Just think, 300 more years of gumming my food, shuffling here and there, and forgetting where I live and who you are. But I guess it beats the alternative.
Posted on 07/19/2003 4:56:57 PM PDT by AntiGuv
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Fancy living another 100 years or more? Some experts said on Saturday that scientific advances will one day enable humans to last decades beyond what is now seen as the natural limit of the human life span.
"I think we are knocking at the door of immortality," said Michael Zey, a Montclair State University business professor and author of two books on the future. "I think by 2075 we will see it and that's a conservative estimate."
Zey spoke on the sidelines of the annual conference of the World Future Society, a group that ponders how the future will look across many different aspects of society.
In a presentation at the meeting in San Francisco, Donald Louria, a professor at New Jersey Medical School in Newark said advances in manipulating cells and genes as well as nanotechnology make it likely humans will live in the future beyond what has been possible in the past.
"What was science fiction a decade ago is no longer science fiction," he said.
500 YEARS?
"There is a dramatic and intensive push so that people can live from 120 to 180 years," he said. "Some have suggested that there is no limit and that people could live to 200 or 300 or 500 years."
Outside the conference, many scientists who specialize in aging are skeptical of such claims and say the human body is just not designed to last past about 120 years. Even with healthier lifestyles and less disease, they say failure of the brain and other organs will eventually condemn all humans.
"These people spout off as though a large part of the population is going to be able to do something like this. It's just way beyond reality," said Thomas Perls, who leads the New England Centenarian Study, the largest such analysis of the oldest of the old. "It's just pure science fiction."
"We are fast approaching what our bodies are capable of achieving," he said in a telephone interview. "To get even the average person to be 100 or to get them to 180 is like trying to get a space shuttle to Pluto."
STAMPING OUT DISABILITIES
Any dramatic extension of the human life span would depend on altering the onset of disabilities that accompany the aging process by changing one's genetic make up, said Harvey Cohen, director of the Center for the Study of Aging and Human Development at Duke University Medical Center.
"It's certainly unlikely any time in the near future," he said in an interview. "Sure there is a possibility but there is no data currently available to suggest ways that would happen."
Scientists also differ on what kind of life the super aged might live.
"It remains to be seen if you pass the threshold of say 120, you know; could you be healthy enough to have good quality of life?" said Leonard Poon, director of the University of Georgia Gerontology Center. "Currently people who could get to that point are not in good health at all."
Poon, who leads a study of more than 150 centenarians in Georgia, cited the case of Jeanne Louise Calment of France, the oldest person on record who died at age 122 in 1997.
"At 122 she was fairly debilitated. I visited her when she was 119 in France and at that time she was pretty much blind and having very much difficulty hearing," he said.
Man, that's a tough name to have to live with.
The big gains have been in the average lifespan. These gains have been obtained mainly by raising living standards, nutrition, and medical knowledge, thus allowing more people to reach more of their potential longevity. The maximum lifespan has only budged a little. (There have always been a lucky and healthy few who would live to be around 100. Now the best-cared-for and luckiest live a bit longer yet.)
Well, except for those Old Testament guys. :-)
Just think, 300 more years of gumming my food, shuffling here and there, and forgetting where I live and who you are. But I guess it beats the alternative.
Yep. That's why God is sovereign.
Humans are, sort of special, in that grandparents are a common thing to have. In most species, you are on a very short leash once your ability to breed is over. It is speculated that we have grandparents because they provide resources to their grandkids that outweigh the cost of the resources they hog up.
The longer a human lives past their childbearing years, and their children's childbearing years, the more likely said human is to be simply hogging resources to no particularly good end, from the human race's point of view.
I am not enchanted with the vision of masses of viagra-enhanced oldsters cavorting behind the high walls of their deluxe enclosed condo communities while the comparatively tiny populations of their young, distant offspring scratch in the few remaining, uncondo-ized dirtpiles for a living.
More than most other creatures, humans exist as families and tribes. If you aren't capable, or are no longer inclined to at least chew some leather so the tribe can have thongs to hunt with, than what's the point in you hanging around gobbling up resources? This fear of death we have is infantile, and comes, I speculate, along with this 20th century disease of living alone because you are rich enough to afford to--what you should fear is being useless and irrelevant, and death is the appropriate cure for that.
Quite wrong, I think. If nothing is wrong with your brain's calculator, than the older you get, the more of the culture's resources you control. That's the nature of compound interest.
Having a huge overburden of sufficiently self-absorbed, self-contained old wheezers--as to allow wealth to collect like that, instead of properly passing it on--live 500 or 1000 years will distort the economy beyond belief, and probably beyond remedy. If you want hardy, viable, incredibly well-educated young adults, than your culture's resources should flow into the hands of the young while they can still breed.
I will be buying casino stock, because their slot machine customers are going to be around for a few hundred years longer.
And when do you plan to collect & spend the profits from this venture? See how easy it is to become part of the problem? People who are able to collect, say, 150 years of investment growth will have incredible economic clout compared to people with normal investment frames of reference--such as poor young people just starting out.
As for me, I'm a published author who is right now too busy starting and selling businesses to write. I'd love to have the time to write again.
That's what FR is for. Frustrated essayists. Why not indulge?
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