It's important to make a distinction medically between pushing as many as people as possible towards the high-age end of that curve on one hand and scaling the entire X axis on the other. The first one is what we're currently doing with modern medicine, and it boils down to debugging the most common causes of premature death.
The second one is completely separate from this and way harder to tackle because it involves messing with the parameters of life in a profound way. The main problem here is that the human body, like all higher life forms on this planet, is designed to be a disposable object from the ground up. We now know that human biochemistry is the result of an evolutionary process which when faced with a problem consistently comes up with the worst possible solution that is still workable. It's 3 billion years worth of crufty spaghetti code, literally.
Contrary to disease, aging isn't one factor going "wrong". It's a million little modules coming to the inevitable end of their cheaply designed life. Of course, we'll tackle this eventually - we have to if we ever want to move on from this weird intermediary half-state between nature and intellect - but it's going to be slow, slow progress.
Intuitively, I'd say we might have some very limited success in scaling up that X axis within the next 20 years, but it'll be a long time before we actually solve this issue. Which is sad, because I wanted to be around for much longer and now I most likely won't get to do that. Then again, the subject of life extension meets with so much hostility it's actually easy to argue that we as a culture are not ready for this yet.
We now know that human biochemistry is the result of an evolutionary process which when faced with a problem consistently comes up with the worst possible solution that is still workable. It's 3 billion years worth of crufty spaghetti code, literally.
As someone educated in theoretical biology and learning theory, I object to this kind of characterization of the evolutionary process. There is no evidence for a superior magical learning algorithm that would have done better-- see the no free lunch theorem. This characterization also lacks respect for the difficulty of many-dimensional optimization problems on non-fixed fitness landscapes, which is what evolution has to deal with. (Mathematically, the problem tackled by natural evolution is effectively infinite-dimensional. By comparison, the problems tackled by human engineers are toy problems.)
It would be more accurate to say that evolution, when faced with a problem, finds a working solution. There is no way to know how close or how far that working solution is from a theoretical optimum, since the theoretical optimum is non-computable. (If it were straightforwardly computable, evolution would find a gradient to ascend and discover it rapidly.)
"Life doesn't work perfectly. It just works."
That being said, it is likely that our mortality represents a hard compromise between the survival value of longevity, adaptations to prevent cancer (many of which have aging side effects, like telomeres), and the species-scale (or selfish-gene-scale) survival value of getting oldsters out of the way to make room for the next generation.
The fact that humans can live substantially longer than is merely necessary to reproduce is due to the fact that we're a K-selected species rather than an R-selected species. (Cicadas, for example, are an R-selected species. Dolphins, Elephants, and Humans are K-selected.)
I'd say there's little value in trying to fix what's broken to the core. Research should focus on ways to extract one's consciousness from the body and place it in an artificially designed shell (a Ghost in the Shell, one might say).
Here is one problem with life extension that I haven't seen mentioned - can we just assume that people who grew up in vastly different time periods will just be be able to coexist comfortably?
To give an obvious contemporary example - gay marriage is a lot more controversial among older American voters than younger voters.
Now multiply that times a thousand - what if people who grew up in the time of Christ were still a significant part of the voting population? We can't just assume they'll all become hip techno-libertarian atheists/extropians just because they managed to live long enough. My guess is that they'd have a strong attachment to the values and way of life they grew up with - thus creating potentially bitter conflicts among the different cohorts which might make contemporary domestic politics seem downright friendly.
So while its cool to imagine living indefinitely - it seems to be in many ways healthier for society to have a continuous "purge", to constantly start fresh with new minds that have less baggage from the past.
Also on a personal note - if society in 2,000 years is radically transformed into something I find really bewildering and bizarre - do I really want to be around for that? Of course I would gamely try and adapt, but it might be better for everyone to just leave that future world for people who grew up with it and who find it natural.
Still, I am not any kind of Luddite - if life extension and mind uploading etc. is perfected I won't oppose it - I'll just have a lot of misgivings as will a lot of other people.
Actually, now that I think about it, if this whole scenario actually happens the best thing might be to maintain separate societies for people born in different time periods, which can communicate and interact but which operate relatively independently.(e.g. Being gay might be illegal in the 1000 CE society but being straight could be illegal in the 3000 CE area!) That might be the only way to keep some relative peace.
if we ever want to move on from this weird intermediary half-state between nature and intellect
I don't know if I follow correctly. Do you feel that solving the life extension puzzle is tantamount to intellectual nirvana? I'd say there is still plenty more to talk about (say [1] and [2], for example), and arguably deeper from a strictly intellectual viewpoint. In fact, I'd say that the fact that I happen to be mortal or not does not tackle any of classical intellectual conundrums.
Then again, the subject of life extension meets with so much hostility it's actually easy to argue that we as a culture are not ready for this yet.
I'm not sure about life extension, but effectively ending retirement would be met with hostility! But then again, we're getting both things (end of retirement/pensions and the resulting unrest) without indefinite life extension.
On the other hand, the subject of life extension meets with so much hostility it's actually easy to argue that we as a culture are not ready for this yet.
It's important to make a distinction medically between pushing as many as people as possible towards the high-age end of that curve on one hand and scaling the entire X axis on the other.
This is a great synopsis of the situation. There is little research going into actually extending the human lifespan. It's fascinating to hear people like Aubrey de Grey describe some of that research (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aubrey_de_Grey).
There are many suspected specific reasons for why this is (telomeres shortening, mtDNA mutations, protein cross-links, etc), but it boils down to this: accumulating damage accumulates faster as self-repair mechanisms are damaged by accumulating damage.
That's not strictly true, you are more likely to die at age 2 than 10. And even if you have a ~50% chance of dieing at 100 there are people who make it to 120 or so.
Diminishing returns. If you address some of the top causes of death, you can significantly increase lifespans. If you address some of the smaller causes, you can somewhat increase lifespans. However, in the limit you need a solution that doesn't just solve individual problems one by one. Biologically, "fixing" telomeres would probably address many of the nonspecific "died of old age" cases that we don't fully understand yet, though I doubt that alone would fix the general problem.
More importantly, we need people to care, and for some insane reason people don't. How do we manage to not treat this as pretty much the most important unsolved problem in humanity? (Mostly, I suspect, due to a combination of perceived futility and ingrained cultural problems.)
There's a great TED talk a few years ago on this. We have the technnology and know-how to significantly increase life expectancy and to do research to make it even better, but why don't we? Curing cancer and Alzheimer's is not the same thing. Why don't we explicitly research life extension? The speaker brought up several philosophical, political and economic reasons why society has chosen to ignore the problem. There are a lot of unforeseen implications to a world where everyone lives past 150.
I was just reading this morning an archaeological report about a 14th century cemetery dug up somewhere in the Balkan area. Around 40% of the skeletons belonged to children aged 0 to 7, while out of the rest no skeleton was found having belonged to a person older than 60. In the following 2 centuries the situation got slightly better, as the percentage of children 0-7 decreased to ~30%, and they were able to find a few skeletons that had lived beyond 60.
The point I'm trying to make is that we tend to very easily forget that we've come a really long way, but these things take time and they don't involve only science (the fact that the area I was studying was ravaged by the Ottoman expansion definitely had an impact on how long the people in the Balkans lived, as do today's not so healthy diets for most of the Western-populations). This is why I think that making bold and unsubstantiated predictions such as "in 20 years' time we will have reached indefinite lifespans" doesn't really get us anywhere, it only helps confusing us.
The article addresses this at the end: Kurzweil, et al are banking on dramatic changes in medicine on the level of the introduction of antibiotics. Right now we're possibly at the farthest end of the antibiotics-and-surgery technology suite. Much longer life expectancies or actuarial escape velocity will need to come from a disruptive medical technology.
The submitted article reminds me of a science fiction story I read as a child, "Hunting Lodge" by Randall Garrett, in the anthology Men and Machines edited by Robert Silverberg.
The premise of the story is that an effective life extension treatment has been found, and it is so expensive that only the politically powerful can have access to it. The protagonist (and first-person narrator) of the story is an assassin whose job is to murder the immortal oligarchs who rule a future United States--it is pretty apparent that the target of his assassination plot is J. Edgar Hoover in a far-off future. That has always caused me to pause and think about whether I would really like society to discover an effective longevity treatment. Are you sure that people who are as high on the social power and influence scale as HN readers will have access to the treatment?
Are you sure that people who are as high on the social power and influence scale as HN readers will have access to the [life extension] treatment?
Magic 8-ball says: "it is likely". Typically, new technologies are at first available only to the rich and powerful, but eventually they become cheaper and more widely available. Consider cell phones, televisions, and the internet. Today, the poorest person with an internet connection has access to information on a scale which far surpasses anything available to even the kings of old.
The most important thing to focus on is not life extension, but extending healthy vitality longer or compressed morbidity. Life extension is way too much of a tax on humanity if we can't solve the problem of frailty in the extreme old.
Apart from a few fringe people there doesn't seem to be a real great push towards increasing longevity. Average lifespan through better treating illness yes but not much to help those that have managed to dodge everything and make it to 115.
From the little I have read on the subject it does seem like this is one area where we have a long way to go to really make progress as we don't really understand all the variables yet.
Interesting quote: [S]upercentenarians owe their longevity more to freakish genes than perfect health; the 122-year-old Calment smoked cigarettes for 96 years [...]
I am unable to find a citation for this but I recall having read that Scientists had started to notice a pattern - The life span of a mammal is typically a function of the age of maturity. The function was a factor of 6.
In humans age of maturity is approximately 20.
So it is believed that the maximum lifespan is about 20*6 =120 years for humans.
A regression analysis was made of age at first reproduction in female mammals, as a function of body weight, using the data of Wootton. Data on maximal life span, also expressed as a function of body weight, were used to calculate “adult” life span, wherever possible, by subtracting the cognate value for age at first reproduction. Then a regression analysis of adult life span as a function of age at first reproduction was made. In both cases global regression lines (i.e., for whole data sets) were computed by standard least squares and by a robust method, as well as local regression lines for subgroups classified by taxonomic and ecological criteria. The slopes of the various regression lines were found to vary widely as a function of the method of classification. This result argues against the notion that the ratio of life history variables is a constant, or that one life history variable is likely to be a simple function of another. The results for bats are anomalous, in that age at first reproduction appears to be independent of body weight (over about two orders of magnitude). It is concluded that a full understanding of life history variables, such as maximal life span and age at maturity, is likely to depend on combined physiological, ecological, and evolutionary insights.
Keywords: maximal life span; age at maturity; regression analysis; mammals
3 And the LORD said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years.
AFAIK, all people in recent history (<3000 years) claiming to be aged over 120 years are either questionable or not verified.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Calment
If this is true, [i]Men[/i] still did not exceed 120 years by 128,99 days. Interpreting the bible is hard, determining as literal and figure of speech is the hard part.
In any book composed of random fantasy elements, written by hundreds of authors, it is pretty much inevitable that some bits will, merely by chance, be correct.
Genesis is the same book that puzzlingly fails to mention the big bang, for example.
Not that it matters but... If you take it in context the 120 years are referring to when the flood was scheduled to occur, not the upper bounds on human life. (See Calvin)
[+] [-] Udo|14 years ago|reply
The second one is completely separate from this and way harder to tackle because it involves messing with the parameters of life in a profound way. The main problem here is that the human body, like all higher life forms on this planet, is designed to be a disposable object from the ground up. We now know that human biochemistry is the result of an evolutionary process which when faced with a problem consistently comes up with the worst possible solution that is still workable. It's 3 billion years worth of crufty spaghetti code, literally.
Contrary to disease, aging isn't one factor going "wrong". It's a million little modules coming to the inevitable end of their cheaply designed life. Of course, we'll tackle this eventually - we have to if we ever want to move on from this weird intermediary half-state between nature and intellect - but it's going to be slow, slow progress.
Intuitively, I'd say we might have some very limited success in scaling up that X axis within the next 20 years, but it'll be a long time before we actually solve this issue. Which is sad, because I wanted to be around for much longer and now I most likely won't get to do that. Then again, the subject of life extension meets with so much hostility it's actually easy to argue that we as a culture are not ready for this yet.
[+] [-] api|14 years ago|reply
As someone educated in theoretical biology and learning theory, I object to this kind of characterization of the evolutionary process. There is no evidence for a superior magical learning algorithm that would have done better-- see the no free lunch theorem. This characterization also lacks respect for the difficulty of many-dimensional optimization problems on non-fixed fitness landscapes, which is what evolution has to deal with. (Mathematically, the problem tackled by natural evolution is effectively infinite-dimensional. By comparison, the problems tackled by human engineers are toy problems.)
It would be more accurate to say that evolution, when faced with a problem, finds a working solution. There is no way to know how close or how far that working solution is from a theoretical optimum, since the theoretical optimum is non-computable. (If it were straightforwardly computable, evolution would find a gradient to ascend and discover it rapidly.)
"Life doesn't work perfectly. It just works."
That being said, it is likely that our mortality represents a hard compromise between the survival value of longevity, adaptations to prevent cancer (many of which have aging side effects, like telomeres), and the species-scale (or selfish-gene-scale) survival value of getting oldsters out of the way to make room for the next generation.
The fact that humans can live substantially longer than is merely necessary to reproduce is due to the fact that we're a K-selected species rather than an R-selected species. (Cicadas, for example, are an R-selected species. Dolphins, Elephants, and Humans are K-selected.)
[+] [-] w1ntermute|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rweba|14 years ago|reply
To give an obvious contemporary example - gay marriage is a lot more controversial among older American voters than younger voters.
Now multiply that times a thousand - what if people who grew up in the time of Christ were still a significant part of the voting population? We can't just assume they'll all become hip techno-libertarian atheists/extropians just because they managed to live long enough. My guess is that they'd have a strong attachment to the values and way of life they grew up with - thus creating potentially bitter conflicts among the different cohorts which might make contemporary domestic politics seem downright friendly.
So while its cool to imagine living indefinitely - it seems to be in many ways healthier for society to have a continuous "purge", to constantly start fresh with new minds that have less baggage from the past.
Also on a personal note - if society in 2,000 years is radically transformed into something I find really bewildering and bizarre - do I really want to be around for that? Of course I would gamely try and adapt, but it might be better for everyone to just leave that future world for people who grew up with it and who find it natural.
Still, I am not any kind of Luddite - if life extension and mind uploading etc. is perfected I won't oppose it - I'll just have a lot of misgivings as will a lot of other people.
Joe Haldeman's "Forever War" has some good exploration of the nature of "Future Shock": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forever_War
Actually, now that I think about it, if this whole scenario actually happens the best thing might be to maintain separate societies for people born in different time periods, which can communicate and interact but which operate relatively independently.(e.g. Being gay might be illegal in the 1000 CE society but being straight could be illegal in the 3000 CE area!) That might be the only way to keep some relative peace.
[+] [-] ez77|14 years ago|reply
I don't know if I follow correctly. Do you feel that solving the life extension puzzle is tantamount to intellectual nirvana? I'd say there is still plenty more to talk about (say [1] and [2], for example), and arguably deeper from a strictly intellectual viewpoint. In fact, I'd say that the fact that I happen to be mortal or not does not tackle any of classical intellectual conundrums.
Then again, the subject of life extension meets with so much hostility it's actually easy to argue that we as a culture are not ready for this yet.
I'm not sure about life extension, but effectively ending retirement would be met with hostility! But then again, we're getting both things (end of retirement/pensions and the resulting unrest) without indefinite life extension.
[1] http://philpapers.org/surveys/results.pl
[2] http://www.claymath.org/millennium/
[+] [-] iwwr|14 years ago|reply
Only from the Malthusians.
[+] [-] zargon|14 years ago|reply
This is a great synopsis of the situation. There is little research going into actually extending the human lifespan. It's fascinating to hear people like Aubrey de Grey describe some of that research (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aubrey_de_Grey).
[+] [-] AngryParsley|14 years ago|reply
There are many suspected specific reasons for why this is (telomeres shortening, mtDNA mutations, protein cross-links, etc), but it boils down to this: accumulating damage accumulates faster as self-repair mechanisms are damaged by accumulating damage.
[+] [-] Retric|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JoshTriplett|14 years ago|reply
More importantly, we need people to care, and for some insane reason people don't. How do we manage to not treat this as pretty much the most important unsolved problem in humanity? (Mostly, I suspect, due to a combination of perceived futility and ingrained cultural problems.)
[+] [-] jinushaun|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] glimcat|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lkozma|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sebkomianos|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paganel|14 years ago|reply
The point I'm trying to make is that we tend to very easily forget that we've come a really long way, but these things take time and they don't involve only science (the fact that the area I was studying was ravaged by the Ottoman expansion definitely had an impact on how long the people in the Balkans lived, as do today's not so healthy diets for most of the Western-populations). This is why I think that making bold and unsubstantiated predictions such as "in 20 years' time we will have reached indefinite lifespans" doesn't really get us anywhere, it only helps confusing us.
[+] [-] Hyena|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tokenadult|14 years ago|reply
http://books.google.com/books?id=3PSTqQrrzjEC&pg=PA141&#...
The premise of the story is that an effective life extension treatment has been found, and it is so expensive that only the politically powerful can have access to it. The protagonist (and first-person narrator) of the story is an assassin whose job is to murder the immortal oligarchs who rule a future United States--it is pretty apparent that the target of his assassination plot is J. Edgar Hoover in a far-off future. That has always caused me to pause and think about whether I would really like society to discover an effective longevity treatment. Are you sure that people who are as high on the social power and influence scale as HN readers will have access to the treatment?
[+] [-] bumbledraven|14 years ago|reply
Magic 8-ball says: "it is likely". Typically, new technologies are at first available only to the rich and powerful, but eventually they become cheaper and more widely available. Consider cell phones, televisions, and the internet. Today, the poorest person with an internet connection has access to information on a scale which far surpasses anything available to even the kings of old.
[+] [-] bradshaw1965|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scotty79|14 years ago|reply
Given as little as you need to make this problem solvable and nontrivial calculate how often (on average) oldest human in the world dies.
[+] [-] simonsarris|14 years ago|reply
The very first human is the oldest human and they died once.
[+] [-] glimcat|14 years ago|reply
It depends on whether you want the oldest person as an individual or as a class. Good riddles shouldn't be forked.
[+] [-] robryan|14 years ago|reply
From the little I have read on the subject it does seem like this is one area where we have a long way to go to really make progress as we don't really understand all the variables yet.
[+] [-] shawndumas|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mdonahoe|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] suprgeek|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smiley325|14 years ago|reply
Abstract:
A regression analysis was made of age at first reproduction in female mammals, as a function of body weight, using the data of Wootton. Data on maximal life span, also expressed as a function of body weight, were used to calculate “adult” life span, wherever possible, by subtracting the cognate value for age at first reproduction. Then a regression analysis of adult life span as a function of age at first reproduction was made. In both cases global regression lines (i.e., for whole data sets) were computed by standard least squares and by a robust method, as well as local regression lines for subgroups classified by taxonomic and ecological criteria. The slopes of the various regression lines were found to vary widely as a function of the method of classification. This result argues against the notion that the ratio of life history variables is a constant, or that one life history variable is likely to be a simple function of another. The results for bats are anomalous, in that age at first reproduction appears to be independent of body weight (over about two orders of magnitude). It is concluded that a full understanding of life history variables, such as maximal life span and age at maturity, is likely to depend on combined physiological, ecological, and evolutionary insights. Keywords: maximal life span; age at maturity; regression analysis; mammals
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] aab1d|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Ruudjah|14 years ago|reply
3 And the LORD said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years.
AFAIK, all people in recent history (<3000 years) claiming to be aged over 120 years are either questionable or not verified.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Calment If this is true, [i]Men[/i] still did not exceed 120 years by 128,99 days. Interpreting the bible is hard, determining as literal and figure of speech is the hard part.
[+] [-] jacques_chester|14 years ago|reply
Genesis is the same book that puzzlingly fails to mention the big bang, for example.
[+] [-] shawndumas|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chc|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zavulon|14 years ago|reply
I was about to post the same thing - this is no surprise to us Jews. As the saying goes - may you live to 120 years!
[+] [-] ciupicri|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jaredmck|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
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