From hindsight, how sad:
Next Stop: Immortality (Future Magazine, December 1978)
According to the actuarial tables used by insurance companies, if you are in your 20s now you probably have about 50 years more to live. If you are in your 40s, you have only about 30 years more and if you are in your 60s your life-expectancy is only about 10 years. These tables are based on averages, of course — not everybody dies precisely at the median age of 72.5 years — but these insurance tables are the best mathematical guesses about how long you will be with us. Right?
Wrong. Recent advances in gerontology (the science of aging, not to be confused with geriatrics, the treatment of the aged) have led many sober and cautious scientists to believe that human lifespan can be doubled, tripled or even extended indefinitely in this generation. If these researchers are right, nobody can predict your life expectancy. All the traditional assumptions on which the actuarial tables rest are obsolete. You might live a thousand years or even longer.
Robert Anton Wilson wrote this essay around the age of 46, and he died earlier this month. Do the math: it turns out that 1970's actuarial tables predicted Wilson's life expectancy from age 46 pretty much on the money.
Wilson makes other questionable assertions in this essay. For example:
. . . Dr. Paul Segall of UC-Berketey predicts that we will be able to raise human lifespan to "400 years or more" by the 1990s.
Unless this refers to some unknown "ultracentenarian" like the Highlander, I don't think anyone around in the 1990's started out life in the 1590's, during William Shakespeare's career. We don't know if anyone can live to 400 years until someone actually does it, and that won't happen for someone born in the 20th Century until the 24th Century, at the earliest.
Wilson then says,
Even cryonic freezing — the long-range gambler's approach to longevity, when it started in the 60s — is advancing by leaps and quantum jumps. An October 1975 McGraw-Hill poll found the majority of experts in the field believed cryonic freezing would be perfected and perfectly safe by 2000.
Okay, what "experts in the field" did this poll ask, and what "leaps and quantum jumps" in cryonics in the 1970's does Wilson refer to? Apart from Dr. Paul Segall, the mainstream cryobiological community in the 1970's considered cryonics an embarrassment and tried to discriminate against its members who advocated the research. And, obviously, the "perfected and perfectly safe" cryosuspension, by which I guess Wilson meant a survivable procedure integrated into mainstream medicine, certainly didn't arrive seven years ago.
And, of course, Wilson states an early version of the "actuarial escape velocity" idea now credited to Ray Kurzweil and Aubrey de Grey:
The basic Immortalist argument runs as follows. Be as conservative as you like in estimating the probable life-extension breakthroughs of the next two or three decades. Assume the relatively tame prediction made by Dr. Bjorksten back in 1973, when this research was (by comparison with its present status) in its infancy. Say that Bjorksten was right then and we can only expect to see lifespan increased to 140 years in the near future.
But this means that, if you are in your 40s, you will probably not be hauled offstage by the Grim Reaper in 2008, as the insurance companies are betting. You will probably still be here in 2078. And if you are in your twenties or younger, you have a good chance of being around until 2098.
From the perspective of what has actually happened between 1978 and 2007, Wilson clearly sucks as a "futurist." No wonder today's "futurists" have felt the need to postpone the science-fictional stuff until the latter 21st Century and beyond.
And people wonder why the 21st Century so far doesn't impress me, despite all the visionary progress porn about this era I consumed as a child and teenager.
