Jump to content

How long will you live?


cwericb

Recommended Posts

This is pretty detailed.

 

If a person knew just how long you were going to live, saving for retirement would be easy. Of course if you knew when you were going to die you would probably worry yourself into an early grave as you got closer to the date -  invalidating the whole process.

 

http://gosset.wharton.upenn.edu/mortality/perl/CalcForm.html?utm_medium=Newsletter&utm_source=Personal%20Finance%20Reader&utm_type=text&utm_content=PersonalFinanceReader&utm_campaign=123555881

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Life Expectancy: 84.23 years

Lower Quartile: 76.62 years (75% chance you will live longer than this)

Median Lifetime: 86.34 years (50% chance you will live longer than this)

Upper Quartile: 94.06 years (25% chance you will live longer than this)

 

59 to go. I guess that is high for men.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I'll go Kurzweil on this: if you don't die before 2050 or so, it is likely that you will live forever.

 

In fact, it is likely that humanity is facing a binary outcome: either there will be a civilization-level collapse or there will be a positive singularity type of event after which the life as we know it will change into something very different. With practical immortality as a side effect. This is likely to happen in 2040's to 2070's at latest.

 

So if you're young, keep in mind that the world will be very different sometime this century.

 

Personally, I might or might not make it to this. Of course, Kurzweil is older than me and he hopes to make it, but I'm not as optimistic as he is.  8)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I'll go Kurzweil on this: if you don't die before 2050 or so, it is likely that you will live forever.

 

In fact, it is likely that humanity is facing a binary outcome: either there will be a civilization-level collapse or there will be a positive singularity type of event after which the life as we know it will change into something very different. With practical immortality as a side effect. This is likely to happen in 2040's to 2070's at latest.

 

So if you're young, keep in mind that the world will be very different sometime this century.

 

Personally, I might or might not make it to this. Of course, Kurzweil is older than me and he hopes to make it, but I'm not as optimistic as he is.  8)

 

Of course you only need to live until they can expand life expectancy out 3 or 4 decades to make it until they cure aging completely.  I think large gains in life expectancy will come before 2050, in which case you will likely live to 2050-2070.  Anyone under 60 today has a good chance I think of living for hundred years.  Note I didn't say "forever". I forgot where I read it, but I read a good analysis of what life expectancy without aging would be and just counting the probability the average person has of dying an accidental death on any given year, the average life expectancy would be about 700 years.  I'm assuming with things like space tourism and everyone having more time on our hands because of technology to travel or do stupid things the rate of accidental death will probably remain about where it is now.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I'm assuming with things like space tourism and everyone having more time on our hands because of technology to travel or do stupid things the rate of accidental death will probably remain about where it is now.

 

One possible way of immortality is having your brain/mind scanned and deposited into new organic or inorganic receptacles. If copy could be kept, the accidental death would not be permanent. But, yes, there will be some deaths even in best case scenario, so you are right to not say "forever". :)

 

Yes, there are a lot of questions/issues with this, but that's why it's called "singularity" - it's very hard to predict all the repercussions including social and economic ones. And, yes, it could lead to catastrophic crises, which is why I think that the outcome is rather binary.

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I wonder what would happen to the brain if you could make your body live about 200 years. It would probably result in a lot of jaded 40 year old looking 150 year olds.

 

It seems a 130 year old with a healthy body and still a lot of energy would have a huge edge against a 30-40 year old. So much more wisdom.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Here's a thought...

 

Longer life span will effect retirement age, retirement savings, pensions and government programs like social or old age security which are going to need to be addressed quickly.

 

Not that many years ago, sixty was considered “old”. Anyone living beyond one hundred was a real rarity. Now most industrialized countries see a rate above 20 per 100,000 living beyond age one hundred. In Japan that number is fifty-six!  If my math is correct, with a Japanese population of 127.3 million, that means there is over 71,000 people in Japan alone who are over one hundred.

 

People in this age bracket could have well been retired for at least 40 years. How many present pension plans/savings/social programs are geared to support this?

 

How many here are saving for a retirement that may last up to or beyond 40 years?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

How many here are saving for a retirement that may last up to or beyond 40 years?

 

It depends how life is extended. If you just extend the frail period at the end of someone's life, then that's a problem.

 

If you actually work on curing the diseases of aging so that you don't get to that frail state in the first place, then retirement isn't a problem anymore; the current system is set up so that people who are in bad shape can stop working. But if you are 100 but as healthy as a 30-year-old currently is, there's no reason why you couldn't retired for a few years (a few decades) and then go back to work, or just never fully retire if you like what you do.

 

When something big enough changes, you have to look at all assumptions, not just try to keep the old system going in a totally different context.

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Bill Gates on immortality research:

 

http://www.standardmedia.co.ke/business/article/2000149742/bill-gates-it-is-selfish-for-rich-people-to-try-to-live-forever

 

I doubt this will stop people from researching it though.

 

I hope not. Helping the poorest people might be top of the list, but helping everybody else who suffers and die from the diseases of aging (iirc around 200-300k die every day, and multiples of that are affected, ie. friends and family) still ranks very high on the list. If we have to cut somewhere to support that effort, obviously we shouldn't cut in what the Gates Foundation does, but there's millions of other useless things that we spend human capital on that are way less important for the betterment of the human condition (if all the bright people who go into finance went into biogerontology instead, maybe we'd be getting somewhere).

 

Besides, the Gates Foundation is helping fund some tools that will be helpful in the fight against aging (some of the computational biology efforts from Washington University come to mind). It might not be direct help, but it helps nonetheless.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

It depends how life is extended. If you just extend the frail period at the end of someone's life, then that's a problem.

 

If you actually work on curing the diseases of aging so that you don't get to that frail state in the first place, then retirement isn't a problem anymore; the current system is set up so that people who are in bad shape can stop working. But if you are 100 but as healthy as a 30-year-old currently is, there's no reason why you couldn't retired for a few years (a few decades) and then go back to work, or just never fully retire if you like what you do.

 

When something big enough changes, you have to look at all assumptions, not just try to keep the old system going in a totally different context.

 

Even if you don't like what you do, learn how to do something else.  What is 4 or 8 years of school and/or 15-20 years of on the job experience when you have hundreds of years left to live.  A person could very well have 6 or 10 or 20+ different careers over a lifetime where they reached expert/senior/master level in each field.  Technical obsolescence will likely force this on you eventually even if you would like to do your job for 400+ years.  This will certainly have an effect on marriage as well.  "'Till death do us part" will be a long long time.  The divorce rate is already above 50%, how many marriages would last 300 or 600 years, possibly raising multiple groups of children separated by decades or centuries?  It will be interesting for sure.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

space travel could become interesting with lifespans that. They could build travelling mini planets that hop from solar system to solar system. If you think about it, technology could still so drastically change life, that looking back on today 500 years from now will look worse then looking back on the middle ages now.

 

Also staying in one place, with one person, would seem really boring to do for 2-300 years. Also thinking back on something that happened 300 years ago? We will probably find the limit of the human brain to remember things.

 

Or what about unlocking all the secrets of the brain? What if we could just plug into a shot of heroin every day without building up tolerance or damaging the brain? It would be totally irrational to not do that, if possible.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

My biggest fear about dying is not being able to see how the future turns out. I absolutely hope to live to 200+ years.

 

I do worry how artifical intelligence will play out. Musk, Hawking and Gates have expressed concerns.

 

Same. And on AI, that's why Friendly-AGI research is so important:

 

Machine Intelligence Research Institute

 

We need to figure out if we can prove mathematically if it's possible to design a recursively improving AI that would conserve goals and values in a safe way, and how to achieve that.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Or what about unlocking all the secrets of the brain? What if we could just plug into a shot of heroin every day without building up tolerance or damaging the brain? It would be totally irrational to not do that, if possible.

 

So you can get the same neurons to fire as if it was your first ever shot of heroin and do it whenever you want?  You could also simulate the feeling of winning huge at gambling, simulate sex, or any other feeling you wish to have.  There may be a lot of unproductive people around, but very little depression.  If you start having a bad though, just turn it off and plug in a happy one.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I do worry how artifical intelligence will play out. Musk, Hawking and Gates have expressed concerns.

 

I for one would welcome our new AI overlords.  8)

 

Seriously, if it came to humans vs. self-conscious AI, I'm not sure which side I would take. Humans have a lot of unadmirable qualities.  8) The best case - and perhaps likely - IMHO is the merging of humans and machines. But, yeah, there are lot of things to work out. :)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I hate to be pessimistic but you guys that think you may live to see 150 or 200 are really, really optimistic.

 

Aside from that I wonder what the odds are of being hit by an asteroid, a tsunami, a massive earthquake, a new disease, a major war or the deadly repercussions of global warming? And if we are talking about the next 100 years what about the after effects of the collapse of our financial system.

 

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I hate to be pessimistic but you guys that think you may live to see 150 or 200 are really, really optimistic.

 

Aside from that I wonder what the odds are of being hit by an asteroid, a tsunami, a massive earthquake, a new disease, a major war or the deadly repercussions of global warming? And if we are talking about the next 100 years what about the after effects of the collapse of our financial system.

 

I told you that I see binary outcome. :) And I think it's about 50-50% which way things go. So, no, I am not optimistic.

I just believe that we won't muddle through. Either we get the whole cheese, or we crash and burn.

 

Regarding your examples:

asteroid - predictable, possible to handle

tsunami - predictable soon, affects tiny parts of population (even if California is hit)

a massive earthquake - see tsunami

a new disease - possible, but unlikely to destroy civilization. Horror movies are mostly fiction. (Yes, grey goo is a risk)

a major war - yes, possible. Civ destruction is possible.

the deadly repercussions of global warming - possible to handle

after effects of the collapse of our financial system - not sure what you exactly mean, but I'll go with "collapse of financial system due to massive automation, massive human unemployment due to robots". Yes, possible. Likely to lead to war. See war above.

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I hate to be pessimistic but you guys that think you may live to see 150 or 200 are really, really optimistic.

 

How optimistic people are depends on how old they are right now. I'm 32, and I think that the chances that medical science advances a lot over the next 50 years is very high.

 

What people miss is that to benefit, we don't have to go from zero to a perfect therapy for the diseases of aging. We just have to do enough to allow you to live long enough for these therapies to be improved enough in the meantime so that by the time you would need them, there are developped. So you add 15 years to someone, and in those 15 years you improve treatment enough to add a further 15 years, and during those 15 years you figure out how to fix the remaining problems that you couldn't fix well enough in the earlier therapy, etc.  It's the concept of longevity escape velocity. Of course that's most dangerous to people who are just on the edge of what can be done, but those who have a buffer of a few decades ahead of the bleeding edge should be safe.

 

Once you add more than 1 year of extra longevity per year, on average  your chances of death stop becoming correlated with your age. You can still be hit by a truck or die from any of the things that can kill a healthy 20-year old, of course. But if you look at mortality rate for young people in the western world, you can pretty easily extrapolate how long the average person could live (and then you can assume that in a world of longer lifespans, we'd be more careful about things like driving, so it'd be even longer).

 

All the cells in our bodies are replaced multiple times over the first 4-5 decades of our lives. It's not like an engine that wears out and stops functioning well; the reason why everything starts going wrong after 50-60 years is that it's an evolutionary blind spot. For most of human evolutionary time, relatively few people lived that long and reproduced after that age, so genes for repair mechanisms aren't selected for. We are not our cells that are wearing out; we are a pattern that is maintained, and if we can figure out how to periodically repair the damage that accumulates in long-lived molecules, we should be able to keep our bodies in good shape. Same concept as how you can maintain a vintage car indefinitely if you just do enough maintenance and repairs on it. After 50 years, maybe you've changed almost all the parts, but as long as you kept the original pattern of the car intact, it's still the same car.

 

Aside from that I wonder what the odds are of being hit by an asteroid, a tsunami, a massive earthquake, a new disease, a major war or the deadly repercussions of global warming? And if we are talking about the next 100 years what about the after effects of the collapse of our financial system.

 

It's not because you solve the diseases of aging that you automatically solve everything else, but those other problems are worth working on too, and maybe more people would care if they had longer lifespans.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Very nice post Liberty.  :)

 

If interested in learning more, you can check this out:

 

https://www.fightaging.org/introduction/

 

And then keep going through the links on the right of that page.

 

This is old but a good intro to some of the concepts:

 

 

This one goes into a bit more details:

 

 

Then if you want more details there's this book:

 

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0312367066

 

And if you want even more detail and the very latest, there's this peer-reviewed scientific journal:

 

http://www.liebertpub.com/overview/rejuvenation-research/127/

 

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rejuvenation_Research

 

And if you want to help fund the effort to defeat the diseases of aging with the engineering approach described above (not trying to modify or learn everything about metabolism, that's too hard, just periodically repair damage before it accumulates enough to cause pathologies), you can donate here:

 

http://www.sens.org/donate

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
×
×
  • Create New...