Slashdot Mirror
Do You Want to Live Forever?
Jamie McCarthy writes "In 1918, Gunnery Sergeant Daniel Daly inspired his weary men to attack by yelling, 'come on, you sons of bitches, do you want to live forever?' But how would the world change if we could? This month's Technology Review introduces us to the computer scientist, and self-taught biologist, Aubrey de Grey, who thinks immortality could be within our grasp by 2030. Thinking like an engineer, he's broken aging down into seven specific problems, like cell atrophy and mitochondrial mutation, which he believes can all, in principle, be solved. And he has good reason to think those seven are the only 'bugs' standing in the way of a thousand-year lifespan. De Grey is clearly both a genius and a little nuts, but I'm not sure in what proportion..."
The Social Security System will fail Shortly after 2031. Could you imagine getting paid to not work for 935 years? You would have to have a population growth 935 times what it is today to sustain that growth! This is one reason that SS is fundamentally flawed.
But it'd be nice if someone remembered me a thousand years from now...
Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, whereas slavery is easy.
As he reviewed the possible reasons why so little progress had been made in spite of the remarkable molecular and cellular discoveries of recent decades, he came to the conclusion that the problem might be far less difficult to solve than some thought; it seemed to him related to a factor too often brushed under the table when the motivations of scientists are discussed, namely the small likelihood of achieving promising results within the period required for academic advancement--careerism, in a word. As he puts it, "High-risk fields are not the most conducive to getting promoted quickly."
The world needs more thinkers like him, even if he's a little nuts. Anyone willing to start his own international symposium after teaching himself micro biology is. Too many professional scholars are pinned into doing research that has immediate market viability and too many researchers are more interested in their own career advancement than the science they're supposed to be advancing. So they play it safe.
Daly dreams of being on the cover of Time magazine I'm sure, ego is almost certainly a factor for him as well, and no doubt a huge payday would follow and major advancement on any of his 7 problems. But it's the all-or-nothing mentality, the fact that he's willing to go for it even if it never pans out, that separates him.
I Want To Believe
De Grey is clearly both a genius and a little nuts
Those are the kind of people we count on now days! But honestly...I'm sure there are many people who might be better off not living forever. I won't mention any names or anything...
RTJKJAS
I really would like to, just to see what happens.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
3D High Def THX Surround Sound home entertainment (some brain surgery required)
The 100th season of the Simpsons
200 more years of Dick Clark in Times Square
Windows Cthulhu (C'mon, you know it was coming some day...)
Baseball players finally agree to seriously address the steroid issue after a homerun ball is driven through the skull of a guy two miles away from the stadium.
No matter how well you cared for your teeth, you'll eventually lose them.
Watching every public retirement system go into the stock market and then watch it really tank! (Alpo! Yum!)
Liver Spot removal pill spam
Survivor Krakatoa
Final Fantasy LXXVI: The ploy that isn't beaten to death, yet.
After about 20 presidents claiming to reduce spending you realize they're full of shit as the world runs out of money to finance the US debt. And those guys who said, "The debt doesn't matter", they died, so it didn't matter to them.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I will live forever, unles someone chops my head off.
But not if I have to eat stuff that tastes bad!
.signature not found
Oh great, in addition to the bigger penis spams, we'll start getting "Live Forever" messages.
AND...we'll be getting them much longer. Jeez!
Successfully condensing fact from the vapor of nuance since 1998.
What would immortality do to the planet? What happens when we reache the carring capacity of nature? Would johnathan swift's A Modest Proposal then be up for use? Serve the children as food... Because we can does not mean we should
I believe the proper question at this point isn't "can we" it's "Should we"
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
I guess it would mean that the U.S. government would have to take another look at the Social Security (i.e. government pension plan) system.
[Insert pithy quote here]
I probably don't want to live forever, but I want to be young for as long as I do live.
By the time you are in your 70's so much stuff pisses you off that you can barely deal with it. Things change so much from what it was even when you were growning up.
This would raise interesting ethical problems. Such as, what if you could have 1000 year life span, but the brain only lasted 100 years? That makes euthanisia a more important topic.
Plus, where will we fit everyone?
Only if my brain keeps working and doesn't turn into pudding. Plus I don't want to have to drink blood or anything. If I could live forever in a 25 year old body that would be nice too. But if I have to live forever in a 120 year old body wetting my diapers forget it.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
er em ... better post this AC
also, in practical terms, i'd rather not know that my death will most likely be by a sudden accident and that i can't ever "retire" because i won't know how long i'll live (hence how much i need.)
Who wants to live forever, when love must die?
Arch Obler addressed some of the realities of such a life span in one of the episodes of the old radio show "Lights Out".
There was a revolution. The younger generation was tired of being held down by the generation that was in power when immortality became possible. Bereft of political power for hundreds of years, there was a violent and bloody revolt, resulting in the massacre of the older generation.
Can you imagine the state of civil rights if the people running the country in the 1950s were still alive and well?
To an extent, society just doesn't change unless the older generation dies off.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
Granted I didn't RTWFA (Read the whole f*ck*ng article), but no I don't want to live forever. Why take as a case in point my grandparents. One of which just recently died at 94, and the other one is still alive at 95. Both of them, since about age 85 onward have been depressed to the point of which the only thing apparently running/ran through their minds was "kill me...kill me...". No amount of family contact/therapy/meds seemed to help this. So rather than spend about 910 years thinking "Kill me...Kill me..." I think I'll just ask to die at 85 a nice happy man. Then again I've known some happy old people so YMMV...
...in bed
We might see the day when Duke Nukem Forever is published.
All kidding aside, it would remove the current obstacle of slow-speed space exploration.
A 60-year mission to Pluto? No problemo.
Is it because 2038 going to be just like 1970 all over again?
--- Jason Olshefsky
Karma: Poser (mostly affected by adding this line long after everyone else did)
I read the article, and was surprised to discover what are basically the conventional explanations of aging. Neither are the possible solutions particularly revolutionary, although I have some doubts as to whether de Grey's proposed approaches are the most likely to yield results. None are easy or likely to come about in the next few years.
Fox Interactive would need to change the name of their spy-parody first person shooter series.
[Insert pithy quote here]
Do I want you to live forever?
Some days it's just not worth
chewing through my restraints.
If much of these projected technologies come to be, then Social Security will fail long before 2031. That projection relies on an increase in lifespan of only seven years in the next seven decades!! Image what happens when the baby boomers come to use Social security in 2018, and then suddenly people stop dying nearly so fast as they do now...
Yet in the recent Social Security article, many Slashdot readers would seemingly choose to ignore advances like those outlined in the article, quite odd for a supposedly technological nerd oriented forum. I guess we can expect them all to post and tell us why this article is complete bunk and we'll be dying in 100 years at about the same age as now.
I think I shall label them with the new term "politically-motivated luddite".
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
i certainly wouldn't mind going on as long as i want, without growing old and feeble, and being able to choose at what point i was finished.
there's no fundamental reason (that we know of) that a sentient biological entity shouldn't be able to sustain itself indefinitely. the only reason we're not effectively immortal is that we're not designed to be. there's no evolutionary advantage to being so.
i could live a little longer in this prison
If we "fix" this whole aging thing, won't we also need to put a stop to this giving birth thing?
I don't think the Catholics are gonna like this very much.
Unless we ended reproduction, or severely limited it (perhaps, by removing reproductive capabilities of newborns), the world would soon be extraordinarily overpopulated. Economies would crumble, society would be in shambles, etc.
Of course, we could always legalize murder to balance it out a little, but I think having everyone not live 1,000 years is a better idea.
If we could stop aging, imagine the population boom. Especially imagine the families that like to have lots of children, when women never go past childbearing age (whether preference or religious belief, they would have huge families).
So any cure for aging would need to also include a limit on reproduction. Perhaps the treatment would, by law, include sterilization. And perhaps the treatment would be denied to anyone with more than a certain number of children.
If you could solve these problems, most of our money would probably go to medical. Dealing with all the aches and pains we'd pick up along the way.
And who would we, as a tax-paying society, be obliged save from an early death via old age? Prisoners? Poor? Past Presidents?
...live 1,000 years with 940 of them infirmed, or live 100 years of youth?
I know that's an old question, but it's worth asking.
Telling people that they don't have to die has to be the oldest get-famous-quick scam out there.
How credible this guy is is something you can tell from the fact that he has never actually done any hands-on biology. Unfortunately, in real life, biological systems are enormously complex and unpredictable. We can't even cure the common cold or create a safe and effective diet pill; immortality is likely still very far off. (And whether it is at all desirable, even from the completely selfish view of an individual, is also an open question.)
Nearly every week there is some "new study" published that contradicts a previous one. Theories of aging 10-20 years ago are pretty different than those of today. So I'd venture at least half of his seven claims would be either wrong or insignificant 20 years from now.
I am optimistic that someday medicine will have a better understanding, but not today.
Since we age because the air we breathe oxidizes (read: RUSTS) the metals (ie: iron) in our blood, all you'd have to do is simply suspend chemistry and go against all that evolution has created.
Want to live forever? Everyone stop breathing. hah.
Besides, what'd be a functional purpose?
Good luck.
entertainment industry dominates global economy forever.
"since no one starts working until well into their two-hundreds, we've seen our consumer base grow exponentially," said one industry exec. "these fleetingly short 4 year cycles of government make it impossible for anyone to overturn any of the legislature we've pushed through, so our intellectual property is secure forever. we win!"
Duh! Of course!
Just think how well my meager investments will be doing after they've had the chance to grow for 100 years! I'll be loaded!
Seriously, I think the money and class issues are the interesting side of this. If it happened there would be a clear class division between those that could afford it and those that couldn't. And for those that could, their wealth could grow without bounds. Our (in the US and most other western countries) society depends on inheritance and the associated taxes, dividing of estates, etc, to redistribute wealth, and this would immediately negate that effect. Anyone with an estate worth much could afford the technology to extend their life, and therefore not pass on the estate.
While it raises all kinds of social issues, on a personal level it means each of us has to try to accumulate enough wealth to get into the category of people that can afford it before the end of our natural lifespan. It's a race against time.
"I don't know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve."
Sometimes people just have to learn and adapt to change, it is one of the requirements of being a living thing.
acquire enough wisdom. But the question is, are you someone who believes in reincarnation, the afterlife, etc.?
Who wants to live forever? Ahhhhh eee ahhh
they can only be president twice.
I've got my own secret program to live forever. So far, it's working!
Just, you wouldnt die of old age. Jumping off a 100 story building would still probably kill you. Stuff like car accidents, etc could kill you as well. I'm still for it though, I wouldnt mind living to be 500, or even 1000 as long as I could get out of bed every morning and be productive. Of course, I'm only 23 right now so when I'm 60 I might have a different attitude.
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
I perhaps may be in the minority but I really have no desire to live beyond my life expectancy of 80yo. I mean how greedy does one have to be. I woudl rather live the life that i do have to teh fullest. The world has had enough of me let someone else take my place. can you imagine a world of montgomery burns' who just live forever with there old thinking and old ideas. it's safe to say they the concept of renewal is built into every espect of nature. why can't we just go with the flow
Cities in flight By James Blish, circa 1955. Good pulp. Looks like de Grey just finished the first book.
The real problem is that we have redundant systems that have the same purpose but overlap.
Social Security and Welfare are two forms of social saftey nets to try and make sure that people that fall below a certain line can be helped back up (or at least that's the idea). But someone on welfare does not keep receiving welfare if they manage to pick themselves back up and start earning money again.
Why then does a program like Social Security make any sense? Why just because you get old are you garunteed to have the government pay you as long as you live? Indeed if suddenly people did start living forever (or even just to 200 years old) the program would ie a very ugly death.
Speeking from a systems standpoint, it makes more sense to have a single program to help with living expenses for people of all ages, one that really worked. I'm no fan of welfare but perhaps if you combined social security and welfare into one you could come up with an improved system to help people who fall on hard times.
Obviously as people get older they need more medical care, so something like Medicade makes a lot of sense. I am mostly talking about payments made to help people with cost of living expenses.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Hey, we won't be ready for immortality in 2258, so what makes this guy think we'll be ready in 25 years?
Alright, Slashdot as a whole has a highly educated, engaged and interesting population that post on it, however, we are but a fraction of the people in this world, i am asuming that the majority of people here are in the top 5% of the inteligence bracket. This being said, that leaves 95% of the population of the world to be ether less mature, informed or inteligent in one form or another. Now, imagine everyone on shashdot picking the most anoying, stupid, ignorent idiot they know and making them live for the next 1000 years. THEN, factor in that a new generation of people comes along every aprox 25 years, so in that span of 1000 years, you do not only have the original anoying people, you now have X to the 40th power (X being the original number of anoying people, 40 being the number of generations in 1000 years, asuming each generation there is the same percent of anoying people) (sry if my math is flawed, but i hope you can ignore that and get the idea im trying to say)
So you can see how within the spann of just 10 generations the earth would become increadable overpopulated.
some scientific breathroughs should not be made, others should, but i have to say if they found a way to make people live signifigently longer lives, it would just end up as a disaster in the end.
Because, On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
I hope to live long enough to celebrate my 50th wedding anniversary and play with my grandchildren. After that, I can die a happy man.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
Would have hair as tall as the statue of liberty by then.... The great thing about extendeding life such as this would be that the greatest minds wouldn't fade out of existence and the newer generation of great minds would have the opportunity to better learn from those still living. Of course population would be an issue, but hell we are gonna all be Star Trek like by 2030 anyways so what the hell.
News Reporters Make Tasty Polar Bear Treats!
The creators of the Social Security system were resurrected from their graves with new regeneration technology only to serve out the rest of their 1000 years of life in prison.
Speaking of dumb catch phrases to lead people into battle, I never "got" the Klingon phrase, "Today is a good day to die." Because the response would simply be, "Yeah, for YOU dipshit." And there could no clever follow-up to it. Basically, the Klingon would be standing there like a moron.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
> thinks immortality could be within our grasp by 2030
Isn't the world supposed to end in 2029?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I think a thousand years might be a nightmare, but as short as life is now, I think 200 years might prove useful. At 1000 years, you would have to work for 650 years to provide enough retirement benefits to cover the last 350.
I don't know if the two have talked about this, but I went to a talk by Ray Kurzweil (the inventor and writer), and he said much the same thing. His claim is that not only has processor speed, storage, etc. followed a logarithmic climb by time, but lifespan has as well. I think he said 2026 is about the time when we'll gain one day of lifespan for every passing day, if the curve keeps up.
:-p
In his efforts to reach the point of immortality early, he also said he's taking some ungodly number of nutritional supplements. I guess he's trying to stretch YMMV to its limit
my department came across a very huge sum of
money belonging to Mr. Carison Hogarth who died along with his wife and his Two sons and the fund has been dormant in his account
This is a lie! This is a lie for I am Mr. Carison Hogarth!
Great, another 930 years of no sex. Oh well, at least I'll get to play Duke Nukem Forver.... maybe
hack a day
sounds very much like the same train of thought that led futurist Ray Kurzweil to co-author the book Fantastic Voyage. Very interesting stuff and right along the same lines.
~slashdot are my only freinds ):
One needs to read Ishmael to realize how devastating this would be for humanity. Maybe I am a little paranoid, but I doubt that even one generation would last before the earth would be rendered uninhabitable.
I think most people are not seeing the real benefit of this. If everyone lived forever than it wouldn't be a big deal to spend a few centuries traveling about the galaxy.
Then the population issue wouldn't be a big deal since we could send as many people as need be off the planet elsewhere or we just put get rid of the body and put their brains into jars to conserve space via neural interfaces in a virutal reality.
This of course may sound farfected, but if you are saying immortality (for a thousand years at least) then my feeling is that inter solor system travel and neural interfaces aren't that impossible either.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
I read somewhere once that the average human has a fatal accident once every 300 something years. So unless we're all wearing personal force fields by 2030, we won't be surviving to 1000 years of age anyway.
better stuartship of the planet, economy, and international relations.
why? because the folks in power cannot just think in a mind set of "well I will be dead in 10/20/30/40 years... it doe snot matter to me."
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Why hasn't think got a higher score for being funny? It is funny. 2038 is going to be like Y2K again, except that next time round the politicos will say "we were duped over Y2K: we spent all that money and nothing went wrong!". And we'll spend nothing. And everything will go wrong. And then all the destined-to-live-a-thousand-years people will starve to death.
It's not God's will. Just ask Jerry Fallwell, Pat Robertson, or any other red state sleazebag. God's will is a lower capital gains tax, occupying Iraq, faking a social security crisis, and demonizing progressives. Now that's God's will.
Oh, and let's not forget - bringing our corporate Gods more power and money. Now that's God's will!
If you're in generation I of the immortals then you'll be on top of the food chain in 100 years.
200 yr old ppl that are healthy can probably take care of themselves. You'll actually end up working on something you want to, etc.
Overpopulation.
Even if we solve the biological problem of senescence, we are still left with the problem of women having a limited reproductive lifespan -- women are born with a certain number of eggs, which they begin to use up once they hit puberty. And, there's nothing yet that can stop them from using them up -- nope, the pill doesn't stop women from using up eggs. In fact, most women run out of eggs BEFORE they hit menopause.
So, even if we solved aging, women would still be forced to reproduce in their first ~40 years of life, or not at all. Which means the birth rate would not decline by the order-of-magnitude necessary to keep the population from exploding.
Yes, women could freeze their eggs, but who knows how long an egg will last frozen in liquid nitrogen? And I think the whole process of collecting, freezing, fertilizing, and implanting eggs is unpleaseant enought that many women would choose not to if they could use the old-fashioned route.
When we can work for 1000 years, we'll be paying SS into our Social Security Insurance for the first 965 years. Then we'll be able to retire on our accumulated claim.
BTW, your math is totally and obviously wrong, which certainly qualifies it for our current "debate" about "reforming" Social Security.
--
make install -not war
Marge: You awful man. Stay away from my son!
Bob: Oh I'l stay alright. Stay away, FOREVER!
All us middle-aged geeks want to be well retired by 2038 so we don't have to deal with the *nix/Linux 32-bit date problem - or at least semi-retired so we can be called back on consultancy basis and hefty fee.
AT&ROFLMAO
With a 10x longer lifespan, we'd be able to at least make modest efforts to visit the nearest stars and comment on the "inter-stellar bypass" that the Vorlons(?)'s have planned for the local neighborhood (ref: Hitchhiker's Guide...). Seriously, has anyone ever considered that maybe we ain't such great Darwinian examples as our lifespans are far to short to do anything meaningful in terms of stellar exploration. Assuming, of course, no new physics...
Hook me up with some ImmortoTech and stick me in a big lead box bound for the stars!
Of course, all of the supporting technology for that sort of journey still needs to be worked out.. but by being immortal, I could afford to wait around for it.
HOw far can breasts sag in that much time. Is tit worrth living. We have other problems to solve along with this. I bet the divorce rate would reach 100% too.
Evolution or ID?
Has anyone else noticed that a lot of /. articles lately are just pulled from boingboing?
Gravity should be one of the listed issues.
The pulling down of body organs is something
that would have to be considered.
full of high-quality, low-pay tech people?
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
IMABiologist, and you are absolutely incorrect.
If you want to look at immortality, you need not look further than the common bacterium.
And if we started colonizing other planets/space we could mitigate this problem.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
Yes, I want to live forever. Thanks.
--
make install -not war
You don't need to worry about immortality, there is no way you and I will be able to afford it, during our lifetimes.
Even if lifespan extension technology evolves substantially,there is no way it wil be available to the hoi-polloi. For Bill Gates and Montgomery Burns, sure. For you and me, unlikely.
Looks like Aubrey de Grey is a little too late.
If it means that we can't ever shave again (or maybe that is just the author's belief :P)
Like our planet isn't overcrowded enough? The populations in the US, Asia and South America are already too big to sustain life and protect the environment on this planet. Why in god's name would we want to do worse? Mother Nature gave southern Asia a bitch slap with the tsunami, which should help protect forests and the oceans in that region for a few decades (hopefully). The last thing we need on this planet is more people. In fact, we need LESS.
While I agree this would be the greatest breakthrough in the history of man, it would also rank as one fo the most damaging.
After all, Keith Richards is at least 4000 years old.... I'm sure the man partied with King Tut.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
Living to be 1,000 couldn't be all that bad. Elves do it all the time and they seem to get along just fine. If elves can do it, then I think humans can too.
Criminals being to ask for the death penalty instead of facing hundreds of years in prison for life terms.
I always thought the problem with living that long would be your teeth, they aren't meant to last that long (especially the way we take care of them). Those 900 years with dentures would sure suck...
They say the Earth is overpopulated as it is and people are talking about expanding the average lifespan at least 12x? Think about how bad that is. No one wants to die, but it is apart of life. The stress on the planetary resources would be enormous.
I want to see what the year 2505 will be like just as much as the next Slashdotter, but it is not meant to be. Will we achieve faster-than-light space travel, transporters like in Star Trek, colonialize other planets, or what will the geo-political situation be like 500-1000 years from now? I _really_ want to know. But, such is life.
"Hard work never killed anyone." -- Some Dead Guy
Our limited lifespan also probably protects us against cancer. If a cell can only divide a certain number of times the damage it can cause through rapid division is limited. If the cell is modified for immortality the problem would be greater. Mutations allowing unlimited or less limited division are routinely found in cancer cells. If all of one's cells were modified in such a way cancer would probably become more common.
...that the phrase "self-taught biologist" gives me the willies, I just can't get over the beard.
Like the guy who came in to fix my copier last week wearing a--I kid you not--Utilikilt.
Yes, I know I'm being shallow. However, I do tend to wonder about people who cultivate their hygiene in an apparent attempt to LOOK LIKE RASPUTIN.
Slightly OT, I suppose.
m-
You catch enchiladas by picking them up behind the head and holding them underwater until they don't kick anymore -VeGas
We aren't reproducing ourselves right now so maybe living longer will keep us from going extinct. We're having to attract immigrants to pay our social security. If you live longer, you can work longer after all.
Having the majority of the population able to remember things like the first world war and the great depression might mean the politicians couldn't do some of the stupid stuff they're foisting on us right now.
Frederick the Great, "Dogs of War! Do you want to live forever!"
Popular Science last month had an article on de Grey.
At what point do the odds of surgery to lengthen your life begin to lessen your odds of surviving the surgery?
"The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits." -- Albert Einstein
Isn't that great? We could be the last generation to snuff it. So close...
This isn't about you. We aren't going to live forever. Bill Gates might. Karl Rove might.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
The problem isn't that life expectancy could be raised to 1000 years or more.
The problem is that it would only be available to relatively few people. People who could afford multimillion dollar fees (which might exist solely to keep out the riffraff) or people with key political connections.
Working slaves can forget about it. Banks can always repossess a multimillion dollar house, but what do you do here when somebody declares bankruptcy after treatment?
The bottom line is that assets and power will quickly become (even more) concentrated in the top 1% or so of the population. Imagine what the average working person could do with a second lifetime where they own their own home from the beginning -- but they would start with much more real world experience and street smarts. Now imagine the same thing with people will millions of dollars in assets and dozens of lifetimes of experience.
The result would not be unlike the Go'uld in Stargate. The "immortals" might even put on the cloak of divinity. A few hundred years ago monarchs claimed they ruled by divine right, but they died just like us. How hard would it be for people with a centuries-long lifetime to manipulate society so the emphemerals believe that the immortals are graced by god. How long would it take for the emphemerals to forget that these medical treatments even forget or that everyone naturally dies within a century or so.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
That they will be able to do something for people with currently irreparable injuries. I could only imagine losing an arm or a leg, and having to live a thousand years without it.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
what De Grey's beard will look like by 2030.
While many, including myself, will argue that human physiological evolution has effectively stopped, the development of "immortality" will make that argument moot. Then all we have to look forward to is overpopulation.
One side benefit might be easier space exploration, since you're no longer limited by the "short" lifespan of a human.
I'll bet the Malthusians are goign insane right now.
but...
1. can the environment support immortal humans?
2. who gets to be immortal?
3. what would th non-immortals who want to be immortal do to the immortals?
4. what would immortlity do for science?
a. immortals would be able to amass more knowledge
b. but, the next generation might look at things in a new way.
always mosh clockwise
Can't we stay away from these ad hominem attacks?
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
I'm 34 and so much stuff pisses me off that I can barely cope.
Not because of change, but because of the amount the shit stays the same.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
I've talked to my wife about this since the first article, I find it fascinating. Human society, with the thought of "immortality", would advance exponentially. Think about it. Most of our life is spent learning, a little bit of doing, and then passing off what we learn to the next generation. With this advancement. Minds like could be working alongside their protege, and the next one, learning and advancing. Even sports, Michael Jordan would be playing against the "next Michael Jordan" and so on.
Also think of family heirachy's, this would change also. Probably a lot like Tolkien's Elves. Family structures could expand into little fiefdom's, who knows.
And last but not least, we could all live to see "Duke Nukem" (I had to say it)
Where do I sign up?
"It takes many nails to build a crib, but one screw to fill it."
Quantity of Life doesn't mean much without Quality of Life.
If people stopped dying from old age today, the population increase would probably just lead to all kinds of unpleasantness. Crime, poverty, disease, etc. People wouldn't live forever, they'd just die of other causes, and live in worse conditions in the meantime.
A few Sci-fi books I've enjoyed that deal with Eternal life scenarios:
John C. Wright's "The Golden Age"
http://amazon.com/o/ASIN/0812579844
David Brin's "Kiln People"
http://amazon.com/o/ASIN/0765342618
Richard Morgan's "Altered Carbon"
http://amazon.com/o/ASIN/0345457684
The general consensus: Eternal life doesn't automatically make you happy. But it beats the alternative.
I'm sure there are others that could be added to this list.
The facts have a liberal bias. --The Daily Show
KANG: Abortions for all!
[crowd boos]
Very well, no abortions for anyone!
[crowd boos]
Hmm... Abortions for some, miniature American flags for others!
[crowd cheers and waves miniature flags]
whatwhatwhaticahntundarstahndyoopleaseclickondesta hrtdbaddanandtypeeyepeeseeoheneffeyeenjeespessslah shkoowestyunmahrkentarh
A few years after building the model T, Henry Ford sent his engineers out to junk heaps and look at the Model Ts they found there and analyze what happened to them.
... When you reach around 100 years of age every single bit of your body begins to fail because not doing so would be wasteful from an evolutionary standpoint.
There were many, many reasons why the cars had broken down- but after making a comprehensive list of all that went wrong, they found out that there was a shaft inside the wheels (or somesuch, I forget the details) that was never, ever broken in even a single car.
So Mr. Ford told his engineers: "We spend too much money making this shaft- Manufacture it more cheaply in the next production run!"
The moral of the story is that this is exactly the way evolution thinks
Sheesh! Did /. get cross linked with "Phylosophy Today"?
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I'd live to see Duke Nukem Forever released!!!
Alright, Slashdot as a whole has a highly educated, engaged and interesting population that post on it, however, we are but a fraction of the people in this world, i am asuming that the majority of people here are in the top 5% of the inteligence bracket.
your Rong. I'm the stupidest idiot in the world and my cousin is even stupider!
What's the point of living forever if your body is fragile and weary. Living forever does not mean you'll be in stasis mode for growing...or shrinking. Just like a car, the body organs do eventually wear out. Will I be a cyborg strapped in a wheelchair by the age of 200? Is that really living?
I am reminded of the movie Death Becomes Her, in which the vanity aspects of eternal life turn ugly real fast. Fall down the stairs, break your neck? No problem! But that humpback won't look so good in an evening dress.
I'd have a personalized plate on my car, but "toxic bachelor" won't fit into 7 letters.
used this phrase before, saying
"Hunde wollt Ihr ewig leben", which is German for 'come on dogs, do you want to live forever?'.
would not be the weight of the fuel, it would be the weight of the books and VCDs we would have to pack... :-) ITOH, we could do a lot of follies during the trip.
Or... can you imagine the practical joke value of erasing/hiding all titles in the video/text library of the ship?
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
Can you imagine the population growth if people actually lived this long? Sure, I'd love to be around for 1000 years, and I'd do it if I could; but, it's going to create a social nightmare. But then, what major technological change hasn't? If this comes to pass, we're probably going to have to finally bite the bullet and accept enforced birth controls, which, if nothing else, will finally solve the problem of resources running out. We simply pick a level of consumption we want to live at, calculate the population which can be supported by the planet at that level, and work to maintain 90% of that level.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
we have plenty of other planets to fill up. You have to think four-dimensionally as well as three-dimensionally. ;)
Firstly, can you imagine how many regrets you would have by 300? After that long, if your life wasn't going swimmingly (and it wouldn't be -- anyone you loved would have met an untimely end through accumulated chance) you'd have eternity to regret it.
Secondly, I'm not convinced that our abilities to mentally adapt would be sufficient -- we already have difficult after a mere 40 years or so, so we'd be increasingly left behind and isolated, living in our little ruts and habits.
In addition, just imagine some people from 1600 being alive today...
I do have a pocket watch of 1883 and it works perfectly, with all original pristine parts. It's all a question of making things to endure, and not to be thrown away at the first opportunity.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
Nonliving tissue that's part of the body's basic structure. Think:
teeth
bones (especially joints)
tendons and ligaments
lens of the eye
basement membrane (think jowls sagging to your shoulders, breasts sagging to the knees)
These parts of the body are usually laid down prior to adulthood, and last a "normal" life as nonliving tissue. Humans are largely unique in lasting past reproductive years, and most of the effects of wear and tear on nonliving tissue are seen in those people. There's no repair/replacement mechanism for these tissues because none was ever needed during the course of ordinary evolution.
Speaking of evolution, some might make the argument that dying not too long after reproductive years is good for the race.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Well in all fairness governments world wide need to protect certain information and methods of information gathering. Companies need to do the same otherwise you could not stay competitive in business (both international and domestic). People who don't understand the need for certain things to be patented or kept as trade secrets or protected by governments baffle me? We won't ever live in a perfect, utopian society where everyone will do the good thing with the information available so how can you not protect it if it is valuable enough to do so?
News Reporters Make Tasty Polar Bear Treats!
Be a little more pro-species people!
Tired: Social Security, Earthbound, Overpopulated, Beuracratic
New hotness: off-planet, self governed, immortal.
It's yours if you want it.
kulakovich
The kids would be in no rush to go to college and get a place on their own. Thy'd probably only move out when they get to fifty or so.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
If Thomas Kuhn is right, then scientific revolution only really takes place when the senior scientists who are invested in the old paradigm die or retire. (A good example in this century is the very slow acceptance of plate tectonics as even a theory to be taken seriously.)
It may be that immortality is the last great scientific advance to be achieved.
Like putting a rubber sheet over your dick before making love? Man, this is a revolution! Let's go to the patent office NOW!
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
If I was going to live "forever" what's my motivation? Even an average engineer that avoids marrage can retire by 40. Then what? You think poeple are lazy now, just wait.
:)
Their "how long will a person born in 2100 life" is rather silly. An entity born in 2100 will most likely me either artificial (human intelligence inorganic) or 100% engineered biomech (human intelligence organic). Either way, it will not be "human".
If you're reading this, you will be long obsolete even if you are alive. Have a nice day
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
The bug reports were closed under the heading "operates as designed"
And this is not Fear Factor or Survivor, so you don't have to eat the bugs
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Dear god, I've been doing this for 31 years. The thought of having to slog through this for another 31 makes me want to shoot myself. Wait, I'm not suicidal or anything, but I've seen all I want to see. The newness wore off about 20 years ago. Live forever? No thanks!
1) Murder
2) Horrific Accident
3) Natural Disasters
4) War
5) New Incurable diseases.
6) Starvation, Lack of Fresh Water
With the massive increase in population that would result I believe 1,2 and especially 4,6 would be the order of the day. Nobody would die peacfully in their sleep. Those that die from some mutated virus not yet curable, might be the lucky ones.
I'd previously heard the "Do you want to live forever?" line attributed to a sergeant at Omaha Beach. Not suprising that it was previously heard a generation earlier. And I'd guess that it's much older than that. It's probably as old as warfare.
The only difference between genius and stupidity is genius has limitations.
Even if you replace every damaged cell, there are still supercellular structures (tissues, organs) that have to be maintained. You are probably going to need a lot of wholesale organ replacement. Living things have elvolved to grow their organs from small or large by multiplying cells in a certain pattern. I'm not sure that cell replacement can adequately maintain that pattern. If you have an old house and you replace each piece of wood as it rots out, small inacuracies will build up over time, and the whole structure will become misshapen, and you will have to replace the whole wall.
I guess the point is that living things were designed to grow, and by that I mean go from small to large, into adult form, and then die. Can maintenance really work? If you look at, say, the spiral pattern on a flower, I think it's fairly easy to get one cell to multiply into that pattern, but then to replace a single petal? A lot of our organs have that branching tree structure. I think it's easier to grow that than to maintain. I don't know if our DNA has a program to replace a section of artery, but it certainly has a program to grow it.
I remember from a radio interview a museum curator said "It's easier to destroy than to create, and it's easier to create than to maintain". I think it will be cheaper to make new people and let the old ones die than it will be to maintain everyone.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Wow, ZZ Top is smarter than I gave them credit for.
You were warned.
Hey! I can do this, too!
How to defeat cancer in 3 steps:
(1) Prevent spontaneous mutations in genes related to cell reproduction
(2) When they do occur, develop methods for preventing cells from reproducing and passing on their mutations.
(3) Develop drugs that will selectively kill cancer cells.
Ooooh, ahhh, maybe I can get some magazine to publish this! Oh, wait, my boring conventional mainstream graduate degree disqualifies my opinions.
Sigh. Yes, this was sarcasm.
Well if social security isn't broke now, it will be if this comes about.
They're either running out of news, or some editor over there is getting a bit old and wants this research pushed...
From April 2004, a QA session with "Methuselah Man" Aubrey de Grey.
I don't remember where I read this, and don't feel like digging for it....but a few years ago I read even if we didn't age and get old, our expected life span would be around 800 years.
It seem that even though we wouldn't get old and die, we'd still be being hit by cars, killed by villans, devoured by animals, or sucked into jet engines etc.
After 800 years, the odds were more in favor of you being dead than alive.
and think of the market disruption that will occur in the religious "eternal (after)life" market.
PLEASE let this come to pass! it will be so much fun to watch!
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
Yes I do.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I already find myself humming "knocking on heaven's door".
I love my (step) children, and the last thing my generation will do for them is to die and get out of the way so they can fill our shoes.
If my generation stays as productive adults forever (or close to it) they my kids must remain teen-agers for ever. The greats of any given generation only become great when those before them have exited the stage.
Elizabeth Moon touches on this in some of her books.
Erlang Developer and podcaster
NO.
Granted, even though those 'non-living' bits stay relatively static throughout your adult life, the human body is already able to repair/replace those bits, if they become broken or torn. If that wasn't the case then adult humans would have to be more careful about tearing or cutting their skin or ever obtaining a broken bone...
The suggested problem #8 you are providing isn't really all that much of a problem, considering that most skin sagging and other 'non-living' tissue issues are partially related to the aging of the living tissue components.
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
Even in our "mortal" society, the percentage of work needed for basic survival- food and shelter- has drastically declined the past couple centuries. In an immortal society, this trend would continue, with the unproductive & dependent parts of the lifespan like childhood and old age sink into insignificance. People would probably spend much of their lives in leisurely pursuits like education, entertainment, travel and sport, perhaps punctuated by periods of productive service to society. The amount of time to fill basic survival needs wouldn't be a third of a liftetime as it may be now, but on the order of one percent or less.
Society still needs to figure out how to better distribute its immense productive capabilities. The current mode of thought is to monetarize most of human activity and buy-sell-trade it. Authoritarian and commune approaches have been tried and work less well than this. Immortality may suggest different approaches.
1) will these treatments be cheap enough to apply to everyone who wishes it, or just the very wealthy?
2) will they be simple enough for any nation to implement them, or just the developed nations?
Who want to live forever if your life will be spent as a slave to some corporate overlord?
Some may call it a dupe even...
If people were to live forever, we would face many problems, but one big one is overcrowding.
Obviously, if people started living forever, we would have to at the same time stop having children. Now how many parents out there would REALLY want to give up their family life?
For some interesting reading, read Isaac Asimov's "Elijah Bailey Books" and "Foundation". In the Elijah Bailey novels, he deals with extremem longetivity given to the spacers, and the same theme is dealt with in the final Foundation book.
While I have a decent grip on reality, and know that obviously you can't rely on Science Fiction to heavily for truth, it does raise some interesting Philosophical questions.
you will be dying soon.
I mean, if you know you had 10 years left, wouldn't you be grumpy?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I am a microbiologist, and I can tell you that practical immortality WILL happen in the relatively near future. If you know anything about the research that's happening, you understand that it's just a matter of time.
HOWEVER... Eliminating death from disease (and age is, effectively, a disease, at least from a biological perspective), does nothing to eliminate accidental death. Quite simply, the longer you live, the greater the chance you will die accidentally. In fact, the matter of your death still remains, not a question of IF, but when and how. Some may be luckier and live millions of years, some may die tomorrow. But, in the end (and within the practical lifespan of the universe), everyone will die. (Yes, accidents can be mitigated, but it's an imperfect universe in which we live defined, partially, by uncertainty.)
to visit the SENS site itself and avoid the commentary-bloated article.
Basically TFA gives 3 pages of pertinent information and 3-4 pages of the author saying "He's charismatic but I hope he's wrong because I disagree with him." And he uses way too much verbal flourish to give his writing an air of authority.
I think the author could learn a thing or two from De Grey: "Everything he says is pertinent to his argument". He could've cut this article down by 1/3, and as a bonus it probably would have been a more enjoyable read.
In the future, all spacecraft will be made of cheese.
From the point of view of biology, it is essential that the lifespan of individuals is limited: that is how species evolve and adapt. It is also an central part of our social structure. And it is how our bodies are put together: lots of parts have never needed to work more than about 35-40 years, and that's why they break down steadily after that.
Most likely, it will be far more than seven things that need to get fixed in order to extend our lifespan significantly past age 100 on average: for a lot of things in the human body, there simply are no repair mechanisms because they have never been needed before. It's good enough to put something like bones or brains together during the first few years of life and then to leave them alone, with only limited maintenance.
From an evolutionary point of view, it would be unwise to remove or disable the central mechanism by which we adapt. We probably have already adapted to the toxins and other environmental factors we live under today; if a population of 1000 year olds decided to do something stupid that ended up killing most of them, or merely had the bad luck of being particularly susceptible to some flu virus, there would be very few individuals of reproductive age to select resistant individuals from.
And from an ethical point of view, it is unclear that we have the right to prevent billions of potential human beings in future generations from coming into existence.
The traditional "three score year and ten" is a good thing to plan for: you probably won't get much more than that. Use them well.
So I guess the Grim Reaper gets to find a new job. I reccomend an insurance salesman.
Sigs are nice guns
Have a read of the late 50's sci-fi stories (sadly I've forgotten the names of the stories), which all prophesised that the inner cities would continue to become so overcrowded that families would end up living with three generations of elderly relatives in the same house (all taking their eternitol pills), or that for every person born, another would have to leave.
The authors didn't count on the effect of the automobile and the creation of the outer suburbs - although that did lead to the creation of the ghettoes as the rural farmworkers were displaced by new housing developments.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
NO! I am Mr. Carison Hogarth!
Getting people to re-evaluate their core beliefs about such "sci-fi" ideas is HARD, but give Ray Kurzweil's Law of Accelerating Returns a read if you want to understand how incredibly fast progress is going to accelerate in the next few decades leading up to our potential[1] Singularity.
Immortality -- even if only biological -- is just ONE of the implications of exponentially evolving technology, but most people will just balk at even this possibility because they can't accept even that tiny bit of future shock.
[1] The odds are that the growing incompatibility between our primitive brains and advancing tech will kill us first.
Power to the Peaceful
has anyone read the short story collection, "The Last Man on Earth", edited by asimov? some of the best scifi short stories i've ever read.
by the title, you can tell what the stories concern, and after reading (many times), i'm sure that i don't want to live forever. maybe a 1000 years, but not *forever*.
There are two sure things in this life - taxes and death. If I had the option of taking one away at the cost of leaving the other, it sure wouldn't be death.
Whilst I personally love the idea of being able to live forever I think the medical hurdles are only the beginning of a huge raft of problems we would need to solve.
First of all there is obviously not enough room on Earth for everyone to live forever and carry on having children who would also live for ever, there are a number of solutions to that problem.
1) Conquer new worlds and increase the habitable space available to us.
2) Allow our children a limited ( maybe even a natural ) lifespan, do not allow them to reproduce themselves and then kill them.
3) Restrict the technology to a chosen few and force everyone else to carry on as normal.
Number 1 is fairly unlikely in the short term, number 2 would be hard to police and basically evil and number 3 would be horribly unfair but fit in well with the way the world is generally run anyway.
Presumably the cost of the treatment would initally be fairly expensive but after a while it would probably become cheap and widely available which means at some point something is going crack. Who is going to want to spend 1000 years working in a factory ?
This movie offers profound insight in both scope and depth on the difficulties of living forever and the kind of evil it can foster.
Laws are for people with no friends.
Though I'm not cynical about human ability and intelligence (the only way we could do the stupid things we do is be smart enough to come up with such innovative stupidity), I'm not sure we're ready to handle immortality.
Let's face it, people can't even keep spyware off of their computers, program their VCRs, or use all the features of their cell phones.
Are we ready for an innovation like immortality?
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
Has he taken in account the suicides induced by madness, itself also induced by living longer than one should... How would you live your live knowing you would never die? Would you work as you do now? Where's the psicological factor?.. It's like (an analogy here) being a john doe and suddenly rising into stardom, or being poor and then earn a trillion $$ .. many can't handle this.
I fuse with Mercer every single day...
The energy cost of moving a person from one planet to another is so insane that colonizing other planets is pretty much a pointless means of population control.
InThane
"Culling" anyone?
... leave me wondering of the implied necessities of "forcing" breeder selection onto the populus.
THIS:
"It's an incremental thing. It's not a question of how long life should be, but whether the end of life should be hastened by action or inaction. "
AND THIS:
"We will realize there is an overpopulation problem, and if we have the sense we'll decide to fix it [by not reproducing] sooner rather than later, because the sooner we fix it the more choice we'll have about how we live and where we live and how much space we will have and all that. Therefore, the question is, what will we do? Will we decide to live a long time and have fewer children, or will we decide to reject these rejuvenation therapies in order that we can have children? It seems pretty damn clear to me that we'll take the former option, but the point is that I don't know and I don't need to know."
--------
Magic 8 Ball says: "Culling very likely.".
I'm worried, you should be.
Opinion:=TMyOpinion.Create(Me);
"There can be only one!"
Someday, we can all be so immortal that we can only be killed by having our heads chopped off with antique swords.
And Queen will provide the soundtrack.
That's "Mr. Soulless Automaton" to you, Bub.
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/12/0 3/164257&tid=191&tid=14
The last time Mr. Grey showed up on slashdot.
Does anyone else find it incredibly funny that he has a rip-van-winkle type beard?
Maybe he already knows the secret and just isn't sharing?
George II -- Spreading Freedom and American values, one bomb at a time.
I'm somewhat surprised to see so many "Well, here's why this wouldn't work" stuff that is about problems that do seem rather soluble to me.
Social issues: This kind of change would completely alter the social landscape. Simply put, so much of culture and society is built, implicitly, around the fact that people die, and do so within a fairly predictable range. But the fact is, people adapt and change their ways and techniques. Not quickly, but they do when they need to. Why wouldn't we continue to do so? Eliminating death would be a *massive* upheval, about equivalent to coming down from the trees or figuring out how to use fire. So, our very existence would change in ways that are hard to predict.
Medical issues: "I wouldn't want to live forever if I had to be decrepit!" Of cours not - but what makes anyone think if we had the technology to keep you alive for 1000 years we wouldn't also have the technology to make that lifespan more or less bearable? Currently, quality of life is a BIG issue because life extension techniques focus on keeping people alive with machines, pointlessly, because (often) family or government isn't willing to let people who should die, die. But with the technology to keep people alive for 1000 years... Surely hand in hand with that would go the technology to keep them healthy for that long as well. I'm 33, I have arthritis in my hands because I broke them horribly when I was younger, but I am pretty sure that Eventually(tm) there'll be a treatment that could repair the damage (or just grow me new hands). On top of that, who's to say you'd even have a human body for that entire span? I can easily envision all kinds of changes that would really go quite far to eliminating many of the flaws and foibles of our current form - hell, biomechanics is a field rife with "patches" for homo sapiens. Why would "Humanity 2.0" have to be as flawed as our current beta test version?
Lifestyle issues: Why, if you could live for 1000 years, would anyone think you'd have to work for all of them? Who's to say you couldn't work for 40 years and then take 20 years to screw off, and then go do something like work again when you get tired of vacation? Also, if we posit a world that is rich enough to actually *have* immortality, why wouldn't that world also be rich enough to not require work in the same way we currently think of it? The definition of wealth and work and ownership would change so dramatically it's ridiculous. Hell, look at the digital age for an example - we have huge problems trying to adapt our old atoms-as-property laws and concepts to bits and data, I can't imagine that the future will lead to things staying the same.
Also, any world in which it will be possible to be made immortal will *have* to either be such a dire place where the ultra-wealthy are ruling with an iron fist that no one but the ultra-wealthy would want to live there for long (I know I wouldn't) or one where immortality and material wealth are easily obtained, and where people pursue something other than just more shiny rocks to gaze at.
Population: Yes, people living and being able to breed for 1000 years would cause a problem. But who's saying people would have to breed their entire lives? I could easily see whatever macro governmental entitiy was organizing things also doing stuff like limiting children to replacement levels. I know, some people will look upon such things as abominations and horrors, but fortunately they'll likely also be the ones who have objections to the idea of immortality anyway, so they'll all die off anyway.
I don't think a future of immortals would be a utopia by default, but I also don't think we have the ability to even fathom just how deep the changes would be. That said, pretty much every objection to this I have seen is just so ridiculously short-sighted and narrow as to be a joke. Seriously - social fucking security? We'd be living in a world where people could be made to be immortal; I'm pretty sure we'd have some other tricks up our sleeves to deal wi
Popular Science ran an article on Aubrey de Grey last month as well. Guy's getting a lot of press these days.
of 100 million dollars US paid over your lifetime.
say you win when you're 50 so that's 950*12=11400 months. 100M USD / 11400 = $8771.93 dollars a month, not accounting for intrest or anything of course. Mind you, in a thousand years 8771.93 will only buy you a chocolate bar anyway.
IANALOOA
On the other hand, I'd finally get to see "Duke Nukem Forever" and maybe a copyright-free Disney movie. Maybe.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
This was posted on December 3 of last year with a link to a BBC article.
If someone asks if you want to be immortal, you say YES!!
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
In 2030, I'll be 87. Doubt if I'll want to stay that way forever.
But call me anyway and I'll make up my mind then. If I still have one.
Could we rewrite the law so I can remarry even hundred years or so?
And you think you need Viagra at 50-- wait till you are 500!
Many people have long imagined eternal lives beyond our bodies. But this is hard to gasp. People have a hard time dealing with pleasure or pain lasting days or years. Imagine billions of years or longer! Even the most subtle heaven could become a hell if long enough.
The single thing that I am really, truly afraid of is to be immortal.
The dullness, the boredom, the horror of it, being stuck in this single life instead of going back...
Makes me shiver down to my bones. Immortality is not a boon, it's a curse, the worse one that could be visited onto a living being.
If he explores all forms and substances Straight homeward to their symbol-essences; He shall not die.
Scientists are full of it. They think they are so high and mighty and that they can solve all of our problems. How many times have they been wrong in history? Is the world flat? I talk to many people about immortality and many (most?) don't even want to. They see all of the problems in the world with war, crime and other violence, why would they want to live forever in a world like this? The only true solution to man's problems is in God's kingdom that the Bible shows us will solve all of our problems, weather it be in violence or lifespan.
If we are all going to be imortal I am planning on taking fencing lessons and maybe a community collage class on swordsmanship now so that i can get a head start on the killing.
A couple of months ago when i started at Cambridge i met him at the fresher's fair. He was sitting on his own at this stall next to the Hot Air Balloon society or something, with a stand covered in pictures of himself and "DO YOU WANT TO LIVE FOREVER" slogans. I spoke to him to see if he really was nuts. He is. Trust me.
He'd be a lot more believable if he didnt present his ideas in such a crackpot way. Or, y'know, if he just..shaved. All i got out of him was a few mumblings about his new world order -- not quite his words, but thats what he sounds like when he describes it -- and a cheap leaflet thrust at me.
Bacteria have a short generation time, therefore, they evolve very quickly. With billions of long-lived people living in crowded circumstances, bacteria will evolve to take advantage of the situation.
The same goes for viruses. Let us not forget that the influenza outbreak of the early 20th century killed far more people than World War I (25 Million vs 10 Million). Reference
De Grey does not mention beefing up the immune system in his list of "seven horsemen".Life expectancy is longer for every generation due to science and economics. And the law of accelerated returns applies to this as well, so it is quite safe to say that life expectancy will increase faster in the future.
:-)
Only thing I need now is life expectancy growing more than 10 years every decade.
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
We already have an overpopulation crisis, why prolong it with immortality. Also, who would want to stay on this earth for more than 100 years. 70 years on this planet is plenty sufficient for me thx.
Personally, no, I'd like to live my four score or so and go on to what's next. Cheating death doesn't get you closer to the Big Questions: What is reality? Why are we here? What is the ultimate nature of the universe? What happens after we die? Those are all more interesting questions (explored through either Zen or death) than getting rich or having X more sensory experiences.
I also suspect, from a Buddhist perspective, that getting so attached to your life that you want to live for 1,000 years is not healthy.
Also, living forever puts too much weight on life. Right now, you live a while and you die. Thank God! That really takes the pressure off, doesn't it? No matter how badly you screw up, it's not forever! 1,000-year lives are about the equivalent of forever. No thanks.
I'm not suicidal or depressed - I'm chock full of happiness. But I like life the way it is. And yes, I'm old enough that I'm not saying that because I'm in my 20s.
Other religious viewpoints:
Advice: on VPS providers
"people have a duty to give people the opportunity to live as long as they want to. " What if I don't want to live that long (due to whatever)? I'd like to choose when I die, why is that such a problem with everyone, especially "Christians"?
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Albert Einstein
We got a madman at our hands....
I'd just like to mention that eternal life on an Earth unblemished by sickness, poverty, or war is an opportunity held out to anybody who wants it. If you do the research you'll find that it's been common knowlege for some time.
The majority of people can't face it, though, because they don't like the repurcussions that acknowlegement would have on their lives. They prefer the false comfort offered by the "blue pill."
You can run but you can't hide, except, apparently, along the Afghan-Pakistani border.
The name says it all. Remember Durk Pearson and Sandy Shaw? The folks who wrote that book, Life Extension. Same old bullshit with a few discoveries along the way. de Gray is a tireless self-promoter, much like John McAfee. Any one remember John and his half-assed anti-virus software? F-PROT and Thunderbyte ran circles around his product, but all you heard was McAfee, McAfee. Smoke and mirrors people.
how the middle-earth Elves managed to live so long. However, the pointy-ears question still bugs me...
In Cory Doctorow's novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom there is no more death thanks to technology. It's been a while since I read it but I remember it being very good (free download).
http://craphound.com/down/
Doctorow is also the mad man behind boing boing.
http://www.boingboing.net/
it is you who has the power to decide what will 'be', and what won't.
If you can beat aging, you wouldn't be old. Did you read even the summary?
eat shiat and bark at the moon
Guns invest in guns, with guys like Bill Gates, Donald Trump and CowboyNeal around us longer than they should people will blow their minds like super bowl tv commercials.
Unemployment for 935 years? Don't worry! You just need a congressman to pass the "Soylent-Green Bill". Problem solved! :)
...sucking blood ?
If so, count me out please.
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
This sounds rather like the Python skit where a bunch of children get together and decide to solve the worlds problems. They reduce them to simple basics and propose the immediate remedy. Problem solved!
Paraphrased:
"How do we solve world hunger? First, gather all the hungry people together. Then take the food from people who have too much, and give it to the hungry people!"
Check out the Quantz daily dinosaur comic from December 8, 2004. That's the one where they discuss immortality and T-Rex learns that science means that not all dreams can come true .
Follow-up on 12/15/04.
Heh!
-- null
Hmmm, In Starship Troopers I remember hearing, "Come on you apes, do you want to live forever?" I wonder why they changed it. Hmmmm....
- Danny
Without generational turn-over, would we would never have had newer open-minded people to make the world suck a little bit less. Imagine if immortality were discovered during the Dark Ages, for example.
-- Microsoft is the most expensive commodity operating system and office suite vendor in the marketplace.
Not without my flying car!
How far can they sag? If they only drop six inches over 40 years (20-year-old breasts vs. 60-year-old breasts) then you're looking at 11 feet of boob drop over 900 years. That's pretty disgusting.
As for divorce, "On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero."
I doubt it'd be 100%, some people would HAVE to die before getting divorced... but I'd agree that there would be a lot of other changes to society if such a thing were possible.
I read this article about 235 years ago, jeez, will slashdot ever stop posting dupes!
This would have to coincide with lots of other advances. Living twice as like would double your chances of catching diseases, being struck by lightning, being hit by a bus, etc. Okay, technically not "double" because I don't think statistically it would be so simple. It would, however, increase those chances and not just because of chance. A longer life exposes you to more opportunities to die prematurely. Okay, okay, so I'd like to take this chance too! I'm just pointing out the obvious.
grin
There may indeed be contributing biological factors, I certainly have no contrary evidence to disagree with you there. But I think the primary reasons for resistance to change lie elsewhere.
Let me start off by defining conservatism as the resistance to change, for whatever reason, not as political right-wingery. I think the primary impetus for conservatism is something outside of biology, because conservatism exists outside of biology. Observe what happens to large organizations and even smaller organizations as they change.
What happens is they focus more and more on their "core business", whether that core business is making buggy whips or acquiring other companies to profit from them. It becomes harder and harder to change their policies or direction from either the inside or the outside. This is not a function of the pursuit of wealth, either. Non-profit organizations do this too. And government organizations are notorious for it.
I think the primary reason for conservatism is that old people and entrenched organizations alike have found strategies that are successful after making many mistakes. But success is a broad term, and furthermore the degree to which a strategy remains successful changes over time. These entities choose a few strategies that are workable over the short term, and because they had to discard so many unworkable strategies, they come to believe implicitly that their strategies are the only ones that are safe enough to use. The result is that any change is seen as too dangerous to attempt, and any major change of focus or direction is unthinkable.
For this reason and because organizations and people are both subject to this, I have to reject the hypothesis that the cause is primarily biological. Which means that, whatever biological advances we make, I think we'll still see conservatism in our infinite longevity society.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
Jesus was a myth built on earlier godmen myths
eat shiat and bark at the moon
I'm reasonably certain that the very day I took the pill, I'd be mistakenly charged with murder and sentenced to life without parole. And the camera would pan to Rod Serling...
stripShow - Where WordPress meets webcomics
This article and his website contain absolutely no technical details.
He thinks money and politics is the problem.
The problems are technical. I don't see a research plan all I see is political mumbo jumbo.
He needs to separate the technical from the political mumbo jumbo. Until he does I can't take this guy seriously.
The reason we shouldn't is because it would bring human evolution to a grinding halt.
Everyone seems to be missing one very important (and somewhat counter-intuitive) point here: death is absolutely necessary for the continuation of life. If it weren't for relatively short lifespans, the world would be covered in a sea of bacteria. Evolution doesn't work very well without short lifespans.
"Death to others"
Can't believe no one caught this as a dupe from Dec.
--- Tolerance is the axiomatic "virtue" of those without convictions ---
Maybe he's experimenting on himself! I mean, how long did it REALLY take to grow that beard!
If we do become immortal, imagine how that will change people's tendency to take risks. We all take small risks all the time. We take risks driving cars, flying, etc. because the odds of it killing us before we die naturally is small. But if we live 10x longer then we end up in the situation where the risks are likely to kill us before we die of natural causes.
Also imagine the wrongful death suites if someone would be expected to live another 500 years. Who will want to take any risks if it might cause them to die when they don't expect to die ever?
"You're welcome. Now, can I please let go of your balls?"
- CEO Nwabudike Morgan, "Five Centuries is Long Enough for Sid Meier"
... can it run Linux and play OGG files?
Do You Want to Live Forever?
Yes.
Unfortunately, the development and production of a functioning Cellular Regeneration and Entertainment Machine has been continuously thwarted by the soulless minions of orthodoxy.
The machine would transmit biogenic energy on a chromoelectric wavelength and send uplifting and entertaining messages to every nuclei of every cell in your body. Spend eight hours a day a day in one of these machines and your cells will never get bored, you'll never grow old ... and most importantly, you'll never die.
would you want your mother to live forever?
-- Microsoft is the most expensive commodity operating system and office suite vendor in the marketplace.
Risk evaluation would have to change.
Right now, you don't worry much about crossing the street against the light. The odds that you'll be struck and killed by a car you missed are pretty small, even when you take into account just how many times you jaywalk.
If you live forever, however, eventually you'll be hit and killed.
Assuming immortals still drive cars. I wouldn't; even with a very small chance to be involved in a fatal crash, per mile driven, eventually the Law of Large Numbers will catch up with me and I'll die behind the wheel. No thanks.
Behavior that's an acceptable level of risk over the course of a normal lifespan becomes unacceptable as lifespans increase.
If you look beyond the SF theme, it is all about society and how it reacts on this kind of changes.
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
Supposedly your nose and ears continue to grow as you age.
Just think how large they will be after 1000 years. It's frightening.
If humans could live forever, or several hundred years, we'd see a great increase in laws that attempt to preserve life. Compare the difference between an injury robbing you of the last 20 years of your life or robbing you of another 1000 years and you'll see why I believe that.
I happen to believe we have already been legislated into being sissies and already put to much stress on the quantity of life over the quality of it and if we increase our lifespan it'll only get worse. I bet we'd have to wear helmets just to walk down the street. Motorcycles would surely be outlawed. And so on.
Screw that! It's better to burn out than fade away!
All we need is a really big desert.
In 25 years I'll be 47. Unless something really bad happens to me I'd take immortality at that age. I'm willing to settle for a fully functional cryo chamber to hold me till the immortality kinks are worked out though. My cryo chamber has to be like those dream machines in Vanilla sky.
Immortality... he better get it right!
"There is no real right or wrong, just what the majority accepts at the time."
Subtract 50 years for secret government research and this was already possible in the 1980's. Perhaps before.
This quote is attributed to a lot of people in a lot of versions. The earliest I could find is Frederick the Great in 1757.
Free Manning, jail Obama.
If the programmers at Microsoft lived for 1000 years, they would have time to patch 60% of the security holes in their products... ;)
"Nature bats last..."
Interesting counterpoint:
From Eurekalert: University of Manchester makes made-to-measure skin and bones a reality using inkjet printers
Do You Want to Live Forever?
Fear of mortality is the number one cause of the world's ills. Wanting to live forever is the pipe dream extension of that fear, and may actually escalate man's desperate desire to prolong himself. That's what I figure.
- IP
This would give a whole new meaning to "Life in Prison!"
Homer no function beer well without.
Imagine getting paid for 935 years while you pursue your own interests...
Unless your sole purpose in life to destroy everything else, you will find more time to devote to things that you always wanted to do. This will lead to a burst of creativity and development, and since all the wisdom you accumulated in 70 years isn't lost, you still have time to develop, implement, and share everything you know.
I think a thousand year life will allow some of us to visit mars and remote areas of our solar system in person, and do other things -- like devote 100 years to art, another 100 to mathematics, another 100 to biology, and a big chunk to sex! SS isn't flawed, because while the first batch of pensioners and workers may face some hardships, it will all be over in their lifetime!!!
compared to the number of people paying into the system. When you double the number of people drawing from the system but do not do the same for the number paying in something will break.
the solution isn't higher taxes, the solution is to fix the system. Look at Chile, a country most of us would consider beneath the US. They had a system modeled on ours but switched because they knew it was doomed.
The only reason it isn't fixed is because most of the current congressman know they won't be in office when it HAS to be fixed. They don't care. Right now it buys them votes to NOT fix it and to scare the bejeezus out of the "we are entitled seniors" group.
Social Security like the current tax system has been transformed from the ideal goals set out by 40 plus years of meddling to be over complex scheme to buy votes.
There is a problem. Too many people put it off as minor because they read some half-wit website that cannot even do basic math.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
If the majority of people didn't die, we'd undoubtably end up with new ideas being squelched even harder than they are now, as the carriers of the old ideas (e.g. Earth is flat) will never die.
We need to move forward with innovative thinking over the span of centuries and not recycle the same arguments over and over again. Imagine the evolution vs. creation argument never ending. Ever!
I really think it's funny that doctors who are mending bones, restoring vision and helping people to walk again are coming under attack by "religious" people who receive donations which are used to buy nice cars and mansions. Give CBN 10,000,000 and they'll buy some more planes and maybe feed 1,000 people in Africa while they shove Jesus down their throat. Give it to a doctor and he can really perform miracles.
"Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit. A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit. Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire. Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them."
What would you do with eternity?
JMD
When all else fails, feel free to panic.
By living forever, I want to have to flee the solar system in my early youth because the sun is turning into a red giant. Of course, I also hope to be outside the solar system long before them, but I'd like to come back to visit my birth planet periodically. Later on, also in what I'd consider to be my early youth, I'd like to be able to sit back and watch the Milky Way galaxy collapse into a large black hole already at its center. I'd like to be able to measure lifetimes of stars as ticks on my stopwatch. A thousand years isn't anywhere near forever.
Reject Fear - Embrace Hope
- MIT Technology Review Not Up To Reviewing Healthy Life Extension Technology
- Aubrey de Grey responds
- Technology Review editor responds
- The TR forum for this article - lots of good comments
I strongly urge you to read the articles and the (highly dubious) editorials and have your say as to what sort of journalistic ethics you expect from a publication like the TR.The article got me reminiscent of Blade Runner..
Tyrell: Would you like to be modified?
Roy: Stay here. -- I had in mind something a little more radical.
Tyrell: What-- What seems to be the problem?
Roy: Death.
Tyrell: Death. Well, I'm afraid that's a little out of my jurisdiction, you--
Roy: I want more life, fucker.
Tyrell: The facts of life. To make an alteration in the evolvment of an organic life system is fatal. A coding sequence cannot be revised once it's been established.
Roy: Why not?
Tyrell: Because by the second day of incubation, any cells that have undergone reversion mutations give rise to revertant colonies like rats leaving a sinking ship. Then the ship sinks.
Roy: What about EMS recombination.
Tyrell: We've already tried it. Ethyl methane sulfonate as an alkylating agent a potent mutagen It created a virus so lethal the subject was dead before he left the table.
Roy: Then a repressive protein that blocks the operating cells.
Tyrell: Wouldn't obstruct replication, but it does give rise to an error in replication so that the newly formed DNA strand carries the mutation and you've got a virus again. But, uh, this-- all of this is academic. You were made as well as we could make you.
Roy: But not to last.
Tyrell: The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long. And you have burned so very very brightly, Roy. Look at you. You're the prodigal son. You're quite a prize!
Roy: I've done questionable things.
Tyrell: Also extraordinary things. Revel in your time.
Roy: Nothing the god of biomechanics wouldn't let you in heaven for
*IMHO I don't aproove of aproaching the self-termination of life as a "bug" or a on/off feature. Self termination is an intrinsic and fundamental element of the whole design.
- these are not the droids you are looking for -
I do not want to live forever. I believe death is a very important part of life.
I want to live my life fully knowing full well that I will eventually cease to exist. This keeps me in the present and makes me grateful for the slice of time I have found myself existing in. I want to do my thing and be gone with it like billions have done before me, leaving room for the next generations.
I do not believe in an afterlife yet I do wonder if any remnants of my consciousness will remain after I die. If so, neat; if not, I won't be around to deal with it.
I believe we humans need certain death as a motivation to have a good life!
A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous, got me?
Despite that, we'll get this right eventually. Mammals don't wear out; their own cells kill them by evolved-in timeout first. We'll probably reach the point where people die at the rate of about 0.5% per year independent of age.
You have to take into account the notion that societies change as older generations die off.
Did you ever see any of the protests in Moscow, calling for the return of Communism? *Everyone* in the demonstration was old.
A lot of things we take for granted in society are made easier by the fact that the people who we consider to have archaic ideas tend to die off and let the younger folk decide what defines society.
Two more issues that come to mind are resentment between the different "classes" of human (think rich/poor) and that people granted a much extended lifespan wont take any risks, for instance they may consider driving in a car too dangerous.
Hmmm... so did the article somehow come to us from the *future*? If the author doesn't live to be 1000 years old, at least we know he'll still be alive next month... and somewhere between today and two weeks from now someone must have invented a time machine to send the article back in time.
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
more than 300 years old.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Imagine how long that sucker could get in a few thousand more years! At .5 inch per month, thats 2500 feet added on to what looks to be a foot and a half already in place.
Question: "If you could live forever, would you and why?" Answer: "I would not live forever, because we should not live forever, because if we were supposed to live forever, then we would live forever, but we cannot live forever, which is why I would not live forever." -- Miss Alabama in the 1994 Miss Universe contest.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Stuff pissing you off is probably the main cause of aging.
Of course, the scientific research into this is still in the stone age so go with whatever makes you feel young.
Hah - just work on developing "math groupies", and we can multitask our first 100 years in art/math/bio/sex. Maybe immortality is easier...
--
make install -not war
In the words of D.R.I.'s "Underneath The Surface", "I don't wanna live forever, I'll leave that to you, I just wanna live until there's nothing left to do."
What's the point in living, if there's nothing to live for?
... can only hold so many people!
Do you really want to cheat our post-human descendents out of their existence for the sake of immortality? I don't think of humanity as the step in the chain. As long as men are still born with nipples, we still have a long way to go. Kudos Terry Gilliam.
I don't really want to live much past 80 or 90. Now, if I could look and act like I were 20... it might be a different story. I, for one, am more concerned about premature death due to the stupidity of humanity in general, not due to age. I imagine after 100 years, you don't want to live too much. All the Guiness recordholders for age seem to have no quality of life whatsoever.
where are they hiding?
It's time to spell 'millennium' correctly or chew bubblegum, and I am all out of gum.
Is this a sigs-optional kind of place? 'Cause I am totally down with that if you know what I mean.
You're under 25, right?
Bearing surfaces wear, some parts are plastic, rather than elastic, teeth erode etc
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
If a thousand year life span was available and only the rich could afford to get it, it would be a death sentence to everyone else. If this occurred, it would be the most extreme example of the have and have-nots. As a free society, we can't allow this inequality to happen. The treatment should be and must be free and to available all. Economically, the differences between rich and poor would also have to be weakened. Who wants to live poor for a thousand years?
have we seen this article before on slashdot a while back. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4003063.stm
You can stop aging. Hell, you may even reverse it. What you can't stop is all of the _other_ causes of death, ie. accidents and disease. Maybe someday we'll even cure all diseases. That's swell. But what'll stop that bus from mowing you over when you step off the curb at the wrong instant. Let's see them try to put that back together. Face it. We'll all die. The only immortality we'll ever see is through whatever legacy we leave behind, be it some significant contribution to mankind, our children, or just a scribble on a stone that says "Here lies a schmuck."
Living forever?? Who would you pick besides yourself to live forever? Your spouse? Your children? Death is change. Do we want to become stagnet? Do we want a world without children? How many people would be willing to take risks if they where going to throw away 500 years? Of course there may be people willing to take those risks just so they can possibly die for a good reason. And yes some projects that might take a hundred or two hundred years may happen because people would be willing to take that long.
Unless we end up expanding our living space ie. Going off planet. I see this as one of the great bad ideas of all time.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Government scrap pensions.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
For someone whose body might be good for a thousand years, all else being equal s/he is probably going to slowly knock the shit out of themselves. Think of the accumulation of injuries many of us have picked up over 20, 30, or (for me) 40 years. Hell, by the time many people make it to 60, they're pretty beat up even if basically healthy.
Now try avoiding all that wear and tear with ten times our current reasonable max lifetime. How boring of a life are we willing to live to avoid twisted ankles, separated ribs, bumps to the head, or food poisoning, not to mention the everyday accumulated risk of transporation, equipment failures, natural disasters, screwing in a freakin' light bulb. The mind boggles at the possibilities. Give me a shot at it!
Luke, help me take this mask off
...since I'd have to eternally deal with my ex-wife.
I know you mean well, but have you ever had that much time to yourself? Sure, you'll start off working on that conf-file-gui app you wanted to write, but after a while, your intrest will fade and you'll find yourself going to the doctor, asking for more percoset and the like.
You'll become a bit [more] reclusive, and slightly messier. Your friends won't want to come over any more because they say you're 'acting weird', and your xanax just isn't cutting it any longer.
Do you really want to spend your life like this? Of course you don't. So quit being a baby and just die.
That what angered him the most about dying was not reading tomorrow's newspaper.
I'd have to agree. Living forever would give you that possibility of a new day.
What is music when you despise all sound?
The UK moved from a system like SS to a "privatized" one like the one proposed by Bush. Earlier this month it was described as a "bloody mess" by an English economist, summarizing the general conclusion there.
--
make install -not war
I want to live forever.
I want to see what advances we make. I want to see the unfolding of the human story. I want to see how it all ends. I don't want to miss any of it!
The article mentioned donations. Are there any charities seeking donations now that are involved in this kind of work?
"Do I dare disturb the universe?"
Here's hoping the tecnology occurs in my lifetime!
Ever since watching Bicentenial Man, I've always dreamed of that sort of life. It sure would be nice being able to choose when I've had enough. All the while living in perfect health, thanks to the marvels of hyper efficient synthetic parts.
I don't know about anyone else, but I imagine 300-400 years would pass before I would even think about getting off my ass...
Sign me up!
Isn't this the same guy referenced in a newscientist (or something) article a while ago? (as referenced by slashdot - like I read the news) They also had a counterarticle by an actual scientist in the field...
The funniest part was the counter artical mentioned several other historical figures who:
1. Prophsized that eternal life was almost within our grasp, and
2. Are all now dead and burried.
"Personally, I've been hearing all my life about the Serious Philosophical Issues posed by life extension, and my attitude has always been that I'm willing to grapple with those issues for as many centuries as it takes." - Patrick Nielsen Hayden
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
but it always struck me that the Klingons would want to risk death, for it's own sake. Death is the primary goal. The sooner they get whacked in an honorable fashion, the sooner they get to meet Kahless The Unforgettable and take the dime tour of Sto-Vo-Kor, or whatever their after life was.
If you want to take Star Trek seriously at all, I guess it could be taken as a indictment of the Federations's, and the modern world's obsession with long life, perfection, and all-around, well-scrubbed goodness.
And yeah, it would hurt to furrow bony brow ridges which is why the Klingons would get off on it.
Why do I have this? I don't smoke.
All us middle-aged geeks want to be well retired by 2038 so we don't have to deal with the *nix/Linux 32-bit date problem - or at least semi-retired so we can be called back on consultancy basis and hefty fee.
... I should by ready for my 10^75th rejuvination treatment by then. :-)
feh...I'm already out of it. I run 64-bit Gentoo GNU/Linux on a dual opteron. Call me when 64-bit dates are due to roll over
Of course, that won't stop me from charging 500 Euros/hour (dollars will no doubt be worthless by then, thanks to the long term effects of our current administration's policies) to those dumb enough to still be running 32-bit in three decades.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
I have the immortality rings, all you need is a little magnetism
165 161 155 130 153 165 130
what is the opposite of living your life as if every day were your last?
Thanks, but no thanks.
Dyslexics have more fnu.
Count Dracula 'fixed' the aging thing centuries ago.. ;)
I don't see it in the highest-rated comments and, with the volume of posts, this might be a dupe so I apologize in advance if that's the case, but...
Immortals also die.
Just because your body will never naturally die doesn't mean you'll live forever. There are diseases that act in means outside what we're discussing. There's suicide. There's murder. And (I don't remember where I read it; if someone has a cite, I'd be grateful) actuarial science shows that the rate at which people die in accidents is sufficiently high that even if we never got sick or old we'd still manage to off ourselves by doing something stupid sometime before our 500th birthdays. On average.
People would still die. As individuals, we're just too stupid to live forever, no matter how sturdy our bodies are.
Note that there is a difference between life span and life expectancy. The former is a biological limit, and the latter is s trick of statisticians.
Some animals have infinite life span, like crocodiles. Others, like humans, have anomalies that guarantee death on a long enough time line.
If you want to live forever, just get rid of the anomalies, as de Grey suggests.
Robo-Blogs of the world: UNITE!
I think entropy has other plans for us.
But if you really think about it, with the growing areas in nano technology, the answer to aging will probably lie somewhere with that. Mutations and repairing of cells may easily, say 10-15 years in the future, be fixed by specified nanites that travel throughout the person's body constantly repairing. By then, the human race will probably have or should be out off of earth, and on to different planets (mars and such) that population growth will take some time to be effected by this age prolonging procedure. (not to mention the fact that it will probably cost in the millions or billions..) I've also seen readers posting about how living for 1000 years may suck, truth is, if this were to work, people would age at a proportional rate. i.e once the procedure is given to the person, they will either stay at the current age or just age alot slower, not just adding onto the years you would usually have.
If we all lived for(almost)ever, there would have to be almost no children.
Think about that for a minute.
No children, no youth, no one to teach... Life would get boring, for starters. The completely open mind of a child, and the nieve ambitions of our youth, drive us to improve and change and be better people. We learn to accept things as they are as we get older, and generally that's a good thing, but it also causes us to overlook new possibilities. For the most part, it's the young that counter that.
Immortality = stagnation.
The timing is hilarious...I just completed his book The First Immortal, which is long on vision and light on substance but an interesting viewpoint nonetheless. If today's story is true, then there may not be any need for an interim storage solution like cryonics after all.
Yes, fixes are tiny now. Which is why we should do something now.
What would you advocate? Wait until it's a far larger crisis than today? Wait to see what projections are correct and hope for the best?
Why not be proactive and fix the problem, if it's easy enough to do so at the moment. If it's not much of a change than why should anyone be resistant to it.
I do like the 1-2% of social security money going into private accounts, but my main reason for supporting this is that is gives lower income people who die early more of an inheritance to help lift thier children out of the lower income brackets. I think that's a worth social change even if Social Security itself is not much affected by the chage (though I think it will be through a substantially higher rate of return, current social security funds make less than money market rates).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
British Author Peter Hamilton has explored the possibility of super extended lifetimes through repeated rejuvinatons in his novels Misspent Youth (2002) and Pandora's Star (2004). The procedure leads to lots of randy old people packed in teen bodies. Bring it on.
I'm not a biologist, but isn't that a bunch of crap? If that were the only thing preventing us from living forever, then why don't iron supplements extend life?
||:|::
Maybe with longer lifespans people and governments would stop taking a short-term view of things like global warming or pollution and some good could actually be done.
After all, its one thing to be dead and gone when we run out of fossil fuels or the world overheats but quite another if you are going to have to live through it.
Reading code is like reading the dictionary - you have to read half of it before you can go back and understand it.
An extended lifespan would present incredible problems for the justice system. Although you still plod though life at the same pace, serving out a 'life' sentence could be considered by some a cruel punishment.
Imagine a 900+ year sentence. These mind-boggling (and rediculous) sentences are handed out on a regular basis here in the US. But in de Grey's world a sentence of 100 years for each of three separate charges to be served consecutively would not be something the convict would consider a death sentence.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
Except for the obvious difference that the people who receive welfare have not paid a bloody dime into the system. It is those of us who pay income tax that provide the benefits to welfare recipients, on the basis that it is better for all of us to be forced to support them, than for us to see them starving beside the street.
On the other hand, Social Security is sold to the people as a system where they pay money in over their working career so that they can then have it back after they retire.
Which would be great except for the problem of it not working that way.
Instead people working now are paying for the people getting social security today. Private accounts would move it in the direction of acting as you outlined, but currently it is nothing like that apart from a notation about how much you've paid in so far to taunt you.
I pay social security, other people get that money. I pay taxes, other people get that money. To me there is no difference. I should just pay some level of taxes and expect that if I fall on hard times in the future there is some way of helping me out. I don't like paying into a system that has such a low rate of return that I am required to independantly contribute to many other forms of savings (like Roth and 401k) so that I'll have actual money when I retire instead of hypothetical money that I cannot count on and is hardly enough to live on anyway.
There should be some middle ground between social security and welfare such that I could pay less into the system, keep more for investment, but also provide better support for those that really need it.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You know, I used to see things the way you do -- I really believed that we are the ones to blame for our own misery when it comes to working insane hours and getting very little time to ourselves. I really believed that we have to work so much (especially here in the US) because of our own greed -- essentially that we are to blame if we feel we work too much or too hard. It's our fault for being greedy bastards that want to buy all this cool stuff.
I have come to the opposite conclusion. The system really is designed to get you hooked in to a lifetime of unrewarding labor, and you really have minimal say in the matter.
Here's how it goes for most people born into the lower classes:
Age 0-18 - free education provided by the government where you are indoctrinated in various ways to tolerate long hours of tedium and monotony to better prepare you for whatever path of indentured servitude should you choose later in life. You are taught a bare minimum of real academic skills so as to make attending a university almost compulsory for all but the most menial of jobs. Additionally, the 'schoolwork' assigned to you is pointless, mundane, and at best only prepares you for the boring tasks you will be almost capriciously assigned later in life by your corporate masters.
Age 18 - Choose to either work for minimal pay as some form of "blue-collar" worker without a college education, or you can choose to attend college after which hopefully you will find a slightly less tedious job for better pay.
Age 18-22 - Become indebted to various banking conglomerates in order to pay for your college education. The debt is so large that it will take 10-20 years to pay off for most people.
Age 22+ - Graduate from college with a degree. At this point you are minimally competent to contribute labor and hopefully generate wealth for some corporation. Note that at this point you are tens of thousands of dollars in debt and you have little choice but to find work as quickly as possible. Spurred on by this form of motivation -- you accept your fate and begin to adapt to a life wasted in an office sitting at a desk solving minute and inconsequential problems so as to better lubricate the large corporate machine that you are but a cog in.
Profit-oriented capitalism basically guarantees that the majority of people work really hard to ensure profits for the corporation, which is owned by a few lucky individuals. Those profits are by and large created by the labor of the individuals at the bottom of the corporate hierarchy. Yet they see little or no part in the profits.
The few grow rich exploiting the labor of the many.
It's a story as old as time itself. Whether you be a Roman putting the conquered to work for you, or a feudal lord demanding labor of your peasants in exchange for the priviledge of using the land -- mankind has a real love for organizing itself into a hierarchy where a few lucky people are extravagently wealthy at the expense of the many.
If anyone can tell me why we like to organize ourselves in such a way I would be really grateful as this question has gone unanswered for me for quite some time now..
Let's presume you get this treatment and have a potential for a 1000 year lifespan. Let's go one step further and presume you're a successful person who through thrift and luck is able to achieve a financial nest-egg that eliminates the need to work for money and allows for some amount of leisure spending.
After 200 odd years, won't you have "seen it all"? Trips to all continents, all attractions, every museum, etc?
What about your spouse?
If you don't make enough for a permanent retirement, will you "retire" for a few years and then head off to college again? Get a new degree and start a new career?
To me this raises the same questions that extended use of the anti-narcolepsy drug modafinil raises -- how much capacity does the human mind have for experience?
I would like to recommend once more the novel Aritoi by Walter Jon Williams. Due to two things, life is very different in this future world - nanotechnology, and the leashing of multiple personalities, called Daimones.
At any rate, things are incredibly safe, and medicine is veryvery advanced, along with genetic manipulation. There is generally only one death, something called Breakdown (or Dorian Grey's Syndrome, IIRC), and people frequently live to see their second thousand.
At any rate, the above produces some problems in this society, so that's why I thought it was relevant.
The sad truth is that those who would have the ability to live 1000 years are just the type of people we don't want to have around.
Frankly put, we, as a society are not mature enough to be able to deal with this gift. Just as you do not give diamond rings to two-year-olds, this gift is beyond humankind's current ability to grasp.
Well, good idea: Idiots will be killed off relatively early through their dumb actions Bad idea: A bunch of the smart ones left are gonna be assholes, just like they are now!
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Just the list of projects I want to work on exceed what I can probably accomplish in a standard human lifespan, and I'm thinking of more all the time. Plus the chance to see how we evolve both technologically and sociologically over the next hundred, thousand and million years is exciting! Bring it on! Give me the pill (or potion or whatever)!
Don't underestimate the power of The Source
You know, we see these "No More Aging" articles on Slashdot every couple of months or so, yet I've never seen anyone consider the memory problem. Obviously, I can't say for sure, but I'd bet money that humans don't have unlimited memory capacity.
What happens when we run out? Will our mind simply start over-writing our old memories with new ones, or will we simply stop creating long-term memories? Could we actually cause ourselves psychological illnesses as a result? How many years can we live before we need to start worrying about it, anyway?
I'd like to think that, at some point, we'll have a way to expand our memory capacity, but given what we know about the human brain now, that's a long way off.
It may be possible, like all things are... but anyways bottom line is, things doesn't work that way, we're not meant to live for ever, we're not meant to live in this world eternally... -- Again, it _may_ be possible, but consider this: Overpopulation - birth rate is a serious issue _nowdays_... imagine in 40 years from now on (when people get to be immortal) If we don't die it will be likley that Mother earth will kill us, and find a way to balance it again - No living thing is meant to live for ever. -- so, what if the earth doesn't look for a way to re-balance it, and we can actually live for ever? well, our mind would get tired, we will be young in age and very old and detiriorated in our minds, pretty much like our grandpa's... Our brains, has a maximun capacity, but what if the brain doesn't get older? Well, Earth is pretty dirty these days, so our lungs will get really dirty, we would eventually die. What if our brains and lungs doesn't get older or dirty? -- Our muscles will get deteriorated, you see... it's meant to be, we born to die. Life's like that.
WARNING: DO NOT LET DR. MARIO TOUCH YOUR GENITALS. HE IS NOT A REAL DOCTOR!
SS is not a "safety net" for people who for some unimaginable reason stop making money to support themselves. SS is basically a retirement fund that you pay into your whole life; if you've ever gotten a paycheck in your life, you would see that line where it says "social security tax". This is money you pay into the system in order to be guaranteed money when you can't make it. SS has nothing to do with welfare, other than the fact that republicans want to get rid of it. If you don't expect to get old, you're in for a rude awakening. You can't, however, expect the conditions that lead you into poverty (and hence welfare) at a young age.
Ask around how many younger workers today think they are getting that money.
To claim it's a savings program where what you pay in you get back is simply false to most peoplel indeed, false in reality.
The reality is that the money I pay in today is going to people getting SS today - thus a saftey net. My hypothetical money I may get out later from the program comes from other people paying into the system at that time - but because there may not be enough people they are talking about how taxes will have to go up 20% or benefits slashed to make up the difference.
If Social Security were really a "Savings Account" none of that would be needed because money people put in the system would be there for them later (although at a horrific rate of return). But the fact that is does not really work that way means that to claim it is a "savings account" is a very dangerous notion because you will come to incorrect conclusions about what can happen to the program.
Later on when two people are paying into social security for ever single person withdrawing funds - that is the point when something has to give, and you will see it's not like a bank account at all.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This is a no-brainer, really. Overpopulation is a problem even with current mortality rates. Breeding would have to be controlled extremely strictly, but I don't see how that could be accomplished. More likely, immortality would only be available for the wealthy, which would obviously cause even more problems for humanity.
Curing sleep would give me 33% more usable time, and is much easier than curing age. There also isn't any problem with overpopulation, or other "moral" arguements.
Not that this wasn't entirely predictable.
A few points:
-Most religions will speak out against this.
-Not everybody would want this due to moral, religous, and personal reasons.
-Not everybody would be able to afford this (although I'm sure you'd have plenty of time to make payments afterwards!)
-Even if they got past all of that, whos to say they'd actually live much longer? Instead of dieing at 98 due to natural causes, they die at 120 due to cancer.
-Who wants to actually ensure they only way they die is by a disease or through somebody's intervension? Most elderly don't mind that their end comes, not just because of the medical problems they have, but because they've lived for quite some time.
-I'm sure there would be a prime time to opt for the procedure and that would probably be somewhere in the range of 22-38 years of age in which you'd be making a decision that you may not agree with in 100 years.
-If you had this done at age 28 and you looked 28 for as long as you lived and you were 200 years old, what type of credibility would you have?
You put all of this together and I doubt many people would actually elect to go through with this.
At least in the short term, it is quite possible to escape entropy. It just requires the application of energy. When all the energy in the universe has fled, then we will have a problem, but that has little bearing on 1000 year life spans.
Jeesh, couldn't you have just linked to the article and excerpted the relevant counterpoint? This is a Copyright violation as posted. Try to do better next time, eh?
I think overpopulation might be a short term problem. BUT, what if we deal with a lot of the issues facing the world given our longevity and most everyone on the planet joins the "First World?" If everyone lived for a 1000 years, what happens when everyone reaches 500? Could we still reproduce? Since we seem to be only able to reproduce from age 14-50, what happens if the population's average age is 300?? Will anybody be able to reproduce? Everyone might reach an age where a birth would be a rare occurance or it just might stop happening! Immortality could be the demise of our species because people will still die due to accidents, war, and certain pesty illnesses and we'd have no one to replace it (it happened to the Ents!!)
Aubrey de Grey is a crackpot, and a hermit. His ideas are not new, or revolutionary, and if you bother to dive deeper into the subjects he deals with, you'll realize they're as stupid as hydrogen powered cars (unless you're stupid enough to believe in that too).
It is interesting to note that de Grey believes that people will voluntarily cease having children in order to solve any overpopulation problems. This may be as flawed as his assumption that a population problem would continue to manifest itself beyond a certain point. Consider China, if you will. Their population control and birth rate controls have worked, but only with enforcement by governments. Logically, some people will understand the need to control population, in certain areas. However, most people in free countries will not stand for it. It is the forbidden fruit syndrome. The more it is forbidden, the more people want it.
Now consider that people currently inhabit about 54% of the earth's surface. This number includes farms and any areas not totally uninhabited. The average amount of land occupied by one person in many countries is at or over an acre (you can google this to verify). Now, this is an average that includes farms with single families, etc. Considering this, at current birth rates with reduced die off, overpopulation of the globe will take some time. To that point there will be issues with relocating people out of already overcrowded areas, such as China and India, but overall there will be no significant overcrowding globally for some time.
Now here is where the basic flaw of his thinking comes in. He is only conisdering that we inhabit the land masses of the Earth. Rejecting space travel for the moment, that leaves 70% of the Earth's surface uninhabited. Oceans cover the majority of the surface and have the potential to be colonized.
Alright, now for space travel. We have within our technology the ability to travel to and occupy at least one celestial body. Although it would need to be resolved internationally, the moon can be colonized using current technology. Heck, engineers at NASA figured out how to do it in the sixties and seventies, and they believed that we would already be up there by now. If not for the demise of the space race, we might be. Now consider that this life extension will not occur for another 30 years, and the overpopulation will not occur until some time after that. This provides a significant window for technological advancement in other fields that could advance space travel and engineering technologies.
Considering the window of opportunity that presents itself for technological advancement, the assumption that overpopulation itself will be a significant issue for long, if at all, is a flawed assumption. It is simply a possibility, not a certainty. In all likelihood, by the time this life extension is possible and available to the population as a whole, there will be many other factors at play. You must remember that although it may be possible by 2030, that doesn't mean it will be cheap by 2030. Most likely the cost will remove it from all but the most wealthy individuals list of options for some time. Realistically, I wouldn't expect this technology to be available to the population at large for at least fifty years after introduction. Barring a governmental mandate, as per vacinations, there would be no incentive for companies to make it affordable. Anyone who really wants to live that long will pay for it. Not to mention, misplaced fears of overcrowding will probably be used as an excuse to keep it out of the hands of the bourgeoisie.
To summarize, the notion that this technology will be made available and affordable for regular use within our lifetimes is unlikely, if not pure fantasy. Whether or not it is possible has nothing to do with it. On top of that, the notion that if made available it will cause overcrowding in any rapid manner is also based on misconceptions of population trends and also does not account for technological advancements. Finally, assuming overcrowding does become an issue, it will either reverse itself through the spread of civilization beyond current bounds due to technological advancements, or it will be a fatal factor. There will never be a voluntary, rational reduction in birth rates. Even with re
Just don't let that get in the way of living your life.
Social Security exists for one reason, and that reason has been verified by scientific study, people don't save their own money. Thats not to say YOU don't save your money, or educated wealthy people don't save their money. No. The average joe schmoe, the normal guy, doesn't save money for retirement, and if he does, doesn't save nearly enough.
On the other hand, why would people need to save when there is social security?
Might not the existance of the program have something to do with poor rates of savings.
I kind of agree with you that if people really did live for a very long time, Social Security would not be needed - instead they would just work until they had saved up enough to live comfortably on investment return, and at that point could work as nessicary for any apot funds they might want (like a big trip). It sure would make real estate more valuable...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
http://www.cartoonbank.com/product_details.asp?msc ssid=LNEDF5GPW9X39NMW6NBSU9Q75ERCERP8&sitetype=1&d id=4&sid=43960&pid=&keyword=technology§ion=car toons&title=undefined&whichpage=3&sortBy=popular
--
"You've only got one finger left,
and it's pointing at the door."
burblebeepburblewarble
"Orthodoxy is unconsciousness" - Orwell
So if everyone were to live 1000 years. What would we do with people who had mental or physical disabilities? We would have to take care of them for a long ass time. Would it be worth it?
Perhaps we would leave them out for the wolves, but how could our society handle politics and political correctness. Fortunately, people die rather quickly, 50-75 years. So our enemies change at least once or twice every century. Imagine being at the throats of the Soviet Union for thousand years.
I think living that long, or even something like 200 years, would seriously give us enough time in one's lifetime to make destroying the world, in a non-religious sense, more of a possibility.
... if you lived for ever, you wouldn't need social security. There'd by time to make and lose fortunes. Maybe there'd be a realisation that the simple things are more than enough. A place to sleep, a loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and thou. Oh, and broadband internet.
... can Aubrey de Gray find us a fountain of SMART?
Sustainability and energy independence essay
When you are born, your parents invest $10 at 3% insterest. When you are ready to retire in 1000 years you will be worth $100,000,000,000,000
Sign me up!!!
When looking at retirees, there are basically three classes of people:
1) Those who prepared carefully with their own private investments. They bought real estate, they invested in the Stock Market, what have you. They drive BMWs and nice Cadillacs, wear nice clothes, and have a golf course as their back yard.
2) Those who are comfortable with Social Security and (union) retirement. These are the types who worked at Ford Motor Co. for 30 years. Neither feast nor famine - they drive a 6-year-old Ford Taurus or Chevy Citation. They complain about utility bills, and have a monthly disposable income after base expenses of a few hundred.
3) Those who had no planning at all. These guys work at McDonald's when they can, eat dog food when they can't work, and live their golden years in desperation.
If people lived forever, the wealth equalizer of death would no longer work, and those who knew how to invest wisely would continue to get wealthier. We'd see a disparity of wealth that would make todays "shrinking middle class" look like a walk in the park.
Once you reach a particular level of wealth, you no longer need to work to increase your wealth! If you know what to do with wealth, the wealth itself can earn you profits from investments!
So I imagine, in this life of eternities, a quickly separating class of super-mega wealthy that live very long lives of ecstacy, devoid of necessary work, while the poor continue to breed and die since they cannot afford the eternity treatments, and live with more daily risks.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
SS's weakness has been known from the day it started - it's a Ponzi scheme paying current beneficiaries out of current receipts. It's only managed to muddle along so far because of repeated rate increases, extending the retirement age, and an increasing working population. Those trends are coming to an end. When I become elgible in 10-15 years, my generation will transition from being the biggest sources of revenues for SSI to the biggest drain. And we'll be calling in such wonderful investments such as the Zero Coupons the Feds sold the SS Trust back in the 90's. Zeroes are a little shell game that defers the expense of a bond until the bond comes due. So not only will there be more beneficiaries asking for payouts, they'll be calling in the zeroes that funded the deficits.
Roosevelt was able to pass SSI legislation because he knew damn well he wouldn't be around to clean up the mess he'd created. Most /. readers, however, will be around to witness what FDR wrought and it isn't going to be very pretty. Watch for terms like "Consensual Euthanasia" and "dead weight baby boomers" to start circulating. You'll see front page stories (even on the NYT if it's still around) extolling the Eskimo's way of death.
I don't think we have to worry about becoming non-functional after a certain age. Some one somewhere would have human (male and female) DNA backed up in a lab somewhere where we could recreate ourselves artificially. We'll just have to hope there are thousands of individuals DNA to choose from, or else we will all become a bunch of clones eventually.
It happened to the Númenóreans!!!
You're being very selective in your vision, choosing the best doctors and the worst "religious" people, to prove that money is best spent on medicine.
I will admit that there are excellent doctors, who could save more lives with more money for their work/research. However, I'm sure you will admit that there are doctors (hopefully a minority) who do not really care about their patients, and are in their profession for the prestige/money. Providing them with more money would have minimal effect.
I will also admit that there are horrible "religious" people, who profess charity for the poor while driving luxury cars and eating caviar. Or ones who make no effort to care for the physical needs of the poor, spending lots of money preaching to them, but making no attempt to prevent them from dying of starvation/disease or living lives of abject poverty. To my knowledge, these are not the majority, even though they are some of the more highly visible.
If we're going to choose the best of one, let's choose the best of the other. Let's compare who would did more for the world with $X000, a doctor (choose whoever you like) or Mother Teresa. And maybe one of the many people in India she helped will cure cancer, or help someone else, lest you argue that the doctor's reesarch advances are permanent improvements whereas saving somebody from starvation does not feed the next generation.
Uteri seems to be less of a problem; at least some women's work fine through age 66.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
This may give Slashdotters a lifespan long enough to find a chick that's willing to sleep with them.
I had to rack my brain for a good 10 minutes before I could remember which movie that was a quote from...
I'm a postdoctoral researcher at a major US medical research center (i.e., not at the Banzai Institute for Biomedical Engineering and Strategic Information). Because I do aging research for a living, I'm familiar with Aubrey De Grey's so-called research. I can assure you that he is to legitimate, experimentally-based aging research what Rael is to cloning: an opportunistic, publicity-seeking fraud. Lots of hot air, zero experiments to back up his outrageous claims.
I've got adult ADD, you insensitive clod! I can't prusue my own interests for a week, let long 935 years!
"The Internet is made of cats."
Oh, ye of little faith!
Heard any good sigs lately?
Using the current rate of crime where the convicted get sentenced to life in the pokey, there will be more prisons per city block than Starbucks...
I bought "The Mitochondrial Free Radical Theory of Aging", Aubrey's book, a couple years back.
It's a wonderful book... if you have the $120 to spend and want to be educated instead of entertained.
Go Aubrey! see you on sci.l-e
Very funny, but really I could think of worse things that to work with people like that!
Experience it seemed is undervalued in companies today, but if people lived a lot longer I think it would be held in far greater esteem.
I do fear the postings saying something like "Must have 100 years experience in Fragnorak" when it's only been around for five... everything that's a problem now could be scaled in wierd ways.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
you know, i love my wife dearly and look forward to 50 years or so of the standard ups and downs of marriage... but 500??!?! 750?!? ETERNITY? BAH! stick a fork in me already. m.
By the time we are able to e.g. replace defective genes to rejuvenate mitochondria, checking and error-correcting the DNA on a dish full of stem cells and reprogramming them to make new ova or spermatogonia will be old hat. We should have the difficulties of artifical gestation licked too, so women won't have to put up with the nuisances and hazards of growing babies in their bellies. Making another billion babies would mean ordering the hardware and waiting nine months.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
+3 Interesting
+2 Insightful
Personally, I'd rather die than experience 1000 years of arthritis, senility, and incontinence.
Does anyone know of any well thought out economical essays or papers that have been theorized with regards to the future lack of human aging? Will economics eventuallly turn to Star Trek-based one-for-all utopian communities, or will prosperity continue to be based on monetary rewards? Does anyone have any interesting links?
good god, grandkids!?!?
... or just to know everybody. sheesh.
dude, let's say you have two kids... and each of them has two kids... and each of them has two kids and each of them has two kids...even if each generation only happens once every 100 years... that's like 2 to the 9th or 10th power... dude... and then add all the older generations... you're gonna NEED a crapload of years just so send everybody christmas presents
m.
I was honestly thinking about this as I walked home from a funeral the other day 'What is it that brings the end, how do I stop it'. I recently have been quite healthy, insuring a much more fun way of life for many years, but the fear of something along the lines of cancer still sits in my head. I thought about applying the ideas of logic to the problem, ie: 1) how do we grow? 2) What stops our regeneration process? etc etc......
(Disclaimer: I'm going to be bashed by many christian devots, but the hell with it)
We human beings get bored of everything, and the only reasons why some of us don't get bored of life is that it's too short and we're always at risk to lose it. Try to imagine how you would enjoy life after having seen every releases from DOOM I to DOOM CLXII, (XOR) fscked thousands of chicks, visited every holyday places a dozen of times, having reached and kept the best professional position your skills can afford 150 years ago... I mean, all of those stuffs are enjoyable because they're difficult to get, because we've got too few time to enjoy them, and more generally because our lifetime in structured into relatively short and radically different periods corresponding to radically different experiences.
All of you who have been students know it: when there's no time pressure, nothing gets done. And if the normal way to terminate a life is to suicide oneself when still healthy but globally bored, then people will do that. If a couple of us need an incentive to make their lives more boring, and it happens to be socially useful, don't worry we'll find a way. Another way to deal with boreness would be to have riskier leisure: a society where the first cause of mortality is base jump rather than getting stuffed in one's own fat doesn't sound bad to me. A couple of healthy wars to renew the generations doesn't seem unlikely either; it might even become the favorite "exit door" for those power-whores who will constitute the oligarchy.
To make a nerdy metaphor, remember last time you played a game with a cheat code giving you infinite life: it eventually spoiled the game, and sure you weren't killed by aliens anymore, but after a while you gave up the game, which is just the equivalent of suicide in the real life. Real life might be a much funnier game which takes longer to be spoiled, but eventually it will, esp. if you know there's virtually no risk anymore.
About reproduction, I guess that losing the fear of death, together with an adequate social pressure, will lower it to an acceptible level. Once again, some properly enforced laws can help if required. But trust people to find ways to limit it, and trust them as well to get bored enough to eventually give up their lives, if only to the profit of their children.
So, sure this kind of technical advances will make the society look radically different, the average lifespan might be dramatically increased, but I'm quite confident that reproduction rates will be adapted and generation turnover will still happen one way or the other.
Through human language and communication we have essentially created an immortal collective conciousness. Each individual human is only a small step above an animal in terms of intellegence, except we have the ability to tranferr thoughts before we die. Writing a diary is a crude way of achiving immortality because it transfurs your thoughts into another medium wich can be later run in someone elses brain when they read it. Alot of information is lost in the writing process however. true immortality will be acheved only when uploading is invented. Untill then there will only be one copy of your conciousness. When this happens lifespans will be in billions of years not thousands. The conciousness or sole or ghost is simply a collection of your long term memorys and the information stored in how your neurons are interconnected. Theoretically this information could be copied onto a computer and run in a simulation. If you were to communicate with this simulation and it could recall all of the same memorys you have now, it would be you. If your memorys are erased you are essentially killed even if your body is still alive. Technically death actually occurs when the information is destroyed, such as cremation, bacterial decomposition,alshimers or a bullet. So in order to actually prevent death all someone has to do is make sure that the information stored in the layout of ther neurons and the chemical build up of there synapsys is not destroyed. This is called cryogenics. Cryogenicists goals should to figure out what information needs to be stored. Then they need to figure how to preserve this information, not nececarily the actual physical brain. Even if cell walls are poped open by ice crystals the information is still recoverable.(allthough that brain will never be able to function again without extensive repairs) The information is useless unless it can be run again, ethere in a computer or in a meat brain. A brain with no way of reccecitating a conciousness is like a book that cant be translated : completly useless(see voinach manuscript). In order to upload a brain there are several possible ways. (see wikinfo) 1 The black box idea is to simply tap the brain at the spinal colum and map the respons to stimuli.The black box method wont work because there are two many possible combinations of stimuli and as the stimuli are applied the brain will change. 2. Another way to do it would be some type of electromagnetc immaging system.(just about all pop science fiction uses this idea)EMI probably will never acheve the resolution ncecary. besids EMI only can see the active parts of the brain. If a uploader was to use an EMI the patient would have to activly recall all of his memorys(like that jim cary movie). This might be circumvented with some type of chemical tagging system. 3. Nanobots might be able to go through the brain and catalog each neuron and its connections. 4. A more achevable technology (50 years from now mayby)would be to put the brain in a meat slicer and scan each slice. The slices would have to be about the thickness of hal a neuron. The brain would have to be solidified to increase the accuracy of the slicing. The origonal copy would be destroyd. the synamps connections would somehow have to be chemmicaly tagged so a scanner could distinguish them from the rest of the meat. Once the information is recoverd there needs to be a computer fast enough to run the simulation. Currently computer requires a large number of electrons to transmit a bit. A quanom computer could use one electron to transmitt several bits by assigning a different value to each spin state. Current processors have smaller capacitors than a neuron. The main problem is they cant print a 3lb 3dimensinal chip that can rewrite its archetectur on the fly. Once in a computer the simulation could be tweaked to improve memory(ther would no longer be a size limit). The trivial brain functons like heart beat, and oter reflexes could be discarded. The human brain has a built in mechanism for for
I'll be halfway on the road to senility by then. No sense living like a drooling vegetable for hundreds of years.
People seem perfecting willing to accept either the concept that people will die at the same age they always have for some time to come, thereby making Social Security just fine as it is - or that indeed we will live forever in just a few decades and it will be caviar for all for eternity.
It seems really hard for people here to think about somewhere in the middle, that we might just live 200 years and still have to have something like social security to contend with. That is my position, is that both ends of the spectrum (six years increase in seven decades, or immortality) are far more unlikely than a scenario somewhere in between. That is the scenario unaccounted for and that people are unwilling to explore, dismissing it out of hand. Being the most likely scenario, it seems very illogical to me to ignore it.
Furthermore, if we do live forever what do you think the general population at large would think of the government just shutting down the program and taking all that money for themselves? I actually would not care as I have considered it a tax my whole life and if all that money was gone tomorrow I'd just say "eh". However if you were stupid enough to imagine it was some kind of fund with money that was yours in the first place I think you would be rather irked. So ever if we do live forever you have to think about graceful ways to back out of the program that will not enrage a majority of the populace. At the very least people in the program now would have to continue to be paid until they could get back working again, and frankly why would they want to when the mindset they had all thier lives was that they were done with work at sixty-five or seventy?
This issue is very real for me (as it should be for most Slashdot readers) because my parents are just in that band where they'll be taking social security sooner rather than later, and have made plans around that - I would like to see the program there for them when they retire but am taking no chances and am trying to make sure I can take care of them if SS cannot.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I'm pretty sure the majority of people given a choice between having babies and living a health vigorous life for +1000 years will choose the latter. Not all of course, see paragraph one. We don't even have to give up having babies entirely, but engage in a huge slow down. Say one baby per couple, per average lifespan to date. The rate of growth would slow and slow. Assuming accidental or eventual death it would even start to reverse at some point. In several centuries a couple of more population doubling may have occurred (I haven't done the math), but science will no doubt have progressed so far as to keep us all well fed.
Abrey De Grey may be onto something or not. I applaud his work not because I expect to live to One Thousand Years Plus, but because I believe in the Singularity with respect to progress. I think its most likely arrival is 50 to 100 years. An extra 50 human years nets me an immortality of transcendent survival in the machine. Maybe it comes in 30 years and I don't need De Grey's help. Maybe it comes in 300 years (I would mark this the outer bound for the Singularity), in which case I hope De Grey has gotten all the funding he wants.
I the meantime to hedge my bets even more, I'm getting brochures from Alcor
Letter To Iran
Has anybody touched on the fact that imortality would increase the population. If nobody dies where do all the mature new people go? I think we should start colinization of space maybe, or forget imortality alltogether.
You'll get to play Duke Nukem Forever, once that time comes !
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I'm sure he's still around somewhere, having faked his own death to get out of going to yet another birthday party for one of his descendants...
The bible records people living for centuries. Why not now ?
-- You can't give it, you can't even buy it, and you just don't get it!
If you could live for ever it woudl atleast solve the problems with space travel ok it may take 6 years to get to mars but when you live for ever what is 6 years mabye this is the way we get aroundt he vast distancis of space. If you build a box big enuth it could hold enuth food to last the trip we could move peopel off to over worlds a lot easyer than now.
There are as many people alive today as have ever died.
Therefore, half of those who have been born have never died.
Then it's plain to see that there is approximately a 50% chance you will never die.
There are more people alive then dead. Think about that for a moment. There are more people living, today, then have ever lived and died in total in all the generations of human beings.
Woman, after they reach menopause won't be able to have any more children, so people probably won't have much longer child-bearing ages then they do now. (although culture might adapt to have children raised by their 'young' and healthy grandparents or something, rather then young and inexperianced 30somethings).
But as studies have shown wealth usualy means people produce less children (I guess rich people have more intresting things to do with their time). Since life-extension will probably be expensive only rich, low-fertility people will be able to afford it.
I think it will also make people lazy, as they have will have infinite time to acomplish things they'll spend much less time working.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
The rich get richer and the poor get poorer until they commit suicide.
"When I die, I want to go quietly, like my grandfather, in his sleep... not screaming, like the passengers in his car."
A. Yeah, they sucked?
Anyone who has lost a family pet after 10 years has asked why can't they live longer? If the lifespans of dogs could be extended to even 30 years, it would save so much heartache from those of us that mourn the loss of them so terribly.
By becoming a US Marine Daly achieved immortality. This route is still available to many of us. See your local Marine recruiter and be sure to ask about how you might become part of the Corps enduring legend. Semper Fidelis.
First of all, it's going to cause an incredable uproar among some christians (I'm a christian and it wouldn't bother me because we would techincally still be mortal i.e. if I got shot in the face I'd still die). The fact that we all die eventually is sort of a key point of christianity. Secondly, and this I think is important, if we ever defeat aging, we're going to have to legalize suicide past a certain age. I think ~150 years would be a good cutoff point. It would be cruel to just allow people to keep living if they don't want too, and have well passed a natural lifespan.
--The universe will not be altered by forum threads, even those which are very wry. --Tycho Brahe (Penny Arcade)
... suddenly characters in the Old Testament living to 900 years doesn't seen quite so implausible.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Starting at the post.
If we have immortality at 2030, the system will fail in 2031. He wasn't stating a present fact. He was making an anectdotal observation.
The actuarial analyisis on the health depends greatly on the life expectancy being short. if we all suddenly started living to 1000 years, without working a good portion of the extra 933 years after retirement, it most certainly would fail.
Pay attention.
"Hunde, wollt ihr ewig leben?"
Nothing's ever changed. Same yoke, same master.
Why then the gullibility when it comes to biology? Do people really think that biology is so simple that someone could teach themselves, do no experiments and find the answer to one of the most difficult problems? I don't claim that the people who have spent their lives working on the problem are following the correct avenues (IMHO, they are misguided too) but these guys are no dummies and have thought long and deep about it over the years. And at least they have some data to back up their ideas and speculations...
Excuse me but I think I'm going to write a book about a new kind of computer science now...
Only the most diehard religious people will opt out of this. I know plenty of catholics who wouldn't mind eternal life. So let's be frank, let the crazies live out their short lives.
As for dying by old age or dying through a disease, it may just be me, but I would prefer to go out fighting than dying passively on my bed.
As for being a twenty something for the rest of your life. Great! And imagine the joy of banging a real twenty something while you're actually 900 years old! Hee hee.
disparity between them wont change from what it is now...there are poor people, the rich getting richer or living longer doesnt change someone's zero in their bank account. But if some of these long lived, possibly very productive members of society use this advantage to give back to humanity in the long term then I think we'll be sitting pretty. Also, when stuff like this comes up, people focus on the ONE THING forgetting that there is other science out there like space travel, nanotechnology, and bioengineering. All of these working in concert will enable us to pull ourselves, almost quite literally, out this primordial soup called Earth by our bootstraps. Think nanobots producing goods from trash using free energy from space which is used to construct ships to travel to other worlds where we can spread out indefinately and live forever. Unless governments seize it all and use it to keep themselves in power and keep the status-quo because "they know what's best". The salvation of humanity will be won by a few great people with the insight, creativity, and strength of will to bring these things to people everywhere and not allow it to be abused by those who would seek to use it for ill.
Did you know you can be apathetic to apathy? Not that I give a shit...
You'll become a bit [more] reclusive, and slightly messier. Your friends won't want to come over any more because they say you're 'acting weird', and your xanax just isn't cutting it any longer.
Do you really want to spend your life like this? Of course you don't.
Huh? It was sounding better and better.
A hundred and fifty years back, life expectancy was a lot lower etc, but typically kids were getting married, moving out and having their own kids in their teens. Now teenage pregnancy is seen as a big problem. If we live to our hundreds having kids in your 30's will become the new social problem.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
You are fortunate enough to have a job that pays well enough that you *could* work it part-time, if allowed.
I don't consider myself wealthy at all, but most of my family and peers think I make a lot for my age group, and I'm still making barely half of what I'd need to survive working a half-time job. I'm essentially working full time just to barely break even. I don't live an extravagent lifestyle either - I rent a room in a house, and spend the rest of my money on groceries and gas.
I have the skills needed for a higher-paying job, but cannot find one because the labor market is saturated.
Perhaps the solution to both our problems is the same. If the employers of people like you would let you work your job half-time, that would free up your free time, and free up job opportunities for people like me.
On a related note, I have often noticed that I am far more efficient when working short hours than long ones. If I know I'm coming in for a two-hour job on something, I come in, get to it, and get it done. If I'm settling in for an eight hour day, I feel more concerned with not running out of things to do before the day is over. If paid more, I could afford work less, and still get just as much work done, more efficiently. Everybody wins.
I think perhaps mandating a shorter work-week and a higher minimum wage could in fact increase efficiency for businesses and increase free time for individuals, many of which would then be spent doing hobbies (increasing the creativity and individual productivity of the populace), and probably spending more money on service-oriented businesses (movies, dining out, etc), stimulating the whole economy and improving lifestyle in one fell swoop.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Most works on the subject of aging agree that the issue is with the overall rate of aging -- which is determined genetically (at conception or shortly thereafter).
If you want to live to 1000 you'll have to accept a 100 year childhood. (Know any parents that would be ok with 100 years of teens?)
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
Any attempt to prolong live would also have to prevent aging! Check out "Gulliver's Travels." Swift makes the point that immortality isn't worth much if we keep getting older!
Just another try at a godless heaven-on-earth.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
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 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).
Imagine after 1000 years of breeding your children and their children , you would have enough relatives to make a whole city, I can imagine the xmas shopping list, what a nightmare. Then again it would also mean a higher chance of a 12th generation grandchild to intermarry someone from the same family tree without knowing it, which isnt a bad thing, since at least you know the relos.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
On the other hand, why even keep those organs around? The best rout to immortality is to maintain the brain only. Brain cells last for a long time, and if we can figure out how to get them to divide naturaly the way they do when we're young we could keep brains going forever. But rather then death, you'd have a slow 'fading' of old memories.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
1-2% of money people are putting in right now (basically from the trust find as thats where the money would otherwise have gone).
Not very risky, but yes it's a big effort.
The problem with social security as a pension system as it's very soon coming to a point where the number of people putting money in the system will decline rapidly, more than offseetting the increase of input over the years due to rise in salaries.
Also do not forget that part of that rise is taken away by inflation over the years, so even though workers are putting in more now than fifty years ago it may pay for only the same amount of housing or food that original contributions were paying for back then. I don't think many people really get by on Social Security alone.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
When coming up with the program not many people thought the birthrate would decline so dramatically, leaving the program in the hole when there are not enough people actually working to support the ones taking in social security.
Thus the projected problems starting in 2018 (the year the program has more money going out in payments than comes in from workers) instead of 2042.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You're probably right, any female genetic instinct can probably be overridden until "it's too late". Too late now being in your 60s:
This woman gave birth at 67, which is way above life expectancy for much of the world.
As for men, our genes would prosper the more children we had raised to sexual maturity. But we could trick other men into raising our children...
Copyright. Patents. Public Domain. Scary.
I am
Just An Obnoxious Twit
I like to compare longevity with other behind the horizon tehcnologies that attract the same kind of reactions: artificial intelligence and nanotechnology. For both AI and nano it seems inevitable they will happen (assuming they are possible) because having them gives you so many benefits. Even if some large efforts illegalized them, the benefits of them would be so great that someone would still do them, after which anyone not having them would be at such a serious disadvantage that they would mostly capitulate.
How about longevity? Forget moral issues for a while - would the company you work for benefit? Your country? The world as a whole? Would you do more stuff, or would you simply take longer to do the same amount of stuff? Or would you slack indefinitely thinking there's always tomorrow - literally. Most people would probably become very risk averse, meaning less traveling (all those diseases and accidents), less people available to do jobs like mining, construction and firefighting, and so on. People would be moving away from earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes, hurricanes...
There would definitely be more effort spent on avoiding asteroids! And to make the world a safer place in general. Would that be the new driving force to work - have to go to work to build the anti-disease, earthquake warning system, asteroid cannon NOW because those things might kill you in the next few thousand years.
<rant>
Maybe I've overreacting, but it's a pet peeve of mine when people talk about "living forever" or having "immortality", but then they start talking about all these things that can make you live 1000 years or 10,000 years. I hate to tell you this, but longevity and immortality are separate things. Please, use the appropriate term.
The worst part is, I'm really not sure if some of these people grasp the difference! All of these techniques (like repairing the DNA or growing new organs) only multiply your expected lifespan by some factor. You can't multiply two finite numbers and get an infinite one. This seems so obvious that it pisses me off when supposedly-intelligent people, like people who have computer science degrees, start saying crap like this.
The fact is, everything in the universe will eventually die out. It's just the simple laws of thermodynamics. It's heat death. Existence in physical form is a dead-end street. You can extend the length of the dead-end street, but you can't change it into something other than a dead-end street.
If thermodynamics doesn't do it for you, think about probability. Consider the strong law of large numbers. What does it tell us? Well, one thing it tells us is that if there is a finite chance (however tiny) of a certain outcome every time you some particular thing, then that outcome will eventually happen. It is impossible for that outcome not to happen; the only variable is how long it will be before it does. So, since we live in a universe where there is random variation, and theoretically any particular can teleport from point A to point B (even if the probability of this is astronomically low), any system that you build has a chance of failure at any time. So this means any system you build will eventually fail.
Bottom line is, immortality is not something that can be achieved within the physical universe. I would hope scientists, of all people, would be smart enough to see this. If you want to believe in immortality, go to church or something. At a church, there may be some things that are questionable logically, but at least you are not going down a path that can basically be mathematically proven to be wrong! Or, if you don't believe there is any supernatural element to anything, then be realistic and give up on immortality, because it isn't possible!
</rant>
Gunnery Sergeant Daniel Daly inspired his weary men to attack by yelling, 'come on, you sons of bitches, do you want to live forever?'
/. was born.
NO, the men shouted! But somewhere way in the back one whiney voice was heard to say "yes". And thus
Here is his website that's been on /. several times b4. It explains his 7 targets to fix for immortality and everything else.
When I read Niven's "A World out of Time" I learned about an intersting method of making one immortal: ageing is caused by the build up of waste material that impeeds the body's ability to maintain itself. I wonder if this is part of the process being dicussed...
Is anyone else reminded of the short story in Vonnegut's Welcome to the Monkey House on this topic? I think of it everytime I see something like this in the news and it freaks me out a little.
Basically, the story takes place in a time when people never really HAVE to die, as long as they keep taking some kind of pill or medicine. Extended families all have to live in the same apartment, sleeping in sleeping bags all over the floors because there are so many of them, and everyone is constantly trying to kiss the butt of the eldest family member who owns everything for a spot in their will. Every little thing results in a threat to be removed from the will and left with nothing, but every year the eldest person finds a reason to keep taking the pills instead of letting themselves die. Anyway, it's Vonnegut, so whackiness ensues, etc etc. I see this as eerily close to what would happen (basically), but still one of our smallest problems in such a situation.
... they actually did figure out how to make everybody immortal in about 25 years or so, but that by that time, with global warming and overpopulation and everything, the world becomes such a miserable place that nobody would want to extend their lives anyway.
I'm dying out here!
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
I don't think that any human brain could cope with that much organization, the raw space may be there but for most humans it's hard to keep clear with just 20 years of information.
You all really need to read Robert Heinlein. He developed a (in my view) very realistic society of people who live thousands of years. Lazarus Long anyone?
If you want to look at immortality, you need not look further than the common bacterium.
Yes, you need not look any further because there is nothing else. Once you have differentiation into somatic cells and germ line cells, the somatic cells age and die. Invariably. Even sponges and hydra.
IMABiologist
Ask for your tuition back--you clearly didn't get your money's worth.
End of discussion.
Let's not go throwing the word "immortality" around when the thing that's being discussed is the natural aging process that eventually makes us all mortal, no matter how safe our lives might be previously.
:) It sure is long, though.
This will do nothing to keep us from jumping or falling off buildings, dying from any kind of trauma, disease or freak medical event.
Also I noticed that both a thousand year lifespan and living forever are mentioned in the story. So which is it? Well maybe I should RTFA
RP
From http://www.mprize.org/:
Cash Prize Total: $122,129
Cash and Pledges: $855,687
On the Three Hundred:
Wonderful!
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
Bob "Mario, what did you spend your three point on?"
Mario "I got a level with my knife."
Bob "Thats pretty good, I got a level with my gun."
Mario "That's pretty good to"
Mario "Yuri, what did you spend you three points on?"
Yuri "Immune to aging"
Mario "Thats really good!"
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I plan on billing a whole lot of money to fix this issue before it destroys society as we know it!
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Sorry. As smart as this guy may be this is terribly fallacious logic. Some problems only become apparent as other problems are solved.
assuming medical advances continue at the same pace, 60 year old will probably be as fit as a 40 year old by then.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
if you take the average age based on 5 year old and older, are average lifespan is only a few year longer.
If you take pre five year old in the mixe, then you are including infant maortality, which was a staggering number until about 75 years ago.
So, were not actually liveng that much longer, but more of us are given the chance to live beyond 5.
So the original poster is right about not increase the lifespan, but very very wrong about it not improving health.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
is mortal.
think outside that box for a second.
You kids grow-up, there is no reason both generations can't make there mark on the future together.
There is no reason why you would have to stand in the way.
Now, we would need to but some hard term limits in politics, and civil service.
Elizabeth moon often has some large logic 'oversites' in her books. There still enjoyable.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
"Wouldn't it make more sense for them to make it commercially viable by funding, then marketting it?"
sense it what way? there are philanthropist in the world. UNIX wasn't created because they thought there was a huge commecial demand.
"Furthermore, Eternal Life is nothing if not commercially viable. "
yes, nothing worse then having customers forever.
"Chuches have been proving that for at least 2000 years, now"
and seem to be doing rather well commercially.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Check out the January issue of popular science magazine, its a better technically posotive/unbiased look at the comming longevity breakthoughs. Or, look at the on-line article:
, 20 967,929447,00.html
http://www.popsci.com/popsci/medicine/article/0
Back to the Mit magazine article, it was way too negative and in the letters to the editor, the magazine got roasted for being so biased against longevity breakthroughs.
You would think that an Mit technical magazine article would be the last place that such negativity would be found.
My experience in the past with talking to friends about the possibility of longevity breakthroughs is much like the response you used to get before the personal computer existed, people could simply not think what you would want to use pc's for...same for any longevity research, people can't quite understand why you would want to stop getting old and use future nano/biotechnologies to stop and reverse the aging process.
But if you look into the future 30 to 50 years, nanocomputers and nanoassemblers will have been developed and used to fix peoples cells, eliminate aging, make really powerfull computers you can's see because they are so small and we will probably have decent AI technology too (because of really powerfull/cheap nanocomputers).
Future generations will probably wonder what the big fuss was about nano/biotech, just like present day kids can't imagine a time before the internet/pc's/cell phones/video games/dvd/cd's etc.
BOOTH: "Please choose mode of death. Quick and painless, or slow and horrible".
FRY: "Yeah, I'd like to place a collect call."
BOOTH: "You have selected slow and horrible"
BENDER: "Good choice!"
stop buyng that crap.
Talk to some financial experts and money managers.
Plan, Plan, Plan.
I give you this advice as a older grasshopper hoping to turn my children into ants.
I implore all people to stop spending. Get rid of all non-neccessary expenses for 1 year, then think about what you missed.
Retirement is not about age, it's about money. Had I been more frugal in my youth, I would be retired right now. For the record, I am 40,and I don't know if I will ever be able to retire.
Yes, I screwed up. Please learn from my lesson.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Ever heard about ENTROPY??? Nothing is ever going to live forever in this universe. The best we're able to come up with is consuming/diffusing all energy before facing the inevitable.
it will actually be from Mars!
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
A third year molecular biology undergraduate could shoot down all seven theories without even breaking into a canter.
De Grey has broken the golden, unwritten rule of life sciences:
Have Humility in the Face of Nature
I wish at was Friday, but I dont want to wish my life away. So I wish it was last Friday.
According to the NCHS , in 2002 about 4.3 percent of all deaths were unnatural, and the average life expectancy was 77.3 years. If this trend continues linerally you only have about a 50/50 chance of making it to your 962nd birthday. Hardly immortality, but ill take it!
One of my favorite authors, Wil McCarthy, writes a series of books which concentrate mainly on a few technologies, one of which is the 'fax gate', or just 'fax'. Similiar to today's fax machines, the point is to accept an item as input, and transmit data about it to another point for reproduction. Unlike today's faxes, the faxes of Wil McCarthy's world consist of a print plate filled with nano scale assemblers which 'dissolve' you on one end and store your substance in a buffer, then transmit a highly detailed pattern of you to another fax gate elsewhere where the assemblers use mass from the previous entrants to reconstruct you to every last detail, even preserving quantum states so you're still alive an conscience.
An unintended consequence is that people who've stepped into a fax plate exist only as data, and data can be manipulated. Software can (and does, in his fiction), fix damage, remove disease, and undoes genetically programmed death. The upshot of all this is that everyone has the perfectly toned bodies of 20 year old athletes, and the worst that happens in death is that you lose a few hours of memories for ever. As long as a fax gate is nearby (and they're as common as telephones in McCarthy's future), the damage would have to be pretty extensive to cause actual death, otherwise your body can simpley be tossed into the nearest fax, and a repaired you will be spit out almost immediately. You're immorbid, incapable of natural death, and with backups made everytime you step through a gate, you're theoretically immortal.
Of course, with the notion to tamper comes the required self improvement. Soldiers would elect to have carbon nanofibres woven into their skeleton, and protective diamond plates inserted around major organs. Slashdot weenies, tired of receiving wedgies, could order up a buff exterior and pump up their enemies. Women could go blonde for a day, or enlarge their boobs for that special date, then shrink them down when they become a nuisance. You can even, with enough mass in the buffers, make copies of yourself.
Is this possible? Depends on who you ask. Some nanologists poo poo the notion of nanoassemblers citing electronic forces on the atomic level as inhibiting the movement of little claws. Others poo poo the poo pooers by pointing out that individual atoms have already been manipulated in the lab.
The overall issue of immorbidity raises new questions. If we are incapable of death ourselves, do we lose our concept of it, and therefore our fear of it? Or how about, what if someone chooses to die. Their immorbid and highly improved bodies won't allow it. And what happens when you reach the physiologicallimit of your own memory capacity? Do you download it into a flash disk, or just dump them forever. And with people living for centuries, what do you do with all the bored, unemployable, and resource draining people who will overpopulate the planet in a society where production of basic goods is so efficient that there are absolutely no environmental pressures or population controls? Well...besides colonize space (which didn't work so well in McCarthy's books).
Like every other product, there has to be constant profit in it before any company will release it to the public. Sure a one time fee of 1 million dollars would do it, but hey $50,000 a year for a thousand years brings more to the shareholders.
On a side note... I would not want to live to 1000 as it is not quite long enough to insult every person on the planet personally. Give me a call when they sort out that immortality thing.
Say what you will about Utilikilts, they make the ladies all hot 'n' bothered. I was unaware of this until I took my ladyfriend to the "Fetish Fair Fleamarket" in Boston, and she started gesturing and salivating at the men in kilts.
Also, they're remarkably comfy. I tried one on. Too bad they're like three hundred bucks.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I have a degree in Biochemistry, Cellular and Molecular Biology. I used to work in a Genetics research lab as well. Now, I'm no Cambridge Scholar, but I'm not stupid. But unless I'm missing something, this guy has basic points wrong in most of his 7 points.
Eliminating telomerase is not bad, and a way to reduce/eliminate cancer. Telomoerase is essential for Germ Cells, i.e. sperm and egg cells. It seems unlikely to be able to eliminate it in all cells but these.
Cancer cells don't need telomerase. There are countless avenues to cancerous cell growth.
Stimulation cell growth is good and necessary. Cell growth in the brain could be extremely problematic. The brain is a living, connected system. The connections are what make the brain what it is. Unlike computeres with fixed hardware and variable software, the brain is variable in both. The electrical patterns can change as well as the paths the patterns take. Essentially, they are insepearable. The addition of new cells, with no way to control their connectedness would not aleveate the problems of cellular degredation and loss.
Extrecellular protein linkages are unique. Biology is extremely effecient at its use of chemical compounds, structurally. Our knowledge of protein strcuture is limited, due to the limitiations we have of computational modeling due to limited computational abilities. That he should think that extracellular proteins show unique linkages seems hubristic. It is possible we don't understand all protein interactions yet.
Cell growth can be stimulated naturally. Here, even a passing comment has errors. Muscle cells are stimulated to divide by excercise. No! Excercise increases the size of muscles by stimulating an increase in production of muscle fiber proteins. More proteins cause a cell to be larger, and thus the overall muscle to be bigger. Thus excercise increases the size of muscles, not the number of cells. This is basic biology.
Mitochondrial proteins will work in the nucleus.While most cells in the world use a universal genetic code, some vary specific cells do not fully share the code's universality. Some non-eukaryotic cells and mitochondria. (It is interesting to note that mitochondria are thought to be descendended from symbiotic non-eukaryotics cells themselves.) I don't know off the top of my head if these proteins will work with both codes, but it seems likely that even if the nucleus can produce the raw protein, the proper folding, transport, and ultimate use of the proteins might not occurt since they are not where they need to be, namely inside the mitochondria. Only native proteins might be functional.
Again, I might have too simple an outlook or be completely incorrect, but it seems that there are basic concepts of biology that conflict with de Grey's ideas.
You still have a problem even if you raise the retirement age. Possibly if you did it today, it might be OK - telling people right now that are due to retire at 65 in fifteen years or so they could have some time to make other plans (though really not much).
But any kind of very long lifespan is going to involve an ugly switchover with gradually diminishing returns for people still in the program or very close to using it. So you still have a major issue even if we don't see extra leaps in lifespan for thirty years. The longer we take past 2018 to close down social security the more money drained from the system as that is the point when less is paid into the system than is being extracted, and the more people any kind of attempt to close down social security will affect.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
http://practicallynothing.oxyfx.com/2005/01/worm-w ood.htm
If the worms can do it, why can't we?
Only a few people "work", the rest manipulate the workers for vast profit.
I know for a fact your boss
1. Works less than you
2. Is possibly less educated than you
3. Drives a much nicer car than you
Your little reading into economics is unsound, and taking away from productivity.
Back to work!
This was covered a while ago here.
I'm reminded here of the old Star Trek episode Requiem for Methuselah (Kirk and Co. discover a guy called Flint on a remote planet who is Brahms, Leonardo Da Vinci, Alexander The Great and more).
"sweet dreams are made of this..."
Ok, so you'll live a couple of kiloyears. Then, statistics catch up with you, and you're killed in an accident.
Like the old vacuum tube computer designs with 20,000 tubes, estimated to run about 20 minutes between breakdowns, so, too, very few will live to be a million, much less a billion.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
No, you'd just turn into a Bitter Old Republican with Old Timers.
- Then, there wouldn't be any Social Security, Welfare, Medicare, or an Army. But, your taxes would be cut.
Then, there wouldn't be a United States.
How the world would change if humans lived forever? Easy: The human race would disappear. The limited lifetime of all species on earth is not something that nature introduced just for fun. It ensures that evolution can take place, which is crucial for species to adapt to a changing environment.
...Larry Niven's Ringworld take on immortality? The whole reproduction rights lottery seems pretty relevant to me...
This sounds interesting, but imagine if all
of the old slave owners, rigid thinkers
and the status quo of 200 years ago
was still alive today? The cycle of older
generations dying off and replaced by new
ones is one way of "cleaning house" and
(hopefully) ensuring that old, stale and
backwards and rigid policies vanish with them.
If you've got adult ADD, ALL YOU DO is pursue your own interests. :P
I went after this goal many years ago, and I'm happy to report that I have succeeded.
I've always said tht if someone wants to pay me twice as much, I want to work half as long. I'm now self employed, and the greatest slacker I know. I make just enough to pay the bills, but aside from the occasional techno toy which is obsolete in a year, or trip somewhere, I just don't see the point in busting my ass.
No, you're not going to find a part time *JOB* to do this. But it IS possible. You just have to cultivate your own clientele independently. Call the shots, and be persistent. It won't happen overnight, either, but if you're smart and continue compiling the advantages of the opportunities that accumulate, you'll get there.
I have no regrets.
----
Get a free ipod! [freeipods.com] My friend got his, it's real. all you need is an email for spam. sign up and get 5 people to do the same.
Ok, let's assume you're right about people not wanting to have any more children than they do now (even though this is a questionable assumption).
If this kind of of technology is introduced en masse there will be a huge population surge as people continue to live past the average lifespan.
So back then I'm sure that humans could have been having the same debate... "If grandparents hang around that much longer- an extra 30 years- won't they get bored? What if they can't hunt or gather? Where will they live?" Humanity handled it then. We'll learn to handle having our great and great-great grandparents around (or do we really wish them dead? Do we want to keep hearing our grandparents talking about all the friends they've lost, while we ourselves dread the 3am call to hear that a great-aunt or grandparent is dead?)
True, the medical advances of the 20th century got us to a more reliable 75-85 year lifespan. I think its reasonable now to ask medicine to get rid of the worst aging processes which can really degrade the last 10-15 years. If as a side-effect that gets us to, say, 90 years of healthy life followed by 10 years of standard senescence that'll be a respectable gift to give our parents. And then to build up to 130 years of healthy life, followed by 5 years of standard senescence: that'd be a great gift for our kids.
Who says I won't?
So far, so good!
Dump the IRS - http://www.fairtax.org
Everyone dies. I wish everyone a long and happy life and Im all for medical advances that improve people's quality of life and prevent premature death from disease. However, death is natural and it happens for a reason.
If you believe in evolution then if we were supposed to live longer lives we would have evolved in that direction (Longevity would defenitly be a key trait that would definitly survive). If you accept creation and that God made everything the way he did for a reason then, death is still an important part of the picture.
Either way one looks at it, if we were meant to live forever, we would be doing so right now (or at least not dying of old age). God or evolution has determined that death should happen, though we may not like the idea very much.
I believe in God and I believe in science, and I will continue to profess them both.
What happens to patents and copyright? Considering there are so many complaints about the longevity of patents today can you imagine patents and copyright that last the lifespan of the inventor if this happens?
Yes that song from 2005 goes into the public domain somewhere around the year 3000. 0_o
Some historians feel that most of societal changes are cused by this group. A lot of hot headed, act first people tend to promote change - for better otr for worse. Just look at the news at who is protesting in the Middle east. And better yet who jumps into the fray. They are the ones who are the "have nots" - societal change often serves to better their position in life.
..........FULL STOP.
I wholeheartedly agree with the parent. We work for no tangible goal or cause, other than the next "thing" we (want to) aquire - house, car, trophy partner etc ... Such aquisitive goals can be easily replaced by constructive goals.
A constructive goal can be just living simply with no possessions, or another cause such as defeating aging or whatever.
Im myself moving to a part of the world where my current networth can allow me to retire on an annuity, and my cause is to help advance AI/robotics/exoskeleton driven prosthetics that allow those with 0 or minimal motor skills to perform normal motor functions.
If anything, politicians are getting younger due to the power of TV.
The scenario outlined above is completely ludicrous.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Sometimes I believe you guys in the US get the nuttest of the nuttest religious idiots in the whole known Universe (well, not really, Saudi Arabia and Iran take the biscuit out of you).
Anyway, millions of Catholics around the world have premarital sex, re-marry, use contraceptives and in general completely ignore what the religious hierachy have to say about reproductive matters. For goodness sakes, Mexico's President is a devout Catholic and re-married (civil ceremony of course) while in office. That is a typical example about what Catholics think about the church's opinions in matters not spiritual.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
The only one we have any hope of ever habiting without massive artificial infrastructure is Mars, maybe Venus (big maybe). Anything else is too hot or to cold.
And as for reaching other stellar systems, get real, it would take thousends of years, even with improved technology, to reach even the closest stars.
We are stuck here, so better we make the best out of it.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
So it's been tried before, and it was an unmitigated disaster. Now, if science can fix evil, that would be progress.
On the bright side we don't have worry about more copyright extention acts.
On the other hand copyright already lasts life+X years.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
De Grey is clearly both a genius and a little nuts
... they are not geniuses.
No, mate, those people who got on the internet and make wild predictions
The geniuses are the ones who go onto the net and say "here is the blueprint for living forever - open source". The geniuses solve the problems.
The people who just pontificate about them on the web are called something else.
But we'd also need to restructure society pretty drastically too. I remember seeing, but don't have a reference to unfortunatly, and article that demosntrated that your chance of being involved in a fatal accident is about 90% by the time your 350.
Life only works when there's evolution. That's the motor of it. No evolution, no genetic creativity. Now if you extend human life artificially, there won't be enough "genetic shuffle" since there are not enough new generations coming into the pool. In short, de Brey's idea contradicts the fundamentals of all life-forms.
It's the typical, slightly infantile, desire of engineers to want to "fix" things, while there are certain things that can't be "fixed" since they are based on an entirely different logic. (Engineers can't stand the idea that there are things beyond their control).
You can't artificially replicate genetic evolution and adaptation. And so de Brey's entire idea is contrary to the logic of Life.
I prefer Life over an engineered bag of flesh and bones which lacks the motor of Life. Life is too precious to give it away to philosophical amateurs like de Brey.
de Brey has a very immature notion of what life is: life is nothing more than the evolution of genetic material which is passed on over generations.
In that sense, we are already immortal.
De Brey focuses on the individual too much, but life has nothing to do with individuals; life is a group thing, and based on permanent exchanges of genetic info.
Take away this motor, which de Brey wants to do, and you end up with a nice engineered set of individuals, but not with life. In fact, you destroy the essence of life.
de Brey basically doesn't know what he's talking about.
I've got adult ADD, you insensitive clod! I can't prusue my own interests for a week, let long 935 years!
What, you think we could cure aging, currently seen as one of the most immutable biological processes, but not be able to cure ADD?
Is that is it overwhelmed when you really do have people living significantly longer.
To address some individual points.
First, we have a different situation here than other countries that have tried private accounts. Just because it has not worked elsewhere does not mean it cannot work here - you might want to ask your actuarial friend what "sample size" means.
Also, the rate of return in my mind is factoring what you paid in vs. what you get out. Genrally this is lower than money market rates. Ask someone who actually is on SS how much they are getting vs. how much they put in. The rate of return of the money in the trust fund is meaningless, all that matters is what people actually get out of it.
And I do tend to spell economics with an 'e', just a quirk I have. I can tell you are getting desperate when you break out the Spelling Nazi routine. That you must stoop to such an argument seems to indicate you have little of value to say.
Sure I generally trust actuaries. However they are only as good as the historical data they work with - how can you predict an large spike in longevity rates from historic data when nothing like it has occured before? I think you have to admit that history has had a few surprises in store for people who think they had predictions down pat.
Consider the maker of the Thomas Flyer in 1908 - a number of countries held an around-the-world auto race which the Thomas Flyer (from America) won. Great, right? Except that demand spiked so high for cars in general after the race that Thomas could not keep up, the Model T stepped in, and the rest was history. A roundabout way of saying that predicitons based on past data can easily be irrelevant, which is my whole argument in this case. It's all based how how likley non-statistical rise in longevity is and to me it seems very likley. This is the point you keep dancing around but all your arguments pale in the face of. Either agree or disagree - you can disagree and really I'd have little to say about it except RTFA. But neither of us know. my argument is that it is better to be prepared for the real worst case scenario, not a worst case based on data that may easily be misleading.
As for food stamps. Yes I KNOW those programs are only a small portion of budgets. The real question is what percentage of budgets are they FOR PEOPLE ON SOCIAL SECURITY. That is to say, to make it very clear to you, how much other aid do people on SS generally get from other sources in relation to the SS benefits they get - FOR THOSE PEOPLE ONLY ON SS WITH NO OTHER SAVINGS OR SOURCE OF INCOME? Sorry to yell but you seem to have ignored most of my point there. The fact that the government may or may not spend much of them as a percentage of budget means nothing to what I was saying. You are so focused on upholding your fantasy of Social Security being in fine shape that you are unwilling to see anything else.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Then:
0. Time to think, and reflect.
1. We would see people that look 23, but think well beyond their time.
2. Memory devices will have greater importance.
3. The ability to see your dreams to completion.
4. The ability to create more dreams.
5. Enjoyment of Subtlety.
6. Enjoyment of Complexities.
7. Not having to notice when the weather changes.
8. Shear experience easily relateable to common sense.
9. To have a 40 year house payment debt paid off.
Then OK, where do I sign up?
I like another theory, proposed (probably not first) by Richard Dawkins in his masterpiece, The Selfish Gene. He says that one way of increasing lifespan is by slowly increasing the minimum age at which you're allowed to breed.
If you can't have kids until you're 30, you'll systematically remove early-death genes from the gene pool. Then bump that age up to 35, then 40... etc.
It sounds like it would work, but of couse will never happen.
Berto
assuming one is able to live healthily for a millennium, it makes no sense that they would only work to age 65. comparing retirement age to average life expectancy, we currently work til about 90% of life expectancy. by this logic, we would work to about 900 years old. giving us plenty of time to contribute more to ss as well as have enough money saved so as not to depend on ss.
Grey responds to the article: http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/01/wo/ wo_degrey0101805.asp
Vagueness doesn't help. Please explain why it is so hard to find a *single* success story.
Because there are none - yet. That does not preclude a success. I would have thought that to be obvious but then you seem keen on missing things.
And one could equally ask, "how can you call them way over optimistic if you yourself admit that you can't predict the future"? The past has shown that they're *too pessimistic*. That's the only data that we have to go on here.
You you assume it's not possible? That's fine, you can assume that if you like I just happen to think it's dead wrong. Imagine what the table for tidal deaths looked like in Indionesia before the tsunami - actuarials were the ones who decided we didn't need a tidal warning system there. Yet you would blindly trust them to your doom (or at least other peoples doom, as I have to think that YOU are probably not relying soley on Social Security for returement).
The entire system is designed to have the retirement age increase should longevity increases affect it. They made up for the increase in the early 80s; they'll do it again. Longevity increases equally affect private plans, by the way.
What seems impossible for you to grase is that moving out the retirement age does nothing with people tat are already in the system. Imagine the boomers all hit retirement - they still have a good 20-30 years left on average. But in that time the average lifespan spikes. Now what? Are you going to drop those people out of SS and tell them to go back to work?
Oh, I just find it funny that someone who claims to know something about economics can't even spell the word.
Actualy my efort to chek spelng is directy proportional to the respect I have for the arguent I am respding to. Now you can post about how petty I am, a gift for you.
If I am wasting you time, please feel free to stop. You are equally wasting my time but I feel the need to correct you in case people accidentially stuble on your writings and take it as gospel. It's best to have a realistic counterpoint present.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The problem with this or plans that raise the retirement age is that I don't think you can just take people out of the program that are in it already - If you only allow 10-15% of the population to be in the plan but then the population expands and people do not die fast enough, what do you do?
It's also not fair to have people think they are five years away from retirement and suddenly pull that away from them. People need 15-20 years notice, I would say, to properly prepare for retirement and put other plans into motion.
I like the idea otherwise, I just have cannot see how you can make it work well.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You are probably correct, but think of the upside: We won't have to read anymore stupid stories about all the COBALT programmers dying off...
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Not a single year, agreed - it would take some time. The problem comes if it happens during a time when the outgoing funds start exceeding incoming funds, currently projected to be 2018 and onward.
Then if you have a sudden jump and push out the retirement date for those incoming as you stated, it would be a reduced flow but I'm not sure if it's enough to make up for the increased drain on the fund.
Also, even though your graduated pushback is more kind I still feel very uncomfortable in telling someone due to retire even in five years that it's really seven now. If you've really been planning then a sudden two year gap coming only five years off can be a huge deal.
I would support the graduated pushback, but again I'd say that it would be best to say people within at least fifteen years are immune from the pushbacks.
When they changed the SS retirement age from 65 to 67 they used a kind of graduated scale as you mentioned, increasing it year by year - then they did provide three to four years of buffer with gradually reduced payments for people entering in in the middle of the changeover (closest thing I could find on that is here). SO perhaps something this this could be used for larger values, you change the retirement age slowly and also the amount you are paying people caught in the middle slowly.
Then I think it comes back to the same problem though, you need to do something earlier rather than later.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The quote is not originally by some US Marine, however heroic he might have been. It was king Frederick II of Prussia who in 17xx yelled at his fleeing soldiers "Hunde, wollt Ihr ewig leben?".
Excellence: Moderate (mostly affected by comments on your karma)
Yes that helps. But the problem is you cannot do that suddenly - when you increase the retirement age it is a gradual process with the age gradually being raised over the course of time, and the people who are caught in the middle (so to speak) being paid something but less than the full amount for a while.
So then after 2018, the projected date when you have more payments going out than in, if you start having people die off later than they are supposed to, while you can slow down the influx of people it's not like you can suddenly push it off. In my mind the likelihood is that we'll see a number of advances in care that will jump life expectancy enough that a gradual slowdown of incoming recipients will not be enough of an offset for the people that remain in the program for an unexpected long time.
The SS program is like a large ship, you can't get within ten feet of the iceberg and then expect to turn. The real problem is I think they will be too late in revising mortality estimates, and the jump will catch them by surprise. While that may not happen the main article does make a compelling case for large breakthroughs on the horizon. If you don't think any of it will come to be, then probably Social Security is OK as it is. I just happen to think it's best to be cautious.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Current copyright law will really fuck this all up.
Well I've wrestled with reality for thirty five years doctor, and I'm happy to say I finally won out over it.
Being alive longer would only give you a greater chance of being hit by a bus, or whatever other tragic end you like. I mean at that point the average lifespan wouldn't be infinite, rather it would be based the statistical likelihood of being killed.
For once I'd like to see a first +5 post that is actually a lucid discussion of the topic, rather than cheap jokes. It's easy to come up with a quick post full of funnies; it's a lot harder to actually RTFA and THINK before posting.
Ok, I'm done ranting now.
You make some good points on the SS fund and interest carrying it along... I'll have to mull that all over.
I agree with you about Medicare, there are going to have to be some tough changes made or there's going to be a huge problem.
Thanks for the thoughtful response.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I would have to disagree with you somewhat:)
Eliminating telomerase is not bad, and a way to reduce/eliminate cancer.
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As long as you eliminate telomerase (and the other pathway there is) then no cells will be able to proliferate indefinitely (e.g. no cancer). If you can come up with a better cancer prevention mechanism then I would like to hear it.
Stimulation cell growth is good and necessary.
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Stimulating growth of new cells is generally very good, but obviously it varies depending on tissue types, I would hate to see what condition you were in if your liver were unable to regenerate at its usual rate.
Extrecellular protein linkages are unique
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One of the reasons for the increase in heart attacks and blood pressure as we get older is that the walls of our arteries get stiffer due to crosslinking, and there are products that can potentially reduce this (e.g. ALT-711). You are right that biology is efficient but also remember that biology was only meant to get us through procreation and to grandparent stage.
Cell growth can be stimulated naturally.
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Muscle cells do divide also. Muscle satellite cells that is.
Mitochondrial proteins will work in the nucleus.
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There has already been successful work to move some of the mitochondrial dna to into the nucleus, so its not impossible, the key is that you need to produce the same protein at the end, it doesn't really matter that the coding mechanism is slightly different. But you are correct in the sense that there is probably a very good reason that these proteins are produced in the mitochondria, so perhaps an alternate strategy of targeting dna repair enzymes to the mitochondria might work instead.