A long but very worthwhile essay by Aubrey De Grey on the societal resistance to ending aging–“old people are people, too“:

Geronto-apologists simultaneously hold, and alternately express, the following two positions:

* They refuse to consider seriously whether defeating aging is feasible, because they are sure it would not be desirable;
* They refuse to consider seriously whether defeating aging is desirable, because they are sure it is not feasible.

Like a child hiding in a double-doored wardrobe, they cower behind one door when the other is opened, then dash to the other when it is closed and before the first is opened. Only when both doors are flung open in unison is their hiding-place revealed. They are both well and truly open now, and the time when this sleight of hand was effective has passed.

There is no question that indefinite lifespan will cause a host of new problems to be solved. But that doesn’t mean that they’re insoluble, or that they’d be so bad as to want to continue the current holocaust that has been going on since the dawn of humanity, in which everyone is sentenced to death after only a century or so. In any event, it’s probably inevitable, barring some societal catastrophe in the next few decades, so we’d better start thinking about how to solve them.

[Update a few minutes later]

A comment I just made in the comments section made me think about this flawed argument that De Grey pointed out:

The litany of obfuscation begins by exploiting the terminological ambiguity of the word

The distinction between hardware and wetware is going to really start to blur in the coming years:

Charles Higgins, an associate professor at the University of Arizona, has built a robot that is guided by the brain and eyes of a moth. Higgins told Computerworld that he basically straps a hawk moth to the robot and then puts electrodes in neurons that deal with sight in the moth’s brain. Then the robot responds to what the moth is seeing — when something approaches the moth, the robot moves out of the way.

Higgins explained that he had been trying to build a computer chip that would do what brains do when processing visual images. He found that a chip that can function nearly like the human brain would cost about $60,000.

“At that price, I thought I was getting lower quality than if I was just accessing the brain of an insect which costs, well, considerably less,” he said. “If you have a living system, it has sensory systems that are far beyond what we can build. It’s doable, but we’re having to push the limits of current technology to do it.”

There are going to be some humdinger ethics issues to deal with along this road.

Here are this guy’s opinion of the top ten for 2007. And by “technology” he means IT.

An anti-aging drug is about to go into human trials, even if its makers won’t admit that it has this effect.

Early detection of cancer and Alzheimers with blood tests:

The company is also validating protein-based tests for Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, the latter an affliction for which the only conclusive test is currently an autopsy. Among the possible benefits of a proteomic Alzheimer’s test, due out late next year, would be the ability to definitively separate sufferers from those with other neurodegenerative problems, now a major obstacle to running effective clinical trials of drugs for Alzheimer’s.

“Power3 won’t do it all,” says Essam Sheta, the company’s director of biochemistry. “But my expectation is that in the next five years, we as a scientific community will be able to develop diagnostic tests for many, many types of diseases.”

Let’s hope so.

Tim Oren has some worrisome thoughts.

And, unrelated, but from the same site, Joe Katzman says to short Google. They’re not tending to their knitting.

Here’s a review of Bob Zubrin’s new book, which is about energy rather than space.

If you’re in the DC area, there’s an opportunity to hear him speak about it tomorrow night.

FETs made with fullerene.

Cool.

…through termite guts:

The bellies of these tiny beasts actually harbor a gold mine of microbes that have now been tapped as a rich source of enzymes for improving the conversion of wood or waste biomass to valuable biofuels.

Sounds better than converting food to fuel.

Does anyone know if this is for real, or vaporware?

There is no doubt a significant market for a supersonic business jet. The problem is, they still haven’t found a solution to the sonic boom problem. They’re finessing it with this airplane by (as the Concorde did) flying supersonic over water only, but enhancing performance by flying it just slightly below sonic velocity (almost transonic) over land, which gives them a faster trip than a conventional subsonic jet. But the advantage isn’t all that great, since they’re restricting it to Mach 1.5 (presumably because their fuel costs would go through the roof, and their range to almost nothing, if they went faster).

If you look at the comparisons of trip times, in some cases, it doesn’t make that much difference, and because they haven’t solved the wave drag problem, they still don’t have trans-Pacific range–they have to make a stop to refuel, so it only drops the trip time from fourteen to nine hours or so. Also, they only show a route from the east coast to Japan. If they wanted to fly from, say, LA to Down Under or Taipei, it’s not obvious to me where they’d stop for a refuel. Hawaii’s too far from Asia for their range, and Society Islands are too far from the US. It’s interesting, though, that they claim to have the same range at Mach 1.5 as as Mach 0.85. They really get killed in that transonic region, as expected.

A true supersonic bizjet (say, Mach 2.4, which is about as fast as you could go with aluminum), with adequate range to get across the Pacific, could do it in about five hours, which would be a huge revolution.

Still, there will be a market for this thing, I think, if their cost numbers are valid. They seem to be claiming that they’re comparable to a G550 on a per-mile basis (which also means on a passenger-mile basis for the eight-passenger configuration). I’d like to understand more about them, though. What are they calling “fixed” and “direct” costs?

While they drink a lot more Jet A than the Gulfstream, they claim to have lower fixed costs for supersonic flight. Is this because they spend less time to travel a mile, and get more miles per maintenance? That would explain why they have higher “fixed” costs and lower “direct” (mostly fuel, I assume) costs for the high subsonic mode.

I think they can make some money with this, but it’s not the real breakthrough we need.