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Re:Age Reduction Breakthrough? by putlake on Monday May 11, 2020 @12:25PM (#23143831)
People who had this mutation could have died of causes other than aging.
Re:Age Reduction Breakthrough? by commandlinefan on Monday May 11, 2020 @12:32PM (#23143925)
My first thought too - maybe it's just wishful thinking, but the bible does talk about people who lived for thousands of years. We're prone to dismiss this as hyperbole from uneducated ancients, but maybe they actually did exist and this sort of thing was why.
Re:Age Reduction Breakthrough? by jjoonathan on Monday May 11, 2020 @12:39PM (#23144030)
"Someone slipped up the distinction between years and generations and a legend was born" still seems enormously more probable than anomalous longevity existing but somehow never making it into the wider gene pool.
Re:Age Reduction Breakthrough? by pbhjpbhj on Monday May 11, 2020 @03:25PM (#23145939)
Do you (they) mean "distinction between years and months"?

That would be between solar cycles and lunar cycles: seems enticing. That would make Methuselah 80yo when he reportedly died; but there are problems still as Seth (for example) became a father at 105, which if it were months would be 8¾ years.

Another possibility is that when it says Methuselah it just means "Methuselah's blood line" or "Methuselah the tribe"; it's a Hebraic thing (elsewhere in the OT) to refer to a tribe as if referring to the founding person.

Or, the person writing down the numbers used a different system, through error or otherwise.

Re:Age Reduction Breakthrough? by jjoonathan on Monday May 11, 2020 @05:24PM (#23147267)
Yeah, they would both account for being off by a factor of 10-20. As would any of a dozen other simple mistakes or embellishments, in all likelihood. IIRC the Skeptic's Annotated Bible has a bunch of direct numerical self-inconsistencies if one needs proof that this sort of slipup is possible, which one shouldn't, because of course it is.
Re:Age Reduction Breakthrough? by holtalanm on Monday May 11, 2020 @12:45PM (#23144127)
> the bible does talk about people who lived for thousands of years

I don't remember anyone mentioned living for _thousands_ of years. There are plenty of characters that live for hundreds, though. It is believed that Abraham lived to the age of 175, while I believe there was one character that lived into the 300's, but I do not recall their name. It has been a while since I delved into the old testament.

Re:Age Reduction Breakthrough? by lm28469 on Monday May 11, 2020 @12:49PM (#23144172)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methuselah

> Said to have died at the age of 969, he lived the longest of all figures mentioned in the Bible.

Re:Age Reduction Breakthrough? by twodave on Monday May 11, 2020 @01:03PM (#23144348)
Interestingly, Methuselah died the same year that the Flood happened, so you might assume he would have lived longer had his grandson not been instructed to build a party boat that he wasn't invited to...
Re:Age Reduction Breakthrough? by Unknown_Unknown on Tuesday May 12, 2020 @06:41AM (#23152562)
I believe in Islam Noah is believed to have lived 950 years. It took him a long time to build the arch.

The other story mentioned in the Quran is about a group of people and their dog who slept in a cave for 309 years and woke up afterwards. I believe they died shortly after. There is an actual chapter in the quran about this called the cave[1].

[1] https://www.clearquran.com/018.html

Re:Age Reduction Breakthrough? by Cactus2018 on Monday May 11, 2020 @01:31PM (#23144674)
Nota bene, lunar year vs solar year
Re:Age Reduction Breakthrough? by holtalanm on Monday May 11, 2020 @01:03PM (#23144346)
that name rings a bell now that I see it. thanks!

edit: Found it on the wikipedia page you linked. I was thinking about Enoch, Methuselah's father, who lived to be 365 years old according to the bible.

Re:Age Reduction Breakthrough? by SketchySeaBeast on Monday May 11, 2020 @12:32PM (#23143929)
On a long enough timeline, can't we assume that pretty much everyone is going to die of cancer?
Re:Age Reduction Breakthrough? by TheAdamAndChe on Monday May 11, 2020 @04:22PM (#23146557)
Elephants are massive, and have a very large number of cells compared to humans, yet their rates of cancer aren't higher than ours. Research indicates that it may be due to TP53, a cancer suppression gene that is repeated a ton in the elephant. I could see anti-aging therapy eventually being used in conjunction with gene therapy to strengthen our own tumor suppression capacity.
Re:Age Reduction Breakthrough? by James_Henry on Monday May 11, 2020 @05:59PM (#23147603)
The body, when it is healthy, generally kills cancerous cells on its own. This is, from what I understand why many cancers come with sickness/age, because your body doesn't react as robustly to broken cells as it did in health and youth. Something like "age reduction" could end up being a cure for many cancers, one could think.
Re:Age Reduction Breakthrough? by SketchySeaBeast on Tuesday May 12, 2020 @09:38AM (#23153828)
Given that there are cancer's that strike the young as well, I don't know if that would actually work out.
Re:Age Reduction Breakthrough? by bovermyer on Monday May 11, 2020 @12:37PM (#23144004)
People who are immune to aging are not necessarily immune to a cannonball impacting their face.
Re:Age Reduction Breakthrough? by Nevermark on Monday May 11, 2020 @02:54PM (#23145621)
If only we could subject enough people to cannonballs we might find one of the super humans I postulate exist.

But train wrecks would allow for significantly higher populations per experiment.

I must ponder this.

They call me Mr...