I think we have too many wars going on right now: The war on drugs, the war on poverty, the war on teenage pregnancy, the war on illiteracy. Plus the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. And they all seem to have Czar's, you know? But the thing about wars is that they're black & white. Us against them. Good vs. bad. And aging just isn't like that. I mean it's cool having a war to go after Osama Bin Laden. I think most of us can get behind that one. But I don't think that most of us can get all motivated and suited up to fight, claw, struggle and sacrifice so that baby boomers can have a few more years in charge. So Sylvester Stallone can make Rambo 18. So tenured professors can keep their jobs forever. Or so that a bunch of dirty hippies can sit around in their nanotechnology enhanced 150 year old bodies telling kids about how awesome the 60's were and how lucky those kids are to have all that debt.
One concern I see with destroying aging is that it will most certainly result in the destruction of a very precise
cycle of evolutionary innovation, even within our species.
It's like a giant "no retirement" program, never allowing younger generations to be placed into positions were they are forced to create change, innovate and fail; all the while bettering the human race.
It's no accident that innovation comes mostly from youth - the inexperience that makes you foolish occasionally creates species changing progress.
This is the Pandora's box of unintended consequences, all in the name of refusing to accept a key aspect of the human condition.
Evolution has almost exclusively adopted destructive aging processes in every form of life on the planet. The fact that we can't conclusively answer why this is so is reason enough not to temp fate in this way.
You're right that aging seems to have an evolutionary advantage. That advantage is increased diversity within a species. Super successful individuals, who would otherwise "take over" a species, are replaced, so that other strains can get a chance. Diversity in a species is as important as diversity in a stock portfolio. What's working great today, may not work great tomorrow, so portfolios and species that survive plagues, asteroids, and global warming fanatics tend to be diversified.
However....
I contend that the human race has moved beyond evolution. No longer do only the fittest survive. We protect our weak and stupid, and they mate just as frequently and successfully as our strong and smart. We've wrestled the destiny of our species away from evolution, and taken control of it ourselves.
Now, how that experiment turns out, it's too early to tell. So far, so good. But since the ship has already sailed anyway, any argument that something is "against evolution" is a moot argument.
I would like to live for longer than 100 years myself, so I admit to being a bit biased on this issue. I think a case can be made that the "best and the brightest" of our current governing and business class could use some augmentation. We've had some great leaders in our past, it might be nice if they were still active. Closer to our hearts here, what if we still had Richard Feynman? What if we still had Arthur C Clarke? Wouldn't the world probably be better? We are not so brimming with extra talent that we can just throw it away after a few decades.
>> That advantage is increased diversity within a species.
Actually evolution doesn't really work like that. Traits will rarely evolve to the benefit of a species. Evolution operates much more strongly at the individual level & even more strongly at the gene level.
It's discussed some place in the video belos but I don't remember which part (of 6). Worth watching if you're interested anyway. Otherwise, the evolutionary reason given there for aging is an evolutionary bias for 'fixing' diseases that affect the young. A disease, deadly at 5 years old is more of a problem for lifetime reproductions then something deadly at 20 which is more of a problem then something at 30 etc. I'm not sure if this explains aging in it's entirety, but it seems like a logical part.
None of your ancestors died at infancy. Very few are likely to have died younger then 15. You can probably trace some that died younger then 25. It would be unusual not to have some within memory that died younger then 50.
Since ancestral humans probably rarely lived (reproduced or contributed to the reproduction of their offspring) past 40-50, it's not surprising that there are many issues unique to this life stage that have had very little evolutionary tweaking done.
What I would like to ask/say (Richard, if you're reading, speak up) is that this might explain why old age illnesses are more severe. It doesn't do much to explain the discrepancies in young/old illnesses.
Evolution is still happening. It's not weeding out what you call the weak and the stupid, but that's not its job - it only selects those who are best adapted to their environment, whatever that may be.
Some people are still having 8 kids, some are having 2, and some are having none. This is not randomly distributed across genotypes, so some are being selected.
Interesting points. I agree that it is most certain that evolution from a natural sense is something we have forced ourselves out of.
I worry though that the further down that path we venture, the more likely we are to hasten our demise. A few thousand years is nothing to evolution. As long as we are completely reliant and subject to its rules - and we are, we are at it's mercy. Our insistence on protecting our weak, and encouraging their procreation is almost certainly a dead end, evolution wise. The clock is already ticking, and it's not if, but when and how bad. Hell, segments of our population die from immediate peanut exposure - good grief!
We are not so brimming with extra talent that we can just throw it away after a few decades.
I'm not sure I agree with this. I think we are. What our current society is poor at though IMO is recognizing and developing that talent. For every Feynmen, there are thousands that "drop out" due primarily to artificial pressures.
Good point, but I would just add that evolution doesn't go away just because we are affecting it consciously. At best it just means we are responsible for our own evolution, which of course leads to the question, "do we collectively think it's best for reproduction to decrease and lifespans to increase?"
You've answered one way by citing the best and brightest. I would answer another way by saying that I think the best and brightest are outnumbered 100 to 1 by greedy individuals leveraging their wealth to consolidate power.
I don't know that increasing longevity would decrease diversity, because increased longevity doesn't necessarily open up the "window of opportunity" for having kids.
It might or might not. We have women having children now at ages that would be considered absolutely ancient 10,000 years ago. As we extend our lifespan, we seem to stretch out everything ... childhood, child bearing years, productive years, etc. My point is that, it doesn't matter, since we no longer submit to evolution's rules, anyway.
" To give an example of the way man operates compared to other animals, consider speciation, which, as we know, tends to occur when a small group of animals gets separated from the rest of the herd by some geological upheaval, population pressure, food shortage or whatever and finds itself in a new environment with maybe something different going on. Take a very simple example; maybe a bunch of animals suddenly finds itself in a place where the weather is rather colder. We know that in a few generations those genes which favour a thicker coat will have come to the fore and we'll come and we'll find that the animals have now got thicker coats. Early man, who's a tool maker, doesn't have to do this: he can inhabit an extraordinarily wide range of habitats on earth, from tundra to the Gobi Desert - he even manages to live in New York for heaven's sake - and the reason is that when he arrives in a new environment he doesn't have to wait for several generations; if he arrives in a colder environment and sees an animal that has those genes which favour a thicker coat, he says 'I'll have it off him!'"
Those stubborn humans: they're always tempting fate by learning to hunt, farm, write, sail, smelt, fly, and compute. If only they would accept the human condition as their ineluctable fate: they would then learn the wisdom of dying, and welcome Death with happiness and joy!
"Evolution has almost exclusively adopted destructive aging processes in every form of life on the planet. The fact that we can't conclusively answer why this is so is reason enough not to temp fate in this way."
I'd say it's pretty obvious, although I'm no biologist: natural selection doesn't "care" how long you live, as long as you live long enough to have (and possibly raise) kids.
Sure, but I don't think this effect is enough to be significant to most evolutionary processes, especially if (and I believe this is the idea) in aging you don't become feeble. As long as there are enough resources to go around, there isn't a big problem, especially since people are resources themselves.
(If this weren't the case, you would think that evolution would drive us to die shortly after we had children, or at least after we lost our ability to have children.)
Most species have far more limited resources than we do (ie. that we have created for ourselves recently), and they exist in some sort of equilibrium. If old members of the population live longer, then the group will run short on resources and some will starve. If the old are not feeble and they don't die more than the young, then evolution will slow and the population as a whole will be less able to adapt to a changing environment over time.
Is this effect significant or not? I don't think we can guess at these types of things. Subtle changes in a complex system are hard to predict.
Natural resources aren't finite in any meaningful economic sense. Even in a physical sense, the upper bounds are huge. And, most important, most people are net producers; the longer they live, the more they produce.
No; the default is decay (as we see from the second law of thermodynamics), and we would have to explicitly inhibit decay in order to stop death. There is no evolutionary incentive to stop death due to aging.
To play devil's advocate, why have a meta-care about the race if you will not be around to witness it? It's like planning your own funeral--you'll never know how it turned out. The whole game of evolution is a greedy contest of self-interest--why approach it selflessly with concerns about "the race?"
Normally, from instance to instance, each of us ceases to exist. A new person, under an illusion of being a "continuous" person and not merely one one in a sequence of related instantaneous persons, takes the place of the old person. And so it goes, from instance to instance. An instant from any given instance, the you of that instance will not exist. So why bother planning for those instances of you (who might remember being you, but are not you) that will exist (in their respective instances)?
That you that were you when "you" began reading this, is not the you that is you now. That former you left you his memories, but he cannot experience what you are experiencing now. So, why did he bother leaving any memories for you at all? Such bothering should have been pointless from his point of view, now that he is extinct. Yes? (...Unless he were under the illusion that he would somehow still exist, rather than the more-likely scenario of merely some creature like him, i.e. you, existing in his stead and who might be under the illusion that he is the same person as the person who kindly left the memories, the physical possessions, the bank account, the bodily health, etc.)
someone with a materialistic view of the world might also see the disintegration of a given corpus as the killing of a human being. The reassembled human might be considered a different sentience with the same memories as the original, as could be easily proved by constructing not just one, but several copies of the original and interrogating each as to the perceived uniqueness of each. Each copy constructed using merely descriptive data, but not matter, transmitted from the origin and new matter already at the destination point would consider itself to be the true continuation of the original and yet this could not logically be true; moreover, because each copy constructed via this data-only method would be made of new matter that already existed at the destination, there would be no way, even in principle, of distinguishing the original from the copies.
The problem of personal identity relates to change as applied to people. [...] The question is exactly why we call the old woman in 1998 the same person as that little girl in 1920.
It depends on what you define as "you". Honestly, I don't think the question is that interesting. It's like asking whether Linux 2.2.17 can be considered the same project as Linux 2.6.28. All we can say objectively is that they share a history and a name. Whether they are the same project is a subjective opinion.
The point is that -- given that you will in objective fact not exist tomorrow -- if you can find a reason to care about the impostor who tomorrow will take your place in society and pretend to be you, you should be able to apply the same reasoning to caring about your community as it might exist after you pretend to "die". That you are related to both is objectively confirmable.
In short: if you care about one, logically you should care about the other.
The "you" now shares a common history with the "you" a second ago. Other individuals do not. Your conclusion only follows if there is no objective difference between your past self and other individuals, and there clearly is.
I'm talking about the personal history an individual perceives through his memories. The history that connects the "me" of the now to the "me" of the past.
So, you would feel sensible in caring about (having altruistic feelings for) someone who could remember being you. Yes?
Would you feel sensible in caring about the future-you if (the present) you knew that he was going to have amnesia?
Me: "I'm going to drain my bank account and run wild, having a good time, because I know that tomorrow (and forever after) I won't remember having done such a dastardly thing to myself."
It's not about what _I_ feel sensible about caring about. We're talking about a hypothetical individual who cares only about versions of himself that share a common ancestor or descendant state.
If such an individual were given advanced knowledge of an irreversable amnesia, then logically he would commit acts that benefit him and cost the individual inhabiting his body in a day's time. So yes, it makes perfect sense.
But given the same circumstances, I'd behave differently, as I'm not a sociopath.
I completely and wholeheartedly disagree. Here's why: it is uncertainty, pain and infirmity I am afraid of, not death.
We don't need a war on aging, we need a war on suffering. Not because of some wishy-washy feel-good philosophy, but simply because it is crucial for the survival of our species. Which currently depends as much on innovation as it does on adaptation (evolution). We need to improve overall quality of life so we can tackle the challenges ahead instead of worrying about food, shelter, resources, infirmity and old age.
I'd be even more ambitious and say we need a war on long-term, trans-generational suffering. Why? Because it seems like some of the problems we are facing today as a species cannot be solved in a single lifetime, not even an enhanced lifetime.
Let's solve the natural resources problem first, then tackle aging, maybe ... I'll concede this: the 'death problem' is worth solving, but who said it needs to be solved in your generation?
I [...] disagree. [...] it is uncertainty, pain and infirmity I am afraid of, not death. [...] We don't need a war on aging, we need a war on suffering.
Thus you can throw yourself flat on the ground, stretched out upon Mother Earth, with the certain conviction that you are one with her and she with you. You are as firmly established, as invulnerable as she, indeed a thousand times firmer and more invulnerable. As surely as she will engulf you tomorrow, so surely will she bring you forth anew to the new striving and suffering. And not merely "some day." Now, today, every day she is bringing you forth, not once but thousands upon thousands of times, just as every day she engulfs you a thousand times over.
- Erwin Schroedinger, My View of the World, 1964, p.21
If you oppose anti-aging treatments, refuse to take them. But of course, you want to decide for the rest of us. Well, death lovers: you first! How about right now? For the good of the species! What, no takers? I smell rancid hypocrisy.
Anyone opposing anti-aging research should be seen as trying to kill you and treated accordingly.
<cynic>Alternative title: "Concepts, that if accepted by many people, would make funding much easier"</cynic>
<devil's advocate>Death by old age is there by (non-intelligent) design. It's no accident (leaving aside the process of natural selection).</devil's advocate>
I've said it before on Hacker News, I'm indifferent towards life extension. The pros and cons are very evident but one doesn't seem to trump the other. I'm very much undecided on the issue and would like to be otherwise.
I find this longevity research very disconcerting, especially the tone of this page in particular.
It's thinly veiled egotism to say "people should not grow old and die". What the advocate is really saying is, "I'm terrified of death and I will do anything to prevent it, no matter the consequences to society or humanity".
I'm reminded of Tolkien's Akallabeth.
Death is the fundamental strength of all species. Sure we should try to pursue advances in health care that improve longevity, but attacking the cause of aging itself is abhorrently idiotic.
attacking the cause of aging itself is abhorrently idiotic.
Because it is good for society that 30-year-olds, because of aging-related processes, tend to have lower IQ's (and worse joints, poorer eyesight, poorer hearing, etc.) than 20-year-olds?
I am against youth-related processes (eg, birth), because younger people generally tend to be less wise, and not as mature.
More seriously, I find it dubious that proponents of 'longer, better life' don't focus on the low hanging fruit: how to get people to eat better, eat less, and live a less sedentary lifestyle. Many of the ailments of aging could be 'cured' in this way.
I don't expect them to be ready in time to immortalize anybody reading this, certainly not codgers like de Gray and Kurzweil. When my 5-year-old asks me what the world will be like in 100 years, I tell him we'll most likely all be dead. But it's theoretically possible.
You don't even need them to reduce glycosylation. There are drugs in development that reverse it. Here's one that looked promising, but the company ran out of money before they ran out of red tape:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alagebrium
ISTR that there are supposedly better medications that do the same thing in the works.
Known crosslink breakers (e.g., alagebrium, of the thiazolium halide family) are only partly effective because they break only a subset of AGE crosslink structures (sugar-derived alpha-diketone bridges). So far, no agent has been found that breaks the prevalent glucosepane and K2P crosslink structures. Enzymes that would be able to recognize and disassemble glycation products may be too big to migrate into the ECM and repair collagen or elastin in vivo.
Meanwhile, over the next decade, glycation -- that might otherwise have been largely-inhibited by simple and inexpensive glycation-inhibition regimens -- will turn today's:
* 20-year-olds into further-degraded 30-year-olds,
* 30-year-olds into further-degraded 40-year-olds,
* 40-year-olds into further-degraded 50-year-olds,
* etc.
The point is that glycation is just a chemical reaction which can be reversed. You need to get something there which can reverse the chemical reaction. It's not necessarily easy, but it's not necessarily impossible either. There are also other potential ways to deal with A.G.Es, like stimulating turnover of those molecules, or, as you implied, preventing their formation.
I'm not trying to imply that todays n year olds won't be 2019's n+10 year olds, or 2050's fertilizer. I'm just saying it's possible in theory.
Yes, because it allows that batch of 20-year-olds to fine new solutions to the same problems the 30 year olds faced, moving the society itself forward. Repeat ad-infinitum.
How egocentric of us to assume that what is good for an individual is always good for the society as a whole.
How egocentric of us to assume that what is good for an individual is always good for the society as a whole.
logic alert. It would be egocentric to believe that what is good for me is good for society as a whole. To believe what is good for individuals in general is good for society as a whole is the opposite of egocentric. I'm like a tiny speck on the face of humanity and my fate would not affect the general state of "what is good for the individual"
Besides, this is all a moot point guys. We already have answered this question when the first doctor cured a disease. Death is no fun. We have a moral obligation not to allow our fellow members of society to die if we can help it. Life extension in some fashion or another has been around since the first herbal cures.
Now if there is some magic line where suddenly you're ruining the human race by letting people live a year longer -- and we haven't already reached it -- where is it? And if we have reached it, what do you guys propose? Keeping medicine away from old people? Perhaps denying flu vaccines after the age of 80?
There is no right time to die. Society is doing just fine with people living 5x what they did ten thousand years ago. We can go another 5x easy. After that -- we'll figure it out when we get there.
Apologies for the poorly worded statement. I believe you understood my meaning, however.
There is a difference in preventing death and eliminating it (or extending life in such a way that the same side effects are achieved). While I certainly don't have all the answers, I can't help but be struck by the rather narcissistic and frankly immature tone that dominates the debate, particularly with those in favour of enhanced exploration.
Perhaps it is because of this attitude, and not the life extension itself that I find myself put off. The human condition is what it is primarily because of death. We can't possibly accept that we can remove death and not significantly alter what it means to be human. While that might not be an issue, and may even be desired, that's not what we discuss; in fact it is often dismissed.
"removing death" seems to the the absolute extreme position in this discussion. It also seems the most unlikely in the next couple hundred years. It seems that this is the thing you have the most problem with -- the selfish, immature attitude of wanting to never die.
I got the gist of what you were saying, but it doesn't track with me. Of course people don't want to die: that's the whole idea of being alive. Not dying. Sounds silly, but you can't be alive unless you really have an aversion to dying. Else you'd jump off a house roof or something to see what it was like to fly and that would be that.
If you feel some threshold is going to be crossed where we're non-human -- and we're not already there -- then I think it's up to you to define where that is. It would help advance the argument. We could discuss what attributes of humanity we lose when we cross that line. Otherwise all we have is the extreme case -- never dying -- and that's nowhere near being on the table as a realistic possibility.
I'm 43, so that makes me half-way there, more or less. Of course I could kick it tomorrow. Would I like to live to be 250? Well heck, I liked living to 43, and that's a lot more than my great ancestors could have done.
Imagine what somebody from 10,000 BC would think of us: living to 110 sometimes, having major parts like hips replaced with plastic parts. Artificial hearts, animal organ transplants in the near future, medicine that makes you frisky when you're 90. Seems to me we've already passed the point of being non or trans-human. We're already in this world that longevity research opponents describe.
I dismiss it completely. "The human condition" as a phrase is usually associated with pain, suffering, horror, inhumanity to others, and so on. It's not a pleasant phrase.
The current state of 'being human' or current society have no inherent right to stay as they are. They change every day with every invention, and if longevity changes them again, so be it. If people opt-out of longevity, so be it. But the changes wont be magic - people will still be alive to guide and choose how society changes, it wont be instant-hell in a handbasket. And if it is, you can find a suicide booth and be in the same state you would have been otherwise.
Move it forwards to what end? Society isn't moving towards a goal (and if it is, then why don't you want to be around to help it?)
Death so society can 'progress'? Why not life for as long as you can / as long as you want? Society can progress more slowly if people die more slowly, but what does that matter?
No, my argument is "let's not classify a universal constant of all known life as a horrible problem, because the repercussions of messing with fundamental biological imperatives will probably open a can of worms bigger than anyone can anticipate"
You're being a fear monger. No other species has had the capacity to take control of their own evolution, that doesn't mean doing so would be bad. We're in a unique position and the natural order of things sucks, if we can fix it we should.
Look, I truly hate fear-mongering, and I see where you are coming from, but I'm not being a luddite here or arguing against science out of dogma.
I believe it's hubris to think we can change the fundamental natural order of things, and by fundamental order I am setting the bar extremely high. I'd be hard-pressed to think of anything else that qualifies in fact.
Of course that doesn't matter. If people can do it they will do it. But if I could place a bet I'd say it will do us more harm than good in the long run. That's all I'm saying, nothing more nothing less.
People do not retire (become unproductive members of society) because they simply want to. People retire because they become physically degraded. Many nations outlaw old car-drivers. Many professions force retirement at threshold ages. This loss of productivity hurts everyone.
Aging is bad because it hurts quality of life. Right now, people live longer than their bodies can perform at full capacity. Most people would prefer to remain healthy for their entire lives. No matter how ready someone is to die, no one wants to spend ten years in a nursing home. So everyone could find a way to die before then, or they could find a way to stay healthy even if that doesn't increase their life expectancy. You can guess which option is more likely to catch on.
The argument over whether we should fight aging is one worth having, but only as a philosophical exploration. The reality is that we always have fought aging, and we always will, because those who think otherwise have a tendency to die first.
Hm, I often say "I would do X if I had infinite time and motivation"... if De Grey and Sens comes to pass I may have to just stop procrastinating and do these things.
BENFOTIAMINE (S-benzoylthiamine-o-monophosphate) is a lipid form of thiamine, Vit B1. A natural substance found in trace amounts in roasted garlic, onions, chives, etc. Glycation, the cross-linking of proteins by sugars, is a major cause of aging [...] Benfotiamine acting like a time-released thiamine with increased ability to get into brain and muscle cells, helps protect against the formation of AGEs by glycation
Squaring an aging curve is not the same thing as extending maximum lifespan. Simply because, after substantial squaring of the aging curve, the average 100-year-old might be as healthy as -- and physically indistinguishable-from -- the average 20-year-old, does not imply that any 100-year-old will live past the age of 120. It could be the case instead that biologically youthful 100-year-olds tend, from around that age, to decline rapidly.
PhytoFarm techniques could feed a hundred times the world's present population - say 500 billion people - with factory buildings a hundred stories high, on one percent of present farmland. To put it differently, if you raise your bed to triple bunk-bed height, you can grow enough food on the two levels between the floor and your bed to supply your nutritional needs. [...]
Only two hundred years ago, half of the diet of Sauk and Mesquakie Native Americans came from hunting, and "It took 7,000 acres to support one human." Phytofarm's one acre, which supports 500 or 1,000 people, represents an increase in productivity per acre a million times over compared with the Native Americans. [...]
Nor is this any "ultimate" limit. Rather, these gains are just the result of research over the past few decades [...] It is likely that before the world gets to 500 billion people, or even to 10 billion, the maximum output per acre will be increased much beyond what PhytoFarm achieves now.
Birth rates are falling rapidly in the developed world, and they'd be a lot more spaced out if we had bodies like 30-years old for a long time. More than enough time for technology to increase out productivity to support these people.
Death is probably what is driving us towards all our progress, after all if you live forever why do anything today, you might as well put it off until tomorrow.
Fear of death is a natural thing, just as natural as dying.
Long term my money is on the grim reaper, he'll just have to get a bit more inventive in case we breed out of control. If we haven't already passed that point.
Well, wanting to accept it and having to accept it are two very different things.
The age of something is simply the measurement of elapsed time since something came into its present configuration. A 'war on aging' makes as much sense as a war on pi or a war on stone, aging is a simple fact, easily observed and unavoidable.
> The age of something is simply the measurement of elapsed time since something came into its present configuration. A 'war on aging' makes as much sense as
The war under discussion is a war on aging, definable as biologically senescencing, rather than a war on simply existing-over-time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senescence
Oh come on, now you're changing the terms. I've never heard anybody wanting a war on the measurement of aging.
It's the human bodily degeneration and weakness, physical and mental, that results from the biological processes of life running for tens of years that's the undesirable part. Commonly known as "old age" and "aging".
You can never live forever. If we don't die of old age we will die accidentally. I imagine car accidents alone would restrict most people to a few hundred years.
Fatalities per 100 Million
Vehicle Miles Traveled: 1.37
At that rate, if one drove 10,000 miles per year of his life, he could expect to live around 7,300 years.
Also, accident rates do not exist in a vacuum. They are affected by other risk factors, such as heart-disease and cancer, such that a world with less death from disease could be expected to be less risky in other ways as well. If the number one risk of death in your world were accidents, wouldn't you try to compensate for that by being more cautious?
If we ever get to the point where we can back up our consciousness, we could ensure there was enough redundant storage to make an accidental erasure of all copies a very unlikely event.
