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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

#221

Post by DoctorOetker »

joelthelion wrote: post #180
dsign wrote: post #118

I was walking on the street the other day. It was fine summer, and I saw so many elderly walking outside. All of them were using one type of aid or another; some even had a social worker at their side. As I saw them, I was thinking that my 63% marginal tax was paying for it, while I part with 25% of my income after taxes to pay my mom’s pension. That monetary cost is nothing, I would gladly pay it for the rest of my…

> So, we are paying an extremely high cost for letting God go on with His Slow Tormentous Cooking of Souls before Consumption, and things are only going to get worse, given the demographic expectations. Wouldn’t it make sense to put a big chunk of budget into creating life-extension tech? It's controversial, but I think it would be tremendously beneficial to our society if we accepted that death is (currently) inevit…

But then how would you justify the healthcare racket?

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

#222

Post by Kinrany »

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.

Aging itself is not a disease, it's just stuff falling into disrepair over time.

Age-related illnesses shouldn't be dismissed with "they're just old" of course but there's no reason to expect a single cause. Other than passage of time itself.

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

#223

Post by grues-dinner »

throw__away7391 wrote: post #199
lblume wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Historically, increases in total lifespan have always corresponded to increases in the length of healthy lives. People don't only live longer, they also live without being sick a whole lot longer.

Exactly. It is far more fantastical to imagine such lifespan improvements resulting in a planet of crypt keepers than one of external youth. What magic do you expect would keep such people alive?

The same magic that keeps some people on quasi-life support for sometimes decades already.

You could imagine entirely curing cancer, heart disease, frailty and infection but not brain degeneration, for example.

Curing everything else except frailty also seems invidious, though with sufficiently good brain-machine interfaces perhaps that would be less of a problem: you can just float in anti-impact gel from 100 and 200 and mentally roam the wreckage of the internet! If AI takes over knowledge work, how you pay for your life support and data connection may become an issue.

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

#224

Post by simianparrot »

4gotunameagain wrote: post #207
simianparrot wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I appreciate you being honest, but I also don't want people like you to immigrate to my country. How are you so sure of the role our old people played in your reasons for emigrating? Even if you're in the US and from a country the US has actively destabilized, how many of the people on welfare -- old and/or infirm -- were instrumental in the actions that led to the destabilization of your country? How many of these p…

Apart from the complex topic of political complicity, I am talking about events and actions that the majority of the local population supported. I would of course have to reveal quite a bit about me in order to be more specific. But even if I were an immigrant to the US from Venezuela or any of the tens if not hundreds countries that the US destabilised, I would indeed think of the majority of US's population as comp…

Then why would you move there?

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

#225

Post by ACCount37 »

sigmoid10 wrote: post #215
ACCount37 wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's consistent with what I said, yes. Two decades of this kind of research spending add up to $100 billion. And most billionaires are closer to $5 billion rich than to $500 billion rich. It would sure be nice to have an infinite money glitch billionaire who cares a lot about funding anti-aging research and lobbying for anti-aging efforts, the way Musk cares about space exploration and trolling people online. We're…

The point is if anti-aging didn't have this edgy image in billionaire circles, there would be more than enough money to go around. If everyone agrees that we should get on this like we do certain other diseases, we could certainly tap into a lot of resources.

I don't think there would be "enough money" just from that, but I agree that it would sure help.

It's why I stress that aging should be recognized as a disease. If we had the likes of WHO and FDA in agreement that aging is unwanted and treating aging is desirable, even if it can't be done yet, it would shift the perception considerably.

It would make it easier for billionaires to contribute to anti-aging research as a philanthropic effort - but it would also open many doors in terms of research funding and corporate investment.

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

#226

Post by simianparrot »

ACCount37 wrote: post #209
simianparrot wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And in those species there's other constraints that weigh up for it. I'm not sure which ones you're thinking of, but in every single one I know of there's other tradeoffs. And if there's some without them, I'm pretty sure we just haven't discovered them yet. I find it peculiar that you interpret my statements as "whining". I specifically wrote: > My point isn’t to stop researching and understanding and even treating,…

There is no "fairness enforcement" in life, and biology is no exception. The closest we get is conservation laws, and those do not forbid living healthily well into your 500s. You're out looking for "tradeoffs" that may not be there, or may not be worth caring about. There is no "balance of tradeoffs" in everything. There isn't an Authority on Biology that says "if you get good X then you must take bad Y to keep thin…

> But nature barely even tried. Humans can do better than that.

~3.8 billion years of evolution "barely even tried"? There's hubris and then there's _hubris_. But to repeat myself: I am not saying we shouldn't try. I'm saying we should expect no free lunch, and that the concept of tradeoffs for every alteration is a much healthier mental framework to work off of because _so far_ that's been the one consistent truth in all of biology.

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

#227

Post by brabel »

nabla9 wrote: post #214
ggm wrote: post #191

Remarkable hostility and strange circular logic from some people posting here. Clearly belief outstrips evidence. If research suggests there's an observable asymptotic trend, public health dollars at the very least might be better spent on quality of life as much as quantity. The posts saying an atom of oxygen is potentially infinitely long lived (ignoring radioactive decay?) As a "proof" that life extension has no l…

Radical life extension within our lifetimes has become secular religion substitute. It’s driven more by hope and faith than by scientific fact. While a lifespan has no limits in theory if technology is advanced enough, the belief that it can be achieved by a living person is based on hope rather than evidence. - Possible in our lifetime. - Affordable to the faithful. You remove these two, and the faithful lose their…

What theory says that human lifespan has no limits with technology assistance? Anything involving replacing biological systems with artificial ones is not really extending human lifespan, it’s replacing human life with something else.

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

#228

Post by DiscourseFan »

9dev wrote: post #158
picafrost wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a great point. It's not a robust counter-point, but Gödel's incompleteness theorems come to mind. We do know there are limitations to formal systems, we think there may be limitations to computational complexity. Maybe we haven't developed the tool set to make similar claims about biology (or maybe such tools cannot exist) or technology in the abstract. But these may also come in the future.

Fair enough. If we reach a point where we’ve discovered all fundamental truths of the universe and no more knowledge is helping towards solutions we need, then yes, that may imply awareness of the plateau; I’ll give you that. It also seems fantastically far away, so much so that it seems an exercise in futility to speculate about it.

Its so far away, in fact, considering that we cannot even observe most of the universe, or even have a fully coherent notion of what the universe is.

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

#229

Post by agumonkey »

makingstuffs wrote: post #187
orwin wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

We all kinda did. There's a clear drift in France too after the 70s. The acceleration of communication, US cultural exports, a strong trend of modernization all led to our current situation. And also part of the reason why there are so many traditionalist movements popping up.

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

#230

Post by A_D_E_P_T »

joelthelion wrote: post #180
dsign wrote: post #118

I was walking on the street the other day. It was fine summer, and I saw so many elderly walking outside. All of them were using one type of aid or another; some even had a social worker at their side. As I saw them, I was thinking that my 63% marginal tax was paying for it, while I part with 25% of my income after taxes to pay my mom’s pension. That monetary cost is nothing, I would gladly pay it for the rest of my…

> So, we are paying an extremely high cost for letting God go on with His Slow Tormentous Cooking of Souls before Consumption, and things are only going to get worse, given the demographic expectations. Wouldn’t it make sense to put a big chunk of budget into creating life-extension tech? It's controversial, but I think it would be tremendously beneficial to our society if we accepted that death is (currently) inevit…

> assisted suicide is a lot better than artificially prolonging suffering at great cost for as long as possible.

I beseech you to contemplate how badly this might be abused, and how monstrous the consequences could be. Even now MAID in Canada and other forms of assisted suicide in Europe have arguably gone way too far.

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