7 ms·
You will live for longer than 1% of the entire history of human civilization.
The first civilization started in Mesopotamia around 5000 BCE (more or less), which is 7,000 years ago. If you live until age 80, that's more than 1% of the history of civilization.
Just throwing it out there for anyone else who'd never thought about it before. Certainly changed my perspective a bit.
- quellhorst 17y agoI have multiple relatives that are 100+. I wonder what percentage of all people they have lived longer than.
- patio11 17y agoYou will also probably outlive three nines of humans historically. A woman at my church passed away recently, tragically young at 68. (That is about a decade below the life expectancy of Japanese women of her generation.) Also, while I generally scoff at scifi, it is entirely possible that we will make big strides against aging this century. I expect my chilren will grow up with their grandparents. I expect their grandkids will not even understand the import of that sentence.
- crcoffey 17y agoMy grandparents are still alive, and are actually doing quite well. I'm 19 years old, and I hold a strong hope that they will hold my children in their time. I can't explain how much that would mean to me.
- mosheg101 17y agoMy granddad just visited me, he's 87, does every day 40 x 25m pool laps, dances, sings and almost beats me at armfight. :P EDIT: he's also great-granddad to my kid :) My great-grandmom from grandmom side lived to 95...
- mynameishere 17y agoI still have a great-grandmother who is almost 100. It was a very surreal experience when her daughter died, at about 68 or so, and she hosted the viewing. Can you imagine burying your own elderly daughter?
- gcheong 17y agoReminds me of the abc documentary "Live to be 150... can you do it?" where the profile several centenarians. They look in surprisingly good shape considering they are over 100 years old. See http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Longevity/Story?id=4559263&page=1 http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Longevity/Story?id=4559263&...
- pj 17y agoMy grandmother, still living, became a great-great grandmother last month. Living members of 5 generations of the same family.
- clistctrl 17y agoMy dad goes the senior center a few times a week with my grandmother... and he's not visiting :)
- kragen 17y agoI'm curious where you get your statistics on the detailed distribution of historical human lifespans. They have never been, you know, Gaussian. I think it's always been the case that several humans per thousand survive into their 80s.
- gregwebs 17y agoThis gets at the root cause of what is wrong in our civilizations today. Most of our genes were evolved pre-civilization. Civilization itself is just an experiment. An experiment that hasn't been going all that well if judged by what has been happening to our planet. There is wisdom from the pre-civilization days I hope we can tap into while using new technologies to actually have sustainable civilization.
- kingkawn 17y agoLonger generations mean we stay mired in the past, and our elders are around to advocate for the world views of their era in a way that can be good and bad, my guess that its leans more toward the latter. Also, considering how much time I waste now, who's to say I won't just take more resources to complete what I'd have done in a shorter span?
- jodrellblank 17y agoThe goal of life is to live it, not to go anywhere particular. No matter what we as a species do or where we go, we're trapped in the universe. There's no escape, ultimately. Yet you're arguing that people should hurry up and die so 'we' can move on and not stay 'mired in the past' and 'wasting time'. What do they matter? Where are we moving to that's so important? If we can live until we choose to die or die by accident, feed everyone, keep the planet in good condition, hit virtually 100% nanomechanical recycling / construction and have enough resources for people or virtual people to set off exploring the universe, what else matters? Why do we need everyone to be young? And we might be able to step usefully close to those things in a thousand years or so - and if you agree with Kurzweil, 1000 years of progress will happen in much less than 1000 years. We might even live to see it.
- kingkawn 17y agoI didn't say that we should all die young, but instead that aiming relentlessly to extend the quantity of life misses the qualities that make it worth living, including hope and the stunning curiosity that comes with youth. There's beauty that no matter how burdened an individual is by experience, they will die and the next generation will get to try again, hopefully without too much of the negative baggage passed on.
- jodrellblank 17y agoinstead that aiming relentlessly to extend the quantity of life misses the qualities that make it worth living, including hope and the stunning curiosity that comes with youth. Misses the qualities that make it worth living? Have you checked out what death is? The only way you can have hope and curiosity is by being alive to experience them. Prolonging the state of being alive is a much much better way to address "quality of life" than saying "death is for your own good - you'd probably be miserable otherwise anyway". There's beauty that no matter how burdened an individual is by experience, they will die I think not, because there is nobody outside "people who are alive" to be experiencing the alleged beauty. The next generation don't get to try "again", they get to try ... full stop. Try what, though? Humanity as a whole isn't trying to do anything. There's no outsider giving points for space exploration and underwater colonies and disease eradication. The only point to progress is to progress the lives of people who are alive, and anything other than that about "the next generation" is a holdover from the fact that we don't have enough power to affect big changes in one lifetime but we can argue that they are worth changing for the next generation. It would be even better, not worse, if we could be changing things to improve our own lives a hundred years on.
- mnemonicsloth 17y agoYes, but there's a catch. The human race has existed for 140,000 years or so (edit), but has only been civilized for 7000. The population of nomadic humans was lower, but there's evidence that they were much healthier than those who settled down to grow crops full-time. Agriculture was a win because it allowed for many more people to be born, but it's not a life for which we're well adapted. ADDED: If this guy is right, 99% could turn out to be an underestimate or an overestimate: 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...
- KirinDave 17y agoWhat evidence is that? The average lifespan is on the increase, not the decrease. Or are you using some other metric to measure what you call "healthier"?
- kingkawn 17y agoIf "healthier" is measured by number of mastodons killed with bare hands, yes, it's been a precipitous decline.
- jibiki 17y agoThis article mentions it in passing: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=533743 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=533743 "We know roughly when and where farming began, because of the archæological evidence: domestication is a shock to the physiology of man and beast. The skeletons of people change, they temporarily grow smaller and less healthy, as the human body adapts to a protein-poorer diet and a more arduous lifestyle. Likewise, newly domesticated animals get scrawnier at first." I'm sure some google wizardry could find a real source.
- dejb 17y agoI'd say increases in the prevalence disease would have been the biggest factor in the reduction of lifespan for 'civilised' people.
- 17y ago
- vaksel 17y agomore things were invented in the last 100 years, than during the entire world history combined note: I'm note sure if that's right or not, but it sounds like it might be
- Retric 17y agoI wonder how advances in CPU design compare to slight variations in arrow design. In 10,000 years they might consider computer evolution to basically be mechanical, vacuum tubes, transistors, optical, then quantum. Even if we see huge advantage to smaller and faster transistors it's still mostly learning how to make a better version of the same thing.
- tibix 17y agoI don't doubt that you can say "in the last 40 years" and you will still be right...
- BearOfNH 17y agoThere's a most excellent vintage 1980s lecture by Robert Anton Wilson titled "The Jumping Jesus Phenomenon". The gist of it can be found at the rawilson.com website as well as elsewhere. Wilson defines the "jesus" (small j) as the number of scientific facts known at the time of Jesus. Then he goes on to count how many years it takes to double that number. By his count, humanity accumulated 2j by about the year 1500. Then 4j by the year 1750, and so on. I forget the exact numbers but the point of the lecture was that our j-factor was increasing at an ever-increasing rate. By Wilson's estimation the curve would go vertical sometime around ... wait for it ... the year 2012. This reads a lot like Kurzweil's singularity hypothesis (among others) but I'm not sure who developed the concept first.
- AndrewDucker 17y agoIt's Terence Mckenna's Timewave theory (from the 1970s). Kurzweil was following along after a lot of other people. Vernor Vinge, for instance, came up with the term Technological Singularity in 1993, Teilhard de Chardin had the Omega Point in 1950, etc.
- donaldc 17y agoAnd change happened at a much slower pace for most of that 7,000 years. The 21st century is going to be very interesting.
- pbhj 17y agoI think we've hit local maximum in civilisation (perhaps we're just beyond the cusp). If the last century was defined by technological innovation, this one unfortunately I think will be defined by over-population crises. If we haven't solved the over-population issues by 2100 then I think the 22nd Century will be defined by ecological disaster. I'm not sure if I'm being too pessimistic or not!
- Quarrelsome 17y agoPessimism IMO. Generally brought about through age (older people are generally more negative about the future) or fears of immigration. I'd bet we can sustain WAY more people then we have at the moment.
- spoiledtechie 17y agoIts not the older people are generally negative about the future. Its that the more experienced people of ANY organization are generally negative. The world pop is an organization, but you can put this idea towards any organization that exists.
- Raphael 17y agoYou're saying this is the end of civilization?
- Eliezer 17y agoI plan for the entire history of human civilization to be less than 1% of my lifespan.
- Gormo 17y agoTo accomplish this, you must both (a) live to be at least 100(x+7000) years old, and (b) destroy human civilization within x years. I hope you're already working on your immortality elixir and your doomsday device.
- aristus 17y agoFunny you say that: E is working on something that is both.
- sailormoon 17y agoI believe he means that he intends his consciousness, in some form, to dramatically outlast corporeal human existence as we know it. This simply requires some mechanism to upload one's consciousness, and then all you have to do is wait.
- Eliezer 17y agoHey, I said human civilization, not humane or human-originating civilization.
- nostrademons 17y agoThat sounds like an awfully boring existence. What will you do for the remaining 99% of your uncivilized life?
- teeja 17y agoMore perspective change: according to the 1903 Ladies Home Journal, half of people then died before they were sixteen. One in a hundred lived to 65. Something else to mention to people who ignore science. http://craigiest.googlepages.com/ThisWonderfulWorldofOurs.pdf http://craigiest.googlepages.com/ThisWonderfulWorldofOurs.pd...
- rjs0 17y agosince this is all about the past evolution of the species, let me throw in a few proposals about the future evolution: http://geaugailluminati.wordpress.com/2009/07/01/the-human-race-is-almost-finished/ http://geaugailluminati.wordpress.com/2009/07/01/the-human-r... (and) The Moral Imperative of Our Future Evolution: http://www.prometheism.net/moral.html http://www.prometheism.net/moral.html