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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 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?
Wow, how's that for not reading the article? The blurb even says it has his comments on the "overpopulation" argument. My view is: how in the FUCK will cloning or anti-aging have any MEASURABLE effect on population? I'ts the babies, man, and it's the babies of the pre-developing and developing countries in particular, which drive the population growth. Cloning and anti-aging will cost a LOT of money, for a long time, so few people will be trying it out.
And who the FUCK are you for saying I should not be allowed to live? Oh, you said "should not be allowed to live without aging." Well, if I can't reach 120 with aging, you're saying I should not be able to live to 120. You're telling me I should be required to die. I'm telling you to get lost.
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Who said murdering young children? There's a difference between wearing a rubber or getting your tubes tied and killing babies... Yeesh
-Jesse
Nothing says "unprofessional job" like wrinkles in your duct tape.
Well, you generally don't die of "old age," but when you get older your susceptibility to certain diseases / conditions increases dramatically. Presumably, part of getting people to live forever would be to keep them in good health -- for instance, if you could halt the aging process at forty, people would be unlikely to fall prey to diseases that primarily affect the very old.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
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
IQ is a very limited measure of a person's value to society. In fact, in my experience, the most socially valuable individuals tend to be found closer to the mean. I say this as a (lapsed) Triple-9 member.
That is, of course, assuming He didn't leave the bag of tricks out in the open on purpose, to watch us discover His Creation in all its great depth and subtlety.
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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.
Amusing, but think about the effects of people not just working for 30-40 years, but hundreds. A person could become experienced and knowledgable in a subject to levels which we can't imagine, and who knows what they could come up with.
Or a person could spend 50 years in a career, then take 5-10 off and learn something entirely new, then start a career there. Think about all the benefits that could come from that sort of inter-disciplinary work? What might someone who's been a chef, a writer, a materials engineer, and a chemist bring to a new job?
"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
I doubt this is going to give real trouble. Consider this, if we're immortal all those long term problems (overpopulation, global warming,...) are suddenly problems we are going to suffer from and not just a nameless, faceless distant decendant. Doesn't that give you reason to start working on a decent solution?
Too many people will result in depletion of resources and overpopulation... I would prefer not to have that life for my grandkids one day.
Really? You are worried about your grandkids having problems with overpopulation? Are you "white" or of some european decent? You shouldn't be worried about overpopulation then, because people of european decent are dying out. Russians, Europeans, and Americans of European decent are all having less and less children.
While health care is better than it was 50 years ago, that doesn't make up for only having 1 or 2 children instead of 5 or 6. Reasons for less children are many, and they aren't going away. Things such as greater access to birth control, and social security (and such programs) to care for the elderly, etc. As populations move twards a western lifestyle, they reproduce less. There will be a breaking point in many countries when the old people who can no longer work need to be supported by a generation of young people half their size. This will in fact break socialism, social security, or whatever program the governments are using to take care of the elderly. The only solutions are mass immigration or a plague. Look at how the US is opening up it's borders despite it's terrorism problem.
If there is a scientific way to keep people from the effects of aging, it should be pursued so elderly people can still support themselves.
Does this longevity include a increased period of fertility? If not then I wonder if the biological imperative to reproduce will produce a conflict that is not so easy to "cure" and I don't mean the incresing population, I mean the deep seated drive to make offspring being tempered by teh reality that 1100 years is a lot of offspring that one almost certainly cannot actually afford to raise. It might lead to some very complex problems. Even more weird if you live for 1100 years but can only produce offspring for the first 5% of them. Might make you go made. Might be very different for men and women. Might be _very_ scary.
"The first thing to do when you find yourself in a hole is stop digging."
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.
Whenever the subject of interfering with nature / the divine plan comes up, I refer to this response which I heard one day in an interview: the single development in recorded history which has most vastly extended lifespans was the invention of the toilet... yet you don't hear people going around debating the morality of having toilets.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
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.
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.
The poor get everything last because new technology costs a lot of money - it takes time for the price to come down as techniques are perfected and businesses go after the lower income demographics. They got TVs last. They got cheaper heart surgery last. They got dialysis last. They'll get regenerative medicine last. But you know what? They will get it. They only way the poor don't get something is if people prevent new technology from being developed by saying that it'll only be available to the rich at first.
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.
The anti-aging technology, if ever completed will stop the evolution of the species.
We've been messing with natural selection ever since the beginning of medicine; it's a bit late to object now.
Furthermore, this will probably only benefit the richest, not the fittest...
Maybe at first, but there was a time when only the rich, or only governments, could afford computers. In the US today, poor people have TVs that the wealthy could only dream of in the 50s. Anti-aging technology will start out expensive, but it won't stay that way--and besides, doesn't the idea of the wealthy being the beta testers appeal to your little class-warfare soul?
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
This is as naive as the people who predicted a constant exponential growth - you're trying to predict a trend based on the last few data points. There's no reason to believe that industrialized nations cause themselves to die out. For one thing, the nations having the most problems (the Scandinavian countries) are beginning to push towards trying to encourage people to have more children (one of the countries suggested putting state sponsored porn on TV, if memory serves).
:_(
Porn is going to encourage people to have children? Now there is a backwards through if I ever saw one. The problem isn't a lack of sexual desire.
And you also forgot another one - late interest in children.
I didn't want to make a 5 page post out of it. There are several reasons for a population implosion. Late interest in children due to working mothers is one, another is lack of religon, lack of agriculture (no need for 10 kids to work the farm), de-valuation of the family unit, female liberation, increased acceptance of homosexuality, etc. That isn't even getting into increases in impotence, or people just choosing not to have children. I'm not saying these are all bad things, what I am saying is that western culture could bring about it's own death which would be sad.
Here's a thought experiment for you - what if it's not that people don't want children, but that people want children later in life?
that is only one small piece of the problem.
Fertility drops off significantly in the 40s,
Only for women.
so convolving the dropping fertility with a shift in the age at which people want children will naturally lead to a lower birth rate. The total number of average *desired* children might not be changing at all.
Ok, so say women can have babies until they are 50. I still don't think that will make a large difference in the grand scheme of things. It wont change 1.5 million abortions a year in the US alone, or how many children aren't born because of birth control. Again, I'm not saying these are bad things socially, but the are leading the US to a shrinking population.
But then what happens when science is able to significantly improve the fertility of those in their 40s? A boom happens all over again.
Unlikely. How many children are they going to have at 40? 1? Not only do you have to improve a women's chance to become pregnant, you have to do something about the greater miscarrage rate women have over 35.
Like I said, it's a little naive to say that the birth rate trend won't change. They thought this back in the 80s, as well. I'm sure they had just as impressive reasons
No, they didn't. Their reasoning was "People are fucking, people are going to continue to fuck". Sorry to put it so bluntly, but that was about the extent of it. I don't think in the 70's when "the population bomb" (or whatever the book was named) came out that they put much thought into what role abortion or womens rights might play with the population.
as we have for believing that the birth rate will continue along its (relatively recent) trend. But despite our arrogance, we really haven't figured out human societal trends yet.
Agreed it might not continue along it's trend, but I don't see any factors to stop it. Do you? Improved fertility will help, but that alone wont do it. Men and Women have to have the desire to have large families. They may have the desire to "do the deed" but they certainly don't want to deal with trying to raise a large family, at least here in the US. The best solution might be incentives from the government. As much as I like the idea of Free Porn (god bless the Scandinavian countries) I don't think that alone will do it. Perhaps the affected countries could make some kind of large finacial incentive for the middle class to have children. In the end, I think the US will solve it's problem VIA mass immigration.