<story><title>Your body wasn’t built to last: a lesson from human mortality rates</title><url>http://gravityandlevity.wordpress.com/2009/07/08/your-body-wasnt-built-to-last-a-lesson-from-human-mortality-rates/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>neals</author><text>I&amp;#x27;d hate to die, for so many different reasons. Why can&amp;#x27;t we all just keep on living? Any change of immortality in the coming 60-odd years? Or is that just not far enough into the future? Are we doomed to die?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>eli_gottlieb</author><text>Here is why you&amp;#x27;re being downvoted: human longevity is an extremely difficult, multifaceted problem.  Research doctors are not even trying to slay a dragon but a &lt;i&gt;hydra&lt;/i&gt;: combat one way to die of old age and another one pops up.&lt;p&gt;Lastly, attempting to forecast &amp;quot;chance of immortality in the coming 60-odd years&amp;quot; is asking a question that relies for its answer on extremely controversial ideas.  Particularly, attempting to answer requires us to forecast whether the rate of advancement in ageing research is speeding up or slowing down.  This is &lt;i&gt;hard&lt;/i&gt;, and can be affected by a bunch of different factors: funding breakdown in non-corporate research, Great Stagnation Hypothesis, breakdown in public acceptance of science, economic decline in some places, economic growth in some places, public uptake of anti-aging ideologies, attitudes towards the retirement crisis we&amp;#x27;re already facing even before anti-aging research comes in.  Oh, and then we face the issue of whether we can or are improving our quality of scientific findings through better research training or data science&amp;#x2F;machine learning techniques.  And then we get to the &lt;i&gt;really&lt;/i&gt; out-there stuff &amp;quot;immortalists&amp;quot; are often secretly thinking of and can&amp;#x27;t stop yacking about: the chance that we manage to create Friendly Artificial Intelligence and trigger a Singularity, thus rendering us all immortal utopian transhumans before many of us on this board even hit retirement age.&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: I have no bloody idea, but I still regard contributing to my Roth IRA as a pretty sensible move.&lt;p&gt;EDIT: The one trend I&amp;#x27;m willing to say I observe is that average life expectancy is a fairly good tracker of social and economic development, even once you&amp;#x27;ve gotten over the infant-mortality hump.  If you want to be immortal, you should encourage society to act in ways that result in longer average lifespans and also to fund anti-ageing research in hopes of achieving the fabled &amp;quot;ageing escape horizon&amp;quot; where medical science advances faster than you die.</text></comment>
<story><title>Your body wasn’t built to last: a lesson from human mortality rates</title><url>http://gravityandlevity.wordpress.com/2009/07/08/your-body-wasnt-built-to-last-a-lesson-from-human-mortality-rates/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>neals</author><text>I&amp;#x27;d hate to die, for so many different reasons. Why can&amp;#x27;t we all just keep on living? Any change of immortality in the coming 60-odd years? Or is that just not far enough into the future? Are we doomed to die?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Hermel</author><text>The question really is: what aspect of you do you want to preserve? You will most certainly change over the years. &lt;i&gt;You now&lt;/i&gt; will be very different from &lt;i&gt;you in 100 years&lt;/i&gt;. Your immortal you in 500 years might be as different from your current you as your grandchildren. Do you really care more about your own existence in 500 years than about the existence of your grandchildren in 100 years?&lt;p&gt;The solution to immortality is to embrace the idea that you won&amp;#x27;t stay the same anyway and that instead of caring so much about your host body, it might be more efficient to preserve what you value in other forms: e.g. your genome and values in your children or your ideas in books. If you write down your thoughts into a book today, these thoughts are more likely to be preserved for 500 years than if you were immortal and relied on your memory.</text></comment>