Slashdot Mirror
Humans Could Live For 1000 Years
Maajid wrote to mention an article on the Chronicle of Higher Education site about a biogerontologist who thinks he can kill death. From the article: "The 42-year-old English biogerontologist has made his name by claiming that some people alive right now could live for 1,000 years or longer. Maybe much longer. Growing old is not, in his view, an inevitable consequence of the human condition; rather, it is the result of accumulated damage at the cellular and molecular levels that medical advances will soon be able to prevent -- or even reverse -- allowing people to go on living pretty much indefinitely. We'll still have to worry about angry bears and falling pianos, but aging, the biggest killer of all, will cease to be a threat. Death, as we know it, will die."
and it's an issue evan today with our current lifespan: over population...
ofcourse, a lifespan of 1000 years can open doors to interstellar voyages...but still
Just what we need: a way to slow down our own evolution.
One of the nicest things about life is that it doesn't go on forever.
This is to say nothing of the sociopolitical consequences, such as state-mandated birth control, and their sociopolitical consequences.
"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh." -- Voltaire
It's so easy to talk like you did, isn't it?
The fact is that Aubrey de Grey is a respected biologist (despite having a degree in computer science), and participates in many important conferences, according to what I've read. If you find information which contradicts this, please give me a link. In the meantime, perhaps you should check your facts better before posting such things.
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
A human right now could potentially live to about 130 , we likely will succumb to another condition about 50 years before that though.
The chance of contracting many of these conditions is greatly increased with age , if we can limit the decay associated with that then chances of contracting these conditions is also limited .
Though the 1000 year target is not taking into account environmental damage , it seems reasonable figure for perfect conditions .
limiting the cellular ageing will also help us to look a lot more youthful for a great deal longer
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
Death, as we know it, will die.
First a "Dead Like Me" reference, then a Cthulhu reference. "That is not dead which can eternal lie. And with strange aeons even death may die."
Well, since death will die, I for one, welcome our OLD, many-angled, overlords.
I accept that we could, in theory, mitigate the cellular damage that leads to aging, and humans could live much longer than they do now. There are, however, two BIG problems, in addition to the overcrowding that everyone else has mentioned.
First is cancer. Cancer is caused by DNA damage which causes cells to begin dividing uncontrollably. Humans, over our mere 100 year lifespan, face a very high risk of dying from cancer. Over a thousand years, it becomes a virtual certainty that at least a handful of your cells would have a very harmful mutation. Unless we also have the technology to periodically "refresh" all the DNA in your body (hint: unlikely), the simple fact is that after a thousand years you would have developed every kind of cancer known to man. I don't believe any medical technology could keep one of us alive that long -- if and when humans manage to extend our lifespans to the thousand year range, we won't be doing it in our current bodies.
Second is psychology. The human mind did not evolve to last a thousand years, and asking it to operate so far outside of its design parameters is bound to have some surprising (and likely unpleasant) effects. In fact, I am very skeptical that anyone could even hold on to sanity for that length of time. We just aren't built for that kind of time scale. We obviously don't know the effects of a truly long life on the human mind, but I just can't imagine an ordinary human lasting for a thousand years without becoming seriously disturbed.
ZFS: because love is never having to say fsck
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Imagine a world where the vast majority of skilled people live effectively forever. What opportunity will there be for the young, if the elders have had a centuries-long head start?
Speaking from an economics standpoint, there will always be people who need things, they are called consumers. In order for consumers to acquire the things that they need, they must produce things that others need, etc... Perhaps one day there will be a small subset of humanity that can produce enough goods and services to supply the whole, if that were to happen, then it wouldn't matter much if everybody had a job or not. People would just get what they wanted. The worst that would happen in that case is that there would be a dramatic surplus of goods.
The other scenario is that there are not enough producers to supply the world's population, in which case there should be boatloads of opportunity for the young to succeed. They need only learn how and what to do to provide themselves with the goods they desire. In any case, so far this has not been an issue - even as the average life expectancy has more than doubled from what it once was.
How could we possibly provide the resources necessary to feed an effectively undying yet still growing population? Would famine become the determiner or longevity?
Resources would likely determine the maximum stable population size. Any more than the maximum and people would start dying, any less and the population would grow. It stands to reason that at some point, it will become necessary for people to stop having offspring. But then, people produce offspring for a variety of reasons, many of which are unplanned, and some of which are psychologically related to leaving a piece of themselves behind after they have died. Once people stop dying, I expect there to be less of a driving force behind having children. Government subsidized (or incentives for) sterilization are also quite likely.
Can the human brain retain the sheer volume of information and experience achievable in a millennia of living? Would we forget the past, or become unable to learn the future?
I would be happy with a 10-20 year memory span. Phase the old useless info out and the new info in. Personality changes quite a bit over time, and I can't say that I remember much from even 5 years ago - just a few select memories here and there that I have some emotional attachment to, the rest gets filled in from facts and records when I see them. The current research suggests that memories are not stored like data, but rather reconstructed from cues. People have even been quite easily tricked into having false memories by mere suggestion. I would hazard to guess that memory would not be any more of an issue than it is today.
Would longer-lived decision makers take longer-term factors into account? Would humanity be more inclined to space travel if time were no longer the limiting factor?
At some point, I would imagine that people would look to space travel to acquire more resources and allow for more population and culture. The earth is getting pretty crowded with so many people falling under so few governments. I'd expect that as instant communication and cheap and quick transportation become increasingly available, that the notion of nationality and local law will begin to collapse and the world will slowly enter into the control of one or two governing agencies. When that happens, people will look to colonize space to set up their own independent societies.
We can't even cure hunger
...diseases caused by natural bodily functions. In cases like this, medicine is all too willing to look at simply interrupting one of the chemical reactions in the body
Yes we can. Eat.
Seriously, hunger as you refer to it is not a disease but more of a political problem. Food and other resources are controled and dispatched in such a way that some people do not get any. But we're not lacking food and, again, hunger itself is not a disease.
Again, we're facing and finding solutions to symptoms. Often, we do not have to cure anything as if it's a natural reaction, it will go away. It's the people making the choice of being treated or taking this or that pill so as to not endure the pain while it lasts. And what disease are caused by natural bodily functions?
You are more than the sum of what you consume. Desire is not an occupation.
OK, hot from the CDC we learn the following average death rates (in persons per 100,000 population per year) from causes that have nothing to do with old age:
Grand total, 66.9 per 100,000 per year. From which it follows that the average person has a 0.0669% chance of dying each year from some reason other than old age. The rough estimate of your life expectancy is then reasonably close to the inverse of this number, i.e. 1500 years.
Nice enough, but hardly forever. More troubling, however, is that these rates are for a population that is quite young. Suppose instead we use the results for old people, 85 and over, who are unfortunately far more susceptible to accidents and disease:
Grand total of 1462.8, which means your average 85-year-old has a 1.46% chance of dying each year from causes unrelated to chronic "old-age" diseases like heart attacks, strokes, and cancer. The inverse of this is 68 years, for a grand total lifespan of 153 years. Lots shorter. And wet get intermediate results if we use the results for other older age groups, but not the oldest.
Which is to say, you can only get a 1000-year lifespan if you not only defeat the usual diseases of old age (cancer, atherosclerosis, etc.) but also stop the clock on practically every consequence of aging from fading vision to slowing reflexes to slower healing to more brittle bones. A very tall order indeed.
So what is wrong?? Is the list of needed fixes incomplete?
My guess is yes, it is. One theory of aging is that we are carrying around many genes which are harmful, but have a serious effect later in life. Such genes were never selected against when expected lifetimes were 35 years or less. Now that we have cured many things that prevented people from getting to 30 or 40, we are seeing new problems that prevent people from getting to 100 or 150. But who's to say that there are not even more aging effects that will only become apparent after 150 or 200 years? It seems shortsighted to assume that the aging processes that are a problem now are the only things we need to overcome in order to live thousands of years.
I also think that a lot of the items on his list amount to replacement of body parts, whether whole organs or DNA. That isn't really reversing aging... That's just repair work which is likely to be needed more and more frequently as the person gets older. It also doesn't address the non-replaceable parts like the brain. Neurons continually die off during a person's adult life, and you don't grow new ones... that's going to be significant after a few hundred years.
If ageing is really to be solved, I think it will be done from the inside, by understanding and altering the functions of harmful genes. That's a long ways in the future, though.
Many types of cancer arise from the results of cumulative errors introducd in the duplication of your DNA prior to cell division.
When a cell of yours duplicates the 6 trillion base pairs in your DNA, after the duplication errors result in mistakes (average one in 10,000) and the correction mechanisms clean up as many as they can, there is an average of 1 mistake per cell per dupication. 95% of your DNA is (near as we can tell so far) non-coding; it is not used to build proteins. So every once in a while, in cells that divide often (like skin or surface cells in the gut, not nervous cells) errors accumulate. Toxins (chemicals) and mutagens can introduce still other DNA mistakes.
Over time, one of those mistakes breaks the code for a protein that the cell needs to fight cancer (or to kill itself, or to stop replication). There could be hundreds of those crucial proteins, and sometimes several of them need to be disabled serially before the function they perform goes haywire. But over time, given enough chances and over enough cells, the normal regulation functions of some small number of cells breaks down due to mutations, the cell does not commit suicide or stop replicating, and you get cancer. While it happens more often over longer periods of time, it can also happen quickly to younger people. Or some people are born with one or more mutations in a sequence and just need a single error to kill a crucial cell function and initiate cancer.
Then there are the teleomeres - the repeated sequences at the end of chromosomes that delete one repetition every time the cell divides. There is enough teleomere sequence in most cells for several dozen (couple hundred?) divisions, then it doesn't divide right any more.
And the genetic problems people are born with - is your code for a crucial protein faulty? Depending on the bad protein and the fault in it, you might get cystic fibrosis, an increased risk for breast cancer, etc. etc.
These things can be detected and, in theory, fixed using techniques known today. Fixing those kinds of problems may be what this dude means when he says we can dispense with the consequences of cellular "disease" and live forever. Maybe, but there's still lots of work to do.
Psychology isn't an invention to rule the populous, it is only commentary from observation of the populous. The variety of coping abilities among people is virtually infinite. People don't have to constantly look for new things, especially when they don't expect the new things to bring them any kind of satisfaction.
People would continue to live in the same day to day manner that they do now. Suicidal people would tend to not look for longer lives, thrill seekers would get as bored as they are now with their lives, people who look for gratification at the expense of their long term benefit would still try to do the same. Drugs, smoking, overeating, lack of excercise, depression, vices, would have a more profound effect in visibly damaging quality of life.
As cheesy as the movie was, there is some insight to be found in "Groundhog day". Some people will find long term satisfaction in spending time with other people, descendants, doing gardening, research, developing talents, art, new careers.
I personally have way more interests than I have time to ever delve into them. If I could raise my kids and have 2-10 lifetimes after that, I wouldn't have any trouble filling my time and thoroughly enjoying it. If I could spend that time with my wife as well, and enjoy my current health, even more so. People who would turn to the kind of things that were quoted to look for a thrill would quickly find that it didn't satisfy either. Most long lived people would figure it out before ever having to try it.
I would love to see what kind of perspective living a thousand years could give someone. Psychology would have new insight that the paltry 100 years we currently live cannot give.