Peter Thiel once said something along the lines that nobody is against aging research, because in practice what you’re solving for are problems everybody wants cures for, like Alzheimer’s, cancer, Parkinson’s, etc.
I often think about that quote because aging is such an intractably hard problem, we’ve sort of collectively rationalized it as something “good”. You see it in many religious traditions. In the zeitgeist. That somehow death gives life meaning. Makes it good.
But I’ve never found anybody who thinks cancer is a good thing. Nobody sane at least.
I’ve thought for a while now that every philosophy problem is in some sense, just a health problem waiting to be solved.
Occasionally I think about the Bible too and the way Christ (regardless of your religious beliefs) upended this tradition of rationalizing death as good. There’s a line in the Bible that’s the shortest verse in the English version: “Jesus wept.” And he was weeping for Lazarus, a man who died (who he could bring back to life effortlessly); in some sense a true condemnation of death as evil. Something even a god would weep over.
I think about the future often too; the way immortality will finally be achieved. There’s so many complications when it comes to aging, and so much we don’t know about the human body, I wonder whether humans will be involved at all; whether machines will silently develop cures while our bodies lie in a metal tomb, explaining to us what happened afterwards in terms we can understand.
I think it’ll happen someday. But I don’t know if it’ll be a year or 100 years from now.
I certainly hope it’s soon. Some days I feel like I’m at the edge of an eternal history.
> Peter Thiel once said something along the lines that nobody is against aging research, because in practice what you’re solving for are problems everybody wants cures for, like Alzheimer’s, cancer, Parkinson’s, etc.
> I often think about that quote because aging is such an intractably hard problem, we’ve sort of collectively rationalized it as something “good”. You see it in many religious traditions. In the zeitgeist. That somehow death gives life meaning. Makes it good.
> But I’ve never found anybody who thinks cancer is a good thing. Nobody sane at least.
This seems to be suggesting that people (have convinced themselves that they) dislike aging research because they have convinced themself that aging is good, which... I just don't think is true? I think most people would like to not get old, but they are just skeptical about this research.
In other words, aging research doesn't have a bad reputation because people are morally opposed to aging research, it has a bad reputation because it's just pretty dismal as science.
A lot of aging research makes assumptions (such as the "programmed aging" theory) that are widely believed to be false by mainstream scientists, simply because that's the only scenario in which it is actually feasible to "solve" aging at our current level of technology.
As Peter Thiel said in that quote, most people want to solve diseases like Alzheimer's and cancer.
The problem with a lot of aging research is that we haven't solved these diseases, and it seems like we simply can't solve them yet because we don't understand enough about how the human body works. We can't even prevent hair from turning gray or (in a satisfactory way) balding. The idea that we can seriously slow or stop aging overall at a point in time where we can't even solve these individual diseases frankly seems pretty unlikely.
Consider if world leaders didn't die. That would potentially mean an indefinite rule in the cases where there is no peaceful transfer of power. That means no change. This means being governed by an increasingly old person, whose ideas and beliefs haven't changed since the stone ages.
"[Death] is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new."
Edit: By downvoting without commenting why you disagree, you're only further reinforcing my point. Think about it.
The general population has indeed been observed to be resistant to change. Max Planck noted that science advances one funeral at a time, and the same appears to be true of social norms as well (e.g. really old people being forgiven for blatantly racist behavior because they’re “from a different time.”)
The fact that a minority of people are able to adapt their views over time does not change how the general population does not do this.
Yes. I expect some variation of “society needs death” to be 100x more common than more careful considerations of whether aging research has questionable models
>In other words, aging research doesn't have a bad reputation because people are morally opposed to aging research, it has a bad reputation because it's just pretty dismal as science
The quality of the science has nothing to do with it. Being against aging has the same emotional reaction from people in general as pissing in public. That's not how people would react if their issue was with the science.
you'd say I'm rationalizing it, but I do not believe that death is a problem to be solved
As I take it, that line of thought (that death is just a problem to be solved and that immortality is something to strive for) leads to solving death just before going on to "solve" childhood. Why do we have to be born ignorant of the world and must "waste" some 20 years learning about it (possibly more) before we can go on to be socially productive persons? another 'challenge' for medical science to "fix"...
no, no. I repeat myself, death is not a problem, immortality is nonesense. To percieve death as opposed to life is a consequence (IMO) of thinking with words and only with words; i.e. within language (and logic) these two seem opposite, but there're are ways to think beyond just the logical-linguistic.
Perhaps have you read Baudrillard (specifically, Symbollic Exchange and Death)?
He talks precisely about this problem: that by rejecting death and segregating it from life, we end up immortalizing death and suffer from this distinction. And this ontological paradox ultimately encompasses every aspect of Western society: not only how we treat the dead (rise of suicides and euthanasia, and our reaction to it), and soon-to-be-dead (the elderly abandoned in nursing houses), but also the functions of Capital and labour, the breaking down of social democracy, the ever-increasing opposition between the State and terrorism, and the eventual rise of fascism (the perverse aestheticization of death).
All of this is quite complex and I can't do justice here in this single comment, but I highly recommend it if you haven't read it. (I personally think this is Baudrillard's magnum opus, whereas most people only remember him for the book Simulacra and Simulation and the concept of hyper-reality.)
That's a lot of words, but I still don't see a justification why death (I.e. the end of life) is not a problem for people that do not want to stop living (most people).
Yeah, I was confused as well. I think the argument is that it's a slippery slope to a different thing, and since the different thing is bad, solving for death is bad too.
you correctly appreciate the structural way in which the argument works.
but you still do not seem to want to see the underlying subltety; that death and life are merely parts of the same larger entity and that our language (our rationalist analytical way of thinking) makes us "miss the forest for the trees", to focus on life and death as opposing rival forces when in fact they're different edges(ends, or sides) of the same larger phenomenon.
There's probably an analogue argument for diseases and I'd still rather live in the universe where poliomyelitis was eradicated than one where it wasn't.
Why it being part of a larger phenomenon would stop us from preferring to stay on one side of it?
I would also say that we probably should reject the idea that there's a yin-yang give and take where one is the flip side of the other. So far as we can tell, most of the universe, heck most of earth just isn't alive; most things just live on the surface.
In most of the universe things are just dead, and stay dead, and aren't part of any process of transformation where death transforms into life. If anything, the "process" of things dying can be part of a downward spiral of more death, and life can be part of an upward spiral that begets more life, and there's all kinds of pertinent details that separate those circumstances.
Life probably started here by underwater volcanoes, and started feedback loops that bloomed more life, and on and on. Meanwhile, most places stay dead and don't become anything.
It's just so frustrating to step into conversations about saving someone's life so they can live to see their great granddaughter's birthday and have someone say we shouldn't because they'd rather play games with metaphysics.
IMO it's rather annoying how the argument usually goes "well, there might be some bigger quasi-mythical reason for things being like that" but they just don't provide any good reason for betting on that metaphysics.
They've decided it's how things should be and often will pull unknowable arguments for it.
I think I fully understand this new subtlety and consciousness dismiss it as ridiculous. Two unlike things were being compared, and the underlying idea that life and death are complements (1) is so vague and open ended that it would take a lot of clarification to understand whatever you think it brings to bear here and (2) on account of its vagueness, functions as a pretty broad expression of a casual acceptance of death that invites all kinds of slippery slopes far worse than the one you are identifying.
And since I'm on the side of thinking we can appeal to analytic concepts to distinguish between health problems that emerge in old age and "solving" childhood with horrific consequences, and you are on the side of seeing them as the same because those distinctions are trapped in strictures of analytic thinking, I imagine that you give your full blown acceptance a pandora's box of outrageous situations. Genocide? Eugenics? Letting global warming happen? Letting war happen? Nuclear bombs? All just the flip side of life, part of a greater dialectic that unites them, and ultimately all fine and good.
Since you reject separating out good and bad cases according to any reading that would have structure, I trust that you embrace this slippery slope just as much as the one you want to attribute to the project of combating health issues in old age.
The problem is always, and has always been, wanting things. Desire and our compulsive need to split the world into concepts that can be the aims of our desire.
Not saying it's not a fun game, but if you take it too seriously you're bound to go crazy!
I think that Hollywood and other media have already indirectly addressed this. It's simply a matter of how far you are willing to go to achieve effective immortality. Vampire stories essentially gloss over this - you live forever at the cost of coming out into the sun, garlic, crosses, etc. That is to say, the way to become immortal is simply by becoming a vampire. There are exceptions of course, but these transformations are generally regarded as unfavorable, because you cease being human in lieu of becoming a monster.
For me, once humanity achieves immortality, that is the inflection point. You are no longer human. You could argue whether one is human may come before or after that point. But for me, this is where I personally draw the line.
Life saving implants, artificial limbs, illness curing/muscle enhancing/brain stimulating steroids, cybernetic/internet connected brain implants, AI merging singularity brain upload, you name it. It's not necessarily bad or good either way. But at some point, you cease to be human (by my definition anyway). And it just so happens that if you're effectively immortal, I consider that obviously inhuman.
In a future where people stop aging at 25, but are engineered to live only one more year, having the means to buy your way out of the situation is a shot at immortal youth. Here, Will Salas finds himself accused of murder and on the run with a hostage - a connection that becomes an important part of the way against the system.
Ok, how about if all efforts are aimed only at eliminating sickness and suffering?
If somehow that were possible for all ages would you be for that?
Then, since death is not a problem we could just “schedule” it for some reasonable date in the future to retain all the philosophical benefits it brings? You first?
thing is, I've begun to consider old age as a graceful easing out of life, as if without old age ceasing to be alive can only be violent affair (violent like an explosion or a high-speed crash)
I don't think it's a problem we can solve. If we ever solve aging we'll get up to so much other malarkey that we're bound to die some other way, and not much later than if we'd died of old age.
Personally, I'd rather enjoy old age and go out suddenly than spend the last 20 or 30 so years of my life slowly crumbling to death, so addressing the diseases of aging is a worthwhile endeavor.
I like how aging is explained in "Lifespan: Why we age and why we don't have to"[1]: cells are analog holders of information and just like analog tapes, each copy holds data of slightly lesser quality. After a number of copies, cells become less performant in their job and eventually some lose enough information that new copies cannot function properly enough to survive and/or not mutate.
Then why aren't children affected, each generation becoming more damaged than the last? Are reproductive cells special in some regard? If so, can we make normal cells more like that? (I know about older parents having a higher risk of giving their kid Down's and autism but that only happens for a small percentage and the rest of the kids are fine.)
Perhaps the (biological) choices are growth and decline. No steady state (stable equilibrium) is feasible. Just a stupid guess; I have no basis for this notion.
Human race is not destroying its DNA at current pace for long. Deterioration may be more pronounced in a few generations.
And as to why the child is not formed from bad copies of worn-off cells of a mature parent - it's been some time since I read the book but I think that there was some reset mentioned when a whole new person is formed inside another organism. Fetal stem cells are known to have superior properties.
But if you look further at David Sinclair's videos on YouTube, the aging problem is not the lost of information but mostly the lost of capability to read/interpret the information. The cell then doesn't operate as it should. He's working now on ways to "polishing the CD" so information can be read as in young cells.
Cells may be analog, but DNA is digital -- with error correction even (or error deletion at least). I don't know the details of the epigenome, so maybe that isn't digital?
DNA is not digital though. It has a geometrical structure (independent of epigenetic modifications) that is dependent on a slew of environmental factors that alters it’s meaning. The computer programmer’s incessant need to reduce complexity to bits needs to stop.
DNA is literally digital: it is a quaternary system based on four values: AT, TA, CG, and GC. Those are the only four values possible within the system. If you want to claim it's not (without resorting to the epigenome) then nothing is digital.
What I don't understand is how anyone can believe that there is any future where we can defeat death. If we could increase human longevity to the point of living for a thousand, a million, a billion years, death is still sitting there at the end of the road, waiting for you.
Whether you live for a year or a million, our fates are sealed.
There are different theories about the end of the universe such as a heat death or a big collapse. We'll never know with certainty what that end state will be, but that is not something we can escape. (Also, the time frame of these types of cosmic events is incomprehensible to the human mind)
We can and should try to cure all diseases and ailments to ensure everyone has the chance to live as long and healthy as possible. But death is inevitable.
"But I’ve never found anybody who thinks cancer is a good thing. Nobody sane at least."
Interesting that you bring up cancer ...
Cancer occurs when individual cells decide to act in their own self interest and no longer act for the collection of cells that is your body. They ignore cell signaling mechanisms and resist the culling actions of apoptosis, etc.
I agree that cancer is not a good thing. I wonder if individual humans acting to preserve their own selves will be a cancer upon humanity.
> Cancer occurs when individual cells decide to act in their own self interest and no longer act for the collection of cells that is your body. They ignore cell signaling mechanisms
Please could you point to a good reference as tumor microenvironment seems to play an important role?
Is it intractably hard? We already know how to 'rejuvenate' cells for a decade. The field did not receive a lot of attention however, partly because of misguided ethics concerns. COVID changed that attitude
There's a lot happening here, what a wide ranging post! Thanks for stimulating the mind.
I'd separate aging research from attempting to solve Alzheimers, PD, cancer, and other maladies. Cancer is ever-present, sorry to say but most people who read this have some small amount of latent cancer growing slowly. Maybe we will harness the immune system and new powerful drugs and techniques to remove cancer more and more effectively, until it becomes like infectious disease: a threat to all, but usually treat-able.
For aging research, however, we're in a different realm. Assuming someone didn't die from any common malady or old-age related ones, let's say they live to 105. What's likely to kill them then? Well, it could still be cancer, but it could also be solve-able issues like falling and breaking a hip (we could invent machines to prevent or lessen damage from falls). It could be cardiac events, strokes, things where the cardiovascular system has been through so many "duty cycles" that the parts reach their expiration date.
And this expiration date is where I think we'll struggle most. We need to make our hardware last much, much longer if we're to achieve immortality as biological-only entities. The valves of our heart, the vessels of our brain and heart, the operation of the lungs, the sensory organs, the kidneys and bowels: these parts need a lot of extra "lubrication" and "TLC" over our lifetimes if we're to get past the "Age Limit" which is probably around 120 years old.
I'd hesitate to put too much stock into aging research at present. It's in its infancy, and until it ages to maturity, it's going to be an over-hyped area for rich people to dabble in, but I doubt 99% of people living now will ever reach escape-velocity and reach immortality.
That's the same philosopher who thinks we live in a simulation. They're about as credible as their profession is respected. I'm fairly certain I'd disagree with him in the piece of writing he next pens as well.
No, he believes that one of these three things is true:
1. "The fraction of human-level civilizations that reach a posthuman stage (that is, one capable of running high-fidelity ancestor simulations) is very close to zero", or
2. "The fraction of posthuman civilizations that are interested in running simulations of their evolutionary history, or variations thereof, is very close to zero", or
3. "The fraction of all people with our kind of experiences that are living in a simulation is very close to one."
Furthermore, reality itself is the "simulation". It takes the entire universe at one time t1 as input, transforms it according to the functions known as the fundamental forces, to produce the entire universe at time t2 as output, where t1 and t2 are one discrete time step apart. Restricting the "simulation" on a subset of the input is bound to introduce errors.
Yes. He has no basis for that belief. The three points you've raised in clarification on his behalf are neither mutually exclusive nor exhaustive over the entirety of the probability space. He is pulling "very close to" out of thin air, in complete disregard for rigorous evidence borne of the scientific method.
Dualism will lead to only a very basic understanding of existence. Death, nor cancer, are good or bad. Jesus might have had the whole thing wrong after all. Of maybe humanity, as its so often does, misinterpreted His teaching.
Before we knew about cancer, and yes there was a time we did not know what cancer was, was canned good or bad? Did we even see natural death as bad? So where did these constructs come from?
And now I guess you are saying immortality is good? Good for who? Overpopulation is already an issue, imagine if no one died!!
You cannot create a good thing without also creating a bad thing. That is just the way it is.
Overpopulation can be solved while increasing the human population, by eliminating people's environmental footprint. This is a much better way of solving the issue of overpopulation than consciously avoiding solving the problem of aging.
A larger population, that sees an acceleration in the rate of per capita human capital accumulation, as a consequence of aging being solved, could also be a huge boon for other lifeforms, as it could mean artificial habitats being created outside of Earth where these lifeforms could flourish. It is entirely possible for human civilization to one day create continent sized O'Neill cylinder covered with forests originating from Earth.
> Overpopulation can be solved while increasing the human population, by eliminating people's environmental footprint.
Ha! I have heard of people trying to control the world but I have never seen it accomplished. Yes, there are many impossible possibilities that can only be created with fascism.
What I described is not a museum. It is a living, evolving ecosystem. It is however under the conscious control of humans. A milder version of this exists in the form of national parks and wildlife reserves.
It also is not mutually exclusive with preserving Earth's natural habitats. In fact, expanding beyond Earth makes it possible to outsource industry and agriculture off-Earth, to allow more of the Earth's surface to be returned to its pre-human state.
Finally, in terms of human-engineered expansion of habitats for other lifeforms, there is the far more durable possibility of terraformed planets. These would require no active intervention to maintain once the terraforming has been completed.
In short, the ascent of human civilization can be, and I would bet would likely to be, a massively positive development for all forms of Earth-based life.
There is much more rationalising about death being good in Christianity (with the notion of a heaven for the believers) than in Judaism (no set beliefs on the after life) or even many pagan religions of that time (Greek life after death is often depressing for non-heroes)
"I wonder whether humans will be involved at all; whether machines will silently develop cures while our bodies lie in a metal tomb, explaining to us what happened afterwards in terms we can understand."
This kind of nonsense reasoning had people predicting civilization end within 15 or 30 - back in the 70s...
Resources aren't a fixed notion, crude oil was worthless and toxic before we learned how to refine it and suddenly it's a critical resource.
Natural ecosystems are considered vital today, but if we were to come up with artificial biospheres we would be looking back at the days people got infected by malaria and tick born disease living in uncontrolled environments like we look at people who live(d) in cities without sewage systems.
Anything can be a resource, and be worthless or harmful, depending on the context. Claiming that resource problems can't be solved is a logical fallacy - resources are anything you use to solve a problem.
Or the fact that if everyone went vegetarian we could free up 80% of the farmland in the world?
Whilst resource are not fixed, like lab grown meats, supplements which can alter people's diets like histidine will reduce red meat consumption, I am aware some businesses have also kept some resources under wraps from the public so I agree they are not a fixed notion, but in ten years the US lifestyle has increased its use of resource from 4 planet earths to just over 5 planet earths.
Sure anything can be a resource, we might even be able to use plate tectonics as landfill waste disposal because everything came from this planet so is technically from the Earth, and who knows what resources could be mined from the planets core, or do we get into mining Helium13 from the moon?
there is a still a problem and that is quality of life, being kept in smaller more expensive livestock pens called homes.
What price do you put on having rolling pastures all around your home and no manmade noise around you?
With a global population set to peak in 2100, we still have 80's years of declining quality of life to put up with.
>What price do you put on having rolling pastures all around your home and no manmade noise around you?
And yet that's much cheaper and attainable than a small "livestock pen" in a large city :) If you don't mind living without infrastructure - building a cabin in the middle of nowhere isn't that expensive and doesn't seem like there will be a rush to this any time soon. Population seems to be heavily concentrated and the rural areas are being depopulated if anything.
I agree to an extent, but the matter involved on this planet is finite, the added entropy it can handle is finite. Our power consumption is growing exponentially and that has to stop at some point or we will just cook. We will find new resources like clean fusion energy, but that won't let us sink more heat. We worried about food back in the 70s but then we got better at agriculture, except it isn't sustainable what we do to boost the yields, the soil is getting used up. We can do better, but there are simply limits, and with no deaths we will find them much sooner. We will have to expand off earth, which is another seemingly impossible problem, or stop our growth, which isn't technologically difficult, but apparently socially impossible.
> We worried about food back in the 70s but then we got better at agriculture, except it isn't sustainable what we do to boost the yields, the soil is getting used up. We can do better, but there are simply limits, and with no deaths we will find them much sooner.
See but when you're saying this and mention expanding off earth in the next sentence - why do we need soil to produce food ? Or plants even ? Even now there's efforts to process algae into protein etc. It wouldn't surprise me at all that we have specific nutrient production farms via some simple GMO organism in some large scale industrial setting - vertical stacking, ocean surface farms, etc. Compared to space colonisation this seems far less far fetched.
For protein we can probably crispr in the ability for us to synthesize the essential amino acids that we currently cannot. Synthesizing mono unsaturated fats directly from co2 and water is also certainly possible. Carbs seem harder but likely possible, agriculture might become just the way we get micronutrients, and all macros require no land. So I agree all that is far more possible in the near future than leaving earth. The energy required for that stuff is still a huge problem. Even if all our power generation was renewable, simply using all that power dumps the heat into our environment. Right now that isn't so noticeable, but our power demands are growing exponentially, the estimates on when that starts being a climate issue vary from centuries to decades, but its out there.
Resource use is a separate axis to longevity. The right industry (we already have the tech) and a hundred billion can live sustainably on what is currently desert. Remove all the tech and the sustainable population of the entire planet is mere tens of millions.
World population is also a separate axis.
If lifespan is unchanged, population goes up or down depending on rate of new children. Rich and resource-hungry westerners have the lowest reproductive rate. If we get a perfect fountain of youth, we can’t forecast how society will or won’t change. More kids, or fewer?
Likewise resources per person, will we stay in the rat race forever, or shift to working as little as possible as soon as the mortgage on the third mansion has been paid off?
Also, “no ageing” doesn’t mean “immortality”, because current rates imply there’s a 50% chance of dying from accidents or malice in roughly any thousand year period. Though again, no way to predict how that might change with eternal youth.
Lets say as a thought exercise that: it is proved beyond doubt that there is nothing after death. And all life human beings included are just self perpetuating complex biological loops no different than a toy with electricity. Lets also assume immortality is found by some kind of fixing of this biological machine and so defeating death.
Is such an existence worth living? You would be no different than a straw on wind with all its movements explained by physical laws.
I already live my life under this understanding. Regardless, I wish to continue experiencing the world for as long as is possible.
Could it be that an idea of self-worth tied to a metaphysical immortal soul stems from an attempt towards acceptance of death? What happens if that death is removed from the equation?
I would say yes. All religions, metaphysics and paranormal explanations seem to have come from trying to explain death and an yearning for continuation of life.
Wishing to continue to experience the world is good but lets say if every activity we do, every desire we have, every thought, inhibition, fear, perception can be debugged external and be shown to be deterministic. That would effectively make us code and probably able to run on machines/simulation. In which case, the whole thing at least for me would seem really to be pointless existence. I mean if all our thoughts, desires, perceptions are just code being run by some giant cpu, then well I'm not going to look forward for the execution of more such instructions (:
That's a deep mischaracterization of positions against aging research. People are against because in the way it's conducted and given the existing social order, it will reinforce inequalities and make the world a worst place. If you are more privileged you will live longer and have more chances to concentrate money and power for yourself or your family and away from less privileged people.
This is even more the case in a world on the verge of ecological and social collapse where the age expectancy is lowering.
If you are more privileged you will live longer and have more chances to concentrate money and power for yourself or your family and away from less privileged people.
It doesn't have to be that way, even in our current system.
Metformin was discovered in 1922 and is very low-cost to make. It's available over the counter in many countries but in the US and the EU, you currently need a prescription.
It is on the World Health Organization's List of Essential Medicines [1].
It's used primarily for treating type 2 diabetes. What got noticed is diabetes patients on metformin (on average) outlived otherwise healthy people who didn't have diabetes.
Turns out it activates some of the longevity pathways being discussed on this thread. People on Metformin are also less likely to die from the diseases of old age: cancer, Alzheimer's and heart disease.
Now many doctors are prescribing off-label for patients who want it.
There's a major clinical trial going on to see if aging can be treated with metformin [2].
Metformin costs pennies per day to take, so you don't need to be affluent or privileged to afford it.
Wealthier societies and individuals always get the first shot at new technologies, so this is a general argument against any improvement until we've established global communism. Cancer treatments and Covid vaccines have not made the world worse despite being unevenly distributed.
It's a particularly bad argument here because mitigating the harmful effects of aging would result in massive reductions in medical expenses. Governments and insurance companies would be highly incentivized to get them to as many people as possible.
No, it's not an argument against improvement, it's an argument against inequalities. Fighting inequalities is fundamental to unleash the potential of medical technologies. Potential that cannot be reached under the current economic model that is hindering research, progress and wellbeing.
The argument about medical expenses doesn't make any sense: it's more profitable to have sick people living longer and increare their medical expenses. The failure of the American healthcare system is proof that a market economy is not fit for healthcare.
The argument about medical expenses doesn't make any sense: it's more profitable to have sick people living longer and increare their medical expenses. The failure of the American healthcare system is proof that a market economy is not fit for healthcare.
Profitable for who, exactly? Companies, individuals, the state, or whole society? For that matter, which companies are we talking about?
Whenever we talk about longevity we cannot not mention David Sinclair, who is a leading researcher in longevity. His recent podcast is the most popular on the topic of longevity.
I love listening to him but the problem is I know calorie restriction and time restricted eating is smart but I love good food more.
People don't just want to live longer. They want to basically do absolutely nothing different than what they do now and also live longer. I wish we at least would frame the problem correctly.
The ultimate "best" outcome would be some sort of intervention that mimics the results of calorie restriction or fasting, but without the sacrifice.
But to get there, we need to study the mechanisms through actual calorie restriction and fasting, both to 1. prove that it works in humans, and 2. figure out why.
It’s worth noting that there has been a lot of controversy around Sinclair and his work.
> Sirtris Pharmaceuticals, Inc. was a biotechnology company based in Cambridge, MA that developed therapies for type 2 diabetes, cancer, and other diseases. Conceived in 2004 by Harvard University biologist David Sinclair and serial entrepreneur Andrew Perlman, and founded that year by Sinclair and Perlman, along with Christoph Westphal, Richard Aldrich, Richard Pops, and Paul Schimmel, the company was focused on developing Sinclair's research into activators of sirtuins, work that began in the laboratory of Leonard P. Guarente where Sinclair worked as a post-doc before starting his own lab.
> Sirtris went public in 2007 and was subsequently purchased and made a subsidiary of GlaxoSmithKline in 2008 for $720 million. GSK paid $22.50/share, when Sirtris's stock was trading at $12/share, down 45% from its highest price of the previous year.
> Studies published in 2009 and early 2010 by scientists from Amgen and Pfizer cast doubt on whether SIRT1 was directly activated by resveratrol and showed that the apparent activity was actually due to a fluorescent reagent used in the experiments.
> GSK/Sirtris terminated development of SRT501 in late 2010. GSK said it was terminating SRT501 due to side effects of nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea it caused, and because the compound's activity wasn't specific to SIRT1, at some doses it actually inhibited SIRT1, and the compound itself wasn't patentable.
> In February 2022, Sinclair raised widespread controversy in the longevity research community by rejecting to communicate in an academic debate in which his resveratrol research was criticized after months of mounting evidence against reseveratrol as a longevity intervention.
It's like only focusing on the Steve Jobs failed products and not his successful ones. David Sinclair isn't at the Jobsian level yet but from everything I've read, listened to and viewed, he certainly has the potential to be there.
I am glad this dude is like 20 years older than me, it gives me a safe buffer to decide if I should hop on his train or not. If he still seems healthy in his 70s it will be very interesting.
Of course they are. It's so far beyond our current understanding of aging that there is no way that you are going to turn this into applied science today. These are at best open research problems and they will likely be so for many years to come. Assuming we don't collectively kill ourselves first.
Perhaps its not necessarily a bad thing that there's a delay in this type of research. Given the extreme inequality in the world today, it might end up really hard to overcome the way that that inequality manifests itself with regards to access to these types of medicine/research.
Even your own comment hinted that perhaps we have some more pressing issues to figure out first
I’ve always suspected this sentiment to exist somewhere— essentially “death is the great equalizer (and thus good)”—but don’t think I’ve seen it until now.
It’s always been obvious to me that the problem with singular focus on inequality is precisely this — the easiest way for everyone to be equal is to be dead. This is appalling and a strong argument against a singular focus on inequality.
I would say the same thing about wealth. The easiest way for everyone to be equal is for everyone to be poor. So, make sure your preferred economic policies don’t follow this adverse incentive and just “cut the tall grasses”, so to speak, and just make everyone poor and/or limit upward mobility.
I never made such a statement. I never said death makes people equal
I don't see how my argument is any different from the arguments about us not being ready for general AI because of how much it could concentrate power.
> us not being ready for [thing] because of how much it could concentrate power.
Power is already concentrated, such an advancement would not change the indelible fact that we've reinvented kings and dynasties and we can't seem to get rid of them. Given that life has gotten better for everyone anyway when we discover great things, such concerns must be seen as immaterial. Improving the life of all people is more important.
Sorry for misstating you. It does seem bad if only some have the tech. Maybe in the worst case, rich nations lock others out? That just seems implausible to me, I think any such medicine tech would be shared without delay. With general AI, I think that’s a tech that would not be fully shared and would stay concentrated.
Do you think the stock will go 10x or 100000000x. Every single human on the planet needs only what only u can provide. Do the math again. Also its not 1 in 50 but 1 in 50000
I hate it when this type of info does not have a date attached to the main article, right in the beginning. I could assume some years, by looking at the references and some mentioned inside (2016?!? A little after?!?), but in today's accelerated scientific progress, especially in the light of recent developments of successful applications, post-COVID appearance, it is hard to determine how authoritative this info is.
Sorry for the academic terminology, but: longevity is basically the dream of eternal life recast for a modern disenchanted world. If this topic interests you, I highly recommend reading some books by Charles Taylor.
Also, recommend Baudrillard's Symbollic Exchange and Death for how this fantasy of immortality poses a devastating problem to Western society.
Seeing that you've mentioned Taylor's A Secular Age, maybe I should start reading it (it's been on my reading list for some time, but this renewed my curiosity as his studies seem to be closely related to what thinkers like Bataille and Baudrillard has problematized in political economy)
Thanks for the suggestion! I didn’t know Baudrillard wrote about this.
> this fantasy of immortality poses a devastating problem to Western society.
Absolutely. While I agree with the other commenter that basically no one is against life extension research in principle, the energy that leads to deifying it (which is the vibe I get from a lot of longevity materials) might be better served learning to understand and accept death as a natural phenomenon. I’ve found Seneca’s On the Shortness of Life to be an excellent work on this topic.
Then again, one might characterize the technological successes of the West in the last ±500 years as deliberately ignoring cyclical time in favor of linear “Progress.”
> Seeing that you've mentioned Taylor's A Secular Age, maybe I should start reading it
I really do recommend it. It’s a bit dense but I’ve found the concepts he uses (the immanent frame and the Nova Effect to name a couple) to be extremely useful in understanding the modern world.
You don't need capital G God to live a spiritual life, which is the process of becoming fully human. Qualia that you experience are of a mind operating in non-dualistic reality which we are always a part of because of its transcendental nature.
As someone who follows life extension research closely: all the lifestyle stuff like "eating less" is useless. You can't rejuvenate an organism by changing the external inputs to its natural processes. It's half-measures at best.
Are you sure you’re actually following life extension research as opposed to some “quantified self” hacks?
I’ve personally starved and seen worms live much longer than they normally do, and regularly found worms in plates months after they should have all died. There’s nothing unnatural about an organism going into “survival” mode when food becomes scarce. It’s clearly something that benefits a species survival.
I don't think anybody's claimed that it reverses ageing, and if they have I think they would have clarified that they did mean 'slows' the ageing process. And there's no doubt that caloric restriction and IF both slow ageing relative to a normal caloric intake. I don't have the paper on me atm, but IIRC it was 30% longer lifespan in mice. Now whether you want to say ageing is slowed or that lifespan is increased, and I'm not denying that there's a legitimate difference, but either way caloric restriction is completely legitimate for both, and to the extent you said it's useless, I don't think that's fair at all.
For anybody interested, the mTor pathway is really interesting in this regard, and in general the effects of AMPK on cellular metabolism. TLDR is that in the modern world most people never activate these pathways (since we're always in a fed state). Ostensibly there will be some breakthroughs when we finally learn why these starvation pathways are so beneficial. Inflammation seems a decent guess - eating increases it, and fasting decreases it, as a general rule.
This essay overlooks the most likely path to life extension, which is our ability to snapshot the brain's electrical/chemical storage. Always back up your data! The speed of progress in computing is fast outpacing medical research, and at the end of the day, the human brain is just a computer of sorts. Historically it's been orders of magnitude too complex to understand, but the gap is closing fast.
Obviously this raises a million different questions, such as what to do exactly with the data, and whether it can exist outside it's biological substrates.
But the concept of life as data is worth noting in any conversation about the human lifespan.
Only tangentially relevant nitpick: shouldn't that first graph have a sigmoid shape since it represents chance of dying as a function of age. At age 130 is should top out at 100% but it shouldn't increase exponentially.
It looks basically accurate, as it's showing your risk of dying at a particular point in time during your life. This risk increases as you get older: the you're more likely to die if you make it to 80 than at 70 or at 60, and so on. So it would seem accurate that the risk increases steadily with time.
This table [0] shows the underlying data. If you plot age against death probability, you get a similarly-shaped curve to the article's.
A sigmoid curve would seem to imply that your risk of dying decreases after a certain age, which isn't the case. I think what you're imaging is a curve that shows one's overall chance of dying at a particular age (rather than risk at a point in time)? Or am I missing your point?
Even if we „solved“ death and disease, accidents and wars would end our live eventually. Lifespan would increase for sure (I think there was a model that predicted sthg like 500 years?), but immortality just won’t work.
I think the only way we get “true” immortality is memory transfer to silicon (or whatever is in-vogue at the time) barring all the gibberish about “souls” and “what does consciousness mean”. People like me who are materialistic and think we are chemistry and sensations manifest as consciousness. Assuming tech ever actually reaches that point, and probably not in our lifetimes. It's one reason I read all the Warhammer 40k novels about the Necrons. I know it's pulp fiction but is fun to ponder while daydreaming.
Correct. Eliminating aging doesn't mean immortality, it just means you don't have to watch your body and often your mind deteriorate over the course of several decades. It would still be extraordinarily valuable even if humans had unremovable biological time bombs that caused us to drop dead at 100 years regardless of our health.
From your previous comment: " Feeling very depressed as a 23 year old with agressive hair loss. Tried (and still trying) everything there is, but nothing worked yet (1.5 years into min/dut)."
I think I'm going to pass on medical advice from you.
You can keep stigmatizing depression or balding, luckily Im no more in a position such that statements like yours would affect me adversely.
It took 4 months and a bit of experimenting, but vert was able to change it, I just want to raise awareness.
You can read up on "Verteporfin", the patent for cell regeneration (thru "controlled wounding") is already filed by Stanford, pending approval.
Then please stop (mis)judging people just because they experienced a depressive episode in their life - this is exactly what that sentence meant, even if not your intent.
Definitely not my intent. I just think that if you are going to spread medical advice like that that maybe you should think twice about it, what works for you will not necessarily work for others and that is a caveat you did not add. 'thank me later' implies a guarantee that it will work.
healthspan research is clear.
1) inflammation is a natural process that results in wear on your body
2) lower inflammation
3) doing so is different for everyone. behavior is at the core of this process. including eating, sleeping, living a life of non-excessive stress, avoiding and treating major disease, maintaining healthy mouth, and moderate exercise.
so in a word---a lot , but not all , of chinese and eastern medical philosophy has been epidimilogically confirmed.
all the new crap about 'caffiene' 'metformin' and other bullshit being good for you is just that, garbage.
what isn't , is that sometimes some people do have deficiencies of insulin sentitvity, or vitamin D, or other things---like they used to have scurvy ( vitmain C defficiency) -----so these things have been figured out and in no way relate to logevity only healthspan.
the annoying stupid thing about longevity idiots is that if a set of practices and health observation and treatments coudl guarantee living a life of perfect healthy until 100 years old----(assuming any rich person coudl afford this) ---this would yield a total revolution in human affairs for the rest of civilizations existence.
longevity is the dream of fools
guaranteed healthspan is the dream of realists.
no one on hackernews is over 60 yet, and this is why all you idiots think with your brains, instead of your hearts. you dont' talk to 80 and 90 year olds, and if you do you dont' empathize with the path towards aging sickness and death. but you will if you don't die healthy and young, because that is what happens to you . guaranteed.
and you will only realize how stupid the idea of living forever is, when you eventually get sick and just want to live healthy one more year. you will realize that feels like forever when it's you. but it's only one more year.
virtually no one lives past 110. focussing on pushing that limit is stupid and longevity research has yielded very little interesting results applicable to other areas.
suspended animation and metabolism research , are , however , intereseting and they are fundamental biological areas of exploration and not 'goal oriented' towards the philsopher's bone. cause that's what it is. a skull bone.
I often think about that quote because aging is such an intractably hard problem, we’ve sort of collectively rationalized it as something “good”. You see it in many religious traditions. In the zeitgeist. That somehow death gives life meaning. Makes it good.
But I’ve never found anybody who thinks cancer is a good thing. Nobody sane at least.
I’ve thought for a while now that every philosophy problem is in some sense, just a health problem waiting to be solved.
Occasionally I think about the Bible too and the way Christ (regardless of your religious beliefs) upended this tradition of rationalizing death as good. There’s a line in the Bible that’s the shortest verse in the English version: “Jesus wept.” And he was weeping for Lazarus, a man who died (who he could bring back to life effortlessly); in some sense a true condemnation of death as evil. Something even a god would weep over.
I think about the future often too; the way immortality will finally be achieved. There’s so many complications when it comes to aging, and so much we don’t know about the human body, I wonder whether humans will be involved at all; whether machines will silently develop cures while our bodies lie in a metal tomb, explaining to us what happened afterwards in terms we can understand.
I think it’ll happen someday. But I don’t know if it’ll be a year or 100 years from now.
I certainly hope it’s soon. Some days I feel like I’m at the edge of an eternal history.