
Your body wasn’t built to last: a lesson from human mortality rates - quizbiz
http://gravityandlevity.wordpress.com/2009/07/08/your-body-wasnt-built-to-last-a-lesson-from-human-mortality-rates/
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amohr
The MIT Technology Review held a contest of sorts, offering $20,000 to anyone
who could prove that Aubrey de Grey's "Strategies for Engineered Negligible
Senescence" was "so wrong that it was unworthy of learned debate." They
received 5 entries, 2 of which were discarded, and the other three can be
found on their website along with de Grey's rebuttal and the subsequent
responses.

<http://www.technologyreview.com/sens/index.aspx>

In his TED talk, de Grey claimed the the first person to live to 1000 may
already be alive today.

Not saying I necessarily agree with him, but according to the judges at MIT -
TR, it's at least not outside the realm of reasonable debate.

~~~
rsheridan6
Yes, but showing that de Gray's ideas are not "so wrong that it was unworthy
of learned debate" sets a pretty low bar. I would disagree with that statement
even though I fully expect to be in a grave along with de Gray in several
decades.

~~~
amohr
I just thought de Gray's work was relevant because it addresses the
counterpoint to the author's central thesis. The underlying assumption here is
that the body has a built-in expiration date that we cannot avoid, but I
didn't think it effectively answered the question of when that expiration date
actually is.

My problem with the article, I guess, is the lack of a perspective over time.
De Gray also posited that the first person to live to 1000 is probably already
alive, I'm not saying all of this really makes sense, but it is scientifically
feasible and should at least be noted in an article that asserts the opposite.

According to Wolfram Alpha, the probability of living past 100 (in the United
States) increased from .17% to 1.4% between 1933 and 2000 and then to 2.4% in
2008. Living past 70 jumped from 45% to 75% to 76% in the same time period.
This has a lot of interesting ramifications that I'm not really in a position
to investigate, but they are clearly worth addressing.

edit: sources:
[http://www16.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=life+expectancy+U.S.+...](http://www16.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=life+expectancy+U.S.+1900)

[http://www16.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=life+expectancy+U.S.+...](http://www16.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=life+expectancy+U.S.+2000)

[http://www16.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=life+expectancy+U.S.+...](http://www16.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=life+expectancy+U.S.+2008)

~~~
euccastro
The article says there is an expiration date in the body. Nowhere it says that
it can't possibly be 'avoided', just that current and foreseeable medicine is
not quite there yet.

~~~
biohacker42
_current and foreseeable medicine is not quite there yet_

That's the key point. We all know eventually the singularity will arrive. And
we know we have PLENTY of work to do today to make things a little bit better
but still be far short of the singularity.

So it's wonderful to be a cheerleader for progress, but it can also be kind of
annoying on occasion.

------
quizbiz

       "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."
    

It pained me to read that. But because we don't know why the equation fits, we
don't know that there is nothing that can be done to make it shift. Maybe one
day we will talk about life span like a shifting demand/supply curve.

~~~
lionheart
That statement would make sense with the addition of "at our current level of
technology."

~~~
Locke1689
_(Ignoring, of course, the upward shift in the lifetime distribution that will
result from future medical advances)_

...

------
holygoat
"You were made as well as we could make you". "But not to last."

~~~
sharpn
The light that burns...

------
gcheong
Too bad Moore's law doesn't apply to medical science, but in any case I'm
hoping we'll see some major advances to put in the "cops" arsenal.

------
thras
Senescence is one of the prices of having evolved rather than having been
specially created.

It's surprising that we don't work harder on fixing this. 10x what we're
spending on AIDS might be a good place for a start. Imagine what humanity
could accomplish if the standard life-span was just 200 instead of 70. Imagine
what you personally could accomplish.

~~~
m_eiman
Would humanity really be better off by having individuals living longer? I can
see the personal benefits of course, but younger individuals are less set in
their ways and thus more likely to come up with the outside the box kind of
solutions to problems that we need to solve.

Plus, they're more likely to accept the world as it is now instead of moaning
about how much better everything was fifty years ago... (I think there's some
kind of statistic or history tracking that has shown that in the mind of
society, everything has always been better fifty years ago. I recall reading
something about how the young are only interested in partying and fighting -
written by a monk two hundred years or so ago).

~~~
jerf
This entire argument is predicated on the false assumption that you know what
being young and healthy for 200 years will be like. We don't. We don't know if
old people are "stuck in their ways" because it is an intrinsic part of being
old, or if it is because their brain is becoming _physically_ less flexible,
and subsequently they rationalize the ways they first learned.

It's also predicated on the assumption that it's actually bad for long-lived
people to get a little stuck in their ways. This may not be true either;
society is unstable, in the physics sense of the term, what with the constant
influx of new naive people. Adding some more "momentum" into the system may be
safer and better. Again, I'm not saying this is true or false, only that the
casual assumption of the truth is unjustified.

Having 120-year-old youth will be a genuinely new phenomenon, and nobody knows
what that means. Preventing such technologies from being used or developed (or
even arguing against it) based on such terrible arguments would be a terrible
thing to do.

~~~
philwelch
_It's also predicated on the assumption that it's actually bad for long-lived
people to get a little stuck in their ways. This may not be true either;
society is unstable, in the physics sense of the term, what with the constant
influx of new naive people. Adding some more "momentum" into the system may be
safer and better. Again, I'm not saying this is true or false, only that the
casual assumption of the truth is unjustified._

With a 200 year lifespan, we would have people trying to enforce cultural
norms from 180 years ago. In 1829, women couldn't vote, slavery was common,
imperialism was considered good foreign policy, it was common sense that women
and blacks were incapable of complex tasks or higher level reasoning, and
forcible relocation of American Indians was being practiced. Meanwhile, the
steam engine was considered pretty hot shit.

To ask someone who grew up in that era to accept the son of an African
immigrant as president, gay marriage, streaming pornography, the fall of the
European empires, globalization, and software startups as facts of life is
absurd. Likewise, if we lived long enough to build the world of 2189, it would
have the same petty biases and taboos that we have today.

It's important sometimes for generations to forget bygone eras and move on.

~~~
nopassrecover
Why is it absurd. Many of our grandparents have seen all of these things
change in their lives and they have accepted them.

~~~
philwelch
Because they are increasingly outnumbered by younger people. The social norm
changes, probably faster than they're comfortable with, but with or without
them as they die out. Black people go from slaves to sharecroppers in a
generation, but it takes over a century for any of them to become
millionaires, CEO's, and presidents. Women have progressed even slower.

My grandparents are all dead, but I suspect that few of them would be pleased
with the prospect of a black president. Even my parents would be less than
pleased to learn that I was bisexual.

Your grandparents may be more open minded than mine, and that is a credit to
them. But for every one of them there's ten old people who don't keep up as
well.

