Immortality in Our Lifetime? Selection Bias and Collective Delusion

Posted by Marcy Darnovsky September 8, 2011
Biopolitical Times

The Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, which claims it is not a transhumanist organization, has just released the results of a poll that asks its readers whether they expect to die. IEET's findings:

A majority of IEET readers age 35 or older who answered our recently concluded poll say they expect to die within a normal human lifespan. In contrast, a plurality of readers under age 35 believe that radical life extension will enable them to stay alive in their current bodies “for centuries at least.”

Among those who believe in "functional immortality," it's not that younger people are simply more optimistic than their elders. Rather, the logic goes, they are more realistic: They understand that they have a better chance of living long enough for the live-forever technologies to develop. As the IEET article that introduced the poll explained:

IEET Fellow Aubrey de Grey, a leading expert in the field, has predicted that the first person to live to be 1000 years old will be born in the next twenty years.

Further data: Among the younger set of [nominally non] transhumanists, fully 68% believe either that they'll live for hundreds of years, that they'll be resurrected after being frozen, or that their minds will be uploaded to a computer. Among the over-35s, only 48% think they'll not die for centuries, or not stay really dead.

Previously on Biopolitical Times: