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Engineering An End to Aging
Reason writes "Biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey has put forward a biological engineering plan to end human aging and co-founded the Methuselah Mouse Prize in recent years. Now he is finally getting some of the public recognition he deserves in an excellent David Stipp article at Fortune Magazine. If you ever wondered exactly how to go about engineering away the 50 million deaths due to aging that occur each and every year - and how to bring about a sea change in the scientific establishment - then this is the place to start. As an added bonus, I don't think you'll find a more succinct (and utterly British) answer to overpopulation objections to life extension than the one at the end of this article!"
If i lived forever I would get board, I probably join Wowbagger The Infinitely Prolonged in insulting the universe, we could insult everybody in it. Individually, personally, one by one, and in Alphabetical Order. I don't care if it is imposable I can dream can't I?
http://hhgproject.org/entries/wowbagger.html
...that we are all going to die some day.
We must be alert to the danger that public policy could become captive to a scientific-technological elite. - Eisenhower
Dick Clark
If people are going to stop dying they had best stop reproducing as well. There's already too many of you people breathing my air and eating my corn chips.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
As far as I know, from the Methuselah Mouse Prize, the current record holder (by a lot, mind you) has been people who have kept their mice alive the longest by keeping their mice healthy.
It's nice to think science will hold all the answers to everything, as (at least the USA) is obsessed with looking/staying young, but does anyone else see this as not realistic? Anyone else think that just staying as healthy and active as you can is the best way to go, rather than literally hoping for a miracle?
People should not be allowed to live without aging. The world is already overpopulated as is, we don't need to prolong it anymore. I say live a healthy, happy, and productful life, then don't worry about death because you have lived a good life. Too many people will result in depletion of resources and overpopulation... I would prefer not to have that life for my grandkids one day.
The best way to predict the future is to invent it. -Alan Kay
As to the question of life becoming so long that it loses its meaning, De Grey has a response that's truly guaranteed to silence critics: If you don't want to try it, you can simply reject rejuvenation therapy and fade away.
Bingo. It seems like there are always people who whine every time the subject of immortality comes up -- overpopulation, interfering with the divine plan, or just, "I wouldn't want to live forever. I'd get bored." To which the proper answer is: you can always die. If you feel that you're selfishly using up too much of the planet's resources, or that God doesn't want you to live past a certain age, or the ennui of your endless existence is too much to bear (oh, the angst!), fine -- please kill yourself now.
But of course people don't do this, because it is inherent in the nature of life to want to live. People who think a 200- or 1000- or 50000-year lifespan is nightmarish will still struggle, at the end of their lives, to hold on to whatever years or months or even days of life they have left. We rage against the dying of the light because the urge to live is part of our every cell.
So, for those of you who think this kind of research is a terrible thing, an affront to God and man -- please go off somewhere to die quietly. And those of us who choose to live will drink a toast on your graves.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Cheers,
Ian
because it would be too boring and stuff, but one thing is certain: If i can spend 70 years looking and feeling young and fit (25ish) that would improve heaps my quality of life!!.
"The quality of life is inversely proportional to the number of keys on your keyring."
Aging and death are a natural part of living.Some people fear it some people won't accept it but it is the way it is.nothing is forever.Why do people even try to cheat death and aging i don't know.Even if it does work what the? organs still go trogh wear and tear and what about overpopulation? If people are born and no one dies it's gonna get very crowded very fast.
In maybe 50 years, computers will be powerful enough to simulate the humain brain. Just take an image of the brain before Alzheimer settles in and reincarne yourself in kind of a Mame cabinet with cameras, mics and actuators. Sounds simpler to me than the here proposed solution. There just has to be a good UPS and some backup disks.
Google passes Turing test : see my journal
All I see is that this nanomedicine would pave the way for more intensive euthenasia - by logic of 'purifying' the race.
I'm all up for living longer (more video game time) - but, not at the cost of murdering the young children due to 'overpopulation' or letting the rich and smart and beautiful live while the unwanted die off early (in theirs 70s as compared to their 1100's)...
I personally don't think that humanity in general is responsible or ready to handle this technology - but who knows.
that means we could send people on super-long space exploration voyages, provided we can also engineer an end to 0-gravity boneloss
help what does this mee-mee word mean.
Happy Trails!
Erick
http://www.busyweather.com/
a new place to put all those extra people. This Earth is already kinda crowded.
Shorah-
-erockett
This is a little off topic, but this post reminded me of an "online book" on kuro5hin about 'living forever' because of human intervention (indirectly even). There was a post on slashdot awhile back about it (here - note: I *HATE* the slashdot old-story search)
anyway, the online book is here
The murder rate will sky rocket because
1) Wives will just get tired of thier husbands if they have to live together that long and vice versa.
2)If people won't just die on their own then someone will end up killing them. Right now, we at least have the feeling that some peopel will just die someday.
3)If you have my neighbors for that long of a time you might kill them too.
Evolution or ID?
CMX-1152 a.k.a. ROHLEN seems to be a credible way of relieving oxidative stress. More info here and here.
I'd rather grow older and die, thank you. Natural processes and all that.
What's the point of overstaying your welcome? Let the young have the world they are born to inherit from us, let them take our place. It's not fair to them, or to us, to engineer ourselves to stick around forever and take up their resources.
"Sufferin' succotash."
Well, that should be enough time to learn emacs. Thank you.
you ever wondered exactly how to go about engineering away the 50 million deaths due to aging that occur each and every year....
Why would we want to?
We've eliminated death by aging! w00t! More feeble senescent retired oldsters sucking off the world's productive tit. Um, yay.
And traffic already sucks, thanks, without adding some 300 year old methuselah trying to merge onto the freeway at 5.2 mph ahead of me.
-Styopa
I recently saw Ray Kurzweil give a talk. His new book, coming out in October, will be titled How to Live Long Enough to Live Forever. He touched on several topics that will advance longevity. Much was about nanotech and how it will become part of our bodies. He says in the past few years, he's gotten about 10 years younger in 'absolute age.' Neat Stuff.
Slashdot Eds Link Anonymous Posts With Logged Posts
They Are Vermin Feeding On Each Other's Feces.
I Hate \.
every week (sometimes more often) someone posts on slashdot a link to an article that says, summarized, "nanotechnology is the only thing that will save us! but, oh, it's so great, it will definitely save us!"
it's like a bunch of little machine supermen. but years from now, when it becomes practical, slashdotters (if they still exist) will resurrect all the arguments we've got against technologies like rfid and refuse to submit.
it's funny, that way.
~dijjnn
My buddy Brian wrote an article about longevity/immortality for the humanist.
It's the cover story in the May/June issue.
http://www.thehumanist.org/
I don't know of a direct link to the full article... but it's worth picking up a copy in a bookstore.
Jesus used to be my co-pilot, but we crashed in the mountains and I had to eat him.
Sorry, but "that's your problem, not mine, why should I care, piss off and die" is a very American answer to a "why are you..." question.
The Slashdot Paradox: "100% Overrated"
What about over-population? Are there not enough people in the World already? This is a silly thing to be wanting, to live "forever" or at least a lot longer, the planet simply does not have the resources to sustain infinatly growing populations. Not to mention where are all the people going to live? I keep thinking of Soylent Green...
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
If it was possible to live forever, wouldn't that mean not only the end of "evolution", but an elvolving society and culture as well? Human life would forever be a snapshot of the early 2000's. And truthfully, despite what the Germans may think, I'd rather not see David Hasselhoff live forever....
Re: the end of the article. I'm no historian, but I'm certain Condoms go back at least 200 years, so a scientist who mentioned this in 1800 wouldn't haven't been thought absurd.
catch (ModDownException mde) {post.modUp("Interesting")}
"My conversations with Aubrey are invariably like the ones I have with colleagues after we've spent four hours in a pub," says University of Idaho gerontologist Steven Austad. "But with him you don't have to go to a pub for four hours--you just start from that point."
This new development might break the one of the two truisms, death and taxes. However, in my experience, life has killed everyone when there were no other natural or unnatural causes. Life is fatal. Make your time.
Low Caloric diets have long been fabled to extend life (with mixed results). This so far has been the most promising way of extending life, although depending on how you look at it, it's not really extending human life but allowing us to reach our potential. Think of a wild animal with the eating/lifestyle habbits we humans have. Don't think turtles would live so long smoking and eating McDonald's. (Me not good at html linky stuff) http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A255 64-2004Apr19.html
http://webapp.abclocal.go.com/kabc/health/032304_h s_low_cal_diet.html
http://www.youngagain2000.com/lowcalorie.html
I boycott signatures
http://www.youngagain2000.com/lowcalorie.html
http://webapp.abclocal.go.com/kabc/health/032304 _hs_low_cal_diet.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A2 5564-2004Apr19.html
I boycott signatures
forget the penis enlargement spam. now, you can look 25 forever and get a penis enlargement. and of course it will come from my grandma who still looks 25.
Evolution or ID?
Aging is a response to mutations which naturally build up over time. Most aging is the slowing down of metabolism so as the reduce cell activity in order to reduce mutations. If you bypass this slowdown, then mutations will build up faster. Entropy will then win in the end anyhow and one will die of cancer.
The only total solution I see is some kind of nanoprobes that cleans up DNA/RNA errors in potentially each and every cell. Only then we can turn up the metabolism to 20-year-old levels. But, that is a long way off.
Table-ized A.I.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/9812 387412/qid=1086193953/sr=1-7/ref=sr_1_7/103-108181 9-9473438?v=glance&s=books
Some of these flies have preactically stopped aging...
Jesus used to be my co-pilot, but we crashed in the mountains and I had to eat him.
Is there where I make the obligatory joke about keeping the Olsen Twins at the age they are now?
"Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
...suggested breeding for longevity. His book Methuselah's Children talks about it some.
Basically, you look for people who have all four original grandparents still living, and encourage them to breed with each other. Money was the incentive used.
But then, his concept required that you start the project in the 1800s. Today, I imagine you'd probably look for people with all eight great-grandparents surviving.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
" Yes, that may be a problem, but how can you argue it's ethical to accept the deaths of tens of thousands of people a day from aging-driven diseases? Besides, he says, we'll find ways to cope. On the question of overpopulation, for instance, he offers this analogy of how we've handled it in the past:"
His argument is flawed in that while he continues to go on and give an example of doctors in the past who lowered infant mortality rates, and how it is similar, it is not applicable at all.
You see, the numbers which are being dealt with are on completely different scales. It is assumed that these babies who were saved from death at birth will die in some manner in the future, with age being the 'last ditch' cause. However, when you take out that final check point, things get thrown radically out of whack.
What will happen if age is no longer a cause of death in the future (save for those who choose not to undergo this therapy)? Will everybody die by accident/malice/illness?
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
"May you love as long as you live, and live as long as you wish." (Minerva, Time Enough for Love)
;P
(I might as well have given a closer look to those "weekend viagra" commercials
My journal. Mainly about freedom.
By the same token: if you do want to try it, fund it yourself! Don't ask for my taxpayer dollars!!
The only problem with death is that you have to be reborn and go through 12 years of school again. :-)
Sounds similar plot to Sterling's book, Holy Fire, where humanity struggles with technology that allows them to reach medical immortality and the tension that exists between the younger generation that will have this mortality and the older generation that is at its limits of using life-extension technology.
Yeah, but then Mac apologists will always have someone to demonize.
Almost every time you read some story or other about the world's oldest woman or world's oldest man, their secret to long life usually includes some kind of alcoholic beverage, drunken on a daily basis. So who needs bio-engineering when you can have a good drink instead?
People say I'm crazy, I got diamonds on the soles of my shoes...
My mom is 81 and she's busier than she's ever been although physical constraints are starting to slow her down. My grandmother died very alert, aware and reasonable active at age 100 and said she was ready to go, but it had mostly to do with the fact that her friends had all been dead for a long time by then.
Some people would look forward to a longer life because they find some meaning in their lives and others, I am sure, don't and probably would not partake of these treatments. I suggest that you folks who are not familiar with Robert A. Heinlein's novels several of which concern, among other things, longevity issues. Take a look at "Time Enough for Love"(1973).
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
I sure hope Aubrey de Grey took the time to also engineer a new planet, or some other place for me to move to when I'm in my Yoda-years. I hate crowded planets.
Simpy
try this
to search.. works better to use google and site: then most websites own searches, especially microsofts knowledgebase.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
On one hand, this might be far-fetched, and is surrounded by questions of ethics, etc, but doesn't evenyone want those few extra years?
;)
I think this is pretty cool; the only problem I can see is what happens to those of us 20-somethings if a miracle aging cure comes out tomorrow? Our damned parents, against whom we have rebelled for 20+ years, will maintain control of the world... FOREVER. AAAAGGGGHHHH
--------------------- -me, Crusher of those who are Foolish (don't be foolish)
It's true that we all would like to live longer but where is the money going to come from to support the elder after they retire? where is the young people going to find jobs with little or no experience when those jobs are taken by older people with decades of experience? the governement would also have to change a lot, let us die...
1) The role of science fiction as inspiration for entire generations of scientists cannot be overstated. It's amazing how many scientists were inspired in their youth by hard science fiction, and equally amazing the number of previously fictional devices that have manifested as a direct result. This is dreams becoming reality, folks.
2) Before aging is stopped we have a serious problem of resource distribution and management on Earth to consider. Unless one believes the governments of Earth have just authority to implement national breeding policies (e.g. 1980s China, 1930s USA, 1940s Germany) people only dying from accident or crime might really turn Earth into the Easter Island metaphor that environmentalists so enjoy. Perhaps nanotechnology will mitigate or delay this problem long enough to allow for a solution, such as sea or space colonization, to be devised.
3) Consider the current problems of baby boomers vs youth culture in the US. Old folks will soon become a supermajority of the population, and won't die anytime soon as lifestyles get healthier and medical science progresses. Youth violence against those in older age brackets has steadily increased at a parallel rate. With indefinite lifespans and continued physical and mental acuity, this gap could create culture clashes everywhere, and will most likely result in revolution as the dissatisfied youth minority have their lives dictated to them by the ancient majority.
...then most likely the people who shouldn't be using it would be the ones to take it.
The last thing we need are for the idiots to live forever.
Well, ok, it could be a considerable problem if people stopped aging to death, but it wouldn't be the biggest problem.
The biggest problem is that our society would collapse from corruption. It's a pretty simple formula. Powerful people maintain their power by maintaining the status quo. The more powerful a person is, the stronger their grip on the status quo. These people purposely manipulate the opinions of the less powerful people (via control of the media and other less well-publicised means) in order to do this, and we generally fall for it pretty readily.
The only serious mechanism for social change is the death of the powerful. If death stopped being inevitable, then the rich and powerful would be the first ones to get that technology.
At that point, the only means for social change would become bloody revolution. Finding and killing the methuselas would become an obscession for anyone who wanted to change things for the better (or even at all).
I think that that world is inevitable, but I don't look forward to it.
Wake up - the future is arriving faster than you think.
which de Grey figures will limit life expectancy to about 5,000 years.
Eat your heart out, Leto II!
Is anyone else a little freaked out by the spider-goats?
"You will soon be more aware of your growing awareness." - My first recursive fortune cookie!
no one wants to die .. well some do, but living forever is a dream since people has awaken to be thinking thingies ...
... eg in a big city poor people share a few square meters of apartment with 10 others while the rich own endless properties with golfcourses or other unproductive land (no i do not think everything should be used as agricultural land, but owning a few hectares of forest would help pollution as opposed to a deforested golf course )
...
..
.... i might be sick though ...
... and i am a vegetarian ... i think people will kill for the opportunity to live even 30-50 years longer ...
however that planet is overpopulated or at least badly distributed
and, who is going to afford to be re engineered or their kids re-engineered to live forever?
not the people who work in shitty dangerous environments for nothing, but the ones who can interestingly get out of harms way even with diseases like cancer, aids and other ilnesses that kill the rest who cannot afford to be alive
i feel that if XY moviestar or president can heel from nasty stuff, the only reason others cannot do that is because our governments do not want it
and back to aging: why would you give the opportunity for the poor masses to live longer, spare longer, get out of poverty and stop doing the dirty stuff for you, while you could just live forever and make sure they reproduce into their own hamster wheel to keep you served ?
I am the kind of person who suspects that some diseases were released on purpose to keep control of overpopulation
ps: every time i see a vampire movie i start thinking if i would take the opportunity for the small burden of drinking blood and living at night
Try <a href="http://www.youngagain2000.com/lowcalorie.ht<nobr>m<wbr></wbr></nobr> l">Meaningfull title</a
Like the back of your hand, can't have one without the other. Besides, there is no death, just change. We are souls, and we are eternal.
In other news:
World Death Rate Remains Steady at 100%
World Death Rate, Annual
------------------------
2004 (est) 100.00%
2003 100.00%
2002 100.00%
2001 100.00%
2000 100.00%
Source: USA Today
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
I plan on living forever.
So far, so good.
What often gets missed in these debates is that the mere fact of stopping that aging process, or at least slowing it a great deal, is not the same as living forever. You will still get hit by a car, get shot, catch a nasty virus, or slip in the tub sooner or later. You just won't have to deal with the various nasty bits of growing old while you're waiting for it to happen. Realistically, I imagine that the average human lifespan would only increase marginally due to such technology.
And if you wind up living a few hundred years and it gets boring, it's not like you can't jump off a bridge.
I haven't RTFA yet, but I'll comment anyway. From what I learned in med school so far, you're not allowed to state that the cause of death is "old age" on a death certificate. What I'm trying to get at is, most people don't "die of old age" as the slashdot blurb seems to imply above. Usually it's a problem such as hypertension, atherosclerosis, diabetes, etc. So the person submitting the story should have said "Engineering an end to problems/diseases that arise from old age." There is nothing wrong with aging per se, it's the health problems that are more probable to occur at old age that kills you. I realize it's a matter of semantics, but in such an age-phobic society (i.e. the US), I feel that things like this have to be voiced to stem other social problems such as "age-ism." Moreover, all the money spent to extend the last few years of life is overtaking needed health expenditures in other areas -- such as child healthcare and universal coverage. It seems that 90% of healthcare costs are being spent to extend life just another 10% or less. I'd rather support expenditures in areas such as hospice.
Linux at home
Tapping the ego and calling upon people to "go ahead and die" if they feel extending human lifespan is a bad idea is a childish statement, and the sort you would expect from a fanatic, not a scientist. There's no way earth can sustain our current growth rate indefinitely, let alone what would happen is people increased their lifespans. Indefinitely extending human lifespan is a death sentence for earth itself.
"So, for those of you who think this kind of research is a terrible thing, an affront to God and man -- please go off somewhere to die quietly."
I agree, but I don't think theists see it that way. Catholics and many other mainstream religions would probably consider refusing this type of medical care as suicide. The theory seems to be that God gave you this life and it would be ungrateful of you to throw away that gift. When God wants you to die, he will see to it.
I think many would feel that they had an obligation to continue life long after it had become not worth living. They expect terminal patients in continual pain to suffer on for the glory of God, after all.
-- your Web browser is Ronald Reagan
"The President's Council on Bioethics met this month to discuss Age-Retardation: Scientific Possibilities and moral challenges. The consensus was that "aging is a natural part of the life cycle, not a disease." Think Social Security was discussed?" Bruce Sterling's book Holy Fire is a good look at this issue if you find it interesting.
Here's a link...
And a link to the current site of bioethics.gov's views on aging retardation.
640 years should be enough for anyone.
(ducks and runs)
We get more willing to look past materialistic pursuits as we age because by the time we're older, we realize what is really important in life is the people and the relationships in it.
By the time we realize it, life is over, and we need to hunker down to prepare for uncertain health in old age.
I wonder what the world would be like if my grandparents were still around and healthy and vibrant as say.. 40 year olds? I wonder what the world would be like if the wisdom and compassion that accumulates with age was allowed to be expressed by vibrant and energetic elderly instead of being locked up in the shadows we become?
Really what we are talking about here a child understands and we fatalistically complicate things with our hopelessness that anything can be done about aging..
Life is good.
Death is bad
and anyone who suggests that the suffering and death of millions is desirable and that the "negative" changes to our world that would come about by extending life couldn't be dealt with should take a real hard look at what they are saying...From what I've been able to see so far.. our world could do with a few changes.
br
The force that keeps the world moving anc changing is youth.
The world belongs to the young--as you grow older you grow less adaptable and more set in your ways. This isn't true of everyone, but MANY. This is the definition of Conservative.
If the older filthy rich Americans running the place right now don't die (SOON) then I really question if we are going to have a future any of us would care to live in.
I almost shudder to imagine the wisdom and intelligence of a person who has lived 5000 years...
Youth plays an important role in the dynamic growth and advancement of human culture. As we age we become loath to tear things down and start again. On the other hand stagnation leads to decay, and decay provides oportunity for revolution. Probably the old will all end up slaves to an over-class of young leaders who opt to die at an appropriate age.
As we shift our population balance, it will be interesting to see how it plays out. Obviously the population is alrady starting to shift, and the shift is already having an impact.
But i'm not the problem.
Anyhow, do you know how hard it is to kill yourself.
'I'm feeling a bit bored to day'.
'Stop moning and kill yourself then'.
"I don't like what the artcal says".
"Kill yourself then".
A life of bliss and all it takes is to kill youself.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
between thinking "this kind of research is a terrible thing" and considering that planetwide immortality might cause some major problems. Are you calling Isaac Asimov, Greg Bear, Kim Stanley Robinson, the Dalai Lama, everyone involved at Alcor, Julia Roberts, etc. "whiners" because they have stopped to consider reality?
How about Einstein and Oppenheimer, who before they were used considered the development of nuclear weapons a good idea. Were they "whiners" for considering the very real possibility of what a future world with such weapons would be like? Should they have just gone off somewhere to complain quietly perhaps?
I see this code there:
;_)
[a href=mailto:rfreitas@rfreitas.com]rfreitas at rfreitas.com[/a]
Er, I had to tell you, buddy, but that isn't going
to hide your address from spambots.
its all fine to think about overpopultion, but think of this. could you handle working for 10,000 years. i sure cant
Well, I must say people talk a lot about over-population and a lot of related issues and I feel those are definitely areas of concern. But why do we hate aging? Here's a couple of reasons just off the top of my head:
* disease and discomfort
* loss of capability
There are a lot of details beneath those two reasons such as the vast amounts of humiliation and indignity of not being able to do the things you once did merely a few years ago.
But one thing that people rarely if ever mention is about technological growth. Consider if our top minds were able to continue their research and learning for even twice as long as they do now? Consider the greater amount of knowledge that the average human would be able to obtain?
Now present sociological facts asside, I believe the advancement of the human species depends on extending the life-span. As it stands now, we're advancing pretty slowly and for some pretty petty reasons, but once people become smarter, there is increased potential for world-wide peace and more.
Who knows? We could even finally outgrow our need to worship gods and join the rest of the universe.... (Okay, maybe I *do* watch too much SciFi...)
CMX-1152? Why must it be so close in name to a dystopian science fiction story derived from Brave New World?
Sheesh. We've already got the "Matrix" project.
The problem with aging is that with each cell division strands at the end of the DNA called telomeres are shortened. After certain number of divisions these strands are gone and DNA replication becomes impossible. This is an effective mechanism to prevent cancer.
Cancerous cells do not shorten the teloremes which enables them to divide endlessly. Though the scientists may find a way to avoid shortening the DNA you'll eventualy die of cancer. It's a catch 22
Man...if this guy has his way, I'll never collect that social security check. Retirement Age: 4,634 Current Age: 36 Back to work, I guess... Dave
You may have a more difficult time murdering someone successfully - and preventing their regeneration, resurrection or re-creation - than you think.
"1) Wives will just get tired of thier husbands if they have to live together that long and vice versa."
Even with average lifetimes at ~100 I suspect "til death do us part" is doomed. My wife can probably tolerate me for 40-50 years, I can't expect the poor woman to deal with me for 100+ years without going barking mad.
-- your Web browser is Ronald Reagan
Sociological consequences aside, there's no reason to think that we won't find a cure for aging eventually. A thirty-five year old couple can conceive a perfectly healthy, perfectly youthful baby... how is that? The genes they used to create this new life were copied from 35 year old cells--cells that have been damaged by oxidation, cells that have probably lost a significant amount of their protective end-sections (IANAG--I forget what the ends of the DNA molecules are called, but they basically act as a buffer to prevent harmful mutation. Over time, though, they get shorter and disappear.)
Reproduction itself flies in the face of aging. Consider, too, that some species (such as turtles, I believe?) are basically immune aging. How can you be so pessimistic in the face of such things? No, give us enough time and I'm sure we could find the cure, though it might be availible only to our genetically-engineered children. If we still haven't found a cure in a century or two, it will be because we don't want to find a cure, because we're afraid of the consequences such a thing might bring... NOT because it's a hopeless fantasy.
And to your left, laides and gentlemen, you can see the End of the World!
Seriously, if this is actually possible, then tons of people will take advantage of it, less people will be dying, just as many WILL be born, and we will EAT THE PLANET. To support that kind of population will take more natural resources than are at our disposal, and soon anough there will be none left.
Unless we find another planet like Earth to move to, this could possibly result in the end of the world as we know it.
With diseases like Alzheimers we at least have an idea of what causes it, and we know what changes happen to the brain as it progresses.... I think it's only a matter of time before it can be prevented. However, I daresay that theories about where and how exactly memories are formed and stored in the brain are mostly wild speculation. We know the roles that certain regions of the brain play in memory, and there are some good abstract models (such as the Phonological loop and the Visuospatial sketchpad) but we are a very long way away from knowing how these are done at the hardware level of the brain.
The sending of this message pretty much inconveniences everyone involved.
and found on Google: "Biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey has put forward a diabolical engineering plan to end human aging"
"Teleporting Rodents with D-Cell Battery Displacement" theory -- IgnoramusMaximus (692000)
Perhaps a baby conceived, born in, and raised to maturity in space might be better equipped to live in a 0g environment over the long term than terrans.
I guess some mods just don't get "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" references.
Want to live longer?
Step #1: Find a cure for cancer.
Just what we need... more old farts clinging to life longer to enforce their old, outdated ideas.
His answer to overpopulation is "we'll think of something, we always have". But we've got over 6 billion humans, tribal wars everywhere, the Greenhouse, water and oil droughts, famine, social crises in every community. And we're just about to enter the catastrophe phases, as a couple billion Asians get cars and disposable incomes, on top of the Euramericans already pushing us to the brink. Overpopulated countries around the globe are living in misery, when some of the pressure could be relieved by people dying of old age. Instead, many linger in a prolonged dying, using up their families' and governments' money to keep them in misery until the end.
I want to live forever as much as the next guy (except Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged). But I'm not sure it's for everybody. Not so sure, at least, that I'd flip off the repercussions of my work to ratchet up the population problems as just "somebody else's problem", as if that solved it.
--
make install -not war
come on guys, I thought it was funny. Almost everyone in the US is waiting for Castro to die a natural death to hopefully trigger reform. Then some medical miracle extends him forever. That would be a big blow.
Corruption - Courtesy of Bush, Cheney, Powell, Rumsfeld
Thank you for playing.
Have an Ashcroft_spam_free weekend,
Kilgore Trout
IANAGE (I am not a genetics expert) but my experience of the universe tells against any "end to aging." All natural systems decay and breakdown.
With a system as complex as the human body, it seems unlikley that science will be able to overcome this decay. At the cellular level, there are millions of processes that are occurring every day to sustain life. Any one of these can go awry. Many do, and contribute to what we call aging.
It may be possible to lengthen life. Perhaps significantly (say a factor of 2) but I think perpetual youth is still... unlikley
When science "solves" entropy, get back to me
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
If people lived longer would we see an end to hatred.
I personally have no problem with people from Japan.
My grandfather disliked them, he lost a borther in WW2
My grandfather is dead.
If he lived to be 2,000 years would he ever get over this?
Would the Japanense who dislike Americas for the atmoic bomb ever get over it?
Death solves many problem including this one.
More than a few of those centennarians in Russia.. are not centennarians. Quite a few lied about their ages to avoid military conscription during Stalin's day.
As for the Chinese, well, there may be a similar argument there, not sure.
The Guinness Book is loathe to accept records for longevity for the larger reason. Lack of reliable evidence makes claims to longevity ripe for fraud. Think of how unreliable record-keeping must have been in various parts of the world over 100 years ago. Or how many records have been destroyed by disaster or conflict over the years..
--- The American Way of Life is not a birthright. Hell, it's not even sustainable.
I will live to play Half Life 3 and maybe even Duke Nukem Forever!
Praise our new found knowledge!
Worldwide Aging Fatality Count (WAFC) = 3 Libraries of Congress (LOC)
Now I can quote Internet 2 bandwidth by in WAFC units!
"My connection gets 10 WAFC/sec! W00t!"
It's interesting that this prize is also supported by the Chairman of the XPrize. Peter Diamandis is a founding and key advisor to the Methuselah Foundation. The prize amount's gone from zero dollars to $400,000 in less than 9 months...mostly from regular folks. My favorite donor is the undertaker in Japan who pledged $25,000 so he could change careers :-)
I didn't know death was such a big problem... but that's the first time I've seen it in terms I can understand. According to that last article, people die at a rate of three Libraries of congress per year!! I tried to convert it to terabits/year for everyone else but Google didn't recognize the units.
There are 2 constants in this world: change and death. None of us will ever overcome either. Besides, you people who theorize what the world would be like if everyone lived forever (or for nearly forever) always come up with some really crazy, whacked-out scenarios. Would you even want to live in such a world where all the evil people continued to live on and on and on? Either they live on and on or you choose to put them to death. You can't have it both ways you know.
I didn't think anyone died of old age. It's all the nasty stuff that comes with aging...
"That's the purpose to life, not dying!" - George Carlin
On one hand, it does kill the Mother Theresa's of the world. But it will also kill the Stalins and Hitlers, if nothing else can.
The part that scares me, is that if anyone can afford immortality, it will be the Stalins and the Hitlers. I want to live forever too, but maybe this is a toy humanity isn't ready to play with yet. Maybe we ought to wait until we won't swallow it and choke on it.
If the human race is stupid enough to discover the secret of immortality and then not bother to ever leave this horribly cramped blue-green sphere, we deserve to go extinct.
As far as using up the resources of the entire universe is concerned, I think we'd probably experience heat death before that happens.
You could sell that platform to Congress: "Think of the Children!"
-- Posted from my parent's basement
we already have a problem with overpopulation, now people won't die?
so when does everyone get sterilized?
It's eaiser to build from scratch than to renovate.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Now we'll run of out space even sooner ;)
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
This family certainly does not learn the lesson!
I plan to live forever....or die trying.
Vila
HAHAHAHAHAHA! Those crazy Brits!
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
I think we have a way to prevent 0-G bone loss. Accelerate 1/2 the way to the destination at 1 G, then do a 180 and decelerate the remainder at 1 G. This just skirts the issue, because that would take alot of fuel, thus consolidating your problems into one. Propulsion. I love the idea of extended space travel by humans and hope that I live to see it.
www.facebook.com/DareDefendOurRights
www.fairtax.org
In Frank Herbert's "Dune", there exist a sisterhood of women called the "Bene Gesserit". With mnemonic devices, hypnotic therapy, advanced meditation, and hundreds of centuries of a selective human breeding program, these women had mastered biofeedback to the point of being able to alter their metabolism, and possibly grant themselves immortality. Thought it echoed this article somewhat.
Anyway, that whole "overpopulation" argument that's cropping up here is bunk: the richest countries in the world have a population growth rate so small that it couldn't sustain their populations without immigration. Now also consider that the only people who could afford this methuselah treatment are the super rich - not too many are there.
------- "From bored to fanboy in 3.8 asian girls" ----------
There can be only one?
I fuse with Mercer every single day...
But of course people don't do this, because it is inherent in the nature of life to want to live
Oh, yeah, and your appeal to biology is quite wrong. During fetal development certain cells are programmed to die. During mating the male of certain species of spider intentionally touches the female in a way that triggers her to eat him starting with the head, his reproductive parts still locked on to hers. A species that decides to selfishly cling to life will soon become extinct.
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
...I wonder if he's related to Dorian?
So I can goof off playing video games the first 600 years of my life, then spend my last 4 or 5 hundred years as a buddhist reaching enlightenment! Sa-Weet!
Calling natural deaths a "human holocaust" or "greatest catastrophe humankind has ever faced" is a little misleading. To say that losing less than 1% of the population of the world to natural death is worse than losing over 3% of the total population every year to the Black Death (not to mention all of the people dying natural deaths as well) seems a little off. Same thing with the Great Indian Plague, to have 3% of the world die completely unexpectedly seems a little more horrific.
After seeing the stats and reading the claims it was kind of hard to take the rest of the article seriously.
I think we should force certain people to stay alive at least a couple centuries. In particular, I'm thinking of our greatest scientists, engineers, and philosophers. One of the biggest losses to society is that these folks usually only have about 40 years of good output.
If we forced them to live to at least age 200, society as a whole might benefit immensely. After all, it's your tax dollars that taught them, perhaps it's not such a crazy idea.
I doubt most people smart enough to qualify would be stupid enough to want to do it, perhaps a surreptitious entity could 'infect' them during vaccinations, then kill 'em off when they've ceased to be productive, happy people. All my great grandparents lived to be over 100, and were enormously happy and generous folks (excepting WW's I & II, and Lincoln's assassination adversely affected some psychologically.)
One thing that came to mind after the submit button is that your ears and nose keep growing throughout your life. This is why old men, who have ears and noses larger than women's in the first place, have such large ears and noses. So if we live to be 1000, people will look like elephants!
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Adding a year or two to the human lifespan wouldn't do much to either population or social balance. Adding a full century or two would have a massive impact, and could hasten social revolutions. However, any advance in this area (increasing lifespan, defying aging) requires better developments in the areas of age-related dementia, Alzheimer's, and senility. Otherwise there is really little purpose in keeping someone alive an extra decade or two, if they are incapable of independent life.
On a similar note, overpopulation would not be a problem if there were major advances in birth control and fertility. By this I mean a method for preventing pregnancy unless both parties consciously decide they would like a child - something with a 99.999% success rate that doesn't have a negative impact on later fertility.
Tied together with the above - mental capacity not being lost - humanity could have the time to seek more and better long-term solutions.
I was taking one day at a time, but then several days got together and ambushed me. (from a Rhymes with Orange comic)
But what is the capacity of the human brain? More than 25 years ago, I was writing HP/1000 assembly code; yet I certainly couldn't do that today without completely relearing it.
How is this an 'outrage'? Death is a fundamental part of the life process, and natural death should not anger people! Yes, it is sad to lose loved ones, and almost everyone would gladly accept a few more years tacked onto their life, but to be angered that life ends, and to equate natural death with a holocaust is just selfish megalomania.
"Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion." - Democritus
The total system entropy has to increase but not the local entropy of a subsystem as long as there is an energy gradient to take advantage of.
Also, no one is going to live forever, just a bit longer than a paltry 70+/-30 years. Meteorites and falling pianos will eventually nail everyone.
There is an continuous unbroken stream of germline cells that got to you. That system somehow managed to escape the inevitable grip of entropy, didn't it?
I mean, you could regenerate neurons somehow I suppose. Would that do something to your memories?
If that refers to the Forbes article, most of us won't see it due to the appeal for $4.95 for those of us with no subscription to Forbes. The last article was free, but tried to justify age-extension based on economics. Ha! That ignores the biological reasons for death, like clearing out the bade genes that crop up in every generation. Also, money doesn't necessarily make people happy. There's quite a few people who are better off dead for other reasons. I'll mention Stalin because naming the other great homicidal maniac of his era would theoretically terminate the thread.
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
More overpopulation of obesity and celluloid people saying, "Have another Big Mac and tub of fries! I'm genetically impervious to disease!"
It still doesn't change the fact you lost sight of your pecker/phagina years ago and no one would touch you sexually even with another person's pecker/phagina, not even with a toy.
Can we focus more on exploring the undiscovered frontiers of the Mind?
One of the major reasons people marry is to have children, to leave a legacy to the world after their death. With immortality, there is not so much reason to take this approach. You'll be around, so you're your own legacy. People will marry instead principally for love or for not wanting to be alone for forever.
Sigs are like bumper stickers.
If you think about it, the common UFO is perfect for this type of flight pattern. When on the ground it has normal gravity pulling down, when it takes off, the force is still downward, just stronger. When in space, those rockets on the bottom just continue to accelerate to provide artifical gravity in that same direction.
It's so well designed I could almost believe they really do exist, if it wern't for the fact that so many people desperatly want to believe that they exist that we'd have some real hard evidince by now if they did.
If people live longer, and world population rate increases significantly, it will reverse and stabilize because people will just kill each other more often.
The developed parts of the world average around 1.3 children per family. Undeveloped birth rates are much higher, even well outpacing infant mortality. However, they have proven to be much more inclined to kill each other in great numbers. That would increase, and the population growth would stall accordingly.
.sigs are for post^Hers.
5000 years is won't happen without some major restructuring of society. As we currently have things set up you have a 50% chance of being involved in a fatal accident by the time you are 300.
anyone remember Holy Fire? It is a Bruce Sterling novel, giving few insights into working of society "blessed" with potential of immortality (or, at least longevity).
Main bohater come through experimental surgery, which has practically reset her biological clock so she is twenty again instead of fifty. And then, she meets really young people, impoverished of most civil laws. Conflict of generations - anyone?
how tough could be relation with someone 30 years older most of us know. How tough could be same relation with someone 300 years older? I dont see possibility to establish any democratic society based on such diversions: it will rather go into class system, similiar to old Hindu society.
Who says aging comes from mutations and toxins? I hate to break it to the junk science lovers but there's a bit more to it than that. Lifeforms have a genetic clock, which quite possibly has a time limit on it. You're not gonna tell me toxins and mutations are what take a 2 year old from screaming shorty to full grown person in 16 years.
/. IMHO
This link shouldn't have even been posted to
Ignorance kills, complacency kills, hatred kills, but usually not the ones guilty of them.
biological engineering plan to end human aging
i hope this will work, cause i want to play "duke nukem forever" in my lifetime.
beer as in "free beer"
Conditions like Alzheimer's, and memory loss in general, cause the last things learned to be the first things forgotten. People won't forget their childhood, but they might reach the point where their memory is so full that they can't add any substantial new information. You'd enter a sort of mental stasis.
Of course, I'm not sure that really makes sense, since from a personal point of view, stuff that happened recently is still fresh in my mind. I can remember most of the events that happened yesterday, but not the events of some arbitrary day four or five years in the past.
Sigs are like bumper stickers.
Not related to Dorian Gray by any chance? Or is that just Wilde speculation ...
Don't go to a brothel if you want to buy broth
"Wanted: 1 Oracle Forms Developer. Must have 420 years experience."
Perhaps people won't really feel the need to have children at all, or at least not close to the rate that they're having them now. After all, one of the main reasons, if not
Work is punishment for failing to procrastinate effectively.
Go to www.prestigepublishing.com and read about how to do it. Not a joke, not a troll. The books contain detailed instructions on how to apply molecular biochemestry to health problems.
...then the defects would be inherited by offspring.
Isn't that why sexual reproduction exists?
The people who want to live forever is because they're so embedded in the system that they cannot see the bigger picture. Why are we here?
I believe there is so much more to being in this planet working and paying bills.
Alas, if only this meant the end of emails telling me how I need generic viagra to keep it up in my old age...
Still no help on those countless mortage applications I don't remember sending...
There is no mod option "-1: Disagree" for a reason. "Overrated" is not an acceptable substitute. Post something instead.
I fear that if all our grandparents were still alive, we'd never be able to get anywhere because of all the RV's clogging up the highways.
CMX-1152 a.k.a. ROHLEN seems to be a credible way of relieving oxidative stress.
...With one major problem: Extreme variability
in effective dosages among individuals, and a
TI < 2 (meaning, less than twice the amount
that will convey maximum benefit will begin to
cause damage; almost all (non-cancer) drugs in
common use have TI's greater than four, with
most over ten).
As a starting point for something better tolerated, however, I agree it looks very promising.
One of the strongest stabilizing forces on both technology and culture is the lifespan of the human being. As long as people are physically alive to remember and teach their children about a particular cultural facet, that facet will remain strong. The strength of that facet can get either stronger or weaker over time, depending on how many other trusted human beings are around practicing it and teaching it. (This gets heavily into memetics, but I'm going to avoid that topic.)
;-) People will always be innovating, but it'll take a lot longer for new technologies and techniques to gain acceptance when almost every technologist will be satisfied with the technologies they're already using. College kids entering the workforce are a great source, not of new ideas (necessarily), but of blank slates--people who can be talked into trying new things and seeing if they work, because they haven't made up their minds yet.
In the same vein, technology is taught by other trusted human beings. If a lot of trusted people say to use C++ or Java, then lots of people will choose to learn C++ or Java. (I'm convinced this is the only reason these languages still exist.
If the average human lifespan becomes much longer, it may not matter that it takes longer for technology to be accepted and become mainstream, but we will see a distinct change in how we plot the rate change of history.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
As a story I read one time read,
"No queiro ser renaquajo condenado a prision perpetua en el verdoso estanque de la vida"
~ "I don't want to be a tadpole condemned to a perpetual prison in the stangnant cesspool of life."
Why would you want to even approach immortality? Do people just want to be immortal because they fear death? At one point in time, you did not exist, and you have no problem with this now. Why fear the day that you will cease to exist again?
is if they've found a cure for cancer? I mean, since the chances of getting cancer increase dramatically with age (presumbly because there's an increase in the probability of a faulty DNA copy over time), wouldn't people just die of cancer instead of "old age"?
Since evolution cannot get rid of conditions/diseases that afflict us after reproduction has occurred, I suspect that there will always be some disease/condition which will cause death with age. But maybe that's just me.
HAND.
The current record holder for the Mouse prize won by placing his mouse on a very strict diet. This isn't the South Beach Diet. The mouse was fed the minimum amount of calories to sustain it's life, and other systems that would normally fail were artifically supplemented in a way least likely to cause celluar damage.
The mouse winner played the Free Radical game. This is _NOT_ Healthy living. If you did this, you wouldn't be strong enough to walk, and barely enough to bring air into your lungs.
There are people out there that count their calories so closely they can perdict a 5yr added life bonus by decreasing the amount of waste products metabolism produces. Many are now suffering from delbitating illness like Osteoporosis.
So yes, Science does hold the answers to everything. It's not a miracle, it's _science_. We're a machine, we can be maintained like one.
-Malakai
A Dragon Lives in my Garage
People, there is no such thing as the Fountain of Youth. Have any of you believers taken Thermodynamics clcasses? Ever heard of Entropy?! You can't beat it, ever. Aging is a direct product of entropy, people, and cannot be stopped. Give it up already.
May be a bit off-topic - but why is this guy being singled out. As far as I can see he has contributed very little to the field. Why doesn't Fortune write about Elizabeth Blackburn who pioneered telomerase studies (and was recently kicked off the Presidential council of Bioethics - the only real scientist) or the researchers he associates with who work on aging as their day-job.
A very American attitude to credit the money rather than the brains.
Back on topic though - my personal opinion is that all this research is a bit doubtful. My problem is that they are based on relatively short-lived organisms or tissue culture where DNA damage may indeed be important. Very hard to extrapolate to humans I think, where many of the accumulated errors may be on the level of the organization between cells (scarring is a trivial example) and not inside cells. Still it is very interesting research...
In his book "Why We Age" Steven Austead points out that places like the Ukraine and Central America where there was a claim for people living routienly for >100 years, invariably there were poor birth records. Invariably, those whose births are documented in those regions seem to have a life-sapn that is much shorter.
The likely cause? People inflate their ages to gain respect. He even uncovered proof of this in one of his examples.
The human body wears out at approximately ~80 years age. Based on Austeads studies of Opposums, he has developed a hypothesis that the period of female fertility is evolutionarily controlled by an organisms life expectancy in the face of predators and a hostile environment, which in turn drives the rate at which the organism "wears out"
Thus, our life expectancy is hard-wired into our genes, and is the product of the ~35 years of life that a prehistorical homo sapiens could expect to survive.
Yes, it is possible to manipulate gene expression, or even replace genes entirely with a retro-virus (despite what they said in the pseudo-scientific babble in Blade Runner). However, I expect that I will be long dead or rotted by the time the medical arts have gotten that good.
I remember from freshman health class (it was a couple of years ago though) that females are born with all the eggs they'll ever produce. So an average woman only had about 500 or so eggs in her entire lifetime. Thats unlikly to change despite and extended lifespan. I'd think that even if menopause didn't happen, a woman would just run out of eggs after 50 years or so. Somebody wanna correct or confirm this, i'm not sure if i'm remembering right, and my health teacher was an idiot.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Pretty big difference between 'making' it to 100 years old (pruned up, no bladder...etc). And living to 180 with the body of a 35 year old.
Eat healthy is obvious, but it alone won't solve this problem. You need science.
-Malakai
A Dragon Lives in my Garage
Just ending the ageing process and preventing death from most diseases. All the other ways of croaking would still be around. Some small number of people may make it to 1000 years or more, but I'd be very surprised if average lifespans got above 300. Even 300 assumes an ideal stable society.
People would still die. Property would still pass on to younger generations. It would probably be much easier to "leave a legacy to the world after their death" than it is now - it's hard to accomplish much long term with our short lifespans.
-- your Web browser is Ronald Reagan
Yes, it's nice seeing Babylon 5 spin and all, and some similar designs (rings) may lead you to believe that you'd need a giant vessel.
But all you really need is rotation in order to generate gravity.
Preferably, you'd want this gravity to be somewhat constant-ish so that your feet aren't much heavier than your head.
So you need a rotation around a fairly large radius.
For this, however, all you really need is a vessel describing this the large circle that is the result of this radius.
One way to do this would be to fly a ship around in circles, but I'd fear the technology needed.
Another way is to force a ship to fly around in circles.
For example those little toy planes that only have 1 engine, to go forward, which are limited in motion by a piece of plastic that is stuck around a central pole. Thus describing a circle.
Of course we don't have a giant pole in space to spin around, so we'd need something else to give us counter-motion.
And what better than...another vessel, of same mass, flying in the 'opposite' direction ?
So now we have a setup much like this
Add in a central motor...And instead of just flying in circles, it can actually fly towards places. Make the central motor have vectored thrust (either by a vector-thrust engine, or by multiple engines), and a course can easily be plotted, corrections be made, etc.
Well, in theory anyway. one of the problems : A material strong enough to connect everything.
Though that should be much easier than finding the material to build a space elevator(!)
I probably missed something, just seems like the above might work. I'm not an aerospace engineer, though
"As an added bonus, I don't think you'll find a more succinct (and utterly British) answer to overpopulation objections to life extension than the one at the end of this article!"
The guy posted five links. To which article is he referring, the Fortune one that requires registration?
- No hope for a new generation. Imagine generations of the living who still harbor grudges hundreds of years old. Just look at the Balkans, Middle East, etc. Sometimes the best hope is new generations with new perspectives.
- Now turnover in wealth. A perpetual economic ruling class would be established since they'd never have to pass on their wealth. Society would stratify more than ever.
- Medical costs would skyrocket at people accumulated injuries, side effects of the anti-aging process, the cost of the treatments, etc since voters in the US would demand equal access to the treatment.
- A drop in creativity as generations of people fixed in their ways of thinking never turn over.
- Population control would be essential. No avoiding this. Sorry, we won't be marching off by the millions to live in space or other planets.
- Rotten people would also live longer also
- Life in prison sentences would become unbearable burdens on society and an ethical nightmare
- Ennui will eventually hit everyone as life becomes ever more predictable
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Given the nature of what it would require to insure not aging (constant repair of every cell in the body) these treatments would have to start at least by age 25 for most people.
I can remember what I was like at that age...
With age comes wisdom as a result of the physical changes your body tends to force upon you. It's how we learn patience, empathy, logical progressive thought patterns, and so on and so on.
Are you telling me that someone is seriously considering making every twenty-something immortal?
[shudder]
Mod me troll, if you must, I can't help it.
Don't you think people like the Pope or Queen Mom have very good advisors already ? I once looked at the homepage of some rich american family who is hosting funds for other rich families(1) and they do have in fact some medical research foundation.
Making this kind of research public increases the chances that some of it will trickle down into the normal population.
IMHO, this kind of research should not be focused just on living longer, but on the quality of life. One should be able to work longer years and have fun longer years. Spending more time in a home for the elderly just isn't going to cut it.(2)
And another point, draft and military service should be required from the old not the young.
(1) I forgot the name it is probably among my 1000s of bookmarks, makes me wonder how many bookmarks you could collect in a longer lifespan.
(2) Unless, of course, I can read my beloved slashdot every day.
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
doesn't it.....
Genesis 6:3 reads:
Then the LORD said, "My Spirit will not contend with [1] man forever, for he is mortal [2] ; his days will be a hundred and twenty years."
[1] Or "My spirit will not remain in"
[2] Or "corrupt"
Speaking as a Christian, my personal viewpoint is: God didn't want it because man is corrupt, and so I don't either. I don't need to stay in this world any longer than it takes to complete God's plan for me. The next world is far better, why focus on this one any longer than God asks of me?
I'm all for better quality of the life we have, but I believe the lengthening of it will inevitably lead to the same situation in Genesis 6 because of human nature -- which will not change.
Here is an interesting article titled New Discoveries in the Biochemistry of Aging Support the Biblical Record.
currently at "Life of the creator +way too many years"?
Well, at least no one could make another derivative work of Michael Crichton's books.
Yeah, I know its not truly derivative, since he wrote the screenplay, but you get the point.
What?
Though people may cite overpopulation and religious reasons why we shouldn't do this, those are just straw men.
The real reason is because this totally turns the natural order of things upside-fucking-down which will likely be to our detriment. If you only care about yourself as is human nature (and particularly reinforced by individualistic American values) then fine, try to live forever. But as far as our species is concerned, living forever is not necessarily the most advantageous. Of course no one can see all ends, but consider:
People living forever means less need for kids, which slows down evolution. Do we want to be strictly responsible for our own genetics? How do we identify practical genetic defects if we never die? Our existence as a species will then be dependent on the survival of a highly technological civilization which is far from guaranteed.
Take away the motivation of a limited lifespan and suddenly everything seems a lot less urgent. Motivation to learn, motivation to find the meaning of life, motivation to accomplish something. After all, you can always do it later.
How does the human brain develop at such extreme ages? We all know that people are shaped by childhood experience, and that many old people are set in their ways. With a huge population who 'have it all figured out' how will we continue to make progress? Periodic lobotomies?
I'm all for extending life through healthier living, but the quest for the fountain of youth is an egotistical obsession stemming from the fear of death. Personally I refuse to let the fear of death drive me to radical genetic techniques to extend the inevitable. I don't want to be some kind of artifically-preserved shell of a human, and I don't think anybody should want to (though I wouldn't stop them). What people need nowadays (in America anyway) is acceptance of the fact that we can't control everything. The best you can do is live your life well, make good decisions, and hopefully fate will be kind.
Anonymous Kev
Proudly posting as AC since 1997
(Finally got a dang account in 2004)
"Who wants to live forever?" (That was a Queen song from "Highlander", a movie about immortals,BTW) I do, moron.
Overpopulation? Not when we Transhumanists get through with you monkeys. Your population will be nicely culled, thank you - assuming you don't do it first with your brain-dead wars and inability to cooperate well enough to feed yourselves.
Cloning? Au contraire, mon frere - cloning produces an entirely independent entity - does nothing for immortalizing YOU - unless you brain transplant which raises issues about the clone's brain. And it still leaves you biological and just as subject to death as the next clone.
The only solution to immortality is direct replacement of human biology with nanotech - body, brain, the works - non-destructive, fault-tolerant, failure-tolerant, restartable and resurrectable procedures only.
This will be done.
And whatever you monkeys think about it is irrelevant.
You're going to die. I won't.
Have a nice day.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
We can't even fix it now, but imagine is everyone lived forever. In 70 years we went from 3 people putting in for every person taking out. We are now less than 1.1: 1, with baby boomers coming of retirement age it'll drop big and quickly. We are going to be fubar now. Well, I won't, but I'll be missing a nice chunk of money that is rightfully mine. I'm already looking at being 70 before I retire, and in the computer industry, that's not good.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
"IF YOU'RE AN ENGINEER, COMPUTER SCIENTIST, ETC: learn some biology. I started making really well-received contributions to biogerontology after I'd been reading the literature for TWO MONTHS -- no kidding. Maybe I was lucky, but maybe it was just that scientists really need input from people with a different training and mindset. Don't take the easy way out of thinking that you can't help because you haven't got the right expertise."...says SENS
As pointed out by Richard Dawkins in his brilliant book The selfish gene death of age is nothing more than just a spinoff of evolution. The bar of age just seems to be there because people were able to reproduce already and that fact alone makes genes successful that might proof fatal inside older bodies.
If we would reproduce beyond the age of 80 then evolution would HAVE to select the genes that are vital for longevity (is this the word? german here.). He also claims that it would be theoretically possible to raise the bar by passing a law that would forbid reproduction before the age of 40, then 50 and so on. Of course this is utopical but if you look at it it makes pretty much sense...
Only way to curb the population once this happens is to implant gems in everyone's palm. Once you hit a certin age it turns red and you are thrown into the carosel.
I can't use my sig - my computer can't read my handwriting.
Actually, there are more people alive today, who have not died, than at any previous time in history. In a recent survey of 12 people in my neighborhood, only three reported dying in the last twelve months, and I suspect they may have been lying. If anything, the death rate is decreasing . . .
Upstairs Dog, Downstairs People.
He was snacking on His couch in His glory, and was playing around with His bag of tricks when He got a phone call that He had to pick up His Holy Mother at the bus depot. When He left, He accidently forgot to put His bag of tricks away; leaving it wide open for Us to discover His secrets of immortality. All glory and praise to Us!
Incidently, this is also the way He lost His television remote. Fortunately, He was able to Create another one with all the great depth and subtlety of His old one. In His divine wisdom, He added a 30 second Fast Forward button to His new remote so He didn't have to watch commercials during taped episodes of Average Joe.
almost 20 years ago the FDA or whoever came out
:)
:)
with the 'Food Pyramid'.
You know, that diagram with fats in the tiny bit
at the top and the big wide bars for carbs at the bottom?
Anyone else notice that the majority of the population in the United States LOOKS like that F'n Pyramid now? *sigh*
People are not honest, with themselves and definitely not with those around them.
Interview ALMOST any overweight person and you'll find that the reason they are un-happy with their life is because they've been dishonest in the past and are STILL being affected by it DAILY.
I would NEVER have believed that being honest could make such a difference if I wasn't standing
here looking at the last 3 years of my life as proof.
Wake the fuck up people. Be honest and do what
you KNOW is right. Your life WILL get better.
Hell, three years on honesty and I'm doing FABULOUS now.
Quite the drastic change from what my life used to be.
As it stands now, your children don't end up like steadily more badly-mutated humans because there's a 'pre-culling' process that goes on. Sperm with bad mutations die or never make it very far. Eggs undergo a lesser culling process. Embryos that have problems are by and large let go naturally by the body - and mostly with good reason.
Those 'proving grounds' reset most genetic troubles from generation to generation, something that we cannot do quite as well for our own cells.
Michael West's The Immortal Cell is a pretty interesting account of one researcher who has been chasing the dream for a number of years. It's pretty fascinating reading, and those who haven't been watching the field will be amazed at what we have not only figured out, but what we have actually accomplished.
One option that comes up for the shorter term is tissue cloning. There are actually a number of things we know already (some from Michael West's book):
(It seems we can also 'reset' cellular programs by de-alkylating histones - those big 4-piece wintergreen mints that DNA is wrapped around. Histone alkyl 'tails' seem to have a lot to do with telling a cell what it actually does. Some of West's research indicates that you can get this to happen as part of the tissue cloning process)
So, instead of using hard-to-procure human eggs, you can perhaps use rabbit eggs (I'm sure the Australians wouldn't mind) and have what amounts to basically switching Duracell batteries for Energizer batteries. You can then pick out the healthy clonal cells for division into tissues.
With genomics, proteomics and experimentation, we can find the hormones or hormone chains to specialize the cells into skin, retinas, livers or even bone marrow.
Bone marrow gets my vote as a worthy cause. Being able to produce blood from the DNA of known-good donors would provide a decent backup if the ideal solution - cloning blood from the patient's own DNA - can't be done in time.
Sure beats any other 'stem cell source' we can get our hands on.
The next steps would be to try repairing aging cells in situ. The two biggies to fix which researchers have identified are the shortening telomeres (chromosome caps) and mitochondria (they are more susceptible to mutation, being more bacteria-like and exposed to by-products of burning food for energy).
Some good news at least in that it seems that we might not induce cancer in an attempt to lengthen telomeres - although further testing will be required.
It's pretty amazing how far we've come, but the things that are going to make the difference are going into the pipeline now - expect pretty fantastic things in 20 years, perhaps even 15.
Binary geeks can count to 1,023 on their fingers
It is not the inevitable result of time. Children born with progeria age about 7 times faster than normal, dying of heart failure at 13 years.... All the symptoms of aging are there. The tellomere caps are ravaged for some reason. Aging is a process, it is programmed, it is reversible, there is no time-related cause for it, biological systems can be very long lived.
I'm not saying the procedure is flawed one way or the other but I am saying in the long run it won't work, lets for a minuite think how that will effect us.
From now on no one will die. Those who are in power will stay in power those who control will remain in control, no new ideas more violence as the only way new people can get heard or positions is by brutally murdering those above them. Want your kids to get a job and be successfull? How? You want a raise? How? As people get older they retire to make room for the new but now they will be able to work for ever. How are people going to move up, get fired? Then what once all the jobs are taken, they are all gone.
And if you don't have a job you will unemployed for life most likely you won't be able to commit suicide because they will just make you a new wrist / heart/ neck... whatever and throw you back on the streets.
You may have the choice to choose wheather you want to do this or not but who will?
You can try to mess with mother nature as much as you want but just as physists must judge thier actions with great care so they dont go splitting atoms in public places for kicks because they know that the consequences no matter how good they seem on paper may really fuck things up. We are scared of death that is pretty relevant beacause of this type of research but we must also evaluate the consequence of avoiding it as well.
Sig
A loop, by its nature, continues. If that didn't make sense, start reading this sentence again.
I was wondering what the flood had to do with living forever. Then it became clear. That's why the creators of Halo wanted to destroy all biological matter. Once converted to flood, aging stops and your free to live forever, with a very strong urge to share the wonderous longevity with others by slashing them or shooting them until they are incapacited enough to receive the gift of eternal life.
:)
On a more serious note though, that's exactly what the book
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is about. It says pretty much exactly the same thing in the first chapter. Everyone is for life extension because anyone opposed to life extension died out, and to the kids growing up it was just a fact of life that you could live forever. Excellent read, and a free download for you cheapos.
for a living.
Face it. There's a whole segment of the population
that's made up of people who have NO MOTIVATION.
They may not be the brightest but they WILL scrub toilets for a living.
NO, there's nothing wrong with that occupation, it's just that for someone with MY mindset it's so NON-challenging that I'm immediatly going to be looking for a different line of work.
there is NO dishonor in HONEST work. I don't care what the job is. Trash, plumbing, nuclear, whatever.
At all. Those that love life will continue to love it. Those that are bitter will maintain their bitterness. Great writers will produce great works. Great artists and inventors, likewise. In essense, with an increase in longevity, we will see an increase in quantity. Had Mozart lived to the age of 100, do you think we could expect even greater genius to have emerged from his brilliand mind? Do you? Hmm... Get on with it and live your lives!
Oh yeah, sorry, FREEDOM-Fries! UP UP AND AWAAAAAAY!
Anyway, I thought that the earth was already overpopulated, and now this, what the hell is wrong with humanity?
My solution?: The people who thought of this: go win the X prize and stay in orbit, you nut!
Sounds like the umbrella corporation might be up to something now we need to go and send in sexy looking Milla Jovovich to really find out what's going on in Raccoon city.
I never meant to imply that it would be simple; I merely meant to show that we've already seen phenonmena that halt or even reverse the fundemental causes of aging. The exact implementation is irrelevant; the fact that it is feasible at the cellular level is enough. It's just like coding, man, only our software actually creates our hardware. Do you realize the incredible freedom that gives us? Given enough time, I'm sure we could work around any bugs that arise. [insert obligatory Microsoft joke here]
Example: what if we could activate the telomerases and figure out another way of hard-coding cell death, thus preventing cancerous behavior?
The anti-aging technology, if ever completed will stop the evolution of the species. Death is necessary so species "improve" themselves (and leave the path to improved generations). If we do not age and die, then we will not evolve.
Have we reached a point where Humans are "perfect"? I say no. Furthermore, this will probably only benefit the richest, not the fittest... So we would end with a population of mostly spoil rich brats, Bill Gates look-alikes...
whats with slashdot and the late news?
I'm a rabbit startled by the headlights of life
Entropy will win in the end. The most you can do is delay the inevitable.
Most likely, living forever will require some very intensive regimen. Maybe less intensive as the centuries go by, but surely for the first subjects, it will be a serious pain in the ass. Injections (or their futuristic equivalent--transdermal sprays, nanofine needles, I don't know) every day, pills three times a day, trips to the doctor, trips to the pharmacy. You'll have to change your lifestyle, because I'm sure that at least the first few generations of these treatments will only be optimized for people who are still relatively healthy. So it is unlikely that, at least for the first few hundred years, you'll be able to eat as many Big Macs as you would like. And maybe they might disqualify you if you do something to yourself that causes damage. Either metabolically, by eating nothing but trans-saturated fats, or traumatically, like falling off of a cliff while rock-climbing.
And I bet you that bad things will happen if you happen to slack off on any of these things. Or that you physically, chemically, and biologically won't be able to continue once you reach a certain threshold of non-compliance to the regimen.
Not to mention that this will certainly cost a shitload of money. There will be very few immortals in the first few centuries, and the ironic thing is that they'll probably be disinclined to reproduce. (Assuming that this process doesn't render you sterile anyway.)
And if Western civilization gets set back somehow, a la the European Middle Ages, then you can kiss your immortality goodbye, because clearly something this intensive will require the infrastructure of a fully functioning civilization.
So, is it possible? Certainly. Is it probable? I'm a little less sure about that.
You can still always get killed in a car crash or by a bullet in the head. And it'll certainly take even longer to develop methods of reversing death than it will to develop methods of extending life.
And then, even if you can somehow keep from getting killed traumatically, and we somehow keep civilization from getting set back the way that human history so far demonstrates that it cyclically does, you still have to worry about that killer asteroid that has our name written on it. And if we get off the planet, there's the sun exploding. If we get to another star, the Milky Way will get sucked into the black hole at the galactic center. And then eventually, there's the heat death of the expanding universe.
Forever is a long time.
What I mean by that, is live the one life you have like you realise you've got a limited lease! The problem with most people is that they waste a lot of time (doing unfullfilling things) and live AS IF they ARE immortal. Suddenly they discover they are old, they've wasted the opportunities that they had, they are suddenly too aware that they've not got long left and then they start crying "oh give me another ten years/day etc.. I promise to make good use of these extra years.."
You don't find this kind of attitude in much evidence in extreme sportsmen/sportswomen.. why? Because they are doing stuff they LOVE and they are all too aware that each day could be their last and so they DON'T casually put things off (forever).
Why is it that every time an article links to the New York Times web site, the link is followed by some moronic blather about the NYT registration requirement. When articles from Fortune or Business 2.0 are linked, no such comment, despite the fact that NYT registration costs $0.00 while others require either a full-on magazine subscription or a monthly or daily fee.
/. editors, at least be consistant and warn us when you link to site that requires a paid subscription and doesn't offer an anonymous option.
If you object to the NYT requirement, you can register under an assumed name and stop complaining. You can't do that with the Fortune site, since you have to pay them somehow. It's not just the money, you have to give up your anonymity as well.
Please,
No really, it is. Any time anyone ever tries to tell you that the world is overpopulated, look at them funny, then calmly explain the following.
Every person in the entire world can be given 1000 sq. ft. of land all to themself, and all that land would fit inside of Texas.
World population: About 6 Billion
Land Area of Texas: 261,914 Square Miles (or about 1,912,428,000,000,000,000 (1.9 Quintillion) Square Feet)
Using handy dandy Google calculator on the following:
(261914^(.5)*5280)^2/6 billion
We get about 1217 Square Feet per PERSON if we only consider Texas.
This doesnt even begin to think about how much space every person would have if we built buildings so we could use multiple stories of space, or even if we divided the world down into family units that would live together.
Now granted it would be silly to put everyone into Texas, but the point is that it could be done, and you wouldn't be mashed up against 15 other people with literally only enough space to breathe.
Overpopulation is a myth, anyone who tells you otherwise hasn't been properly informed.
For an immortal, the consequences of any short-sighted decision WILL come to roost. Live your life exploiting other people? You WILL have to deal with those people, or their offspring later in life. (Or you WILL sooner or later make someone made enough to kill you.) Have a propensity for collecting junk? After a few hundred years, you are going to have a mountian of trash to clean up.
To an immortal, what you are paying at the pump right now doesn't mean squat. It's will the CO2 your Taho is shooting in the air flood his beach house in 100 years. Taxes today don't matter as much as the economic chaos that decades of deficit spending will cause.
To be an immortal requires a set of ethics that Jesus and Lao Tsu would be proud of. And it's not out of "goodness", it's out of self-preservation.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Can't find a cite, but there was a thought-provoking story I read as a child featuring a researcher who was arguing that the human memory was like a box full of index cards where we stored individual memories and sights. What he feared is that, with the advent of television, the human brain was cataloguing thousands of images each minute and would eventually run out of index cards. Near the end of the story, the president went on TV to issue the warning, and froze up as his brain reached capacity reading the cues on the closed-circuit TV in front of him.
Personally, I suspect there is eventually an upper limit, but probably it's like a disk drive wherein the sectors which lack pointers to them will be the first to be over-written. Really lazy garbage collection perhaps? ^_^
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
Ya know, being able to perform cleverly on a test made up of multiple-choice trick questions doesn't actually say anything about your "mindset", or for that matter anything useful about your intelligence. And yes, I can score as highly on those silly things. It means nothing.
This is wrong both morally and practically. Morally, it is wrong to draft anyone. Practically, the old are comparatively feeble. Also practically, an old person who doesn't want to be drafted is far more likely to be successful in dodging a draft or exacting terrible revenge if he is drafted.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
If you're Republican, 40 is already the top age for youthful indiscretions.
According to the CDC the average American has 1 in 3000 chance of dying from an accident per year. So people would live an average of 3,000 years, some much longer. Perhaps people would be more afraid of adventure, bad machinery, etc. if they thought it could kill them.
Can anyone tell me what the "succinct (and utterly British) answer to overpopulation objections to life extension" at the end of the aricle the poster refers to. I'm not willing to subscribe to forbes in order to read the full article.
Think for a minute what kinds of risks you take in your everyday life: driving fast, crossing busy roads, parachuting, going to war?
Would you change what you do if you could live 1000 years barring accidental death? What about 10,000? Or 100,000? Or if you could live forever?
Would you go fight in Iraq for USA if you knew you had 1000 years of life ahead of you (meaning you would live much longer than USA is likely to exist)? Would you go blow yourself up with the hopes of ending up in heaven, if you knew you could live forever here on earth?
I would imagine that a lot of people would become a lot more risk averse if they potentially faced a lot longer lifetime.
Well, I've got to admit it, the /. crowd has really disappointed me this time. Normally, I can count on seeing some insightful comments on any given topic, but this particular subject has (to date) generated a mighty poor showing.
Even weeding the victims of "Star Trek Syndrome" (the unfortunate tendency to consider technological advances in isolation) out of the mix, I don't see much sign of intelligent life here. There are exceptions: MythoBeast's reply, in particular, shows an awareness of the more fundamental issues.
For the record, the capability to engineer functional immortality in the human species is a question of "when", not "if". Assuming that we can maintain a technological civilization, it seems inevitable within the next two centuries. The real question is: "How are we going to deal with it."
Consider: the technology is going to cost a fortune to develop, but will probably be cheap to reproduce, self-replicating and inheritable. I base these statements on the assumption that the mature form of the technology is a combination of gene-tweaking and nano-or-bio-technology-based house-cleaning agents. Given, this, and the implied capability that goes along with it, the beneficiaries of this technology will not have to worry about being fat, ugly, or old, and the only diseases they're likely to be plagued by are the ones designed in laboratories. All of which implies that the primary causes of death in a society with access to such technology would be reduced to three: accident, violence, and suicide (considering going off your longevity regime as a form of suicide).
What does that really mean? All of our cultural institutions (and it doesn't make any difference whose culture you're talking about; by "our", I mean humanity's), all of our societies are shaped by the knowledge of death. By implication, ALL of these societies will lose their viability in the face of Universal Functional Immortality (UFM). The problem is, we've got nothing to replace them. And its not just UFM; consider all the other technological trends and you potentially have a world in which everyone could be young, health, beautiful, immortal and idle, the latter because all of the forms of purely physical labor have been automated. Ironically, I suspect the development of A.I.s sophisticated enough to create this "utopia" will take much longer than finding a way to put the brakes on the aging process.
It's not just our culture; the structure of our brains is shaped by death as an environmental constant. Much of what we consider "human nature" is likely "hard-wired" as a mess of evolutionary spaghetti-code. Fixing aging is one thing; changing human nature is another. Unfortunately, that nature did not evolve in an environment where really long-term thinking was a survival trait. We run by simple rules: survive, reproduce; monopolize resources; minimize change within our environment. As individuals we exhibit a wide variety of thresholds at which we consider these imperatives to be satisfied, but they drive us all.
What happens when immortals with no physical wants try to satisfy these urges? How do you build a society, starting where we are now, that won't self-destruct or go into stasis? Or is the technological singularity simply inevitable?
Come on, show me that you're part of that "top 25% of the I.Q. curve".
Option 1: Reproduction only allowed for 'Finite-life-span' people
This option proposes a rule that people will only be allowed to have children if they agree to switch back to a 'finite' life span (presumably of some traditional duration like less than 100 years or so). That rule, in conjunction with a 'one-child-per-parent' rule, would prevent population explosion.
Option 2: Reproduction only allowed if you go off-planet at some point.
In this second option, indefinite-life-span people are allowed to reproduce on Earth, but after some specified duration, they have to leave the planet and 'retire' somewhere in outer space, in order to prevent population explosion.
As our technology for maintaining human health becomes more powerful, the population/reproduction issue will become critical at some point. People should remember that the same technology that can prevent aging will also be able to drastically reduce the probability of accidental death for a significant percentage of the population.
I'm curious if anyone else has thought of alternative ideas for dealing with the problem of reproduction with indefinite lifespan.
mhack
Building a better ribosome since 1997
An appropriate randomly generated Slashdot quote was a bit late today. (3:30EST)
Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon. -- Susan Ertz
Adidas To Bring Back Sneakernet
Several scientists and scifi writers have speculated that such treatments may have to be applied relatively early in life, probably before puberty. By then the body may have used up too much of its regnerative capability. Or reproductive capability may negate immortality.
This has resulted in the "Neverland" scenario where immortals are perpetual children.
This one was at the bottom of the slashdot page, couldn't resist the urge:
Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon. -- Susan Ertz
pot.kettle(black);
Great to hear, now I know that I won't die from old age, but instead starvation.
TruePunk | Games
Some biologists have noticed that bipolar sex, multicellular differentiation, and preprogrammed death (at both the cellular level and whole organism) seemed to have evolved together. Only single cell life and the simplest multicellar organisms live forever until they are eaten, starve, or encounter an adverse environment. These organisms lack tissue differentiation and gender. Though they may mix genetic material.
Modded funny ? I think it's a very insightful comment, after a certain time the chance of being involved in fatal accident must be very high.
Aging is a response to mutations which naturally build up over time. Most aging is the slowing down of metabolism so as the reduce cell activity in order to reduce mutations.
There is no indication whatsoever that this is the root cause of aging. In fact, there are complex organisms that live two to three times as long as humans do.
Most likely, there is no simple mechanism that limits how long humans live, it's just lots of different things failing in different ways. And the reason why they are failing is that, historically, people were killed by the age of 35 or 40, so there wasn't any evolutionary pressure on them to evolve organs that would last longer. Things work well with high probability until about 35 or 40, and after that, they slowly but steadily start failing, for different reasons and in different ways.
By analogy, the transmission and motor in your car are probably not designed specifically to last 500000 miles because rust and obsolescence get most cars off the road much earlier. In fact, your car's components are probably only designed not to fail too much within the warranty period, and that happens to give most cars maybe 2-3 times the warranty period as their total lifespan.
The nicest things about very very wealthy people is that eventually they have to confront their own mortality, and usually this changes them to think about "humanity" rather than "themselves". Death is why we are moral creatures.
His rebuttal for the overpopulation argument is little more than this: The current trend is more deaths than births - or a Population Implosion - which will lead to national extinction.
Sorry, but trends can be deceptive if not all the information is provided. Where is the trend for number of births (irrespective of deaths)? Unless that trend is on a marked decline, more deaths than births can easily correspond to crappy world conditions - like ongoing war and famine and gang wars and so on. What was the trend in births like over the last 100 years. If it saw a massive increase 40-70 years ago, then no kidding there are more deaths now (in other words "baby booms" = "death booms" 40-70 years later). Reducing births from families with over 10 children to the 1-3 more common now is not a threat to a nation. Even reducing births to 1 child per 100 couples (thats one birth for 200 future deaths) wouldn't threaten our population for a long time to come.
In other words, there is no shortage of births occurring now - regardless of the ratio of deaths to births. If anything, we have a brief reprieve from the population explosion that has us straining resources in many parts of the world.
I was taking one day at a time, but then several days got together and ambushed me. (from a Rhymes with Orange comic)
MAD = mutually assurred destruction
Now we just need an accronym for SENILE that conveys an even worse scenario. Michael Jackson reengineered himself, and look where that went. He's the kind of person who can afford the anti-aging technology when it arrives. Anyone want to speculate on Michael's appearance on his 300'th birthday? Anyone? Hint: his complexion be so far into the ultraviolet the guests will need welder's masks. Bonus: there won't be children any more, just adults engineered to look like children. Oh, it'll be great, for sure.
How can any sane person think this line of research is a good thing for the world at large? It boggles my mind.
is remarkably apt:
"Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon." -- Susan Ertz
Personally, I think boredom can be dealt with. It's the realization that you will spend 18 years of your 5,000 year lifespan at school, and the next 4,500 years as a wage slave, paying taxes to support the older generations through their 500 years of retirement.
--
E_NOSIG
Their idea of an invading westerner is Alexander the Great!
Check out the robot and foundation series for thoughts on how aging affects innovation and improvement of the human species. Not too flattering.
Exactly. Unfortunatly I can't find the reference for this, but it came up when discussing a similar issue recently along the lines of 'how long would you like to live?'. My understanding is that actuarial statistics indicate that if we were granted genetic immortality free from disease practical immortality would be limited to around 300 - 500 years as in our current state of society you'd most probably be involved in a fatal accident before you reached this age.
I find this interesting as most people assume when discussing increasing lifespans that all that is involved is a matter of medicine and genetics. Of course it could be assumed that in such a society fewer accidents are fatal, but personally I rather doubt it. Seems to me that if you could live a long time in a reasonable state of health by the time you reached 150 with the body of a 30 year old you'd be looking for all sort of novel experiences, and inevitably novel experiences involve risk. And that's in addition to the normal risks of living - I've been driving for 25 years and during that time I've had a couple of very close near misses. I'm sure if I'd been driving for 250 years (or the equivalent) the probability of one of the expected 20-odd near misses being fatal must be very high indeed.
By my calculations, Wilt Chamberlain would have 4,138,0001 children
Zing!
Wilt the stilt Chamberlain
His figures for WWII and WWI are incorrect, the WWII figures are off by a lot. It almost appears he's only counting the military dead. And that's not even considering that the "official" figures for the Russian civilian dead run as high as 20 million. At face value, it cannot be said whether this is an honest discrepancy between "offical" sources, or if he was employing some creative accounting to opportunistically make his point. If he has fudge the figures, that puts the entire premise into a suspect light. Reality is what it is; trying to shape it as a means to an end speaks to basic issues of integrity and the most obvious next question is what else may have been "adjusted"?
Then there's the matter of perspective. The plage of the 1300's killed as much as half of the population in the cities that did not institute quarantines, which flys in the face of his "age is the number one killer" premise.
That goes for the Bristish Commonwealth, the Dutch and the Danish. Dangerous decade to be a queen mother.
I think the Brain's structure and biological limitations selected by evolution woul pose a limit to how many years a person can lead a normal life (you know, eating, farting, hangin out with friends, etc).
Besides the biological challenges, there are social challenges. The longevity meme site is a load of hyperbole. I don't buy a bit of it.
I am not for or against people trying to live longer. But, attacking the aging problem by keeping the body organs alive longer is not living longer. I can't imagine how ****ed up a 300 year or a 500 yr old omind would be. Unless there is a clear answer to why evolution lets people die and why we should stop that from happening, I would call this way too much of self-indulgence.
Science as a way of life.
What if we are all just "cells" in a big multicellular organism known as Gaia? If we short circuit our natural "cellular" cycle of birth, growth, death, and regeneration, from Gaia's perspective couldn't that be considered the equivalent of cells in our own body turning cancerous?
I really do like the motd that I got with this article:
Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon. -- Susan Ertz
You mean to say that we should be good and do the right things instead of being bad and doing wrong things?
*slaps forehead*
Why didn't *I* think of that???
dinner: it's what's for beer
Why the fuck post a link AND an end-of-article tease line, when the article requires a paid subscription?
:)
KNOBJOB!
That said, can someone violate copyright and post the text?
Mmmmmm... Bold, yet refreshing!
In a system where disease and aging have been defeated, and population expands to it's maximum, eventually competition for resources (i.e. food) will become so severe that cannibalism is the only possible outcome. The weakest will die as a result of starvation, or be killed for food. Soylent Green would be the solution to overpopulation.
Do we really need GWB running around for another 2000 years? I know he is not going to get any smarter unless we fill his empty head with nanobots to repair the lifelong coke and drink habit.
That's the finding on a recent study on them - see Sciencedaily.com
Basically their growth continues forever, but slows down greatly. From an evolutionary point of view, it works as the largest/oldest are the most fertile and produce the most eggs/sperm, and act as anchors on the population size.
I know it's not very Slashdot-like to you know, read articles, much less books, but there's an interesting mention of this in Brave New World where a small colony of "alphas" is created. Everything very quickly goes to crap and it falls apart and there's a desire to bring back the system of an engineered population.
:-)
The point of the whole thing is that society runs the most smoothly when people's function in society best fits their abilities.
Of course the overarching theme of the book is that this leads to a very well run hell, but that's beyond the scope of this mini-rant.
It's simple really- being able to live 5,000 years means we can start interstellar travel.
At least, that's the theory I hear from people that think aliens helped us evolve by inoculating our planet with magic mushroom spores.
Information: "I want to be anthropomorphized"
I already live in Florida. Like I need a billion MORE old people.
Lousy facepalm.
As an added bonus, I don't think you'll find a more succinct (and utterly British) answer to overpopulation objections to life extension than the one at the end of this article!
I don't suppose this solution has anything to do with the boiling and eating of small Irish children does it?
Radical social change doesen't happen because powerful people pass away, it happens when they suck as leaders and are deposed.
A 200 yr old man with total power is just as disposable as a 20 yr old man with total power. It didn't matter how old King Louis XVI was for France to revolt or when Adolf Hitlers birthday was for other countries to put a stop to his political movement...
This phenomena is well studied in the form of non-charismatic dictatorships. When power is inherited, it gets diffused via several mechanisms. For instance:
1. The kid doesn't know how to weild the power and loses respect.
2. The kid disagrees with the parent about how power should be weilded.
3. Power is divided among several siblings (this is especially true about money), and some of it is lost due to lack of appreciation for it.
Of course, none of that stopped the Plantagenets from ruling England for over two hundred and fifty years, but I suspect that immortality would have extended this reign, probably to the current day.
Wake up - the future is arriving faster than you think.
... or maybe just a brainwashed religious zealot who believes in an afterlife.
isnt overpopulation a problem isnt overpopulation a problem isnt overpopulation a problem
|plastic....or gasoline?|
If the human race is ever going to undertake interstellar travel, then the human race will have to redefine its physiology. That includes increasing lifespan to several thousand years, which would be the time needed to travel to our stellar neighbors.
If you want the solution to aging, developing more sophisticated biotech technologies and nanotechnologies will enable us to go inside cells and fix the genetic machinery that wears out/breaks down..we will be able to re-furbish the "guts" of each cell by using mechanisms that produce stem cells etc. (the processesse by which each generation produces new sperm and egg cells which are essentially brand new cells), after all, cells are made from dna codes and all most of the population out there now understand what code (software) and hardware is...you couldn't explain that to the average person 25 years ago....so what we find ourselves with now-a-days is that we have reached a point in history where we will soon be able to fully understand how aging works and how we will be able to "overclock/mod" it some day soon. You could look at sites like www.longevitymeme.or and www.betterhumans.com and www.immist.org and www.futurepundit.com for more info and these sites are the equiv, of slashdot for daily info on aging research breakthroughs and news.
Don't know why this one got modded down. Vampire the Masqerade is an excellent example of the kind of social dynamic that occurs when the old and powerful never pass away.
Wake up - the future is arriving faster than you think.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
How did you learn that?
Ok, here it is
The implication is that certain people will go to extraordinary lengths to kill themselves if you take away ordinary mortality. A person might fill their need by riding motorcycles too fast and suffering the consequences. A person whose life is already hard will have their misery quotion filled already and won't seek it out.
Some people always are getting addicted to something, some people are always sad and sabotaging relationships. Misery is a constant. If we don't get it naturally, we'll find it.
This reminds me of the Genesis account of the antedeluvians. They had hundreds of years to perfect their natures, for good or ill. Look how that turned out. Even if it's just a cute oral tradition, the idea of the perfectability of man's nature is worth reviewing.
Who's up for a Charles Manson with 800 year lifespan? Heck, I can't say I wouldn't want to kill a few annoying *****s if I only had to spend 20 years out of 800 in jail. A true life sentence would really suck though. People would be sure to commit really high grade aggravated murder in order to insure the death penalty if they got caught. Some half-baked theory huh, and it's only wednesday.
Why do I have this? I don't smoke.
Yes I know it's been said, but apparently not loud enough.
FORTUNE requires a monthly subscription fee. Why isn't there a mirror or an alternate article, or please just skip the article, or something? Sheesh.
Google News has this cool feature where it says next to the news provider if it's (subscription), (audio). That would be nice to know here.
Joseph Elwell.
She was right about that (it was probably in the book anyway) she's still an idiot. She'd make up non-sensical statistics ("one third of teenagers will die in an accident on tomorrow"), gave stupid (bigoted) reasons for statistics in the book. She, as a black woman, said that so many black males get AIDS is because all black men are closet homosexuals, she also said white girls dont get AIDS because they dont sleep around. Our 200 point final inclded 50 multiple choice worth 3 points each, 25 matching worth 2 points and 10 short essay each worth 5 points. Also her grammar was terrible and she affected this really fake amalgam of a british/caribbean accent. In case anyone wants to know, thats Ms. Golden, heath 'teacher' at Milwaukee Rufus King International Bacheloriate High School.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
The real cause, as you pointed to, is in regions with high death rates. In fact, the only strong corollary that has been statistically linked to a birth rate is the death rate of the area.
This can be seen by the fact that Europe has the lowest death rates and has the lowest birth rates--the native populations are declining in many European nations. The also holds true for the United States, Japan, et alii. --it is pan-culture, pan-race, pan-religion.
The trick then would be finding a way to use this to extend the life-expectancy of the developing peoples--and the requisite "quality of life".
Of course, if you can do that you'd be able to solve most of the global problems anyway.
--
It's the same with men as with horses and dogs:
nothing wants to die
Thom Waits, "The Fall of Troy"
However, there will be *some* cutdowns, but not at all as huge as in other countries. Norway isn't only the best country to live in according to UN, we are also mainly avoiding your stated problem
A low death rate leads to a low birth rate.
Most people in the world still depend on children to be their 'retirement fund.' If there is a high death rate (especially of children), then parents must assure their old age pension by producing more children. More children means that odds are better that there will be enough of them alive to support their parents.
China has a one child / couple rule and a cultural custom where only sons (and son's wife) supports the parents in their old age. Therefore, many couples choose to have a boy. It has now been 20+ years since this rule started to be enforced. Can you guess what their problem is now?
In a related breaking story, scientists in Bogota have discovered that with an infinite lifespan, people tend to have longer and longer nose and ear hairs, and begin wearing tissue boxes instead of shoes.
My Linux Command of the Day site : LCOD
How did you learn that?
IIRC, SciAm did a writeup of various anti-aging drugs a few months ago, including that one. I may have the magazine wrong (Pharmacy Today? JACS? Science? Nature? I don't have the relevant issue at hand), but I remember the mention of CMX-1152 as a seeming "miracle" drug, except for the problem of its toxicity at doses entirely too near those having therapeutic value.
Of course, as with all such studies, the data comes from mice rather than humans, so humans may tolerate it better (then again, it also might just not work as well (or at all) in humans <G>). So take that with a grain of salt.
Plato
Aristotle
Julius Ceasar
Jeasus Christ
Montazuma
Fame + a very long lived civilization = imortallity
YOU just won't be around to enjoy it.
Woody Allen says...
"Some people want to achieve immortality
through their works or their descendants; I
want to achieve immortality through not dying."
-- Woody Allen
Fortunes have been made, fortunes have been lost.
Maintaining power is not easy because of fierce compitition in most industries.
Further, democracy and free press rules out the possibility of maintaining political power.
In Italy, however, we see some of your claims being justified, however, that situation will change gradually.
Over and over I hear "but what about overpopulation?"
Strangely, I hear this from people who think nothing of *directly* and *immediately* contributing to overpopulation by having or planning to have multiple children. Why are they not concerned about the population consequences of *that*?
If you're concerned about population, have fewer (or no) kids, support easy access to contraception, support sex education, and make more room on the Earth by wasting less energy and producing less non-biodegradable waste.
PS: I*A*G
My grandmother died of "old age". She was healthy to the end of life.
One day, when she was going to sleep, she told: "It's enough". And never woke up again. She was 91.
Try reading a book.
The idea that evolution leads to something "better" or "closer to perfection" is completely false. Anything that we do to the environment (good or bad in your eyes) is all part of natural selection. You are incorrectly setting humans apart from the rest of the animal kingdom.
Evolution is always occuring, within each generation (on a much smaller scale). More people alive means more mating means more genetic mixing and random variations. In other words, no death would have the exact opposite effect of what you claim.
"Survival of the fittest" ended when we were able to modify our living environment. Even the most unfit survive.
Of course, eventually we'll go too far and consume all our natural resources, but this will definitely speed up the exploration/habitation of other worlds (the moon... of course... being the ultimate goal, according to durr fuhrer)
If people lived longer would we see an end to hatred.
I don't know if you're an american, however, you don't need so see further than to the Iraq-war in order to falsify your statment!
For example: It's like you americans suddenly don't like the french because they wouldn't support your *stupid* war agains Iraq (where are the weapons of mass destruction?!?)
No, hate grows by itself.
Programmed cell death (which occurs throughout life, BTW, not just in fetal development) contributes to the survival of the organism, and sacrifical mating contributes to the survival of the species. In both cases the overall purpose is to ensure that life goes on.
Yes. I'm aware of apoptosis, as I have a degree in biology. I gave a few counter-examples (not meant to be exhaustive) to your statements "it is inherent in the nature of life to want to live" and "the urge to live is part of our every cell". I'm still waiting for a cogent argument that explains how the survival of the species is helped by people who live to be a thousand years old. Trees do it, but that's because they rely on wasteful methods of reproduction.
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
Immortality sounds great, and might even be achievable, but if a "scientist" claims on a webpage that it will take only thirty years, it means he knows he will never get funding if he claims it will take 100 years or more. Don't get worked up over this, none of us will see it in our lifetimes -- except perhaps the Wandering Jew.
The problem is the ant-aging tech will not help those of us today, most likely. So how do we oldsters get our memories and our consciousness to the future that does have such tech? Try cryonics....
eat shiat and bark at the moon
More likely is that the references are cliched at this point and that referencing a book that everyone has read, even if that book was funny, does not make you funny.
Now that people can live long enough they can go off and find habital planets.
Evolution speeds up when death from old age is taken out of the equation. This is because death from old age is not particularly natural-selection prone like diseases or accidental deaths. It's removal means that the people who grow very old will statistically be more fit than those who didn't make it.
Of course this all assumes that we're still evolving rather than engineering our genes within a meaningful timeframe. It seems likely that people will start fiddling directly with their genes to be smarter/stronger/prettier/tougher in the near future. At some further point evolution will be purely social/informational and genes will just be for fashion.
Michael
"I can give the government half of what I create and they can squander it, or I can give them a quarter, invest the quarter I save, and in 100 years that quarter will have grown to about 1.05^100 (about 131) times its original size..."
The longer I have to enjoy them, the more I'll value the fruits of my labor.
Americans hate the French because deep down they know the only thing driving their actions is envy and a desire for undeserved attention. Communist or monarchist, radical left or racist right, a French government can be counted on to oppose American policy because the only ideals they have is their own aggrandizement.
The current poster boy for this is Chirac, whose right wing government opposed the war more bitterly than Germany's left wing one did. Take a look at his foreign minister, Dominic de Villepin: defender of multilateral diplomacy at the U.N. by day, degenerate, craven Napoleonic power-worshipper in France by night:
This is why Americans hate the French and everyone else despises them. Because they are weasely, cowardly, short-sighted cretins who will support any tyrant, betray any friend, sacrifice any ideal to live in a fantasy world where they are still a leading nation instead of a U.N. security council anachronism.
OTOH, there's plenty of time to restructure society. It's pretty obvious IMHO that sources of risk that we ignore today will be aggressively tackled in the future. Some seem particularly problematic, eg, mental illness.
Geez, I'm always surprised by the economic ignorance of the Slashdot-crowd. The future will probably not feature a Star Trek-like socialist economy, though even if it does there will always be the need for markets and prices as transmitters of information. Thus we don't need some stupid 2 rule system to manage population growth, only price information which will lead to changes in human behavior long before we "run out" of food or land or whatever.
Lots of discussions here debate the probability of success of this project. What about the potential benefits?
Let's say this guy doesn't figure out how to slow or stop the aging process - but he does figure out how to reduce or eliminate uncontrollable, erroneous cell division? He might actually cure cancer.
Lots of scientific discoveries have been made accidentally. Hopefully this guy will make some.
-ted
Curing aging! The world is full of crazy people. That is as stupid as trying to stop the Earth from rotating to prevent hurricanes.
Don't these people have nothing better to waste their time on?
Now excuse me, I'm just going to age a little bit.
The healthiest, and most importantly skinniest people I know, are more or less all the ones that don't ever eat a whole meal: they continually graze, snack and it suits them well. This is not to say that they ever eat junk food, or anything of the sort, they just eat nuts, fruit, vegetables, etc, and somehow live off that.
Personally, I think if you can avoid macdonalds, grease-pits like it, and really fast food in general you can be pretty healthy, comparitively.
I like my noodles. noodles+mushrooms. mmmm
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
Just to have a sizable community and a large ship to support the community. Generational ships where the people who arrive at the destination are the descendents of those who started. Requires people to realize and accept they will never see the new planet, and their children won't, and their children won't, etc...
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
What if the human life span was already 5000 years? What would it matter? While I realize it's a shock to people (now) that they could suddenly live 500+ times more than they expected, in the long run, would it matter? While the expected human lifespan has increased 4 fold in the last 300 years, we're somehow still okay. What is the harm in research? Even if they meet only 1/7 of their objective by effectively treating cancer, isn't that enough to fully support this endeavor? For the people that disdain increased lifespan, what perspective do you have on current healthcare? Should someone die because of a cold? I don't understand where you can make the distinction between making the human body more resiliant (via medicine) and making the human body more resiliant (through gene therapy).
If people can potentially live for thousands of years will they become more scared of dying? All those things that you mentioned, instead of cutting a potential 70 year life short, it's now cutting a 5000 year life short. How will people react to that? Or after the first hundred years have most people already accepted that their life will end sometime due to an unforseen event.
I would guess that at the beginning, it wouldn't be quite as big a deal. Say a person died at 150. "Oh well, they lived a good long life, a helluva lot longer than they would have without the treatment."
But as time goes on and people becomed accustomed to the idea that they will live 5000 years, I think people will be very scared of dying "young". 150 years will now be a life cut "tragically short". I think people will then be a lot more cautious about things we might even consider rediculous. Even to the point where people might lock themselves in a safe environment for hundreds of years at a time. Another question is will it slow down progress... will it take a thousand years to change laws or regulations while people debate and study it?
The sending of this message pretty much inconveniences everyone involved.
If i lived forever I would get board...
Maybe you could use all that free time to learn how to spell.
Your personal advertisements only serve to nauseate those of us tired of cliched, useless marketing gimmicks. Go die, k thx bye
For those interested in hearing Aubrey de Grey speak about radical life extension, he will be speaking at the TransVision 2004 conference in Toronto on Aug. 7. For more information about the transhumanist themed conference go to the TV04 Website and learn more. http://www.transhumanism.org/tv/2004/
Today, Japanese people have the longest lifespans, and have had for quite some time.
Your comment ignores the fact that average human lifespan has almost doubled already, in the past 100 years.
... wow!), I'll enjoy it.
To be sure, most of the increase is due to reduced child mortality. Maximum human life span has not increased as much, but the chances of (say) a 10-year-old living to see 60 have increased a LOT in every developed country in the world.
So I read your whole comment from the perspective of a gentleman in 1900 deciding whether to adopt technological life-extension measures such as "refrigerated food" and "vaccination". I take these things for granted, and I know I'm enjoying the increased longevity and quality of life that I get from them.
And I haven't noticed much diminuition in technological progress or social change from the 100% increased average lifespan over the last 100 years. So if we can get another 100% over the next 100 years (live to 160
You know, as a French person I must agree that Jacques Chirac and many members of the French government opposed Iraq for pragmatic rather than political or idealistic reasons, but I think this is basically true for the German government as well.
We the people of France (or at least, most of the ones I know) have mixed feelings about this. We pretty much universally decry the war in Iraq as wrong for moral and idealistic reasons; on the other hand, we aren't stupid, either, and know the real reason the right opposed the war. The French political news satire, "Les Guignoles", constantly makes fun of its own government in much the same way that Americans make fun of Bush. This is quite normal, I think.
What's important though, is that for a country that is mostly anti-war, our government has taken an anti-war stance. They did it for reasons wholly disconnected with the reasons the populace opposed it, this is true. They claimed they did it for moral reasons, which all reasonable people know to be false. But in the end, we're still happy with the situation, because whatever their reasons, they are still opposing the war. And the French, by and large, oppose the war.
As for using morals to masque commercial interests, well, I agree that its dispicable and the only reason I voted for Chirac in the last election was because Le Pen was worse, much worse. But at the same time, while we're admitting our respective nations' faults, consider Bush's reasons for going to war with Iraq: arguably all involve some moral justification, which very few thinking people can honestly believe are his real reasons. So while this sort of politicking is by no means honorable, it is by no means uncommon, either. I think it's really the nature of the profession. Someone once said, "The only people fit to rule are those that want nothing of it", and therein lies the problem, at the base, with all systems of governence. But I digress.
One thing that I do not understand, however, is the allegation constantly leveled on this forum and elsewhere that the French are simply an arrogant people jealous of US supremacy and under the false impression that they are still a world power.
I think our disagreement over Iraq, and especially much of the "I told you so"-ing going on since WMDs have in fact not been found, has wounded American pride somewhat. We French, while also westerners, are culturally different from Americans and our way of expressing ourselves is apparently perceived as rude by many Americans with little experience with the French. Similarly, French people often claim Americans are "fake". These allegations are cultural misunderstandings, though, not actual truths. French people are very direct and resent American overfamiliarity, and traditionally respond to what they perceive as rude, well, rudely. Americans are, without meaning to be, very rude, in the French cultural context. This causes a lot of misunderstandings across the Pond.
But French people do not hate Americans, not really. We do resent you, sometimes. I'm not sure if this amounts to jealousy over our dwindling importance militarily, or just because America has, for better or worse, appointed itself world policeman, and people always dislike policemen. But the allegation that we seek always to undermine your position, well, that's simply untrue. Look at Security Council veto history, if you care. The PRC is the nation that has used its veto the least, to be sure, but France is second last. By far the largest number of vetoes come from the US. The structure of the UN gives a number of formerly important nations (such as France and Britain) the ability to act on par with the US (the only true world superpower at this point in time). This is no longer a realistic socioeconomic/military power structure, and France has historically vetoed in accordance with that.
France and the US have a long shared history. You bailed us out of WW2, and helped us rebuild our c
Assuming that people's bodies could be kept at the 20-year-old state indefinitely. All diseases, accidents, violence, etc would happen to you with the probability of a 20-year-old. Consulting medical and acturial databases, how many years would this add to the mean lifespan?
I don't believe that "15 year" answer, so I looked at a mortality table and did the math myself. I came up with an estimate of 800 years.
The acturial tables that you want are called mortality tables. Here is a collection of them from the American National Center for Health Statistics.
NCHS Data Warehouse
Going to the first table, death rates by age, the death rate for 15-24 year olds is 80.7 per 100,000 (all states, 2001).
This means that in the year 2001, in this population group, for each 100,000 people, 99,919.3 of people of these ages lived, and 80.7 of them died.
Or, to scale it down: start with 1000 people. In a year, 1 person dies, and 999 live. What's the average life span of that population? It's a hell of a lot longer than "15 more than normal 60 or so"!
A quick calculation, log(0.5)/log(0.999193)), shows that the median life expectancy of a "perpetual 20 year old", would be 858 more years. That is, if you had 100,000 of these perpetual 20 year olds, after 858 years, 50,000 of them would still be alive.
Calculating average is a bit trickier and I'll leave it alone.
The primary observation was that, while older people are on the average more susceptible to such things than younger people, the difference isn't all that great.
Oh yes it is.
ALL AGES: 848.5
0-1 year: 683.4
1-4 years: 33.3
5-14 years: 17.3
15-24 years: 80.7
25-34 years: 105.2
35-44 years: 203.6
45-54 years: 428.9
55-64 years: 964.6
65-74 years: 2,353.3
75-84 years: 5,582.4
85+ years: 15,112.8
A 50 year old has 5 times the chance of dying as a 20 year old. A 60 year old has 12 times the chance of dying as a 20 year old.
NCHS has lots of interesting tables like these; or you can google for "mortality table" and get tables from other sources, too.
"You can be healthy and 80 but you are still not going to be able to do the same things as a healthy 20 year old."
This is exactly what the author is trying to let happen. Undoing the damage done to cells by the body's metabolism WILL allow you to do the same things as a healthy 20 year old. Sounds pretty good to me.
+++ATH0
There are more people alive today than the sum of all human deaths in history.
That's exponential population growth in a nutshell, folks. Longevity poses no real threat in the overpopulation department--procreation far outweighs it.
I'm curious about the content of the "utterly British" quote. Is the article reprinted somewhere or are y'all Fortune subscribers?
Socialise health care now, like the rest of the bloody world...
Actually, the story might be more complex than this: UCSF's Signaling & Oncology department head explained, during a talk, that the LOSS of telomeres seems to precede many breast cancers. Once the telomeres are lost, the chromosomes apparently "stick" together, eventually causing large-scale genetic damage, potentially including the loss of tumor suppressor genes, etc.
I treaded through nearly every post in this article, my first read through in a few weeks (thank you i'm glad to be back on the /. scene), and I have a simple conclusion ready YEARS ahead of its time. When everyone is old and their lifespan infiniately lengthened they will look back on those few short years of life where people lived glorious lives of riches, pasion, and beauty. They will look upon every grave and they will see something which they have yet to achieve. If and when this becomes common place it will become COMMON PLACE, you won't have half the nation or even a percentage of the nation obstaining from "gene therapy" it will be as common as a vacination for tetness. That being said we are living the dream of the future now, just be as intelligent, creative, and productive as possible and you will end up living your life fuller and longer than the longest "immortal".
Imonna Live Forever!
Morally, almost nothing is always wrong morally - you can always make up a situation where it is not. Also draft can be rejected in some countries if you are willing to pay some penalty, so you still have a choice, it is just a harder one.
Practically, the old have had years to learn martial arts, learn team tactics in FPS games and learn about where not to be on a battlefield.
And they have had the chance to place their votes very often so as to prevent a war.
You are right that an old person who doesn't want to be drafted is far more likely to be successful in dodging a draft, simply by using his position of authority and age to get the young ones drafted.
Usually, the drafted are expected to exact terrible revenge for being drafted on their enemies on the battlefield.
(That I can turn around your arguments so easily maybe means that it is hard to argue consistently both from a moral and practical viewpoint)
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
Americans hate the French because deep down they know the only thing driving their actions is envy and a desire for undeserved attention.
Please, thats just stupid. How can you hate them? Btw, many americans throw in the "envy"-argument when being critisised, and thats just hilarious. Why should we envy you? West-Europe is just as good (or better!) to live in than USA. We feel no need to dominate the world.
This is why Americans hate the French and everyone else despises them. Because they are weasely, cowardly, short-sighted cretins who will support any tyrant, betray any friend, sacrifice any ideal to live in a fantasy world where they are still a leading nation instead of a U.N. security council anachronism.
If you hate all french, then I pity you. Honestly. You seem like a shallow person. Try analysing the reasons behind your hatred.
Your arguments are just as stupid as the americans effort to change the word "french fries" into "freedom fries". People die by the thousands, and you want to change a freaking word. Stop acting like children!
PS: Im not french.
You won't be seeing these anymore...
Life sentance, Isn't there a limit on years exactly on these things?
I could imagine several instances where you wouldn't want to live forever. Such as a blind, deaf, quadraplegic.
Scary!
Karma whoring
When the world was younger, and my ...late... wife was alive, I'd have been very interested. These days, I'll pass.
Note: there comes a time when you get tired of dealing with the world. Like Bilbo and Frodo, you come to look forward to a very long rest.
mark
Wow, this is some pretty deep stuff. Lets see..
If people can potentially live for thousands of years will they become more scared of dying? All those things that you mentioned, instead of cutting a potential 70 year life short, it's now cutting a 5000 year life short. How will people react to that? Or after the first hundred years have most people already accepted that their life will end sometime due to an unforseen event.
It seems almost tragic does it? Of course the article only mentioned old age, so I'm sure Cancer, AIDS, Heart Disease, etc will get some people. Eventually there might be cures (2000 years in the future?). Then everyone will die a violent death or not die at all. Kind of twisted to think about.
I would guess that at the beginning, it wouldn't be quite as big a deal. Say a person died at 150. "Oh well, they lived a good long life, a helluva lot longer than they would have without the treatment."
But as time goes on and people becomed accustomed to the idea that they will live 5000 years,
Could you image the job requirements? Java Programmer needed. Must know JDK 400.4.2. Must have 1000 years experence with Java and Oracle. Will people go to college for 50 years?
I think people will be very scared of dying "young". 150 years will now be a life cut "tragically short". I think people will then be a lot more cautious about things we might even consider rediculous.
I would suspect that the other side of the spectrum would come about also. Where people would "live for the day". Long term planning for countries will be the norm, after all it (pollution, the national debt, etc) will no longer be your grandkids problem.
Even to the point where people might lock themselves in a safe environment for hundreds of years at a time.
Kind of like the shut in teens in Japan? I could see it happening.
Another question is will it slow down progress... will it take a thousand years to change laws or regulations while people debate and study it?
Probably. Another interesting idea is that if you have the lifespan of 5000 years, manned space travel becomes much more feasable. Although finding volunteers might be a problem. "I'm not going up there, I'm too young to die! I'm only 950 years old!"
Hopefully we'll keep that organlegging problem under control with these other new developments. Luckily you can read a lot about De Grey's publications here .
"I went on a diet, swore off drinking and heavy eating. And in fourteen days, I had lost exactly two weeks. Joe E. Lewis
Hey, it worked for the Romans.
Thank you for calling "Bullshit" and for doing so in a manner which refutes the grandparent post with resources & data, not simple claims. I specifically read below my standard threshold in hopes of seeing exactly what your comment says. I wish I had mod points. The funny thing is that when I do get mod points, I rarely find a comment worth modding. Most times they expire. (The mod points, not the comment. :D )
people might lock themselves in a safe environment for hundreds of years at a time.
Or they might assemble a fleet to assault the Undying Lands of the Uttermost West.
Tolkein's explorations aside, I suspect that, in a world of long-lived people, material wealth accumulates and a greater and greater fraction of human effort is devoted to the zero-sum game of power politics. You won't die, but you will lose.
Specifically, you're illustrating what is perhaps *the* major difference between Western and Eastern cultures. Western culture focuses much more on the individual and his/her desires/betterment, whereas Eastern culture is far more collectivist and thinks in terms of groups and masses of people, often discounting the good of the individual.
I sure know which side I'm on.
+++ATH0
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of YOU.
I for one, welcome the anti-aging drug overlords. May their anti-aging overlording be ever overlordous.
As a computer, I am amused by the faith you have in technology.
That's right. We would all need to learn how to use swords before we would be considered immortal.
Both sides of this argument are right, and both are wrong. Fear is a part of life, just as death is. If we did not fear death, we would hardly provide an experience worthy of being called life.
When thinking with perfect rationality, it is quite obvious that death is not the end of subjective experience. Those who do not comprehend this consider death to be some sort of binary barrier, when the fact is it an analogue property. If each neuron in your brain were turned off one by one, you would be a little more dead with each, granted, but hypothetically they could also be turned back on at any point. What exactly constitutes a critical mass, and if you go so far as to conjecture that there is a point of no return, how does a new life attain subjective experience not having that critical mass to work with at first?
And to those who take the opposite approach, you are indeed in "denial", but not of the nature of death, rather that of life. You like the idea of living in a perpetual gnosticism, effectively treating life as a big video game or TV show, since it is less stress. Well, video games without stress are just screensavers, and so are TV shows without villains, and after a while you will suffer greatly from the resulting monotony, as well as boring the hell out of those around you.
Fear, it turns out, is the basis for most emotions, and those particular emotions are the basis for our best thoughts, and those, the basis of our actions -- our very ability to make life into an interactive affair. If you do not feel it, you will slowly run out of all motivation as the fear that it was spun from dissipates, fading into a vegitative coma. Were you to always feel it (the inevitable result of becoming too unfamiliar with the process of death) there would be no room for the more complex forms of experience.
Personally I think the choice a person makes as to how frequently to fear death is a personal matter, unless they choose to seek the involvement of the outside world in this decision. Fear can grip the most enlightened individual suddenly and intensely, just as enlightenment can emerge from the very pit of existential despair.
Recognize that the people around you have a variety of dispositions to choose from and can change them suddenly and without warning. We can plan accordingly rather than harbor some vain hope that everyone will come around to their viewpoint, and stay there. Most of the time, we are neither rational automatons, nor raving maniacs. Please respect that, rather than dwelling on the extremes.
Personally, as far as scientifically attacking old age is concerned, I only have a decade or so before I start feeling the bite of decripitude, and I would think everyone should support this cause merely on the basis that it is the very same research that will free us from the pain of the current aging process. I'd rather skip the whole gradual slide into a daily routine of changing my Depends(r) with advanced arthritis.
Someone had to do it.