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Age Reduction Breakthrough?

joshmitteldorf.scienceblog.com

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Re: Age Reduction Breakthrough?

#191

Post by rossnordby »

ohyes wrote: post #154
throw1234651234 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with not wanting to die?

You ask a valid question. Not wanting to die is fine, I think more importantly, not wanting to age and gradually become a burden towards end of life is also natural. Not wanting to be lost and missed (nevertheless hoping that you've done well enough to be missed). The idea of being bedridden and helpless is more scary to me than death. But not wanting to die __ever__ can be driven by narcissism. If no one dies or get…

>If the cure is widespread you get overpopulation, if it is limited you get a class divide, never aging fantastically rich immortals and a semi-permanent underclass. Neither seems fantastic.

At the risk of repeating myself: imagine a world where everyone was ageless by default, and they started to experience issues like inequality or overpopulation. What would that world's top scientists come up with? Would it be "kill everyone above a certain age"? I doubt it, because that would be very silly, and anyone seriously suggesting it in that world would be considered obviously insane. There are a lot of better options that don't require mass early death; these problems aren't inevitable.

>there's always the heat death of the universe. There's no escape from reality closing, you'd probably have a difficult time sustaining biological life-forms long before the universe is dark and cold. I doubt it would be pleasant.

This has always struck me as a very, very odd argument. Assuming protons decay, we're talking ~10^37 years until physics starts getting in the way. That's 10^27 times longer than the age of the universe. An entity observing those timescales would have time to see entire solar systems grow, mature, and die a billion billion times over, without exhausting even a billionth of that duration. Sure, such an entity would run out of stars to observe, and biology would get tricky, but computation wouldn't cease, and fundamentally that's all that's needed for a rich existence. It's an eternity nested in an eternity nested in an eternity. And if protons don't decay...

It's not infinite, but as a human, the distinction is completely irrelevant. Whatever a human would become on those timescales can decide what it wants to do later- for now, I'd just like more than a measly 100 years. It's not like we're wishing on a monkey paw.

Re: Age Reduction Breakthrough?

#192

Post by hackinthebochs »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #178
hackinthebochs wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a lot of factors involved in having viable offspring. For example, you need enough resources to sufficiently feed and nurture the children you already have. So having more offspring than some ideal amount for the environment can be detrimental. But parents also compete with their offspring for resources. Aging and dying is eventually the best thing a parent can do for their children.

This doesn't really work at the individual level. Parents compete with their children, but so does everybody else. Having two parents competing with you for resources in addition to the other ten thousand people in your local community is not a meaningful difference. Meanwhile if there was an entire community like this then the people living longer still wouldn't be at a disadvantage, the community would just have a…

That's a fair point about competing with the community. I was thinking of "parents" in aggregate, so the previous generation vs the next, but I didn't word it right.

But if everyone lived longer than required, i.e. the minimum ideal for raising viable offspring, then this population stood to be out-competed by another population that aged at a more efficient rate. Individuals in a population aging at an optimal rate is an evolutionary advantage to the population.

Re: Age Reduction Breakthrough?

#193

Post by pmiller2 »

EndXA wrote: post #118
amluto wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When the author says things like: > But Katcher has no research grants or university lab or venture capital funding, no team of grad students mining databases and screening chemicals in the back room. > One thing Katcher has going for him is the correct theory. I start to suspect the author’s opinion is stronger than their evidence.

I'm not taking a stance on the topic, but I think that if you quote the part that you did, then you should also quote the part right before it, for full context: > In the race to effect substantial, system-wide rejuvenation, Harold Katcher is a dark horse. He has the right academic credentials and a solid history of research. In fact, in earlier life he was part of a team that discovered the breast cancer gene, brca1…

Katcher is definitely a credible researcher, but that doesn't mean he's not also a crank. Consider Linus Pauling and his megadose vitamin C obsession.

Re: Age Reduction Breakthrough?

#194

Post by all_blue_chucks »

maxander wrote: post #63

Since it seems like the upshot of all of this is that Katcher is claiming to have discovered a set of signalling molecules which, when injected, rejuvenate tissue and presumably lengthen life, it runs into one of the most fundamental objections that can be leveled at theory of aging (or cure thereof): of the billions of humans that have existed, how is it that none of them have possessed a mutation which (in this cas…

Evolution only cares about whether you have viable offspring. Beyond that longevity could be a harmful feature because the long-lived would be competing with the fertile individuals for resources.

Re: Age Reduction Breakthrough?

#195

Post by pharke »

ohyes wrote: post #154
throw1234651234 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with not wanting to die?

You ask a valid question. Not wanting to die is fine, I think more importantly, not wanting to age and gradually become a burden towards end of life is also natural. Not wanting to be lost and missed (nevertheless hoping that you've done well enough to be missed). The idea of being bedridden and helpless is more scary to me than death. But not wanting to die __ever__ can be driven by narcissism. If no one dies or get…

That's a rather depressing way to look at the world. It seems a bit of lazy thinking to assume that waiting for one generation to die is the only way for society to advance. You're also taking for granted that new ways are always better than old ways but human civilizations have collapsed and regressed too many times for that to be true.

Perhaps longer, healthier lives would allow more people to find their way out of poverty. Perhaps people would be less neurotic about accumulating massive amounts of wealth and power if they didn't have to worry about a limited lifespan. Maybe we'd all be more concerned about the future of our planet and of humanity in general if we knew we were going to be there to see it in another 50, or 100, or 10,000 years.

The heat death argument is also a bit absurd when you consider the relative timespans we're talking about. Why trade billions of years for 100 just because they're both finite? If we were talking about dollars it would seem more concrete. And given a billion years who's to say what's possible?

Re: Age Reduction Breakthrough?

#196

Post by pmiller2 »

WhompingWindows wrote: post #20
peter_l_downs wrote: post #4

As someone entirely outside this field, can someone with more inside knowledge give any insight into where this lies on the crank/hoax spectrum? A biorxv paper and a well-written blogpost don't really point either way.

1) It's only rat tissues and human tissues; any research published in only tissues only or in ratsonly , and not a large RCT in actual humans, needs to be taken with a huge grain of salt. 2) The research in the blog post is not fully summarized. You know it's a weak blog post when they post results WITHOUT SAMPLE SIZE. This is a GLARING omission and highly unscientific. The actual paper shows n=593 rat tissues and n=…

This sounds to me like a very strong pilot study: something that's very likely to attract additional grant funding, but may or may not pan out in the real world.

Re: Age Reduction Breakthrough?

#197

Post by abootstrapper »

Meegul wrote: post #175
steelframe wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone I work with looks very youthful for their actual age, and that isn't always a good thing. When the team went on an offsite morale event jet skiing, he was told by the proprietor that he couldn't participate because their policy requires you to be at least 16 years old. He was 27 at the time. He never lived that down with his peers. When he tries to go to a bar with friends, he's sometimes accused of trying to…

I'm only 23, so I understand that I am young, but looking young is, without a doubt, a serious disadvantage when it comes to people trusting in your ability. I recently worked on overhauling the reporting system for one of the largest police departments in the US, and every step along the way I was asked who was in charge, how did I enter the workforce so young, how I got an internship while attending high school (I…

I always looked about 5 years younger than my age. It sucked when I was young. At 40 it’s not the worst quality, but it also doesn’t help much. So I look 35, big whoop. I did discover wearing my hair long in my 20s made me look a bit older (eh, more like my age). Might try modifying your look.

Re: Age Reduction Breakthrough?

#198

Post by pmiller2 »

lawrenceyan wrote: post #166

It's impossible for an old cell to become young again, at least with our current level of technology, because that would require you to reverse all the mutations that have built up over time in that cell. If your argument is that our bodies have many different repair mechanisms, and that as long as we can figure out how to activate them properly, we can then reverse aging, I would caution you that while you're correc…

> It's impossible for an old cell to become young again, at least with our current level of technology....

Depending what you mean by "become young again," that's not true. See https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2020/03/old-human-cel... The problem here is scaling this up beyond tissue cultures.

Re: Age Reduction Breakthrough?

#199

Post by dredds »

Supermancho wrote: post #176
parentheses wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the only movies that remains intriguing throughout despite being basically a single conversation.

I happen to love certain niche movie genres, which happens to include "dinner party movies". Feel free to list some recommendations, if you like "people talk in a room" movies. Some of my favories: Coherence (scifi) Garden Party (sleazy young adult Los Angeles drama) Murder Party (low budget horror comedy) How English sounds to non-English speakers (youtube) Circle 2015 (scifi)

The Invitation (2015 film)

Re: Age Reduction Breakthrough?

#200

Post by jdhendrickson »

zarkov99 wrote: post #75
mdszy wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Luck is not success.

Yes of course, Gates, Musk, Buffet, Ford, these are just evil mediocrities that got lucky, you are right. Anyone could have done what they did, but for lack of luck.

Gates at least, admits it was in large part luck. There are brilliant hard working people of equal caliber who die in ignominy every single day.

"‘I don’t deserve my fortune,’ Mr Gates added. ‘Nobody does. It has come through timing, luck, and through people I worked with.".

Is he brilliant, assuredly, and incredibly hardworking as well. Does that change the fact that millions of brilliant incredibly hardworking people die in poverty and obscurity every day?

Luck is the differentiator for the most part. Being born in the right place, to the right family, growing up with the right people, during the right time. It takes a person of consummate focus and skill to take advantage of their circumstances, but let's not pretend captains of industry in Silicon Valley would have been equally successful born the son of a welder in Calcutta.

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