This is not a great article. It leaves out Dr. Sinclairs work, further developing discoveries by Dr. Yamanaka specifically around the four transcription factors (Oct3/4, Sox2, Klf4, and c-myc), turning any cells back into pluripotent stem cells. More important, leaving c-myc disabled, the cell reverts to a younger age. This is what Dr. Sinclair has been working on recently, to completely reverse macular degeneration. He has been able to regrow damaged optic nerves all the way from the eye back to the brain.
Here is a talk he did at Google [1] He briefly talks about the ethics of this here [2].
He looks reasonably young for his age but that could very well be genetics as much as sensible living or following his research; though I didn't watch the video far enough to see if there are reasons that is unlikely.
That's a bit of an exaggeration. I'd put him at his mid-40s. He looks roughly my age. 50 is possible too.
Thing is, you estimate age mostly based on someone's skin, and with clothes on, that means face. It's very superficial. If you've got good skin, you'll look younger. There's a ton of products that will help. There are plenty of celebrities that are older but look younger. (Did you know Cher is 74?)
The most interesting part is really the health benefits: less degradation of various bodily functions, more stamina, better quality of life.
That was his area of focus about a decade or so ago. It turned out not to be as exciting as many thought it would. There are some benefits to TransResveratrol, but not what people were hoping for. Here is an interview with Dr. Rhonda Patrick and he talks about longevity genes. [1] I believe he covers TransResveratrol here. He also talks about reversing the Horvath Clock and reversing damage to optic nerves.
Could you summarize please? I watched that interview and didn't get much out of it, since I perceive R. Patrick as a sensationalist - magic ice baths, magic saunas, magic grape chemicals, etc.
There's another branch of aging research that is gaining traction recently and that feels just so much more sensible. Its basic idea is that there's really no "wear and tear" happening, but rather, aging is a programmed process whereby cells deliberately disable their various cleaning and healing mechanisms via epigenetic alterations. This whole thing is controlled by signal molecules in the bloodstream, and there's some kind of feedback loop going on.
Here are some links for you to learn more about this:
I'm not interested in reading an entire book about "cutting-edge science." That's too big a commitment to learn about a bunch of optimistic guesses that will mostly not pan out. Give me a book about stuff we have some real confidence about. Maybe I'm not the intended audience for this book any more? I feel like when I was younger I felt like I had all the time and energy in the world, and I devoured this stuff, but now I'm tired and stretched and for me this kind of writing falls into a no-man's land between "zero-effort entertainment" and "applicable to/stretching me for life."
I recently began sleeping when ever I felt tired, disconnected from stressful colleagues, and generally brought down my stress levels further by not signing up for more than what I can handle.
I’ve concluded that Low stress + adequate sleep + good food Together are like NZT for me.
I’m no longer tired and I can think better than I can remember during the past 15 years.
I think the difference is a growing awareness of the limitations of my life and potential, coupled with a growing appreciation of the boundless things I could do to learn, enjoy myself, and improve my life and others'. I think when I was younger I just saw something fun and exciting and went for it. As the years have gone by, the sheer number of things that I have identified as fun as exciting has become so overwhelming that "fun and exciting" seems utterly unhelpful for narrowing down the possibilities.
I can also look back now and see how many things that I was sure I would do in my life haven't happened yet. Plus, like another commenter pointed out, life obligations keep mounting up.
I range from between 7 hours to 8 hours. I’m still coming to terms with getting triggered when I encounter certain colleagues, so I wake up at night. I know by elimination process that the trigger during the day reflects into a wake up at night.
For the past three weeks, I’ve been sleeping without interruptions ( waking up suddenly) until today, having encountered a problem person yesterday and flew into a minor rage at certain recollections of unfair actions by them.
I think the only thing we have confidence about health wise is "sleep enough, do cardio, do low-impact weight-lifting in moderation, don't eat sugar, don't expose yourself to known toxins, don't go out in the sun in the middle of the day without sunblock, use your mind" That's about it.
Physical aging has its effects. Moreover, as we age we generally accumulate more responsibility. A relationship. A team to manage. Two kids. That sort of thing takes up time, focus and energy.
Of course, the money behind actual de-aging and things like replicating a consciousness is entirely funded by rich people in their quest to live forever. If this tech ever goes ‘production’, it’ll take billions of dollars to do and thus only be something the ultra rich and their families will be able to afford. Part of this is being done by the Alphabet (Google) subsidiary Calico[0].
Nearly all R&D is funded by "rich" people. The fact that this is too tells you nothing about how democratized it will be down the road. That entirely depends on the method of action the end product and whether or not it's scalable. If it is, money can be made selling it to everyone. If it isn't, then only people that can afford it will get it. That's how limited resources work.
Most R&D is funded by governments around the world, coming from the pockets of the population, not from the the rich. Unfortunately, the very rich are the ones putting most of the results of this research in their pockets.
You are pinpointing a specific area where there is private interest in investing due to the high commercial potential of drug patents. The large majority of research areas benefit little from private investment.
In the Middle Ages the rich people of the time were donating almost all their wealth to the Church on their dead-beds because they were afraid of eternal death, nowadays rich people throw a lot of money on bogus stuff like the one described in here hoping that they would actually get to live forever but in the end they'll still die (and I suspect the Middle Age rich guys' souls still didn't get to live forever on account of there not being anything after physical death).
There is no concrete reason to believe immortality through tech won't happen in the next 100,000 years. They eventually will live forever. This isn't like a speed of light limit, at least none that we know of.
Of course there is. Humanity is likely destroy civilization and/or its environment within the next 100,000 years, assuming a meteor doesn't take us out.
At first. See Peter F Hamilton's excellent Commonwealth Saga for a society where in 200-300 years the unfathomably rich are the super-rich of today, but where rejuvenation is so well-developed that it's government-provided for everyone, and immortality is just expected. The super-expensive start of the technology is covered in the short and less good Misspent Youth, which isn't really part of the main story. They get around the population explosion problem with portals to other habitable planets.
Just like jet plane rides, air conditioning, cell phones, etc. were only for the rich and powerful initially. Capitalism encourages efficiencies which drive prices down over time.
One merely has to look at speculative fiction to see that the upsides in letting this technology become available to everyone are non-existant to those who help fund its creation. A monopoly around this technology would form faster than DeBeers could say "Wow" - legal or not.
Human nature plus immortality is not a pretty thing to think about.
If a cure is invented in Country X and monopolized, every other country in the world has an incentive to replicate it by some combination of espionage and reverse engineering. If it can be invented at all, what makes you think that it can be used without other parties figuring out how to copy it? The atomic bomb was duplicated within 4 years.
This is not about countries, it is about the rich and powerful vs the rest of us. Do you think the rich in the US would steal the secret of eternal youth from the rich of China and just give it to everyone? Or just keep it for themselves?
The rich? Perhaps, perhaps not, depends how much money they could make from it. Some biohacker equivalent to Linus Torvalds or Aaron Swartz? Almost certainly, and for free.
Hey, I'm also not a fan of "Rich Bad!" simplistic narratives, but billionaire "philanthropy" is about the most dubious and laughable concept on the table here. It's pennies-on-the-dollar nature is carefully designed to dupe your statistics-naive hind brain into believing there is something being done when it's really the opposite ; it's the microoptimization of the economic world, equivalent to transforming a multiplication-by-two into shifting while the code above you is allocating one million boxed objects. Just a small, pointless thing you do to make yourself feel better for no actual reason.
A few millions here and there, no matter what they do or how much happiness they cause, is nothing compared to billions upon billions^(TM) continuesly pumped out of the world into one person's coffers.
I don't care what kind of persons billionaires are, allowing someone to have wealth equivalent to several countries' economies is ugly and injust. No amount of gift-giving and hospital-visiting is gonna make that any less of a moral disaster. Maybe when we discover arbitary-destination wormholes can we be that inefficient and injust with resources distribution, but with just one freaking planet? good luck convincing me (and the several billions who are not billionaires) that philanthropist billionaire overthere isn't stealing somebody's (probably several million somebodies) food in their pointless unending quest to pile wealth they're not going to use 10% of in their wildest dreams.
It's an easy way to generate conflict in fiction. You can't use it as evidence of non-existent benefits any more than you can cite fiction for why you're legitimately worried about zombies.
And how is a monopoly going to form? You think people are going to refuse to eat synthetic diamonds-that-make-you-stop-aging because of marketing around getting "the real thing"? And you can't buy out all the mines for something that isn't dug up.
> Human nature plus immortality is not a pretty thing to think about.
Capitalism isn't a system, it's a tool applicable within a system.
And it's not an individual business thing. Capitalism is amoral (note: not immoral), with a value function. If in a scenario it behaves what we consider "badly", we provide incentives to skew that value function towards what our society wants. For example through taxes or subsidies.
I think that capitalism's endgame may be a post-scarcity society, where technology allows us to have almost free energy, and very cheap everything that we may require for survival, with minimum human work.
There's only so much money you can squeeze out of rich people; they tend to be, well, tightwads. The best way to earn more money is to reach more people (read: increase market share). You can think of prices as indicators of inefficiencies. The high price invites participation which causes competition. The players, driven by greed or desire for profit, seek to eliminate competition (or become monopolies in their field). With the right legal incentives this competition is healthy and innovation leads to lower prices to gain market share. Again, market share == people, and poor people are included in that group.
From this perspective, Capitalism (or "the market") can be viewed as a tool governments can use to increase the quality of life of its citizens.
Granted this explanation is a bit banal and hand wavey and leaves out a ton of stuff (consider impacts on jobs for instance); this is an internet post not a thesis on economics. :) Hayek, Mises, and Friedman are good sources if you care to explore more.
I just don't understand why rich people would need to share their resources with poor people at all if we live in a world that does not value labor.
Guy says "post-scarcity" but what does that really mean? Even if we have cheap energy and cheap raw goods, there will still be things that are limited, perhaps open space, nature preserves, beach property.
Or maybe even in a land of plenty, there will still be those who live in poverty (some would argue that poverty is a choice today).
I'm not sure what will be valuable in the future, but I am sure the rich will hoard it.
Anti-aging technology is a bit of a game changer; it would effectively create automatic oligarchies, because the rich and powerful would never die and pass on their power.
There is effectively no reward for the rich to make this technology broadly available. There's every incentive to keep their workforces and consumers ignorant and short-lived.
The rich and powerful create oligarchies now. Even if the problem would be worse with anti-aging I'd trade not-dying for more powerful oligarchs.
I think it might make things more egalitarian. A hard working genius born to poverty only has 80 years to work their way into the upper echelons. Removing senescence means such people will have more time to rise to elite positions and demonstrate track records of competence and merit.
I don't agree that anti-aging would be restricted to the richest. One simple reason is that anyone with the know-how could make vast wealth by making anti-aging available to the masses.
ALittleLight seems to be saying we should give poor people more time to develop their talents. Taking away healthcare from them would provide them will less time to develop their talents.
Who said you'll have access to the life-prolonging tech? Parent's comment is exactly that once having this technology, the rich will only share it for such a high price that only other rich people would afford.
We heard that with the Internet too. And 25 years later: while certain metrics like poverty and standard of living have improved globally, things have gotten worse in Western countries. Why do you think something as Holy Grail-esque as anti-aging tech will be any different?
No, not really. What sounds crazy is "people have always died of pneumonia, we don't understand the reason, but that's how it's always been, and so that's how it will always be, and even trying to understand why it happens or change it is against nature and crazy talk."
Involuntary death is obviously a problem.
Sure, overpopulation is too, and there's a conflict, but there may be other solutions than letting people die against their will.
It is a risk factor, but not the only risk. There are plenty of carcinogens, sometimes even viruses can cause cancer (HPV).
It would still be fantastic improvement to have the body of a 25-year-old for all my adult years even if my lifespan didn’t change — but while I assume [0] it would extend life expectancy, preventing aging isn’t enough by itself to prevent all illnesses.
[0] I am not involved in medicine or biology and this would be way outside my area even if I had gone down that path, so my knowledge is “watched documentaries” level
Yes, there are many known carcinogens, however age is the largest risk factor: almost 90% of cancer patients are over the age of 50, and 50% are over 70! Preventing the core pathology of aging itself would of course not prevent all illness (even young people get sick), but it would eliminate an enormous amount of the disease burden we face.
Your risk of dying from cancer increases with aging, not age. Old people face a greater probability of getting cancer each year because their bodies are being progressively damaged.
If you could hold the probability at the level of an 18 year old, that would massively reduce the incidence.
You age inevitably, because your genetic code will degrade over time, increasing the chances for malignacy. If you can reverse that in each of the 10^16 cells in your body, you will stop ageing.
I think the current understanding of the relationship between aging and cancer is a bit nuanced than this; e.g. immune system distinction is thought to play a major role in failing to eliminate precancerous cells.
It will because your immune system is also aging. If your immune system stays young it may help to keep the cancer rate at the level you get in younger people.
Given enough time it's also possible manking will regress or kill itself or plateau. We haven't made any deals with the universe for limitless progress...
Not that you said we did, but many kind of think like that's the case, for hand wavy reasons, like "the sky is the limit", "human ingenuity is limitless", etc...
It’s pretty obvious and (I think) uncontroversial that humanity could cause its own demise or fail to prevent external causes (like large celestial object impacts). What does seem controversial is the claim (which I adhere to) that it is also possible for humanity to solve every problem that they meet.
What are you even talking about? Humans have existed something like 200,000 years. In 500,000 years from now (or less), evolution will have changed us into something entirely different.
So? If we put some effort into it we might maintain cultural continuity, which is imo what matters more than how our bodies look like (if we still have any).
The better rebuttal is that currently it looks like we'll crash the planet's ecosystems and with them technological civilization within the next century or two, long before we've reached the point of curing all disease.
Species will evolve to thrive in the new ecosystem. Perhaps that will be a subset of humans evolving into something else, perhaps not. But life won’t disappear because we raise global temperatures.
I don't care too much about the ecosystems, I care about our civilization. That is orders of magnitude more likely to disappear than life (or just the human species) because we raise global temperature, deplete topsoil, deplete aquifers, poison everything with substances that last millennia, cut down forests, deplete fish stocks, etc etc.
I would not get too attached to our civilization. Can you imagine how many there must have been in 250,000 years? Include the ones from Neanderthals and other homo species, too. And they’re all gone. Ours will be, too. How can we possibly secure a civilization for, say, 1M years?
Not necessarily. Not getting cancer through healthy live choices is part of the "live longer" equation. Have a look at Michael Greger's works like "How not to die".
There are factors - diet - that contribute to cancer and vice versa.
Yeah if you somehow manage to freeze all other scientific progress, you would be right. Otherwise, our children will likely never know what cancer even is, aside from history books.
Give it another 10 years or so and we will be able to target any kind of cancer cell and destroy it. A harder task might be to prevent cancer, but in the end it doesn't really matter. It will be like the common cold.
My children know what cancer is. Progress on cancer prevention and treatment has been a slow grind with only slight improvements in survival rates year by year. I'll bet you that 100 years from now cancer will still be one of the top 5 leading causes of death.
For details I recommend the Peter Attia podcast episode: "#121 – Azra Raza, M.D.: Why we’re losing the war on cancer". It's long but packed with accurate scientific information by someone at the forefront of research and patient care.
There are many organisms that appear to be able to live for exceedingly long times (and perhaps indefinitely). Disregarding unicellular organisms, there are, for example, species of jellyfish that appear biologically immortal [1]. There are also examples of trees (or, rather, root systems) that have lived for extremely long times [2].
Aging is just another disease. Seen in that way it will be a choice, much like dying of tuberculosis or hepatitis c is. There are cures for them now. There is no reason to think aging and cancer (which seem related), are any different. Progress will give us the options.
I find the title of this submission profoundly disturbing and unworthy of this platform. To me “Scientists believe...” implies a lot more than what this article describes.
On the contrary, any scientist that says they're 100% confident doesn't know what they're talking about. "Belief" is as good a word as any to describe how we look at probabilities, weigh evidence, and come to the most likely conclusion.
I agree completely on the first point, but belief is also something people have about fairies and yetis. “Have compelling evidence that” seems like a good term to me.
I think a middle ground would be that it's fine to start with a belief about how something might work (also known as a hypothesis), after all that's the first step in the Scientific Method. But crafting a hypothesis without a subsequent experiment to prove or disprove it is just wasted breath. As the adage goes, claims that are made without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
I downvoted you because it's perfectly possible to "believe" something because there is evidence for it. Plenty of scientists will say they "believe" in evolution, for example.
> I downvoted you because it's perfectly possible to "believe" something because there is evidence for it. Plenty of scientists will say they "believe" in evolution, for example.
We don't "believe" in scientific concepts. Their being a fact has no precondition on whether (or how many) people believe in them. Evolution didn't begin when Darwin started studying it.
That being said, you're right. We have to start somewhere. For example, scientists just a hundred or so years ago believed in the existence of something called aether. I believe many (most?) scientists will change their opinion if we can provide them evidence contrary to their belief. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson%E2%80%93Morley_exper...
On the other hand, scientists are just human as well and are subject to the same flaws and limitations as the rest of us. Facts are only facts, until they are not (that sounded weird, I am not actually against evidence based decision-making). I mean we make what we think is our best attempt at describing our world given the tools we have and the reality we live in. I wouldn't put too much weight that scientists believe aging is optional any more than I'd put weight on scientists saying technically it is possible for us to fly in a metal tube across the Atlantic Ocean or that technically we can put a man on the moon... until it happens.
> We don't "believe" in scientific concepts. Their being a fact has no precondition on whether (or how many) people believe in them. Evolution didn't begin when Darwin started studying it.
I don’t understand the point you’re making here. Surely your second sentence contradicts the first?
> I don’t understand the point you’re making here. Surely your second sentence contradicts the first?
I rarely have a point to make. I started off thinking I disagree with the parent comment but as I started typing I realized I agree with them more than not. It is more of a thinking out loud. It helps me a lot because I have very simplistic opinions that are sometimes VERY incorrect so when I think out loud, people can correct me. I guess where I thought I differed from the parent is that when you "believe" in something, you will dig into your position given contrary evidence. I like to believe this is not true with scientists.
anti aging is probably going to have a lot of unknowns and surprises along the long road. In the mean time, brain-machine interfaces and the transfer of conscious processes outside the brain seem like a more feasible road to immortality
Maximum lifespan extension has been very stagnant. Hieronymus of Cardia, a companion of Alexander the Great who outlived his famous friend by about 80 years, dying at the age of 104 in the year 250 BC.
That’s someone famous enough to be memorable, presumably he wasn’t the record holder 2270 years ago. Most medical progress has been around avoiding people dying young rather than actually extending lifespans after 90. So moving the needle when life expectancy hits 85+ becomes far more difficult.
increasing the average, but nowhere near immortality (actually the average has dropped a bit the past decade). OTOH if we figure out how to extract the whole brain information outside the body, we know how to simulate it forever.
The "transfer of conscious processes" does not seem more feasible to me at all. We have absolutely no way to do that right now, we don't even know what consciousness is. I don't know of any research avenues on the subject either, if you know of some some I'd be interested to read about it.
In some distant future maybe making a copy of your brain in a simulator would be possible, but the copy would live on, you'd still die.
I think you're being incredibly optimistic if you believe it's possible to build a machine both complex enough to house a fully simulated human consciousness and robust enough to last billions or even thousands of years.
Bits rot, things break down, and it tends to happen to technology more quickly in most cases than to the human body. The more complex technology is, the faster it fails. We measure the life cycle of our most modern tech in months, not centuries.
The idea that you're going to surf the universe in an immortal, inviolate android body untouchable by aeons of time is closer to a religious hope than likely reality.
It's more that we're able to build computers from scratch, and we can transfer data between them. You can ship-of-theseus-backup yourself ad infinitum (well, until the usable energy runs out.)
By the time we get to this thought experiment we only really need to consider people that were fine with the initial upload process. Being transferred to a new computer is peanuts in comparison.
so "you" is connected with the physical matter that makes you up? You are aware that that physical matter is completely replaced many times over during the course of your life time?
They still die. "Uploading" is a copy operation, but the flesh and blood human and their flesh and blood brain still dies. Whether the copy counts as equivalent to the original is a philosophical matter. But as far as biology isn't concerned, you haven't eliminated death, you've just moved the goalposts on life.
Neurons are created and die all the time. Replacing them one at a time, with their virtual equivalent, would not be entirely different to what is already happening.
Not really, neurons are one of the few types of cells that don't undergo a cycle of death/creation of new cells. The neurons you had when you were born are the same you have now. They probably encode a lot of information that would be lost if they died and were replaced by fresh cells.
there is some neurogenesis, and the assumption is the new cells integrate with existing circuits over time.
However , in the scenario that single neurons are replaced with artificial copies with exact same synaptic weights, then yes they are functionally equivalent. It's already happening, with deep brain implants etc.
In the end, the geometry does imply that for a given reproduction rate, you eventually reach a crunch where there's not enough surface area of new space to expand to for your colonists, who are proportional to your volume. Being uploads speeds up your rate of expansion, because you could send out seedships much nearer to c and then beam over the digital colonists to be picked up by the infrastructure built at the new system- but digitised people could also reproduce much, much faster than biologicals.
If there truly were a way to increase lifespan to 200 or 300, I hope the person who comes up with it destroys the research.
Can you just imagine if people could live that long? If people started applying it now, it would make our overpopulation situation even worse.
We are not prepared to live that long, either, emotionally or physically. The more we use technology and bioscience to alter our basic physiology and life history, the more trouble we will be in.
> it would make our overpopulation situation even worse
More healthy, longer lived people doesn't just equal more mouths to feed. It means there are more productive members of society with vast troves of experience and skill, all of whom no longer have the excuse of "I'll be dead by the time this becomes a problem". The solution to limited resources isn't rationing, it's to get more resources and make more efficient (not limited) use of them.
> We are not prepared to live that long, either, emotionally or physically
That's, like, your opinion man. Me, I'm incredibly excited to spend as long as it takes to see and learn everything I can in this universe. The idea of a time limit does more emotional harm to me than the idea of infinity.
> The more we use technology and bioscience to alter our basic physiology and life history, the more trouble we will be in
This is just an appeal to nature. Plainly wrong, you may think you would be a happy hunter gatherer but I'd strongly recommend you try before you buy that one. Nature, for all its temporary beauty, sucks when there is no escape from it. We developed technology to separate ourselves from nature when it gets nasty. Don't believe me? Drive out to the country at 2am, strip naked and try lying in a field for as long as you can. See how much sleep you get. Bonus points if you do it in winter.
I seriously hope biotech becomes the next darling of industry and research. We're starting to hit the wall with electronics, there are still gains to be made but the low hanging fruit is gone and it's going to take much longer between breakthrough advancements. Biotech is just getting started, with enough of a push we can grow by leaps and bounds in the next decades. I hope my children will grow up in a world free from the miseries of disease and death.
All these replies to my comment may be true, but all of them are actually forgetting the impact we are doing to wildlife and the natural world. So, while we can easily grow and become even more populous, we are just destroying our world at the same time. It's rather sickening.
Three only reason I have to fear dismantling Mercury to build a Dyson swarm of O’Neill cylinders to live in, complete with wildlife preserves greater in internal surface area than the Earth, is “can human politics work like that?” rather than anything else.
You find it sickening? Don’t worry, you probably won’t even notice the new “stars” twinkling around you, even in the unlikely event of self replacing factories on Mercury being developed in an un-augmented human lifetime and therefore you living long enough to know about it.
Here is a talk he did at Google [1] He briefly talks about the ethics of this here [2].
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nXop2lLDa4
[2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4tsELrQfFQ