"Immortality Distracts" from overcomingbias.com
http://www.overcomin...#comment-451900Excerpt:
"But if you search for his name and “immortality” you will find he is associated with that word quite often, including in the title of many interviews of him. He’s even listed as an advisor to the Immortality Institute. And you’ll find things like:
De Grey says he is talking about the “indefinite extension of longevity.” “Average life spans would be in the region of 1,000 years,” he says. “Seriously.” … So humans will be just as spry at 500 as we were at 25? “If you have difficultly imaging this, think about the situation with houses. With moderate maintenance they stay up, they stay intact, inhabitable more or less forever. It’s just that we have to do a bit of maintenance to keep them going. And it’s going to be the same with us,” says de Grey. …
“The first generation [of new med tech] will give us maybe 30 extra years of healthy lifespan,” says de Grey. “So, beneficiaries of those first therapies will still be around to benefit from improved therapies that will give them another 30 or 50 years and so on. So this is basically staying one step ahead of the problem.” … De Grey acknowledges that immortality will not be cheap. “We are talking about serious expenditure here.”
Are houses immortal? Very few (no?) thousand year old houses still function, and maintenance costs probably makes them cost more overall than just building a new house. Old houses are even more expensive if you want to retrofit them with modern conveniences, such as lights or air conditioning, or if you consider the opportunity cost of the land on which they sit. And even if, with sufficient expenditure, houses could last a thousand years, that should be little comfort to those who can’t possibly afford such expense. Furthermore, lasting a thousand years is nothing like being immortal!"