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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

#521

Post by wizzwizz4 »

brabel wrote: post #509
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 conside…

Take the existing organism apart, fix all the problems, put the organism back together. No laws of physics prevent this, so by the totalitarian principle it's physically possible. Principles of engineering might make it impractical, and even if it is practical we might never discover how to do it, but it's possible.

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

#522

Post by ethersteeds »

A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #235
ethersteeds wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 characteriz…

You aren't wrong. I was replying to a flippant declaration "I don't see the point [in coming to grips with mortality]", which is quite different from your nuanced reply.

I tried to convey that I'm not saying "this is as good as it gets and it's wrong to try for longer life". Your "thoughtful and reasonable" approach was exactly what I had in mind.

What I say leads to suffering arises from denying that mortality is inevitable and tarring those who say otherwise as defeatists. Death is another part of life, as you acknowledged. It unnerves me to see denying that truth cast as a virtue.

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

#523

Post by fluidcruft »

brabel wrote: post #508
fluidcruft wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The point is that a fundamental assumption that "reproduction" does anything that can't be done by regeneration is just a hunch that so far isn't actually supported by anything in microbiology. The existence of reproduction is irrelevant to the question.

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

#524

Post by FireBeyond »

Levitz wrote: post #348
Earw0rm wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this! A few Pakistanis moving in down the road doesn't stop British people practicing British culture. The reason they don't can be summarised as laziness and ignorance. "The pub got turned into a mosque", maybe it did but it wasn't because the Moors invaded fgs. A successful pub gets to carry on being one - if it's not successful, maybe that's because people stopped using it.

>A successful pub gets to carry on being one - if it's not successful, maybe that's because people stopped using it. And pray tell, how does the influx of a muslim, non-alcohol-drinking population, influence this?

Are you seriously claiming with a straight face that there are too few pubs in England and that they are a threatened species?

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

#525

Post by FireBeyond »

garciasn wrote: post #391
abricot wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mentioning the president is a bit like saying the pope is old. They are both selected/elected old.

I don’t care at all about the pope; they’re meaningless entities. The President, however, especially when Congress is forced to toe their line, is. No president should be permitted to be more than 20 years older than the median age of the general population when they’re done leading the country. In this case, they shouldn’t be more than 58y old when their 8y term is up. This way, they and their progeny need to live w…

> There’s a reason there is forced retirement in some industries and government groups. Why the fuck we don’t enforce similar rules on the president I’ll never know.

Yep, I am not a big fan of our military policy, but I have a friend who recently retired as an Army LTC.

At his level there are standard procedures - at each rank you have a timeframe, and the rule is "promote or retire". Precisely to ensure you don't break the assembly line.

Even in software. "We don't hire mid level/junior/associate engineers, only senior/staff". No pipeline can hurt. Yeah, you can hire for all that, but there's value of having junior staff within, when you promote those staff level folks to EMs and Directors.

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

#526

Post by A_D_E_P_T »

estearum wrote: post #518
swat535 wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Suicide in an acceptable manner" sounds as like an oxymoron. Why would you care that it's "acceptable" by society which you will no longer take part of ? If your concern is pain, then perhaps that is your mind telling you NOT to end your life and seek therapy instead. Assisted suicide only makes sense in situations where the person is in extreme chronic pain and no palliative care or treatment can be provided, which…

> Assisted suicide only makes sense in situations where the person is in extreme chronic pain and no palliative care or treatment can be provided, which is rather rare. As medicine and technology advance, assisted suicide will make sense/be required in nearly 100% of natural human deaths. With enough money, we will be able to keep people "alive" (on paper) arbitrarily long. It will be nothing like what people think o…

If you're (a) unconscious, (b) hooked up to a bunch of machines, and (c) can't wake up or live without an operational hookup to those machines, then: When the doctors turn them off that is neither suicide nor murder. It will be then, as it largely is now, an informed decision made by medical staff and next of kin.

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

#527

Post by ACCount37 »

Intralexical wrote: post #503
ACCount37 wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Evolution doesn't care. It's a greedy optimizer that loves its local minima. If it happens to optimize for things like quality of life, it's incidental. Humans can do better than that.

I'm baffled by your desire to defend the status quo that involves you and everyone you love dying a long and miserable death before the age of 100. Even more so with the amount of "actual real diseases" that loop back around to aging.

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

#528

Post by krageon »

simianparrot wrote: post #156
nojs wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a catch-all dismissal that you could make about any medical innovation throughout history. There are a lot of things we can fix, and we’ve had a lot of success so far in doing so.

It’s not. We never fix anything in medicine: We treat and prevent. Removing the appendix prevents or treats acute appendicitis, but it also has a tradeoff in terms of removing a gut biome reservoir. This isn’t me dismissing the incredible improvements to our way of life modern medicine has brought. In essence it’s given everyone access to the same potential standard of living as was reserved for kings and nobility in…

What is your end goal with this opinion? Just getting everyone to stop looking, because "you can't"?

It's okay if you want to die, but I think I draw the line at demanding others want it too.

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

#529

Post by ImPostingOnHN »

inglor_cz wrote: post #512
ImPostingOnHN wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think that prophecies like this are fundamentally unsound and unscientific. Well, the study is literal science from a scientific institution, compared to an internet comment so... It wins here.

It does not. There is a lot of useless papers produced because of the "publish or perish" pressure, and even harder sciences have a massive reproduction crisis. Feynman diagnosed this sort of cosplay as "cargo-cult science" decades ago.

There are a greater number of useless internet posts produced within the same period, and the `useless/total` ratio is higher for internet posts than for scientific papers.

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

#530

Post by ecb_penguin »

bigDinosaur wrote: post #332
ecb_penguin wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

[flagged]

> This is perhaps the single worst form of argument I've ever seen.

It's because you didn't understand it

> 'how can a cancer cell live indefinitely but other cells cannot'

Cancer cells are damaged cells mutating without regard for function. It's pretty obvious that there is a difference between "living indefinitely in a mutated form devoid of original function" is different from a cell performing a specific function

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