The Core
Why We Are Here => Water Cooler => Topic started by: Mackin USA on April 05, 2015, 10:57:49 AM
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2015/04/04/tech-titans-latest-project-defy-death/
“Death has never made any sense to me,” Larry Ellison
A number of guests were skeptical about achieving immortality. But could science and technology help us live longer, to, say, 150 years? Now that, they agreed, was a worthy goal.
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>sense
Flip side
http://news.sky.com/story/1458210/teenager-trapped-in-100-year-old-body-dies
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Growing old ain't for cowards.
When it gets so I can't care for myself I want to check out early. The nightmare is extending the age of enfeeblement for decades for no reason. Just my personal opinion.
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enfeeblement
I'm not a big fan either ;D
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I say it as "Old age is not for the faint hearted"
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Not the first tech giant to go there: http://time.com/574/google-vs-death/
Baby boomers in general see death as an afront, a problem to be solved. Of course, so does Voldemort and I don't think the comparison with Google and Ellison is completely off base.
>>Growing old ain't for cowards.
The famous version is attributed to Bette Davis: "Getting old is not for sissies" or "Old age ain't no place for sissies" but Wikiquote lists only the latter and has it as "attributed" not verified - http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bette_Davis
It was a favorite quote of my mom's. I told it to my friend Ray who after a career as an engineer and other things, was a ski instructor in his mid 70s and he responded with his cackling laugh and said "Yeah, but it sure beats the alternative"
So I made this for my mom
(http://i3.cpcache.com/product/265704097/getting_old_not_for_sissies_sweatshirt.jpg?color=White&height=460&width=460&qv=90)
http://www.cafepress.com/dd/27923541
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Yes the second line often follows from my Dad, although it is not something we have discussed in the last 3 years.
Love the designs, thanks for sharing :)
Back to the original post, I cannot help thinking long levity would be better for some people but not others.
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Http://www.2045.com
...complete with timeline.
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A dissenting view from "Ezekiel J. Emanuel is an oncologist, a bioethicist, and a vice provost of the University of Pennsylvania"
http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/09/why-i-hope-to-die-at-75/379329/
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I'd love to live a long life, and I'd take 120+ years if I could. I'm thrilled at the possibility of seeing how the society and technology will change through a century plus of observation. I'd like to live long enough to witness the discovery of life somewhere other than here, even if it is just some type of bacteria. If I get 80 years of a full life I'll be satisfied with that too.
<edit: removed the ranty bit>
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My hope is to truly -live- until I die, whenever that happens to be.
An extended period of enfeeblement isn't what I'd wish for but if that's what happens I pray for the spirit to live it gracefully.
The other thing I hope is that my money lasts as long as I do!
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My hope is to truly -live- until I die, whenever that happens to be.
I don't want to delay death. I want to extend health.
Read the Ezekiel Emmanuel article - it has some sobering points regarding how we've been much better at delaying death than we have at extending health.
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I guess I need to draw a distinction between living with lessening physical prowess and what I'd call extended end of life care. I think if I could live life with a mind in tact and still have the ability to interact with the world in a way that I find stimulating I'd want to keep going, even if that meant living with some disabilities. I think that is different than what happens to a lot of people at the end of their lives as they try to squeeze out an extra week or month under brutal conditions. Obviously this stuff is very much a personal choice.
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Well said, LM
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Obviously different for everyone and I guessed that's where you were coming from.
For my old boss, his work was everything. Two days before he died, we agreed to final edits on a book we co-authored. He was working right up to the end despite being in a wheelchair after his brain hemorrhage.
That said, the brain hemorrhage left him with poor vision and unable to walk. Reading, writing, lecturing and teaching were his reasons for being. I say he was researching up to the end, but at the end he needed someone to read to him. So the final drafts of our book, he edited by listening as our rough drafts were read aloud to him.
Anyway, all that to say that those last years of poor health were actually fairly productive for him (most people never publish a book even in their best years). But I think he regretted them. He told me often that he was depressed and didn't see the point anymore if he couldn't read and couldn't walk. Of course it's not for me to make that decision for someone else, but I think in retrospect, he may have preferred that the homorrhage had killed him.
I could give up a lot in life and be happy. I'm sort of looking forward to being a crotchety old guy who can bust the chops of the kids (i.e. anyone under, say, 70) and get away with it. My grandmother once told me her 80s were her best and happiest years and I can see there are many pleasures in life and don't mean to deny it.
But Emmanuel's article is definitely interesting food for thought especially for those of us already into (or well into) middle age. I don't believe science is going to save us. Today's two year-old may in fact be healthy and productive for 120 years. I think our life spans, though, will be much like our parents and having seen family die slowly and die quickly, I will choose younger and quicker any day if I can. But like Littleman, as long as I'm reasonably healthy and can make myself a thorn in the side of youth without being a burden to them, I'll keep kicking.
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IT is likely the first person who will live to be 1,000 years old is already alive today.
http://www.news.com.au/technology/science/researchers-believe-a-biological-revolution-enabling-humans-to-experience-everlasting-youthfulness-is-coming/story-fnpjxnqt-1227304902553
Can't believe any news out of AU ;D
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This is coming from Aubrey de Grey who laid this out in a 2006 TED talk.
https://www.ted.com/speakers/aubrey_de_grey
He's always struck me as a bit overoptimistic, possibly a bit crackpot... a couple steps closer to the fringe than Kurzweil.
The great thing about people who made prognostications about the world in 2025 is that I have a decent chance of being here to find out if they were right. 2050... not so sure. 2100... not unless Aubrey de Grey really picks up the pace.
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It is most likely quackery, but who knows. Human knowledge has been growing exponentially. There are animals that are biologically immortal, meaning they will not die unless they are killed -- lobsters being one of them. Perhaps one day we'll discover a biological switch.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_immortality
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>>It is most likely quackery
I don't think quackery. There's real science behind it, but often the promise of science takes a long time to realize and there are many false starts and dead ends.
When my wife got her doctorate, the commencement speaker was a senior scientist who talked about fashion in science. He made the point that in the late 1970s and early 1980s it was almost impossible to get funding in his field unless you had a gene therapy slant. By 2002 when she graduated, he noted that you couldn't get funding for anything that did include gene therapy and the great promise had fizzled. It was only in 2006 after 34 years that therapies started to look promising, but even today it's considered experimental - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_therapy
Kurzweil and de Grey always focus on exponential progress and that's true. My wife's major professor was one of the first people to do PCR and basically had to sleep in the lab and manually move things to sequence DNA. It was huge. By her era, you just plated it and put it in a PCR machine and had a sequence by morning. By the time she was done six years later, people were sequencing arrays of about 1000 sequences at once. Who knows where we're at now, but the cost in time and money has shrunk to nothing for a given sequence if you're doing them at scale.
But translating that to medical knowledge and longevity effects is a much slower process.