Time interviews Larry Page about new venture to extend human life
business.time.com
business.time.com
Thinking about improving total life expectancy in this way is not so useful because the large gains have already been made. For instance if no-one in the UK ever died between birth and age 60 it would only add 2-5 years to life expectancy at birth. 100 years ago the same situation would have added 20-25 years.
Perhaps more interesting would be to look at increasing the maximum life span, reducing the variance about the age of death, increasing the median age of death, or to consider the effect of curing cancer/other diseases on healthy life expectancy which I think could still be meaningfully increased.
So, can we radically extend life? Probably, with sufficient research.
But without solving the other two issues it raises huge problems. Unless of course we're talking a tiny immortal class controlling all the world's wealth and dwindling resources, and the rest with no access to it.
Until we can provably show that resources outside of Earth are available for human consumption, and within some range of feasibility; it's not valid to use the argument that the potential availability of said resources are a solution to the magnification of natural resource depletion on Earth caused by overpopulation.
I understand that it is rather prudent to presume to act as if we are limited solely to Earth's resources - because we are right now - but to be reflexibly dismissive of space exploration as an avenue to be actively pursued to remedy such issues is simply not constructive.
But more basically you can add up energy consumption necessary to sustain any basic average standard of living sufficient to also maintain a functioning global economy, multiply it by population and compare it to the NOT proven reserves but net recoverable energy taking into account EROEI and it's not a good number. Google is your friend.
Further, this ignores other essentials such as topsoil depletion, fresh water and NPK inputs - NPK inputs are very limited in quantity, depleting rapidly and incredibly energy intensive to recover.
Exponential growth can't continue forever in nature.
Inductive reasoning? Sure. But not wishful thinking.
Regarding the first, though, if we need to produce X horsepower for Y hours, then we can do it by using Z gas + Z' gas, or Z gas plus an idea for a more efficient engine. Ideas absolutely replace energy. They can't, so far as I can see, replace the last bit of energy, but we're nowhere near that.
Yes, I said as much.
"Efficiency gains aren't going to cut it with the energy consumption dynamics we have."
Maybe not; that's a broader question. The point is that you can displace some need for energy with efficiency gains or alternatives. The more energy you're using, the more of a difference an idea can make, since ideas tend to mean proportional improvements in efficiency (though not necessarily large proportions).
Whether it's sufficient is a huge question that would require a lot more attention than I'm able to give this right now (which is why I've persisted in staying out of the mainline of the discussion here).
No need. This is just for those with the dough to spend. Who cares about the unwashed masses?
To the people that will use this, upper middle class is like white trash.
http://www.kurzweilai.net/monolith-when-google-hired-ray-kur...
Now he can put Google's resources to work on the problem.