Daryl's Q: The First Person to Reach 200?
February 29 2008 / by Marisa Vitols
Category: Health & Medicine Year: General Rating: 10
“If you consider the first person who will reach the age of 200, in approximately what year was he or she born?”
The above question was posed by Daryl on the comment thread of our recent Aubrey de Grey article on life extension. Please vote and if you do be sure to explain your reasoning in the comments section!
And for the sake of argument, let’s not include cryonics. So the rules are that the person can not have already been dead. :)
Comment Thread (4 Responses)
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It’s reasonable to think that someone born in 1929 could expect to naturally live to 115. Based on linear tech and info increases, this person would die in 2044. But with exponentials driving computing power and the rate of paradigm shift it’s highly likely that gene therapy, organ replacement, nano-tech, etc. could extend this person’s life considerably, say by 40 years. That brings the life expectancy to 2084. During those 40 years (2044-2084) it’s conceivable, certainly if the exponentials hold true, that additional advances could tack on the remaining 45 years. It’s counter-intuitive, but such is the potential for life sciences post- knee of the curve.
Posted by: Alvis Brigis February 29, 2008
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Based on responses, it seems that a large percentage of the community feels that the first person to live to be 200 is currently between the ages of 28 and 58. Although I both agree that Alvis’ scenario is plausible and hope that it comes true, as there are a number of people getting on years that I would like to see stick around for a long time, I can see why that would be a common age range selection. It not only gives science a longer time to work with but also a younger cohort to employ what will be a tricky regenerative process (at least initially).
Posted by: Joe Meme February 29, 2008
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Thanks to Marisa for transforming my little question into a blog. :)
I agree with Alvis that living longer would allow a person to enjoy the benefits of new medical advances, which would promote a few more years of life, which would enable medical science to bound ahead again…on and on in a wonderful cycle.
According to Wikipedia, there are currently over 55,000 centenarians in the US alone. Presumably most of them are benefitting from reasonably good medical care. It’s also fair to say that at least a few hundred of them will benefit from the advances in regenerative medicine and gene and stem cell therapies of the next decade. And a handful of these folks will then be alive to enjoy the powerful nanomedicine technologies of the 2020’s.
Once we get a little further out, the exponentially-increasing pace of science will put everyone on a level playing field. To put it another way, in 2035 it won’t matter if you’re 120 or 20—you will have an essentially indefinite remaining life expectancy. Indeed, in an age of advanced AI and human-machine mergers, the term “life expectancy” will lose its meaning.
Therefore, my answer to my question is that the first person to reach her 200th birthday was born in 1907, plus or minus 5 years.
Posted by: Daryl March 01, 2008
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I first voted for 1930-1949, but I didn’t realize that there were that many centenarians in the US! Now it makes sense that the first dicentenarian would then be born in the early 20th century. If we have mature nanotechnology by the mid to late 2020s then we can go in and take out all the unwanted debri, fix mutations in DNA and mitochondria, get rid of unwanted cells, etc. This scenario seems very plausible. I’m 30 now. So maybe I can hold out past the biotech fixes and wait for the highly precise nanotech fixes. One effect this insight has had is now I’m not in a rush to get things done. We have alot more time on our hands than most people think to focus on goals that really matter.
Posted by: Ryan March 05, 2008
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