Thanks Mati_Roy and aarongertler for the suggestion of adding a summary. Now there is one!
Maty_Roy, thank you for the points made! I would like to correct what I think are a couple of misunderstandings and I would like to elaborate on your idea about using Death Escape Velocity, instead of Longevity Escape Velocity:
Misunderstandings:
1) 36,500,000 are the people dying of aging in a year, so bringing LEV closer by one year (and not by one day) would save this number of lives.
2) If Longevity Escape Velocity doesn’t happen, bringing the date in which aging is cured completely closer could simply do nothing. This because people living at that time could have already a really low risk of death, that can’t go much further down with an additional improvement on treatments for aging. This because if Longevity Escape Velocity doesn’t happen, then I would expect the “very slow scenario” or the “dire roadblocks” scenario to be true, and aging would be eradicated really slowly, possibly in centuries.
The points about why my estimate is conservative are summarised well, thanks for doing that :)
Regarding the idea of using “death escape velocity”: I didn’t use it because technologies that would decrease the risk of death by other causes other than aging are substantially different from the ones brought about by aging research. So it would be another cause area completely! I also would expect them to become more relevant in the future. I think there is not much use of thinking about them now and they wouldn’t make potential EA interventions to fund, since our ideas will be probably be made useless by potentially much better technology existing after aging gets eradicated (that is the first step). “Death escape velocity”could be brought about, for example, by friendly AGI, if that ever comes about. I think this input is valuable though, since it’s an existing related concept that is not talked about much.
Thanks Mati_Roy and aarongertler for the suggestion of adding a summary. Now there is one!
Maty_Roy, thank you for the points made! I would like to correct what I think are a couple of misunderstandings and I would like to elaborate on your idea about using Death Escape Velocity, instead of Longevity Escape Velocity:
Misunderstandings:
1) 36,500,000 are the people dying of aging in a year, so bringing LEV closer by one year (and not by one day) would save this number of lives.
2) If Longevity Escape Velocity doesn’t happen, bringing the date in which aging is cured completely closer could simply do nothing. This because people living at that time could have already a really low risk of death, that can’t go much further down with an additional improvement on treatments for aging. This because if Longevity Escape Velocity doesn’t happen, then I would expect the “very slow scenario” or the “dire roadblocks” scenario to be true, and aging would be eradicated really slowly, possibly in centuries.
The points about why my estimate is conservative are summarised well, thanks for doing that :)
Regarding the idea of using “death escape velocity”: I didn’t use it because technologies that would decrease the risk of death by other causes other than aging are substantially different from the ones brought about by aging research. So it would be another cause area completely! I also would expect them to become more relevant in the future. I think there is not much use of thinking about them now and they wouldn’t make potential EA interventions to fund, since our ideas will be probably be made useless by potentially much better technology existing after aging gets eradicated (that is the first step). “Death escape velocity”could be brought about, for example, by friendly AGI, if that ever comes about. I think this input is valuable though, since it’s an existing related concept that is not talked about much.