RoR: Forum

Post 0

Friday, November 16, 2007 - 3:45am

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Thanks for quoting this, Ted. It's an important, yet under-appreciated, truth.

Ed

Post 1

Friday, November 16, 2007 - 9:37pm

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Avoiding death is easy. Living, on the other hand, is hard.

Post 2

Saturday, November 17, 2007 - 1:32am

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I recently read an article somewhere that argued if all death by aging and disease were to end, people would still live only to about 17,000 years given that ones chances of dying in an accident any given year average out to 1 in 17,000.

Of course, one would think that if aging and disease were conquered, people would most likely be much more risk averse, so to accept the current statistics as immutable is ridiculous. And I would think that suicide would become the or at least a leading cause of death.

This is a bit off topic, but it is an interesting notion.

Larry Niven even designed an alien race of such immortals, the "Pierson's Puppeteers" who are so risk averse that those who have contact with aliens or risk FTL travel are considered ipso facto insane.

Ted Keer

Post 3

Saturday, November 17, 2007 - 6:56am

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I'll take my 17,000 years.

Thank you.

:-)

Ed

Post 4

Saturday, November 17, 2007 - 1:21pm

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Of course, if 17,000 is an average, then some will die the day they are born, and others live much, much longer. I never took statistics, so I am not sure which sort of curve describes the distribution of the occurrence of a random time-dependent event across a population. I assume it would be a right-shifted bell curve going from zero at the origin to a long right handed tail. Can anyone correct me?

Also, so long as we remain earthbound, all our eggs are in one basket, so to say.

Of course these are not ethical, but sociological observations.

Ted Keer

Post 5

Saturday, November 17, 2007 - 2:30pm

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That would be making a tribal assumption of a psycho-historian...... with the same fatal results of the Foundation......

meaning by this, that as humanity progresses [assuming one 'sees' a progression in humanity], there would as a natural course be an increase in the sense of individualism - which would then throw off the bell curving, as the predictability gets lost in the diversity.........

(Edited by robert malcom on 11/17, 2:34pm)

Post 6

Saturday, November 17, 2007 - 2:42pm

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Robert, you misunderstand. The point I was discussing is accidental mortality. Just because people are individualists doesn't have anything to do with their dying by misfortune, and couldn't possibly affect the shape of a graph of general mortality. If you assume randomness increases, then whatever the general curve, the more smooth it will become.

Ted Keer
(Edited by Ted Keer on 11/17, 2:50pm)

Post 7

Saturday, November 17, 2007 - 2:51pm

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I wonder on that - in as much as there would be a great propensity to being able to get out of otherwise impossible situations than the 'average' person would..... if not, why?

Post 8

Saturday, November 17, 2007 - 9:50pm

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Robert, remember I'm talking about death due to accident. Whether or not one is an individualist, being hit by a drunk driver, killed by an asteroid, a burst steam pipe...

One could choose to live in a bubble or as a hermit, but this would simply make the general mortality curve flatten out towards the right end.

Ted