From: Brett Paatsch (paatschb@optusnet.com.au)
Date: Tue Jun 17 2003 - 05:47:21 MDT
Ramez writes
> 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.
Thing is the question "greatest threat to survival" doesn't specify a
time period. All of the total deaths in 2001 did not survive until 2002.
It could be that what is the greatest threat to survival until the age
of 150 for a healthy 20, 30, 40, 50 etc year old American as of today
could all be very different.
- Brett Paatsch
PS: If I *knew* what the greatest threat to survival to (say 150)
was for the average healthy 36 year old Australian male was that
might focus my energies wonderfully.
Nature does not engineer us to last for 150 years. If we are going
to try and reengineer our survival times it is likely a different set
of risks and design considerations will need be weighted.
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