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.
Only Old People... Oh, wait.
There is a reason for people dying when they do. There would be major overpopulation if people were to live that long...
... in my lifetime that I can see the Red Sox win the world series!
Can we have eternal youth as well?
How long until they raise the retirement age to 980?
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
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.
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.
As someone who has already put 40 full years behind him, I'd liek to see another 960, thank you very much.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
does he plan to put 50 billion people?
*blinking cursor*
To demonstrate this, please commit suicide.
Well, isn't that what you're asking everyone else to do, by wilfully forgoing life-extension technology?
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.
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
Think of the Matlock ratings!
OddManIn: A Game of guns and game theory.
Why that's only 8 years old when written in decimal.
Look as good you will not, hmmm.
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.
Thank god he's not doing cloning work.
"Oh, damn, I thought I had a sheep in that petri dish, but it looks like I've cloned myself again."
Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud.
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.
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.
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.
So you mean I'll REALLY be around when they release Duke Nukem Forever?! sweet.
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?
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
No, Woody Allen said it best:
"People say I want to achieve immortality through my work. I don't want to achieve immortality through my work, I want to achieve immortality through not dying!"
or something like that.
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.
God help us if it's both.
--- Ban humanity.
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.
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
Genesis was supposed to have been dictated to Moses by God. So the possibility of Noah having memory problems is sidestepped.
The Bible is a huge, HUGE book, written by many people over a period of several thousand years. While I'm not going to claim perfection (it's been copied and translated many times, and that *always* introduces some margin of error), you might want to double-check your sources before you repeat them. For example:
We are told the Bible has no scientific errors, yet it says the batis a bird (Lev. 11:13,19)
Who's to say that it's *not* a bird? I mean, really. There was no Audubon society at the time, and no so-called "scientists" who think they're more qualified to classify these creatures than the God who created them.
and insects (Lev. 11:22-23) have four legs
(Lev 11:21) Yet these may ye eat of every flying creeping thing that goeth upon all four, which have legs above their feet, to leap withal upon the earth;
That's 4 to walk on, 2 to leap with. Last time I checked, 4 + 2 = 6. But of course, your source conveniently left verse 21 out of his critique.
People with an agenda tend to make very poor critics.
But God demonstrates his love for us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us - (Romans 5:8)
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.
Uh not exactly.
It's more like this (Gen 5).
Then in Gen 6: "1 When men began to increase in number on the earth and daughters were born to them, 2 the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful, and they married any of them they chose. 3 Then the LORD said, "My Spirit will not contend with man forever, for he is mortal ; his days will be a hundred and twenty years."
Then after that was the flood and the tower of babel, and the lifespans declined (Gen 11).
Though 120 years was stated to be the max - a number of people in the Bible did live a bit longer than that (even post-Flood).
It is interesting that 120 years appears to still be the current max for modern humans.
BTW you can probably breed for longer lifespan if each generation of creatures were only allowed to reproduce later and later in their life spans. But there could be trade-offs especially if you are not careful and just breed for lifespan.
Maybe you could live to 1000 years with some future tech, but I wonder what the cost would be.
Previously even if you were rich, you'd die not that long after the poorer folk (excluding the really really poor). Whereas, if the tech costs a fair bit, the rich could live to 1000 years, but the poor to 90 max. If you think unbridled capitalism creates imbalances and polarization, this would be even more so.
Also the evil could rule for millenia... Sure the good could too, but what are the odds... AFAIK most of the good people don't really have such a strong drive to _rule_ over their fellow people. Once in a while you do get benevolent dictators, but...
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.
I think I agree. If I could see it coming a hundred years in advance I would probably do something spectacular too.
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
http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/12/03/obit.johnston.ap/ index.html Death of oldest American
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?
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.
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
in that small world called US uh
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.
-- 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
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 ]
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...
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 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
Just imagine what it would do to that institution. Death would be a reprieve...
Just think of all the murderers that will be walking the streets after they serve their consecutive lifetime sentences! OH THE HUMANITY!
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?
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.
Well if I can't get an erection after age 100 then what's the point of living to a 1000?
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:
Obviously, limits on reproduction would be necessary.
Wants kids? Fine, you can have one, but you have to give up your own immortality treatments. Sounds like a deal to me.
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?