
Scientists say they’ll soon extend life ‘well beyond 120’ - forloop
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jan/11/-sp-live-forever-extend-life-calico-google-longevity
======
zw123456
I too would like to live forever, but one problem I see is that if you just
extend peoples physical age but their minds become frozen in time, then all
progress stops. It is well known that as people age their neural plasticity
degrades and they loose the ability to learn anything new. I have observed
this with my Dad who is 84. If people lived to be 1000 but their neural
plasticity was gone by 120, we would still have slavery, women would not be
able to vote and we would still be riding around in horse and buggy. There has
been a lot of speculation that progress in technology or society or both has
slowed are stopped. I think if true, it is likely due to an aging population.
In addition to slowing the physical aging process, there would need to also be
a way to somehow maintain peoples brain function, including neural plasticity.

~~~
chubot
It would be pretty interesting if you had more than 3-4 generations at a time
(say a generation is 30 years, then 3 x 30 = 90). I think the significance of
a generation is as you say: in human terms, it seems the vast majority of your
personality and outlook is formed by age 30.

If people lived to be 1000 years old, then you would have 33 different
generations at once. At the very least, those 33 different generations will
tend to cluster together socially, to the exclusion of another. They will have
come of age with the same events. You already hear people in their 30's
talking about how they don't understand what teenagers are doing (Snapchat,
etc.). Imagine if there were 32 other generations to comprehend: you would
have to be an expert in history to even relate to people.

People already say that baby boomers have hogged wealth at the expense of
their children and younger generations. I haven't investigated those claims in
detail but it seems plausible. You would probably see different generations
fighting for policy that favors them. I mean it would be hard to imagine this
NOT happening.

~~~
xefer
I've always wondered if the average human lifespan is somehow implicitly
factored into interest rates. If people lived to 1000+ years old, a small
investment made early in life could potentially balloon into incredible wealth
given even relatively conservative investments. Obviously political and
financial stability could have huge impacts too. I have to imagine multi-
century-long held accounts would have an impact

~~~
oAlbe
I think the markets will regulate themself as they always do. If (actually, in
such scenario it's best to say _when_ ) the accounts held for a vastly longer
amount of time start to spread, there would be at most an initial impact, but
then the markets will stabilize automatically and nothing will by disrupted
unrepairably. What now we call "short term investments" will become very very
short terms, and so on. There's nothing that will be distructed on this side
in my opinion.

What could lead to problems (that is: a not changing social and political
situation) would be the adaption of political mechanism for the longer
lifespans. For example, now politicians have mandate that last from 3 to 5
years, then there are elections (talking about not totalitary states). Putting
this in prospective, with humans having a 1000+ years lifespan, politicians
mandate would grow to 50+ years. That's bad, and in my opinion will only lead
to deadlocks.

Imagine a nation guided for 50+ years by the same persons. They will start
demanding always more power, leading to mostly only totalitary scenarios.
Everything will fall apart.

Instead, keeping the actual model could lead to even more _variety_ (that's
not the right word in this case, my apologize for it) than what we have now,
and there's a reasonable chance that humanity will benefit from this.

Of course, the one described is just one of the worst case scenarios (altought
not the worst at all), maybe our brain will change drastically and we will
become a complete different _thing_.

~~~
mattmanser
Why would political terms suddenly change because people are living longer?

------
DanielBMarkham
Blood transfusions are old and safe tech. I don't see any reason why you
couldn't right now go into a nursing home and begin intensive transfusion
therapy and see what happened. in fact, the weird thing here is that only
Stanford is doing something like this.

Which leads me to believe that one of the real obstacles here is going to be
the legalities and logistics of actually testing something and bringing it to
market. If you have a cough and I give you a pill, either you stop coughing or
you don't. We have a very tight feedback loop: in the order of hours or days.
But if you're 50-years-old and want to live another ten years? We just can't
wait around for 40-year feedback loops. It simply won't work.

So I'm convinced that some improvement is possible over the next decade:
perhaps on the order of 10-20 extra years of life. But treatment is going to
exist in a really weird grey area. You could either travel to a country with
little or no drug oversight or you could try getting off-label or black market
treatments. The drug approval system in the U.S. is simply not equipped to
make serious decisions about medicines with these kinds of effects.

Sidebar: the interesting question is whether or not we're close to the point
where increases in lifespan happen faster than aging itself: have we reached
the 1000-year person point? I'm almost certain the answer is no, but I think
we may be within 100 years of it. My intuition is that as we keep pushing the
human biological machine, it will find new and unique ways of breaking down.
The most obvious example is cancer. The longer you live, the more likely you
are to get cancer -- and we're a long ways from a cure for cancer. Still, this
is a very fascinating field to watch.

~~~
gus_massa
[Ignoring the moral/legal problem ...]

One problem is the unknown blood transmitted illness (something like AIDS, or
Hepatitis C, some years ago before the blood tests were common). In the normal
case, you are in an ER and your options are dying now or a blood transfusion
with a low probability of an unknown illness. In this case, you are trying to
live for a looong time, and receive a lot of transfusions. Each transfusion
increase the probability of a problem, and the possibility that your life
expectancy is reduced.

~~~
adaml_623
[Ignoring the increasing moral problem ...]

If you know the source of your blood transfusions because you're paying
someone for it then that problem can be removed

------
jeffreyrogers
> the probability of a 25-year-old dying before their 26th birthday is 0.1%

It's probably significantly lower than that as well if you take out all the
accidental deaths that occur in people's 20s.

On a more skeptical note, I'm very doubtful of any claims to predict timelines
related to medical or technological advances. We've been trying for a long
time and with much better funding to cure/treat things like AIDS and various
cancers and only recently have we made significant progress on those fronts.

My general impression of modern medicine based on conversations with friends
and family members in the medical field is that, while the cures are getting
better, the best course of action is to take a conservative approach to life
(avoid smoking, severely limit drinking, exercise and lift weights regularly,
stay active, and keep using your brain), as this has much better odds of
maintaining a high quality of life as you age than hoping modern medicine will
be able to fix whatever's wrong with you.

------
slashnull
Fortunately, their approach seems to take into account the fact that most
people's quality of life degrade _very_ steeply after hitting, say, 70, and
aim to augment this "quality" lifespan at the same time as the "total"
lifespan.

Just ask Scott Adams if he would have wanted his father to live "well beyond
120".

~~~
slashnull
Another important point is that the relation between children, their parents
and the society they live in would be changed in ways that are hard to
predict.

See, the current assumption (or rather, the assumption that socially still
stands but that is already shaken by the _current_ lifespan augmentation) is
that once a child is an adult, it won't be long before they will eventually
see their parents either die (before modern medicine) or retire (the current
paradigm), and have to replace them.

They will get hired fast, to get enough experience with their notional parents
while those are still in the workforce, and then quickly be needed in a full-
time, important gig.

It's also worth mentioning that the society, right now, is built on the idea
that full-time stable jobs are widely available, on one hand, and a strict
necessity for anyone to reach any kind of reasonable level of material
comfort, social adjustment and general happiness. When not the only way to get
basic human dignity.

 _That_ assumption is _old as balls_ , and it's hard to see it surviving the
current state of technology and medicine, let alone what's about to come.

So what will probably happen is that we'l keep telling people that working 40
hours a week in a job you had for the last, like, 5 years, is a basic
necessity, yet that it's nearly impossible to get 'em, because old people are
a) living forever b) holding on to those jobs because _they 're a strict
requirement_ c) creating machines that do other people's 40hrs/week jobs.

So yeah, now that stable, full-time work has been overloaded with all that
junk, the conditions that make this paradigm possible have to be saved
whenever they're menaced. Sometimes I wonder whether I'm the only one here who
thinks that the point of working is to make the world around me a better
place, rather than a way to reach some kind of social status and
_incidentally_ keeping a relatively helpful system up and running.

With those prospects of limitless healthly lifespans, those limits would look
like either

\- capping the timespan people are allowed to work, so that they can't hog
those precious, limited 40hrs/week stable jobs that young folks need to get
some kind of implicit economic citizenship

\- creating demand for those, by doing the old sorta-Keynesian thing and just
creating jobs. This has worked great in the past, 'cause those jobs looked
like building the Golden Gate, the Hoover dam, nailing down the basics of
nuclear physics, getting jet engines to work, and then sending people on the
freaking _moon_. But now it looks more like working as under-trained wannabe-
SWAT police teams raiding teen's bedrooms for small-time weed deals, building
the like five thousandth M1-A1 the USArmy doesn't need, and stuff like that.

My ideal, which I can't even seriously hold as I watch how most governments
deal with their respective economic crises, is to strip that socioeconomic
status away from stable employment.

I picture guaranteed basic income as the very first economic stepping stone of
that project. See, I would gladly accept a basic living wage to stay home,
cook for my family, take care of the house, and whatever, while dedicating
exactly all, and not one second more, of my daily intellectually productive
work timespan to something relevant, I don't know what. I think that, all
things considered, I'd be more productive at my programming job working 3
hours per day than my current 8-ish.

But this is an socioeconomic rant I need to refine and turn into a set of
attainable political measures, and then get off my butt and militate for them.

~~~
zo1
Jobs are not a finite resource. More people = more jobs, and vice-versa. You
make it seem like "jobs" just pop into existence, and then the labor force
consumes however much of it it finds.

It's as if you can't conceive of the possibility that the two are intertwined
and feed off one another in a constant feedback cycle. One method is "no job =
no money = not a good idea to have kids = less workers". Another perhaps:
"have job = have money = spend money = buy product = job needed to make said
product". Or how about: "No job = try open a business"

~~~
ZenoArrow
Or how about "No ownership of materials = no need for jobs", or at least no
need for jobs in the usual sense. It's worth questioning whether possessions
like money help us live rewarding lives or whether they hold us back (or
both).

~~~
zo1
I'd say that it would be quite against what most would individuals would want.
And if ownership/possession is indeed a natural concept that we as a species
have, then you'd probably have to resort to some sort of pervasive government
clamp down on instances of it occurring. And that would hardly be a utopia
that most proponents of such a concept would make it out to be.

Whether it hold us back in general is not something we could easily answer.
You could look at the communist (or any communal ownership concept for that
matter) communes and mini-experiments that have been attempted in isolation
over the years. As far as I know, they were all failures.

And these communal-ownership ideas can only operate and possibly chug along if
they were to operate in complete isolation. Otherwise, free trade (as a black-
market if it were banned) would quickly ruin the entire thing. You could argue
that free-trade isn't even possible under a system of communal ownership, as
there is no private property to trade with.

Back to your initial point about no possessions requiring no jobs. I'm not
entirely sure what you're proposing there.

~~~
ZenoArrow
"I'd say that it would be quite against what most would individuals would
want. And if ownership/possession is indeed a natural concept that we as a
species have"

Do you really want ownership, or do you really want access? For example, if
you could hire a car at no cost and at no inconvenience, what benefits would
you gain from owning it?

------
Houshalter
>And someday when the descendants of humanity have spread from star to star,
they won't tell the children about the history of Ancient Earth until they're
old enough to bear it; and when they learn they'll weep to hear that such a
thing as Death had ever once existed!

From HPMOR.

------
ChuckMcM
And if you thought it was hard to get hired in tech at the age of 50, wait
until you try at 100 :-)

On a more serious note, it is going to be a huge financial disaster if folks
"suddenly" start living to 120. There are many many things which have nominal
lifespans "baked in" and if that changes gradually the algorithm can be
adjusted gradually but if it changes suddenly, that results in insufficient
money collected to pay out promised payments.

When you get to a certain age (varies by individual) you start talking to or
consulting retirement advisors. Those advisors will ask you something like
"when do you want to retire?" and "what sort of net income do you want?" and
they will take your expected lifetime (say 100) and tell you when you can stop
working such that paying out at that rate will exhaust your savings when you
hit 100. But if you roll with that plan and at 75 get a treatment that extends
your life to 120, well that is something of a problem right?

~~~
atallcostsky
This would be a problem of course, but I'm betting this is a problem most
people would like to have. If my two options are: Die at 100, and not have to
work for the last X years, or live an extra 20 years, with required working, I
at least would prefer to live and work than to die and not work.

~~~
ChuckMcM
Since I don't think changing the lifespan will change societal values much,
and because of that I believe that statistically the likely outcome is 'want
to work but can't find it.'

Being at the end of your life and unemployed is a markedly different
experience than being at the beginning of your life and unemployed.

~~~
atallcostsky
That does make sense - definitely something to think about.

------
tedsanders
In 1850, the average 80 year old lived to be 86 years old.

In 2011, the average 80 year old lived to be 89 years old.

[1]
[http://ourworldindata.org/roser/presentation/online/Improvin...](http://ourworldindata.org/roser/presentation/online/ImprovingHealthAroundTheWorld/ImprovingHealthAroundTheWorld.html#/Life-
Expectancy-by-Age) (press the right arrow key for the graph to pop up)

[2]
[http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005140.html](http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005140.html)

Modern medicine has mostly benefited the young, not the old. The last 150
years of little progress makes me skeptical of claims about future life
extension, though of course I'd love to be mistaken.

~~~
D-Coder
Six more years vs nine more years is a 50% increase. Or looking at it another
way, it's three solid years of life. That's pretty decent! Not even
considering that for the first several decades after your starting point,
medical technology hardly changed.

------
jqm
There are so many inter-related factors involved with changing a system of
this complexity. My fear is the creation of half living zombies that don't
die, but who's brains have long since moved on. Zombies, who not incidentally,
keep title to accumulated resources for very long periods of time and
presumably hold office and vote.

This might sound bad... but as it sits right now, many people in their late
80's - 90's (not all I grant, but in my experience...) don't seem to be fully
alive right now. They are often kind of half in and out of reality, and not at
all the people they once were. They can't really contribute much (don't bother
posting a link about a 90 year old who did such-and-such... it's a very
glaring exception and we both know this). They take a lot of care. And, I
can't imagine this is very pleasant state to be in either.

If the state of aging progresses, but somehow death is forestalled, I don't
see this being any advance at all, but rather one of the nastiest things that
could be done for the human race, both old and young. It seems like
forestalling death without solving the problem of aging (likely a much harder
problem) might be very doable soon. And it is not a good idea. There are many
evolutionary reasons for death. It's not altogether a bad thing.

------
EGreg
Well with the plunging birth rates in developed countries, I think this would
be feasible. Robots and automation would solve the economic issues of having
an inverted pyramid entering the workforce. We would in a sense become long-
lived rich eloi.

However in pockets of the world which won't use contraception - such as
religious states, or poor areas, there will be age-old issue of producing a
lot of babies who go and consume the resources of the "1st world". These
places still exist on earth and the lives produced there are just as valuable
so the ethical question would be, how would the rich countries deny the life
extending medicine and procedures to others? It almost has to be a function of
population growth.

I wanted to write a novel one day about the year 2278 when a couple of married
Elders finally decides to have children and therefore forfeits their access to
prolonging their life more than 50 years. The idea is that it would become one
or the other.

~~~
kaybe
I guess there could be religious arguments for not using the life extending
medicine, since god didn't make humans with that longer life-span. So if there
are arguments against contraception, they could also be used against long
life.

------
kirse
I always see anti-aging research as an expression of our inbuilt need for hope
and significance (a desire to be _known_ for eternity). It's far more
philosophical than scientific. Many have concluded there is no meaningful
eternity, and thus they seek to construct their own hope through anti-aging
research.

So it's slightly ironic that the article mentions anti-aging research as
needing to address a "root cause", when in reality there's a deeper spiritual
need at work. And so the religion of science presses onward, simultaneously
discarding all notions of spirituality while (quite obviously) answering the
same fundamental philosophical questions and needs in it's own way.

~~~
mikeash
Because the desire to conquer aging couldn't possibly be a simple preference
for living over dying.

~~~
Gatsky
What kirse is talking about is a real thing:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terror_management_theory](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terror_management_theory)

~~~
mikeash
Given his emphasis on religion, and especially the use of the phrase "religion
of science," I don't think that's what he was referring to.

------
angrybits
This scares the hell out of me from a retirement planning perspective. If I
outlive my savings, what then?

~~~
landryraccoon
If people lived forever, why would they ever retire? I imagine you'd take a 5
year sabbatical every 20 years or so and you'd probably even head to school a
bunch of times to change careers if you got bored of centuries of the same
vocation.

~~~
jqm
Who is going to hire you? Try getting a job at 62 right now.

~~~
Encosia
A big part of that is employers not wanting to invest in someone who is about
to permanently leave the workforce. If the retirement age scaled with
lifespan, or adapted along the lines of what landryraccoon suggested, that
would probably change. If you went back 200 years from today, most people
would probably think it's not even possible that 63% of my generation would be
unmarried by age 30.

~~~
jqm
Part of it might also be that employers may not feel a 62 year old can do what
a 32 year old can. (Unmarried at 30 is an unrelated issue.) Are they wrong?

Where are 95 years olds going to work? What are the going to be capable of
doing? Uber drivers? They are going to have to fix a bunch of stuff rather
than just extend life for this to be feasible. I hope they do that first, and
worry about extending life after they have fixed degeneration.

Or we, are going to have to re-arrange our social/economic systems
considerably so work isn't such necessity.

~~~
Encosia
If I understand correctly, the implication is that if science can make us live
a thousand years, a 62 year old would be almost every bit as vital as a 32
year old. The life extension would be at a fundamental level, not just keeping
older folks on life support for longer.

------
davesque
I just hope such medical advances would be available to everyone and not just
a privileged few who can afford it.

~~~
pjscott
The target market is very, very large. That bodes well for prices, since the
costs of R&D and red tape can be amortized across a huge number of people and
long spans of time.

------
reasonattlm
One of the things that rarely makes it to the press is that all of these
efforts are not equal in their likelihood of producing therapies that are
useful for old people.

A good 95%+ of the funding and interest in aging at present still goes towards
investigation only, no attempt or thought on therapies. The Ellison Medical
Foundation fell into this category, as aging was only an incidental part of
the Foundation's plan. The point was molecular biology, and aging just
happened to be one of the better fields to exercise that goal. So the EMF
simply expanded some of the NIA study programs and arguably did nothing
meaningful to advance progress towards therapies for aging.

Then 95%+ of the sliver of funding and interest that does aim to extend life
goes towards things that have absolutely no hope of meaningful results. They
are generally focused on trying to understand metabolism sufficiently well to
slow aging slightly. An over the top ambitious goal in this area is adding
seven years to life spans over the next 20 years - that's the Longevity
Dividend proposal. There is no concrete plan, nowhere near the level of
understanding needed to even have a plan, and so people pick at proteins and
mechanisms one by one that might be linked to calorie restriction or autophagy
or other longevity-associated mechanisms. Look at the past fifteen years of
very expensive and entirely fruitless sirtuin research to see how this will go
over the next decade. The research community is gearing up to spend billions
more on mTOR-related work, and the expectation of outcomes should be exactly
the same: knowledge, but not therapies.

Genetics is another area of favor at the moment, but is just another facet of
"let's mess with metabolism" to try to find ways to slow down the accumulation
of damage in this vastly complex poorly understood system. There is an
argument to say that all of this focus on things that won't really help much
is in fact just a new way for researchers to draw in new funding to the
established goal of mapping metabolism.

Since aging is damage, slowing damage is pretty useless for old people. They
won't benefit from that approach at all. If we're going to wait around for the
next few decades for treatments, I want to see rejuvenation at the end of the
line instead of merely tinkering the system to damage itself more slowly.
Rejuvenation means repair: if aging is damage, then rejuvenation is repairing
that damage.

So the vast unknowns in aging are not related to the actual damage itself, but
rather how the damage interacts and progresses in the highly complex apparatus
of our biology. There is a very good catalog of the biochemical damage that
causes aging, the direct results of the correct operation of metabolism, not
caused by other forms of damage. This is the list of distinctive differences
between old tissue and young tissue. That catalog was built over the past
century and hasn't been expanded since the late 1980s, so it is reasonable to
think that all the important stuff for now is captured.

We could bypass the vast complexity of the "mess with metabolism" approach to
slowing aging and instead try to repair the damage. This is much better as
there are concrete plans for doing so, and so much is known of the damage that
there are numerous very detailed proposals for producing repair therapies. If
you can repair the damage then you don't need to know how it progresses in
detail from moment to moment, or which form is more important, or how exactly
it causes age-related disease. Just fix it. The analogous situation is rust in
an ornate, complex, load-bearing metal structure: rust is simple, the
structure is complicated, so the results of rust over time will be very
complicated. Do you build models and analyse the molecular progression of rust
in ever more detail to figure out how to build better structures, or do you
just paint the thing and rustproof it every now and again? One of those paths
is clearly better than the other.

This is why I don't expect great things from Calico, as Calico is funding the
same mainstream approach to aging (mess with metabolism, drug discovery, try
to slow aging) that will do a lot for knowledge and next to nothing for
practical outcomes to extend life and rejuvenate the old. They won't fund the
right path, which is to say SENS and related repair-based approaches, until
those approaches have completed their disruption of the aging research field
and gathered sufficient support that no-one has to specify repair-based
approaches as being their approach, because it is just assumed that that is
what is meant by aging research.

~~~
xaa
Well, if SENS has the answer, the TFA has a $1M incentive for them to prove
it, since this prize isn't about mechanism at all.

I think the idea of focusing on understanding and slowing the accumulation of
damage is partially based on the assumption, or hope, that the body can repair
itself, or be stimulated to repair itself, if damage accumulation is slowed
enough. In particular, if damage to the repair mechanisms themselves (e.g.,
stem cells) is slowed sufficiently.

If you have kept up with drug development news you will know that target-based
approaches and other highly complex interventions have almost uniformly
failed. To this day, we can't and don't design interventions based on the
understanding of systems, we just see that a drug inhibits, say, gliomas, and
find out the mechanism later, possibly after FDA approval. If we can't even do
this for diseases that are simple compared to aging, how do you think a highly
complex and interdependent set of interventions as proposed by de Grey is
going to work out?

Many repair-based approaches are proposing we build a rocket to the moon when
we can't even build airplanes.

------
adrianlmm
This calls for a reform to the penitentiary system, someone condemned to life
in prisson that can live 120 years will cost more to the state than someone
that can live 80.

As always, goverment is to late to react.

------
stanmancan
I've always wondered what are the implications of extending life span and
curing certain diseases that kill millions every year. What happens when all
the sudden everybody lives 20% longer and some of the major killers heart
disease, cancer) aren't a problem. Things like over population, resources and
such.

~~~
eveningcoffee
This has proven to not be a problem in Europe in general and in Asia in Japan.

In other continents, yes this would become a huge problem. Well, it actually
is already today.

~~~
mikeash
Japan's looming demographic crunch is thought to be a massive challenge for
the country in coming decades. To say they've proven not to have this problem
is like saying that falling off a building isn't a problem, because this guy
is halfway down and still doing fine.

~~~
getsat
The post-WW2 baby-making bonanza is literally dying off. That's it. Japan's
population is slowly returning to its equilibrium level.

------
tokenadult
This is a very well reported article and I'm grateful it was submitted here
for discussion. The article definitely deserves a thoughtful read from
beginning to end, as it raises a lot of issues that will have to be considered
as research on human aging continues. The comments here posted before this one
are interesting too.

Having read the article and the previous comments, I'll jump in with an
observation that I've had so much occasion to make here on Hacker News that it
is a FAQ block of text I keep off-line for posting here. What's really amazing
about fighting human aging is that even with the haphazard approach of
tackling one disease at a time, humankind has already made enormous progress
in increasing healthy lifespan into old age. Girls born since 2000 in the
developed world are more likely than not to reach the age of 100, with boys
likely to enjoy lifespans almost as long. The article "The Biodemography of
Human Ageing" by James Vaupel,[1] originally published in the journal Nature
in 2010, is a good current reference on the subject. Vaupel is one of the
leading scholars on the demography of aging and how to adjust for time trends
in life expectancy. His striking finding is "Humans are living longer than
ever before. In fact, newborn children in high-income countries can expect to
live to more than 100 years. Starting in the mid-1800s, human longevity has
increased dramatically and life expectancy is increasing by an average of six
hours a day."[2]

An article in a series on Slate, "Why Are You Not Dead Yet? Life expectancy
doubled in past 150 years. Here’s why"[3] Provides some of the background.

Life expectancy at age 40, at age 60, and at even higher ages is still rising
throughout the developed countries of the world.[4]

You can look up websites that will take information you provide and report a
personal life expectancy for you based on the information you provide.[5] You
may be surprised by what you see. The online longevity calculators are based
on historical cohort data and do not reflect any further progress in medicine,
public health, or lifestyle improvement that may occur between now and your
predicted age of death.

[1] [http://www.demographic-
challenge.com/files/downloads/2eb51e2...](http://www.demographic-
challenge.com/files/downloads/2eb51e2860ef54d218ce5ce19abe6a59/dc_biodemography_of_human_ageing_nature_2010_vaupel.pdf)

[2]
[http://www.prb.org/Journalists/Webcasts/2010/humanlongevity....](http://www.prb.org/Journalists/Webcasts/2010/humanlongevity.aspx)

[3]
[http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science_of_...](http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science_of_longevity/2013/09/life_expectancy_history_public_health_and_medical_advances_that_lead_to.html)

[4]
[http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v307/n3/box...](http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v307/n3/box/scientificamerican0912-54_BX1.html)

[5] Various life-expectancy calculators:

[http://www.livingto100.com/](http://www.livingto100.com/)

(My calculated life expectancy a year or two ago predicted I would outlive my
mother's current age, and three of my four grandparents.)

[http://gosset.wharton.upenn.edu/mortality/perl/CalcForm.html](http://gosset.wharton.upenn.edu/mortality/perl/CalcForm.html)

(My life expectancy a year or two ago as calculated by this was lower than for
the website above. This website is especially cool, because it shows a
confidence interval around the estimate.)

------
ludo150
120 but to do what? Sometimes I think it's better to have a short but intense
life than a long one and do nothing because you know your life will be long.

~~~
Retra
You don't know your life will be long. You can die at any time for any stupid
reason, no matter what your life expectancy is.

------
imaginenore
Please hurry up. I want to live for thousands of years.

~~~
imjustsaying
You might be interested in joining the effort. Leaving a task to others is a
failing strategy when everyone adopts the same strategy.

~~~
sadawi
Of course, it's only a failing strategy if adopting that strategy _causes_
everyone to adopt the same strategy, which is very unlikely for most people.

~~~
hawkice
This may be wrong for complex reasons. Similar minds making the same decision
for the same reasons do not _causally_ influence each other, but that doesn't
change the outcome, nor does it make it any less bad. For a fairly deep view
into how one might formally describe this particular aspect of decision
making, I strongly recommend:
[https://intelligence.org/files/TDT.pdf](https://intelligence.org/files/TDT.pdf)

------
reasonattlm
Nice to see more press on the Palo Alto Longevity Prize; the whole point of
the exercise is to do what they are doing very loudly.

Establishing a research prize is a form of investment in progress only
available in the philanthropic world. At the very high level it is easy to say
that philanthropists pay people to work on specific tasks. This is simple
enough for smaller amounts: transfer a few thousand dollars to a research
group and you have bought a very small slice of the time and equipment needed
to achieve any particular goal. When we start talking about much larger
amounts of money, millions or tens of millions, then there are important
secondary effects that occur when making such investments. In these amounts
money has gravity, money makes people talk, and money changes behavior and
expectations in a far larger demographic than just the recipients. This is
well known, and thus investment activities, philanthropic and otherwise,
become structured to best take advantage of this halo of effects. Most of the
experience in doing this comes from the for-profit world: it doesn't take too
long spent following the venture capital industry to see that investment is a
lot more complicated than choosing a target and writing a check, and this is
exactly because there are many secondary effects of a large investment that
can be structured and harvested if investors go about it in the right way.

I theorize that the reason why research prizes remain comparatively rare is
that firstly they are an investment strategy restricted to philanthropy, and
thus people with the money to burn have little direct experience, and secondly
the whole point of the exercise is not in fact paying people to do things
directly, but rather creating a situation in which near all of the benefit is
realized through the secondary effects generated by the highly publicized
existence of a large sum of money. A research prize works by being a sort of
extended publicity drive and networking event conducted over a span of years,
a beacon to draw attention to teams laboring in obscurity, attract new teams,
and raise their odds of obtaining funding. Connections are made and newly
invigorated initiatives run beneath the light of a large sum of prize money,
but at the end of the day that money becomes more or less irrelevant. It
wasn't the important thing, it was merely the ignition point for a much
greater blaze of investment and publicity. By the time a team wins, they are
typically in a position to raise far more funding than the prize amount
provides.

The ideal end result is that a field of science and technology is rejuvenated,
taken from obscurity and thrust into the public eye, made attractive to
investors, and numerous groups are given the attention and funding they need
to carry on independently. This is how it worked for the Ansari X Prize for
suborbital flight, and more quietly, for the Mprize for longevity science: in
both cases the entire field changed as a result of the existence of the prize
and the efforts of the prize organization to draw attention, change minds, and
build new networks. But the award of money wasn't the transformative act, and
in fact that award didn't really occur at all for the Mprize, but rather
change was created through the sum of all of the surrounding effects.

So consider this: people who arrive at the state of being wealthy and wanting
to change the world through philanthropy, often after decades of for-profit
investment participation, don't have much in the way of comparable experience
to guide them in the establishment and operation of research prizes. Thus
creation of a research prize falls low in the list of strategies under
consideration by high net worth philanthropists. Few people do it, and so
there are few examples from which others can learn. It is the standard vicious
circle of development, in which steady, grinding bootstrapping is the only way
to create change.

Why care? Because research prizes work well. They work exceedingly well.
Depending on how you care to plug numbers into equations, a well-run prize of
$10 million will generate $150 to $500 million in investment in an industry,
and that is just the easily measured result. Just as important is the
following change and growth enabled by that initial burst of attention and
funding. The Ansari X Prize spawned a number of other prizes in various
industries, but I think it remains the case that medicine and biotechnology is
poorly served in this respect. Outside of the efforts of the X Prize
Foundation, the New Organ prizes, and other independent efforts such as the
Palo Alto Longevity Prize, there is little going on. Given the proven utility
of prizes there should be many more of them, and yet there are not.

------
egsec
Finally, we will be old enough to rent "ultraporn" (160+ years old). [1][2]

[1][[http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Futurama](http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Futurama)]
[2][[http://futurama.wikia.com/wiki/Hubert_J._Farnsworth](http://futurama.wikia.com/wiki/Hubert_J._Farnsworth)]

------
biomimic
If we extend life to 120 it buys us more time to go for 150, then that buys us
more time to go for 300 etc.

~~~
ChrisGranger
Yes, this, exactly. I was trying to explain this to a friend the other day. We
don't _need_ to "cure death" all at once in order for humanity to achieve
practical immortality. It will take significant effort, obviously, but I have
no doubt we'll attain it as our understanding of biology gets ever more
sophisticated. Whether or not we'll personally be around to see it is another
matter.

~~~
Brakenshire
A good parallel is an escape velocity.

But in practical terms in the here and now it is a nonsense. Life expectancy
has been going up 1 year in every ten for a hundred years, and the pace of
that increase has not increased.

~~~
biomimic
So were stuck at IQ/EQ too. Not so. We will adapt and thrive throughout the
Multiverse as we have done throughout history. We will discover intellect that
is greater than ours. Any other thought is a fastrack to suicide in terms of
Time/Energy/Light.

------
kiteglue
What about an invulnerable no form factor with beyond-time communications.

------
elorant
I don’t want just to live longer, I want to live longer while in a relatively
good shape. Because if we are to live 30 years more with the physique of a 90
year old man then what’s the point. If on the other hand I could have the
physique of a 70 year old man while I’m 100+ that sounds like a good deal.

~~~
jqm
Agreed, although I'm holding out for 30 year old physique.

I would rather live 60 years in a 30 year old body/mind than 120 years in an
80 year old body/mind.

From my perspective, aging is a more serious problem to be solved then death.

~~~
mathgeek
> I would rather live 60 years in a 30 year old body/mind than 120 years in an
> 80 year old body/mind.

As someone who's lost both parents and all four grandparents before I turned
31, I take the experience of my grandfather in his late 80's to mind. He was
often told that the surgeries that he could have done to relieve the pain of a
body that was breaking down weren't worth it because he wouldn't likely live
long enough to really benefit. I imagine that if, at age 90, you had another
20-30 years, science could do some amazing things to your body to keep you
moving forward.

------
eagsalazar2
I can't believe no one thinks this is a terrible idea. Of course _I_ ,
selfishly, would love to live longer but doing so on a large scale is almost
guaranteed to be a disaster.

While we're at it why don't we just solve aging, provide infinite food supply,
and eliminate predation for deer. That would be a great idea right? No way
that would have any negative side effects, right?

~~~
Ilverin
"doing so on a large scale is almost guaranteed to be a disaster"

Over the past centuries, human life expectancy has increased greatly and yet
we have a much higher quality of life. It's an extraordinary claim to suggest
that the continuance of this already-existing trend is 'almost guaranteed to
be a disaster'.

~~~
tmuir
The decline of global pirate population has correlated strongly with the rise
of global temperatures, too.

~~~
SwellJoe
While the pirate population might have something to do with the price of tea
in China, it has nothing to do with this conversation. The comment you replied
to did not make a correlation=causation argument. The comment did, however,
make an argument that historic behavior, in this case of society as a whole,
may be used to predict future behavior. I don't believe that is an entirely
unreasonable argument to make (though more data from more fields is always
better). It is certainly a stronger argument than was made by the previous
comment, which provided no evidence to back the assertion that it would be a
disaster.

------
spopejoy
_Larry Ellison, co-founder of computer company Oracle, told his biographer
Mark Wilson. “How can a person be there and then just vanish, just not be
there?”_

Succinct summary of the vapid naivete of zillionaires who can't incorporate
death into their "but I've gotten everything _else_ I want" mindset.

I applaud the research. But I don't mind a finite life. Death is part of the
cycle that has nourished our planet from the beginning. There are definitely a
host of unintended consequences we'll face when it's only poor folks who die
"young".

Look at the bright side: future generations can enjoy a world without Larry!

~~~
zo1
The world loses something when the sum of all a human's experiences are lost,
forever. All that knowledge, experience, comprehension and interpretation of
so many events and facts... Gone, in usually an instant.

It seems awfully wasteful, and I sincerely hope some day we overcome it. I
believe we will all be better for it.

But sure, let's excuse the topic/problem by blaming it on the "naivete of
zillionaires".

~~~
jqm
"Gone in an instant".

That's why we have books.

~~~
zo1
You mean that's why we invented many means to persist information past our
inevitable fading? Of course, not everyone writes, and not all knowledge can
be transferred with books or other tangible media.

