
We will be able to live to 1,000 - RiderOfGiraffes
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4003063.stm
======
MikeCapone
We might or might not defeat the diseases of aging anytime soon, but if you
want to help the people who are trying to make it happen, consider donating to
the SENS Foundation (money goes directly to research):

<http://www.sens.org/>

Sadly, because aging isn't considered a disease by the FDA and other
regulatory bodies, there is actually very little research being done on it if
you take into consideration the fact that it kills more people than anything
else in the rich countries (100-150k/day, usually after a long period of
suffering).

If you want to learn more about what they are doing and why they think their
engineering approach has a chance of success, check out Aubrey's book (the
paperback version contains a new chapter, afaik):

[http://www.amazon.com/Ending-Aging-Rejuvenation-
Breakthrough...](http://www.amazon.com/Ending-Aging-Rejuvenation-
Breakthroughs-Lifetime/dp/0312367066)

It contains a lot of biology, but should be understandable to the lay person.

And if all you want is a really quick intro, check out his TED talk (it's a
bit old now (2005), but the general concepts have stayed mostly the same
despite recent progress):

[http://www.ted.com/talks/aubrey_de_grey_says_we_can_avoid_ag...](http://www.ted.com/talks/aubrey_de_grey_says_we_can_avoid_aging.html)

or the talk that he gave at Google (2007):

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEyguiO4UW0>

~~~
jules
Before donating you should ask yourself whether Aubrey de Grey is a crackpot
or not. I'm not sure myself. Can somebody shed some light on this?

~~~
gte910h
He's looking for cures to issues that are real problems. If you fix any of the
problems, even partially, they show great promise for helping older people to
be decrepit, even if they don't actually extend lifespan. His hope is curing
these types of damage will cause humans to functionally stop aging, but
_curing these types of damage are useful in and of themselves_ :

Cell loss, tissue atrophy

Nuclear [epi]mutations

Mutant mitochondria

Death-resistant cells

Tissue stiffening

Extracellular aggregates (Cleaning crap out of our bodies that shouldn't be
there and isn't in cells)

Intracellular aggregates (Cleaning crap out of cells that shouldn't be there
and is in cells)

~~~
JulianMorrison
In fact, the SENS foundation is ignoring some of those - because medical
research is already attacking them as problems in their own right.

~~~
MikeCapone
Yep, SENS isn't duplicating already existing research. If you support them,
you are supporting research that might not take place otherwise.

------
gte910h
When I donate to research, I like to see what the "partial failure result" is.

One of the neat thing about sens research is that if you happen to even get
one or two of the parts of damage fixable or even moderated, then you have a
much less inactive old age period, even if no actual longevity is gained.

I find _decrepit_ old age to be one of the biggest issues of our time (who
cares if grandma is 80 if she can move like she's 50; the issue society faces
today with the elderly is one of them not being able to take care of
themselves).

Additionally, with the aging of Europe and Japan, prolonging the useful life
of the workforce is a big worry.

~~~
mechanical_fish
_prolonging the useful life of the workforce is a big worry_

Not in my world. The world where we are at the tail end of the largest
recession in two or three generations, with danger of double-dip; we have lots
and lots of surplus productive capacity, productivity just keeps going up, and
unemployment is between 10% and 25% in the US depending on how you count it.

~~~
tansey
Think about how much more efficient and productive an economy could be if the
oldest members didn't have to retire due to old age?

More poignant to the current recession-- imagine how much better things would
be now if people who lived through the great depression were still around (in
large numbers) and running for office.

~~~
smallblacksun
Think about how impossible it would be for the young to get a job if they had
to compete against people who had been doing a job for 50, 100, 500 years.

~~~
tansey
How many jobs actually exist for more than 100 years?

Also, just like we've seen in the last 200 years, people's education
requirements would continue to grow. If you live to 1000, maybe the first 50
years of your life are spent as a student.

------
rauljara
When my intro to genetics teacher in college explained to us how aging in
cells worked, he told us that one of his professors had explained to him that
a "cure" for aging was about 10 years away. But that had been more than ten
years earlier. My professor said that he had recently talked to that same
professor again. The new ETA: about 10 years.

This is one of those problems that seems easy to solve in principle, but the
details are nasty. Frankly, I think there's a reason complicated life evolved
so that it would age. The standard reason given is that eventually errors in
replication accumulate and cancer results. I.e. we age to avoid cancer. But
that is a ridiculous reason. There is a chance we might die of cancer if we
grow too old, so we trade that possibility of death by cancer for a certainty
of death by aging? It just doesn't make evolutionary sense.

I have a feeling that whatever the real reason for aging is, it will take us a
long, long time before we find a way around it.

~~~
jwegan
I think part of it might be that evolution only cares about how successful you
are in passing on your genes. Why do salmon die after mating (its due to
exhaustion)? There isn't really any reason they have too, but they
successfully passed on there genes so there is little evolutionary pressure on
what happens afterward.

I think it is the same for aging. There isn't really a reason for aging, it
just happens because there is less evolutionary pressure once humans pass the
age when they normally procreate.

Of course I don't have any qualifications and this is just my hypothesis so
take it as you will.

~~~
v3rt
I believe the predominant evolutionary theory actually does have an
explanation - sexual reproduction serves to produce offspring that are
different from their parents and have a better shot of being adapted to a
constantly changing environment on average (particularly relevant to
parasites/diseases). These children still carry their parents' genes, though,
so it is in the parents' best genetic interests to die once the kids are self-
sufficient so as to avoid out-competing their own offspring.

~~~
asdflkj
W.R.T. humans, the predominant evolutionary theory does have an explanation,
and it's exactly what jwegan said. Your scenario is _only_ relevant to
organisms who live in niches very far from our own. Humans have always lived
in ecosystems large enough that our kids' share of the burden of our claims on
resources is infinitesimal, and certainly no comparison to benefit that kids
derive from their alive parents.

------
jpablo
There's a book by Asimov, Please Explain, that has a list of science
questions.

I remember the very last question is about "what point does getting old has?".

He argues that without aging and dying, populations will stop getting better
and will stagnate.

It seemed very appropriate to link here, but I couldn't get a link. Other than
a Spanish translation :-(.

~~~
logic
A specific concern I've always had about this idea of indefinite lifespan is
that of monoculture. How often have you heard a phrase along the lines of
"this is a temporary problem; once the 'old guard' is no longer in charge,
society can move forward on issue XYZ"? Make "XYZ" any major social issue
we've had in the past thousand years; from fiefdoms to gay rights to
democracy.

It's effectively the end of generational cultural change, which might be a
good or bad thing, depending on which generation you most identify with.

~~~
devinj
People still die, from accidents and what have you. In terms of multiples of
the average death rate, generational change will be exactly the same. But
generations are 10+ times as long in this view.

------
ck2
That article is from 2004 (from top of page)

 _Last Updated: Friday, 3 December, 2004, 00:01 GMT_

This kind of sensationalism is silly.

<http://xkcd.com/678/>

Falls under: _It has not been conclusively proven impossible._

We don't know what kind of roadblocks there will be for this kind of
development, we can't even guess - claims of 10-20 years are beyond silly,
they are crazy and ignoring the concept of "what we don't know".

ps. _Can you imagine how overpopulated the world would be?_

 _How we would strip every resource bare?_

------
jrockway
Can I bet on the opposite side of this? I bet that nobody who is 60 now will
live to 1000.

Don't get me wrong, I would like to live to 1000... but I would be pretty
surprised if my kids live past 150. I will be surprised if I live to 100. It's
sad to think about, but our bodies wear out over time (cosmic rays and
whatnot), and we don't have the technology to repair them efficiently yet.
People still die from the flu!

~~~
mechanical_fish
A fun exercise for a high school class: Get some basic mortality tables off
the Internet. Now, tell me -- to first order, of course -- all the causes of
death we'd have to eliminate in order for, say, 25% of the population to live
to be 1000.

What I really want to know is what common everyday activities we'd all have to
give up. I bet motorcycling and scooter-riding are right out, but what about,
say, swimming? Horseback riding? In a world where life expectancy is ten times
longer, is everything an order of magnitude more dangerous?

~~~
alan-crowe
It would be a good idea if safety laws, such as speed limits, where
constructed around formula with life expectancy as one of the variables. Plug
in 70 years and get out 30mph. Plug in 140 years and get out 25mph.

Since you are going to grow old and die anyway, spending too much time trying
to avoid accidental death is self-defeating. Acknowledging this would provide
a check on the tendency towards super-safety in public policy.

------
rmorrison
I don't see how humanity could handle something like mass distribution of a
magic treatment that allowed people to live to 1,000. The world would quickly
get over crowded, resources would dry up, world wars would follow, and who
knows what else.

~~~
sshumaker
This is silly.

Everyone was worried in the 1970's that the 1990's would have massive
overcrowding and famines, but it didn't happen. Instead, the world population
growth rate has begun to level off.

Why? In affluent countries, people no longer have children out of necessity,
but of desire. In fact, many first-world nations are actually now undergoing
population contraction (Japan, much of Europe).

If you eliminate aging across the world, the necessity of children will go
away. People will only have children if they want them.

~~~
biggitybones
If people lived 10x longer than they do now, the birth rate would have to drop
_dramatically_ (my rudimentary math would assume that it would require 10% of
the amount of births we have now) or you'd risk overcrowding.

We'd end up with government controlling the number of children, possibly even
a lottery system. The overcrowding worries of the 70s and 90s were not because
of a 1200% increase, rather a 10-20% increase.

~~~
gnaritas
> If people lived 10x longer than they do now, the birth rate would have to
> drop dramatically

And it would, if you knew you'd live that long most wouldn't tie themselves
down with kids while they're still young, they'd wait much much longer and go
out and live life.

As it stands now, if you don't have kids by the time you're 30 you risk not
being able to have them at all and having to suffer though months of fertility
treatments and such just to try.

~~~
biggitybones
The fact is, society would change _drastically_ if this were to happen, so we
can speculate all we want :)

People could want kids for a variety of reasons (to pass on their genes, the
utility of having children, etc) and you'd have to maintain that you could
only have two children max at one point in your life to effectively replace
yourselves and not increase the population.

Not to mention if you'd want to have kids 2 or 3 times over, now that they're
growth is only a small percentage of your total life.

------
ibagrak
While I was interning at Google in 2006 I heard the guy speak in one of the
Google Talks there. Going to the talk I thought this would just be some
outrageous crackpot theory, but he seemed very thoughtful and the approaches
he talked about sounded very sensible (although I knew and still know too
little about the subject to invalidate his claims).

------
rleisti
I wonder if this would change the popular morality of suicide? What if you're
800 years old, and you truly feel that you've had enough? Should you be forced
to keep on going, potentially indefinitely?

Or even just knowing when to step aside and let the next (evolved) generation
take over? (or will that still naturally just happen, via accidental death or
death by lack of resources to live)

------
yan
Just FYI: This article is from 2004.

------
sardonic
I can't believe no one has called out the bogus math in the article:

"If you are a reasonably risk-aware teenager today in an affluent, non-violent
neighbourhood, you have a risk of dying in the next year of well under one in
1,000, which means that if you stayed that way forever you would have a 50/50
chance of living to over 1,000."

If you assume 1/1000 chance of death in a year, and 1000 years (1000 trials),
your probability of living to 1000 is only 37%, not 50%. I don't know if I
would trust the scientific analysis of someone who doesn't understand basic
binomial probability.

~~~
jarek
You are assuming this based on a mainstream media article. First of all, you
have no idea if he knows the right answer and is just dumbing it down for
those who don't understand basic binomial probability. Second, the quote says
"well under one in 1000", not "one in 1000". The correct value of one in
1415.8 as calculated by Retric in
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1368664> is, in fact, under one in 1000.

------
Retric
"If you are a reasonably risk-aware teenager today in an affluent, non-violent
neighbourhood, you have a risk of dying in the next year of well under one in
1,000, which means that if you stayed that way forever you would have a 50/50
chance of living to over 1,000."

I know there is a shortcut to this but for this to be true you need a constant
rate of 1 death in 1415.78389 per year.

1 / (1 - 10 ^ ((log .5) / 981)) = 1415.78389 so (1-1/1415.78389) ^ (1000-19) =
.5

------
awt
Just going based on the title here. But if we let people live to 1000, that
will deny many people the right to have children. The long term consequences
of such a change could be a drastic slow down in technological innovation as
the super-elderly are able to accumulate vast sums of wealth. Just think of
the advantage you'd have as a 500 y/o over a 25 y/o.

~~~
crystalis
Why is childbirth a right? Would you accept a trade of a parent's life for a
child's life, perhaps with a time delay?

There's also several financial methods that could be used to prevent
undesirable wealth accumulation.

~~~
joubert
You, and nobody else, own your body. I.e., nobody should be able to say you're
not allowed to have children.

~~~
crystalis
You've simply asserted that, though.

I own my own body, does that mean nobody should be able to say I'm not allowed
to, say, defecate? What if I'm positioned directly above them?

Simply being able to do something doesn't make it a right.

(I, and nobody else, own my car. I.e., nobody should be able to say I'm not
allowed to max out the speedometer?)

~~~
joubert
You're not allowed to think that way. The committee decided.

~~~
crystalis
So are you saying you're just trolling...?

------
biggitybones
It's amazing to think that just 500 years ago things were so bad that people
awaited death patiently and willingly because they believed life was a
punishment rewarded with an afterlife.

Now we're trying to extend the amount of time that we live 10 fold because
things are so great right now. I'm not saying either is right, just an
observation.

~~~
kscaldef
Maybe you don't talk to religious folks much, but that attitude hasn't changed
all that much.

------
teilo
I just have to shake my head at this. The only adequate word for this is
arrogance. The arrogance to believe that we know enough about the processes of
life to extend them indefinitely.

We don't even know what we don't know. How many times have we been at this
place in the history of biology, where we honestly believe that we are just
"that" close to figuring out the processes of life. We were wrong then, and we
are wrong now.

We do not know or understand the over-arching cause of cancer, nor the cause
of its radical increase. Similarly with heart disease: after a generation of
assurances that the cause is a high-fat diet, the premise itself is being
rejected. I could go down the list of major congenital diseases, and tell the
same story. Even the most basic assumptions which we have about disease are
being overturned. And whatever replaces them will likely be overturned yet
again.

~~~
MikeCapone
> We don't even know what we don't know. How many times have we been at this
> place in the history of biology, where we honestly believe that we are just
> "that" close to figuring out the processes of life. We were wrong then, and
> we are wrong now.

Aubrey's point is that we don't need to understand metabolism to repair the
damage of aging, just like you can maintain and repair a house or a car
without understanding in detail all of the mechanisms that cause damage and
failure. You just clean up some of the damage and change some parts
periodically so that it never reaches a threshold at which failure is
possible.

Our bodies already do this quite well for the first 20-30 years of our lives,
but after that, we're in an evolutionary blind spot and long-lived molecules
accumulate and eventually make maintenance and repair mechanisms stop working
for long enough to lead to pathologies. If we clean up these long-lived
molecules, that'll be a very good start.

------
sliverstorm
The article claims that to suggest we should NOT defeat aging is ageism and
denying people the right to live.

I disagree. Until we find a way to support a population that grows at a rate
like that, we would be forced into one of several possible situations, none of
which are pleasant:

1: starvation

2: endless war

3: iron-fisted birth regulation, only allowing one new child per legally
documented death

3.5: The implications of couples who really want children + a rule saying they
can have one, if someone has died

Until the question of resources is answered, granting people the right to live
(longer) equates to denying other people either quality of life
(starvation/war) or the chance to live at all (birth regulation). Which brings
up another interesting question; if everyone alive has a right to life, do
those who have not yet been born have a right to live as well?

~~~
sliverstorm
I'm not saying we shouldn't extend our lifespans- I would love to live to see
a lot of things come to pass, like leaving our own galaxy- but to blindly
proclaim anyone who opposes the goal is ageist is to ignore that the benefits
have costs, especially considering we already have population issues looming
on the horizon.

Call me utilitarian and get pissed that I might stand in your way of living
forever, but we have to consider the bigger picture.

------
Zak
This article, and a few others covering exactly the same thing keep getting
posted here ever few months. I hope Mr. de Grey is right, and I hope I live
long enough to find out. That said, until there's some progress to announce,
please stop re-posting this here.

------
JustinSeriously
Someone smarter than me noted that all predictions of living forever always
have one thing in common: it places the time when people start living forever
within the lifetime of the predictor.

Aubrey de Grey is 43, and he's predicting that this might be in place in 20
years.

~~~
crystalis
Could you care to point out the number of correct predictions that take place
well after the point of time they were made?

~~~
smallblacksun
A number of Da Vinci's "inventions" were really just predictions of things
that were invented much later (like his helicopter).

~~~
crystalis
I think that's setting a low bar for "prediction" next to dated predictions
like "In the next x years, we will be able to extend human lifespan by y years
every z years."

I don't know that anyone can reasonably object to the theoretical possibility
that an individual human life could be sustained indefinitely.

------
WiseWeasel
Hell, give us another 50 years and I'm sure we'll all have our minds cloned
into an army of robot bodies and computer brains for, uh, let's say longevity.

------
quizbiz
I heard some interesting insight recently. I am not sure how correct it is but
it suggested that while we have made a lot of progress in living longer
(allowing us to be old for longer) we have not made much progress at slowing
down the process of aging (making it take longer to get old).

If we want to live long and fruitful lives, how do we slow down aging? I
prefer that question over, how do we live until 1,000?

------
tyree731
Life expectancy has increased a good amount in the past 50 years, raising by
~8.5. That is to say, for the exponentially increasing abilities of modern
medicine, we have increased linearly in life expectancy. Maybe there is some
breaking point, such as a universal cure for cancers and/or the end of heart
disease, but regardless it seems like a huge leap to go from ~78 to ~1000 in
life expectancy.

~~~
elidourado
Let's say that life expectancy is now increasing at a rate of 2 years per
decade. If you want to live to 1000, you just need to increase that to 10
years per decade. You don't have to go from 78 to 1000 all at once.

~~~
DrSprout
Maintaining two per year for 500 years is more than sufficient.

Personally, I expect false starts in the next couple centuries. The beta
testers will be healthy and fit into their hundreds, but those that follow may
get to 200-400, then possibly further. There are just too many engineering
issues to work out in a single iteration.

------
mattiss
Is there any practical ways to apply some of this research today? It seems
like there must be something out there we can be doing right now to help ward
off aging?

Also what is the most promising research being done?

------
jeremyawon
instead, let's engineer away our anxieties about not existing.

------
die_sekte
And after living a 1000 years one is going to walk into the central computer,
edit their memories and be born again a few millenniums later.

I am a pretty big fan of Arthur C. Clarke.

------
niallsmart
I'm pretty sure that beard will need a trim by 3010.

------
tingley
Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy (Red/Blue/Green) has this sort of
development as a backdrop.

Nothing good comes of it.

~~~
gte910h
And Heinlein had tons of novels where it worked out fine.

I don't think we should fund research based on what storytellers wrote to
entertain us.

------
mitjak
Where do I donate to ensure I don't live till 1,000? Nuclear weapon research?

~~~
crystalis
I understand you might not want to live that long, but why would you want to
take that away from others?

~~~
mitjak
Because the world is already overpopulated and we don't currently have any
means to spread our virus to a different planet.

~~~
crystalis
So your solution to alleviate potential suffering is to induce immediate
suffering?

~~~
mitjak
Exactly.

------
pedrokost
Yesterday my goal was to live 150 years. I am expanding it to 250 now :D

------
benofsky
Ignoring any claims that the man is a crackpot and any other problems one
might have with the science. Does anyone really want to live to 1000? I think
you might get a little bored :-/

~~~
ubernostrum
I've always preferred the idea of immortality on the installment plan -- get
frozen/stored/whatever, then woken up every couple hundred or couple thousand
years, do stuff, go back into freeze/storage/whatever.

Which, at least for me, is less about avoiding death (which doesn't actually
scare me all that much) and more about just getting to see what sort of cool
stuff the future holds.

~~~
FlorinAndrei
You will live in a perpetual state of cultural shock. You can't possibly be
useful to the society in that situation.

~~~
ubernostrum
Meh. If the technology existed to do that, society would have to find ways to
cope with it anyway.

