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by teamspirit 693 days ago
I'm curious to know how far into the future we'd have to simulate to get meaningful data. Obviously it would matter how extreme the case is, using your example of eating sugar (I assume you meant only sugar) for a week, might quickly show us consequences but then how long would eating "healthy" need to run for?

Will that be the limiting factor in the future? I can hear it now, "I'm sorry, your insurance only allows for a 3 day simulation."
1 comments
mystified5016 693 days ago
Ideally, all the way. Patients would probably care quite a bit about the bottom line number of overall life expectancy impacts of various choices.

Now, that's entirely out of our scientific and computational abilities no matter what anyone says. It likely will be for a few decades, at minimum. Though by that point who knows what kinds of new medical technology will exist. I wouldn't be surprised if this question is irrelevant by the time we can answer it. Just idle speculation though

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ultimafan 693 days ago
>Ideally, all the way.

If it turned out that your body had some kind of problem that would guarantee death within some margin of error around a known date, and there was no cure or solution available yet, would you want to know?

Curiosity wise I think I would with the reasoning that it'd allow me to budget the time I have left more wisely and spend it on better, more satisfying things. But then thinking about it more, I'm not sure if I'd really want to. I think the stress of knowing exactly when I'd die would probably end up significantly impacting my life and causing health issues that would move up the death date ahead of when it really should be. And I think I'd end up enjoying those "meaningful" moments less because they'd feel like I'm rushing through a checklist of things to get ticked off before dying.

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mewpmewp2 693 days ago
If it is possible to know I would want to know because if it is possible to know I would end up obsessing over it anyway. I wouldn't be able to forget that it is possible to know and my curiousity couldn't handle it.

I also don't think I am currently particularly enjoying my life to an extent where checklist like idea of rushing through a bucket list would make it worse.

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