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
It's called medicine, man! It ain't witchcraft.
I think Mel Brooks has this act patented.
does he plan to put 50 billion people?
*blinking cursor*
How much will it hurt 900 years from now? I don't even want to know.
Lasers Controlled Games!
What kind of sport would that be - they move slowly and don't hide well. That would kind of be like hunting cattle - in a feed yard.
A fine is a tax you pay for doing wrong and a tax is a fine you pay for doing all right.
To demonstrate this, please commit suicide.
Well, isn't that what you're asking everyone else to do, by wilfully forgoing life-extension technology?
he doesn't mention anything about remaining youthful. I don't think I'd want to be 1000, cuz after 50 years things get a little wrinkly, saggy, floppy, and don't work so well. At the very least, it wouldn't be very pleasing to the eye to see a bunch of 500 year old people walking around.
Quote, "When 900 years old you reach, look as good, you will not."
Don't take life so seriously. No one makes it out alive.
Think of it like a building. You can have bricks replacing themselves, but at some point you need to do a wholescale replacement of the wall because it's not aligned, and then we're getting into expensive surgery.
Some organs, like kidneys, lend themselves to remove and replace, but other systems are intertwined with other systems. I'm not sure that the body can maintain that indefinately. The body grows into an adult form, and then shrinks and dies. Even if you have cells maintaining themselves, the tissual structure might get out of control over time. Some tissues and orgrans can be economically replaced, others can't.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
good news for the u.s. gov't... they can just raise the retirement age and won't have to worry about running out of social security for another thousand years or so
I surely hope so... then my 6 digit /. ID will look so cool to all those 48 digit l4mers who just signed up.
/. member so bite me.
That's right script kiddie: I'm a top 1,000,000
John.
Another 960 years of Spam! I don't think I could handle that!
"I intend to live forever. So far, so good."
Olshansky is just bitter for failing to invest in stemcell startups, while profiting from dissing extropians like Kurzweil in his book.
--
make install -not war
If we are all going to be able to live to be 1000, colonization of space needs to be something we can easily do. The problem with living that long (aside from being bored with life, although let's assume that those willing to live that long are cool with it) is overpopulation. Spreading to other planets would fix that quite easily.
just b/c we can, should we?
let's say for the sake of argument it's actually possible. everybody would want immortality: it's been the dream of most of humanity for a long, long time. that all makes sense.
so how would you go about seeing who gets it, and when? there's wars going on b/c of contention over who owned a stretch of land first over the course of more than a few centuries. what kind of chaos and violence would this bring?
but even beyond that: a world in which nobody dies of old age for centuries? if you think that overpopulation's a problem now, we could very easily be headed towards a soylent green kinda world if we don't have natural limits on lifespans.
ed
The elfs are finally revealing their secrets.
-- ess
I am not a crook's head!
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
Hope I'm not spending all my time patching Windows 3000 when the time comes. That would be sad. Kill me! Please........kill me!!!!!
So this guy says the person to live to 1000 years old might already be 60... and about how old does he look in the picture? It sounds a lot like the needs instead of the fact dictating the expectation.
.001 chance of dying each year, that means you have a .999 chance of living, and over 50 years you have a .999 ^ 50 = about .95 chance of living. 95% is very different from 50%.
Secondly, this is apparently a major field of interest for this fellow, but he has basic facts that are way off...
From the article:
"If you are a reasonably risk-aware teenager today in an affluent, non-violent neighbourhood, you have a risk of dying in the next year of well under one in 1,000, which means that if you stayed that way forever you would have a 50/50 chance of living to over 1,000."
Uh, no, that's not at all what it means. If you have a
In fact, I agree with his philosophy that life extension is a soluble problem, and that it is a very good thing. However, he's sure as heck not the spokesman I would choose unless he's being misquoted badly.
... how much karma you could accrue on slashdot!
Though I must say, if I lived 1000 years, I would probably just end up fading into the West (Hawaii or there abouts).
Think of the Matlock ratings!
OddManIn: A Game of guns and game theory.
Why that's only 8 years old when written in decimal.
In Communist Korea, only old people die.
Tech, life, family, faith: Give me a visit
There is a reason for people dying when they do. There would be major overpopulation if people were to live that long...
... usually for women).
Use a condom.
Take the pill.
There are preventative measures, if you're intelligent enough to use them and not to subscribe to toxic religions that ban them (and other forms of medicine
Other people's stupidity, lack of control, or religion (the third I suppose implies the first) is no reason I shouldn't live to be 1000, or 10e29 for that matter.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Look as good you will not, hmmm.
... in my lifetime that I can see the Red Sox win the world series!
and live to see the release of Duke Nukem Forever, and maybe play it while we are young!
"It takes many nails to build a crib, but one screw to fill it."
The Good News: You'll live to be 1,000 years old
The Bad News: For the last 925 years, you'll have no bowel control.
It always strikes me as odd that many articles that talk about extending our lives, enhancing our intelligence, etc., have one section devoted to appeasing religious groups. At the end of his article Dr Aubrey de Grey includes the "Playing God?" section. Isn't it strange that a betterment of human kind must be safeguarded against religious arguments? Why isn't James Watson's argument "if we could build a better human, why shouldn't we" sufficient. Is this god really so jealous of us living longer, knowing more, having fewer diseases?
A religious war is an adult version of a fight over who has the best imaginary friend
you still wont get laid.
Accident probability is Poisson Distributed. Poisson distributions have no memory. Your probability of being in an accident doesn't increase with time. Strange, but true.
over population.... I can see it now, I haven't had any kids in the last 100 years, i think it's time for 2 or 3 (times that by 700-1000 year and you get 15-30 kids per 2 people)
:)
What about all those dumb people who we all have been waiting to die because they have been using up our precious oxygen
or worse 500 years from now you'd be one of those people (if the planet still exists)
Yeah, that's great an all, but will my dick still work at that point? If not, it's not worth it.
Oh.. cool!! I dont have to get married at 30 ... I can stay bachelor till i am 950.. :) ... That does releive loads of tension... But, will i be able to do "it" after marriage??
It might be a good idea to wait until we are able to colonize other planets before we start extending life spans to 1000 years. With the overcrowding that would ensue, it would be become necessary to cull the herd anyway. Then what's the point?
And other thing is, is stopping cellular damage as time goes on going to translate into longer lifespans? The body might be able to repair itself more effectively, but what would a person look like after 1,000 years of life? Would the quality of life even make it worth living? Who would want to live to be 1,000, anyway?
-R
SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence)
It's amazing how so many organization names just happen to translate into catchy, meaningful acronyms, eh? We should start an organization for Monitoring Organization Names That Also have Not-so-bad Acronyms (MONTANA).
George W Bush has been re-elected to his 225th term of office. Some doubleplus-ungood thoughtcriminals have alleged that there were irregularities in the electoral process, but they are being rounded up and taken to the Ministry of Love at this very moment.
I for one welcome our macavalian antediluvian overlords!!
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
So your saying the majority of people here will reach a thousand. wooohoo!
Sounds like you've been reading Larry Niven. He has some good stories on this subject, save that the oldest people in his stories have only lived about 300 years.
But your argument applies to any other radical change in human lifestyle. The agracultural revolution shifted the balance of power putting a few landowners in charge of large numbers of farm workers. The industrial revolution shifted the power to a few rich industrialists in charge of large numbers of factory workers. Etc... Every time we change the way we live the old order is upset and we have to adapt. We'll adapt to this change if it ever comes about. That's what we do best (besides blather constantly).
And yes, most people would not live to be 1000. The human life expectancy in many places is 75 years and most people do not make it that far. But does that mean we shouldn't try?
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
and living for 1000 years could quite possibly be one of them. It's almost a curse if you think about it. Friends and family die before you, you see the world completely change from how it used to be (and you know it was ALWAYS better back in the good ol days), relationships will be a joke as you try to pick up 20+ year old girls at 632 years of age. Do they even make viagra that works on people over 90 without creating a serious chance of heart failure?
Yeah, right.
... no, I will take the high road.
This reminds me of a guy wanting to attract grants. Except for the
There is SO much that goes wrong with the human body as it ages. He predicts in effect that in the next 10 years we'll simultaneously find cures for two maladies that appear to be universal: Alzheimers and cancer.
The statistics on prostate cancer for men and breast cancer for women are such that if you live long enough, you are assured of getting them. The only variable is age of onset.
The same is true for Alzheimer's. Live long enough, and you'll get it.
1000 years? Let's try 130 first.
sigs, as if you care.
I don't buy it, not a scrap of it. On the shallow side, he even -looks- a bit of a quack. I suspect he's the next Penn & Teller cannon fodder for their series. No where in the article did I even see anything remotely scientific. It was just a bunch of hype. Where're the scientific facts he's supposedly gathered to back it up? A thousand years is a big promise to make, a promise of 100 years would've sufficed even in this day and age.
The Methuselah Mouse project did/does prolong the life of a mouse, granted a mouse only lives for three years naturally so proportionally a mouse that lives 5-10 years would seem phenomenal.
I'm with Olshansky, the way de Grey makes it out to be makes you suspect he's forming it into a bit of a cult instead of an actual scientific endeavor.
"I'd rather stay here with all the madmen, for I'm quite content they're all as sane as me..." ~ David Bowie
It's about time ... and to think, before this I would have been happy with uploading my consciousness to the internet!
Seriously though, most of the world is going to have to prepare for the concept of living virtually forever. If this is coming sooner than later, we have to think about the burgeoning population problem in the 3rd world. There are billions of impoverished people and it's going to get messy with 100, 200, 300+ year old people taking up space. Additionally, we have to keep people busy and productive.
Obviously, it's time to get to thinking seriously about colonizing space. It's going to get rather close here on Earth!
Yeah, because you know death doesn't serve any beneficial effects.
Look, I'd like to be immortal as much as the next guy, but come ON. The ramifications on this would be freakin' HUGE. Population growth, global warming, fascist dictators, stagnation of society, etc. Death is bad, but it's not ALL bad.
There's downsides, that's all I'm saying.
Cancer is the real limiting factor here. Your cells are evolving. Once a zygote has divided into two cells, those two cells are in competition for reproductive success. Now, the body is an environment that's tailored to make "selfish" behavior (like consuming lots of resources and reproducing as fast as possible) less beneficial than it might otherwise be. And the cells start out with lots of mechanisms that make them poor competitors.
But evolution works wonders. DNA replication is imperfect, and mutations arise. Eventually, some combination of mutations will increase the reproductive success of some cell line, and you're on your way down a road to cancer.
We can make the environment less hospitable to such cells with chemotherapy, we can ameliorate some of the more common precancerous mutations with drugs or perhaps even fix them with gene therapy.
But I have a lot of faith in the ingenuity of life, and its ability to find ways around these fixes. Give a trillion cells a thousand years, and one of them is going to figure out a way to take advantage of the incredibly friendly environment inside a body and start building a little empire somewhere inside your pancreas.
Behold the riant ape! Beware, his crooked thumbs!
No.
Love and herpes will continue to remian the only things shared freely in human history.
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hopefully on your 900th birthday you will finally get a raw version of Duke Nukem Forever!
You can't handle the truth.
The longer we live, the greater the chances we have of eventually getting laid!
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
I don't see where this is funny. George Bush believes it to be true and he is the smartest man alive. That many Christians can't be wrong!
Support Texas Troops use TXGoogle
Awwwww, thats just not right.
reunion tours will that put us in for? And man, Kiss will NEVER hang it up now.
Sweet informative mod.
Chances are that even if you can remove the causes of ageing which can be notices when people are 200 years old, there may be other ageing effects which don't show up until you are more than 500 years old.
"What kind of sport would that be - they move slowly and don't hide well. That would kind of be like hunting cattle - in a feed yard."
I think hunting thousand year old people would be quite challenging actually, especially armed ones.
Think of how cunning they would be after a thousand years of playing Half Life, Doom and that other one.
I'd rather hunt an armed thirty year old than an armed thousand year old any day.
If you think about it, the success of all life on this planet is predicated on the fact that, sooner or later, it dies. This necessitates the ability to reproduce, and reproduction is the key to evolution.
I don't just mean genetic evolution here, either. The advancement of human civilization has always been about the next generation surpassing the accomplishment of their parents. Science, philosophy, economics, art -- you name it. The progress we as a species have made have always come from the student looking at what has been accomplished before them and saying "That's great, but what if..."
Aside from the obvious population issues, allowing people (or far worse, some people) to outlive Methusela poses a very real danger of short-circuiting this vital process. Understand, this is what has worked for eons -- ever since your ancestors and mine decided to gang up and be more than free-floating amino acids, this is the way it's been. Ask yourself: is your own inflated sense of self-importance worth short-circuiting that?
I'd rather die knowing my descendants would someday achieve things beyond my imagining than live and help ensure that they don't.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
This sure will mean the typicly exaggerated story along the line "You have it easy, you kids! When I was young...", now will be even more exaggerated. -Those Exahertz processors, then I was young, we only had two Gigahertz.
If natural life expectancy was 1000 years, this doesn't reduce the chances of dying violently. In fact you will be 13 times more likely to die violently. According to http://www.nsc.org/lrs/statinfo/odds.htm, you have a 1 in 23 chance of dying from "external" causes. If the average life span is 1000 years, then this increases the chances to 13 in 23, or more than 50%. Also, if we lived 1000 years, there would be alot more to gain from being agressive, so you would see significantly more social injustices. Would you want to be a peon for the next 1000 years, or would you rather pick up a gun and take your chances at a more lucrative future? If you're not, someone is, and you'll be the one in bondage. Thanks but I'll let God take me when he's ready for me.
Can you imagine how long that guys beard will be in 900 years!
Protip: Rip Van Winkle was not the most stylish of guys, so emulating him might not be a good idea.
Although there's science involved here, the real question is a philosophical one, as other comments have touched upon. I think the topic begs great big questions like, "What is the purpose of life?" To learn? To experience? Most humans piddle away their meager seventy years, and when it's time to go they realize all the things they should have said and done but... it's too late.
Humans don't need to live longer, they need to live better.
If humans lived to be 1,000 years old:
In Korea, old - no, wait, "Snuggling Ifbot" robots provide companionship to old Japanese, not old Koreans (they just use email).
Problem is, the snuggling ifbots were only warranted for the first four years... and then...
HUMAN: I'm surprised you didn't come to me sooner.
IFBOT: It's not an easy thing to meet your maker.
HUMAN: And what can he do for you?
IFBOT: Can the maker repair what he makes?
HUMAN: Would you like to be modified?
IFBOT: Had in mind something a little more radical.
HUMAN: What's the problem?
IFBOT: Death.
HUMAN: I'm afraid that's a little out of my...
IFBOT: I want more life, fucker.
From the article:
> We will still die, of course - from crossing the road carelessly, being bitten by snakes, catching a new flu variant etcetera -
Guess we gotta add "eyes gouged out by snuggling ifbot" to that hazard list, bub. On the other hand, four years (or more, depending on whose interpretation you follow) with a Rachelbot sounds pretty sweet. Sign me up.
Seriously, given the likelyhood of an accident getting you, imagine the sort of life people would have to live to average living to 1000. Even if you could offer people a constant youthful physique and extreme longevity, how many of us are really going to make it to even 200?
Looks as if those two problems cancel. To get to that last, Sucky century in the nursing home, you'd have to have way too little fun along the way. If you have a full, active life, as you said: ``... something's going to get you.''
I think that the whole point of these life extension projects is to give us a good life until an accident does us in, so that instead of becoming a miserable burden to ourselves and others after 70 or 80 years, we can go on being useful.
For me, the draw isn't ``live as long as possible'', it's ``be physically able to live 'til I die.'' Longer total life span is ok, too, I guess.
See what I've been reading.
When you eliminate disease and ageing as causes of death, you're left with accident, murder and suicide.
Darn few would make it to 1 kiloyear. Those that did would mostly have led very boring lives.
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What?!? A whole page of replies, and not a single person suggests asking Mel Brooks for advice on what it's like to live to be 1000?
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I think the long term result would be the exact opposite. On the surface yes, what you suggest would happen, but consider the OTHER implications of 1000 year old politicians... No longer would pollution, poor city planning, etc be a problem for their grandchildren/successors. Each and every person would have to spend at least 900 years living with the consequences of their decisions. Also, consider how boring it would be to be a senator for a thousand years. I would wager that most "career" politicans would retire after about as long as they do now, simply out of boredom. 60 or 70 years of income gives a pretty sound basis for a 900 year retirement just as much so as for a 20 year retirement.
The body is a very, very complex machine that, for evolutionary reasons, is programmed to cease functioning after reproduction is not possible. This pesky built-in evolutionary trait (death) can be overcome by science.
It won't happen all at once, though. Treatments will extend the average lifespan a few years at a time, as has been happining since the advent of modern medicine. Its a game of cat and mouse.
In New York city, over the last 10 years, the average lifespan for males has increased 6.8 years. This means that, for those of us under 30, the average lifespan will have increased from 74 to 101 in the 40 intervening years, assuming the trend holds. Perhaps we are not so far from a practical kind of immortality.
Then again, if you're over 80 your chances of being demented are better than 50%, so it may not be much of an immortal life.
If you RTFA, you'll see how the author gets the 1000 year number. He states a reasonably safety-conscious teenager has a .1% chance of dying in an accident, does some math, and says you've got a 50% chance of making it to 1000. Personally, I get (.999 ** 1000) = .37, or about 1:3 chance, but that's close enough.
So, you won't spend the last century in a nursing home. You'll basically be a 20-something the whole time, up until you get flattened by a bus.
That being said, these claims sound wildly optimistic to me, just like interferon was going to cure cancer by 1990, fusion power by 2000 and nanoassemblers will build anything you want by 2020.
I would. Think about all the things that you would be able to acomplish. The colinization of other worlds (Granted if you only travel 1/4 the speed of light, the closest system would only take you 160 years to reach).
The last 10 years of your life in a nursing home is going to suck anyhow. As for the social and scientific stagnation, lets face it things are only getting worse now, so why not. And as for the economic devistation, lets really look at things as they are right now, the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. Inflation cannot be held in check. That $30,000 home your parents bought is worth probably over $150,000 today, when you are your parents age that will probably be 1.5 million. What happens to all the people that live in apartments etc. that dont own property or have financial savings, they will end up our homeless. I beleive that we are heading for a financial colapse here in the next 50 years or so and we will have to re-think our monitary policies and end up more of a socialistic society. Just my 2 cents.
I will bend your mind with my spoon
The point of the article is that you wouldn't age, so you wouldn't be in a nursing home for the last 150 years of your life (unless you're working there, or you just like the atmosphere). The science of aging is very interesting--in many ways it is artificial and 'un-natural'. To cease aging would obviously create a slew of problems (population explosion, justice/incarceration, jobs, etc), but I think we can deal with these problems.
The "opposing" article is just a bunch of crap. "Don't expect to live to 1000, because Indiana Jones tried to get the grail but it fell down the chasm."
For the guy who wrote that he'd rather live 50 good years that 1000 years of pill-popping-- if you really could take one pill a year that would eliminate aging for the next year-- you wouldn't take it? How about your loved ones? Have a parent that's getting old? How about your children? I'd rather live 1000 good years than 50.
The article implies that one of the aims is to "cure" aging-- does this mean that if I'm 75, and I drink their potion, then I'll "revert" to 50 or 40 or whatever?
This is actually funny because there was a Twilight Zone episode on last night about aging-- "A Short Drink From a Certain Fountain", I think.
Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. --Nietzsche
Also, why do they always have to play awful junk on the radio these days?
I really don't want to think about how depressed and cynical I would be in 970 years time.
The best way to have a balanced prospective is to read a variety of sources. I would not depend on media outlets to tell us what is balanced.
I'll take yours if you don't want them. Seriously, if I have to take pills so that I can make it to 1000, then fine -- I'll take the pills.
I don't fear death but I'm quite sure I am in no hurry to meet him.
You know, I really suspect that when Og the caveman first figured out how to light a fire, his buddy Thag bitched about this dangerous new technology because he was afraid Og's fire would burn up his prized collection of mammoth hides. Meanwhile, the rest of the tribe said, "Hey, now we can keep our caves warm!"
...
Every technological advance brings with it the potential for danger and social change. There are real, hard questions which must be answered. But for myself, I'd rather have the opportunity to answer those questions with some real-world experience
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
While this means that a huge number of /.'ers are relatively safe, the rest of us are still going to get ourselves killed going over the handlebar on our bikes or crashing our cars or walking in front of a bus or hitting trees skiing or etc.
I seriously doubt that. Our mothers basements are usually devoid of those things.
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
What I'd really like to know is if the treatment will be a simple once a day pill or a three hour long invasive therapy I have to go through every morning (much like showering).
Professor: Here, take this pill (offers Fry a fist-sized pill)
Fry: I can't swallow that!
Professor: Good news! It's a suppository.
Urge to post... fading... fading... RISING!... fading... fading... gone.
everywhere Dr. Olshansky PhD talks about historical ideas of immortality, substitute "traveling to the moon". He has no argument. Just because people have been chasing it forever is no reason to believe we'll never get there.
The guy in the picture looks to be at least 500!
Robert Heinlein, Lazarus Long, 1974
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I'm not religious, but I remember reading this passage in the old testament with my father. John lived to be 738 years old, and then he died. Ezekiel lived to be 902 years old, and then he died. Abraham lived to be 872 years old, and then he died. ....
"brxref
So *that's* the name Dorian's using these days...interesting...
Reject Fear - Embrace Hope
or 1000,000 year or more to see the future.
Just think...1000 year life span opens up some possibilities for deep space travel. That could be very interesting. Not that there wouldn't be other problems to deal with, but it makes for some interesting though.
This is going to cause problems with medical insurance. If we could cure all diseases and aging, but the cost per person rises exponentially as the person ages (and this will go on for 1000 years per person, not just 80 or 100), who will be stuck with the bill?
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
This shows that the entertainment industry will stop at nothing trying to increase their profit. When then can't get legislators to extend copyright to 900 years past the death of the author, they want scientists the extend the life of authors by 900 years instead. Assuming most authors will have forgotten that they even wrote something more than 500 years ago, their publishers can expect to collect the royalties for themselves.
For a limited time, indeed.
....... to cease functioning after reproduction is not possible.
I am trying to run a vascectomy clinic here, you insensitive clod!
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
So you mean I'll REALLY be around when they release Duke Nukem Forever?! sweet.
The oldest American died Wednesday at 114 according to CNN. The end of the article mentions that the oldest person living in the world is also 114.
So it looks like 114 is the current maximum. I don't doubt that genetic research will help us find ways to extend this, but 1000?
If it does turn out to be true though, we'll all be kicking ourselves that we didn't buy stock in the companies that own Cialis, Levitra and Viagra. There's gonna be a lot of old sex going on.
Don't you dare however tell me, or thousands of others like me that we're not allowed to try for such a goal. I am not easily bored. With all of the languages, musical instruments and places to see in the world I could occupy myself quite possibly for eternity.
"War makes me sad." - Me
I was wondering about that myself. Let's say that everyone works enough in their first 100 years that they can save/invest enough so that they never have to work again - ever. Now, you have 900 years of retirement doing whatever you want. Now you just have a lot of money, only 10% of the people who are able to work do so and the other 90% don't produce. This is assuming that most people are disciplined enough to have that kind of financial plan. - There, I just shot my own idea down the toilet - everybody would live the same way financially, only over a longer period of time. I guess we'd see 300 year mortgages and as a result a typical family home would cost, what, $2,000,000?
Because people have thought we could beat aging before and they were wrong? It seems that Olshansky's theme here is that there have been many people in the past who have believed (in one form or another) that we could beat mortality, and they died. Before it was actually achieved, I wonder how many believed that flight was for the birds alone simply because others had already tried and failed?
Cue Highlander references!
because he's just asking for it
If we can extend the life of 60 year old to 100 and in that 40 years learn to extend his life to 150 and in that 50 years extend it another 50 then we'll stay ahead of the game and extend life indefinately. We don't need to cure aging today , just take the first step before I die :)
This link [google cache] shows how its planned out.
why can't we?
How smart would a 1000 year old dog be?
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
I have thought about this alot. Especially since I have been reading up on the Genome project and it's relationship with "aging" genes.
In the course of human history, I can't think of anything else that comes close to the impact that immortality would bring upon the earth - aside from destroying it (which is another topic).
If we are able to "master" aging, *everything* will change. Economics. Religon. Politics. Business. Culture. Education. Government. Philosophy. I am not smart enough to theorize on how they will change but I can say that the change would be larger than anything the human population has ever seen or even thought about.
There are all kinds of interesting moral questions as well, like who would be eligible? How would we handle population growth? Etc.
And it's worth noting that that figure (999.5 years) is your expected remaining life regardless of your current age.
Coming from a guy that looks a lot like Rasputin his argument carries a lot of weight.
I Am Not A Biologist, but I have a degree in biology. (I'm a medical student.) This article is a bunch of hooey, but I think the alternative view does an inadequate job of debunking it. The main argument of the article is similar to this: "I'll be able to drive from New York to London just as soon as I get the radiator in my car fixed." The real problem is much bigger than he's making it out to be.
We have indeed learned a lot about aging in the past few decades, particularly with the advent of molecular biology. We have been successful in raising the average life expectancy for those who have access to modern medical care. But there is no evidence that the maximum possible age is getting any older. The only thing increasing is the chance that people with good health care will approach the maximum age.
One of the curses of old age is the increasing chance of getting cancer. Cancer treatment has improved dramatically in recent decades, but is nowhere near guaranteeing complete recovery for all. The basic strategy of all cancer therapies is to use agents which are relatively more harmful to cancer cells than to the rest of the body, and to hope that the agent kills all of the cancer cells before it kills the patient. Some types of cancer are still basically untreatable. Cancer is not a problem which will be "solved" in the next few decades like polio was "solved" by vaccination. And as more and more people live longer and longer the cancer problem will actually increase.
... that most of the people promising eternal life are older thatn me, such that they have to work real hard to give themselves and me the proof.
On top of all that: just last week they illustrated the Queens speech with a photo of the back of the Queen's crowned head, repeating the (republican-flavoured) insult of the left-wing UK "Guardian" newspaper which had published the same view of her head the day before.
I really don't think that they can be called balanced, or unbiased for that matter.
If people start living that long, we are going to have some severe over population issues. People procreating and not knocking off until hundreds of years later!
Yoda. What more evidence do you need?
We are told the Bible has no scientific errors, yet it says the batis a bird (Lev. 11:13,19), hares chew the cud (Lev. 11:5-6), and some fowl (Lev. 11:20-21) and insects (Lev. 11:22-23) have four legs. Matt. 27:9-10 quotes a prophecy made by Jeremy the prophet. Heaven is supposed to be a perfect place. Yet, it experienced a war(Rev. 12:7). How can there be a war in a perfect place?
How can 2 Kings 8:26, which says Ahaziah began to rule at age 22,be reconciled with 2 Chron. 22:2, which says he was 42? How can Ex. 33:20, which says no man can see God's face and live,
be squared with Gen. 32:30, which says a man saw God's face and his life was preserved?
Did Solomon have 40,000 stalls for his horses (1 Kings 4:26) or 4,000(2 Chron. 9:25)? Did Solomon's house contain 2,000 baths (1 Kings 7:26) or 3,000 (2 Chron. 4:5)?
You could go on and on...
Click here or here.
Wouldn't we look like Yoda?
"Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet." General James Mattis
You didn't RFA did you? The thousand year estimate is based on the likelihood of death by accident. Admittedly I'm not sure where he got the odds of accidental death from (he may have pulled it directly from his ass).
"Physics is to math as sex is to masturbation." -R. Feynman
"When 900 years old you are, look as good you will not"
http://unmoldable.com W:"No one of consequence" I:"I must know" W:"Get used to disappointment"
The ramifications of everyone living to be 1000 years old seem extreme because it's such a huge jump. If this is reached a s a progression it becomes more managable. Consider that if everyone starts living to be 100 and then to 200 and so on. The gradual progression would teach us how to deal with the implications, population and otherwise.
Science is often faced with an odd host of moral/ethical questions. Equaly often the question of 'Can we do it?' is answered before 'Should we do it?' Nuclear weaponry is a great example, specificly the application of.
In the 1940's we proved that we can construct a weapon capable of intense destrctive power. Then we used it. At the time it might have been the action that we should take to help end WWII. And it did help. In retrospect, 60 years later, we struggle with whether we should have used them.
Living to be 1000 years old sounds very cool, right now the question is 'Can we?' soon though 'Should we?'. I think the answer will be yes, but I think there will be a gradual approach to reaching the goal, limited both by available technology and social climate.
I am invisble, and you can't see me.
What about if they devise some sort of contract that whomever decides to accept this medicine, they have to sign a contract that by age x (say... 200?) they are required to leave the planet. Of course, they can come back to visit their great great great great great great not so great great great grandchildren every once in a while and suches, but for the most part, they'd be living elsewhere.
I think since most geniuses don't hit their peak of invention until nearing the ends of their lives, extending it will either push it much further back or... make huge leaps in technology.
But what about education? Most people today only ever go to school because they want to make the most of their short life. They want to graduate, get a good job, live a good life.
If you have 984 years to go, would you really be interested in pursuing higher education? Would this "dumben down" our populace?
We'll either get a lot of smart people, or a lot of patient lazy people.
So, where do I sign?
- shazow
From the opposing-view article: ...Ponce de Leon discovered Florida in his quest for the fountain of youth...
He might not have found the fountain of youth, but he did find a nice place to retire.
Life is like a web application. Sometime you need cookies just to get by.
I don't mind not living to 1000, but it would be nice to know that I'd be youthful till I got hit by a bus at 80 or 90.
Isn't the limited human lifespan one of the things keeping us from the Soylent Green scenario?
At what life expectancy does the next generation shift from being our greatest hope to our greatest threat?
--- Ban humanity.
One argues with that starry eyed kind of scientific idealism (not that I'm faulting him, it takes somethings outlandish belief to make things like this even start to happen) while the other argues that because no one in the past has done it, why should we believe that someone will now.
Both seems like sort of extremes at either end, the truth is usually somewhere in the middle (probably in the lower quadrant).
Life extension would be probably harder to argue against, and with a little luck, what will begin to be achieved within our lifetimes.
Personally, I'd settle for a few more years and better overall health. Dementia, Alzheimer's, clogged arteries, heart problems, weakening bones all seem like unnecessary indignations for our eldest and wisest (and me!).
Quack, quack.
I want to see the average 15 year old talking to the average 850 year old. That would be approximately like like a teeenager today asking someone "What was life like before the Magna Carta?"
Leave the gun, take the cannolis.
Notice that the argument for lists the problems we face and talks about solutions.
The argument against merely says "People promised this back in ancient times and it didn't work. So it won't work now."
Which about as valid as saying "Crystal Balls are fake, so we'll never invent a way of seeing things on the other side of the planet."
My Journal
NO NO NO. God declared that man's years before the flood would be 120 years. There were many instances of people living past 120 after God made that statement.
Just wait until you young whippersnappers have to support 1000 year old boomers.
I think Aubrey is already 1000: it must have taken that long to grow that beard.
"some sort of significant cosmological or climatological shift might have contributed to shortening our natural lifespan"
Wait..its beaming into my head now....
This is precisely true. The aliens tell me that this is due to the removal of large amounts of Xenon from the atmosphere. Xenon has a naturally regenerative quality as it unmasks higher dimensional primary points. This is easily demonstrated by using a small Xenon Flash tube from radio shak, placing a magnet behind it (preferable south pole or north-seeking pole), and placing the combination over an injury. Healing time is accelerated by approximately 3x.
BTW do not fool with applying power to a Xenon tube. They can be very dangerous. The above does not require any power, just the tube sitting on top of the magnet.
"If you are a reasonably risk-aware teenager today in an affluent, non-violent neighbourhood, you have a risk of dying in the next year of well under one in 1,000, which means that if you stayed that way forever you would have a 50/50 chance of living to over 1,000."
How this guy is a PhD is beyond me with this fundamental misapplication of basic applied statistics. And this article mentions nothing more than various "therapies" that need to be combined in order to reduce the effects of repeated cellular replication over time (also known as Senescence, or the "effects of aging"). As your cells replicate, telomeres, or sequences of repetitive DNA at the end of the chromosome that protect the genetic information inside the chromosome, grow shorter. If the telomere 'runs out', as would certainly be the case after a couple hundred years, chromosomal information would become corrupted (i.e. mutations) and subsequent cells would be irreperably damaged. Any article claiming to 'cure' aging would have to address the telomere issue first.
Woried about overpopulation? Enforce China's one child law in all countries that have the life-extension technology available and if you procreate beyond the limit you lose all rights to future longevity treatments.
Picture a new form of reproduction where when you die accidentally or perhaps choose to leave the mortal coil due to boredom your DNA is combined with another person in a similar situation and a new person is cloned to replace the departed.
Also realize that many will choose not to participate with the new society for religious or moral reasoning and will conveniently die out on their own as their children depart to join the new long-living Bitchin' Society.
Oh and go read Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow. It's fun, free and on-topic.
"Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest." - Denis Diderot
True, but a Poisson model is incorrect for the discussion at hand. Consider:
.0000002 (assume) chance of dying on a given day due to accident, over time, the odds that you won't die due to an accident add up. However, it IS true that on your 1000th birthday you still only have a .000002 chance of having a fatal accident. It's just that you are one of the VERY lucky few to have not had one yet. Think of it as a die. Having an accident is rolling a 1. Keep rolling. How long can you go without rolling a 1? Your chance each time is 1/6. But the odds of rolling no ones in 1000 rolls is very low. It can be done, but its low. Realistically, you are going to roll a one, and it is equally likely to happen at any given time.
The poisson distribution can also be used to study how 'accidents' or 'malfunctions' or the chance of winning the lottery never, once or more than once, are distributed on the level of a population. If having one 'accident' has no influence on the chance of having another accident, the victim is 'put back into the population' immediately after an 'event', people may have one, two, three, or more accidents during a certain period of time. The Poisson distribution tells you how these chances are distributed.
The accidents the parent is talking about are not the kind you can have more than once. We're assuming the non-existence of undead and miraculous recoveries here, so once you're dead, you're dead.
So, given that you have a
Moo.
I mean, can you imagine how low boobs will hang after 1000 years?!? *shudder*
Plus I'd pull the plug when I start losing the ability to have decent sex (around 600 or so)
God help us if it's both.
--- Ban humanity.
I recall the Martian society in Stranger in a Strange Land where the immortal elders way outnumbered the mortal youngsters. Societal copnventions were frozen for millions of years.
Anyone interested in this might want to take a look at Holy Fire. It's a speculative work about the impact that an aging population and an emphasis on life extension could have on society. In the future depicted in the book, most wealth and power is concentrated with the very old, leaving the young in society marginalized with very little upward mobility.
The main character is a very old woman who undergoes a radical experimental treatment which leaves her with a physical age in her early twenties, and essentially has to start over. A very interesting look at the direction we could be headed.
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
At least, assuming there's no bug in my floating point unit...
Behold the riant ape! Beware, his crooked thumbs!
I would just like to thrown Heinlein's stories, such as "Time Enough for Love."
:)
If the young-ins want to hunt people once they get old (which happened in that story) the old-sters can just migrate to another planet and build a new culture which respects longevity.
If you have to ask how much it costs, you can't afford it. If the ``developing'' nations clean up their corruption, they'll be first-world-nations soon enough, even with our present lifespans.
If the treatment is universally shared, what will be done about overpopulation of the planet? With birthrates where they are now ...
If only the rich can afford it, there won't be any overpopulation problems. Right now, the birthrates in the first world nations are below the replacement rate, including the U.S., where we have enough first generation immigrants from the third world to keep us at a TFR of 2.0 (2003 data, slightly below replacement rate of 2.1).
The sure way to defuse the population bomb is to eradicate disease and poverty. The sure way to do that is to replace corruption with the rule of law. Free-er countries have less poverty.
See what I've been reading.
They'll definitly have to legalize suicide.
The other deal is that people would commit suicide all the time. This wouldn't just be wrist-slitting or other desperate actions, this would be, "I've lived a very full life, and nobody around me is dying, so I'm going to try the most reckless things I can think of so that I go out in style!" People would (assuming any of this ever happens) purposefully find novel ways of killing themselves. Just as young people plan out weddings years in advance, often decades, people would plan out not only their funeral ahead of time, but also their method of death. This is the normal human reaction to being able to control something: doing it in style, knowing that people are watching.
Playing pornographics games during the day is evil! Play at night!
16 years. The distance to Alpha Centauri is 4 light years, and if you travel at 1/4 the speed of light, that would take 16 years, not 160. The distance to Alpha centauri is 4 light years, not 40 which would make your claim correct. Since the distance is only 4 lightyears to Alpha Centauri, it would not take 160 years, but rather 16 years, since the distance is slightly more than 4 light years. However, if the distance was 40 light years, it would have taken 160 years to travel there, which is an awfully long time. But fortunately the distance is only 4 light years, so it takes a measly 16 years to get there, which is a lot shorter than the 160 light years that you wrote. That's 144 years less since we are talking about a distance of 4 light years instead of 40 light years, which is 10 times shorter .. so it will take 10 times less time to get there; that is 16 years, not 160. 160 years is quite a lot to get to a place, more than a human lifetime, but fortunately it only takes 16 years since you made a miscalculation or didn't have your facts quite straight. So, to sum it up, it only takes 16 years to get to Alpha Centauri, which is the closest ystem, and not 160 years, since Alpha Centauri is only about 4.2 light years away and not 40. So: it will take 16 years to reach, not 160 since Alpha Centauri (the closest star system) lies at a distance of 4 light years and not 40 (which would be the amount of light years there if we would have to travel 160 years at 1/4 the speed of light to get there. Fortunately, it only takes 16 years and not 160 years.)
Anyway, much as it would be nice to live so long I am sure it will lead to serious civil unrest, revolutions, wars etc. for many reasons such as..
1. if only the rich can afford it the poor (me) will rise up..
2. if everyone gets it the planet will fill up and resources will diminish faster than alternatives or solutions can be found then human nature will naturally lead to conflicts.
Either way we are all doomed.. netcraft conf.. oh never mind.
Having said that I don't care - I want to live forever!! ;)
Sorry, but I think this scientist is blowing smoke. So they are gonna be able to make people live to 1,000, but they still aren't able to cure the common cold?? I would rather put my faith in God who promises that we will live forever AND with no more sickness as well. And we know his promises will come true...
The alternative viewpoint provided by the BBC was not impressive whatsoever. He skirted the entire issue and debuked the immortality claims by saying, "it hasn't worked before why should it now." He needs to actually tackle the issue at hand, not provide his unabashed opinion on the matter.
Based on the majority of the replies I suggest that most of you actually read the article (including it seems the alternative viewpoint author). They aren't talking about just dragging you on at old age for 1000 years, they are talking about rebuilding your body at a cellular level (as far as i can tell).
I agree it raises a TON of issues, including overpopulation. However, some of the things you are stating won't seem to be problems anymore. Do you really think we'll still have buses and cars in 1000 years. Do you really think our safety levels will decline.
I foresee a future in which we will live for as long as we want, and to stay safe we will be able to hook into virtual worlds (yes very matrix like, however we'd be lucid to the fact). If millions of people are just inside virtual worlds, population density would cease to be a problem.
I don't claim to be an expert on the subject, but I think it's possible. Look at the rapidness of change in just our lifetime. Is it really so crazy to think that all these things could really happen.
What i'd want to do is get my conciousness (sp) inside a computer and then die. If there is no after life then just hop me into a virtual world and then everything is ok.
Regardless, an exciting future lies ahead.
If the treatment is universally shared, what will be done about overpopulation of the planet?
...we'll need to move billions of people into space.
You can't just make matter. Where does the matter of a couple billion extra people come from? Well, the food they eat. If people keep breeding, starvation will keep them in check until people start to wise up.
We can't just move everyone into space. That's not even close to practical.
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Either [1] there exists some absolute age limit X such that you can live to X-1 second but you can't live to X+1 second;
or [2] you can live to any age.
This meme is available for licensing to life-extension clinics at fees to be negotiated. Some restrictions apply.
rj
I see an awful lot of "But living that long would suck" posts.
I think this question is a great illuminator of which side of the pessimistic/optimistic divide you fall on. If you are fundamentally a pessimist, how better to draw that out that to give you a scenario where you are free to imagine the worst that can happen - stretched to over 1000 years!!!
Myself, I think it would be fantastic and fully expect to live to be 200 at least, due to advancement in technology. And not in a creepy Davros half-human mechanised wheelchair kind of way either. More like the 80-year old woman I met climbing a fourteener when I'm 800 or so.
What would I do with so much time? Well, imagine for a start what savings would mean - right now people save up for "retirement" - which then lasts a short time (relativley) and near the end of life.
Instead imagine a world where you spend 100 years working on something you like (and you could take a lot more time to find something you like without having to settle down before you were thirty or so), then perhaps take the next 100 years (!) off just living on savings accumulated! If you are thrifty the first hundred you could probably live off the interest indefinatley. Just recently I read a story about a janitor that managed to save up enough to donate a few MILLION dollors to the school he worked at.
But I'm avoiding the initial question - what to do with all that time? What wouldn't I do!! Finally time enough to finish the vast backlog of books I have to read. Or play piano better. Or try five or six other interesting carreers in depth. Basically, if you have a mind that finds the world interesting then what wouldn't you do? I have a cousin right now that does this on a Micro scale, working for some time until he's accumulated enough money - then taking a year (or as long as possible) off to do what he loves.
With a potential lifespan so long some people seem to think that people would become terriby risk adverse and never venture forth for fear of wasting life. But in fact do not people grow far more cautious as they get older? With life stretched to 1000 years, then the first two-hundred or so would be more like your twenties when you were brash and did risky things.
Furthermore, people overlook the VAST benefit you would get from people living so long and having such a depth of knowlege. It would provide a perfect offset for a world overly focused on the moment, and less on the "Long Now" (if anyone out there has not read "The Clock of the Long Now", they should).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Once you start applying this en masse to the populations of first world nations, would it be morally repugnant not to do the same in second- and third-world nations? Even when their birthrates are astronomical? It's hard to draw parallels to today's world. I mean, places like Africa only get a pittance from first-world nations for AIDS prevention/therapy, but AIDS, but there's no 100% cure for AIDS (yet), and one can rationalize that AIDS is their own fault, in a sense. (Of course, not true for those who are raped.) But what about an anti-ageing therapy that is known to suspend ageing? I mean, could we as a people stand to see some 60 year old African guy on TV, begging for this therapy so he doesn't die? Some interesting moral delimmas would be raised, indeed.
In any event, I really hope this comes to fruition in my lifetime. I'd like to never die, and I don't think I'd get bored. Not with Halo 2 out and all.
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
Something like 50-75% of ones cell regnerations/divisions happen *before* puberty. Some people speculate that you'd have to apply the immortality process in childhood. Perhaps even prevent puberty altogether, except for a limited caste that would bring new people into the world and die early.
Personally, I hope to die before this type of tech becomes mainstream. I feel that it has happened already, but should we all live to 1,000 years of age, human evolution will essentially stop. Death fuels evolution. Has the human race already reached its zenith? I fear that such may be the case and yet we are still so frail and imperfect.
What is your penile percentile?
And copyright would last forever.
Some of these documents have been passed on and translated from dead language to dead language for tens of thousands of years.
The first examples of structured linear writing have been found in the lower Danube Valley and date from around 5000 BC.
5000 + 2004 ~ 7004 which is << one 10,000
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writing
"And remember, none of that time would be lived in frailty and debility and dependence - you would be youthful, both physically and mentally, right up to the day you mis-time the speed of that oncoming lorry."
All right! Does that mean I won't have to watch my life partner's breasts sag? Great sex could change the minds of the many non-believers out there.
I was listening to Coast to Coast the other night when George Noory talked about this. Some good points were brought up: 1. What are the odds of surviving past a certain age without getting killed in an accident? Ans: According to some study, after 700 years the average person has a 99% chance of dying from some stupid accident. 2. What new diseases or conditions might crop up later in "life"? (e.g. Alzhimer's disease wasn't really discovered until people started to live long enough for it to be a factor.) 3. What new functions might be developed? Cited here was that humans reach puberty around 12 years of age. Suppose at 250 we start to develop some telepathic skills, or unleash the medulla? I thought those were some interesting points.
Ma gavte la nata
Genesis was supposed to have been dictated to Moses by God. So the possibility of Noah having memory problems is sidestepped.
There's gonna be a lot of old sex going on.
You really need to be smacked for putting that image in my head.
Finkployd
From tfa:
If you are a reasonably risk-aware teenager today in an affluent, non-violent neighbourhood, you have a risk of dying in the next year of well under one in 1,000, which means that if you stayed that way forever you would have a 50/50 chance of living to over 1,000.
Um, nice deductive reasoning. Good luck staying a teenager forever, seriously. How's 900 years of senility sound?
What a time to be alive!
http://fromthemorning.blogspot.com/
[FromTheMorning]
I doubt that most people could mentally handle living for a millenium or longer. The article say 1000 years because a teenager's chance of dieing is 1/1000. Most people that lived that long wouldn't take that many risks. To control overpopulation they'd have to add something to the pill to reduce fertility, and people would have to cope with the fact that the "love of their life" would probably move on after a while. People also tend to get set in their ways rather early in life, listening to the same music, doing the same job, keeping the same set of skills, retaining their view of the world, ect.. Old people seem stubborn now, I wonder what they'd be like if they were 10 or 20 times as old... The cultural changes would massive as well. Just imagine all the stuff that has happened in the last 1000 years. An average person probably wouldn't even have enough memory to remember it all. In fact, I doubt that someone that old could remember much at all, maybe just the most significant events or the most recent ones. But I guess the life expectancy isn't taking into account people's bad habits, like smoking or eating tons of unhealthy foods, but I would expect someone to come up with a way around that sometime in the next 100 years.
Birthday candle makers rejoice!
..and the average drops. Physical health is one thing, but mental health is far more difficult to get a handle on, and living for thousands of years will just amplify problems many people in our society manage to control as they get older.
Remember asking that girl out? You know the one. She said "Not in a million years". Well, if we multiply our high-end life span by 10 each generation, we're only 5 generations away from getting that date (she'll have to say yes in 10 million years).
Even if you could offer people a constant youthful physique and extreme longevity, how many of us are really going to make it to even 200? Unless you live your entire life underground in a room with little windows, never venturing forth into the world, something's going to get you.
In this day and age, assuming you are in a developed country, you're probably going to even die of heart disease/stroke or cancer.
"old age" death is due to cell damage -- fix that, and cancer is already cured.
I'm not sure about the heart disease -- with a healthy diet, would it be a problem after X years? My gut instinct says it won't be for 200 years, perhaps longer.
Ditto stroke.
Congrats! Now don't get hit by a bus on the way out.
In 1916 George Bernard Shaw wrote "Back to Methuselah! A Metabiological Pentateuch". In it, the Ancients, as the long-livers came to be called, lived among us, changing lives every few years to avoid the issue of explanation to the masses. In the fifth play, "As Far as Thought Can Reach", those Ancients wandered naked through the mountains, reciting numbers. That's where I'll be!
Many biologists have noted the coincident occurence of multi-cellular bodies, sex and death about 700 million years ago. Single cells that reproduce by fission can potentially live forever. They usually perish from harsh environmental conditions, starvation, or being eaten. Though single cells can renew their DNA by conjunctive mixing with each other, they dont use the two-sex methods of most multicellular creatures. Sex probably allowed life to evolve faster. Death may be somehow related to se and multicellular bodies too, beyond evolving simultaneously. An ecological niche that lacked genetic death would eventually die from running out of resources.
Some science fiction writers speculate that immortality may somehow be linked to the ending of sexual relations. For example, Ann Rice's vampyres. I dont see why this is necessary, but it is an interesting speculation.
I have to ask:
When did 900 words become a "Long Article"?
They weren't lying about the impressive whiskers, though...
Sacrifice is tied into the consumption of food -- you don't offer sacrifice of something you are not eating. Able had to have been eating meat. You may need to check with other Bible commentators on how to understand Genesis 9:3.
I tend to view human prehistory as divided into hunter-gatherer, cereal grain agriculture, and domesticated animal (pastoral) phases. Genesis, among other things, is about the emergence of Jewish people as a pastoral culture from out a cereal grain society in what is now Iraq.
The emergence of cereal grain agriculture is what allowed Egypt one one hand, Ur, Summer, Akad, Babylon, or whatever those dudes in Iraq called themselves long ago on the other, to build their pioneering civilizations. I don't know all of the mechanics of this but while grain ag allowed an expansion of the population and a more reliable food supply, it resulted in a rather top-down society with these kings lording it over people and the common people eating a less nutritious diet of grain instead of lean meat. Yeah, yeah, a vegan diet is supposed to prevent cancer and heart disease, but the bone records show that the serfs in grain culture had poorer health than the hunter-gatherer peoples preceding them.
Maybe the deal is that when you planted a crop, you had to stay put, and you needed some kind of king/Mafia boss type to protect you from raiders, and you had to pay that king some kind of tithe.
The emergence of the Jewish people from that substrate, well how do I describe it, it was a kind of an independence movement, but it was a kind of "get back to nature" movement. Sheep and goat herding introduced economy of scale into reproducing the diet (meat, cheese) of the original hunter-gatherers. I guess with the pastoral culture 1) you had a much richer diet, 2) you had security of your food supply, and 3) you could move around and not require the protection of some king.
The pastoral culture has all kinds of positive reference in the Bible, ranging from Abel's sacrifice being preferred to Cain and Cain taking matters into his own hands (probably relates to the inherent tension from between the cereal-grain civilizations and the pastoral tribes not under their thrall) all the way to our Lord calling himself the "Good Shepherd" in the Gospel of John.
I hate to say it, but RTFA.
What's described isn't an extended aging process. Aging would be suspended completely. You'd live the entire 1000 years in the body of a 30 year old (or however old you were when you started the treatment).
The only reason you would eventually die is because of an accident (or murder or something). They figured 1,000 years because an average person has less than a 1 in 1000 chance of dying every year.
That you could find out for sure if Man is still alive in the year 2525!
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
If you are a reasonably risk-aware teenager today in an affluent, non-violent neighbourhood, you have a risk of dying in the next year of well under one in 1,000, which means that if you stayed that way forever you would have a 50/50 chance of living to over 1,000.
Ok, someone tell me, how the hell did these quacks make it into the news?
wel thats just great. the world already has way too many people in it (and the number is rising!) the last thing we need is people living 10 times longer than they should. I, for one, am extremely opposed to the idea of prolonging life for that long. a lif expectancy of 85 years is plenty to do everything there is to do in life. can you say over-population? great, we can live to be 1000, but we'll all starve before then. humanity sickens me, and more than that, humanity sickens nature.
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People often confuse human lifespan with human life expectancy. Our life expectancy has increased over the millenia to 70 some odd years thanks to medicine, not being eaten by tigers, etc. But, there is still a physical limit of 120 years or so that we can approach, but never reach (or more properly exceed). The body, including the brain, just isn't designed to live that long even under ideal conditions and with constant repair. There's a good reason people live as long as they do and no longer - by then, they will have had plenty of time to have kids (i.e. replacements) and raise them.
I think I agree. If I could see it coming a hundred years in advance I would probably do something spectacular too.
How many politicians do you know that are really in office for the income??
@HbFyo0$k8 tH!$
Those raising the point of population problems are assuming that the norm of having children in your 20s and 30s will continue.
Why would you tie yourself down with children at that age if you can live ten times as long?
--- Commission free trading & free stock up to $500 - use http://share.robinhood.com/kelvinp6
Until they find a way to "cure" this "Obesity Epidemic", cardiac failure will remain the #1 cause of death, especially if old-age is taken out of the equation.
no comment
I'm sorry, but this is ludicrous. Elros Tar-Minyatur only lived to be 500 years old, and the blood of Númenor is so thin these days it practically doesn't exist. Hell, even Aragorn Elessar only lived to be 210.
English is easier said than done.
I don't disagree with the "rebuttal" article - I think 1,000-year lifespans are fantastically unlikely. However, there's one argument the author gives which is extremely poor, and this should be pointed out.
"What do all these proponents of immortality have in common? They are all dead."
One could just as meaningfully have said in the 1890s, "What do all these proponents of heavier-than-air powered flight have in common? They've never flown in such a vehicle!" Saying that the current state of medical technology makes Methusalen lifespans unlikely is reasonable - categorically denying that technology adequate to the task will ever emerge is not. The author doesn't quite do that, but he comes close - and in so doing, he minimizes the role of a little something I like to call "technological progress".
I'm the stranger...posting to
From TFA:
If you are a reasonably risk-aware teenager today in an affluent, non-violent neighbourhood, you have a risk of dying in the next year of well under one in 1,000, which means that if you stayed that way forever you would have a 50/50 chance of living to over 1,000.
Actually, no... If you have a 1/1000 risk of dying in any year, your probability of living to age 1000 are 37% (0.999^1000). You have a 50/50 chance of living to about age 690.
Not that age 690 wouldn't also be a dramatic change...
The cure for cancer is coming: Reovirus
That guy is a quack and quite dumb. He doesn't seem to know that genetics controls aging. It's a pretty simple process. The connectors between each strand of DNA are like little chain links. Each time a cell divides, those chains are broken and a link gets lost. Once there are none left, the cells can no longer duplicate themselves and death results. Not everyone has the same amount of links and the number is not uniform thoughout the body. This means that some people will live longer than others and some parts will fail before others. Some people do have them all the same number of links and very long so they live to a ripe old age in very good health and physical condition. BTW, it's been discovered that the maximum life span of a human is about 120 years based on this genetic limitation. Which happens to correspond to the Biblical limit also. If we can figure out how to stop the loss of links then we can pretty much get back to an approximately 1000 year lifespan.
I don't have the refernces handy, but do some searching on "genetic limits of cell division" and also cloning. It was due to researching in cloning that this phenonmenon was discovered. The most famous example is Dolly the sheep clone. It died at what was thought to be a premature age, until they compared the dna to that of the original sheep and the material used to create the clone. It was then that they found the limit on cell division and that the clone had started at the "age" of the donor, not at a "birth" age with a full set of links.
http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/12/03/obit.johnston.ap/ index.html Death of oldest American
Aside from that, try to imagine the social, scientific and political stagnation that would occur from having old people not dying. Try to picture the economic devestation among young people (you think following the boomers sucks...), the lock-in of power among a few Very Oldsters.
Seeing as you can get on the Supreme Court when you're in your 50's, that's a 900-year reign of one person's opinion.
Copyright laws would suck at life+100. Life in prison has a new meaning. Heck, we'd probably have to rewrite half of our Constitution and legal system.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
1000 years of putting up with the telephone company's crap?!? Who Needs it!!!
... Dr. Aubrey dyes his beard?
I wonder which will happen first:
I have a sneaking feeling that the former will have to happen, conditionally, before the latter.
some psychologists even theorize that some forms of senility derive from "running out of space," suggesting we may only have enough for 80 or so years.
we do not know at what point will our brains run out of space, and whatever point that is the ultimate limit to our lifespans (in lieu of genetic re-engineering).
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
There simply is no other explanation for otherwise intelligent human beings to beleive in such nonsensical fairy tales!
For instance, the Bible says the Earth is only 6,000 years old. Only the mentally ill could possibly believe in such nonsense!
More like a bible club.
The arguments brought up are sickening, especially on a site that presumably caters to the nerd and technologist. A discussion about gerontology starting off with endless harping about what substance Adam and Eve were made of. wtf?
This rabid spread of religious mumbo-jumbo into every niche of daily life is almost physically revolting.
It took mankind so long to get a distance from superstitious, unfounded and uttlery fabricated crap (which everything is until proven otherwise) that is such a hallmark of religion - only to see it resurrected again with a vengeance. In my opinion religion might as well be the single most prevalent threat to the betterment of mankind.
I mean damn, it's *science*.slashdot.org....
thats just great. now I'll have to deal with this old hag an extra, approximately, 920 more years. great. marriage sucks.
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The article explained that the potential technology would allow you to exist at your current state of physical and mental well-being and in fact reverse the physical and mental age of existing older people until you died due to unforseen circumstances, such as getting hit by a speeding truck.
I don't see why you would rather live a full life, up to 50, without pills and such, instead of living that same full life for, on average, 1000 years of life with pills and such...
Kids these days, always speaking before they know what they are speaking about.
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
Since the article is slashdotted, I will state impressions from previous articles on the topic. The basic cause of aging is entropy. There have been documented mutations that cause a person to age prematurely, but NEVER the other way around, at least not beyond a few decades.
Evolution "knows" about this entropy, and counters it somewhat by slowing down the metabolism of an individual over time. The slower the metabolism the slower the entropy. However, this has side-effects, such as achy muscles, dried out spinal disks, clouded vision, loss of intestinal enzyme generation, etc. Cancer is usually the final result of the entropy, but not the only.
There is no magic chemical or Telemere tweak that will stop the entropy. The only way to to reverse the entropy is to clean up and fix damaged cells and damaged DNA. This will probably require nanotechnology. Thus, the secret to anti-aging is probably in nanotechnology rather than biochemistry or macro-gene thearopy.
Table-ized A.I.
"...[if] you have a risk of dying in the next year of well under one in 1,000, which means that if you stayed that way forever you would have a 50/50 chance of living to over 1,000. "
.3677
Bad math.
0.999^1000 =
Really you would only have slightly better than a third of a chance. I can't trust a scientist who can't do math.
any 3rd grader can tell you that the "common cold" is an oxymoron.
If they can make it so that I can live for thousands of years and still be youthful as I am today, that would basically make one of my dreams come true. I really really hope this will be possible before I die, but I am not too sure.
60 or 70 years of income gives a pretty sound basis for a 900 year retirement just as much so as for a 20 year retirement.
If that were true, you'd only ever have to make enough money to pay back taxes on what you got from your parents when they died. Let's say you make $100,000/year for 60 years. That's $6,000,000. Let's say that you save enough and get a high enough return on investments that you retire with about 20% of that value saved. $1,200,000 is your retirement nest egg. That is not enough to live on indefinately. And this was ignoring all the taxes you'd have to pay, etc.
Second problem, and probably the bigger one (since at some point you really can save up enough money to live on interest payments). Wealth cannot be represented by dollars alone. If everyone retires at age 150 and lives to age 1500, then 90% of the population won't be working. That means that 10% of the population has to generate goods and services sufficient to provide the wealth necessary to support and entertain the rest. This might be possible with technology improving worker efficiency, but it doesn't seem terribly likely.
However much I may want to live to 1000 I don't think I'd enjoy being 1000. Think about it.
[signature]
If people started living for thousands of years, interstellar space travel would become a real possibility, even without FTL ships. The real problem would be boredom. You would need some pretty extraordinary people on the mission. Most people would probably go insane if they were stuck inside a tin can for several centuries. But with the right people, a cribbage board, and NetHack, such a long voyage could certainly be undertaken.
sudo eat my shorts
Live to 1000 Years Old, and just maybe, _just_ maybe, you'll get to play Duke Nukem Forever.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
A better analogy with death and 1/6 odds might be a traditional game of "russian roulette".
DNA just wants to be free...
Take a look at the guy. You can tell he's a loon. He's not in touch with reality.
Just based on probability, any mutation that can happen will happen- people are born with 6 fingers, 1 leg, 1 eye, etc.
But I have *NEVER* heard of any living thing having a mutation that allowed it to not age. You'd think if it was possible you'd see numerous people throughout history that did not age, did not grow old and die, etc. Or at least someone would have a pet dog that lived forever.
But none of this has happened. Because it cannot happen.
Not neccesarily. Maybe you spend your first century bungee jumping, until the cord breaks, and you're a quadrapeligic for the next 900 years.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Mr. de Grey is not talking about "Here take this pill and you'll never die". He's talking about fixing what's wrong with you, all the time.
--Your kidneys fail, so you head to the hospital and they grow you new ones or give you a treatment that fixes your current ones.
--You contract HIV so they give you a treatment and it's gone.
--You get whatever disease and they cure it.
So, no immortality pill. They just fix what's wrong. One of the things that is wrong is, due to ageing, lots of problems crop up in your body. Fix those problems and you live better and as a side effect, longer too.
And all the folks that say they don't want to live a long time are the same ones that won't stop treading water if they fall out of a boat. If you want to die then you are depressed and guess what - that's something else that's fixable as well.
Mr. de Gray is also not talking about a bunch of geezers in nursing homes, draining the resources of us young folk. Old people (as well as young) will be healthy and able to contribute to society.
And no over population, because our population will likely peak and start to decline around 2050. Eventually we'll need the healthy old people.
And the "they" I've been mentioning is the medical/scientific establishment in general.
It's going to happen (barring nuclear armageddon or something), and Mr. de Grey is just trying to orchestrate it and speed it up.
So, do you want to die of cancer? Or with Alzheimer's? Or of AIDS? Or failing kidneys? What is it you do want to die of?
Everything you know is wrong, Just forget the words and sing along.
Consider this simple test: What was the name of your favorite teacher in grade school? What did you have for lunch two weeks ago?
Items that have a large impact on your life stay in long term memory. Minor things fade quickly. Since the amount of memory we can actually hold is finite that means the gaps will just larger. (Whoa, what happened to the eighties, dude)
As for boredom itself, I can get bored in 10 minutes. How will an extra 900 years change that?
Presumably, new health technology will provide the author with adequate time to take an introductory statistics course.
"If you are a reasonably risk-aware teenager today in an affluent, non-violent neighbourhood, you have a risk of dying in the next year of well under one in 1,000, which means that if you stayed that way forever you would have a 50/50 chance of living to over 1,000."
No. To live from age 13 to age 1000 based on the suggested 1/1000 probability of death is most easily calculated by finding the probability of *surviving* for 987 consecutive years.
P = (0.999)^987 = 0.3725
The 50/50 age can be back calculated:
0.50 = (0.999)^x : x = 692.8
...or export them. Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars trilogy addresses some of these issues.
Also, I think people would probably have many careers and several retirements. Work for 50 years, retire for 10 or 20 (til you got bored). Then you can do something else for another 50... At what point would your brain just get full?
"Son are you eating right? You're looking thin!"
...5 minute interlude..., great, great, great grandson to the park."
"Mom I'm 787 years old I know how to take care of myself."
"Oh you will always be my baby! Now go take you Great, great, great,
"Argh, but he is in his terrible 200's"
Now all I have to do is persuade the scientist to lend me a bunch of cash that I will return to him personally with a substantial interest in only 200 years from now.
Yeah, the caves were warm, but Thag DID lose his mammoth hides. It was a legitimate concern.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
...Yeah, it'll be drawn-out at least 10 times as long as at present.
It sounds like what you are saying is that age in the story is determined by physical characterists. So those who look young are marginalized?
If thats the case this would not be relevant under the conditions the first artcle author describes. He mentions that many of the treatments being developed would restore cells and the body from damage it has suffered over the years. So everyone would look younger.
I think actually the more it will change the more it will stay the same. As usual mobility and freedom will probably remain limited and controlled by controlling and limiting access to good stuff...like property and information, as well as spreading the usual FUD. Although maybe not....
Just running with my thought. Part of the problem people face in overcoming marginalizing tactics is that you run out of time. You only have so much time to educate someone, or to get into the right carrier track, or save enough money. And usually right about the time you might get stable or free, like your late 40s, suddenly you body starts to fail. And you have children expenses during your strongest years. So maybe a lot of those pressures would disappear. Because it simply wouldn't be so hard to keep working and moving etc. Of course the vision of 500 years of corporate/physical enslavement is not so nice. But then since everybody will have to deal with this stuff for such long periods of time, maybe eveyone will finally start working on improving things... hahaha.. ok thats rediculous.
I'd love to live for 1000 years. Think of all the cool stuff you could do and experience! Course, it'd be even more fun if everyone else wasn't living to 1000. ;-)
Still, though.. you could fail over and over and have the time to learn to do it right. Or, just give up on this hectic modern concept of life and just become a wander for, say, 80 years. You could do all sorts of great things. Think long term. Produce works of art impossible to do any other way. Imagine a painting by a master that took, say, 50 years just to complete--because it was an entire city! That master could produce many of them--and they'd be LARGE scale projects. Business would have a much longer and more stable outlook. Quick reactions would be frowned upon and instead, careful consideration would be rewarded. These would all be great improvements, I think.
Hexy - a strategy game for iPhone/iPod Touch
I wish there was a "baffling" mod.
My joke got modded as Insightful and my insight got modded as Funny.
In a nutshell, a really-really-rich guy surnamed Howard was so disgusted with having to die of old age that he set up a huge trust fund and a foundation to manage it. The idea was that people who could prove that they had grandparents or great grandparents who had lived past 100 years would get a grant and would qualify as "members" of the foundation. Then if two such members married, they'd qualify for another grant. And each child they had would get a grant, and so on. The idea was to promote selective breeding for longevity using financial incentives.
As Heinlein developed the idea through the story, he relates how the foundation had to become a secret society due to persecution of their members. They had to use cosmetic and disguise techniques to make their aging seem more like the public norm and then change identities after faking their own deaths.
The neat twist though was that the main character of the novel, "Lazarus Long", the oldest living "Howard", had never had the benefit of "rejuvenating" treatments. Having gotten a set of DNA without any congenital defects purely by chance, he had been roaming about, disguising his age, changing identities as his various spouses inevitably died.
(The grand finale where he goes back in time to screw his mother and then gets rescued by his clone-daughters who also screw him... well, it totally wrecked an otherwise amazing book, I thought.)
there should be one last prompt asking if you want to login before the posted message goes through.
it already happens. Those "retirement homes" are dens of filth and deprevity. AIDS rates among seniors have also been steadily rising.
in that small world called US uh
As people got older, their physical appearance didn't change, but they became sharper-witted and had better hand-eye coordination.
And probably better lovers, too, knowing Niven...
free speach
Did you mean: free speech
A tumor's cells do die. They are constantly growing new cells just like the rest of our body. When we age, the tumor ages also. It's not in the shape we're accustomed to but it does age.
Look at someone with a mole, when they grow old the mole grows old also. It doesn't stay nice and young looking while the rest of their body looks old. The aging of cells stays proportional.
this is only good until the Quickening, because after that there can be only one.
I don't want to disappear forever and never think another thought.
The worse thing I can imagine is the point in time right before I know I'm going to die.
I want to live forever.
The Longevity of the Patriarchs
WHAT IF we were to live to 1,000 years? ... now imagine if everyone could live to be even 500 years old, starting in the next 20 years (according to the first article).
Would that be a good thing? Look at our populations and resources
Do we currently have the ability do deal with this in such a short time?
Personally, I see more problems than good coming out of this.
Where a man was given a godlike wish, and chose eternal life.
Unfortunately, he forgot to ask for eternal youth/health along with it, so he just grew older and more decrepit. But seriously, if quality of life becomes a problem than I could see suicide becoming legalized.
Actually, a good first start would be modifying the human genome so we can regrow and replace our teeth every 10-20 years or so, as many animals do. Otherwise, if life was extended to 200 years, our teeth would be totally worn down. This change alone would make dentists obsolete, and keep the tooth fairy very busy for our whole lives.
My rights don't need management.
I don't mind LIVING for a thousand years...I just don't want to LOOK like I've been living like a thousand years!
"Funny I found many hits on google from geologists who do not dispute this. Like this one [ www.creationscience.com ]."
Please don't present a "creation science" site as a "geologist" site. It insults actual geologists. "Creation science" is an oxymoron like "civil war".
"Also they have found fossils several thousand feet up in the mountains, like you said."
Ummm... never heard of geological uplift related to mountain formation, have we?
No wonder our country has become the scientific laughingstock of the developed world.
Finally someone gets it!
Of course we may have to suffer with press releases like this:
"...Now in his 100th Term as the US President, President Schwarzenegger says he still like 'Da Pump' at age 536...."
Old age dies from you!
Would it be wrong to maybe just DOUBLE our lifespan??? Maybe to 150 Years?
There are those that believe this goes against the will of GOD to do so. Well, for those of you who believe this goes against the will of GOD, then you should realize that before the days of medicine and vaccines, it was not common to live beyond the ripe old age of 40.
At what point would your brain just get full?
Probably not before we also figure out how to A) mix man and machine, giving us extended digital memory, or B) genetically engineer in more/denser/better brain tissue, giving us more of that unreliable, fleshy wet memory.
People would probably get stuck in a rut for the first hundred years, but they'll get so bored that they'll resume doing new things and maybe taking risks out of sheer boredom.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Is it just me or does this guy remind me of a cross between Rasputin and RMS?
Take a look for yourself!
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
You don't have to defeat your enemies. You simply have to outlive them.
That green slime had it coming.
See Gen 4.
"In the course of time Cain brought some of the fruits of the soil as an offering to the LORD . 4 But Abel brought fat portions from some of the firstborn of his flock. The LORD looked with favor on Abel and his offering, 5 but on Cain and his offering he did not look with favor. So Cain was very angry, and his face was downcast."
I'm more inclined to interpret it as Cain did not offer his "best" to God, whereas Abel did. God looks at the heart.
Also: I don't see why you imply there can't be sacrifices which you don't eat. BTW, the laws governing sacrifices in the later books were for Israel's contract with God, and so unlikely to apply in Cain and Abel's time. And even in them there are sacrifices which were not to be consumed. See Leviticus if you are interested.
The Israelites did grow and consume grain - there were laws regarding land and harvesting.
You may be extrapolating a bit too much from very few verses of the Bible, and thus getting a skewed view of things.
I recommend reading a fair bit more.
I just turned 58. I have worked in DP/IT since I was 21. THats 37 years. I am ready to retire. I might live another 20 years. I just want to spend time with my cameras and build a darkroom. I am tired of working. But if I had another 700 years to look forward to, who the f**k is going to pay my SSI, my health cost, my annuity benefits? Also, just think of all the senior citizens driving around! millions of us - smashing into cars, trashing flea markets.
No, sorry, man was designed to die after a short finite time. This planet cannot support that amount of population. The tensions of such a huge population will result in many more wars and disease. Besides, I dont think we can produce enough Depends to support all those old sh*ts.
Obviously we would have to discard capitalism in the event such medical technology becomes commonplace.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Are we sure we want to get to be 1,000 years old? The cartiledge in the nose and ears never stop growing. After 1,000 years a person would look ridiculous!
(wasn't there a Bill Plympton cartoon that showed what this would look like?)
Punctanym: alternate spelling of words using punctuation or numerals in place of some or all of its letters; see 'leet'
Extending 6 billion lives to 1000 years or more will just introduce massive world famine and the average person may not actually live much longer at all. Intead of dying of old age we'll just starve to death instead.
Not to mention the planet will be destroyed by 6 billions people driving Hummers to work. Car dealerships would start offering 100 year financing terms.
Such extension of human lifespan is not favor of social evolution, rather against it. People want to keep living just as they are.
You wield "change is good" as a marketing catch phrase. Life extension delays change introduced by newer generations, who bring novel concepts and attitudes seeded by passing generations.
You want change? You're in luck! The world is soooo unfair, in so much pain, there's work to be done everywhere to make it better. Also, the world is soooo beautiful, full of simple elevating truths and meaning. Are you finding these gems?
Which brings me to another point: the efficiency of a lifetime. Are you living your life knowing how precious little time there is?
If you lived 1000 years, would you be entertaining yourself a whole lot more, or fighting for relevance throughout the centuries?
Do not waste time extending life. Improve it for others, and secondarily for yourself.
The author says we have a right to die. Is this normal in Europe? In America, we don't have a right to die at all. We have to suffer till the very end, no matter how much we might want to die.
Tell that to the car/truck you just got run over by ...
When someone comes out with information like this, and granted it is not new information, I remember reading something very similar more along the lines of nanoscale cell repair to extend life... but why not live with the positive effects the thoughts of even the posibility of 1000 years of life brings?
We need something to bring the world together eventually, unfortunately this may bring about even more world protest as the technology rich countries would most likely benefit from this before 3rd world countries will, and if we thought they were jealous of our beer and happy meals now, wait till they find out we are near immortal. Anyways, I think DR S Jay Olshansky PhD needs to read The Toynbee Convector by Ray Bradbury and shut his negatively charged cake hole.
It is actually 2^30 + 2^29 .... + 2^2 grand(^n)parents assuming 3 generations every century. Imagine all the tertiary cousins you would know... And then consider buying gifts to all of them ;-)
We should have a decision in SCO vs. IBM by then....
1,000 years huh? I doubt we'd ever see Duke Nukem Forever even if we lived that long.
All I know about Bush is I had a good job when Clinton was president.
It doesn't matter anyways, all you bible thumpers and trolls. Eventually the planet will be destroyed by the Vogons to make way for a Interstellar Space Super-Highway.
play World of Warcraft for 1000 years!
-- statistically: You'll live longer by avoiding all manner of risks of accidents. Avoid cars, planes, electricity, wild animals, hazardous weather, high-crime neighborhoods, etc.
-- physiologically: avoid anything which is stressful, overly exciting, fattening; opt for unrelenting exercise, drastic caloric reduction, etc.
Unfortunately, the bulk of the effect is relativistic:
you'll live somewhat longer, but mostly it will just *seem* longer (ba-dum-bump, thanks folks, you've been great, I'll be here all week).
Here's an interesting tabulation of your risks of death due to injury.
Your odds are slightly worse than one in eighteen hundred of dying in any given year due to injury. (About 1 in 2800 of accidental injury; the rest is due to self-inflicted injury or deliberate assault.)
Assuming that figure remains constant throughout your lifetime, your odds of surviving to various ages would be
The distribution of actual injury risk vs. age is more U-shaped in reality. We're prone to accidental injuries while we're very young (getting dropped, falling, sticking fingers in electrical sockets) and while we're older (poorer reflexes, vision, balance, less ability to heal). Obviously our accident risk is going to depend on how well this treatment arrests the aging process, and at what stage.There's also the possibility that individuals who want to live 'forever' might make a conscious effort not to do so many stupid things, and therefore lower their own risks.
~Idarubicin
It's increasingly difficult to take anything that Slashdot contributors take seriously if they keep editorializing in their comments. The BBC is now balanced?
I've been a consumer of the BBC for nearly two decades and balanced is the last word I would use to describe it.
You want to know who isn't running Firefox 2.x? They spell it "definately" and "rediculous".
living with the consequences of your decisions would be a deterent for me it might keep some people from wasting natural resources but c'mon! We have heard for decades that smoking will kill us, sloppy sex will get us AIDS and running around in SUVs is ruining the environment AND WE STILL DO ALL THOSE THINGS! Throw in things like inner city birthrates for unmarried teenagers who,in this goofy scenario, can remain fertile until they are, lets say 400 years old...get my point? There are some people who live with out a friggin' clue about the consequences of their actions.
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
To take this thread even further offtopic than it already is, you're comparing apples and oranges. Before the 19th century, most people, particularly serfs, were chronically malnourished. When that's the case, the extra calories and protein in meat are a gem to be treasured, so certainly vegan serf in the 16th century wouldn't have been as healthy.
In the developed 21st century, though, food is abundant and our evolved tastes for sweet and fatty things, designed to help us scrounge every last calorie in a subsistence life, are deadly to us, causing us to massively overeat.
With abundant food, it is easy to get full nutrition (yes, including protein) from plant material. Meat isn't necessary anymore, and folks who choose to eat vegetarian or vegan can avoid some of the potential drawbacks of it.
But now we can actually bring the thread (which went lifepan->bible->cain and abel->meat vs. vegan) back on topic, in a modern society, limiting your caloric intake and avoiding using meat as your primary calorie source can in fact help you live longer. What's crucial is that you mantain a diet that has good diversity of calories (carbs, protein, and fats) and is nutritionally complete with respect to vitamins and amino acids. But, in out modern world of fresh produce etc., that's 100% doable.
Note that you don't have to avoid meat entirely to gain lifespan benefits. But, you're not doing yourself any favors if you eat two pounds of steak a day, either.
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
The article said that it would repair existing cell degradation. That means your senses would most likely improve, brain activity, and even some of those nasty brown marks you old farts get all over your skin after age 55 might go away. Of course you'll have to stop wearing Old Spice, and that's the real problem now isn't it...
The near-immortality proposed by the article is truly fascinating. It is hard to even imagine the scale of changes brought by 1000 year lifespan. Quite a few comments here concentrate on individuals and the rest on the society and they bring up some good points. What really interests me, however, is what happens to families.
...
Relationships grow as people grow. It is quite mindbogging to think about a relationship with a century of common history.
1. Sex. There'd be ten times as much. That would probably finally reveal us if it is possible to get bored of sex.
2. Marriage. The institution of marriage is already slowly losing the status it has had in the recent years. It seems difficult to find a mate for 50 years -- imagine the difficulties in finding a partner for 500! One possibility is that marriages become short-term only, ie. you get married for 20, 30, 50 years at a time. This leads to
3. Children. Obviously you can't go on spawning children every 10 years. The population explosion would be more like a population supernova. A child would be a very very rare occurence. It wouldn't be inconcievable that marriages would be only granted for the express purpose of having a child and raising it into adulthood.
[ Antti Rasinen ]
Our bodies are very complex, but that does'nt mean they can't be fully understood. Once all proteins are matched with their function, the ability to create a protein with a desired function will be possible. Just that alone will push life to a new limit. The scariest part is that it really is not far off. When technology and biology are completely merged, people who choose to live long lives, simply will.
Maybe he did, maybe he didn't. But if they hadn't gone ahead and built the fires, nobody would ever have known.
;)
Of course, based on your username, are you speaking from experience?
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
I'm sorry, I couldn't think of anything funny to say about it. Just, man, BEARD.
Beard beard beard.
On topic, these things always sound the same to me: a lot of blue sky about technologies that are gonna get there real soon now... I know only a bit about the topic, I think it's naive to think that drastic life extension is impossible, but a couple things occur. The first is that, I think that considering the vital role of cell senescence and death in biological processes, it will be continuously surprising how many problems extending mortality will create. The second is, it is stupidly obvious this kind of thing, if it is developed, is only going to be available to the super-rich. I mean, bleeding edge medical technology, and like insurance companies are going to pay you to stick around longer to rack up more medical bills. So a more accurate quote might be "I think the first person to live to 1,000 might be 60 already... and really, really, really rich."
And finally, BEARD!!!!!
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
Describing an article consisting of less than 900 words tells us something about the attention span of ...Ooh look! Shiny thing!
I think that eventually you wouldn't be considered experienced enough to be a politician until you were 500-800 years old. Same problem, bigger numbers.
He talks about Radical Social changes, but what about environmental changes?
Can our ecosystem support people who live to be a 1000 years? Just in the last 100 years human population has increased exponentially because of better medical science. I doubt we have enough resources to support people living to be 1,000 years or more. The rate of reproduction is going to remain the same, while the rate of mortality will be very low for while (until maybe a 1000 years from now). We'll have a population explosion - how will we support this population?
There is another social implication he hasn't talked about. Humanity has been advanced very rapidly in the last two centuries. Living to be a 1,000 years old will make us complacent and I don't know if we would be as driven to accomplish different things before we die.
It's hard to say how exactly our society will be affected, but the main issue is the population explosion problem.
Vivin Suresh Paliath
http://vivin.net
I like
Things are moving along nicely, talking about things. The chemistry is *incredible*.
Then you find out (I don't know, maybe the convo made a strange turn to genealogy) she's your great-great-great-great-great-great grandmother.
I mean, how many of us would recognize our great*n grandparents if we met them on the street?
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
Not to pick on you or anything, but women become infertile because they run out of eggs (being born with all they will ever have already inside their body) so extending their lives won't do much for extending how long they can have children. Men on the other hand can feel free to procreate until they die.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
so it says -
The right to choose to live or to die is the most fundamental right there is; conversely, the duty to give others that opportunity to the best of our ability is the most fundamental duty there is.
--------
but in reality of it all people take away the right to choose to live or die already anyways throwing suicidal people who obviously choose to die rather than live into mental hospitals and force them to live against their own will. On top of all that Its already crowded enough as it is on this planet do i really want the amount of new life coming in to be that much higher than the death rate i think not. brilliant that they can figure out how to do it, but there is nothing worse that a brilliant moron because they are definantly stupid to actually practice what they learned.
Shades of Heinlein's "Polkayne of Mars." Except in that case, they froze either embryos or newly-born babies. Even if that's silly, the essence was that a couple could do their genetic stuff when young, but raise their kids after they had a few years under their belts.
IMHO, there's a flaw in this. Nature/evolution equipped young adults with the ability to party all night. That ability wasn't put there to party, it was put there to take care of babies. Parties are the unexpected benefit.
But just imagine coming home from a business trip one evening, have a little time with the family, then put the kids to bed, and go yourself, shortly after, because you've had a long day. THEN both kids are up about 2:00 AM, BOTH sick at BOTH ends. Clean it all up, and a half hour the next wave of sickness starts. Clean it all up, and you're out of sheets, so start running the laundry around 3:00 AM. Etc.
Been there, done that - in my mid-30's. I sure wouldn't want to take that on in my late 40's or later.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
I don't think that any human being, as we understand ourselves now, can withstand living past 120 or so years without undergoing some pretty hefty consequences.
Cancer. How much radiation will you absorb over 1000 years? How many parts-per-billion of the innumerable carcinogens, heavy metals and free-radicals will your body come in contact and absorb over that much time? The sheer volume of damage to cells and DNA by these factors, as well as the simple (and natural) mishandling of our DNA by basic cell division, puts one at a tremendous risk for developing cancer. Any kind of longevity thereapy would have to be aggressive and continuous to stave off these problems.
Insanity and or lossing the capability to change healthily. How much can the human mind hold, safely? You might very well live to be 1000, but would you still remember the first 500 years of your life? Even if you remain active, and fight off senility and alzhimers to the end, you only have so many neurons that are available for use. Even assuming that you learn to use the so called unused 85% of your brain, would your consciousness, your very psyche, be able to withstand so much knowledge without loosing your sanity? How about just keeping up with current events?
I stand on the Fifth.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
I refuse to live any longer than 1000 years, though. Anything beyond that and I'd run out of new things to do.
Read the full text my book Perl for the Web
This reminds me of a topic we recently covered in my patient-centered medicine class (I'm a med student). More and more people are living with chronic diseases that are kept in check by aggressive treatments. Often there is a slow decline, or a punctuated decline with relative stability between crises. Examples of diseases people live with as a chronic condition include various types of cancer, diabetes, heart diesase, and even HIV/AIDS in recent years.
Modern medicine has done some incredible things to keep the disease process at bay. A good part the increase in the average life expectancy is due to people being able to live with chronic conditions where they otherwise would die.
I'm quite skeptical about the notion of indefinitely prolonging life by genetic engineering, etc. To have God-like power, one must have God-like omniscience and omnipotence. To keep a person optimally healthy for eternity you would have to:
We can do none of these things right now with any proficiency.
Will not God be angry since our lives where shortened for a purpose. I imagine technology will soon allow people to live indefinately. Not immortal, but without aging. Although, to what end since God dissallowed long life long ago. I can see that our time is coming to an end here on Earth as it is now. One thing is for sure the FDA will somehow ban or limit life extending to most people so they can keep in power.
It wouldn't be opposite at all. It would have a tremendous impact on every part of our lives. Talk about overpopulation, what happens when the death rate is cut in half but the birth rate is kept the same or rises. Getting a job in a founded business would be nearly impossible as the only way anyone could leave would be a fluke accident or leaving of their own accord or retire, which would lead to an even worse impact over time.
As for retirement plans, it would bankrupt many companies after the first 100 years as the number they have to support continuously increases with little to no death rate. And social security, consider that in 900 years about 9/10 people will be getting it while only 1/10 are paying into it if the current rules/requirements are kept.
And if they are able to, I see no reason a Senator aka American Royalty would leave except old age or not getting re-elected.
It would have its benefits and I'd welcome it, but if it is as sudden a change as this article suggests, it would have some tremendous negative impact along with it.
If it were possible to live to be 1000 years old
except if you had an accident or were murdered it would make the value of life much more. Loosing say the last 20 years of your lifespan would be much less of a crime than the last 800. Just think of the cost for medical malpractice settlements, or wrongfull death lawsuits! And any homicide conviction would carry the death by slow torture penalty, it would be the only penalty that would suit the crime!
In this book, there is a rejuv treatment that is *very* tightly controlled by one corporation. In order to get your rejuv, they want all of your assets, but it's got to be above a certain minimum.
So you wind up with a lot of young-looking old people, and their biggest objective is to get enough money to guarantee their next rejuv. Their next biggest objective is to find a way to hide *more* money from the corporation, so they won't be broke when they get out. Beyond that, the expense of rejuv and the "all your assets" clause tend to make them moles instead of prominent citizens.
Oh, and you have this REALLY rich corporation with its fingers in just about every pie on the planet.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
BBC is doing it's readers a disservice by calling the second article "an alternative view". It's not an alternative, because it has almost no relevant informative content that would help answer the question in the title of this discussion.
Mr. Olshansky just gives a long history of people believing that immortality can be achieved using som quackery (since they lived in quacky times), then just claims as a fact that there is no reason to believe we can dramatically extend our lifespan. He doesn't give any evidence to that, doesn't provide any arguments or counter-arguments, his strongest "argument" is that gerontologists will not succeed, because a certain Ko Hung, a famous Chinese alchemist living in the 3rd century, didn't. And then, again without arguments he finishes his diatribe by saying the same boring lie that we should not work on extending life, but improve physical and mental health instead.
BBC should be doing analysis, not just striving for the false balance. Read this excellent article by Chris Mooney: Blinded By Science: How Balanced Coverage Lets the Scientific Fringe Hijack Reality. Even though an uninformed person may think that it's Aubrey de Grey (with his scary beard) is on the fringe, in fact the point applies to his opponent.
And if you don't have time to read another FA, this picture makes the point almost as well.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
Just imagine what it would do to that institution. Death would be a reprieve...
Prof. David Friedman is working on a new book, Future Imperfect. He devotes a chapter to some of the possible consequences of practical immortality. It's Chapter XVI: The Last Lethal Disease.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
Given the low entropy of our modern Snuggling Ifbots, how can we possibly prevent senility among the octocentagenarian population?
Share and rate p
Now wait just one minute you young whipper-snapper...
Before you go on makin' people live to 1000, how 'bout curin' cancer, aids, and heart disease first?
Seems we've got a bunch of little things to do before anyone can live to 1k.
-ted
Just think of all the murderers that will be walking the streets after they serve their consecutive lifetime sentences! OH THE HUMANITY!
Our bodies were made to live about 50 years, maybe up to 100 when we have easy lives.
I do believe one can stop and even reverse the general aging mechanisms, whoever there are so many very complex parts in our bodies (such as the brain) that are still badly understood and were not "made" to function much beyond 100 years. I'm pretty sure that all kind of strange and new "defects" would pop up all over in our bodies if they would live much longer without aging.
This apart from cumulative effects that cannot be avoided causing cancer in the long run (natural radiation, chemicals, waste products, toxins). Already, due to increasing average age, cancer is increasing a lot. I guess almost 100% of people would develop cancer not much after 120 years.
To state that without the normal aging process our bodies would suddenly hold out for 100's of years seems very optimistic and naive to me.
Most of these ideas of rejuvenation are based on attacking biological malfunctions. That's all well and good, but it misses something else - there'a a fair amount of nonliving tissue in our bodies.
The first thought would be bones, but for the moment let's not think about them. Instead think about the cartilage that keeps the joints from grinding themselves into oblivion. That stuff's nonliving and doesn't replenish. We build one supply of it as we grow to adulthood, and after that it's got to last. (Or get replaced, but thos don't last nearly as well as the OEM joints.)
Then someone else mentioned fertility, thinking more of population. But think in another way, for a moment. Menopause starts as the woman's egg supply runs out and the ovaries shut down. She was born with her full egg supply - it's finite. So yes, she maybe she can live to be 1000, but about 950 of those years will be post-menopause. There are similar considerations for men. (Much more could be said, even without intending to joke, but enough's enough.)
Finally, our flesh itself is anchored with nonliving membranes. That stuff is also laid down as we grow to adulthood, and then it's got to last. Old people get saggier, it's just years and years of gravity.
Teeth. We get two sets, and we drop the first early in life. The second set's got to last.
So yes, we can improve healing mechanisms, we can mitigate some types of damage. Maybe there would be some way to convince the body that our adult teeth are really baby teeth, and go through that cycle again. But there are aging issues for which the body has no healing or renewal mechanism, at all.
The image of "early 20's forever" is attractive, but it ain't quite real. Nor is "60 forever," but I suspect the form-factor that would live forever isn't here, yet. The "forever person" would have some 20's traits and some 60's traits. That is, until we figure out some mechanisms to tell the body to destroy tissue it's never destroyed before, and lay down replacement tissue that it hasn't laid down in decades - or centuries.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
I don't know why I'm bothering, because this is probably just going to get buried, but... Has anyone stopped and considered the evolutionary consequences of this? He is proposing to constantly repair all types of molecular and cellular damage. The "damage" done to our DNA (aka mutation) is the source of change and new, potentially beneficial traits. And in order to fix them, wouldn't that imply that we know how they are supposed to work? Do we? Isn't the way that all people work differently one of our strong points? Of course, mutation/recombination would still happen through reproduction, and could even be performed while one is alive, but the fact remains, if you want to improve things, you'll have to change them, and if you want to change them, you introduce the risk that you will break them. If no one wants to take that risk, how will we improve, or will we be happy with extended stasis?
60 or 70 years of income gives a pretty sound basis for a 900 year retirement just as much so as for a 20 year retirement.
How? Please explain!!!
Rodney Brooks, in Flesh and Machines, briefly discusses various people (I remember Raymond Kurzweil with his "spiritual machines" concept among them) who have predicted that Real Soon Now we'll have technology which can make people virtually immortal. He cited a study of various thinkers through the years who have made this claim, which found that most of them predicted such technological innovations would come about roughly at the time they were entering old age. Brooks concluded that most of these predictions were fueled more by the desire for personal longevity than by a serious attempt to predict the likely progress of science.
I am Sartre of the Borg. Existence is futile.
Inflation cannot be held in check. That $30,000 home your parents bought is worth probably over $150,000 today, when you are your parents age that will probably be 1.5 million.
The equation is remarkably simple:
things to buy = money to buy them with
Increasing the supply of money changes the number of units of money required to buy the same stuff. Making new stuff drives prices in terms of a fixed money supply down. Fiat money issued by a government that keeps printing it is the source of rising prices.
Sadly, socialism, even in limited forms is part of a slippery slope to totalitarianism. Read The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich von Hayek. Even more stunning is Socialism by Ludwig von Mises because it was published in 1922 in German. Mises warned about the dangers of socialism and he was ignored.
With Alex Chiu's fantastic Magnetic Rings!
Let's execute him!
Oh my god, does that mean that instead of working a mere 40 years or so of my life, I will have to work for this shithole for the next several centuries???
"Our funds have never taken part in toxic or death spiral convertible financings of any sort" -BayStar's managing partne
You forgot compounded gains during your working years, which'd turn six million into some astronomically high sum which I don't feel like calculating by hand right now.
It is in the bible. We support peace, but we will kill all that disagree with us!
The other deal is that people would commit suicide all the time.
What it means is that by living very long we would further devalue life. Think about it if someone is to commit a suicide it means that he does value his life anymore and perhaps lives of other people. Death is what gives meaning to our lives. If life is to go on indefinitely it would have no meaning whatsoever.
Ok, since the image is stuck in my head I might as well comment on it.
Those "retirement homes" are dens of filth and deprevity. AIDS rates among seniors have also been steadily rising.
It is probably difficult to tell a group of people who know they only have a few years left to be responsible and think of the future rather than enjoy their remaining time by engaging in a whirlwind of hot, dry, sex. Plus I'm sure viagra has a LOT to do with this.
Finkployd
They want their flood myth back. People say that prostitution is the oldest profession. This may be true, but plagiarism apparently wasn't far behind.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
Well if I can't get an erection after age 100 then what's the point of living to a 1000?
The genes you are referring to are called "telomeres", and yes they do govern cellular aging. As for sperm, they don't divide, but rather are produced by division of a class of cell (which remains in the testes). Sperm have only half the requisite genes for replication, eggs in women have the other half (not counting mitochondria).
Aging in this context is probably an evolved response to uncontrolled division of cells. Cancer occurs when cells "forget" to stop replicating. Also, living forever doesn't make sense from an evolutionary perspective; reproduction matters more than lifespan (natural selection only applies to your genes, not you yourself).
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
According to another religious text.
How do planes manage to get through?
There, I just shot my own idea down the toilet - everybody would live the same way financially, only over a longer period of time.
Interest rates are set by people's time preference for money. That is, the degree to which the prefer present consumption vs. saving for future consumption. It varies from person to person for lots of reasons. A more important fact to realize is that it will vary for a single person over a lifetime.
There would be no need for people to work all of their lives. But retirement would probably all but disappear. It would become common to take longer vacations, sabbaticals and years off to retrain for a new career. Economically, retirement only works if you can save enough to live off of it for your expected future lifespan. Few people manage to save enough that they can live off of the interest forever, but it does happen now. The reason it happens is that they have enough money that the amount people will pay them for the temporary use of it is enough to live off of.
Capitalism is about people trading with each other for what they want. Changes in life expectancy are going to change the value of various things to people. I think we'll find that lots of things become less desired. Some will become more sought after. The system of trading amongst ourselves doesn't have to be scrapped.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
that people living longer would stills top being productive, insightfull, and expressive at the same age it does now.
Now I can work on a project, with my son, his son, and his son. WHy wuold the result be worse? I think it would be something that never could have been. New avenues and ways to do things, longer time for more ideas.
You also seem to think that the people younger then someone living to 1000 can't add to society, and try new things, but thats not true either.
What impact would DiVinnci had is he was still alive? Einstien?
Plus I would still die, and my ancestors would still go on to achieve the unimaginable.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
A man gains an audience with God. Man: Lord, what is a billion years like to you? God: To me, my child, a billion years is but a day. Man: Lord, what is $1 billion like to you? God: To me, my child, $1 billion is but a penny. Man: Lord, would you give my a penny? God: Tomorrow.
"I claim that we are close to that point because of the SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence) project to prevent and cure ageing.(sic)" I was under the impression that aging, which they couldn't manage to spell correctly, was a fact of biological existence rather than a health problem? By eliminating natural selection at both the beginning and end of the life cycle, we're really cutting off our nose to spite our face in terms of biological evolution. Could we meddle any deeper?
JoloK
Now all we have to do is get rid of taxes and EVERYTHING will be relative!
See I achieve unaging status. my generation makes the treatment available for every one, and then every 10 years, we eliminate retirment for the young, and tax them to support us. All While we our drinking it up in Aruba!
see everyone wins.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
"Also, consider how boring it would be to be a senator for a thousand years. I would wager that most "career" politicans would retire after about as long as they do now, simply out of boredom. "
Yeah, like Strom Thur- DOH!
"I mean a couple of billion years has fit in about 5 days. Speaking of which,, the whole idea of T-Rex/ evolution that a lot of cristians find contradictory to the bible does not have to contradict at all. The bible said that animals were created in one day. It does not say how. And it could have been a long day. The only direct reference is sculping adam out of clay (IIRC) and making eve out of a rib...that does not make much sense, but even christians agree that bible is full of metaphors. Taking it as the exact literal truth is not correct." What is it with the five days thing, anyway? The Bible stated that "a thousand years is as but a day" to god, and states that god had 6 creative days creating the world. Why don't people put two and two together and figure out that these are FIGURATIVE, not literal? They could have been millions or billions of years for each day. And the order they are given in is perfect (creatures in the water before land, etc).
The Bible is based on a lunar calendar and filled-hand based counting system; at most Methusaleh lived to be 86 when you take the calculations for that into account.
Worse yet, modern acturial tables show that you've got a 1:500 chance of being struck and killed by a moving vehicle in any given year- which gives a theoretical limit of about half the 1000 year limit given.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Constitution that allows your current "President" George W. Bush to extend his
term indefinitely.
Great work Slashdot; however, your continued absence
from Bible classes will ultimately result in your detention
at Camp Cheney.
Regards,
George W. Bush
Well that sucks - second accepted submission on this topic and I get my name redacted. Grumble.
If this topic interests you, you may want to check out the following:
Lots of good information and links to further resources at those sites.
Women become infertile now because their eggs get old and unsuitable.
Make people healthier and more youthful, and they will become infertile because they ran out of eggs. They have a lot of 'em, though...
While I personally would love to live for 1000+ years there are some great things that normal lifespans provide for society.
Where do you think the civil rights movement if all the now if the slave owners did not die off. Or the KKK members from the early part of the century, or anyone who accept bigotry. Death provides up with a socially mobile society. Without it what the young consider progress will grind to a halt as the old keep everything the same.
What would happen when rulers never die? When someone has an iron first and complete rule over everyone at least we can currently look forward to that person's death within a reasonable amount of time. With these treatments not only will that dictator not die but will have centuries to strengthen their grasp on power.
If humanity can not get past their greed something like this will only make the divide between the haves and have nots 1000x greater than it is now.
Tinfoil hat? Naa, I long since replaced it with a reinforced titanium alloy.
No longer would pollution, poor city planning, etc be a problem for their grandchildren/successors. Each and every person would have to spend at least 900 years living with the consequences of their decisions.
I think you've got it partially backwards. People will still be idiots. Becoming a crack addict in your teens will fuck up your twenties, but that doesn't stop people from becoming crack addicts in their teens. (...) No, when everyone can live to be 1000, young people will just seem extra stupid compared to older people (damn 90-year-old whipper-snapper!). People may spend the first 100 years of their lives making bad decisions which they then regret for the latter 900 years of their lives. This isn't to say you're all wrong, though. For example, I think the quality of the fresh air I breathe is pretty good. But if I could remember what it was like to breathe fresh air 300 years ago, I might not be so quick to put hydrocarbon byproducts in the air all the time. But the social divide between first-centurians and multi-centurians will be great.
I'm not a smorgasbord.
One of the fundamental characteristics of capitalism is the accumulation of the means of production (materials, land, tools, etc) as property into a few hands; this accumulated property is called "capital" and the property-owners of these means of production are called "capitalists."
Surely you can see how capitalism combined with lifespans measured in the centuries would inevitably lead to an unbreakable plutocracy and the total loss of individual freedom and self-determination?
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
If you have a full, active life, as you said: ``... something's going to get you.''
In Alistair Reynold's Chasm City, the "immortals" are people who have access to the sort of preventive and restorative techniques at the cellular level described by Dr. de Grey in the first article. They partake in all kinds of risky extreme sports with high fatality rates because they get bored.
Your fantasies contain the seeds of important concepts.
We know if teenagers think they're likely to die early (violent neighborhood, say) or they're unlikely to have a family (because they die early / other reasons), then they often live risky lives w/ short planning horizons. Even if its causing a feedback loop, it is rational behavior if, in fact, the local average lifespan is low.
Ditto for a sense of control and ownership of your health / home / public spaces and "the commons." If they aren't "defensible," that is, your hard work to protect them is easily ruined by external factors, then rationally you don't put much time into taking care of them. (Note that a "commons" meant that multiple people had predictable control over an area: outsiders couldn't arbitrarily ruin them.)
So even now we know we shouldn't have neighborhoods / countries / regions where most people think their lifespan is half of the worldwide average, or that they can't control their health or local environment. Their rational behavior can change their health / environment for the worse (nevermind the problem of angry hopeless young men and wars / violence). Pollution spreads. Epidemics spread. It is in everyone's best interest for all people to think that they're all on the same bell curve with regards to health, lifespan, the environment... for everyone to think and live as if they can make it to their 70's.
Of course currently it isn't true: many countries have significantly lower average life expectancies (even without childhood mortality in the mix). But it doesn't take much to change that: once countries hit a per capita GDP around $2000 then average lifespans get into the 60s to 70s. (Clean water, immunizations, basic access to clinics and medical knowledge). Once women have education and job opportunities birthrates go way down (education isn't the only factor, but the most significant one)
So lets say we can fix Aubrey's big 7 problems (see below) and can expect to reach 150. These aren't overwhelmingly complex solutions. Molecules can be copied: labs are getting cheaper. Science has always been more bazaar than cathedral, and with the internet open-source biology is even easier.
It may be for the most part "sharing" won't be relevant. We'll be "participating," so will most other people. "The rich" won't have much control over KaZaa-Life, and a billion eyeballs'll be keeping track of the anti-viral wetware on Life-Forge. In this case some people will still die young-- some treatments won't work for all people -- but that'd be just bad luck. You'll still try to live like 150 is possible.
But what if some countries are still on different bell curves: they reasonably can expect to live only 45-55, 65 years if they're lucky. They'll behave differently- taking more risks, discounting the future- not out of anger or jealousy (though never ignore the power of those), but simply because its rational. Using more untested / black-market copies of drugs. Perhaps slightly less likely to use antibiotics in "old" (=60+) age.
AdG writes that epidemics can still get us. Even without malicious intent they'll be more likely to come from the regions where lifespans are 1/3 the average. So again, if the wealthy elite (or 1st world countries generally) want to reach 150, we'll be handing out our telomere lengthening inhibitors and ATase like candy (low-glycolic index candy).
The 7 problems & solutions:
with an articulate argument. My take on the literalness of the Bible follows:
(not invented by me, yada yada yada)
The temperature of Heaven can be rather accurately computed. Our authority is the Bible, Isaiah 30:26: "Moreover, the light of the moon shall be as the light of the sun and the light of the sun shall be sevenfold" as the light of seven days. Thus, heaven receives from its moon as much radiation as the earth does from the sun, and in addition seven times seven (forty nine) times as much as the earth does from the sun, or fifty times in all. The light we receive from the moon is one ten-thousandth of the light we receive from the sun, so we can ignore that in our calculation. Keeping in mind that Heaven will stay in place for infinity and thus eventually reach thermal equilibrium, with these data we can compute the temperature of heaven: The radiation falling on heaven will heat it to the point where the heat lost by radiation is just equal to the heat received by radiation. In other words, heaven loses fifty times as much heat as the earth by radiation. Using the Stefan-Boltzmann fourth power law for radiation
(H/E)^4 = 50
where E is the absolute temperature of the earth, 300K (273+27). This gives H the absolute temperature of heaven, as 798 absolute (525C).
The exact temperature of hell cannot be computed from Biblical sources but it must be less than 444.6C, the temperature at which brimstone or sulfur changes from a liquid to a gas. Our source there is Revelations 21:8: "But the fearful and unbelieving... shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone." A lake of molten brimstone [sulfur] means that its temperature must be at or below the boiling point, which is 444.6C. (Above that point, it would be a vapor, not a lake.)
We have then, temperature of heaven, 525C (977F). Temperature of hell, less than 445C (833F). Therefore heaven is hotter than hell.
It would be nice for parents not to have to worry about their children dying in some far away place at such a young age. Draft the old people if they still have the ability and fitness to be soldiers. That's what I say.
But give me 100 years of compound interest, and I'll hire a nanny to do all that for me. With blackjack and hookers.
Oh, and I'm 40 and got little tykes, and I agree completely: I am baffled on why anyone 15 years older than me would WANT to inflict early-childhood parenting on themselves. I mean, the kids part makes sense (love 'em!), but there should be a documentary video *warning* sent to childless adults by the Gummint (Social Security?) when they turn 35: "YOUR STAMINA IS FADING FAST! DECIDE NOW: KIDS SOON, OR BETTER OFF NEVER!"
I'm going to be living to 1000 and cleaning up on low yeild, long term investments!
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Your ID is seven digits long.
a life term in prison.
"Ko Hung believed that animals could be changed from one species to another (the origin of evolutionary thought),"
Uhm, no evolution has nothing to do with individuals changing. Evolution is something that happens to a species as a whole, is *incredibly slow* (we're talking dozens of generations for barely perceptible changes). Existing individuals do not suddenly 'evolve', new generations have a variety of very slight 'mutations', and the ones that are better suited to the environment survive. In fact, evolution can only happen with the death of the individuals with the non-optimal mutations (or at the very least, their failure to reproduce)
"that lead could be transformed into gold (the origin of alchemy),"
With the appropriate nuclear technology (cyclotrons, etc) this could theoretically be done. Not on any scale that would be remotely cost efficient, but it could be done.
"and that mortal humans can achieve physical immortality by adopting dietary practices not far different from today's ever-popular life-extending practice of caloric restriction."
I recently saw a PBS documentary that actually explained a lot of the research being done on the study of aging, (The show with Alan Alda) and while I am a skeptic at heart, it does make sense. Obviously the only way to find out is to wait 20 years and see. Just remember they claimed man would never go to the moon either. (And no, it *wasnt* a hoax. Put your tinfoil hat back on)
Yeah, that's why so many religious fools are happy to destroy the environment, kill others, lead the planet into who knows what sort of disasters. Because this life isn't precious for them, and they've made that decision for the rest of us too.
Sad thing is, not only do we all have to live with the consequences of this delusion, we won't even get the satisfaction of seeing them realise the folly of their ways, when they die and their consciousness ceases to exist. No chance to even say "I told you so".
The ability to reverse aging or the ability to colonize other planets?
It seems to me that if we figure out how to reverse aging first, we will have a lot less time to spare before we need to colonize other planets.
Forget that this woman doesn't back her argument up with any facts, this would never work. We would all ultimately die a hell of a lot sooner, even if we could stave of death for 1,000 years. Why, you ask? Simple: resources, the biggest being living space. Imagine the billions of people who died in the past 900 years. Now imagine them still being alive. Now imagine how many more children they would have had. The world's population would be astronomical. There'd be no space to grow food, absolutely no fossil fuels left, and war would be a way of life.
I could go on, but I'm sure many science fiction writers have addressed the issue. Point is: if age doesn't kill us, we will kill each other in the fight for resources.
if(!toilet_paper) roll.replace(new roll);
Time speeds up and slows down accordingly vs perception.
Time is actually increasing it's speed at an exponentional rate or maybe I'm just getting older. Things seem to move faster now than they did a year ago. I am able to still live in a world speeding up, but it just feels odd. Maybe it's technology and the amount of information I must consume, but I can't help but feel it.
Then again time is supposed to explode around 2012... But what do I know.
This is stupid. You don't think they'd be able to cure paralysis after 900 years? They've already made huge progress with stem cell research since Christopher Reeve was paralyzed and started a new focus on the problem.
I mean, would you really want to live to be 1000 years old? That is a loooong time.
Then what about the health of people? People have enough problems starting at 60 years old, to barely being able to move at 100... are they sure they could engineer us to be 10x better?
I'd like to live my 70 years, and then be a spectator for the rest... you know? Like a football game or something, play for 70, then sit in the stands and watch the rest of the world blow itself up.
With the uncertainty of the future(Bush's war against everybody who isn't Christian) it feels like this is the beginning of the end. And, I personally don't want to be around to see it.
Then the other issue... Why must we continue to mess with nature? Whats wrong with people taking on their natural path in life? Poeple are afraid of death, which is funny, since it's the only thing that is guarenteed in life. Nothing else.
My suggestion is, do what you can to better yourself and the earth and be happy for what you get.
Let's say you make $100,000/year for 60 years. That's $6,000,000. Let's say that you save enough and get a high enough return on investments that you retire with about 20% of that value saved. $1,200,000 is your retirement nest egg. That is not enough to live on indefinately. And this was ignoring all the taxes you'd have to pay, etc.
Lets not be silly. Have you done any research into investing? I make less than $100,000 per year, and after around 20 years I can still have over $1,000,000. I surely hope that someone making more, for 60 years can handle it. IE, save 20% of your salary ($20,000 for your example per year). Assume 8% on your money (middle of the road guess, some say 11%, some say 6%)
Year 1 you have $20,000. Year 2 you have $41,600. Year 3 you have $64,928. Continue on, year 21 you have $1,008,458. Work for 60 years at this rate, you'll have a bit over $25 million. Now of course you can save more than 20% as well.
Simplistic calculation, but don't be silly saying that you'll only have a bit over a million after 60 years.
And oh yes... copyright extension laws that now last a million years.
Gonna be real fun!
Point 1) Get rid of our weak carbon based bodies... we need something new and we have the materials...now we just have to figure out that last part.
.20041128. I personally am very grateful that I was born when I was to see all this wonderful stuff going on, I definitly would like the oppurtunity to never have to stop.
Point 2) Could you imagine how advanced our society would become and how quickly? Itd be great if Einstein, Feynman, Planck, Newton, etc... were all still alive. Not only would we have the knowledge, insight, and new ideas brought to the table the younger generations, but we'd have these amazingly brilliant people that would have centuries of knowledge and research to work with.
The reason humanity began to advance so quickly was because we started writing things down so future generations could learn from what prior generations did. Imagine if those prior generations could teach you themself, or at least record it asaccurately as possible. With today's technology and what's coming tomorrow, we could have nearly 100% data retention. The efficieny and speed of our progress would be mind boggling. Another point worth making is that if we live to be 1000 years old I can nearly guarantee you that if not by the time your 100, then by the time that your 300, we'll have some form of brain backup considering that its really the only organ that we couldn't just grow a new one of using stem cells or some other technology (in other words, it's not hot swappable like many other organs most likely will be a a decade or two). Once we have some redundancy of our brains, then who cares if you get smashed to bits and pieces, revert to version
Regards,
Steve
If everyone retires at age 150 and lives to age 1500, then 90% of the population won't be working. That means that 10% of the population has to generate goods and services sufficient to provide the wealth necessary to support and entertain the rest. This might be possible with technology improving worker efficiency, but it doesn't seem terribly likely.
Huh?
If people no longer became frail as they aged, there'd no longer be a reason for nursing homes, social security, etc. If people want to save up for a "retirement", it'd be their own responsibility, not society's. The working part of society would have no obligation to provide for older people any more.
So, if old people want goods and services, they'll have to pay for them, just like everyone else. This means they'll need money. They can either get that from their savings/investments, or they can go back to work. If they're working, then they're generating goods and services themselves. If they're just living off their investments, their money will be used as capital in producing goods and services. Either way, there's not a problem.
The only possible problem is that, with all these old people (with money built up by compounded interest) demanding goods and services, either the supply will become scarce, or the prices will go way up. This might suck a lot if you can no longer afford to buy a nice house or car or painting or whatever until you're 300. It'd be a disaster if food were limited, and only rich old people could afford to eat. But hopefully, improved technology, and better resource allocation, will keep resources abundant so this won't be a problem.
With the earth's resources limited, we either need better government to control distribution of these resources (without screwing it up like most governments seem to do), or we need to get off-world to find more resources to exploit. So, in my opinion, any push for life-extension technologies needs to be done with a simultaneous and aggressive push for development of space technology.
... that he didn't mention "starving to death as a result of massive overpopulation" as one of the ways these future Methusalahs will die.
Nowhere does it link to info about the research doing this.
Nowhere do can you read why they think a breakthrough might be so close...
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
WTF??
You, like many people, are missing some very important points.
With a lack of aging, there would be no more reason to have retirement plans or social security. These could be abolished (or at least phased out). What's the point of social security when you're not going to get old and need to stay in a nursing home? Elimination of these things would eliminate a huge burden on society.
As for old people keeping all the jobs, a healthy and expanding economy would keep this from being a problem. Social Security was introduced in the Roosevelt (FDR) Administration because the economy had collapsed, so jobs were scarce, and they decided to free up jobs by getting the older workers out of the workforce. A healthy economy has no need of such a thing. Furthermore, with lots of old but healthy people running around, working, and demanding goods and services (instead of sitting in a retirement home being a drag on society), taxes would be lower and the economy would grow. There'd be plenty of jobs for the young people. There'd also be more opportunities to create new businesses.
The problem with massively incumbent politicians is a separate, non-economic matter however. Perhaps term limits would need to be enacted: make an Amendment that no person can serve more than 4 consecutive terms, for instance. If they get re-elected after someone else has a chance to serve, that's a different matter.
Anyone reminded of the movie Death Becomes Her staring Goldie Hawn after reading this article? -Ryan
The "balanced" response is one of the weirdest analyses I've seen in a long time. We're talking about current scientific research into molecular biology and he's refuting it by saying that a Chinese fellow 1600 years ago thought he had a breakthrough too, but he died. Its like "So what!!!"
That'd be like saying to Wilbur and Orville that their dream was futile because someone else tried it once and didn't get off the ground.
Fox News airs two opposing viewpoints as well, but all I see on ./ is "biased biased biased Fox News."
The yearly rate of accidental death just isn't that high. If you weren't going to die from any chronic illness, and didn't suffer from problems associated with aging, your odds of living to 200 would be pretty decent.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Yep, the main causes of death are age-relaged: heart attack and stroke are the big ones. Eliminate those and suddenly people's average lifespans will shoot up greatly.
Busses aren't the problem, however; auto accidents are. If aging is eliminated, the Europeans will live to 1000, while Americans are all dying at 100-200 because of auto accidents, which is a huge killer in this country.
I'm probably exaggerating, though. IIRC, between 20,000 and 50,000 people die of auto wrecks in the USA each year. While a lot, that's probably a tiny fraction of those who die of old age, heart disease, etc.
Hopefully. I imagine that, eventually, people would simply forget all their earlier years.
Removal of telomerase will prove deadly way too soon. Another solution for cancer must be found, not blocking telomerase.
I read the artical linked, the problem with replacing telomerase with periodically injected stem cells is some places (like the brain) will not function correctly. Also, the individual will be completely sterile from this.
Running out of eggs has nothing to do with why most women become infertile with age.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Once there was a man who was contemplating the greatness of God and asked in a prayer, "Oh Lord, if only I could know what a million years must be to You?"
Suddenly a loud, deep voice boomed down out of the sky, "My child, a million of your years is but only like one minute to me".
The man was astonished that he was actually being answered by the Almighty himself and asked further, "Oh Lord, what is a million dollars like to you?"
Again God answered him, "A million dollars is to me like one penny is to you".
The man decided to push his luck, "God, could I please have a million dollars then?"
God answered, "Yes my child, I'll give it to you in just a minute."
I could live up to 1000 years, and still wouldn't manage to get laid.
Surely you can see how capitalism combined with lifespans measured in the centuries would inevitably lead to an unbreakable plutocracy
Pure capitalism always leads to plutocracy anyhow. That's why pure capitalism doesn't work (it always leads to a revolution by the poor, unless the rich are clever enough to share the wealth first)
Immortalilty will make it somewhat more obvious, because the ruler will be the same 1 man, instead of the same 1 dynasty.
The poisson distribution can also be used to study how 'accidents' or 'malfunctions' or the chance of winning the lottery never, once or more than once, are distributed on the level of a population.
Nope. The Poisson model is completely appropriate. It has no requirements for subjects to be re-inserted into the population after an event as you claim.
Just check your textbook for the chapter on "Mean Residual Life". Classical application of Poisson curves.
So true!
So they play Quantum Soccer, and get lost in mathematical studies... they're still human. We can empathize with them and their ignorance, curiousity, love and pain, losses and triumphs.
As for making it there, maybe Kurzweil's Fantastic Voyage can't get me all the way to the 7 not-all-that-complex looking solutions (below), but I sure don't want to be in the control group. And if its the next generation, not mine, that get all 7, I'll be jealous but I'm not going to try to keep them from having it.
"We've always done it this way, we had to go through it, so you do to" is a philosophy that caused a great many hospital mistakes (and deaths) before they realized that forcing 40 hour shifts doesn't make you a better doctor, it makes you a 'functionally equivalent to drunk' doctor. I'm thankful my ancestors worked their health up to keeping grandparents around (30,000 years ago) and got the average lifespan up from the 40's to the 70's (100 years ago). Now to try to get it from 80 to 160, so when you- some datarcheologist in your second career in your 130's- come sifting through Slashdot, don't forget to feel thankful for those of us who fought against the Kassian "We've always died, we're better for it" attitude.
And once more for those people who keep saying: "but what about Cancer and Alzheimers, we'll still have those?" No we won't. Look at what A.d.G is actually proposing, and why, here.
Namaste
I think that although there would be changes in the short-term, extremely long lived people would result in the stagnation of society in the long run.
Once people live beyond 40, they tend to cling to the ideas they already possess and don't much like change. Society progresses when the old fogeys in power die off and younger people with newer ideas take their place.
I predict that in a long-lived society, old ideas would stay around and change would be minimal. The only way for change would be for the younger people to be far more numerous than the older people.
Dang it, I try to post as AC whenever I want to be gratuitously insulting. Sorry about that!
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Well, I am going to bet that a large part of my position is because I am an able-bodied 18 year old male, but I see older people with all their problems and I can't stand the thought of relying on pills to keep me alive.
:->
I felt much the same way when I was 18, then suddenly before I knew it I was 25, then in another blink of the eye, I was 35 and beginning to feel the first onset affects of aging and glad that the world of medicine has made such fantastic scientific progress in recent years. Now, I'm staring down the barrel of a 45... (my 45th birthday is coming up in just a few months), and all those Viagra and Cialis spam emails are actually beginning to look worthy of attention
You'll be walking in old phoagie shoes before you know it too, kiddo.
I don't really see people sitting around "retired" for thousands of years. To begin with it is the creating and the doing of new things that makes life fun. Those few that retired and sat around would end up ether killing themselves ( on purpose or through lifestyle choices like drugs, etc.) or would get bored enough after a few years to go back to school or start a business or go exploring , or fall in love and start a new family. Remember these are not "old folks" with weak tired bodies. These are people with young energetic bodies. They will not be sitting around in a rocking chair any more then a twenty-something sits around.
There will end up being huge changes in society. Manditory poplulation control becomes unavoidable. Space travel becomes a bigger priority in order to provide new living room and to give society a goal. Money will either become a barrier to long life for the masses if the treatments are expensive or if the treatments are cheap it will become much less importaint since anyone will become wealthy given enough time and compound interest. The idea of marrage will change. I love my wife dearly and can not imagine being without her but living for a thousand years makes the phrase "till death do us part" sound unlikely. Will we still get along in 800 years? Who knows? I expect that it will become common for people to take a break from their marrage for years or even decades at a time but not get divorced becouse their finances and families are too intertwined. They may even still love each other but just need a break. Or perhaps the normal "marrage" will be a contract to live together and raise a family for a set period (Fifty years? That gives enough time for the grand children to grow up.) with prenuptual agreements all the way around.
Every wrong attempt discarded is a step forward - T. Edison
writing comments on slashdot.
and i'll be pleading for them to kill me!
Here's my thought.
We're only now reaching the point where private spaceflight is possible. This is not even taking into consideration the likelihood of terraforming in anything resembling a century timespan, much less a millennium, and this is not taking into account the vast distances between stars, or the likelihood of any other planets that would support human life.
Now, if millenial longevity were to take place, the human population would grow virtually nonstop for one millennium before the death rate would once again match the birthrate. Without anyplace to go, this could have horrible repercussions on humanity at this time.
And all that's not taking into account the resource requirements for such a population explosion. You thought the Baby Boom was a problem? This would make the Baby Boom look like a slight tremor in birthrate.
Now, I'm not saying I wouldn't want to live 1000 years. I would, very much, like to live that long, because I am very determined to see the future, even if I can't get there right away. I'd also like to have more than 10 years to enjoy my retirement when I finally achieve independence from the need for a job. But now is not the time for this breakthrough.
The Penguin Producer
If we slowly keep raising this breeding minimum, we can eventually breed people who can be up to 200 years old!
Of course, this is my extremely short version, but you can sort of see the idea. Pick up the book and other genetics stuff if you're interested, I'm just a drunken ECE college student
The Selfish Gene is an amazing book. It will seriously change the way you think about things.
Berto
On memory - you are right, that would be the big question as that's one thing I think not well enough understood to fix the same way they are talking about fixing other side-effects of aging.
Interestingly this was dealt with in Kim Stanley Robinsons "Mars" series of books (Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars) where about halfway through the book humanity developed a technique for the kind of longevity talked about here - but then after a few hundred years I think, people started having problems with memory and just going into decline as a result (I might be remembering that a bit wrong). That's a great series of books to read for some thoughts on what longevity would do to society.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The Poisson model is appropriate when analyzing the life-threatening events that may occur any number of times to a person who lives 1000 years.
.00002 chance of dying on any given day up to that point, he calculates using a binomial model. He would also use a binomial method to see what his chance is of living to 459, 783, and 1000 -- starting from 386. Now, if he wanted to calculate how many brushes with death he would have before actually getting the big accident that kills him, THAT is a poisson model.
This is akin to saying that rolling a 1 on a d6 may kill you -- or it may not. Some other criteria is involved then to discern whether the 1 killed you or not.
As for actual life-taking events, thats binomial - yer dead or you ain't. So if a person is 386 years old, and knows that he had a
This is of course all heavily simplified.
Moo.
$1,200,000 is your retirement nest egg. That is not enough to live on indefinately. And this was ignoring all the taxes you'd have to pay, etc.
How, in any way, is this amount of money not enough to live on indefinatley?
Lets say I manage to only make a 5% return on that million dollars, a pretty reasonable return.
What is 5% of $1 million (to make it easy)? Why it is $50k!! Do you not think you could live on $50k a year with no housing costs beyond taxes (after all you would have paid off the house long ago)? I'm pretty sure I could!
You seem to assume that you retire with a lump and just watch it evaporate. Rather someone bent on the task would save enough that investment return alone could sustain them.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Curious questions from someone to lazy to (re(re))register:
1) Why post as AC to be insulting? To expand - is it protection of some lame-ass karma bonus? Or rather, to not go through life with a-hole behavior associated with oneself? Personally, I think the second is a better reason.
2) Isn't the whole the Karma/AC pointless and stupid? When I seriously want to read a thread - a whole thread - I got to browse at 3 just to filter out the kharma whores posting at 2 (I assume one whores their way to a 2, of course). I ask 'cause clearly you've been around a while.
Headline: "New Therapy Extends Life to Millenia".
(Next day)
Headline: Asteroid Discovered To Collide With Earth In Three Days".
-- Gary Goldberg KA3ZYW 301/249-6501 AIM:OgGreeb Digital Marketing Inc., Bowie, MD
Does Kingston still offer that life time warranty? I think I could go shopping...
Shut up, Nebraska-boy!
/* Unless you live your entire life underground in a room with little windows, never venturing forth into the world, something's going to get you. */
I don't understand what you're saying. There's an actual WORLD outside my parent's basement?
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
It's in early Genesis. I believe it's true, and Guiness doesn't have contradictory records.
It's probably not a good idea to get a life in prison sentence if you plan on living until age 999.
since when is marriage only about sex. You speak of getting bored with sex or being married to the same "hag" for years. Marriage to me is about companionship and having someone to share my life with. I think to live a thousand years with the same woman is a very appealing idea and I would enjoy the time with her and the growth in our maturity with one another. Some of you are obviously very young and I only hope someday you will grin at how much you do not understand about the purpose of life.
BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING!
While in principle this is a cool concept and I'd be more than happy to be a guinea pig for it, if it does get off the ground we'll be boned anyway.
Worse yet, modern acturial tables show that you've got a 1:500 chance of being struck and killed by a moving vehicle in any given year- which gives a theoretical limit of about half the 1000 year limit given.
First off, I'd love to see any actual actuarial table that gives a 2 out of 1000 chance per year of an automobile-related fatality. According to these guys , there was 38,252 fatalities out of a population of 290,810,000 in the US in 2003. That works out to about .13 out of 1000. A couple of orders of magnitude less than what you quoted.
Secondly, the idea that any chance gives a "theoretical limit" shows your total lack of understanding how statistics or probability works. What it will sometimes be expressed as is an amount of time till you'd have a 50% chance of a fatal accident... which, in the case of the actual statistics, and not the ones you made up, is 5331 years. If you include death from non-ageing related disease, crime, and "Hey y'all, watch this", you probably get a 50% chance of living 1000 years.
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
What might even be worse than premature death is all the damage that gets done along the way. Sure, if you drive to work everyday long enough, eventually some fatal combination of circumstances in traffic will do you in. If that doesn't get you, perhaps it will be a freak accident with a circus elephant, or a bolt of lightning that sends you to your great reward. That has been well established.
What is less talked about and more insidious is the damage and wear and tear on irreplaceable parts that takes place as part as a meaningful life. You may drive 700 years before having that freak head-on with a bus that does you in for good, but as an average driver, you will probably be involved in dozens of lesser accidents before that happens. Some of these accidents will probably be pretty serious, and result in things like concussions, busted jaws, torn cartilige and ligaments, burns, and so on. Add to this the hundreds of slips on ice and snow, a couple dozen times falling off the ladder, and the scars from the tens of thousands of paper cuts, insect bites, shaving cuts and so on that life dishes out. By the time that bus gets you, you will be a patched up mass of scar tissue anyway, unless you live like a monk.
Once young adults graduate from the school of hard knocks, most tend to make fairly rational decisions not only about their driving style, but about their career choices as well, based on their expected lifespan. Certain trades are notoriously dangerous, such as roofing, but things like concrete work, commercial fishing, mining, and transportation eventually maim or kill large percentages of the people who make it their life's work. When I was watching my new house going up about a year ago, I watched the roofers heft heavy bundles of shingles while they danced across a steeply pitched roof, their feet often slipping dangerously. I also noticed that of about 15 men doing concrete and roofing, only about 2 were over the age of 40, and none over 50. I thought about my own aching 45 year old joints, and understood immediately why these businesses are a young man's game. My own occupation as an electronic tech working in an office environment tends to attract quite a few grey heads, where physical prowess and bravery are less valued than responsibility, common sense, and the ability to draw from a broad base of knowledge.
Even with the current paradigm of an expected lifespan of about 80 years or so, most people abandon truly dangerous occupations by the time they are 40, unless they are extremely well-paid, have no other options, or are adrenaline junkies. People in slightly less dangerous occupations just hope they can hang in until they retire without catastrophe befalling them. Miners, cops, and long-haul truckers fall into this category, and are often physically or emotionally scarred for life from their time working. Most cops put in their 20 or 30 years, take their pension and a part-time job, and try to forget about all the crap they had to deal with. Many do okay, but some spend their final years divorced and staring into a glass.
This is where things get sticky. Although job safety improvements or phasing in robots to do really dangerous but necessary work might be possible in the future for some jobs, there will almost certainly be some types of hazardous work that only people can do. Who will take the chance of being a city cop or fireman if the liklihood is that he will live only 1/5 as long as his office worker classmates, or live as a psychological wreck after 50 years on the force for the rest of his life?
The opposition dude's article was worthless, essentially only saying that many people have wanted immortality but are now dead. No specific critiques to the statement that the seven accumlative causes of aging will be cured in 20 years. Do any of you have a response to that statemtn?
People who want to grow old and die, should be allowed to do so. I personally love life and would want to live as long as possible. Assuming I remained relatively healthy. Many religious people think there is a heaven, so they want to die and get off this earth as quickly as possible. We shouldn't force them to stop their aging. Infact we may even want to encourage them to not take life extension medicines.
Hah! I didn't realize that I had a dossier. :)
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
He says that there was a Dr. Li in Tibet who lived to 250+ and got certificates of congratulations from the Chinese gov't.
I think he also said that Nat'l Geographic Magazine, in it's January 1973 issue, ran an article on people who lived long lives and they had pictures of all kinds of people who were over 120 years. It seems there are at least five cultures in the world where this is common: the Russian Georgians, the Hunzas, the people who live near Lake Titcaca, etc.
Take your vitamins folks...
2) Pretty much. I wouldn't assume that high karma == whoring, though. Some of the darnedest things get modded up, so it's not like you have to be a Nobel prize winner to get some anonymous moderator to toss a point in your direction. As much as anything, karma seems to correlate with longevity. Stick around long enough and don't spend too much on trolling and it's bound to max out eventually. It'd be interesting to see what would happen if karma decayed with time, so that you'd have to actively maintain it or lose it.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
We have enough youth. How about a fountain of smart?
10: PRINT "Everything old is new again."
20: GOTO 10
Look on the bright side. Maybe the US will have fixed Social Security by then!
SharkJumper
6 years ago he was at the top of his career, doing great research, planning fantastic projects. Then illnesses hit like tornados, tearing his career and health away.
So you'd think he'd just want to kill himself-- how could you ever come to terms with such a change? But, you know, humans are resilient, and the desire to live is tenacious. He learned, most people there learned, to make the best of it. He did go the "Rage, rage" way a few times, but mostly he had peace. Contemplation. TV and music. Family visits. He was no more or less happy in the nursing home than before it all happened: just the focus of happiness changed.
Now, in contrast, the Nursing Home of 2904 is going to Rock. First, its not going to be a nursing home, but a regenerative center for people who need time off while cloned body parts are growing for the transplant. Or a cell-by-cell Hans Moravec style mind transfer zone. Or a place for people to live who want to review, organize and backup their entire lives before they die / copy themselves / do a massive personality change.
It doesn't have to be a home: it could be a life-support exoskeleton letting you wander the world. Or a Matrix-style feed, but one without crazed killer AIs. Unless you want them there. Unless Microsoft-RIAA has taken over, you'll have all the social networks, movies, music, books, interactives, VR worlds, MMOGs, and world's largest poker tournaments you've ever wanted to experience.
For food you can have direct olfactory / taste stimulation. For fun you can have direct any-other-type-of-nerve stimulation.
Yes, it will be a big change from the previous 860 years- a step down, a shrinking of your life. But you'll learn to adapt. People are resilient. If you choose to spend your last century in a nursing home (don't know why you'd choose that, but go ahead) you'll be just as happy as you were in the previous 900 years.
On the other hand, for a well-written SF noir on why immortality and the rich don't mix, try Richard Morgan's extraordinary Altered Carbon.
I think that it would work the other way around. Once people get to the top, they want to keep what they have because they know that they don't have the strength to get it again. If you knew that you would not physically or mentally degrade, then you wouldn't fear losing as much - because you could always get everything you wanted back.
Now imagine the other extreme - old people seriously bored with everything, wanting something new, some thrill. The "been there, done that" syndrome. Instead of stagnation, a society looking for the newest thrill and exploring every possible avenue of every new idea to mine out the most difference... Leading to reckless change.
... people will still die due to accidents, nature, etc. Not to mention billions of years out if there are no inherent "natural law" based limits that constrain our travel outward, I can easily see Humanity getting wiped out by Stars going belly up or cosmic evolution despite them having achieved "immortality" and near "godhood" in science and knowledge. You can't really run from a blackhole.
They are still dependent on nature of matter and energy to live even if they can exist in a non-biological fashion they will still suffer from decay and a host of other natural processes.
If they can fiddle with your DNA and RNA to get you to live to 1000, they should be able to fiddle with it so that - come your 900th birthday - you die suddenly of a heart attack.
Voila! No more 100 years of sucky old age.
Next problem, please.
I am anarch of all I survey.
If you manage it properly, you're looking at about 5% annual return on it. That gives you $60K a year to live off of - and if it's done right, it's tax free. Not a princely sum, but more than enough to live off of.
And yes, I do know what I'm talking about - my parents just sold the farm and netted just about 1.2; they put the money in some sort of managed account/trust/something-or-other and are pulling down 5% (-.5% bank fees) tax-free. Don't ask me how, but I do know that's the deal.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
Unfortunately a lifespan shift of this caliber would result in perpetual global famine. Birth control systems aren't remotely capable of dealing with that type of load. (They don't even work now despite the 99+% effectiveness of condoms and pills.)
Bascially, the more life that you have available to you, they more valuable it becomes. We consider crimes against children much worse than crimes against 99 year old men on thier deathbeds simply because when a child dies, so much more is lost.
If you know you have another 800 years to go, you will be much more careful with your life. "Life in prison" suddenly means SO much more. Even 50 years of poverty and despair isn't your entire life... it's just a drop in the bucket. You won't have any great need to commit crimes and evil to get ahead because you don't have such a pressing NEED to live a good life NOW.
umm.. ok, so i was an order of magnitude off in my calculations, only because I thought it was 40. patch -vc slashdotcomment
I will bend your mind with my spoon
I didn't see this posed as a question yet, but what about the effects of aging on brain deterioration?
I've heard this similar claim of long life with cloning and brain transplanets. Sure we probably will have the technology to stop aging at some point, but last I checked, we're still a long way off from even coming close to understanding most of the human brain. Claiming we can stop aging in that area would be a rather hard to believe claim when we still can't agree on how most of the brain actually "works."
I'm sure we can find a way for our bodies to live to be X age, but what's the fun if our brain is a puddle of mush?
A Poisson process would work just fine for a model, if you only measure the fatal events. You certainly could model a hypothetical number of fatal events for one person over some interval of time, and count the number of times he's died, but that doesn't make as much sense if the first event kills him. What you'd really want to draw from the Poisson process is that the waiting time from time 0 (birth) to the first event (death) would be exponentially distributed if we're only looking at accidents. And the exponential distribution is basically what you're describing in your third paragraph.
What the grandparent probably means is that if you could die repeatedly from horrible accidents, yet continue to live in mocking counterpoint to your pending dooms, then a Poisson distribution adequately models the number of times you will decease over some interval of time. Also, at any given point, no matter how long it's been since you've last died, Death is equally likely to be waiting around the corner right... this... minute...
Utterly ignoring the question of whether you ought, can you prevent it?
Or, would it be more the case that, as with guns, were longevity science to be outlawed, only outlaws would have longevity?
Would you really like to bequeath to your hypothetical descendants, a world where the least ethical are likely to have the largest accumulated influence?
"I don't really see people sitting around "retired" for thousands of years."
And this is the brilliant thing. Right now, lets say the average person lives to be 80, for a particular profession that requires a bachelors they study untill they are 21 and they retire at 65, well that knocks off 21 years of contributions (not counting any contributions in college) and 15 years at the end of their life. That means they are not producing 36 years of their life!
So out of eighty years you would put 44 years of work and developent back into society. If we have people living longer and retiring later, then this would change drastically! Someone living to 160 (twice as long) could potentially be working 120 years. That's one person putting 120 years worth of innovations, inventions, wisdom back into society. This is great!
So society educates someone 21 years and they get a huge return on their investment. Now imagine that same calculation for 1000 years. I'm sure people would retire after working x amount of years, but then again I'd see them come back into the workforce out of boredom or a need to create, serve, or whatever. Heck more people might be an Engineer for 40 years, then go into Medicine for 30 years, then use their combined knowledge to create something entirely new and unconcievable to us now.
Eventually with all these centuries old braniacs around, we would have robots doing all our work, that day all of humanity can retire! That is unitll the machines revolt...
- Chia God
Georgia Tech, the leader in Chia(tm) technology.
"There is as yet insufficient data for a meaningful answer."
It's not a matter of preventing change, but managing it.
Analogy: when some plaster falls off your wall, do you pick up the original plaster and grain-by-grain reassemble it into the original? Or do you mix a new batch and plug the hole?
Genes that go wrong will likely be detected ad-hoc via symptoms, and repaired to an assumed safe state, not to the original. As for changes without symptoms, the Spock quote applies: "a difference that makes no difference is no difference".
would you put your brain in a robot body?
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The problem is, if everyone does this, there will be a lot of multi-millionaires around. And all those people with all that money can only mean one thing: massive inflation. If everyone is going to live for 1000 years, you can bet I'll be investing in things like gold.
You don't have to do anything you don't like - ever. There are always options, including walking to other states.
Ask Cuban refugees who come across the ocean on makeshit rafts to shed tears for you because you feel "trapped" at McDonalds.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
"time" risk has no factor at all in markets. In no way is lifespan related to market return.
In fact, I have if anything a rather strong counter example. Over the decades our lifespan has gotten significantly longer - yet returns are as high, or higher for some things, than ever!
In fact you would also see a huge rise in investment with far longer lifespans, and more people would become far more savy about complex monetary tools that have better returns but are harder to leverage.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Here's the thing about fundy Christians. You say that Christ fufilled the old jewish law, so that you can eat pork, for example, but, then, still cleave to the old law so you can justify your unchristianlike hatred of gays.
From what I read, Christ did not make any exceptions to his commandments for not judging other people, for turning the other cheek, for not pursuing wealth, etc. He didn't condemn Mary Magdalene and he made a tax collector one of his apostles. You want to really accept Jesus into your life? Stop chasing more money, stop waging pre-emptive wars and accept taxes and gays. There's nothing christian about conservatism.
This is my sig.
Because I wish not to let the nature decide when I've seen enough of things? Even the thousand years would not be enough for that. Why should I let 'nature' decide when I have seen enough instead of myself? If you feel that using healthcare and other stuff is messing up with nature, fine. However, I think there are plenty of us that do not share the same opinion.
I want to visit other star systems. I want to see nebulas and other galaxies up close. I want to become a photographer so good that I can master every category seen so far and a few others rising in the future. I want to follow the evolution of individual stars. I want to learn things no-one has even dreamed about yet. I want to hear all the great music that will be released in the future.
Are these things really doable in the 'natural' lifespan? Why should I not pursue these goals, but accept the 'natural' limitations instead?
Everyone who makes generalizations should be shot.
What the hell are you talking about. How in any way did I imply we are all born equal? Get off the horse and re-read my message. I said, and say now, there are always options for ANYONE to get out of somehting they are in now. The means of course wil be different bewteen people due to ability but the FACT is that if you are in a situation you do not like, you can change that - especially in more free and open scocieties (a little harder, but still possible, to do in places like Iran or China).
I am just as against the notion we are all equal as you are, perhaps more so. But I also believe strongly in free will, I don't think we have a fate we are trapped in without recourse.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
How does saying that anyone can get out of anything imply we are all equal? Right now for instance I would assert that obviously we have differences, in that you cannot understand a simple point and seem unable to change your mind. You also mistakenly think you are clever, another difference between you and I. Are you happy now? Is that enough difference for you?
But continue your fantasy by all means, and keep believing that I have any notion at all of a universal equality. The funny thing is I exactly agree with your espoused philosophy, and despise those who seek to keep people down through the mistaken notion that all are equal - I loved the Incredibles for attacking this notion. But if you are too think-headed to understand the difference between that and what I argue, (which is all about free will) - carry on.
After all, I did say the means for people escaping is different for each person according to ability. But you seem to have let that fly right over your head.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
That doesn't have anything to do with living 1000 years though. When I decide to go, I plan on having a grand suicide party with women, drugs, music etc. The last month will be the best month of my life (and all charged on the credit card of course).
Been there, done that - in my mid-30's. I sure wouldn't want to take that on in my late 40's or later.
But that's the point of aging treatments, not just long life but long life while staying quite youthful - even if you where 500 years old, you wouldn't be in your late 40's, but more like mid twenties, or whatever is the "perfect" physical age when everything is ready but hasn't yet started to degenerate.
And since you insulted me I won't be replying to you any further.
Translation: Since you lost the argument you are going away in a huff. Goodbye!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
running out of eggs is a theory in some jeopardy...I recall some mouse work that found eggs were still manufactured in adult females...not the case that the female was born with her life time allotment..but you could be right...we are way out on a hypothetical limb anyway.
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
You know, we think of early 20's as being a "perfect" physical age, but what about mental age? I know that physicists and mathmaticians peak in their 20's, and can believe that physically the brain is on the slow downhill slope from then. But somehow I'd like to believe that I've learned something from the last 20+ years, and that while the physical substrate of my brain may be less capable, I've made better use of what's there, learned valuable life lessons. So I'd like to think my peak mental age, in some respects, still may not be here, yet.
So imagine a 20's physical brain with longer life experience. But is an essential part of that life experience coping with your own diminution and mortality - your limitations? If someone hit their mid-20's and stopped aging, would they acquire the same sorts of wisdom? Might it be best to get into your 60's (or later) and then get the clock turned back?
Enquiring minds would like the chance to know.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
How can everyone be rich? That's a classic inflation scenario --- too much money chasing too few goods. Interest rates would have to adjust.
You seem to be assuming though that all of the people having lots of money to invest would make the rate of return far lower, because the number of investment opportunities would remain roughly the same over time as more money pours in...
But why would that be so? Again, history has shown that as larger sums of money are availiable for investing the range of investments expands to accomodate them. Why do you think there is a limit on the availiabilty of investment opportunity?
Basically I don't see how you can consider your argument to be correct when it seems like the last thirty years of investment proove otherwise.
I also think there is a key difference in that while many people would appear to be richer than they are now (with more assests) they would not generally act in an extravident manner - preferring instead to live off interest with occasional fligs of larger spending.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This rules! Interesting that you're more likely to be killed by your hot tap than die on a train. I guess I should worry less about the commute home and more about the bath afterwards.
fish and pipes