To those that think I’m too damn depressing on this blog about the troubles I’ve seen (or see down the road), here’s a link to a happier post by Instapundit. I’ll just copy and paste what he did and comment:
“Life is getting better—and at an accelerating rate. Food availability, income, and life span are up; disease, child mortality, and violence are down — all across the globe. Though the world is far from perfect, necessities and luxuries alike are getting cheaper; population growth is slowing; Africa is following Asia out of poverty; the Internet, the mobile phone, and container shipping are enriching people’s lives as never before. The pessimists who dominate public discourse insist that we will soon reach a turning point and things will start to get worse. But they have been saying this for two hundred years. Prosperity comes from everybody working for everybody else. The habit of exchange and specialization—which started more than 100,000 years ago—has created a collective brain that sets human living standards on a rising trend. The mutual dependence, trust, and sharing that result are causes for hope, not despair.”
Well, yes. Absolutely. I’m a complete optimist with regards to human progress and more importantly, science and technology, at least in the long term. The problem is our maturity as a race politically and morally, and that’s definitely a two steps forward, one step back sort of thing. That step back is going to be painful, and it won’t be directly due to specialization or science gone mad, but simply a nasty combination of greed, lack of foresight, and the disturbing propensity of humankind to whistle past the graveyard.
In the long run, though, even through any tough times that may lie ahead, the march of scientific and technological progress will continue, making things better for humankind as a whole. Progress of this sort tends towards a exponential progress, meaning the more we learn, the faster we learn, and I believe, the more unstoppable that learning is. Therefore, any major step back will be pretty temporary, and completely different than anything we’ve experienced before. We’re not going to suffer through a Great Depression like anything our grandparents did. This is a good thing. All this optimism doesn’t mean, though, that we’re not going to see hard times, and perhaps some severe ones.
I think I’ll copy and paste gratuitously for once, this time from Instapundit. It’s short, and full of great advice:
SECRETS OF LONGEVITY: “Allingham, who was the world’s oldest man when he died Saturday at 113, attributed his remarkable longevity to ‘cigarettes, whisky and wild, wild women.’”
Heh. Guess I shouldn’t have quit. (Which one, comes the inevitable question?)
If you or your wife are over 40, there’s one more reason to have a baby later in life: to have an idea if you’re going to be longer lived than average. Well, perhaps that isn’t a great reason, but it’s still interesting. Basically, a study was just published showing that women who had babies into their 40′s, on average, lived longer than those who didn’t. The implication here isn’t that having babies later in your life makes you live longer, but those that can have babies later in live also tend to live longer than those who cannot. One more step along the way to locating, and then manipulating, genes that will allow us to start seriously extending healthy life.
I read today from another blogger an offhanded comment: dying at 75 now seems almost too young. Hopefully by the time I’m 75, they’ll be saying the same about 110. Bring on actuarial escape velocity!
Life expectancy increases slightly every year as treatment strategies and technologies improve. At present, more than one year of research is required for each additional year of expected life.
Actuarial escape velocity occurs when this ratio reverses, so that expected years of remaining life actually increases each year.
I don’t follow that many blogs. I mean, probably 40-50, but many of those don’t blog every day, so it really isn’t that many compared to some. So, when one blog says something and another comments on it, it’s kind of cool.
Late last week, Charlie Stross, the science fiction author, posted some fairly depressing speculation about what this century will hold for humanity. Singularity? No. Colonizing Mars? Nu-uh. He’s not all down on the near future, but he’s certainly not hugely optimistic. He’s a pretty smart guy, and I do pay attention to him (and I love his books to boot). The blog Next Big Future came right back the next day to answer him with some fun ideas about how Orion nuclear space ship technology can let us dream big and execute on those dreams this century.
I have no idea if it’ll happen. People that try to predict what’ll happen 100 years in the future with any real degree of detail (read, increasing global temperature) are always wrong. Always. But I do wish people would dream big about what humanity can achieve. If we don’t dream it, we’ll never do it.
Currently, our culture insists that only sick people can take drugs. There doesn’t seem to be a clear, moral case for this to be so, however. This Lifeboat article skims this topic, listing out many drugs that can help with your brain’s functionality that are available right now. Of course, you need to be sick to get most of these. But really, why? I’d love to have increased memory, cognition, and especially focus. Click through for the table of drugs.
Now, drugs that enhance mental functioning in healthy people are becoming known and – increasingly – used. We are in the midst of a series of discoveries that will progressively enhance mental abilities. Alpha-CaM kinase II causes remembering a bad memory to erase it, at least in mice. Credible evidence exists for other biomolecular approaches to cognitive enhancement, some listed in the table.
