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How Long Do You Want To Live?
Hugh Pickens writes "Since 1900, the life expectancy of Americans, driven by improved hygiene, nutrition, and new medical discoveries and interventions, has jumped from 47 years to almost 80. Now, scientists studying the intricacies of DNA and other molecular bio-dynamics may be poised to offer even more dramatic boosts to longevity. But there is one very basic question that is seldom asked, according to David Ewing Duncan: How long do you want to live? 'Over the past three years I have posed this query to nearly 30,000 people at the start of talks and lectures on future trends in bioscience, taking an informal poll as a show of hands,' writes Duncan. 'To make it easier to tabulate responses I provided four possible answers: 80 years, currently the average life span in the West; 120 years, close to the maximum anyone has lived; 150 years, which would require a biotech breakthrough; and forever, which rejects the idea that life span has to have any limit at all.' The results: some 60 percent opted for a life span of 80 years. Another 30 percent chose 120 years, and almost 10 percent chose 150 years. Less than 1 percent embraced the idea that people might avoid death altogether (PDF). Overwhelmingly, the reason given was that people didn't want to be old and infirm any longer than they had to be, even if a pill allowed them to delay the inevitable. Others were concerned about issues like boredom, the cost of paying for a longer life, and the impact of so many extra people on planetary resources and on the environment. But wouldn't long life allow people like Albert Einstein to accomplish more and try new things? That's assuming that Einstein would want to live that long. As he lay dying of an abdominal aortic aneurysm in 1955, Einstein refused surgery, saying: 'It is tasteless to prolong life artificially. I have done my share, it is time to go. I will do it elegantly.'"
Should be enough for me.
99% of people are idiots.
Just long enough to lick the tears off of Raymond Kurzweil's widow's face at his funeral.
To see my enemies buried. After that, I don't care.
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
Overwhelmingly the reason given was that people didn't want to be old and infirm any longer than they had to be, even if a pill allowed them to delay the inevitable.
Well, it's a good thing that that's not what we're talking about, isn't it? The whole idea is to delay--or if possible, prevent entirely--the things that make us "old" and infirm to begin with. Nobody wants to spend eternity in a nursing home, duh. Spending an indefinite amount of time young and healthy, or even middle-aged and mostly healthy? Sign me up.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
She's supposedly pretty sharp, still there in the mind and still happy. The last part is the most important. I'd rather die happy at 85 than live to 120 in misery.
Ought to be enough for anybody.
Barbarian: “How do you want to die?”
Tyrion Lannister: “In bed, when I’m 80, with a belly full of wine and woman’s mouth on my cock.”
I know Jesus exists. So what if I die, I get to live forever. There's a cool thing that happens when you know this life isn't the end: You suddenly stop caring about yourself and just live your life to help everyone else. This life will be the only life where other people need our help. It only costs 100$/yr to keep children from starving to death. So the obvious idea is to work for enough money to live on frugally, then give excess to the poor. If enough people actually did do self sacrificial giving of their excess funds, there would be no such a thing as World Hunger. But as long as other people need help to survive, we should be helping them.
God spoke to me
Why is he quoted so often? It's like he's some Jesus/Buddha/Mohammed/Hubbard. It's kind of bizarre. He was just a scientist, although a very good one. His accomplishments were in physics, not metaphysics, not morality.
How many of those people believe in an eternal afterlife?
I'm satisfied living forever. And then I get to choose my lifespan.
Ought to be enough for anybody...
If I live to 200, do I spend most of that time with the body of a 30-year-old, or a 90-year-old? If the latter, thanks but no thanks.
This question is meaningless without defining quality of life. If I can reach 6000, and have the same Quality of Life as I have now (age 47) or even the QOL I expect to have at 67, Im all for it. In fact Immortality, yes please!
If I have to wait in bed in pain from 100 until 6000, than, no way.
There's a cool thing that happens when you know this life isn't the end: You suddenly stop caring about yourself and just live your life to help everyone else.
There was a cool thing that happened to me when I figured out that the Law of Parsimony indicates that life is the end. I realized that all I would leave behind is other people's memories of me and I stopped being a dick and judging everyone else based on my doctrine. How odd that the biggest inhibitor of being like Christ was being a Christian.
I suppose I can understand some arguments for cutting your life short based on overcrowding, etc., but I think we can get over that with science.
But limited lifespan because of boredom? I mean, have you *seen* this world we live in? If you can't come up with enough different things to do, and see, and explore, and discover, and wonder about to last you thousands of years, you are doing it wrong. That's not even thinking about all the incredible people you get to meet.
Asking for a show of hands at the start of a bioscience lecture?
Let's see him ask a bunch of 80 year olds how many of them don't want to live past 80... That would be just as biased but I think the answers would be more interesting.
It's easy for relatively young people to say they won't mind dying sometime in the distant future...
While life expectancy has increased over time due to improved diet, health care, lower infant mortality etc the max age has held steady.
Even 200 years ago you could live into your 80's or 90's as long as you survived past around 10.
Seriously. I am in the 30% that is considerate of the consequences of people living a long time.
For a poignant example, look at the current USA. We have an aging "boomer" generation. If you aren't familiar with the problems an aging boomer generation is causing, google is your friend. Now, imagine them living another 60 years. 100 years... FOREVER.
In addition to the problems with resource allocations, the political and ideological bottlenecks immortality, or even jut artificialy ling lives would introduce would be catastrophic. Instead of a progressive civilization, which becomes more tolerant and technologically advanced, we would have an ideologically stilted, recalcitrant population of aged and possibly immortal persons halting all forms of social progress.
I would actually campaign for a shorter, but less labor intensive life than a longer one.
but barring that I'd settle for a couple thousand years. Even five hundred would be pretty nice.
-- CEO Nwabudike Morgan,
MorganLink 3DVision Interview
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
This kind of thinking is basically Stockholm Syndrome writ very large.
Let's say you asked people a thousand years ago, "Would you want to live with a king?". I'm sure the vast majority would have said "no", and come up with a bunch of reasons why that would be personally undesirable and socially perilous. The reasoning is so transparently irrational it's ludicrous.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
the life expectancy of Americans, driven by improved hygiene, nutrition, and new medical discoveries and interventions, has jumped from 47 years to almost 80
Talk to a genealogist, its a bogus number. Life expectancy at birth, given that at least half used to die as babies or little kids.
Most birth-death years in my family tree are like 1854-1855 (whoops) or 1853-1930 (a good long while). Not much in between, other than maybe 5% of the women died around childbirth age around a year or so after the last baby. Stereotypical electronics "bathtub curve" plus the danger of giving birth. The main change in the last 200 years or so is if you are born, you'll probably live to age 10, whereas in the olden days if you were born you'd probably die before age 10, but some made it till 80s, just like now.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
I plan to live forever, of course, but barring that I'd settle for a couple thousand years. Even five hundred would be pretty nice.
-- CEO Nwabudike Morgan, MorganLink 3DVision Interview
(from one of the best games ever made)
This recent news story in the UK Makes me sad. It doesn't matter how long you want to live if you have no legal choices when you want to stop living.
It seems like we give our pets more compassion at the end of their lives than we do our fellow humans.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
And, of course, if they ALSO have access to life extending tech, then you're essentially saying "forever".
I would say 120 years, actually.
Look, you can extend your functional life by periodic fasting (reduced caloric intake with water, minerals, and vitamins) for 10-14 days every 10 years or so, you can stop smoking (+10 years), you can get mild to moderate exercise 2-4 times a week for 15-60 minutes (+10 years), you can drink (males only) red wine with meals (2-4 glasses avg), and you can eat a varied diet low in red meat and low in processed foods. And you can reduce stress and get enough sleep.
This will keep you functional.
But after a certain age, your risk factor for Alzheimers and Cardiovascular disease starts going up quite a bit.
We're working on growing organs - literally - and it's coming along, so maybe we can replace part of your liver or other organs, but my current educated guess is maybe 120 years fully functional.
More than that ... would require better understanding of not just the primary biochemical pathways regulated by mRNA, miRNA, siRNA, etc but also literal DNA/RNA repair with targeted strands. And a deeper understanding of not just the secondary biochemical pathways, but also the evolutionarily conserved tertiary pathways you inherited from when we were fish or rats.
(my humble opinion, maybe something will happen to change the current science)
Do you want to live in a society of really old people enslaving the youth in Hunger Games?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I'd like to hang around to see if humans, or any descendent species, ever achieves species-wide intelligence. Homo sapiens sapiens certainly hasn't.
Know what happens after the global population "levels off" at ten billion?
And yet, when those pills hit the market, they will all line up to buy it. This poll reveals how people think in "far mode". People enter "far mode" when contemplating events they assume are unlikely or distant in the future... far more is selfless, idealistic. Put the pill under their nose and you'll get a very different reaction.
How do I know? Old people don't massively take their own life, people overwhemingly chose treatment when facing cancer, etc.
It's soothing to imagine one's to be comfortable with death, it makes the whole prospect less absurd and cruel. This is just a protective form of denial, unfortunately, death-ism seriously hampers anti-aging research.
\u262D = \u5350
If all I'm going to be doing at 120 is sitting in a wheel chair, unable to remember what I had for breakfast with a catheter and colostomy bag attached to me, you can keep your attempts at immortality. While we've increased the average lifespan of people, I do not see a decrease in the symptoms which make us feel old -- arthritis, osteoporosis, etc... My grandmother died at 77 years old and she was very frail and unable to get around easily. My father died at 83, and spent the last five years of his life with a horrible back and having undergone multiple operations and treatments for various cancers. The very fact that these scientists are asking the question, "How old do you want to be" is very telling because it says, the older you live, the longer you'll have to deal with the ailments of old age.
...I know I certainly would. Do I get to live a long lifespan AND be healthy and relatively active? Or do I live a long and ultimately sad and sickly life? I don't want to become a burden on my family. But if I could be reasonably self sufficient then yes I'd sign up for a longer life.
As a geek I would love to see the future just because I think for all of our human failings we will eventually make great strides as a society. I'd love to see the cityscapes and the exciting possibilities the world of tomorrow holds. Most of all I'd like to see us live in mutual respect and not manipulated by political and religious interests. If I could live 200 years perhaps I would see some pretty amazing changes.
If I had a guarantee of 80 or 90 years I know I'd live long enough to see my children become parents. I'd get to see them as adults and see them grow into the confidence of middle age. I might even see my great-grandchildren, which would probably make me wish for more years.
Most of all I want to be a support to my family, which means I at least need to be around until 65 or 70. To see my young children past the mistakes we all make as late teens and young adults, to be a safety net and a caring dad.
Ultimately I'd be happiest if I could just do this job as well as my dad.
It isn't enough to be physically healthy. Setting side the questions of cost and availability, with artificial and transplanted parts plus current biochemistry we could already keep a person mostly-healthy beyond 100. But until/unless we can delay the natural cognitive decline that begins in late middle-age - which can't be fixed with a transplant or implant, or any known medical procedure - what's the point? Who wants to be fit enough to walk a mile to the store, but unable to remember the way home?
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Get a job!
Not sure you're actually listening to yourself. You say that by the time we can extend human life we'll have the technology to feed the planet. Then you say we have the technology to feed the planet now, presumably we lack the willpower as a civilization to get the job done. Hunger isn't a problem of technology, it's a problem of human nature, and while technology progresses with time as a matter of course, human nature does not. There's no guarantee that solving the technological problem of extending human life will necessarily come after solving the human nature problem of feeding the hungry.
Of course, you could mean that technology will push the price of fixing hunger so low that a relative minority of charitable individuals could solve it, which I would find believable.
Only 1 % choose not to live forever, until the moment they about to die, then they change their mind.
Most people who die at an advanced age really, really want to die. Each of my grandparents, when they were getting to that point, voiced the opinion that they just wished their lives were done with.
Being sick and in pain all the time is not fun. Which, as others have pointed out, is really the problem with the question as worded. It's now, "how long do you want to live while getting increasingly frail?" Nobody wants that. The question is, "how long do you want to live while looking and feeling like a 20-year-old?" The answer to that, universally, should be "forever."
There's no reason the Earth can't support 10 billion, or even much more. The key is, it can't support that many using shitty present-day technology, with everyone driving a big gas-guzzling SUV. Instead of taking the average middle-class American lifestyle as the benchmark, imagine instead large, densely-populated cities with advanced, autonomous transport systems; done that way, it's certainly doable, and the Earth could probably support tens of billions easily, plus others could live on giant space stations, the Moon, etc. The problem, of course, is human nature: greed, shortsightedness, etc. Instead of working to create new technologies and habitats like this, we say "it's impossible" and keep driving our gas guzzlers, and we constantly fight wars with each other over resources and ideology. Read up on "arcologies" to see how people could live without such an individual impact on the environment.
Go watch Star Trek: The Next Generation; that shows a society that could sustain tens of billions on Earth alone. The problem is that the people in that show aren't actually human; they're too intelligent, too thoughtful, too unselfish, too far-sighted, WAY too competent at their jobs, and there's no sociopaths there. Even the screw-ups have very understandable motivations for their actions, and even the Ferengi have better ethics than the people running our corporations and governments.
Imagine you're "invulnerably immortal" you cannot die under any circumstances. Now imagine you're spelunking and several million tons of rock caves in on you, burying you hopelessly under several hundred feet of rock. Oh, and you forgot to tell anyone which particular cave you were planning on visiting. Now imagine any number of other circumstances where you could be trapped, with no hope of rescue and no end to your torment.
YOU, sir, need a hobby or three. Badly.
Having reached my mid-40s, I've only begun to explore the things I'd like to do in my life. I find that I'm having to pare back all the interests I have because I just can't find the time for them all. I look at the time I have left and think, "shit, it's going to take me 2 years to complete this project, which means I'm going to be X old before I can even begin this next one."
I've started worrying less about the cost of my endeavors and more about the time commitment. I can always make more money, but damnit I've only got another 20 great years left, another 10 or 15 mediocre ones, and - if I'm lucky - maybe 10 more to do some low intensity stuff while I look for "young" people willing to hang with the "old dudes in the home."
It's a shame I can't buy 10 of the good years you have left, 'cause you sure aren't using them in any meaningful way, it seems.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Cannibalism.
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
Bill Clinton's Head in a Jar: "Hey, sugar cookie. You know, legally, nothing I can do counts as sex anymore."
Gerald Ford's Head in a Jar: "I apologise for his rudeness, ma'am. He gets this way around meaty-looking women."
Hectice, baby, Mercator says hello to you
There's no need for research - we already know why. Men have a Y chromosome. The Y chromosome does not carry the same genes as the X, which means that men wind up with only one copy of some genes. That in turn renders men more susceptible to mutations of those genes, and diseases caused by those mutations.
Further, men tend to be more aggressive and take more risks than women, and there's a good bit of evidence that this is genetic. Lastly, men in Western culture at least are more likely to lack a social support network, and many buy into the idea that "real men" don't talk about their feelings, don't try to get help with mental/emotional problems, etc. All of these things contribute to shorter average lifespans.
-Lorien (Babylon 5, "Into the Fire")
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
im sure that if a subset of the population became Immortal there would be fights between them
Note to Police if you hear "There can Be Only One!" from somebody Use a Shotgun (and aim for the Head)
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I'm told that the real downer is after the sun starts to die and you end up doing some quality lava-swimming before being engulfed and trapped within an utterly sterile, slowly cooling gravity well until the end of the universe, if any...
Statistically, if you had kids you'd be less happy. According to my readings, if you want to be happier, devote more of your time to helping other, spending time with friends, learning new things, etc.
Awesome furniture, accessories and cabinetry in Santa Rosa, CA: http://humanity-home.com/
When I was 40 I got up in the morning and ran 2 miles every day. It was great.
I am 62 right now and I'm enjoying life quite a bit however I have slowed down and no longer run in the morning because it hurts my joints.
My father is 86 and is suffering from mild dementia and and severe arthritis. His wife of 60 years is gone.
If this is the trajectory I certainly wouldn't want to live to 120.
However if the trajectory were to be the current decline only stretched out I'd go for 120. Maybe 150.
Sorry to mention it, but isn't the fact that the average American glutting on fast-food, doesn't exercise and is a workaholic moving the life expectancy down? I remember hearing that the current generation will be the first one for a while to live longer than its children. And I know ... citation needed.. and here it is
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/aug/13/usa.ewenmacaskill
and here http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/nation/life-expectancy-map/?hpid=z3
"The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes" - Winston Churchill
You insensitive clod.
Godforbid, they'd have to take responsibility for future consequences of their actions, or endure the pain of changes in the world around them.
There is only one correct answer.
As long as I can!
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens