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Age Reduction Breakthrough?

joshmitteldorf.scienceblog.com

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Re: Age Reduction Breakthrough?

#231

Post by rantwasp »

koheripbal wrote: post #224
rantwasp wrote: post #213

Improving longevity is what the people at https://www.lifespan.io/ have been trying to do for ages. The research is being done, there are tons of new promising things - with the catch that they are experimental / not tested on humans. Before you get too excited and wonder where you can buy these magic pills, remember that there are things you can do right now to improve both your longevity and your quality of life: 1…

While I generally support these efforts, I have feeling it would be easier to engineer a way to escape these meat bag prisons we live in, and construct an android body that isn't built from the worst form of spaghetti DNA code imaginable.

it is not easier. you cannot engineer what you don't understand. for all the progress that has been made there is still a lot we don't know about how life works in general. not to mention the ethical can of worms this opens.

Re: Age Reduction Breakthrough?

#232

Post by rantwasp »

koheripbal wrote: post #219
rantwasp wrote: post #213

Improving longevity is what the people at https://www.lifespan.io/ have been trying to do for ages. The research is being done, there are tons of new promising things - with the catch that they are experimental / not tested on humans. Before you get too excited and wonder where you can buy these magic pills, remember that there are things you can do right now to improve both your longevity and your quality of life: 1…

I believe the most impactful thing you can do is drastically reduce caloric intake - like by 50%. Experiments have show large increases in lifespan, across mammals.

reducing caloric intake may work, but it's also as important when you eat (ie fasting / intermittent fasting).

also, you can reduce caloric intake all you want, if you eat crap and don't sleep properly you're still going to have a bad time

Re: Age Reduction Breakthrough?

#233

Post by pixelperfect »

sirtaj wrote: post #88
spacephysics wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Economically, and historically, the more wealthy tend to try out the expensive, new technologies, then as market forces play out, such technologies become cheaper, to where most average workers can afford them (see genome sequencing costs decline over the past 15 years.) We need wealthy people to try out the expensive new advances. Just because someone is wealthy doesn’t necessarily mean they’re apart of the “evil bi…

Didn't the price of insulin in the US nearly triple in 10 years? The market is not always particularly efficient.

Yes, but this is considered by many to be scandalous and I doubt it will continue to be so high-priced long-term.

Re: Age Reduction Breakthrough?

#234

Post by rantwasp »

zemvpferreira wrote: post #227
koheripbal wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe the most impactful thing you can do is drastically reduce caloric intake - like by 50%. Experiments have show large increases in lifespan, across mammals.

It's weird to me to say so but this intervention is one of the few things that, even if it were to demonstrably increase my lifespan from ~80 to ~120 years, I probably wouldn't do. I don't know if that's because I enjoy food and bodily activity too much to value a longer life without them or because I'm addicted to food. I've wondered. What wouldn't you be willing to give up for a much longer life?

there is a huge difference between enjoying food and being a slave to food.

the best example I have in this bucket is sugar. If you depend on sugar you're basically a drug addict (i know, i know, but just because it's socially acceptable does not make it okay. there is research out there that show sugar is as bad as cocaine when it comes to how addictive it is and on the health effect).

if you could pick just one intervention you could do quitting sugar is what you want (maybe if you're smoking, quitting smoking, but after that sugar is the nastiest thing you can put into your system)

Re: Age Reduction Breakthrough?

#235

Post by all_blue_chucks »

curiousgal wrote: post #30

Age reduction. Enammel reconstruction. Batteries. The three pillars of perpetual breakthroughs.

Add cold fusion to the list.

That said, breakthroughs that would be phenomenally beneficial and aren't prohibited by physics are worth throwing money at decade after decade due to the risk/reward ratio. It's like playing the lottery where the odds are a million to one against you, but he payout if you win is a billion times your ticket cost. You probably won't win but you would be stupid not to try.

Re: Age Reduction Breakthrough?

#236

Post by rantwasp »

sterlind wrote: post #210
rantwasp wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is the right answer. once you reach reproduction age and you are able to reproduce, from an evolutionary point of view you're done.

Eh that's too simple in humans. Hanging around longer to tend children and pass on knowledge benefits the survival of your grandchildren, who carry your genes too.

yes. you need to reproduce and to ensure your offsprings reach sexual maturity. but humans are in no way special. we believe we have escaped our biology because of the cultural stratum we posses (ie exchanged memes for genes) but we are still basically animals.

Re: Age Reduction Breakthrough?

#237

Post by nickalaso »

ryandvm wrote: post #95
throw1234651234 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with not wanting to die?

Being dead is basically the equivalent experience as not having been born. I'm not terribly upset about all the things I missed before 1977 AD. Not sure why I should be too worried about what I'll miss when I'm gone.

So to follow your argument to its logical conclusion.

Are you fine with dying today?

We want to live when life is good, because life is good. If you are enjoying your life today, and want to keep living because of it, then you are going to want to keep living when you are in your 70's.

But you don't worry about it now, because you are young.

Re: Age Reduction Breakthrough?

#238

Post by asciimo »

gotrythis wrote: post #230
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 think people age at different rates. My Dad is in his mid 80's and plays four hours of sports a day, or at least he was before the pandemic hit. When I was in my mid-20's I had to impress the hell out of potential clients to get work, as I looked like I was 15, and girls my own age wouldn't look at me as I was too young. I never drank, so bars weren't an issue. When I was in my early forties, 15-20 year old girls w…

> A couple of years ago, my now 43 year old partner was mistaken for her teenage doppelganger and asked to the high school prom by three different boys while walking home from work.

Pretty sure I saw this movie in the 80s.

Re: Age Reduction Breakthrough?

#239

Post by AnthonyMouse »

hackinthebochs wrote: post #192
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This might explain why genes for aging exist but doesn't really explain why genes for not aging don't exist. You could have a stable community where e.g. 15% of the population doesn't age and not run into community-level problems because they aren't that large of a percentage of the community, so where are they?

Re: Age Reduction Breakthrough?

#240

Post by goto11 »

eganist wrote: post #70
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…

At risk of sounding absolutely insane: There's probably no way to prove that this hasn't happened. Anyone who realizes they're not aging normally would likely have taken on a new identity elsewhere for fear of: 1. being burned at the stake 2. being trialed in repeated experiments 3. being deified, and then subsequently being burned at the stake. --- I realize my comment sounds like a joke, but I'm entirely serious. I…

Sounds more like vampire-fiction like historical realities. People were "burned at the stake" for heretical ideas and challenging church dogma, not for looking suspiciously young. And the examples we have of living persons being deified was generally because they acquired enormous power (roman emperors, pharaohs and so on) not because of looking particularly young for their age.
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