Your body wasn’t built to last: a lesson from human mortality rates

http://gravityandlevity.wordpress.com/2009/07/08/your-body-wasnt-built-to-last-a-lesson-from-human-mortality-rates/

by sirteno • 13 years ago

151 175 13 years ago

gravityandlevity.wordpress.com

neals4• 13 years ago

I'd hate to die, for so many different reasons. Why can't we all just keep on living? Any change of immortality in the coming 60-odd years? Or is that just not far enough into the future? Are we doomed to die?

fit2rule2• 13 years ago

Yes, we are doomed to die.

Don't think of it as doom, though. If you look around you, pretty much any Life, itself, involves the cycle: start -> do something -> finish.

Do your absolute best to do the best for yourself, and others, while you are Alive. Life is the most precious substance in the Known Universe, and believe it or not: you are in control.

So, think about it not at all, or often, but know this: you will reach the end, no matter what. You're in the 'do something' stage right now.

neals4• 13 years ago

I get what you are saying and totally agree. However, now I am stuck between choosing between what is good for ME and what is good for OTHERS. What is more important? My life being good or leaving others in a better place when I'm gone? Should I just live for myself until I'm 45, than start giving back?

mindcruzer• 13 years ago

Once you're dead I don't think you'll mind.

rfnslyr2• 13 years ago

Definitely going to die if you're not a multi millionaire or billionaire. Why would common folk ever receive immortality therapy?

I firmly believe we're just a hologram, an experiment, with only one defined condition in our environment, death. Our overlords have watched us evolve and under the condition of death, and once we solve it, we will have won.

icebraining3• 13 years ago

Definitely going to die if you're not a multi millionaire or billionaire. Why would common folk ever receive immortality therapy?

For the same reasons they often get life-saving treatments? Why would the people who own the therapy refuse to be handsomely paid by common folk and/or the State for providing it?

Of course, it won't come cheap. Maybe a 500 year loan per treatment?

vezzy-fnord• 13 years ago

No. Immortality would be even more horrific.

I would definitely like to see the average life span significantly extended, but there should still be a foreseeable death.

will_work4tears5• 13 years ago

I don't think it's such a black and white issue. Apart from some nerd rapture/uploading the brain scenario (which I find preposterous, just IMO) true immortality is just not possible. Even discounting the extreme view of the heat death of the universe, I don't think even the most careful people would live to be more than a couple thousand years. Most would probably die of something in 2-3 hundred years - war, famine, disease, natural disasters, or just even dangerous activities (driving, skiing, hiking, skydiving, etc) would at least on average, keep a steady rate of deaths.

But I agree with trying everything we can to extend the life as much as possible. I just feel in the end, a 500 year long life would represent a pretty lucky person.

edit: just FYI though, I'm not a hater; I'm even a futurist and a tiny bit of a transhumanist.

awjr2• 13 years ago

Or at least a right to a dignified and peaceful death.

I do think a society that 'solves' death would need some way of identifying when life prolonging therapy should be withheld and that this should not just be a function of income.

In effect our current "do not resuscitate" clause.

sejje2• 13 years ago

I don't want a foreseeable death, and I don't think you or anyone else should be able to impose one on me.

eli_gottlieb19• 13 years ago

Here is why you're being downvoted: human longevity is an extremely difficult, multifaceted problem. Research doctors are not even trying to slay a dragon but a hydra: combat one way to die of old age and another one pops up.

Lastly, attempting to forecast "chance of immortality in the coming 60-odd years" is asking a question that relies for its answer on extremely controversial ideas. Particularly, attempting to answer requires us to forecast whether the rate of advancement in ageing research is speeding up or slowing down. This is hard, and can be affected by a bunch of different factors: funding breakdown in non-corporate research, Great Stagnation Hypothesis, breakdown in public acceptance of science, economic decline in some places, economic growth in some places, public uptake of anti-aging ideologies, attitudes towards the retirement crisis we're already facing even before anti-aging research comes in. Oh, and then we face the issue of whether we can or are improving our quality of scientific findings through better research training or data science/machine learning techniques. And then we get to the really out-there stuff "immortalists" are often secretly thinking of and can't stop yacking about: the chance that we manage to create Friendly Artificial Intelligence and trigger a Singularity, thus rendering us all immortal utopian transhumans before many of us on this board even hit retirement age.

TL;DR: I have no bloody idea, but I still regard contributing to my Roth IRA as a pretty sensible move.

EDIT: The one trend I'm willing to say I observe is that average life expectancy is a fairly good tracker of social and economic development, even once you've gotten over the infant-mortality hump. If you want to be immortal, you should encourage society to act in ways that result in longer average lifespans and also to fund anti-ageing research in hopes of achieving the fabled "ageing escape horizon" where medical science advances faster than you die.

neals4• 13 years ago

Wow, thanks. I feel better now, not sure why though:)

woodchuck642• 13 years ago

How about a simplification: chance that computational technology will increase by 3 orders of magnitude in 30 years: almost 100%. Chance that increases in computational power lead to increases in biological breakthroughs: 100%.

Therefore, we should not measure the current rate of anti-aging research but rather project it exponentially in some fashion to match the likely trajectory. This has been true for DNA sequencing for example.

melling• 13 years ago

We haven't made any progress in lengthening the maximum human life. We can simply help more people so that they live closer to the maximum, so it's highly doubtful that we're anywhere near extending life beyond the 100-120 limits of our bodies.

Consider, for example, that work on artificial intelligence started in the 1950's. We've made lots of progress in 60 years, but it's definitely not a solved progress, despite the incredible progress.

jowiar• 13 years ago

I don't particularly want to die, but knowing it's going to happen makes life a whole lot more interesting. For me, the looming finitude of life keeps my inclination to procrastinate in check - Why do today what can be done tomorrow? Because otherwise the things to do add up faster than the tomorrows on which to do them.

icebraining3• 13 years ago

On the other hand, there's what you could call the Homer Simpson reaction[1]. If you know you're going to die, and you don't even know if it won't happen soon, you might be discouraged from doing things with a longer time frame.

[1] http://global3.memecdn.com/live-each-day-like-it-was-your-la...

Hermel• 13 years ago

The question really is: what aspect of you do you want to preserve? You will most certainly change over the years. You now will be very different from you in 100 years. Your immortal you in 500 years might be as different from your current you as your grandchildren. Do you really care more about your own existence in 500 years than about the existence of your grandchildren in 100 years?

The solution to immortality is to embrace the idea that you won't stay the same anyway and that instead of caring so much about your host body, it might be more efficient to preserve what you value in other forms: e.g. your genome and values in your children or your ideas in books. If you write down your thoughts into a book today, these thoughts are more likely to be preserved for 500 years than if you were immortal and relied on your memory.

eli_gottlieb19• 13 years ago

Nah, that's way scarier. Looking at the sweep of history, I can take comfort that my mortal shell won't last long enough to witness much more of the damn stuff, but I'm terrified that my thoughts and values are simply going to be swept away in a tide of blood and a return to a more miserable human condition.

Ensorceled• 13 years ago

Your immortal you in 500 years might be as different from your current you as your grandchildren. Do you really care more about your own existence in 500 years than about the existence of your grandchildren in 100 years?

As somebody with no kids ... yes.

This is a strange argument since at no time between now and 500 years from now will there be a point where I want to grow old and die. So asking me if I care about 500 year old me is irrelevant, I don't want to die.

gordaco• 13 years ago

Another question: what happens to a brain that stores so many years of memories? If there are serious complications, and I'm pretty sure that there are, chances are that they're going to be next to impossible to solve, unless some serious alteration (more brain capacity or memory erasing) happens.

I'm also assuming that any life expanding treatment would tackle senility issues (maybe with brain-repairing nanomachines? Who knows). If not, it would be far, far less useful.

swalsh3• 13 years ago

If I had to choose a society with all young people, all old people, or a healthy mix of each... i'd choose the later. Young people provide new thinking, they're essential to society. Old people provide foundation, and wisdom, they're essential too. We live on a planet with finite resources, to support the right mix, we should accept that its just not RIGHT to live forever, even if it were possible. I'd like to live until i'm 100, and I hope science makes it so i'm just as productive at 100, as I am today.

icebraining3• 13 years ago

That's only assuming we could be immortal, but still stuck on a single planet. I find that an unlikely event.

DougWebb• 13 years ago

If society included lots of immortals, they'd be pretty driven to make sure that we're not stuck living on a planet with finite resources. There are plenty of untapped resources laying on the ocean floors and deeper into the Earth's crust than we typically mine today, and lots more off-world. Those are all technologically within our grasp today, they're just not cost-effective. But if we had to support an immortal society, the ROI terms change: it becomes reasonable to invest in an infrastructure that will take a few centuries to pan out, because people will live to see it completed and get the benefits from it.

sgk284• 13 years ago

Re: finite resources - Constraining the human race to a single planet puts a pretty small upper bound on our species' potential.

Humans evolved a desire to explore and adapt to new environments as an evolutionary advantage, this advantage doesn't need to be bound to one tiny little ball floating in space.

31reasons2• 13 years ago

Life expectancy only a few hundred years ago was about 40 years. Its about 78 years in the US currently. Human longevity is extremely difficult problem but there is no physical law stating that you can't live up to 200 or 500 years. Biological science is advancing at an extremely rapid rate and its possible that we may see doubling of life expectancy in next 50 years.

Dewie2• 13 years ago

How much of that life expectancy 100 years ago were affected by child mortality? We haven't really doubled our longevity, we just took care of some things that lead to a lot more children reaching adulthood. The bulk of that might have been pretty simple, like better hygiene.

nova4• 13 years ago

If only it were merely technically and scientifically super-difficult.

The biggest hurdle is cultural and social, as many comments show. The first step towards ending death is to consider the fight possible and positive. But we are still deep in deathism, "Death is inevitable (with current science), ergo death is good". The biggest case of sour grapes or Stockholm syndrome ever, the most awful meme.

logfromblammo3• 13 years ago

The sociological problems of immortality are more difficult than the technical problems. The entire sweep of human history has rested upon the same solid foundation: death takes everyone eventually. Kings fall down as dead as peasants, and the dirt nap of a saint lasts as long as a sinner.

Imagine what would happen if the people who held certain beliefs never died off. Imagine the result if large estates never passed to any heirs, or debts never cancelled. Imagine copyrights that never expire, since the authors never die. The young, vital, and innovative do not prosper, since they are forever dominated by their elders who become increasingly conservative and risk-averse. Money and power do not pass from one generation to the next.

The problem is only made worse if biological immortality is itself an expensive product that is only accessible to the wealthy. Down that path I can imagine dozens of dystopias.

negamax• 13 years ago

I often wonder if all our life's earnings will eventually be used in upgrading our bodies. Could future be like 'In Time' or something parallel to that?

maxerickson• 13 years ago

That would either require that technology was only barely keeping most people alive or a vastly more restrictive legal regime (because as much horror as people express at patents, you are talking about 20 years not being such a long time anymore).

KiwiCoder• 13 years ago

"... millions long for immortality who don't know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon." - Susan Ertz

neals4• 13 years ago

So if we can also control the weather, would that be Utopia?

ph0rque• 13 years ago

You still have to then solve the problem of Sundays.

eli_gottlieb19• 13 years ago

And for those of us who can easily find something to do on a rainy ~~Sunday~~ Shabbat afternoon?

grahamburger• 13 years ago

That's exactly why we want to live forever, so a Sunday afternoon spent lazily listening to the rain on the window and dozing doesn't feel like a waste.

dave1629• 13 years ago

Peter Thiel's version of this: http://blakemasters.com/post/24253160557/peter-thiels-cs183-...

300bps• 13 years ago

4.5 year old blog post that I didn't find any interesting information on. For example:

Exponential decay is sharp, but an exponential within an exponential is so sharp that I can say with 99.999999% certainty that no human will ever live to the age of 130. (Ignoring, of course, the upward shift in the lifetime distribution that will result from future medical advances)

The author makes a hugely controversial statements saying that no human will ever live past 130 and then says, "of course, ignoring the most important variable".

Anyone interested in this topic might want to check out:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aubrey_de_Grey

michalu• 13 years ago

I don't really want to die, but if there was no end, I would keep wasting my time and life forever. Now I feel a sense of urgency to do something - and a short life with purpose feels better then eternity of boredom and procrastination - that's just my personality though.

awjr2• 13 years ago

One consideration, is that prolonging human life into 100s of years would be very useful for colonisation of space.

VikingCoder2• 13 years ago

Your body is a cannon, meant to shoot DNA into the future. Once it has fulfilled that purpose, and possibly done a bit to nurture the next generation(s) of your / your tribe's DNA (or harm the DNA of others), your body serves no more purpose.

sejje2• 13 years ago

So then all time is "free time."

Excellent.

VLM9• 13 years ago

"possibly done a bit to nurture"

There doesn't seem to be any obvious upper bound on this behavior.

I have a Harvard professor two centuries ago around 1800 in my ancestry. His DNA would still be serving a useful purpose to his descendants if he was teaching/advising my kids today in 2013, or if he was teaching/advising my descendents in early 2300 for that matter.

I would imagine being young in a post 500-year-lifespan society would be very suffocating if your first few decades had a student:teacher ratio flipped around from current numbers to 20 teachers per student rather than current 20 students per teacher.

VikingCoder2• 13 years ago

The resources you consume, versus the reproductive edge your provide to your offspring. Specifically, if you're competing for resources they could have used in their own reproduction.

The most successful DNA will be when a group of people launch their descendants off into the galaxy to avoid the Red Giant death in our solar system. We're all rats on one slowly sinking ship, right now.

hooande• 13 years ago

There is no reason that human beings cannot live forever. Gompertz Law is not a law of physics, but a law of observation similar to Moore's Law. Medical and safety technology are also advancing exponentially. Barring a catastrophe that blasts us back to the stone age, one growth curve will eventually overtake the other.

The article uses a cops and criminals analogy to explain how our bodies degrade over time. Technology can allow us to produce artificial cops and conditions that make things more difficult for the criminals. The Methusaleh Foundation [1] is working on pieces of this problem right now, with a cash prize. There are many other research institutions working on different aspects of immortality. Once medical nanomachines become a practical reality we might be able to turn the work of Gompertz on it's head within a generation.

Many people, myself included, find the idea of effective immortality to be disconcerting. But all of the arguments have been made and rebutted: Just because we can't imagine immortality doesn't mean that isn't a good thing, if we were born into a world without death we wouldn't give it up for any of the advantages of mortality, we would have more productive time to solve the problems of overpopulation, etc and so forth.

If our species is able to continue on its current path then death is going to, well, die. The tragedy is that none of us will live to see it. That doesn't mean that we can't consider the implications and start preparing an infinite future for our descendants.

[1] http://www.mprize.org/

JumpCrisscross4• 13 years ago

There is no reason that human beings cannot live forever.

Second law of thermodynamics. Granted this is a bit pedantic since we are nowhere close to that as a limiting factor.

alexeisadeski3• 13 years ago

Well it's not that pedantic.

StavrosK• 13 years ago

Well, at least for small values of "forever".

eli_gottlieb19• 13 years ago

I thus hereby engage in the obligatory mention of The Last Question.

mmastrac• 13 years ago

I think "forever" is generally understood as "for relatively long, but finite values less than the remaining lifetime of the universe"

nicholas73• 13 years ago

If we can expand life expectancy by 30 years, we would effective double if not exponentially increase the rate of progress. This is because it takes scientists and engineers about 30 years to mature into their field and find their niche, counting from childbirth. Another 30 years before their are close to retirement age. If people were healthy into their 90's, you'd have unbelievable masters of their craft working at high levels for an additional 30 years.

mcguire6• 13 years ago

I'm not sure I buy that. There seems to be a half-life effect for people working in one field; after some period of time, call it 20 years, a significant proportion of them have either changed fields dramatically, or have become stagnant.

On the other hand, the possibilities of cross-pollination....

VLM9• 13 years ago

On the other hand look at fields like programming, where due to ageism and such, you've got a shorter career than a pro football quarterback before you get replaced by a cheap new grad. So you'd have genius grade programmers working at walmart as people greeters from age 30 to age 90, contributing to open source and stuff. This has both good points and bad points.

Another interesting one to think about on the other side, is its not entirely unusual for academics to spend a large fraction of their working years as minions before getting a professorship and tenure and a serious paycheck... imagine having to do grunt work twice as long as now.

jmartinpetersen• 13 years ago

Usually people who worry about how long others live (mainly those who issue life insurance policies) use the "extended" Gompertz-Makeham Law (which is, basically, the Gompertz Law extended with an age-independent component - the lightning bolts).

One thing I have a hard time wrapping my head around is how the lightning bolt deaths (the Makeham component) will be dealt with by society if "immortality" becomes a reality. As it is now, we accept that people gets killed (i.e., gets their date of death advanced) by e.g. traffic, but how will that change?

ars3• 13 years ago

It will cause people to become much much much more conservative and safety oriented.

You already see this in practice - you can't buy real chemistry sets, kids are never left alone, safety equipment for riding a bike, etc, etc, etc.

Basically everywhere people say "When I was a kid we used to xxxx", and today they don't. It's a direct result of accidents slowly becoming the primary cause of death.

rebel• 13 years ago

The movie "In Time" is an interesting view on how the world would evolve if that were the case. It's one of my favorite movies and it provides a perspective I'd never imagined.

venomsnake• 13 years ago

Depends on the type of immortality. This is your body, you are stuck with it (elf) will be one thing. This is your body, when you wear it enough we will transfer your mind in the new one - it will be something entirely different.

hcarvalhoalves• 13 years ago

There is no reason that human beings cannot live forever.

There are plenty of fundamental reasons for why we can't.

Gompertz Law is not a law of physics, but a law of observation (...)

Second law of thermodynamics.

pmelendez• 13 years ago

From wikipedia:

"The second law is an empirically validated postulate of thermodynamics" [1]

And

"Empirical evidence (also empirical data, sense experience, empirical knowledge, or the a posteriori) is a source of knowledge acquired by means of observation" [2]

So, it is a law by observation after all.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_law_of_thermodynamics

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empirical_evidence

raverbashing2• 13 years ago

"There is no reason that human beings cannot live forever"

There are plenty. Mainly, every machine has an expiration date.

Unless we go the "Ship of Theseus" way, but even then one thing remains, the brain.

Let's go for a much simpler analogy: Is there a way a car can be used forever? By replacing every part, maybe, it still precludes "total loss" events.

"Oh, but we can have micromachines fixing our body" sure, great, this will be helpful, but not everything can be 'micro-fixed'

The lightning bolt theory is not "wrong" per se, but it is a small part of the causes of mortality, and it certainly doesn't explain the sharp fall, but it is the main responsible for middle of life causes of death

krisgee2• 13 years ago

Your body already does this though. Cells die and are replaced all the time, even neurons. You aren't you from seven years ago nor 14 years ago and you're still barely you from last year. I'm not really sure why this argument even enters into the equation, if I replace all my parts and still think the same I'm essentially still me (In an awesome robot body).

stcredzero• 13 years ago

There are plenty. Mainly, every machine has an expiration date.

Re-hash of old argument, addressed by SENS.

http://www.ted.com/talks/aubrey_de_grey_says_we_can_avoid_ag...

not everything can be 'micro-fixed'

There are only 7 distinct forms of aging-related damage. The only one that doesn't have a sensible and straightforward strategy for fixing is cancer.

WWWWH3• 13 years ago

Unfortunately, medical technology is not even remotely advancing exponentially. The rate of new drug approvals is decreasing (and costs are rising); we are appallingly bad at turning biochemical knowledge into medical technology.

Now, I know you weren't talking about drugs as such, but they are a reasonable proxy for our ability to understand a biological system and then intervene. And the state of the industries that try and do this, strongly suggests that we haven't got a clue.

Just to lay the pessimism on a little thicker, we may even be lucky to stay where we are, given the spread of antibiotic resistant bacteria.

Never mind immortality, I'd be happy to know that we still have working antibiotics when I roll up to hip replacement age!

edit: My grammer sucks.

robinhoode2• 13 years ago

The rate of new drug approvals is decreasing (and costs are rising); we are appallingly bad at turning biochemical knowledge into medical technology.

Why should we measure medical technology at the rate of new drugs developed? What about the speed of DNA sequencing advancing faster than Moore's law? What about Organovo's recent claims on 3D printing organs, with vascular system in place, by next year? What about advanced prothesis that can provide touch senses to the user? Or even visual or audio prothesis, made possible with advancements in brain-computer interfaces?

Your argument basically boils down to saying that the rate of CPU clock speeds developed in recent history is indicative of an overall slowdown in computer science. Clearly there are other paradigms that need to be explored before we can say that Moore's law is no longer relevant, let alone all of computing.

Yes, the average of all medical tech is going to always lag behind computing for ethical reasons. And that of course, there are ways we can improve medical testing using stem cell research. But to say that we're at risk of moving backwards because one or two particular areas are in serious need of optimization is a bit far-fetched.

wissler7• 13 years ago

Unfortunately, medical technology is not even remotely advancing exponentially.

Which is why we desperately need the government to get the boot off the necks of potential innovators and customers.

dragonwriter• 13 years ago

Unfortunately, medical technology is not even remotely advancing exponentially. The rate of new drug approvals is decreasing (and costs are rising)

New drug development is not the whole of medical technology any more than higher clock speeds are the whole of computing technology development.

mcguire6• 13 years ago

Just because we can't imagine immortality doesn't mean that isn't a good thing

Note that the counter is also true.

if we were born into a world without death we wouldn't give it up for any of the advantages of mortality

One of the things I periodically complain about, with regards to the US manned space program, is the cultural believe that no one must die. Take a look at the progress of aircraft technology in the last century, and the number of aircraft pioneers that died gruesomely.

Now imagine what you wouldn't do, if you were effectively immortal.

VLM9• 13 years ago

I would take some issue with the space program comparison, in that if you're going to live forever, then rather than putting up with a space shuttle that kills the crew roughly 1 in 50 launches, you have an infinite amount of time so launch that dude 1000 times unmanned to debug it fully before you send the first humans up.

Another curiosity might be if your average dude lives 500 years you may very well start launching 475 year old astronauts in that a tragedy will only cause as many lost life years as launching a 50 year old dude today.

epaladin• 13 years ago

I can accept everything about being human, except for death, so this is a challenge I've wanted to take on since I was quite young, but was afraid to directly face. Now I really know that I need to start moving more in that direction. Somehow. I'm already in bioinformatics, but wasn't very focused on any subdomain of biology, so there's a lot to catch up on. I'm excited about Calico, but there's so little information available that it's hard to know if there's going to be any way for someone with just an MS in bioinformatics to wedge their way into helping with that effort (though I'm going to try!).

It would just suck to fail at figuring it out (result: death) and it might also suck to succeed (crazy fundamentalist shoots me in the head, result: death) but indefinite procrastination is probably the most assured way to die and be unfulfilled on top that... so it's worth having a go. Maybe I should work on cryopreservation instead, and leave the living forever bit to someone else to figure out?

Thanks for the mprize link, hadn't heard of that.

nova4• 13 years ago

I can accept everything about being human, except for death, so this is a challenge I've wanted to take on since I was quite young, but was afraid to directly face.

Glad to read this. The enterprise will be very difficult, but your heart (or brain) is in the right place.

dorfsmay2• 13 years ago

I can say with 99.999999% certainty that no human will ever live to the age of 130

That is unfortunate. I grew up in the 80s (the 8 bit µ processor era), always had a very positive outlook on life, and thought 127 was the perfect age for me to die.

mathattack• 13 years ago

Having taken care of some elderly, and watched others pass, my impression that living forever appeals more to the young than the old. Some of it may be their bodies breaking down, some of it may be losing old friends and loves, but most of the folks 75+ seem to be ready when the time comes. Certainly more ready than their kids.

But still... To quote the Rolling Stones, "What a drag it is getting old."

will_work4tears5• 13 years ago

However, if they have the body and mental acuity of a 25 year old at 75+ and so do their friends, they might not be as ready for it. And not need people to take care of them.

All of your argument is null and void if you take out the "dying" part.

It's like saying "Nobody goes 100 miles in a day because they can't walk that far, so nobody is going to want to ever have a car/bike/airplane" also walking that far tears up your feet so a car is silly."

greedo• 13 years ago

My stepfather passed away two weeks ago, and my mother is worried that she'll live as long as the women in her line; roughly 90+. To her, that's a nightmare of infirmity and worry. Will she have enough money? Will she be independent, or have to rely more on caregivers? She's only 80, so she's got a good decade or more to think about these things.

I think if she wasn't alone and in declining health, she'd be glad to live longer.

JumpCrisscross4• 13 years ago

Biological immortality does not mean immunity from accidents or homicide. Hugh Hixon, at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, calculated the half-life of a biologically immortal population at 1 654 years [1].

If we lowered fatality odds to 1 in 100 000 per year (no accidents, Sweden's homicide rate) this figure inflates to 69 315. It's an interesting illustration of how the effects of randomness will not be muted, just shifted.

[1] http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/MisadventureAsACauseOfDeat...

electromagnetic4• 13 years ago

But the key question is how long do we have to live before we're going to bed at night and backing up all our memories for the day to the cloud. So if we get hit by a bus we just wake up in a few weeks in a rapidly grown body?

I know people will say it won't happen, but are you going to let a 650 year old mind die with its cumulative knowledge and wisdom? Nope, you'd get them a new goddamn body.

chrisamiller2• 13 years ago

As a cancer biologist, I can tell you that at least some of these assumptions don't hold true. Acute Myeloid Leukemia is driven entirely by "accumulated lightning bolts". Every time your blood stem cells divide, a small number of replication errors occur randomly in the DNA. If one of these cells accumulate two to three of these mutations in the wrong genes, you will develop AML. The longer you live, the more likely it is that this will occur. Bottom line, everyone who lives long enough will eventually get cancer.

While I agree that these plots are interesting, it's dangerous to read too much into these without thinking more deeply about the vast number of ways that there are to die, many of which will have strikingly different age distributions.

(see http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867412...)

Symmetry• 13 years ago

And if we solve cancer and age related deterioration, everyone will eventually die in an accident. But the fact remains that the deaths that dominate life expectancy statistics behave in the way described.

icegreentea• 13 years ago

Kinda late, but I thought that there are typically corrective measures that try to prevent oncogenes from kicking off. The key difference between "accumulated lightning bolts" and the final model chosen is that "accumulated lightning bolts" assumes a more or less fixed rates of lightning bolts, while the final model essentially that the rate of lightning bolts will increase over time, which corresponds well to an interpretation of long-term decay of corrective measures - such as replication error detection systems.

I think the key point is that systems for retaining homeostasis (so second order systems I guess) are themselves subject to degradation.

chrisamiller2• 13 years ago

There are some cancers driven by things like mismatch-repair defects, so that the amount of DNA damage grows very quickly over time, but these don't cause the majority of cancers. In liquid (blood) tumors, especially, these are very rare - The predominant mechanism is just the accumulation of random defects due to cellular division.

On the other end of the scale are things like automobile accidents, where incidence peaks in teenage years and decreases thereafter (with a possible second peak as vision and reflexes deteriorate in the elderly). My point is that neither of these fit the neat curve drawn by the author. When everything is lumped together, the curve fits, but trying to draw broad conclusions about mechanisms from that kind of aggregate data is foolish.

a3n• 13 years ago

If people lived to, say, 150 or 300 years, 500 years, I wonder how hard it would be to convince people to risk their lives in war? I wonder if people would be more careful with the environment if they knew they'd actually have to live with their treatment of the environment?

VLM9• 13 years ago

On the other hand, leadership positions strongly attract psychopaths and sociopaths, and at least some segment of the population will think, eh, I'm going to live for 500 years, I can afford to give President Palin a mere four year chance, and next thing you know we're launching missiles at who knows who for no particular reason, or they're launching missiles at us.

My point being a 500 year lifespan allows a "survival of the craziest" to likely result in truly awful people naturally ending up in positions of leadership. Every nutcase having his 4 years of fame instead of just some of them, or just 15 minutes of fame for some of them.

It could be really bad. And not just politically, imagine the typical CEO psychological profile under centuries of those selection pressures instead of mere decades.

"if they knew they'd actually have to live with their treatment of the environment"

Imagine a 500 year old hoarder.

This whole discussion is enjoyably ripe with possible sci-fi or fantasy novel plots, very interesting.

scotty79• 13 years ago

Do you know any other scenario that results in distibution of this kind?

sirsar• 13 years ago

It bothers me that 8 is the "magic number." Did Gompertz simply round? I find it hard to believe that the real number is not 7.7 or 8.3, and those would have vastly different effects. Why should evolution mark itself by whole rotations around the sun?

exarch• 13 years ago

We already know why cancer rates increase with age: cancer is a result of several cumulative cellular mutations. Obviously, the chance of these mutations all occurring in any given cell increases with the number of cell divisions that occur, i.e. the length of time the person lives.

dsego• 13 years ago

We don't neccesarily need a body. I posted this link a while back but it went unnoticed:

http://aeon.co/magazine/being-human/virtual-afterlives-will-...

"The question is not whether we can upload our brains onto a computer, but what will become of us when we do"

eli_gottlieb19• 13 years ago

Currently, "can we" is indeed a question. It is followed by the question, "Oh dear God in Heaven, why would you do that!?". I mean, seriously, there are large numbers of computer security breaches each week. Now what are you going to do if those computers are substrate for people? Hell, it's even worse if they're running people using cloud computing: one attack on a datacenter could let you obtain root access to dozens or hundreds of living human minds.

And then we have to decide on scheduling and resource-sharing algorithms. Oy gevalt.

Though actually, trying to devise a secure system architecture for running real people would be a hilariously evil joke-project.

onedev• 13 years ago

Honestly, I don't want to live forever.

100 years I think is what would be ideal.

Futurebot2• 13 years ago

For anyone here who has not yet read Eliezer Yudkowsky's "You Only Live Twice", please do so:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/wq/you_only_live_twice/

Pertains to Cryonics, which is our best bet for immortality until we solve the aging issue (i.e., we hopefully stay cryopreserved until immortality is achieved.) At least with SENS/The Methuselah Foundation/Calico now getting attention and a bit of funding, there's hope here. One day, perhaps governments will consider aging "force" or "harm" and do the number one job government should do: protecting people from it (by funding research to prevent it.)

eli_gottlieb19• 13 years ago

That one's a bit... silly. It's a surprisingly religious sentiment for Mr. LessWrong.

Yes, I have heard the shpiel. However, from the shpiel I've heard, cryonics is currently a faith-based ticket to God Only Knows Where. Very few people actually believe whole human beings can be resurrected from cryopreservation, and it's certainly never been actually done even in animal experiments, so why should anyone sign up?

Well then, the cryonicists say, let me tell you about neuro-cryo, which is cheaper. We can totally plausibly claim the information content of your brain is preserved in cryopreservation, or possibly brain plastination says gwern. Anyway, point being, you sign up, and it will result in a future friendly superintelligence reading your brain out into a computer to resurrect you someday...

To which I say, hold the fuck on you just skipped a whole lot of freaking steps there!

Futurebot2• 13 years ago

Hanson and Yudkowsky make the point that it's the best we've got (in one article, they put the chance of success at 5%), and that the alternative right now is nothing. Considering the relatively low cost, it's a gamble worth taking.

For the record, I've been signed up for a long time.

Edit: as for the tone, Yudkowsky has had the inspirational, secular techno-futurist new-age-ish sounding hope thing going for ages, as you probably know. It doesn't surprise me (and probably doesn't surprise him) that very reasonable people sometimes mistake it for the anti-skeptic / superstitious / actual new-age nuttery / cult types. I think part of the problem here is a kind of Poe's Law effect: if a rational, informed, intelligent person talks seriously about the likelihood of FAI, superintelligences, cryo, etc. in a positive, hopeful way, they're instantly mistaken for a nutcake.

abhiv• 13 years ago

Great article. For me personally, the issue is not so much dying but aging. Seeing your hair thin, your eyesight deteriorate, your memory weaken and your energy decrease with time must be a profoundly depressing experience -- one of the major reasons why the old in general are more solemn than the young, I think.

These changes are still in the future for me (thankfully), but I imagine they will happen some day if I live long enough.

I think a world in which people would keep remain mentally and physically fit, but simply die (maybe from a lightning bolt type event) at some point, would be much better than one in which your body and mind slowly fade with time.

I'd be happy with medical advances that let you keep the mind and body of a 25 year old till you're 80 and then simply die one day. Unfortunately, some period of old age and infirmity seems to be present no matter how much lifespan extends.

jostmey• 13 years ago

This is a very interesting approach to describe the mortality rate as a function of age. I wonder how this theory ties in with more established theories of aging, such as the Evolutionary Theories of Aging (ref. http://www.genetics.org/content/156/3/927.full)

avn2109• 13 years ago

A reliability engineer might say that as a first approximation, the time-till-failure of the human animal (really just an electro-mechanical-chemical machine) has a governing equation which is a linear combination of many Weibull equations [0] and Arrhenius equations [1]. Mechanical failure is known to be governed by Weibull, and chemically-driven devices fail according to Arrhenius.

From this claim it isn't hard to cook up superexponential-ish results over certain timescales by tuning the fitting parameters and combination coefficients. But that doesn't mean the underlying failure physics here are truly superexponential.

But as a better approximation, human death may be governed by a system of differential equations with primarily stochastic coefficients and plenty of strongly nonlinear operators. So after our biomedical engineers remove the first few bottlenecks at ~105 years old, these curve shapes might change dramatically to reflect the true complexity of the underlying physics.

[0] http://reliabilityanalyticstoolkit.appspot.com/mechanical_re... [1] http://reliawiki.com/index.php/Arrhenius_Relationship

erroneousfunk• 13 years ago

In response to the the morbid web calculator at the bottom of the article, I made this a few years ago: http://javasaur.com/deathCalculator.html that provides similar information, but takes into account current age and gender. It uses US actuarial tables (so this assumes that you're living every year as if it were 2007 or whatever year it was I used...)

Your body wasn’t built to last: a lesson from human mortality rates

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