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Scientists say they’ll soon extend life ‘well beyond 120’

theguardian.com

41–50 of 151 posts

Re: Scientists say they’ll soon extend life ‘well beyond 120’

#41
Well with the plunging birth rates in developed countries, I think this would be feasible. Robots and automation would solve the economic issues of having an inverted pyramid entering the workforce. We would in a sense become long-lived rich eloi.

However in pockets of the world which won't use contraception - such as religious states, or poor areas, there will be age-old issue of producing a lot of babies who go and consume the resources of the "1st world". These places still exist on earth and the lives produced there are just as valuable so the ethical question would be, how would the rich countries deny the life extending medicine and procedures to others? It almost has to be a function of population growth.

I wanted to write a novel one day about the year 2278 when a couple of married Elders finally decides to have children and therefore forfeits their access to prolonging their life more than 50 years. The idea is that it would become one or the other.

Re: Scientists say they’ll soon extend life ‘well beyond 120’

#42
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has proven to not be a problem in Europe in general and in Asia in Japan. In other continents, yes this would become a huge problem. Well, it actually is already today.

Japan's looming demographic crunch is thought to be a massive challenge for the country in coming decades. To say they've proven not to have this problem is like saying that falling off a building isn't a problem, because this guy is halfway down and still doing fine.

Japan's birthrate has steadily slowed, and the population is actually shrinking now. This seems to happen any time population hits the maximum.

Re: Scientists say they’ll soon extend life ‘well beyond 120’

#43
Blood transfusions are old and safe tech. I don't see any reason why you couldn't right now go into a nursing home and begin intensive transfusion therapy and see what happened. in fact, the weird thing here is that only Stanford is doing something like this.

Which leads me to believe that one of the real obstacles here is going to be the legalities and logistics of actually testing something and bringing it to market. If you have a cough and I give you a pill, either you stop coughing or you don't. We have a very tight feedback loop: in the order of hours or days. But if you're 50-years-old and want to live another ten years? We just can't wait around for 40-year feedback loops. It simply won't work.

So I'm convinced that some improvement is possible over the next decade: perhaps on the order of 10-20 extra years of life. But treatment is going to exist in a really weird grey area. You could either travel to a country with little or no drug oversight or you could try getting off-label or black market treatments. The drug approval system in the U.S. is simply not equipped to make serious decisions about medicines with these kinds of effects.

Sidebar: the interesting question is whether or not we're close to the point where increases in lifespan happen faster than aging itself: have we reached the 1000-year person point? I'm almost certain the answer is no, but I think we may be within 100 years of it. My intuition is that as we keep pushing the human biological machine, it will find new and unique ways of breaking down. The most obvious example is cancer. The longer you live, the more likely you are to get cancer -- and we're a long ways from a cure for cancer. Still, this is a very fascinating field to watch.

Re: Scientists say they’ll soon extend life ‘well beyond 120’

#44
post #36
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check out The Structure of Scientific Revolutions for an argument for this in the science world: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_R... In a nutshell: people don't change fundamental beliefs, even when confronted with evidence. Instead, they die off and the newer generation adopts the new theory.

I am sure Einstein and his generation would like a word with you.

[deleted]

Re: Scientists say they’ll soon extend life ‘well beyond 120’

#45
post #36
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check out The Structure of Scientific Revolutions for an argument for this in the science world: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_R... In a nutshell: people don't change fundamental beliefs, even when confronted with evidence. Instead, they die off and the newer generation adopts the new theory.

I am sure Einstein and his generation would like a word with you.

Most of what Einstein achieved were during his miracle years from 1905 - 1915 when he was in his 20's and 30's. But just to level set, I am not an ageist, I am 58 years old. And all this is just my opinion of course, but I find for myself it is harder and harder to accept new ideas. But being aware of this, I try to always listen and embrace new "crazy" ideas young people come up with. I think older people like me have wisdom and younger people have new ideas and if there was a way to combine those things it would be powerful. Perhaps stating the obvious there.

Re: Scientists say they’ll soon extend life ‘well beyond 120’

#46
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has proven to not be a problem in Europe in general and in Asia in Japan. In other continents, yes this would become a huge problem. Well, it actually is already today.

Japan's looming demographic crunch is thought to be a massive challenge for the country in coming decades. To say they've proven not to have this problem is like saying that falling off a building isn't a problem, because this guy is halfway down and still doing fine.

The post-WW2 baby-making bonanza is literally dying off. That's it. Japan's population is slowly returning to its equilibrium level.

Re: Scientists say they’ll soon extend life ‘well beyond 120’

#47
post #26
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anything other than your speculation to back up your belief in individuals neural plasticity having anything to do with the social advances you mention? Young people have not had a great record of voting. So those changes you are attributing to neural plasticity are likely brought about by those old frozen minds you mention, and less so the young plyable ones if you ask me. But everyone has a right to an opinion I su…

Check out The Structure of Scientific Revolutions for an argument for this in the science world: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_R... In a nutshell: people don't change fundamental beliefs, even when confronted with evidence. Instead, they die off and the newer generation adopts the new theory.

That really isn't what Kuhn is getting at with the idea of a paradigm shift. It's not an argument based on generational age or demographics, it's more about observational data slowly accumulating until current explanatory models become untenable. The people doing the accumulating and the people doing the sudden theoretical shift aren't necessarily the old in one camp and the young in the other. Granted I do see how that argument could be made, given the fact that a lot of the famous paradigm shifts were made by people in their 20s - it just isn't Kuhn's argument.

Re: Scientists say they’ll soon extend life ‘well beyond 120’

#48

Fortunately, their approach seems to take into account the fact that most people's quality of life degrade very steeply after hitting, say, 70, and aim to augment this "quality" lifespan at the same time as the "total" lifespan. Just ask Scott Adams if he would have wanted his father to live "well beyond 120".

Another important point is that the relation between children, their parents and the society they live in would be changed in ways that are hard to predict.

See, the current assumption (or rather, the assumption that socially still stands but that is already shaken by the current lifespan augmentation) is that once a child is an adult, it won't be long before they will eventually see their parents either die (before modern medicine) or retire (the current paradigm), and have to replace them.

They will get hired fast, to get enough experience with their notional parents while those are still in the workforce, and then quickly be needed in a full-time, important gig.

It's also worth mentioning that the society, right now, is built on the idea that full-time stable jobs are widely available, on one hand, and a strict necessity for anyone to reach any kind of reasonable level of material comfort, social adjustment and general happiness. When not the only way to get basic human dignity.

That assumption is old as balls, and it's hard to see it surviving the current state of technology and medicine, let alone what's about to come.

So what will probably happen is that we'l keep telling people that working 40 hours a week in a job you had for the last, like, 5 years, is a basic necessity, yet that it's nearly impossible to get 'em, because old people are a) living forever b) holding on to those jobs because they're a strict requirement c) creating machines that do other people's 40hrs/week jobs.

So yeah, now that stable, full-time work has been overloaded with all that junk, the conditions that make this paradigm possible have to be saved whenever they're menaced. Sometimes I wonder whether I'm the only one here who thinks that the point of working is to make the world around me a better place, rather than a way to reach some kind of social status and incidentally keeping a relatively helpful system up and running.

With those prospects of limitless healthly lifespans, those limits would look like either

- capping the timespan people are allowed to work, so that they can't hog those precious, limited 40hrs/week stable jobs that young folks need to get some kind of implicit economic citizenship

- creating demand for those, by doing the old sorta-Keynesian thing and just creating jobs. This has worked great in the past, 'cause those jobs looked like building the Golden Gate, the Hoover dam, nailing down the basics of nuclear physics, getting jet engines to work, and then sending people on the freaking moon. But now it looks more like working as under-trained wannabe-SWAT police teams raiding teen's bedrooms for small-time weed deals, building the like five thousandth M1-A1 the USArmy doesn't need, and stuff like that.

My ideal, which I can't even seriously hold as I watch how most governments deal with their respective economic crises, is to strip that socioeconomic status away from stable employment.

I picture guaranteed basic income as the very first economic stepping stone of that project. See, I would gladly accept a basic living wage to stay home, cook for my family, take care of the house, and whatever, while dedicating exactly all, and not one second more, of my daily intellectually productive work timespan to something relevant, I don't know what. I think that, all things considered, I'd be more productive at my programming job working 3 hours per day than my current 8-ish.

But this is an socioeconomic rant I need to refine and turn into a set of attainable political measures, and then get off my butt and militate for them.

Re: Scientists say they’ll soon extend life ‘well beyond 120’

#49

This scares the hell out of me from a retirement planning perspective. If I outlive my savings, what then?

This is where you consider buying a life annuity from a life insurance company if this really concerns you.

How would a dramatic breakthrough in longevity affect the solvency of life insurance/annuity companies?

Re: Scientists say they’ll soon extend life ‘well beyond 120’

#50
post #33
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Instinct, caused by the fact that our ancestors with such a preference had a better chance of surviving and procreating than other animals without it.

My mistake on deleting my reply. Humans acting on this instinct for survival seems irrational in view of the scientific big picture, does it not? A longer survival nets nothing if the fate of all things (including the memory of those things) is nothingness. What is the payoff if one creature lives 10,000 years instead of 100?

I don't understand what any of that has to do with it. Creatures with a survival instinct were better at passing on their genes. Apply this for a few billion years and creatures strongly prefer to keep living. That's it.
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