You will live for longer than 1% of the entire history of human civilization.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=725086

by GraffitiTim • 17 years ago

86 65 17 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

The first civilization started in Mesopotamia around 5000 BCE (more or less), which is 7,000 years ago. If you live until age 80, that's more than 1% of the history of civilization.

Just throwing it out there for anyone else who'd never thought about it before. Certainly changed my perspective a bit.

patio11• 17 years ago

You will also probably outlive three nines of humans historically. A woman at my church passed away recently, tragically young at 68. (That is about a decade below the life expectancy of Japanese women of her generation.)

Also, while I generally scoff at scifi, it is entirely possible that we will make big strides against aging this century. I expect my chilren will grow up with their grandparents. I expect their grandkids will not even understand the import of that sentence.

crcoffey• 17 years ago

My grandparents are still alive, and are actually doing quite well.

I'm 19 years old, and I hold a strong hope that they will hold my children in their time.

I can't explain how much that would mean to me.

mosheg101• 17 years ago

My granddad just visited me, he's 87, does every day 40 x 25m pool laps, dances, sings and almost beats me at armfight. :P

EDIT: he's also great-granddad to my kid :) My great-grandmom from grandmom side lived to 95...

mynameishere• 17 years ago

I still have a great-grandmother who is almost 100. It was a very surreal experience when her daughter died, at about 68 or so, and she hosted the viewing.

Can you imagine burying your own elderly daughter?

gcheong• 17 years ago

Reminds me of the abc documentary "Live to be 150... can you do it?" where the profile several centenarians. They look in surprisingly good shape considering they are over 100 years old. See http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Longevity/Story?id=4559263&...

pj• 17 years ago

My grandmother, still living, became a great-great grandmother last month. Living members of 5 generations of the same family.

clistctrl• 17 years ago

My dad goes the senior center a few times a week with my grandmother... and he's not visiting :)

kragen3• 17 years ago

I'm curious where you get your statistics on the detailed distribution of historical human lifespans. They have never been, you know, Gaussian. I think it's always been the case that several humans per thousand survive into their 80s.

gregwebs• 17 years ago

This gets at the root cause of what is wrong in our civilizations today. Most of our genes were evolved pre-civilization. Civilization itself is just an experiment. An experiment that hasn't been going all that well if judged by what has been happening to our planet. There is wisdom from the pre-civilization days I hope we can tap into while using new technologies to actually have sustainable civilization.

kingkawn5• 17 years ago

Longer generations mean we stay mired in the past, and our elders are around to advocate for the world views of their era in a way that can be good and bad, my guess that its leans more toward the latter.

Also, considering how much time I waste now, who's to say I won't just take more resources to complete what I'd have done in a shorter span?

jodrellblank4• 17 years ago

The goal of life is to live it, not to go anywhere particular. No matter what we as a species do or where we go, we're trapped in the universe. There's no escape, ultimately.

Yet you're arguing that people should hurry up and die so 'we' can move on and not stay 'mired in the past' and 'wasting time'. What do they matter? Where are we moving to that's so important?

If we can live until we choose to die or die by accident, feed everyone, keep the planet in good condition, hit virtually 100% nanomechanical recycling / construction and have enough resources for people or virtual people to set off exploring the universe, what else matters? Why do we need everyone to be young? And we might be able to step usefully close to those things in a thousand years or so - and if you agree with Kurzweil, 1000 years of progress will happen in much less than 1000 years. We might even live to see it.

kingkawn5• 17 years ago

I didn't say that we should all die young, but instead that aiming relentlessly to extend the quantity of life misses the qualities that make it worth living, including hope and the stunning curiosity that comes with youth.

There's beauty that no matter how burdened an individual is by experience, they will die and the next generation will get to try again, hopefully without too much of the negative baggage passed on.

anc2020• 17 years ago

Yeah and missing the age of immortality by just a century or so would be a bit of a bummer.

philwelch• 17 years ago

"Yet you're arguing that people should hurry up and die so 'we' can move on and not stay 'mired in the past' and 'wasting time'. What do they matter? Where are we moving to that's so important?"

For instance, the decline in institutional racism against black people in America wouldn't have been nearly so successful if it wasn't for all the old segregationists dying off in recent decades. There are definitely real costs and benefits to social conservatism.

mnemonicsloth2• 17 years ago

Yes, but there's a catch. The human race has existed for 140,000 years or so (edit), but has only been civilized for 7000.

The population of nomadic humans was lower, but there's evidence that they were much healthier than those who settled down to grow crops full-time. Agriculture was a win because it allowed for many more people to be born, but it's not a life for which we're well adapted.

ADDED: If this guy is right, 99% could turn out to be an underestimate or an overestimate:

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

KirinDave• 17 years ago

What evidence is that? The average lifespan is on the increase, not the decrease.

Or are you using some other metric to measure what you call "healthier"?

kingkawn5• 17 years ago

If "healthier" is measured by number of mastodons killed with bare hands, yes, it's been a precipitous decline.

jibiki• 17 years ago

This article mentions it in passing:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=533743

"We know roughly when and where farming began, because of the archæological evidence: domestication is a shock to the physiology of man and beast. The skeletons of people change, they temporarily grow smaller and less healthy, as the human body adapts to a protein-poorer diet and a more arduous lifestyle. Likewise, newly domesticated animals get scrawnier at first."

I'm sure some google wizardry could find a real source.

mnemonicsloth2• 17 years ago

There's always wikipedia:

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

The first subsection is "variation over time". The drop between the paleolithic and neolithic coincides with the development of agriculture.

This is a pretty contentious issue. The idea that humanity's single most (evolutionarily) successful technology caused a massive decline in individual quality of life is pretty disturbing, and some of the evidence is contradictory. It seems like a debate best left to experts, but I thought it was worth mentioning.

I still agree with the original post -- we're very lucky to be alive now.

scott_s• 17 years ago

Read "Guns, Germs and Steel" and "The Third Chimpanzee" by Jared Diamond. He talks a lot about the rise of agriculture.

When we look at how the average lifespan is increasing, we're only looking at the lifespan since the start of civilization as we know it - allowed by agriculture. It's possible that our quality of life is only now catching up to what our hunter-gathered ancestors had.

netsp3• 17 years ago

Even our age as a species (it's a range depending on which estimate you take and how widely you define species) is very young. Even less if you consider our long generations (which we are). A thousand generations is nothing on an evolutionary scale.

dejb3• 17 years ago

Some people argue that significant evolution has occurred within the human species after the civilisation started, most likely in response to the changing selective pressures brought on by civilisation itself. The book 'The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution' makes this case.

netsp3• 17 years ago

I'm not sure accelerated evolution is the right term, but the idea makes sense. Changing conditions exert selections pressures.

Dietary changes would have been a substantial. Lactose tolerance, for example is almost certainly new.

kragen3• 17 years ago

We've domesticated cows, pigs, sheep, goats, cats, horses, donkeys, chickens, and rabbits in, more or less, that time, creating substantial selective change. Even lab mice are pretty genetically different from wild mice, and that's within the last century or three, at most. So it wouldn't be that surprising if we had also domesticated ourselves.

derwiki• 17 years ago

I can't up vote you enough for sharing the Aubrey de Gray talk. I can't believe I haven't seen that one!

sailormoon3• 17 years ago

Exciting isn't it. I quit smoking because of that talk, or rather, as part of a series of life changes inspired by that talk.

Fingers crossed!

vaksel• 17 years ago

more things were invented in the last 100 years, than during the entire world history combined

note: I'm note sure if that's right or not, but it sounds like it might be

Retric• 17 years ago

I wonder how advances in CPU design compare to slight variations in arrow design. In 10,000 years they might consider computer evolution to basically be mechanical, vacuum tubes, transistors, optical, then quantum. Even if we see huge advantage to smaller and faster transistors it's still mostly learning how to make a better version of the same thing.

tibix• 17 years ago

I don't doubt that you can say "in the last 40 years" and you will still be right...

BearOfNH• 17 years ago

There's a most excellent vintage 1980s lecture by Robert Anton Wilson titled "The Jumping Jesus Phenomenon". The gist of it can be found at the rawilson.com website as well as elsewhere.

Wilson defines the "jesus" (small j) as the number of scientific facts known at the time of Jesus. Then he goes on to count how many years it takes to double that number. By his count, humanity accumulated 2j by about the year 1500. Then 4j by the year 1750, and so on. I forget the exact numbers but the point of the lecture was that our j-factor was increasing at an ever-increasing rate. By Wilson's estimation the curve would go vertical sometime around ... wait for it ... the year 2012.

This reads a lot like Kurzweil's singularity hypothesis (among others) but I'm not sure who developed the concept first.

AndrewDucker• 17 years ago

It's Terence Mckenna's Timewave theory (from the 1970s).

Kurzweil was following along after a lot of other people.

Vernor Vinge, for instance, came up with the term Technological Singularity in 1993, Teilhard de Chardin had the Omega Point in 1950, etc.

donaldc• 17 years ago

And change happened at a much slower pace for most of that 7,000 years. The 21st century is going to be very interesting.

pbhj• 17 years ago

I think we've hit local maximum in civilisation (perhaps we're just beyond the cusp). If the last century was defined by technological innovation, this one unfortunately I think will be defined by over-population crises.

If we haven't solved the over-population issues by 2100 then I think the 22nd Century will be defined by ecological disaster.

I'm not sure if I'm being too pessimistic or not!

Quarrelsome• 17 years ago

Pessimism IMO. Generally brought about through age (older people are generally more negative about the future) or fears of immigration. I'd bet we can sustain WAY more people then we have at the moment.

Raphael• 17 years ago

You're saying this is the end of civilization?

Eliezer3• 17 years ago

I plan for the entire history of human civilization to be less than 1% of my lifespan.

Gormo• 17 years ago

To accomplish this, you must both (a) live to be at least 100(x+7000) years old, and (b) destroy human civilization within x years.

I hope you're already working on your immortality elixir and your doomsday device.

aristus• 17 years ago

Funny you say that: E is working on something that is both.

sailormoon3• 17 years ago

I believe he means that he intends his consciousness, in some form, to dramatically outlast corporeal human existence as we know it. This simply requires some mechanism to upload one's consciousness, and then all you have to do is wait.

Eliezer3• 17 years ago

Hey, I said human civilization, not humane or human-originating civilization.

nostrademons• 17 years ago

That sounds like an awfully boring existence. What will you do for the remaining 99% of your uncivilized life?

sailormoon3• 17 years ago

Anything he wants? There is a whole universe of things to do. So many books to read, so much music to listen to, so many things to learn and build and understand.

I just can't imagine being bored, not in a million lifetimes.

xiaoma• 17 years ago

There's nothing to say the latter 99% will be an uncivilized existence. Far more likely is that it would be very civilized, but no longer human.

jodrellblank4• 17 years ago

"You should probably die because I'm worried you'll get bored otherwise"

Eliezer3• 17 years ago

http://lesswrong.com/lw/xy/the_fun_theory_sequence/

quellhorst• 17 years ago

I have multiple relatives that are 100+. I wonder what percentage of all people they have lived longer than.

teeja• 17 years ago

More perspective change: according to the 1903 Ladies Home Journal, half of people then died before they were sixteen. One in a hundred lived to 65.

Something else to mention to people who ignore science.

http://craigiest.googlepages.com/ThisWonderfulWorldofOurs.pd...

rjs0• 17 years ago

since this is all about the past evolution of the species, let me throw in a few proposals about the future evolution:

http://geaugailluminati.wordpress.com/2009/07/01/the-human-r... (and) The Moral Imperative of Our Future Evolution: http://www.prometheism.net/moral.html

You will live for longer than 1% of the entire history of human civilization.

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