8 ms·

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 saf

by 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".
  - eli_gottlieb 13y ago
    Any value of forever large enough that we need to find someplace to put our excess memories outside our original brain is still getting into "forever" territory from the perspective of our current lives.
    - thaumasiotes 13y ago
      People already do this. The traditional forms of memory storage are known as "diaries" and "photo albums". It is universally acknowledged that without their aid, your brain will overload and lose the information you wanted to preserve. But despite all this, no one thinks of human life as lasting "forever", or anywhere close to it.
      - electromagnetic 13y ago
        The irony is the only things I can't forget are the ones written down or photographed. I never need to look at them, but if they weren't written down it would have vanished. It's like I have a form of telepathic cloud storage. So long as the physical information exists, I can always remember it and will never look. So some is potentially in a Schrödinger's cat state as I never know if my wife actually threw the note out or not as I'll never need to go look for it.
- eli_gottlieb 13y ago
  I thus hereby engage in the obligatory mention of The Last Question.
  - BillyMaize 13y ago
    That was an awesome read, thank you for mentioning it.
- mmastrac 13y ago
  I think "forever" is generally understood as "for relatively long, but finite values less than the remaining lifetime of the universe"
  - eli_gottlieb 13y ago
    That depends. Just how much mad science are you willing to engage in?
    - ep103 13y ago
      All of it. All of the mad science.
      - eli_gottlieb 13y ago
        Well then, I can happily inform you that depending on just how physics works out, we might just get a solution to that whole "heat death of the universe" problem. Too early to tell, precisely, but I've heard some neat things about new child-universes forming inside black holes such that they torque space itself and generate non-conserved new mass-energy.
        martindale 13y ago
        Citation, please?
        eli_gottlieb 13y ago
        Seen on /r/science a while ago, let me go grab the paper. Aaaand it's torsion, my mistake. http://arxiv.org/abs/1007.0587 http://arxiv.org/abs/1007.0587
nicholas73 13y ago
If we can expand life expectancy by 30 years, we would effective double if not exponentially increase the rate of progress. This is because it takes scientists and engineers about 30 years to mature into their field and find their niche, counting from childbirth. Another 30 years before their are close to retirement age. If people were healthy into their 90's, you'd have unbelievable masters of their craft working at high levels for an additional 30 years.
- mcguire 13y ago
  I'm not sure I buy that. There seems to be a half-life effect for people working in one field; after some period of time, call it 20 years, a significant proportion of them have either changed fields dramatically, or have become stagnant. On the other hand, the possibilities of cross-pollination....
- VLM 13y ago
  On the other hand look at fields like programming, where due to ageism and such, you've got a shorter career than a pro football quarterback before you get replaced by a cheap new grad. So you'd have genius grade programmers working at walmart as people greeters from age 30 to age 90, contributing to open source and stuff. This has both good points and bad points. Another interesting one to think about on the other side, is its not entirely unusual for academics to spend a large fraction of their working years as minions before getting a professorship and tenure and a serious paycheck... imagine having to do grunt work twice as long as now.
  - hyperpape 13y ago
    Shorter than a pro football quarterback? Let's compare Rob Pike and Brett Favre. Ageism in CS seems to be real and a huge issue, but let's try to be accurate about the extent of it.
  - gaius 13y ago
    I don't think this would be an issue, since to have a world where people live longer, you also need to have fewer kids. You can only practice ageism if you have a surplus at the young end.
jmartinpetersen 13y ago
Usually people who worry about how long others live (mainly those who issue life insurance policies) use the "extended" Gompertz-Makeham Law (which is, basically, the Gompertz Law extended with an age-independent component - the lightning bolts). One thing I have a hard time wrapping my head around is how the lightning bolt deaths (the Makeham component) will be dealt with by society if "immortality" becomes a reality. As it is now, we accept that people gets killed (i.e., gets their date of death advanced) by e.g. traffic, but how will that change?
- ars 13y ago
  It will cause people to become much much much more conservative and safety oriented. You already see this in practice - you can't buy real chemistry sets, kids are never left alone, safety equipment for riding a bike, etc, etc, etc. Basically everywhere people say "When I was a kid we used to xxxx", and today they don't. It's a direct result of accidents slowly becoming the primary cause of death.
  - JumpCrisscross 13y ago
    >It's a direct result of accidents slowly becoming the primary cause of death. Unintentional injuries were responsible for 39.4 deaths per 100 000 in 2011 [1], behind heart diseases (191), malignant neoplasms (185), chronic lower respiratory diseases (46), and cerebrovascular diseases (41). The age-adjusted unintentional injury death rate "was relatively unchanged, from 38.6 deaths per 100,000 population in 1985 to 37.7 deaths per 100,000 in 2004" [2]. EDIT: while unintentional injury death rates have held their ground, overall death rates have been in decline. Hence, unintentional injuries are rising as a proportion of deaths (though they have a good distance to cover before they can tap on disease's shoulder). [1] http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr61/nvsr61_06.pdf http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr61/nvsr61_06.pdf page 4 [2] http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/misc/injury2007.pdf http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/misc/injury2007.pdf page 19
    - ars 13y ago
      You should check statistics only for under age 30. Also the accident rate in previous years is the wrong thing to check - you want to check the accident rate relative to the non-accident rate.
hcarvalhoalves 13y ago
> There is no reason that human beings cannot live forever. There are plenty of fundamental reasons for why we can't. > Gompertz Law is not a law of physics, but a law of observation (...) Second law of thermodynamics.
- pmelendez 13y ago
  From wikipedia: "The second law is an empirically validated postulate of thermodynamics" [1] And "Empirical evidence (also empirical data, sense experience, empirical knowledge, or the a posteriori) is a source of knowledge acquired by means of observation" [2] So, it is a law by observation after all. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_law_of_thermodynamics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_law_of_thermodynamics [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empirical_evidence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empirical_evidence
  - statusgraph 13y ago
    By that definition all laws of physics are laws of observation.
raverbashing 13y ago
"There is no reason that human beings cannot live forever" There are plenty. Mainly, every machine has an expiration date. Unless we go the "Ship of Theseus" way, but even then one thing remains, the brain. Let's go for a much simpler analogy: Is there a way a car can be used forever? By replacing every part, maybe, it still precludes "total loss" events. "Oh, but we can have micromachines fixing our body" sure, great, this will be helpful, but not everything can be 'micro-fixed' The lightning bolt theory is not "wrong" per se, but it is a small part of the causes of mortality, and it certainly doesn't explain the sharp fall, but it is the main responsible for middle of life causes of death
- krisgee 13y ago
  Your body already does this though. Cells die and are replaced all the time, even neurons. You aren't you from seven years ago nor 14 years ago and you're still barely you from last year. I'm not really sure why this argument even enters into the equation, if I replace all my parts and still think the same I'm essentially still me (In an awesome robot body).
  - raverbashing 13y ago
    So, if it does that, why doesn't it keep doing that, or it keeps working as if brand new? And it's "Your", not "You're"
    - krisgee 13y ago
      Because over time the replication of cells becomes imperfect, I'm not going to try and explain it because I don't feel like I truly understand it but that's the essential bit, after around the age of 35-40 your cells stop replicating perfectly and errors start building up which eventually lead to the actual cause of death, things like organ failure or cancer. Thanks for catching the typo, I don't look these posts over well enough sometimes.
- stcredzero 13y ago
  There are plenty. Mainly, every machine has an expiration date. Re-hash of old argument, addressed by SENS. 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... not everything can be 'micro-fixed' There are only 7 distinct forms of aging-related damage. The only one that doesn't have a sensible and straightforward strategy for fixing is cancer.
WWWWH 13y ago
Unfortunately, medical technology is not even remotely advancing exponentially. The rate of new drug approvals is decreasing (and costs are rising); we are appallingly bad at turning biochemical knowledge into medical technology. Now, I know you weren't talking about drugs as such, but they are a reasonable proxy for our ability to understand a biological system and then intervene. And the state of the industries that try and do this, strongly suggests that we haven't got a clue. Just to lay the pessimism on a little thicker, we may even be lucky to stay where we are, given the spread of antibiotic resistant bacteria. Never mind immortality, I'd be happy to know that we still have working antibiotics when I roll up to hip replacement age! edit: My grammer sucks.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- robinhoode 13y ago
  > The rate of new drug approvals is decreasing (and costs are rising); we are appallingly bad at turning biochemical knowledge into medical technology. Why should we measure medical technology at the rate of new drugs developed? What about the speed of DNA sequencing advancing faster than Moore's law? What about Organovo's recent claims on 3D printing organs, with vascular system in place, by next year? What about advanced prothesis that can provide touch senses to the user? Or even visual or audio prothesis, made possible with advancements in brain-computer interfaces? Your argument basically boils down to saying that the rate of CPU clock speeds developed in recent history is indicative of an overall slowdown in computer science. Clearly there are other paradigms that need to be explored before we can say that Moore's law is no longer relevant, let alone all of computing. Yes, the average of all medical tech is going to always lag behind computing for ethical reasons. And that of course, there are ways we can improve medical testing using stem cell research. But to say that we're at risk of moving backwards because one or two particular areas are in serious need of optimization is a bit far-fetched.
mcguire 13y ago
> Just because we can't imagine immortality doesn't mean that isn't a good thing Note that the counter is also true. > if we were born into a world without death we wouldn't give it up for any of the advantages of mortality One of the things I periodically complain about, with regards to the US manned space program, is the cultural believe that no one must die. Take a look at the progress of aircraft technology in the last century, and the number of aircraft pioneers that died gruesomely. Now imagine what you wouldn't do, if you were effectively immortal.
- VLM 13y ago
  I would take some issue with the space program comparison, in that if you're going to live forever, then rather than putting up with a space shuttle that kills the crew roughly 1 in 50 launches, you have an infinite amount of time so launch that dude 1000 times unmanned to debug it fully before you send the first humans up. Another curiosity might be if your average dude lives 500 years you may very well start launching 475 year old astronauts in that a tragedy will only cause as many lost life years as launching a 50 year old dude today.
  - mcguire 13y ago
    Your first paragraph is more-or-less my point. You have an unlimited amount of time to make it safer now. Unfortunately, you don't have an unlimited budget, so the result is that you don't launch anything. Except meetings. Lots of meetings. Anyway, what happens when you have trouble finding qualified crew because no matter how much work you put into it, it'll never be "fully debugged?" (When you're doing something new, there's not any good way to tell if the barrel is full of bees, other than sticking your head in it.)
    - VLM 13y ago
      "Unfortunately, you don't have an unlimited budget," Actually you do, if you model NASA as a jobs program and take an infinite amount of time. Slowing time down by a factor of ten would have a huge number of economic effects aside from NASAs budget, but presumably you could take ten times as long to R+D and then launch 1/10th as often with no impact on progress per lifespan. One problem from the SS program is it promised all things to all people so that would give the same jokers ten times as many chances to make ridiculous specification promises. So the new design constraints would have to be smaller than a Cessna 172, and HTOL instead of vert takeoff and the payload would be 100 times what it actually could carry, etc, at which point they'd probably find a way to blow it up 1 in 50 times again.
epaladin 13y ago
I can accept everything about being human, except for death, so this is a challenge I've wanted to take on since I was quite young, but was afraid to directly face. Now I really know that I need to start moving more in that direction. Somehow. I'm already in bioinformatics, but wasn't very focused on any subdomain of biology, so there's a lot to catch up on. I'm excited about Calico, but there's so little information available that it's hard to know if there's going to be any way for someone with just an MS in bioinformatics to wedge their way into helping with that effort (though I'm going to try!). It would just suck to fail at figuring it out (result: death) and it might also suck to succeed (crazy fundamentalist shoots me in the head, result: death) but indefinite procrastination is probably the most assured way to die and be unfulfilled on top that... so it's worth having a go. Maybe I should work on cryopreservation instead, and leave the living forever bit to someone else to figure out? Thanks for the mprize link, hadn't heard of that.
- nova 13y ago
  >I can accept everything about being human, except for death, so this is a challenge I've wanted to take on since I was quite young, but was afraid to directly face. Glad to read this. The enterprise will be very difficult, but your heart (or brain) is in the right place.
  - gknoy 13y ago
    They're already uploaded? ;)

by hooande 13y ago

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".
- eli_gottlieb 13y ago
  Any value of forever large enough that we need to find someplace to put our excess memories outside our original brain is still getting into "forever" territory from the perspective of our current lives.
  - thaumasiotes 13y ago
    People already do this. The traditional forms of memory storage are known as "diaries" and "photo albums". It is universally acknowledged that without their aid, your brain will overload and lose the information you wanted to preserve. But despite all this, no one thinks of human life as lasting "forever", or anywhere close to it.
    - electromagnetic 13y ago
      The irony is the only things I can't forget are the ones written down or photographed. I never need to look at them, but if they weren't written down it would have vanished. It's like I have a form of telepathic cloud storage. So long as the physical information exists, I can always remember it and will never look. So some is potentially in a Schrödinger's cat state as I never know if my wife actually threw the note out or not as I'll never need to go look for it.
eli_gottlieb 13y ago
I thus hereby engage in the obligatory mention of The Last Question.
- BillyMaize 13y ago
  That was an awesome read, thank you for mentioning it.
mmastrac 13y ago
I think "forever" is generally understood as "for relatively long, but finite values less than the remaining lifetime of the universe"
- eli_gottlieb 13y ago
  That depends. Just how much mad science are you willing to engage in?
  - ep103 13y ago
    All of it. All of the mad science.
    - eli_gottlieb 13y ago
      Well then, I can happily inform you that depending on just how physics works out, we might just get a solution to that whole "heat death of the universe" problem. Too early to tell, precisely, but I've heard some neat things about new child-universes forming inside black holes such that they torque space itself and generate non-conserved new mass-energy.
      - martindale 13y ago
        Citation, please?
        eli_gottlieb 13y ago
        Seen on /r/science a while ago, let me go grab the paper. Aaaand it's torsion, my mistake. http://arxiv.org/abs/1007.0587 http://arxiv.org/abs/1007.0587

nicholas73 13y ago

If we can expand life expectancy by 30 years, we would effective double if not exponentially increase the rate of progress. This is because it takes scientists and engineers about 30 years to mature into their field and find their niche, counting from childbirth. Another 30 years before their are close to retirement age. If people were healthy into their 90's, you'd have unbelievable masters of their craft working at high levels for an additional 30 years.

mcguire 13y ago
I'm not sure I buy that. There seems to be a half-life effect for people working in one field; after some period of time, call it 20 years, a significant proportion of them have either changed fields dramatically, or have become stagnant. On the other hand, the possibilities of cross-pollination....
VLM 13y ago
On the other hand look at fields like programming, where due to ageism and such, you've got a shorter career than a pro football quarterback before you get replaced by a cheap new grad. So you'd have genius grade programmers working at walmart as people greeters from age 30 to age 90, contributing to open source and stuff. This has both good points and bad points. Another interesting one to think about on the other side, is its not entirely unusual for academics to spend a large fraction of their working years as minions before getting a professorship and tenure and a serious paycheck... imagine having to do grunt work twice as long as now.
- hyperpape 13y ago
  Shorter than a pro football quarterback? Let's compare Rob Pike and Brett Favre. Ageism in CS seems to be real and a huge issue, but let's try to be accurate about the extent of it.
- gaius 13y ago
  I don't think this would be an issue, since to have a world where people live longer, you also need to have fewer kids. You can only practice ageism if you have a surplus at the young end.

jmartinpetersen 13y ago

Usually people who worry about how long others live (mainly those who issue life insurance policies) use the "extended" Gompertz-Makeham Law (which is, basically, the Gompertz Law extended with an age-independent component - the lightning bolts). One thing I have a hard time wrapping my head around is how the lightning bolt deaths (the Makeham component) will be dealt with by society if "immortality" becomes a reality. As it is now, we accept that people gets killed (i.e., gets their date of death advanced) by e.g. traffic, but how will that change?

ars 13y ago
It will cause people to become much much much more conservative and safety oriented. You already see this in practice - you can't buy real chemistry sets, kids are never left alone, safety equipment for riding a bike, etc, etc, etc. Basically everywhere people say "When I was a kid we used to xxxx", and today they don't. It's a direct result of accidents slowly becoming the primary cause of death.
- JumpCrisscross 13y ago
  >It's a direct result of accidents slowly becoming the primary cause of death. Unintentional injuries were responsible for 39.4 deaths per 100 000 in 2011 [1], behind heart diseases (191), malignant neoplasms (185), chronic lower respiratory diseases (46), and cerebrovascular diseases (41). The age-adjusted unintentional injury death rate "was relatively unchanged, from 38.6 deaths per 100,000 population in 1985 to 37.7 deaths per 100,000 in 2004" [2]. EDIT: while unintentional injury death rates have held their ground, overall death rates have been in decline. Hence, unintentional injuries are rising as a proportion of deaths (though they have a good distance to cover before they can tap on disease's shoulder). [1] http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr61/nvsr61_06.pdf http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr61/nvsr61_06.pdf page 4 [2] http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/misc/injury2007.pdf http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/misc/injury2007.pdf page 19
  - ars 13y ago
    You should check statistics only for under age 30. Also the accident rate in previous years is the wrong thing to check - you want to check the accident rate relative to the non-accident rate.

hcarvalhoalves 13y ago

> There is no reason that human beings cannot live forever. There are plenty of fundamental reasons for why we can't. > Gompertz Law is not a law of physics, but a law of observation (...) Second law of thermodynamics.

pmelendez 13y ago
From wikipedia: "The second law is an empirically validated postulate of thermodynamics" [1] And "Empirical evidence (also empirical data, sense experience, empirical knowledge, or the a posteriori) is a source of knowledge acquired by means of observation" [2] So, it is a law by observation after all. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_law_of_thermodynamics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_law_of_thermodynamics [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empirical_evidence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empirical_evidence
- statusgraph 13y ago
  By that definition all laws of physics are laws of observation.

raverbashing 13y ago

"There is no reason that human beings cannot live forever" There are plenty. Mainly, every machine has an expiration date. Unless we go the "Ship of Theseus" way, but even then one thing remains, the brain. Let's go for a much simpler analogy: Is there a way a car can be used forever? By replacing every part, maybe, it still precludes "total loss" events. "Oh, but we can have micromachines fixing our body" sure, great, this will be helpful, but not everything can be 'micro-fixed' The lightning bolt theory is not "wrong" per se, but it is a small part of the causes of mortality, and it certainly doesn't explain the sharp fall, but it is the main responsible for middle of life causes of death

krisgee 13y ago
Your body already does this though. Cells die and are replaced all the time, even neurons. You aren't you from seven years ago nor 14 years ago and you're still barely you from last year. I'm not really sure why this argument even enters into the equation, if I replace all my parts and still think the same I'm essentially still me (In an awesome robot body).
- raverbashing 13y ago
  So, if it does that, why doesn't it keep doing that, or it keeps working as if brand new? And it's "Your", not "You're"
  - krisgee 13y ago
    Because over time the replication of cells becomes imperfect, I'm not going to try and explain it because I don't feel like I truly understand it but that's the essential bit, after around the age of 35-40 your cells stop replicating perfectly and errors start building up which eventually lead to the actual cause of death, things like organ failure or cancer. Thanks for catching the typo, I don't look these posts over well enough sometimes.
stcredzero 13y ago
There are plenty. Mainly, every machine has an expiration date. Re-hash of old argument, addressed by SENS. 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... not everything can be 'micro-fixed' There are only 7 distinct forms of aging-related damage. The only one that doesn't have a sensible and straightforward strategy for fixing is cancer.

WWWWH 13y ago

Unfortunately, medical technology is not even remotely advancing exponentially. The rate of new drug approvals is decreasing (and costs are rising); we are appallingly bad at turning biochemical knowledge into medical technology. Now, I know you weren't talking about drugs as such, but they are a reasonable proxy for our ability to understand a biological system and then intervene. And the state of the industries that try and do this, strongly suggests that we haven't got a clue. Just to lay the pessimism on a little thicker, we may even be lucky to stay where we are, given the spread of antibiotic resistant bacteria. Never mind immortality, I'd be happy to know that we still have working antibiotics when I roll up to hip replacement age! edit: My grammer sucks.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
robinhoode 13y ago
> The rate of new drug approvals is decreasing (and costs are rising); we are appallingly bad at turning biochemical knowledge into medical technology. Why should we measure medical technology at the rate of new drugs developed? What about the speed of DNA sequencing advancing faster than Moore's law? What about Organovo's recent claims on 3D printing organs, with vascular system in place, by next year? What about advanced prothesis that can provide touch senses to the user? Or even visual or audio prothesis, made possible with advancements in brain-computer interfaces? Your argument basically boils down to saying that the rate of CPU clock speeds developed in recent history is indicative of an overall slowdown in computer science. Clearly there are other paradigms that need to be explored before we can say that Moore's law is no longer relevant, let alone all of computing. Yes, the average of all medical tech is going to always lag behind computing for ethical reasons. And that of course, there are ways we can improve medical testing using stem cell research. But to say that we're at risk of moving backwards because one or two particular areas are in serious need of optimization is a bit far-fetched.

mcguire 13y ago

> Just because we can't imagine immortality doesn't mean that isn't a good thing Note that the counter is also true. > if we were born into a world without death we wouldn't give it up for any of the advantages of mortality One of the things I periodically complain about, with regards to the US manned space program, is the cultural believe that no one must die. Take a look at the progress of aircraft technology in the last century, and the number of aircraft pioneers that died gruesomely. Now imagine what you wouldn't do, if you were effectively immortal.

VLM 13y ago
I would take some issue with the space program comparison, in that if you're going to live forever, then rather than putting up with a space shuttle that kills the crew roughly 1 in 50 launches, you have an infinite amount of time so launch that dude 1000 times unmanned to debug it fully before you send the first humans up. Another curiosity might be if your average dude lives 500 years you may very well start launching 475 year old astronauts in that a tragedy will only cause as many lost life years as launching a 50 year old dude today.
- mcguire 13y ago
  Your first paragraph is more-or-less my point. You have an unlimited amount of time to make it safer now. Unfortunately, you don't have an unlimited budget, so the result is that you don't launch anything. Except meetings. Lots of meetings. Anyway, what happens when you have trouble finding qualified crew because no matter how much work you put into it, it'll never be "fully debugged?" (When you're doing something new, there's not any good way to tell if the barrel is full of bees, other than sticking your head in it.)
  - VLM 13y ago
    "Unfortunately, you don't have an unlimited budget," Actually you do, if you model NASA as a jobs program and take an infinite amount of time. Slowing time down by a factor of ten would have a huge number of economic effects aside from NASAs budget, but presumably you could take ten times as long to R+D and then launch 1/10th as often with no impact on progress per lifespan. One problem from the SS program is it promised all things to all people so that would give the same jokers ten times as many chances to make ridiculous specification promises. So the new design constraints would have to be smaller than a Cessna 172, and HTOL instead of vert takeoff and the payload would be 100 times what it actually could carry, etc, at which point they'd probably find a way to blow it up 1 in 50 times again.

epaladin 13y ago

I can accept everything about being human, except for death, so this is a challenge I've wanted to take on since I was quite young, but was afraid to directly face. Now I really know that I need to start moving more in that direction. Somehow. I'm already in bioinformatics, but wasn't very focused on any subdomain of biology, so there's a lot to catch up on. I'm excited about Calico, but there's so little information available that it's hard to know if there's going to be any way for someone with just an MS in bioinformatics to wedge their way into helping with that effort (though I'm going to try!). It would just suck to fail at figuring it out (result: death) and it might also suck to succeed (crazy fundamentalist shoots me in the head, result: death) but indefinite procrastination is probably the most assured way to die and be unfulfilled on top that... so it's worth having a go. Maybe I should work on cryopreservation instead, and leave the living forever bit to someone else to figure out? Thanks for the mprize link, hadn't heard of that.

nova 13y ago
>I can accept everything about being human, except for death, so this is a challenge I've wanted to take on since I was quite young, but was afraid to directly face. Glad to read this. The enterprise will be very difficult, but your heart (or brain) is in the right place.
- gknoy 13y ago
  They're already uploaded? ;)