For instance, Star Trek answers an important philosophical question: "What if we gave a starship command to a man with a bigger sex drive than an entire class of high school seniors?"
Yeah "ST:Voyager" really cleared up that question.
Real science fiction writers, are merely using a genre setting to comment on the PRESENT, and perhaps on the human condition in general.
Nothing sucks worse than soft sci fi, a smooth pablum of tech applied over a tired predictable story, but its "new" because they use video phones, even if they utterly fail to account for the effect of tech on the story. (I'm looking at you, Stranger in a Strange Land, that story was horribly bad sci fi)
Just wanted to point out a huge contingent of people prefer the exact polar opposite of your "ideal", because that opposing idea is at least occasionally interesting or creative.
I take that back, that the only thing worse than soft sci fi is swords and sorcery sci fi where its just pagan dungeons n dragons magic complete with knights in shining armor and swordfights (I'm looking at you, star wars). But its not a tired old medieval LotR wannabe because its "sci fi" see right there where the sword is electrical, and the shining armor on the kings knights is plastic so its really "new and exciting" not the same old crud.
If the specific consumption per mass and volume is "similar" to human tissue, then its effect on the body would be about like a similar weight/volume of fat. I don't think they're planning on pulling 500 watts out of the thing anytime soon...
I'd be interested in volumetric and mass power density. I know my body outputs about a watt per pound and generates about a hundred watts per cubic foot. If this is much higher or lower in either measure, its going to have interesting effects on the body. Otherwise the effect on the body will merely be like being that much fatter, mostly.
Being able to biologically power a LED light would be an interestingly useless hack.
How do they build an aircraft hanger like that? Hundreds of feet on a side with no support columns and built by construction guys?
The planes in them seem believable, because they're made out of aerospace grade unobtanium by $50/hr expert machinists. You expect something with a pedigree like that to hold together.
However, the hangers are even bigger, made out of conventional "stuff" by good ole boys or illegals. The tension in the steel at the center of the door must be astounding...
Somebody already translated the Esperanto. Now translate this please:
I used to try to assemble computers way back when and they came out looking like a skateboard.
If its a noob thing, then its a pre-1981 noob thing because that's when I got started in computing... Some kind of weird S-100 CPM reference to 8 inch disks? I never got Amiga disease so it might be an Amiga thing?
Furthermore, they should be charged for their time in the hospital, because it was idiotic, informed, and self inflicted.
Theres a dangerous road to go down, since that could be 3/4 of the people hospitalized, at least to some interpretation of idiotic, informed, and self inflicted.
Bus / mass transit riders? When my family goes on a car family trip, its not unusual at all for my wife to call for directions / hours / vacancies / reservations from the passenger seat while driving.
All the places you list are accessible by car, or within 50 feet of the road, anyway, or else no one would ever go there. To a first approximation if you drive a circle around a park, and there is no tower inside the circle, all spots in the park will have better reception than the lowest spot on the perimeter of the park.
In fact, if it exists, shouldn't it be easy to find as it will likely have an orbit that repeatedly intersects earth's orbit?
Only if its in the same inclination as the earth relative to the sun. Classic orbital mechanics mistake... just because two things are up there (lets say, ISS and HST) doesn't mean they'll ever come really close to each other.
Gravitational slingshot might mean the orbit has been permanently changed. On a long enough scale, from the perspective of small enough objects, there are no non-chaotic orbits. There are Lagrangian points and there is no reason for long term stability there (even the most stable ones can get swept clean by some orbiting "whatever" that passes near enough or thru the L point).
At this point, we don't know if the Great Filter is in front or behind us
I thought the "great filter" was a lot of handwaving to explain away rather unique features required for an "advanced" civilization that can't be remotely detected:
1) Magnetosphere to keep water vapor in the long term and reduce cosmic rays in the short term.
2) Continental arrangement that gives enough ice age action to encourage evolution competition but not completely wipe out lifeforms and once civilization gets rolling to keep temps and sea levels constant for an unusually long geologic time
3) A nice sized moon to visit or otherwise F with or at least encourage astronomical study.
4) Planet thats a little smaller doesn't have the heavy metals and resources for high tech culture (even just plain ole surface area) and planet thats just a little bigger is virtually impossible for crude chemical rockets to lift off and launch satellites.
You can't see any of this stuff remotely, at this time. It "seems likely" to be pretty rare. If you think it isn't rare, then you need the "great filter" hypothesis to explain why we aren't overrun with little green men.
7. "I saw that in Nature or arvix or Science six days ago WTF" 8. "slashdot dupe see yesterday" 9. "Can anyone figure out what the journalist means, or unfilter the journalist stuff to figure out what the subject meant?" 10. "The journalist claims this is new, here is a wikipedia article about the same having been done five times over the past thirty years" 11. Can a work a goatse joke into this somehow? or 1. 2. 3. 4. profit? or In soviet russia, the skepticism abounds you
Nice. I like the block diagram of programmable gain op amps (hopefully high performance / low noise?) and A/D D/A systems, but it really cries out for a nice set of fast sample and hold units. Imagine an array of programmable op amps at the inputs dynamically feeding fast S/H and comparator units, while switching the fancy A/D in and out of the S/H as needed.... kind of a dynamic analog processor rather than static designs. Interesting. Also with enough functional units on chip, you could survive damage, if A/D unit #3 blew out either in use or broke from the factory, theoretically smart enough software would work around it...
One could interpret this as a whole: we have a burning rate that leads us to a 120 years maximum lifespan. If any drug were to extend it to 150, one would have to live like a turtle...
Bad analogy. comparing track and field athletes (even amateurs) vs turtles, that medical treatment would raise max lifespan to something like 12000 years not 150.
Frankly, for academic research, I'm thinking a 11000 year old philosopher or poet would be pretty interesting to listen to. Maybe not so good for a restaurant waiter, but...
I would see running out of things to do to keep busy as a problem
That's why you need education, rather than training, from the "higher education system". To a very crude first approximation, the European university system was designed to teach the idle children of nobility how to amuse themselves for a lifetime in a socially acceptable manner. Frankly I can't imagine ever being bored, I'm just too well (self) educated.
I suppose after a couple centuries, I could master all the fine arts, perform as an actor in all the plays, learn all human languages and literature, learn all the sciences... but by then the physics I learned 450 years ago would be obsolete and its time to start over again... As a hobby I think it would be fun to sail a sailboat into every harbor on the planet. That would take awhile. Others would want to hike every trail... Every trail, even little game trails in the middle of nowhere. I think it would be fun to master all the mechanical arts... all of them, just to see if I really can do it, from fine finish carpentry to millwright work, I bet I could do it... I'm not into jock stuff, but I could see someone wanting to carefully and methodically master the history, theory and practical play of all "ball games" and all track and field events. So it takes 10 years to become a true master of the long jump? I got time... Philosophy, history... And then there is politics and economic trading and a universe of games of chance/skill.
Nobody is going to want to spend 70 years (half their life!) basically dying.
Both before and after the life extension invention, people spend 100% of their time in a terminal condition always ever closer to death. Unless they have delusions of immortality, which admittedly is probably going to be much more popular when everyone lives to be 150...
I might be willing to credit that performance levels in general rise and peak around 15 or so, in which case the average person already spends 4/5 of their life "dying" as you describe it.
What happens when people live to 150, that means 45% of the population gets felonized.
I can't tell if you are making fun of people who come up with arguments in favor of having people die of old age or if you are serious. I think you are making fun of them, in which case, good job!
The legal structure is set up intentionally so everyone breaks laws and can be busted either thru bad luck or at the whim of the powers that be, and we reduce the excess middle class population by turning X% of the population into a permanent stigmatized excon underclass per year. And people seem to like that, or at least it makes the rich richer so we're told to like it, or whatever. Anyway that seems to be how it is. So if suddenly people live longer, we're going to have to legalize weed or something, else we'll reduce too much of the surplus population in the long run if we maintain the same harvesting rate. Or we'll have to put less money into irrelevant yet profitable law enforcement, or change our social outlook toward excons, or something.
The funniest part about all the responses to my post is I was thinking of housing and social status and every response was instead about climbing the corporate ladder, perhaps because more/.ers post at work? As if there still exists a corporate ladder to for us to climb... Maybe as obsolete as the concept of working for one company from graduation to retirement.
Anyway, to expand on my housing idea, you need the toe-tag types to move out of their retirement mansion into the nursing home (or morgue), so the school kid families can move into the empty nest mansions or retirement cottages, so the starter house newlyweds can move out of their "nursery grade" homes, so the dating couples can move out of their apartment rentals or condos... Suddenly that freezes up and I'm stuck in "school kid neighborhood" for another 100 years...
Social status is the "wise old men" running the hobby club or fishing lodge or whatever social structure you have will eventually get the F outta my way when I become the oldest and theoretically wisest man and they're all dead/retired/bored. OK I've lived a life planning on getting there at age 60 or whatever. Suddenly I've gotta wait another freaking 100 years to be the "wise old man". Hmm, I was not expecting an extra 100 years of being a noob at the hunting lodge or the target shooting competition or the hobby metal machinist club or ham radio net or whatever. On the other hand, assuming the old timers don't lose their minds, they're going to be freaking geniuses compared to the current crop of old timers due to extreme levels of experience, so maybe if I have to wait, its good? This applies to female hobbies too, now an "expert knitter" is going to have to apprentice for 130 years instead of only 40 or so years, which changes the grind characteristics of the hobby game quite a bit. If your goal was to "learn it all" its going to take a heck of a lot longer..
Find the riskiest projects the ones people expect to fail and make them work.
LOL everyone does that already regardless of age. Youth is more likely to fail than elders due to lack of experience so I'm thinking your advice is doom to the cohort as a whole. Maybe for the 1 in 100 elite it works, but that leaves the remaining 99% waiting, which was my whole point.
Most workplaces are not upwardly mobile... you've gotta wait for the RIP retired-in-place to die before you can move up. In the case of tenured teachers and family businesses, this is literally true.
Unless we find a way to truly slow aging so you're like a 30yo @ 60, 50yo @ 100 and 75yo @ 150, I doubt we'll ever reach 150.
We already have. I'm old enough, and I have a lifetime of experience of looking at women, or at least enough to know:
1) The girls that smoke, drank, suntanned until they looked African despite Swedish ancestry, and eat tons of junk food currently look like AARP poster models. Like 20 years older than chronological. Some of its rather heartbreaking, I remember this one goddess, like Aphrodite walking the earth when she was about 20, who now has wrinkly motorcycle leathers for skin, starter emphysema, some cataract vision problems...
2) The girls that lived a pretty granola lifestyle of non-smoking, not drinking too much, pale untanned skin, lots of organic food / farmers markets / salads, spend time indoors mostly, watch their weight, could almost pass for playboy models despite their age.
When I was young I saw this in my girlfriend's moms. Some were pretty hot and young looking and frankly I'd date them, some looked more like grannies, and it had a lot more to do with lifestyle and diet than chronological age or genetics. My advice to the young men of/. is all chicks look hot when they're 19, so don't pay attention to that when wife shopping; examine how their moms look, because that's what you're gonna be waking up to in 20 years, assuming the marriage lasts, and depending mostly on the lifestyle they were brought up in, some 40ish women still look like goddesses and some like grannies.
Trust me dude, we know how to make women look like they're 20 when they're 40, and how to make them look like 60 when they're 40.
I have one non-smoking non-drinking sorta healthy eating female relative who's more active and "youthful" at 70 than my smoking drinking junk food eating relative at 50.
The discovery could lead to the invention of devices that can reconfigure their internal wiring and evolve into an entirely different and new device, to reflect the changing needs of consumers
No that's old old old stuff not an invention.
In the digital world, think of a classic digital computer. Decade(s) ago I've used (expensive telco) FPGA products which reconfigure themselves. Some of the exotic massively redundant switchgear could reconfigure itself on the fly while passing production customer traffic, although we usually did it during maintenance windows anyway. VLIW CPUs, etc. I've done embedded FPGA work where you embed a really simple CPU in the FPGA and build all the smarts into the FPGA as reconfigurable peripherals of the CPU itself, so you start with a minimal but usable "microblaze" (or was it picoblaze?) core and then add a hardware multiplier as necessary, etc. Very old stuff, not new...
In analog you've got the option of doing it "for real" with analog computer building blocks and lots of analog switches, or doing it "emulated" using DSP chips.
This approach is currently economically feasible, but rarely implemented. Mostly terror of being single sourced, or violating a patent. If I buy a USB interface that violates someones patent, I'm much more insulated than if I implement a FPGA / software USB interface that violates that patent. Maybe not legally, but definitely practically.
It might be new in that its yet another implementation, kind of like "yet another ia32 386 compatible CPU" can be new. It might be new in that its really freaking small or really energy efficient (although existing DSP chips, shipping in the millions, are going to crush your R+D possibly beating a theoretically better technology)
Can you imagine humans living longer and the birth rate of longer lived humans? What kind of impact would our planet experience from this?
Female fertility will still end at the same age... Once the eggs gone, its gone, game over. Male fertility never really ends, although it declines some. So there will be 150 year old rich guys marrying women born when he was 130.
Child rearing will be weird. In some American racial subcultures breeding begins below 15, others wait until 40+, with huge impact, some cultural groups its "normal" to be a grannie by 30, others its "normal" for grandparents to be dead of old age when the grandkids are very young. Imagine "everybody loves raymond" sitcom but with, perhaps, ten generations living across the street instead of just 1. On the other hand, with 3 to 15 complete living generations, possibly/probably local, that's going to destroy commercial day care operations. Maybe even destroy lower grades of public schooling, if every family is big enough to have a related "teacher".
Currently young people take half a decade or so off from "work" to go to university and drink beer etc. Possibly, "young" people would live at home with parents and not start work until their cohort's females are post menopausal. In a way it makes sense, go to high school, start breeding, and when your kids are all in grade school, you start university, and when the kids are roughly in middle school hit the job market and start making money to pay to raise your own kids and soon grandkids. So you'd start work at age 50. Some people will insist on starting work at age 15, which is going to be weird.
The wear and tear on the body is such that even if you can increase the lifespan to a theoretical 150 years you wouldnt be very healthy for the last 90 or so years. You also need something that adresses the wear on the body.
All my life the public assumption is the only way life can be extended is to add "bad years". All my life the only way I've seen to extend life in current practice is to add "good years". It seems self evident that if "everybody" dies at the physical equivalent of 80, the only way to make it to 90 is to live 80 chronological years while only causing 70 years of wear and tear. Don't sun tan, don't smoke, don't drink much alcohol, don't eat grains and sugars, eat lots of paleo/natural/organic foods...
Slashdot Mirror
For instance, Star Trek answers an important philosophical question: "What if we gave a starship command to a man with a bigger sex drive than an entire class of high school seniors?"
Yeah "ST:Voyager" really cleared up that question.
The masses can't tell the difference between witchcraft and science? (note, I'm not kidding)
Real science fiction writers, are merely using a genre setting to comment on the PRESENT, and perhaps on the human condition in general.
Nothing sucks worse than soft sci fi, a smooth pablum of tech applied over a tired predictable story, but its "new" because they use video phones, even if they utterly fail to account for the effect of tech on the story. (I'm looking at you, Stranger in a Strange Land, that story was horribly bad sci fi)
Just wanted to point out a huge contingent of people prefer the exact polar opposite of your "ideal", because that opposing idea is at least occasionally interesting or creative.
I take that back, that the only thing worse than soft sci fi is swords and sorcery sci fi where its just pagan dungeons n dragons magic complete with knights in shining armor and swordfights (I'm looking at you, star wars). But its not a tired old medieval LotR wannabe because its "sci fi" see right there where the sword is electrical, and the shining armor on the kings knights is plastic so its really "new and exciting" not the same old crud.
If the specific consumption per mass and volume is "similar" to human tissue, then its effect on the body would be about like a similar weight/volume of fat. I don't think they're planning on pulling 500 watts out of the thing anytime soon...
I'd be interested in volumetric and mass power density. I know my body outputs about a watt per pound and generates about a hundred watts per cubic foot. If this is much higher or lower in either measure, its going to have interesting effects on the body. Otherwise the effect on the body will merely be like being that much fatter, mostly.
Being able to biologically power a LED light would be an interestingly useless hack.
How do they build an aircraft hanger like that? Hundreds of feet on a side with no support columns and built by construction guys?
The planes in them seem believable, because they're made out of aerospace grade unobtanium by $50/hr expert machinists. You expect something with a pedigree like that to hold together.
However, the hangers are even bigger, made out of conventional "stuff" by good ole boys or illegals. The tension in the steel at the center of the door must be astounding...
Somebody already translated the Esperanto. Now translate this please:
I used to try to assemble computers way back when and they came out looking like a skateboard.
If its a noob thing, then its a pre-1981 noob thing because that's when I got started in computing... Some kind of weird S-100 CPM reference to 8 inch disks? I never got Amiga disease so it might be an Amiga thing?
More likely use UTC for meetings, flights, etc. Its not a big deal and it solves a lot of problems.
Furthermore, they should be charged for their time in the hospital, because it was idiotic, informed, and self inflicted.
Theres a dangerous road to go down, since that could be 3/4 of the people hospitalized, at least to some interpretation of idiotic, informed, and self inflicted.
It's always been a mystery to me why I can eat and enjoy something so toxic that I have to wear rubber gloves to prepare them.
Think of raw salmonella dipped chicken before you grill or fry it. Practically any raw meat, for that matter, including fish.
Bus / mass transit riders? When my family goes on a car family trip, its not unusual at all for my wife to call for directions / hours / vacancies / reservations from the passenger seat while driving.
All the places you list are accessible by car, or within 50 feet of the road, anyway, or else no one would ever go there. To a first approximation if you drive a circle around a park, and there is no tower inside the circle, all spots in the park will have better reception than the lowest spot on the perimeter of the park.
In fact, if it exists, shouldn't it be easy to find as it will likely have an orbit that repeatedly intersects earth's orbit?
Only if its in the same inclination as the earth relative to the sun. Classic orbital mechanics mistake... just because two things are up there (lets say, ISS and HST) doesn't mean they'll ever come really close to each other.
Gravitational slingshot might mean the orbit has been permanently changed. On a long enough scale, from the perspective of small enough objects, there are no non-chaotic orbits. There are Lagrangian points and there is no reason for long term stability there (even the most stable ones can get swept clean by some orbiting "whatever" that passes near enough or thru the L point).
At this point, we don't know if the Great Filter is in front or behind us
I thought the "great filter" was a lot of handwaving to explain away rather unique features required for an "advanced" civilization that can't be remotely detected:
1) Magnetosphere to keep water vapor in the long term and reduce cosmic rays in the short term.
2) Continental arrangement that gives enough ice age action to encourage evolution competition but not completely wipe out lifeforms and once civilization gets rolling to keep temps and sea levels constant for an unusually long geologic time
3) A nice sized moon to visit or otherwise F with or at least encourage astronomical study.
4) Planet thats a little smaller doesn't have the heavy metals and resources for high tech culture (even just plain ole surface area) and planet thats just a little bigger is virtually impossible for crude chemical rockets to lift off and launch satellites.
You can't see any of this stuff remotely, at this time. It "seems likely" to be pretty rare. If you think it isn't rare, then you need the "great filter" hypothesis to explain why we aren't overrun with little green men.
7. "I saw that in Nature or arvix or Science six days ago WTF"
8. "slashdot dupe see yesterday"
9. "Can anyone figure out what the journalist means, or unfilter the journalist stuff to figure out what the subject meant?"
10. "The journalist claims this is new, here is a wikipedia article about the same having been done five times over the past thirty years"
11. Can a work a goatse joke into this somehow? or 1. 2. 3. 4. profit? or In soviet russia, the skepticism abounds you
Cypress has configurable analogue chips: http://www.cypress.com/?id=1353
Nice. I like the block diagram of programmable gain op amps (hopefully high performance / low noise?) and A/D D/A systems, but it really cries out for a nice set of fast sample and hold units. Imagine an array of programmable op amps at the inputs dynamically feeding fast S/H and comparator units, while switching the fancy A/D in and out of the S/H as needed.... kind of a dynamic analog processor rather than static designs. Interesting. Also with enough functional units on chip, you could survive damage, if A/D unit #3 blew out either in use or broke from the factory, theoretically smart enough software would work around it...
Creatures studies show that lifespan is closely linked to heartbeat, even for humans.
One could interpret this as a whole: we have a burning rate that leads us to a 120 years maximum lifespan. If any drug were to extend it to 150, one would have to live like a turtle...
Bad analogy. comparing track and field athletes (even amateurs) vs turtles, that medical treatment would raise max lifespan to something like 12000 years not 150.
Frankly, for academic research, I'm thinking a 11000 year old philosopher or poet would be pretty interesting to listen to. Maybe not so good for a restaurant waiter, but...
I would see running out of things to do to keep busy as a problem
That's why you need education, rather than training, from the "higher education system". To a very crude first approximation, the European university system was designed to teach the idle children of nobility how to amuse themselves for a lifetime in a socially acceptable manner. Frankly I can't imagine ever being bored, I'm just too well (self) educated.
I suppose after a couple centuries, I could master all the fine arts, perform as an actor in all the plays, learn all human languages and literature, learn all the sciences... but by then the physics I learned 450 years ago would be obsolete and its time to start over again... As a hobby I think it would be fun to sail a sailboat into every harbor on the planet. That would take awhile. Others would want to hike every trail... Every trail, even little game trails in the middle of nowhere. I think it would be fun to master all the mechanical arts... all of them, just to see if I really can do it, from fine finish carpentry to millwright work, I bet I could do it... I'm not into jock stuff, but I could see someone wanting to carefully and methodically master the history, theory and practical play of all "ball games" and all track and field events. So it takes 10 years to become a true master of the long jump? I got time... Philosophy, history... And then there is politics and economic trading and a universe of games of chance/skill.
Nobody is going to want to spend 70 years (half their life!) basically dying.
Both before and after the life extension invention, people spend 100% of their time in a terminal condition always ever closer to death. Unless they have delusions of immortality, which admittedly is probably going to be much more popular when everyone lives to be 150...
I might be willing to credit that performance levels in general rise and peak around 15 or so, in which case the average person already spends 4/5 of their life "dying" as you describe it.
What happens when people live to 150, that means 45% of the population gets felonized.
I can't tell if you are making fun of people who come up with arguments in favor of having people die of old age or if you are serious. I think you are making fun of them, in which case, good job!
The legal structure is set up intentionally so everyone breaks laws and can be busted either thru bad luck or at the whim of the powers that be, and we reduce the excess middle class population by turning X% of the population into a permanent stigmatized excon underclass per year. And people seem to like that, or at least it makes the rich richer so we're told to like it, or whatever. Anyway that seems to be how it is. So if suddenly people live longer, we're going to have to legalize weed or something, else we'll reduce too much of the surplus population in the long run if we maintain the same harvesting rate. Or we'll have to put less money into irrelevant yet profitable law enforcement, or change our social outlook toward excons, or something.
The funniest part about all the responses to my post is I was thinking of housing and social status and every response was instead about climbing the corporate ladder, perhaps because more /.ers post at work? As if there still exists a corporate ladder to for us to climb... Maybe as obsolete as the concept of working for one company from graduation to retirement.
Anyway, to expand on my housing idea, you need the toe-tag types to move out of their retirement mansion into the nursing home (or morgue), so the school kid families can move into the empty nest mansions or retirement cottages, so the starter house newlyweds can move out of their "nursery grade" homes, so the dating couples can move out of their apartment rentals or condos... Suddenly that freezes up and I'm stuck in "school kid neighborhood" for another 100 years...
Social status is the "wise old men" running the hobby club or fishing lodge or whatever social structure you have will eventually get the F outta my way when I become the oldest and theoretically wisest man and they're all dead/retired/bored. OK I've lived a life planning on getting there at age 60 or whatever. Suddenly I've gotta wait another freaking 100 years to be the "wise old man". Hmm, I was not expecting an extra 100 years of being a noob at the hunting lodge or the target shooting competition or the hobby metal machinist club or ham radio net or whatever. On the other hand, assuming the old timers don't lose their minds, they're going to be freaking geniuses compared to the current crop of old timers due to extreme levels of experience, so maybe if I have to wait, its good? This applies to female hobbies too, now an "expert knitter" is going to have to apprentice for 130 years instead of only 40 or so years, which changes the grind characteristics of the hobby game quite a bit. If your goal was to "learn it all" its going to take a heck of a lot longer..
Find the riskiest projects the ones people expect to fail and make them work.
LOL everyone does that already regardless of age. Youth is more likely to fail than elders due to lack of experience so I'm thinking your advice is doom to the cohort as a whole. Maybe for the 1 in 100 elite it works, but that leaves the remaining 99% waiting, which was my whole point.
Most workplaces are not upwardly mobile... you've gotta wait for the RIP retired-in-place to die before you can move up. In the case of tenured teachers and family businesses, this is literally true.
Unless we find a way to truly slow aging so you're like a 30yo @ 60, 50yo @ 100 and 75yo @ 150, I doubt we'll ever reach 150.
We already have. I'm old enough, and I have a lifetime of experience of looking at women, or at least enough to know:
1) The girls that smoke, drank, suntanned until they looked African despite Swedish ancestry, and eat tons of junk food currently look like AARP poster models. Like 20 years older than chronological. Some of its rather heartbreaking, I remember this one goddess, like Aphrodite walking the earth when she was about 20, who now has wrinkly motorcycle leathers for skin, starter emphysema, some cataract vision problems...
2) The girls that lived a pretty granola lifestyle of non-smoking, not drinking too much, pale untanned skin, lots of organic food / farmers markets / salads, spend time indoors mostly, watch their weight, could almost pass for playboy models despite their age.
When I was young I saw this in my girlfriend's moms. Some were pretty hot and young looking and frankly I'd date them, some looked more like grannies, and it had a lot more to do with lifestyle and diet than chronological age or genetics. My advice to the young men of /. is all chicks look hot when they're 19, so don't pay attention to that when wife shopping; examine how their moms look, because that's what you're gonna be waking up to in 20 years, assuming the marriage lasts, and depending mostly on the lifestyle they were brought up in, some 40ish women still look like goddesses and some like grannies.
Trust me dude, we know how to make women look like they're 20 when they're 40, and how to make them look like 60 when they're 40.
I have one non-smoking non-drinking sorta healthy eating female relative who's more active and "youthful" at 70 than my smoking drinking junk food eating relative at 50.
The discovery could lead to the invention of devices that can reconfigure their internal wiring and evolve into an entirely different and new device, to reflect the changing needs of consumers
No that's old old old stuff not an invention.
In the digital world, think of a classic digital computer. Decade(s) ago I've used (expensive telco) FPGA products which reconfigure themselves. Some of the exotic massively redundant switchgear could reconfigure itself on the fly while passing production customer traffic, although we usually did it during maintenance windows anyway. VLIW CPUs, etc. I've done embedded FPGA work where you embed a really simple CPU in the FPGA and build all the smarts into the FPGA as reconfigurable peripherals of the CPU itself, so you start with a minimal but usable "microblaze" (or was it picoblaze?) core and then add a hardware multiplier as necessary, etc. Very old stuff, not new...
In analog you've got the option of doing it "for real" with analog computer building blocks and lots of analog switches, or doing it "emulated" using DSP chips.
This approach is currently economically feasible, but rarely implemented. Mostly terror of being single sourced, or violating a patent. If I buy a USB interface that violates someones patent, I'm much more insulated than if I implement a FPGA / software USB interface that violates that patent. Maybe not legally, but definitely practically.
It might be new in that its yet another implementation, kind of like "yet another ia32 386 compatible CPU" can be new. It might be new in that its really freaking small or really energy efficient (although existing DSP chips, shipping in the millions, are going to crush your R+D possibly beating a theoretically better technology)
Can you imagine humans living longer and the birth rate of longer lived humans? What kind of impact would our planet experience from this?
Female fertility will still end at the same age... Once the eggs gone, its gone, game over. Male fertility never really ends, although it declines some. So there will be 150 year old rich guys marrying women born when he was 130.
Child rearing will be weird. In some American racial subcultures breeding begins below 15, others wait until 40+, with huge impact, some cultural groups its "normal" to be a grannie by 30, others its "normal" for grandparents to be dead of old age when the grandkids are very young. Imagine "everybody loves raymond" sitcom but with, perhaps, ten generations living across the street instead of just 1. On the other hand, with 3 to 15 complete living generations, possibly/probably local, that's going to destroy commercial day care operations. Maybe even destroy lower grades of public schooling, if every family is big enough to have a related "teacher".
Currently young people take half a decade or so off from "work" to go to university and drink beer etc. Possibly, "young" people would live at home with parents and not start work until their cohort's females are post menopausal. In a way it makes sense, go to high school, start breeding, and when your kids are all in grade school, you start university, and when the kids are roughly in middle school hit the job market and start making money to pay to raise your own kids and soon grandkids. So you'd start work at age 50. Some people will insist on starting work at age 15, which is going to be weird.
The wear and tear on the body is such that even if you can increase the lifespan to a theoretical 150 years you wouldnt be very healthy for the last 90 or so years. You also need something that adresses the wear on the body.
All my life the public assumption is the only way life can be extended is to add "bad years". All my life the only way I've seen to extend life in current practice is to add "good years". It seems self evident that if "everybody" dies at the physical equivalent of 80, the only way to make it to 90 is to live 80 chronological years while only causing 70 years of wear and tear. Don't sun tan, don't smoke, don't drink much alcohol, don't eat grains and sugars, eat lots of paleo/natural/organic foods...