Poll: How long do you expect to live?
Do you anticipate having a normal human lifespan, or do you expect to see radical life extension technologies before your time?
So if we take into account another 40-60 years of R&D, and they are bound to get another 20-50 years out of human bodies.
Ofcourse that doesn't take into account the Mayan end of the world in 2012
My feeling is that it's all-or-nothing. I see the human life expectancy either plateauing around 90, or shooting off into the stratosphere. The reason for this is that most of the current life expectancy gains come from death reduction, which has occurred across the board in recent decades. But a 50% across-the-board death-rate reduction only buys 8 years, because that's the rate at which a person's mortality doubles. Meaningful life extension requires slowing the aging process itself, and I feel like if that can be done through technological means to any meaningful extent (20% slowdown, meaning that mortality would double every 10 years, or more) it can be stopped and reversed, in which case life expectancy goes to 800+.
I'm 25, and expect to have a normal-ish lifespan around 90, but I think the first 500-year-old will have been born before I die.
http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2008/08/11/2331197.ht...
However, success in slowing aging is going to come down to success at slowing the failure of the weakest or most fragile part.
Need to get spaceships and space stations first before we can expand the earth population.
If you visit an old cemetery, you might be surprised at how many people lived to be 70-90 years old. The popular picture of everyone dying at 40-50 years old just isn't true. Rather, the variance on lifespan was much higher: a lot of people died before age 7, then a few in the prime of their adulthood, then several in their 60s/70s/80s.
I also don't think we'll see much improvement in lifespan over the next 50 years, because the biggest killer these days is stupidity. If you look at ultimate causes of death, the big ones now are 1.) smoking 2.) obesity 3.) alcohol 4.) infectious agents 5.) toxic agents 6.) firearms 7.) sex 8.) cars and 9.) drugs (source: http://www.benbest.com/lifeext/causes.html, about 1/3 down). Of those, all except #4 are completely preventable, we just haven't been able to convince people to prevent them.
Stupidity is not "the biggest killer these days". People who avoid 1-3, 5-6, 9 (and possibly 4, 7, 8) on your list still die, just a decade or two later. Not everyone who gets, say, lung cancer was a smoker. Moreover, a lot of "injury" deaths are due to events like frail old people falling on their staircases and, because their bodies don't recover quickly, dying from their injuries and related complications; this can't really be classified as "stupidity".
Age is obviously the ultimate cause of most deaths.
It's only when we give up all of those things could life spans extend through those centuries. It would take a lot of math to calculate life expectancy with perfect and infinite biological health.
I think humans will eventually conquer aging, but not death. Mind uploading seems unlikely, given that we don't know what mind is, nor even whether or not it's physical.