Comments on: Aging, Health and the Long Term

By: matthew welter

matthew welter — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 05:33:00 +0000

I think what Kurzweil says about aging is right. Infact if it doesn”t
we well go extinct. The largest growing group are those in their 80″s
and it goes down from there. the least productive people are growing
the most while the most productive are growing the least. It will on
only a matter of time before production will not be able to support
billions of a graying population with a smaller and smaller populated
youth. technology won”t save us because each group rolling into
their 80″s will become smaller, and those between 20 to 50 will be
so small that reproduction will collapse.
We can only count on a society that doesn”t age. Not only will it
sustain humans but it will freeze are population to an acceptable
limit.
Were living more of our live”s in virtual world, which means we”ll
problably live all our lives there in the future. I see us moving
undergroud when that happens stripped to our essentials, needing
only material and energy to support our brain. Living only in our mind.

By: John Feeney

John Feeney — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 07:41:28 +0000

Yeah, this is potentially a gigantic looming policy issue.

But I tend to agree that Kurzweil’s predictions are too “optimistic.” In part, that’s because I suspect serious ecological problems will interfere with economies and prevent his predictions from coming to fruition as soon as one might think.

But then, ironically, if they do come to fruition, they’ll create the obvious huge ecological problem you guys point to. I agree the only solution would seem to be a drastic restriction of births.

There are folks who would say the solution is colonization of other planets. But I suspect the life extension advances are likely to come much sooner than the possibility of large scale migration to other planets.

There is even the problem that, given the math of exponential growth, we would fill up the known universe much sooner than one might imagine. Perhaps that realization is why we don’t don’t have hard evidence of other more advanced civilizations all around us?

By: Glen Hiemstra

Glen Hiemstra — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 21:58:56 +0000

We will have to dig further to see what Kurzweil thinks of the social implication. You numbers are eye opening. The only way it works is really drastic reduction in births, perhaps even a kind of Children of Men (the movie), plot line. And could such a world be viable? My favorite read on this possible future is Bruce Sterling’s novel, Holy Fire. Check it out.

By: Bill Harris

Bill Harris — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 16:40:05 +0000

Glen, interesting post. I’m curious: what does Kurzweil see as the policy ramifications of such a development?

Out of curiosity, I did a simple simulation of the earth’s population given an average lifespan of 75 years and a birth rate fraction (that number which, when multiplied by population gives current births) of 0.03633 (combined, that gives a doubling time of about 30 years), and I got an estimated 60B people in a century. When I raised the lifespan to a million years (very few die, much like Kurzweil’s prediction), we ended up with 223B people, almost 4 times as many as in the base model and about 37 times as many as we have today.

My numbers are admittedly crude, and they don’t account for any naturally (or not naturally) imposed limits to growth, but the principle (and the general impact if we no longer die) seems sound: if such a thing were to come to pass, how would we feed / cloth / house everyone? How would we resolve major disputes in a world where there was even less separation to give cooling-off time? Would we choose to limit births (infinite lives and a finite world might mean zero births)? If we did, how would we replace the new ideas we often get from new generations?

Or did I misunderstand something?