61–70 of 151 posts
In 2011, the average 80 year old lived to be 89 years old.
[1] http://ourworldindata.org/roser/presentation/online/Improvin... (press the right arrow key for the graph to pop up)
[2] http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005140.html
Modern medicine has mostly benefited the young, not the old. The last 150 years of little progress makes me skeptical of claims about future life extension, though of course I'd love to be mistaken.
I 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…
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 marke…
One problem is the unknown blood transmitted illness (something like AIDS, or Hepatitis C, some years ago before the blood tests were common). In the normal case, you are in an ER and your options are dying now or a blood transfusion with a low probability of an unknown illness. In this case, you are trying to live for a looong time, and receive a lot of transfusions. Each transfusion increase the probability of a problem, and the possibility that your life expectancy is reduced.
I 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…
I 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.
Is there documented evidence of this. Some people do better than others, obviously, but I find it hard to believe that anyone has literally as much plasticity at 90 as they did at 25.
> Some begin to decline in their 20s (especially if heavy use of drugs is involved).
Probably should be more specific than "drugs", since most drugs have no effect on neuroplasticity, and some drugs appear to actually enhance it.
I 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…
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…
I 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 generation…
This generational warfare meme is pushed by, among others, Stan Druckenmiller:
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2014/01/three-card-monte-gene...
You'll note that they push both sides at once. Boomers are told that millenials are feckless and lazy. Millenials are told that Boomers screwed up the economy and are hogging all the wealth.
Divide and conquer.
It's working, too.
I can't believe no one thinks this is a terrible idea. Of course I , selfishly, would love to live longer but doing so on a large scale is almost guaranteed to be a disaster. While we're at it why don't we just solve aging, provide infinite food supply, and eliminate predation for deer. That would be a great idea right? No way that would have any negative side effects, right?
"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'.
Also, if you count only people who reached adulthood and eliminate early deaths from injury which were common in adults between 25-45 yrs old, life expectancy and height are only now catching back up to the paleolithic.
I can't believe no one thinks this is a terrible idea. Of course I , selfishly, would love to live longer but doing so on a large scale is almost guaranteed to be a disaster. While we're at it why don't we just solve aging, provide infinite food supply, and eliminate predation for deer. That would be a great idea right? No way that would have any negative side effects, right?
I don't what comments you're reading, but as usual with topics of this nature on HN, the comments are sadly negative.
I 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…
I don't think anyone needs to worry about a hypothetical future where medical science has cured cancer, Alzheimer's, and every other disease, but somehow has failed to restore neuroplasticity. Restoring neuroplasticity is a tiny, easy task compared to all the other breakthroughs needed to reverse or stop aging.
The goal in the research community is health assurance, so of course every aspect of aging that impacts health will be addressed. The goal of people who are in the market for health assurance technologies will also be for all aspects of aging that impact health and function to be addressed. So it seems rather unlikely outside of dystopian fiction that we'll run into a situation in which everything except aspect X gets fixed.
This is especially true because the hundreds of distinct manifestations of degenerative aging are caused at root by only a small handful of distinct types of damage [1] resulting from the normal operation of metabolism. Effective treatments will be those that repair the root cause damage, each damage repair approach (and especially in conjunction with the other approaches) being capable of treating and preventing whole swathes of age-related conditions. So it would be exceedingly implausible for any particular aspect of aging to stand alone and unaffected by repair strategies for aging.