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

New research reveals longevity gains slowing, life expectancy of 100 unlikely

lafollette.wisc.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

431–440 of 535 posts

Re: New research reveals longevity gains slowing, life expectancy of 100 unlikely

#431

Post by mannycalavera42 »

Vinnl wrote: post #350
A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> assisted suicide is a lot better than artificially prolonging suffering at great cost for as long as possible. I beseech you to contemplate how badly this might be abused, and how monstrous the consequences could be. Even now MAID in Canada and other forms of assisted suicide in Europe have arguably gone way too far.

I'm not familiar with MAID, but AFAIK I live in the European country with the most liberal euthanasia policy, and hardly anyone here thinks it's gone too far, let alone way too far.

This! Eurovision has prepared us for this moment of unity: Knuckles-Knuckles

Re: New research reveals longevity gains slowing, life expectancy of 100 unlikely

#432

Post by nradov »

kruffalon wrote: post #265
DrBazza wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget that the recipient countries of immigrants are brain-draining the countries they're leaving. Arguably those motivated individuals are precisely those that should stay in their country and make it less 'bad'.

Yes! But more importantly wealthy countries shouldn't depend on there being poor countries where women still have "too" many children but rather we should fix our own problems so we want and can have sufficient young people of our own (not said in a nazi way). And we should also redistribute wealth so there aren't any poor countries to exploit for natural resources, crops and people.

Redistributing wealth will not make poor countries rich. Most poor countries are poor because of bad governance, corruption, political problems (including armed conflicts), culture, and geography. I support some limited forms of foreign aid but when we simply redistribute wealth it mostly gets stolen or wasted without achieving any sustainable improvements.

Re: New research reveals longevity gains slowing, life expectancy of 100 unlikely

#433

Post by adastra22 »

close04 wrote: post #295
adastra22 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are mixing up evolutionary incentives with real chemistry-driven biological constraints. The base incentives of reproduction-driven natural selection may make aging inevitable under natural selection, but that says nothing of artificial selection or bioengineering.

> You are mixing up evolutionary incentives with real chemistry-driven biological constraints > but that says nothing of artificial selection or bioengineering Feel free to be specific. Start from here and describe your revelation about my “confusion”: >> Humans are a special case because we don’t operate only on biological imperatives so you could make immortal humans Natural life o overwhelmingly selects for well d…

There’s a well-known short story called “ The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant” meant to reveal how ridiculous and nonsensical society’s attitude towards death is. You seem to be taking the opinion that the society shown within, in which death is artificial and societally enforced, is ideal and something to emulate.

I truly don’t know how to respond to this. If you want to die on a rigid time table, fine. Don’t take the rest of us out with you.

[0]: The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant: https://nickbostrom.com/papers/the-fable-of-the-dragon-tyran...

Re: New research reveals longevity gains slowing, life expectancy of 100 unlikely

#434

Post by nradov »

HeadsUpHigh wrote: post #244
hamandcheese wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wouldn’t it make sense to put a big chunk of budget into creating life-extension tech? Won't that just make the problem worse ?

Most longevity enhancing interventions that have worked in mice have extended healthspan and lifespan at the same rate.

The interventions that have worked in laboratory mice seem unlikely to translate to humans. Those mice live in nice safe flat little cages where there's no risk of trauma or infectious disease. In the real world a frail old human will fall down the stairs, break a hip, lose mobility, and end up dead within a few years because of that original injury.

Re: New research reveals longevity gains slowing, life expectancy of 100 unlikely

#435

Post by Demiurge »

zksijdjd wrote: post #356
Demiurge wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In almost all cases immigration replaces the need for native births - the latter being a key component for a strong, safe culture that creates a happy median population. Immigration in USA has multiple components, but it seems to be you're undervaluing the amount of opportunistic intellectual workers, who come here to participate in high level education, and entrepreneurial capitalism. But, here are the numbers acr…

Most Americans want a country that benefits Americans. High skilled immigrants: 1. Take jobs an American would otherwise fill, which would not be a problem except 2. The economy disproportionately benefits the capitalist class (billionaires). Bringing over immigrants to boost the economy doesn’t help the median American, and it creates competition for natives I’m not undervaluing it. Im saying it provides no value fo…

> Take jobs an American would otherwise fill

That's a big assumption. Yeah, take out all the H1b immigrant that came to this country since 1985, what do you think the US economy looks like, filled exclusively with Americans? Where do you think US economy would be? Where do you think the Silicon Vally would be now? Do you think US and Americans would be better off? Do you think that the economic input of the immigrants is net negative?

I don't think you need to answer. I think you've already said no, these workers, and their contibutions are net negative. I just don't see how that makes any sense, given they're clearly a big part of the economy.

Re: New research reveals longevity gains slowing, life expectancy of 100 unlikely

#436

Post by jajko »

kelnos wrote: post #268
brabel wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: New research reveals longevity gains slowing, life expectancy of 100 unlikely

#437

Post by Intralexical »

ACCount37 wrote: post #198
Intralexical wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the logic of a cancer cell. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immortalised_cell_line

If cancer cells can pull it off, then why not humans? Clearly, there are no "laws of biology" that would forbid it.

Because a cancer cell pulls it off by sacrificing all of the cell's useful functions, resulting in the destruction of the host organism as well as the death of the cell itself.

Re: New research reveals longevity gains slowing, life expectancy of 100 unlikely

#438

Post by ACCount37 »

nradov wrote: post #425
ACCount37 wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's for them to decide, not you. I don't have enough cruelty in me to demand that someone should stay in Sudan and try to "fix" what's happening there.

Would you have said the same about the USA's founding fathers in 1776 who stayed to fix what was happening there?

Yes. That was very much their own decision to make.

Re: New research reveals longevity gains slowing, life expectancy of 100 unlikely

#439

Post by inglor_cz »

ImPostingOnHN wrote: post #408
stevejb wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that completely circular then? E.g. "if there are no technologies which change $X, then we predict that $X will stay the same."

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…

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.

Re: New research reveals longevity gains slowing, life expectancy of 100 unlikely

#440

Post by Intralexical »

nabla9 wrote: post #214
ggm wrote: post #191

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 l…

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…

> 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.

Post reply on HN