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."
Can we have eternal youth as well?
Is there any documentary or archaeological evidence, outside of the Bible itself, to support this claim? I'm not trying to troll or anything, but before we use a single dubious source as a basis for determining what may or may not be scientifically feasible, we may want to look for more evidence.
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.
...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.
To demonstrate this, please commit suicide.
Well, isn't that what you're asking everyone else to do, by wilfully forgoing life-extension technology?
While I am certain that this post is going to invite many a troll, the Bible is not the only ancient text to document extended life spans. That's not to say they're not all blowing smoke, but it's not out of the question that some sort of significant cosmological or climatological shift might have contributed to shortening our natural lifespan.
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.
$20 says Dr. Reducto will change his mind at 49. Any takers?
Tech, life, family, faith: Give me a visit
There is a reason for people not flying.
There is a reason for people not being able to see well.
There is a reason people can't communicate with each other over long distances.
Just because something has been a certain way, doesn't mean it's SUPPOSED to be that way. Sometimes, things just are the way they are. That is, until they change.
Should the technology become available, you don't have to extend your life. You can live without all this fancy technology. BTW - you don't go to the hospital and stuff, do you? There is a reason for people dying from diseases, after all, and curing them would be unnatural and wrong.
"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
Think of the Matlock ratings!
OddManIn: A Game of guns and game theory.
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.
Nope... ancient texts aren't scientific journals - we shouldn't read them with our modern spectacles and expect them to adhere to our rules.
:P), then it only takes one of those to forget a detail or two and it's gone forever.
It was common in ancient times to extend lifespans of rules/important people to emphasize their status - in fact some of the lifespans around 1/2 kings actually overlap somewhat because of this.
Also remember that the lifespans of the earliest characters in the bible (whether written as myth or aurally transmitted until written, or both) may not even have been known. eg. if only 5 people allegedly survived the flood (and no library
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.
Well, I am going to bet that a large part ofmy position is because I am an able-bodied 18 year old male,
Bingo.
but I see older people with all their problems and I can't stand the thought of relying on pills to keep me alive.
And yet people do take pills to stay alive; obviously, for them, living with the infirmities of age is better than not living at all.
Nobody is talking about forcing people to stay alive against their will. If you depend on a pill to stay alive, you can always stop taking it -- and generally, if you really want to die, you can always find a way to do so. (Yes, even if you're bedridden or quadriplegic; there are a lot of medically assisted suicides going on, all the time, no matter what the law says about it.) But most people want all the time they can possibly get, and I suspect you will too.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
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.
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.
Either that or somebody is certainly trying to make the time span managed in the book.
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.
Speaking of god's increased precision, as the time passes... Is it just me or is god exponentially decreasing in time and scope.
badness 10000
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
And copyright would last forever.
What no one here seems to have taken into account is when the Bible was written.
The beginning books were written well after the lives of the central figures (i.e. Adam and Eve and their direct descendents). Also, they weren't immediately set to paper (papyrus, stone, whatever they used to write on) as soon as they were first related. Word of mouth was the most likely way in which these early tales were related.
Anyone who has ever participated in the grade school experiment of whispering a story around a classroom only to hear a completely different version of the story come out at the end will understand what word of mouth does to tales related in such a fashion.
Also you must remember that once the Bible's tales were written down they weren't yet "canonized" and conflicting versions were bandied about. Gaining the favor of the nobility whose money paid for the first written copies of the Bible was a huge factor in determining how the Bible would be interpreted and what would be included as canon.
No information can possibly be taken as truth that has such a dubious history.
Genesis 1:29-30 would imply that last part. I don't understand why God made an earth that is so clearly billions of years old, and made it around 6,000 years ago. Fortunately, our salvation doesn't depend on getting that straight.
I happen to believe the Bible ...
We don't have to worry quite so much about how long we're going to live as the folks who don't.
See what I've been reading.
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.
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: