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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."
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
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
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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.