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."
While there is no direct commandment forbidding man from eating animals prior to the flood, we do have the initial instruction God gave to Adam concerning his diet:
(Gen 1:29) And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.
It's not until Genesis 9 that what would *appear* to be new instructions are handed down:
(Gen 9:3) Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things.
I personally don't think an increase in sin had anything to do with the gradual decay of man's average lifespan. I find it more likely that the massive geophysical changes that the flood brought on is the culprit.
But God demonstrates his love for us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us - (Romans 5:8)
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.
Reference, please? I haven't found that.
Pre-flood
Gen 2:15-17: "The LORD God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. And the LORD God commanded the man, "You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die."
Post-flood
Gen 9:1-5: "Then God blessed Noah and his sons, saying to them, "Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the earth. The fear and dread of you will fall upon all the beasts of the earth and all the birds of the air, upon every creature that moves along the ground, and upon all the fish of the sea; they are given into your hands. Everything that lives and moves will be food for you. Just as I gave you the green plants, I now give you everything. But you must not eat meat that has its lifeblood still in it. And for your lifeblood I will surely demand an accounting. I will demand an accounting from every animal. And from each man, too, I will demand an accounting for the life of his fellow man."
Don't ping my cheese with your bandwidth!
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