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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
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?
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
that means we could send people on super-long space exploration voyages, provided we can also engineer an end to 0-gravity boneloss
Happy Trails!
Erick
http://www.busyweather.com/
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 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.
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They Are Vermin Feeding On Each Other's Feces.
I Hate \.
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.
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
Just being old doesn't kill relatively that many people -- accidents, cancer, suicide, abuse of your body (smoking, drinking, etc) and other mortality factors knock off most people before they manage to linger into their triple digits in some retirement home.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
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.
[
People should not be allowed to live without aging. The world is already overpopulated as is
Simple solution: Annual Free Motorcycle day!
That'll take care of that overpopulation problem in a jiffy!
You can't take the sky from me...
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?
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.
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.
...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)
I'd rather grow older and die, thank you. Natural processes and all that.
Do you also refuse medical care if you get ill? Natural processes and all that.
You can't take the sky from me...
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
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
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.
I personally don't think that humanity in general is responsible or ready to handle this technology - but who knows.
This comment has been made before, many times in fact. We weren't ready for nuclear processes. We weren't ready for combustion engines. We weren't ready for genetic engineering. Quite honestly, I hate this argument, for one short and simple truth: By definition any new technology is going to have unexpected factors and consequences, thats the part that makes it new... Throughout human history we have not been ready for things, I've even read some opionions that said humans went wrong when we discovered fire before we were ready for it. The only problem with looking at things from this perspective is, how do you know/become ready for a technology you know nothing about, because once you know about it, whether you're ready for it or not, it's coming.
The stupidity of your average American is just about the same as the average European, we simply show it off better.
...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
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 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
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.
"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)
Apparently nobody RTFA. The worry isn't about OVERPOPULATION, the worry is about a Population Implosion due to development (just about every country in the developed world is already well below replacement birth rates). Demographically, we're less than 5 years away from the Population Implosion- at which point I guess India takes over as the new superpower?
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
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.
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.
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
Wow, how's that for not reading the article? The blurb even says it has his comments on the "overpopulation" argument.
Uh, maybe some of us have read it and find the arguments unconvincing? Don't just uncritically accept everything you read.
He doesn't even address the overpopulation argument, he just points out what we lose from natural death. And he doesn't say where he gets his figures. When most people die we don't lose any valuable information. And he seems to assume that the person's assets are thrown into the furnace upon death.
Who said anything about murdering young children? You're the only one who has brought this up.
"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
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.
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.
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.
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.
HAHAHAHAHAHA! Those crazy Brits!
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Actually strangely enough .. statistically the only way to reduce population growth is to lower the death rate.
.. the only country to achieve a negative population growth with a high death rate is China. In every other case a high death rate results in an even higher birth rate.
Check it in the poulation stats
Low birth rates, on the other hand, make for low to negative population growth almost every time.
It's counterintuitive and supprised the heck out of me the first time I noticed that.
I almost shudder to imagine the wisdom and intelligence of a person who has lived 5000 years...
Ha... most people will be just as clueless after 5000 years as they are after 100. Really, 4900 years isn't going to make their brains any bigger, make them store more information, nor, most importantly, process and correlate that data any better. Unless of course we develop some "smart drugs" that do precisely that, there will be plenty of stupid and ignorant people around.
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
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.
The worry isn't about OVERPOPULATION, the worry is about a Population Implosion due to development (just about every country in the developed world is already well below replacement birth rates). Demographically, we're less than 5 years away from the Population Implosion- at which point I guess India takes over as the new superpower?
India, China and a Muslim super-state if they ever create one. Mostly it's European and Euro-American birthrates that are declining. China's population would explode again if they stopped the governments regulation of the birthrate. India is huge, and birth control/abortion isn't big in islamic countries. Those populations are going to explode while the western world is heading twards population implosion due to birth control, women in the workforce, etc etc. Russia is going to be particularly fucked if their population keeps dropping. I forget the exact numbers, but I remember it pans out that by 2050 if birthrates stay the same, China will have doubled their population, and the islamic states will have doubled theirs while Russia's population is halved. At some point, China is going to want her old land (Siberia) back. Nuclear weapons may be the only deterant.
Russia also has it's own terrorism problems with radical islam.
Overall, the western world could use some population growth.
"May you love as long as you live, and live as long as you wish." (Minerva, Time Enough for Love)
Should be: "May you love as long as you live, and live as long as you love."
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Maybe that would lead to a more knowledgable populace, but not more creative. To put it bluntly, people in general become more conservative as time progresses in their lives and they are most creative when the world is still "new" to them. With a static population we would solve a lot of our current problems, but more importantly not think up any new ones for the future...in other words, the world would stagnate.
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 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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).
Reasons for less children are many, and they aren't going away.
And you also forgot another one - late interest in children. 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? Fertility drops off significantly in the 40s, 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.
But then what happens when science is able to significantly improve the fertility of those in their 40s? A boom happens all over again.
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 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.
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."
- 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.
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!
Look at how the US is opening up it's borders despite it's terrorism problem.
Terrorism problems? Many countries prior to the precious United States of America have experienced terrorism. Perhaps the military fund could be better cut in half and used to fund a better standard of living instead? This is what encourages terrorism anyways, poor foreign policy.
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.
Support themselves? None of us support ourselves we are dependent on resources. The more people, the more resources depleted, simple fact.
Beyond that, maybe the US could embrace the Kyoto protocol to slow down the effects of aging. Since their is direct links to health effects and pollution.
Sorry, if this sounds as a rant, but this is the very reason why in 100 years we will have no fresh water or trees to produce the oxygen we breathe.
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...
Hey, that only works if you are in a domed city. Venture out into the wasteland and it turns clear. You also get to meet Peter Ustinov. :-)
Political correctness is the newest form of slavery.
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
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).
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?
jazzer : "Terrorism problems? Many countries prior to the precious United States of America have experienced terrorism"
,imperialism and racism including the evil Europeans establishing apartheid in South Africa.
:"Perhaps the military fund could be better cut in half and used to fund a better standard of living instead? This is what encourages terrorism anyways, poor foreign policy. "
Your point being?
You foking, arrogant, American-hating Euro-creeps just make me sick!
Most of the world's problems WERE caused by European colonialism, neo-colonialsm,
You are just in no position to lecture America on morality of any kind.
jazzer
RUBBISH!
Bin Laden and most of his evil gang in Al quaeda are some of the richest human beings on the planet, not just in the Arab world.
Africa remains by far the poorest continent on the planet, but you don't find us driving planes into buildings and slaughtering 3000 innocent people in New York do you?
This is typical Euro-BS, full of appeasement and excuse making for terorists.
jazzer : "Beyond that, maybe the US could embrace the Kyoto protocol to slow down the effects of aging. Since their is direct links to health effects and pollution. "
Kyoto rotocal is based on bad science. Its simply yet another attempt by the evil Europreans to destroy the American economy. We won't be party to such nonsense.
And by the way, tell me, just how many EU members have actually signed and are abiding the Kyoto protocol? The answer is a big fat ZERO!
Its a bit rich for you European cazies to scream about so-caled Kyoto principle to America , while making sure you don't implement it yourselves, isn't it?
Thats gotta be the biggest con job going right now.
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.
That's what evolution is all about, man. The week, ugly, undesirables WILL be eliminated. It won't be a concious effort (a la Nazism), rather simple side effect of life. Accept it and live with it. Hell, you owe your existence to this very same phenomenon.
What is your penile percentile?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
You are confusing correlation with causation. The statisical correlation between low death rates and negative population growth only suggests that the two may be related in some way. It doesn't mean that one causes the other.
Demographers will tell you that what happens is something called a "Demographic Transition", where better medical care and living conditions (ie: less poverty) leads people to live longer, and fewer of their children to die, so they feel safe having fewer children. Also, a lot of poverty is also associated with rural living conditions (ie, poor farming villages), where having a lot of kids means lots of free labor to help the family survive by farming. Finally there is the lottery effect, were in a large family one kid might make it into the city and get a job that will support the whole rural family. All of these factors combine to create pressure on impoverished people to have larger families. In developed populations, the few people who have large families do it for other reasons.
If you look at demographic trends in developed countries over time, you see that death rates dropped first, while birth rates stayed high for a generation or so, then birth rates dropped. You will also see that this caused population booms.
As far as reducing population growth, the most effective way (aside from perhaps draconian laws) is to educate and provide work opportunities for improverished women. This gives them options and many of them will choose to do other things than fill their houses with babies.
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.
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"
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?
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
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.
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/
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.
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.