Interesting quote: [S]upercentenarians owe their longevity more to freakish genes than perfect health; the 122-year-old Calment smoked cigarettes for 96 years [...]
I wouldn't be surprised if nicotine proved to be important for longevity.
Why aren't the oldest living people getting any older?
41–50 of 90 posts
Re: Why aren't the oldest living people getting any older?
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
We now know that human biochemistry is the result of an evolutionary process which when faced with a problem consistently comes up with the worst possible solution that is still workable. It's 3 billion years worth of crufty spaghetti code, literally. As someone educated in theoretical biology and learning theory, I object to this kind of characterization of the evolutionary process. There is no evidence for a superi…
I have no authority on the subject, but, the fact that we cannot prove nor properly evaluate solutions that emerge from evolution does not change the fact that the first solution that fits is the one that will be kept. Intuitive reasoning that not work on such a subject, but still, I have hard time to accept that it is the best. The only proper qualifier, as you state, is that it is the existing one. The same way I a…
The first solution that fits isn't necessarily kept, unless it can be refined to a high enough level of development to compete with other emerging solutions. The eye, for example, evolved separately many times.
BTW, in human engineering the first solution is also often kept. Look at nuclear power. We probably should be using the thorium cycle, but we kept light water reactors because they were the first big reactor commercialized (for military reasons). Another example would be x86 architecture. I am not arguing that evolution is magical in any way, just that human engineering doesn't show signs of being much better in many cases.
I see a lot of engineers who are ignorant of biology claiming that "evolution is slow" and that we should be able to snap our fingers and do better. It's a popular point of view among the singularity crowd.
Engineers are trained to be arrogant about their abilities. This is probably a good thing, since it causes them to fling themselves at problems fearlessly. But it's also not necessarily realistic.
Re: Why aren't the oldest living people getting any older?
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
Speaking of the Bible, Adam lived 930 years ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam ) and if I remember correctly Eve also lived nine hundred years.
Pfft. Martin Silenus does better than that in Hyperion. Of course, the age of fictional characters doesn't really have much impact on the debate about the maximum possible age of a human being, does it now...
If more characters lived extended lifespans, perhaps the general public would be more accepting of the pursuit of immortality
Re: Why aren't the oldest living people getting any older?
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the beginning, there was light. On second thought, do we have to count "the beginning" as the moment of the singularity or as the time when the universe became transparent to photons? Gonna end up with a holy war over that one. Wait, it's all good. You start out with a dark and formless void, then you get your "fiat lux" afterwards. The Bible was right again!
1:1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. 1:2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. 1:3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. Oops, there's water before there's light. Better retcon that sucker.
The waters are figurative; they basically represent chaotic universal essence which God separates and shapes. If Plato wrote Genesis he would have said aether. We would probably refer to a singularity or strings or something else we think everything is made of.
Re: Why aren't the oldest living people getting any older?
#45Diminishing returns. If you address some of the top causes of death, you can significantly increase lifespans. If you address some of the smaller causes, you can somewhat increase lifespans. However, in the limit you need a solution that doesn't just solve individual problems one by one. Biologically, "fixing" telomeres would probably address many of the nonspecific "died of old age" cases that we don't fully underst…
There's a great TED talk a few years ago on this. We have the technnology and know-how to significantly increase life expectancy and to do research to make it even better, but why don't we? Curing cancer and Alzheimer's is not the same thing. Why don't we explicitly research life extension? The speaker brought up several philosophical, political and economic reasons why society has chosen to ignore the problem. There are a lot of unforeseen implications to a world where everyone lives past 150.
Re: Why aren't the oldest living people getting any older?
#46Interesting quote: [S]upercentenarians owe their longevity more to freakish genes than perfect health; the 122-year-old Calment smoked cigarettes for 96 years [...]
I wouldn't be surprised if nicotine proved to be important for longevity.
Can you think of anything that might be informing that hunch?
Re: Why aren't the oldest living people getting any older?
#47The most important thing to focus on is not life extension, but extending healthy vitality longer or compressed morbidity. Life extension is way too much of a tax on humanity if we can't solve the problem of frailty in the extreme old.
Re: Why aren't the oldest living people getting any older?
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
1:1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. 1:2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. 1:3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. Oops, there's water before there's light. Better retcon that sucker.
The waters are figurative; they basically represent chaotic universal essence which God separates and shapes. If Plato wrote Genesis he would have said aether. We would probably refer to a singularity or strings or something else we think everything is made of.
Or the waters are literal; and it represents that the Bible was written by a pre-modern people with nothing more than their imagination to guide them. I think Plato would have been embarrassed to be caught anywhere near Genesis.
Re: Why aren't the oldest living people getting any older?
#49I have a riddle for you that I came up with few years ago: Given as little as you need to make this problem solvable and nontrivial calculate how often (on average) oldest human in the world dies.
Well, taking it as a riddle, once.
The very first human is the oldest human and they died once.
Re: Why aren't the oldest living people getting any older?
#50It's important to make a distinction medically between pushing as many as people as possible towards the high-age end of that curve on one hand and scaling the entire X axis on the other. The first one is what we're currently doing with modern medicine, and it boils down to debugging the most common causes of premature death. The second one is completely separate from this and way harder to tackle because it involves…
I'd say there's little value in trying to fix what's broken to the core. Research should focus on ways to extract one's consciousness from the body and place it in an artificially designed shell (a Ghost in the Shell, one might say).
I'd argue that the common view that our mind is somehow independent from our body is probably wrong, and a judeo-christian falsity. Our mind is a real-time, continuous creation of our brain AND our whole body. I don't think that a brain in a vat could be anything but either a vegetable or a psychopath; and that the "ghost in the shell" (or the mind dump neuromancer-style) is anything more than a pleasant, impossible fiction, similar with faster-than-light travel.