cheeno said:

I'll catch the next one.

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redandguilty said:

You'll need this:
http://www.amazon.com/Transcend-Nin...=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1338945346&sr=1-1

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cheeno said:

Thanks for the tip Red, plus kudos for knowing I was semi serious.

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redandguilty said:

Every now and then I look up pictures of Ray Kurzweil to see if he looks his age. The e-book version of Transcend was $4 a while back. I don't know if it goes on sale often though.

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cheeno said:

I read a lot of the medical advice in Fantastic Voyage, I guess Transcend is similar with some revisions and written for a wide audience. My question would be once these life extending treatments come into effect (nanobots, gene therapy), how much will they cost and will only the very rich be able to afford it for the first century or so.

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redandguilty said:

I think Kurzweil took some heat for some of the things he said in FV, so he got a doctor on board for Transcend.

http://www.rayandterry.com/transcend/

You can take a survey and get advice now.

http://www.rayandterry.com/personalprogram/

I don't know about the nanobots happening anytime soon, but people are making materials with nanoscale features that do have the potential to dramatically advance what we can do. ...and of course the costs will be crazy.

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cheeno said:

Do guys like Kurzwiel that believe that we will be able to dramatically extend our lifetimes in the next 20 years ever mention the cost? And if you do extend your life expectancy past 100 you better have some retirement fund.

I agree with you on the nanobots, they are just my favorite image; little spider looking things going through your body at the cellular level, repairing mitochondria, ingested through a vial or injected with a syringe. Suddenly your 20 years younger.

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redandguilty said:

When it comes to bringing costs down, I am a little optimistic that IBM's Watson will help eventually. Even if you had vast nanoscale capabilities, you still need to diagnose problems and make a call on the treatment. The smaller the scale you're looking at, the more detail you have to deal with and the more difficult it gets just to comprehend the complexity of the system.

Regarding how you go about paying for the longer life...if you can afford the life extending tech, you can afford to live longer. The expectation is that you'll have the capacity to work longer...and that means spending more time at the top of the ladder. Good for the haves. Not so good for the have nots.

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cheeno said:

Damn you'll need 25 years of experience just to get out of the mail room. I'd hate to be a young person in the future if the guy above them is retiring at 90.

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redandguilty said:

If you extrapolate from that idea, it can get scary. If things go well, we'll have to rethink how we want our economy to work. Capitalism fails when a population can satisfy the material needs of it's population with much less than the bulk of the available labor. If 10% of the people are all that's needed to provide all the services we need, what are the other 90% supposed to do to earn a living?

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cheeno said:

Colonize elsewhere?

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redandguilty said:

If they go somewhere else, then we'll need even fewer workers providing services.

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cheeno said:

I know this is getting a little sci-fi, but I what meant was the ones not finding work here on earth become the pioneers of colonies on other planets. Expansion creates jobs.

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redandguilty said:

That's probably part of the solution. But how will they go? Boldly?

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