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Comment Threads

• brucecohenpdx commented on Thought experiment
  Also, let's be clear, the mechanisms of aging and senescence are common to a very large clade of animals (most of the Vertebrata at least, I would think; I'm not sure how much of an urban myth that story that some fish don't age is). It's got to be a relatively well-conserved genetic constellation, certainly one that will be functionally if not base-for-base identical in all humans....
• Charlie Stross commented on Thought experiment
  My prediction is that population control would fail, in a generation or two we would see massive numbers of people migrating out of high-birth-rate poor countries and a resulting series of wars. This didn't happen in China under the one-child-per-family laws. (Now largely rescinded, incidentally, because it turns out they've undergone a demographic transition and are now facing a Japanese-style ageing population.)...
• vivtek commented on Thought experiment
  I guess I'm way late to the party, but this is what finally induced me to start a comment. Charlie @ 91: It's possible that surviving 200-year-olds will have learned to take the long view. But I wouldn't bet serious money on it. Yeah - but you're, what, 40 years old? On the topic of memory: I've lived 44 and a half years so far, so I'm starting to see some changes in memory as time goes on. My wife and I have been married for 22 years - and there are things she remembers that I completely, and I...
• Charlie Stross commented on Thought experiment
  Yeah - but you're, what, 40 years old? On the topic of memory: I've lived 44 and a half years so far Youngster :) I'm inclined to agree about forgetting lots of stuff, but formative events and experiences hang around long after trivia has gone. For example, you probably can't remember what you ate last week (unless there was a significant meal out with friends, or you took some care to cook something unusual), but you almost certainly remember the meal on your wedding day. Reinforcement occurring shortly after a significant event causes it to be remembered better, so I...
• brucecohenpdx commented on Thought experiment
  I would expect to see a standard distribution in the longevity of corporations, with a mean not much different from what we see today (though the median might be much larger because there will be a very long tail). That's because the makeup of a company changes a great deal in the first few years of its existence as it goes from a startup or spinoff to a mature organization operating in a mature market. And in the course of that change different kinds of people will be attracted to work in it, certainly at the top levels, if not...