Remarkable hostility and strange circular logic from some people posting here. Clearly belief outstrips evidence.
If research suggests there's an observable asymptotic trend, public health dollars at the very least might be better spent on quality of life as much as quantity.
The posts saying an atom of oxygen is potentially infinitely long lived (ignoring radioactive decay?) As a "proof" that life extension has no limit is about as reductively silly as it is possible to be.
Bills of mortality bootstrapped Financial investment in annuities. You think the money people aren't tracking this trend now, when they have for the last 400 or more years?
Radical life extension within our lifetimes has become secular religion substitute. It’s driven more by hope and faith than by scientific fact.
While a lifespan has no limits in theory if technology is advanced enough, the belief that it can be achieved by a living person is based on hope rather than evidence.
- Possible in our lifetime.
- Affordable to the faithful.
You remove these two, and the faithful lose their interest in discussing the matter.
What theory says that human lifespan has no limits with technology assistance? Anything involving replacing biological systems with artificial ones is not really extending human lifespan, it’s replacing human life with something else.
I won't touch on whether or not you're still you as you replace your biological components with artificial ones.
But who says that's the endgame? Presumably an advanced enough medical technology could remove the internal byproducts of aging, and get your cells to stop dying / running out of steam / going cancerous. Obviously we have no idea how to do that, and maybe we never will, but it seems plausible.
You can replace almost whole body and its still you as the mind. But once you replace brain then its just a copy, you can't literally move biolectrical complex that makes us into silicon in any possible way. And brains age like the rest of the body, telomeres issue applies too.
The best possible outcome would be watching your digital copy having digital life, while you yourself wither away regardless. More akin to having a child than oneself preservation. Not really something special, having physical children still beats this.
Ship of Theseus it. Slowly replace the brain bit-by-bit, taking breaks in between. For each component, use three in a democratic redundancy (for future maintenance).
I wouldn't personally do that unless I was already dying. But, I see no reason believe it wouldn't preserve the soul. Your organic brain is already doing it all the time on a small scale.
We know it’s possible for living things to be functionally near immortal.
We also know germ line cells can give rise to new organisms which can give rise to germ line cells in an unbroken chain effectively forever.
This is quite far from making a human immortal but it shows that there appears to be nothing in physical law or intrinsic to biology that prohibits it. Therefore it is possible.
Star travel and terraforming Mars are also possible. Possible does not imply anything about difficulty. We don’t really know if radical life extension or borderline immortality are fusion hard, quantum computing hard, or starship hard.
> We know it’s possible for living things to be functionally near immortal.
Not in any sense that's applicable to humans.
The often-cited animal examples, like greenland sharks, tortoises, and lobsters, are slow-moving ectotherms with "cold" metabolisms. Adjusting for watts per unit mass of biochemistry, they might "live" less in all their centuries than you do in a single decade [0-3].
In that sense they're only "long-lived" in the same way a tree is long-lived. Yeah, it might not die. But it's also not doing much that produces wear and tear, misfolded proteins, scar tissue, plaque buildup, etc.
Microorganisms and cnidarians, which can be truly immortal, are even more divergent. For example a common form of "immortality" involves periodically regenerating body parts by reverting to stem cells. IIRC regeneration is ancestral to all animals, but mostly lost in mammals.
Humans can actually already regenerate to a limited extent [4]. But how are you going to regenerate an entire primate nervous system (which "immortal" animals don't have), without losing everything you are?
In fact, the use of regeneration to achieve "immortality", and even that only rarely and in very simple animals, suggests it may not be possible at all for living organisms to live indefinitely in the same body. Otherwise, why would evolution waste calories rebuilding a whole body?
I suspect some systems-theoretic effect like the Red Queen hypothesis [5], but on a micro scale. Change is the only constant, and immortality implies trying to stay the same when the only thermodynamically favorable options are to grow or decay.
0: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-76371-0
1: # Greenland shark metabolism over entire lifespan
sh -c "units '((30mg/oxygen)*(mol/g))/hour/(1000/1000^0.84*kg) * (434kJ/mol) * 200year' MJ/kg"
2: # Greenland shark lifespan metabolism, alternate estimation
sh -c "units '192kcal/day*200year/126kg' MJ/kg"
3: # Human metabolism over 1 decade
sh -c "units '150W/100kg*10years' MJ/kg"
4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regeneration_in_humans
5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen_hypothesis
I don't think regeneration of bulk tissue is what people are generally talking about when they talk about immortality. Rather they talk about there being advanced homeostasis from yesterday, to today and to tomorrow under "normal" living condition. The point is not that you should be able to regenerate from blowing your brains out.
Yep. The point I'm making is that there is no precedent in nature for a complex animal maintaining homeostasis indefinitely like that (that doesn't rely on bulk regeneration). And given such immortality would presumably be highly evolutionarily advantageous, there is therefore no reason to believe it's possible at all, and many reasons to suspect it might not be (antagonistic pleiotropy, chaos theory, thermodynamics…).
Aren't some trees, some fungi, some sharks and some crabs basically exactly that? They are most certainly complex life. Sure you are right heir metabolic profile is very different.
But really the your argument is already shifting to "there is no life ver similar to humans that do it, so it must be impossible" which imo is a much larger stretch then assuming it's possible.
We aren’t much more complex than a crab, if we are at all. “Complexity” is not what makes us what we are. It’s that we went down an evolutionary path that heavily leveraged intelligence and social cooperation so we got a big hypertrophied brain. Our brain is like a cheetah’s musculoskeletal system or a rabbit’s reproductive system.
The OP is also massively underestimating plant complexity. We aren’t much more complex than a tree either.
We are higher metabolism than both though, and with that the OP has a point. We are already long lived for a high metabolism animal. Our metabolic rate makes it harder for our repair mechanisms to stay ahead of oxidative and radiation damage. That will make extreme life extension hard for us, harder than if we were reptilians or arthropods.
If you had full understanding of human cell and how they contribute to homeostasis, you could reprogram the cell to rejuvenate them endlessly without turning into cancer (many cancers have unlimited lifespan). You would also need to find ways to remove all cruft that gradually accumulates even in healthy body, like heavy metals etc.
How do you know that you could? That’s the question! If we did understand biology perfectly it may be that we would then prove no organism can live forever and reproduction is the only way.
Reproduction doesn't create whole new cells from nothing (except in the ship of Thesius sense). It's existing cells getting reprogrammed to do new things.
Reproduction does result in new matrix/scaffolding being built but the cells build that (and can rebuild it if so directed).
Of course some things "we" care about exist exclusively in the matrix (configurations of neurons, learned behaviors, memories, etc) so that could well be a limit for those parts of the body where we care primarily about preserving the matrix.
Anyway my point is that "reproduction" doesn't create whole new life, it's just a continuation.
> Anyway my point is that "reproduction" doesn't create whole new life, it's just a continuation.
Then you're just arguing that we're already immortal, after all we reproduce, but I don't think that's what we're talking about when we talk about longevity. Longevity is the continued existence of a particular being, not its continuation through descendants.
The point is that a fundamental assumption that "reproduction" does anything that can't be done by regeneration is just a hunch that so far isn't actually supported by anything in microbiology. The existence of reproduction is irrelevant to the question.
Reproduction is not physically special. If it is physically possible to create a new organism with a longer lifespan than its parent (which it is), then it is physically possible to extend the lifespan of an existing organism. This may be impractical, but we cannot prove that no organism can live ≈forever, because it's not a physical impossibility. (Assuming a source of power remains present: it looks like the universe won't last forever, so we can trivially assert that no organism can live forever.)
> it is physically possible to extend the lifespan of an existing organism.
This is not at all guaranteed until we actually manage to do it. And that's exactly what we're discussing, you can't just say "but it must be possible". There's no rule of the universe that says it should, and given life has been around for 4 billion years and there's no single species (specially animals which is what we really should consider here if we're talking about human lifespan) that manages to live for more than a few hundred years, I think that's strong evidence that life is approaching a fundamental limit here. Someone else said "maybe that's enough" - well, why?? Maybe 100 years is already quite enough then??
Take the existing organism apart, fix all the problems, put the organism back together. No laws of physics prevent this, so by the totalitarian principle it's physically possible. Principles of engineering might make it impractical, and even if it is practical we might never discover how to do it, but it's possible.
Because there's absolutely no reason to believe that's the case? Like I don't know what the point of this argument is: maybe it's impossible. Sure, great. Okay. But you know...let's actually find out, because it looks very possible if hard from our current vantage point.
This is perhaps the single worst form of argument I've ever seen. It does not help, it does not engage with anything scientific, it doesn't promote any new ideas (an example of an idea worth exploring is 'how can a cancer cell live indefinitely but other cells cannot' or 'why do different animals live for different lengths of time and what triggers this process'?). Things not worth exploring include whatever you're engaging in.
> This is perhaps the single worst form of argument I've ever seen.
It's because you didn't understand it
> 'how can a cancer cell live indefinitely but other cells cannot'
Cancer cells are damaged cells mutating without regard for function. It's pretty obvious that there is a difference between "living indefinitely in a mutated form devoid of original function" is different from a cell performing a specific function
Do you believe this limit on lifespan is a uniquely human condition? or do you believe that it's impossible for any animal whatsoever to have a long lifespan (let's say 400 years for the sake of argument here).
I mean I also feel like people would be pretty happy with the average lifespan of a tree, or a Greenland Shark, etc.
Also, some few (fairly primitive) animals are "biologically immortal," for example, lobsters (which are motile and vaguely resemble us more than, say, sponges and jellyfish) don't experience senescence.
That being said, I think we have a long way to go if we want to make any progress at all, and I doubt I will live to see it.
If you could put your mind in a robot, is it still you? What if you get a knee replacement? What if you infuse a young persons blood? What if you put on a contact lens? Fun questions, but I’m not sure the answer changes what we will do much.
Two issues here - the first is that relatively new discoveries like the bidirectional gut-brain axis, and the major effects it has on you, pose a technical issue to traditional thought experiments like brains in a vat (or robot as it may be). The second is that this also doesn't really answer the question. Your brain, like everything else in your body, degrades over time. It's not like it becomes immortal if you just stick it in a robot, if that were even possible.
> While a lifespan has no limits in theory if technology is advanced enough, the belief that it can be achieved by a living person is based on hope rather than evidence.
I would say it's based on fear. Ego. Maybe disconnection, bordering on solipsism, as if living in this world is only meaningful if you personally live forever.
Hope motivates aspirational curiosity. The attitude from some longevity enthusiasts here seems to lean more towards vitriol and tautology.
It has also become popular with billionaires to invest huge sums of money into life extension, or at least cosmetic surgeries to appear younger (Hair transplants, etc).
I have come to the conclusion that no amount of money or technology can cure being spiritually empty inside, as well as unable to cope with your own mortality.
Some would say that if they were able to find meaning in life or cope with mortality, then they wouldn't have hoarded so much money and tech in the first place.
This is a very good question which i resonate with. The implications that an extend life is better. In my personal opinion life as we know it would be vastly different and who knows how different it could be, for better or for worse.
Wouldn't it be great if every figure we learned about in history class was still alive and kicking today? Wouldn't that just make everything so much better?
Anyone who says "we will have within this generation technology to extend your lifetime indefinitely" is lying just as much as the priest who says he knows God exists is lying[1]. I would say it's more likely that the scientist liar is accidentally right, than that the priest is; that doesn't make either of them people you should trust.
At the current stage of technology, belief on this process is basically based only on hope. Belief in this is essentially religious.
[1] possibly they both believe they are saying the truth, so you could argue they are wrong rather than lying. They are still both standing on the same grounds.
Actually all the heads of labs and the top 2 cited scientists are saying exactly this. Hassabis Hinton bengio and amodei. It's crazy to think they are lying priests and give 0% probability on this. It's really short minded.
oh thank goodness you've finally shifted the goal post! in other comments you were arguing that radical life extension was impossible but now it's merely impossible within our lifetime! that's a huge shift!
I made two comments in this thread. The one you replied to, and this one I'm using now to respond to you. Do you have me confused with someone else?
But yeah, I think "within our lifetime" is a critical qualifier, and most people who are not writing it down are implicitly assuming that the qualifier is obvious. I have very limited interest in technologies that will not exist until centuries after I'm born, other than as entertainment.
Without that qualifier, almost any practical discussion about technology is moot. It's fun to talk about FTL or whatever, but we certainly should not be investing heavily into it... It might be possible, but most research on that direction would be wasteful.
How do you know it's viable? We may try, but if your argument is merely that it wasn't disproven yet, then it doesn't invalidate OP's point of it being aspirational first.
> Radical life extension within our lifetimes has become secular religion substitute. It’s driven more by hope and faith than by scientific fact.
Did someone prove mice have souls that go to heaven or hell while I wasn't looking?
For all the limits of research that only works in mice and doesn't generalise to humans (I'm *not* going to plan with the assumption of radical longevity) it's not quite as bad as taking everythin on faith.
The secular religion spoken of by nabla has nothing to do with afterlives. It's for people who don't believe in any afterlife trying to placate their fear of death by having faith that technology will somehow grant them an indefinite life, not an afterlife.
(Context: I am firmly an atheist, but I also disapprove of the people who want to live forever. I think that's selfish and childish. People should get to grips with the reality of their mortality and make peace with that.)
> People should get to grips with the reality of their mortality and make peace with that.
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
I agree. For one, most people don't change. In the sense that their ideas don't change. For the ideas to change in the society, sometimes people themselves have to be replaced, i.e. generations have to change.
Heaven and hell, souls, they're just examples sampled from the set of things called "religious".
Radical life extension has been demonstrated… in mice.
If you don't like my chosen examples, take any other religious statement and demonstrate it in a mouse. Have Anubis weigh their heart against a feather, pay Charon to cross the Styx, whatever.
Point isn't the specific it's compared against, it's the entire set that longevity definitely isn't in, because unlike those things it has been demonstrated (in mice).
I don't have to be hostile to be somewhat skeptical about mechanical extensions of current trends into distant future.
An analyst living in 1825 could analyze the traffic stats to conclude that the era of increasing land travel speeds is coming to a close because the horses can't run any faster, and an analyst living in 1975 could analyze the telecom stats to conclude that international calls are always going to cost much more than local calls and remain somewhat of a luxury, particularly in the developing world.
I read an article somewhere around 1960 that predicted we'd achieve travel at the speed of light in 25 years (I forget the real number, but within the lifetime of many people living then), and exceed the speed of light shortly thereafter. He based his prediction on the increases in speed of travel over decreasing spans of time, starting with people running, then tens of millennia later horseback, then a couple millennia later steam ships and trains, then a century later airplanes, then sixty years later orbital space travel.
And that is precisely why I don't find that much value in articles such as "New research reveals longevity gains slowing, life expectancy of 100 unlikely".
Declaration such as:
“We forecast that those born in 1980 will not live to be 100 on average, and none of the cohorts in our study will reach this milestone."
is too self-confident. Their youngest cohort is born in 2000. It is impossible to predict how longevity technology will look in 2070 or 2080, and yet the authors make such bold statements.
To be fair, the study authors explicitly say that their forecast only holds, “In the absence of any major breakthroughs that significantly extend human life," and, "The findings of this study are not intended to be interpreted as evidence in favor or against a biological age limit to human life."
Let's use "time travel" for `$X` and see if we come to a useful forecast: Sure, one could hope that someday we'll have enough major breakthroughs to achieve either one. But "maybe we'll discover something we don't currently know or understand and it will change everything and we will go back in time" isn't a very promising or useful forecast if your aim is fixing a current problem.
You could perform the same exercise substituting "perpetual motion" as `$X`, and come up with an forecast equally useless for solving current problems.
Also: you replaced "major breakthroughs" with "technologies" when paraphrasing. What do you think the difference is between those two different terms? Do you feel your refutation would be as strong if you spoke to the original point, rather than rephrasing it and responding to your own, differently-phrased version (essentially responding only to yourself) ?
This analogy does not seem to be very strong. No one is making any progress on time travel, which may well be totally physically impossible.
On the other hand, our knowledge of mechanisms of aging has been growing fairly rapidly in the last decade or so, and if history is any teacher, such a growing heap of discoveries usually produces some concrete applications sooner or later.
We can already rejuvenate individual cells and smaller samples of tissues in vitro. That is not yet a recipe for a functional treatment of a living organism, but it is a (necessary) step in that direction.
There is also Sima the rat, breaking the longevity record for Sprague-Dawley rats by living for 1464 days after Katcher's treatment. Out of 8 subjects total.
Could be a random occurence, but the chances to break the longevity record in just eight rats are very, very low. And if it wasn't a random occurence, we already saw a meaningful life extension in an ordinary mammal.
The study takes all the advancements you mention into account, and says that even with that rate of progression, the specified life extension target (100y) is unlikely. Just like perpetual motion or time travel.
On the other hand, people have been claiming "breakthroughs" in all 3, so if that is what you want to hope for, that's cool. It just doesn't factor into our forecasts for any of the 3.
"takes all the advancements you mention into account"
And I think that prophecies like this are fundamentally unsound and unscientific. There is no way you can extrapolate from basic experiments like Katcher's to the year 2080.
It does not. There is a lot of useless papers produced because of the "publish or perish" pressure, and even harder sciences have a massive reproduction crisis.
Feynman diagnosed this sort of cosplay as "cargo-cult science" decades ago.
There are a greater number of useless internet posts produced within the same period, and the `useless/total` ratio is higher for internet posts than for scientific papers.
There's also a practical case today where this applies: cancer treatment. One of the reasons life-expectancy are not given much past a 10-year timeline, is because it's generally expected that over a decade the quality of cancer treatment will have improved substantially and as such the likely patient outcome much beyond that isn't known (and is usually better).
Woa. Hold on. I'm talking about "the future" in the context of history. You can predict the future state of some systems, e.g. we can make fairly accurate weather predictions, from past observations of weather events, for sure. As far as I can tell that's what the authors are trying to do.
But if you want to know when the next big technological leap will happen then you won't learn that by looking at what happened last time: last time is not this time, that's my point.
public health dollars at the very least might be better spent on quality of life as much as quantity.
Improving quality of life often leads to improving quantity of life. Life expectancy is, in part, a policy choice. Be wary of those who are outright against these things.
> If research suggests there's an observable asymptotic trend, public health dollars at the very least might be better spent on quality of life as much as quantity.
Isn’t that already the case with a ton of research going into cancer treatment, Alzheimer’s treatment and how to keep people healthy longer?
Honestly, having seen the life of my grand parents once they past 90 and especially the last 2 when they had significant dementia, I would much rather die before.
Give me a good life as long as possible and spare me and my family the worst of the decline.
The problem is that mistrust is at its highest that it has been. Science and evidence have been used as political tools in the recent past... and it has started becoming clear to more and more people. Either that or to protect financial interests of some legacy chaebol... so people are losing faith.
In my country people both believe and have some evidence that those that live in an orderly fashion, learn to be emotionally detached and focus most of their energies on flow states and forward escapes end up living longer than those who don't and living beyond 100 is not really difficult if one lives a healthy balanced life as prescribed by Yoga philosophy from the get go.
I'm gonna stick my neck out and say that if life's goal is living, like it should be — and not endless economic growth or an endless compulsion on the hedonic treadmill — it isn't hard to live beyond 100.
When life's goal is living every aspect of it from family, to children to rest get the love and attention they deserve and economic outcomes and status games do not dictate life. But for that to happen one needs to realise that the most precious thing they own is their energy and will. And must learn to see which activities increase their leverage and which ones don't. When one lives that way, the most contrarian thing is that you can achieve a lot more than by chasing because you start to intrinsically do rather than chase — the latter being much more expensive energy wise. I understand if this gets too esoteric for HN. But it's what I believe to be true and is also IMHO the reason why many high performing individuals seem to be unaffected by illnesses even at old age because their energy is continuously and exponentially directed in virtuous cycles and not disturbed easily by external happenings. You are energy and can be understood and defined entirely mathematically. Yoga means union with the universe's synchronicity. It originates from Sankhya Philosophy which simply means counting all energy.
I can understand the sarcasm and respect your take
Science has helped reduce mortality at birth and manage or even eliminate a lot of diseases like malaria, HIV, small pox, polio and many more. Also for burns, broken bones and accidents. And continues to. I advocate vaccines. I myself took the Anti Covid shot 3 times. And use medicines and supplements regularly.
There’s another side to it though.
At what point do I just take an Adderall that’s prescribed to me? Or a pain killer? Rather than trying preventive lifestyle cures? We need a way to tell when to apply what but IMHO in practical life what gains ground is what serves the providers more rather than the beneficiaries. An interesting example is that Anaesthesia was a more quickly adopted invention than Anti-Septic. Even though the latter is more important for the safety of patients. But the former makes life easier for docs, hence it was adopted much faster.
There is a place for both and knowing when to apply which is key. You cannot trust HCPs using allopathy aka science backed by academia in every case cause they’re motivated by self interest and aren’t perfect! Even people like Gabriel Weinberg have acknowledged this in his book Super Thinking when touching upon inefficiencies in healthcare and academia.
I believe that to be able to trust science more we need to save science from p-value manipulation by self-interest groups…
You don't trust doctors but you took the covid jab three times? I accept that I will never understand some people. If anything the covid jab is the reason we're not going to get longevity anytime soon. The medical establishment destroyed all the trust and hope people had in the future of biotechnology with that thing.
When you say you’ll “never understand some people,” it sounds less like a statement about me and more like a limitation you’ve accepted for yourself. From a psychological perspective, that reads as defensiveness — dismissing what feels uncomfortable rather than trying to process it. It might be worth asking yourself why you feel the need to provoke instead of engage.
Because if you zoom out enough you'll learn that we're all one... so I believe in doing what's right. Your comment deserved that response because it's doing exactly what I've described. Anyways, take care! Hope you get a hug from someone today :) (even that helps with strengthening the immune system because it stimulates your thymus gland which then releases the good hormones you need).
The COVID vaccines are an absolute miracle of modern medicine and it's people like yourself who have turned it into a tragedy.
Without the hysterical and scientifically illiterate people complaining about the COVID vaccines, we very likely could've had a renaissance of investment into next generation biotech platforms like mRNA. Instead, they "have" to be destroyed because the woke right can't read a scientific paper and real information takes more than a tweet or TikTok video to convey.
Very few people have the genetics to support living past 100 regardless of lifestyle. In other words, lifestyle choices can help prevent premature death (and improve healthspan) but they can't extend maximum lifespan.
For sure, they won’t guarantee being a centenarian but will increase the odds for it to happen in my opinion
The word forward escape is borrowed from author Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi which as I understand it means just doing what you like and is good for you both as opposed to doing what you like but is bad for you aka vices which he refers to as backward escapes.
If research suggests there's an observable asymptotic trend, public health dollars at the very least might be better spent on quality of life as much as quantity.
The posts saying an atom of oxygen is potentially infinitely long lived (ignoring radioactive decay?) As a "proof" that life extension has no limit is about as reductively silly as it is possible to be.
Bills of mortality bootstrapped Financial investment in annuities. You think the money people aren't tracking this trend now, when they have for the last 400 or more years?