Death Is An Outrage
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Robert Freitas', 'W')hile you were reading this sentence, a dozen people just died, worldwide. There. Another dozen people have perished. I think this is an outrage. I want to tell you why I think so, and what nanomedicine can do to help.
Figure 1: Worldwide Death Toll in 2001
Let's look at the dimensions of the human holocaust that we call "natural death."
The death toll in the Year 2001 was worst in India. Almost 9 million casualties. The bodies were piled nearly as high in China. The United States fell in third, with 2.4 million fatalities. 21 nations lost over half a million lives, each. These 21 countries represented all cultures, races, creeds, and continents. The human death toll in the Year 2001 from all 227 nations on Earth was nearly 55 million people, of which about 52 million were not directly caused by human action, that is, not accidents, or suicides, or war. They were "natural" deaths.
Figure 2: Natural Disasters
Even the most widely recognized greatest disasters in human history pale in comparison to natural death. For example, the typhoon that struck Bangladesh in 1970 washed away a million lives. In 1232 AD, Genghis Khan burned the Persian city of Herat to the ground. It took his Mongol horde an entire week to slaughter the 1.6 million inhabitants. The Plague took 15 million per year, World War II, 9 million per year, for half a decade each. The worldwide influenza pandemic of 1918 exterminated less than 22 million people – not even half the annual casualties from natural death. But natural death took 52 million lives last year. We can only conclude that natural death is measurably the greatest catastrophe humankind has ever faced...
PeakOil is You
Death Is An Outrage
Death Is An Outrage
by Schadenfreude » Mon 14 Apr 2008, 03:28:04
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'I')t is as if in the Year 2001, someone took out a giant broom and swept up all the physical assets of human civilization into a cosmic trash can, and then threw it all away. That's $100 trillion dollars of financial assets, real estate, and durable goods. Gone. And then in 2002, the giant broom sweeps again. Another $100 trillion dollars of human capital is destroyed, or three times larger than the $33 trillion dollars of annual economic activity represented by world GDP. Then it happens again in 2003.
But the economic disaster caused by natural death is even worse, if you go back through history. Since the modern human species first emerged, perhaps 25 millennia ago, 34 billion people have ever walked the Earth, and 28 billion of us have already died. The equivalent total information waste is more than 28 billion books, enough to fill almost 2000 Libraries of Congress. The equivalent total economic waste is about $60 thousand trillion dollars, enough to rebuild our current tangible civilization 600 times over. If you carry the tally back a million years, to the very dawn of man, all these figures about double. Natural death is a disaster of unprecedented proportions in human history...
Bootstrapping Our Way To An Ageless Future
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'B')iomedical gerontologist Aubrey de Grey expects many people alive today to live to 1000 years of age and to avoid age-related health problems even at that age. In this excerpt from his just-published, much-awaited book, Ending Aging, he explains how.
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '.')..I'm now going to switch briefly from science to the history of science, or more precisely the history of technology.
It was well before recorded history that people began to take an interest in the possibility of flying: indeed, this may be a desire almost as ancient as the desire to live forever. Yet, with the notable but sadly unreproduced exception of Daedalus and Icarus, no success in this area was achieved until about a century ago. (If we count balloons then we must double that, but really only airships—balloons that can control their direction of travel reasonably well—should be counted, and they only emerged at around the same time as the aircraft.) Throughout the previous few centuries, engineers from Leonardo on devised ways to achieve controlled powered flight, and we must presume that they believed their designs to be only a few decades (at most) from realisation. But they were wrong.
Ever since the Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk, however, things have been curiously different. Having mastered the basics, aviation engineers seem to have progressed to ever greater heights (literally as well as metaphorically!) at an almost serenely smooth pace. To pick a representative selection of milestones: Lindbergh flew the Atlantic 24 years after the first powered flight occurred, the first commercial jetliner (the Comet) debuted 22 years after that, and the first supersonic airliner (Concorde) followed after a further 20 years.
This stark contrast between fundamental breakthroughs and incremental refinements of those breakthroughs is, I would contend, typical of the history of technological fields. Further, I would argue that it's not surprising: both psychologically and scientifically, bigger advances are harder to estimate the difficulty of.
I mention all this, of course, because of what it tells us about the likely future progress of life extension therapies. Just as people were wrong for centuries about how hard it as to fly but eventually cracked it, we've been wrong since time immemorial about how hard aging is to combat but we'll eventually crack it too. But just as people have been pretty reliably correct about how to make better and better aircraft once they had the first one, we can expect to be pretty reliably correct about how to repair the damage of aging more and more comprehensively once we can do it a little.
That's not to say it'll be easy, though. It'll take time, just as it took time to get from the Wright Flyer to Concorde. And that is why, if you want to live to 1000, you can count yourself lucky that you're a human and not a mouse. Let me take you through the scenario, step by step...
I bet PenultimateManStanding will be the only PO.com poster to make it to 1000 years of age. But he won't be bragging about it on that marvelous birthday; Oh no! He'll be talking about something completely off-topic.
Last edited by Schadenfreude on Mon 14 Apr 2008, 04:14:57, edited 1 time in total.
- Schadenfreude
