Damien provide an interesting link to Chris Lawson's
Essay on aging and longevity. Attached is the letter
that I sent to Chris regarding this essay (with which
I mostly agree).
Robert
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Chris,
I have read your essay:
The Tithonus Option is Not an Option @
http://www.ozemail.com.au/~claw/tithonus0.htm
A great deal of research in this area has been done by
James Fries, from Stanford. The abstracts for some of
his papers related to this topic can be found @
http://www.aeiveos.com/Aging/Authors/fries-jf/
I would generally agree with his analysis that we will
see a compression of morbidity as we approach the limits
of the body as engineered. The part that is always left
out of the discussion however is the "re-engineering"
of the human body. To the degree that we accomplish
that through replacement organs, hormonal promotion
of stem cells (particularly neuronal) and eventually
develop strategies to entirely replace cells and/or genomes
(explored to some degree in the recently published Nanomedicine
by Robert Freitas), we will bypass the limits imposed by Nature's
incomplete program and become your "Gurskian immortals".
At the December American Society for Anti-Aging medicine
conference in Las Vegas, during my discussion of trends
in biotechnology from genomes to biobots to nanobots,
I included a slide similar to those in your paper. It
pointed out that given the current U.S. accident rate,
the average Gurskian life expectancy would be about 2000
years. These large numbers are are clearly not relevant
with regard to personal or societal planning. The fundamental
question as has been discussed periodically among the Extropians
and Transhumanists is at what point technology advances will
be adding a year of life expectancy every year.
I would optimistically/pessimistically put the dates for
that transition between 20 and 40 years from now. I would
disagree somewhat with your conclusions that we do not face a
window for the "Tithonus Option" (long lived with minimal quality).
Much depends on the degree to which drugs currently in the
research pipeline manage to delay the onset and progression
of Alzheimer's and related illnesses. If those drugs work
and become available to large numbers of individuals so we
maintain a relative rates of brain/body aging then the
situation appears good. Relatively older people (>60?),
will age fairly uniformly and then die. Relatively younger
people (<30?), will take advantage of the emerging technologies
and become Gurskians.
If, however, our body enhancing technologies progress faster
than our brain enhancing technologies, we may yet face
a time when we can indefinately preserve individuals whose
quality of life (brain awareness/activity) is minimal.
In this situation we could end up with a fraction of the
population being preserved with a very low quality of life.
Whether or not this occurs depends a lot on how societies
invest in and apply medical technologies and the laws they
develop regarding things like pre-death cryonic suspension
(which would allow people to take a calculated risk before
their brains had lost most of the structure required for
a life with quality).
I'll be posting a copy of this letter to the Extropian mailing
list for discussion there.
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