Is aging a disease? :)
Sometimes I feel we should cure living. I would prefer to live only 70 years but fully, having built good human relationships, knowing how to learn, rather than 100 unfulfilled ones.
Can Aging Be Cured?
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Re: Can Aging Be Cured?
#22I recall one ageing specialist asking why husbands die before their wives? The answer? Because they want to.
Re: Can Aging Be Cured?
#23Well if we "cure" aging, it will have the awkward consequence that every life must end with an accident, disease or suicide.
You left out murder and war.
I doubt it will be awkward. It will be viewed that aging is a disease, that we have the cure now, so there's one less way to die. Getting rid of polio didn't make the other ways of dieing more awkward.
Re: Can Aging Be Cured?
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you have a deeper point—which I'm missing—or is this FUD?
This is me reading between the lines -- so maybe not the parent commenter meant at all! -- but I think the point is that all sorts of grudges, prejudices, and regrets naturally expire through generational turnover, and in a world without aging that natural expiration won't be there to help society put the past behind us.
The loss of grudges/prejudices is also a loss of skills and unique perspectives. That sounds as much an opportunity as a danger.
I could come up with ridiculous 'nightmares', and interpret them, as well:
I wake from nightmare worlds where 'world hunger' is cured but 'satiety' becomes broken.
Interpreted as:
Without scarcity peoples' greed will continue to grow unabated. The lust for consumption will result with the depletion of natural resources, and the destruction of society.
The dream is a non sequitur; and even taken as a metaphor, it has gapping holes in the logic!
1. Prejudices are passed down through generations.
2. People change their position on subjects, when new information becomes available.
3. There's nothing 'natural' about living short lives. Some species live longer than us; and some are even negligibly senescent[0]!
4. I've established there's at least one other mechanism by which people can alter their ideas (point 2). Others could be found.
5. Dying of cancer (and other diseases) seems like the worst possible solution to the problem. Torturing people who don't age, and then not have them die in the end seems more humane! (That may be the second worst solution). Killing healthy 150 y/o, so that there's generational turnover would also work (I would prefer that to the status quo, personally). Under such circumstance, I think it probable a reasonable remedy could be found (sans death, pain, and indignity)!
Thanks for the interpretation, but you may have been overly charitable!
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Re: Can Aging Be Cured?
#25Is aging a disease? :)
Its a cause of death. We like to avoid those. And we know multicellular organisms exist that can maintain their telomeres and avoid senescence. We are almost certainly going to be able to genetically engineer that into future people at some point, among a lot of other useful things. Dunno if we are going to manage to get gene therapy that can alter living humans so drastically before they die, though. And who knows w…
I would hate to be poor and immortal. That would be the worst. I feel like immortality is something for the rich.
Re: Can Aging Be Cured?
#26In a way, we've already "cured" aging. On average, we live a lot longer than many of our ancestors. We can check many diseases and conditions that would normally kill elderly people. The problem is like cancer, in that it's not one thing, but a multitude of things. (And cancer itself is among that multitude!) Not many people, outside of healthcare workers and AIDS patients know of cytomegalovirus, but most of the pop…
We're now learning how to "reset" the immune system. 1. Collect immune system "seed' cells. 2. Wipe out the existing immune system with chemo therapy drugs and other violence. 3. Inject the collected cells and let them build a new fresh immune system. You now have lost all your immunities and will need to be revaccinated for everything. But any autoimmune disease like MS you had is probably also gone. http://www.nih.…
Holy hell, that's cool. What a promising line of research for autoimmune sufferers!
Re: Can Aging Be Cured?
#27If we can finally cure aging, then, at long last, we will finally be able feasibly tackle inter-galatic travel and planet-level terraforming.
Re: Can Aging Be Cured?
#28Re: Can Aging Be Cured?
#29One reason why we age and die - might be because we(any living being) want to evolve, and that pressurizes us to cross breed and give birth to new generation before we die and finally die and not hog up all the resources ourselves. And let the better generation live on.
That natural strategy might have become suboptimal since the progress in science.
Re: Can Aging Be Cured?
#30One reason why we age and die - might be because we(any living being) want to evolve, and that pressurizes us to cross breed and give birth to new generation before we die and finally die and not hog up all the resources ourselves. And let the better generation live on. That natural strategy might have become suboptimal since the progress in science.
You might be mistaking cause for a reason here.