I'm not a billionaire and I'm not old, but I am so excited about anti-aging. I know Hacker News is super negative, but who doesn't want to live longer?! Of all the pain points humans experience, you'd think death lies pretty high on the list. Why are people fighting this?
I sometimes talk about wanting to live forever and get weird stares. Are you joking me?? I want to hike every trail in the world. I want to climb every mountain. I want to play every video game. I want to beat the hardest raids in every expansion of WoW. I want to learn multiple langauges. I want to spend several years living in every biome. I want to learn all of the programming languages. I want to go back to school for more degrees. I want to build several businesses. I want to write computer games from scratch. I want to travel to the stars. I want to live on the moon. I want to live on Mars. I want to get a doctorate degree. Or two or three? Gah, not enough time.
Thankfully death comes along and sorts through the wants from the willing. It has a nice way of making space for a newer generation of thinkers. Old prejudices die, new thinkers arrive.
There's nothing wrong with your thinking. In my humble opinion it shows your personal desires without much concern for everyone else. I guess this is the rub I get from most people that extol the Silicon Valley dream of extending the lives*
*of those that will inevitably be able to pay for it.
>There's nothing wrong with your thinking. In my humble opinion it shows your personal desires without much concern for everyone else.
Oh shush. You know, I've got a 93-year-old grandmother with a damned sharp wit who should not fucking need assisted living and should be able to remember what we were talking about five minutes ago. I've also got a 68-or-so uncle who came down with Parkinson's Disease almost instantly upon his retirement from a lifetime of practicing medicine.
That's not to mention the in-laws with fibromyalgia and the step-father with several "bad lifestyle" diseases.
If your argument in favor of aging and death is, "Indiscriminately inflicting extreme suffering to randomly-selected people for every moment of their lives really helps to freshen up the world", you should reconsider. The problems I mentioned are not unique and special things that happened like a car accident happens. They're just what happens to everyone from living long enough. The bit at the end where you go to sleep and never wake up is nothing; the problem is the decades of suffering followed by that.
People like to assume the natural course its somehow the best course, but its far from the true, the fact its that from a biological perspective its much easier to start from scratch than to remain alive for too long; and that's how evolution works, evolution does not care much about what happens after your reproductive years have gone by (so to speak), maybe only enough so you can take care of your offspring while is needed, but thats about it.
Dragon Flys only live for 4 weeks, but its enough time to reproduce and that's all "mother nature" cares about, and hardly anyone would suggest that living 4 weeks is long enough; so we need to understand our lifespans are just as arbitrary.
The tools that made us successful as a species capped our lifespans. Technology may have changed that equation such that it makes more sense to live longer (or forever), but if immortality had made evolutionary sense up to this point we'd see a few immortals walking around.
For whatever reason, hardcoded death was the more successful route for a species to take. (with some notable exceptions. I believe there are species of lobsters that won't die if you put them in the right environment, I believe a species of jellyfish as well, and then some microorganisms as well)
Mother nature could never have awareness for the contexts in which we live now.
Purely biological success knows nothing of the societies we have built and the knowledge, ability to experience, and the complex contexts within which we all live our lives. Death really doesn't make sense for an individual, and no one is really itching for Humans V1.1 so the idea of letting evolution continue doesn't make much sense either.
If I could stop aging right now, I would be content with what I am capable of. Even if I die in 30 years from bus to head syndrome, I will have been fit and active for those years and that is a much better situation than slowly deteriorating to death.
That is the reality medicine has given us already, and anti-aging is only the focusing of a subset of general health issues that tend to cause problems as we age. It isn't the search for the imoral and exclusive elixr of life as some people seem to claim it is.
Then why are we spending so much energy trying to augment ourselves? Better exercise, better diets, better schools, less disease, etc.
I would say that almost everyone can name something about themselves that they wish evolution had optimized more. (And if not evolution, then direct intervention).
I guess that was my point, no one is expecting to enjoy the benefits of evolution (because of course they will be dead). So the argument of halting evolution or that it goes against the so far proven way to become a better species makes no sense. Better that we focus on working with what we have.
Perhaps the version was number a bad way to express that though!
Basically you are saying that it's better we die so that a new generation can come and then die for others come around just to die to make way for others.
Whats the purpose of that for the individual? Why is that by any metrics desirable for humans to die for other humans to come along to just die for yet others?
Well, I can understand how from your perspective it makes sense for you to want to live forever, but from an evolutionary perspective your species is more successful if you die after a while.
If if immortality didn't have negative consequences as severe as stunting an entire species, we'd probably see more species that were capable of immortal individuals. Such species do exist, but not in the Mammal kingdom as far as I'm aware.
But I also think it sets a good guideline. Death improves a species, because it leaves room for more children + more generations (for a given set of resources), which means more opportunity for improvements to evolutionary fitness.
edit: another commenter pointed out something I think is fairly profound. When a group of cells in your body decides to pursue immortality, it's usually cancer. And if you don't address it, it kills you, and them too. Science theoretically has a way to grant our individual cells immortality without causing cancer, but it'd have to be orchestrated carefully.
You are missing the point. Op claimed that the continuation of adding new life and letting other life die out was important. I am questioning that argument not evolution. Why should i care about the continuation of life for anyone but me.
Those were lives well lived and a lot of the meaning and wisdom now derived from their lives is because they are gone. Same can not be said for the multitude that just wants more time.
All of the meaning and wisdom derived from their lives was because they were alive. Now they aren't, and we don't get any more of their particular genius, and that is a damned shame.
It's also a damned shame that my grandfather, who is precisely nobody on the world stage, but still somebody, and currently in the hospital and I might get a text any minute saying he's dead, is on the brink of exiting the world, joining the hundred billion or so other humans who've ceased to exist for no good reason other than that the blind god Nature doesn't care about anything we care about. What Nature has ordained, she has ordained without reference to meaning or wisdom or the interests of those who live and die within her system, and we will be doing right when we remake her.
Reflection requires pause. It would not be the same if all those people were contemporaries of current modern scientists. In fact I have no clue how much value current scientists are adding or not adding or whether Feynman and friends would still be contributing in any way as you are assuming. The geniuses will appear after some reflection in a hundred years or so. Long after they're all gone.
I'm sorry for your eventual loss but immortality does not appeal to me the way I guess it appeals to others. Cycles in nature don't seem like a disease to me that need curing. Alleviating the pain and suffering of aging is fine and that's what these guys seem to be doing.
Perhaps. There might be a lot more cynicism and conservatism. Our legislators might not have adjusted to the implications of telephone and tv, let alone apps and online privacy.
Oh, I see. You mean we should be able to run on to 200 don't you? ;)
This is probably the best pro-death argument -- the social consequences. The rest can be solved.
But in two to seven decades, when they have this problem, I doubt they will see it as a moral choice to kill (/refuse to save) people because a lot of them will be conservative.
> "orators argued that the dragon has its place in the natural order and a moral right to be fed. They said that it was part of the very meaning of being human to end up in the dragon’s stomach. Others still maintained that the dragon was good for the human species because it kept the population size down"
The article paints death in a very black and white, good-vs-evil picture, but I hold that it's a much more complex mechanism.
And I don't mean to suggest that we should accept death or not pursue the escape of death, but most species (with some notable exceptions) who have enjoyed evolutionary success have death hardcoded into their genome.
Which suggests to me that over a sufficient timescale (probably dozens to thousands of generations), death is beneficial to a species. Death means that there are more resources available to younger generations, and means that you get more cycles of genetic optimization. That makes the species more successful as a whole.
Humans may find some way to get optimization cycles that don't involve death, but I hold the opinion that if we don't continuously pursue optimization cycles, we'll eventually be out-competed evolutionary by something that does. We have a huge head start, but in the fable, so did the dragon.
Something doesn't need to be beneficial to be conserved, being not too harmful is enough. Or even being harmful but pointlessly crosslinked with something essential such that it's hard for evolution to escape the local minima.
More over, human values are not the same as the objectives of evolution, nor should they be.
> but I hold the opinion that if we don't continuously pursue optimization cycles
We can undermine the optimization of evolution just fine, without ending death from aging--
I seem to recall that both of us wear corrective lenses, thus largely excluding the selective pressure for naturally better eyesight that we might otherwise be subjected to. :)
With that in mind, it's something of a false choice that you present: It's not like mankind is subject to the full force of evolutionary pressure with aging and completely free of it without.
Besides, I seem to recall the the rate for accidental death in adults suggests that we'd end up with a roughly 500 year life span even if we completely cured all aging related issues. A lot longer in human terms, but hardly anything for evolution.
Another perspective would be that the biggest threat to mankinds survival isn't anything evolution is well equip to protect us from-- us killing ourselves with phenomenal weapons and bad policy. Because our bad decisions could wipe our mankind worldwide evolution has no real chance to fabricate less problematic future humans. ... But perhaps humans acting in their own perpetually immortal interest might just behave a little more prudently.
> Humans may find some way to get optimization cycles that don't involve death, but I hold the opinion that if we don't continuously pursue optimization cycles, we'll eventually be out-competed evolutionary by something that does. We have a huge head start, but in the fable, so did the dragon.
I think we're pretty safe. Evolution works really, really slowly. Even the earliest humans recorded optimized their lives much faster than evolution. That's our advantage - a brain that can do the iterations in abstract, many orders of magnitude faster than nature does in matter.
At first I thought the article was going to explain why it isn't worth pursuing agelessness, but I'm impressed at how well it wrapped everything up. Great article, thanks.
I'm disappointed that this isn't the top-rated response, because I think it's totally fair. The parent post resonated with me incredibly -- I want to do all the things. Yes, I fully expect to die in a motorcycle accident far from modern health care. I'm ok with that. I suspect the parent would agree.
"I f*cked up spectacularly" is an acceptable way to go. "I watched a lot of TV" is not. 80 years is not long enough to attempt all the spectacular things.
Hah, yea, good point. Honestly though, I live in northern California, and I have climbed a good handful of the 10k peaks around here, but there are just so many more I have not had the time to visit. So many parts of the Pacific Crest Trail that I havn't been able to hike. And that's just stuff in a 2 hour drive. I've climbed a few dozen of the Tahoe peaks, but there are so many more to do. Over the past few years, I've probably gotten to a mountain top once every 4 weeks. Some months I go every weekend, other months I get busy with other things. I never want to do Everest. But, there are some 14k in Denver that might be fun. Believe me, I'll hike more trails and mountains than most people, but there are just so many hikes, and not enough weekends.
Not enough time? Perhaps, but forever is a long time. Quite possibly it's exactly our limited time that has us achieve great things. If you have all the time in the world why bother starting that business or learning that new skill today? Might as well start tomorrow ...
I also find it at least a bit disturbing that WoW is so high on that list. Then again, if you have all the time in the world ...
Also, no one is trying for immortality. You will still die, just not from standard health decline. Hack, why not at least try and see what happens, going back to normal dying will be easy (depending on the cure, but most likely).
Depending on the solution, normal dying might indeed be impossible. I remember a piece of dystopian fiction (I think it was an Outer Limits episode) where characters couldn't even kill themselves anymore because nanobots would instantly repair any damage.
Not that this scenario is extremely likely but there might be ramifications we can't think about yet. Immortality after all isn't a particularly well-trodden path.
The items were not listed in order. I've had a couple spins of playing WoW and DotA, and often times the reason I quit are because there are so many other things I want to do. I work full time, I have a rental property, I have a small business (with my wife), 1 dog, 3 cats, no kids yet, but soon hopefully. We get outdoors, go camping, visit family. Probably getting into sailing next summer. Life's great. Don't get me wrong. But, dang. With "forever" I could get so much done. I'm also fairly patient, and conservative, so with time on my side, the safest investments will pay off well. But, then again, if you have time to work, why not jump into the risky investments. If you lose everything, you can just rebuild. Maybe a hybrid of both approaches. However, if death were cured, then money, investing, and finance would probably change quite radically as well.
I love thinking about this concept. I hope that over the next 20 years, they figure out how to extend life to 125 years, so that then in the following 20-40 years they can extend life indefinitely. Here's to hoping.
I disagree. I believe that a big reason kids are so good at learning and trying things is that they haven't yet internalized the concept of "not enough time" - there's always shitloads of time; if not today, then tomorrow. If not this summer, then next summer. When you don't have to worry about running out of time, you don't mind blowing it on learning stuff.
There's the rub. The feeling of "There's just not enough time." precisely stems from the fact that our time is limited. If that's no longer given that feeling might disappear from humanity entirely, which in turn could lead to stagnation and ultimately - and ironically - to mankind dying out.
The guy on the farm next door is happy killing leopards which threaten his sheep. Leopards are endangered. He doesn't care, in his world view there have always been many Leopards.
He has his reasons for wanting to kill leopards, but eventually humans are going to kill them all and that can't be right.
Like you, I'm excited by the idea of living longer, but it's selfish. For the world it would be better if we lived even shorter. You'd have a faster churn of ideas. Think of ignorant people consuming ivory or rhino horn out of ignorance. This ignorant generation is going to wipe out these animals outside zoos and tiny protected reserves. Their children would likely be more educated and likely not follow the ignorant behaviour of their parents. But the parents(we) live too long.
I'm sure there is an analogue in my appetite for beef and the destruction of the Amazon or my desire to own and drive a fossil fuel driven vehicle.
That is, unless you get yourself a time-traveling space ship and dedicate yourself to the engrossing project of personally insulting every single being in the universe, in alphabetical order.
Like the movie the green mile you may not want to live forever when everyone you love dies and that cycle continues over and over. Emotionally you might wish you too followed the cycle of life all those you love were following.
I'm in my mid 30's. There are a few hikes that I do repeatedly. One to a peak, one to a riverbed. I've done them dozens of time. Sitting by the rushing water, no cars, no people, no industrial sounds, trees everywhere. Rejuvenates me every time.
Yea, there are typically trees, bushes, rocks and dirt on every trail. But, they're different. Even the same trail changes over time. Trees fall, views change. Sometimes you see a deer. Sometimes you find a crazy looking flower, or bug, or plant. Sometimes it's just exhilarating to hike quickly and elevate your heartrate in the crisp cold mountain air.
I know what you're saying though. I have been on a trail, where it was the first time on that trail, and I though, geez, same ol' same ol'. But, I quickly forgot that a few minutes later as I left the highway, and got deeper in the wilderness.
I love it. As I mentioned earlier, I work a full time. Sitting at a desk. So, these times on the trail are so refreshing.
Obviously, I'd like to maintain my body and will. When I was in Maryland for a year, my landlady was 104 years old, and quite sharp. Her daughter was 80 and crazy spry. Every day my landlady would be out on the porch, cleaning and organizing. She couldn't run around, and she was probably past the point where I'd enjoy spending eternity, but the point is that her bloodline was amazing. I could certainly spend an eternity with the health that her 80 year old daughter had. She could pick up her grandson, and get around the yard just fine.
Part of the whole agelessness thing is that some of the mechanics of how our cells breakdown and begin to fail would need to be cured. At which point, our bones, and muscles, if cured of that deterioration, would lead to curing death, but it would also lead to the ability to maintain your health and body. As long as you continue to exercise, and eat well, you'd probably have a body similar to an average fit modern 40 year old I'd expect. Or somewhere between the crazy metabolism of 20 year olds, and the deterioration of 70 year olds.
I don't know any of the science though, so just speculating based on what I've read, and my opinions.
I dunno. Constraints give us meaning. They're what force us to make choices, and it's choices and opportunity costs that let us define who we are at people. If we lived forever, we wouldn't have to make any hard choices - we'd just do it all. And paradoxically, being able to do it all means that none of it means anything.
It's like playing a game with all the cheats on. Sure, they let you "win" super easily, but because it was super easy, it stops being fun.
You could still just as easily get hit by a car when you are 90 and look 20. Or 1000 and look 20, assuming that's even possible. What's really interesting is if people could actually prolong their lifespan indefinitely but we have the same limited bodies. Then you'll see people trying really hard to say alive to comical effect.
I think Aronofsky's The Fountain is a really great outlook on death. It is a disease and like any disease we may as well try hard to defeat it. Doesn't mean it isn't very natural.
That seems even more meaningless though, to make the moment of your death random rather than mostly-predictable. I mean, it'd suck to live my life like I had a million years and then get hit by a bus tomorrow.
It might be unthinkable to someone in the future that we could experience the universe meaningfully in 100 years.
I tend to see human-lifespan rationalizations as simple fatalism. It's okay to think you'd get bored after a million years, but dooming every living human to die because you'd be bored is kind of insane if you think about it.
Why are we so afraid of change of different experiences? Aging is not hell. It may teach us humility. It may give us the opportunity to question our priorities.
Ultimately all the human race will die. Over a short or a long span only learning will matter.
Have you seen people needlessly suffer in old age? Stooped backs, sore joints, limited abilities, dementia.
On the contrary, talking to my 82-year old professor who is sharper than most college kids but has constant health problems and I wish we could beat aging.
You're right, we shouldn't be afraid of different experiences, but that doesn't also mean that fighting aging is bad. We could apply your arguments to all medical care, but we don't because there's no point in needlessly suffering.
It comes from reverence for naturalism. It's similar in that sense to other movements, like anti-GMO, anti-vax, etc.
Tell people you want to cure cancer and you're a hero. Tell people you want to cure age-related decline and eventually death and you're a weirdo extremist.
I'm excited for ant-aging, not so much for an endless deluge of VC backed treatments/supplements that aren't grounded in science and/or ineffective.
Besides, lifestyle needs to be addressed first. Reduce/eliminate risky behaviors, eat correctly (whatever that may be), and exercise regularly. Then perhaps look into supplements and treatments.
Some vegans die at their 60s of "natural causes", Winston Churchill died at 90 after having smoked all his life and being very fat. Yeah, statistically there is relevance to eat correctly, but its not as dramatic as some like to believe.
I'm not sure how controversial the opinion is, but it's pretty clear to me that immortality is harmful to a species in the vast majority of cases.
Evolution is a constant processes of competition. When members of a species start living longer, the upgrading of their gene pool slows down. The older members maintain their old ideas and ways of life, and they soak up resources that crowd out the younger members.
The environment is constantly changing. Thanks to all the other organisms that are evolving, it's not enough to become the apex predator and then stagnate. Organisms are always finding a new way to take advantage of their environment, which includes the other organisms.
For this reason, I do not think that any single individual will ever be immortal, and probably not even a collective. That would require gaining control of the universe's resources in a way that guarantees they never lose it.
Decentralization is inherent to the functioning of the universe. The speed of light ensures that multiple decisions be made in parallel. Those that make the most self interested decisions will be competitive, and while that often means participating as a group, no biological group that I know of is entirely devoid of selfish behavior among its members.
Immortality is largely incompatible with evolution and competition.
>Immortality is largely incompatible with evolution and competition.
That's an incredibly good argument in favor of immortality. "Evolution" and "competition" are not gods. They do not have any moral authority over us. Our entire civilization has been built on the principle of not subjecting ourselves to Darwinian survival-selection.
That aside, you should probably go count ducks in a swamp or do some other ecological fieldwork before talking about the evolutionary fitness of organisms or ecosystems. You sound atrocious at biology.
> Our entire civilization has been built on the principle of not subjecting ourselves to Darwinian survival-selection.
I don't believe it's something you can escape. It largely boils down to the idea of infinite wants vs. finite resources. Bostrom and co. like to talk about how there's enough energy in the universe to power 10^XX human lifetimes, but I strongly don't believe that a human is going to be the ultimate lifeform. Already we can see that the average first-world human today uses substantially more energy than the average human 1000 years ago.
Unless we hit a ceiling on complexity (not currently in sight), there will always be people who want access to more energy. Since energy is finite, there will be competition between them for that energy. And that will more or less result in Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest, at least as far as some individuals/groups/organisms/species will be better at getting access to individuals as others.
I guess the other alternative is that we hit an entirely egalitarian society, but I think that's exceedingly unlikely, as it would require everybody to agree 100% to limit their energy consumption to exactly what they've been allocated, and not to try to acquire more.
> That aside, you should probably go count ducks in a swamp or do some other ecological fieldwork before talking about the evolutionary fitness of organisms or ecosystems. You sound atrocious at biology.
I appreciate the criticism, and apologize for the sloppy metaphors. Evolution thus far though has very clearly favored death as the primary means of design. Few species have remained unchanged over the past XX million years, and even fewer are theoretically capable of immortality (barring some sort of medical intervention). Most organisms have aging hardcoded into their genome.
>I strongly don't believe that a human is going to be the ultimate lifeform.
Once again, you sound atrocious at biology. Using terms like "ultimate lifeform" isn't even real biology, it's anime and video game "biology(tm)". Real-world evolution has no teleology built into it: there's no "ultimateness" to reach towards.
>Evolution thus far though has very clearly favored death as the primary means of design.
Evolution doesn't really favor anything, as such. Death happens because the Second Law of Thermodynamics makes even the most robust systems (and life is really robust, actually) break down eventually.
>I guess the other alternative is that we hit an entirely egalitarian society
So to be clear, you think an "egalitarian society" (your words) is even less likely than human immortality, despite the fact that relatively egalitarian human societies have been observed in, say, Sweden, while immortality has not.
Have you considered that you may be Ebeneezer Scrooge?
Probably, because they somehow revere age-related death as something more than it is (see all the comments about making space for new generations and so on). Age-related death is simply another sickness or the accumulation of sicknesses that finally overwhelms your body and strikes you down. And like every other sickness, I hope we get rid of it as fast as possible. Unfortunately, it will probably take longer than my lifetime until that happens.
>Of all the pain points humans experience, you'd think death lies pretty high on the list. Why are people fighting this?
Because nobody ever seems to go around funding peer-reviewed medical science done in well-controlled labs with large sample sizes to study how to fight aging.
This is not a problem that a startup company can solve. This is a problem for steady, difficult progress over decades. But people go for the sexy headline rather than the eventual working solution.
How much steady, difficult progress is currently being made?
This seems like a thing that is being under-funded and under-researched, and more money, and particularly attention, being given to it is a good thing even if you don't think the particular method is likely to be effective.
I absolutely, 100% do not want to extend my life. And for the record, I am quite pleased with my life. I do not fear death, I do not worry about it, it does not concern me. Therefore I do not feel the need to combat it in any way. The good truly does not exist without the bad, life without death, and so on. Walking the path of "controlling" your life and/or death like this seems needy, egotistical, and pretty sad, imo.
You are already extending your life by going to the doctor. What's the difference between that and an anti-aging therapy? How is that even controlling your death? You are going to die one day. It's a fact. How do you want to die? Would you rather die in the worst conditions possible, like it happens to most people nowadays? If you are happy about dying like that, you might as well stop going to the doctor. Fact is, even if you don't realize, we have been 'manipulating' death for a long time. I think what's egotistical is your comment, honestly. You are basically opposing to a therapy which would remove plenty of suffering from the world, starting with reducing the chances of cancer, removing Alzheimer, etc., yet you don't want to remove it because evolution decided that living indefinitely was not advantageous for human survivability, and so we should not touch that. Heck, what's the point of technology if not to improve our daily lives? Should we oppose to all technology?
I actually don't expect anything. I get what I get, that's all. Expectation is a problem, generally speaking. Actively killing myself is quite different from un-attaching myself to the concept of an expected X number of years on this earth.
Well, to belabor the point, not walking out into traffic without looking is evidence of self-preserving instincts. Again from there its a matter of degree.
Admittedly I am also of the school of 'be safe as long as it doesn't take too much mental stress'. I'll live as long as I live, given flu shots and careful driving. But I'm not going to obsess about it either.
Let's talk again after you had the "great" experience of waiting in an ER for your end thanks to cancer, if you really do not fear death (or rather do not miss all the things you'd still want to do with your life).
Ok, should I text you or something when that happens? You're taking a very black-and-white approach to what I said. I never stated that I wouldn't have the very natural and human urge to continue life or the feeling of missing out on what could have happened, should I find myself at death's door any time soon. What I said is that I try not to attach myself to those feelings. I see absolutely no value in letting a 100% factual eventuality concern my living, breathing moments in any way whatsoever. That doesn't mean I don't eat healthy or avoid obvious paths to an "early" death. It just means I do not think about it (fear, worry, regret, whatever), as this thinking wouldn't be fruitful for me. Is that not understandable, even if you don't agree with this way?
I'd love to live longer if I could stay young throughout. Death is not a pain point for me, but old age is. After watching my grandparents slowly lose control over their bodies, I don't wish to go through that same phase.
Some aspects of living longer I'd love to have - more experiences, more knowledge and so forth.
If we achieve this, but don't reduce input, longer life will just mean we live to see the crash. So in order to have long life how can we stop the growth, and ideally reduce, the human population without totalitarian approaches?
Before solving aging we need to solve achieving a genuinely sustainable number for the planet and its biosphere.
So long as increased longevity also comes with better geriatric health overall, I'm very much on board. A life worth living is not just avoiding death, it's also being able to physically and mentally function properly as well.
Humans should not be immortal like gods until they attain godlike control of their impulse to consume and reproduce. If we get total liberation from nature's constraints (already 90% there), without evolving a corresponding ability to plan and resource long term, it will make the ecological disaster we're already witnessing 1000X worse and we'll likely destroy ourselves anyway.
I'm not saying death doesn't suck or that I wouldn't like to save my loved ones from the suffering that comes with old age, of course as an individual I would. Still extending life is a terrible idea from an ecologist point of view. How about while we're at it we extend the life of and provide unlimited food and protection from predation to elk? That would go real well right? Right now we are no different than Elk in our ability to manage our own consumption.
To people who say "oh we'll figure it out" I say yeah maybe but we're already wrecking this earth as it is, why add fuel to the fire? And everyone will have to die someday anyway and it will still suck.
As a counterpoint, perhaps when the next generation's crop of CEOs begins this anti-aging therapy, it will occur to them that it's prudent to plan ahead a bit further than the next quarterly profit report.
Right now, your average upper level executive knows they've got maybe 40-50 good years ahead of them before it's game over. In that light, the pervasive mindset of "make as much money as you can as fast as you can, all else be damned" makes some sense, as the cash required to keep them and their loved ones comfortable for life can be realistically obtained in a short time. When you're looking 400+ years in the future, though, that picture changes dramatically. Considering the bigger long-term perspective becomes much more personally, viscerally important.
When I read about projected consequences of climate change, most of the worst ones will be after I'm dead, and it quickly becomes abstract to me. I care, but not nearly as much as I would if I had a reasonable certainty of being stuck here in the middle of all that.
I tend to agree with you. On the other hand, being 'immortal' might be a pretty good incentive to start considering long-term problems. And especially since the first generations of 'immortals' would probably be the ultra-wealthy and ultra-powerful, that might actually do some good!
Ending aging won't make humans immortal. Humans will still die in car crashes, suicides, murders, bath slips, etc. All ending aging will do is stop us from dying slowly by decrepitude.
Life expectancy without aging is something like 550 years [1] - not my idea of immortality.
Not only it is taxing on planet earth I think there is more to it. Assume people of middle ages lived 1000 years longer than they did, I doubt the civilization on earth would have developed as far as it did.
To progress we need people to die and the new to born with radical ideas.
That's a fairly large assumption. Students need 24 years of education to get to Phd level before they reach the state of the art and push things forward. If we lived longer with augmented brain power we would have more experts in fields and thus more progress. My assertion isn't any less refutable than yours.
People do not develop interests in chronological lockstep with each other. Consider that there may be a pool of people who do not develop interests in mathematics or science until their late 20s, at which point they rationally decide it is too late to make a career of it. Increased longevity would open that pool of creative thought.
A corollary to that: removing time constraints would allow people to engage with a much broader range of experiences in a very deep way, possibly enhancing creativity and cross-fertilization of ideas.
does death suck ? I've never tried it, personally I find life has it's downsides, so to fear something I've never tried seems irrational ? I like children, and old people, if the old people don't get going at some point, where do we put the children?
On the other hand people breed less as they amuse themselves with the internet, cable and video games. The fertility rate in much of Europe is well below what's needed to keep the population constant.
In one of his AMAs he said something a bit different:
Q: What do you think about life-extending and immortality research?
A: It seems pretty egocentric while we still have malaria and TB for rich people to fund things so they can live longer. It would be nice to live longer though I admit.
Which really just scratches the surface of the enormously amount of research accumulated since the 1960s on the role of senescent cells in aging and age-related diseases. The lung tissue paper above is a particularly good read if you want to get a sense for the nuts and bolts of the issue. Senescent cells secrete signals that disrupt tissue structure and cellular behavior, and even at 1% of the population, that is enough to produce pathology. But on the other hand, 1% is small enough to clear without major disruption, so targeted destruction is a very plausible technology, and removing some fraction of these cells as a one-time treatment should be all upside. Repeat as needed.
You are right on the mechanism, wrong on the solution. The problem is that senescent cells (aging) are an evolved response to prevent cancer - basically aging is an anti-oncogenic system. Remove the senescent cells and you will die of cancer at a young age.
Aging and cancer are tightly intertwined and you can't cure aging without first curing cancer.
Seems like exposure to mild stressors would be a good way to cause senescent cells to go apoptotic. Calorie restriction, exercise, hypoxia, heat shock, etc.
I just finished a book by Nick Lane where he discussed how he believes aging is cause by mitochondrial free-radical leakage. His hypothesis (and he is a smart guy) is that science will allow people to live longer, but probably not much longer than 125.
His hypothesis (and he is a smart guy) is that science will allow people to live longer, but probably not much longer than 125.
Not exactly! I just finished the same book and the exact quote is: I doubt we will ever find a way of living much beyond 120 by merely fine-tuning our physiology.
So he's a smart guy indeed! He says that there still may be ways to extend lifespan, but they have to be more radical compared to just fine-tuning physiology.
enter new organs growth. Any organ, except for the brain, could be replaced by a new one, and thus there is no limit. Brain probably too can be updated in some ways, we just don't know how yet.
im not a biologist (anyone qualified to comment please do) but i dont think the new organs will stop the free-radical leakage. it occurs in every cell in your body, organs are only a small portion of those cells.
The Vital Question. As a layman -- and an audio book listener -- this wasn't an easy book to get through! Still, it caused me to sit and think a little, and that was the whole point.
I would love to get involved with a company like this, however I am only a software engineer with no background in the biological sciences. Is there a feasible path that does not involve going back to school for many years? I am not afraid of learning new things or doing the hard work I'd need to do, I just feel like that route would be highly inefficient. I would really like to contribute towards meaningfully extending human lifespan, don't really care about the salary.
In the short term, get the highest-paying software engineering job you can, and donate a meaningful part of your income to charitable organizations working on anti-aging research such as SENS. (Check if your employer matches charitable donations, as well.) Much more efficient and effective than rethinking your entire career just so you can add one person's worth of time to such an effort.
(That's not to say "don't work on the problem directly", and there are jobs in that effort for software engineers, but don't feel like you can't contribute unless you can directly work on the problem.)
I'm currently sponsoring a matching fund for new recurring supporters of SENS, starting in November: every new recurring donation gets matched for a year, up to $24k. See https://www.fightaging.org/fund-research/
I'm in much the same boat. I have great admiration for those who have pulled off the mid-life career switch into biotechnology. There's one of those folk at the Buck Institute working on senescent cells with Judith Campisi of UNITY, in fact, transitioned over from a former entrepreneurial business career. He quit that, went back to school, and there he is, being a scientist and advancing the state of the art: http://www.buckinstitute.org/content/kevin-perrott
But for me, the math works out such that the road of greatest efficiency is to channel money into research funding via organizations like the SENS Research Foundation that I know are going to make good use of it, and have a great track record of making good use of past donations.
There are undoubtedly other efforts that could benefit from parent's CS skills -- much more than just at this company: university labs, startups, non-profits, etc. We need more people to combine CS with other fields to make this world a better place -- not just CS for CS' sake (or fintech, apps, web, etc).
meerkats1, I assure you: The "work to donate" mantra commonly touted for charities does not apply. There are plenty of organizations looking for top CS talent, and they're willing to pay real salaries. Get out there and ask friends for introductions, send emails to biotech people in your area, etc.
I'm a grad student studying a field known as bioinformatics. Basically, we come in to do the computer work for the biologists. We are in very high demand, as most biological research today generates huge quantities of data, and most biologists don't have the skills to deal with it.
The good news for someone like you is that I've met a number of people with a lot of experience in the computer side of things but little to no biology knowledge. There are in fact a lot of projects that could benefit from a good programmer/data analyst even if they don't know much biology. A lot of bioinformaticians just pick up the biology they need to know about their project as they go. Grad school would also be another route. A lot of bioinformatics programs are catered to people lacking either the biology or computer side of things. A good student could get into one of these programs without needing to go back and do a separate undergraduate degree.
I hope that helps! It's too bad that you can't pm people through this site, or I'd have no problems answering any questions if you were interested in hearing more. That said, there are a number of friendly online communities, such as the bioinformatics subreddit.
I'm sure most labs would kill for a 'don't care about the salary' skilled software engineer. You might start out just following orders but once you're on the ground floor you'll pick up the jargon, you'll see what research is currently 'hot', and if you pay attention and stay informed you'll find yourself moving in the direction of industry expertise.
As long as you can get your foot in the door there's no requirement to go back to school.
Count me in. I dont need money, I need datasets and biologists, I can provide the engineering, data science and computing capacity. Biologists contact me!
The concept of retiring will disappear relatively soon. I don't even think we will be working 8 or 10 hours every day. I think society will make a shift when it comes to work.
People can't help themselves. I don't think we're very close to retiring, it's just not in our social coding.
Today, to live free of work, you need about $500,000. There are groups of people dedicated to achieving this (FIRE / Moustaches). Then you live somewhere cheap, make sound investments, and live off of $25k / yr. In the right places, less than 1/4 of that will go towards rent.
If our primary concern as a society was escaping work, we'd be better at it. Most of our modern economy goes towards making things better, not cheaper (phones, transportation, entertainment, etc.).
We're already at a point where as a society we have the tech to live off of 10 hour work weeks. But we'd have to focus our economy on making a low standard of living cheap, instead of focusing it on raising the standard of living.
It's well-proven in mice but the quantities of blood needed are gargantuan and make a transfusion-based approach extremely difficult. The most effective mouse models have used parabiosis -- not a palatable or moral technique for humans. However, there's ongoing research to isolate and synthesize the chemical factors responsible for the effect -- which may provide a viable therapy.
(Source: my girlfriend worked in a lab studying young blood.)
He obviously doesn't talk about it because it's super weird and vampire like, but Inc. did an interesting story about it last spring. I don't know that there's proof that he's doing it per se, but strong evidence in that direction. The evidence:
1. There's a pharma / plasma company in Monterey named Ambrosia. [1]
2. Ambrosia is running a study titled "Young Donor Plasma Transfusion and Age-Related Biomarkers" [2]
3. This study is patient funded, participants volunteered and pay $8k to recevie regular infusions of plasma from donors <25 years old.
4. Ambrosia didn't advertise or fundraise beyond seeking patients.
5. Ambrosia's CEO received a call from Jason Camm, an 'Angel Investor' at Thiel Capital who was interested in learning about what the company was doing.
6. Jason Camm isn't actually an investor, he's Peter Thiel's "Personal Health Director". His professional profile claims that he "Enables his clients to make radical breakthroughs in their immediate day-to-day health, cognitive functioning and physical performance -- all of which increase their prospects for Optimal Health and significant Lifespan Extension."
7. A year before the Inc. article, Thiel brought up parabiosis unprompted to a journalist but didn't think there was much of a business case for it, just a personal-health impact.
Which includes reference to the latest research they've published, on senescent cells in atherosclerosis pathology. This crowd likes timing their press and their research releases.
My comments:
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The whispers of late have had it that UNITY Biotechnology was out raising a large round of venture funding, and their latest press release shows that this was indeed the case. The company, as you might recall, is arguably the more mainstream of the current batch of startups targeting the clearance of senescent cells as a rejuvenation therapy. The others include Oisin Biotechnologies, SIWA Therapeutics, and Everon Biosciences, all with different technical approaches to the challenge. UNITY Biotechnology is characterized by a set of high profile relationships with noted laboratories, venture groups, and big names in the field, and, based on the deals they are doing, appear to be focused on building a fairly standard drug development pipeline: repurposing of apoptosis-inducing drug candidates from the cancer research community to clear senescent cells, something that is being demonstrated with various drug classes by a range of research groups of late. Senescent cells are primed to apoptosis, so a nudge in that direction provided to all cells in the body will have little to no effect on normal cells, but tip a fair proportion of senescent cells into self-destruction. Thus the UNITY Biotechnology principals might be said to be following the standard playbook to build the profile of a hot new drug company chasing a hot new opportunity, and clearly they are doing it fairly well so far.
So this, I think, bodes very well for the next few years of rejuvenation research. It indicates that at least some of the biotechnology venture community understands the likely true size of the market for rejuvenation therapies, meaning every human being much over the age of 30. It also demonstrates that there is a lot of for-profit money out there for people with credible paths to therapies to treat the causes of aging. It remains frustrating, of course, that it is very challenging to raise sufficient non-profit funds to push existing research in progress to the point at which companies can launch. This is a problem throughout the medical research and development community, but it is especially pronounced when it comes to aging. The SENS view of damage repair, which has long incorporated senescent cell clearance, is an even tinier and harder sell within the aging research portfolio - but one has to hope that funding events like this will go some way to turn that around.
From the perspective of being an investor in Oisin Biotechnologies, I have to say that this large and very visible flag planted out there by the UNITY team is very welcome. The Oisin team should be able to write their own ticket for their next round of fundraising, given that the gene therapy technology they are working on has every appearance of being a superior option in comparison to the use of apoptosis-inducing drugs: more powerful, more configurable, and more adaptable. When you are competing in a new marketplace, there is no such thing as too much validation. The existence of well-regarded, well-funded competitors is just about the best sort of validation possible. Well funded competitors who put out peer-reviewed studies on a regular basis to show that the high-level approach you and they are both taking works really well is just icing on the cake. Everyone should have it so easy. So let the games commence! Competition always drives faster progress. Whether or not I had skin in this game, it would still be exciting news. The development of rejuvenation therapies is a game in which we all win together, when new treatments come to the clinic, or we all lose together, because that doesn't happen fast enough. We can and should all of us be cheering on all of the competitors in this race. The quality and availability of the outcome is all that really matters in the long term. Money comes and goes, but life and health is something to be taken much more seriously.
Now with all of that said, one interesting item to ponder in connection to this round of funding for UNITY is the degree to which it reflects the prospects for cancer therapies rather than the prospects for rejuvenation in the eyes of the funding organizations. In other words, am I being overly optimistic in reading this as a greater understanding of the potential for rejuvenation research in the eyes of the venture community? It might be the case that the portions of the venture community involved here understand the market for working cancer drugs pretty well, and consider that worth investing in, with the possibility of human rejuvenation as an added bonus, but not one that is valued appropriately in their minds. Consider that UNITY Biotechnology has partnered with a noted cancer therapeutics company, and that the use of drugs to inducing apoptosis is a fairly well established approach to building cancer treatments. That is in fact why there even exists a range of apoptosis-inducing drugs and drug candidates for those interested in building senescent cell clearance therapies to pick through. Further, the presence of large numbers of senescent cells does in fact drive cancer, and modulating their effects (or removing them) to temper cancer progress is a topic under exploration in the cancer research community. So a wager on a new vision, or a wager on the present market? It is something to think about.
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Billionaires are not immune to the terrifying realities of life and death, they're just more likely to delude themselves into thinking that like so many rules, they can beat that too. The result is, on the bright side, that sometimes they do some real good by funding research. The downside is that often they blow that money on extremely expensive snake oil.
He still needs money to fund, for example, his cryogenic payments. He wears that little metal bracelet everywhere he goes (I got to a lot of conferences), I can't imagine the service is cheap.
This is accurate. The absolute cheapest option is around $35k plus an annual membership fee (or a one-time few-k fee I believe). The more premium (but head-only) option is $80k plus annual membership fee. (A bit more if you opt for a standby team.) A life insurance policy that covers these amounts does not cost very much.
Sure, most people bang some form of this drum, but when they do people chuckle. When someone starts swinging tens of millions of dollars whiling banging the drum though... people pay attention. For some strange reason though, they stop seeing it for what it is... dazzled by the money as they are.
I don't understand this belief, can you expand on it? The way I see it, you don't "lose" anything when you die, because a "loss" implies the lack of ability to use something you once were able to use, and the feeling that comes from that lacking. When someone dies they'll never again be able to use stuff, so there is no loss.
I think we agree up to "a 'loss' implies the lack of ability to use something you once were able to use". Since a dead person is unable to do anything, being a billionaire or not leads to the same conclusion.
Where we differ is on the feeling that comes from that lacking. A dead person feels nothing and by your definition is not losing anything since they can't feel it.
this is all very true and I agree, however as humans we can sense impending events and a since death is an indisputable fact the feeling of this eventual loss can begin to haunt one before it actually sets in. So technically we can argue that a billionaire begins to feel the cost of losing it when she becomes a billionaire. (since she knows she will die and lose it).
You think, when billionaires think about death, that they're bemoaning the loss of their money? That's a very strange thing to believe, and I'm very sure it's wrong.
The planet has no needs at all, and human longevity is unlikely to be a major issue when most of our human ventures center around efficient ways of killing each other.
Unknown. There is are reasons to believe that longevity isn't necessarily a bad thing however, and many reasons to believe that it could have global value. You have to remember that in such a rosy future, we still have the oceans to colonize, and then space. Longevity would bring problems with it, but they could be solved by sensible controls on birth rates.
That's blatantly incorrect. The radical majority of human ventures center around improving the quality of life for humans on the planet. An extremely small percentage of human ventures are focused on finding new ways to kill (less than 1%). US defense spending for example - most of which goes to human soldier expenses for pay / benefits / veterans etc - is merely 3% of US GDP. The actual amount of that 3% that goes into figuring out new ways to kill, is less than Google's revenue. In other words, you missed by greater than a factor of 100x (I'd guess greater than 1000x) in your estimation regarding how much effort/money/time humans as a whole are putting into killing each other.
Yes, because a huge part of the reason people disregard climate science today is because many of the people with the decision making authority to invest in actually correcting for it also judge they won't be alive to suffer from the consequences.
Make humans live forever and suddenly everything matters. Interplanetary colonization for the preservation of the species alone is not enough, but to preserve themselves it becomes essential.
Why develop Type 2 civilization power generation technology if you would never live long enough to see the transition? Make people live longer and you increase the likelihood the long term becomes relevant to them.
That's the theory. Practically, almost all humans don't give a shit about the 5-year consequences of their actions even though they will most likely leave at least another 50 years.
You say we're royally fucked, meanwhile the condition of human existence, or the standard of living at the median, has done nothing but drastically improve over the last 5,000 / 500 / 100 / 50 years.
We're the exact opposite of royally fucked. We've been dealt the greatest hand imaginable. Improvements in the human condition are accelerating by the decade.
When you look at the equation of what you do with your life it starts to become more of an imperative to work on ending aging because if that is solved it gives you an infinite or at least much longer time to work on whatever else you want. I am now also starting to get pangs to work on climate damage mitigation because it won't be fun to live in a super hot or flooded world.
Life extension would really help environmental concerns. The problem with things like global warming, ocean acidification, biodiversity collapse, etc. is that the negative effects are usually too far in the future. But if you're actually going to be around that long, it suddenly becomes a matter of self-interest.
Life extension industry is too early. It is much more productive to work on other problems (e.g. solving more immediate problems and do scientific research to help solving these immediate problems).
Then later, when technology is robust enough - meaningfully invest into actual anti-aging efforts.
Unfortunately the time for meaningful anti-aging research may come in ~100 years when we all would be already long dead.
I actually found the martian anti-age drug from Spin very well designed. If you would take it, you would be sterile afterwards and it would reduce your ability to aggressively compete with other society members, thus allowing for a longer live, while making room for others.
I know you're making a joke, but a lot of people say this and it always irks me slightly. This narrative that if rich people fund X universally desirable thing, then only rich people will have X. This is literally never the case in the history of technology. Yes, the rich get it first, but it filters down to poor people really really quickly, especially in the modern age where costs fall at an insane pace.
Sorry, didn't mean to respond overly seriously to a lighthearted comment! Just wanted to get that in there.
In technology, sure. In somewhat less easy to define things, not so much. Rich people tend to have better education, better health care, less worries and stress (or at least less existential worries and better coping mechanisms), and better "life opportunities" as far as anything that requires money is concerned. Poor people can't work in industries where unpaid internships are commonplace for example, because they need to earn money for rent and food. Rich people can work for free if they choose to.
Whether a vastly extended lifespan falls under just technology, and thus ends up as something everyone can have, or something else that is actually limited to the rich is something we don't yet know.
For example, if the key to a longer life is technology plus retiring as early as possible to limit stress, poor people aren't going to live longer.
Yes, rich people always have better things. Technology and healthcare are no exception.
I'm not saying that the poor will ever equal the rich contemporaneously. They won't. What they will do is equal the rich of say, ten years ago (perpetually moving forward). That is the nature of progress.
That doesn't really contradict the notion that rich people fund advances which end up enriching everyone's life, it just poorly expresses your envy about rich people having more than you.
In all seriousness, the price for eternal youth will be the cost of production and shipping.
If it turns out to be a compound for eternal youth, then it can be reverse engineered by labs in China or India (or anywhere). There is no sufficient patent, IP law, moral high ground about R&D expenses. The world will be supplied at the cost of production and shipping.
My doctors in the US, were hesitant to give me an MRI for my knee because of costs (~$1000 per MRI). Something about the insurance company needing some prerequisites. Fair enough. My knee really wasn't that bad, and I lived my life. 3 months later I was in India for other reasons. I walked into a clinic, spent $96, two days later I had the results of my MRI. I was handed a CD with the raw image files they collected (MRI specific file format). I had "printouts" of those images. I even had a note in english for a layperson like myself to understand. Later, I took those MRI files to my doctors in the US. They confirmed all the findings, and suggested the same things as the doctors in India and I went along my way. Unprovoked the Ortho looking at my knee and the MRI even exclaimed, "thats the best $100 MRI I've ever seen".
In this case, the total costs of production/shipping were higher than they would have been in the US. But that is because I had to ship myself (i.e. ~$2000 round trip). However, I built it into my vacation, so the MRI essentially cost me the ~$100 for "production". I've had single dinners which are more expensive.
Taking pictures of your body is relatively innocent. Medication is a little more tricky. You need to be able to trust the source. However, if layperson B can trust the source of the Heroin they consistently buy on Silk Road, I have no doubts that the trust issues for medication will be solved far before we have compound "eternal youth".
For what its worth, we just happen to have insurance so we tend to think everyone buys drugs legally like we do. Do some research about what people without options actually do. Did you watch the "Dallas Buyers Club"? Where do you think poor diabetics get Insulin, or Metaformin? Even today, Metaformin being an "anti-aging" drug, is even imported from China and sold without prescription.
If you're still not convinced: Think about the risk reward calculation for a second. Importing illegal drugs, risk (aside from eating bad pills): 50 years in prison. Reward: You're now eternally young. Endure a really poor 50 years, then a long long time from now, watch the universe slowly end as you eat at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, fondly looking back at the last bajillion years.
For example: Is it illegal to buy lab equipment? No. Is it illegal to make medical compounds in your home? No. Is it illegal to violate patent or copyright law with zero intent to distribute and monetize? No.
For a couple 10s or 100s of millions of dollars I could buy the infrastructure to build the compound in my garage. Depending on the legality, potentially use it to feed friends and family as gifts. Sell the infrastructure.
All of a sudden the compound's cost is determined by your ability to buy and sell on craigslist.
Meanwhile, why go through all the trouble? Just go on Yelp, find a reputable seller in Brazil, China, or India (somewhere it is not illegal to buy). Spend $5000 on a vacation, and another couple thousand on the compound. At most (for the poorest people) its a couple years (10 maybe) of debt.
Normal small-molecule drugs are trivial to reverse-engineer, biologics are trickier but the means of manufacturing them is self-replicating, and Shenzhen is good at reverse-engineering other technologies if we're to believe what we read in the media
I highly doubt the process will be a single drug. I can't imagine any way any compound could remove DNA damage[1] for all cells in your body. Of course, if it did that would be great.
Most likely treatment would be some sort of specialized therapy where your DNA is painstakingly copied (with some process that is somehow better than the biological one) and then all the cells in your body are periodically repaired.
Even if we cure aging the median life expectancy might not surpass 1,000 – that is a long time to not get in a car accident, fall off a cliff, be struck by lightning, etc.
The estimated statistic I've heard is that if you eliminated all causes of death related to aging and age-related degeneration, the average life expectancy would be right around 1000.
Which, more importantly, means 930 or so more years to figure out the next solution after that. See also "longevity escape velocity", for how we can incrementally get to 1000 in the first place.
If some anti-aging magic bullet was discovered, the market for it would be insanely huge. Unless the technology is intrinsically complex, capital intensive, or "high-touch," it's going to rapidly decline in price with scale just like any other technology.
Jeff Bezos surely has a diverse set of investments. A clock in a mountain, space travel, anti-aging. Is he trying to create a bionic space conquering society? His mountain clock being +0 and everything else in the galaxy dependent upon it as basis for time.
“We don’t expect people to be living to 150 years, even in the wildest version of success,” he said. “But we do expect people to live free of a variety of chronic diseases.”"
You didn't read the article, just posting the typical "anti-aging" comment, right?
The idea is to be relatively healthy in your old age, not necessarily extend your life by much beyond what the human body can currently live, if it remains free of disease.
In many cases, we spend a fortune in health care costs in the last few years of people's lives. If we can keep more people relatively healthy until they go in their sleep, for example, we'll all be happier and insurance costs should fall.
The idea is to be relatively healthy in your old age, not necessarily extend your life by much beyond what the human body can currently live, if it remains free of disease.
That's a futile approach. What's needed is to suppress the biological changes that come with aging. Aging is a timeout, not a wearout. This is clear because there are diseases which accelerate aging, and the same steps happen, but faster.[1]
There are lots of disagreements and debate about the science of extending the life span, so there is probably not going to be much fruitful results in the near future.
For the short term, you could extend your life by: 1) having a low calorie diet, 2) avoiding foods with high glycemic index, 3) exercise, 4) good sleep
As far as I understand, this is just looking at demographic data, so probably if you do everything like exercise and diet right, and you have good genes, 115 is about the limit. It's basically saying that lifespan isn't going to continually drift upwards about that level with marginal improvements in living standards.
I don't see that we can get anything from that data which gives you clear answers about the potential for direct medical or pharmaceutical interventions to extend life.
This was very much a case of a researcher finding an unnecessarily provocative way of saying that medical technology to date hasn't done much for the processes important in late-stage aging. Which is true. There's only one therapy recently in clinical trials to clear the transthyretin amyloid that appears to be the major cause of death in the oldest people. No other therapy really even touches that form of age-related proteopathy. So the present situation is quite consistent with the appearance of a maximum to human life span, and will continue to be so until such time as the medical research and development community actually start to meaningfully address the forms of damage and waste accumulation that cause high late life mortality.
TTR amyloid most certainly is not the or even a major cause of death in older adults. While associated with cardiomyopathy and nephropathy and etc, it's not associated with coronary artery disease, stroke, or cancer - the main drivers of mortality (yes, even in the oldest people).
My understanding of the upper age limit is that it's the "natural" limit (i.e. if you don't take medicine and gene therapies and such). The goal of these new anti-aging therapies is to raise that natural limit.
