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Silicon Valley's Quest To Extend Life 'Well Beyond 120'
HughPickens.com writes: The Guardian has an interesting article on the current quest sweeping Silicon Valley to disrupt death, and the $1 million prize challenging scientists to push human lifespan past its apparent maximum of about 120 years. Hedge Fund Manager Joon Yun's Palo Alto Longevity Prize, which 15 scientific teams have so far entered, will be awarded in the first instance for restoring vitality and extending lifespan in mice by 50%.
"Billionaires and companies are bullish about what they can achieve. In September 2013 Google announced the creation of Calico, short for the California Life Company. Its mission is to reverse engineer the biology that controls lifespan and "devise interventions that enable people to lead longer and healthier lives." ... In April 2014 it recruited Cynthia Kenyon, a scientist acclaimed for work that included genetically engineering roundworms to live up to six times longer than normal, and who has spoken of dreaming of applying her discoveries to people.
Why might tech zillionaires choose to fund life extension research? Three reasons reckons Patrick McCray, a historian of modern technology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. First, if you had that much money wouldn't you want to live longer to enjoy it? Then there is money to be made in them there hills. But last, and what he thinks is the heart of the matter, is ideology. If your business and social world is oriented around the premise of "disruptive technologies", what could be more disruptive than slowing down or "defeating" aging?
"Billionaires and companies are bullish about what they can achieve. In September 2013 Google announced the creation of Calico, short for the California Life Company. Its mission is to reverse engineer the biology that controls lifespan and "devise interventions that enable people to lead longer and healthier lives." ... In April 2014 it recruited Cynthia Kenyon, a scientist acclaimed for work that included genetically engineering roundworms to live up to six times longer than normal, and who has spoken of dreaming of applying her discoveries to people.
Why might tech zillionaires choose to fund life extension research? Three reasons reckons Patrick McCray, a historian of modern technology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. First, if you had that much money wouldn't you want to live longer to enjoy it? Then there is money to be made in them there hills. But last, and what he thinks is the heart of the matter, is ideology. If your business and social world is oriented around the premise of "disruptive technologies", what could be more disruptive than slowing down or "defeating" aging?
How? Why? Who?
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
Die clean, white man from town, die clean!
So many billionaires in Silly Valley, and none of them is willing to invest more than $1 million in extending their lifetime to forever?
Clearly they don't expect much to come out of this research.
I've posted this in another post, and yet again.
A certain irreducible background incidence of cancer is to be expected regardless of circumstances: mutations can never be absolutely avoided, because they are an inescapable consequence of fundamental limitations on the accuracy of DNA replication, as discussed in Chapter 5. If a human could live long enough, it is inevitable that at least one of his or her cells would eventually accumulate a set of mutations sufficient for cancer to develop. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/bo...
Telemeres - for now they look like imposing a pretty hard upper limit.
May they find greatly-lengthened and considerable technologically-amplified pleasure in their lives while the remaining 99% of us scratch and grub for the barest minimum to achieve survival in this brave new world of post-scarcity possibilities.
I wish nothing but the best possible outcome for our obvious betters, those for whom life's problems amount to the tyrannical difficulty of deciding between thirteen hundred cases of Krug Clos d'Ambonnay or Domaine Jean-Louis Chave Ermitage Cuvee Cathelin when catering for their this week's offensively-ostentatious wedding or birthday party.
Yes, Kim Kardashian, you vile cunt, I'm looking at you (amongst others).
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
Its true that cancer is an almost inevitable consequence of simply living, and the longer you live the more likely you'll have it -- but many cancers are treatable, depending on the particulars of the strain. You think these people aren't prepared to pay top dollar for the best treatments when/if the time comes that their longevity has a consequence?
If the human lifespan increases by much more, we're going to have a serious overpopulation issue. Alternatively this will only be accessible to the Rupert Murdoch's of this world...
Between the misery of operations and post-recovery, chemotherapy in the old age.. at what point is life even comfortable enough to enjoy?
Where do I claim my million dollars?
Controlled cancer is the key because cancer cells in the right environment can live forever.
I find that many people claiming aging is absolutely inevitable are suffering from a case of sour grapes. SENS is a very real, very realizable goal. The human body is of limited complexity and we're putting the pieces of the puzzle together fast. Skepticism is understandable, after all people have been promising cures for aging ever since the emperor of China ate mercury. But recent advances show real promise and are based on real research.
It's popular to say one wishes for death at an arbitrary age... until one is that age and it's time to try to live or try to die. The upshot of recent newsis there's a very real chance that the first person to reach escape velocity is already alive. Here's to hope for a prosperous and very long life for each of us.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
We don't need a full cure for aging just yet -- or anytime soon. We just need to start solving the problem at a rate that increases life expectancy by one year, every year on average.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
A collection of obscenely wealthy guys are upset that life won't let them get their way. Maybe if they at least admit they're scared shitless about it they can get their way.
Silicon Valley's Quest To Extend Life 'Well Beyond 120
followed by the government's quest to extend the pension age well beyond 115
Imagine if Genghis Khan's life had been extended, or Stalin's. Death is a great leveller that ensures change and progress. I can imagine billionaires becoming trillionaires and simply sitting on a mountain of wealth acquired by nothing more than rent-seeking behaviour. For example, the notion that Rupert Murdoch will be dead in a decade or two is surely a good thing. This sociopath, with a mind and attitude formed in the 1950's, will simply pass, rather than needing to be killed for the good of the world.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
And why do you feel that defeating cancer isn't already part of the research into helping us live longer?
You can make the same argument about all of it, the longer you live the more likely you are to catch any deadly disease. The longer you live the more likely your heart is to give in. The longer you live the more likely you are to suffer a stroke. The longer you live the more likely you are to go deaf and lose your vision.
Cancer is no different, increasing age increases the chance of suffering all these things. Part of living older is defeating or delaying each and every one of these possible threats. What makes you think that cancer is somehow a distinctly different problem on the way to the same goal as the rest of it that means that it should be singled out and held up as a possible problem of increasing age more than anything else?
I'm 40 and I'm ready to check out. DNR, etc.
I've seen it all and can't build up much of an excitement for anything. I can't imagine that my Dad is 90 and my Mom 86 and they're both not showing signs of going anytime soon.
Just my luck to be stuck with depression *and* longevity. I keep telling people that I'm 25 years away from my best years in the past, but I don't think I can last another 25 just to live through the decay of everything I used to enjoy.
These idiots better work on getting rid of aging, not just clocking in more years.
Mostly random stuff.
Or indeed any process which carries a relatively constant risk, accident being the most obvious. Personally, I can't wait for the headline "121 billionaire breaks neck skiing".
[FUCK BETA]
They just want to get the money from the zillionaires. My aunt was at one point the oldest person alive in the world.
When I asked her how that felt, she told me that somebody had to be the oldest and by pure luck, this time it was her.
She gave her body to science and several things have been found thanks to that. It also encouraged a search for more people above 100 to donate their body to do more research.
She not only gave her body. She also insited that the outcome was for others to learn. She opensourced her body.
If people are able to get older, you talk about the species, not only about a happy few (just ask Steve Jobs). And no, I do not think I will be getting that old. She was just a statistical anomaly.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Imagine if this were 150 years ago and a bunch of rich guys wanted to find out how to prevent infant mortality or improve surgical outcomes or find out what causes diseases.
According to the moaning Luddites in here, they were all born outside of a hospital and refuse modern medicine?
I guess you also refuse indoor plumbing and your fridge full of sterile, safe, and nutritious food?
I assume that, if they've considered it at all, the plan is 'an immune system indistinguishable from magic; also no nasty autoimmune diseases.'
Agreed,
And even if completely defeating cancer is not possible or achieved quickly (progress in partially defeating cancer is business as usual), the set of technologies they are seeking would allow us to live healthier, longer and more productive lifes until the cancer (or whatever) takes us away. This would be a huge deal for anyone.
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
I'm certainly not betting on strong AI; but there is the alternate possibility that tech guys are putting their money into aging not because it has better absolute odds; but because the odds of strong AI saving them from inevitable death are zero whether it works or not, while the odds on aging may be lousy; but the upside involves their getting to be conscious for some additional amount of time.
'Immortality', as an organism, is actually comparatively easy. We think of bacteria and the like as being 'immortal', and humans as having 'ancestors' and 'descendants', because bacteria are just unicellular goo all the time and we don't have much incentive to distinguish between the cell that divided and the resulting two cells; but our biological function is no less continuous than that of organisms we think of as 'immortal'.
You were produced from live gametes, which were produced by cellular division in live parents, and they from live gametes, and so on, at least back to the point where your ancestors were some sort of small shrew-like mammal, and quite possibly a great deal further back than that. Depending on the messy, poorly fossilized, and somewhat uncertain question of the origin of life on earth, possibly all the way back.
Doesn't really do 'you' much good, though. Odds are very good that you'll experience less than a century of consciousness; barring substantial medical advances in the near future they are effectively perfect that you'll be dead well south of 150. Regardless of whether or not you continue your biological line, 'you' as a conscious entity are toast, probably in the relatively near future. Mere biological immortality isn't what these guys want. They want continuity of consciousness, something that humans have not had much success with.
In light of that goal, AI research is effectively taking a long shot on having really interesting kids. It won't make you any less dead.
Some (most?) billionaires deserve 120 years of continuous radiotherapy and chemotherapy.
Like extending the life of some computers and hardware beyond the life cycle dictated by the world according to Microsoft and their planned obsolescence specialist "hardware partners"! Thank God the geniuses in Silicon Valley have not figured out how to transfer the engrams of Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer onto micro chips just yet.
YIPES just maybe they already did it and that is why we are stuck with operating systems that expire! Perhaps they are keeping the real human interface software, networking, bandwidth and available memory space all to themselves and are really just herding the plebs from somewhere out on the net called silicon heaven and are not even human beings anymore!
This message was not sent from an iPhone because Peter Sellers really was a deviated prevert without a dime for the call
Luckily this could never happen again today, because they need all those children for the Foxconn plant.
This being Silicon Valley, they feel there's some use to the hedge fund managers. It's fine though, they can happily use software patent lawyers for the early testing.
Suggestion: Develop an inexpensive and effective cure for cancer first.
Fundamentally, it's an inesacpable consequence of the second law of thermodynamics. However, this consequence can be avoided if you keep throwing energy at the system.
Someone will create expensive cancer detecting nanobots for that. These will roam your body and either eliminate any cancer and other threats before they get out of hand, and/or alert an also very expensive monitoring system. Constant monitoring is needed for detecting and replenishing failed nanobots.
Key word is 'expensive'.
This is not the sig you're looking for.
If I were a betting man, I'd put my money on strong AI before I'd put my money on a full cure for aging.
I guess you think strong AI isn't going to happen in your lifespan eh?
But a full "cure" for aging would require designing an entirely new species (presumably that looked and acted human) with all kinds of entirely new repair mechanisms and entirely redesigned developmental pathways.
Yep, sounds like a hard problem. Doesn't sound like an impossible problem any more than strong AI does.
Perhaps Silicon Valley could find the 'Elixir of Life' in Japan
They already found it!
Ezekiel 23:20
I don't know about the 3000 children part, but I do know that he was feeding the Emperor a lot of heavy metals in his potions, which is probably what killed him.
Cancer may not have to be the cause of death, but rather the cause of immortality.
Perhaps they can harness the same thing that keeps HeLa cells immortal - sort of a body-wide 'cancer' that makes you immortal?
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
The day we've won isn't the day when we find a perfect way to kill cancer cells. The day we've won is the day where we find a perfect way to revert cancer cells to normal behavior.
It's times like this I wish I had a friend named 'The Professor'.
Cancer isn't random. If it were, incidence would be spread throughout the life rather than being concentrated in the later years of life.
Far more likely (IMO) that cancer is a side effect of aging. We have merely reduced mortality from other diseases (including some other age related disease), which has left more people getting cancer.
I kinda doubt that telomeres are the key to aging. Rather, I think they are strictly a method for preventing cancer. Instead, I think that something is happening to cause a decline in the number of stem cells in the body as you get older, likely something to do with NAD.
Seem to be panicking upon realizing that aging and mortality are the great equalizers.
I see such things as the greatest form of selfishness, it wasn't enough they hoarded resources from people in their own generation. They want to continue to do so to their children.
I guess the second law doesn't apply to naked mole rats. Maybe someone should see if we can make a perpetual motion machine out of them? Or maybe we should learn a little more about thermodynamics before citing them in ways that don't make any sense at all (people who don't age still eat).
So cancerous mutations represent a measurable delta-S that normal cellular processes do not? Do please, tell me more!
It's funny all of the things people try to credit to the second law of thermodynamics that aren't even talking about thermodynamics, as if you can user-define "disorder" any way you wish ("cancer sounds disordrous... so let's say that the second law of thermodynamics means cancer will occur!"). No, the only thing in that regard that's an inescapable consequence of the second law of thermodynamics is that at least some day all humans will be dead, as the universe will have died of heat death.
It's times like this I wish I had a friend named 'The Professor'.
I don't care how rich you are, death will still claim you.
The ultimate equalizer is a bitch, ain't it?
-Styopa
It is a stupid point.
When you get rid of aging and diseases that kill due to age weakened immune systems the mortality rate is still 2%.
2 individuals in a hundred die every year due to misadventure or other accidents,suicide, war and chronic diseases/infections/botched surgeries.
That statistically puts the likely upper bound on lifespan somewhere near 2000-3000 years.
Me too.
Sardaukar, please stop for a second. People aren't mad at what you have to say. They have a problem with how you're saying it and how you're taking everything way to personally. Try to relax and you'll have a much better time here. :)
It's times like this I wish I had a friend named 'The Professor'.
Dude, there is a TON of low hanging fruit (hell, I found some myself, which is why I now take niacinamide daily, much cheaper than NAD riboside, but feeds the same set of reactions that increase NAD levels, which seems to be the mechanism that makes calorie restriction extend the lifespan, and I feel FANTASTIC as a result). There has been almost no research into the field. Twenty years ago you could count the lab groups studying aging as such on one fucking hand. Cancer is FAR better understood than aging, even though aging is a very likely cause for most cancers.
There is a lot of reason for optimism here.
We see this all the time on Slashdot. Nerds in technology field A can at the same time be total Greenpeace MSNBC-slurping luddites in technology fields B, C and D.
Neuron emulation will likely happen within our lifetime, which would enable uploading, which enables us to escape the creeping grasp of death.
Yep, it's so simple: nobody wants to suffer and die (both of which are essentially guaranteed outcomes of normal aging.)
The fact that the commentator in the article had to imagine alternate, contorted reasons for wanting to stop aging is likely an example of just how deeply in denial many people are about death. The denial, the supposed "acceptance" of death are defensive reactions to the horror of aging and death.
Witness how the world erupts in outrage when a handful of people are killed by (for example) religious extremist gunmen, but somehow supposedly many people claim to be at peace with millions of people being slowly and painfully killed by aging(including themselves.)
It's very very simple:
1. Suffering, disease and involuntary death are horrendous for both the victims and their loved ones.
2. Aging is the single largest cause of human suffering, disease and involuntary death in the world today (2/3 of all human deaths.)
3. Therefore, it stands to reason that stopping aging is one of, if not the, single biggest moral imperative for humanity.
We should be approaching this like the Manhattan project, or the first manned mission to the moon: pouring massive resources into this. It is arguably the biggest problem humanity faces. Aging and the involuntary and suffering it causes needs to be stop
"Man will never fly!"
We've already created machines that have limited cognition. Just recently a lab group trained a neural net to identify not only objects within a still image, but what was actually going on (ie a picture of a girl playing with a dog was identified as such). This is already PRIMATE LEVEL COGNITION, but in a very limited domain. It just has to be expanded on until we can make one that talks.
http://www.kurzweilai.net/deep...
I'd be fascinated to see a (reasonably large scale) 'neural network' simulation in the biological sense of 'neural network', rather than the computer science analogy. Life extension aside, it would certainly be a very neat piece of gear.
It would also catapult the old philosophical chestnut of whether a perfect copy of you is you, or a distinct person very similar to you who will go on and live their own immortal life while you shrivel and die from the dusty pages of PHIL101 to practical application. That would be interesting to watch.
For that reason, I assume the more concerned brand of would-be immortal will attempt to 'Ship of Theseus' his brain into an immortal simulation, one neuron at a time, in the hopes of avoiding the creation of an immortal replica. Should be good fun.
why bother? if you can kill the cancer cells and make way for non cancerous growth, why bother 'reforming' them? besides, don't many cancers present as abnormally fast growing tissues? Do you want those cells around, in any form?
Part of normal cell behavior is to die off when an area is too crowded. Your worst case of a "reform" scenario is the best case of a "kill" scenario.
It's times like this I wish I had a friend named 'The Professor'.
It's just a simple numbers game that a 99.999% reliable process is going to fail 0.001% of the time.
And a 100% reliable process is going to fail 0% of the time. You don't even need that level. Just get the reliability high enough that heat death of the universe (which breaks the assumption that you have more energy to throw) is more likely to happen first.
(people who don't age still eat).
Hence, the use of the phrase "keep throwing energy at the system".
So cancerous mutations represent a measurable delta-S that normal cellular processes do not?
Yes, it's not magic. There are more states that lead to broken cellular processes than there are states that lead to normal cellular process. That leads to a measurable delta-S.
A weakness of neural nets is that they often bypass hard work (like reading the entirety of a post) by pattern recognition (reading just the first part and assuming the rest of the post is equally inane, rather than cleverly contradictory).
I need an upgrade. Sigh...
Yes, the Ship of Theseus is exactly the correct path to go. Communication is required to maintain continuity of self, ie the "soul". "You" are not the sheet music, nor the instruments, nor the people who play them, but rather the music itself. Your performance can be extended indefinitely by replacing the fragile human players with synthesizers of sufficiently high quality during breaks in a particular instrument's performance. Might not even notice the difference.
Note the article linked says "slows" and not halt or reverse. Not a reset button, or even a pause button.
Also, why do you consider "for now they look like" and "consider X then get back to me" as "posting like an asshole"? I'm not pretending to have the absolute answer like someone rubbing a link in my face as if I've never read it.
Controlled cancer is the key because cancer cells in the right environment can live forever.
But they can't live forever organized as you or me.
I kinda doubt that telomeres are the key to aging. Rather, I think they are strictly a method for preventing cancer. Instead, I think that something is happening to cause a decline in the number of stem cells in the body as you get older, likely something to do with NAD.
As unscientifically as possible and no cite to really get your questions going (but I'd search /.):
There is (call it a rod) in each cell, each time the cell divides this rod loses a bit of length.
Say this rod is half the size it started at, then you are at half of your life (age).
If this rod shorting can be stopped a longer life should be a result.
Why might tech zillionaires choose to fund life extension research? ... First, if you had that much money wouldn't you want to live longer to enjoy it?
Or one could ask if, perhaps, they have more than enough for one lifetime and concentrate on other things.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
But some cell rods don't shorten when they divide, namely stem cells and germ cells.
I would use the analogy that lengthening telomeres is to preventing aging the way building taller buildings is to lifespan of jumpers. Better to just stop people from jumping in the first place.
The idea of an existence inside a machine fills me with dread. Without flesh...how do you hold your wife, or hold your kids? It sounds like hell. Here, you can observe all the things you love, but you can't touch, you can't taste, you can't smell...
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
> and I feel FANTASTIC as a result
Of course you do, you're taking a pill. The contents of the pill matter little.
> Dude, there is a TON of low hanging fruit ... been almost no research into the field
Which means there's a TON of BS. Maybe I'm just a little older than you, but NAD is the latest in a very very very long string of things that ultimately proved to do nothing, as one would expect.
If it doesn't have a double-blind, it's not true. You should take that to the bank.
Really? I'm glad you feel fantastic but can you point out where Niacin prolongs (or improves, I'll go for that) life?
Otherwise, I will suggest a brief perusal of the placebo literature.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Develop an inexpensive and effective cure for cancer first.
Oh, of course! Why didn't we think of that sooner? We'll just whip that up and call you in the morning.
More ideas here in my proposal on health sensemaking: https://www.newschallenge.org/...
"We want to improve public health through free and open source public intelligence tools for individual and collective sensemaking about health topics -- especially related to nutrition and lifestyle choices."
Wish some billionaires wold fund that. :-)
Good fats are important for health and good brain function as your brain is mostly fat ("fat makes you fat" is BS; it's more that refined carbs and sugars makes you fat). Good sleep is important. Having a sense of autonomy, master, and purpose is important (see Dan Pink's work).
"RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us "
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
More inspiration by Joe Cross that health change is possible:
http://www.fatsickandnearlydea...
See also the long version of my essay here for more ideas:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/read...
We need you as one more person out there doing good stuff! :-) Sure, maybe your "best" years are behind you, I can feel that at my age too, but "the woods would be pretty quiet if no bird sang there but the best", and there can be a lot of important things still worth doing, even if not quite so well as when we were younger. Plus older people tend to have some advantages, like oftentimes more perspective and patience.
Good luck!
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
You really seem to cherish your pessimism. NAD supplementation has been shown to modify cellular markers associated with aging in middle aged and elderly mice back to those of young mice after just a week. Never mind the fact that b-vitamin complex shots (which include niacinamide) have been known to instantly improve health for ages.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
By me on that theme:
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/d...
http://www.pdfernhout.net/prin...
So, plenty of room for at least another 1000 years of exponential growth. After that, it's someone else's problem, and there are more minds to think of solutions (like tapping zero point energy to create energy and matter in the void of space, creating new dimensions, etc.).
See also:
https://overpopulationisamyth....
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Nicain as nicotinic acid produces severe side effects (flushing, vomiting) at the effective dose. Nicotinamide riboside doesn't. The one that I found, nicotinamide (sold as niacinamide) doesn't either, so long as you stay under 3 grams a day.
The current state of the research shows that it effects cellular health/aging markers, effectively turning the cells of old mice into the cells of young mice. Last I heard, the same group that showed that was going to start a new study that looked at their actual lifespan.
Current thinking is that NAD facilitates communication between the nucleus and mitochondria.
This is a real stunner, not because it is so new and amazing, but because this is about as low hanging of a fruit as you can get. I learned NAD and its role in cellular metabolism in biochemistry class. It had been observed to decline with age. But no-one ever thought to try increasing the concentration to counter the aging process or at least some of its side effects!
Why would you think that only neurons could be emulated? Didn't you ever see The Matrix? Imagine that, only everyone is completely inside (ie no goo pods or needles in the brain), no-one dies (or get sick, or injured), and, like with the loading program, there is no limit to the goods (or services) that can be conjured from nothing.
Not only that, but with extra resources, you could not only have the senses you have now, you could gain any number of other ones. See the entire spectrum of light, or have some of Neo's code-vision, or be able to feel and move arbitrary objects (ie telekinesis). And those are only a few of the things my tiny little ape-brain could come up with.
All these nerds turning 40+ and thinking about their mortality.
There are 2 obvious areas to really explore, DNA Repairing, and Memory Downloading; both would be very useful.
I cannot help but wonder if Edger Allen Poe had a poem for Robber Barons.
By puberty you are 80% through your "Hayflick" limit of cell divisions. Then it may be too late to do much. (Hayflick observed that most animal cells had a characterist of limit of cells divsions before the cell line died. Each animal class and tissue had differing limits.)
You could tell me that you have a pill I can swallow that will let me keep living a thousand years, but if it means I'm still going to get decrepit and still going to experience a steadily declining overall quality of life? Then I tell you 'no thanks'. If I can't be at least as strong and active as I am right now, then what's the point? If I'm going to steadily go blind, or become frail and weak, or worst of all: My mind is going to go, I forget who I am, everything, and everyone I know, and have to have attendants to keep me from wandering off? No fucking way, I'd rather eat a bullet. Now, if it's going to be like being on boosterspice (http://larryniven.wikia.com/wiki/Boosterspice) and I'm going to become younger, biologically similar to being 25 years old, and stay in that state of vigor so long as I can keep taking the stuff? Then I'm all in on it.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
.. at least not soon. The fact is that the human body was not designed - it evolved. And it evolved with all of these random chemical cross-linkages (in fact, this bizarre randomness is a main point of evidence that it was not designed). So when you find a therapy, it often interacts with several body systems. And quite often those actions have negative impacts on the system, as well as positive (it's why so many of the newer drugs have so many bad side effects). So it's a messy problem.
Silicon Valley has thrived using the technique cutting through problems by simplifying and disintermediating them. As such, they believe that any problem can be solved by doing this. Do I really need to say that this will not solve this particular problem? OK, I'll say it... It won't.
Removal from the biological matrix is a prerequisite for significant life extension (if by "life", we really mean "lifespan of our instance of sentience"), just as removal from the physical matrix is a prerequisite to eternal existence.
That is all.
Yeah, cancer sucks. I just lost a very good friend to it, way too young.
But facing cancer after 120+ years of healthy, happy life, instead of dying from heart disease or arthritis-enforced inactivity or dementia at 85 or 90? I'd sign up for that in the blink of an eye.
So having a long rod is desirable? What else is new?
Sorry, but thermodynamics is not about how many states there are in any arbitrary system. There's countless states in which you can win money in a casino and only a few (such as paying for chips or inserting money into a slot machine) that they take yours - does this mean that the second law of thermodynamics guarantees that you're going to beat the house? Is winning at the casino an increase in entropy?
Please stop taking scientific terms and making up your own definitions for them. The second law of thermodynamics cannot simply be taken out of context and shoved into whatever other context you want and then claimed to be proof that something is going to happen.
It's times like this I wish I had a friend named 'The Professor'.
Wow, she was also an aunt of my father! Small world! :-) I think we might have commented on slashdot on that coincidence a few years back? But you'd have to be pretty old if she was your aunt, as opposed to, like me, a great aunt? I met her once with my father when she was still in her own home, and maybe incidentally another time or two perhaps (decades ago).
Glad that "open sourcing" runs in the family. :-) Although I might feel differently about open sourcing my body or DNA than open sourcing some software I've written. :-) Still, it is kind of a mental calculation of the risk that personal DNA sequences could be used against one or one's family somehow versus the benefits of medical breakthroughs for your own family and also everyone, and also that DNA is not that hard to get via copies of medical samples or from trash or whatever...
I've put some links in other replies to ideas about health sensemaking to help everyone live longer and healthier lives.
https://www.newschallenge.org/...
And while I was born and raised in the USA, maybe it shows some Dutch roots that I believe we can make more "land" for a growing population by reclaiming it from "space" in addition to the sea. Of course, with falling birth rated in industrialized countries, long term population growth does not seem to be one of our problems/blessings, even if many people start living a lot longer.
http://p2pfoundation.net/backu...
Health may be also be partially a function of what you do relative to your genes and environment, so her preferences, say, for orange juice and herring might have worked better for herself than for others in different situations. For health commonalities, one can read about "Blue Zones" and also I like Dr. Joel Fuhrman's work overall emphasizing eating more vegetables (but quibble about some parts).
http://www.bluezones.com/
http://www.drfuhrman.com/libra...
Attitude and "morale" is also a surprisingly big part, for many reasons including because it affects your connectedness to your community from which other good things flow. Probably easier to have higher morale in the Netherlands than in a much crazier place like the USA though. :-)
Contrast:
http://www.findingdutchland.co...
"According to Unicef's most recent Child Well Being in Rich Countries survey, Dutch kids ranked as the happiest kids in the world. Dutch kids led the way in three out of the five categories, namely- material well being, educational well being, and behavior and risks."
With:
https://www.adbusters.org/maga...
""The reason our children's lives [in the UK] are the worst among economically advanced countries is because we are a poor version of the USA," he said. "So the USA comes second from bottom and we follow behind. The age of neo-liberalism, even with the human face that New Labour has given it, cannot stem the tide of the social recession capitalism creates.""
Anyway, we're all not going to live that long unless we sort out some of the wealth inequality and distribution issues given the spread of AI, robotics, and other automation that makes most human labor less and less valuable economically. The following may sound silly in the Netherlands or other parts of Western Europe, but it sound all too plausible in the USA given current politics:
http://marshallbrain.com/manna...
"But that's stupid." I said, "What possible justification is there for a whole population of people to be living on welfare or t
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Who wants to (almost) live forever?
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
I'd rather we figured out how to increase the quality of life for everyone than make a few wealthy people live longer. Eliminate poverty, hunger, war, strife, etc. Maybe help people find more purpose in life than being consumer-drones. But that's just me, I'm funny that way.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I've posted this in another post, and yet again.
A certain irreducible background incidence of cancer is to be expected regardless of circumstances
I think you have mutations and cancer confused. If cancer was a unavoidable fact then we would not have creatures like the naked mole rat that does not EVER
get cancer. I remember hearing that sharks don't get cancer either, but they are not being used in labs to study why they don't get cancer like the naked mole rat is, so it is perhaps less of a scientific fact and more conjecture.
-- ssoorrrryy,, dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh oonn.. -Quote found on actual fortune cookie.
Because serious cancer research isn't being done for a gimmicky prize.
Shall we talk about entropy then? It's clear you are out of your depth as you do not know how biological systems respond to aging. Eliminating all cancer still will not make people live longer. Cells die. That's a fact. As one gets older new cells stop replacing old cells and systems start to degenerate. You would have to stop cellular decay. That would require changing your DNA. That's not happening anytime soon.
That's the sick truth of it....cancer is the one thing that could promote longevity.
I am talking about entropy. Actual entropy, not "let's take an actual scientific concept and pretend it means something that it doesn't" entropy. I'm not making any comments about whether people are going to change DNA any time soon. I'm simply talking about the abuse of scientific terms - entropy being one of the most widely abused. To everyone who's doing it: stop.
It's times like this I wish I had a friend named 'The Professor'.
Every person has innumerous mutations throughout their lifetime. With ~37 trillion cells constantly replicating, it happens a lot. The human body is also very good at catching and correcting this errors. Some are genetically predisposed to better handle mutations which is why cancers are genetic. As you age, you're immune system becomes more and more compromised increasing your risk of cancer.
My point is, our body already knows how to fight cancer very well. Using this knowledge, there is no reason to think we couldn't completely prevent cancer by increasing our immune responses to both mutagens and mutations.
Brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.
You're being modded down because your comments give nothing to the discussion at hand and in the cases above are even attempts to start unrelated arguments.
Brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.
If you are going to extend the human live span are you also going to extend the years human women are fertile?
Pretty simple rule for any supplement: If it doesn't have at least three human studies by different researchers showing benefit and statistical significance then you're wasting your time.
Why not use their resources and efforts to extend life so the youth in most parts of the world can reach adulthood without dying or being killed?
This isn't a marketed use, it's one that I discovered. We were talking about low-hanging fruit, remember? This isn't even my specialty, I just know how to read scientific papers, and how to put two and two together.
You have a very confrontational attitude here. What is wrong with you? We are talking about bleeding edge stuff (ie something that I as in ME as in MYSELF discovered, implying this would be really easy stuff for researchers to systematically explore), and you start blathering about how there aren't three human trials on it. I'm not trying to fucking sell you anything, I'm just reporting something that has an effect that by far any possible placebo effect, ie it is effecting things that I never expected, and noting that it is something that SHOULD HAVE BEEN DISCOVERED DECADES AGO, but no-one has been researching aging. As an example of unexpected effects, my bowels move much faster than they used to (presumably due to increased output of the mucous membranes there--ever notice how kids will take a crap at any time of the day?), my libido has increase 2-4 fold, my night blindness has disappeared, and I'm suddenly having extremely vivid dreams that are creative and logical that I can remember when I wake up.
You don't want to believe some guy on the internet, then fine, but don't try to tell me to discard my own observations, and don't try to tell me that there isn't low hanging fruit in this field.
Of course mutations can be completely avoided. DNA is digital information, which can be copied perfectly. Whether any particular living organism actually does so is another matter, and likely one of the issues that need to be adjusted. Not that it really matters: cancer is actually pretty simple to treat (just kill all of the malfunctioning cells), is only a problem due to the limited accuracy of the knifes we can currently wield, and with nanotechnology and robotics advancing at geometric rate will likely fall within a century to fleets of medical micro-killbots.
In any case, we need to decouple our minds from our bodies at some point. The only place our current physical forms are at home is Earth. Furthermore, while our brains are impressive their inherent biases are worse and worse fit for modern circumstances, and most of their power is not easily accessible to consciousness. We must figure out how to transfer that consciousness from one physical shell to another. That way, we can inhabit human bodies when appropriate, move to supercomputer cluster to do physics, become a spaceship to set up a space colony in outer solar system, and make that colony itself a vast virtual world with high-power transmitters for moving people in and out - much more efficient than building a metal shell filled with oxygenating gasses. And as a nice side effect, it moves cancer from a killer to "damn, ruined my clothes" status.
That is a tautology: if you live long enough for event X to happen, then it's inevitable that X happens, since if it doesn't, then you haven't lived long enough yet. You can replace "cancer" with "every atom in your body randomly undergoing cold fusion into iron at the same time" and your statement will still be just as true - and just as meaningless - as before.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Your Spouse? Your Kids? Aren't THEY going to want their kids to Iive that long?
There aren't many parents around that are going to want to outlive their kids. So whatever expensive medical procedures are required to make this happen, they're going to want to fund it for them too. Of course, the kids aren't going to want to work until their 100, so you're also going to have to cover their living expenses for 55 years. Probably their spouses as well.
From the more long lived people I've known, it is sometimes a little sad. Their friends have all died or are close to it. They've lost a lot of family over the years including some of their own descendants.
What also seems to go hand in hand with extending life is extending the years of poor health. I think I'd rather have 80 or 90 years of good health and drop dead one day, then 100 years of good health and 20 years of living from one doctor appointment to the next. Maybe it was a slashdot article but somewhere I saw something about a guy who decided he wanted to be done at around 75. It's not that he'd off himself at that age, just that he'd refuse treatment for any disease that he acquired after that point.
You're looking at it backwards. It's the same process as evolution. Cell lines which die out (high entropy) disappear from the body. Leaving behind cell lines which don't die out (low entropy), which thus become a larger fraction of the remaining body.
People who view these processes from the standpoint of an individual cell line or individual animal mistakenly conclude that the second law of thermodynamics favors the high entropy state (no evolution, inevitable death). But if you view it at the level of the population as a whole, by rapidly eliminating the high entropy solutions, the second law yields a universe with more and more low entropy solutions. That is, as entropy increases, a greater fraction of the remaining population has lower entropy (species become more complex, cancer is more prevalent).
Agreed. Brain to Machine (or other medium) transfer of what makes you, you, will require some sort of simultaneous consciousness. That is, to reliably be able to say that you are in the Machine, and not just a copy of all of your memories and thought processes, you'll have to be awake while hooked up to the new body while still 'in' the old wetware, and only then be able to jettison the old like an out of date hard drive. Any sort of interruption of consciousness would introduce the possibility that it's just a copy - even if it "thinks" it's still you.
Of course, none of that even gets into the problems that arise once transfer is possible, because if we can write your memories to a new medium, what stops someone from altering or editing them? What stops the new you from being hacked?
It turns out the key to long life is to eat cigarettes and slather whiskey all over your skin. Take that, health nuts.
What sort of health nuts? Almonds are pretty good, but walnuts are nasty.
So far, efforts to increase longevity and slow the aging process have indeed extended the number of years over which people can still be productive, healthy and independent, but they have extended by almost as much the subsequent period of decline during which people are still alive but largely unable to care for themselves. Proportionally, we are spending a larger fraction of our lives in disability than ever before, thanks to modern medicine. One can make a pretty good argument that we have already gone too far in increasing human lifespan.
If 2% of the population dies each year, then the average lifespan is 50. Since life expectancies in advanced countries are something around 80, and many such people die of old age or old age-related things, accident-related deaths can't be that high. Did you get a decimal point off? I'd find an average lifespan of 500 reasonable under your assumptions.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Sorry, but thermodynamics is not about how many states there are in any arbitrary system.
That's right. Instead it is Entropy which is about how many states there are in a particular system. This is the traditional interpretation of entropy in a statistical mechanical system.
There's countless states in which you can win money in a casino and only a few (such as paying for chips or inserting money into a slot machine) that they take yours - does this mean that the second law of thermodynamics guarantees that you're going to beat the house?
Every one of the "countless" states in which you win, involves you expending money, just as every one of the states in which you lose.
Is winning at the casino an increase in entropy?
Any action involves an increase in entropy.
The second law of thermodynamics cannot simply be taken out of context and shoved into whatever other context you want and then claimed to be proof that something is going to happen.
What makes you think thermodynamics is being taken out of context?
*YOU* aren't organized as you for more than the time of a fleeting memory... So what?
Within a certain fuzziness, the cells comprising my body are organized as "me" enough that others recognize me as me and not as someone else.
Cancer is only a "broken" state because it's not preferable to you.
And my viewpoint is the one that counts for determining "broken".
So having a long rod is desirable?
:)
I've posted this in another post, and yet again.
A certain irreducible background incidence of cancer is to be expected regardless of circumstances
I think you have mutations and cancer confused. If cancer was a unavoidable fact then we would not have creatures like the naked mole rat that does not EVER
get cancer. I remember hearing that sharks don't get cancer either, but they are not being used in labs to study why they don't get cancer like the naked mole rat is, so it is perhaps less of a scientific fact and more conjecture.
I came across another one following links on the /. article of possible life on mars, killing time research of mine came across this article of a life form that hasn't changed for 3 million years, so no mutation nor cancer which is a mutation (in cancers case, a cell reproduced wrong, and of no benefit).
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
Also when I came across the cite given.
Anecdotal.
LOL. A lot of spit behind them words!
There's more to cancer than mutations resulting in fast-reproducing cells, there's also the failure of the immune system to recognize and kill the bad cells. Reducing that failure is one of the techniques/goals of cancer research and life extension in general.
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