Ray Kurzweil at Wired, June 13:
In The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge With AI, the spiritual sequel to his (in)famous 2005 book, Ray Kurzweil doubles down on the promise of immortality.
We are now in the later stages of the first generation of life extension, which involves applying the current class of pharmaceutical and nutritional knowledge to overcoming health challenges. In the 2020s we are starting the second phase of life extension, which is the merger of biotechnology with AI. The 2030s will usher in the third phase of life extension, which will be to use nanotechnology to overcome the limitations of our biological organs altogether. As we enter this phase, we’ll greatly extend our lives, allowing people to far transcend the normal human limit of 120 years.
Only one person, Jeanne Calment—a French woman who survived to age 122—is documented to have lived longer than 120 years. So why is this such a hard limit to human longevity? One might guess that the reasons people don’t make it past this age are statistical—that elderly people face a certain risk of Alzheimer’s, stroke, heart attack, or cancer every year, and that after enough years being exposed to these risks, everyone eventually dies of something. But that’s not what’s happening. Actuarial data shows that from age 90 to 110, a person’s chances of dying in the following year increase by about 2 percentage points annually. For example, an American man at age 97 has about a 30 percent chance of dying before 98, and if he makes it that far he will have a 32 percent chance of dying before 99. But from age 110 onward, the risk of death rises by about 3.5 percentage points a year.
Doctors have offered an explanation: At around age 110, the bodies of the oldest people start breaking down in ways that are qualitatively different from the aging of younger senior citizens. Supercentenarian (110-plus) aging is not simply a continuation or worsening of the same kinds of statistical risks of late adulthood. While people at that age also have an annual risk from ordinary diseases (although the worsening of these risks may decelerate in the very old), they additionally face new challenges like kidney failure and respiratory failure. These often seem to happen spontaneously—not as a result of lifestyle factors or any disease onset. The body apparently just starts breaking down.
Over the past decade, scientists and investors have started giving much more serious attention to finding out why. One of the leading researchers in this field is biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey, founder of the LEV (Longevity Escape Velocity) foundation. As de Grey explains, aging is like the wear on the engine of an automobile—it is damage that accumulates as a result of the system’s normal operation. In the human body’s case, that damage largely comes from a combination of cellular metabolism and cellular reproduction. Metabolism creates waste in and around cells and damages structures through oxidation (much like the rusting of a car!). When we’re young, our bodies are able to remove this waste and repair the damage efficiently. But as we get older, most of our cells reproduce over and over, and errors accumulate. Eventually the damage starts piling up faster than the body can fix it.
The only solution, longevity researchers argue, is to cure aging itself. In short, we need the ability to repair damage from aging at the level of individual cells and local tissues. There are a number of possibilities being explored for how to achieve this, but I believe the most promising ultimate solution is nanorobots.
And we don’t need to wait until these technologies are fully mature in order to benefit. If you can live long enough for anti-aging research to start adding at least one year to your remaining life expectancy annually, that will buy enough time for nanomedicine to cure any remaining facets of aging. This is longevity escape velocity. This is why there is sound logic behind Aubrey de Grey’s sensational declaration that the first person to live to 1,000 years has likely already been born. If the nanotechnology of 2050 solves enough issues of aging for 100-year-olds to start living to 150, we’ll then have until 2100 to solve whatever new problems may crop up at that age. With AI playing a key role in research by then, progress during that time will be exponential. So even though these projections are admittedly startling—and even sound absurd to our intuitive for linear thinking—we have solid reasons to see this as a likely future.
I’ve had many conversations over the years about life extension, and the idea often meets resistance. People become upset when they hear of an individual whose life has been cut short by a disease, yet when confronted with the possibility of generally extending all human life, they react negatively. “Life is too difficult to contemplate going on indefinitely” is a common response. But people generally do not want to end their lives at any point unless they are in enormous pain—physically, mentally, or spiritually. And if they were to absorb the ongoing improvements of life in all its dimensions, most such afflictions would be alleviated. That is, extending human life would also mean vastly improving it.
But how will nanotechnology actually make this possible? In my view, the long-term goal is medical nanorobots. These will be made from diamondoid parts with onboard sensors, manipulators, computers, communicators, and possibly power supplies. It is intuitive to imagine nanobots as tiny metal robotic submarines chugging through the bloodstream, but physics at the nanoscale requires a substantially different approach. At this scale, water is a powerful solvent, and oxidant molecules are highly reactive, so strong materials like diamondoid will be needed.
And whereas macro-scale submarines can smoothly propel themselves through liquids, for nanoscale objects, fluid dynamics are dominated by sticky frictional forces. Imagine trying to swim through peanut butter! So nanobots will need to harness different principles of propulsion. Likewise, nanobots probably won’t be able to store enough onboard energy or computing power to accomplish all their tasks independently, so they will need to be designed to draw energy from their surroundings and either obey outside control signals or collaborate with one another to do computation....
....MUCH MORE
Fluid dynamics, very important. Provide a proof of the "Navier–Stokes Equation" and win yourself a million bucks. And that's just the start of the opportunity. It might be as large as a trillion dollars.
January 2020
The Trouble With Turbulence
In the introduction to a post on fish and the Little Ice Age last July I mentioned how mind-bendingly complex fluid dynamics can be.
September 2021
Fluid Dynamics (and the filth on your phone)
This is one of those fields of study that are so mind-bogglingly complex that, short of having a supercomputer close to hand, we can only approximate as to the details. See also weather, markets, and any other complex/chaotic system you can think of.So anyone who can get a handle on what is actually going on with this stuff gives a whole 'nother meaning to the concept of smart.
September 2021
Think You're Smart Don'tcha: Figure This Out And Make A Million Bucks
In last week's post "Fluid Dynamics (and the filth on your phone)" I made the assertion "This is one of those fields of study that are so mind-bogglingly complex that....", without supplying any supporting statements or facts.
(in these situations the reader can assume I am relying on the Charlie Munger all-purpose turnaround: "Think about it a little more and you will agree with me because you're smart and I'm right.")
June 2023
Figure This Out And Make A Million Bucks: Now With Penguins
First up, the penguins, from Chalkdust, (A Magazine For The Mathematically Curious)....
Follow-up To "Figure This Out And Make A Million Bucks..."
There is a lot more money involved than just the million dollars from the Millennium Prize for understanding fluid dynamics and turbulence. In the climate arena the coupled climate models are still not all that skillful when trying to comprehend the interactions of the sea and the atmosphere, a huge and extraordinarily complex part of the whole picture and not that well understood.
On a much smaller scale, understanding turbulence can be worth hundreds of millions to billions of dollars when siting turbines on a wind farm.....
