This research and all similar research (and sentiments like yours, which I strongly agree with) remind me of the classic Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant.[0] It feels as though we are finally on the cusp of learning the shape of the armaments that will one day slay the dragon. And I wish the world could band together the way we attacked COVID to attack this problem.
>the king answered in a broken voice: “Yes, we did it, we killed the dragon today. But damn, why did we start so late? This could have been done five, maybe ten years ago! Millions of people wouldn’t have had to die.”
TLDR: a big dragon (represents aging) kills tens of thousands of people every day, until the people invest in technology to defeat it, and then vaguely wish they'd started the research sooner.
Come on. It's like more than half a century ago some economists predict because of the improvement of technology and the overall production, most people only need to work 4 hours per day.
aaand now we have a lot of people working 12 hours a day over the wire already. GDP is the millstone that when it's bigger it grinds more soul - because things are operated in scale as technology develops, individuals can only grab every opportunity they have, in order to participate in the economy, even when the opportunity is outstraight abusive.
There will be new jobs but new jobs are either rockstar economies like being social media celebrities, or bullshit jobs that people have to scratch their head and come up with overpriced bullshit products from nothing and marketing those as the best thing ever.
It's not unlikely we ended up working 16 hours a day pointlessly in the so-called metaverse half a century from now on.
And what for? If I retire, I want to enjoy it… the last thing I want is to go back to work
That would be worthwhile, right?
Yes, we as a society have historically made poor decisions about what to do with productivity and lifespan increases. Let’s work on making better choices _and_ enhance our lifespans.
It's just the stress on GDP which makes me feel alarmed - historically speaking, things like GDP are always excuses to convince people they're goals worth following before we improve things like inequality or the quality of life. Do people now generally feel happier than half a century ago since GDP has drastically increased? Or the mental health of a large fraction of us was deteriorating all along over the decades?
It almost feels lies like "let us focus on delivering the features first, we'll get back to the technical debt once we have time" in some organizations - there are always new features, and always room for development, other things are always overlooked or keep bare minimum.
Back to the specific topic of increasing lifespan. Inequality is a problem much harder to solve than the technology itself. If we don't solve it carefully, it's very likely to be more harmful than helpful to the world. The right to live and the right to reproduction are the two most sensitive things to creatures - fundamentally it's much more risky than inventing the Internet or plastic surgery.
I can't help but think what I saw in the hospital - people with cancer and with no money giveaway their painkiller to drug dealers in exchange for some dirty motel nearby. Meanwhile, I know there are old, important figures who live in the hospital and spend several years of the average person's income per day, taking up a large fraction of scarce medical resources, equipment, and wards, just because they're old (many of them have no serious problems, just in case) and "important".
Think about the ancient tyrant who spent a lot, searching for immortality elixir died from poisoning. He became a laughing stock because the elixir didn't work, but it wouldn't be so funny if the elixir works. Nowadays, rich people can already fight cancer much better than poor people. Just imagine, how it feels when you know the first 0.1% of powerful figures you know (name the first 3 at least), are going to live for the next 500 years, but not everybody else?
...but the bigger question would be - If this protein encoded a protein that identified cells which should always be eliminated in old age; why hasn't any mammal evolved to start destroying them?
It's more likely that there is some trade-off which we have not discovered yet.
Evolution doesn’t optimise for length of life, just propagation. A number of species have evolved to have very short life cycles because that enabled greater propagation. Presumably shorter lives generally confer greater adaptability as it increases the opportunity for evolutionary change
Chromosomes have a limited number of telomeres, each time the cell divides the telomeres become shorter. If your cell runs out of telomeres it can't divide anymore. This is one of the primary mechanisms the body balances repair against cancer risk. Current max of human life is about 120. If you don't "solve" the telomere problem you are not going to extend life past 120, though you may have more people live that long and may improve quality of life in later years.
Our species has a good balance that lets us live well past reproduction age, presumably because there is evolutionary pressure (benefit) to having elderly people around to pass on knowledge, help raise grandchildren, etc.
You can do things that extend the telomeres, but that makes cells more likely to reproduce out of control (cancer). This is a very hard "problem" to solve because cell final death is so important in preventing cancer. We are not even close to solving this, it would require revolutionary biological understanding.
Nanobots at some point may be able to essentially destroy bad/old cells, and maybe feed/nourish good cells we want to keep, and when cells can't divide anymore, could those be replaced with ones that could ?
I think back to the movie Bicentennial man, where he made completely real working human / robot interchangeable parts that basically allow for increased life and better health. Sure it's a movie, but we can 3d print organs and things, so it's not outside the realm of possibility...
In a sci-fi hypothetical where nanobytes can do arbitrary behaviors, sure, maybe they could intelligently do that. But that's an extremely complex thing.
My point to my original post is really that if anyone hears a "longer life" breakthru that doesn't even mention telomeres, I immediately move on. If they moved the needle on well-being of the elderly a bit, that's great. But nobody's "solving aging" without telomeres.
This seems like part of the puzzle. First repair the damage, then extend the time span, and the more you do this the more opportunities you have to find an optimal solution.
I think the only thing that will actually work is for entirely new bodies to be built and for our minds to be copied over.
It's not immortality but that is probably as close as we will get, and once we can do that then extending our current body's lifespan will be exponentially easier.
Clearly some tradeoffs are less relevant today than they were to a tribe of cavemen. Even if grandpa is in great shape, he will have a hard time hunting thay wooley mamoth, and having him around too long will be too many mouths to feed.
Also it's hypothetically possible to give everyone a ripped physique without gym memberships, downside of this would be increased protein consumption.
I think that evolution selects mostly for reproduction and not longevity. You don't have to live very long to have many kids (in like caveman / hunter-gatherer type of context as this is where evolution is basically), you just need to have great genetics. I guess sticking around for a few years after to protect the kids and provide for them is a bonus, but that part may be handled by the tribe too. But there's not much to be gained (from evolutionary point of view) from an individual living up to a 100 years or so.
This (the measuring, at least) is mostly a solved problem.
I disagree. I’m familiar with the world happiness report. I don’t think that would be an adequate measurement to replace GDP with.
There seems to be annunderlying assimption that GDP is a good meaurement?
In UK we had reduction of life expectancy, wages, trade and production of physical goods while GDP grew. The only sources of GDP growth seem to be never-ending rise of house prices and inequality.
For example being in nature brings you happiness. BUT this is only in well developed countries and among people with enough wealth to live comfortably.
Money does not make you happy but it gives you much more opportunity to be happy.
That’s actually not correct. By that argument the happiest country should be the United States as it has the largest GDP. However the United States ranks #19 on the World Happiness Report: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/happiest-...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-vs-happiness
Chart above clearly shows that mostly increase in GDP results in higher life satisfaction.
That chart clearly shows a handful of countries happier than the US with less GDP per capita…
I would be genuinely surprised if older people are happier than younger people.
Does it really? The derision of millenials seems never ending, along with 'kids these days' and 'back in my days'.
“Soya told the TV programme Getsuyou Kara Yofukashi (Sitting Up Late From Monday) that he had wanted to increase his presence on social media and believed people would prefer to see a "younger beautiful woman" rather than an old "uncle".”
Almost all advances of civilisation are created through unhappiness about something. Would a state of total happiness stop creativity?
What would that mean in practice?
Not to mention... funding.
There are a lot of things that could be tweaked, but at a gross level it’s pretty consistent. In fact the recent, seemingly politicized, accelerated approval of aducanumab certainty caused a lot of turmoil and appears to have been a mistake.
When I was gestating my mother’s colleagues apparently couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t take the miracle drug thalidomide (much less even aspirin). Lucky for me! In general I think the medical side of FDA works reasonably well.
Human experimentation is limited and carefully managed for very good reasons. Killing people to extend other people's lives is not a good tradeoff.
It is social, political and psychological major changes. Revolution may be. Good luck.
The whole idea behind the current pandemic is that people need to die, via vaccines, or the virus, or the media.
Soon we won't have a planet to live in. I am sure mother nature will find more subtle but beautiful way to eradicate us.
But, hopefully we leave this small planet and explore other planets in near future.
Missing /s?
Nature's remedies are more normally quite blunt and brutal.
Your way is depressing and dystopian AF.
Obviously it should only be used by the poor, so they have longer to find happiness. Someone has to blow the horn and push the wheelbarrows.
Why would that be your conclusion? It's 10 more years of life. It's not 10 more years of better life. It's a little more of the same.
That 10 years is "experienced" as only a short increase in local time. Whereas before 33% of your life would have been 28 years old, afterwards 33% of your life would be at 31 years old. So life events would happen a couple years sooner or later but you wouldn't feel the difference.
It's not like world hunger would end. In fact we would need more food, because more humans would be alive at any point, because people are dying later. The senior citizen voting block would increase, expanding the lobbying power of senior citizens, which has a disproportionate unfair effect on the young. Which will get interesting as time goes on seeing as the birth rate has been declining steadily.
It also means your retirement would not last long enough anymore, meaning you would either have to work longer or harder or save more in order to retire. Social security dates would also have to change, and paycheck contributions may even have to increase. But corporations won't want to increase wages (as they never want to) so your money won't go as far in retirement, and inflation would act on it over a longer time, reducing it further than before. And since it would be a voluntary vaccine, as we have seen from the COVID-19 insanity, just having a life-saving vaccine available is no guarantee people will take it. So there would be controversy over whether to extend social security, and some significant amount of the population is going to get screwed over.
Finally, as the wealthy will live even longer, more wealth will get tied up in private ownership for longer, extending the wealth gap. Copyright would also take even longer to expire as it's based on how long since the creator died. There's tons of other random ways that arbitrarily extending the life of a portion of the population will not immediately lead to the greatest good that could be done for humanity.
Call me crazy, but I think we could do much more good for humanity today than just making it take longer for them to die.
Yet another opportunity for boomers to fuck over their kids' generation by squeezing them out of the workforce again, and the lingering around longer than ever before, creating an unprecedented drain on social services that their children will have to pay for. Can't wait!
Sure, f*ck climate change, let's just live and suffer longer
- the GP haven't said "fuck climate change", you did. There is no contradiction there, we can try and solve more than one issue at once.
- climate change objectively speaking kills way less people than ageing and will continue to kill less for the foreseeable future. You grandma (or grand-grandma) wasn't killed by climate change, neither will you.
- I don't know about you, but my life is not full of suffering, climate change or not, and I would prefer it to be longer and healthier. If yours is, I suggest looking at reasons other than climate change.
- We have to retrain every generation of scientists and engineers before they can contribute to solutions for any problem, climate change included. Increasing the amount of output per trainee by half goes a VERY long way towards solving our issues including climate change.
So, you are fixating on "healthy" and "long" life and you are SO afraid of death that the idea of aging cure seems to be attractive. Delusion, greed, and aversion are classic poisons that are the root cause of all human suffering.
So less jobs for young people.
(b) In the future, there will be more humans than jobs anyways thanks to automation and this is a problem we are going to have to face one way or another. Social contract will change, and the economy will need to be refactored commensurately.
They're not "things" that exist in a limited supply.
You can think of them as relationships between people.
When population increases, no one worries that society will "run out" of friendships or marriages. Jobs work the same way.
They do exist in a limited supply. When a factory closes down and outsources all the jobs in a town, your job goes away.
When a robot starts doing your job, you are not needed anymore for that job. People in ivory towers expect that you should easily retrain and find new jobs that does not happen for the average joe.
When an immigrant is willing to do your job for less money or less safety, you dont get that job unless you are willing to compromise.
Now with all this you are going to have older people not retire then you are reducing the job pool for younger folks.
> Jobs work the same way.
In reality smart politicians can tap into the fear and frustration of average folks when good paying jobs run out and they promise they will bring back jobs, so voters vote for them.
I should have said "fixed number".
The US population is now twice as big as 1955. If the number of jobs had stayed fixed since then, unemployment would now be at least 50%.
This is clearly not true, which disproves the "fixed number of jobs" theory.
Not sure why you are disproving your own theory.
Perhaps you just missed the point I am trying to make.
A-Females are willing to marry B-Males, but B-Females are not willing to marry A-Males. This creates lots of abundance for B-Males and lots of scarcity for A-Makes.
As for jobs, in theory they can always be created a new. But in practice there are 1) very few people who can create jobs 2) external forces that might prevent new jobs from being created
My point is only that if the population increases, that percentage will stay the same. The number of marriages will increase proportionally.
> in practice there are 1) very few people who can create jobs 2) external forces that might prevent new jobs from being created
If that's true where do all the current jobs come from? How come almost everyone can get a job?
And they're going away anyway soon enough, as automation develops.
Seriously though, the majority of humans never see material upward mobility in their lifetimes, and a world without mandatory low-wage jobs per se isn't necessarily a world without upward mobility.
As humans are able to automate activities that span the creation of everything we find valuable, from resource collection to manufacture to transportation to design to art, that necessarily limits the economic efficiency of using humans for labor. The last 3 years have demonstrated that creative tasks are highly susceptible to automation, with most artistic automation approaching or exceeding human performance as proofs of concept. The next decades will see an ever decreasing landscape of activities where humans are more effective than software.
Jobs are endeavors defined around the exchange of money for labor. It does not make sense to pay more money for less effective labor - i.e. if I can pay $30k usd for a burger flipper robot, I won't have to pay for 2 full time burger flipper jobs. It makes no sense to hire people for labor that can be automated.
We're a long ways away from being able to automate everything, but the trend is clear. Jobs don't make sense under our current technological path. We either have to eliminate progress in that direction and artificially enforce a human preference job efficiency limit so as to maintain a "sufficient" number of jobs, or start exploring new economic models that let us transition to post-scarcity economics.
We are, however, going to see a time where anything humans can do, machines will do better. Using humans will be inefficient, and companies will be out competed if they don't automate. We can either prepare for that and try to make things fair, or assume new jobs will arise that will make meaningful enterprises available to people through innovation and novel opportunities that haven't yet been conceived. It seems clear to me that the latter is basically invention of make work, and we need to prepare for post scarcity.
We don't need agi. We have Moore's law and "good enough" algorithms to achieve human parity performance. We should figure out a better measure of the value of human time than jobs and employment.
Walter Reuther: Henry, how are you going to get them to buy your cars?
2. I believe all governments should create Warpspeed for this approach. At the depths of covid lockdowns, GDP was down 20%. Imagine the massive GDP creation from making every 65+ year old feel 40 again. They'd work, consume, and generally flourish. Even if it's only 10 more years of quality life, this is the greatest good that could be done for humanity. To avoid another 10 years of my parents death is something I'd do a lot for. Economically and ethically, we should prioritize this research above most else.
3. This approach is scientifically sound. Certain aspects of aging cures are approaching engineering levels of work rather than pure science. We simply know that many diseases are caused or amplified by senescent cells. And we have ample evidence that elimination of these cells reverses diseases in complex mammals, as long as you don't remove too many, too quickly. The rest, is the engineering problem of how to remove the right cells at the right cadence.
4. This is the kind of thing biohackers should hack on. Find an aging part of your skin, and attempt to convince your body to kill the senescent cells. If you succeed, you will have benefited humanity, become beautiful, become wealthy, and be remembered forever (is there any other fundamental need humans have, not covered)?
Let the race begin!