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

We will be able to live to 1,000

news.bbc.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 156 posts

Re: We will be able to live to 1,000

#81

Post by tansey »

mechanical_fish wrote: post #41
gte910h wrote: post #6

When I donate to research, I like to see what the "partial failure result" is. One of the neat thing about sens research is that if you happen to even get one or two of the parts of damage fixable or even moderated, then you have a much less inactive old age period, even if no actual longevity is gained. I find decrepit old age to be one of the biggest issues of our time (who cares if grandma is 80 if she can move li…

prolonging the useful life of the workforce is a big worry Not in my world. The world where we are at the tail end of the largest recession in two or three generations, with danger of double-dip; we have lots and lots of surplus productive capacity, productivity just keeps going up, and unemployment is between 10% and 25% in the US depending on how you count it.

Think about how much more efficient and productive an economy could be if the oldest members didn't have to retire due to old age?

More poignant to the current recession-- imagine how much better things would be now if people who lived through the great depression were still around (in large numbers) and running for office.

Re: We will be able to live to 1,000

#82

Post by ugh »

colonelxc wrote: post #72
ugh wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But people die! Wouldn’t you want to stop that if you could? I don’t know how you could consider death some sort of necessary evil. That seems like a pretty cynical and cruel view to me. Think of all the intelligent, experienced and capable people who die every day (or are slowly losing their intelligence due to aging). Wouldn’t it be great if Shakespeare were still alive? Newton? Darwin? Einstein? Crick? Death is wa…

His argument is that there would be overcrowding. Then, we potentially wouldn't be able to sustain the large population... then people would die from lack of food/water. This can probably be overcome with new technology, much like in Asimov's robot books (the "Cities"). Anyways, while death from old age is sad, I think premature death is worse. The 5 year old kid with leukemia, the car accidents, wars. There are tons…

It seems pretty logical to me to put some serious resources into fighting the leading cause of death (which is aging [1]).

I absolutely do agree with your last line. We shouldn’t just add years, we have to increase quality of life.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_causes_of_death_by_rate

Re: We will be able to live to 1,000

#83

Post by sketerpot »

rauljara wrote: post #18

When my intro to genetics teacher in college explained to us how aging in cells worked, he told us that one of his professors had explained to him that a "cure" for aging was about 10 years away. But that had been more than ten years earlier. My professor said that he had recently talked to that same professor again. The new ETA: about 10 years. This is one of those problems that seems easy to solve in principle, but…

And there's the beauty of Aubrey de Gray's plan: it's not about finding a Cure for Aging. It's about finding a number of techniques that will allow us to extend people's life-spans long enough to find out how to extend their life-spans more, which will give more time for research, and so on.

It's a much more realistic approach than "finding a way around aging," which is how the problem is usually miscast.

Re: We will be able to live to 1,000

#84

Post by s3graham »

MikeCapone wrote: post #70
s3graham wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "reason" for aging seems almost self-evident to me. The goal is to pass on [mutated] genetic information. Post-reproduction, you're simply a drag on local resources. Hypothetical populations that didn't age and die would have killed themselves off due to lack of food.

Anything that happens after reproduction is in an evolutionary blind spot. Aging is the result of evolutionary neglect , not design.

I disagree. If my parent stays around and eats all my food, I'm carrying bad genes that cause me to die pre-reproduction.

Re: We will be able to live to 1,000

#85

Post by jules »

MikeCapone wrote: post #34
jules wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before donating you should ask yourself whether Aubrey de Grey is a crackpot or not. I'm not sure myself. Can somebody shed some light on this?

He used to be a lot more controversial a few years ago (Technology Review even had a challenge, asking biogerontologists to debunk his claims, though none really did a convincing job). He's slowly but surely making his ideas more mainstream by tirelessly speaking, debating anyone who wants to, organising conferences and editing a respected peer reviewed journal (Rejuvenation Research, iirc). If you think you have a g…

What are the results of his research or related research? How much money does he think he'll need to meet his goal?

Re: We will be able to live to 1,000

#86

Post by mattiss »

Is there any practical ways to apply some of this research today? It seems like there must be something out there we can be doing right now to help ward off aging?

Also what is the most promising research being done?

Re: We will be able to live to 1,000

#87

Post by crystalis »

FlorinAndrei wrote: post #65
javanix wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt that we'll ever find a "reason" for aging. It's the result of an imperfectly optimized biological system - after all, humans are the result of one great big evolutionary algorithm. We've proven time and again that those run exponentially and are not perfectly accurate, especially in the presence of a dynamic environment.

If it's an imperfect mechanism, then look back at the huge chain linking you to the first living creature: adult body / sperm & egg / adult body / sperm & egg / adult body / ... How come that chain hasn't failed? Basically, you're just rephrasing the "aging through accumulation of errors" hypothesis. The problem is, errors should accumulate along the chain mentioned above, too. Yet they don't.

The chain gets to weed out errors by starting with cells that got through functionally unblemished courtesy functioning error correcting mechanisms. Each new cycle gets a fully functional error correction mechanism, and is fault tolerant to the theoretical point of repopulation from a small point of individuals.

An individual human body has error correcting mechanisms that do not benefit from being renewed every cycle- they deteriorate over time, Individuals suffer from problems larger systems don't - a few cancerous cells can poison the whole individual, but a few cancerous individuals are likely to die with few offspring, and their offspring are also more likely to die with few offspring. If an individual is left with only a few correctly functioning cells, they have no recourse for rebuilding themself.

Species get a constant influx of fresh water, as it were, and individuals have to make do with a set quantity.

Re: We will be able to live to 1,000

#88

Post by crystalis »

mikedmiked wrote: post #76
jules wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before donating you should ask yourself whether Aubrey de Grey is a crackpot or not. I'm not sure myself. Can somebody shed some light on this?

I've met him and he seems like a crackpot. Extremely nice, gentle and loveable; but a crackpot.

I've met mikedmiked and he seems like a crackpot. Extremely nice, gentle and loveable; but a crackpot.

Re: We will be able to live to 1,000

#89

Post by alan-crowe »

mechanical_fish wrote: post #56
jrockway wrote: post #39

Can I bet on the opposite side of this? I bet that nobody who is 60 now will live to 1000. Don't get me wrong, I would like to live to 1000... but I would be pretty surprised if my kids live past 150. I will be surprised if I live to 100. It's sad to think about, but our bodies wear out over time (cosmic rays and whatnot), and we don't have the technology to repair them efficiently yet. People still die from the flu!

A fun exercise for a high school class: Get some basic mortality tables off the Internet. Now, tell me -- to first order, of course -- all the causes of death we'd have to eliminate in order for, say, 25% of the population to live to be 1000. What I really want to know is what common everyday activities we'd all have to give up. I bet motorcycling and scooter-riding are right out, but what about, say, swimming? Horse…

It would be a good idea if safety laws, such as speed limits, where constructed around formula with life expectancy as one of the variables. Plug in 70 years and get out 30mph. Plug in 140 years and get out 25mph.

Since you are going to grow old and die anyway, spending too much time trying to avoid accidental death is self-defeating. Acknowledging this would provide a check on the tendency towards super-safety in public policy.

Re: We will be able to live to 1,000

#90

Post by logic »

jpablo wrote: post #10

There's a book by Asimov, Please Explain, that has a list of science questions. I remember the very last question is about "what point does getting old has?". He argues that without aging and dying, populations will stop getting better and will stagnate. It seemed very appropriate to link here, but I couldn't get a link. Other than a Spanish translation :-(.

A specific concern I've always had about this idea of indefinite lifespan is that of monoculture. How often have you heard a phrase along the lines of "this is a temporary problem; once the 'old guard' is no longer in charge, society can move forward on issue XYZ"? Make "XYZ" any major social issue we've had in the past thousand years; from fiefdoms to gay rights to democracy.

It's effectively the end of generational cultural change, which might be a good or bad thing, depending on which generation you most identify with.

Post reply on HN