
Kirk Douglas: ‘I never thought I’d live to 100. That’s shocked me’ - davidf18
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/feb/12/kirk-douglas-i-never-thought-id-live-to-100-thats-shocked-me
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mordant
TIL that Kirk Douglas isn't dead.

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crpatino
To be honest, I'd be surprised if most of the crowd in HN knows who Kirk
Douglas is. Maybe the smarter ones will figure out he's Gordon Gecko's dad.

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douche
I would hope that people know who Sparticus really is.

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PhilWright
No, I am Sparticus!

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gonvaled
Aging is an illness, a degenerative process for which evolution has optimized
against by reproducing before it takes its toll (death). It is entropy
maximizing, dissolving the body. Those processes can be reverted by correctly
directing outside energy into the system, in order to achieve reordering
(reduce entropy); we just need to find the proper way to do it.

Once we find the root cause of aging, and we devise a cure for it, we will be
surprised at why it took so long to understand such a simple problem. The same
way we are surprised to hear that people 200 years ago were convinced that
heavier-than-air objects could not fly, or that trains traveling at high speed
(50 Km/h) would cause irreparable damage to the body.

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EliRivers
"people 200 years ago were convinced that heavier-than-air objects could not
fly"

Did they not have birds back then?

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gonvaled
They did. People who thought the Earth was flat also had an Earth to check,
but it was not enough.

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kfk
Side note: one son overdosed and one nephew in prison, maybe having everything
(post-scarcity, basic income, etc.) could be an issue for society.

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davidgoldman
ashkenazi jews live very long lives. There are plenty of articles about this.

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dannylandau
Current oldest person still living --
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yisrael_Kristal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yisrael_Kristal)

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raldi
Nope:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_verified_oldest_pe...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_verified_oldest_people)

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majewsky
The article on Kristal says "oldest living man". Looks like the grandparent
misread this as "oldest living person". He's "only" #19 on the
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_living_people](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_living_people),
by the way.

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melling
There are over 53,000 people 100 or older in the US. I imagine with a few
advances in medicine, that number could increase 10x, or even 100x, within the
next half century.

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crpatino
I wont rule out that posibility, but it is much more complex than that.

There is a qualitative difference between causes of death before and after ~75
yo. People in their 60s and 70s have a tendency to die from specific organ
failure, - heart disease, liver disease, kidney disease, etc, - modern
medicine has gotten really good at dealing with this kind of health problems.

People 80+, on the other hand, have a tendency to die from ageing itself. The
deterioration in their body is generalized and they find it harder to bounce
back after common illnesses and mild accidents, with a non trivial risk of
complications always present. And even if they kind of recover, this just adds
to the teardown of general health and it will be a little bit harder to
recover the next round.

IMHO, the increase we see in people who reach the 100+ mark has more to do
with they being people that have won the "genetics lottery". Their families
just seem to age more gracefully and/or slowly than average; we are seeing
them appear in greater numbers now because they would have died of specific
organic disease a generation ago.

However, I am afraid that in order to see the kind of dramatic increase in
maximum life expectancy, we would need to develop a different kind of
medicine, one that deals directly with the aging problem, not with specific
diseases. I don't think we are that close to such breakthrough as to expect to
personally benefit from it, so I will count my blessings if I make it to age
80 or so.

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melling
We do have Blue Zones from which we can study the genetic aspect:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Zone](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Zone)

It's a very young science so it's hard to say what we'll be able to do with
it. To date, not much research has been done on aging. We could learn a lot in
50 years. The world of 1967 was a lot different than today, for example.

And I would think that the world will change more in the next 50 years than it
has in the last 100.

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crpatino
Mostly agreed, though I would hedge this to include the fact that it is a non
trivial effort to move from basic science to applied science, and from there
to professional best practices.

Even if we crack the aging problem within 15-20 years, I do not think that the
bulk of doctors that are going to learn the procedures that come out of it in
Med school have been born yet. The doctors that would be in a position to
invent such procedures might have been born already, but they will reach
middle age themselves before they get a chance to develop their breakthroughs.

That being the case, please forgive me if I do not hold my breath.

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sulam
Honestly it seems like doing procedures is less likely to extend your life,
unless someone figured out head transplants. ;)

Much more likely that gene therapy will drive therapeutic advances for the
next 50 years.

