From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Wed Apr 24 2002 - 09:47:06 MDT
"Robert J. Bradbury" wrote:
>
> > I wrote:
> > > It probably matters to the extent of ~150,000 people per day
> > > that die from aging associated causes. On an annual basis,
> > > that is more people than were killed in WWII (over several years).
>
> On Wed, 24 Apr 2002, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky responded:
> > Point of order: I don't know what percentage of the planetary death rate is
> > due to aging, but I sincerely doubt it's 100%. Antiaging research is not
> > the same as immortality research.
>
> Point taken. The number I'm most familiar with are 13-18
> million deaths a year from hunger and malnutrition [1]. I also
> recently saw a number of ~5 million per year from global pandemics,
> primarily HIV and malaria. Taken together those numbers would be
> somewhere in the range of 33-42% of annual deaths.
>
> However my calculation of annual world deaths was based on U.S.
> death rates and we don't for the most part die from hunger or
> pandemics (HIV dropped out of the top 10 causes of death several
> years ago). So world death rates may be higher. Obviously
> dying of the non-aging related causes removes you from the pool
> of those who die from aging.
My calculation of annual world deaths, which independently arrived at
roughly the same numbers, was based on UN statistics - so the death count
from aging is probably substantially less than 150,000/day.
> I don't believe there is such a thing as "immortality research" yet.
> Until several things are proven, such as protons not decaying,
> "immortality" remains a very dubious concept.
True. As Greg Egan points out, immortality is more than living an extremely
long time before you die; immortality means not dying, ever. At this time
we don't know whether we're reaching for eternity or just very long
subjective spans. Nonetheless, "lifespan extension" doesn't quite convey
the overtones of "human lifespan > stellar lifespan".
> As most know, I'm a proponent of radical lifespan extension
> research. I tend to lump all causes of death together
> (which Eliezer was objecting to) because when we have the
> technologies to achieve radical lifespan extension, we
> should also have the technologies to eliminate pandemics
> as well as hunger and malnutrition.
I don't object to lumping all causes of death together; I was just objecting
to lumping them all together under "aging".
-- -- -- -- --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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