The futile quest for immortality
Articles like these always crack me up. While it's true that one can (in theory) live longer by making lifestyle adjustments, it's hardly a sure thing. "Everyone" knows this. But then you get the fringe crazies like Ray Kurzweil, and this guy who are just completely out in left field swatting at flies and picking their noses.
Immortality naysayers point to all the historical attempts to live forever with comments like "What do the ancient purveyors of physical immortality all have in common? They are all dead." Witty, but often they fail to point out that science — among other things — isincreasing the average lifespan in a truly meaningful way. Chronic illnesses are the leading killers in the first world instead of infectious disease.
Are these immortality naysayers wrong? No, but it's important to remember that we've also never been at a point where mankind's fundamental understanding of biology is growing at such an exponential pace, so looking at historical precedents for guidance is rather, well, silly. True, we won't live forever, and I don't think the technology will exist (in my lifetime, and I'm fairly young) to augment flesh and blood with machine in a meaningful way. Even if it did, resistance to such technology will be just as prevalent as resistance to abortion is today. And such technology will create an elite that the underclasses (for lack of a better word) will resent. Think crabs in a bucket.
Let's also not forget that death is a necessary part of life for the sake of survival at the species level. If you've got millions of people living to be 1000, you're going to find resource scarcity will become a very real problem, even though those people living to that age will likely reproduce at a much lower rate than the rest of the world. (High standards of living and incomes tend to depress reproductive rates.) The demographics of "virtual immortality" simply don't add up when there are only finite resources are available for consumption — as is the case here on Earth.
Demographics, of course, cuts both ways — not just in the negative direction. Higher incomes often lead to a longer lifespan according to a new study:
All of the people in the Whitehall study had access to universal medical care, and none were impoverished. Still, there was a substantial difference between the life spans of junior and senior civil servants. Those who made more money, or who had attained higher rank, lived substantially longer. Mid-level administrators did better than porters–even after risky behaviors like smoking and drinking were accounted for.
Given what I know about the average effect on happiness as tied to wealth, this is probably due to a better attitude more than it's due to having money. Correlation does not equal causation — which the article doesn't explore — and I wonder whether those with more positiving ("winning") attitudes live longer and extra wealth is simply a function of their more positive outlook on life. This would fit with the "wealth helps a person live longer and happier, but only to a point" mantra that the data supports once you reach a certain income threshold — after this point, the effects on lifespan and happiness are statistically indistinguishable from zero.
In the meantime, medical science will continue to advance the average lifespan as it has done for the last 100 years. I wouldn't be surprised to see average lifespans creep up to 100 years or so in my lifetime. But certainly not 1000.
[tags]Medicine, immortality, quack medicine, income, happiness[/tags]
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