STARTING POINT
My starting point of life expectancy averaging the age of my dead relatives is 67 years.
They all smoke and heavily drank. I do neither. smoking loses you
10 years of life.[7] By avoiding smoking my life expectancy increases to 77 years old.
I also don't drink more than one glass of one a night. Not taking the drinking to excess while making sure I do get some alcohol unlike my relatives adds a total of 8 years to my life. We are now at 85.
I use diet interventions proven to
extend lifespan [8[, take metformin which increases
longevity[11], and take telomere lengthening
supplements, [9] as the length of telomeres has been associated with the total lifespan of a
person. [10] With these interventions, I think a safe prediction is that without any advances in technology I'm on pace to hit 100.
I should live to see the year 2083. What happens prior to 2083, is what's going to determine whether I'll be around to take advantage of coming technologies.
I limited the debate to making it to 200 years old, is because should we eliminate every age related disease, and every medical condition than life expectancy would still just be 1,000 years old due to things like accidents,
homicide, suicide etc. [12]
The Immortal Jellyfish
Many times, when you bring up the possibility of an extended lifespan than you will get people saying biological immortality (hereafter used to mean indefinite lifespan), just isn't possible for carbon based life forms. This however is a myth and here are some examples to show other species have accomplished it, and this is merely a matter of rearranging our own DNA, and or repairing the accumulation of cellular damage to
make it happen. [13]
The Turritopsis dohrnii is a type of Jelly fish that scientists have called immortal due to it's ability to revert to earlier cellular states when it needs to and theoretically, some may have been around since the time of the dinosaurs.
The hydra doesn't seem to have any senescence (cellular decay) at all and the genes responsible for it (FoxO genes) are also prevelant in humans and apparently is a signal to the cells for when to die. By altering the signal to match the FoxO signals in hydra, may be our ticket to eternal youth.
Lobsters do not age, because there telomeres seem to stay the same size indefinitely, when they do die it isn't usually from aging, but by becoming so large the energy to create a new exoskeleton becomes too much.
The mole rat doesn't appear to face a larger chance of death as they get older.
biological immortality is possible. Often when you bring up the strategy to extend lifespan by taking car of cellular damage as technology becomes advanced enough in small bites to do so, people will object by saying the body is not like an old car that you can just swap out parts. My response would be that it's silly to think you can just indefinitely keep a car going that in no way is not self repairing, but somehow a human body that is self repairing would be too difficult to handle. It seems like the arguments otherwise are defeatist, pessimistic and inaccurate.
Escape velocity
Imagine living in a time where people get around on horseback. a place where there is no refrigeration, you just keep your food in a cool cellar. For comfort you don't have TV or radio, you have a book and the more your read it by candlelight when nightfall comes, the more your eyesight weakens. This isn't as far back as you may think. There was a gentleman who watched Abraham Lincoln die in 1865. There was a guy like that who does have an interview you can watch in 1956. His name was
Samuel J. Seymore. [14]
This man was born into the world described. He went from living in a world where people got around on horseback, to one where people took trips on planes, A place where a family was lucky to have electricity to a world where nearly every man woman and child had access to a television. He went from salting meats to eat later, to constantly having fresh refrigerated food on hand.
I want voters to know. The world they live in today, will be as alien to to our kids as the 1960s was to Mr. Seymore. These changes happened to Seymore in a slow gradual way, and only looking back does this technological advancement look fast. It's the same for me at 40. All the changes came slow from tapes, to CD's to MP3's and then the slow transition to just listening to music on my phone. It's only looking back that I can see how alien the world has become, and you too will have this experience.
The whole point of relaying that information to you is to show you that these slow gradual changes really add up and some changes look miraculous if you were to just jump your life 20 years, but are mundane when you experience it as it happens. Slow increases in life expectancy won't be noticed as you experience them, and then one day you are looking at your mother who is now celebrating her 500 year birthday and maybe you will pause to think.... "How the fuck did this happen?".
Life expectancy is currently about
80 years old. [1] People watching Mr. Seymore on television in the 1950s explaining that he saw Lincoln shot in the head, would be dumbfounded at the alien world he lived in. The people watching that show had a
life expectancy of 40 years old. [1] The doubling of life expectancy between their time and ours had to be a welcome surprise. Had some health conscious person debated them saying he would live to be 100 many of those people would tell him, he was crazy.
To achieve life extension to get us from 80 to allowing us to live to 200, we don’t need a big leap in technology. Baby steps are good enough. The currently we are progressing on average of adding 3 months of lifespan for
every year we are alive. [2] In order to reach escape velocity, all we need to do is add one year of life, for every single year we are alive.
Lets say that the current rate of improving lifespan by every year I am alive holds true, and we have no reason to assume it wouldn't. Just that rate alone gets me from 100 years old to 115, but I get 3 months a year from those added 15 years as well which brings me to 118, and I am rounding down to account for any hiccups so This argument brings my total lifespan up to 118 and that takes us to the year 2101. Let's see if we can get some hints as to what will happen between today and the year 2101
Law of accelerating Returns
Earlier we learned from Mr. Seymore that technology can move in the blink of an eye but it is often not noticed until we look back. When we look at the years 1650 to 1750, it was almost exactly the same. It was like that throughout most of earths history. mostly 100 or 1000 years of time sometimes 10,000 years of time where the beginning and end of the time period was indistinguishable. If we go back to the 1850s and then to the 1950s, not to dissimilar to what Mr. Seymore did, the world looks completely different over that span of time. The same sort of jump happened between the 1950s and 2000s. The technological advancements are not just happening rapidly, the rate of progress is also accelerating. We call this "The law of Accelerating Returns".
Ray Kurzweil the originator of the law of accelerating return says;
He goes onto showing us an example of this in our recent past. The human genome project started in 1990, and critics pointed out that at their pace and with technology what it is, it might take 1000 years to finish the project, less than 5% of the project was complete by year 5, but the 15 year project ended up being completed 1 year ahead of schedule.
Predictable advances in technology
Kurzweil used his law of accelerating returns to make several startling predictions on the advancement of technology that came true. Of the 147 predictions he made since the 1990s 127 of them have been correct. 12 of those were off by a year or 2 though. This gives him close to a 90% accuracy rate, showing that the law of accelerating returns is a reliable predictor of what the
future will look like. [4]
1. We will mostly use portable computers by this time
2. Personal computers will be available on clothing such as watches
3. Cloud computing will be common-sense
4. Predicted Google Glasses
Kurzweil as late as 2016 has predicted that within the next 10-15 years, we will see our life expectancy increase by 1 year for every year that passes, putting us at
escape velocity.[5] He uses some current technologies to prove this. . He does not refer to unknown technologies, but known technologies and what they will be capable of when they are predictably improved at the predictable rate.
For example in the 2020, he says 3d printing will be advanced enough to start to replicate human
organs. By the 2030s we will have computers the size of human bloodcells, which can repair cellular damage or deliver drugs. Some companies are already working on this. If we look back to earlier in this round I mentioned one strategy for extending lifespan being cellular repair because of cells damaged by the aging progress.
Conclusion
If Kurzweils predictions hold true and let's remember they are 90% true than we should reach escape velocity by 2030. I have affirmed the resolution that I will most likely be alive to see us reach escape velocity, if he is a little off and escape velocity is reached by 2040, I should still most likely live to see 200 years old.
(╯°□°）╯︵ /( ‿⌓‿ )\
im gonna post here what austin said in round 1. when the words stretched to single letters, or is slightly split up.
• life expectancy in the US dropped an entire year from 2020 to 2021
• Does this mean everyone is going to live a year less? clearly not.
• For people who got COVID and died,
they lost all their remaining years.
• For people who did not get COVID, they lost none of their remaining years.
• This demonstrates how life expectancy, which measures the average of a population, can be misleading if cited out of context.
(later part where words split slightly at the end right before Conclusion [underlined])
• since the debate concerns whether it is likely for wylted to 200, not whether he can live to 200, even theoretical technologies wouldnt be enough to prove his case.
I actually have the second round argument written out. It's been a rough week though
how in the world can i vote on this and not consider it a troll debate or a hypothetical debate?
especially when wylted wont allow kritiks.
I was deeply impressed by your simple, yet elegant and concise, second-round argument. Not only did it address every single one of my points with thorough and undeniable rebuttals, it also expounded and clarified your first-round arguments with delicate yet to-the-point prose. 10/10, would debate again.
You did have me worried you would miss your round. Me being on a phone for whatever reason means I can only read like 75% of your arguments at the moment so can't wait to read them fully
Remind me never to do nested bullet points again. Spent 20 minutes fighting against DebateArt's auto-formatting, idk how oromagi stays sane
Do me a favor and arrange them in whatever style is easiest to defeat. If nested than carry on
They're nested, oromagi style, so it's not technically a gish gallop.
you trying to gish gallop me bro?
75 bullet points.
all of that sounds correct as far as what is naturally able to be done. I'd argue they lived longer though because their blood was mixed with nephilm blood.
I'll try to post my argument tomorrow night. It has about 75 nested bullet points (so yes, I am taking this debate quite seriously).
Honestly, I think one of the best ways to freeze aging is to revert back to what the "original humans" did after The Fall (Biblical reference). All of our senses were completely heightened as we relied heavily on them in our hunter-gatherer societies. The human body was designed to move. Remaining stagnant induces atrophy and breakage. If we focused less on comfort via technological advances and looked more at how to be the apex predator in nature, we would improve our life span.
We were made to dominate the earth. Climb mountains, sprint barefoot, kill lions, strategize with groups. Domination starts with transforming your physical body and mind. I think this is part of why Adam and Eve and their close descendants were able to live for centuries. Some will say, it was because their bodies were "closer to perfection than ours nowadays." But, their bodies were affected by sin and destruction just as much as ours.
One of the most unique capabilities of the human is the ability to run and travel very, very far. There are people in the world that run marathons every single day. Sometimes its over mountains and other rough terrain. We were made to travel the earth. Some people have forgotten this and live lazily.
I started thinking a lot more about this after reading "Natural Born Heroes: Mastering the Lost Secrets of Strength and Endurance."
If you want a book get "ending aging" also by Aubrey DeGrey and Michael Rae.
Start by going to YouTube and watching Aubrey DeGreys Ted talk. It doesn't matter which Ted talk but one is linked in the second comment on this debate. He clearly explains escape velocity. After that here is one website https://www.fightaging.org/
I would also look at something called "CRsociety" if that website is still online and go find some lectures by ray kurzweil on his law of accelerating returns.
The CRsociety if I remember has hundreds of studies listed many monkey studies, mice studies etc.
If you want to attempt radical life extension think the following things
1. Fasting (cr gets mildly better results but is torture and will make you physically weak)
2. HIIT exercise 3 days combined with 2 days of weight lifting full body minimum.
3. Regular and aggressive health checkups to catch things in the earlier possible stages.
What are some good website links or online content for researching "escape velocity"?
"...order by God to keep life below 120 years old after the flood."
Not all Christians believe in that statement as you have described it. I do not. It is very possible to live well past 120 years of life. If you were referring to me, I do not think this as "anti-Christian."
I would also at some point debate a fellow Christian who would see pursuing radical life extension as anti-christian. I would be welcoming of a jew wanting to debate it as well because the arguments usually come down to a perceived order by God to keep life below 120 years old after the flood.
I appreciate that. I want to prove radical life extension is possible and then go into the ethics of it. I feel like I will have to do the debate again, even if I win it because the argument can be more digestible. For example just paring the debate down to the part about escape velocity and describing escape velocity in the description and then spending several words explaining why it is likely to occur before 2045
This debate has been very interesting so far. I enjoyed reading it, and thank you for posting legitimate content
One of the reasons I gave a full week is so we can both do a lot of research. I also spend most of my time studying these ideals not expressing them, so I need to figure out how to express them properly which takes a while to figure out
I appreciate that. The possibility of life extension is something I want to prove before I move onto debates about the ethics of it, etc.
Thanks for the link. In that case, I'll go for more a constructive discussion since it is a legitimately interesting topic (I was very tempted to "Kritik" the topic based on the misspelling in rule 1, but I feel that would be in poor taste).
I don't want you to struggle with Google searches. It is supposed to be DeGrey but my phone keeps autocorrecting it
I think this link leads to it. https://www.technologyreview.com/2005/02/01/231686/do-you-want-to-live-forever/
I didn't fully vet it though
I think Aubrey Degray asked MIT to write a paper to criticize SENS for extending lifespan and to debunk his optimism. It might be worth looking at that paper to formulate some good rebuttals.
The lengthening of life expectancy from 40 to 80 can be attributed to things like reduced infant mortality to a large extent.
Escape velocity is a very specific concept created by Dr. Aubrey Degray. It is some future point where natural lifespan is extending one year for every year we exist. Lifespan currently is maxed out at about 120 calorie restriction could potentially push that to 130. The "SENS" research being done currently looks to develop ways to erase damage caused by cells to extend human lifespan past it's natural limits. What I am saying is the things in the past that extended lifespan such as lower infant mortality are not going to be the things in the future that extend it. Even 1000 years ago we had some 100 year olds walking around. The future advances I would need to prove likely to happen, will focus not on extending life expectancy with technologies that extend natural life span. Again natural lifespan being something that caps out at about 120 years of age
Well, I was planning to save my points for the actual debate round, but I'd be fine with having a little discussion in the comments. It would probably help me plan out my case anyway.
Your "escape velocity" concept doesn't really make sense. Extending life expectancy doesn't simply mean that you "add" a year to your life. For example, many of the gains in life expectancy in modern times have been a result of reduced childhood mortality. While completely eliminating childhood mortality would likely add several years to life expectancy, it wouldn't change yours. Similarly, many treatments only work on those of a younger age.
I suppose if we're still using space terminology here, we could term it as "event horizon" - the age at which no level of medical advances can keep you alive long enough to see new ones.
I am more than willing to clarify my position in the comments if it will get me a better debate. My goal isn't to win, so much as it is to test whether I am right. Sometimes I debate to win. This isn't one of those times
I am more than willing to clarify my position in the comments if it will get me a better debate. My goal isn't to win, so much as it is to test whether I am right. Sometimes I debate to win. This isn't one of those times
I believe I linked to studies showing the effects of different lifestyle choices on life expectancy or at least articles that cite those studies.
If the average life expectancy of a smoker is 70 and a non smoker 77 than it is fair to say cutting smoking adds 7 years to your life. This does of course drop off as you get older due to the law of diminishing returns. I mentioned my smoking alcoholic relatives died at 70 from drinking and smoking too much. If smoking took 7 years off of their life's and my genetics are identical to theirs, I believe it fair to say I added 7 years to my life
For starters, I can see a minor problem with your first paragraph: by your logic, if I kill myself at the age of 20, I've reduced my life expectancy by 60 (from 80, the national average or so). Therefore, if I don't kill myself, I will live to 140.
There are a ton of cognitive biases which meet that definition and I wouldn't call them fallacies, but if that is the definition you are using than obviously in a debate it is our jobs to show the voters the errors of reasoning both sides make
Well, it depends on your definition of fallacy. I was always taught that it was an "error in reasoning."
Start with Ted talk I listed in the second comment. After that go see if you can find kurzweil talking about his law of accelerating returns. Because when it comes time to, assuming I get the opportunity than I am expanding my arguments using those people as my main guides depending on which arguments need to be expanded more.
If you think you saw fallacies I would recommend making sure you understand the arguments before wasting an entire round embarrassing yourself.
Logical fallacy anyway, I don't care about the rest
Name one fallacy.
Yea, I figured.
Wylted is famous for instigating troll debates.
This is the first time I've seen fallacies number in the triple digits...?
.............
unfortunately for that argument I think I would have needed to provide some evidence, I am an astronaut and I didn't save my W2s from that job
Depends on what a year is. If you work near a black hole, then to earth folks, you can easily live over 200 years.
Good luck, I can't wait to see your response
You have enough room to debate this on equal ground with me that you won't need to get fancy.
15k is ideal imo - whenever I do 10k debates, I always feel like a few hundred words would be nice to close things out. It also gives you room to quote your opponent's arguments, and do proper citations (with full links and author attributions).
I just realized that rule 1 doesn't explicitly ban Kritiks. :thinking
i think 10k is enough to be a good debate, but not so much as to bore the hell out of voters
Or - hear me out - you could set a higher character limit?