H+ Elbow Life and Youth Extension
Main Topics
- Issues of individual life extension versus available to all, who would chose it and why
- We will have the tech, but we’ll also need the mental ability to handle it
- Difference between avoiding death and questing for life
- Issues of natural selection, having children (timing, serial monogamy, reasoning, etc)
- Longer lives through biological improvements, mechanical integration, overlap, etc
- Sustainability: Nature, population density, mortality rates, closed systems
- Cryonics, and social implications as well as mental; knowledge being temporally dependant
- Life extension versus Youth Extension (mental and physical abilities)
- Dedication of time, how having more time might (or might not) affect that
- Perception of time and relationships is pulling away from a linear model
Introductions
Rob: researching a creative writing project
Chris: into today’s topic
Gabriel: general topic as a whole
Lady: stumbled upon it
Victor: into this topic for a long time
Cameron: really good at procrastinating
Brian: likes different people’s perspectives
Sarah: here to spread illegal child-like joy
Libby: has a problem, because she’s always around Bloo
Kevin: fresh to the area
Baron: enjoys interesting topics with interesting people
Minutes
1:38 Willow defers to someone else because she’s a cynic; “many who long for immortality don’t know what to do on a rainy day;” would like to go for as long as possible at this rate
2:58 want it for yourself but not for anyone else
3:00 don’t want it for self unless it’s available to everyone else; therapy not advancement
3:18 people who don’t use what they have now will likely fade when they have more time; takes desire to do things in order to want to live longer; who deserves it isn’t an issue, people who don’t use that extra time will just fade away
4:20 will it be distributed on will or on financial ability?
4:41 living for a really long time develops a complex mental state, we’re not built to deal with everything around you falling apart; it’s a psycho-social issue, not necessarily the chemical-science-ability one; the issue is being willing to see cities die, etc
6:04 major challenge is psychological
6:10 Heinlan’s book with Lazarus Long, being bored because you’ve done everything
6:37 we missed the dinosaurs, what would happen in another million years? Curious to see future
7:17 we’re constantly surrounded by the fantastic, manage to make it commonplace; if you’re bored then you’re bored, it doesn’t matter how long you’re around
8:07 so some people just aren’t going to bother
8:13 who would raise their hands to die tomorrow?
8:24 different death background, don’t necessarily *want* to die tomorrow, but others don’t necessarily fear it in the same way, not necessarily a good question
9:08 if you could choose to die at any point, why would you chose tomorrow instead of hundreds of years in the future? Cancer kills 25%, Heart disease another 25%
9:30 so is it avoiding death or questing for life?
9:34 quest for life, we’re so much closer now to curing these issues than we were further in the past
10:02 but something like prostate cancer will hit every male eventually; we’re yey close to curing x problem, given enough time; it’s not necessarily an issue of curing everything; the future is not magical fairy land, it’s a constant process
11:04 what about the Singularity, and living through that?
11:12 we’ll talk about the Singularity at another meeting
Singularity digression
13:55 living forever removes you from natural selection
14:18 any system where we mess with it, if there are errors they tend to build up until they crush whatever’s going on; which is to say, it’s not living forever, it’s continuing to live
14:47 all we’ve ever done is remove a cause of death, we can treat the symptoms; there’s an idea of a Wall of Death : chances of death do not grow exponentially as we have thought
15:54 after you hit the late eighties your estimated life span actually increases
16:07 we’re curing more causes of death, there will always be accidents which cause death or something like it; which I believe removes the psychological issue of death; a process of lengthening life, it’s not going to be our generation, it’s going to be generations down the road, each generation living longer and subsequently waiting longer to have children
17:37 serial monogamy, not just one set of kids with one person
17:53 is living preserving conscious memories? Because that determines what a cause of death is
18:06 what is life? People who live through their children or books they wrote or whatever, different ways to describe immortality; what is you, and how do you preserve that?
18:45 think it will be possible to upload in at least some vague form before we are dead
18:51 so we have the tech now to add 10 years on to your life, and in that time tech comes out to add another 10
19:05 but you’ve degraded in that time and it might not be applicable to you
19:10 if you can add years faster than you’re degrading…
19:20 the tech we come up with now, we have life extension tech now; the people that jump on these things pick up the alpha-release technology; these are notorious for being buggy, which is tough enough to deal with on a computer, but what about if you’re messing with biology? It’s not a smooth-grade curve, it’s a shuddering stepping curve while we sometimes scrap everything
20:49 cochlear implants as an example of once you’re installed with hardware it’s not removable, which only allows for software upgrades, which can’t necessarily be planned for; are we advancing through hardware or biologically? Or overlap, of course
22:07 used to be all about the hardware but hardware can’t learn as opposed to biological systems which adapt to surroundings
22:55 but we have evolving software systems; we can match amoebas in evolving abilities, so when you take that into nanotechnology
23:24 biology runs on proteins which are self-replicating, but building a chip is still incredibly difficult
23:50 but we’re engineering biological things to create computery-type stuff; e-coli making plastic, bacterial processing, etc
24:11 but then is it hardware or biology?
24:15 there isn’t a difference
24:32 population issues
24:52 nature tends to deal with over population when it happens
25:01 higher density cities also often have a lower mortality rate; death tends to be associated with poverty
25:17 we haven’t hit max population density on this planet, but within a closed system it’s not sustainable
25:46 but some places have a negative population growth, considered to go with a wellness of society
26:13 but bacteria self-replicates every 30 seconds, there are different levels of population
26:23 bacteria also stop when they don’t have room any more
26:28 we’re also assuming this is a closed system, which it isn’t, we can go somewhere else
26:44 which we should
26:46 or when we have uploading
27:04 cryonics is also a stop-gap thing
27:16 cryonics have never worked
you can freeze a dog and bring it back after three minutes
yeah, three minutes.
27:32 also the human factor; if there are already so many people on the planet, why would we bring them back?
Culture shock, Transmet stuff
28:02 even if there is social responsibility to bring someone back, that’s where the responsibility stops; more life or more of anything is not really going to change the fact that fresh fruit is better than frozen fruit
28:33 reheating people for lunch
digression
29:25 great thinkers are defined by their point in time; temporily dependant
digression
30:02 end part 1
0:00 life extension and youth extension
0:11 what’s the difference?
0:16 as you age, you become more decrepit; lose physical and mental abilities
0:37 but true life extension is prolonging life in a way that is useful
0:51 most of what has happened with life extension so far has not tacked on what one might consider youth
1:25 telemetric limit, 24-28 year old point when reproduction of DNA
1:54 cancer cells get around that
2:03 defining your youth through telemetric abilities
2:23 individual basis of when youth is
2:36 a brilliant mind trapped in a useless body is useless
Steven Hawking?
Still has enough to get it out there
Well what’s useless then?
3:01 prone to separation of mind and body which is not necessarily true
4:24 if you could adjust your chemistry, we have regenerative medicine now, can redo hormone levels
5:10 mind and body aren’t separate, you can’t be an 80 year old man with a 13 year old’s hormones because those hormones radically affect psychological states; part of the reason older people have more control over themselves is they’re not awash in a tide of hormones
5:48 idea of youth extension as a term for idea of able body and mind, which is very individual, idea is being able instead of degrading
6:29 recreational drugs to recreate youth
7:00 sensible use, people have figured out what they’re good at, strengthening that; from that ability they are able to quest after they really desire; Edison
8:13 we have a separation of mind and body because we only have so much time to concentrate on each. What if time wasn’t such a restriction? When we have to chose between things, something loses; if we have the option to have enough time for everything, will we actually make the right choices?
9:09 never enough time
9:11 what are the economical factors? What happens if you have all the time in the world now? Are you going to punch in for a nine to five or will you take a vacation for a couple hundred years?
9:43 probably will work the same way it does now. Some people want to work even if they don’t have to; people who want to be on permanent vacation are already trying to do that; don’t think it has to do with available time
10:55 people who are not alienated from their jobs might enjoy working; issue of student loans; the economic and social systems we have now will evolve to encompass any extra time we have, unalienated labor will still be rare
11:30 short frantic lives, so we make the most out of what we have in what time we have; new social systems emerging due to more time
12:03 false assumption: we invent tools to save time, to extend lives, and yet our lives never seem to get less complicated or time consuming; there is no clean break between Now and Shiny Future; we have to change what we have to have the future we want
12:58 if you have the short end of the stick now, you’re going to continue having it
13:15 difficult to believe, Singularity, nanotech, AI; our problem in a few decades will be filling time
13:34 with so much more time now than in the past we still live frantic lives
13:47 slave to something different, but always a slave
14:08 reality is always nonlinear, Singularity will bring completely new things, the systems we have now won’t exist; new beginnings, new science
15:16 interesting idea, difficult to talk about until it’s here
15:43 coping is what we do as humans, socializing is the issue
16:00 Vengie? Did he say if the singularity arrived and we weren’t ready for, all we’d have is technological wealth but without value
Singularity digression
16:51 it’s not an issue of if we can do it, it’s if we want to
17:16 you can plan for it too, live off planet, befriend people with similar views
17:39 the longer we’re in our lives, the more expertise you can aquire, which means more is expected, which means more schooling is expected, etc
18:00 the bar will be raised
18:10 why cynical, not a lot is going to change
18:33 very linear way of looking at it, with causality; what about new business models, we have the capacity to think about things differently; so what if the bar is raised for law school, what about a community of law
19:20 unless we work actively things aren’t going to end up that way
20:04 what about renewable and nonrenewable resources?
20:12 well look at the sun
Inefficient but possible; living twice as long means consuming twice as much
21:33 we spend a lot of energy building things that destroy thing; pro genetic modification; soil sterilization example
23:12 the meme of the rapture is so widespread that people don’t care; if people gave that up we’d be a lot more efficient
23:32 in life extension there is an issue of time, people who believe time is linear in a vacuum, others believe it is based on the idea of change; time slow chamber
digression
26:26 life extension only wanted by people if the people they love can live longer as well
27:12 only one person needed; not lonely, but super celebrated
27:29 think that person would break
27:55 many people can welcome people no matter what their age
28:20 FBI report that the most destructive technology would be biogenertology, living so long
28:53 that explains the FDA
29:10 the cohort feeling is an interesting one, do you die off because the people around you are?
29:35 time and energy put into bonding
29:51 biggest psychological issues of life extension; self-selecting; deal with people dropping off; the people into life extension are going to get used to it
31:11 why do people have kids?
31:23 the longer people live, the less likely they are to have kids
31:33 bigger separation between generations; acquired cultural disease, needs to be a connection through time scale
32:12 we have a scale for when it’s right to have kids, it’s always changing; there is no point that you can say it’s always been this way
32:51 the later you have kids, the longer you live
33:28 which is the cause?
33:39 not just the body, the mind must also grow; education is necessary for longevity
34:31 with more education are fewer accidents
34:43 but longest live species are trees
35:07 end
