The primary increases in longevity over the past century have come from increasing survival into adulthood. If, instead of considering longevity at birth, you look at longevity at 35 (that is, how long you can expect to live if you've already made it to 35), the increases are a lot less dramatic. Furthermore, if you look at the records for "oldest living person", that number effectively hasn't moved in the last 200 years, and is stuck somewhere between 110 and 120, which should give you a pretty good idea of where the upper limit is.
Sure, with improvements in medicine, we can keep people productive into their 70s and 80s when they used to spend their last decade or so as invalids. The future of medicine looks like this: you're healthy and active into old age, then you hit the floor. No long suffering, no being bed ridden...but you still hit the floor at some point.
Entertaining the notion that we could live forever if only we spent enough on medical technology is one of the main reasons that we're in the situation we're in. You are not immortal. You will die.
Spot on.
I keep saying that but that's not a very popular point of view here.
HN is rife with 'uploaders' too, people that think that within their lifetime they'll be uploading themselves in to a computer so they'll be immortal.
I really don't get how people can delude themselves like that, given 0 evidence some enormous extrapolation gets made which then attracts a lot of followers.
The human body is a machine. It is a very complex and intricate machine, but a machine it is nonetheless. Yes, we do not yet have the understanding. Yes, we do not yet have the necessary tools. But we will have them one day.
It is a machine, and any machine can be fixed with the right knowledge and tools, and it would seem quite foolish to claim otherwise.
It would seem equally foolish, of course, to plan one's life around the very uncertain wager that these technologies will be acquired by humankind within one's lifetime. No disagreement from me on that one.
Why not? It may be difficult, but aging is a collection of physical processes, and physical processes can be modified with sufficiently advanced technology.
Sure, with improvements in medicine, we can keep people productive into their 70s and 80s when they used to spend their last decade or so as invalids. The future of medicine looks like this: you're healthy and active into old age, then you hit the floor.
That's exactly my point. Medicine today consists largely of playing whack-a-mole with diseases whose underlying cause is aging. That's expensive and produces continuously decreasing benefits. We haven't failed to cure aging; we haven't even tried.
I don't really have the inclination to get into a detailed technical argument but I don't think these sweeping claims that aging is "not going to be cured. PERIOD. FULL STOP!" are credible in the least. The human body is a machine that can be repaired like any other, given the technology and understanding. It might not be in my lifetime, but I can't think of any reason why perfect anti-aging technology would not be available eventually. And if you're going to make broad claims to the contrary, you'll need to back them up.
