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."

Comments

Re:See only the Bible for answers.

[giantsfan89]

• ... Humans were *not* allowed to eat animals until after the flood...
  
  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."

Re:Yeah, because the old way just wasn't effective

[Idarubicin]

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.

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

100 - 94.5%
500 - 75.5%
1000 - 57.0%
1235 - 50.0%
2000 - 32.5%
5300 - 5%
8200 - 1%

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.