From: Ramez Naam (mez@apexnano.com)
Date: Tue Jun 17 2003 - 02:59:24 MDT
From: Robert J. Bradbury [mailto:bradbury@aeiveos.com]
> On Mon, 16 Jun 2003, Ramez Naam wrote:
>
> > From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky [mailto:sentience@pobox.com]
> > > Even if we consider only personal survival, what are,
> > > on the average, the greatest probable threats to the
> > > survival of any
> > > given human living today?
> >
> > 1) Old age (and its related causes of death)
> > 2) Infectious disease
>
> I'm not sure I agree with this -- the problem is with the
> statement "any given human".
Good point. I wasn't quite sure how to interpret this in Eliezer's
post, so I took it to mean "a human randomly selected from the current
world population".
> There are *many* humans who
> *will* die (if not preserved with cryonics or some other
> technology -- which currently means *most* of them). The
> causes of death (i.e. threats to them) are here:
>
> http://www.aeiveos.com/~bradbury/Aging/CausesOfDeath.html
This looks like a breakdown of US causes of death to me. When you
look at the numbers for the whole world, it's like so (as of 2001).
Total Deaths in 2001 56.5 million 100%
Non-communicable[1] 33.1 million 58.6%
Communicable[2] 18.4 million 41.4%
[1] - This category is dominated by heart disease and cancer, both of
which are radically more common in old age. Even if we imagine that
20% of deaths in this category are not age-related, we end up with
almost half of all deaths being indirectly due to aging.
[2] - This category also includes about 2.5 million deaths due to
pregnancy complications and infant mortality, and another 0.5 million
deaths from famine. Even so, we end up with more than 15 million
diseases due directly to infectious diseases, around 26-27% of the
total deaths in 2001.
Data courtesy of WHO's World Health Report 2002, Annex Table 2, Deaths
by cause.
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