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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

#231

Post by ACCount37 »

Kinrany wrote: post #222
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.

Cancer is "stuff falling into disrepair over time" too. Get enough faulty cells with DNA damage and one of them is going to make itself a problem. The only way to avoid cancer is to have something else kill you before you get it.

That's not a reason to say that cancer is somehow "not a disease". It obviously is. We don't want cancer. We fund efforts to research cancer and funnel money into better cancer treatments, and we get results.

Aging should get the same treatment.

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

#232

Post by camillomiller »

The longevity trend is fascinating. It’s mostly fueled by people who hoard money and power and realize they will just lose it all like everyone else when death will inevitably come. This fear has driven men for a long time, but we used to focus on living through memory. So we tried and gain literary and art fame, if coming for poorer backgrounds, or we built mausoleums and palaces that were supposed to outlive us in the centuries.l, if rich and powerful. Now the shallow uncultured tech billionaires just believe their own simplistic mechanistic lies and focus on living longer themselves. The result is there’s nothing trickling down for all the others. This that we have to all endure must be the most inane and distasteful class of rich and powerful people to ever walk the Earth.

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

#233

Post by nabla9 »

brabel wrote: post #227
nabla9 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you had full understanding of human cell and how they contribute to homeostasis, you could reprogram the cell to rejuvenate them endlessly without turning into cancer (many cancers have unlimited lifespan). You would also need to find ways to remove all cruft that gradually accumulates even in healthy body, like heavy metals etc.

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

#234

Post by iLoveOncall »

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. *…

This sounds like RFK's type of "medicine". The number of people dying from transmissible diseases is a lot less than people dying from heart attacks, cancer, etc. which are linked a lot more to lifestyle than to diseases.

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

#235

Post by A_D_E_P_T »

ethersteeds wrote: post #134
seydor wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see the point in doing that

If mortality is just a tradition and you're the first to realize you needn't acquiesce, sure. If not, the point in doing that is the enormous amount of suffering you create while thrashing against an inevitability. That is not to say you should take naps and wait patiently for death, but it's a line to walk.

> If not, the point in doing that is the enormous amount of suffering you create while thrashing against an inevitability.

This is absurd. Of course mortality is inevitable -- eternity is a very long time -- but working to increase lifespan, prolong one's youth and vigor, and delay the inevitable doesn't cause an "enormous amount of suffering" (far less than the diseases of aging cause) and it's unfair to characterize it as "thrashing" when it can be approached in ways which are thoughtful and reasonable.

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

#236

Post by okr »

A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #230
joelthelion wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It is my life. Not yours. What you are afraid of is openly murdering people.

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

#237

Post by A_D_E_P_T »

croes wrote: post #34
adastra22 wrote: post #4

There is no physical/chemical/biological reason you can’t live indefinitely with the health and vitality of a 25-35 year old. Aging isn’t a law of nature.

>There is no physical/chemical/biological reason you can’t live indefinitely Given that that the universe hasn't an indefinite life span there is at least physical reason why we can't live indefinitely.

Assuming no proton decay, its life span (for baryonic beings such as us) is far beyond 10^1500 years, so I don't think that "lifespan of the universe" is a limiting factor here. Nobody's speaking of living an infinitely long life.

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

#238

Post by ACCount37 »

simianparrot wrote: post #226
ACCount37 wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

And tell me - for those "~3.8 billion years of evolution", what was the optimization target?

What was natural selection selecting for, exactly? Longevity? Happiness? Quality of life?

Hahahahaha hahaha hahah ha no.

There is no "fairness" in biology, and natural selection isn't your friend. It's aligned with your interests sometimes - but if evolution could make humans reproduce much more effectively by making them live half as long and ten times as miserable? It would. There's just one primary metric that evolution cares about, and it totally would throw your well-being under the bus for it.

Evolution doesn't care much about whether humans live long and happy lives. Only humans themselves care about that. There are a lot of optimizations possible there, and humans have to be the ones to find them.

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

#239

Post by A_D_E_P_T »

okr wrote: post #236
A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It is my life. Not yours. What you are afraid of is openly murdering people.

There are lots of ways for you to end your life. You do not have to involve government or society. You do not require sanction or assistance.

The only people who might require assistance and sanction are those who are so catastrophically ill that they cannot function independently at all. But MAID has already killed people who were able-bodied! (And some for stupid or trivial reasons: https://care.org.uk/news/2024/10/poor-lonely-and-homeless-op... )

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

#240

Post by Earw0rm »

echelon wrote: post #29
czhu12 wrote: post #5

I don’t want to be that guy but isn’t this kind of an obvious result? The main claim is that life expectancy improvements in the past century are mostly due to decreases in childhood mortality. During the Roman period, the average life expectancy was only 22-25 years old because so many babies were dying prematurely. If you could make it past the age of 10, then you were expected to make it to about 50, which almost…

That's 100% on the mark. Infants aren't dying anymore. Real longevity is hard science and we're still at the punch card phase of biology. Wake me up when we can make headless, full body monoclonal donors for human head transplants. Antigen free / HLA neutral so immunosuppressants are a thing of the past. That'll cure every cancer except brain and blood, cure every other injury, and increase health span of everything…

Won't happen for broadly the same kind of reasons interstellar travel won't happen.

Lab-grown organs is doable, but the brain and spinal column just aren't modular in that way.

In-place system renovation and targeted replacement is a more likely way to yield results.

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