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You are here: Home / Politics / Politicans / David Brooks Giving A Seminar At The Aspen Institute / We’ll be eternally free yes and eternally young

We’ll be eternally free yes and eternally young

by DougJ|  January 7, 201111:09 am| 129 Comments

This post is in: David Brooks Giving A Seminar At The Aspen Institute, Good News For Conservatives, Green Balloons

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This strange quote from Mitch Daniels isn’t getting much attention for some reason.

What you’re saying to these younger people is – who, by the way, I think, barring disasters, are going to live to possibly old ages, as we have always thought of it…. They will live to be more than 100, because, again, barring accidents or something, or war, well over. They should. They’ll be replacing body parts like we do tires. If you ask a young person who’s paying any attention to this, “How old do you expect to be, and how long would you like to be a vital working person?” they’re not going to find this offensive. Thirty years from now, you might work at 68, 70, 72….

Frankly, the answer, to me, is a means-tested basis that’s adjusted for people’s health status. With the money we spend on Medicare, you could give people enough money to purchase a very good insurance program suited to them.

What is he talking about? From what I can see, the life expectancy for Americans born today is projected to be 76 for men and 81 for women (EDIT: and note that these figures are almost identical for people 10-40 today, to be pedantic about “young people today”). That is just a projection so it could go up, but it has only gone up by about nine years since 1950, so I don’t see why it should suddenly shoot to 100 now. Perhaps some new shit has come to light that I am not privy to, but it seems more likely that Daniels is just talking out of his ass.

It goes without saying that if Daniels were a Democrat, we’d be hearing about how he’s a hippie weirdo who’s out of touch with traditional American values about lifespans, how no one at the Applebee’s Salad bar thinks they’ll live to 100 (they’re just worried about their next pay check and how big a bite the government is going to take out of it). RedState commenters would start calling him mitchdaniels and in all future discussions of life expectancy, simply saying “Mitch Daniels is short” would trump all arguments.

Since he’s a Republican, though, this probably just shows that Daniels is a Burkean visionary in the mold of Ronaldus Maximus.

But it also shows that Daniels likes saying weird unsubstantiated sci-fi shit. So I ask you: will Daniels be hurt politically if he starts talking about robot sex a la Instapundit?

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129Comments

  1. 1.

    Nellcote

    January 7, 2011 at 11:13 am

    Then there’s that different life expectancies by race thing. Also too.

  2. 2.

    MikeJ

    January 7, 2011 at 11:14 am

    I prefer New Frontier, but nice pick for the hed.

  3. 3.

    DougJ

    January 7, 2011 at 11:14 am

    @Nellcote:

    I took the figures for white Americans to be as generous as possible with the figures.

  4. 4.

    Mumphrey (formerly Renfrew Squeevil (formerly Mumphrey Oddison Yamm (formerly Mumphrey O. Yamm (formerly Mumphrey))))

    January 7, 2011 at 11:16 am

    I always loved Donald Fagen.

  5. 5.

    Elvis Elvisberg

    January 7, 2011 at 11:16 am

    What a glorious time to be free.

    You’re welcome, Iraq! Some fine number-crunching ol’ Mitch did helping make that happen.

    EDIT: … Aaand, I see I’m the third person to be all psyched about the lyric reference. Well, ok, here’s the video for New Frontier. I’d seen the last 10 seconds of it in like 1995 til digging it up on YouTube recently. Great stuff.

  6. 6.

    Cat Lady

    January 7, 2011 at 11:17 am

    And Spandex jackets for everyone!

  7. 7.

    Omnes Omnibus

    January 7, 2011 at 11:17 am

    @Mumphrey (formerly Renfrew Squeevil (formerly Mumphrey Oddison Yamm (formerly Mumphrey O. Yamm (formerly Mumphrey)))): No, they were talking about Ronald Reagan…. What? Oh, never mind.

  8. 8.

    Belafon (formerly anonevent)

    January 7, 2011 at 11:19 am

    As everyone has pointed out, this increase is largest among the wealthy. The lower middle has only seen an increase in life expectancy of one year. It’s basically just another tax cut for the rich.

  9. 9.

    Comrade Javamanphil

    January 7, 2011 at 11:21 am

    It’s 80s lyrics day on BJ and I couldn’t be happier. Also, Mitch Daniels is an idiot.

  10. 10.

    burnspbesq

    January 7, 2011 at 11:21 am

    This buffoon is being seriously mentioned in some Republican circles as a potential Presidential candidate.

    That is the Republican Party in a nutshell. Gulp.

  11. 11.

    Ann B. Nonymous

    January 7, 2011 at 11:22 am

    The taqiyya master plan is working. After Daniels successfully wins the Republican nomination in 2012, it will be crypto-Muslim versus crypto-Muslim in the presidential election. Therefore, using Logic, the taller candidate will win. This follows from Aristotle.

  12. 12.

    sven

    January 7, 2011 at 11:22 am

    Twice I have had long and awkward conversations with friends who were convinced that the filmEnemy of the State represents technology currently employed by the CIA/NSA.

    How many people think CSI or NCIS represent real world forensic science?

    I would love to see some academic work assessing the extent to which the public has confused the media (movies, tv, video games) for reality.

    Xkcd link

  13. 13.

    The Grand Panjandrum

    January 7, 2011 at 11:25 am

    Al Gore is fat.

  14. 14.

    Bruce (formerly Steve S.)

    January 7, 2011 at 11:25 am

    He may be right, we may kept alive to impossibly old ages by 2100. Of course, we’ll be spending 40-50% of that lifespan with type II diabetes, and all the reality shows on future tv will be about people coping with gout. Spandex jackets, one for everyone.

  15. 15.

    Shinobi

    January 7, 2011 at 11:26 am

    From the perspective of a 28 year old, they need to think about LOWERING the retirement age. There are SO many boomers, and no one in my generation or the one before mine can make any money because the boomers are never going to retire.

    Let the boomers retire, let the younger folks actually make some money so we can afford to take care of the boomers.

    THEN if you want to raise the retirement age, fine. But I’m not exactly sure what they think is going to happen if people just keep working until they are 75. It’s not like there are suddenly going to be more jobs for all these people to do. There are just going to be fewer young people with decent jobs. (As if this number needs to get much lower.)

  16. 16.

    burnspbesq

    January 7, 2011 at 11:27 am

    @Comrade Javamanphil:

    “It’s 80s lyrics day on BJ”

    Can we get equal time for some 60s lyrics?

    “ahhhhh wake me, shake me, when it’s over.
    Somebody tell me that I’m dreamin,’ and wake me when it’s over.”

  17. 17.

    Robert

    January 7, 2011 at 11:28 am

    Mitch knows of what he speaks.
    As soon as noted cloning expert Christie O’Donnel can work out the kinks with “cross-breeding humans and animals and coming up with mice with fully functioning human brains”, we’re all going to live to be 100, maybe 150 years old. (I won’t have to exist in a mouse’s body, right?)
    I say the hell with Social Security. Who needs it when you can work at WalMart for 80 years?

  18. 18.

    Blue Neponset

    January 7, 2011 at 11:33 am

    His point about being able to buy “a very good insurance program” with the money we spend on Medicare is bogus too. If all those old people were added to the insurance rolls insurance premiums would skyrocket.

    It would have been nice if the dope that did the interview challenged Daniels on this obvious point.

  19. 19.

    Alex S.

    January 7, 2011 at 11:33 am

    Apart from his strange scifi vision, I was confused by his life expectancy claim as well. As far as I know, the life expectancy number most widely known is life expectancy at birth, which is about 80 for women and 76 for men right now, or something around that. Daniels says that the babies born right now will become 100 years old, so I think he doesn’t understand the concept (or he really believes that we should model present social programs with the expectation of several scientific revolutions falling from the sky). In any case, this statement alone should disqualify him from being the “intellectual republican”.

    Edit: Oh, and I should have read what Doug already said… but I read Daniels’ statement yesterday and was eager to get my opinion out.

  20. 20.

    dr. bloor

    January 7, 2011 at 11:34 am

    What is he talking about? From what I can see, the life expectancy for Americans born today is projected to be 76 for men and 81 for women.

    Not disputing that Daniels is an idiot, but if you make it to 65-70 these days odds are you’re going to hang around until you’re in your mid-80’s. It’s cherry-picking in the sense that you’re no longer counting those who have already died, but we’ve become pretty good at keeping old people alive longer. I can definitely see that pushing 90ish by the time my twelve year old son retires.

  21. 21.

    Jennifer

    January 7, 2011 at 11:34 am

    Of all the possible “fixes” for social security, raising the retirement age is the worst.

    Plenty of people over 65 work now. But you don’t find too many of them working as tile or brick layers, plumbers, roofers, etc. Which is what a lot of people do for their careers. For most of them, their bodies won’t allow them to continue this type of work past current retirement age – and for many of them, it becomes a struggle long before then.

    Then again, those aren’t the types of people Republicans care about.

  22. 22.

    grass

    January 7, 2011 at 11:34 am

    I’m pretty sure those tables you linked to are taken as an average of the whole population, i.e. if you lift past the age of ten, you have 66.3 years to live on average based on the current population. That is to say they do not include predictions about future improvements in lifestyles and medicine. I might look for statistics later, but life expectancy is increasing, and children born today will live longer than 80 years.

  23. 23.

    Omnes Omnibus

    January 7, 2011 at 11:34 am

    @Robert: If our brains are transferred to mice, our cost of living will decrease. Cheese prices will skyrocket. Someone will need to work on crossbreeding mice with opposable thumbs. Cats will become a major concern. The fashion industry will need to account for tails. This stuff is complicated. I wonder if O’Donnell has fully thought this through.

  24. 24.

    GregB

    January 7, 2011 at 11:35 am

    Have we seen Mitch Daniels birth certificate?

    We know these Mooselim types are on a roll and have even taken over Gorver Norquist so we can’t be too cautious.

    Besides, Mitch Daniels is an anagram for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

    Ann B., Throw in Ralph Nader and we’ll have a perfect storm of an electoral Muslim trifecta.

  25. 25.

    Omnes Omnibus

    January 7, 2011 at 11:38 am

    @GregB:

    Besides, Mitch Daniels is an anagram for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

    It is actually a McAnagram, like a McEstimate.

  26. 26.

    rec

    January 7, 2011 at 11:39 am

    .. and even if the sci-fi scenario does come true (medically speaking), you pay hundreds of dollars today for seeing your doctor for 15 minutes, but apparently replacing your internal organs and a few limbs would be easy and affordable.

    Free market, baby. And those good private insurance programs of course.

  27. 27.

    Dave

    January 7, 2011 at 11:39 am

    Replacing body parts like tires? Really? Even if that happened, he acts like you could get a kidney for 44.99 at the local Organs-R-Us.

    When your party’s “serious thinkers” are Mitch Daniels and Paul Ryan…it’s time to consider shutting the whole operation down.

  28. 28.

    mclaren

    January 7, 2011 at 11:39 am

    Large majorities of the American electorate and the American elites like saying weird unsubstantiated sci fi shit.

    Let’s take a few examples:

    1) The U.S. army has said it plans to replace 30% of its soldiers with robots by 2020. This, despite the fact that we still can’t get computers to run for more than about an hour without crashing and giving the blue screen of death. Remember that scene in Robocop where the ED 209 prototype goes berserk and kills one of the board of directors? Yeah, that’s the future of the U.S. army, I bet that’ll work out real well.

    2) Ray Kurzweil and company keep gibbering about how we’ll all be interfacing with our computers by talking to them within five years. Despite the fact that speech recognition hit a wall of 80% accuracy and has never gotten beyond that no matter how much processing power we’ve thrown at it.

    3) The computer industry keeps yelling about how much faster and better and more sophisticated the new CPUs are, despite the fact that CPUs hit a 3 Ghz wall back in 2002 and have never been able to get any faster.

    4) We keep hearing about fabulous new social software and new paradigms for being connected, despite the fact that Web 2.0 isn’t discernibly different from the FIDONet bulletin boards I used to log onto back in 1985.

    5) We keep hearing all sorts of bullshit from the medical community about all these alleged breakthrough cures. But if you have back pain today, there’s no cure. Nothing. Spinal fusion surgery has been shown by studies not to work. If you have tendonitis? No cure. Nothing. No treatment. Suffer. That’s the treatment. If you have arthritis? No cure. Nothing. No treatment. You cringe in agony. that’s the treatment. For most types of diseases there is still no cure and in many cases not even any treatment. Doctors are lying, hospitals are scamming people, and the drug companies are for the most part engaged in a vast Ponzi scheme that generates drugs that cause more harm (like Vioxx) than the disease they’re trying to treat.

    6) We’ve been told over and over that automation will improve our lives. Back in the 1960s, pundits smugly assured everyone that the work week would soon drop to 20 hours and the big problem in American society would be finding something to do with all our free time. Now, in 2011, people are working three jobs and still can’t afford food.

  29. 29.

    Chet

    January 7, 2011 at 11:42 am

    Daniels says that the babies born right now will become 100 years old, so I think he doesn’t understand the concept (or he really believes that we should model present social programs with the expectation of several scientific revolutions falling from the sky

    They’ve already fallen from the sky, though. I mean how much longer do you think people can possibly continue to die from old age, now that we know:

    1) Why the body degrades with age;
    2) How that process can be harmlessly arrested;
    3) How, practically, to quintuple the lifespan of mice and other mammals.

    Diabetes? Cured in mice. Old age? Cured in mice. We know how to genetically engineer a mouse that can run 5 kilometers without tiring – the equivalent of biking the entire Tour de France in one go without even feeling winded.

    Sure, that’s all in mice, and the differences between mice and humans are not trivial which is why we’re not all supermen and superwomen, yet. But how long do you really think that obstacle can last? How long do you really think the human genetic condition will limit us in an age when you can do genetic engineering in your garage?

    You guys can keep talking about how buggy whips continue to make a great investment since people won’t stop needing to travel any time soon, but that’s really missing both the point and the reliability of scientific/technical “revolutions.” This whole thread deserves a Von Newmann award.

    Learn to think in terms of exponential growth.

  30. 30.

    Sentient Puddle

    January 7, 2011 at 11:42 am

    Indeed he is talking out of his ass. We’ve seen dramatic increases in life expectancy throughout history mainly because of two things: A drop in infant mortality, and the concept of sanitation.

    But because of that whole infant mortality thing, he’s confusing the concept of “life expectancy” with “life span.” There’s not really any good reason to expect life span to really increase much in the future. Not unless there’s another big thing along the lines of sanitation coming soon.

  31. 31.

    Ross Hershberger

    January 7, 2011 at 11:42 am

    Daniels is kind of on the right track but he’s gone way too far.
    Humans die of component failure, not system failure. Component replacements and repairs have extended lifespan.
    Currently the fastest growing demographic is people in their 80s. If you make it to 80 in decent condition you may well see 90. But no, you still won’t be digging ditches in your 70s.

  32. 32.

    Pangloss

    January 7, 2011 at 11:44 am

    I doubt life expectancy will be that high after the GOP dismantles Medicare.

  33. 33.

    Villago Delenda Est

    January 7, 2011 at 11:45 am

    I would love to see some academic work assessing the extent to which the public has confused the media (movies, tv, video games) for reality.

    You left out “Local TV news” from your list of media entities that confuse the public. Violent crime rates are going DOWN, according to the FBI, but it’s still “if it bleeds, it leads” on local TV news, which shapes the perceptions of most Americans.

  34. 34.

    PeakVT

    January 7, 2011 at 11:45 am

    It sounds like for a minute or two Daniels was channeling Newt, who has occasionally spewed futurist nonsense. Newt is still with us, unfortunately, so that means world has at least two Republican futurist wackaloons. Joy.

  35. 35.

    Ross Hershberger

    January 7, 2011 at 11:46 am

    @Chet:

    The meds. Open the bottle. Take the pill. Sit still until it takes effect.

  36. 36.

    steviez314

    January 7, 2011 at 11:46 am

    Will people who are left behind after the Rapture still be eligible for Social Security? Cause there could be some savings there. Just sayin’.

  37. 37.

    Dork

    January 7, 2011 at 11:51 am

    2 wetsuits and a dildo will add at least 7 years to a lifespan.

  38. 38.

    suzanne

    January 7, 2011 at 11:51 am

    @mclaren:

    The U.S. army has said it plans to replace 30% of its soldiers with robots by 2020. This, despite the fact that we still can’t get computers to run for more than about an hour without crashing and giving the blue screen of death.

    Sure we can. If you’re on a Mac. (Yeah, I went there.)

    I think a whole army of sleek, minimalist, aluminum-bodied iSoldiers would be quite visually appealing.

  39. 39.

    Svensker

    January 7, 2011 at 11:55 am

    @Chet:

    Learn to think in terms of exponential growth.

    OK.

  40. 40.

    Ross Hershberger

    January 7, 2011 at 11:57 am

    @mclaren:

    If you have tendonitis? No cure. Nothing. No treatment. Suffer. That’s the treatment.

    True. After 6 months of ‘treatment’ (pulling on rubber bands) and $10K in insurance billings I own my work related lateral epicondylitis for life. The only hope the doctors have is that it will flare up and they can soak the insurer for another barrel of cash.

  41. 41.

    New Yorker

    January 7, 2011 at 11:57 am

    They’ll be replacing body parts like we do tires.

    I look forward to replacing my old brain with a new one and donating the old one to one of Christine O’Donnell’s mice.

  42. 42.

    Villago Delenda Est

    January 7, 2011 at 11:57 am

    @Chet:

    Learn to think in terms of exponential growth.

    You mean like cancer cells?

  43. 43.

    uila

    January 7, 2011 at 11:59 am

    Is Mitch not aware of the Great Fattening? Something like 1 in 4 people over 60 have diabetes. I declare Peak Life Expectancy.

  44. 44.

    Chet

    January 7, 2011 at 11:59 am

    You mean like cancer cells?

    Cancer cells are immortal as well as growth-unregulated. There’s no reason to believe, though, that the traits have to come hand in hand. What if your body’s cells could be normally growth-regulated but immortal?

  45. 45.

    Ross Hershberger

    January 7, 2011 at 12:03 pm

    @Chet:

    What if your body’s cells could be normally growth-regulated but immortal?

    If this was possible, where are the immortal organisms that 3,000,000,000 years of evolution produced?

  46. 46.

    Barney

    January 7, 2011 at 12:04 pm

    To defend what Daniels said slightly, you need to know that ‘life expectancy at birth’ figures are based on “the current chances of surviving a year from aged 0” followed by “the current chances of surviving a year from aged 1”, and so on. So the current “life expectancy at birth” figure implies no improvement of survival in any form in the future. It doesn’t matter if smoking figures have been going down – there’s an effectively assumption they’ll never improve again, and neither will diet, or available drugs and techniques, and so on.

    And so, if you do try to project figures of how healthcare figures are improving, you get results like 3 million UK under-16s will live to 100. And that’s from one in five of 61,792,000, or 12.4 million – about 25%. Life expectancy at birth for the UK is less than a year more than for the USA, according to Wikipedia.

    So it’s reasonable to think that a quarter of today’s American children will live to 100. And while that’s not what Daniels said exactly (he was vague, but it was a chat, not a speech), you should be thinking in terms of lots of survivors to 100.

  47. 47.

    scav

    January 7, 2011 at 12:04 pm

    @Villago Delenda Est: And house prices will eternally go up too!

  48. 48.

    Omnes Omnibus

    January 7, 2011 at 12:09 pm

    @Ross Hershberger: Well, there’s me. Of course, that is a limited sample.

  49. 49.

    DougJ

    January 7, 2011 at 12:10 pm

    @Barney:

    Not convinced. Young people as he said it probably means more like 20-40 and I don’t there’s any way a quarter of them live to be 100 from the tables I saw.

  50. 50.

    JustMe

    January 7, 2011 at 12:11 pm

    Frankly, the answer, to me, is a means-tested basis that’s adjusted for people’s health status.

    We call this means-tested basis adjusted for people’s health status “insurance.” If you have bad health, you get a lot more benefits in the form of lots of money spend on health care than if you have good health, in which case you receive much less treatment for the ailments that you don’t have.

  51. 51.

    scav

    January 7, 2011 at 12:19 pm

    Practically speaking, he must also be assuming that all these tire-rack easily-available we’ve-all got-em ubiquitous extra human replacement organs aren’t from actual human bodies if he’s expecting life expectancy to rise so much because to make the statistics work, we’re clearly not getting them from sources/people who, you know, die.

  52. 52.

    Sentient Puddle

    January 7, 2011 at 12:19 pm

    @mclaren: What the fuck dude? No seriously, what the fuck?

    1) The U.S. army has said it plans to replace 30% of its soldiers with robots by 2020. This, despite the fact that we still can’t get computers to run for more than about an hour without crashing and giving the blue screen of death.

    That this is apples to oranges shouldn’t need to be pointed out, but how the hell are you using your computer that you manage to blue screen it in an hour? The only way I can do that is if I set it as my screen saver.

    2) Ray Kurzweil and company keep gibbering about how we’ll all be interfacing with our computers by talking to them within five years. Despite the fact that speech recognition hit a wall of 80% accuracy and has never gotten beyond that no matter how much processing power we’ve thrown at it.

    I bet you’re misinterpreting what Kurzweil is saying in order to cherry-pick stats. If you’re trying to have a conversation with a computer, then yes, you can forget it. Humans suck too much at adhering to formal language rules for that to be feasible in the near future. But set constraints on how voice is used to interact with computers? From the article you link:

    But sticking to a few topics, like numbers, helped. Saying “one” into the phone works about as well as pressing a button, approaching 100% accuracy.

    This is the sort of thing that can be polished up and work quite well in a few years (hell, Windows 7 has an implementation of voice command that works reasonably well, hobbled mostly by the fact that it’s set on an interface that’s designed for a mouse and keyboard).

    3) The computer industry keeps yelling about how much faster and better and more sophisticated the new CPUs are, despite the fact that CPUs hit a 3 Ghz wall back in 2002 and have never been able to get any faster.

    Megahertz myth. Really, this is a pretty fundamental error to be making.

    4) We keep hearing about fabulous new social software and new paradigms for being connected, despite the fact that Web 2.0 isn’t discernibly different from the FIDONet bulletin boards I used to log onto back in 1985.

    The hell? Are you limiting your scope to the underlying code or something? Presentation and ease of use are light years beyond 1985, and that counts for a ton. You don’t see many operating systems today that are merely command prompts, do you?

    In conclusion, I just died a little reading what you wrote.

  53. 53.

    Comrade Javamanphil

    January 7, 2011 at 12:19 pm

    @Chet:

    Learn to think in terms of exponential growth.

    Of course, you might just be on the left side of the inflection point of a sigmoidal curve.

  54. 54.

    Ross Hershberger

    January 7, 2011 at 12:19 pm

    Speaking of demographics and lifespan. I worked in the life/health insurance industry for years. Home office IT work. The smartest people in the building by far were the actuaries.

    Conservatives frequently argue that the retirement age and SS age must be increased because people live longer than when SS was instituted. The actuaries who crafted the mathematical basis for SS assumed rising lifespans and took that into account with estimates. As of around 2005 their lifespan estimates were about 6 months higher than actual longevity, so the small error is contrary to Conservatives’ claims.

  55. 55.

    Chet

    January 7, 2011 at 12:23 pm

    If this was possible, where are the immortal organisms that 3,000,000,000 years of evolution produced?

    Why would there be any? There’s no selection pressure for immortality; quite the opposite.

    But there’s dozens of examples of organisms that live far longer than we do. The oldest continuous-living (as opposed to clonal) organisms we know about live (or lived, in the case of the oldest known) almost five thousand years. Reliably breaking a century pales in comparison.

  56. 56.

    Alex S.

    January 7, 2011 at 12:23 pm

    @scav:

    Someone should ask Daniels about his position on stem cell research.

  57. 57.

    Brachiator

    January 7, 2011 at 12:23 pm

    OT, I couldn’t help but think of a Balloon Juice style caption for this story.

    This Is What It’s Like When Doves Die

    Dead birds, turtle doves, fall from the skies in Italy by the thousands, within the last few days. This adds to the already numerous accounts of dead birds, as well as dead fish, being reported around the world.
    __
    The dead birds in Italy were mostly the white turtle doves, these are the pretty, docile birds that are often released in flocks for celebrations, such as weddings. These birds of celebration also symbolize love. Today they join the other casualties of dead wild life from around the globe. The reports of the dead doves in Italy brings the count to 15 incidents of dead wildlife around the world in the last few days.

    Anyhoo, back to the topic at hand:

    So the current “life expectancy at birth” figure implies no improvement of survival in any form in the future.

    The Wiki, of course, has a good article about this:

    The starting point for calculating life expectancies is the age-specific death rates of the population members. A very simple model of age-specific mortality uses the Gompertz function, although these days more sophisticated methods are used.

    Obviously, you can’t really take into account potential future improvements in survival, because this would call for speculation, not analysis.

  58. 58.

    Steeplejack (phone)

    January 7, 2011 at 12:25 pm

    We will be guided by machines that make big decisions, programmed by fellows with passion and vision. What a wonderful world it will be.

  59. 59.

    Ross Hershberger

    January 7, 2011 at 12:26 pm

    @Chet:

    There’s no selection pressure for immortality; quite the opposite.

    Okay. Tell us now what the reproductive advantage of death is.

    The oldest continuous-living (as opposed to clonal) organisms we know about live (or lived, in the case of the oldest known) almost five thousand years.

    Okay. You go be a bristlecone pine, but not me.

  60. 60.

    Chet

    January 7, 2011 at 12:26 pm

    Web 2.0 isn’t discernibly different from the FIDONet bulletin boards I used to log onto back in 1985.

    Well, except for the fact that a fifth of the human population is now on Facebook, or something, and only a couple of thousand people ever used FIDOnet BBS’s back in the day.

    Other than that, yeah, no fuckin’ difference at all.

  61. 61.

    Ryan

    January 7, 2011 at 12:28 pm

    Stem cell tech has the potential to do what Daniels is referring to, but as for now it’s just potential (especially since it’s been woefully underfunded thanks to the fundies who can’t get over the fact that a few cells do not constitute a whole human being). But given that we probably won’t be able to feed 60% of humanity 20 years from now, I wouldn’t call the next generations long-term prospects all that great.

    Maybe Sully’s right and we should just let the robots take over.

  62. 62.

    Chet

    January 7, 2011 at 12:29 pm

    Tell us now what the reproductive advantage of death is.

    Not competing for resources with your offspring. Also, your morphology can’t really reflect mutations picked up after your gestation, but your offspring’s morphology can. Thus, there’s a survival advantage for your genes when you’re replaced by your children.

    Duh. Did you just fail all your biology classes, or something? This stuff isn’t very hard. Or maybe you just never studied any biology, in which case maybe discussions of life expectancy and biotechnology aren’t in your field of expertise?

  63. 63.

    Alwhite

    January 7, 2011 at 12:31 pm

    @Shinobi:
    Yes! there are two great fallacies being pushed on social security reform & you hit one right there. We would actually be better off if us old fart would get the hell out of the work force & let you guys move in.

    The second is this BS about life expectancy. If you look at expected life for people at age 20 there really has not been much of a change since FDR got social security passed. In fact the real increase has been in getting kids to live to age 5. 100 years ago if you wanted to have two children in your family you better plan on giving birth to 4 because odds were that 2 would die before they reached adulthood. Once you reached 20 you were almost as likely to make 80 as someone born 20 years ago.

  64. 64.

    kay

    January 7, 2011 at 12:32 pm

    Why doesn’t anyone ever talk about Indiana’s unemployment rate?

    Mitch Daniels has been governor since 2005. His big promise was to race that state so far to the bottom on social services and regulation that every corporate entity would locate there. He’s made good on that promise. They’re at the bottom.

    Indiana’s unemployment rate is now….equal to Illinois and Ohio. Going on 6 years of selling everything that wasn’t nailed down, and that’s the result?

    Pennsylvania’s is a full point lower. Why isn’t Ed Rendell a conservative hero, if it’s all about the jobs?

    His state isn’t doing so great. Looks to me like he gave away the freaking store without getting a lot of jobs in return.

  65. 65.

    t

    January 7, 2011 at 12:34 pm

    What a beautiful world it will be. What a glorious time to be free.

    -IGY

  66. 66.

    PWL

    January 7, 2011 at 12:35 pm

    Well, nothing surprising here. People have been able to listen to Repubs babble on about “terrorist babies” and “death panels” with a straight face.

    Idiocy and lunacy–IOKIYAR!

  67. 67.

    ThresherK

    January 7, 2011 at 12:42 pm

    @Belafon (formerly anonevent):
    @Jennifer:
    Plumber’s Crack: The phrase you’re looking for which describes how poor people, largely manual laborers, should give up a couple years of their Social Security because their well-off white-collar age peers are living longer.

  68. 68.

    Paul in KY

    January 7, 2011 at 12:43 pm

    I think the little SOB is saying that if you’re in good health, you shouldn’t get Social Security till you’re 90.

    Fuck him.

  69. 69.

    WereBear

    January 7, 2011 at 12:44 pm

    This strange quote from Mitch Daniels isn’t getting much attention for some reason.

    And this surprises you? If they paid attention, it would become clear that the man they are talking up as a possible Prez contender is batshit crazy.

    They don’t want to go there.

  70. 70.

    liberal

    January 7, 2011 at 12:44 pm

    @Villago Delenda Est:
    LOL!

  71. 71.

    Bob Loblaw

    January 7, 2011 at 12:45 pm

    @Ross Hershberger:

    Okay. Tell us now what the reproductive advantage of death is.

    There isn’t one. There is, however, the incontrovertible law of entropy. Thermodynamics are a bitch.

    It astounds me that in a thread making fun of a politician for being an overexuberant futurist, plainly not one of you has any idea what you’re talking about. But the doomerism and Ludditism is running strong. Lots of old people fearing the impending inevitable, I’d reckon, and jaundiced to the reality that they aren’t of the generation that will benefit from the next great leap forward medically, just like all the ones who came before them too. That’s the way it goes.

  72. 72.

    Paul in KY

    January 7, 2011 at 12:46 pm

    @mclaren: We’ll soon have transparent steel too. Also a warp drive.

  73. 73.

    WereBear

    January 7, 2011 at 12:47 pm

    @Paul in KY: And unobtanium!

    Which can be used for darn near anything.

  74. 74.

    liberal

    January 7, 2011 at 12:50 pm

    @Chet:

    Not competing for resources with your offspring. Also, your morphology can’t really reflect mutations picked up after your gestation, but your offspring’s morphology can. Thus, there’s a survival advantage for your genes when you’re replaced by your children.

    Not sure it’s that simple. Wikipedia article on evolution of aging starts off with

    Enquiry into the evolution of ageing aims to explain why almost all living things weaken and die with age. There is not yet agreement in the scientific community on a single answer. The evolutionary origin of senescence remains a fundamental unsolved problem in biology.

    And early on claims

    August Weismann was responsible for interpreting and formalizing the mechanisms of Darwinian evolution in a modern theoretical framework. In 1889, he theorized that ageing was part of life’s program because the old need to remove themselves from the theatre to make room for the next generation, sustaining the turnover that is necessary for evolution.[1] This theory again has much intuitive appeal, but it suffers from having a teleological or goal-driven explanation. In other words, a purpose for ageing has been identified, but not a mechanism by which that purpose could be achieved. Ageing may have this advantage for the long-term health of the community; but that doesn’t explain how individuals would acquire the genes that make them get old and die, or why individuals that had ageing genes would be more successful than other individuals lacking such genes. (In fact, there is every reason to think that the opposite is true: ageing decreases individual fitness.) Weismann disavowed his own theory before his life was over.

  75. 75.

    DougJ

    January 7, 2011 at 12:51 pm

    @Bob Loblaw:

    Look at the fucking tables I provided. There is no reason to believe that a high proportion of people 20-40 will live past a hundred, unless there are advances in the next 50 years that far, far exceed those of the last 50.

    What I love about commenters like you is your air of superiority combined with lazy idiocy.

  76. 76.

    Paul in KY

    January 7, 2011 at 12:51 pm

    @Chet: I think that organism is what we call a ‘tree’

  77. 77.

    liberal

    January 7, 2011 at 12:57 pm

    @Sentient Puddle:

    The hell? Are you limiting your scope to the underlying code or something? Presentation and ease of use are light years beyond 1985, and that counts for a ton. You don’t see many operating systems today that are merely command prompts, do you?

    Mostly true, but not entirely. For example, because the Web exists, USENET is becoming defunct. One unfortunate side effect of this is that instead of at most a handful of groups to read or perhaps post a question to, there are hundreds if not thousands. IMHO that’s a step backwards. (Yeah, yeah, you can winnow things iwth a Google search, but then you have to “join” each goddamn new group you want to post to.)

    As for command prompts…windowing/graphics has its uses, but oftentimes command line seems much easier to use.

    And HTML itself is something as a regression, insofar as the codex is far superior to a scroll.

  78. 78.

    Barney

    January 7, 2011 at 12:57 pm

    @DougJ:

    Well, Doug, the figure is one in six of the whole current UK population, so for the 20-40 age group, one in five is a reasonable estimate. For an example of how the centenarian age group is likely to explode, here’s the US Census Bureau‘s own guesses for centenarians alive from today, up to 2050 (as far ahead as they project):

    2010 79101
    2020 134697
    2030 207631
    2040 297949
    2050 600909

    So that’s just for people over 60 now. A bigger cohort from the start of the baby boom gives some of that increase, but it’s still apparent that surviving to 100 becomes much more common all the time.

  79. 79.

    Barry

    January 7, 2011 at 1:00 pm

    @Ross Hershberger: Actually, I’d doubt that – by your 60’s, a lot of things are going wrong, and they interact.

  80. 80.

    WereBear

    January 7, 2011 at 1:00 pm

    @liberal: And it keeps “people” as opposed to “coders” out of the ‘Net entirely.

  81. 81.

    WereBear

    January 7, 2011 at 1:00 pm

    @liberal: And it keeps “people” as opposed to “coders” out of the ‘Net entirely.

  82. 82.

    DougJ

    January 7, 2011 at 1:00 pm

    @Barney:

    I don’t think 1-in-5 young people living past a hundred is the same thing as “they’ll be living past 100 barring accidents”.

  83. 83.

    WereBear

    January 7, 2011 at 1:03 pm

    Look, this makes no freakin’ sense, just like all the other R solutions they pull out of their behinds.

    I’m sorry any of them ever saw The Matrix. I fear it gave them ideas.

  84. 84.

    geg6

    January 7, 2011 at 1:08 pm

    @Alwhite:

    This is exactly right. And the whole bullshit argument does not take into account the differing life spans when broken down into economic status. The top 5 or 10% are the only ones whose life spans have appreciably been lengthened. For the poor, nothing has changed and for schmucks like us, it’s only amounted to an extra year or two. As for his idiocy about replacement parts, I think some recent corpses in Arizona would like to know where you get some of those as they became corpses because nobody wanted to pay for them.

  85. 85.

    Deb T

    January 7, 2011 at 1:09 pm

    @mclaren:
    What mclaren said. Really, couldn’t state it any clearer.

  86. 86.

    Villago Delenda Est

    January 7, 2011 at 1:09 pm

    @WereBear:

    They also read 1984 and The Handmaid’s Tale and took them to be instruction manuals.

  87. 87.

    Bob Loblaw

    January 7, 2011 at 1:11 pm

    @DougJ:

    There’s a difference between believing that we’re all going to live past 100, and being unwilling to write off our chances of curing/mitigating Type II diabetes sometime in the next 30 years.

    There are people in this thread who are fervently advocated the notion of “Peak Health,” as it were, which is just nonsense.

    @DougJ:

    I don’t think 1-in-5 young people living past a hundred is the same thing as “they’ll be living past 100 barring accidents”.

    So, in other words, a sizable minority of centenarians to come isn’t a fantasy worthy of Roddenberry. Shucks. I was hoping the standard of living would never be projected to improve, just to score political points on Mitch Fucking Daniels.

    What any of this has to do with attacking the actual malice in Daniels’ statement, his subtle plan to corrupt and wither social security, is beyond me.

  88. 88.

    DougJ

    January 7, 2011 at 1:13 pm

    @Bob Loblaw:

    One-in-five is not everyone, barring accidents, you fucking moron.

    Drop the attitude or get a brain. You can’t be this dumb and this smug.

  89. 89.

    Mnemosyne

    January 7, 2011 at 1:14 pm

    @geg6:

    Not to mention the whole confounding element of genetics. You can make some predictions about how long someone will live based on their social class and race, but you can’t predict how long a specific person will live based just on those things. My dad and my brother will probably live longer than my grandfather and great-grandfather thanks to advances in medicine, but we’re talking about maybe making it to 80 with a whole lot of medical intervention (like dialysis, which my 72 year old father will be on for the rest of his life).

    I, on the other hand, have a very good chance of making it to 100 because the women on both sides of my family are very long-lived. There’s also Alzheimer’s once you get past 85, so it’s not all gravy, but given my genetics it’s fairly likely that I will get to 100 like my Aunt Gina did.

  90. 90.

    Jager

    January 7, 2011 at 1:17 pm

    Things will even out because people will drop dead of sheer boredom from doing the same shitty job for 60-70 years…

  91. 91.

    pablo

    January 7, 2011 at 1:18 pm

    DONALD FAGEN
    “I.G.Y.”

    Standing tough under stars and stripes
    We can tell
    This dream’s in sight
    You’ve got to admit it
    At this point in time that it’s clear
    The future looks bright
    On that train all graphite and glitter
    Undersea by rail
    Ninety minutes from New York to Paris
    Well by seventy-six we’ll be A.O.K.

    What a beautiful world this will be
    What a glorious time to be free

    Get your ticket to that wheel in space
    While there’s time
    The fix is in
    You’ll be a witness to that game of chance in the sky
    You know we’ve got to win
    Here at home we’ll play in the city
    Powered by the sun
    Perfect weather for a streamlined world
    There’ll be spandex jackets one for everyone

    What a beautiful world this will be
    What a glorious time to be free

    On that train all graphite and glitter
    Undersea by rail
    Ninety minutes from New York to Paris
    (More leisure time for artists everywhere)
    A just machine to make big decisions
    Programmed by fellows with compassion and vision
    We’ll be clean when their work is done
    We’ll be eternally free yes and eternally young

    What a beautiful world this will be
    What a glorious time to be free

  92. 92.

    Omnes Omnibus

    January 7, 2011 at 1:18 pm

    @DougJ:
    Five to one, baby
    One in five
    No one here gets out alive, now
    You get yours, baby
    I’ll get mine
    Gonna make it, baby
    If we try

  93. 93.

    handy

    January 7, 2011 at 1:19 pm

    @Sentient Puddle:

    With respect to the “megahertz myth”, just for clarification sake it does appear we have in fact run up against a real wall with respect to clock rates. It’s a soft wall, though, as CPU manufacturers have been addressing that by, among other things, adding more cores to the die, but multi-core computing is fully leveraged in a limited subset of larger scenarios. Bus speeds, which have historically lagged considerably behind processor speeds, are quickly catching up, as are RAM speed and efficiency. So the situation is not totally bleak.

  94. 94.

    liberal

    January 7, 2011 at 1:21 pm

    @WereBear:
    I don’t think USENET was all that difficult to use, and I think that anyone who thinks this absurdly fractured Web 2.0 bullshit is an improvement is just wrong, at least for people looking for advice.

  95. 95.

    DougJ

    January 7, 2011 at 1:21 pm

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    I like it.

  96. 96.

    liberal

    January 7, 2011 at 1:25 pm

    @handy:
    I’d be interested in the historical improvement limited to simple, single-threaded numerical programs. Not that I think that’s the only measure to use or anything.

  97. 97.

    handy

    January 7, 2011 at 1:31 pm

    @liberal:

    No but the point is well taken as single-threaded processes probably make up the bulk of computations, since it is not a trivial matter to simply push threads off to another core when one has peaked.

  98. 98.

    The Moar You Know

    January 7, 2011 at 1:36 pm

    Ray Kurzweil and company keep gibbering about how we’ll all be interfacing with our computers by talking to them within five years.

    @mclaren: I love Ray Kurzweil’s piano samples. The man is a raving idiot otherwise, who at this point can only be in it for the money as everything he has predicted has proven to be staggeringly wrong.

    I also agree with everything else you said. I’m a techie myself, and can’t help but notice that pretty much everything has hit a brick wall as far as capability goes.

  99. 99.

    licensed to kill time

    January 7, 2011 at 1:38 pm

    When I think about this the mental image I get is that pe.nis growing out of a mouse in South Park’s Eek! A Pe.nis!

    Can’t link because FYWP. Use the Googly.

  100. 100.

    Bob Loblaw

    January 7, 2011 at 1:38 pm

    @DougJ:

    One-in-five is not everyone, barring accidents, you fucking moron.

    Never said it was, sunshine. I said it was a “sizable (and constantly growing one, at that) minority,” which in my eyes, is still an unequivocal good thing.

    But oh noez, a p-p-politician exaggerated scientific r-r-research! The horror, the horror! Where is my fainting couch?!

    Clearly the exaggeration is the important thing, and not the stated desire to privatize medicare and fuck over seniors.

  101. 101.

    Villago Delenda Est

    January 7, 2011 at 1:39 pm

    @handy:

    Not to worry. All hardware speed improvements will be dealt with and nullified by bloatware.

  102. 102.

    Felonious Wench

    January 7, 2011 at 1:44 pm

    @Sentient Puddle:

    In conclusion, I just died a little reading what you wrote.

    Mine was just a facepalm, and I don’t think any brain cells were harmed in the impact. I was, however, as an enterprise systems architect, made indignant and sad at the ignorance. I was even offended on behalf of Microsoft and the PC industry, and trust me, that doesn’t happen, ever.

    I refuse to start a tech war here, basically because I want to spare those of you who wish we’d just shut up. But mclaren, really, site some stats here, some studies, something, because it’s so far from the reality of today I can only assume you’re a curmudgeon who thinks these crazy kids just need to stick to command lines and dumb terminals, because darn it, they were faster and worked just fine.

  103. 103.

    DougJ

    January 7, 2011 at 1:46 pm

    @Bob Loblaw:

    Fair enough, though if Al Gore had said this it would be proof he was a crazy hippie.

  104. 104.

    Three-nineteen

    January 7, 2011 at 1:46 pm

    @Paul in KY: I really hate myself for doing this, but I have nothing substantial to contribute to this thread, so here goes:

    It’s transparent aluminum.

  105. 105.

    Lee

    January 7, 2011 at 1:52 pm

    @Chet:

    You wrote exactly what I came here to write.

    Except much much better.

    Apparently Mitch Daniels has been paying more attention that DougJ….

  106. 106.

    Paul in KY

    January 7, 2011 at 2:01 pm

    @Three-nineteen: My bad. Hadn’t seen film in 20 or more years.

    But, I bet transparent steel will be just around the corner, once we get transparent aluminum. Mark my words!

  107. 107.

    Gravenstone

    January 7, 2011 at 2:25 pm

    @Chet: Have you met matoko_chan? You two kids would get along just famously together.

  108. 108.

    ericblair

    January 7, 2011 at 2:34 pm

    @Paul in KY:

    But, I bet transparent steel will be just around the corner, once we get transparent aluminum. Mark my words!

    Well, we’ve got colorless sapphire, which counts as transparent aluminum, I guess. Not exactly available in mass quantities at wholesale prices, though.

  109. 109.

    ericblair

    January 7, 2011 at 2:36 pm

    @ericblair: Oh wait, I just looked at my watch crystal. Yup, wholesale. BTW, FYWP.

  110. 110.

    Brachiator

    January 7, 2011 at 2:47 pm

    @geg6:

    This is exactly right. And the whole bullshit argument does not take into account the differing life spans when broken down into economic status. The top 5 or 10% are the only ones whose life spans have appreciably been lengthened. For the poor, nothing has changed and for schmucks like us, it’s only amounted to an extra year or two.

    Sorry, this is just wrong. One of the largest leaps in health and life expectancy came about from improvements in sanitation, which affects everyone. The second greatest came about from vaccines, which, again, benefited the poor as well as other income groups. The life expectancy of poor Americans, and poor Westerners, greatly exceeds that of the poor in less developed nations.

    And the notion that once a person passes infancy, there is not much difference in life expectancy is another lie. Fewer people die of diseases and epidemics that used to hit adults.

    There are also far fewer deaths to women from complications of childbirth. There are fewer deaths from accidents thanks to health and safety laws. For example:

    From 1880 to 1910, mine explosions and other accidents claimed thousands of victims. The deadliest year in U.S. coal mining history was 1907, when 3,242 deaths occurred.
    __
    Total deaths in all types of U.S. mining, which had averaged 1,500 or more during earlier decades, decreased on average during the 1990’s, to under 100 and reached a record low of 55 in 2004. There were 65 mining fatalities in 2007. The average annual injuries to miners have also decreased steadily.
    __
    Where annual coal mining deaths had numbered more than 1,000 a year in the early part of the 20th century, they decreased to an average of about 451 annual fatalities in the 1950s, and to 141 in the 1970s. The yearly average in coal mining decreased to 30 fatalities from 2001-2005.

    And of course, no smallpox. Nowhere on planet Earth. Don’t matter if you are rich or poor. Smallpox ain’t gonna get you.

    Fewer deaths associated with the effects of poor nutrition and lack of vitamins.

    And on and on.

    Relatively more people die of cancer and heart disease now because they have escaped many of the causes of death that would have laid them out in earlier years.

  111. 111.

    curious

    January 7, 2011 at 2:54 pm

    means-testing is designed to ghetto-ize medicare, right? thanks but no.

  112. 112.

    Delia

    January 7, 2011 at 2:58 pm

    @Paul in KY:

    But, I bet transparent steel will be just around the corner, once we get transparent aluminum. Mark my words!

    All of this crap is worth zilch until we get our flying cars. They’ve been promising us flying cars for over fifty years now and where are they? Nowhere. That’s why you can’t trust the bastards.

  113. 113.

    bcinaz

    January 7, 2011 at 3:02 pm

    Dick Cheney might live to be 100, that’s because he gets government health care. – The rest of us? Meh…not so much.

  114. 114.

    Mumphrey (formerly Renfrew Squeevil (formerly Mumphrey Oddison Yamm (formerly Mumphrey O. Yamm (formerly Mumphrey))))

    January 7, 2011 at 3:12 pm

    @Robert:

    Who needs [Social Security] when you can work at WalMart for 80 years?

    That may be the most horrifying description of the dystopian hellscape that awaits us that I’ve ever seen.

  115. 115.

    Calouste

    January 7, 2011 at 3:16 pm

    Didn’t Bismarck, when he created the world first pensions for the Prussian army, decided on 65 as the retirement age because that was the average life expectancy of a soldier and in that way it wouldn’t cost too much? Seems like our Galtian overlords are going back to the idea of getting the post-work life of the minions as close to zero as possible.

  116. 116.

    Brachiator

    January 7, 2011 at 3:21 pm

    @Calouste:

    Didn’t Bismarck, when he created the world first pensions for the Prussian army, decided on 65 as the retirement age because that was the average life expectancy of a soldier and in that way it wouldn’t cost too much?

    Nope. Urban myth.

    One persistent myth about the German program is that it adopted age 65 as the standard retirement age because that was Bismarck’s age. This myth is important because Germany was one of the models America looked to in designing its own Social Security plan; and the myth is that America adopted age 65 as the age for retirement benefits because this was the age adopted by Germany when they created their program. In fact, Germany initially set age 70 as the retirement age (and Bismarck himself was 74 at the time) and it was not until 27 years later (in 1916) that the age was lowered to 65. By that time, Bismarck had been dead for 18 years.

    The InterTubes is our friends.

  117. 117.

    Triassic Sands

    January 7, 2011 at 3:55 pm

    It ought to be clear that we can’t afford a significant increase in life expectancy. Perhaps we’ll need to increase the retirement age to 80.

    On the other hand, how many people will be able to afford to live that long. If Republicans get their way on health care, then we’re going to have millions upon millions of people with no health insurance. Extending life expectancy won’t be cheap. Why would it be — life will be treated as a commodity and only those with enough money will be able to afford to have their lives extended.

  118. 118.

    NonyNony

    January 7, 2011 at 4:11 pm

    @Triassic Sands:

    It ought to be clear that we can’t afford a significant increase in life expectancy. Perhaps we’ll need to increase the retirement age to 80.

    Problem is – we keep adding people to the job pool at the bottom end because we don’t have anywhere close to zero population growth. To be able to increase the retirement age to 80 we’d actually have to have an economy that was growing at HUGE amounts, or we’d need to have negative population growth (including via immigration) to be able to even expect to have jobs available for everyone.

    This is the part that the idjit Republicans don’t seem to get – if you raise the goddamn retirement age to 70 then you’ve lost 5 years worth of jobs for people entering the workforce. The only way to replace those jobs is either if the upcoming work force is smaller than the one that should be retiring (it isn’t) or if the economy is growing at a faster pace than average. An economic slowdown is exactly the wrong time to be pushing for an increased retirement age (in fact, from a purely economic-technocratic, non-political standpoint it’s exactly the right time to push for reducing the retirement age to encourage folks close to retirement to drop out of the workforce and free up those jobs for some of the younger unemployed).

  119. 119.

    Brachiator

    January 7, 2011 at 4:11 pm

    @Triassic Sands:

    It ought to be clear that we can’t afford a significant increase in life expectancy.

    Which means what, death panels? Logan’s Run and Soylent Green life termination parties? And who is “we?”

    Perhaps we’ll need to increase the retirement age to 80.

    Surely, you’re joking.

    And fortunately or unfortunately, there is no magic formula or combination of medicine or technology that can significantly extend a person’s life, no matter how much money they have. Especially if they also expect some quality of life.

  120. 120.

    Quicksand

    January 7, 2011 at 4:26 pm

    That’s Ronaldus Magnus to you, DougJ. Are you not aware of all internet traditions?

  121. 121.

    Triassic Sands

    January 7, 2011 at 4:32 pm

    @Brachiator:

    Surely, you’re joking.

    Yes, I was joking.

  122. 122.

    Brachiator

    January 7, 2011 at 5:04 pm

    @Triassic Sands: RE: Surely, you’re joking.

    Yes, I was joking.

    Hence, my opening (e.g., I won’t call you “Shirley.”)

  123. 123.

    longnow

    January 7, 2011 at 5:59 pm

    I hate to say it but the link from Glenn Reynolds
    really was humorous snark…this time.

  124. 124.

    longnow

    January 7, 2011 at 6:11 pm

    Mitch Daniels is supposed to be the pinhead intellectual
    of the republican party. He is super short but he is also, from
    what I’ve seen, a typical kneejerk republican who tries very
    hard to “stand out” and be topical and stuff but he doesn’t
    quite make it. He tries to talk the talk. He calls democrats nasty,
    oh yes they are nasty, the nastiest politicians he’s ever
    seen. Translation? He does a good job of reversing
    what republicans are typically called and really are…the nastiest players in the political world. Has he called democrats fascists yet?
    Who cares.

  125. 125.

    mclaren

    January 7, 2011 at 6:29 pm

    @DougJ:

    Drop the attitude or get a brain. [Bob Loblaw] can’t be this dumb and this smug.

    Oh yes he can.

  126. 126.

    mclaren

    January 7, 2011 at 7:11 pm

    @Chet:

    Diabetes? Cured in mice. Old age? Cured in mice. We know how to genetically engineer a mouse that can run 5 kilometers without tiring – the equivalent of biking the entire Tour de France in one go without even feeling winded.

    Get back to us when this stuff gets cured in humans. Lots of treatments work great in vitro, or in mice or in monkeys. Then they fail in humans.

    “The US National Cancer Institute treated mice growing 48 different human cancer with which they had been implanted. They used 12 different drugs which were proven successful in humans, and in 30 cases the drugs were useless in mice.”
    Source: Science, vol 278, 7 Nov 1997, pg. 1041

    “While conflicting animal results have often delayed and hampered advances in the war on cancer, they have never produced a single substantial advance in either the prevention or treatment of human cancer.”
    Source: Irwin Bross, former director of Roswell Park Memorial Institute for Cancer Research, in testimony before the United States Congress, 1981

    “We have cured mice of cancer for decades – and it simply didn’t work in humans.”
    Source: Dr Richard Klausner, director of the US National Cancer Institute, Los Angeles Times, Wednesday 16 May 1998

    “Boy, we can cure mice like nobody’s business, but when it comes to humans we have a harder time.”
    Source: Jim Mullen, chief executive of Biogen Idec, The Financial Times, 19 Dec 2003

    Sure, that’s all in mice, and the differences between mice and humans are not trivial which is why we’re not all supermen and superwomen, yet. But how long do you really think that obstacle can last? How long do you really think the human genetic condition will limit us in an age when you can do genetic engineering in your garage?

    Since not even the world’s greatest biologists have even a vague clue of what the vast majority of the human genetic code does, it looks right now as though several hundred years at the very least. The problem, you see, happens to be that our genetic code was never designed. It evolved. And evolution doesn’t do things in a sensible straightforward way –evolution builds on whatever kludge it finds, and then kludges that. And does it incomprehensibly weird ways. The myth that human DNA is a “blueprint” that we can “read” and then “modify” buys into the ignorant delusion of a Grand Designer. There is no Grand Designer who built human DNA. No aged white guy with a beard sitting in an imaginary heaven building animals and plants. So there is no design to unravel, no blueprint to read. Instead there’s weird molecular kludge inside weird molecular-biology kludge, all of it counterintuitive and incomprehensible, feed-forward loop inside emergent-ordered structure inside self-generating morphology that arises from strange attractors you can’t predict by looking at the highly nonlinear equations.

    The human genome sequence, drafted ten years ago, promised to go even further, helping scientists trace ancestry, decipher the marks of evolution and find the molecular underpinnings of disease, guiding the way to more accurate diagnosis and targeted, personalized treatments. The genome promised to lay bare the blueprint of human biology.

    That hasn’t happened, of course, at least not yet. In some respects, sequencing has provided clarification. Before the Human Genome Project began, biologists guessed that the genome could contain as many as 100,000 genes that code for proteins. The true number, it turns out, is closer to 21,000, and biologists now know what many of those genes are. But at the same time, the genome sequence did what biological discoveries have done for decades. It opened the door to a vast labyrinth of new questions.

    Few predicted, for example, that sequencing the genome would undermine the primacy of genes by unveiling whole new classes of elements — sequences that make RNA or have a regulatory role without coding for proteins. Non-coding DNA is crucial to biology, yet knowing that it is there hasn’t made it any easier to understand what it does. “We fooled ourselves into thinking the genome was going to be a transparent blueprint, but it’s not,” says Mel Greaves, a cell biologist at the Institute of Cancer Research in Sutton, UK.

    Instead, as sequencing and other new technologies spew forth data, the complexity of biology has seemed to grow by orders of magnitude. Delving into it has been like zooming into a Mandelbrot set — a space that is determined by a simple equation, but that reveals ever more intricate patterns as one peers closer at its boundary.

    Source: “The Human Genome At Ten: Life Is Complicated,” Nature News, 31 March 2010.

    To give just a small example of this, consider that the genome of theT4 bacteriogphage uses data compression that reads forward in the genome as one set of tRNA codes, and then the rest of the coding when you read the entire genome in reverse. It took 20 years to figure out that tiny little simple plasmid because no one imagined such a bizarre form of data compression would exist in such a tiny organism. Take that example to the 100th power, and you have some idea of the incredible complexity involved in trying to figure what goes on in human DNA.

    You guys can keep talking about how buggy whips continue to make a great investment since people won’t stop needing to travel any time soon, but that’s really missing both the point and the reliability of scientific/technical “revolutions.” This whole thread deserves a Von Newmann award.

    LOL. Learn how to spell the names of your clay-footed idols before you cite ’em. You mean von Neumann — John von Neumann. Incidentally, John Von Neumann is the king of the crackpot failed predictions. Let’s take a look at John von Neumann’s silly claims and failed predictions:

    John von Neumann confidently predicted that weather control was only a decade or two away. Just modify a weather system with a few tiny sprinkles of silver halide, and poof! No more tornados, no more typhoons. Von Neumann’s prediction was classic hubristic bullshit, blown apart by the reality of Lorentz’s radically non-linear weather models. Turns out weather systems exhibit classic nonlinear chaotic behavior, such that a tiny change in initial conditions cause vast changes in the system. So a butterfly’s wings flapping can eventually create a hurricane. Of course, von Neumann didn’t realize this, since he was too consumed with arrogance.

    John von Neumann was a member of the MITgroup which met over the summer in the 1950s to discuss the problem of creating human-level Artificial Intelligence in computers. They confidently predicted that success in creating true AI was no more than 20 years away.

    John von Neumann dismissed the computer vision problem as “trivial.” 60 years later, researchers still haven’t come close to solving it. Getting a computer to figure out the 3D configuration of a real-world object from a 2D camera representation is so hard that out here in the real world, computer scientists have no idea how the human brain does it. What we do know is that roughly 60% of the human brain seems to be devoted to processing vision, and the latest research now shows that each of the brain’s several hundred billion neurons seems to pack the same processing power as one of today’s supercomputers.

    John von Neumann pioneered the theory of self-replicating automata. Based on his work, scientists firmly predicted that self-replicating robots would soon populate the world, enabling us to live in a world of leisure by the 1970s. Out here on planet earth, in the real world, robots have failed to duplicate even the simplest tasks performed by human infants after 60 years of effort by the smartest scientists on the planet. Today, no robot can even begin to walk across a cluttered room without toppling over and crashing to the floor. The situation created such despair in formerly enthusiastic AI researchers that Marvin Minsky penned a lecture in 2001 called “It’s 2001: Where’s HAL?”

    Learn to think in terms of exponential growth.

    Good thinking! From 1700 to 1890, the maximum speed of transportation increased from the speed of a horse galloping to the speed of a train — roughly from 40 mph to 90 mph. From the first Wright Brothers flight in 1903 to the moon landing in 1969, the speed of air travel increased from circa 50 mph to 17,000 mph. Carrying this forward, we can confidently predict that by the year 2000 we’ll be sending starships to Alpha Centauri.

    Of course, we’re not doing that. Transport speeds peaked with the Concorde at slightly above Mach 1 and now the Concorde has been retired and there are no serious plans to replace it. As Peak Oil rushes toward us, transport speeds are slowing, and after Peak Oil hits, turboprops will likely replace jet engines because of their superior fuel efficiency.

    Learn to think in terms of sigmoid curves, little kiddie. Every sigmoid curve looks like an exponential at the start. But no tree grows to the sky, and a single culture of bacteria which could theoretically take over the entire world if it kept growing exponentially, in reality never actually does.

    Wow. What a testament to the ignorance and hubris of today’s twenty-somethings. You sound you’ve come straight out of the 1936 film Things To Come with your lexan sandals and flying jet pack and food pills. It was bullshit in 1936, and it’s bullshit now. Scientists confidently predicted underground cities and flying cars and all the rest of that crap, and they were spouting nonsense, just as cranks like Ray Kurzweil are spouting nonsense today when they talk about uploading people’s minds and living forever.

    Go back to watching old 1950s sci fi movies like Creation of the Humanoids where you can bask in your fantasies of domed arctic cities and driverless cars of the future and synthetic meals in a pill. Out here in the real world, on planet earth, that crap never got any farther than some deluded futurist’s pipe dream.

  127. 127.

    DrewS is the business and economics editor for his family

    January 7, 2011 at 7:27 pm

    Mitch Daniels is an idiot. This is yet another example of republicans talking out their ass about things they know nothing about. Average lifespan has increased dramatically over the last ~120 years, but that is almost entirely due to decreased childhood mortality. Maximum lifespan for humans (which is what Daniels is talking about here) has hardly changed at all over the last several hundred years. There are a lot of people working on ways to change this and actually increase maximum lifespan, but most of them are crackpots, like the folks taking massive doses of growth hormone and other steroids, and the ones trying to live on 750 calories a day (if you can call that living). The bottom line is that there is a lot of talk about extending maximum lifespan, no one has a clue about how to actually accomplish it.

  128. 128.

    mclaren

    January 7, 2011 at 7:42 pm

    @DrewS is the business and economics editor for his family:

    Average lifespan has increased dramatically over the last ~120 years, but that is almost entirely due to decreased childhood mortality.

    Precisely. And the second biggest boost to average lifespan?

    Improvements in sanitation. To put it politely, cholera epidemics stopped abruptly when it was discovered that sewers should not be located close to drinking wells.

    As a matter of hard cold fact, humans have already turned on nearly all the genetic switches that would lengthen our lives. Humans are unusually long-lived among mammals already. There is simply not much left that we can do to prolong our lives further.

  129. 129.

    Lee Hartmann

    January 7, 2011 at 7:46 pm

    Donald Fagen is one of my gods.

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