7 ms·
> So if you've made it to 150, you're "over the hump" (a long time ago), and then there's simply no limit to how long you can live. Even if we accept that life
by dghf 11y ago
> So if you've made it to 150, you're "over the hump" (a long time ago), and then there's simply no limit to how long you can live.
Even if we accept that life-extending and rejuvenating technologies will progress as described, and that all diseases will eventually be either curable or eradicated, there's still the risk of death from accident (or murder).
In England and Wales in 2010, about 0.025% of the population died from accidental or malicious (but not self-inflicted) injury or poisoning. If we take that as a typical annual risk of death, then over a thousand years you have a 22% chance of dying from one of those causes. At about 3000 years, it becomes more likely than not: at about 9000 years, overwhelmingly more likely (~90% chance of death); at about 50000, a practical certainty (> 99.999%).
Of course, the above assumes that risk of death from injury won't drop as medical technologies improve, which is wrong, but as long as it's non-zero, there is still going to be a statistical limit on the length of life. No hanging around till the heat death of the universe for you.
- tomswartz07 11y agoOn a lighter note, I can imagine that the size of the ego which accompanies the type of person that lives to 9,000 years old would more than likely encourage someone to poison or strangle them.
- jerf 11y agoYou gotta play the game theory out. An 8,500-year-old strangling a 9,000-year-old needs to be asking hard questions about the sort of incentive structure they're producing for the 8,000-year-olds. The world where life span runs on like that is deeply, profoundly weird, and thinking about it is hard because it's so unlike where we live. You can't just imagine one 9,000-year-old and try to imagine what the world is like, because they will not be alone.
- jandrese 11y agoI imagine absurdly conservative politics and a completely ossified power structure. How are you supposed to advance if your boss has 500 years more experience and will be in that position for another 8000 years? I mean in the current world rich assholes do eventually die and sometimes their replacements are better (or worse, but in a way that destroys their power base). Do you really want to live in a world where the Bilderberg Group is immortal?
- knodi123 11y agoObviously this could go either full dystopia, full utopia, or somewhere in between. I personally believe that "in between" is an unstable equilibrium and that a fall in one of the directions is inevitable. But there's a reason we use the word "singularity" to describe that kind of future- it really is impossible to envision with any greater accuracy or confidence than elizabethans could imagine the world of 2016.
- jerf 11y agoStill not creative enough. If everybody realizes there's no way to advance because of the old people, everyone will react to that fact. Something will happen. Actually, lots of somethings, with varying levels of success and failure. But there certainly will not be 99.9% of the long-lived human race just sort of sitting around for centuries at a time going "Oh well, guess I'm going to be a loser for the next thousand years." At that point the crystal ball becomes too fuzzy for me to guess exactly how they will react, except to point out that "go kill all the old people" is a really uncreative solution to the problem, and you've got a lot of people who will be highly incentivized to find another solution, since they plan on being the old people at some point.
- coldtea 11y ago>Still not creative enough. If everybody realizes there's no way to advance because of the old people, everyone will react to that fact. Except everyone (the majority) could be old people too. If you can live for 5000 years for example, you don't need as many reproduction going on (besides the huge overpopulation that would already be going on).
- jandrese 11y agoA lot of people in the world know that the Kim family is strangling North Korea, but you don't see people rising up to overthrow them. Imagine a world where Kim Il-sung was effectively immortal. Imagine a world where the monarchies of the middle ages could last a thousand years or more. Without something to shake up the status quo every once in awhile the situation tends to stagnate, even if it is a bad situation. It is possible that human mentality would change if we had to start thinking about longer timescales like this, but that seems optimistic.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- ChicagoBoy11 11y agoBeyond the reduced risk of death from injury, you also have to account for a change in behavior. I posit that we would all act very differently if we knew our life expectancy to be a few thousand years. I'd venture a guess that we would be a lot more risk-averse. Society would look drastically different.
- neuromancer2701 11y agoWhy wouldn't we be more risky if we knew we would live for 3000 years. Instead of 5-10 years of drinking and partying we would have 100-200 years of extended "college" years. There no pressure to get your stuff together if you know you can mess around for a couple of centuries and still have time to get your life in order.
- chacha102 11y agoI'd rather just have my life together for a couple centuries and not have the pressure of having to get it together later. Plus, can you imagine the compound interest? :)
- rpgmaker 11y ago> Instead of 5-10 years of drinking and partying we would have 100-200 years of extended "college" years. You're putting too much faith in the judgment of centuries-old "teenagers". My guess is that they would squeeze 100-200 years of drinking and partying into 5-10 years :)
- ant6n 11y agoEven if you can stay at 150 for 850 years, if you want kids, you might want to start somewhere in the first century.
- mfoy_ 11y agoAnd then after a millenium your great grandchildren will be relatively as old as you are (Say 900 to 1000, at that point how does aging affect someone?) Also, how would your memory hold up? Would you even be able to really remember anything that happened over a century or two ago?
- DyslexicAtheist 11y agoraises an interesting philosophical question: If one would commit murder and the victim has already lived 500 years is it then as much a crime as if the victim were 25 yro? e.g. Assuming not everyone could afford the technology and you have a 30 yro killer who lacks the funds to rejuvinate committing murder on somebody much older. Would that even be a crime or could it be argued that a 2nd class citizen has only tried to revenge or to set right to what they perceive an unjust society. Playing god is scary. I think we can only do it if we are really thick enough and full of our selves to believe that certain individuals are better than the rest. (... of course all under the usual disguise of democracy and with a system that ensures the majority of those living under it, that what they do is right and for the greater good). People suck :-/
- pc86 11y ago> If one would commit murder and the victim has already lived 500 years is it then as much a crime as if the victim were 25 yro? Yes.
- DyslexicAtheist 11y agoyou haven't read or understood my comment. it is neither black nor white.
- cylinder 11y agoWe punish based on intent, not on victim type.
- rogersmith 11y agoNo we don't. Most legal system have some concept of aggravating circumstances if the victim of a particular offense is a certain age, a certain profession, etc
- lloyd-christmas 11y agoWe punish on both victim type and perpetrator type. On the perpetrator side, the punishments themselves are in the context of current lifespan. If the life expectancy jumps to 150, is 36 the new 18? On the victim side: "A Denver Post analysis of five years of state sentencing data found that those convicted of child abuse resulting in death between 2007 and 2011 got prison sentences 25 percent shorter than those who killed adults and were sentenced for the comparable felony charge of second-degree murder." http://www.denverpost.com/failedtodeath/ci_21996958/inequity-exists-length-sentences-deaths-kids-and-adults http://www.denverpost.com/failedtodeath/ci_21996958/inequity...
- melling 11y ago"there's still the risk of death from accident (or murder)." Yes, everyone already knows that. I wouldn't worry about living for 1000 years if you're alive in 30 years, the human races spends much more time discussing the inane. Someone yells the equivalent of "squirrel" and down the rabbit hole we go...
- onion2k 11y agoGetting to 150 and then stopping ageing means you'll live the next 850 years of your life in the body of a 150 year old. That doesn't sound fun.
- adventured 11y agoIf they can get you to 150 and stop your aging, it implies a mastery over the physiological context that means you can stop worrying about the age of the body as we might have previously. The aging would get repaired one way or another.
- RealityVoid 11y agoHey, as long as my brain works well, I'd be cool with it.
- damon_c 11y agoVideo games are going to be pretty freaking awesome in a couple hundred years. I'm in.
- JauntTrooper 11y agoIt's better than the alternative though.
- cgriswald 11y agoSome of the treatments are expected to also reverse the effects of aging, so you wouldn't live for 1000 years in the body of a 150 year old. Although I suspect it won't be neat and clean. So if you're born into a world with aging treatments, you might live for 1000 years in the body of a 25 year old, but if you age and then get the treatments, even though you might have the body of a 25 year old, you might have some scarring or other effects left over (like an obese person who loses weight very quickly and has extra skin).
- crusso 11y agoWhy would you think that you'd have to tolerate scarring in a world that could fix DNA and implant it as easily as we run shell scripts to change our UNIX environments?
- nness 11y agoIf each year your chance of dying is 0.025%, and there's no relationship between subsequent years, wouldn't the chance remain 0.025% even after thousands of years? (since what we're talking about is the probability of independent events.)
- morgante 11y agoThe probability of dying every year stays the same, but the probability of dying in one of those 9,000 years is cumulative.
- IncRnd 11y agoIf that is how you calculate probabilities, what happens between 4,000 and 9000 years? Are you undead for 5,000 years?
- morgante 11y agoNo... If you were just born, then you will probably die by age 4000. But if you are 3999 then you will almost certainly live to age 4000. Your probability of reaching a certain age is always contingent on your current age.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- JoeAltmaier 11y agoFor this reason I'd predict a society of immortal conservatives. No risk is worth taking. Speed limits drop precipitously. Traffic infractions become federal offenses. Interest rates drop to nil. Everyone would just have too much at risk, to allow anything dicey.
- technofiend 11y agoThere are a great number of books that explore this subject. Robert A. Heinlein's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methuselah%27s_Children https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methuselah%27s_Children is an early treatment. As you say at least one society (I'm sorry I don't remember the book) became increasingly risk-averse and added to an ever-growing list of death penalty crimes to feed the organ banks. Rather than utopia my fear is that would be closer to the truth.
- JoeAltmaier 11y agoI don't see death penalty happening in a society where a lifetime could be thousands of years. Its just too harsh, with so much to lose. Perhaps sentencing would grow to centuries.
- Joof 11y agoMurder becomes a much harsher crime as well.
- JoeAltmaier 11y agoYes! The ultimate crime, surpassing even Treason. Perhaps death would be too easy for a Murderer. They would have to face perpetual imprisonment, thousands of years of confinement, to sufficiently punish them.
- technofiend 11y agoGo read a few Philip K. Dick novels and see if you change your mind. Take current examples of selfish actors with essentially unlimited funds (billionaries, big business, whatever gets your goat) and envision the world after 1,000 years of uninterrupted influence. It's easy to envision a dystopia where caste returns and you're born into a wage slave job at <large retailer of your choice>.
- jliptzin 11y agoPerhaps we have already solved death and the world we currently live in is a virtual reality in which death is simply a reboot cycle where memory is wiped and new attributes are assigned.
- krisdol 11y agoThen we have the rich not only figuratively starving out the poor by hoarding wealth, land, and production; but, also literally starving them out by simply refusing to die while excessively consuming resources into eternity.
- IronIvan 11y ago> Of course, the above assumes that risk of death from injury won't drop as medical technologies improve, which is wrong, but as long as it's non-zero, there is still going to be a statistical limit on the length of life. No hanging around till the heat death of the universe for you. Technically, this is not correct. If your chance of dying drops exponentially (perhaps not very realistic, hence 'technically'), your probability of survival converges to something greater than 0. E.g.: If your probability of dying in the first year is 1/2, then 1/4, then 1/8 and so on, then your probability of living forever is roughly 29 % ( https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=product+i%3D1+to+infinity+%281-1%2F2^i%29 https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=product+i%3D1+to+infin... )