scrape_r_rational/data/cache2/7d59gg.md

## [The Onion] World Death Rate Holding Steady At 100 Percent

* Author: u/awesomeideas  *Dai stiho, cousin.**
* URL: https://www.theonion.com/world-death-rate-holding-steady-at-100-percent-1819564171
* Score: 119

* Created: 2017-11-15T16:34:18

### Post:

[Link to content](https://www.theonion.com/world-death-rate-holding-steady-at-100-percent-1819564171)

### Comments:

> **u/XxChronOblivionxX** [+50]  (2 hours later)
> 
> [Obligatory mention](https://www.theonion.com/millions-and-millions-dead-1819565193) of what the most gut wrenching article on this website.

>> **u/None** [+29]  (2 hours later)
>> 
>> [deleted]

>>> **u/ywecur** [+9]  *LessWrong (than usual)* (22 hours later)
>>> 
>>> But not the vast majority that ever **will** live

>> **u/bbrazil** [+34]  *NERV* (5 hours later)
>> 
>> [Daddy Put In Bye-Bye Box](https://www.theonion.com/daddy-put-in-bye-bye-box-1819569708) is the one for me.

>>> **u/None** [+7]  (6 hours later)
>>> 
>>> God damn I came here to see interesting stuff, but first, as a future health care professional I get reminded that I probably won't be able to even put a dent in the Death problem in my lifetime, and then I read this and get attacked by the feels.
>>> :(

>> **u/General_Urist** [+6]  (8 hours later)
>> 
>> >And [the problem is] very difficult for most people to process psychologically
>> 
>> Yup.

> **u/VirtueOrderDignity** [+51]  (42 minutes later)
> 
> It's more like 93% given a cumulative human population of ~100 billion.

>> **u/I_Hump_Rainbowz** [+4]  (2 days later)
>> 
>> ? I heard numbers close to a trillion. The only source i got that had 100 billion only went back to 8000BC which makes no since.
>> 
>> I did more digging and seemed to have found the "math" that got this number. 
>> 
>> >To calculate how many people have ever lived, Haub followed a minimalist approach, beginning with two people in 50000 B.C.—his Adam and Eve. Then, using his historical growth rates and population benchmarks, he estimated that slightly over 106 billion people had ever been born. Of those, people alive today comprise only 6 percent, nowhere near 75 percent. "[It is] almost surely true people alive today are some small fraction of [all] people," says Joel Cohen, a professor of populations at the Rockefeller and Columbia Universities in New York City.
>> 
>> Firstly their was never only 2 people and secondly humans have existed for about 200 thousand years ago (I got these numbers from wiki but know that this number has grown significantly from my anthropologist friend). if we include all homo species that is about 2 million years of death to add up.

> **u/DrainageCity** [+15]  (3 hours later)
> 
> >'Enough is enough. I'm paying through the nose here, and I don't want to die.'
> 
> I mean, that's basically the attitude of the silicon valley billionaires calling themselves "healthspanners", so maybe this article will stop being satire in a decade or two, when their research starts showing potential fruit.

>> **u/Geminii27** [+3]  (9 hours later)
>> 
>> Nah. The extremely wealthy have been trying this for centuries. Possibly millennia. If you look at the state of medical science at the moment there is still such an enormous amount of things we don't know about, or have such limited information on, that it seems incredibly unlikely that we'd be able to significantly extend human lifetimes any time soon. At a bare minimum it's likely to be centuries away.

>>> **u/TheAtomicOption** [+16]  (10 hours later)
>>> 
>>> >At a bare minimum it's likely to be centuries away.
>>> 
>>> Naw, one century if everything goes as poorly as possible from what I hear. I only have a BSc in Molecular Biology, so there are others with a better direct grasp of the issue and centuries is not at all the time frame prominent scientists in the field are giving. I highly recommend reading Ending Aging by Aubrey de Grey and check out the Methuselah Foundation's quarterly newsletter. We may not have everything mapped out perfectly yet, but we have a good idea what needs to be done which makes now completely incomparable to any other time in history.  We definitely know enough to start making designing serious repair and maintenance therapies.

>>>> **u/abcd_z** [+9]  (20 hours later)
>>>> 
>>>> [Relevant SMBC comic.](https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=1968)

>>>>> **u/TheAtomicOption** [+5]  (22 hours later)
>>>>> 
>>>>> hehe except I'm not old. And to be fair to the last few generations, when they were young saying "things are gonna change in 50 years," they were right.

>>>> **u/Nuero3187** [+2]  (18 hours later)
>>>> 
>>>> And how much do you think it will cost?

>>>>> **u/TheAtomicOption** [+3]  (22 hours later)
>>>>> 
>>>>> That's hard to predict given the instability of the US healthcare system. The price isn't going to be steady either. Like most high technology it will be very expensive at first, but become more effective and cheaper over time--but probably won't ever be dirt cheap. And it's a thing you'll have to do repeatedly to stay healthy long term because they're *repairing* age, not eliminating entropy, so there's that.
>>>>> 
>>>>> Aging isn't currently on the list of what the FDA considers to be "a disease" either, so it's likely that some or all of the things will need to be approved for a specific disease. For example approved for atherosclerosis sclerosis, and then used even for people who don't appear to have a disease symptoms from it yet.

>>> **u/696e6372656469626c65** [+10]  *I think, therefore I am pretentious.* (15 hours later)
>>> 
>>> > At a bare minimum it's likely to be centuries away.
>>> 
>>> You should be wary of talking in quantitative terms like this when you don't have a *very* concrete model of how things are going to shake out in the future.

>>> **u/Silver_Swift** [+5]  (21 hours later)
>>> 
>>> > At a bare minimum it's likely to be centuries away.
>>> 
>>> That seems really unlikely to me. Two centuries ago, physicians were describing mercury treatments and bloodletting as cures for just about every ailment. Slightly over a century ago we were starting to figure out that there are such things as viruses and that washing your hands before cutting into a living being might be a good idea. Antibiotics were only discovered 80ish years ago and 68 years ago they gave a Nobel prize for medicine to the guy that invented *the lobotomy*.  
>>> 
>>> The future is hard to predict, especially over this kinds of timescales, but it seems to me that in terms of scientific progress we are a lot closer to meaningful life extension than the people of the early 20th century were to us (let alone the people of the 19th century or earlier).

>>>> **u/Geminii27** [+3]  (a day later)
>>>> 
>>>> Oh, we're closer, yes, but reading the medical literature of today, it's fairly obvious that we're still largely stumbling around in the dark with regard to an enormous amount of things.

>>> **u/holomanga** [+1]  (2 days later)
>>> 
>>> It seems that by the middle of the 21st century we might start getting the first superintelligence - lots of AI scientist predictions put AI there, and it's not implausible that something like [in-vitro eugenics](http://jme.bmj.com/content/early/2013/02/13/medethics-2012-101200.full?sid=e04fe105-6117-4c50-8902-0bbc6891dc30), especially [iterated embryo selection](https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Iterated_embryo_selection) could give us some very smart biological humans if that doesn't pan out. At that point it's going to go a whole lot more smoothly, at least.

> **u/plushiemancer** [+3]  (a day later)
> 
> Not true though. death rate after 1900 (oldest person right now is 117) is lower than 100%

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