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

501–510 of 535 posts

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

#501

Post by jart »

r_singh wrote: post #498
jart wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't trust doctors but you took the covid jab three times? I accept that I will never understand some people. If anything the covid jab is the reason we're not going to get longevity anytime soon. The medical establishment destroyed all the trust and hope people had in the future of biotechnology with that thing.

When you say you’ll “never understand some people,” it sounds less like a statement about me and more like a limitation you’ve accepted for yourself. From a psychological perspective, that reads as defensiveness — dismissing what feels uncomfortable rather than trying to process it. It might be worth asking yourself why you feel the need to provoke instead of engage.

Why would you offer impromptu psychoanalysis to a stranger on the Internet?

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

#502

Post by r_singh »

jart wrote: post #501
r_singh wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you say you’ll “never understand some people,” it sounds less like a statement about me and more like a limitation you’ve accepted for yourself. From a psychological perspective, that reads as defensiveness — dismissing what feels uncomfortable rather than trying to process it. It might be worth asking yourself why you feel the need to provoke instead of engage.

Why would you offer impromptu psychoanalysis to a stranger on the Internet?

Because if you zoom out enough you'll learn that we're all one... so I believe in doing what's right. Your comment deserved that response because it's doing exactly what I've described. Anyways, take care! Hope you get a hug from someone today :) (even that helps with strengthening the immune system because it stimulates your thymus gland which then releases the good hormones you need).

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

#503

Post by Intralexical »

ACCount37 wrote: post #495
Intralexical wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "law of biology" at play here is tradeoffs. Aging is not single disease, but an accumulation of error states and maladaptations which arise in a thermodynamically unstable system of high complexity, existing in an even more dynamic environment, likely due to the inescapable mathematics of chaotic systems. In the N-dimensional gradient from homeostasis to oblivion, N is high enough and the ground shakes often enou…

Tradeoffs aren't real. Your human brain expects them to be, but they aren't. Life isn't fair, and you can get all downsides with no upsides, or the other way around. There is no Authority on Biology that says "if you want good X, you'll have to take bad Y to keep things fair for everyone". It's just hard to get "good X, good Y, good Z" at once, and nature never really tried. That's up to us then. That little "cancer"…

> Tradeoffs aren't real. Your human brain expects them to be, but they aren't.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antagonistic_pleiotropy_hypoth...

So… You're just approaching this with, like, zero reference to actual science at all? "My mind imagines I can have eternal life, and therefore I can, and anybody pointing out flaws with my position is worthless miserable fluff"?

Look, I don't like the limits of thermodynamics more than anyone does. But I think it says a lot that there are, you know, actual real diseases that people suffer from and we can make a cost-effective amelioration of with focused effort. And instead you're here raging that we as a society aren't spending billions of dollars trying to make you immortal.

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

#504

Post by Intralexical »

rowanG077 wrote: post #480
Intralexical wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We know it’s possible for living things to be functionally near immortal. Not in any sense that's applicable to humans. The often-cited animal examples, like greenland sharks, tortoises, and lobsters, are slow-moving ectotherms with "cold" metabolisms. Adjusting for watts per unit mass of biochemistry, they might "live" less in all their centuries than you do in a single decade [0-3]. In that sense they're only "lo…

I don't think regeneration of bulk tissue is what people are generally talking about when they talk about immortality. Rather they talk about there being advanced homeostasis from yesterday, to today and to tomorrow under "normal" living condition. The point is not that you should be able to regenerate from blowing your brains out.

Yep. The point I'm making is that there is no precedent in nature for a complex animal maintaining homeostasis indefinitely like that (that doesn't rely on bulk regeneration). And given such immortality would presumably be highly evolutionarily advantageous, there is therefore no reason to believe it's possible at all, and many reasons to suspect it might not be (antagonistic pleiotropy, chaos theory, thermodynamics…).

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

#505

Post by Intralexical »

sherburt3 wrote: post #488
Intralexical wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't it be great if every figure we learned about in history class was still alive and kicking today? Wouldn't that just make everything so much better? "So long as men die, liberty shall never perish."

Have you heard of term limits?

You mean those words written on paper that get immediately torn up as soon as they become inconvenient for people in power?

Russia had term limits too. Once.

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

#506

Post by sdeframond »

ACCount37 wrote: post #484
sdeframond wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pharmaceutics are so valuable because they can be sold . A healthy lifestyle must be earned. It is a constant struggle against the fastfood industry. Soon you'll see Coca-cola or Nestlé [0] selling both very unhealthy quasi-addictive food and drinks to kids and magic pills that cure obesity. Sounds scalable enough ? [0] https://www.nestle.com/brands/healthcare-nutrition/medical-n...

Miss me with that "must be earned" bullshit. If you think that being healthy should be a reward for a lifestyle of virtue, that's your problem, not mine. I'd rather have an actual solution than a blanket "those people don't struggle hard enough", pointed at the majority of US population that's overweight.

Yes that's correct, we can't just expect people to lead that struggle alone.

How about some regulation in the F&B industry? Reducing screen time at school? Those can be done now and don't really cost much.

And then make our cities pedestrian and bicycle friendly. More difficult but definitely a win.

Or would you rather pour billions hoping for a magic pill that solves it all? This is not realistic.

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

#507

Post by rowanG077 »

Intralexical wrote: post #504
rowanG077 wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think regeneration of bulk tissue is what people are generally talking about when they talk about immortality. Rather they talk about there being advanced homeostasis from yesterday, to today and to tomorrow under "normal" living condition. The point is not that you should be able to regenerate from blowing your brains out.

Yep. The point I'm making is that there is no precedent in nature for a complex animal maintaining homeostasis indefinitely like that (that doesn't rely on bulk regeneration). And given such immortality would presumably be highly evolutionarily advantageous, there is therefore no reason to believe it's possible at all, and many reasons to suspect it might not be (antagonistic pleiotropy, chaos theory, thermodynamics……

Aren't some trees, some fungi, some sharks and some crabs basically exactly that? They are most certainly complex life. Sure you are right heir metabolic profile is very different.

But really the your argument is already shifting to "there is no life ver similar to humans that do it, so it must be impossible" which imo is a much larger stretch then assuming it's possible.

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

#508

Post by brabel »

fluidcruft wrote: post #360
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.

Reproduction doesn't create whole new cells from nothing (except in the ship of Thesius sense). It's existing cells getting reprogrammed to do new things. Reproduction does result in new matrix/scaffolding being built but the cells build that (and can rebuild it if so directed). Of course some things "we" care about exist exclusively in the matrix (configurations of neurons, learned behaviors, memories, etc) so that…

> Anyway my point is that "reproduction" doesn't create whole new life, it's just a continuation.

Then you're just arguing that we're already immortal, after all we reproduce, but I don't think that's what we're talking about when we talk about longevity. Longevity is the continued existence of a particular being, not its continuation through descendants.

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

#509

Post by brabel »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #327
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.

Reproduction is not physically special. If it is physically possible to create a new organism with a longer lifespan than its parent (which it is), then it is physically possible to extend the lifespan of an existing organism. This may be impractical , but we cannot prove that no organism can live ≈forever, because it's not a physical impossibility. (Assuming a source of power remains present: it looks like the unive…

> it is physically possible to extend the lifespan of an existing organism.

This is not at all guaranteed until we actually manage to do it. And that's exactly what we're discussing, you can't just say "but it must be possible". There's no rule of the universe that says it should, and given life has been around for 4 billion years and there's no single species (specially animals which is what we really should consider here if we're talking about human lifespan) that manages to live for more than a few hundred years, I think that's strong evidence that life is approaching a fundamental limit here. Someone else said "maybe that's enough" - well, why?? Maybe 100 years is already quite enough then??

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

#510

Post by brabel »

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.

> Because there's absolutely no reason to believe that's the case?

The fact we haven't seen an organism live forever is strong evidence that that's the case. You're the one making the case without any evidence!

Post reply on HN