5 ms·

I heard that if you eliminate all the microaccidents causes of death(cancer, cardiovascular disease, alzheimer), we would be able to live 700 to 1000 years and

by kiba 14y ago

I heard that if you eliminate all the microaccidents causes of death(cancer, cardiovascular disease, alzheimer), we would be able to live 700 to 1000 years and be in good health when we die. Of course, death in the future might be more violent because that's the only way to die. You might bled out, have your skull crushed, fall to your death, get shot, committed suicide, or be murdered. It's pretty unpleasant, but the alternative is getting old and unhealthy and then dying of cancer/heart attack/neurological disease at the age of 80. I think I take my chance living up to 700-1000 years in a 20 something body.

cstross 14y ago
Only if you also eliminate senescence -- cells generally lose the ability to divide over time, and a whole bunch of creeping malfunctions result in us breaking down towards a limiting age of 114.
- lloeki 14y ago
  So, we each have 114 years to transform our bio-bodies into mechanical machinery and/or our minds into digital ether. We're becoming a holometabolous species. We just don't know how to become beautiful, space-faring butterflies yet.
  - lukifer 14y ago
    There's a non-zero chance that we'll move back into asexual reproduction: clone yourself and raise as a child, or fork a copy of your brain into a simulator, or build a new body from synthetic cells and imprint your neural matrix, etc.
  - cstross 14y ago
    That process is probably a lot harder than you think, if you haven't studied the biological sciences. (Analogy: it's not like refactoring code in a high level language, it's like reverse-engineering a heap of spaghetti-coded self-modifying assembly written by a neural network and designed to run simultaneously on several different CPU architectures that have been glommed together in the same box. In other words, it's nightmarishly difficult.) 114 years might suffice to do it. Or to demonstrate that it's a very intractable problem (on the order of Fermat's last theorem) or to prove that it's impossible. Meanwhile, for those of us who are already pushing fifty (like me), it's probably already too late.
    - entropy_ 14y ago
      Fermat's last theorem was proven in 1995 though, uber hard, yes, but not intractable :)
    - lloeki 14y ago
      You missed my point: I'm not saying that from today we have 100+ years to solve the problem, but that once the problem is solved, a given human being biological body will only be a transition.
nerdfiles 14y ago
Aubrey de Grey suggests this in one of his TED Talks (http://www.ted.com/talks/aubrey_de_grey_says_we_can_avoid_aging.html http://www.ted.com/talks/aubrey_de_grey_says_we_can_avoid_ag...). The main problem is that one _can_ die regardless how much infrastructure, political, religious, economic, etc. we build around death. "Graceful death" is what we should be aiming for, as ultimately such a "bubble-up" approach to dying itself will give us a way to modularize and treat its symptoms (or, as you put it, "microaccidents"). Applying principles of graceful degradation to the process of dying may have a consequence of extended life, but the main goal is to not build _unnecessary_ medical, political, doxastic institution, industry or infrastructure around this process. So, for instance, do we _really_ need hospitals or surgeons _physically_ touching patients? Whether or not one comes down on one decision or the other, there will be political, economic, pharmaceutical, technical, industrial, etc., etc. that follow. Medicine is _costly_ to practice; _triage_ is stressful and costly; ERs are costly; ambulances are costly -- Do you _believe_ in these things? Or do we simply wish to maintain our health? What is the most efficient way to do this? "Graceful dying" may be viewed as a kind of preventive, holistic therapy to this process, where all we've done historically is _react_, medically speaking, to this natural process. "Graceful death" may, in the long run, be _cheaper_ and we get the added benefit of physiologically more rewarding life experiences.

by kiba 14y ago

cstross 14y ago

Only if you also eliminate senescence -- cells generally lose the ability to divide over time, and a whole bunch of creeping malfunctions result in us breaking down towards a limiting age of 114.

lloeki 14y ago
So, we each have 114 years to transform our bio-bodies into mechanical machinery and/or our minds into digital ether. We're becoming a holometabolous species. We just don't know how to become beautiful, space-faring butterflies yet.
- lukifer 14y ago
  There's a non-zero chance that we'll move back into asexual reproduction: clone yourself and raise as a child, or fork a copy of your brain into a simulator, or build a new body from synthetic cells and imprint your neural matrix, etc.
- cstross 14y ago
  That process is probably a lot harder than you think, if you haven't studied the biological sciences. (Analogy: it's not like refactoring code in a high level language, it's like reverse-engineering a heap of spaghetti-coded self-modifying assembly written by a neural network and designed to run simultaneously on several different CPU architectures that have been glommed together in the same box. In other words, it's nightmarishly difficult.) 114 years might suffice to do it. Or to demonstrate that it's a very intractable problem (on the order of Fermat's last theorem) or to prove that it's impossible. Meanwhile, for those of us who are already pushing fifty (like me), it's probably already too late.
  - entropy_ 14y ago
    Fermat's last theorem was proven in 1995 though, uber hard, yes, but not intractable :)
  - lloeki 14y ago
    You missed my point: I'm not saying that from today we have 100+ years to solve the problem, but that once the problem is solved, a given human being biological body will only be a transition.

nerdfiles 14y ago

Aubrey de Grey suggests this in one of his TED Talks (http://www.ted.com/talks/aubrey_de_grey_says_we_can_avoid_aging.html http://www.ted.com/talks/aubrey_de_grey_says_we_can_avoid_ag...). The main problem is that one _can_ die regardless how much infrastructure, political, religious, economic, etc. we build around death. "Graceful death" is what we should be aiming for, as ultimately such a "bubble-up" approach to dying itself will give us a way to modularize and treat its symptoms (or, as you put it, "microaccidents"). Applying principles of graceful degradation to the process of dying may have a consequence of extended life, but the main goal is to not build _unnecessary_ medical, political, doxastic institution, industry or infrastructure around this process. So, for instance, do we _really_ need hospitals or surgeons _physically_ touching patients? Whether or not one comes down on one decision or the other, there will be political, economic, pharmaceutical, technical, industrial, etc., etc. that follow. Medicine is _costly_ to practice; _triage_ is stressful and costly; ERs are costly; ambulances are costly -- Do you _believe_ in these things? Or do we simply wish to maintain our health? What is the most efficient way to do this? "Graceful dying" may be viewed as a kind of preventive, holistic therapy to this process, where all we've done historically is _react_, medically speaking, to this natural process. "Graceful death" may, in the long run, be _cheaper_ and we get the added benefit of physiologically more rewarding life experiences.