How Long Will You Live?

I don’t often think about it anymore, but lifespan is one of my many interests. A few months ago I wrote a blog about how people perceive time, and that is only one aspect of the matter. I have noticed that people seem to have a good idea of how long they will live. I have known some people who pretty much predicted their own deaths. I am also interested in the research that is being done in longevity, and I posted a link to the Wikipedia article on Aubrey de Grey, a British longevity researcher who has said that he thinks that the first person who will live to be one thousand years old is alive now. I hope to prove him right, but we will have to wait and see.

Much of the research that de Grey and others are doing concentrates on DNA, both cellular and mitochondrial. I am not as familiar with mitochondrial DNA, but the time limit on cell nucleus DNA is a matter of the telomeres deteriorating. Telomeres tend to deteriorate with each division of a cell, so slowing cell division can be helpful for longevity, and there is an enzyme, telomerase, which will build telomeres back into shape. Alas, telomerase is very carcinogenic. We are hoping to find a way to restore telomeres without causing other damage.

Telomere Lengths Predict Life Expectancy in the Wild, Research Shows

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/11/121119213144.htm

“Don’t be surprised if your doctor asks you to sit on the floor at your next checkup. A new study says testing a person’s ability to sit down and then rise from the floor could provide useful insight into their overall health and longevity.”
http://health.yahoo.net/experts/dayinhealth/weird-test-predicts-longevity

Then there’s palmistry
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQbshEeuq6U

600 to 1200 years, but this is just a wild claim
http://www.paklinks.com/gs/philosophy-and-spirituality/202918-human-life-span-can-be-jacked-up-to-600-to-1200-years.html

I was kind of wondering again about potential human lifespan. It looks like the predictions are about the same, and Aubrey de Grey’s thousand years are the upper limit of predictions that have any credibility. (I like the idea about sitting on the floor. I can sit and get up from the floor without using my hands, but even when I was a skinny teen ager I preferred to use my hands on my knees getting up, because it impressed some easily impressed people.)

My lifeline goes into my wrist without any breaks, but I don’t think that’s significant. I suspect that we are genetically programmed to live a certain range of years, and I think that we are pretty much aware of this; although most people would say that it’s just “a feeling”; although it may be well known at some level of consciousness.

Time travel might make long life spans more common and interesting. If one can live for thirty years in the eighteenth century, another fifty in the thirty-second, and hop back to the third millennium BCE for a century of research on the Indian subcontinent before the Indo-Europeans, then back to the twenty-ninth century for a vacation, then one might lose track of how many years one had lived. That might be even a bigger problem after effective space travel becomes available. Or would it be a problem at all? Even General Relativity says that simultaneity is rather meaningless. Long lives and space travel would bring that home to humans, and it provides material for science fiction writers now, and provides more material for writers of romances in the future.

I expect that longevity will turn out like Quantum Mechanics; there will be a huge advance that I won’t notice until a few years later.  If that does happen, then it will be more evidence that there are many worlds or that a time traveller came around and updated the knowledge of this era. At present, the finger of blame is pointed at DNA, and that fits with what kills people. People don’t kill people; DNA kills people. There are evolutionary reasons for DNA to have a built-in expiration date, so the obsolete models will not continue to take up space. There are some species of animal that appear to be immortal; they activate telomerase, and the cells become young again, but those are relatively simple animals, jellyfish, sea squirts, starfish, etc. Those have the ability to regrow parts also. The possibilities are out there. Some say that human evolution ended with central heat; they probably are mistaken, but evolution will end, if people start being immortal. At present, the best indicator of longevity is to look at how long a person’s ancestor’s lived in the times before antibiotics. I had an uncle who was born in the 1780’s and died in 1893, and others who had similar lifespans. They haven’t done as well since antibiotics and other modern inconveniences came into use.

A more accurate questionnaire for determining how long someone will live should include the terminal ages of ancestors, because that is an inheritable trait. Sometime we will have to look at making humans females fertile for their entire lives. That is a characteristic that would also lead to a longer lifespan.

Quantum Reality, Free Will, and Time Travel

Possible impact of physical proof that there are Many Worlds on the argument whether humans have free will and on time travel.

It has been known for a very long time that all events are governed by causality, the endless chain of cause and effect. This endless chain is widely regarded as determining everything, eliminating the possibility of free will in human activities. How can we truly have free will if everything is caused by causes that can’t even been seen, because they occurred far in the past? However that reasoning assumed that everything that existed was in this space-time, except for Heaven and Hell, maybe. Although there has been debate about free will for a long time; the answer has been determined by causality. But I recently learned that there is solid, physical evidence that the Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Theory has been found. A small piece of metal was seen to be in two states at the same time, which indicated that the wave function of the particles did not resolve into a single state, as the Copenhagen Interpretation predicted.

This may seem irrelevant or insignificant to the discussion of free will, but it tells us that causality was causing more than one thing at a time, at least in some situations. It has been theorized that the alternative that did not end up in this space-time ended up in a different one, and that there are many and maybe infinitely many space-times. We can’t tell where the other options are, but that idea is the best one available. Those other space-times are also places where the other side of any number of decisions actually happened.

I will confess that I was a fence sitter on free will until a few months ago, when the causality argument convinced me that we have no real choices. The choices were decided at the time of the Big Bang, because there simply was no other way that things could have happened. My personality is such that I would have preferred to have the ability to make real choices, but I could not see around the matter, until I learned that there are other space-times.

Writers have been playing with the idea of multiverses for several decades, so the concept is not foreign any more, but it is convenient, and it leads me to think that some of the more unlikely possibilities actually do exist. Some of the ideas in fiction may also have physical existence, but there is no way to access those other realities. The piece of metal that was seen having two states was separated from this space-time as much as possible (vacuum and extremely low temperature). For fiction I was thinking of ways to isolate a time machine from the rest of this space-time, and the best that I could think of was a using a vacuum metalizer (essentially a large thermos bottle). Then something would have to be done complete the insulation.

I can’t think of any other way to get out of this space-time, and that method might leave the travelers in a hyper-space, between space-times. I have not yet thought of a reliable way to propel that kind of time machine, but having the insulation incomplete might do something, and changing some of the physical constants for the thing might also do something. It’s worth trying both methods.

Then there was the syllogismobile that Harold Shea used. Maybe that would work.

While looking for something else I noticed this article. The conclusion is that this space-time is not simulated.

Do We Exist in a Simulated Universe?
http://www.web2carz.com/tech/everything-else/2204/do-we-exist-in-a-simulated-universe?w2caf=298c9c9f53282a30

Time Machine Test Ride

I dropped into a time warp for the weekend. It was effective and relatively easy, but most importantly, it worked. The program that I was in at university had a reunion, and it was much like a weekend there would have been back in the late Fourteenth Century. As it happened, the transition was more effective with some people than with others.  

During the seven year period when the program existed, the average apparent age of participants was about twenty, plus or minus five. The apparent variant appeared to have increased to more than twenty years. In addition to mere time travel, there was a rejuvenation component, but that feature appears to have been variable in effectiveness, from one hundred percent effective to as low as zero percent effective.

The time warp did provide useful data regarding the fact that people never change. The beautiful, brilliant, and loveable still are, and, if anything are more so than they were in tomes past. The noisome and intolerable may also be more so, but I didn’t notice any such.

The biggest problem with this kind of time travel is that it is temporary, which might be fine, if one managed to get everything important done before the virtual wormhole collapsed, but virtual wormholes do not require more energy than the universe holds, so some future alteration to the methodology may make longer trips possible.

With one partly successful test drive completed, I have more reasons to test out some more methods of time travel.

On Building Time Machines, Part 1

Time is part of the background to existence. We are constantly moving in time, but everything is moving in time and apparently at the same rate. One of the descriptions of our space-time is of time being a ball rolling through a pipe that is space. It would be a little more accurate to say that time was a board about half a second wide sliding through space. Or it could be that space is that plank and it is sliding through time. Another description is that events are projection on a screen of the substrate of quantum matter. We can move around in space quite readily, but time seems to move at a single rate, until one moves at extremely high speeds. People have thought up several ways for moving through time at other than the traditional rate.

There are several types of time machine. Each variety depends on an application of a particular item from theory. The simplest in theory, but most difficult to get to work is going faster than the speed of light. That can even allow you to go directly into the future, or it allows you to bend around the probability cones so that you will be in the past. This is simple and direct, but it is impossible for one simple reason; it requires an infinite amount of energy to accelerate to the speed of light. That means that, if it could be done, all of the energy in everything else would be drained away. Stars would go out, molecular bonds would break down, animals would die, and so on.

Then there is the matter of going through a black hole and out the other side. This almost certainly would work, but no one knows what of when you would come out; it might be at the time of the Big Bang, or it might be at any other time. And you might come out anywhere in the universe. The energy consumed would mostly be from the black hole. The major problem would be building a spaceship that would be able to go there. This method violates no laws of physics.

Next on the list is the interdimensional craft. This beast depends on something that may, or may not, exist; that is, it assumes that there is something outside our time-space continuum, and that it is not a continuum. In this matter it is not out of agreement with present theory, and it assumes that there was something before the Big Bang, and that there is something outside the time-space. Al this requires is that one get outside the time space and moves about then reenters. That is fine, if time-space is a special set of characteristics upon which matter, etc. “piggyback. There are some in the physics community who think that matter is a collection of holograms that are projected upon the substrate that is hyperspace. If that is true, then we simply have to shut off the projection in a limited space, and we would have time machine, maybe. It would still require that we move from one spot in time-space to another and return to the projected time-space.

There are a few other methods, that people have proposed, but they have fatal problems. Wormholes look great until one considers the energy requirements and finds that they would require as much as is in the universe. The spinning cylinder of infinite length may allow one to get by with a smaller cylinder and lower speed, but it would still be well beyond the possibilities of today's technology.

An interesting concept is what Robert Forward suggested in his novel “Timemaster”, in which negative matter in significant quantities was discovered, and this allowed the rotating cylinder method to work. Forward did introduce a bit of magic, but producing enough negative matter and holding it are problems.

The problem with time travel is not the mechanics of the process but with the nature of the universe. If the universe, so-called, is in fact a unitary time-space continuum, then there may be no way to move in time at other than something around the customary rate. If mystics are right, then what we perceive as the universe is only a small part of a larger reality, and the matter and events that we see are projections onto a substrate of a more basic nature, rather like what some parts of Quantum Mechanics suggest. There are also concepts that are multiplexes of either of those ideas, and there is the idea that there are a great many amazingly large sheets or plates on one of which our universe is located.

How To Ruin An Economy

In the last half century the economy of the United States of America has gone from strong and growing to shrinking and weakening, and that was with a lot of people trying very hard to improve the economy, or saying they were. It probably would have been possible to do more damage to the economy, but it would have required a strong dictator and a very, very complacent populace, and we have only had a bunch of knuckleheads trying to run the country and a populace that believed that the politicians were trying to help them . The roots of the present problems go much further back than fifty years, but it isn’t useful to complain about the invention of crop insurance about seven thousand years ago. If we restrict things to this country, then the biggest single contribution to the destruction of the U.S. economy was the creation of the Federal Reserve System in 1913; although others would claim that going off the gold standard was worse.

The Federal Reserve System was created for good reasons. The Panic of 1907 was disastrous. For period of time the banking system completely stopped working. The problem was that the clearing banks had gone down the tubes. Clearing banks are the institutions that clear checks and other transfer payments. If people can’t make payments, there can’t be much of an economy. The Panic of 1907 was brought to an end by the remaining banks pooling their assets to create and capitalize a new and (they hoped) stronger clearing bank. It got things restarted, but there was fear that the next time around that solvent banks would not have adequate capital to pull the country out. The economy was growing and the banks owned a smaller proportion of the whole.

It took a few years to get the enabling legislation through Congress, but something that might work was passed and signed, and there was hope for it at first. The principle tasks of the system were clearing transactions, which became progressively smoother as more and more banks joined the system. The Fed was mostly capitalized by member banks, which are required to deposit ten percent of their equity with the Fed, and for that they are paid a six percent dividend.

As a clearing bank the Fed is excellent, and as a lender of last resort it has been excellent when necessary. But over the decades it has also been assigned the task of keeping the currency stable, reducing recessions, and later with managing the currency, eliminating Treasury notes and issuing Federal Reserve notes; these functions have been problematic. The inflation rate has accelerated as the Fed took more charge for the currency, and recessions and, on the average, been more frequent and deeper than was the case in the 1800’s. The recession or series of recessions that started in 2007 is more severe than was the Great Depression; while it was not as deep, the greater length has med it more severe in general.

Not all of the problems with the U.S. economy can be laid on the Fed, because Congress has created a tax system that makes it more profitable to produce goods in other countries and ship them into the U.S. This policy has resulted in a higher level of unemployment, and unemployed people mean fewer consumers, so retailers cut back, and manufacturers cut back.

This is the stage that the U.S.A. is at in the Spring of 2013. We know how to further weaken the U.S. economy; just do more of the same. Improving the economy should be as simple as changing the tax code so that it will be more profitable to produce the goods that are sold in the U.S. made here as well. But that’s more complicated than it should be, because many programs are tied in some way to the income tax code, and there are unrelated matters that have been tied to employment, most notably recently the federal medical insurance program. Undoing Obamacare would be fairly easy, but getting rid of Social Security and other programs that are connected with employment would be more trouble. We will think of a way.

To summarize, the U.S. economy has been greatly harmed by having a central bank that controlled too much of the economy and by having a tax code that favored imports over domestic production. There also has been, and still is, the matter of greedy people, but there are always greedy people. We can greatly improve the economy by rewriting the tax code (and simply eliminating income tax might be adequate) and altering or eliminating the Federal Reserve System. It might also be a good idea to eliminate business corporations, because they allow owners to distance themselves from the business itself.

What do you think? They aren't easy directions, but this was how they blundered into it. 

 

Retail Without People

 

I don’t go to retail stores often, but I recently went to several, and I notice a very disturbing trend; they are getting rid of cashiers. I will not tolerate this. If I owned stock in a retailer, then I would be even more annoyed with this trend. I wasn’t surprised to see that Wal-Mart is going with those business killers, just as I wasn’t surprised that Home Depot started using them a few years ago; they were clearly for overflow and to speed some contractors through. But I was surprised to see those things in a CVS.  

CVS is the kind of store that requires communication with the customer, at least in some cases, when the clerk suggested that I use one of those things, I simply refused, and the clerk rang my order.

I suspect that CVS will abandon the things after a short test, because they will find that they require too much attention from people, because they don’t do a good job. Those things cost more to run that do human clerks, even though the manufacturers put out marketing material that claim lower cost. I also suspect that Wal-Mart will keep the things and claim that they save money. But those machines may be the beginning of the end for Wal-Mart.

Retailers have been living in paradise for the last several decades. They have been making money in all sorts of markets, but recently I have seen signs that retailers are not doing well. In addition to store closings there have been reductions in store size, and stores are just not as busy. The endless recession is doing its dirty work on another kind of business.

But back to Wal-Mart. I looked at a few things and decided not to buy, because what I wanted was mismarked, so I went to Target and found a store that was pleasanter, neater, better stocked, and having power prices than the W place, and their Pharmacy looked as good as or better than CVS, and Target doesn’t have self-service checkouts. Why did I waste my time going to those other places?

I wonder if Wal-Mart and CVS and other stores that use those things realize that they are throwing away customers by having those things. The people who used to be cashiers are out of work, so they can’t afford the luxury of buying things. It’s one thing to insult your customers, but throwing away customers is stupidity. There may be a small after-tax advantage to those things, but after they will be written off without a significant tax deduction, then they will be costs. By then customers will have learned to go to stores that treat them a little more respectfully, and the cashiers will have new jobs. There is no sea of new customers, so sales would not increase to cover the costs. Maybe it’s close to time to sell Wal-Mart.