From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@www.aeiveos.com)
Date: Sat Dec 18 1999 - 10:17:10 MST
On Fri, 17 Dec 1999, Dan Fabulich wrote:
> Actually, the author says that 40 year olds will live to 135 "if the most
> optimistic researchers are right." (That means they'll make it to 2175,
> according to those researchers.) He says of 30 year olds that "some of
> you may even live to see 2100."
>
[snip humorous incredulity]
There are two separate problems, accidents and unknown aging processes.
Accidents are now about 4% of deaths. Using the Y2K accident rate,
if that is all people are dying from, the average lifespan is 2000 years.
It is slowly decreasing but the halving time (to go from 40 to 20 to 10
to 5 to 2 to 1/100K) is quite long. But to get this "average" 2000
years, we have to eliminate all other causes of death.
The second problem is the unknown aging processes. Once we cure all
of the current causes of death, we will be up against a set of
"conditions" that we haven't seen now because people die before they
develop. How quickly we can deal with them will depend on how
frequent they are, how much funding there is to work on them, etc.
Now perhaps Nanomedicine can deal with these quite quickly and of course,
there is always cryonics (some people might have to go under multiple
times!), but we may enter a period in the mid-late 21st century where
we are putting lots of people on ice (virtually dead) while the living
wrestle with solutions.
There is a 3rd problem of the delays due to the current regulatory system.
A system designed not to kill people even if you "lose" the living is
very different from a system designed to save as many as possible,
even if you lose a few (to be frozen) until their problems can be
repaired. My predictions are that this problem will cost us millions
of lives.
Robert Freitas and I have knocked around the idea that in the coming
era of longevity, since "life" will be abundant, rather than "brutal
and brief", forms of dangerous thrill seeking behaviors will increase.
That may mean we never get the accident rate low enough to get 2000
year lifespans.
Robert
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