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Biomedical gerontologist Aubrey de Grey, chairman of the Methuselah Foundation and someone you may recognise from his recent appearance on 60 Minutes, has suggested a volunteer project suitable for economists and statisticians interested in generating greater support and funding for healthy life extension:
A discussion within the Methuselah Foundation has resulted in the idea that it would be good to determine how effective SENS (or equivalently powerful interventions) would be economically: that is, how much they would need to cost before the cost outweighs the economic benefits of keeping someone healthy. Here we are mainly interested in the macroeconomic question, i.e. "cost" is to be understood as how much it costs to administer the therapies (and possibly also to develop them in the first place) rather than how much they might be sold for. Plenty of work has of course been done on this in respect of much more modest [life extension], but no one has quite had the nerve to do it for therapies that conferred escape velocity. I am in touch with people with the necessary enabling technology (datasets, software) to develop such forecasts, but it would probably still be a substantial project. If there are any volunteers who feel they have the right sort of expertise (which means pretty good maths, not just computing) and also a chunk of time to dedicate, please speak up. No guarantees that we can make such a project happen, but we'd like to try.
A discussion is ongoing at the Immortality Institute forums; if this catches your interest, you should certainly drop by and speak up. You might also want to look back in the Fight Aging! archives at a view of the future of retirement (or absence of same), some thoughts on social security and age-related frailty, and commentary on the utter mess that is modern Western-style "social security".
Technorati tags: activism, economics, life extension, volunteer
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Posted by Reason
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