There's an old quip that the greatest correlation for a country to have supercentenarians is them not issuing proper documentation at birth 120 years ago.
So yeah, currently there's a hard limit - around 100, more or less, but with life seldom being worth living after 90. I really wish we'd start investing in breaking this. I'll happen at some point, the only question is when, and I'd think it's obvious why we'd want it earlier rather than later. But some facet of our psychology makes it very hard to think about this in hopeful ways.
> with life seldom being worth living after 90. I really wish we'd start investing in breaking this. I'll happen at some point
What does that end up looking like though, Logans Run? :D
I can't see a voluntary version of it working because of the very psychological issue you mention, we are inherently self preserving creatures in all but the most unbearable conditions. The other thing with these very personal choices, is that you just don't know until you get there - how do you or I really know if life is not worth living after 90, personally? we haven't experienced it.
I remember my Grandfather, when he was younger, specifically saying he'd rather die than live with a certain disease he saw some other people getting - which wouldn't seem like an unreasonable opinion to most people. Yet after gradually developing the very same disease later in life he certainly was not of the same opinion while he was still lucid... That stuck with me, it's easy to speculate about things you haven't personally experienced, and easy to be wrong about your own state of mind in that situation.
Uh, I meant it the opposite way :) Unaliving yourself at 90 is a personal choice which I of course support, but I'm mostly talking about making sure we can live healthy lives over the current limit.
The psychological issue is that even though we as individuals cling to life (sometimes too much), trying to rouse support for life extension sometimes feels like urinating in public.
There will be people who comes out to say we shouldn't do this because it means dictators will live longer or that old people will remains in power longer, as if old people are a blight on society.
I would consider it good news if old people had to live with their decisions and problems they created instead of leaving it to the next generation.
Change of generation is a thing that used to stump me. It's a valid problem, from older people having weird political choices to scientific research counting on fresh blood (yes it does).
Until relatively recently when I switched to believing that there's actually a biological cause for this: sub-clinical forms of dementia. We just get old and lose capacity for meaningful change. We keep functioning, but the decisions we make are based on what we already learned about the world 20-40 years ago.
Which means it's fixable. I don't want a world where I replace my father and am replaced by my children. I want a world where my father starts acting like a valedictorian again, but with a life of experience behind it.
Which means it's fixable. I don't want a world where I replace my father and am replaced by my children. I want a world where my father starts acting like a valedictorian again, but with a life of experience behind it.
As we move through life, we inherit bias and experience and no longer have fresh perspective. It's possible to get wiser with age, but it's also likely we will gain experience that hold us back, such as hatred and trauma.
Here's the thing: the newer generations are also going through this process too! They are not necessarily better. They might have less trauma, but they also have less hard won experience.
Yes, and if people are able to live forever I don't think that would be a change for the better. The 'haves' would at some point become aware that the 'have nots' have the potential to threaten them if they manage to live just as long, and I'm pretty sure I know how that would end.
I don’t think the point of living beyond 100 years old is the years that come after you are 90 (pretty bad years), but that one has more “nice” years to live. Example:
- average person who dies at 80. Middle point in his life at 40. At 20 the person has already lived a 1/4 of his life.
- imagine a supercentenarian who dies at, for the sake of examples, 120. This person at his 60s is like the average person at his 40s! If we consider that for the average person his “sweet years” end at 35, a supercentenarian’s sweet years end at 51!
I beg to differ. In my opinion, life doesn’t really start until you’re 25 or so, maybe even 30. The first 18 years are generally spent at home, following other peoples rules, and learning how to get by. The next few years you get your independence and start finding your place in the world. If you went to college, then you enter the workforce and are probably getting by, still finding your footing.
Then the real fun starts.
I just turned 40, and feel like I’m finally hitting my stride.
A significant percentage of kids are also hampered in their development while growing up by abuse, miseducation or neglect, so they may need even more time to recover from this and 'find their footing'. Many 25 year olds are still processing childhood trauma and playing catch up with their less disadvantaged peers.
This is a great viewpoint emotionally, but physically you can’t do at 50 what you could do at 25. There’s a reason pretty much every sport (even golf!) has a “masters” class for older players.
This is incorrect or at least incorrectly stated with respect to the word "you". I didn't start running regularly until my late 40's and I loathed nearly every step for the first year but my fitness and enjoyment levels slowly improved especially after discovering trail running. I started participating in ultra trail races after a couple years and found a wonderful community of people enjoying an activity all around me I didn't even know existed. Now, 10 years later, I'm the fittest I've ever been and far more fit than the vast majority of 25 year olds.
Am I going to win races against people half my age who are in peak fitness for their age group? No, of course not. But I can physically do far more at 57 than what I could do at 25 with respect to running. Many people can alter the course of their health trajectories at nearly any age but it requires consistent effort and often ignoring the messages of vested societal interests telling them otherwise.
If you had followed the exact same fitness regimen when you were 25, you would have seen better results: higher speeds, more endurance, shorter recovery times, etc.
That’s why I mentioned sports: even people who have worked out their whole lives, at the top of their sports, see declines in physical performance as they age.
Congrats on getting in shape. Relative improvements in physical fitness are beneficial and possible for many people. But it doesn’t reverse aging.
Recovery times are shortest in children - and become very significantly longer even at ages where maintaining muscle mass isn't too much of an issue. Maximum speed peaks with strength in your mid/late 20s & declines from there. Endurance seems to carry on increasing in to the late 30s & declines very slowly, plenty of ultrarunners, Audax cyclists and triathletes in their 40s/50s.
Obviously had I started from an earlier point, I may have achieved a higher overall peak performance level but that isn't the point I was addressing. Nothing reverses entropy that we know of but that isn't the point either. The point is that saying "you can’t do at 50 what you could do at 25" is patently wrong. I point this out simply because many people have an incorrect perception of their ability to alter their fitness via lifestyle changes.
I’m in my 50’s and I’m a much better golfer than I was in my 20’s. Partly club technology has enabled me to hit the ball more consistently and partly I now don’t try and hit the cover off the ball each shot :)
I don't think the post is talking about golf. If you look at physically demanding sports, most players don't last past 40 unless they're an incredible athlete.
That's quite an assumption. Plenty of examples exist of people with decay starting later than average that eventually went through a short "off-ramp" earlier, plenty of examples of people who experienced significant decay very early but then dragged it out very long, seeing their "still seemed so young ten years ago!" peers disappear one by one.
Please explain to me and try to convince me why we should. I’m serious, I just can’t understand why extending our individual lifespan should be a goal of our age, instead of focusing on making our life much better when it’s more worth living.
They go hand in hand. In most professions you need to be about 40 to be competent. When you're young this doesn't seem likely because you don't see many competent middle aged people: that's because they're up in management actually running things. Unfortunately we start aging mentally around the same age, and at 60 we're not really capable of creative work anymore.
So we live 80 year lives, but with only about quarter of that really giving all we're capable of, and a fair share is being dedicated to raising children. Living an extra 20 years isn't a perk - it literally doubles our most productive years. Living an extra 40 years with most forms of dementia fixed? That's almost unimaginably more productive, and unimaginably richer. Both on an individual level (working+learning more = earning more), but as a society.
You mentioned "when it's more worth living". Not sure what context you're coming from, but life is a lot more worth living in its second half, simply because you know more about how to live it, and have the means to do it. The only problem is you're getting old and senile.
Suppose, right now, normal life expectancy was 200 years. How would you feel about a new program being rolled out to impose disease and death on everyone over 80?
This seems fallacious to me, the scenario you describe has zero opportunity cost for being alive till 200, it's free. Assuming no afterlife, you gain nothing by artificially limiting your lifespan to less than half its amount.
But in reality, there's opportunity cost to trying to extend your lifespan, it's all the money and attention and other resources that could have gone to improving other much more certain-rewards problems.
In other words, your thought experiment is a fully general purpose argument for any investment. It's conclusion is that you should _always_ go for the investment no matter what the opportunity costs.
Example (1)
- We should expand the data center from 80 servers to 200 servers
= Why? our loads are not high, we should instead focus on improving the product
- Well imagine if we already had 200 servers in the data center, would you scale it down to 80
Example (2)
- We should invest in renewable energy
= Why? nuclear power is much more certain and mature
- Well imagine if we already had renewables, would you phase it out in favor of nuclear?
In both cases, you're completely missing the point of your opponent by the "Imagine if we already had" maneuver, we don't, that's why your opponent is against it, it's a risky investment with uncertain rewards and plenty of same-utility alternatives (in the opponent's view).
16 billion people stacked on earth?It's a pointless hypothetical because violence would have prevented that scenario long before. And what grand violence it would be! So much easier sending great-great-grandsons into battle than sons and grandsons.
It seems much easier and more feasible than inventing an FTL space drive. If you could live to be 10,000 or 100,000 years or more you could visit interesting places.
So yeah, currently there's a hard limit - around 100, more or less, but with life seldom being worth living after 90. I really wish we'd start investing in breaking this. I'll happen at some point, the only question is when, and I'd think it's obvious why we'd want it earlier rather than later. But some facet of our psychology makes it very hard to think about this in hopeful ways.