He seems to think that anti-aging science has speeded up drastically recently, both in terms of the science itself, the funding and the popularity. I really love what the SENS Foundation is doing in terms of spinning research avenues into startups, since most investors are far more likely to fund high-risk investments than non-profit ones.
He also mentions other positive developments in terms of legislation and advocacy.
I'm still not sure if SENS should stay non-profit. It produced great results, it would get much more money if it would convert to a for profit company. At the same time it's important to keep the control near Aubrey de Grey, as he has a great track record of staying focused.
The main goal of going for a for profit company would be to increase funding. It's sad that Vitalik Buterin had to be the biggest donation giver when there are so many people much richer than him (and with shorter expected remaining lifespan).
This is a great news. Fighting aging is one of the most important challenge of our time.
This is also encouraging:
"Gazette: Are there regulatory hurdles? When we've spoken in the past, you've mentioned that the FDA considers aging a natural process and therefore won't approve drugs to treat it.
Sinclair: I've been part of a group that talked with the FDA, and they are willing and also quite enthusiastic about considering a change that defines aging as a disease."
That's also the only thing that keeps our population in check.
Let's see how we handle the incoming retirement issues, that'll give us a good indication (less workers, more retired people pretty much everywhere in the west, peaking in the next few decades).
Living long won't help much if it just means more people consuming our limited natural resources and weighting on our social infrastructure. At any rate most country would shift their retirement age accordingly and life would be the same but longer, I fail to see the appeal of that (albeit it's the ultimate realization of our "us vs nature" western mentality)
We should figure how to live well before we try to live longer, and we still have some things we're nowhere close to figure out (energy, pollution, retirement, increasing pop, &c.)
But all of that only applies if everyone has access to this tech, which I doubt. Most likely it will be a "cure" for the rich.
Seems to me that scientists are working toward goals that kind of look nice on paper (curing aging, genetic modifications, &c.) without stopping even one second and thinking about the moral/social/economical consequences down the line.
I suspect the opposite given history. Humans are very reactive to incentives - more deaths leads to more reproduction so that when threats are gone they stop trying to "out-compete" it. The deadliest wars in history failed to make a dent but peaceful first world nations are leveling off to replacement rate or worse or only achieving it through immigration. Furthermore living long encourages even the selfish to care more about sustainability since "whatever I'm not going to be around for it" wouldn't be a thing.
As for "only the rich" there are only two kinds of tech roll outs - cheaper alternatives to the existing or for the rich first. The previous while impactful tends to be less groundbreaking by definition because it isn't anything "novel". The latter is how it always has been.
We always here "but what about the consequences" but I have yet to hear a proper forecast. Which means it ammounts to stopping development for imaginary fears, pointless.
The time to stop is if there are problems in testing /after it actually exists/.
It is one thing to say cancel carbon nanotube body armor or structural components due to being too carcinogenic - it is another to stop development for fear it will somehow create a new ice age, grey goo, or similar.
> That's also the only thing that keeps our population in check
Thinking longer-term, it's that plus being restricted to a single planet.
Before anyone says being multi-planetary is a pipe dream, it's historically true that what ends up happening in the longer-term tends to always to be something that would have seemed ridiculous and unrealistic at the time.
Of course, there's all sorts of questions here of the practicalities (eg costs) and the timeline (eg life extension could happen well before being multi planetary).
My primary point is only that it's not necessarily true that death will always be the only thing keeping the population in check.
Not only that, longevity might be proper route to hell for mankind - take the worst dictators, what would they achieve with much longer time on earth. Psychopaths in power don't get better with age, do they.
Generally as with any powerful new tech, inventors/scientists fail to anticipate worst possible usage for it, which is how it will be (also) used.
There would be no way to anyhow regulate it, people would go to great lengths to get it (just look how some are OK with driving animal species extinct just to get potence medicine which is proved to be not working).
Don't get me wrong, I don't think we can avoid it, but it will bring some nasty consequences before it will become a net gain for mankind.
Maybe people are psychopaths because something goes wrong with their cells, and this research will cure that. Can’t know anything like what you or I are suggesting, but we shouldn’t always guess pessimistically.
With that kind of argument, you could also say that our current situation is proper route to hell because psychopath babies are being born constantly, or idk joung people becoming psychopaths or however that works. Sure often, once a psychopath is in power, waiting for them to die of a natural cause is the easiest way of removing them. And surely, if you take the most cruel ruler each country ever had, put them into power right now, and made them never die, it would be proper hell. But that scenario is entirely artificial. Currently, and throughout history, most people in power aren't cruel psychopaths of the likes of Stalin and Hitler. We just remember the cruel ones more than we remember the boring non-cruel ones.
Unless in an aging-free world, for some reason non-psychopaths are more likely to give their power to psychopaths than the other way round, I think we don't need to worry.
Do you realistically think that it will not be worth to scale the solution?
Many medications stay expensive because not big enough number of people are affected. Also don't think U.S. only: how do you stop people from going to China to get the cheap (but well tested) copy of a medication?
We'll make a lesser version of it available to everyone who gets a mortgage > 50 years and a new electric car. It'll involve weekly injections though, that way as soon as you stop paying you go back to where you belong.
And not climate change? In my mind's model of the future we're going to die within 50 years, this research is useless when the infinitely aged doesn't have clean water to drink.
One of the main connections to longevity people usually miss in this whole "climate change" discussion is one of the main psychological reasons people don't take care of the environment in the first place: and it's arguably their lifespan. Everyone in the west knows that they will die at most ~100 years of age, and if you are basically not in some top percentile morality-wise (and also at that point in your life where all more important problems are resolved and you even have energy to care about the environment), you just don't care about it because you know you're going to die anyway. Of course many people think about their children and the other people etc, but many don't.
If we manage to extend the expected (or even just possible) generic lifespan of normal people - that will be one of the best promoters of environment-thinking of normal population. Because suddenly the choices they make today become very real in terms of impact on the environment in the next 50-100-200 years, because there is a good change that this same person is going to be living at that time.
But that's two sides of the same coin, individualism.
Even if we lived 120 years in average, do you think the game would change a lot, I don't. I don't see drastic changes in young people today, yet they'll most likely be alive in 60-70 years. And for argument's sake, even if it does we still end up with much more people living on the same resource limited planet at the same time.
You can already bump your life expectancy (and end life quality) quite a lot by eating health, exercising, quitting drinking/smoking. Most people don't do it because it's too much effort and "that's not life", again individualism/short sightedness.
We need a cure for laziness / individualism, then, maybe, we can start talking considering longevity.
This is exactly the reason these scientists are focusing on genetic and other medical ways to increase lifespan, which are going to be packaged in products that can be used without effort. One might say what they want about people not wanting to expend unnecessary effort, one might call it lazy or just smart, or a drive of progress, it doesn't matter. The fact is if you give people a method that requries less effort, more people will use it. Thus we will have a greater general effect on the population with these methods.
Perhaps a bit OT, but it is interesting that people keep bringing fear of flying as "irrational risk".
People fearing flying more than driving are not afraid of the relative chances of dying (which are low either way). They are afraid of the feeling and experience of spending long time in a falling plane knowing that you are going to die, being stuck in one seat and not being able to do anything about it. This does not happen when you are driving, if there is an accident, you usually either die instantly or in some rare cases receive some injuries, but at least then you can lie at the site of the accident and hope that medics will come. It's not the same as being stuck in a box for 10s of minutes knowing you are most likely about to crash to a painful death. You have to spend time in that experience, to feel it, in a completely hopeless state. That's why people afraid of flying, not because of some statistics.
That's a cherry-picked stat if I ever saw one. In context of this thread you seem to be equating that with "think climate change is a problem that needs to be addressed", which is an entirely different question. Most of us don't want to see our kids lives ruined.
In fact, the headline stat of that linked survey is "56% of Americans over 55 worry a great deal about global warming".
"The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death."
Well, maybe not the last one, but still an important one. Nick Bostrom has a great story describing the underlying philosophy in the fight against aging:
Imagine a world in which Stalin was still in power. That is what amortality looks like.
I can't help but think that this would also completely retard scientific progress. Imagine tenure that lasts a milenium or more. We would still be discussing scholastism.
Imagine a world where Newton could still contribute, peak scientific output wouldn't be before the age of 35, and politicians would tackle long term problems because they will be affected by them too. That is also what amortality looks like.
I'd be worried that Newton would be spending an even higher percentage of his time on alchemy research than he already did, and using his reputation to push promising scientists to do the same.
Modern chemistry was born from Alchemy research. I find it unlikely that Newton would have continued to do exactly the same kinds of things for centuries more.
Politicians tackle quick wins that get them good PR and re-elected in next 4/5 years cycle, plus of course return back all the favors/contributions/etc to shady characters behind governments.
No amount of longevity is going to fix that, in contrary it could contribute to entrenchment of those behind curtains as permanent puppet masters. And we all know that if power corrupts, then semi-eternal power ...
People are living longer and longer already, compared to ~50 years ago. Scientific progress doesn't seem to be slowing down, though it has shifted to different fields.
1) No. Whatever people make, other people can destroy. You could get rid of Stalin any time you wanted, if even by running away or making him irrelevant. With various degrees of difficulty involved.
And for every Stalin, you brought in a few Buddhas and Gandhis.
2) Again, that depends on how you approach innovation which has little to do with age. What would have to be instituted is probably rotation based on tenure, similar to presidency terms. If a professor is still deemed innovative, they can stay in charge.
In fact, such a system would be vastly superior to the current one where once tenured, a professor is almost immovable for many years. It would also help with the publish or perish part if extended to lower levels - you'd get more chances.
Most importantly, if the basic needs are met, you just gained access to a huge pool of genius engineers and scientists by sheer numbers. Imagine if, say, Feynman or Hawking or Knuth or even Leibnitz and Newton were still around, and cooperating... No matter the academic structures.
Why would Stalin still be in power because of lack of aging? Stalin was quite likely murdered, though it was never proven. This is usually what happens to horrible leaders when they're in power too long.
Of course, Stalin was so popular that huge crowds showed up to honor him, and 100 people got crushed in the crowding. Over in Spain, Franco was apparently so popular that they never bothered to oust him at all. So if you don't like dictators like Stalin and Franco, that means you also don't really support democracy, since in a democratic system these people would have also been in power due to massive popular support.
Losing leaders to aging has historically robbed us of great leaders too, don't forget. Elizabeth I was considered one of England's best rulers, her reign considered a golden age of 40 years. Marcus Aurelius is considered one of Rome's best emperors, and he was infamously replaced by the horrible Commodus after he died. I wonder how history would be different if Marcus Aurelius had reigned for another few centuries.
You're imagining Stalin but we live in the 21. century. This century telepathy is going to become reality and that still seems to be the less interesting thing compared to AI, that is also inevitably coming. Do you think these facts won't change anything?
Oh good. I'm glad you agree we will see the largest genocide in history in our life time. People are usually a lot more optimistic than me about the future.
I don't see it as the largest genocide (not that I consider it positive). The Borg didn't kill, it assimilated. Considering that the absolute majority of people in the future will be cloned, the assimilation of old timers (that's us) is going to be seen as a minor event and probably not even a genocide as we will continue to live, I personally think it's going to be seen as our salvation.
--
IMO there is one thing that seems to be truly unique and irreplaceable - consciousness and its continuity, and control over it. That is probably going to be prized.
This makes no sense. Longer productive lifespan means that people can acquire more expert skills and become more proficient at what they do. Or for example switch professions if the economic climate has changed - which will be still much faster than teaching a completely new individual to learn that profession, if there is even a little overlap between them.
I'm not saying that economics should even have any say in making people live longer (I don't think the purpose of life is to make the economy work well, it's the other way around), but even from the point of view of economics, we would want to make everyone live longer.
From the point of view of economics maybe. Switching professions can be done in a current lifespan and is not done very often. I don't see people changing just because their life is extended. I just don't understand people's fixation on having a longer life. Seems to me people just keep looking at the horizon to bring them what they want and they forget what's right in front of them.
One reason not to switch professions is affordability. Few established mid-career professionals can afford to either take time out to train and qualify in another trade, or jump back down to the bottom rung and take a junior role in something else.
If, at 60, you have paid off your mortgage, amassed some savings, and seen your adult children leave home, then you can consider it. However, by then, you only have 5-7 years left until your pension kicks in and 10 before cognitive decline starts to take hold (either may have already happened), so you will probably just plod on doing what you already know. You might not even have enough time to really get to the interesting part of being a whatever-your-new-career-is.
If at 60, you are still in the prime of your life, with 60 more years on the clock, and 30 more years of full cognition and physical fitness available to you, then the idea of a career shift becomes more attractive.
Even without the affordability question, there is likely to be a point in most people's careers where the pursuit of mastery stops and the doldrums set in. The longer the working life, the more likely you are to reach that tipping point at a point when you have time to do something about it.
You are free to kill yourself when you feel like you had enough. Just because you don't want to have the body of a thirty year old forever, that doesn't mean that you should subject others to the incredible suffering that old age brings.
We are not free to end our own life when you feel you had enough. There's laws for that. But yes, I'll reflect on my options whether or not I'll have that chemo when I'm in my sixties/seventies.
On the other hand, they could do that if you don't. There are a few scifi novels where the concept of forced retirement (in form of euthanasia) is explored.
There is a theory that some math problems are not solved because people who are solving them have to few time to think on them.
Other theory states that 100 years war between France and England lasted so long because there were left 0 leaders older than 30+ years old and these guys were not good at negotiation.
The main point of anti-aging is not to keep people around longer, but to keep them healthy since they're going to be around for quite a while anyway. Lifespan increase is a possibility, but might also turn out to be quite hard; health-span increase is the real low-hanging fruit of anti-aging research.
Reading the article beyond the second paragraph actually affirms kinda what you're saying. I guess I shot straight into a kneejerk reaction on the subtitle 'extending the human lifespan' :)
Saying the only motivation to create is urgency through the fleeting nature of life is hardly different from a religious person claiming someone non-religious can't have morals because they don't believe in God.
It is entirely subjective and for all I care wrong until proven otherwise.
Wouldn’t it be easier to send an artificial womb and the necessary freeze-dried ingredients on a thousand-year journey to the stars, instead of grown humans who you’d need to keep fed, watered, and happy?
The real trick then becomes raising babies entirely through automation. Of course, any automatic system up to the task may be smart enough to just colonize the planet itself.
There will be no thousand year journies. You’d be overtaken by the generation after which left in faster ships and arrived in half the time. Make the trip in a few decades or don’t bother making it at all.
Going faster means expending more energy. At some point it won't make economic sense to go faster, even if technically you could. Freeze dried wombs don't care whether the journey takes a thousand years or five hundred, but the costs are very different.
At the same time, you could send information, compressed, enough to accurately reconstitute the travelers in spacetime. That would take some raw materials and a plenty of energy. However, the required devices might be much more resilient to acceleration and radiation than any possible human body.
It takes the same amount of energy to accelerate at any speed in space. The limit is our determination really, it is possible to visit our nearby star with ~200 hydrogen bombs
No it doesn't. Your mass increases the faster you go, so that more and more energy needs to be expended to accelerate more. At 50% light speed, you're 15% heavier. At 90% light speed, you're 129% heavier. At 99% light speed, you're 608% heavier. Your mass goes to infinity as you approach the speed of light, which is why the speed of light is unattainable for objects that have mass.
What if we did send a ship on a thousand year journey, and learn more about building fast ships than if we hadn't? Such that the second ship we send, would be quicker than the first ship we'd have sent if we waited a few decades?
Do you put off buying electronics knowing that next year's product will be faster than this year's? At some point you just got to say, screw it, I'd rather do this now instead of waiting for some hypothetical future where the cost-benefit ratio is at its highest.
the point is to create self-sustaining colonies that will travel into the unknown for probably hundreds of years before finding appropriate planets to colonize.
Having a treatment that allows 20 year olds to live healthily to 120 likely helps the contemporary 85 year olds to live a few more years without being dependent on other people. Ageing populations are a huge problem in many first world countries.
Not really. What you're talking about works with solutions that are minimizing the damages building up in your body, but Audrey is specifically researching repairing the damages.
There is a very good recent more informal-type long-format discussion with this doctor (David Sinclair) discussing a lot of longevity topics on the Joe Rogan channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOTS0HS7aq4
If we can cure aging, then overpopulation will become an even larger problem than it already is. I would propose to only make anti-aging treatments available to people who haven't procreated yet and on condition they get sterilised at the same time.
Overpopulation right now is not caused by people getting too old, it's caused by people having too many babies. It is also not a problem in countries where anti-aging treatments are likely to be available first and even less of a problem in the rich population that will be able to afford them at first.
On the other hand, the promise of remaining able bodied until you die from an accident might reduce the number of children because you don't have to have children that take care of you when you're too old to take care of yourself.
I propose we worry about that when it's actually a problem. We don't know how people behave when they can keep youthful bodies for decades longer than now. Maybe we're lucky and they just don't want more children.
It will likely also take a generation or two until our anti-aging technology actually works and is cheap enough to have a meaningful impact on the planetwide population.
Exactly, do people really think that anti-aging technology is on the verge of becoming available to people who currently have trouble getting clean drinking water or who are dying because they can't get a few dollars worth of anti-malaria drugs or antibiotics?
A lot of the world can barely afford dirt cheap medicine from decades ago. They aren't going to be able to afford state-of-the-art anti-aging treatments for a long time.
The rich and powerful would not allow this. They will be the first in line for anti againg treatment, and also they will be the first who can afford this.
So prepare for some very old rich people ruling the planet who will live much longer than the serfs.
That's an extreme example, and the figures have moved since that article was published, but currently a wealthy citizen of Scotland can expect an extra 25% life expectancy compared to a citizen raised in relative poverty.
I think this line of reasoning is probably too simplistic. It's like suggesting vaccines or antiobiotics would lead to greater overpopulation, when it's not necessarily the case in reality. A couple of the major motivating factors in having children are to have someone to look after you when you're old, and leaving a legacy. With factors mitigated I think it's possible you'd find the population relatively stable.
In case anyone is still reading this, I'd like to add to this. Think about humans in terms of corporate employees. A single human in today's society costs an absolute fortune to raise to adulthood in resources. It takes a lot of investment by society and the parents both to have the child, then to educate it. It takes many years of education to turn the child into a citizen. It takes more education (college) to turn the citizen into a highly productive one. Then, assuming all goes well, they go into the workforce and then there's a lot of ramp-up time, gaining expertise, etc. If they go the postdoc degree route, that's more time. Even worse, look at all the training/education needed for specialized doctors and surgeons. People aren't usually really productive until they're 25-30 years old. Then they only have so many decades until they're too feeble to really contribute a lot, and during that time they're expected to have kids of their own, which is basically a second job. (Even worse, women need to have those kids in their 20s-30s, which is exactly the wrong time career-wise.)
In short, the actual overhead needed to produce useful citizens in today's complex society is enormous, relative to the total lifespan of that person.
It wasn't a problem in the hunter-gatherer days because we didn't need much education to learn some simple non-written language, nor much training to go throw a spear and kill some animals and cook them. Things are very different now.
Extending useful and healthy human lifespans would change that equation, and be a huge boon for modern society. Just look at how many women end up postponing having children, or giving up on it altogether, because it just doesn't fit in with a high-paying career. As a result, developed nations are seeing negative population growth, which isn't sustainable.
What you actually see if you study aging carefully is that it isn't anything like accumulation of damage the body cannot repair, it's the accumulation of damage the body can repair.
In fact, among the most consistent things you can see is the accumulation of iron, and to a lesser extent other minerals, such as calcium. The body seems to have a really big trouble regulating those minerals, it doesn't even have its own way to get rid of excess iron, the only way you can get rid of it is blood loss.
Now, what does it mean? One thing, the body doesn't really makes much distinctions when absorbing metals so that when there is excess iron, it cannot absorb other divalent metals without poisoning itself with iron. So it cannot absorb manganese without absorbing too much iron, and manganese is essential for preventing oxidative damage.
A second thing is, the experiments on rats show that lanthanum (and possibly other rare earths) change the homeostasis in the brain so that the amount of iron decreases, while it normally accumulates with age. Multiple rare earths have been shown to bind preferably to proteins, usually over calcium, but possibly also other metal ions, zinc seems to be a kind of universal element that can bind to almost any place that isn't taken. Neurons even seem to dramatically increase in capacity (with each neuron carrying its own signal, instead of many almost exactly the same thing over and over) as the concentration of lanthanum increases in vitro. (it's worth noting though, that lanthanum has been seen as an essential nutrient for decades in China, so if it cured aging, it would be known)
I thing we need to consider the possibility that there is no such a thing as aging, but is the result of some sort of imbalance caused by early agriculture, metallurgy, or whatever human activity that changed the environment in a way that our bodies, and other mammal bodies have no way of dealing with. The rumors of longevity from history and various isolated places are seen as myths, but they may not all be.
The longevity myths are well known, there are local myths of 100+ year old mountain men, (caucasus + some other range in south asia) and the myths of ancient "golden age" when people didn't age are almost universal, and many of the earliest written sources insist on "implausible" ages of certain people. Surprisingly many religions (virtually all, in fact) agree that people started aging when they previously were not and longevity was the normal state until aging was inflicted on people, only the reasoning why it happened varies. - all the abrahamic religions, a very important part of hinduism mentioned in many texts, the greek religion, sumerian, etc.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMFST20xHwk (1.5x speed is fine)
He seems to think that anti-aging science has speeded up drastically recently, both in terms of the science itself, the funding and the popularity. I really love what the SENS Foundation is doing in terms of spinning research avenues into startups, since most investors are far more likely to fund high-risk investments than non-profit ones.
He also mentions other positive developments in terms of legislation and advocacy.