I’ve read and heard various claims, often from supposedly Very Smart People, that current research into telomere shortening may enable us to circumvent the Hayflick limit, which states that vertebrate cells just can’t reproduce after so many generations. Supposedly, this will enable us to stop cell ageing in humans and give us hyper-extended lifetimes: I’ve heard numbers around anywhere from “1,000 year” lifespans to “live forever”. I believe the current buzzphrase is “metahumans” for such people.
As an aside, all the enthusiasts for hyper-extended lifespans seem to be biologists and other physical scientists with an utter inability to consider let alone fathom the awful social and personal implications of such extended lifespans. As far as I can see, the implications are so dreadful on so many levels that only a white-coated biologist with Asperger’s could fail to see them.
But let us grant that such a thing is possible, and-- to pick a number-- new technology could grant a human being a 1,000 year lifespan, with the physical and mental agility of, say, a 30 year-old for most of that span. And let us add another assumption that the technology stops degenerative diseases at that point; so that unless you decided to drink, smoke, or eat yourself to death, your body stays at 30 for well over 900 years.
During such a long period, what are the actuarial chances of death by accident? Cracked once did an article about how an immortal human (a la Captain Jack in Dr Who) had a 100% chance of being entombed by falling rubble… eventually.
If you had a treatment to eliminate all aging related causes of death, such that you had the statistical likelihood of dying of a 23 year old, you’d have a life expectancy of ~3000 years.
I think that realistically, if you had such a treatment, and did not have bad luck during the first millenium, you’d probably live long enough for technology to be developed that would make you truly immortal. The way the technology would work is that there would be a means to (destructively) scan your brain at the atomic level and make digital backup copies of the state file.
Once your mental state exists in multiple places at once, and some of those places are cryptographically secure such that there is no way for an adversary to discover which places your state is backed up at, then you’d be truly immortal in most practical senses. (gotta worry about the heat death in a trillion years or so, ofc, unless you find a way out of that in the meantime…)
We already had a thread about this topic (that I couldn’t find) and the figure that was calculated was much lower than that, IIRC. Something like 600 years or so.
I’ve thought that there are two types of people - those who embrace long life, and those who get bored and try every dangerous thrill… much like today.
Some will likely never get into a plane or onto the freeway. Others will hang-glide or bungee-jump, parachute jump or mountain climb every chance they get.
Considering that even in a 20-year career (or more) of mountain climbing or parachuting, very few people die, I would suggest the odds are much more limited. How many parachute deaths a year are there in North America? Mountain climbing? You’re more likely to get kiled cycling down a side road in the open country.
In a thousand years, I would guestimate the odds of dying in a motor vehicle accident are still less than 10%, and that’s with today’s incredibly careless drivers and crazy traffic.
According to this report for 2008. On page 18, there is a breakdown of causes of death for people 25-34 years old. By my reckoning, only the first three categories (Accident, Suicide, Homicide) would still be relevant in a world were people no longer die of “health problems”, for a total of at least 24498 “not health problem” deaths (if you assume “all other causes” to be all heath problems) and 32610 such deaths (if you assume “all other causes” to all be non-health problems).
The table on page 94 of that report gives an estimated population of 40931565 in that range. That gives a “death rate from non-health causes” in that group of about 0.08% on the high end and 0.06% on the low end.
Assuming someone could stay in that group for 1000 years, with only those causes of death, living the same American 25-34-year-old lifestyle, one would have a 45-55% chance of surviving the whole thousand years.
As an aside on your aside, I don’t see any good reason to think (1) that the social and personal implications of greatly extended life would necessarily be “horrible”, and (2) that “biologists and other physical scientists” are particularly impaired in their ability to perceive potential problems. Certainly you have not mentioned any specific such implications here.
A society where people routinely live to be 1000 would not work the same way as our current society does, and there would probably be adjustments required, but there is no reason to think of it as being an obligatory dystopia.
Nobody yet seems to be addressing the OP. I certainly don’t know anything about these kinds of matters, but I can think of a few obvious questions. The OP seems to be asking about the sociology of a society where people live for many hundreds of years, being fairly healthy for most of that time.
The most obvious question: What kind of population problems does that create? As people continue to be born, without dying, the population would burgeon. Only after 500 (or 1000 or whatever) years, as the first generation of Gen ∞’ers reach there limit and start dying, would the population begin to stabilize, and at vastly greater numbers than today.
How many people would there be? Where would all these people live? What kind of lifestyle would they have? Would would the economy be like? What would they eat?
How would supply and demand play out, for all sorts of goods and services? Would there be vastly more people than needed to produce the goods and services that all those people need? Or would all those people create demand for goods and services greater than all those people could produce? Or would overall demands for things (especially for food, and maybe even for plain old breathable air) vastly outstrip Earth’s capacity for agricultural and other production?
What would this mean for society? Would we need to have outrageous and draconian birth control measures? Would there be a lottery to pick the few lucky people who would be allowed to make a baby? Or (perhaps more likely) would only the very few very rich or powerful people be allowed to make babies? Would society contains some vast overwhelming number of people living a serf-like existence? Would the world be hyper-super-duper-Malthusian?
Would life be “cheap”? On the one hand, advancing technology could reduce deaths from all other causes, especially things like automotive accidents. (Think advanced automated driverless cars.) With people so plentiful, would society have any incentive to be protective towards its members? Or would everybody’s lives be valued like ants in an ant colony? Would death, destruction, and misery from perpetual warfare be the norm?
Lots of questions like that to be discussed. I think that’s the sort of stuff the OP wants to discuss here.
I don’t think so. That’s all more IMHO than GQ. The OP asked the question “what are the chances of death by accident?” and leahcim took a stab at answering it.
I saw Roy Walford on TV in the early eighties address this very question. He said “the longest you could possibly live is 600 years. After that an accident would get you.” Walford was no slouch at probability theory; he beat the casinos in Vegas as an undergrad.
Isn’t that roughly the same thing as saying that you’d only make it 600 years on average, assuming the mean/median are more or less the same in this case?
Whovian nit, a falling building wouldn’t kill Captain Jack, he’d revive as soon as the rubble was cleared away, even if it took a million years for erosion to do the work. It’s a blessing… and a curse, you know.
Well, I wanted to avoid the part of the death rate that was due to health-related issues, because in the OP’s super-science-disease-curing scenario those probably wouldn’t happen.
How does this “non-aging” thing work? What if I drink like a fish, smoke, and am 100 lbs overweight. You can get away with that in your 20s*. Is that only because you are only in your 20s for 10 years?
So, would even someone 25, age wise, eventually suffer liver failure, heart disease, etc. from a bad lifestyle or would your young and spry genes let you handle it?
Road accidents, homicide and suicide are the main causes of death for those around age 30. In the future we would likely have self driving cars which would be far safer than what we have now. And assuming the person has no desire to commit suicide all that really leaves is accidents and homicide.
Homicide is not very common if you aren’t either involved in a criminal lifestyle, live in an area full of crime or are not at risk of being killed by your spouse (the vast majority of homicide victims fall into those 3 categories. A lot of homicides are criminals killing each other, or to a lesser degree domestic violence). So the risk of being a victim of homicide for a middle class white guy are pretty low.
So that just leaves accidents. plus if you eschew dangerous hobbies, your chances go down even more. Avoid rock climbing, skydiving, drag racing, boxing, spelunking, etc.
[moderating]
The side discussion does sound fascinating, and the OPs statistical question has been answered, so I’m moving the thread over to IMHO to continue the discussion.
[/moderating]
One sci-fi author (Larry Niven) imagine such a society (not human) that had solved the aging problem. They had becoming extremely risk-adverse. Would that be what people would do? I can’t answer that, but it is something to think about.
Here’s something else to think about. Suppose longevity became essentially infinite, but fertility declined as at present. Presumably people would not be allowed to reproduce, or extremely rarely. If this was rigorously enforced, you could have a situation in which all the females were over 50 and humanity stopped reproducing.
How might this change space travel? With 1,000-year lifespans, might people be more interested in jumping on a ship for a hundred years to go to an Earthlike (or terraformable) planet?