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Worm Lifespan Extended To Five to Six Times Normal
Trillian_1138 writes "Scientific America has a
brief article, only two paragraphs, sumarizing research from a recently released longevity study done on worms. The worms, Caenorhabditis elegans, have been known to live 124 days, "the equivalent of a human reaching his 500th birthday." In addition, in worms which had their insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1) altere, "lived six times longer than normal worms and remained active for most of their lives." "These life-span extensions, which are the longest mean life-span extensions every produced in any organism, are particularly intriguing," the team writes, "because the insulin/IGF-1 pathway controls longevity in many species, including mammals." Humans already live significantly longer than only a century ago, in large part simply from hygiene advances. What might the effects on society be if gene therapy or other medical treatement humans lived to be 500?"
I've no doubt that we can cleverly shift the pace of the aging clock, but can we tweak the biochemical algorithms of the brain to handle life and learning over a 500 year span. If a person takes this drug when they are young, do they need to learn (or can they learn as easily as children learn) until they are 50 or 100? Will having too many 400 year-olds in the population hold back progess because they will veiw all the inventions of the last 380 years with suspicion? What about having 500 years of accumulated heartbreaks, lost friends, daily frustrations, etc?
Its one thing to physically live for 500 years, its another thing to mentally thrive for that long. Even if our bodies can be tweaked to last, its not clear that our minds can.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
The statistic that the average lifespan of humans has doubled in the last 300 years is thrown around all the time. People tend to imply that 300 years ago everybody must have died at 40. This is obviously nonsense. The statistic used to calculate life expectancy is actually "life expectancy at birth". So the real influence is not healthy adults living a few years longer. Remember your 3rd-grade arithmetic? If a baby breathes for a coupla minutes, then dies,(ie age = 0) it will affect the average more than someone who lives to say, 80 instead of 75. The reason life expectancy has doubled in the last 300 years is because fewer people die young of poor neonatal care, childhood diseases, malnutrition etc, not because science has done anything major for old people. This is still a Good Thing, but kind of different to the geriatric revolution it is so often painted as.
sustainable living
From Webster's
Famine: an extreme scarcity of food.
Scarcity: the state of being scare.
Scarce: deficient in quantity or number compared with the demand.
War - you have to have people to fight, what do you fight over? Resources. Why do you refight over resources? Because you want more than you have. See Scarce above.
Plague - A plauge is an infectious disease affecting large portions of the populous. Why does it tend to spread so fast and far? Because to many people are crammed together in too small of a space with poor sanitation? Why? Scarcity. see above
Class Inequality - did you read original message.
Poverty - See scacity above and class inequality in original message.