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Do You Want to Live Forever?
Jamie McCarthy writes "In 1918, Gunnery Sergeant Daniel Daly inspired his weary men to attack by yelling, 'come on, you sons of bitches, do you want to live forever?' But how would the world change if we could? This month's Technology Review introduces us to the computer scientist, and self-taught biologist, Aubrey de Grey, who thinks immortality could be within our grasp by 2030. Thinking like an engineer, he's broken aging down into seven specific problems, like cell atrophy and mitochondrial mutation, which he believes can all, in principle, be solved. And he has good reason to think those seven are the only 'bugs' standing in the way of a thousand-year lifespan. De Grey is clearly both a genius and a little nuts, but I'm not sure in what proportion..."
The Social Security System will fail Shortly after 2031. Could you imagine getting paid to not work for 935 years? You would have to have a population growth 935 times what it is today to sustain that growth! This is one reason that SS is fundamentally flawed.
As he reviewed the possible reasons why so little progress had been made in spite of the remarkable molecular and cellular discoveries of recent decades, he came to the conclusion that the problem might be far less difficult to solve than some thought; it seemed to him related to a factor too often brushed under the table when the motivations of scientists are discussed, namely the small likelihood of achieving promising results within the period required for academic advancement--careerism, in a word. As he puts it, "High-risk fields are not the most conducive to getting promoted quickly."
The world needs more thinkers like him, even if he's a little nuts. Anyone willing to start his own international symposium after teaching himself micro biology is. Too many professional scholars are pinned into doing research that has immediate market viability and too many researchers are more interested in their own career advancement than the science they're supposed to be advancing. So they play it safe.
Daly dreams of being on the cover of Time magazine I'm sure, ego is almost certainly a factor for him as well, and no doubt a huge payday would follow and major advancement on any of his 7 problems. But it's the all-or-nothing mentality, the fact that he's willing to go for it even if it never pans out, that separates him.
I Want To Believe
I really would like to, just to see what happens.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
3D High Def THX Surround Sound home entertainment (some brain surgery required)
The 100th season of the Simpsons
200 more years of Dick Clark in Times Square
Windows Cthulhu (C'mon, you know it was coming some day...)
Baseball players finally agree to seriously address the steroid issue after a homerun ball is driven through the skull of a guy two miles away from the stadium.
No matter how well you cared for your teeth, you'll eventually lose them.
Watching every public retirement system go into the stock market and then watch it really tank! (Alpo! Yum!)
Liver Spot removal pill spam
Survivor Krakatoa
Final Fantasy LXXVI: The ploy that isn't beaten to death, yet.
After about 20 presidents claiming to reduce spending you realize they're full of shit as the world runs out of money to finance the US debt. And those guys who said, "The debt doesn't matter", they died, so it didn't matter to them.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Oh great, in addition to the bigger penis spams, we'll start getting "Live Forever" messages.
AND...we'll be getting them much longer. Jeez!
Successfully condensing fact from the vapor of nuance since 1998.
I believe the proper question at this point isn't "can we" it's "Should we"
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
By the time you are in your 70's so much stuff pisses you off that you can barely deal with it. Things change so much from what it was even when you were growning up.
If we live forever, we can work forever.
.signature not found
er em ... better post this AC
Who wants to live forever, when love must die?
Arch Obler addressed some of the realities of such a life span in one of the episodes of the old radio show "Lights Out".
There was a revolution. The younger generation was tired of being held down by the generation that was in power when immortality became possible. Bereft of political power for hundreds of years, there was a violent and bloody revolt, resulting in the massacre of the older generation.
Can you imagine the state of civil rights if the people running the country in the 1950s were still alive and well?
To an extent, society just doesn't change unless the older generation dies off.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
Is it because 2038 going to be just like 1970 all over again?
--- Jason Olshefsky
Karma: Poser (mostly affected by adding this line long after everyone else did)
If much of these projected technologies come to be, then Social Security will fail long before 2031. That projection relies on an increase in lifespan of only seven years in the next seven decades!! Image what happens when the baby boomers come to use Social security in 2018, and then suddenly people stop dying nearly so fast as they do now...
Yet in the recent Social Security article, many Slashdot readers would seemingly choose to ignore advances like those outlined in the article, quite odd for a supposedly technological nerd oriented forum. I guess we can expect them all to post and tell us why this article is complete bunk and we'll be dying in 100 years at about the same age as now.
I think I shall label them with the new term "politically-motivated luddite".
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If we "fix" this whole aging thing, won't we also need to put a stop to this giving birth thing?
I don't think the Catholics are gonna like this very much.
Yeah, but would you get nailed to a cross to do it?
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
Duh! Of course!
Just think how well my meager investments will be doing after they've had the chance to grow for 100 years! I'll be loaded!
Seriously, I think the money and class issues are the interesting side of this. If it happened there would be a clear class division between those that could afford it and those that couldn't. And for those that could, their wealth could grow without bounds. Our (in the US and most other western countries) society depends on inheritance and the associated taxes, dividing of estates, etc, to redistribute wealth, and this would immediately negate that effect. Anyone with an estate worth much could afford the technology to extend their life, and therefore not pass on the estate.
While it raises all kinds of social issues, on a personal level it means each of us has to try to accumulate enough wealth to get into the category of people that can afford it before the end of our natural lifespan. It's a race against time.
"I don't know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve."
acquire enough wisdom. But the question is, are you someone who believes in reincarnation, the afterlife, etc.?
I read somewhere once that the average human has a fatal accident once every 300 something years. So unless we're all wearing personal force fields by 2030, we won't be surviving to 1000 years of age anyway.
All us middle-aged geeks want to be well retired by 2038 so we don't have to deal with the *nix/Linux 32-bit date problem - or at least semi-retired so we can be called back on consultancy basis and hefty fee.
AT&ROFLMAO
I always thought the problem with living that long would be your teeth, they aren't meant to last that long (especially the way we take care of them). Those 900 years with dentures would sure suck...
Isn't that great? We could be the last generation to snuff it. So close...
The problem isn't that life expectancy could be raised to 1000 years or more.
The problem is that it would only be available to relatively few people. People who could afford multimillion dollar fees (which might exist solely to keep out the riffraff) or people with key political connections.
Working slaves can forget about it. Banks can always repossess a multimillion dollar house, but what do you do here when somebody declares bankruptcy after treatment?
The bottom line is that assets and power will quickly become (even more) concentrated in the top 1% or so of the population. Imagine what the average working person could do with a second lifetime where they own their own home from the beginning -- but they would start with much more real world experience and street smarts. Now imagine the same thing with people will millions of dollars in assets and dozens of lifetimes of experience.
The result would not be unlike the Go'uld in Stargate. The "immortals" might even put on the cloak of divinity. A few hundred years ago monarchs claimed they ruled by divine right, but they died just like us. How hard would it be for people with a centuries-long lifetime to manipulate society so the emphemerals believe that the immortals are graced by god. How long would it take for the emphemerals to forget that these medical treatments even forget or that everyone naturally dies within a century or so.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
I am reminded of the movie Death Becomes Her, in which the vanity aspects of eternal life turn ugly real fast. Fall down the stairs, break your neck? No problem! But that humpback won't look so good in an evening dress.
I'd have a personalized plate on my car, but "toxic bachelor" won't fit into 7 letters.
I want to see what the year 2505 will be like just as much as the next Slashdotter, but it is not meant to be.
And as much as I am seriously a religious person I don't let it stand in the way of the rights of others to choose. Man will play out his destiny and if God has a problem with it I'm sure he can take care of it on his own. I doubt that a group of scientists can stand in the way of God's plan.
Who knows... We of faith may be dead wrong too and that in itself should be reason enough for us to let others "do unto themselves". Instead of bashing people with Bibles (or Korans or Gitas or Necronomicons) we should be tolerant and guide those who desire our guidance.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
Even if you replace every damaged cell, there are still supercellular structures (tissues, organs) that have to be maintained. You are probably going to need a lot of wholesale organ replacement. Living things have elvolved to grow their organs from small or large by multiplying cells in a certain pattern. I'm not sure that cell replacement can adequately maintain that pattern. If you have an old house and you replace each piece of wood as it rots out, small inacuracies will build up over time, and the whole structure will become misshapen, and you will have to replace the whole wall.
I guess the point is that living things were designed to grow, and by that I mean go from small to large, into adult form, and then die. Can maintenance really work? If you look at, say, the spiral pattern on a flower, I think it's fairly easy to get one cell to multiply into that pattern, but then to replace a single petal? A lot of our organs have that branching tree structure. I think it's easier to grow that than to maintain. I don't know if our DNA has a program to replace a section of artery, but it certainly has a program to grow it.
I remember from a radio interview a museum curator said "It's easier to destroy than to create, and it's easier to create than to maintain". I think it will be cheaper to make new people and let the old ones die than it will be to maintain everyone.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
I love my (step) children, and the last thing my generation will do for them is to die and get out of the way so they can fill our shoes.
If my generation stays as productive adults forever (or close to it) they my kids must remain teen-agers for ever. The greats of any given generation only become great when those before them have exited the stage.
Elizabeth Moon touches on this in some of her books.
Erlang Developer and podcaster
I bet the divorce rate would reach 100% too.
Marriage would probably become contractual arrangements to stay together for, say, 20 years, with options after that for a specified amount of time (5, 10, or 20 years). Romantics would probably still try for "til death do you part" but I suspect a major change would come around in how it's viewed by society.
Reproduction would almost certainly be done by permit only if one subjected oneself to these kind of treatments. If one did not, and the normal lifespan of ~75 years were expected, then perhaps they wouldn't be blocked, but those living for hundreds of years would probably have to restrict themselves, getting on a waiting list to be allowed to have children.
Another thought... How would people react to dangers if they could live for centuries? Suddenly, you're not risking the experiences of 10 or 20 or 50 years of life. You're risking the experiences of 100 or 200 or 500 years of life. Ouch. One might well think twice before pushing some of the boundaries in those cases.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
If we do become immortal, imagine how that will change people's tendency to take risks. We all take small risks all the time. We take risks driving cars, flying, etc. because the odds of it killing us before we die naturally is small. But if we live 10x longer then we end up in the situation where the risks are likely to kill us before we die of natural causes.
Also imagine the wrongful death suites if someone would be expected to live another 500 years. Who will want to take any risks if it might cause them to die when they don't expect to die ever?
Except for the obvious difference that the people who receive welfare have not paid a bloody dime into the system. It is those of us who pay income tax that provide the benefits to welfare recipients, on the basis that it is better for all of us to be forced to support them, than for us to see them starving beside the street.
On the other hand, Social Security is sold to the people as a system where they pay money in over their working career so that they can then have it back after they retire. (The fact that the system doesn't actually work that way seems to be irrelevant to the masses of SS devotees.) What SS should have been, assuming you agree that people are in general too stupid to save money on their own for retirement, is mandatory personal retirement savings accounts. Determine the average length of time people will live, subtract the average length of time they can usefully work, determine the average monthly income needed after retirement, figure out a reasonable rate of return on funds deposited, and do the math to determine how much they need to be forced to save to provide for themselves.
Social Security was never supposed to be, and should never be thought of as, a welfare program. If you agree that it is a necessary program at all, then it should just be a mandatory retirement account. Every penny of which you put in, is then yours to take back out when the time comes.
"Unheard of means only it's undreamed of yet,
Impossible means not yet done." ~~ Julia Ecklar
Interesting counterpoint:
From Eurekalert: University of Manchester makes made-to-measure skin and bones a reality using inkjet printers
... can only hold so many people!
I'm inspired by the vast expense and coordination required for frauds like "Social Security Privitazation" to barely make enough sense in public that they can be accepted by even the rabid sheep who graze in the Great Plains. Educating specifics like "Social Security isn't broken" is too hard, and unnecessary. We geeks are all on the Great Work of democratizing communications, like cheap/universal email/WWW/VoIP/P2P, that let people talk among ourselves. The centralized corporate media is essential to the perpetual propaganda pump that keeps Americans (and humans in general) delusional regarding our own welfare. So we each do our little parts, and we help people hear from one another their different misgivings with their own slaughter, and soon enough the flock is resonating with either greed or fear, and high-tailing it to another pasture. To resolve the metaphor, bad news travels fast, when people can speak and hear. We geeks just need to help keep the people chatting with one another, rather than sitting in front of Fox News every day.
--
make install -not war
Welfare is for lazy trailer trash who can't get off their fat ass to find a job.
Trailer trash such as my mother, who after the divorce was a single mother of five. Trailer trash that worked her ass off, lived in a "house" in the "city." Eventually she got off Welfare, but thank God it was there for us when we needed it. It was not for lack of work ethic that we were on it, it was poor planning on my mother's part.
Social Security is for old people who worked hard and want to retire.
Socialist Security is not for people who want to retire, the benefits are so tiny that all it does is supplement the typically small income our elderly are able to procure. Think about it -- who wants to hire a 70 year old to a six figure job when that person is bordering on senility and has very few productive years left? Age discrimination may be illegal, but it happens. I see a lot of old people working at Wal-Mart and McDonald's. Social Insecurity will barely pay their rent or house insurance, whichever is applicable.
Lots of people are in favor of cutting welfare benefits in the name of forcing these people to get a job and quit being leeches, while very few people want to be seen as "cutting" SS in the eyes of the older voters.
Not everyone on Welfare, Food Stamps, or whatever other public assistance programs are out there are leeches. Some are just in a shitty part of life and need a boost. I have no problem cutting Social Security as long as everyone gets their dues if they want. I plan on denying my Social Security benefits even after paying into the system all my life. Hopefully I won't need them, because I will plan better than my parents did. It may be a drop in the bucket, and more symbolic than anything, but that is doing my part to keep the system from fucking some poor Joe who gets the short end of the stick in 40-60 years.
24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
The UK moved from a system like SS to a "privatized" one like the one proposed by Bush. Earlier this month it was described as a "bloody mess" by an English economist, summarizing the general conclusion there.
--
make install -not war
Human evolution is already at a halt, or worse, it might even be going backwards. People are allowed to breed no matter what kind of genetic problems they have. Stupid people seem to breed a lot more frequently than smart people.
As long as society exists, you can rule out any kind of human evolution. The only solution for all this is improved medicine.
I would like to expound upon your excellent point.
Social Security exists for one reason, and that reason has been verified by scientific study, people don't save their own money. Thats not to say YOU don't save your money, or educated wealthy people don't save their money. No. The average joe schmoe, the normal guy, doesn't save money for retirement, and if
he does, doesn't save nearly enough.
You can say what you want about how the world should work and how people shoul act. The fact is not only do they not, they did not before the safety-net was there to help them.
So we have a mandatory retirement fund, you pay into it when you work, in the hope that it will pay you when you retire. This has the effect of allowing people to retire before they become physically incapacitated, opening up more jobs for younger people, increasing the standard of living among older people, and taking some of the worry of saving for retirement away (it is still quite advisable to save more, but again, most people wont save enough on their own anyway)
Now that fund works in odd ways, the current working gen pays the current retired gen and it doesn't bank the money so much for us. This is a detail of how its implimented of course, and is subject to change.
Of course if we move to an ageless society, then we remove the need for retirement and retirement savings, and we will all have time to work and play and persue our own interests. Then we wont need social security.
We can then also gut our education system as we will only need offspring enough to cover those who choose not to live forever and those who die of other causes (disasters, accidents and the like) so we should be able to educate what few children there are at a fraction of the cost of the current system
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
I don't see it in the highest-rated comments and, with the volume of posts, this might be a dupe so I apologize in advance if that's the case, but...
Immortals also die.
Just because your body will never naturally die doesn't mean you'll live forever. There are diseases that act in means outside what we're discussing. There's suicide. There's murder. And (I don't remember where I read it; if someone has a cite, I'd be grateful) actuarial science shows that the rate at which people die in accidents is sufficiently high that even if we never got sick or old we'd still manage to off ourselves by doing something stupid sometime before our 500th birthdays. On average.
People would still die. As individuals, we're just too stupid to live forever, no matter how sturdy our bodies are.
Except for the obvious difference that the people who receive welfare have not paid a bloody dime into the system. It is those of us who pay income tax that provide the benefits to welfare recipients, on the basis that it is better for all of us to be forced to support them, than for us to see them starving beside the street.
On the other hand, Social Security is sold to the people as a system where they pay money in over their working career so that they can then have it back after they retire.
Which would be great except for the problem of it not working that way.
Instead people working now are paying for the people getting social security today. Private accounts would move it in the direction of acting as you outlined, but currently it is nothing like that apart from a notation about how much you've paid in so far to taunt you.
I pay social security, other people get that money. I pay taxes, other people get that money. To me there is no difference. I should just pay some level of taxes and expect that if I fall on hard times in the future there is some way of helping me out. I don't like paying into a system that has such a low rate of return that I am required to independantly contribute to many other forms of savings (like Roth and 401k) so that I'll have actual money when I retire instead of hypothetical money that I cannot count on and is hardly enough to live on anyway.
There should be some middle ground between social security and welfare such that I could pay less into the system, keep more for investment, but also provide better support for those that really need it.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
SS is not a "safety net" for people who for some unimaginable reason stop making money to support themselves. SS is basically a retirement fund that you pay into your whole life; if you've ever gotten a paycheck in your life, you would see that line where it says "social security tax". This is money you pay into the system in order to be guaranteed money when you can't make it. SS has nothing to do with welfare, other than the fact that republicans want to get rid of it. If you don't expect to get old, you're in for a rude awakening. You can't, however, expect the conditions that lead you into poverty (and hence welfare) at a young age.
Ask around how many younger workers today think they are getting that money.
To claim it's a savings program where what you pay in you get back is simply false to most peoplel indeed, false in reality.
The reality is that the money I pay in today is going to people getting SS today - thus a saftey net. My hypothetical money I may get out later from the program comes from other people paying into the system at that time - but because there may not be enough people they are talking about how taxes will have to go up 20% or benefits slashed to make up the difference.
If Social Security were really a "Savings Account" none of that would be needed because money people put in the system would be there for them later (although at a horrific rate of return). But the fact that is does not really work that way means that to claim it is a "savings account" is a very dangerous notion because you will come to incorrect conclusions about what can happen to the program.
Later on when two people are paying into social security for ever single person withdrawing funds - that is the point when something has to give, and you will see it's not like a bank account at all.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The answer is quite simple, really. Everyone is really better off when one person is in charge. In anarchy the wealth is evenly distributed, but the total wealth is far less because no one is willing to do anything. In a structured environment, wealth is created so even if the wealth is distributed unevenly everyone is better off. That is why the system works and is stable - everyone is better off, even the lowest members of society. (If you don't believe that, ask yourself why people don't just quit society and go live in the mountains - it is possible, at least in the US)
As for why the people at the top get more than an even distribution - its because it is hard to get to the top, and society is better off if it motivates people to reach the top. I know everyone says that CEOs are overpaid, etc. but good CEOs are extremely rare - and are therefore workth their weight in gold to society. If, as you seem to believe, it was an easy job then others would compete for the job and the board would tell the CEO "Hey, Joe here can do just as well as you, and he will work for peanuts!" The fact is, once you find a good CEO you don't let him go!
Of course, whining is much easier than studying the game theory that explains all this...
while (sig==sig) sig=!sig;
> When you are born, your parents invest $10 at 3%
> insterest. When you are ready to retire in 1000
> years you will be worth $100,000,000,000,000
>
> Sign me up!!!
Except that in a thousand years, that will buy you a Mars bar with enough change to use a payphone.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
If you could live for ever it woudl atleast solve the problems with space travel ok it may take 6 years to get to mars but when you live for ever what is 6 years mabye this is the way we get aroundt he vast distancis of space. If you build a box big enuth it could hold enuth food to last the trip we could move peopel off to over worlds a lot easyer than now.
There are more people alive then dead. Think about that for a moment. There are more people living, today, then have ever lived and died in total in all the generations of human beings.
Woman, after they reach menopause won't be able to have any more children, so people probably won't have much longer child-bearing ages then they do now. (although culture might adapt to have children raised by their 'young' and healthy grandparents or something, rather then young and inexperianced 30somethings).
But as studies have shown wealth usualy means people produce less children (I guess rich people have more intresting things to do with their time). Since life-extension will probably be expensive only rich, low-fertility people will be able to afford it.
I think it will also make people lazy, as they have will have infinite time to acomplish things they'll spend much less time working.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Social Security was conceived as, and still is, a welfare program. It takes money from working people and gives it to retired people. The working people accept it because they too will get money when they retire. But they're not going to get the money they "saved." They're going to get the money from people who aren't yet working today.
I'm against Social Security and forcing people to save, but I think this nonsense over "privatizing" anything is just that. Private groups that coercively redistribute wealth already exist--they're called the mafia.
English is easier said than done.
You are fortunate enough to have a job that pays well enough that you *could* work it part-time, if allowed.
I don't consider myself wealthy at all, but most of my family and peers think I make a lot for my age group, and I'm still making barely half of what I'd need to survive working a half-time job. I'm essentially working full time just to barely break even. I don't live an extravagent lifestyle either - I rent a room in a house, and spend the rest of my money on groceries and gas.
I have the skills needed for a higher-paying job, but cannot find one because the labor market is saturated.
Perhaps the solution to both our problems is the same. If the employers of people like you would let you work your job half-time, that would free up your free time, and free up job opportunities for people like me.
On a related note, I have often noticed that I am far more efficient when working short hours than long ones. If I know I'm coming in for a two-hour job on something, I come in, get to it, and get it done. If I'm settling in for an eight hour day, I feel more concerned with not running out of things to do before the day is over. If paid more, I could afford work less, and still get just as much work done, more efficiently. Everybody wins.
I think perhaps mandating a shorter work-week and a higher minimum wage could in fact increase efficiency for businesses and increase free time for individuals, many of which would then be spent doing hobbies (increasing the creativity and individual productivity of the populace), and probably spending more money on service-oriented businesses (movies, dining out, etc), stimulating the whole economy and improving lifestyle in one fell swoop.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Imagine after 1000 years of breeding your children and their children , you would have enough relatives to make a whole city, I can imagine the xmas shopping list, what a nightmare. Then again it would also mean a higher chance of a 12th generation grandchild to intermarry someone from the same family tree without knowing it, which isnt a bad thing, since at least you know the relos.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
When coming up with the program not many people thought the birthrate would decline so dramatically, leaving the program in the hole when there are not enough people actually working to support the ones taking in social security.
Thus the projected problems starting in 2018 (the year the program has more money going out in payments than comes in from workers) instead of 2042.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Is anyone else reminded of the short story in Vonnegut's Welcome to the Monkey House on this topic? I think of it everytime I see something like this in the news and it freaks me out a little.
Basically, the story takes place in a time when people never really HAVE to die, as long as they keep taking some kind of pill or medicine. Extended families all have to live in the same apartment, sleeping in sleeping bags all over the floors because there are so many of them, and everyone is constantly trying to kiss the butt of the eldest family member who owns everything for a spot in their will. Every little thing results in a threat to be removed from the will and left with nothing, but every year the eldest person finds a reason to keep taking the pills instead of letting themselves die. Anyway, it's Vonnegut, so whackiness ensues, etc etc. I see this as eerily close to what would happen (basically), but still one of our smallest problems in such a situation.
From http://www.mprize.org/:
Cash Prize Total: $122,129
Cash and Pledges: $855,687
On the Three Hundred:
if you take the average age based on 5 year old and older, are average lifespan is only a few year longer.
If you take pre five year old in the mixe, then you are including infant maortality, which was a staggering number until about 75 years ago.
So, were not actually liveng that much longer, but more of us are given the chance to live beyond 5.
So the original poster is right about not increase the lifespan, but very very wrong about it not improving health.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
A third year molecular biology undergraduate could shoot down all seven theories without even breaking into a canter.
De Grey has broken the golden, unwritten rule of life sciences:
Have Humility in the Face of Nature
I wish at was Friday, but I dont want to wish my life away. So I wish it was last Friday.
One of my favorite authors, Wil McCarthy, writes a series of books which concentrate mainly on a few technologies, one of which is the 'fax gate', or just 'fax'. Similiar to today's fax machines, the point is to accept an item as input, and transmit data about it to another point for reproduction. Unlike today's faxes, the faxes of Wil McCarthy's world consist of a print plate filled with nano scale assemblers which 'dissolve' you on one end and store your substance in a buffer, then transmit a highly detailed pattern of you to another fax gate elsewhere where the assemblers use mass from the previous entrants to reconstruct you to every last detail, even preserving quantum states so you're still alive an conscience.
An unintended consequence is that people who've stepped into a fax plate exist only as data, and data can be manipulated. Software can (and does, in his fiction), fix damage, remove disease, and undoes genetically programmed death. The upshot of all this is that everyone has the perfectly toned bodies of 20 year old athletes, and the worst that happens in death is that you lose a few hours of memories for ever. As long as a fax gate is nearby (and they're as common as telephones in McCarthy's future), the damage would have to be pretty extensive to cause actual death, otherwise your body can simpley be tossed into the nearest fax, and a repaired you will be spit out almost immediately. You're immorbid, incapable of natural death, and with backups made everytime you step through a gate, you're theoretically immortal.
Of course, with the notion to tamper comes the required self improvement. Soldiers would elect to have carbon nanofibres woven into their skeleton, and protective diamond plates inserted around major organs. Slashdot weenies, tired of receiving wedgies, could order up a buff exterior and pump up their enemies. Women could go blonde for a day, or enlarge their boobs for that special date, then shrink them down when they become a nuisance. You can even, with enough mass in the buffers, make copies of yourself.
Is this possible? Depends on who you ask. Some nanologists poo poo the notion of nanoassemblers citing electronic forces on the atomic level as inhibiting the movement of little claws. Others poo poo the poo pooers by pointing out that individual atoms have already been manipulated in the lab.
The overall issue of immorbidity raises new questions. If we are incapable of death ourselves, do we lose our concept of it, and therefore our fear of it? Or how about, what if someone chooses to die. Their immorbid and highly improved bodies won't allow it. And what happens when you reach the physiologicallimit of your own memory capacity? Do you download it into a flash disk, or just dump them forever. And with people living for centuries, what do you do with all the bored, unemployable, and resource draining people who will overpopulate the planet in a society where production of basic goods is so efficient that there are absolutely no environmental pressures or population controls? Well...besides colonize space (which didn't work so well in McCarthy's books).
I have a degree in Biochemistry, Cellular and Molecular Biology. I used to work in a Genetics research lab as well. Now, I'm no Cambridge Scholar, but I'm not stupid. But unless I'm missing something, this guy has basic points wrong in most of his 7 points.
Eliminating telomerase is not bad, and a way to reduce/eliminate cancer. Telomoerase is essential for Germ Cells, i.e. sperm and egg cells. It seems unlikely to be able to eliminate it in all cells but these.
Cancer cells don't need telomerase. There are countless avenues to cancerous cell growth.
Stimulation cell growth is good and necessary. Cell growth in the brain could be extremely problematic. The brain is a living, connected system. The connections are what make the brain what it is. Unlike computeres with fixed hardware and variable software, the brain is variable in both. The electrical patterns can change as well as the paths the patterns take. Essentially, they are insepearable. The addition of new cells, with no way to control their connectedness would not aleveate the problems of cellular degredation and loss.
Extrecellular protein linkages are unique. Biology is extremely effecient at its use of chemical compounds, structurally. Our knowledge of protein strcuture is limited, due to the limitiations we have of computational modeling due to limited computational abilities. That he should think that extracellular proteins show unique linkages seems hubristic. It is possible we don't understand all protein interactions yet.
Cell growth can be stimulated naturally. Here, even a passing comment has errors. Muscle cells are stimulated to divide by excercise. No! Excercise increases the size of muscles by stimulating an increase in production of muscle fiber proteins. More proteins cause a cell to be larger, and thus the overall muscle to be bigger. Thus excercise increases the size of muscles, not the number of cells. This is basic biology.
Mitochondrial proteins will work in the nucleus.While most cells in the world use a universal genetic code, some vary specific cells do not fully share the code's universality. Some non-eukaryotic cells and mitochondria. (It is interesting to note that mitochondria are thought to be descendended from symbiotic non-eukaryotics cells themselves.) I don't know off the top of my head if these proteins will work with both codes, but it seems likely that even if the nucleus can produce the raw protein, the proper folding, transport, and ultimate use of the proteins might not occurt since they are not where they need to be, namely inside the mitochondria. Only native proteins might be functional.
Again, I might have too simple an outlook or be completely incorrect, but it seems that there are basic concepts of biology that conflict with de Grey's ideas.
assuming one is able to live healthily for a millennium, it makes no sense that they would only work to age 65. comparing retirement age to average life expectancy, we currently work til about 90% of life expectancy. by this logic, we would work to about 900 years old. giving us plenty of time to contribute more to ss as well as have enough money saved so as not to depend on ss.
You think this isn't happening anyway? As far as cultural norms are concerned, the minimum age to start a family, particularly for women, has gone up from age 14-15 to 21-25 even now. And it is not that unusual to see a woman begin her family at age 30 anymore...even be encouraged to do so in fact.
In most places in America, even have sex at all with people younger than 16 can land you in jail very quickly. I'm not familiar with laws outside the USA, but there are some similar laws in Europe as well.
If people lived to be 200+ years old, and in good shape, with women able to become pregnent at age 60+ (with low probability of birth defects), I think you might find the age women start families to go up even more.
BTW, if you think I've full of it, I don't think 1850 is really that long ago, in terms of # of generations ago that would affect human DNA. And it was very common in 1850 for 15 year old girls to get married... mostly because they had to if they were going to have any kids before they died. There is some evidence of 10 year old girls getting "married" with prehistoric groups.