Even warning you in advance is no guarantee it won’t paralyze you. Are you ready? Are you sure you are ready? Ok here it comes …..
In no less than 20 years and no more than a 100 years we can have longevity mostly reverse engineered. That means that in that timespan we can have treatments the rich nations can afford (…) to give (through collective insurances) or offer (through commercial packages) it most of its citizens – in a non economically incapacitating manner – where these treatments at that moment are good enough to give a clear majority of the citizens a fair expectation to be healthier every year thereafter.
And you can bet that as soon as people understand this, and believe this, they will want this and they will kill anyone trying to stop them.
In other words at some time between 20 to a 100 years from now:
* People will still be dying of all old age, just a lot more in poor nations and substantially less in rich nations.
* The first person becoming a thousand years old may be born today. That person however when becoming thousand may have only fragmentary recollection of 2010.
* Insofar they have global median incomes, more people will be likely to be living far older than dying before 80
* Individual life extension treatments will be far more cheap and safe if mass-produced, but not in the current profit-central corporate model.
* The poor will be ever more desperate to have higher incomes, because they will know poverty will mean death.
* All Societies will face significant internal pressures to democratize, to make sure everyone gets fairest access to longevity treatments.
* We may (or may not) see the emergence of a merit-based selection where longevity is triaged based on good behavior or ‘general popularity’.
* Right now 150.000 people a day die globally through age related diseases. If one person is worth a million (euro?) (which is a silly idea, either way), then that would mean every day we lose 150 billion, and every year we lose about 100 trillion dollar (euro?) to the maggots. And to tears.
Even if we do nothing, medical and scientific progress right now is so steady that in a century we will more or less stumble in ways to engender effective immortality. If we make an actual effort we can start having tangible results in decades.
Think about it. I have no idea what kind of treatments we may be talking about. All I know is that there is no sensible argument to conclude life extension should be impossible. Let me spell that out in case you had any doubts.
1. you should not beforehand assume that life extension is impossible.
2. Given enough time you can make all animals life extremely long. We have shown this with fast breeding animals.
3. Even now there are already some animals that do not appreciably age.
4. It is already possible to grow simple bits of human tissue and bits of organs in laboratories.
5. It is already possible to create simple bits of functioning artificial human organs
6. we are already increasing human lifespan as a direct, attributable result of implementation of emerging technologies
7. Many scientists in the world who study the fundamental mechanisms of aging state that human life can be radically extended
8. Arguments against the possibility of life extension resolve themseives solely to the inexpediency of human life extension
9. A lot that was considered science fiction in the past has now been achieved by mankind. Cloning and the rudiments of artificial intelligence are today’s reality.
10. Striving towards self-preservation is the main feature of living matter. Life extension is, to a large extent, an evolutionary task for our consciousness.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1T8xgHdMEM&fs=1&hl=en_US]
Imminst is primarily a “discussion forum” that does some fundraising on the side for contributions to life extension research. It also seeks to raise public awareness of Life extension technology.
I’m jobless atm and just as poor as you hun. I still do what I can, which for right now is be eloquent on behalf of the future I see.
If you ever see Damien tell him he’s f HOT.
Actually I am planning two underpaintings for aubrey for publicity reasons 🙂
As foir ‘memberships’ of any organization, I’d become member of anything, including the AEI or the bloody vatican, as long as someone sponsored me. Right now I live of disability IRL. And no I have stopped with the thinking that talk=contribution.
Current focus:
http://terasemcolony.wordpress.com/
Start at the bottom.
*giggle* Why are you not a member of the Immortality Institute? http://www.imminst.org/forum/
Please join. I write a technology development thread there regularly.You don’t have to be a paid member to contribute to the discussion.
Yes.
Neelie Smit. Hero.
I would correct that.
Mass produced (where there is much competition and monopolies are restricted) is always cheapest.
Mass produced with a sole supplier (whose monopoly is protected by the state) is always the most expensive.
Mass-produced produced demanded by many consumers, where the state actively protects consumer rights are always cheapest.
Mobile phones are extremely cheap from a historical perspective, and specifically so in Europe where the state actually gives (somewhat of) a damn about its citizens.
Aubrey de Grey mainly talks about engineering type solutions.
i.e. like you drive your car into the repair shop, they check it out and replace the worn out part with a new part.
The first technologies like that are arriving:
* There is a process which allows the replacement of worn out cartilage by removing the worn out cartilage, replacing some kind of bio-matrix and adding some chemicals which encourage the body’s own cells to grow into the biomtrix, thus creating a new replacement cartilage part.
* There is another process similar to the above that allow replacement of corneas with cartilage shaped corneas
* There is another process (I forget the details – but it’s somewhere on science daily’s website) whereby arterial plaques are destroyed and the arteries renewed.
Though none of these processes are currently any more than in the lab,
as time goes by there will be more and more repair processes technically possible and commercially available.
Obviously the rich will get these first, but if capitalism is allowed to do it’s thing, other newcomers to the field will be encouraged to develop cheaper more efficient processes, lured by the smell of profit.
Conversely, it could all go to shit if things collapse due to a big conflagration around Iran and Israel.
Interesting times.