
Your body wasn’t built to last: a lesson from human mortality rates - sirteno
http://gravityandlevity.wordpress.com/2009/07/08/your-body-wasnt-built-to-last-a-lesson-from-human-mortality-rates/
======
hooande
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/)

~~~
WWWWH
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.

~~~
robinhoode
> 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.

~~~
WWWWH
> Why should we measure medical technology at the rate of new drugs developed?

Well, I'd stand behind the assertion that it is a reasonable approximation to
our ability to understand and modify a biological system. But, I'll happily
concede that this is not the only game in town. Your point about tissue
engineering is well made, this is highly exciting and should provide some real
benefits. But there is a awful lot of hard biology to master here; so while I
really hope that we see some rapid initial progress, long term exponential
growth here is going to be just as difficult as it is elsewhere in biology.

~~~
robinhoode
> But there is a awful lot of hard biology to master here

I honestly think most of it can be skipped. The age-old adgage that "a ounce
of prevention is worth a pound of cure" is totally obsolete with respect to
longevity science. Once you've gone past your DNA's "expiration date", it's
easier to repair damage than prevent it.

------
neals
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?

~~~
Hermel
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.

~~~
Ensorceled
> 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
Related, why should one care more about their own children/grandchildren/etc.
than themselves? Perpetuation of the species? Why?

~~~
will_work4tears
Love? I want to live too, very much so. If it came to risking my life to
guarantee the safety of my son, I'd do it in a heartbeat. I'd give my life to
save his if it came to it. I'd probably do the same for my Mom or Dad too so I
don't see it as a "perpetuation of the species" thing at all.

~~~
BlackDeath3
Interesting.

It just all sounds so silly to me. I imagine everybody all sacrificing
themselves for each other. Sounds pointless.

~~~
will_work4tears
Well, to be honest, I'm not going to run around sacrificing myself for just
anybody. And I'd definitely not just going to jump into such a thing without
thinking there aren't any other options. And it'd only be a close loved one. A
distant friend would be a tough call. A stranger? Probably not.

It seems almost borderline Sociopath to not love at least somebody that you'd
be even willing to consider sacrificing yourself for. Have you ever been
tested? (not trying to be insulting, genuinely curious)

~~~
BlackDeath3
Yeah, I didn't really mean willy-nilly sacrifice on-a-dime.

No, I've never been tested for "sociopathy" (I cannot imagine that this is
something that a lot of people do), and I'm not sure that I wouldn't sacrifice
myself for somebody else, but regardless of my personal feelings on the
matter, regardless of whether or not it is sociopathic, isn't it still a
little silly?

~~~
will_work4tears
No, not really. If a car is barreling toward my son, and I can only push him
out of the way by jumping in front of the car and getting hit myself (but
pushing him free of it), I'd do it, and wouldn't consider such a sacrifice
silly at all if I witnessed another doing it.

Now think about the reverse: Several people see you watch somebody you know
and personally love get hit by a car, and notice you could have saved them and
one of them asks you about it. Would you feel bad at all saying "Yeah, I could
have jumped out and saved him, but I would have died and that would be silly?"

~~~
BlackDeath3
I could see myself being _pressured_ into feeling bad about not sacrificing
myself (societal pressures/norms and all of that), but it really doesn't make
sense to me to feel bad, and I sort of hope that I wouldn't. After all, why
should I effectively doom myself to save them? Why should I feel bad? Why
should I trade my life for theirs?

The answer to these questions seems obvious to many people, but I don't get
it. Why is this virtuous? Why is this sensible? Why is this rational?

------
JumpCrisscross
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/MisadventureAsACauseOfDeat...](http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/MisadventureAsACauseOfDeath.html)

~~~
electromagnetic
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
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/S0092867412...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867412007775))

~~~
icegreentea
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
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.

------
300bps
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)

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

~~~
neals
So if we can also control the weather, would that be Utopia?

~~~
ph0rque
You still have to then solve the problem of Sundays.

------
mathattack
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
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."

------
avn2109
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_re...](http://reliabilityanalyticstoolkit.appspot.com/mechanical_reliability_data)
[1]
[http://reliawiki.com/index.php/Arrhenius_Relationship](http://reliawiki.com/index.php/Arrhenius_Relationship)

------
erroneousfunk
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...)

------
abhiv
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.

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

------
michalu
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.

------
Futurebot
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
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
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.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
>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.

No, I would say that leaving money or life-insurance to my family when I die
is worth more.

Besides, if someone developed a _better_ , more _evidenced_ "immortality
treatment", I would want to have the money for _that_. Pascal's Wager is
simply not acceptable for real life just because you wave your arms and go
"Futuristic super-science!" instead of "Magic!"

>Yudkowsky has had the inspirational, secular techno-futurist new-age-ish
sounding hope thing going for ages, as you probably know.

People would mistake it far less for cultishness if he didn't follow the
optimistic futurist tone with prophecies of doom and requests for money in
order to supposedly fund saving people from previously mentioned prophecized
doom.

Which is a fucking pity, because there's so much there worth liking, but they
kinda ruin it with the cult behaviors.

------
VikingCoder
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.

~~~
VLM
"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
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
"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.

------
dave1629
Peter Thiel's version of this:
[http://blakemasters.com/post/24253160557/peter-thiels-
cs183-...](http://blakemasters.com/post/24253160557/peter-thiels-
cs183-startup-class-16-decoding)

------
dorfsmay
> 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.

------
negamax
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
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).

------
dsego
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-...](http://aeon.co/magazine/being-human/virtual-afterlives-will-
transform-humanity)

"The question is not whether we can upload our brains onto a computer, but
what will become of us when we do"

~~~
eli_gottlieb
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.

------
jostmey
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))

------
exarch
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.

------
a3n
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
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.

------
sirsar
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?

------
scotty79
Do you know any other scenario that results in distibution of this kind?

------
onedev
Honestly, I don't want to live forever.

100 years I think is what would be ideal.

