Of course this doesn’t take into account the odd war, meteor strike, alien invasion, reality shows, etc…
-XT
Definitely yes.
These issues are covered by de Grey on his website. Basically, he says we’re going to have to figure out how to make these adjustments as the need arises, something that humans have been doing from the start, whenever that was. There are many possibilities.
That’s where we’re headed right now, given an average lifespan into one’s 70’s, at least in industrialized countries. Expand that by only 2 or 3 times and we’re already talking a completely different ballgame. Again, it becomes an issue of employing human ingenuity to address these issues as they arise and evolve.
This whole issue of making sure to produce another generation reminds me of the issue of fat in the American diet. Fat is not the problem. Fat is an absolute necessity in order to survive. Too much fat is the problem.
Likewise, people are indeed an asset, at least to other people, but too many people is a liability, particularly as we tend to concentrate large numbers of us in relatively small regions. There have been some perfectly good reasons why we have done this, but it has shown to be an overall unhealthy practice in the extremes to which we have taken it.
With fewer people, and with the available technologies, we could spread ourselves out more and still maintain the ability to communicate and cooperate to all of our mutual benefit.
Well, could be. Indeed, we have no way of knowing in advance. Again to paraphrase de Grey, on your deathbed would you turn down 10 more years of healthy, productive life on the basis of, “I’d better not. I might become too much of a risk taker.”?
Again, we are not talking about immortality, here. My use of the word “indefinitely” is a possible misnomer, inasmuch as various natural disasters will take place completely out of our control. But, with a lifespan of hundreds/thousands of years wouldn’t that be all the more time to figure out how to anticipate and guard against at least some of those disasters? Or, indeed, to devise way to move ourselves somewhere else, certain in the knowledge that, no matter how long it might take to find a suitable locale, we’ll get there alive.
The numbers you propose above do not take into account the possibility of humans becoming smarter with age. We all experience this phenomenon throughout our lives, although it generally slows to a dull, embittered, and regrettable trudge as we live out our last decades. Remove the “dull, embittered and regrettable trudge” part and how much could we learn? These are dauntingly important matters to consider.
Still, there will always be that greater-than-zero chance that something out of our control ends it all. That asteroid with our name on it may be hurtling toward us as I type, or be many millions of years away. You want a bunch of people with a productive life of about 40 years working on that, or a bunch of people dedicated to spotting and avoiding the problem who have the knowledge and wisdom totalling hundreds of years of their own productive experience to draw upon? I’ll take the latter.
You raise some interesting questions.
Superb work, Aeschines, every bit befitting of your dedication to the integrity of these boards. (This statement will draw some predictable responses.)
Still, it is that “if” that is unknowable. But we cannot know how much we are capable of learning until we have the years to do so.
Very good. But, how come?
The OP referred to living indefinitely “in good health”. That rules out “disease or random organ failure”, but still leaves misadventure (accident, homicide, suicide).
If misadventure were the only cause of death, and were equally likely to strike on any given day, the chance of living to a certain age would be an exponential function (like the chance of a given atom of a radioisotope surviving for a given time) – see Aeschines’s calculation below.
A couple of complications:
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A level of medical advancement sufficient to cure all diseases and stop aging would also reduce the effective accident rate (i.e. it would be able to heal some serious accident victims who could not be helped by the best medical treatments now available). If it’s possible to “record” minds, it would even be theoretically possible to restore people from backup no matter what (though this raises some philosophical issues that could spawn a whole other thread).
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The risk of misadvanture might not remain constant with time. For example, if people got bored with life after a few centuries, they might get more reckless and/or suicidal. On the other hand, someone who has the chance to live indefinitely might become extremely cautious in order to avoid losing centuries to a trivial mishap.
[hijack]
I wiki’d [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aubrey_de_Grey]Aubrey and I have to say that he looks exactly like the guy in the Skittles commercial with the candy stealing beard.
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I would chose to live indefinitely. Since I enjoy learning, imagine what a couple hundred years worth of education could produce for the world? Also, I’ve always wanted to see another Solar system.
Does it rule out things like a random stroke which cuts off oxygen to the brain when you are not in transporting range of a hospital?
I did the same calculation above his. I just used a bigger chance of being killed accidentally.
BtW, Aeschines, I think your numbers are flawed. The statistics I posted above say that 4.4% of deaths are accidental. Using your numbers and the average human age, I get a 1.3% chance of dying accidentally. You also have to add in suicide and sudden organ failure or stroke, which is why my exponent is much bigger than yours, with a corresponding steeper curve of life expectancy. But it’s almost a moot point, because neither of us have a clue what those numbers would look like were we immortal. We might become very risk-averse, or we might become wild risk-takers. We just have no way of knowing.
Sure. And these complications, among others, are why it’s almost impossible to know how the accident rate might change if we didn’t age. In fact, a radical change like that to human nature means we’ll know almost NOTHING about what the world would look like. Would wars be more likely, or less? Would people have fewer kids, or more? What would happen to families? The job market? Today, you can make valid arguments for almost any direction. On the one hand, you could claim that it would be disastrous because people would breed but not die, and we’d have a population explosion. On the other hand, you could claim that once people realize they are going to live long enough to sleep in the bed they are making, they’d become much more responsible stewards of the environment, and taking the ‘long view’ means we’re less likely to remain a ‘gotta have it now’ kind of society.
We couldn’t even predict all the social ramifications of the birth control pill. No one saw the automobile creating the ‘teenager’ class. The changes to society due to the elimination of aging would be far more profound.
Don’t get me wrong - I’m all for life extension. Anything that gives humans more choices over their lives is a good thing. And I think it would ultimately cause an economic boom, because right now one of our most important assets - educated, productive humans - dies off regularly and we have to start from scratch.
I was taking particular exception to a couple of notions - one, that it would be better for society if we didn’t have as many kids right now, and two, that eliminating aging would mean virtual immortality.
He vaguely resembles Rasputin, to me, although more knowing than sinister in his mien.
So would I! But I’ll take a few hundreds or thousands of years right here.
I’ll just preface my statement by syaing that Mr. de Grey is wrong. No, we won’t.
But if we could, shit, absolutely. Sign me up.
What makes you so sure? On his website he answers to most every conceivable dispute with his observations and conclusions. There appears to be very little of any importance that he hasn’t already addressed. This has some of the orthodoxy extremely pissed off at him. The man is thorough.
It’s reminiscent to me of when Galileo produced incontrovertible evidence that the Earth is circling the sun, rather than t’other way ‘round. The church authorities (the orthodoxy) told him words to the effect that, “Look, we already know. But the masses aren’t ready for this yet. It’s just too big a change in their perception, which is constituted largely by what we’ve told them. We’ll see to letting it all leak out as we see fit. This is because we don‘t want to shake public confidence in Church authority. And if you do go ahead and inform the world of this, we’re agonna make ya pay.” And he did, and they did.
This is exactly my point! Who among you, dopers, would turn down the offer of an extended, healthy life? Who among you?
I’m guessing not a one of you would turn down the opportunity, under just about any circumstances. And that is what makes this effort the most important thing going on in the world today. Well, it always has been the most important thing. We’ve managed to triple/quadruple the human life span since we first gathered around a fire. You can bet your ass that this has been a deliberate effort. No one is complaining about a longer lifespan, except for having to die, usually in an increasingly enfeebled state.
This is one reason that health advances may well destabilize society. Because if the sort of aging cures actually do come about, they are going to be ridiculously expensive and available to only a few. And many many people will spend their lives stressing about whether they can earn enough money to postpone their deaths.
Of course, I’m highly skeptical that any of this can be done. Human aging and death are not some unitary condition (just like cancer is not really all one disease): it results for many many different reasons, many of which play off each other. Cure one ailment and you may well cause other problems that simply result in death from another cause. Furthermore, the body’s repair mechanisms are just not perfect. Scar tissue and cellular/genetic damage and wrinkles and plauques and the likihood of cancers simply increase over time, and it would take a radical radical addition of entirely new biological mechanisms to actually repair and prevent these problems. The problem of genetic damage is probably the worst of all, because you can’t fix it without coming up with a far more robust anti-mutation error correction scheme that’s unlike anything already in the biological world.
We’ve reached the point where we can prevent or cure most of the common ailments that lead to early death a lot of the time. But nothing we’ve seen in any medical field comes close to promising a solution to just the general cost of wear and tear over time: not even stem cells (unless you are going to somehow replace most of your body with stem cells).
I could be wrong, and they could find some genetic trigger that prevents and repairs damage (telomere’s are a start on this process, but that’s only the body’s ticking time-bomb: it doesn’t solve the problems of basic entropy), but I wouldn’t bet on it.
Yes. Strokes are caused by a preexisting circulatory condition (ruled out by the “in good health” stipulation) that causes the formation of a blood clot that migrates into a cerebral artery.
Absolutely. The only thing I want to kill me is the heatdeath of the universe- and when that time comes, I’m sure as hell going to try to do something about THAT as well.
None of you had better do naughty like Rudolf Hess. Solitary confinement for eternity would really piss you off.
Not at all so! Dr. de Grey addresses these issues specifically on his website, under the link “Only the rich!”
All of these points addressed, too, on the website.
On the website, dude. Stem cells and the lot.
Also addressed.
If you “think [you] could be wrong,” find out just how wrong you are before posting. Email Dr. de Grey yourself if you think you’ve nailed down something he hasn’t answered to already. He promises to read all of his email, if not answer all of it.
Believe me, I sympathize with your plight. I was, and still am, composing an email to this guy, which has grown progressively shorter as I peruse his site. I still have a good-sized email to send, but mostly concerned with matters of psychology which, as you may or may not know, is what my doctorate is in.
You raise an interesting issue. Will some of us foul up a thousand year lifespan in the same way that we manage in just 80 years? And then what do we do with the perps?Would the punishment for crimes against humanity include withdrawal of the opportunity for extended life treatments?
I say it should, and what a wonderful deterrent!
Goodness and decency would prevail!
I probably would. Life can be good if you let it be and most of my life I have been happy.
I’m in, though I’ll want a discount if I buy a 5,000-year subscription to the SDMB.
You’ll stand a far greater chance of living 5000 years than lasting that long on SDMB.