Comments on: Life Expectancy 200 and Beyond

By: The Truth

The Truth — Wed, 29 Oct 2014 17:09:00 +0000

What people don’t realize is that unnatural long life would destroy life on Earth as we know it. Even if you COULD live to be, say, 800 years old, you’d never make it a quarter that far. There’s a little problem with population and available space. People don’t die, but there’s a constant increase in births each year. With space completely restricted is leads to many, many things. Wars to destroy other cultures and countries for living space. The destruction of all available “wild land” which leads to environmental failure, not enough farm land to produce food, military states that sterilize people and have harsh mandates to follow. That’s no future I want to be part of. And to suggest we’ll move to another planet, there is NO planet in our solar m to support human life of traveling to a distant system such as Sirius is so far beyond our technological capabilities it’s foolish to think we’d advance that far in 10,000 years. I don’t doubt advances in medicine and technology will eventually increase lifespans, but never to the point many of you are talking about. And we’re talking about “human life”. Not some Sci-Fi mutated cyborg which is ridiculous to suggest. The fact is, everyone in this discussion will die, and sooner than later. We’re no different than any other segment of the last billion years. We just like to think we are. That little issue of human arrogance.

By: https://me.yahoo.com/a/QJc1ars2xtyg8_HamezpRq6vslfI6cw-#06cd1

https://me.yahoo.com/a/QJc1ars2xtyg8_HamezpRq6vslfI6cw-#06cd1 — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 09:44:11 +0000

If 60-year-olds have twenty-something bodies and doctors can measure this happy state of affairs year after year, decade after decade, this will be a strong indicator of the existence of very long life, perhaps true emortality.

So, it will be unlikely to be necessary to wait hundreds of years before we know for sure.

Sally Morem

By: https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/id?id=AItOawk4bpEgP3ML8tptpfdd6EPvJrkpTLFfcj0

https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/id?id=AItOawk4bpEgP3ML8tptpfdd6EPvJrkpTLFfcj0 — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 16:16:43 +0000

The interesting thing is that only one significant increase will be necessary, because the accelerating pace of science and technology will use that increment to make further jumps, ad infinitum.
The uninteresting thing is that the Baby Boomers may be the last generation to die a natural death.
Then there’s the matter of that comet heading our way…

By: bowermaster

bowermaster — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 10:23:34 +0000

HSD –

No confused thinking, just using the term Life Expectancy to mean “how long can one reasonably expect to live” not “how long do the actuaries calculate one can reasonably expect to live?” As I wrote:

“Before the question comes up, yes I DO believe that it’s possible to establish a life expectancy of, say, 300 even if no one has yet reached that age. If you disagree, please choose time frames that you think are appropriate.”

Disruptive advances in medicine may render actuarial estimates useless. If people are routinely living for hundreds of years they don’t need to wait for actuaries to tell them that. And even before that, if aging is eliminated or reversed, life expectancy comes down to how well we avoid diseases and accidents. Cure most of those diseases, and you’re left with accidents and foul play.

BTW, that’s where the 800 came from. It is estimated (can’t find the source right now) that average human lifespan would be roughly 800 years if aging and disease were eliminated as cause of death — that’s how long it would take for us all to be murdered or hit by busses. If it makes you feel any better, that 800 year figure was a projection from actuarial data!

By: holyspiritdenier

holyspiritdenier — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 08:11:51 +0000

These futuristic “life expectancy” predictions display confused thinking: We don’t know if a 200 life expectancy can exist until people living several centuries from now can observe a substantial sample of individuals amongst them who have lived to at least 200 years of age. The first such individual might just represent an outlier, like Jeanne Calment with her 122 year lifespan. Once a crowd of people celebrates 200th birthdays, then future actuaries will have to come up with new actuarial tables based on the changed data about human life expectancy.

Therefore people who say we’ll have even more ambitious “500 year” life expectancies by, say, 2035, speak nonsense, unless several people out there, in our mysterious, far-future year 2010, have already lived at least 475 years, like characters from “Highlander.”

By: https://me.yahoo.com/a/QJc1ars2xtyg8_HamezpRq6vslfI6cw-#06cd1

https://me.yahoo.com/a/QJc1ars2xtyg8_HamezpRq6vslfI6cw-#06cd1 — Sun, 28 Nov 2010 22:36:19 +0000

Hi, I’m Sally Morem

I responded to the first 3 questions with 2050 because I believe nanotechnology will steepen the acceleration of cell repair machines well before 2050, but after 2020. These will enable us to achieve effective “emortality” (Brian Stableford’s term) by 2050 by fixing everything that ails us, and by keeping us thereafter in tip-top shape.

How old would I like to live to be? I said other, because it depends on how a raft of things turn out. If we can reverse aging so I can be a superbly fit twenty-something, I would love to live a very long time that way, perhaps several thousand years. My interest in living a long time with an old body is virtually nil.

Also, if we do figure out how to upload our personality, memory, interests, skills, talents, and a fully robust sense of self, and gain the kind of mental powers Kurzweil was describing in the noosphere, living billions of years constantly learning and growing seems quite feasible and I would expect, enjoyable.