Your body wasn’t built to last: a lesson from human mortality rates | Hacker News Reader

Your body wasn’t built to last: a lesson from human mortality rates

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The MIT Technology Review held a contest of sorts, offering $20,000 to anyone who could prove that Aubrey de Grey's "Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence" was "so wrong that it was unworthy of learned debate." They received 5 entries, 2 of which were discarded, and the other three can be found on their website along with de Grey's rebuttal and the subsequent responses.

http://www.technologyreview.com/sens/index.aspx

In his TED talk, de Grey claimed the the first person to live to 1000 may already be alive today.

Not saying I necessarily agree with him, but according to the judges at MIT - TR, it's at least not outside the realm of reasonable debate.

Yes, but showing that de Gray's ideas are not "so wrong that it was unworthy of learned debate" sets a pretty low bar. I would disagree with that statement even though I fully expect to be in a grave along with de Gray in several decades.

I just thought de Gray's work was relevant because it addresses the counterpoint to the author's central thesis. The underlying assumption here is that the body has a built-in expiration date that we cannot avoid, but I didn't think it effectively answered the question of when that expiration date actually is.

My problem with the article, I guess, is the lack of a perspective over time. De Gray also posited that the first person to live to 1000 is probably already alive, I'm not saying all of this really makes sense, but it is scientifically feasible and should at least be noted in an article that asserts the opposite.

According to Wolfram Alpha, the probability of living past 100 (in the United States) increased from .17% to 1.4% between 1933 and 2000 and then to 2.4% in 2008. Living past 70 jumped from 45% to 75% to 76% in the same time period. This has a lot of interesting ramifications that I'm not really in a position to investigate, but they are clearly worth addressing.

edit: sources: http://www16.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=life+expectancy+U.S.+...

http://www16.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=life+expectancy+U.S.+...

The article says there is an expiration date in the body. Nowhere it says that it can't possibly be 'avoided', just that current and foreseeable medicine is not quite there yet.

current and foreseeable medicine is not quite there yet

That's the key point. We all know eventually the singularity will arrive. And we know we have PLENTY of work to do today to make things a little bit better but still be far short of the singularity.

So it's wonderful to be a cheerleader for progress, but it can also be kind of annoying on occasion.

   "Exponential decay is sharp, but an exponential within an 
   exponential is so sharp that I can say with 99.999999% 
   certainty that no human will ever live to the age of 130."

It pained me to read that. But because we don't know why the equation fits, we don't know that there is nothing that can be done to make it shift. Maybe one day we will talk about life span like a shifting demand/supply curve.

That statement would make sense with the addition of "at our current level of technology."

(Ignoring, of course, the upward shift in the lifetime distribution that will result from future medical advances)

...

I think 200 years ago, the curve would have allowed him to say something like "the exponential is so sharp that I can say with 99.999999% certainty that no human will ever live to the age of 90."

I am not saying that my generation will be able to live to 500, but I bet that someday people will.

(I am interested in seeing the graph of "maximum possible lifetime" throughout time.)

"You were made as well as we could make you". "But not to last."

The light that burns...

Too bad Moore's law doesn't apply to medical science, but in any case I'm hoping we'll see some major advances to put in the "cops" arsenal.

Senescence is one of the prices of having evolved rather than having been specially created.

It's surprising that we don't work harder on fixing this. 10x what we're spending on AIDS might be a good place for a start. Imagine what humanity could accomplish if the standard life-span was just 200 instead of 70. Imagine what you personally could accomplish.

Would humanity really be better off by having individuals living longer? I can see the personal benefits of course, but younger individuals are less set in their ways and thus more likely to come up with the outside the box kind of solutions to problems that we need to solve.

Plus, they're more likely to accept the world as it is now instead of moaning about how much better everything was fifty years ago... (I think there's some kind of statistic or history tracking that has shown that in the mind of society, everything has always been better fifty years ago. I recall reading something about how the young are only interested in partying and fighting - written by a monk two hundred years or so ago).

A counter-opinion about generational perspective: http://curmudgeonjoy.blogspot.com/2008/08/strange-mirage.htm...

Choosing limited lifespan to achieve a particular political balance strikes me as a truly bizarre approach.

As far as science...just take care that smart people have as many kids as they ever do, and we'll be okay.

It is interesting for me to note -- as a purely anecdotal personal observation that is no way supported by any scientific or quantitative evidence from a credible source whatsoever:

The people that I consider the most intelligent and/or smart in various general and specific ways also seem to be the most given to not want children (and some go so far as to get operations that effect this biologically). Many others further down the distribution of "smart people" are inclined to have fewer children, and have them later.

In other words, in my personal life experience there is a very strong inverse correlation between the intelligence of people and the amount of children they have or will tend to have, and that's assuming they have children at all. The intelligent folks I have met seem to be the only group where a total rejection of childbearing exists to a statistically non-negligible degree, to put it mildly.

No, not politically correct at all, and, perhaps unsupported by bodies of evidence other than my own (mis?)perceptions.

But I don't think I'm the only one who has noticed this.

I've heard this argument before, and while there might be something to it, I think it's more specific to say that ambitious people tend to have fewer children. This makes sense purely in terms of time commitment: the more time is devoted to raising children, the less will be devoted to one's startup, research, political ambitions, etc.

This doesn't necessarily mean that more intelligent people will have fewer children, as it's more of a question of prioritization than of ability. It does probably imply a weak correlation (smarter people tend to like to use those smarts), but there are certainly many intelligent people out there who value their children more than they value their personal ambitions. (While this is certainly not a given... consider your parents!)

Graduate education is the most effective form of contraception.

This is a wildly different situation than existed even 100-200 years ago. Gregory Clark has some historical data on the industrial revolution, if you're interested.

Old men will be young men more prone to partying and risky deeds. This will be especially true when all their children grows up.

Today's "younger individuals" who are less set in their ways used to be the old folks, back when life spans were much shorter. I think if life spans extended to 200, someone in their 50s would be considered to be at their peak of productivity, optimism, and creativity, because they haven't yet been saddled down with the need to provide stability for their family. Risk and reaching for the gold ring is a young man's game, afterall. A 50 year old today can't take much risk because they don't have much time to recover. A 50 year old who can expect to live to 200 can take greater risks, because there's plenty of time to recover.

If we do triple our life expectancy, it's probably best if we do what you're implying and delay the time before we have kids by the same amount of time. Otherwise we'll have to get used to having eight generations living at the same time instead of the three we have now - and that'll mean that we more or less triple the population.

We're apparently struggling to feed six billion now, which problably means that we'd need to get rather creative to feed eighteen billion.

This entire argument is predicated on the false assumption that you know what being young and healthy for 200 years will be like. We don't. We don't know if old people are "stuck in their ways" because it is an intrinsic part of being old, or if it is because their brain is becoming physically less flexible, and subsequently they rationalize the ways they first learned.

It's also predicated on the assumption that it's actually bad for long-lived people to get a little stuck in their ways. This may not be true either; society is unstable, in the physics sense of the term, what with the constant influx of new naive people. Adding some more "momentum" into the system may be safer and better. Again, I'm not saying this is true or false, only that the casual assumption of the truth is unjustified.

Having 120-year-old youth will be a genuinely new phenomenon, and nobody knows what that means. Preventing such technologies from being used or developed (or even arguing against it) based on such terrible arguments would be a terrible thing to do.

Since we don't know what being "young" and healthy for 200 years is like, the assumption isn't false. I'd prefer to call it unverified.

I never said that it's bad to be stuck in your ways: what I said (or tried to say) was that not being stuck in your ways makes it easier for you to come up with novel solutions to problems.

Having a certain amount of momentum in society is definately a good thing, but having too much of it means that society will respond too slowly to a changing environment. In my opinion, our current momentum doesn't make us too volatile. That's just my opinion, though, but that might just be a reflection of me being fairly young.

"In my opinion, our current momentum doesn't make us too volatile. That's just my opinion, though, but that might just be a reflection of me being fairly young."

I'm only 30 myself, which definitely moves me out of the flush of 18-24 but hardly qualifies me as an old fart. I sometimes think that going a bit slower could be helpful to society, but the truth is that we don't have forever to dilly-dally where we are. If we're going to win the sustainability race with the high-technology solution [1], we need to get there before the resources run out.

[1] http://www.jerf.org/iri/post/2417

With a 200 year lifespan, we would have people trying to enforce cultural norms from 180 years ago. In 1829, women couldn't vote, slavery was common, imperialism was considered good foreign policy, it was common sense that women and blacks were incapable of complex tasks or higher level reasoning, and forcible relocation of American Indians was being practiced. Meanwhile, the steam engine was considered pretty hot shit.

To ask someone who grew up in that era to accept the son of an African immigrant as president, gay marriage, streaming pornography, the fall of the European empires, globalization, and software startups as facts of life is absurd. Likewise, if we lived long enough to build the world of 2189, it would have the same petty biases and taboos that we have today.

It's important sometimes for generations to forget bygone eras and move on.

Why is it absurd. Many of our grandparents have seen all of these things change in their lives and they have accepted them.

Because they are increasingly outnumbered by younger people. The social norm changes, probably faster than they're comfortable with, but with or without them as they die out. Black people go from slaves to sharecroppers in a generation, but it takes over a century for any of them to become millionaires, CEO's, and presidents. Women have progressed even slower.

My grandparents are all dead, but I suspect that few of them would be pleased with the prospect of a black president. Even my parents would be less than pleased to learn that I was bisexual.

Your grandparents may be more open minded than mine, and that is a credit to them. But for every one of them there's ten old people who don't keep up as well.

I think there are a lot more people nowadays that are open to new and changing possibilities than there were in 'bygone eras.'

{edit} Just to add, I think this is because newer generations are growing up in a world where things are increasingly in flux; whereas older generations grew up in much more stagnant times (with respect to social and technological progress). {/edit}

Everyone thinks they're open-minded about change, because they only see a relatively small amount of social change in their lives. I wish we could revisit this discussion when we get old though, because I suspect many of our ideas and taboos will seem silly and be routinely flouted by future generations.

Maybe the 'general population' but I, personally, am accepting of a great many things. But I guess if we went into reverse social change I would have a hard time living in a society with slavery reinstated... But in general, I'm disappointed with the lack of social changes in many aspects of society today.

I didn't mean to imply that you weren't. I think there are people living today who would get along fine living in the year 2189. But even a progressive in today's society usually wants a specific set of changes that are orthogonal or even opposed to changes that may come in the future. The comeback of polygamy (now billed as "polyamory") in some circles would have come as a shock to the generations that abolished polygamy.

Would humanity really be better off by having individuals living longer?

How does it make sense to talk about how 'well off' humanity is outside the context of living people?

It's important not to overlook the role that disease still plays in old age. Engineering a standard lifetime of 200 years without improving the current morbidity rates would be an enormous drain on society.

Yes. I don't think anybody would wish for another 130 years tacked on to their lifespan if it were all spent in a nursing home.

But, due to the nature of the problem, that sort of thing is unlikely. Fixing old age will necessarily involve making us healthier.

Imagine what humanity could accomplish if the standard life-span was just 200 instead of 70.

We might find that we can't accomplish much, as older, more set-in-their-ways voters choke off support for innovation in favor of being supported in their old age. (We could give the United States as a partial example of a country where this is already national policy.) Note that I am not grinding axes for young people here--I am probably already more than half-way through my lifespan, and definitely a good bit older than most HN participants.

If we have the technology to live that long, the quality of life will probably be higher. There might not be a difference between a 150 year old and a 50 year old. The need for special treatment for older people may not be an issue at all.

Well, if we were specially created, Gen 6:3 would explain Senescence. No need for you to jab at fundie hackers when it's not what your comment is actually about.

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