Re: Life expectancy increasing rapidly

Entropyfoe@aol.com
Thu, 10 Dec 1998 22:45:07 EST

Anders is right. Bruce Stirling stated and explored these grounds eloquently in 'Holy Fire". "Life extension technology increased so the longevity expectation increaseed more than one year every year. So, on was effectively imortal. " [paraphrasing...]
-Jay 

>Anders Sandberg wrote:

> Still a bit away from the breakeven point, but interesting enough. A
> 4/10 increase in life expectancy per year would, assuming steady
> progress give an expectation of 0.4x + (0.4^2) x + (0.4^3)x + ... =
> 1.66 x more years if x are the numbers of "naturally" remaining years
> for a given person, since life extending progress would occur during
> the extra years given by the initial developments. In order to reach
> the breakeven point, we of course need more than one extra year per
> year.

What's really exciting about this, is that a sustained rate of .4yrs/yr means a person of 35 years can expect to live another ~70 years, bringing us to the year 2068. Even the most conservative extropian's see radical nanotech by this point. So perhaps in a sense, we have already reached the breaking point, and can now expect to to catch the wave of ever increasing nanotech life-extension returns.