Category: [Science & technology]

We’re not going to live forever but we’re probably going to live a fair bit longer…

Our ability to extend human lifespans is improving dramatically, but whether there is any natural limit to how far we can push is an outstanding question. New research contradicts claims that we’re approaching a maximum human lifespan.
The question of whether or not there is a limit to how long humans can live has fascinated scientists for decades. While answering this question is likely to require a better understanding of the physiological process of aging, researchers have long tried to divine trends in demographic data that could give clues as to what the upper limit might be.
One study predicted that the human lifespan is unlikely to go past around 150 years no matter what medical innovations we come up with. Another came to the even more conservative conclusion of 115 years. But a new study that uses novel statistical techniques appears to show that people born between 1900 and 1950 could live much longer than previous analyses suggest, opening up the prospect that no natural limit is currently on the horizon.

Ah, just what the world was needing. Assuming, of course, that these Methuselahs actually have a world left in which to grow old, cos the older generation currently running the joint seem disinclined to do much to save it for them…

Stephen Hawking was a smart man, so much more so than myself that I don’t think you could begin to measure it. But something about this sounds… off somehow:

Typing on the computer-controlled voice system that allowed the cosmologist to communicate, Hawking announced: “I have changed my mind. My book, A Brief History of Time, is written from the wrong perspective.”
Thus one of the biggest-selling scientific books in publishing history, with worldwide sales credited at more than 10m, was consigned to the waste bin by its own author. Hawking and Hertog then began working on a new way to encapsulate their latest thinking about the universe.
Next month, five years after Hawking’s death, that book – On the Origin of Time: Stephen Hawking’s final theory – will be published in the UK. Hertog will outline its origins and themes at a Cambridge festival lecture on 31 March.
“The problem for Hawking was his struggle to understand how the universe could have created conditions so perfectly hospitable to life,” says Hertog, a cosmologist currently based at KU Leuven University in Belgium.
Examples of these life-supporting conditions include the delicate balance that exists between particle forces that allow chemistry and complex molecules to exist. In addition, the fact there are only three dimensions of space permits stable solar systems to evolve and provide homes for living creatures. Without these properties, the universe would probably not have produced life as we know it, it is argued by some cosmologists.

Continue reading “It’s life, Steve, but… as we know it?”

So NASA’s found yet another asteroid that has a miniscule chance (0.18%) of hitting the Earth (in 2046), and, well, this was the picture of it they chose:

Fucking look at that. It’s got a face! And it’s screaming! And who could blame it for screaming when it knows it’ll take another 23 years to pose a challenge to the Earth and not even 0.2 of a likelihood of hitting us? I’d be furious too if I were 2023DW…

Anyway, once I saw this story I had to head to the Jerusalem Post to see if Aaron Reich had posted a size comparison, and was not disappointed:

Oh YES. Aaron Reich is the JPost’s science writer, and he seems to have a particular fondness for stories of objects from space hitting, or not hitting, the Earth with bizarre descriptions of their size… his headlines were pretty straight at first, but in the last few months they’ve been getting increasingly odd for some reason; it feels like he’s having some sort of abstract dig at Americans’ refusal to accept the metric system, but I don’t know. This one is not quite as good as “Corgi-sized meteor as heavy as 4 baby elephants hit Texas“, but few things are…

Found on Tumblr. I know that in the very early days of TV in the UK, some programming (news reports and the like) apparently were actually broadcast as sound only, but the rest of the shows had, you know, actual vision. I can’t imagine why you’d want a sound-only TV receiver. That’s just a radio, isn’t it? I don’t get it. The past was a different country indeed…

Via.

Also, any ideas why the artist’s impression accompanying the article —

— looked quite so, you know, penis-ish?

Looking at John Coulthart’s blog just now, I saw a link to the Long Now Foundation, which I dimly recall having read about somewhere a while ago… their avowed purpose is to get people thinking about the super long term, with part of their schtick being to add a zero in front of the four-digit year (therefore this year is actually 02023 according to them) to symbolise that. Also, however, according to a footnote on their about page, the zero has an additional purpose:

The Long Now Foundation uses five-digit dates, the extra zero is to solve the deca-millennium bug which will come into effect in about 8,000 years.

Apparently the Millennium Bug wasn’t enough for them and they had to hypothesise something even bigger. I mean, full marks for planning ahead, but I can’t help but feel it’s maybe a bit paranoid… for one thing it assumes there’ll still be a human civilisation in 8000 years, and on top of that it’ll still be using the Gregorian calendar rather than something of their own devising (much like how we got rid of ab urbe condita—happy 2776, everyone?). Plus I feel like they might have worked out their own solution by 9999 CE that involves something a bit more elegant than a placeholder digit. The REAL question, of course, is what happens on December 31 99,999 when midnight rolls around…

Apparently we are now at the halfway point of the orbit of Halley’s comet, where it starts to swing back in our direction from wherever it goes to, and it’ll be in our vicinity again in 2021.

By that time I’ll be in my late 80s, if I’m still alive, which I don’t expect to be. Then again, I’m surprised every time another birthday rolls around, so I could surprise myself in 38 years. I’ll be even more surprised if I can actually see the thing then, though; I have a feeling that diabetes will have claimed my eyesight long before. Might have to be content with having barely seen it back in 1986 (I don’t actually remember much about it, to be honest; the NASA picture above is better than I recall it being).

That said, the thing that’ll surprise me even more is if there’s anyone else going to be paying attention to it next time it comes round. I don’t know whether predictions of the end of human civilisation by 2050 are accurate (I suspect they may even be unduly optimistic), but if they are I feel like Halley’s return might be low on people’s priorities. Humanity is, as always, welcome to prove me wrong…