Your body wasn’t built to last: a lesson from human mortality rates

The body can be considered as a system of many redundant components, with aging as the result of progressive unrepaired damage to those components. This is a model that works very well. For further reading, you might look at the application of reliability theory to aging: http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2010/05/applying-reliabil... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_theory_of_aging_and... Once you start to think along the lines of damage and repair, you inevitably end up in the SENS camp. It's the logical…

There is no reason that human beings cannot live forever. Gompertz Law is not a law of physics, but a law of observation similar to Moore's Law. Medical and safety technology are also advancing exponentially. Barring a catastrophe that blasts us back to the stone age, one growth curve will eventually overtake the other. The article uses a cops and criminals analogy to explain how our bodies degrade over time. Technology can allow us to produce artificial cops and conditions…

Isaac Asimov wrote in The Caves of Steel, that human body could last 300 years. But on special diet, in sterile environment...

As someone who is studying actuarial sciences ... if you use some real data against the Gompertz you see that it doesn't really fit that well for very small and very large ages. Which is why this guy Makeham did this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gompertz%E2%80%93Makeham_law_of... As a student with a mathematics background (and boy do we love 'simplifications'). I can never stop theorizing and thinking about what would happen if we would just insist on a maximum age of lets say 80. It…