7.8 KiB
[TH] The Onion: World Death Rate Holding Steady at 100%
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Author: u/None *
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URL: http://www.theonion.com/articles/world-death-rate-holding-steady-at-100-percent,1670/
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Score: 55
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Created: 2015-03-19T13:14:44
Post:
Comments:
u/Jace_MacLeod [+24] (2 hours later)
Technically incorrect - the population of people currently alive does not count towards the mortality rate, since they're not dead yet. Actual mortality rate is closer to 94% given about 115 billion people in history, of which about 7.3 billion are currently alive.
(Amusingly, the total mortality rate went noticeably down during the latter half of the twentieth century due to the big population boom, and has continued to fall.)
u/Rhamni [+9] Aspiring author (3 hours later)
If we can cure old age in the next century or two, I wonder what will happen to this statistic. I realize we'll all be dead regardless in a quadrillion years, but say in a thousand years.
u/derefr [+4] (7 hours later)
It's not actually a useful thing to track now (since it has always been 100%), but you could theoretically keep track of a "projected mortality rate" (actuarial mortality rate?) based on things like the statistical presence within the tracked population of genes that code for the telomere-shortening versions of mitotic proteins instead of gene-therapeutic variants, etc.
Each gene therapy and eugenics procedure we will come up with would bring down the conservative projected mortality rate, though only by the slightest amount; it'd be the very few who would be immortal just from fixing the most direct causes of aging in them (effectively, the people whose lives manage to keep their body's core functions operating well enough to live to 110 already, would end up living much longer if aging-related weakness and frailty wasn't a consideration.)
The actuarial age-related mortality rate would drop much faster, though—I'm not sure the curve involved, maybe inverse-exponential?—because it would be taking into account life-extension therapies we hadn't discovered yet, but which we would have in time to save the people then in need of them. If we actually get on the track of the Great Project, there'll likely be some sort of Moore's Law-like effect to it, with a linear progression of extensions given a constant number of researchers. Unlike Moore's Law, though, there'll be a definite point where we have "enough" life-extension that the actuarial age-related mortality rate will drop to zero—which is to say, people would just inevitably die of something else before they die of old age. (Just figuring out how to grow replacement bodies and do brain transplants, and also how to clean detritus like beta-amyloid plaques out of brains, would together have this one pretty-well sewn up.)
The big question, to me as a futurist, ends up being whether we'll even bother, though: if we end up all uploading, we don't need to solve these problems.
u/Empiricist_or_not [+13] Aspiring polite Hegemonizing swarm (an hour later)
The sad thing is this is the Onion. It'd be nice if more than only a few forward thinking groups were seriously outraged by the statistic.
-blink-
Wow I just advocated for something in alignment with groups labeled "forward thinking" . . . I think I'm going to go sit and think for a while. . .
u/None [+13] (5 hours later)
Yes yessss, let your hope consume you! Give in to it, and feel the power of the progressive side!
u/Empiricist_or_not [+1] Aspiring polite Hegemonizing swarm (18 hours later)
Thats usually the problem. A lot of "progressives" work from hope not thought.
Apologies all politics is the mind killer but that one shocked me a good bit.
u/None [+9] (19 hours later)
A lot of "progressives" work from hope not thought.
I think it depends which "progressives" you're talking about, and where you live. I can list large amounts of left-wing proposals that have been subject to extensive research, refinement, and experimentation. I can also point to left-wing "proposals" that are basically just the first thing a bunch of dumb hippies came up with at a protest.
So it depends.
But I do think that being labeled "forward thinking" or "progressive" is not evidence that an idea is bad. To the contrary, it tends to evidence that even if the person proposing the idea is wrong, they are at least trying, rather than simply assuming that either the status-quo or the past must be the Right Thing, simply by virtue of having already existed.
u/None [+0] (2 days later)
[deleted]
u/Empiricist_or_not [+1] Aspiring polite Hegemonizing swarm (2 days later)
I get the impression we have different ideas of what we are referring to with the terms hope and thought. I'm using them in the political vein that lots of us old grumpy bureaucrats and project managers use when criticizing well intended but poorly implemented policy.
Where I am using hope I am talking about the declared intent and intended effect of an action, especially when the unintended second order effects are a negative, and or of greater magnitude. From a planning perspective "hope" is a four letter word. This is along the lines of the programming aphorism
"Don't think; know."
Where I am using Thought I am talking about modeling the first and second order effects and or understanding the implication of taking an action, before you do it.
I'd appreciate to know the connotation and denotation you are referring to. I'm always willing to learn something.
u/None [+10] (2 minutes later)
u/derefr [+5] (7 hours later)
Under Domenici's new bill, all federal funds will be withheld from the medical industry until it "gets serious and starts cracking down on death."
Question: what do you all think would actually happen if someone managed to pass this into law? (Specifically, if no research grants within the field of medicine would be given unless they could justify their research in terms of solving [some component of] age-related mortality?)
I'm guessing we'd just get clever about calling all diseases "diseases of age", like algorithms are patented as "business methods."
It's a neat idea, though—economically incentivizing the pursuit of immortality. I wonder if there are other, more direct methods of doing the same.
Maybe outlawing inheritance and adding an exponential term to interest rates based on actuarial tables—making money compound more, the longer its owner lives than they "should" (in sound health of mind and body, with all the money going away if someone needs to assume power of attorney over them.)
Or, to be even more direct, a plain-old X prize of a billion dollars to the first person to live (again, in sound health of mind and body) to 120. And then another for 130, and so on.
u/psychothumbs [+5] (9 hours later)
u/None [+3] (6 hours later)
Fine, fine, I'm headed back to the office to work!
u/Kishoto [+6] (an hour later)
Anyone else thinking HJPEV would find this article both hilarious and inspiring?
u/None [+7] (an hour later)
Exactly why I shared it
u/paladinneph [+1] (2 days later)
