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Can Aging Be Cured?

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Re: Can Aging Be Cured?

#51

Post by Retra »

mkagenius wrote: post #50
Retra wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Evolution doesn't work like that. You don't consider newer generations 'better', you consider the survivors better. So you're assuming your conclusion and burying it in human moral terms, which evolution has no obligation to apply.

Newer generation is supposed to be better at least thats what genetic cross tries to do, pass on the better/survivor genes to next generation.

There is no 'better' in evolution, only 'survivor.' And if you cured aging, you would survive better. End of story.

Re: Can Aging Be Cured?

#52

Post by flohofwoe »

ffn wrote: post #27

If we can finally cure aging, then, at long last, we will finally be able feasibly tackle inter-galatic travel and planet-level terraforming.

I doubt that life-span would make much of a difference, and I would even suspect that overall, development would slow down with a longer life span even without aging of body and brain, as the 'caste of the old and powerful' will defend their old ways and suppress new radical ideas coming from the young, which will be in an even bigger minority then today. Just imagine what the world would look like if Stalin would still be alive, or if the government of East Germany wouldn't have entirely consisted of senile old fogeys, the iron curtain would very likely still be up.

Re: Can Aging Be Cured?

#53

Post by erikpukinskis »

Old_Thrashbarg wrote: post #18
stcredzero wrote: post #15

In a way, we've already "cured" aging. On average, we live a lot longer than many of our ancestors. We can check many diseases and conditions that would normally kill elderly people. The problem is like cancer, in that it's not one thing, but a multitude of things. (And cancer itself is among that multitude!) Not many people, outside of healthcare workers and AIDS patients know of cytomegalovirus, but most of the pop…

Thermodynamics doesn't say that "everything is bound to break down, and that we won't be able to predict all of the ways it can happen". I guess you're referring to the second law of thermodynamics. It says that the entropy of the universe tends to increase. This is predictable and the lack of "negentropy" won't be an issue for a long time. The heat death of the universe is supposed to be on the order 10^100 years fr…

I suspect they were referring to the ways our body is part of numerous pseudo-closed local systems, and in each of those systems entropy will tend to increase. It's true that we are also open systems in meaningful ways and can be farmers of enthalpy inside our bodies. To some extent that's exactly what life is--enthalpy farming equipment. But farming is tricky and requires constant energy inputs. And it does seem like fighting the entropy of those pseudo-closed (ie can be opened with effort) systems is a difficult if not losing battle.

Re: Can Aging Be Cured?

#54

Post by stcredzero »

Old_Thrashbarg wrote: post #18
stcredzero wrote: post #15

In a way, we've already "cured" aging. On average, we live a lot longer than many of our ancestors. We can check many diseases and conditions that would normally kill elderly people. The problem is like cancer, in that it's not one thing, but a multitude of things. (And cancer itself is among that multitude!) Not many people, outside of healthcare workers and AIDS patients know of cytomegalovirus, but most of the pop…

Thermodynamics doesn't say that "everything is bound to break down, and that we won't be able to predict all of the ways it can happen". I guess you're referring to the second law of thermodynamics. It says that the entropy of the universe tends to increase. This is predictable and the lack of "negentropy" won't be an issue for a long time. The heat death of the universe is supposed to be on the order 10^100 years fr…

Thermodynamics doesn't say that "everything is bound to break down,

It's pretty close to that.

and that we won't be able to predict all of the ways it can happen".

So either you don't understand how to generalize the Halting Problem, or you didn't get the reference.

I guess you're referring to the second law of thermodynamics. It says that the entropy of the universe tends to increase.

Exactly. There are far more states of a given machine that are broken than there are states of a given machine that "work."

EDIT: Also, to expand on what erikpukinskis says in the cousin comment, you can enthalpy farm to fix what's wrong in any given body. The problem is knowing what to fix. The body is so vastly complex, it's going to be very hard to guarantee we always know what to fix ahead of time for everybody. (Halting Problem) Hence, some small fraction of any population is always going to be dying from unforeseen failure modes, unless some philosophically interesting tinkering takes place. (In any case, it's inevitable that all Homo sapiens will be gone, eventually.)

Re: Can Aging Be Cured?

#55

Post by stcredzero »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #42
stcredzero wrote: post #15

In a way, we've already "cured" aging. On average, we live a lot longer than many of our ancestors. We can check many diseases and conditions that would normally kill elderly people. The problem is like cancer, in that it's not one thing, but a multitude of things. (And cancer itself is among that multitude!) Not many people, outside of healthcare workers and AIDS patients know of cytomegalovirus, but most of the pop…

> I suspect that "curing" aging will consist of extending the average lifespan a decade at a time, as we cure dozens of different conditions. Something as complex as a human body is always going to have some unforeseeable epiphenomenal mode of failure, given enough time. There's a very foreseeable failure mode that this approach doesn't address at all. Who'd win in a fight: a 150-pound 25-year-old guy or a 170-pound…

If you think the answer is "the 25-year-old", you've noticed a problem with aging that slowly extending lifespans doesn't solve. It's not just about whether you're alive or dead.

Apparently you are not familiar with the SENS arguments for how an immortal human would have the apparent age of ~35.

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