I don’t want just to live longer, I want to live longer while in a relatively good shape. Because if we are to live 30 years more with the physique of a 90 year old man then what’s the point. If on the other hand I could have the physique of a 70 year old man while I’m 100+ that sounds like a good deal.
Scientists say they’ll soon extend life ‘well beyond 120’
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Re: Scientists say they’ll soon extend life ‘well beyond 120’
#52I too would like to live forever, but one problem I see is that if you just extend peoples physical age but their minds become frozen in time, then all progress stops. It is well known that as people age their neural plasticity degrades and they loose the ability to learn anything new. I have observed this with my Dad who is 84. If people lived to be 1000 but their neural plasticity was gone by 120, we would still ha…
It would be pretty interesting if you had more than 3-4 generations at a time (say a generation is 30 years, then 3 x 30 = 90). I think the significance of a generation is as you say: in human terms, it seems the vast majority of your personality and outlook is formed by age 30.
If people lived to be 1000 years old, then you would have 33 different generations at once. At the very least, those 33 different generations will tend to cluster together socially, to the exclusion of another. They will have come of age with the same events. You already hear people in their 30's talking about how they don't understand what teenagers are doing (Snapchat, etc.). Imagine if there were 32 other generations to comprehend: you would have to be an expert in history to even relate to people.
People already say that baby boomers have hogged wealth at the expense of their children and younger generations. I haven't investigated those claims in detail but it seems plausible. You would probably see different generations fighting for policy that favors them. I mean it would be hard to imagine this NOT happening.
Re: Scientists say they’ll soon extend life ‘well beyond 120’
#53I too would like to live forever, but one problem I see is that if you just extend peoples physical age but their minds become frozen in time, then all progress stops. It is well known that as people age their neural plasticity degrades and they loose the ability to learn anything new. I have observed this with my Dad who is 84. If people lived to be 1000 but their neural plasticity was gone by 120, we would still ha…
Not everyone loses neural plasticity. Some people are as sharp at 90 as at 25. Some begin to decline in their 20s (especially if heavy use of drugs is involved).
Aging is a phenomenally hard problem. I have no idea whether it will be "solved" in 25 years or 100 or 2500 or never... but I'd imagine that neural plasticity is but a small subproblem of it.
Re: Scientists say they’ll soon extend life ‘well beyond 120’
#54I just hope such medical advances would be available to everyone and not just a privileged few who can afford it.
Re: Scientists say they’ll soon extend life ‘well beyond 120’
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
"doing so on a large scale is almost guaranteed to be a disaster" Over the past centuries, human life expectancy has increased greatly and yet we have a much higher quality of life. It's an extraordinary claim to suggest that the continuance of this already-existing trend is 'almost guaranteed to be a disaster'.
The decline of global pirate population has correlated strongly with the rise of global temperatures, too.
While the pirate population might have something to do with the price of tea in China, it has nothing to do with this conversation. The comment you replied to did not make a correlation=causation argument. The comment did, however, make an argument that historic behavior, in this case of society as a whole, may be used to predict future behavior. I don't believe that is an entirely unreasonable argument to make (though more data from more fields is always better). It is certainly a stronger argument than was made by the previous comment, which provided no evidence to back the assertion that it would be a disaster.
Re: Scientists say they’ll soon extend life ‘well beyond 120’
#56Fortunately, 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".
We are already making progress on both quality as well as the length of life.
From the 2013 NBER working paper "Evidence for Significant Compression of Morbidity In the Elderly U.S. Population":
"For a typical person aged 65, life expectancy increased by 0.7 years between 1992 and 2005. Disability-free life expectancy increased by 1.6 years; disabled life expectancy fell by 0.9 years.
"The reduction in disabled life expectancy and increase in disability-free life expectancy is true for both genders and for non-whites as well as whites. Hence, morbidity is being compressed into the period just before death."
Re: Scientists say they’ll soon extend life ‘well beyond 120’
#57Fortunately, 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".
We are already making progress on both quality as well as the length of life. From the 2013 NBER working paper "Evidence for Significant Compression of Morbidity In the Elderly U.S. Population": "For a typical person aged 65, life expectancy increased by 0.7 years between 1992 and 2005. Disability-free life expectancy increased by 1.6 years; disabled life expectancy fell by 0.9 years. "The reduction in disabled life…
Hell yeah!
Re: Scientists say they’ll soon extend life ‘well beyond 120’
#58This is a very well reported article and I'm grateful it was submitted here for discussion. The article definitely deserves a thoughtful read from beginning to end, as it raises a lot of issues that will have to be considered as research on human aging continues. The comments here posted before this one are interesting too.
Having read the article and the previous comments, I'll jump in with an observation that I've had so much occasion to make here on Hacker News that it is a FAQ block of text I keep off-line for posting here. What's really amazing about fighting human aging is that even with the haphazard approach of tackling one disease at a time, humankind has already made enormous progress in increasing healthy lifespan into old age. Girls born since 2000 in the developed world are more likely than not to reach the age of 100, with boys likely to enjoy lifespans almost as long. The article "The Biodemography of Human Ageing" by James Vaupel,[1] originally published in the journal Nature in 2010, is a good current reference on the subject. Vaupel is one of the leading scholars on the demography of aging and how to adjust for time trends in life expectancy. His striking finding is "Humans are living longer than ever before. In fact, newborn children in high-income countries can expect to live to more than 100 years. Starting in the mid-1800s, human longevity has increased dramatically and life expectancy is increasing by an average of six hours a day."[2]
An article in a series on Slate, "Why Are You Not Dead Yet? Life expectancy doubled in past 150 years. Here’s why"[3] Provides some of the background.
Life expectancy at age 40, at age 60, and at even higher ages is still rising throughout the developed countries of the world.[4]
You can look up websites that will take information you provide and report a personal life expectancy for you based on the information you provide.[5] You may be surprised by what you see. The online longevity calculators are based on historical cohort data and do not reflect any further progress in medicine, public health, or lifestyle improvement that may occur between now and your predicted age of death.
[1] http://www.demographic-challenge.com/files/downloads/2eb51e2...
[2] http://www.prb.org/Journalists/Webcasts/2010/humanlongevity....
[3] http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science_of_...
[4] http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v307/n3/box...
[5] Various life-expectancy calculators:
(My calculated life expectancy a year or two ago predicted I would outlive my mother's current age, and three of my four grandparents.)
http://gosset.wharton.upenn.edu/mortality/perl/CalcForm.html
(My life expectancy a year or two ago as calculated by this was lower than for the website above. This website is especially cool, because it shows a confidence interval around the estimate.)
Re: Scientists say they’ll soon extend life ‘well beyond 120’
#59I just hope such medical advances would be available to everyone and not just a privileged few who can afford it.
It depends on the companies working on this like Google's Calico Labs http://calicolabs.com Berkeley Labs GenoPharmix http://genopharmix.com Genentech or Craig Ventors http://humanlongevity
Re: Scientists say they’ll soon extend life ‘well beyond 120’
#60Please hurry up. I want to live for thousands of years.
You might be interested in joining the effort. Leaving a task to others is a failing strategy when everyone adopts the same strategy.
As I get older (I'm about middle age if life expectancy is ~80), I think more about whether I'm really working on the most important thing I could be working on. I'm almost certainly not...but, I have the conflicting desires of making sure I have a reasonable income, decent savings for when I find myself unable to make a reasonable income, and taking big risks on wholly new things.
I have always spent a lot of my time on learning new things, but I find myself conflicted on whether I should be using what I know to maximize my impact in areas I am already an "expert" in, or self development in new areas where it could be years before I would be able to make any kind of impact but might be more important work.
In short: I'm not the person you're responding to, but I sympathize with both arguments. I think life extension (and disease prevention) is among the most important projects of humanity. But, and this is a big but, I have no background in the science behind it (except as someone that follows the field with interest via popular science channels). So, how would I join the effort? I've had my DNA "done" by 23andme, which probably contributes in some realistic, but small, way. But, getting involved in the actual science would take me years...years in which I still need to earn a living. Perhaps I should be looking into the data needs of this research. That's something I at least know a little bit about, having worked in scientific computing on the IT and data side.