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New research reveals longevity gains slowing, life expectancy of 100 unlikely

lafollette.wisc.edu

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Re: New research reveals longevity gains slowing, life expectancy of 100 unlikely

#181

Post by Revisional_Sin »

simianparrot wrote: post #148

The assumption that everything can be “fixed” is one I will never understand. It’s so obvious when studying organisms in all their shapes and forms how everything is a tradeoff, and nothing can be stable. The fundamental truth of the universe is change. Senescence is a tradeoff to ward against cancer earlier in life. Eventually it will lead to cancer as a side effect, but optimally something else has failed before th…

Okay, sure. But it seems reasonable to expect we can keep improving the tradeoffs.

Re: New research reveals longevity gains slowing, life expectancy of 100 unlikely

#182

Post by ACCount37 »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #170
ACCount37 wrote: post #165

Aging isn't even recognized as a disease yet, and it well should be. Very little research currently goes into attacking aging directly - as opposed to handling things that are in no small part downstream from aging, such as heart disease. A big reason for poor "longevity gains" is lack of trying.

That’s kind of naive. Plenty of people definitely “try”, billionaires would love to live a few hundred more years. We know how aging occurs, there is degradation in DNA, telomeres shorten, and a bunch of other things. The main problem is that biological life simply can’t undergo overhauls like machines do, and we will probably just solve aging by creating successor beings that can.

Just compare the effort and the investment that goes into fighting aging with what goes into fighting cancer.

You can't rely on billionaires to fix everything for you. The kind of research effort that would be required to make meaningful progress against aging would likely demand hundreds of billions, spent across decades. Few billionaires have the pockets deep enough to bankroll something like this, or the long term vision.

Getting aging recognized as a disease and a therapeutic target, and getting the initial effort on the scale of Human Genome Project would be a good starting point though.

If there was understanding that a drug "against aging" is desirable by the healthcare systems and can get approved, Big Pharma would have a reason to try - as opposed to developing drugs for other things and hopefully stumbling on something that makes progress against aging by an accident.

Re: New research reveals longevity gains slowing, life expectancy of 100 unlikely

#183

Post by djrj477dhsnv »

simianparrot wrote: post #148

The assumption that everything can be “fixed” is one I will never understand. It’s so obvious when studying organisms in all their shapes and forms how everything is a tradeoff, and nothing can be stable. The fundamental truth of the universe is change. Senescence is a tradeoff to ward against cancer earlier in life. Eventually it will lead to cancer as a side effect, but optimally something else has failed before th…

Aren't there already large long-living animals like elephants that basically don't get cancer?

Re: New research reveals longevity gains slowing, life expectancy of 100 unlikely

#184

Post by Joel_Mckay »

Longevity in misery can be a form of cruelty in itself...

Someday, I don't think synthetic intelligence will escape this facet of existence. After 84 humans call it the forth age, and things tend to stop getting better for ones quality of life. =3

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Have_No_Mouth,_and_I_Must_Sc...

Re: New research reveals longevity gains slowing, life expectancy of 100 unlikely

#185

Post by imtringued »

ACCount37 wrote: post #165

Aging isn't even recognized as a disease yet, and it well should be. Very little research currently goes into attacking aging directly - as opposed to handling things that are in no small part downstream from aging, such as heart disease. A big reason for poor "longevity gains" is lack of trying.

This would require extreme amounts of embryo selection and getting results will require multiple generations, nothing in your lifetime.

The biggest bottleneck is that humans evolved to have children in their 20s. After that age, the old compete with the young for resources, so there is no evolutionary incentive for humans to live indefinitely.

Aging past fertility is like momentum in stochastic gradient descent.

Re: New research reveals longevity gains slowing, life expectancy of 100 unlikely

#186

Post by londons_explore »

lblume wrote: post #177
londons_explore wrote: post #162

I believe this is mostly due to misdirected healthcare efforts. I think we could get the average life expectancy up to 100 if we did a better job of all the preventative things: * Prevent airborne disease by having all indoor spaces getting 50 air changes/filters per hour. * Prevent waterborne disease by having all tap water RO treated in homes, and by heating all shit up to boiling point before it leaves toilets. *…

> daily covid-like lateral flow tests for everyone How would you prevent people from abusing this system? Covid tests were simple to get to show a positive result, and I know some people who would make this instantly unsustainable.

I'd have the tests not show a simple line, but instead a complex checkerboard pattern you scan with a phone. The scan results would simultaneously test for 100+ diseases, and be uploaded to some department of health server which would then decide if you specifically should be paid to stay home.

That decision can be made based on fraud risk, but also on the benefit to society of that person not spreading that disease further. For example if a disease has already infected most of the town in the last few weeks, it makes no sense for someone to stay home because local immunity is already probably high and further spread unlikely.

However the first case in a new town would 100% be worth staying home for to avoid infecting thousands of others.

Re: New research reveals longevity gains slowing, life expectancy of 100 unlikely

#187

Post by makingstuffs »

orwin wrote: post #167
simianparrot wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I include poor vetting and integration as unchecked immigration if that wasn’t obvious. And do note that I wrote > people who do not share the majority of the destination’s cultural values No culture should nor can stay stagnant. But if we allow in people who do not share or wish to share a majority of our cultural values, which vary a lot between European countries as well, then we deteriorate what made our countrie…

I'm pretty sure US cultural slop destroyed more of my culture in the last 20 years than immigration ever did, and while immigrants are part of the movement for sure (especially English retirees, but also a lot of 2nd/3rd gen migrants from eastern Europe/North Africa), they're not the main driver.

100% I often say to people that the reason for the UK’s loss of culture is not immigration but the fact that we, as British people, stopped being British in pursuit of the ‘American dream’.

Somewhere along the line we stopped looking to our own previous generations (which include European nations as, you know, we’re Europeans) for cultural identity and started following Hollywood as our cultural oracle.

Generations of this has lead to the mess you see unraveling in the UK at the moment.

Re: New research reveals longevity gains slowing, life expectancy of 100 unlikely

#188

Post by imtringued »

ACCount37 wrote: post #182
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s kind of naive. Plenty of people definitely “try”, billionaires would love to live a few hundred more years. We know how aging occurs, there is degradation in DNA, telomeres shorten, and a bunch of other things. The main problem is that biological life simply can’t undergo overhauls like machines do, and we will probably just solve aging by creating successor beings that can.

Just compare the effort and the investment that goes into fighting aging with what goes into fighting cancer. You can't rely on billionaires to fix everything for you. The kind of research effort that would be required to make meaningful progress against aging would likely demand hundreds of billions, spent across decades. Few billionaires have the pockets deep enough to bankroll something like this, or the long term…

Bill Gates has enough money for effective longevity research. Longevity research isn't even particularly expensive.

The actual problem is that you would have to do selective breeding and genetic modification of humans the same way we do it with plants and animals. It is primarily an ethical problem.

Re: New research reveals longevity gains slowing, life expectancy of 100 unlikely

#189

Post by ACCount37 »

imtringued wrote: post #185
ACCount37 wrote: post #165

Aging isn't even recognized as a disease yet, and it well should be. Very little research currently goes into attacking aging directly - as opposed to handling things that are in no small part downstream from aging, such as heart disease. A big reason for poor "longevity gains" is lack of trying.

This would require extreme amounts of embryo selection and getting results will require multiple generations, nothing in your lifetime. The biggest bottleneck is that humans evolved to have children in their 20s. After that age, the old compete with the young for resources, so there is no evolutionary incentive for humans to live indefinitely. Aging past fertility is like momentum in stochastic gradient descent.

I'm sure there are longevity gains that can be attained with embryo selection or direct embryo genetic editing. Might even be some low-hanging fruit there. But I see no reason to believe this to be the only possible source of longevity gains.

Sure, the evolution may oppose longevity, but evolution can go eat shit and die. It still works on humans, but it works too slowly to be able to do too much - we can't rely on it to fix our problems, but it also wouldn't put up this much of a fight if we fixed our problems on our own.

Re: New research reveals longevity gains slowing, life expectancy of 100 unlikely

#190

Post by jumploops »

Swizec wrote: post #2

What about quality of life adjusted life years? I don’t want to live to 100 and be miserable for the last 30 But if you can get me 90 years where I feel like a spring chicken until 89, then that’s just fine.

My grandfather had a little saying at each of his birthdays:

88, feeling great!

89, feeling fine

90, less mighty*

91, not yet done!

92, don’t think I’ll hit 102!

He died a couple years later, just a few months after getting my grandmother into an assisted living facility.

*note, I struggle to recall the rhyme for 90, so this one might not be accurate!

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