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

theguardian.com

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

#121

Post by Encosia »

jqm wrote: post #77
landryraccoon wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If people lived forever, why would they ever retire? I imagine you'd take a 5 year sabbatical every 20 years or so and you'd probably even head to school a bunch of times to change careers if you got bored of centuries of the same vocation.

Who is going to hire you? Try getting a job at 62 right now.

A big part of that is employers not wanting to invest in someone who is about to permanently leave the workforce. If the retirement age scaled with lifespan, or adapted along the lines of what landryraccoon suggested, that would probably change. If you went back 200 years from today, most people would probably think it's not even possible that 63% of my generation would be unmarried by age 30.

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

#123

Post by ZenoArrow »

zo1 wrote: post #115
slashnull wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Jobs are not a finite resource. More people = more jobs, and vice-versa. You make it seem like "jobs" just pop into existence, and then the labor force consumes however much of it it finds. It's as if you can't conceive of the possibility that the two are intertwined and feed off one another in a constant feedback cycle. One method is "no job = no money = not a good idea to have kids = less workers". Another perhaps:…

Or how about "No ownership of materials = no need for jobs", or at least no need for jobs in the usual sense. It's worth questioning whether possessions like money help us live rewarding lives or whether they hold us back (or both).

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

#124

Post by iwince »

zw123456 wrote: post #8

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…

Aging does not necessarily stop the ability to learn anything new. You cited your dad so I'll cite mine, he taught himself assembly programming for fun when he was in his late 60's. He lived to be 75 but always challenged himself to learn and do new things.

"There is solid evidence that neurogenesis (birth of brain cells) occurs in the adult, mammalian brain—and such changes can persist well into old age."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroplasticity

Here's another case cited in the same article above, "His father’s story was firsthand evidence that a ‘late recovery’ could occur even with a massive lesion in an elderly person."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroplasticity

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

#125

Post by iwince »

jqm wrote: post #102
Zigurd wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who is going to hire you at 20, right now? It's a problem we have to solve for everyone.

It's a problem that is far more acute for certain ages than others....

Actually the real problem is people who have your attitude about the problem.

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

#126

Post by atallcostsky »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #105
atallcostsky wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would be a problem of course, but I'm betting this is a problem most people would like to have. If my two options are: Die at 100, and not have to work for the last X years, or live an extra 20 years, with required working, I at least would prefer to live and work than to die and not work.

Since I don't think changing the lifespan will change societal values much, and because of that I believe that statistically the likely outcome is 'want to work but can't find it.' Being at the end of your life and unemployed is a markedly different experience than being at the beginning of your life and unemployed.

That does make sense - definitely something to think about.

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

#127

Post by Gatsky »

mikeash wrote: post #14
kirse wrote: post #13

I always see anti-aging research as an expression of our inbuilt need for hope and significance (a desire to be known for eternity). It's far more philosophical than scientific. Many have concluded there is no meaningful eternity, and thus they seek to construct their own hope through anti-aging research. So it's slightly ironic that the article mentions anti-aging research as needing to address a "root cause", when…

Because the desire to conquer aging couldn't possibly be a simple preference for living over dying.

What kirse is talking about is a real thing:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terror_management_theory

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

#128

Post by slashnull »

zo1 wrote: post #115
slashnull wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Jobs are not a finite resource. More people = more jobs, and vice-versa. You make it seem like "jobs" just pop into existence, and then the labor force consumes however much of it it finds. It's as if you can't conceive of the possibility that the two are intertwined and feed off one another in a constant feedback cycle. One method is "no job = no money = not a good idea to have kids = less workers". Another perhaps:…

Well yeah, but one thing that bugs me is that many structures, many businesses even, seem to have little purposes beyond making jobs pop into existence, by having bizarrely huge amounts of redundancy, red tape, or by having goals that seem counterproductive, or by being tolerated despite not having reached any relevant goal for a loooong time.

One of my main problem is that there is a huge bagage of material wealth and social status attached to those jobs that look, to me, right now, completely useless.

By tying that to the job itself, it makes it hard to assess the value of the work accomplished, independently of the fact that said job is stable and well-paid.

Hence,

It pisses me off when politicians announce not that some shit got done, but that jobs were created.

It pisses me off that the goal of working seems to be shifting from solving a problem to getting paid for it.

I'm young and stupid and idealistic and I'm angry with the world.

It'l probably pass ; )

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

#129

Post by jqm »

iwince wrote: post #125
jqm wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a problem that is far more acute for certain ages than others....

Actually the real problem is people who have your attitude about the problem.

That's a rather bizarre comment. Would you care to qualify? Or maybe add just a little bit of substance?

My attitude doesn't have anything to do with statistical reality.

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

#130

Post by xaa »

reasonattlm wrote: post #20

One of the things that rarely makes it to the press is that all of these efforts are not equal in their likelihood of producing therapies that are useful for old people. A good 95%+ of the funding and interest in aging at present still goes towards investigation only, no attempt or thought on therapies. The Ellison Medical Foundation fell into this category, as aging was only an incidental part of the Foundation's pl…

Well, if SENS has the answer, the TFA has a $1M incentive for them to prove it, since this prize isn't about mechanism at all.

I think the idea of focusing on understanding and slowing the accumulation of damage is partially based on the assumption, or hope, that the body can repair itself, or be stimulated to repair itself, if damage accumulation is slowed enough. In particular, if damage to the repair mechanisms themselves (e.g., stem cells) is slowed sufficiently.

If you have kept up with drug development news you will know that target-based approaches and other highly complex interventions have almost uniformly failed. To this day, we can't and don't design interventions based on the understanding of systems, we just see that a drug inhibits, say, gliomas, and find out the mechanism later, possibly after FDA approval. If we can't even do this for diseases that are simple compared to aging, how do you think a highly complex and interdependent set of interventions as proposed by de Grey is going to work out?

Many repair-based approaches are proposing we build a rocket to the moon when we can't even build airplanes.

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