
Your body wasn’t built to last: Math of human mortality (2009) - lighttower
https://gravityandlevity.wordpress.com/2009/07/08/your-body-wasnt-built-to-last-a-lesson-from-human-mortality-rates/
======
jankotek
Isaac Asimov wrote in The Caves of Steel, that human body could last 300
years. But on special diet, in sterile environment...

~~~
AnimalMuppet
That was fiction, though. It wasn't actual science.

------
KasianFranks
Google wants to use naked mole rats to conquer death
[https://www.popsci.com/naked-mole-rat-aging](https://www.popsci.com/naked-
mole-rat-aging)

+

Recent advances in computational epigenetics
[https://www.dovepress.com/recent-advances-in-
computational-e...](https://www.dovepress.com/recent-advances-in-
computational-epigenetics-peer-reviewed-article-AGG)

+

End-to-end guide design for CRISPR/Cas9 with machine learning
[https://www.microsoft.com/en-
us/research/project/crispr/](https://www.microsoft.com/en-
us/research/project/crispr/)

Will require new math.

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YeGoblynQueenne
Could someone send a link to that blog post to Ray Kurzweil? It's just because
he loves exponential growth graphs so much. Just yesterday he was talking
about the exponential growth in biotech that, within 10 years, will allow the
entire population (of Silicon Valley? California? The US? The world?) to reach
"longevity escape velocity" and live to see the coming century:

[https://youtu.be/9Z06rY3uvGY?t=27m20s](https://youtu.be/9Z06rY3uvGY?t=27m20s)

~~~
wetpaws
Kurz is a nice guy, but he seems to be scared shitless of dying and getting
more and more desperate with his estimations.

~~~
YeGoblynQueenne
To be honest, I'm scared shitless of dying also. I don't know why that is a
reason to abandon reason and embrace bad statistics. I would even say that
losing my ability to think clearly and arrive at probably approximately almost
not completely ridiculously wrong conclusions is at least as terrifying as
dying (or at least as terrifying as dying young in a horrible manner).

Death is really scary shit and I get that someone with the money and
connectionts of Kurzweil can convince himself that it won't happen to him, but
we must all realise that, at this point, that's just a pipe dream.

~~~
wetpaws
I don't mind him toying with an idea of immortality within his lifetime if it
takes an edge from the pain. You can even argue that it can be considered as a
some kind of a personal religion, albeit more scientific.

What I'm not happy is so many folks calling him a prophet and jumping this
magic-nanothech-30year-singularity bandwagon.

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onurcel
The Gompertz–Makeham law the author uses, actually allows also to modelize the
accidental death rate. I don't know how hard it is to fit this additionnal
parameter with real-world data though.

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reasonattlm
Some other items worth considering in the context of why mortality rates look
the way they do:

[https://doi.org/10.1006/jtbi.2001.2430](https://doi.org/10.1006/jtbi.2001.2430)

"Reliability theory is a general theory about systems failure. It allows
researchers to predict the age-related failure kinetics for a system of given
architecture (reliability structure) and given reliability of its components.
Reliability theory predicts that even those systems that are entirely composed
of non-aging elements (with a constant failure rate) will nevertheless
deteriorate (fail more often) with age, if these systems are redundant in
irreplaceable elements. Aging, therefore, is a direct consequence of systems
redundancy. The theory explains why mortality rates increase exponentially
with age (the Gompertz law) in many species, by taking into account the
initial flaws (defects) in newly formed systems."

[https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1714478115](https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1714478115)

"For many cancer types, incidence rises rapidly with age as an apparent power
law, supporting the idea that cancer is caused by a gradual accumulation of
genetic mutations. Similarly, the incidence of many infectious diseases
strongly increases with age. Here, combining data from immunology and
epidemiology, we show that many of these dramatic age-related increases in
incidence can be modeled based on immune system decline, rather than mutation
accumulation. In humans, the thymus atrophies from infancy, resulting in an
exponential decline in T cell production with a half-life of ∼16 years, which
we use as the basis for a minimal mathematical model of disease incidence. Our
model outperforms the power law model with the same number of fitting
parameters in describing cancer incidence data across a wide spectrum of
different cancers, and provides excellent fits to infectious disease data.
This framework provides mechanistic insight into cancer emergence, suggesting
that age-related decline in T cell output is a major risk factor."

And of course the SENS synthesis of the compelling evidence for aging to be
the consequence of accumulated damage of various sorts:

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

"Many things go wrong with aging bodies, but at the root of them all is the
burden of decades of unrepaired damage to the cellular and molecular
structures that make up the functional units of our tissues. As each essential
microscopic structure fails, tissue function becomes progressively compromised
– imperceptibly at first, but ending in the slide into the diseases and
disabilities of aging. Decades of research in aging people and experimental
animals has established that there are no more than seven major classes of
such cellular and molecular damage, shown in the table below. We can be
confident that this list is complete, first and foremost because of the fact
that scientists have not discovered any new kinds of aging damage in nearly a
generation of research, despite the increasing number of centers and
scientists dedicated to studying the matter, and the use of increasingly
powerful tools to examine the aging body. In its own way, each of these kinds
of damage make our bodies frail, and contribute to the rising frailty and ill-
health that appears in our sixth decade of life and accelerates thereafter."

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dingo_bat
Your body was also not built to travel to the moon and drive a buggy on the
surface. Didn't stop us though.

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mamon
It is quite obvious that living organisms are not build to last - we are
supposed to live just long enough to produce and raise some offsprings.

~~~
golergka
We are not supposed by anyone. We just happen to be as result of chaotic
natural process.

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GarvielLoken
Another useless scientific article about obvious things. Yes, you have a
higher chance of dying when you get older, is this really a "news" we need on
HackerNews? Notice that the article doesn't even offer new facts, only
statistical observations.

~~~
dang
Please don't post snarky dismissals of other people's work. This breaks the HN
guideline which asks:

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone
says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize."

That principle applies as well to articles as to persons, and there's clearly
more in this piece than you reduced it to. But even if you were right, the
combination of an empty comment and an acidic pH makes for a sourer website,
and the internet is hostile enough already.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

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hacker_9
In my opinion death is simply explained by the human body not having reached
it's final form yet. We are constantly evolving, but evolution has been
concentrating on short term survival for a millenia. It's only recently, in
evolutionary terms, that long term life has become viable. I would say our
healing abilities point to the fact that we are evolving along this path, and
that it is also an obtainable goal, just look at the immortal jellyfish.

~~~
julian55
Why would we evolve to love any longer than we currently do? We obviously need
to live long enough to breed (i.e. to about 40) and probably having reasonably
healthy grandparents may be an advantage but I can't see why we would be
evolving to live any longer than that.

~~~
lqdc13
It might be that people enjoy living without children for as long as possible
in the current western economic/cultural climate.

This age might keep increasing because those who try too late won't reproduce.
So it's passive selection for longevity.

~~~
golergka
I think it's passive selection for reproducing in your late teens or early
twenties out of bad luck. Even a century ago, your wealth level had a
tremendous impact on whether or not your prodigy will survive, so there was an
evolutionary selection for social success; with modern welfare state, I don't
think that there's any selection bias towards the wealthy.

