11 ms·

Your body wasn’t built to last: a lesson from human mortality rates

151 points by sirteno 13y ago

erroneousfunk 13y ago
In response to the the morbid web calculator at the bottom of the article, I made this a few years ago: http://javasaur.com/deathCalculator.html http://javasaur.com/deathCalculator.html that provides similar information, but takes into account current age and gender. It uses US actuarial tables (so this assumes that you're living every year as if it were 2007 or whatever year it was I used...)
neals 13y ago
I'd hate to die, for so many different reasons. Why can't we all just keep on living? Any change of immortality in the coming 60-odd years? Or is that just not far enough into the future? Are we doomed to die?
- fit2rule 13y ago
  Yes, we are doomed to die. Don't think of it as doom, though. If you look around you, pretty much any Life, itself, involves the cycle: start -> do something -> finish. Do your absolute best to do the best for yourself, and others, while you are Alive. Life is the most precious substance in the Known Universe, and believe it or not: you are in control. So, think about it not at all, or often, but know this: you will reach the end, no matter what. You're in the 'do something' stage right now.
  - neals 13y ago
    I get what you are saying and totally agree. However, now I am stuck between choosing between what is good for ME and what is good for OTHERS. What is more important? My life being good or leaving others in a better place when I'm gone? Should I just live for myself until I'm 45, than start giving back?
    - lprubin 13y ago
      There is a school of thought called Vedanta that I learned about from reading Alan Watts. It holds that all is "oneness" or "connectedness" and that the lines that appear to separate ourselves from each other are merely illusions and that helping yourself is helping others and helping others is helping yourself. At first read, this sounded like hippy dippy nonsense to me. But then I started seeing "practical" manifestations of this in my life over and over again. For example, I did a bunch of Pro Bono web development for a non-profit because I liked the non-profit. Besides the good feeling I got from helping a worthy charity and the thanks and friendships I gained from the people who worked there, I also ended up getting three web consulting gigs. I gave a friend some money to start a creative project and their level of happiness has increased. And that happiness level is contagious and I find myself feeling some of that happiness spill over onto me whenever I hang out with them. And when I started eating right, exercising, and following my goals and dreams, I was happier and that happiness spilled over to all around me. And as I became more successful, it opened up economic opportunities for those around me to take part in my business and to partner with. And it inspired those around me to follow their dreams. And that's spilling over to the people around those who were helped by me in an outward circle. In a very grounded way, I'm really starting to believe there is something to this connectedness idea.
    - fit2rule 13y ago
      Alas, you have to decide for yourself, but I can tell you my personal decision is to be as good a person to myself as I am to others, roughly in that order, with some compensation for personal privilege, perhaps, in the late-night fridge visits. That has improved things immensely in my life.
    - mikestew 13y ago
      > However, now I am stuck between choosing between what is good for ME and what is good for OTHERS. What is more important? Question of the ages, that is. I tend toward contributing toward the general good as best I know how. But I came to that conclusion through a fair bit of contemplation, some selfish living (which still continues in degrees), and philosophical and religious thought. (And I'm still no Ghandi, I can play the part of "self-centered asshole" pretty well, and regularly.) In short, it's a journey you get to take all on your own, no one else will figure it out for you. Keep in mind, too, that the two choices you laid out are not at odds with each other. As a personal example, I volunteer at an animal shelter. My wife and I walk homeless dogs, pick up their poop, and take some to training classes if it would make them more adoptable. For dogs that have been there a while, we'll take them on field trips to the park, maybe stop by Wendy's for a burger and fries. We'll each put in at least 100, sometimes over 200 hours/year there. We give the shelter arse loads of money (yea, high tech salaries!) We do it because we believe if we (society) have domesticated the animals, we have a responsibility to see that they are taken care of and treated humanely. Damned noble of us, eh? Except I find it to be a hell of a lot of fun to hang out with the mutts, teach them commands so that they're civilized members of society, go run around in the mud at the park, and ultimately see them get adopted. It ain't all selfless. Dishing up food at a homeless shelter? Makes you feel good, right? That you're doing the "right" thing? It's still about you, because of how it makes you feel, or that you think that you are doing what's "right". Ultimately you should be removed entirely, and it's done because it's what the world needs right now. I'm still a long way from that ideal, but I keep trying. In the mean time at least some effort is expended toward making the world a little better, whatever the motivation may be.
- mindcruzer 13y ago
  Once you're dead I don't think you'll mind.
- rfnslyr 13y ago
  Definitely going to die if you're not a multi millionaire or billionaire. Why would common folk ever receive immortality therapy? I firmly believe we're just a hologram, an experiment, with only one defined condition in our environment, death. Our overlords have watched us evolve and under the condition of death, and once we solve it, we will have won.
  - icebraining 13y ago
    Definitely going to die if you're not a multi millionaire or billionaire. Why would common folk ever receive immortality therapy? For the same reasons they often get life-saving treatments? Why would the people who own the therapy refuse to be handsomely paid by common folk and/or the State for providing it? Of course, it won't come cheap. Maybe a 500 year loan per treatment?
    - rfnslyr 13y ago
      Haha actually that makes sense with the loan. Didn't think of that. "If you take this therapy, you will be paying me a grand a week for the next 80,000 years. Sign here"
- vezzy-fnord 13y ago
  No. Immortality would be even more horrific. I would definitely like to see the average life span significantly extended, but there should still be a foreseeable death.
  - will_work4tears 13y ago
    I don't think it's such a black and white issue. Apart from some nerd rapture/uploading the brain scenario (which I find preposterous, just IMO) true immortality is just not possible. Even discounting the extreme view of the heat death of the universe, I don't think even the most careful people would live to be more than a couple thousand years. Most would probably die of something in 2-3 hundred years - war, famine, disease, natural disasters, or just even dangerous activities (driving, skiing, hiking, skydiving, etc) would at least on average, keep a steady rate of deaths. But I agree with trying everything we can to extend the life as much as possible. I just feel in the end, a 500 year long life would represent a pretty lucky person. edit: just FYI though, I'm not a hater; I'm even a futurist and a tiny bit of a transhumanist.
    - VLM 13y ago
      I suspect that when a car accident means a loss of 450 years of life instead of 45 years we'll probably end up requiring cars to be ten times safer, or roads to be inherently safer, or since we have all the time in the world, maybe no need to ever drive above 10 MPH other than recreational use. This is a problem often not discussed about the utopia of a world filled with self driving cars... its very hard to make an AI that can handle 85 MPH on a crowded interstate, but once "everyone" has a self driving car, we'll probably just lean back and watch TV/movies/podcasts or do desk work or whatever so going 10 MPH is fine, at which point its not so hard of an AI problem anymore. So there's a hump to break thru after which the tech gets a lot simpler and lower risk. Also the nature hike at the park is a wee bit less risky than hiking Mt Everest. Given an infinite amount of life, I think you'd see a lot more patience, and nothing kills people like impatience.
      - michaelochurch 13y ago
- eli_gottlieb 13y ago
  Here is why you're being downvoted: human longevity is an extremely difficult, multifaceted problem. Research doctors are not even trying to slay a dragon but a hydra: combat one way to die of old age and another one pops up. Lastly, attempting to forecast "chance of immortality in the coming 60-odd years" is asking a question that relies for its answer on extremely controversial ideas. Particularly, attempting to answer requires us to forecast whether the rate of advancement in ageing research is speeding up or slowing down. This is hard, and can be affected by a bunch of different factors: funding breakdown in non-corporate research, Great Stagnation Hypothesis, breakdown in public acceptance of science, economic decline in some places, economic growth in some places, public uptake of anti-aging ideologies, attitudes towards the retirement crisis we're already facing even before anti-aging research comes in. Oh, and then we face the issue of whether we can or are improving our quality of scientific findings through better research training or data science/machine learning techniques. And then we get to the really out-there stuff "immortalists" are often secretly thinking of and can't stop yacking about: the chance that we manage to create Friendly Artificial Intelligence and trigger a Singularity, thus rendering us all immortal utopian transhumans before many of us on this board even hit retirement age. TL;DR: I have no bloody idea, but I still regard contributing to my Roth IRA as a pretty sensible move. EDIT: The one trend I'm willing to say I observe is that average life expectancy is a fairly good tracker of social and economic development, even once you've gotten over the infant-mortality hump. If you want to be immortal, you should encourage society to act in ways that result in longer average lifespans and also to fund anti-ageing research in hopes of achieving the fabled "ageing escape horizon" where medical science advances faster than you die.
  - neals 13y ago
    Wow, thanks. I feel better now, not sure why though:)
    - eli_gottlieb 13y ago
      Any time ^_^. The first step is to come out and say that longevity research is a scientific project, not a mystical one (there's no Truth of This Universe saying we can only live 80-something years no matter the scientific might we throw at the problem). That also carries some acknowledgements we need to make: biological immortality being discovered in 2060 will do you no good if you died of a heart attack in 2030, so eat healthy, exercise, and de-stress if you're really so devoted to long life!
- melling 13y ago
  We haven't made any progress in lengthening the maximum human life. We can simply help more people so that they live closer to the maximum, so it's highly doubtful that we're anywhere near extending life beyond the 100-120 limits of our bodies. Consider, for example, that work on artificial intelligence started in the 1950's. We've made lots of progress in 60 years, but it's definitely not a solved progress, despite the incredible progress.
- jowiar 13y ago
  I don't particularly want to die, but knowing it's going to happen makes life a whole lot more interesting. For me, the looming finitude of life keeps my inclination to procrastinate in check - Why do today what can be done tomorrow? Because otherwise the things to do add up faster than the tomorrows on which to do them.
  - icebraining 13y ago
    On the other hand, there's what you could call the Homer Simpson reaction[1]. If you know you're going to die, and you don't even know if it won't happen soon, you might be discouraged from doing things with a longer time frame. [1] http://global3.memecdn.com/live-each-day-like-it-was-your-last_o_62104.jpg http://global3.memecdn.com/live-each-day-like-it-was-your-la...
- Hermel 13y ago
  The question really is: what aspect of you do you want to preserve? You will most certainly change over the years. You now will be very different from you in 100 years. Your immortal you in 500 years might be as different from your current you as your grandchildren. Do you really care more about your own existence in 500 years than about the existence of your grandchildren in 100 years? The solution to immortality is to embrace the idea that you won't stay the same anyway and that instead of caring so much about your host body, it might be more efficient to preserve what you value in other forms: e.g. your genome and values in your children or your ideas in books. If you write down your thoughts into a book today, these thoughts are more likely to be preserved for 500 years than if you were immortal and relied on your memory.
  - eli_gottlieb 13y ago
    Nah, that's way scarier. Looking at the sweep of history, I can take comfort that my mortal shell won't last long enough to witness much more of the damn stuff, but I'm terrified that my thoughts and values are simply going to be swept away in a tide of blood and a return to a more miserable human condition.
  - Ensorceled 13y ago
    > Your immortal you in 500 years might be as different from your current you as your grandchildren. Do you really care more about your own existence in 500 years than about the existence of your grandchildren in 100 years? As somebody with no kids ... yes. This is a strange argument since at no time between now and 500 years from now will there be a point where I want to grow old and die. So asking me if I care about 500 year old me is irrelevant, I don't want to die.
    - BlackDeath3 13y ago
      Related, why should one care more about their own children/grandchildren/etc. than themselves? Perpetuation of the species? Why?
      - will_work4tears 13y ago
- swalsh 13y ago
  If I had to choose a society with all young people, all old people, or a healthy mix of each... i'd choose the later. Young people provide new thinking, they're essential to society. Old people provide foundation, and wisdom, they're essential too. We live on a planet with finite resources, to support the right mix, we should accept that its just not RIGHT to live forever, even if it were possible. I'd like to live until i'm 100, and I hope science makes it so i'm just as productive at 100, as I am today.
  - icebraining 13y ago
    That's only assuming we could be immortal, but still stuck on a single planet. I find that an unlikely event.
    - swalsh 13y ago
      I assume there are only 3 sustainable paths for the human race. The first, is the norm. We continue as we are, we don't adjust to climate change etc in time. Society eventually collapses under the magnitude that it has swelled up to. We enter a second "dark age". The second, is we find a way to to sustain with the resources we have on this planet alone. Population finds a balance, and we go on living another 5000 years, just like we did for the first... except now technology plays a bigger role. The third, is we expand to space and limits become boundless. The only scenario where we can think about super long life spans is the later. My point is, this is like deciding how to spend your millions of dollars before you've made them. My personal opinion is that the singularity is as close to inevitable for as long as we as a society choose to pursue technology. To me the likely scenarios are either A or C, and it really depends on which happens first... an environmental collapse or the singularity.
  - DougWebb 13y ago
    If society included lots of immortals, they'd be pretty driven to make sure that we're not stuck living on a planet with finite resources. There are plenty of untapped resources laying on the ocean floors and deeper into the Earth's crust than we typically mine today, and lots more off-world. Those are all technologically within our grasp today, they're just not cost-effective. But if we had to support an immortal society, the ROI terms change: it becomes reasonable to invest in an infrastructure that will take a few centuries to pan out, because people will live to see it completed and get the benefits from it.
- 31reasons 13y ago
  Life expectancy only a few hundred years ago was about 40 years. Its about 78 years in the US currently. Human longevity is extremely difficult problem but there is no physical law stating that you can't live up to 200 or 500 years. Biological science is advancing at an extremely rapid rate and its possible that we may see doubling of life expectancy in next 50 years.
  - Dewie 13y ago
    How much of that life expectancy 100 years ago were affected by child mortality? We haven't really doubled our longevity, we just took care of some things that lead to a lot more children reaching adulthood. The bulk of that might have been pretty simple, like better hygiene.
    - dorfsmay 13y ago
      Exactly, Socrates was 71 when he was put to death.
    - mcguire 13y ago
      Given the stochastic nature of a lifespan, I believe the statement, "We haven't really doubled our longevity, we just took care of some things that lead to a lot more [younger people] reaching [an older age]." is, and will remain, true.
    - 31reasons 13y ago
      Are you suggesting modern medical science not helping people live longer by treating Cancer, Organ Transplants, Bypass surgeries etc ? I am seeing so much pessimism on HN , it seems unlikely that majority of people here are hackers.
      - Dewie 13y ago
        I'm saying that the bulk of that increase in average lifespan was due to relatively simple advances in medicine/medical understanding.
- nova 13y ago
  If only it were merely technically and scientifically super-difficult. The biggest hurdle is cultural and social, as many comments show. The first step towards ending death is to consider the fight possible and positive. But we are still deep in deathism, "Death is inevitable (with current science), ergo death is good". The biggest case of sour grapes or Stockholm syndrome ever, the most awful meme.
  - logfromblammo 13y ago
    The sociological problems of immortality are more difficult than the technical problems. The entire sweep of human history has rested upon the same solid foundation: death takes everyone eventually. Kings fall down as dead as peasants, and the dirt nap of a saint lasts as long as a sinner. Imagine what would happen if the people who held certain beliefs never died off. Imagine the result if large estates never passed to any heirs, or debts never cancelled. Imagine copyrights that never expire, since the authors never die. The young, vital, and innovative do not prosper, since they are forever dominated by their elders who become increasingly conservative and risk-averse. Money and power do not pass from one generation to the next. The problem is only made worse if biological immortality is itself an expensive product that is only accessible to the wealthy. Down that path I can imagine dozens of dystopias.
    - eli_gottlieb 13y ago
      I used to raise that objection when debating immortalists. What got me to stop raising it was the realization that in the form of business corporations or multigenerational trusts, we already have those problems. It's almost comforting, knowing you already live in Dystopia.
      - nova 13y ago
        Maybe if we didn't have the absurd excuse of "the tyrant is evil, but at least he'll die someday" we would be more inclined to do something, instead of sheepishly obeying and letting time pass.
negamax 13y ago
I often wonder if all our life's earnings will eventually be used in upgrading our bodies. Could future be like 'In Time' or something parallel to that?
- maxerickson 13y ago
  That would either require that technology was only barely keeping most people alive or a vastly more restrictive legal regime (because as much horror as people express at patents, you are talking about 20 years not being such a long time anymore).
KiwiCoder 13y ago
"... millions long for immortality who don't know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon." - Susan Ertz
- neals 13y ago
  So if we can also control the weather, would that be Utopia?
  - ph0rque 13y ago
    You still have to then solve the problem of Sundays.
- eli_gottlieb 13y ago
  And for those of us who can easily find something to do on a rainy ~~Sunday~~ Shabbat afternoon?
- grahamburger 13y ago
  That's exactly why we want to live forever, so a Sunday afternoon spent lazily listening to the rain on the window and dozing doesn't feel like a waste.
dave1629 13y ago
Peter Thiel's version of this: http://blakemasters.com/post/24253160557/peter-thiels-cs183-startup-class-16-decoding http://blakemasters.com/post/24253160557/peter-thiels-cs183-...
berntb 13y ago
17 comments and none has mentioned SENS? http://www.sens.org/research/introduction-to-sens-research http://www.sens.org/research/introduction-to-sens-research
300bps 13y ago
4.5 year old blog post that I didn't find any interesting information on. For example: Exponential decay is sharp, but an exponential within an exponential is so sharp that I can say with 99.999999% certainty that no human will ever live to the age of 130. (Ignoring, of course, the upward shift in the lifetime distribution that will result from future medical advances) The author makes a hugely controversial statements saying that no human will ever live past 130 and then says, "of course, ignoring the most important variable". Anyone interested in this topic might want to check out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aubrey_de_Grey http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aubrey_de_Grey
michalu 13y ago
I don't really want to die, but if there was no end, I would keep wasting my time and life forever. Now I feel a sense of urgency to do something - and a short life with purpose feels better then eternity of boredom and procrastination - that's just my personality though.
awjr 13y ago
One consideration, is that prolonging human life into 100s of years would be very useful for colonisation of space.
VikingCoder 13y ago
Your body is a cannon, meant to shoot DNA into the future. Once it has fulfilled that purpose, and possibly done a bit to nurture the next generation(s) of your / your tribe's DNA (or harm the DNA of others), your body serves no more purpose.
- sejje 13y ago
  So then all time is "free time." Excellent.
- VLM 13y ago
  "possibly done a bit to nurture" There doesn't seem to be any obvious upper bound on this behavior. I have a Harvard professor two centuries ago around 1800 in my ancestry. His DNA would still be serving a useful purpose to his descendants if he was teaching/advising my kids today in 2013, or if he was teaching/advising my descendents in early 2300 for that matter. I would imagine being young in a post 500-year-lifespan society would be very suffocating if your first few decades had a student:teacher ratio flipped around from current numbers to 20 teachers per student rather than current 20 students per teacher.
  - VikingCoder 13y ago
    The resources you consume, versus the reproductive edge your provide to your offspring. Specifically, if you're competing for resources they could have used in their own reproduction. The most successful DNA will be when a group of people launch their descendants off into the galaxy to avoid the Red Giant death in our solar system. We're all rats on one slowly sinking ship, right now.
    - VLM 13y ago
      "if you're competing for resources" A lot of techno-utopia assumptions come into play, such as a culture powerful enough to extend life to 500 years probably has no resources left to compete for other than the momentary attraction of a fertile member of the opposite sex, although even that could probably be worked around in a lab (cloning or something?). If we discover something tomorrow I'd have to eat my words but I'm assuming it would require "star trek era" tech to pull this off.
hooande 13y ago
There is no reason that human beings cannot live forever. Gompertz Law is not a law of physics, but a law of observation similar to Moore's Law. Medical and safety technology are also advancing exponentially. Barring a catastrophe that blasts us back to the stone age, one growth curve will eventually overtake the other. The article uses a cops and criminals analogy to explain how our bodies degrade over time. Technology can allow us to produce artificial cops and conditions that make things more difficult for the criminals. The Methusaleh Foundation [1] is working on pieces of this problem right now, with a cash prize. There are many other research institutions working on different aspects of immortality. Once medical nanomachines become a practical reality we might be able to turn the work of Gompertz on it's head within a generation. Many people, myself included, find the idea of effective immortality to be disconcerting. But all of the arguments have been made and rebutted: Just because we can't imagine immortality doesn't mean that isn't a good thing, if we were born into a world without death we wouldn't give it up for any of the advantages of mortality, we would have more productive time to solve the problems of overpopulation, etc and so forth. If our species is able to continue on its current path then death is going to, well, die. The tragedy is that none of us will live to see it. That doesn't mean that we can't consider the implications and start preparing an infinite future for our descendants. [1] http://www.mprize.org/ http://www.mprize.org/
- JumpCrisscross 13y ago
  >There is no reason that human beings cannot live forever. Second law of thermodynamics. Granted this is a bit pedantic since we are nowhere close to that as a limiting factor.
  - alexeisadeski3 13y ago
    Well it's not that pedantic.
  - StavrosK 13y ago
    Well, at least for small values of "forever".
    - 13y ago
dorfsmay 13y ago
> I can say with 99.999999% certainty that no human will ever live to the age of 130 That is unfortunate. I grew up in the 80s (the 8 bit µ processor era), always had a very positive outlook on life, and thought 127 was the perfect age for me to die.
mathattack 13y ago
Having taken care of some elderly, and watched others pass, my impression that living forever appeals more to the young than the old. Some of it may be their bodies breaking down, some of it may be losing old friends and loves, but most of the folks 75+ seem to be ready when the time comes. Certainly more ready than their kids. But still... To quote the Rolling Stones, "What a drag it is getting old."
- will_work4tears 13y ago
  However, if they have the body and mental acuity of a 25 year old at 75+ and so do their friends, they might not be as ready for it. And not need people to take care of them. All of your argument is null and void if you take out the "dying" part. It's like saying "Nobody goes 100 miles in a day because they can't walk that far, so nobody is going to want to ever have a car/bike/airplane" also walking that far tears up your feet so a car is silly."
- greedo 13y ago
  My stepfather passed away two weeks ago, and my mother is worried that she'll live as long as the women in her line; roughly 90+. To her, that's a nightmare of infirmity and worry. Will she have enough money? Will she be independent, or have to rely more on caregivers? She's only 80, so she's got a good decade or more to think about these things. I think if she wasn't alone and in declining health, she'd be glad to live longer.
JumpCrisscross 13y ago
Biological immortality does not mean immunity from accidents or homicide. Hugh Hixon, at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, calculated the half-life of a biologically immortal population at 1 654 years [1]. If we lowered fatality odds to 1 in 100 000 per year (no accidents, Sweden's homicide rate) this figure inflates to 69 315. It's an interesting illustration of how the effects of randomness will not be muted, just shifted. [1] http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/MisadventureAsACauseOfDeath.html http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/MisadventureAsACauseOfDeat...
- electromagnetic 13y ago
  But the key question is how long do we have to live before we're going to bed at night and backing up all our memories for the day to the cloud. So if we get hit by a bus we just wake up in a few weeks in a rapidly grown body? I know people will say it won't happen, but are you going to let a 650 year old mind die with its cumulative knowledge and wisdom? Nope, you'd get them a new goddamn body.
chrisamiller 13y ago
As a cancer biologist, I can tell you that at least some of these assumptions don't hold true. Acute Myeloid Leukemia is driven entirely by "accumulated lightning bolts". Every time your blood stem cells divide, a small number of replication errors occur randomly in the DNA. If one of these cells accumulate two to three of these mutations in the wrong genes, you will develop AML. The longer you live, the more likely it is that this will occur. Bottom line, everyone who lives long enough will eventually get cancer. While I agree that these plots are interesting, it's dangerous to read too much into these without thinking more deeply about the vast number of ways that there are to die, many of which will have strikingly different age distributions. (see http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867412007775 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867412...)
- Symmetry 13y ago
  And if we solve cancer and age related deterioration, everyone will eventually die in an accident. But the fact remains that the deaths that dominate life expectancy statistics behave in the way described.
- icegreentea 13y ago
  Kinda late, but I thought that there are typically corrective measures that try to prevent oncogenes from kicking off. The key difference between "accumulated lightning bolts" and the final model chosen is that "accumulated lightning bolts" assumes a more or less fixed rates of lightning bolts, while the final model essentially that the rate of lightning bolts will increase over time, which corresponds well to an interpretation of long-term decay of corrective measures - such as replication error detection systems. I think the key point is that systems for retaining homeostasis (so second order systems I guess) are themselves subject to degradation.
  - chrisamiller 13y ago
    There are some cancers driven by things like mismatch-repair defects, so that the amount of DNA damage grows very quickly over time, but these don't cause the majority of cancers. In liquid (blood) tumors, especially, these are very rare - The predominant mechanism is just the accumulation of random defects due to cellular division. On the other end of the scale are things like automobile accidents, where incidence peaks in teenage years and decreases thereafter (with a possible second peak as vision and reflexes deteriorate in the elderly). My point is that neither of these fit the neat curve drawn by the author. When everything is lumped together, the curve fits, but trying to draw broad conclusions about mechanisms from that kind of aggregate data is foolish.
a3n 13y ago
If people lived to, say, 150 or 300 years, 500 years, I wonder how hard it would be to convince people to risk their lives in war? I wonder if people would be more careful with the environment if they knew they'd actually have to live with their treatment of the environment?
- VLM 13y ago
  On the other hand, leadership positions strongly attract psychopaths and sociopaths, and at least some segment of the population will think, eh, I'm going to live for 500 years, I can afford to give President Palin a mere four year chance, and next thing you know we're launching missiles at who knows who for no particular reason, or they're launching missiles at us. My point being a 500 year lifespan allows a "survival of the craziest" to likely result in truly awful people naturally ending up in positions of leadership. Every nutcase having his 4 years of fame instead of just some of them, or just 15 minutes of fame for some of them. It could be really bad. And not just politically, imagine the typical CEO psychological profile under centuries of those selection pressures instead of mere decades. "if they knew they'd actually have to live with their treatment of the environment" Imagine a 500 year old hoarder. This whole discussion is enjoyably ripe with possible sci-fi or fantasy novel plots, very interesting.
scotty79 13y ago
Do you know any other scenario that results in distibution of this kind?
sirsar 13y ago
It bothers me that 8 is the "magic number." Did Gompertz simply round? I find it hard to believe that the real number is not 7.7 or 8.3, and those would have vastly different effects. Why should evolution mark itself by whole rotations around the sun?
exarch 13y ago
We already know why cancer rates increase with age: cancer is a result of several cumulative cellular mutations. Obviously, the chance of these mutations all occurring in any given cell increases with the number of cell divisions that occur, i.e. the length of time the person lives.
dsego 13y ago
We don't neccesarily need a body. I posted this link a while back but it went unnoticed: http://aeon.co/magazine/being-human/virtual-afterlives-will-transform-humanity http://aeon.co/magazine/being-human/virtual-afterlives-will-... "The question is not whether we can upload our brains onto a computer, but what will become of us when we do"
- eli_gottlieb 13y ago
  Currently, "can we" is indeed a question. It is followed by the question, "Oh dear God in Heaven, why would you do that!?". I mean, seriously, there are large numbers of computer security breaches each week. Now what are you going to do if those computers are substrate for people? Hell, it's even worse if they're running people using cloud computing: one attack on a datacenter could let you obtain root access to dozens or hundreds of living human minds. And then we have to decide on scheduling and resource-sharing algorithms. Oy gevalt. Though actually, trying to devise a secure system architecture for running real people would be a hilariously evil joke-project.
onedev 13y ago
Honestly, I don't want to live forever. 100 years I think is what would be ideal.
Futurebot 13y ago
For anyone here who has not yet read Eliezer Yudkowsky's "You Only Live Twice", please do so: http://lesswrong.com/lw/wq/you_only_live_twice/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/wq/you_only_live_twice/ Pertains to Cryonics, which is our best bet for immortality until we solve the aging issue (i.e., we hopefully stay cryopreserved until immortality is achieved.) At least with SENS/The Methuselah Foundation/Calico now getting attention and a bit of funding, there's hope here. One day, perhaps governments will consider aging "force" or "harm" and do the number one job government should do: protecting people from it (by funding research to prevent it.)
- eli_gottlieb 13y ago
  That one's a bit... silly. It's a surprisingly religious sentiment for Mr. LessWrong. Yes, I have heard the shpiel. However, from the shpiel I've heard, cryonics is currently a faith-based ticket to God Only Knows Where. Very few people actually believe whole human beings can be resurrected from cryopreservation, and it's certainly never been actually done even in animal experiments, so why should anyone sign up? Well then, the cryonicists say, let me tell you about neuro-cryo, which is cheaper. We can totally plausibly claim the information content of your brain is preserved in cryopreservation, or possibly brain plastination says gwern. Anyway, point being, you sign up, and it will result in a future friendly superintelligence reading your brain out into a computer to resurrect you someday... To which I say, hold the fuck on you just skipped a whole lot of freaking steps there!
  - Futurebot 13y ago
    Hanson and Yudkowsky make the point that it's the best we've got (in one article, they put the chance of success at 5%), and that the alternative right now is nothing. Considering the relatively low cost, it's a gamble worth taking. For the record, I've been signed up for a long time. Edit: as for the tone, Yudkowsky has had the inspirational, secular techno-futurist new-age-ish sounding hope thing going for ages, as you probably know. It doesn't surprise me (and probably doesn't surprise him) that very reasonable people sometimes mistake it for the anti-skeptic / superstitious / actual new-age nuttery / cult types. I think part of the problem here is a kind of Poe's Law effect: if a rational, informed, intelligent person talks seriously about the likelihood of FAI, superintelligences, cryo, etc. in a positive, hopeful way, they're instantly mistaken for a nutcake.
abhiv 13y ago
Great article. For me personally, the issue is not so much dying but aging. Seeing your hair thin, your eyesight deteriorate, your memory weaken and your energy decrease with time must be a profoundly depressing experience -- one of the major reasons why the old in general are more solemn than the young, I think. These changes are still in the future for me (thankfully), but I imagine they will happen some day if I live long enough. I think a world in which people would keep remain mentally and physically fit, but simply die (maybe from a lightning bolt type event) at some point, would be much better than one in which your body and mind slowly fade with time. I'd be happy with medical advances that let you keep the mind and body of a 25 year old till you're 80 and then simply die one day. Unfortunately, some period of old age and infirmity seems to be present no matter how much lifespan extends.
jostmey 13y ago
This is a very interesting approach to describe the mortality rate as a function of age. I wonder how this theory ties in with more established theories of aging, such as the Evolutionary Theories of Aging (ref. http://www.genetics.org/content/156/3/927.full http://www.genetics.org/content/156/3/927.full)
avn2109 13y ago
A reliability engineer might say that as a first approximation, the time-till-failure of the human animal (really just an electro-mechanical-chemical machine) has a governing equation which is a linear combination of many Weibull equations [0] and Arrhenius equations [1]. Mechanical failure is known to be governed by Weibull, and chemically-driven devices fail according to Arrhenius. From this claim it isn't hard to cook up superexponential-ish results over certain timescales by tuning the fitting parameters and combination coefficients. But that doesn't mean the underlying failure physics here are truly superexponential. But as a better approximation, human death may be governed by a system of differential equations with primarily stochastic coefficients and plenty of strongly nonlinear operators. So after our biomedical engineers remove the first few bottlenecks at ~105 years old, these curve shapes might change dramatically to reflect the true complexity of the underlying physics. [0] http://reliabilityanalyticstoolkit.appspot.com/mechanical_reliability_data http://reliabilityanalyticstoolkit.appspot.com/mechanical_re... [1] http://reliawiki.com/index.php/Arrhenius_Relationship http://reliawiki.com/index.php/Arrhenius_Relationship

151 points by sirteno 13y ago

In response to the the morbid web calculator at the bottom of the article, I made this a few years ago: http://javasaur.com/deathCalculator.html http://javasaur.com/deathCalculator.html that provides similar information, but takes into account current age and gender. It uses US actuarial tables (so this assumes that you're living every year as if it were 2007 or whatever year it was I used...)

neals 13y ago

I'd hate to die, for so many different reasons. Why can't we all just keep on living? Any change of immortality in the coming 60-odd years? Or is that just not far enough into the future? Are we doomed to die?

fit2rule 13y ago
Yes, we are doomed to die. Don't think of it as doom, though. If you look around you, pretty much any Life, itself, involves the cycle: start -> do something -> finish. Do your absolute best to do the best for yourself, and others, while you are Alive. Life is the most precious substance in the Known Universe, and believe it or not: you are in control. So, think about it not at all, or often, but know this: you will reach the end, no matter what. You're in the 'do something' stage right now.
- neals 13y ago
  I get what you are saying and totally agree. However, now I am stuck between choosing between what is good for ME and what is good for OTHERS. What is more important? My life being good or leaving others in a better place when I'm gone? Should I just live for myself until I'm 45, than start giving back?
  - lprubin 13y ago
    There is a school of thought called Vedanta that I learned about from reading Alan Watts. It holds that all is "oneness" or "connectedness" and that the lines that appear to separate ourselves from each other are merely illusions and that helping yourself is helping others and helping others is helping yourself. At first read, this sounded like hippy dippy nonsense to me. But then I started seeing "practical" manifestations of this in my life over and over again. For example, I did a bunch of Pro Bono web development for a non-profit because I liked the non-profit. Besides the good feeling I got from helping a worthy charity and the thanks and friendships I gained from the people who worked there, I also ended up getting three web consulting gigs. I gave a friend some money to start a creative project and their level of happiness has increased. And that happiness level is contagious and I find myself feeling some of that happiness spill over onto me whenever I hang out with them. And when I started eating right, exercising, and following my goals and dreams, I was happier and that happiness spilled over to all around me. And as I became more successful, it opened up economic opportunities for those around me to take part in my business and to partner with. And it inspired those around me to follow their dreams. And that's spilling over to the people around those who were helped by me in an outward circle. In a very grounded way, I'm really starting to believe there is something to this connectedness idea.
  - fit2rule 13y ago
    Alas, you have to decide for yourself, but I can tell you my personal decision is to be as good a person to myself as I am to others, roughly in that order, with some compensation for personal privilege, perhaps, in the late-night fridge visits. That has improved things immensely in my life.
  - mikestew 13y ago
    > However, now I am stuck between choosing between what is good for ME and what is good for OTHERS. What is more important? Question of the ages, that is. I tend toward contributing toward the general good as best I know how. But I came to that conclusion through a fair bit of contemplation, some selfish living (which still continues in degrees), and philosophical and religious thought. (And I'm still no Ghandi, I can play the part of "self-centered asshole" pretty well, and regularly.) In short, it's a journey you get to take all on your own, no one else will figure it out for you. Keep in mind, too, that the two choices you laid out are not at odds with each other. As a personal example, I volunteer at an animal shelter. My wife and I walk homeless dogs, pick up their poop, and take some to training classes if it would make them more adoptable. For dogs that have been there a while, we'll take them on field trips to the park, maybe stop by Wendy's for a burger and fries. We'll each put in at least 100, sometimes over 200 hours/year there. We give the shelter arse loads of money (yea, high tech salaries!) We do it because we believe if we (society) have domesticated the animals, we have a responsibility to see that they are taken care of and treated humanely. Damned noble of us, eh? Except I find it to be a hell of a lot of fun to hang out with the mutts, teach them commands so that they're civilized members of society, go run around in the mud at the park, and ultimately see them get adopted. It ain't all selfless. Dishing up food at a homeless shelter? Makes you feel good, right? That you're doing the "right" thing? It's still about you, because of how it makes you feel, or that you think that you are doing what's "right". Ultimately you should be removed entirely, and it's done because it's what the world needs right now. I'm still a long way from that ideal, but I keep trying. In the mean time at least some effort is expended toward making the world a little better, whatever the motivation may be.
mindcruzer 13y ago
Once you're dead I don't think you'll mind.
rfnslyr 13y ago
Definitely going to die if you're not a multi millionaire or billionaire. Why would common folk ever receive immortality therapy? I firmly believe we're just a hologram, an experiment, with only one defined condition in our environment, death. Our overlords have watched us evolve and under the condition of death, and once we solve it, we will have won.
- icebraining 13y ago
  Definitely going to die if you're not a multi millionaire or billionaire. Why would common folk ever receive immortality therapy? For the same reasons they often get life-saving treatments? Why would the people who own the therapy refuse to be handsomely paid by common folk and/or the State for providing it? Of course, it won't come cheap. Maybe a 500 year loan per treatment?
  - rfnslyr 13y ago
    Haha actually that makes sense with the loan. Didn't think of that. "If you take this therapy, you will be paying me a grand a week for the next 80,000 years. Sign here"
vezzy-fnord 13y ago
No. Immortality would be even more horrific. I would definitely like to see the average life span significantly extended, but there should still be a foreseeable death.
- will_work4tears 13y ago
  I don't think it's such a black and white issue. Apart from some nerd rapture/uploading the brain scenario (which I find preposterous, just IMO) true immortality is just not possible. Even discounting the extreme view of the heat death of the universe, I don't think even the most careful people would live to be more than a couple thousand years. Most would probably die of something in 2-3 hundred years - war, famine, disease, natural disasters, or just even dangerous activities (driving, skiing, hiking, skydiving, etc) would at least on average, keep a steady rate of deaths. But I agree with trying everything we can to extend the life as much as possible. I just feel in the end, a 500 year long life would represent a pretty lucky person. edit: just FYI though, I'm not a hater; I'm even a futurist and a tiny bit of a transhumanist.
  - VLM 13y ago
    I suspect that when a car accident means a loss of 450 years of life instead of 45 years we'll probably end up requiring cars to be ten times safer, or roads to be inherently safer, or since we have all the time in the world, maybe no need to ever drive above 10 MPH other than recreational use. This is a problem often not discussed about the utopia of a world filled with self driving cars... its very hard to make an AI that can handle 85 MPH on a crowded interstate, but once "everyone" has a self driving car, we'll probably just lean back and watch TV/movies/podcasts or do desk work or whatever so going 10 MPH is fine, at which point its not so hard of an AI problem anymore. So there's a hump to break thru after which the tech gets a lot simpler and lower risk. Also the nature hike at the park is a wee bit less risky than hiking Mt Everest. Given an infinite amount of life, I think you'd see a lot more patience, and nothing kills people like impatience.
    - michaelochurch 13y ago
eli_gottlieb 13y ago
Here is why you're being downvoted: human longevity is an extremely difficult, multifaceted problem. Research doctors are not even trying to slay a dragon but a hydra: combat one way to die of old age and another one pops up. Lastly, attempting to forecast "chance of immortality in the coming 60-odd years" is asking a question that relies for its answer on extremely controversial ideas. Particularly, attempting to answer requires us to forecast whether the rate of advancement in ageing research is speeding up or slowing down. This is hard, and can be affected by a bunch of different factors: funding breakdown in non-corporate research, Great Stagnation Hypothesis, breakdown in public acceptance of science, economic decline in some places, economic growth in some places, public uptake of anti-aging ideologies, attitudes towards the retirement crisis we're already facing even before anti-aging research comes in. Oh, and then we face the issue of whether we can or are improving our quality of scientific findings through better research training or data science/machine learning techniques. And then we get to the really out-there stuff "immortalists" are often secretly thinking of and can't stop yacking about: the chance that we manage to create Friendly Artificial Intelligence and trigger a Singularity, thus rendering us all immortal utopian transhumans before many of us on this board even hit retirement age. TL;DR: I have no bloody idea, but I still regard contributing to my Roth IRA as a pretty sensible move. EDIT: The one trend I'm willing to say I observe is that average life expectancy is a fairly good tracker of social and economic development, even once you've gotten over the infant-mortality hump. If you want to be immortal, you should encourage society to act in ways that result in longer average lifespans and also to fund anti-ageing research in hopes of achieving the fabled "ageing escape horizon" where medical science advances faster than you die.
- neals 13y ago
  Wow, thanks. I feel better now, not sure why though:)
  - eli_gottlieb 13y ago
    Any time ^_^. The first step is to come out and say that longevity research is a scientific project, not a mystical one (there's no Truth of This Universe saying we can only live 80-something years no matter the scientific might we throw at the problem). That also carries some acknowledgements we need to make: biological immortality being discovered in 2060 will do you no good if you died of a heart attack in 2030, so eat healthy, exercise, and de-stress if you're really so devoted to long life!
melling 13y ago
We haven't made any progress in lengthening the maximum human life. We can simply help more people so that they live closer to the maximum, so it's highly doubtful that we're anywhere near extending life beyond the 100-120 limits of our bodies. Consider, for example, that work on artificial intelligence started in the 1950's. We've made lots of progress in 60 years, but it's definitely not a solved progress, despite the incredible progress.
jowiar 13y ago
I don't particularly want to die, but knowing it's going to happen makes life a whole lot more interesting. For me, the looming finitude of life keeps my inclination to procrastinate in check - Why do today what can be done tomorrow? Because otherwise the things to do add up faster than the tomorrows on which to do them.
- icebraining 13y ago
  On the other hand, there's what you could call the Homer Simpson reaction[1]. If you know you're going to die, and you don't even know if it won't happen soon, you might be discouraged from doing things with a longer time frame. [1] http://global3.memecdn.com/live-each-day-like-it-was-your-last_o_62104.jpg http://global3.memecdn.com/live-each-day-like-it-was-your-la...
Hermel 13y ago
The question really is: what aspect of you do you want to preserve? You will most certainly change over the years. You now will be very different from you in 100 years. Your immortal you in 500 years might be as different from your current you as your grandchildren. Do you really care more about your own existence in 500 years than about the existence of your grandchildren in 100 years? The solution to immortality is to embrace the idea that you won't stay the same anyway and that instead of caring so much about your host body, it might be more efficient to preserve what you value in other forms: e.g. your genome and values in your children or your ideas in books. If you write down your thoughts into a book today, these thoughts are more likely to be preserved for 500 years than if you were immortal and relied on your memory.
- eli_gottlieb 13y ago
  Nah, that's way scarier. Looking at the sweep of history, I can take comfort that my mortal shell won't last long enough to witness much more of the damn stuff, but I'm terrified that my thoughts and values are simply going to be swept away in a tide of blood and a return to a more miserable human condition.
- Ensorceled 13y ago
  > Your immortal you in 500 years might be as different from your current you as your grandchildren. Do you really care more about your own existence in 500 years than about the existence of your grandchildren in 100 years? As somebody with no kids ... yes. This is a strange argument since at no time between now and 500 years from now will there be a point where I want to grow old and die. So asking me if I care about 500 year old me is irrelevant, I don't want to die.
  - BlackDeath3 13y ago
    Related, why should one care more about their own children/grandchildren/etc. than themselves? Perpetuation of the species? Why?
    - will_work4tears 13y ago
swalsh 13y ago
If I had to choose a society with all young people, all old people, or a healthy mix of each... i'd choose the later. Young people provide new thinking, they're essential to society. Old people provide foundation, and wisdom, they're essential too. We live on a planet with finite resources, to support the right mix, we should accept that its just not RIGHT to live forever, even if it were possible. I'd like to live until i'm 100, and I hope science makes it so i'm just as productive at 100, as I am today.
- icebraining 13y ago
  That's only assuming we could be immortal, but still stuck on a single planet. I find that an unlikely event.
  - swalsh 13y ago
    I assume there are only 3 sustainable paths for the human race. The first, is the norm. We continue as we are, we don't adjust to climate change etc in time. Society eventually collapses under the magnitude that it has swelled up to. We enter a second "dark age". The second, is we find a way to to sustain with the resources we have on this planet alone. Population finds a balance, and we go on living another 5000 years, just like we did for the first... except now technology plays a bigger role. The third, is we expand to space and limits become boundless. The only scenario where we can think about super long life spans is the later. My point is, this is like deciding how to spend your millions of dollars before you've made them. My personal opinion is that the singularity is as close to inevitable for as long as we as a society choose to pursue technology. To me the likely scenarios are either A or C, and it really depends on which happens first... an environmental collapse or the singularity.
- DougWebb 13y ago
  If society included lots of immortals, they'd be pretty driven to make sure that we're not stuck living on a planet with finite resources. There are plenty of untapped resources laying on the ocean floors and deeper into the Earth's crust than we typically mine today, and lots more off-world. Those are all technologically within our grasp today, they're just not cost-effective. But if we had to support an immortal society, the ROI terms change: it becomes reasonable to invest in an infrastructure that will take a few centuries to pan out, because people will live to see it completed and get the benefits from it.
31reasons 13y ago
Life expectancy only a few hundred years ago was about 40 years. Its about 78 years in the US currently. Human longevity is extremely difficult problem but there is no physical law stating that you can't live up to 200 or 500 years. Biological science is advancing at an extremely rapid rate and its possible that we may see doubling of life expectancy in next 50 years.
- Dewie 13y ago
  How much of that life expectancy 100 years ago were affected by child mortality? We haven't really doubled our longevity, we just took care of some things that lead to a lot more children reaching adulthood. The bulk of that might have been pretty simple, like better hygiene.
  - dorfsmay 13y ago
    Exactly, Socrates was 71 when he was put to death.
  - mcguire 13y ago
    Given the stochastic nature of a lifespan, I believe the statement, "We haven't really doubled our longevity, we just took care of some things that lead to a lot more [younger people] reaching [an older age]." is, and will remain, true.
  - 31reasons 13y ago
    Are you suggesting modern medical science not helping people live longer by treating Cancer, Organ Transplants, Bypass surgeries etc ? I am seeing so much pessimism on HN , it seems unlikely that majority of people here are hackers.
    - Dewie 13y ago
      I'm saying that the bulk of that increase in average lifespan was due to relatively simple advances in medicine/medical understanding.
nova 13y ago
If only it were merely technically and scientifically super-difficult. The biggest hurdle is cultural and social, as many comments show. The first step towards ending death is to consider the fight possible and positive. But we are still deep in deathism, "Death is inevitable (with current science), ergo death is good". The biggest case of sour grapes or Stockholm syndrome ever, the most awful meme.
- logfromblammo 13y ago
  The sociological problems of immortality are more difficult than the technical problems. The entire sweep of human history has rested upon the same solid foundation: death takes everyone eventually. Kings fall down as dead as peasants, and the dirt nap of a saint lasts as long as a sinner. Imagine what would happen if the people who held certain beliefs never died off. Imagine the result if large estates never passed to any heirs, or debts never cancelled. Imagine copyrights that never expire, since the authors never die. The young, vital, and innovative do not prosper, since they are forever dominated by their elders who become increasingly conservative and risk-averse. Money and power do not pass from one generation to the next. The problem is only made worse if biological immortality is itself an expensive product that is only accessible to the wealthy. Down that path I can imagine dozens of dystopias.
  - eli_gottlieb 13y ago
    I used to raise that objection when debating immortalists. What got me to stop raising it was the realization that in the form of business corporations or multigenerational trusts, we already have those problems. It's almost comforting, knowing you already live in Dystopia.
    - nova 13y ago
      Maybe if we didn't have the absurd excuse of "the tyrant is evil, but at least he'll die someday" we would be more inclined to do something, instead of sheepishly obeying and letting time pass.

negamax 13y ago

I often wonder if all our life's earnings will eventually be used in upgrading our bodies. Could future be like 'In Time' or something parallel to that?

maxerickson 13y ago
That would either require that technology was only barely keeping most people alive or a vastly more restrictive legal regime (because as much horror as people express at patents, you are talking about 20 years not being such a long time anymore).

KiwiCoder 13y ago

"... millions long for immortality who don't know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon." - Susan Ertz

neals 13y ago
So if we can also control the weather, would that be Utopia?
- ph0rque 13y ago
  You still have to then solve the problem of Sundays.
eli_gottlieb 13y ago
And for those of us who can easily find something to do on a rainy ~~Sunday~~ Shabbat afternoon?
grahamburger 13y ago
That's exactly why we want to live forever, so a Sunday afternoon spent lazily listening to the rain on the window and dozing doesn't feel like a waste.

dave1629 13y ago

Peter Thiel's version of this: http://blakemasters.com/post/24253160557/peter-thiels-cs183-startup-class-16-decoding http://blakemasters.com/post/24253160557/peter-thiels-cs183-...

berntb 13y ago

17 comments and none has mentioned SENS? http://www.sens.org/research/introduction-to-sens-research http://www.sens.org/research/introduction-to-sens-research

300bps 13y ago

4.5 year old blog post that I didn't find any interesting information on. For example: Exponential decay is sharp, but an exponential within an exponential is so sharp that I can say with 99.999999% certainty that no human will ever live to the age of 130. (Ignoring, of course, the upward shift in the lifetime distribution that will result from future medical advances) The author makes a hugely controversial statements saying that no human will ever live past 130 and then says, "of course, ignoring the most important variable". Anyone interested in this topic might want to check out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aubrey_de_Grey http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aubrey_de_Grey

michalu 13y ago

I don't really want to die, but if there was no end, I would keep wasting my time and life forever. Now I feel a sense of urgency to do something - and a short life with purpose feels better then eternity of boredom and procrastination - that's just my personality though.

awjr 13y ago

One consideration, is that prolonging human life into 100s of years would be very useful for colonisation of space.

VikingCoder 13y ago

Your body is a cannon, meant to shoot DNA into the future. Once it has fulfilled that purpose, and possibly done a bit to nurture the next generation(s) of your / your tribe's DNA (or harm the DNA of others), your body serves no more purpose.

sejje 13y ago
So then all time is "free time." Excellent.
VLM 13y ago
"possibly done a bit to nurture" There doesn't seem to be any obvious upper bound on this behavior. I have a Harvard professor two centuries ago around 1800 in my ancestry. His DNA would still be serving a useful purpose to his descendants if he was teaching/advising my kids today in 2013, or if he was teaching/advising my descendents in early 2300 for that matter. I would imagine being young in a post 500-year-lifespan society would be very suffocating if your first few decades had a student:teacher ratio flipped around from current numbers to 20 teachers per student rather than current 20 students per teacher.
- VikingCoder 13y ago
  The resources you consume, versus the reproductive edge your provide to your offspring. Specifically, if you're competing for resources they could have used in their own reproduction. The most successful DNA will be when a group of people launch their descendants off into the galaxy to avoid the Red Giant death in our solar system. We're all rats on one slowly sinking ship, right now.
  - VLM 13y ago
    "if you're competing for resources" A lot of techno-utopia assumptions come into play, such as a culture powerful enough to extend life to 500 years probably has no resources left to compete for other than the momentary attraction of a fertile member of the opposite sex, although even that could probably be worked around in a lab (cloning or something?). If we discover something tomorrow I'd have to eat my words but I'm assuming it would require "star trek era" tech to pull this off.

hooande 13y ago

There is no reason that human beings cannot live forever. Gompertz Law is not a law of physics, but a law of observation similar to Moore's Law. Medical and safety technology are also advancing exponentially. Barring a catastrophe that blasts us back to the stone age, one growth curve will eventually overtake the other. The article uses a cops and criminals analogy to explain how our bodies degrade over time. Technology can allow us to produce artificial cops and conditions that make things more difficult for the criminals. The Methusaleh Foundation [1] is working on pieces of this problem right now, with a cash prize. There are many other research institutions working on different aspects of immortality. Once medical nanomachines become a practical reality we might be able to turn the work of Gompertz on it's head within a generation. Many people, myself included, find the idea of effective immortality to be disconcerting. But all of the arguments have been made and rebutted: Just because we can't imagine immortality doesn't mean that isn't a good thing, if we were born into a world without death we wouldn't give it up for any of the advantages of mortality, we would have more productive time to solve the problems of overpopulation, etc and so forth. If our species is able to continue on its current path then death is going to, well, die. The tragedy is that none of us will live to see it. That doesn't mean that we can't consider the implications and start preparing an infinite future for our descendants. [1] http://www.mprize.org/ http://www.mprize.org/

JumpCrisscross 13y ago
>There is no reason that human beings cannot live forever. Second law of thermodynamics. Granted this is a bit pedantic since we are nowhere close to that as a limiting factor.
- alexeisadeski3 13y ago
  Well it's not that pedantic.
- StavrosK 13y ago
  Well, at least for small values of "forever".
  - 13y ago

dorfsmay 13y ago

> I can say with 99.999999% certainty that no human will ever live to the age of 130 That is unfortunate. I grew up in the 80s (the 8 bit µ processor era), always had a very positive outlook on life, and thought 127 was the perfect age for me to die.

mathattack 13y ago

Having taken care of some elderly, and watched others pass, my impression that living forever appeals more to the young than the old. Some of it may be their bodies breaking down, some of it may be losing old friends and loves, but most of the folks 75+ seem to be ready when the time comes. Certainly more ready than their kids. But still... To quote the Rolling Stones, "What a drag it is getting old."

will_work4tears 13y ago
However, if they have the body and mental acuity of a 25 year old at 75+ and so do their friends, they might not be as ready for it. And not need people to take care of them. All of your argument is null and void if you take out the "dying" part. It's like saying "Nobody goes 100 miles in a day because they can't walk that far, so nobody is going to want to ever have a car/bike/airplane" also walking that far tears up your feet so a car is silly."
greedo 13y ago
My stepfather passed away two weeks ago, and my mother is worried that she'll live as long as the women in her line; roughly 90+. To her, that's a nightmare of infirmity and worry. Will she have enough money? Will she be independent, or have to rely more on caregivers? She's only 80, so she's got a good decade or more to think about these things. I think if she wasn't alone and in declining health, she'd be glad to live longer.

JumpCrisscross 13y ago

Biological immortality does not mean immunity from accidents or homicide. Hugh Hixon, at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, calculated the half-life of a biologically immortal population at 1 654 years [1]. If we lowered fatality odds to 1 in 100 000 per year (no accidents, Sweden's homicide rate) this figure inflates to 69 315. It's an interesting illustration of how the effects of randomness will not be muted, just shifted. [1] http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/MisadventureAsACauseOfDeath.html http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/MisadventureAsACauseOfDeat...

electromagnetic 13y ago
But the key question is how long do we have to live before we're going to bed at night and backing up all our memories for the day to the cloud. So if we get hit by a bus we just wake up in a few weeks in a rapidly grown body? I know people will say it won't happen, but are you going to let a 650 year old mind die with its cumulative knowledge and wisdom? Nope, you'd get them a new goddamn body.

chrisamiller 13y ago

As a cancer biologist, I can tell you that at least some of these assumptions don't hold true. Acute Myeloid Leukemia is driven entirely by "accumulated lightning bolts". Every time your blood stem cells divide, a small number of replication errors occur randomly in the DNA. If one of these cells accumulate two to three of these mutations in the wrong genes, you will develop AML. The longer you live, the more likely it is that this will occur. Bottom line, everyone who lives long enough will eventually get cancer. While I agree that these plots are interesting, it's dangerous to read too much into these without thinking more deeply about the vast number of ways that there are to die, many of which will have strikingly different age distributions. (see http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867412007775 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867412...)

Symmetry 13y ago
And if we solve cancer and age related deterioration, everyone will eventually die in an accident. But the fact remains that the deaths that dominate life expectancy statistics behave in the way described.
icegreentea 13y ago
Kinda late, but I thought that there are typically corrective measures that try to prevent oncogenes from kicking off. The key difference between "accumulated lightning bolts" and the final model chosen is that "accumulated lightning bolts" assumes a more or less fixed rates of lightning bolts, while the final model essentially that the rate of lightning bolts will increase over time, which corresponds well to an interpretation of long-term decay of corrective measures - such as replication error detection systems. I think the key point is that systems for retaining homeostasis (so second order systems I guess) are themselves subject to degradation.
- chrisamiller 13y ago
  There are some cancers driven by things like mismatch-repair defects, so that the amount of DNA damage grows very quickly over time, but these don't cause the majority of cancers. In liquid (blood) tumors, especially, these are very rare - The predominant mechanism is just the accumulation of random defects due to cellular division. On the other end of the scale are things like automobile accidents, where incidence peaks in teenage years and decreases thereafter (with a possible second peak as vision and reflexes deteriorate in the elderly). My point is that neither of these fit the neat curve drawn by the author. When everything is lumped together, the curve fits, but trying to draw broad conclusions about mechanisms from that kind of aggregate data is foolish.

a3n 13y ago

If people lived to, say, 150 or 300 years, 500 years, I wonder how hard it would be to convince people to risk their lives in war? I wonder if people would be more careful with the environment if they knew they'd actually have to live with their treatment of the environment?

VLM 13y ago
On the other hand, leadership positions strongly attract psychopaths and sociopaths, and at least some segment of the population will think, eh, I'm going to live for 500 years, I can afford to give President Palin a mere four year chance, and next thing you know we're launching missiles at who knows who for no particular reason, or they're launching missiles at us. My point being a 500 year lifespan allows a "survival of the craziest" to likely result in truly awful people naturally ending up in positions of leadership. Every nutcase having his 4 years of fame instead of just some of them, or just 15 minutes of fame for some of them. It could be really bad. And not just politically, imagine the typical CEO psychological profile under centuries of those selection pressures instead of mere decades. "if they knew they'd actually have to live with their treatment of the environment" Imagine a 500 year old hoarder. This whole discussion is enjoyably ripe with possible sci-fi or fantasy novel plots, very interesting.

scotty79 13y ago

Do you know any other scenario that results in distibution of this kind?

sirsar 13y ago

It bothers me that 8 is the "magic number." Did Gompertz simply round? I find it hard to believe that the real number is not 7.7 or 8.3, and those would have vastly different effects. Why should evolution mark itself by whole rotations around the sun?

exarch 13y ago

We already know why cancer rates increase with age: cancer is a result of several cumulative cellular mutations. Obviously, the chance of these mutations all occurring in any given cell increases with the number of cell divisions that occur, i.e. the length of time the person lives.

dsego 13y ago

We don't neccesarily need a body. I posted this link a while back but it went unnoticed: http://aeon.co/magazine/being-human/virtual-afterlives-will-transform-humanity http://aeon.co/magazine/being-human/virtual-afterlives-will-... "The question is not whether we can upload our brains onto a computer, but what will become of us when we do"

eli_gottlieb 13y ago
Currently, "can we" is indeed a question. It is followed by the question, "Oh dear God in Heaven, why would you do that!?". I mean, seriously, there are large numbers of computer security breaches each week. Now what are you going to do if those computers are substrate for people? Hell, it's even worse if they're running people using cloud computing: one attack on a datacenter could let you obtain root access to dozens or hundreds of living human minds. And then we have to decide on scheduling and resource-sharing algorithms. Oy gevalt. Though actually, trying to devise a secure system architecture for running real people would be a hilariously evil joke-project.

onedev 13y ago

Honestly, I don't want to live forever. 100 years I think is what would be ideal.

Futurebot 13y ago

For anyone here who has not yet read Eliezer Yudkowsky's "You Only Live Twice", please do so: http://lesswrong.com/lw/wq/you_only_live_twice/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/wq/you_only_live_twice/ Pertains to Cryonics, which is our best bet for immortality until we solve the aging issue (i.e., we hopefully stay cryopreserved until immortality is achieved.) At least with SENS/The Methuselah Foundation/Calico now getting attention and a bit of funding, there's hope here. One day, perhaps governments will consider aging "force" or "harm" and do the number one job government should do: protecting people from it (by funding research to prevent it.)

eli_gottlieb 13y ago
That one's a bit... silly. It's a surprisingly religious sentiment for Mr. LessWrong. Yes, I have heard the shpiel. However, from the shpiel I've heard, cryonics is currently a faith-based ticket to God Only Knows Where. Very few people actually believe whole human beings can be resurrected from cryopreservation, and it's certainly never been actually done even in animal experiments, so why should anyone sign up? Well then, the cryonicists say, let me tell you about neuro-cryo, which is cheaper. We can totally plausibly claim the information content of your brain is preserved in cryopreservation, or possibly brain plastination says gwern. Anyway, point being, you sign up, and it will result in a future friendly superintelligence reading your brain out into a computer to resurrect you someday... To which I say, hold the fuck on you just skipped a whole lot of freaking steps there!
- Futurebot 13y ago
  Hanson and Yudkowsky make the point that it's the best we've got (in one article, they put the chance of success at 5%), and that the alternative right now is nothing. Considering the relatively low cost, it's a gamble worth taking. For the record, I've been signed up for a long time. Edit: as for the tone, Yudkowsky has had the inspirational, secular techno-futurist new-age-ish sounding hope thing going for ages, as you probably know. It doesn't surprise me (and probably doesn't surprise him) that very reasonable people sometimes mistake it for the anti-skeptic / superstitious / actual new-age nuttery / cult types. I think part of the problem here is a kind of Poe's Law effect: if a rational, informed, intelligent person talks seriously about the likelihood of FAI, superintelligences, cryo, etc. in a positive, hopeful way, they're instantly mistaken for a nutcake.

abhiv 13y ago

Great article. For me personally, the issue is not so much dying but aging. Seeing your hair thin, your eyesight deteriorate, your memory weaken and your energy decrease with time must be a profoundly depressing experience -- one of the major reasons why the old in general are more solemn than the young, I think. These changes are still in the future for me (thankfully), but I imagine they will happen some day if I live long enough. I think a world in which people would keep remain mentally and physically fit, but simply die (maybe from a lightning bolt type event) at some point, would be much better than one in which your body and mind slowly fade with time. I'd be happy with medical advances that let you keep the mind and body of a 25 year old till you're 80 and then simply die one day. Unfortunately, some period of old age and infirmity seems to be present no matter how much lifespan extends.

jostmey 13y ago

This is a very interesting approach to describe the mortality rate as a function of age. I wonder how this theory ties in with more established theories of aging, such as the Evolutionary Theories of Aging (ref. http://www.genetics.org/content/156/3/927.full http://www.genetics.org/content/156/3/927.full)

avn2109 13y ago

A reliability engineer might say that as a first approximation, the time-till-failure of the human animal (really just an electro-mechanical-chemical machine) has a governing equation which is a linear combination of many Weibull equations [0] and Arrhenius equations [1]. Mechanical failure is known to be governed by Weibull, and chemically-driven devices fail according to Arrhenius. From this claim it isn't hard to cook up superexponential-ish results over certain timescales by tuning the fitting parameters and combination coefficients. But that doesn't mean the underlying failure physics here are truly superexponential. But as a better approximation, human death may be governed by a system of differential equations with primarily stochastic coefficients and plenty of strongly nonlinear operators. So after our biomedical engineers remove the first few bottlenecks at ~105 years old, these curve shapes might change dramatically to reflect the true complexity of the underlying physics. [0] http://reliabilityanalyticstoolkit.appspot.com/mechanical_reliability_data http://reliabilityanalyticstoolkit.appspot.com/mechanical_re... [1] http://reliawiki.com/index.php/Arrhenius_Relationship http://reliawiki.com/index.php/Arrhenius_Relationship