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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: longnshort who wrote (374734)	7/24/2010 6:03:03 PM
From: Maurice Winn	4 Recommendations Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 794338

No. <If you live longer do you cost he system more, usually ?> That's why humans have evolved to become the longest lived primate and why we live longer than nearly everything other than a few dopey things that just sit there like the Galapagos tortoise. They need a century or two just to catch up to a girlfriend and do a couple of laps of the island. Our brains are so amazingly valuable and nature has found it so absurdly wasteful to spend decades learning huge complexity and sophistication in dealing with the surrounding world that nature has contrived to extend our lives to get our money's worth. Those silly telomeres and other biological limitations are simply unable to do the job right, so in frustration we are inventing cyberspace which provides extra-somatic knowledge and intelligence with sensory input from trillions of transducers and other sources. We can happily continue with our chimpoid ways, while cyberspace does the heavy mental lifting for us. Taxi drivers used to spend years learning "The Knowledge". Soon, Google will be able to do it all and the driver will just tell the taxi the destination [or the passenger could do it] and follow the directions. "Left here, along Moorgate then we'll hang a right into Finsbury Circus." Look, I don't even need to explain The Knowledge because Google has it handy at a moment's notice: tfl.gov.uk As we become freed from the need to have mental horsepower, we will be able to revert to our natural chimpoid inclinations and forget about spending years studying to learn how to do things that cyberspace can do in the blink of an eye. People can go back to mating and fighting at a young age. But it depends on precisely what you mean by "the system". If you mean Obamacare and government pension payments then yes, costs go up as people live longer without working. With Death Panels the costs can be kept way down. We have Death Panels in New Zealand now, deciding who gets what state-funded medical treatment and there is nowhere near enough to go around. They do life-year quality calculations so that if an old geezer gets some medical problem and a young one gets it too, they decide that the young person should get the $10,000 of service because the service will provide good quality life for another 60 years but if they provide the same $10,000 of service to the 80 year old, they'll only get a few years of minimal quality life out of the money. As my mother in law used to say, "Getting old isn't for sissies". Living longer has traditionally provided great value to the system. Putting an old head on young shoulders would be great, but unfortunately, each baby has to battle their way from knowing nothing to figuring out the vast array of things they need to know to live a good life. We can now do a lot of it by cyberspace surrogacy - there's no need to spend hours telling each youngster their ancestry. It can be uploaded to cyberspace and clicked on when a youngster wonders where great great grandpa came from. 23andMe will provide really accurate information. 23andme.com With 23andMe knowledge, people will be able to have healthy long-lived babies - go to 110 years old with excellent functionality. For example, Parkinson's disease [Sergey Brin of Google] wired.com With 23andMe knowledge, there would be no need to pass on Parkinson's disease. Mqurice