Longevity and healthspan research is perhaps the most important undertaking in the history of humanity. The scientists and engineers working on this are heroes to untold future billions.
One day, we will be able to die on our own terms, when we want to go, instead of having our life and our loved ones' ruthlessly ripped away from us. And it will be thanks to these individuals.
I cannot share this optimism. I wonder how a society would look like, where young people are the absolute minority and their demands and ideas drowned by the number and power of those who have lived for centuries, amassing fortunes, having used all the resources of the planet, so that there is no place for a next generation?
But then maybe my thinking is influenced by having watched Altered Carbon [1]?
New lives are not inherently more valuable than old lives. You can already see this reflected in contemporary morality and the discourse around preventing human lives. After all, a life not lived is a life free from suffering.
A lot of the suffering inherent to human life is caused by moral compromises made for the sake of future generations' well-being. Instead, if the norm was living long enough to have to face the long-term consequences of your actions first hand, maybe old people could not afford to be so rigid. They would not be able to "wash their hands" by dying (and possibly leaving any wealth amassed through immoral means to their innocent heirs.)
Personally, what I'm looking forward is augmenting human cognition over long periods of time. I do worry that the result would not necessarily be any more agreeable, or even comprehensible, from our current standpoint, than (post-)modernity would be comprehensible to a caveman; but what I fear is something else entirely: I fear that people would occupy their expended lifespans with centuries of technologically augmented personal drama and sociopolitical "4D chess" - an advancement in complexity of our fundamental primate nature, but otherwise not different from what we do now.
I already find it disappointing that the most valuable thing most people have going on is their "personal" life. And an extension of this principle towards (comparative) eternity would be supremely so.
> I fear that people would occupy their expended lifespans with centuries of technologically augmented personal drama and sociopolitical "4D chess" - an advancement in complexity of our fundamental primate nature,
You've probably read it already, but Frans de Waal's _Chimpanzee Politics_ ends with the (thoroughly demonstrated by that point) claim that politics is older than humankind.
Chimps practice filial cannibalism too. Unless someone proves that the principles behind politics are inherent to the universe at large, I guess I'll keep my hope for transcendence.
Hadn't read that book but I'll check it out, thanks!
Well, I can tell you that the book isn't about cannibalism.
It isn't pessimistic about us transcending chimp-ness either. The point is that when it comes to politics, we very definitely are not there yet. Not even close. We've done a better job of transcending our chimp-ness in just about every other field of human endeavor than we have in politics.
* Officials accepting bribes to approve unsustainable (and sometimes directly deadly) projects, so that they can fund their kids' education
* Regular folks not speaking up against injustice because "they've got a family to feed"
* The "think of the children" card (a.k.a. "we've forcibly cultivated a set of behaviors in our offspring in order to ensure ourselves a comfortable old age, and your radical novelty threatens to disrupt that, dammit")
* Genghis Khan propagating his genome through the reprehensible acts of rape and military conquest. (Although that's not really a "compromise" but the actual essence of a kind of "warrior ethos" that some contemporary populists derive their tripe from)
Point being, it's a sort of norm to excuse acts that negatively affect the well-being of our peers by saying we're doing them in the name of the well-being of our successors. (Not like anyone's asking the successors, who might not even be born at that point. It's just "how life is".)
Barring a "Chinese brain" interpretation, the "entire world" is not a coherent decision-making entity; the majority of human beings living at any point in time have had very little say in "how the world is". World-changing economic decisions are made by a minority - who probably don't have the diabolical motives that conspiracy theories ascribe to them, but are most likely just working in the interest of their children, too (consequences to everyone else's children be damned - which is a possible symbolic meaning of the popular "paedophile cult" conspiracy theory, presuming "lizard folk" symbolize disillusionment with representative democracy, etc.)
>New lives are not inherently more valuable than old lives.
From an evolutionary standpoint, they absolutely are. The whole idea of life is to produce a variety of mutations in the hopes that at least some of them will be able to overcome hostilities that their predecessors couldn't win against.
>A lot of the suffering inherent to human life is caused by moral compromises made for the sake of future generations' well-being
Well, future generations' well-being is exactly the goal of life and evolution. Any species that fail at ensuring future generations' well-being get wiped out. Whether they like it or not.
To me the rigidity seems biological, not because people aren’t “living with their decisions”. That explains why old people become more conservative as they age. The “I do it for ma kids” argument feels weak because the behavior would be very different if that were actually the case.
Preserving the status quo is the valuable piece. To me this is an evolutionary behavior. If you’re old, the status quo has likely been good to you and your offspring. Change risks that. When you’re young, your fear of death is non-existent and you’ve had fewer life scars (whether literal or figurative). If you add protection against death, you’re just increasing the risk-averse population whereas traditionally we’ve used death to weed that out over the long-term. In other words humans are naturally biased towards balancing generating change (youth) and resisting change (aging) since change often has risks or harm and you’re less able to weather it well and adapt in old age (at a minimum your brain’s elasticity helps you significantly while you’re young). Keeping people alive will distort that balance.
The question will be whether society can adapt fast enough relative to how quickly life extends. On its face a medical breakthrough that radically shifts aging for everyone would be pretty bad. A similar breakthrough that shifts it for wealthy people would also be bad on any number of fronts. Our legal and tax systems are designed around existing mortality and as you can see, at least in the US, it can take a long time for any changes in reality to be reflected there nor do those changes typically risk upsetting current power and wealth balances.
Its not that different then generational wealth, we have families in the west that have built up wealth for centuries. But imaging how the west is sliding faster and faster into neo feudalism having to life as a serf forever does make it seem dystopian.
But being immune to aging does give the human race other options where a 100 year trip might now be impossible if you can reach a age of 1000 a 100 year stellar trip might actually be acceptable.
Does makes me wonder how many memories can the brain actually store and not degrade. when you go into your 4th century will you forget your 2nd century slowly.
hah. The only sharp memories of my teenage years - three decades ago - are the ones that make me stop in the street and cringe while swearing under my breath. How could I have been such an asshole? OMG, am I still that much of an asshole?
To remember the sweet and good things I did, said, and experienced as a teenager, with that same sharpness seems like the most desirable gift of all.
It is easy to say something like that when you are not moments from an eternal abyss.
These are problems we can work towards solving. They are not a reason to abandon longevity research that can and will quite literally save billions of lives.
This is something like what it feels like being under 40 today.
But in all seriousness, I agree that being able to prevent aging and mortality likely would not lead to paradise. Probably access to this technology would not be distributed equitably, and we would see an elite few living forever, with mere mortals resigned to a disposable under-class.
I believe the more relevant examples here are the issues facing many low to middle class Americans today. Non-elites are significantly less likely to afford homes, afford marriage at 25, and most importantly in the long run they less power to affect political change. If money is speech, then some people have a lot more capability than others simply based on their bank accounts.
I think a better modern analogy would be lifesaving pharmaceuticals. Unlike cars and cellphones where market forces have driven the price down, in that case we have companies buying IP and increasing the price, since demand for something which can save your life is essentially infinite.
Also you have the problem of where you put this growing population of immortals? It seems that you would have to solve the problem of interplanetary colonization before we'd be ready to solve death.
"It seems that you would have to solve the problem of interplanetary colonization before we'd be ready to solve death."
These things may actually be tangled together. Interplanetary travel is likely to cause some radiation damage to the bodies of the astronauts. Radiation damage manifests a lot like premature aging; these two may have something in common.
In that case, colonizing planets and trying to treat aging will have to develop together, much like development of airplanes and weather forecasting did.
The world is no longer unipolar. China, India have their own tech sector and will compete with the USA. In biotech, they may actually enjoy a competitive advantage, because they have fewer institutional and legal restraints.
Unless you can prevent people from traveling overseas to receive anti-aging treatments, clinics will spring up from Costa Rica to Indonesia. The US, even if it wanted to protect the IP of the few very hard, will have to weigh it against the risk that a systemic competitor like China will provide treatments for artificially low price just out of spite and to gain some sympathy points.
Look at the Cold War. During the conflict with the Communist Bloc, inequality in the West actually went down. In presence of ideological competitors, Western governments learnt to mitigate the worst excesses of their own systems.
If people live indefinitely then I would have thought many short term thinking issues would disappear: people will directly care about the future of the planet/environment/global warming.
Wealth accumulation is an issue, but this also is an issue with family dynastic wealth. Law and tax mitigate that somewhat and a similar answer could be used for this also.
It may be that some of the Conservatism of age is attenuated in a society of constant youth.
Overall I think it may be a positive on society, and the costs can be mitigated somewhat.
>people will directly care about the future of the planet/environment/global warming
I don't think that's a given. Many people flat out don't believe in human-caused global warming, at least in America. A lot of people would also interpret it as an act of God-- perhaps judgement day coming- over the scientific consensus. Of course some people also hate to take responsibility, and we all know at least one person who avoids taking responsibility of their own life to the point of ruin.
I don't think society as a whole thinks as similarly as many assume they would. I also don't think humans are as rational with their decision making as we think. Once people acquire habits and addictions, they themselves have a hard time leaving them. I don't believe humans were designed to live forever,and all too common selfishness and ignorance proves that
Wealth distribution is already a big problem that needs to be solved regardless of life extension. Personally I hope tech will one day let us reach a post scarcity society.
I hope along with extending life we would also learn how to restore neuroplasticity to help reduce old people that are to set in their ways. Then maybe there would be less of a difference between young and old.
Now we scroll through feeds and pat ourselves on the back for increasing the average lifespan. No one asks whether these long lives are even worth living.
No one asks why progress for the sake of progress is inherently good.
False dichotomies are knee jerk response to certain flavours of progressive ideas. It's like "we should not go to mars until we've cured poverty/loneliness/inequality/evil on earth." You'll usually find such comments on any space related thread. "Nobody talks about" is almost always untrue. Usually, it's followed by a cliche, something that someone inevitably talks about. Someone always questions whether progress is actually good, even if the progress is something like not dying from cancer.
I don't particularly subscribe to romantic notions of causes worth dying for, but you can still die for a cause if aging isn't a thing. I daresay cannon fodder will exist, in some form... and it will be romanticised in the same way.
Causes worth dedicating life to... that tends to be more useful than dying for causes. In that frame, you have more to give if you have more life.
> "we should not go to mars until we've cured poverty/loneliness/inequality/evil on earth." You'll usually find such comments on any space related thread.
For what it’s worth, I used to find the arguments that we should put the brightest minds on space exploration over eliminating suffering as concrete, but nowadays.. can’t say they those arguments seem as watertight.. saying that as someone whose hands have touched some of these projects. Curious if others feel the same way or have points to make in the opposite direction
I think broad goals like "eliminating suffering" or "fighting poverty" tend to be in a hard to tackle middle ground.
We're better off approaching them either more broadly or more narrowly. IE, we can dedicate resources to tighter goals, like reducing childhood mortality... a horrendous thing that most people suffered for most of humanity. We really made a lot of progress on this.
Alternatively, we can think of it more broadly... advancing as a species, culture and society. In that sense, space travel is a good idea.
Tackling the elimination of suffering head on is likely to resolve to "be a politician/priest/lawyer" or somesuch.
In any case, I think the mistake is thinking of everything as competitive, at a broad level. Rather, people tend to see ambitious, "humanities' first" goals as competitive with "eliminating suffering" or other broad goals. It's rare to hear people think that sports or cinema are competitive with the elimination of suffering.
I do not need a cause others find noble. I will make my own. And I do not need anyone evaluating if my life is worth extending. What I need is more quality time with the people I love.
That sounds a lot like propaganda line from a book of previous victors who got to write the history.
While I think you are not completely off - there were just undertakings that needed sacrifice of human lives - this line of thinking seems to be stained forever through constant cynical abuse by the powers that be and powers that aspire to be.
I agree with this but it’s important to accept it’s not likely to happen in any of our lifetimes. There are multiple, probably independent outcomes of aging, from basic stuff like joint wear to things like dementia, Parkinson’s, cancer, etc.
Even if we get to the point where we live longer - particularly delayed senescence - we will still have to confront all of those things and may just end up gaining a few years and increasing suicide as the main cause of death.
I love the idea and think it would be wonderful but I think we are woefully underestimating how hard it’s going to be to push things much beyond demonstrated lifespans.
At the same time I think that dramatically improving quality of life for age 50+ is very doable.
On the other hand, that reduces the remaining causes of death to gruesome physical accidents. Knowing that given even time, probability will win, it could make death a very scary thing to think about.
I suppose there is some comfort knowing I'll probably die at age 90 or so.
Study design: Tracks 200 people over one year and measures a suite of biomarkers at the beginning, 6 months, and 12 months. Participants are randomly assigned to one of four dosages or a placebo. Double blind.
The study hopes to find an optimal dose for humans using the various biomarkers as a guide. I’m not sure how well we can connect those biomarkers to actual longevity/healthspan.
Is this physical or mental longevity, or both? It would be awful if you had the body of a 25 year old with the mind of a 95 year old (forgetful, slow, dementia, Alzheimer’s). Those things that take older people quickly are much longer battles for “healthy” bodies.
I am in my early 30’s, but my view right now is that I will live in the time I was born into and take reasonable steps to be healthy for a long life. I hope I get 60 more years with my wife, but when it is my time, it is my time, and I will accept that I have used the time and resources I was given.
Jason Isbell’s song “vampires” comes to mind. Part of what makes life “life” is death. And spending too much excess time and energy (one’s life) on expanding future life is… trading life for life. But likely missing time with family and friends who likely won’t get to live until they are 160.
It's, in the optimistic case, both. At least from what I understand from listening to the radiolab story on it. Regardless, having the body of a 30 year old and the brain of a 90 year old is better than having the body and brain of a 90 year old.
I don't understand people who say things like "I will live with the time I'm given". Do you reject modern medicine because that's an unnatural extension of your time? If you had a fatal illness that could be cured would you refuse treatment? Hand soap, fertilizer, and modern nutrition have likely extended your expected lifespan. Do you go without those as well?
I think it can sound romantic to stick with your natural span. Especially if that span extends out for decades yet. I expect it's another matter entirely to be on death's door.
A less selfish way to think about it is to imagine an elderly loved one. If your mother could take rapamaycin and live an additional 40 years in good health, would you prefer she die at 80?
I think death is a very bad thing and having a way to put it off is very good. Fatalistic attitudes confuse the issue.
Dementia/alzheimers/etc is one of the scariest things i can imagine. I'm not sure i would want to live if i had the later stages of that, or if you can even call that living.
Body of a 90 year old mind of a 30 year old is something i would take, though.
If death is ever preferable to life you can always kill yourself. Having the option to live or die is strictly better than having no option.
My point regarding having the brain of the 90 year old is not that that would be good, but that it would be better than having the brain and body of a 90 year old. I don't want to be frail and prone to injury if I could be healthy and strong.
You could kill yourself before it advanced that far or set a living will. You'd possibly need to move to a country that would be willing to euthanize you - but you could do it.
My mother and grandmother both had it. While I certainly wish to avoid that end, if I get to have the body of a 30 year old from now until 80 and then follow in their footsteps, that’s still an improvement on the gradual physical decline which preceded their mental decline.
Basically I’d take either hypothetical form of treatment. Either is better then neither.
>Dementia/alzheimers/etc is one of the scariest things i can imagine. I'm not sure i would want to live if i had the later stages of that, or if you can even call that living.
ok but it is not a 100% case that the mind of a 90 year old is the mind of an Alzheimer's patient. Michael Caine is 88 and I think he is doing relatively well mentally.
I think when people say things like, “I will live with the time I’m given” they often mean that they will live however long they can, with medical intervention, while the cost of that intervention and additional years it provides isn’t too high. So it’s likely they will still take advantage of the current technologies that have the potential to extend their lives, as long as the price it imposes isn’t over some cost threshold. Though, I suppose some people will simply do whatever they can to stay alive no matter the cost since they value their lives above everything else. Others will shun the life saving measures and die.
I use modern medicine and modern technology to expand my lifespan, but there is a difference between 20 years and 80-100 years.
Assuming some breakthrough that makes age a number, and I can stay as sharp and healthy as I am now, then I still have an issue with sustainability. The earth has a certain carrying capacity, and keeping everyone alive for an indefinite amount of time is not sustainable for long.
Each generation gets its chance to run its course and the world evolves from it. Imagine if 75% of people from 1860 were still around - what is their view? How do they keep up with the changing times? Did they allow the world to come as far as it has? Or did the people stay in power indefinitely and keep things the way they were?
Aging, retirement, and death provide a natural opportunity for change that wouldn’t be there if you had people with 90 years of investment and connections making decisions and you wanted to make a change. Things would be a lot bloodier.
I don’t romanticize the fact I’m going to die. But I do think memento mori provides clarity and focus to what I’m doing.
I see the individual appeal of living indefinitely and keeping those you love alive indefinitely. But that is “in today’s world that I enjoy as I know it, given my current socio-economic status”. So would people allow that to change? What if it made them worse off?
In terms of carrying capacity, I think we are far from physical limits for Earth. We need technological solutions - imagine how many humans we could have with vertical farming and fusion power. Colonizing space? Technology is something we can obtain. You imagine the masses from 1860 holding us back, but what if every scientist from 1860 on was still with us and building on a century plus of experience?
Regarding social progress - first, it is the modern social views we would be extending and entrenching, not antiquated ones. We are extending the lifespan of Trump voters, not slavers or Jim Crow enthusiasts.
Perhaps you are suggesting that our social views, in a hundred years, will seem as reprehensible as those of a hundred years past seem to us. However, there is no guarantee which way social views will progress. Perhaps, without amortals from our time future societies would have worse social views.
Second, I suspect the reason the elderly tend to be more close minded is related to their circumstances. Their minds aren't as plastic, their bodies not as hale, they can't get out to work and be a part of society, etc. If, instead, their bodies were hearty and their minds agile, they might be as amenable to influence as anyone else. We may find the social views of a healthy two hundred year old advance as steadily as society's.
Regardless, I wouldn't kill people or prefer they die just because they have regressive social views. We should convince them if possible or just live with them if not.
There are certainly problems that may arise from extending lifespan. I believe we can solve them.
body and mind goes hand in hand, when my cardiovascular system cracks, my brain follows, my senses after that and my mind suffers from all the difficulties and loss of simple pleasures. now of course one can lose his head even if a healthy body.. but raising the floor overall is good.
We still seem to engage in the "but mind is completely different from body" pattern of thinking.
Even if the modern reincarnationists were right and brain was just a TV set channeling the mental "signal" instead of the source of your mind, it is pretty clear that a broken brain is usually part of a broken body. Degraded metabolism, stiff arteries, cancers, most such pathologies involve the entire organism.
It’s not that it’s completely different, it’s that we have an extremely limited understanding of the brain and how things operate.
Things like CTE can only be diagnosed post-mortem, so research on those things would slow significantly (unless people who got it killed themselves like others have).
I am specifically speaking to head trauma, mental disorders, and issues with the brain. Things we don’t know how to treat or fight, that a 30 year old body would only serve to prolong the pain and decline caused by the illness.
In theory - this assumes that the drug has an equal effect across the entire system and that all organs will age at the same rate. It may, for whatever reason, not be the case and things will age at different rates.
How about senses? Hearing loss can be non-repairable. Likewise with vision / macular degeneration that may not be fixed with this. How about taste?
It’s a nice idea to think that everything will just stay the level of a 30 year old over the period of 100+ years is, in my opinion, wishful thinking. It will still age, just in different and unexpected ways.
So what you are proposing is designing drugs that extends life and cripples the mind. That is very hard.
If you want to be really evil make it cripple the body as well. But that'd be fucking fucking hard.
HN really overestimates scientists. They are not that smart. They barely can extend human life yet. Let's calm down on the evil life extension possibilities for now. One day perhaps. But you'll have to live long enough to see it.
I know the science is limited (and necessarily long running to see the effects), but I think having a conversation about the end goal and potential consequences is interesting and makes for good discussion in the comments.
And my concern wasn’t that the drug would cripple the mind - my concern is that the drug may extend the life of most organs but not be as effective on the brain (or vice versa, or impact them at different rates).
> drug may extend the life of most organs but not be as effective on the brain
This is a non sequitur. It's not a life extending drug if you forget how to breath correctly or are in a coma.
Perhaps you need to be a little older to fear age, but when you see people dying of cancer who have children, which these drugs will delay, you might see that 6 months extra for their children might mean whether they remember their parent at all, or an extra chance to play ball or a programming session or to reach puberty and have a more mature conversation with them.
You die when your times comes is a slogan for the youth. People on their death beds at 90 are scared and crying and fear what is to come.
I've been thinking about starting Rapamycin, but I need to sit down and do the research first. It's a pretty serious drug. But you are not going to be keeping your body healthy 30 years - 140 years with green tea and exercise.
But I don't get why people don't want to slow down their ageing at all. I get people like the idea of eternal life as a cripple, it's a 2000+ years old story https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tithonus but it's not practical.
It’s not that I think the organ will cease functioning and you will die, it’s that it may not be as effective across all organs (e.g. people take the medication and most organs are good except for kidneys because it’s not as effective on the kidney function).
I do not want to be on my deathbed scared at 90. But I think the person who is scared on their deathbed at 90 would also be scared at 120. It’s not like that extra 30 years will make that person OK with dying - if they aren’t by 90 they likely won’t be 30 years later.
I think accepting death as a part of life is important to living. No - I don’t want to die. Yes - I want a long life. Aging is natural and I think it’s important to experience the aging process. Maybe I’ll look back in 50 years and call myself dumb, but if I make it to 80 I’m happy.
This, TAME and TRIIM-X trials are the humanity's best hope (in the short term) to live longer. Until then, keep exercising, maintaining a healthy weight, and seeing your Dr regularly. Fasting too helps!
TBH I'd probably be more excited about a pill that let me hit a healthy 90 while never exercising and eating all the bread and bacon, than one that let me hit 150 with healthy living.
I hear this sentiment a lot, and of course respect your position, but I think it's a lot easier to say this when 90 and 150 both feel inconceivably far away.
Personally, I'd be perfectly happy eating my bacon with low-carb bread for my entire life and working out a couple times a week if it guaranteed an extra 60 healthy years (although I'm biased because I already do both of those things).
This is one of those things that feels relative, in that we keep pushing the age of "good health" further and further as we, well, get healthier. What's if when you're 90 and healthy that you say, "it'd be nice if I could just take a pill and live to 150"?
But you can't enjoy years 90-150 without first surviving years 30-90.
Humans are statistically bad at doing the simple things that would help us live longer, like eating right, exercising regularly, and getting enough sleep. Most of us aren't going to make it to 90, and it's about half-and-half cancer versus heart disease what will kill us along the way.
Sure, I could exercise regularly, etc, and maybe reduce my chance of dying before 90, but as a statistical American there's an 80% chance I'm not gonna, and a 40% chance it will kill me.
Hence, I'd be much more excited if they could fix that with a pill. Fixing the dying of "old age" as my cellular machinery slowly degrads, also good, but I've got to survive long enough for that to be a problem first.
Novo Nordisk's recently approved Wegovy works pretty well for your latter use case, and they're undergoing clinical trials for oral medication (it's currently administered via IV).
iirc, the side effect profile was pretty mild nausea, so definitely a viable option if you're in the market for FDA approved weight loss/control drugs
That is very easy to say until you are 90 and on your deathbed.
I guarantee you that if you were moments from entering that eternal and infinite void, and someone offered you a rewind button to take the second path, you would press it in an instant.
But what if I take that second path, and die at age 60 of a heart attack, because cake is delicious and cardiovascular exercise is 30 minutes a day I can't do other stuff?
The general public is unfortunately quite unsupportive of longevity initiatives. Death is a difficult topic for people to think about, and they convince themselves they're okay with it right up until they arrive at their deathbed, at which point the horror sets in - but it's too late.
As such, longevity research is crowdfunded by a small community that is willing to face the existential horror head-on by acknowledging it and attempting to actually do something about it.
I don't know about that, these lines of thinking seem dismissive. There are many valid lines of thought I've read right here on HN-- like one was if 75% of the 1800s generation were alive would society be as progressive and advanced as we are now, or would the elites like JP Morgan think we need to regulate the Internet for pushing unamerican ideals? I don't know how actually character, but many from that time weren't a fan of new political or social ideas.
But I can also think of a few others. Will my poor cousin India, me, and the millionaire rapper Lil Jon all have equal access, or will cost 50 million? Or, if giants like Rockafeller could continue to gain experience and acquire more money indefinitely would the economy be the same way it is today? Another thing to consider is; death can be an equalizing factor-- Steve Jobs died and now he's not part of the labor market. But if he were, he'd certainly get hired over any newcomers. Now multiply that times 1000 as more and more exceptional people become common. There will also come a point where the planet will be overpopulated and we have to choose who gets to live forever and who has to die. Ect, ect..
I think these ideas really need to be answered before people will be comfortable with the idea of a technology that allows some to live forever.
Just because death can be an equalizing factor doesn't mean it's a good thing. You wouldn't say that to a dying loved one, for example, or accept it as a reason if you were on your own deathbed.
These are problems to solve, but they shouldn't block saving billions of lives. For what it's worth, any real cure to aging would be nationalized by every state on the planet, lest they risk facing internal collapse.
In reality, the discussion never even gets that far with potential funding bodies. A big problem with longevity research is that most people simply refuse to think about death. They both reflexively and purposefully avoid any and all thought about it.
In any case, these organizations never promote something so radical as a potential elixir of life, but rather incremental improvements.
rapamycin is an immunosuppressor. what that means it’s suppressing your immune system (it’s normally given with organ transplants) at the normal dose, as a possible side effect of this suppression your immune system may not be able to fight cancer for example. To say that rapamycin causes cancer is an exaggeration.
now, in this trial the dose is nowhere near what you would get for a transplant. it’s speculated that small doses have a hormetic effect and it actually stimulates your immune system to trigger biological garbage collection paths that normally are not exercised. as a result you end up with cells that are younger. at least that’s the theory.
lookup MTOR, and mtor1 and mtor2. learn a bit about it before scaring people away from what could be a breakthrough way of treating aging
I sometimes wonder what would happen if you built a site like HN or reddit where, as a condition of membership, you sometimes are asked to really probe the depths of a comment you make. Why you selected specific words, who you expected to read your comment, how you expected the content and the style to be received, how you felt about its evident reception. Maybe haul other commenters or up/downvoters into the conversation, how the comment influenced their perception of the individuals in the thread, how they would view future comments from these individuals, etc.
I’m guessing there have been studies of a similar nature, but not in a way that’s public or where you may get to know some of the participants before/after these little exposes.
For my part i stopped reading the comment you replied to after the first sentence. People that don’t have enough self control in the instant to moderate their speech to a basic level of civility aren’t likely to follow it with nuanced perspective.
I'd rather have a site that condensed the main points of a comment, merged it with similar sentiments when appropriate, and kept track of the popularity of that viewpoint. It would solve the problem that, what, 70% of the comments on here are just repeating the same ideas. It seems like we're a few years away from it, but I think it is coming.
I agree with you. Seems I cannot edit the comment now, and this is not an excuse by any means, but the first sentence came as a visceral reaction to the obvious uninformed and fear-mongering tone of the person I responded to.
In my opinion there is zero excuse for whataboutism and I heard a story that said that...
I think part of the problem with today's society is that nobody calls BS anymore and we are more concerned with not being perceived as aggressive vs grounding people into reality. We get to make our own "facts".
That being said, there is a way to call BS without being rude but refuting BS is usually an order of magnitude harder than generating. Also, in my experience, a lot of time people that are spewing BS are not interested in a constructive conversation. They just want to feel smart and/or like hearing themselves talk.
I would say that most drugs have different effects at different doses.
It's usually not the drug that is the problems, it's the dosage.
To answer the rapamycin question: the normal dose that is given in case of an organ transplant is 6mg on day one and after that 2mg per day. That makes for 14-18mg/week.
For longevity what I've heard is 3-5mg once per week.
Now take your normal OTC drug, let's say Tylenol and take 3-4 times the recommended dose. Liver injury or even liver failure follows.
This is pretty opposite of the truth.
In the recent NPR podcast they talked about the fact that inventor of rapamycin practically cured himself of late stage cancer (given up to 6m of life, lived 5 years)
His cancer was nowhere to be found.
Then he decided to prove rapsmycin was the cause, stopped taking it, and died very shortly of cancer.
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/dirty...
Even if it cures some cancers, it may cause others (skin and lymphoma according to the study above). And the inventor's story is an anecdote, not a study.
I'm not saying with any confidence that Rapamycin is a bad thing. I'm just asking a question, which I think is fair, considering the long list of strong adverse effects in higher dosages:
A massive amount of longevity research is crowdfunded by a small community of longevity enthusiasts. Lifespan.io and SENS are both crowdfunded.
Unfortunately, death is a difficult topic for people to discuss and think about. It is mental hazard that induces existential dread, so it is very difficult to hold anyone's attention long enough to garner support for longevity initiatives. People convince themselves that death is in some indefinite future, and that they are okay with dying, but on the deathbed that fear and horror of the eternal void is always there.
But if offered on their deathbed to give up everything they have for a chance to live longer, most people would take it at that moment without hesitation. However, we are immature beings, without a propensity for long-term planning, so most people neither donate nor advocate for longevity research.
I think massive strides in longevity are possible today with enough research. The problem is funding. The problem is garnering social support.
We spent trillions of dollars fighting COVID, which will affect a select few, but we cannot spend a minuscule fraction of that on aging, which has the same end result, but for everyone. It's shortsighted and sad.
I suspect you might be reading a little bit too much into people's skepticism about anti aging research.
Sure, death and aging are hard topics.
But not having any more data about what funding bodies have to say, I would go for the sad and simpler explanation : all proposed "cure for aging" in the history of mandkind have turned out to be ineffective (either disappointing or scams)
(Whereas "cure for fatal disease" have kind of a track record.)
This, I believe, will end the day we have a tech that's "promising enough", but "enough" will be hard to reach.
I don't find it unfair to have a higher bar to clear for "elixir of youth" than for "covid-19 vaccine".
I would agree with you on the cause of skepticism, for one caveat - there is no substantial public funding whatsoever when it comes to anti-aging research.
This shows that people are more content with ignoring the horror of death than actually trying to fix it.
It's one thing to not fund an organization you've never heard of, that is making claims you're unsure of. It's another thing to not even try to solve a pressing problem with public funding and/or initiatives.
Clearly, people find death problematic, given the lengths we go to avoid it when it comes within striking distance. We moved the world to deal with the imminent threat of COVID. But when death is not near us, we tend not to think about it at all - we actively avoid thinking about it, even.
I think future historians will find this general shortsighted behavior quite interesting - how can a species that so profoundly fears death collectively ignore the issue of aging so as to not even dedicate a noticeable fraction of money, time, and effort into solving aging?
In all likelihood, the first products of the longevity research will not "cure aging", but reset the internal clock of the body slightly back. For example, five years.
That would still be a major boost to health of said individual.
Most of such improvements will probably be invisible. If they manage to reduce skin age, too, they will wallow in money.
Your last line made me wonder if there is any serious R&D in the cosmetics industry (or if all money goes to hiring better-looking celebrities to advertise products that do the same nothing as they have done in the past - which sounds like a much saner business plan than "actually trying to fix aging").
> It is mental hazard that induces existential dread
No, some of us simply conclude that anything beyond the usual exercise, eat healthy, etc has negative payoff.
In other words: devoting oneself to a lifelong quest for longevity can be expected to consume far more years of life than it will add. And those years consumed will be younger, healthier, more alert years than any to be gained.
I notice that you use the expression "the usual means" twice in this discussion.
Models of financing science change all the time. Most of the breakthroughs before 1950 were not funded by means that we currently consider usual and current models of financing science are, to a degree, holdover from the Cold War. But note that the same does not apply to applied technology: the VC model that runs Silicon Valley is very successful compared to the usual grant structures.
It is the Online Age now and crowdfunding is an alternative that wasn't available before. There will inevitably be a lot of misses and outright frauds, but I prefer a world with alternatives that do not depend on bureaucracy as much.
Notably, the longevity researchers spent a lot of energy to get aging classified as disease. This is finally bearing some fruit, but I can't help thinking that the same energy could have been spent better in their areas of expertise, not in lobbying.
On the other hand, a crowdfunding campaign can be managed by interns.
Sure, I’m not against crowdfunding research, as long as there is a clear reason for it. For example, too much budget directed to covid is hurting other perfectly valid areas? Fine. Or, someone has a perfectly good research plan, but failed to compete in the usual arena? Fine, too. But there is also a big potential for pseudo-science to be funded in this manner if it’s not 100% clear why. Especially if the reasons sound somewhat like conspiracy theories.
Rapacymin and mTOR has been studied a great deal through the usual means. There is a connection to Diabetes so the subject has received quite a lot of attention.
What does it matter as long as they release the data and their methods. Then someone else can verify it. So it is just science as usual really when you think about it.
Sure, theoretically you’re right, but in practice there are thousands of extremely well-qualified researchers being paid to assess such research plans. I don’t know if it’s reasonable to expect that the general public will simply start to evaluate research projects all of a sudden, voluntarily and effectively. There is a huge potential for pseudoresearch to thrive in this model.
Rapamycin – Increased mean and maximal lifespan in both males and females when initiated at 20 months of age (Harrison et al., 2009) and when initiated at 9 months of age (Miller et al., 2011). Females responded more robustly than males at equivalent doses; when ~ equal blood levels were achieved, response was also about equivalent in females and males (Miller et al., 2013).
If it ends up working and is cheap enough for everyone then society will quickly have massive (more than now) issues with population growth & infrastructure that can't keep pace.
If it works and it's expensive, it will create a class division if "Haves and Have-Nots" more awful enough to create civil unrest on an incredible scale.
I hope it works, but if it does it's hard to see an implementation path that ends well.
The thing to keep in mind is that, essentially, preventing aging is the endgame of medicine as a science. Right now, enormous amounts of resources are used by healthcare systems everywhere in the world to care for the elderly. And even then, all this effort eventually fails.
What I'm trying to say is that just from an economic point of view, it's more beneficial to rejuvenate people enough that they don't have any age-related conditions than to treat those conditions. Even if the cost of whatever the rejuvenation intervention is is high. So, IMO, it's very unlikely that we'll see a class division, especially in countries with universal healthcare.
Medicine is already a class issue. We already see class divisions, at least here in the US, over who gets healthcare and who does not.
Even countries with universal healthcare have it to a lesser extent when, depending on the country, the wealthy can still pay out of pocket for the highest quality private doctors. Or travel to another country like the US that will give you the highest level of care that you're willing to pay for.
As for rejuvenation vs elderly care, that only gets around the problems I mention if rejuvenated people still love about the same amount of time, just with a higher quality of life. Any treatment that increases life span will either cause a a massive population boom, or class-differentiated civil unrest.
It's not just in the US. When our healthcare system basically shutdown here in Canada for everything but very arbitrarily defined "essential treatments" that may or may not exclude treating things that can kill you but just not imminently, a lot of richer Canadians crossed the borders to get treated at full price (because that's sometimes still better than no treatment if you have even just enough to pay). The rest were stuck with almost no medical care for a full year and a half with no alternative or way to get around it if your treatment didn't make it on the list. So yeah you are right, it's always a matter of class even in places with universal single payer healthcare
Does anyone think this would make you ageless until one day you drop dead? I certainly don't. If we all require the elderly care at 150 as we do at 75, all those problems GP mentioned will still exist and all the problems you mention will still be around.
The term you're looking for is longevity escape velocity. It's when lifespan is extended faster than real time.
> this would make you ageless until one day you drop dead
No, that's not how this works. How would a person die of an old chronological age if their biological age is, as far as their body is concerned, still 25 years? It's not like there's a time bomb that goes boom after a certain number of years regardless of what you do.
I meant that to be an absurd prediction. Editted to be clear. But if that's not true I don't get the "but all will be good because no elderly care" argument.
Because in the process of extending life, you will also forestall the other effects of aging besides just death by old age. And if you cure aging entirely, then people won't just live indefinite lifespans, they also wouldn't become elderly.
Could make you ageless until you die in a transportation accident.
Even without aging, humans aren't immortal. There's a probability of dying from something other than medical issues. Eventually that adds up.
I think the people willing to give up travel at greater-than-walking-speed, sports, hiking, etc in order to live longer is small enough that they won't be a burden. I'm not sure I would really call that "living" myself, but it's their choice.
ageless until you die in a transportation accident.
Totally not reliable, but I once heard an estimate that if aging was cured, the average lifespan would be about 600 years due to various forms of non age related death-- accidents etc.
I wonder if people would be more careful knowing the only way they're likely to die is in an accident. The closest parallel we have is younger vs older people, and younger people are on average less cautious. But is that a developmental thing, or because death seems less real being further away? Maybe people would be more reckless!
It’s a group survival thing. It’s helpful to have some reckless members because they discover solutions that others would never explore. In particular, young males have been prewired by evolution to generally be the most reckless members of a group because they are the most expendable. The number of young females determines a group’s reproductive rate and older members tend to have critical skills, knowledge, and wisdom. I speak as a former young male who explored more than his share of possible solutions for the group.
Mm, that makes sense. Which also means that on the individual level it's developmental. (Since it's intrinsic to young males, and they (we) tend to grow out of it.)
Presumably though even if biological aging were somehow paused at the level of young adulthood, I would think cognitive development would still proceed, so young males would still outgrow that reckless period.
We do not really know what kind of unknown health problems lurk beyond the 115 limit. Supercentenarians live and die in a slightly different way from usual people.
If we can possibly keep the immune and cardiovascular system young indefinitely, thus staving off heart disase and cancers, what is going to break down next? Possibly something within the brain.
If the proportion of healthy/working years in one's total lifespan increases, then we should be more easily able to pay for elder care. This is assuming there are no significant political hurdles in terms of increasing the retirement age, etc.
I would think if people age slower they will be infirm longer? Maybe the proportion would stay the same. Only the "longevity escape velocity" the other person mentions would do the trick.
This matches my thinking as well...In general, we are relatively close to breaking new ground in longevity or even aging reversal on multiple fronts...Yet, we are utterly socio-economically, ethically and morally immature for any side-effects that might bring. It's hard to be optimistic about the further divisions this would create in society, and the sheer scale of change that would be required to mitigate the consequences...We are still much more interested in throwing of feces at each other (luckily, mostly symbolically) across imaginary borders, fighting over imaginary tales and dieties and chasing to posses the latest material object which signals success to anyone who can see it, while rapidly destroying our own habitat...I doubt that there is anything that can happen in the short term that could turn things around and make us grow more mature to tackle advancements like this and battle biological and technological challenges before us...Even as an optimist at heart, it seems hard to not have the impression of sliding downwards in recent history / present.
Atheism and agnosticism are increasing every year. Deaths due to war have been decreasing steadily since World War 2. Some people argue that younger people are becoming less materialistic (https://www.econlib.org/archives/2016/10/non-materialist.htm...).
I’m not sure what you mean by “make us grow more mature”, but there could conceivably be some major technological advancement that would give us enough time to deal with the sociological effects of increased longevity. For example, electric cars are taking over, CRISPR gene editing exists, fusion is moving forward with the ITER project and various start-ups, space rockets are now reusable, etc.
I would say we have more objective reasons to be optimistic about our future prospects than not. Things are getting better, and it might just be that train wrecks and car crashes are more interesting to focus on. No one writes stories about the days that someone gets home on time safely.
I believe it would have the opposite effect. Lower death rate appears to lead to people having fewer children. Most countries with GDP over $20K per person now average fewer than 2 children per woman[1]. I think a widely-available longevity breakthrough will lead to a population decline that will have to be managed.
Those are cultural changes that evolve over time. Also lower death rates correlate to higher socioeconomic status, which is what correlates to fewer children.
Either way, a widespread treatment becoming available over a relatively short period of time would not give society time to adjust in this way. There would be a crisis, perhaps even imposed limits on having children in many places. Assuming we got through it, things might settle down.
The hard upheaval to deal with is if it was available only to the wealthy. Class warfare would be taken to a whole new level.
All successful species have strongly developed instincts to maximize the probability of passing their DNA to children who can in turn do the same. For humans, birth timing and number of children are some of the most critical parameters in achieving this. Having too few, having too many, having them too soon, and having them too late, all lower the odds of success. The optimal parameter values depend on environmental risks, our abilities, resources, and our reproductive window.
If we expect a longer lifespan and higher odds of survival for potential children, our instinct is to delay reproduction and have fewer children in order to increase resources available per child.
This instinct developed over a very long period of time, but our technological advances have created a degree of safety and abundance that our instinct was never “trained” on and thus I suspect it is over-suppressing fertility. A longevity breakthrough will appeal to this instinct even more strongly than living in one of today’s highly developed countries. Consequently, I think our instinct will then suppress fertility even further.
Do people in America with one or two children really not have more because they think this is maximizing the expected number of grandchildren? This doesn't seem realistic to me. I think in American even the working poor commonly have children (often more than the wealthy).
It was meant to. My intent was to stimulate thought, not to conclusively prove. There’s great disagreement among researchers studying fertility, income, life expectancy, and such. These are merely my conclusions, which differ from those of many others.
> Do people in America with one or two children really not have more because they think this is maximizing the expected number of grandchildren?
Yes, but my argument is that this is more instinctive than it is conscious thought. For example, women are increasingly having their first child after 30 because they know it is possible to do so successfully and it gives them more time to establish a career and find the best mate. This increases expected resources available per child and expected genetic fitness. In essence, they are instinctively trying to maximize their probability of having children that successfully reproduce, but it tends to lead to fewer children than optimal because our instinct is poorly calibrated to today’s environment.
> I think in American even the working poor commonly have children (often more than the wealthy).
Correct. They also have shorter life expectancy than the wealthy.
If you slow down aging the percentage of healthy people goes up making the elderly a tiny percentage of the population.
Right now about 80% of men in the US live to 65. If you slow aging by 1/10 so someone at 650 would theoretically be as healthy as a current 65 year old only ~(0.8) ^ 10 or 10.7% of men live that long.
Push it to say 1/100th and accidents are basically going to kill everyone while their healthy, in theory only about 7% of men would live to the equivalent of 30.
Would you mind walking through the math there? Are we modeling this “aging to 650” process as 10 “aging to 65” processes? I don’t see why that is a reasonable model, but I’m no actuary so I’m just curious.
Yeah if people can live 1000 years they will probably become more risk adverse. I don't buy the argument at all; I think we'll end up with just as many elderly people --- or maybe even more person-years of infirm-but-not-dying. And while I don't think this has to be bad for society, I think it will be unless we fix a bunch of problems first.
The individualist myopia with all things life-extension is staggering.
I am not saying anything negative about life extension, I would love to avoid aging. Someone is going to be that cautious simply based on their personality. However, someone isn’t everyone more importantly even healthy 70 year olds are at increased risks.
Let’s push things to a 1,000,000,000 years theoretical lifespan. At that point freak accidents are extremely deadly. Essentially your arguing people will 1:1 become more cautious as lifespan increases. Further, that caution will make a difference, you can play it safe that’s not going to prevent terrorist bombings etc on those timescales.
I do agree there is a point where accidents will predominate, but one simple drug doesn't seem like something that would get us anywhere near that, no?
I agree and would be extremely excited if it added even 10%. On the other hand I also doubt people would stop speeding because a cheap drug extended healthy lifespan by say 10 years. It’s an obvious thing to take, but people don’t seem to care that much. Just look the effort it took to get people to use seatbelts.
It’s complicated depending on what we mean by slowing aging by 1/10th. Arguably it means the odds of death at age X are now the equivalent of the old odds of death from someone 1/10th your age. That’s the assumption I was working as a middle ground.
However, even if you take the most beneficial version where the odds of a heath issue killing someone by age X is the equivalent of dying from a health issue by 1/10th your age that doesn’t stop accidents. If your risk of car accident at age 30 is X the slowing aging by 1/10th still rolls that dice 10 times by the equivalent of 31. As such people’s odds of reaching the equivalent of 65 still drop as you slow aging.
On top of this stuff like smoking cares more about the number of years you smoked than your age. A 50 year old with 30 years of smoking isn’t that likely to die before 51. However, someone that started at 200 and tries to smoke for 300 years isn’t going to make it to 500.
Thanks for sharing this. I didn't think of what "slowing aging by 1/10th" meant either and the idea of "odds of death at age X are now what odds of death were at age X/10 for health reasons" is a good definition.
This generalizes into discussion for any treatment that promotes longevity.
The thing that comes to mind is that it overcomes or breaks various “policy levers” that rely on an expected course of life. Some examples: 99-year leases, defined benefit pension plans and life insurance policies.
I also wonder how many mainframe systems assume a maximum possible age of 2^7 years.
Yep, a whole new Y2K when people live 2000 years. And then many years later, "sorry boss it's gonna crash in a few months. The was written in ancient times and only supports 32bit ages."
Currently developed countries are all struggling with fertility rates below the replacement rate, so while something like curing aging would certainly lead to those sorts of problems, I would expect extending healthy lifespan by some decades could actually solve more problems than it creates. Also as health and lifespans increase, people tend to delay having children, and have fewer overall.
Also thinking a bit bigger picture, even if people didn't die of old age at all, couples could still have approximately 1.1 children each on average without the population increasing beyond ~1.5x its initial level. Of course, even that level of restriction seems far-fetched (but then, so does a cure to aging), but it's not like people would need to stop having children entirely.
Can't edit: the 1.5x was wrong. Assuming no one dies, if every couple has 1 child, population would approach a limit of double its initial level. Since some will die in accidents, you could have slightly more than 1 child per couple without unbounded population growth.
> population growth & infrastructure that can't keep pace
why would that be a problem? the healthier the older population gets, the more they can work and produce more (instead of "retiring"), and this production includes making more infrastructure (directly, or indirectly via taxation).
Because having it happen all at once would strain many things to the breaking point. If it only extended life by 7 years then we'd have roughly 10% higher population-- on top of normal population growth.
If it became widely available, the second that happened it would be a race to invest in infrastructure and especially higher yield food production-- investments that would need to be measured in large fractions of the world's GDP.
And it wouldn't even add to the viable workforce for a while: this is life extension, not rejuvenation. We're stuck with the working population we have now: People past 65 aren't going to be able to get out there and build infrastructure. Plenty of them wouldn't want to either if they were otherwise near retirement or actually retired: It would require uprooting their entire lives to change tracks.
I'm not saying it's theoretically impossible, just that I see no likely way it would actually happen given the state the world is in right now.
If it works and is expensive, governments will be forced to nationalize it.
There are precisely zero nations on this planet whose citizens would accept death should a true cure become available. Governments would be faced with either total destruction or producing the cure themselves.
That assumes we do nothing in the US because people in power will die soon. I don't think that's the case. I think we do nothing because our governance has too many veto points and other ossifying characteristics, and that our governance can't respond to future problems because the present is more salient and the bar is very high at which our democracy responds to anything at all.
Max Planck suggested that "Science progresses funeral by funeral!". I think we know that this doesn't only apply to science. A marked absence of funerals in the cadre of very powerful people reluctant to let go, might present yet another problem. Could be a tyrant's charter.
Yes, he talked extensively about rapamycin on the recent Tim Ferriss show podcast, in terms of its potential to extend lifetime. [1]
Also, scientist who has found this compound and saved it in his freezer to be used for transplants rejection problems, applied rapamycin on himself when he was given 6m to live prognosis based on late stage cancer he had. He lived 5 more years, and died short after he stopped taking rapamycin, to prove it was responsible for the cure. Amazing story.
One day, we will be able to die on our own terms, when we want to go, instead of having our life and our loved ones' ruthlessly ripped away from us. And it will be thanks to these individuals.