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Scientists engineer mice genomes to lengthen their lifespans by 30 percent

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Re: Scientists engineer mice genomes to lengthen their lifespans by 30 percent

#131

Post by gaius »

closeparen wrote: post #127
HaveCourage wrote: post #51

Summary of pro death arguments re: longevity progress Fairness Only rich people will get it. (no tech has ever done this.) Better to give money to the poor than science. (family,city,state,nation, has proven local investment beats foreign.) Bad for society Dead people make more room for new, other people. (consider going first.) Run out of resources (live people discover/extract/renew better than dead or nonexistant)…

How about: bad ideas get to remain in power for much longer, because the generations of administrators/voters/executives that enforce them don't turn over. Death ensures adaptation. For example, climate change denying oil barons have done much damage to the world, but we can take some comfort in the knowledge that they will soon die (or at least retire) and that their successors will probably be a little more enlight…

How about: bad ideas get to remain in power for much longer, because the generations of administrators/voters/executives that enforce them don't turn over.

But also: you can have people with literally double or more experience, working on your hard problems. You also have a government that will look out much further into the future, because they will see the outcomes themselves.

Re: Scientists engineer mice genomes to lengthen their lifespans by 30 percent

#132

Post by gaius »

AstralStorm wrote: post #111
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fairness Only rich people will get it. (no tech has ever done this.) Already, modern medicine expands lifetime and in particularly healthy lifetime significantly and the richer you are the more of it you can access. Like, I don't have the same chances to get to 70 and still feel alright as someone born today in Bangladesh, or Zambia. The world is already very unfair, and the only solution to that is to make it more f…

Specifically, make the treatments cheap and scalable, then ignore IP.

Then you will have no new treatments, and be back to square one.

Re: Scientists engineer mice genomes to lengthen their lifespans by 30 percent

#133

Post by gaius »

djsumdog wrote: post #54
HaveCourage wrote: post #51

Summary of pro death arguments re: longevity progress Fairness Only rich people will get it. (no tech has ever done this.) Better to give money to the poor than science. (family,city,state,nation, has proven local investment beats foreign.) Bad for society Dead people make more room for new, other people. (consider going first.) Run out of resources (live people discover/extract/renew better than dead or nonexistant)…

For you Sci-Fi fans out there, I highly recommend Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy. In his fictional world, humans do discover how to extend longevity and it goes into many of the social issues that arise (who gets treatments? The rich? The poor? How do we deal with over population?).

But other than a couple of concepts, the books are excruciatingly bad. Without giving the plot away too much, his characters literally cure cancer, fix pollution, and invent an economic system that everyone in the world agrees is fair, in between taking loads of drugs and having loads of sex. It's wish fulfilment for 14-year-olds who are bored in science class. I'd give all 3 0 stars on Amazon if I could.

Re: Scientists engineer mice genomes to lengthen their lifespans by 30 percent

#134

Post by Jaruzel »

dandare wrote: post #126

The consequences of longer lifespan to social order are unimaginable. Even increase by dozen of years may result in wars and chaos, especially if the treatment will not be available to everyone. From where I stand it seems that relatively little resources are spent on the research of consequences of longer lifespan compared with the discussions we have about friendly/enemy AI, machines replacing jobs, universal incom…

I echo this. We're already over-populated on this planet as it is. Yes there's still a lot of available land, but there are reasons we're not using it either to live on, or to farm - too hostile, too wet, too hot/cold, and the cost of terrafirming those areas is prohibitive.

Unless we manage to escape this rock, and find a nice Earth 2.0 out there, extending lifespans is pointless. It's driven by pure selfishness, and if ever comes to fruition, will create a subdivide of people who can afford to live longer and healthier and those that can't; Homo-Richus vs. Homo-Poorus.

Re: Scientists engineer mice genomes to lengthen their lifespans by 30 percent

#135

Post by aaron-lebo »

Jaruzel wrote: post #134
dandare wrote: post #126

The consequences of longer lifespan to social order are unimaginable. Even increase by dozen of years may result in wars and chaos, especially if the treatment will not be available to everyone. From where I stand it seems that relatively little resources are spent on the research of consequences of longer lifespan compared with the discussions we have about friendly/enemy AI, machines replacing jobs, universal incom…

I echo this. We're already over-populated on this planet as it is. Yes there's still a lot of available land, but there are reasons we're not using it either to live on, or to farm - too hostile, too wet, too hot/cold, and the cost of terrafirming those areas is prohibitive. Unless we manage to escape this rock, and find a nice Earth 2.0 out there, extending lifespans is pointless. It's driven by pure selfishness, an…

Escaping this rock is no relief either. What happens when there's a Muskovite Empire on Mars and all the rich people move there to let the poor die on an old planet stripped of resources to make that possible? Transfers of wealth like that are already happening - let's not make it interplanetary.

Humanity has changed so much in the last few generations and we are still catching up. Maybe we don't understand the consequences. We definitely have to figure out it soon because we'll either never make it to another planet or we'll just bring it all with us.

Re: Scientists engineer mice genomes to lengthen their lifespans by 30 percent

#137

Post by zizzles »

Every life extension discussion derails into debates about foreverness; and therein lies the problem: humans of all backgrounds (even today) are dropping dead of health problems at 60 years of age. Thus, foreverness is science-fiction with our current understanding. Baby-steps first perhaps? Regardless, many agree foreverness is not possible - and if it was - I would not want it.

Re: Scientists engineer mice genomes to lengthen their lifespans by 30 percent

#138

Post by jgord »

grzm wrote: post #107
EGreg wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's SENS?

Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategies_for_Engineered_Negl... gible_Senescence

retry :

Strategies_for_Engineered_Negligible_Senescence, here :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategies_for_Engineered_Negl...

Re: Scientists engineer mice genomes to lengthen their lifespans by 30 percent

#139

Post by bobchops »

lvs wrote: post #95
anigbrowl wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks so much. I don't know why news headline writers are so insistent on bullshit, when they could have taken a cue from you and said 'gene therapy increases mouse lifespans by 30%,' which would have been just as short and interesting but vastly more honest.

Not quite. The actual article title is far more correct than either the clickbait headline or your headline: "In Vivo Amelioration of Age-Associated Hallmarks of Progeria by Partial Reprogramming" ( my addition )

I think the fact that the subjects suffer from Progeria (a syndrome that causes early ageing) is significant. There are other effects of ageing (such as damage to DNA in mitochondria from oxidative stress reducing a cell's ability to generate energy) that may not be displayed early alongside other symptoms of progeria and that this treatment would not do anything to alleviate.

Re: Scientists engineer mice genomes to lengthen their lifespans by 30 percent

#140

Post by sho »

dandare wrote: post #126

The consequences of longer lifespan to social order are unimaginable. Even increase by dozen of years may result in wars and chaos, especially if the treatment will not be available to everyone. From where I stand it seems that relatively little resources are spent on the research of consequences of longer lifespan compared with the discussions we have about friendly/enemy AI, machines replacing jobs, universal incom…

> Even increase by dozen of years may result in wars and chaos

Care to explain? I don't see why humans living on average a dozen years longer would inevitably lead to "wars and chaos" and a breakdown of social order. Indeed, we saw lifespans increase by two dozen in the last 80 or so years and nothing happened at all.

The usual arguments about overpopulation don't seem to apply to developed countries; if anything it's the opposite. So what's the big deal? And why do you assume that any negative externalities created by life extension technology are inherently unfixable?

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