Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Age Reduction Breakthrough?

joshmitteldorf.scienceblog.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

351–360 of 426 posts

Re: Age Reduction Breakthrough?

#351

Post by ohyes »

shrimp_emoji wrote: post #246
ohyes wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I got a little differently with it. But there's two parts, for me. One part is emotional: attempted empathy Current, alive me regrets not seeing the continued beauty of humanity on continental plates in O'Neill cylinders in belt nations strewn around the Sun inhabited by trillions, but I take solace in something "higher than myself" or more significant, stepping out of myself, than my own experience: the experience o…

I also feel a lot of the ‘missing out on the great party in 3,000 years’ effect. I want to see what happens when we travel the stars, for example. But I won’t be around to miss out, so potentially I should feel nothing more than what I feel for not being around to see the dinosaurs.

I like your second analogy and I agree with it. Imagine yourself as a micro thread. You’ve terminated, now there’s room for another micro thread.

But it’s hard not to fetishize our own consciousness I am of course, the center of my own universe.

But if we can keep the same processes longer without degradation and upgrade the hardware to support more of them, then maybe we should?

Re: Age Reduction Breakthrough?

#352

Post by abiogenesis »

cambalache wrote: post #313
yodon wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you or I found out we're not aging normally and look e.g. 25 by the time we reach 40, or 30 by the time we reach 45, would either of us remain in our current lives? I was routinely told I looked 25 at the age of 45, and can assure you I felt no need to start accumulating secret identities.

Internet is full of these stories, I believe none. For one, even if there are people who look younger (say, Selena Gomez, or Lucy Liu) even them cannot pass to be 10+ years younger than they are, after looking at them in person. Have you actually met a 30+ year old person who could pass consistently as a teenager? I have never met one. The second thing is that if you are "routinely" told that you look XX or YY years…

I did meet a Taiwanese woman who I thought was a teenager but was actually in her 30s. It could be because I am not asian myself and have difficulty recognising distinctive features of asians, but she said that her friends in Taiwan told her the same all the time.

Re: Age Reduction Breakthrough?

#353

Post by dntbnmpls »

We could also look into whether holocaust survivors share a genetic, pyschological, etc predisposition which allows them to live longer than native born israelis. Certainly there must be a will to live/survive but also a genetic/biological aspect which helped them survive starvation, disease, deprivation and thrive afterwards.

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-holocaust-survi...

Re: Age Reduction Breakthrough?

#354

Post by waynecochran »

hammock wrote: post #261
rantwasp wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why couldn't it be true that we want to survive to ensure our grand-offspring and great-grandoffspring reach sexual maturity as well? That's a valid strategy (with tradeoffs, as there are with everything)

Read the answers in the link I gave -- they give seemingly solid answers (I am no expert).

Re: Age Reduction Breakthrough?

#355

Post by abiogenesis »

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)

Not exactly a dinner party movie, but Sleuth (1972 and also the 2007 remake) is a good one.

Re: Age Reduction Breakthrough?

#356

Post by pedalpete »

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…

It doesn't need to be the malicious.

Let's assume the mutation happens when the person is in their 20s, which would be ideal. If this occurred any time in history up to the 1800s, would you not still be likely to die of disease, cancer, or other injury? Life expectancy hasn't increased because we are better at slowing aging, it has increased because we are better at not dying of the things that kill us.

If the mutation happened invitro, did the child survive birth? If it did survive but never grew, it wouldn't reproduce, and may have been abandoned if it were too much of a burden.

There are many scenarios where this mutation could have occurred but was never passed on.

Re: Age Reduction Breakthrough?

#357

Post by tanzbaer »

tropheusduboisi wrote: post #333
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.

I'm a grad student in the aging bio field. Steve Horvath is well known and well regarded, but I'm pretty sure he just did the regressions. Other characters on the paper are more unusual including a former Investment Banker from India. I think the mainstream aging community view would be "wow these results too good to be true and I wish they presented more methodical details and individual data points". If it's true,…

That took a dark turn there at the end.

Re: Age Reduction Breakthrough?

#358

Post by chubot »

chongli wrote: post #346
chubot wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Jared Diamond had a similar argument that seems valid. Roughly speaking, it boils down to the fact that you need 90 out of 100 subsystems in your body to be working. Your lungs, your heart, your skin, your brain, etc. They interact, but each part also needs to work on its own for you to live. Every one of those systems can fail and leave you dead. Since evolution only "cares" about you to the point where you…

evolution only "cares" about you to the point where you bear children and raise them Humans are highly social beings that naturally live in large kin groups. Knowledge and culture form a huge part of our survival strategy. Who among us have the most knowledge and experience to pass on? Elders. Take a look at the role of elders in traditional hunter/gatherer cultures. Huge importance. Is it not implausible that natura…

Of course, that's what "raise" means. Grandmothers also raise their grandchildren -- google "grandmother effect" or "grandmother hypothesis".

I'm more talking about people who want to raise life expectancy from 100 to 200, not go from 70 to 100 (not sure where the original article fell on this).

70 to 100 is clearly possible and we've already gotten a long way there in the 20th century (antibiotics, etc.) The "problem" now seems to be that not everyone actually cares if they live that long... i.e. there are plenty of people who don't want to live to 100, and might not even if they maintained the health of a 60 or 70 year old.

Re: Age Reduction Breakthrough?

#359

Post by chubot »

restalis wrote: post #267
chubot wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Jared Diamond had a similar argument that seems valid. Roughly speaking, it boils down to the fact that you need 90 out of 100 subsystems in your body to be working. Your lungs, your heart, your skin, your brain, etc. They interact, but each part also needs to work on its own for you to live. Every one of those systems can fail and leave you dead. Since evolution only "cares" about you to the point where you…

"Every one of those systems can fail and leave you dead. Since evolution only «cares» about you to the point where you bear children and raise them, what are the chances that it engineered ALL those systems to last FOREVER?" Evolution works in small steps, over long periods of time (given the humans slow grow up process). Mutations in any of those systems may increase or lower the chances of such failure. Evolution t…

Sure, but the point is there would have to be a Gilbert-like mechanism for every subsystem of the body.

And Gilbert isn't "free" -- it comes at cost. The body is a machine, and engineering is full of tradeoffs.

People with high abilities in one area (geniuses) often have low abilities in others. Optimizing some protein for your heart isn't neutral for the rest of your body, etc.

The point about the stars is that evolution has "determined" that it can be optimal to take a ton of risks and die early than to live safely for 200 years (in some cases, of course evolution favors diversity too, which is why you see centenarians).

If you could get reward without risk, then it wouldn't work that way -- the "stars" would live forever creating great music and not drink themselves to death. But life is full of tradeoffs and reward involves risk.

Post reply on HN