Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

lafollette.wisc.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 535 posts

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

#311

Post by markus_zhang »

qgin wrote: post #104
markus_zhang wrote: post #42

I think it’s fine. When I get older I’m more intrigued whether there is an afterlife, whatever it is.

When you have general anesthesia, you experience nothing, not even the vague sense of time passing like when sleeping, it's just an edit in time. You basically don't exist when you're under general anesthesia. If a little propofol in my brain can make me not exist, I'm pretty sure when I don't even have a brain I will definitely not exist.

Yeah I did have one and it was as you said, an edit in time. However this is after all still different from real death so we will see.

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

#312

Post by XorNot »

brabel wrote: post #270
nabla9 wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How do you know that you could? That’s the question! If we did understand biology perfectly it may be that we would then prove no organism can live forever and reproduction is the only way.

Because there's absolutely no reason to believe that's the case? Like I don't know what the point of this argument is: maybe it's impossible. Sure, great. Okay. But you know...let's actually find out, because it looks very possible if hard from our current vantage point.

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

#313

Post by amanaplanacanal »

zksijdjd wrote: post #303
StopDisinfo910 wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do we really have to read again and again the same fantasies the far right spew out continuously here in France on Hacker News? It’s so easy to factually disprove, it’s kind of boring. I will keep it short because I value my time but here some things you might want to ponder: - America integration doesn’t exist. The American strategy has always been leave people alone to keep living in their own culture. There is no…

[flagged]

> An American is (on the whole) somebody who’s genetically European and has had family here for generations.

This is obviously nonsense. "White" Americans are something like 57% of the population. The US is very mixed, and always has been.

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

#314

Post by XorNot »

inglor_cz wrote: post #305
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And in 1968 an analyst may conclude that space travel could never become routine and still be perfectly on the money even after the moon landings. So what? We can't see into the future. The future is never like the past, not least because a lot of present tends to intervene.

And that is precisely why I don't find that much value in articles such as "New research reveals longevity gains slowing, life expectancy of 100 unlikely". Declaration such as: “We forecast that those born in 1980 will not live to be 100 on average, and none of the cohorts in our study will reach this milestone." is too self-confident. Their youngest cohort is born in 2000. It is impossible to predict how longevity t…

There's also a practical case today where this applies: cancer treatment. One of the reasons life-expectancy are not given much past a 10-year timeline, is because it's generally expected that over a decade the quality of cancer treatment will have improved substantially and as such the likely patient outcome much beyond that isn't known (and is usually better).

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

#315

Post by Demiurge »

zksijdjd wrote: post #303
StopDisinfo910 wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do we really have to read again and again the same fantasies the far right spew out continuously here in France on Hacker News? It’s so easy to factually disprove, it’s kind of boring. I will keep it short because I value my time but here some things you might want to ponder: - America integration doesn’t exist. The American strategy has always been leave people alone to keep living in their own culture. There is no…

[flagged]

> In almost all cases immigration replaces the need for native births - the latter being a key component for a strong, safe culture that creates a happy median population.

Immigration in USA has multiple components, but it seems to be you're undervaluing the amount of opportunistic intellectual workers, who come here to participate in high level education, and entrepreneurial capitalism. But, here are the numbers across multiple sources (thx GPT):

  - High-skilled (H-1B + EB green cards + PhD retention): ~200–300k annually.
  - Low-wage (H-2A + H-2B + others): ~500k+ legally, probably >700k when including unauthorized inflows.
This a pretty good amount of brain power absorption, not just farm work.

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

#316

Post by Fargren »

arisAlexis wrote: post #242
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…

Religion is a lie. This is actually a possible science path. Don't get confused.

> Religion is a lie

Anyone who says "we will have within this generation technology to extend your lifetime indefinitely" is lying just as much as the priest who says he knows God exists is lying[1]. I would say it's more likely that the scientist liar is accidentally right, than that the priest is; that doesn't make either of them people you should trust.

At the current stage of technology, belief on this process is basically based only on hope. Belief in this is essentially religious.

[1] possibly they both believe they are saying the truth, so you could argue they are wrong rather than lying. They are still both standing on the same grounds.

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

#317

Post by simianparrot »

sothatsit wrote: post #273
simianparrot wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

If you think evolution was optimising for longevity, then you really haven't thought it through. For 3.8 billion years, organisms just needed to survive long enough to reproduce. Cancer, heart disease, and other age-related diseases only became significant killers in the last few hundred years. That's nowhere near enough time for evolution to address them. And even then, age-related diseases don't directly influence…

And evolution eventually led to mammals with complex brain plasticity and an almost _unreasonably_ long and fragile childhood that allowed in-generation transmission of lessons and knowledge bypassing the traditional, heavily trial and error -based approach of just gene transmission and instinctual knowledge.

I think evolution did a damn fine job. And yes there's surely more we don't know than we know or understand, which might change the future just as much as bacteriology has, but let's also be humble and learn from what came before. Both things are possible.

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

#318

Post by XorNot »

lossolo wrote: post #71
VincentEvans wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You haven’t quite come to grips with mortality, I think.

I think OP is not entirely incorrect. Reproductive cells undergo processes like epigenetic reprogramming, which basically strips away many of the chemical marks (like DNA methylation patterns) that accumulate with age. That’s one of the reasons babies don’t start with the cellular age of their parents. Researchers can take adult cells, reprogram them back to an embryonic like state using Yamanaka factors (a set of fo…

More over, babies can clearly grow from limited cells to "young" versions of fully differentiated human tissues. Which means from some initial stock, you can replace the vast majority of the bodies cells with younger versions - i.e. with plausible, attainable technology we would generally expect to be able to grow immunologically identical replacement organs and major tissues. That definitely is an engineering problem, more then anything else.

The only truly troubling one is the brain, and we're very much not sure if it actually is one or for example, suffers degradation from the degradation of the body its attached to - likely both - but we also know that the brain is not a static structure, and so replacement or rejuvenation of key systems would definitely be possible (certainly finding any way to protect the small blood vessels in the brain would greatly help with dementia).

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

#319

Post by ACCount37 »

sdeframond wrote: post #292
ACCount37 wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't scale. If you could put "sleeping well, eating well and exercising" into a $0.25 once a week pill and make that available to everyone, it would work. As is, it doesn't. We want solutions that can be scaled and rolled out broadly, and "basic healthy lifestyle" ain't it.

Why not? What is not scalable about it, specifically ? I mean, sure, it doesn't scale as well as a magic pill as a business . But is certainly is O(n) with the number of people involved.

The kind of solution that scales as "O(n) effect with the number of people involved", but isn't broadly implemented? It's usually at least O(n log n) on the effort required to actually involve those people. This vital input is the source of piss poor scaling in practice.

Why? Because there's a massive variation in people. Everyone who finds it "very easy" to as much as "sleep well, eat well and exercise" already does just that, and the implementation difficulty ramp up gets brutal quickly. It's simple to suggest and hard to execute.

Pharmaceutics are so valuable because they offer good sublinear scaling on many of the inputs. They're extremely hard to develop, but they're often well worth it, because the implementation scales in a way those "simple" solutions don't.

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

#320

Post by ecb_penguin »

XorNot wrote: post #312
brabel wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know that you could? That’s the question! If we did understand biology perfectly it may be that we would then prove no organism can live forever and reproduction is the only way.

Because there's absolutely no reason to believe that's the case? Like I don't know what the point of this argument is: maybe it's impossible. Sure, great. Okay. But you know...let's actually find out, because it looks very possible if hard from our current vantage point.

[flagged]
Post reply on HN