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.
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!
> 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.
> Why should we measure medical technology at the rate of new drugs developed?
Well, I'd stand behind the assertion that it is a reasonable approximation to our ability to understand and modify a biological system. But, I'll happily concede that this is not the only game in town. Your point about tissue engineering is well made, this is highly exciting and should provide some real benefits. But there is a awful lot of hard biology to master here; so while I really hope that we see some rapid initial progress, long term exponential growth here is going to be just as difficult as it is elsewhere in biology.
> But there is a awful lot of hard biology to master here
I honestly think most of it can be skipped. The age-old adgage that "a ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure" is totally obsolete with respect to longevity science. Once you've gone past your DNA's "expiration date", it's easier to repair damage than prevent it.
Drug development also hinges on the false belief that invented drugs are the most effective (ginger worked better for my wife's morning sickness than any drug she was allowed to take, including morning sickness meds) at treating a condition.
DNA sequencing and GMOs would allow us to rapidly implement the medical grade production of substances we're trying to chemically mimic with drugs. It will also allow for easier production of these compounds so we can even test some of them in the first place.
>Which is why we desperately need companies to be able to make any medicinal claims at all about their products without being forced to substantiate them.
You didn't merely make the bald-faced assertion, you were very rude about it with your snide "ftfy".
I've studied this stuff for years. I understand your status quo view, that thinks that good intentions are a substitute for philosophic rigor. Your view doesn't stand up to rational scrutiny, and it's holding all of mankind back.
>that thinks that good intentions are a substitute for philosophic rigor.
On the contrary, I think that scientific rigor is a good substitute for the free market when it comes to profiting from scientific advances. You can argue that the system in place is flawed and politically biased and perhaps it is, but the alternative is to treat cancer treatments and heart medication the same as vitamins and crystal therapy.
What profound innovations are being held back because of people like myself who demand that certain claims meet a standard of proof before hitting the market?
I don't think you know what scientific rigor is. If you did you'd realize it doesn't operate well under threats of force by bureaucracies.
In any case, this is a complex issue that can be examined and debated from various perspectives, but you're just coming in here to pimp the status quo, as if that's useful. Your kind has already won by a landslide, there's no particular point in bullying people who think you have made a mistake. A person with an actual scientific mindset might be curious about new ideas, not pretend they know everything, and bully anyone who comes to the table with new information.
By the way, you're making various presumptions about my view that are false. I never said anything in support of medical fraud or crackpots. And again, this is the kind of sloppy reasoning I've come to expect from your side of the aisle. Your arguments won't stand up to scrutiny, ergo you fabricate straw men. This in itself demonstrates something to suspect in your viewpoint.
>If you did you'd realize it doesn't operate well under threats of force by bureaucracies
Isn't science itself a form of bureaucracy? Or is peer review also a "threat of force?"
>I never said anything in support of medical fraud or crackpots.
You did, though. Your original statement implied that regulation of medicine itself was the problem. There is ample evidence to suggest that quack science and chicanery would flourish in an unregulated environment, because the overriding principle would no longer be an attempt at scientific plausibility but profit. And rigor costs money.
This is one of those situations where I feel the presence of government is a net benefit over the absence of it. Whether that government is qualified or operating credibly is a different matter.
As I said, this is a very complex issue, I can't hope to address all your points here but let me try to address an important one.
You are equating science with government enforcement of majority opinion. Think back to the time of Galileo. Why would you want to make this equation?
You want to think that times are different now, that the majority is wiser than it used to be. Why should that be so, exactly?
Imagine that leaders in the software industry could prescribe what languages were "safe" and what weren't. Imagine what that would do to innovation. Isn't it better to let people decide for themselves?
You fear that lack of regulation would lead to unnecessary harm and death. Yet, what of those who are intelligent enough to know the risks and wish to try new things, knowing the possible consequences? What of the cancer patient who is sure to die in 3 months, who wants to try a new experimental drug, but is legally barred from doing so? How can you justify this tyranny?
You wish to protect the ignorant from their own bad choices, but does this make them more intelligent or less? And what of those who are smarter than you, who know better than you, and who you have banned from doing things to help themselves? What of the future people who would have benefited from what they could have learned, that you prevented them from learning?
These are the types of questions you need to be asking yourself. You also need to stop pretending that fraud is allowed on a free market. It is not.
>Think back to the time of Galileo. Why would you want to make this equation?
Science isn't an enforcement of majority opinion, and that's not the equation i'm making. I'm asserting that the scientific process is an implicit good, in that it requires claims to be provable, and that experts exist to validate them, and that forcing companies which profit from scientific endeavors to present proofs of their claims is also good.
I don't think one can draw a very strong parallel between the world of Galileo and today, anyway, if that were still the case then Charles Darwin and Edwin Hubble would have been burned at the stake. Just because a premise is unpopular and the scientific mainstream rejects it doesn't necessarily imply it has merit on the basis that the scientific establishment exists to hinder progress.
>Imagine that leaders in the software industry could prescribe what languages were "safe" and what weren't. Imagine what that would do to innovation. Isn't it better to let people decide for themselves
I believe this is, in fact, what many industries and the government do - setting rigorous coding standards which include allowing certain languages, and is one of the reasons mission critical systems are not written, for instance, in Node or PHP. I also believe the entire field of cryptography is more or less based on not blindly trusting everyone who comes up with a clever substitution cipher and just hoping for the best. Note that the parallel here between computer science and medicine is where the application directly affects human lives - nobody really cares about "innovation" in webapps, for instance (except maybe for implementations of crypto) but you're probably not likely to kickstart a new operating system for a surgical robot or spacecraft.
>Yet, what of those who are intelligent enough to know the risks and wish to try new things, knowing the possible consequences? What of the cancer patient who is sure to die in 3 months, who wants to try a new experimental drug, but is legally barred from doing so? How can you justify this tyranny?
I can justify it because your question implies that this treatment necessarily works. What if this new experimental drug is complete nonsense? What if the drug company opts to falsify its studies, or hide its side effects, or market it towards treatments for which it is ineffective or dangerous?
> And what of those who are smarter than you, who know better than you, and who you have banned from doing things to help themselves? What of the future people who would have benefited from what they could have learned, that you prevented them from learning?
People like Jenny McCarthy and Dr. Andrew Wakefield who "know better" than to vaccinate children against disease? Or people who "know" AIDS doesn't really exist? Or everyone who "knew" during the plague years that disease itself was caused by bad foul odors, so they surrounded themselves with perfumes and dropped like flies?
If and when this knowledge can be validated, verified, and reproduced then it's science. But you appear to be conflating opinion and belief with science, when those things exist in opposition to one another.
Furthermore, the scenario here is where someone is informed of the risks/benefits, and they want to take part of a treatment plan you disapprove of. The first thing you do is dishonestly preemptively categorize it as crankishness, as if being different than the status quo ipso facto makes it nutty. This is revealing in itself. But on top of that is the fact that IT IS NOT YOUR BODY. So not only are you dishonest, you are grossly immoral.
Why do you keep speaking of the "status quo" as if the scientific method were just a function of inertia and a lack of imagination, or mere politics without any necessary relationship to objective truth? I don't believe at all that being 'different' makes something unscientific. It not being grounded in good science, however, does. I define 'nutty' in this regard as being, simply, unverifiable. Again and again you seem to presume that the establishment is "holding back" innovation yet not once have you given an example of an obviously valid innovation which is being held back.
And you would be correct in stating I was immoral if I were actually arguing that people have no right to do what they like to their own bodies, in fact I believe the opposite. And although I believe your premise is founded on a strawman and a misrepresentation of what science is, in insisting upon the edge case, I won't ignore it.
Let this theoretical person who knows more than "the establishment" do what they like. I believe such people can actually prove their theories and like Galileo and others, will eventually win out. However, their right to do what they wish with their body does not, and must not be extended to an insistence that science, and medicine, accommodate every possible belief, practice or concoction without scrutiny.
The scenario you pose is intractable because it is precisely the claim of quacks and charlatans that the scientific establishment is holding back, dismissing and suppressing their discoveries. What then, are we left with if no set of common standards should exist for science, and no means to enforce them, to differentiate between real, possibly revolutionary claims and spurious ones? Are we simply to let people take whatever bill of goods they're sold and if they're not smart enough to understand the intricacies of DNA testing or nutritional science or genetics then too bad for them?
What i've been, rather consistently I believe, stating is that private enterprise doesn't have the right, nor do scientists in fact, to do what they like to your body without following strict protocols or having a basis for doing so. Human medical experimentation has a particularly nasty history, and it's regulated for very good reasons. I've been neither dishonest nor immoral in this regard.
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.
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.
I don't think this would be an issue, since to have a world where people live longer, you also need to have fewer kids. You can only practice ageism if you have a surplus at the young end.
That is an excellent point, although lets say an average grad is remains employable for the same 1/4 of his working years, thats still in absolute terms more years for the unemployable 3/4 of his working life. Assuming we'd continue working the same fraction of our lives, and not continue to retire at 60-something and then remain retired for the next 440 years.
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....
Well then, I can happily inform you that depending on just how physics works out, we might just get a solution to that whole "heat death of the universe" problem. Too early to tell, precisely, but I've heard some neat things about new child-universes forming inside black holes such that they torque space itself and generate non-conserved new mass-energy.
Any value of forever large enough that we need to find someplace to put our excess memories outside our original brain is still getting into "forever" territory from the perspective of our current lives.
People already do this. The traditional forms of memory storage are known as "diaries" and "photo albums". It is universally acknowledged that without their aid, your brain will overload and lose the information you wanted to preserve.
But despite all this, no one thinks of human life as lasting "forever", or anywhere close to it.
The irony is the only things I can't forget are the ones written down or photographed. I never need to look at them, but if they weren't written down it would have vanished.
It's like I have a form of telepathic cloud storage. So long as the physical information exists, I can always remember it and will never look. So some is potentially in a Schrödinger's cat state as I never know if my wife actually threw the note out or not as I'll never need to go look for it.
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?
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.
>It's a direct result of accidents slowly becoming the primary cause of death.
Unintentional injuries were responsible for 39.4 deaths per 100 000 in 2011 [1], behind heart diseases (191), malignant neoplasms (185), chronic lower respiratory diseases (46), and cerebrovascular diseases (41).
The age-adjusted unintentional injury death rate "was relatively unchanged, from 38.6 deaths per 100,000 population in 1985 to 37.7 deaths per 100,000 in 2004" [2].
EDIT: while unintentional injury death rates have held their ground, overall death rates have been in decline. Hence, unintentional injuries are rising as a proportion of deaths (though they have a good distance to cover before they can tap on disease's shoulder).
>you want to check the accident rate relative to the non-accident rate
You are right - that the "risk of dying decreased by 60 percent from 1935 to 2010" in the U.S. [2] while the unintentional accident death rate remained constant so, yes, the fraction of deaths caused by accidents would have increased. My mistake.
>You should check statistics only for under age 30.
Injury deaths for ages 0 to 29 actually average 36 per 100 000 per year, less than the population average of 39. Granted this is a quirk of injury death rates being lowest for 4 to 12 year olds (average 6 per 100 000 per year) - this is the only age group for which injury death rates are below 10 per 100 000 per year. It then climbs to a local maximum of 75 at age 21, a level not seen again until age 74. A second local minimum occurs at ages 30 to 34 (average 56 per 100 000 per year) and a third at 56 to 67 (average 51 per 100 000 per year).
And presumably the non-accident death rate below 30 is even lower (relative to the population average).
Basically if an under 30 dies it's becoming more and more likely that it's a result of accident rather than anything else. And this causes people to become more and more cautious. i.e. it used to be that people had a real chance of death anyway, so taking a (physical) risk is not that big an increase in risk, but now it's a larger relative risk.
When I was a kid, I should have lost my fingers for playing with fireworks. Roman candle wars, bottle rocket barrages... in hindsight I'm surprised we all made it uninjured to graduating highschool.
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.
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.
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?
>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.
> 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.
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.
Your first paragraph is more-or-less my point. You have an unlimited amount of time to make it safer now. Unfortunately, you don't have an unlimited budget, so the result is that you don't launch anything. Except meetings. Lots of meetings.
Anyway, what happens when you have trouble finding qualified crew because no matter how much work you put into it, it'll never be "fully debugged?" (When you're doing something new, there's not any good way to tell if the barrel is full of bees, other than sticking your head in it.)
"Unfortunately, you don't have an unlimited budget,"
Actually you do, if you model NASA as a jobs program and take an infinite amount of time.
Slowing time down by a factor of ten would have a huge number of economic effects aside from NASAs budget, but presumably you could take ten times as long to R+D and then launch 1/10th as often with no impact on progress per lifespan.
One problem from the SS program is it promised all things to all people so that would give the same jokers ten times as many chances to make ridiculous specification promises. So the new design constraints would have to be smaller than a Cessna 172, and HTOL instead of vert takeoff and the payload would be 100 times what it actually could carry, etc, at which point they'd probably find a way to blow it up 1 in 50 times again.
"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
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).
Because over time the replication of cells becomes imperfect, I'm not going to try and explain it because I don't feel like I truly understand it but that's the essential bit, after around the age of 35-40 your cells stop replicating perfectly and errors start building up which eventually lead to the actual cause of death, things like organ failure or cancer.
Thanks for catching the typo, I don't look these posts over well enough sometimes.
"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]
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/