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Ray Kurzweil was on Joe Rogan's podcast recently. He seems completely deluded about life extension. I think he said we're at 20% of the longevity escape velocity, which means life expectancy is increasing by about ten weeks every year, so that you're really only 42 weeks closer to death every year. He says this is accelerating such that we will reach longevity escape velocity in about ten years I think. This strikes me as ridiculously optimistic and timed so that he is just young enough to be able to benefit from this.
The guy is not doing well, judging by his appearance. Joe Rogan asked him his age and I was expecting to hear an answer that started with a 9 and was shocked when he said he was in his seventies. Judging by videos from just a few years ago, he has started to age really fast. His body was slumped over and he talked very slowly. The interview was painful to listen to. He's taking something like 60 pills a day to stay young and it doesn't seem to be helping.
With Mr Kurzweil the next big breakthrough is always in 10-30 years. LLMs and chat GPT are breakthroughs, but probably not what he and others like him have in mind of something that radically alters existence itself.
Yeah and this is with plastic surgery and hair transplants , which it's evident compared to older pictures
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Unrelated to the actual science or lack thereof in this subject, I think thinking on the extreme measures that Kurzweil is taking to extend his life I find his clear lack of success as a very stark reminder that one of the most important things in life is learning to accept gracefully the inevitable and inescapable quality of death.
While I’m not keen to die and in no hurry, it can’t be mentally or physically healthy spending this much time and energy trying to extend your life. I think there’s a kind of hilarious irony in that.
People who live long don't take hundreds of supplements, but are generally those who love life, themselves, socially active and even a bit insufferable. Like Trump. Oldest person in my family was a bit like him, also pretty sharp to old age, very high self-regard.
Lifting weights to restore muscle lost after sarcopenia starts in sixties really helps. You won't live much longer, but you can move around and do stuff. E.g. Dr. Eugster who decided to lift weights to regain muscle at 87, lived to 97 pretty actively. Or here's Ernestine Shepherd, training old people in a gym at age.. probably late 80s.. She had a body better than most twenty-somethings by 80, nice muscle definition, erect posture. (see attachment for age 85)
If they're physically active and careful enough, easily live to mid 90s.
My grandma who I'm talking about had a massive heart attack at 79 after smoking for half a century, the kind that usually kills people, then lived fairly sedentarily on heart medication until 93 and her irreversible overnight fall in the bathroom while living alone. After that she spent a year in a hospice, mostly sleeping or drowsing but lucid for the daily hr one of her sons came, brought her beer and visited. Her mind was going so she lost her filter, and we heard incredible things. I wonder if she'd have preferred DNR.
I am relieved.
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Poor Ray.
Yeah, I remember Ray talking about escape velocity. That's just a stupid belief for such a smart person. We're going the wrong direction. In the early 1900s, we were at 40% of escape velocity. It's been going down every since. Today, it's close to zero.
And the supplements... Let's say that, in isolation, each of these supplements increased lifespan by 0.2 years which is unlikely, but not impossible. But that doesn't mean that, in aggregate they will increase lifespan by 0.2*60 = 12 years. In fact, all these supplements might interact with each other in negative ways and actually be harmful in aggregate. I don't know. Neither does Ray.
It's certainly not additive.
For someone who is so smart it's sad how he fell off into the realm of health nonsense
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I think this is misleading. The number care about is more like "life expectancy conditioned on being a healthy adult", which I don't think was changing much back then, nor has changed much recently. But probably is still going up a little if you control for demographics, which, in my limited understanding, have been changing in the West to mask (small) improvements in longevity.
I don't know exactly what you mean by "healthy young adult" (healthy young adults by definition die rarely), but life expectancy at every age has increased since 1900:
https://ourworldindata.org/its-not-just-about-child-mortality-life-expectancy-improved-at-all-ages
Life expectancy at 20 years old in 1900 was just under 65 and is now over 80.
Whoops, thanks for correcting me and for providing a link.
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This is not accurate. In the year 1900, mortality was much higher than today at every age range. Healthy adults were constantly being felled in the prime of life by bacterial infections or infectious diseases.
But yes, there was no true escape velocity then or now. The gains were all in helping people realize their potential, but the potential itself remains fixed.
Oh, I stand corrected.
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