
Why We Age, Part III: Can We Live Forever? - Mitchhhs
http://mitchkirby.com/2015/06/02/can-we-live-forever/
======
reasonattlm
If you're talking about engineered longevity and you're not talking about the
brace of technologies that fall under the SENS umbrella [1], or even the
Hallmarks of Aging catalog [2] then you're missing the most important part of
the field. All of the meaningful advances of the future are going to emerge
from repair of the causes of aging, not from tinkering with the operation of
metabolism to try to recapture some fraction of the benefits of calorie
restriction. Or even, hell, five times the benefit of calorie restriction.
That won't move the needle far in humans. You'll be a lot healthier, but still
die on much the same schedule as your parents and grandparents.

It costs two billion dollars or more to push through one drug candidate for a
given desired effect. Current estimates suggest you could implement the entire
SENS program of rejuvenation treatments in mice for that amount of money over
10 years. Those are technologies with potentially unbound gains on healthy
life span; not just slowing down aging, but actually reversing its causes.
Periodic repair has no limit on the degree to which it can extend life, and is
far more effective for old people than merely slowing aging. Given the options
here I know what I'd rather see the research community focusing on, but
getting more R&D to focus on repair over metabolic tinkering is an ongoing
process of persuasion and disruption.

You might look at senescent cell clearance for an example of a SENS technology
that is slowly breaking into mainstream research notice. Oh so slowly. It's
almost painful to watch so much time and effort being directed to old-style
mine the natural world drug discovery for marginal treatments unlikely to move
the needle when we're in the midst of a biotechnology revolution and so much
more is possible.

[1]: [http://sens.org/research/introduction-to-sens-
research](http://sens.org/research/introduction-to-sens-research)

[2]:
[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3836174/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3836174/)

~~~
deegles
Sorry if I don't articulate this well. I'm very much in favor of life
extension and SENS but I get the perception that it's still a "fringe" science
or maybe it's not perceived as well by the broader community. Can you
speculate why there isn't more money and effort being directed to this
research if it has so much potential?

~~~
JoshTriplett
1) Lack of visibility; how many people even know this research is going on,
and that it's potentially close enough to not classify as science fiction?

2) A perception as "natural", together with the naturalistic fallacy. The
black plague and cancer are "natural" too, but we have no qualms eradicating
them; yet for some reason, people romanticize death, especially when thinking
primarily about it applying to other people rather than themselves.

3) Related to that naturalistic fallacy, aging afflicts a less sympathetic
group. Given a disease that strikes down the "young and healthy", or the
affliction hidden behind such thoughtless and abominable phrases as "it was
their time" or "natural causes", the former will tend to attract more funding.

4) In a word, spirituality, whether spoken of or otherwise.

5) Too many crackpots through history have tried to peddle life extension,
creating guilt by association.

------
pzaich
I've always found the social issues surrounding extending life to be chilling
after reading Kurt Vonnegut's take on it in "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and
Tomorrow"
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomorrow_and_Tomorrow_and_Tomor...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomorrow_and_Tomorrow_and_Tomorrow_%28short_story%29)).
What would a future look like where there is very little room for young people
to grow?

~~~
JoshTriplett
Those temporary social issues (and they will be temporary, just while society
adjusts) cannot _possibly_ compare to the travesty of a hundred thousand
people dying every day.

~~~
LaurentD2
People dying is beneficial to humanity in countless ways.

People not dying is the "travesty", and preventing death is probably one of
the worst things you could do to humanity.

~~~
astazangasta
No, death is a travesty. While it may be true that overpopulation is worse,
death is awful. Painful, slow degeneration over decades as your body systems
shut down and your loved ones watch.

What a gain it would be to have people continue their productive lives for
decades or centuries longer.

The costs: we would give up having children. The replacement rate for an
immortal race must be very low. The weight of old, bad ideas might be harder
to shake off.

~~~
deciplex
> The weight of old, bad ideas might be harder to shake off.

This sort of thinking seems to me a consequence of assuming that brains are
somehow separate from the rest of the body, almost bordering on dualism.

They might be _easier_ to shake off, and I suspect this to be the case, if all
human brains are rejuvenated brains with 25 year-old physiology. It is not
clear that "old people set in their ways" is a result of minds that have
simply been around a long time, regardless of their physical condition (i.e.
immortal or not), as opposed to a consequence of a physically aging,
deteriorating human brain.

So we might find ourselves with the equivalent of a population composed
entirely of twenty or thirty-somethings, except some of them happen to have
many decades (eventually centuries and millenniums) of experience. We may well
be much better off than now.

------
CodeSheikh
I suggest reading "The Idea Factory - The great age of American Revolution".
The book talks about the experiences of all these exceptional engineers and
scientists that were brought together under the umbrella of Bell Labs and as a
result a plethora of technologies came out of it (digital computers, networks
etc etc). What we need today is another similar revolution but in the field of
bioengineering and health sciences.

[http://www.amazon.com/The-Idea-Factory-American-
Innovation/d...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Idea-Factory-American-
Innovation/dp/0143122797)

------
ctdonath
After reading Wait But Why's treatise on Graham's Number, I'm not sure I want
to. [http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/11/1000000-grahams-
number.html](http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/11/1000000-grahams-number.html)

ETA: the article gives a sense of vastly hugely mind-meltingly large numbers;
when considering a number so staggeringly gargantuan is just an infinitesimal
speck at the mere beginning of "forever", the thought of living that long
becomes crushingly daunting. I suggest potential downvoters read the link
first.

~~~
nathan_f77
Those are some huge numbers for sure, but how does that have any bearing on
whether or not you want to live forever?

You should be worried about far smaller numbers that relate to the explosion
of the sun, and the heat death of the universe.

EDIT: Sorry, I just finished reading the article :P He talks about death
briefly at the end. I still strongly disagree, and would jump at the chance to
live forever, although it's definitely scary to think about. I would always
want to have suicide as an option, for unexpected events such as a life in
prison, or never-ending torture.

The human brain is definitely not equipped to think about timescales on the
order of Graham's number, but I would probably only be "human" for an
infinitesimally small period of time, relatively speaking.

One day someone from the future might stumble upon these comments and laugh. I
hope we make it that far, as a species.

------
110king
Old is Gold:: When I was a kid my grandpa told me that each person has a bowl
of food reserved for him by God and when you finish it you will die, so if you
want to live longer eat less.

~~~
M8
What about anorexia?

~~~
110king
INHO, eat less does not exactly mean starve yourself to death.

------
reasonattlm
As a reminder, this is an area of medical research where you don't have to
stand to one side and hope. Providing meaningful support to specific early
stage research programs in rejuvenation research is well within the
capabilities of most people making average developer salaries.

Look at the few hundred people who joined the Methuselah Foundation's 300 [1]
over the past decade, and collectively their individual contributions of
$1000/yr helped to launch early SENS research and provided seed investment in
Organovo, now a successful tissue engineering concern and whose founders are a
steadfast part of the New Organ initiative [2].

Or look at the crowd centered around Longecity [3] who have raised $10,000
here and $20,000 there for discrete projects in aging research, ranging from
exploratory laser ablation of lipofuscin (not a success, but a worthy attempt
at a technology demonstration) to a SENS project to demonstrate allotopic
expression in two mitochondrial genes (did quite well, thank you). Early stage
research is cheap, falling over yourself cheap. Meaningful cutting edge
projects can run for a few tens of thousands of dollars over six months - you
just have to know who to fund.

Fortunately there are good, responsible, aggressive research organizations out
there like the SENS Research Foundation [3] that are coin slots for
rejuvenation research and advocacy: you can be sure that money goes to good
uses, funding areas of research that need unsticking and accelerating, picking
those programs that have the best expectation values. You can put in a few
thousand and be in good company with hundreds of other people, many from the
tech industry, who have decided that it is well worth giving a small fraction
of what you make each year to help ensure that when we are old there will be
treatments to prevent the medical conditions that presently harm our parents
and grandparents.

What use is it making a good wage, enough to greatly influence the medical
technology of your future, while sitting on the sidelines and doing nothing
but hoping? Who else is going to make a difference if not you? You have the
choice of living the same life as before, and suffering and dying in great
pain at the end, or making a better future for everyone. It really seems like
a no-brainer to me. There are few places where so little money can produce so
great a beneficial outcome at this time.

[1]: [http://mfoundation.org/300](http://mfoundation.org/300)

[2]: [http://neworgan.org](http://neworgan.org)

[3]: [http://longecity.org](http://longecity.org)

[4]: [http://sens.org](http://sens.org)

