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Comment by trylfthsk | Hacker News Reader

"I plan to live forever, of course, but barring that I'd settle for a couple thousand years.

Even five hundred would be pretty nice.

--CEO Nwabudike Morgan, Morganlink 3D-Vision Interview "

I heard, years ago, that even if we ended death from aging then our life expectancy would be about 1000 yrs, that is we'd never die from old age, but instead everyone would eventually die from trauma like getting hit by a bus.

The source of this potentially was aubrey de grey talking on the matter, perhaps in a youtube video? I'm sorry i cannot provide a better source.

Hmm, I've heard that only under 40 is trauma/suicide the leading cause of death. After that, it's cancer and all sorts of other diseases, or like undiagnosed heart conditions.

If we get human head transplants working, we can use regenerative cloning to create new bodies. It'll be the cure to aging, cancer, everything.

If not clones of the patient, we could use monoclonal bodies with O- blood and HLA neutrality to negate the need for immunosuppressants.

New thymuses and pulmonary systems regenerate immune and endothelial health of the brain.

We're close, we just need a conceptual jump. It sounds icky, but not in practicality.

Tangentially, we could use artificial chimeric pig uteruses to artificially give birth. It'd relieve the burden of bearing children.

Just have a robot body and then simply live in VR.

Love the underlying assumption that somehow the head is "you" and the body is the replaceable part.

Can't say I accept that assumption as true, but it is nice to see it laid out so explicitly.

Brains also decay and malfunction with age.

I think if I was amortal I'd make sure to live a lifestyle apart from buses, cars, and airplanes. At least until I was getting brain backups, augmented body parts to reduce my risk to trauma, etc.

Do you currently live in a way that avoids buses, cars, and airplanes? If not, why not?

Because time is precious and the time saving risk is worth it.

This is an interesting outcome of not aging. As time becomes less dire, we can remove it (or decrease it's coefficient) as a variable in choices. Interestingly as we start to do thing more slowly our effective live span shrinks when counted in events rather than seconds. To illustrate the idea, consider if the travel portion of vacationing took 5 years, in a 1000 yr life you'd have at max 200 vacations. Someone who lives to 80 today and takes 2 vacations per year already has most of that number of "events" per life span. In part this is why adding "healthspan" is more important than lifespan.

Mostly, yes. I think it would be even more valuable to do so if I was putting a longer span at risk every time I got in a car or plane.

Because the risk from them is far smaller than the opportunity cost of losing precious hours of your very finite lifespan moving in a slower but safer manner.

Cars definitely. Busses probably. But airplanes are ludicrously safe. Between 2000 and 2010 there was 1 fatality per 5 billion miles. To put that another way you could fly continuously for 1000 years before you would be expected to die.

There are lots of ways to die away from any sort of traffic, though. Lots of accidents happen at home.

It would probably be (even) more important to invest in safety everywhere.

Traveling by bus or scheduled commercial airliner is usually safer than walking. In many years, US airlines have literally zero deaths from crashes.

culture and maybe even progress may stop developing if the generations change stops going

I'm sorry to say but you cannot provably claim this as there's never been a control group. There are disconnected people groups which do not live very long and their cultures are stagnant. And I'd suggest that the most recent century has seen the most development concurrent with massive growth in lifespan...

Mortality per year for 20-25 year old men is 1 in 2650 and for women it is 1 in 4000 in Switzerland.

The mortality would be lower if you add life experience and some risk aversion to it. An average life expectancy of a few ten thousand years doesn't seem unreasonable.

I mean, it seems like the issues created by overcrowding of the Earth would be a pretty quick problem

“On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.”

― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

.. from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, for those unaware.

In the game he was born in 2005, and the game has a mandatory "retirement age" of 2600 at the lower difficulty settings and 2500 at the higher difficulties, so I'm guessing "Even five hundred" was not picked at random.

I think it would help if Nwabudike lived in a massive ice palace so that their only interaction with the universe was the occasional neutrino and OMG particle instead of the dna scrambling cosmic rays that we all deal with.

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