Plan to Live for Longer than You Think You Will
Advice on financial planning for those who are not paying attention to progress in medicine: "My take on the mortality tables [used in financial planning]: they are excessively pessimistic. The mortality tables assume a fairly static biomedical treatment environment in which only small incremental improvements to medical care are possible. No discontinuities are part of the forecast. This seems a very big mistake. On the horizon we can see the approach of effective gene therapies, cell therapies, and other treatments that attack the underlying mechanisms of aging. The scientists doing research on these treatments will succeed. Once they do we will have biotechnology that enables us to repair aged tissue. For a long time mortality has declined fairly slowly. That's because we've had no tools for attacking the underlying mechanisms of aging. Our bodies gradually wear out just like bodies 50 or 100 years ago. We've got medical treatments that reduce the consequences of failing tissue (e.g. blood pressure medicine) and treatments that slow the rate of development of some types of problems (e.g. cholesterol lowering drugs). But we can't do much about the rate at which we accumulate mutations or the rate at which we accumulate toxic intracellular junk. We aren't going to stay helpless against aging tissues. The legions of scientists experimenting with pluripotent stem cells, tissue engineering, gene therapies, and other promising therapies will succeed and they will succeed in the first half of the 21st century. Once we can fix and replace failing parts the mortality tables go out the window as we gain the ability to do what we can now do to old cars: replace parts and keep on going. At some point in the 21st century we will reach actuarial escape velocity where the rate at which we can repair the body exceeds the rate at which pieces of the body wear out and fail. Our rejuvenated bodies will then go on for many more decades and eventually centuries. In a nutshell: If you are in your 30s or below I think your odds of dying of old age are remote. Whether folks in their 40s, 50s, and beyond will live to benefit from rejuvenation therapies probably depends on how long they will live naturally. Someone who is 50 years old and has 40 years to go even without biomedical advances will certainly live long enough to enjoy the benefits of biotechnologies that will enable them to live well beyond 90 years."
I have been a futurist for years. It was innate in me since high school . I'm a 32 year old new yorker. I've been reading sci-fi and was a math and physics/biology student in college. studied some medicine as well. I have a deep appreciation for human history and for scams as I am a lawyer.
I can tell you this. "immortalism" is a scam. What I mean is that it is perdiocally promised by charlottans (both religious and 'scientist' alike) in order to get people interested enough for someone to commit their money.
It is very unfortunate that this charlottanism has succeeded because there is plenty of good experimental work and 'science' on the subject of health and life extension.
What can be expected is that people with money and access to healthcare can be expected to avoid previously fatal conditions. The side-effects of living longer is that diseases of 'aging' tend to afflict these people. cumulative life expectancies have gone up over 15 years in many advanced nations in the last century.
However, the bigger and far more profound issue of life extension is the one no-one is really talking about---the extension of life that comes from raising living standards of perpetually impoverished war torn countries by way of eliminating war. How is war eliminated? with more war. and with more control (peace) . This can happen. People extecting to live to 40 can live to 70 perhaps.
the real issue here is so what? The big answer is that the world of tomorrow , the worl fo 7+ billion people will see more old people than ever, old people who are super wealthy people purchasing an extra 10 years of life from 80 to 90. and people who are poor that would have once died at 45 in subsaharan africa may live to 58. And finally, far lower infant mortality. All of this is accompanied by birth control. which is aggresively pursued in iran, china, and other countries actively pulling themselves out of poverty .
how does this bode for the world? this is an important question. Because when people are done fantasizing about living forever, they will again have to come back to the reality of 'the future', which although is far from certain, is to a degree predictable and really quite fascinating and mind blowing when you take a look.
this is where 'futurists' should be looking. They are not wise, and are easily lead down a foolish path by scam artists. the question is how do we get 'futurists' to focus on the 'real' future, instead of the absurd fantasy that is and has been ( and will be) sold to a naive paradise seeking crowd like a power dazzling drug trip.
it is sad. I for one would like to see a website dedicated to 'realist' futurism , which is basically an aggregate of existing R&D and political trends , a website that would be a repository of criticism for the stereotypical fantasy world of transhumanism to be replaced with a more down to the earth version of the reality of our future and what we can and should do about it.
This fellow (tesla) seems to give little credence to the progress of actual science today. Well, hold on to your hat Mr. tesla! You might want to view the "Live Forever" episode of Through The Wormhole with Morgan Freeman.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2uqMkMa0AY
Tesla, I appreciate your viewpoint, but I have to disagree with you. The very nature of the future is that it is "unrealistic." It could certainly turn out as you predict, but the idea that relative immortality or transhumanism can't happen, or is even highly unlikely to happen, simply isn't supported. You're just putting your own preconceptions out there and calling it realism. You operate under the assumption that there won't be paradigm shifts, when everything we've experienced about technology and science, and indeed, what we say happening even as we speak, says that paradigm shifts happen. How could you have extrapolated in the 1930's that we'd be fiddling with the genetic code, stem cells, trying to figure out string theory, fusion, the internet, etc? By your standard, people predicting the things we actually have today would have been "unrealistic" and misguided.
There is a very clear way forward to regenerative medicine, that would perhaps work indefinitely--i.e., very much longer than the addition decade or so you posit. There's also some rather intriguing stuff happening in energy production, food production, virtual reality, and human augmentation. I wouldn't be at all prepared to "limit" what the future might hold over the next half century. I strongly suspect it will be a much greater paradigm shift than what we've experienced thus far, as we're starting to get to the point where we can do things that don't even seem real. I encourage you to do some more research, as the future is POTENTIALLY much more interesting, exciting, and less limited than you believe.