This is a known predatory junk journal.

https://predatoryjournals.com/journals/

Please stop spreading these scam journals.

From the about page of the linked site:

> Journals that publish work without proper peer review and which charge scholars sometimes huge fees to submit should not be allowed to share space with legitimate journals and publishers, whether open access or not. These journals and publishers cheapen intellectual work by misleading scholars, preying particularly early career researchers trying to gain an edge. The credibility of scholars duped into publishing in these journals can be seriously damaged by doing so. It is important that as a scholarly community we help to protect each other from being taken advantage of in this way.

Seems to me that there should be a browser extension or something to bring things like this to a person's attention. Maybe a uBlock Origin list?

You can use my keyword highlighter, at least for the invented words (needs modifications for multiple-worded names though):

https://openuserjs.org/scripts/danuker/Keyword_Highlighter/

I second the idea of a browser extension for bad brands/journals/websites in general, maybe something like this posted earlier could be expanded [0].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29577148

I wish the site explained _why_ this particular journal was predatory. Right now it seems to easy to convince the site to add $rival_journal to the junk journal list.

It's based on Beall's list, which was mainly populated ad hoc with little to no overview of his reasoning. While Beall did a lot to put the spotlight on predatory journals, in practise he often included journals just for being of low quality.

I have a hard time seeing what should be predatory about Oncoscience. They don't take fees for publishing, they have named editors, and explicit policies about plagiarism, peer review, etc.. Their peer review process might be loose, but it doesn't seem like they publish straight nonsense papers only published to pad numbers.

I personally think its a journal of very low quality, but that doesn't make itpredatory.

Which journal are you referring to? I tried to search different variations of the website name on the list and couldn't find it.

Oncoscience. The NIH's PubMed (a search engine) is just showing you the article which was published in the junk journal Oncoscience.

That explains it. I was surprised that an nih.gov site would be a predatory journal. I guess they need to filter better what they include in their search.

We should make it a policy on HN to link to the original journal article instead of the PubMed copy.

But only if it is readable without payment, of course.

"Oncoscience" I guess

Pardon my skepticism but this reads like a fairy tale where the author was promised a lot of money to conduct a study that does not need sources because all their strange conclusions are on the abstract and therefore are the hypothesis (and conveniently does not require sources).

Amazing, you found the fountain of youth and you just need 1 million dollars to conduct the experiment and it will take <insert my average maximum lifespan here> years? Sign me up, I'm sure it will never run late after all my life depends on it!

> Leading demographers claim that human lifespan is fixed at a natural limit around 122 years. However, there is no fixed limit in animals.

Not only do the (unknown) experts are all certain of something that requires proof, they also write it in invisible ink! Damn!

> In animals, anti-aging interventions (dietary restrictions, rapamycin, genetic manipulations) postpone age-related diseases and thus automatically extend maximum lifespan.

So you are saying that animals anti-aging interventions are:

- Dietary restrictions - Rapamycin* - Genetic manipulations

> In humans, anti-aging interventions have not been yet implemented

What an innovative idea! Have you ever heard of this thing called Rapamycin*? it is already approved for use in human patients since 2010: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/bies.2009001...

Sorry, this article and this "implicit" conclusion that we can live forever are what people laugh as crazy conspiracy theorists and some of them are flat earthers so they sure as fuck know what they are talking about. Proof first, speech later.

\rant

Not to sound too irrationally angry but this is as foundationless as a floating city.

I think you make some good points, but I also think it's useful that this article was published. It's important to get the idea out there that human lifespan can be extended, so more funding can be directed to that.

But it's already known and is being actively researched? E.g. low-calorie, high-nutrient diet has been demonstrated to improve life span in several species including (non-human) primates, and that was all done already before 2000. Today's almost 2022.

But ideas in junk journals don’t ‘help’ that idea, and it isn’t a novel idea in the first place, there are literally senescence institutes studying this problem

A future where we are approaching 75% of Americans being obese suffering from related health ailments and where the ultra-wealthy are living for millennia. Seems more reasonable every day.

That's like saying that it's useful for alchemists to publish articles so that more funding can be directed to transmuting lead into gold. This is just pseudoscience woo.

> It's important to get the idea out there that human lifespan can be extended, so more funding can be directed to that.

The jump from "could" to "should" seems questionable at best. What's so great about the rich elite living to be 200 years old? Would you like a bunch of people from the 19th century still around, influencing politicians with their money today? It would slow down the rate of social progress. It would also increase wealth inequality, since money hoarded by one generation tends to be squandered by the subsequent. There's also an argument to be made that science advances one funeral at a time; keeping people around loong after their expiration date would likely slow down the rate of scientific progress as well.

Sounds like we should aim to reduce lifespan, then?

Or just leave it the fuck alone?

No, what you’ve listed are all reasons for shorter lifespans.

There are other reasons for longer lifespans, but you’re implicitly saying all of them combined are not enough to counter the reasons you give.

Now, I’m not certain either way about the broader social impacts — I personally very much want to live longer, and yet I am also aware that my personal interests are not always aligned with group interests, e.g. tragedy of commons, Nash equilibrium, prisoners’ dilemma — but it is extremely unlikely that any negative consequences are perfectly balanced to positives either personally or collectively, so I am absolutely certain that the one thing we should not do is leave lifespan as is.

If you want to take my arguments as extolling murder, that's on you buddy. I'm arguing for nonintervention, based on the precautionary principle. This technology has substantial potential for social harm and should not be pursued until all of those concerns are addressed.

> I'm arguing for nonintervention, based on the precautionary principle.

That’s fine, but not what you wrote before.

> This technology has substantial potential for social harm

Yup, like everything.

> and should not be pursued until all of those concerns are addressed.

Nope.

Because death itself has direct harm — indeed, it is widely regarded as the either the worst or among the worst things one person can do to another — the burden of proof is on those who say it would be bad to delay death as much as possible.

I mean, we already delay death as much as possible with all kinds of medical interventions.

> What's so great about the rich elite living to be 200 years old? Would you like a bunch of people from the 19th century still around, influencing politicians with their money today?

You just described "Vampire: The Masquerade"

Which animals? Octopus have a glitch where their digestive tract shuts upon reaching sexual maturity, so they starve to death yet keep passing that gene on, just a few years into their lifespan. F for Failure (At least we dont have to compete on this planet with older smarter octopi)

Are you sure it's a glitch?

Humans are useful to one another past childbearing age because we're social animals: caring for grandchildren helps them survive. Octopods, otoh, are notoriously solitary animals. Once they're done reproducing, surviving adults would mainly be in competition with the young.

All natural selection is a glitch and pure happenstance with no meaning, only retroactively applied to have a purpose.

Octopus may well have genes to make them more social as they get older, but at 3 years old it hasn't developed.

>Not to sound too irrationally angry but this is as foundationless as a floating city.

Laputa was a wonder of the world!

While we're on the subject, floating cloud cities are a potential method of colonizing Venus (the dense atmosphere means buoyancy is more powerful). Brings a new meaning to "on the cloud".

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

Just showed this to our kids, then they drew robots the next day on their own accord. Was beautiful to see!

"I plan to live forever, of course, but barring that I'd settle for a couple thousand years.

Even five hundred would be pretty nice.

--CEO Nwabudike Morgan, Morganlink 3D-Vision Interview "

I heard, years ago, that even if we ended death from aging then our life expectancy would be about 1000 yrs, that is we'd never die from old age, but instead everyone would eventually die from trauma like getting hit by a bus.

The source of this potentially was aubrey de grey talking on the matter, perhaps in a youtube video? I'm sorry i cannot provide a better source.

Mortality per year for 20-25 year old men is 1 in 2650 and for women it is 1 in 4000 in Switzerland.

The mortality would be lower if you add life experience and some risk aversion to it. An average life expectancy of a few ten thousand years doesn't seem unreasonable.

I think if I was amortal I'd make sure to live a lifestyle apart from buses, cars, and airplanes. At least until I was getting brain backups, augmented body parts to reduce my risk to trauma, etc.

Do you currently live in a way that avoids buses, cars, and airplanes? If not, why not?

Mostly, yes. I think it would be even more valuable to do so if I was putting a longer span at risk every time I got in a car or plane.

Because time is precious and the time saving risk is worth it.

This is an interesting outcome of not aging. As time becomes less dire, we can remove it (or decrease it's coefficient) as a variable in choices. Interestingly as we start to do thing more slowly our effective live span shrinks when counted in events rather than seconds. To illustrate the idea, consider if the travel portion of vacationing took 5 years, in a 1000 yr life you'd have at max 200 vacations. Someone who lives to 80 today and takes 2 vacations per year already has most of that number of "events" per life span. In part this is why adding "healthspan" is more important than lifespan.

Because the risk from them is far smaller than the opportunity cost of losing precious hours of your very finite lifespan moving in a slower but safer manner.

Cars definitely. Busses probably. But airplanes are ludicrously safe. Between 2000 and 2010 there was 1 fatality per 5 billion miles. To put that another way you could fly continuously for 1000 years before you would be expected to die.

There are lots of ways to die away from any sort of traffic, though. Lots of accidents happen at home.

It would probably be (even) more important to invest in safety everywhere.

Traveling by bus or scheduled commercial airliner is usually safer than walking. In many years, US airlines have literally zero deaths from crashes.

Hmm, I've heard that only under 40 is trauma/suicide the leading cause of death. After that, it's cancer and all sorts of other diseases, or like undiagnosed heart conditions.

If we get human head transplants working, we can use regenerative cloning to create new bodies. It'll be the cure to aging, cancer, everything.

If not clones of the patient, we could use monoclonal bodies with O- blood and HLA neutrality to negate the need for immunosuppressants.

New thymuses and pulmonary systems regenerate immune and endothelial health of the brain.

We're close, we just need a conceptual jump. It sounds icky, but not in practicality.

Tangentially, we could use artificial chimeric pig uteruses to artificially give birth. It'd relieve the burden of bearing children.

Love the underlying assumption that somehow the head is "you" and the body is the replaceable part.

Can't say I accept that assumption as true, but it is nice to see it laid out so explicitly.

Just have a robot body and then simply live in VR.

Brains also decay and malfunction with age.

I mean, it seems like the issues created by overcrowding of the Earth would be a pretty quick problem

culture and maybe even progress may stop developing if the generations change stops going

I'm sorry to say but you cannot provably claim this as there's never been a control group. There are disconnected people groups which do not live very long and their cultures are stagnant. And I'd suggest that the most recent century has seen the most development concurrent with massive growth in lifespan...

“On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.”

― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

.. from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, for those unaware.

In the game he was born in 2005, and the game has a mandatory "retirement age" of 2600 at the lower difficulty settings and 2500 at the higher difficulties, so I'm guessing "Even five hundred" was not picked at random.

I think it would help if Nwabudike lived in a massive ice palace so that their only interaction with the universe was the occasional neutrino and OMG particle instead of the dna scrambling cosmic rays that we all deal with.

Age-related diseases and dying from old age is the tip of the iceberg. A much more important part is how the behavior/personality changes with age. We start out foolish and energetic, trying things out, making mistakes and creating new neural connections at the peak rate. Towards the 30s, we slow down, rely more on experience, most of newly learned things are recombinations and abstractions on top of the things learned earlier. Once we approach the end of the life, we become much more risk-averse, hesitant to wander off known paths, and grasping fundamentally new concepts becomes nearly impossible. Remember making fun of all those pensioners still using dial-up?

It is likely related to the limited capacity of the human brain and I doubt it could be easily worked around. Generational change and the limitless supply of the generation Z, willing to break things and learn from their mistakes, is what propelled humanity out of the caves and made civilization possible. I don't think killing it off in the name of abstract longevity would be a wise idea...

> It is likely related to the limited capacity of the human brain

I really doubt this. It is likely limited to, "why change when what I did got me here so far".

That and the belief that they'll die sooner than later anyway so why bother. Once you took away the idea that people will die and remain healthy in all ways - I think you'll see folks be much more open to adopting change at later stages in life. I see this with many people I know who are in their 60s. They're like, "Eh, it's too late. Gonna die sooner than later anyway." It's only the ones who think they're gonna live at least another 10 years (and realize how long that is) actually are open to changing.

Getting older definitely changes the calculus on what kinds of investments are worth while.

For example, if I'm 10 years old, and invest 10 years into learning the guitar, it will pay off for the next 50 years. For a 60 year old, investing all those hours into the guitar offers comparatively little payback, even if the 60 yo learns at the same rate as the 10 yo.

I think, it's more gradual. The older you are, the more effort it takes to learn new things. Most people eventually get frustrated and give up. A few that don't, show much better results compared to their peers. But I doubt they could outcompete an equally determined youngster.

One notable example would be moving to a country with a different language. School-age kids become native speakers in terms of years with little effort, while doing it in your 60s requires tremendous effort to get the most basic communication going.

> The older you are, the more effort it takes to learn new things.

My experience has been the opposite. Learning is also a skill, and at this point I am extremely accomplished at it.

> School-age kids become native speakers in terms of years with little effort

Often repeated, but doubtful. School-age children burn through incredible amounts of energy per body mass. There is almost nothing they do which is "little effort".

Probably originated because children (and adults) learn best through play, which is biologically how animals are designed to learn. But somehow "play" doesn't count as "effort"

School kids are forced to become bilingual. Every single interaction they have during the day must be in another language. The 60s year old something has most of the time limited interaction during the day with the other language. That's the main reason. A simple example, in my area we have multiple "international school" teaching only in english. I can tell you that most of the kids are far to be called bilingual in French. The other day I was in front of a group of them trying to see who would be able to order in French at the Starbuck. And this is not because they don't have French lessons, they have plenty. One of my friend is born and raised in Switzerland but only attended english schools and lived in an english speaking family, his level of French is far far from being bilingual.

> why change when what I did got me here so far

Not that much. Brain is a rolling learning machine. When you are young (less than 15), your brain can grab and store a lot of information and instinctively understand complex concepts without even thinking about it. Those information will become the foundation of the rest of your life. Of course you will learn new things, but those things can be learns easily depending on those foundations. When you reach the second part of your life, new things get harder to learn. You can learn few specific things if you spend time on it (often this learn is comparison-based, you compare with what you already know instead on instinctively understanding the core concept, this is a big difference between very young and adult peoples), but not the hundreds on new things coming around.

I think the humble behavior is to actually consider new things are hard to understand and you can't learn everything, so you have to choose the new things to learn wisely.

I would contend that human behavior is primarily driven by incentives

If people dont have to “act older” which includes relying on experiencs and having those experiences to begin with, they wont at the same distribution

We already see this in play generationally and cities where there are options

I'm indeed a strong believer that if we could live forever, the suicide rate would be high, very high.

There is only so much a human mind can get through. Think of all the bad things that can happen to someone in their lives, mental scaring is real. At some point, something is going to snap.

Only vein people would actually keep going forever. Most normal people would give in at some point having had enough.

That said, extending life to 200-300 years would be good. I just think that forever would make everyone bat shit crazy and murdering each other or having suicide parties.

> Think of all the bad things that can happen to someone in their lives, mental scaring is real. At some point, something is going to snap.

I think it would be the other way around - at some point you would kill yourself out of boredom.

As someone put it: when you are a child, you regularly live the worst day of your life. The first time you drop your ice-cream it is quite likely your worst day so far. The 30th time? Not so much.

By the time you lose your 5000th friend, you are probably not as shocked as the first time.

Good point, that's the other way to see it. But think of people that have been through war, rape and famine?

You are right a vast majority of people would become completely apathetic to anything happening around them, similar to how we feel about things happening on other continent sometimes.

I'll make a note you and I discuss this in 800 years and see who's right?

Our bodies regenerate every cell about every 7 years, so those memories would likely seem like other people’s problems at some point.

If we could eliminate death by senescence, accident and deliberate external violence, suicide is just about the only thing left and so on a long enough time scale would automatically be 100%.

I don't think living forever would make everyone bat shit crazy. You will still live your life day by day, year by year and decade by decade. Your daily life won't be that different and humans usually don't contemplate and derive meaning from their own mortality that much.

I think it would make humans happier. Happiness and life satisfaction increases with age. Add better health to that and I don't see how this could be that bad.

Currently mortality per year for 20-25 year olds is around 1 in 2'650 for men and 1 in 4'000 for women. I would expect that the risk of death is lower for someone with the health of a 20-25 year old and the experience of a 100 year old.

I'm not sure this would happen, but I can imagine that the focus on accident and suicide prevention would be higher, so Ten of Thousands of years of average life expectancy don't seem unreasonable.

This is the topic of The Makropulos Affair by Karel Čapek and the related opera by Leoš Janáček:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Makropulos_Affair

>That said, extending life to 200-300 years would be good. I just think that forever would make everyone bat shit crazy and murdering each other or having suicide parties.

The invitations for those would be sick: "A party to die for."

RSVP by the year 2600.

I don't think that vein people could go on forever, quite on the contrary. I think those that keep a young spirit i.e. keep curious and engaged could endure longest.

but I think we as a species are not designed to go on forever and I doubt any sentient being would be or rather the perspective would be so different it would be difficult for us to grasp.

In fiction this is a recurring topic- just see the Elb or Eldar in "Lord of the Rings"...

the die and fade from the world as they have seen everything and do not continue to have children (how many children can you see dying before going insane?)

No, I don't think so. Human behavior is influenced by the supposedly finite lifespan a lot. I'm in my late 20s now. Many of the people around me are, as I would say, "in a hurry to live their lives". They now plan decades ahead, they set deadlines for getting married, having kids and such, they stop traveling, they willingly sacrifice themselves, and explain it all like "it'll be too late if not now". They act their age. This pressure from impending death of old age is absolutely real and it shapes the society in extremely significant ways.

That said, I hope to live forever and refuse to "act my age".

> refuse to "act my age".

If you plan on having biological kids, that is not so easy. The risk of a pregnancy complications past 30yo rises a lot. Planing the life around a timeframe where you get both financial stability and the youthful body to carry a child is extremely important, specially for woman.

> If you plan on having biological kids

I do not, having a child is kind of a worst nightmare for me. And I'm male.

Oh and by the way. Many, many people consider kids a form of immortality. The "someone to leave in this world after I'm gone". The whole idea of "leaving something behind after yourself" is so crazy to me, and spending your best years (again, pay attention to how much aging influences everything including language) on raising a child to leave behind is just... So, yes, decisions whether to have kids at all are also not insubstantially driven by the impending death.

The idea of worrying about individual consciousness and memories is so crazy to me. What matters is preserving our genes and culture. I have children so I am effectively immortal.

So, exactly the opposite from me. Genes especially don't matter at all in an age when we have technologies like CRISPR to perform arbitrary edits on them. Different cultures come and go all the time throughout humanity's history. My own consciousness and personality though? As far as I'm concerned, to me, that's literally the most valuable thing in this universe.

CRISPR applications are very limited so far. It's not a magic technology, and it certainly isn't useful for extending average lifespans.

It isn't useful for life extension for sure, but it does make any individual genome much less sacred.

And then we have technologies to synthesize arbitrary sequences of DNA. They can't create anything as long as an entire chromosome worth of DNA, but there's no reason why they won't be able to sometime in the future.

Sample size of 1: my gramps is 105 and yes he follows many of the same routines you mention but he shows curiosity in the web work I do and asks better questions than my boomer parents and aunts.

So I think it may be more outlook and aptitude than purely age.

My gramps didn't get that far. Passed away when he was 92. However. He'd always bug me (not that I was actually bugged) with questions about how computers and the internet work.

The guy also built a radio receiver as a teenager purely from getting a grasp on the underlying physics from school physics books. According to him the hardest part was actually getting his hands on a suitable oscillator. Eventually he got into a little bit of trouble with that, as he was 'receiving radio broadcasts without a license'.

So, yeah, a legend and an inspiration. I miss him.

Make it a sample size of 2 then.

I discovered I could make a radio receiver by simply attaching a long wire to the phono input on the record player.

I discovered that the cable to a boom mic seemed to be picking up a radio station mid-production when I used to do AudioVisual stuff when I was in school.

Muted it so fast I almost broke the slider.

Easily explained through hormones

We can always improve our brains

> Leading demographers claim that human lifespan is fixed at a natural limit around 122 years.

According to 2019 book "Lifespan: Why We Age And Why We Don't Have To"[1][2] by David A. Sinclair, the science does not know anyone who lived until 120.

Scientists studied centenarians (people who lived to be 100 years old) and supercentenarians (110) from around the world to see what made them tick longer. To my knowledge, there is no *centenarian word for 120 years old person yet.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifespan:_Why_We_Age_%E2%80%93...

[2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43723901-lifespan

> CONFLICTS OF INTEREST The author has no conflicts of interest to declare

Right, who wants to live forever?

There are so many conversations about living longer and they lead in so many different directions:

- How does the world move on from bad influences

- At what point is it ok to choose when we can die

- Will over-population become a serious issue

- How do we support a larger aged population?

- Do we expect to also extend "working years" ... and then why?

- Does extending life cheapen our perception of it?

... etc

The amount of time we have on this planet is a huge unknown to most of us. When any of us learn about a shorter finite time (eg: medical diagnoses), it often inspires us to make drastic changes, sometimes for the better. By finding ways of blanket-extending our life spans, we necessarily change societal expectations. Hopefully this doesn't become yet another area where we have a widening wealth-gap.

> - Will over-population become a serious issue

Over population is a function of choosing to have children. I still think people who have children are not being properly held accountable for the outcomes of their choices -- look at how over populated countries are now the most polluting (even with low per capital pollution). Somehow responsible countries are held to task for their per capita pollution, but not credited with not having created massive amounts of people?

> Over population is a function of choosing to have children.

It's also a function of how long we live.

It's also a function of how long we wait to have those children.

If we start having kids at 15 and we live until 25, we have ~2 generations hanging around. If we start having kids at 25 and live to 90, we often have 3-4 generations hanging around. There is a lot of good info from searching "How does life expectancy affect population growth?"

The fertility rate of some stage 4 countries is so low that the countries are in need of more babies. There is plenty of data on this but my favorite anecdotally is "Do it for Denmark"

> - How does the world move on from bad influences

This is probably the most difficult to answer as reckless youth is often a driving force of change. Aging has negative impact on our mental capabilities, so it seems reasonable to expect the average person to change their mind if they stay young.

> At what point is it ok to choose when we can die

It should be ok right now. In fact it is ok in my country.

> - Will over-population become a serious issue

Maybe, but there is no reason why a bigger population can't use less resources. Longer lifespan might incentivize more sustainable politics

> - How do we support a larger aged population?

If you stop aging, then you increase the population of people who have bodies of healthy 20-30 year olds, not the population with bodies of 70 year olds. This frees up enormous resources that go in elderly care or treating age related disease.

> - Do we expect to also extend "working years" ... and then why?

Probably, but right now, nearly halve of our lifespan is "unproductive". 20-30 hour weeks with 6-12 weeks off per year forever seems better than 25 years getting an education, working 40 hours per week for 40 years with 5 weeks of vacation, followed by 20 years of retirement.

> - Does extending life cheapen our perception of it?

Why would it? If you die when you are 30 you lose around 50 years. Without aging, you would lose so much more.

> > - Does extending life cheapen our perception of it?

> Why would it? If you die when you are 30 you lose around 50 years. Without aging, you would lose so much more.

Precisely because you have so much time, it doesn't seem as valuable. eg: why not waste a few more years working in a job you don't like so you can make a few more bucks that will likely come in handy in later years. The more years you need to plan for, the more likely you are to trade time for money while you still can.

OTOH, if you know you are probably not living past 30, you will live quite differently. Why invest in a 401k or learn about IRAs in this case? Also, most people won't want to spend 16 years in school for 8-10 years of productivity and 0-2 years of retirement. Work-life balance probably looks very different in this case.

Politics will have to change with our increased age lifespan as well...

The world, the technology and the social constructs within it are changing faster and faster every year. Arguably we're already seeing issues with large aging parts of society trying to make decisions on New technologies and trying to maintain what they know (arguably climate change is a problem created several generations ago and not being acted on appropriately by those same generations).

It makes my toes curl trying to mentally find fair and equitable ways to answer these issues. I suspect the anti aging technology will progress faster than our ability to react to it, much like climate change...

On the other hand, maybe we'll get to perform more long-term thinking. Long-term issues like climate change might get easier to tackle.

Uh huh.

I would like to have 3 questions answered:

1. How can the telomere shortening be reversed in an adult without inducing abberant cell growth?

2. How do we stop stem cell populations from reaching senescence?

3. How do we deal with the fact that continued mitosis leads to an accumulation of copy-errors in aforementioned cell populations?

To 1, telomeres;

I need an expert to confirm or deny:

I think to remember having read that the telomeres aren't really an issue. That that they get shorter is a consequence, not a reason - they are not needed because death of the cell occurs earlier. I also think to remember there actually is a mechanism (a protein) to extend them, it's just that in places where it wasn't needed it is not used and evolution therefore removed it, because it had no consequence.

I think it was form one of the books of (biochemist) Nick Lane. Myself, I only took the basic bio-chem course so I never got to such advanced specialized topics.

EDIT: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1933587/

> 1. Do telomere biology and telomerase activity determine aging?

> The first aspect to this question is whether differences in aging rates among mammalian species are caused in whole or in part by species-specific differences in telomerase/telomere biology. A very brief consideration of this question will show that this is unlikely.

> There is little evidence that commonly observed changes in older individuals, such as anemia and impaired wound healing, result from impaired cellular proliferation, which would be the anticipated consequence of shortened telomeres

(ofc there is a lot more details to consider)

It's been some time since I've worked in biology, but: telomere shortening is mostly a protection against aberant growth (ie, cancer): it sets an upper limit to how often a cell can multiply. If we'd live long enough that even healthy cells run up against that limit, we'd have to deactivate/reverse that mechanism. But then we'd lose one very effective defense against cancer.

The mystery is that cell division isn't an issue for germline cells, like SSC, which replicate many times during your lifespan, and then keep on replicating during lifespans of all your progeny.

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

That our germline cells are immortal, yet we are not, suggests that we (our bodies) are merely a replication vessel. Humans don't live to be 150 because (according to natural selection pressures) it's easier to just make a new version of you (or several) than to waste DNA space on efforts to keep 100-year-olds alive. The genome only serves the host through child-bearing years (plus a few extra bc grandma may still be useful to the survival of her grandchildren; what happens to grandma after 90 years old the germline cares not.

There are some other compensating controls that can mitigate cancer but it takes some willpower which I suppose is an entirely different topic all together. This video [1] is worth a watch to learn a bit more about cancer as a metabolic disease.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06e-PwhmSq8 [video]

Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy (HBOT)?

2. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2021/12/12/national/scienc...

This author has a curious publication history, publishing lots of articles in journals of which he is editor-in-chief.

Genesis 6:3 (KJV): And the LORD said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years.

This doesn't mean man is limited to 120 years of life. It means the flood happened 120 years later.

You may be correct, but I think not, for the reasons laid out in the following commentaries.

From https://www.bibleref.com/Genesis/6/Genesis-6-3.html#commenta...

This is another fascinating verse which has been interpreted through several different perspectives over the years. It falls in the middle of a paragraph describing how a group known as the "sons of God" took human wives who gave birth to a generation of famous "mighty men."

Taken in direct context, this verse seems to declare that God will not let humans continue to lead such long lives. Perhaps the children of the "sons of God" and human women would otherwise have gone on living an extraordinarily long time. Or perhaps God is merely saying that even the normal lifespan of humans was too long, given the evil that is taking place on the earth. Considering how much evil man is capable of with a lifetime of less than a century, the capacity for evil over many centuries is immense.

In either case, God says that He will not allow His Spirit to remain in man forever. God's Spirit, in this sense, seems to be His "breath of life." Humans cannot live without God's Spirit or life-force; we are dependent on God to continue to exist. Now God declares that He will place a natural limit of 120 years on that mortal existence. Looking at life spans for those born after the flood, this seems to be the case. While not a literal maximum, life spans after the flood rapidly decrease until few live longer than 100 years.

Some have offered an alternate explanation for this verse: that God is declaring His judgment will come on the earth 120 years from the time of this pronouncement. That could be. It is also true, though, that eventually human lifespans decreased to a maximum of approximately 120 years. Joseph, for instance, lives to be 110. Moses lives to be exactly 120 years old, while his brother Aaron lives to be 123.

--------------------

From https://biblehub.com/commentaries/genesis/6-3.htm:-

My spirit shall not always strive with man.—The meaning of this much-contested clause is really settled by the main purpose and context of the verse, which is the Divine determination to shorten human life. Whether, then, God’s spirit be the animating breath spoken of in Genesis 2:7; Genesis 7:22, whereby human life is sustained, or the spiritual part of man, his conscience and moral sense—God’s best gift to him—in opposition to his flesh, the struggle henceforward is not to be indefinitely prolonged. In the first case, the struggle spoken of is that between the elements of life and death in the body; in the second, it refers to the moral probation to which man is subject. The versions generally take the former meaning, and translate “shall not dwell,” or “abide “; but there is much in favour of the rendering “shall strive,” though the verb more exactly means to rule, preside over, sit as judge. Literally, then, it signifies that the Divine gift of life shall not rule in man “for ever;” that is, for a period so protracted as was antediluvian life.

Except there was no shortening of life, so it's wrong. Don't base your theology on translations or Christian commentaries. All translations and commentaries are biased.

I can't read Hebrew or ancient Masoretic text, so I'm kind of buggered. My illiteracy in ancient languages means that I must base my theology on translations.

That said, before the other day when you raised the question, I've always just taken Genesis 6:3 to mean that God shortened human life expectancy, and I've never looked it up in a commentary.

Anyway, thanks for alerting me to the alternative. I don't think I can explore it further at this time, as attaining the required linguistic skills is a bit "out of scope" for me at this time.

This statement after Methuselah had lived for 969 years, before (it is implied) drowning in a flood.

If you study the various versions, Masoretic, Samaritan and Septuagint, a number of the ages differ. At some point someone reduced Methuselah's age because it would have meant he survived the flood, which didn't fit their interpretation of the Noah story.

That said, most of the ages in Genesis were incorrectly translated from Sumerian cuneiform due to them having different numbering systems for different things which reused some of the same symbols (why would anyone find that confusing???). Whoever copied those numbers into the Bible used the wrong numbering system. If you convert back and use the numbering system for dates and time, you get regular ages. For example, Methuselah didn't live 969 years, but instead, 85 years.

to expand-- the original poster shows that this is in Gen 6. But man was created a few chapters earlier. Thus, if one accepts the genesis creation myth as some standard of truth, God's original plan was that:

we are created in his image In his image we are created. Man and woman we are created.

i.e. the bible says god intends us to be as fully-formed and perfect ("immortal") as god.

addendum: the form I gave above is a well-known poetic form where the rhyme is in the ideas. Thus the very strong implication that the image of god is "man and woman"; a full being has both.

addendum II: Recall also that this says a full person should have both male and female aspects; Eve was split off from Adam (rib surgery). This says NOTHING about sexual orientation. Just as Jesus said NOTHING about it. Homophobic attacks go against the nature spirit and word of god as recorded in the bible.

How is this in any way related to the OP's post about lifespan?

Check out _Lifespan_ by Dr. David Sinclair if you enjoy the topic of anti-aging.

.. just listening to the audio book. It supports the articles headline with substantial insights. I can recommend it. Earlier discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24984800

People entering this post may enjoy Larry Niven's short SF story 'Grendel' in which, if I remember correctly, the protagonist solves a murder partially by realizing that a female antagonist was actually much older than she appeared, due to using an immortality drug, and that the need for novelty was a driver for such people.

Silicon Valley techies are turning to a cheap diabetes drug to help them live longer

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/23/metformin-for-cancer-prevent...

Metformin is the pharmaceutical version of Berberine [1] You can get Berberine without a prescription. Metformin has been used in the US for about 40 years and Berberine in Asia for about 3000 years, initially used to treat gut infections.

A couple things to note if you take either of those is that they put a heavy load on the liver and also deplete vitamin B12. It may be worth keeping an eye on liver enzymes if using either. Hydration is also important. I should also add that if you start doing either to stay near a restroom for the first few weeks.

[1] - https://examine.com/supplements/berberine/

Metformin may delay the onset of some chronic metabolic diseases but it won't extend maximum lifespan and there are significant negative side effects. It's certainly not a fountain of youth. Proper diet and exercise can deliver most of the same benefits with no medical drawbacks.

https://peterattiamd.com/joanmannick-nirbarzilai/

The double contrast is a huge smell for writing. Consider the general form:

Proposition A

However, Proposition B

In Contrast (or any other contradictory linking phrase), Proposition C

Have you considered it? Now answer two questions: - Do you think Proposition C is in contrast to A or B? or neither? - Have you ever seen this general form in _good_ writing?

This is the main problem I've always had with the evidence-based scientific approach. Just because all of your data points show the same thing, doesn't make that thing true. This just goes counter to all logic.

How is 122 ANYTHING other than a random number?

Oh, your set is all human lives ever recorded? Meh... Doesn't mean a thing. Your set is too small.

To me, it is self-evident that there is no natural limit to human lifespan. If anything, the existence of a natural limit should require proof, not the lack of it. But more importantly, spending time on proving something so random seems utterly useless to me, especially compared to the alternative of embracing the (far more natural) assumption that no such limit exists and working from there.

(But yea, with all this said, the article is a bit of a dud.)

So since a 10-sigma event could result in a 200-yr old person, there is no real limit?

There is no hard limit, but clearly the age distribution drops suddenly (for developed countries) at 70.

There are a bunch of single points of failure in our body -- the heart, the liver, the spine, the major blood vessels, the trachea, etc.

There's only so many 9's that those components are built to last for, and they ALL have to work!

FYI: I agree that "Leading demographers ... 122 years" is an incorrect statement.

>How is 122 ANYTHING other than a random number?

It is a random number. They could have lived to 122. But 0 have been shown to live to 150, and we're most certain 0 lived to 200 or 500.

There being a natural limit doesn't mean that "largest age found" is the limit. It just means that there's a natural (e.g. cell based) process that kills people with increasing certainty as they age, with a measured cap around 120 years or so.

Whether that can tomorrow or historically been found to be 130 or 150 in some random human that gets/got to be ultra-old doesn't mean it's not statistically more than appplicable to the 99.99% percentile of humans, or that there's no "increasing natural death certainty" with a limit towards 100% as people age.

>Just because all of your data points show the same thing, doesn't make that thing true.

It surely makes the thing statistically true (this is what happens most commonly), and points to processes and factors making it so.

>Oh, your set is all human lives ever recorded? Meh... Doesn't mean a thing. Your set is too small.

Huh? "Too small" compared to what? One that would include humans in prehistory or pre-modern-registries that might have lived more? (And we do know that they lived less too, even if they're not recorded, from the bodies/bones/etc. records we have).

Rather, the dataset is huge, and (after 20th century or so, where globally registry records are kept) close to exhaustive. Statistically if anything it's much more than required.

>To me, it is self-evident that there is no natural limit to human lifespan.

Sounds more like a wish than a self-evident truth.

>If anything, the existence of a natural limit should require proof, not the lack of it.

People die, lifetimes of billions have been shown to be capped, both in nature (pre-historical living) and civilization (modern life, diet, etc).

That points to a natural limit. And there are similar numbers/caps for all primates and mammals anyway. That's the very definition to a natural limit.

That doesn't mean an absolute limit, or a specific hard number (like "122") just a limit based on current evolution. E.g. if we modify humans genetically or whatever we might be able to overcome it. But as it is, there absolutely are natural processes towards limiting life span at play and there is a clear cap measured. That's not even contestable.

122 is not a number they picked at random, it is the age of the oldest human ever with a verifiable birth certificate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Calment

What parent means is that it's still random, as that person could just as well have lived 121 or 123 or 125 years.

But that's a trivial observation that doesn't really change anything. 122 wasn't never supposed to be "non-random" as in some kind of physical law. The natural law concerns the increased certainty of death observed as ages > 100 approach, not a hard and fixed 122 number encoded in our DNA.

Life insurance rates can provide a validity check on this kind of claim.

This no limit to maximal lifespan has always stuck me as this is in total contradiction with the evolution theory as defined by Darwin

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwinism#:~:text=Darwinism%....

How is it in total contradiction?

Death is necessary for evolution. Shorter lifespans mean more rounds of genetic mutation meaning evolution can happen faster.

I think overall the point is right but I'd a lot of nuance.

- The evolutionary ideal lifespan for any creature is certainly limited but asking about the potential is more of a biochemical question and somewhat orthogonal to evolution.

- Some creatures fill extremely long lived niches proving that at the level of cellular dynamics, longevity is certainly possible.

- Humans no longer really depend on evolution. We'll start genetically modifying ourselves soon and I'd be surprised if there weren't any gm people walking around already.

- Our biggest limiting factor is experimentation. These experiments take a long time and aren't ethical to perform on humans. We'll certainly figure out how to make immortal rats before people.

Evolution only evolves to evolve faster where that is itself an evolutionary advantage; likewise slower only when it’s an advantage. (Where there is no advantage either way you can get drift; also fitness is at a much higher level than a particular gene).

This is why we don’t have the 30-minute reproductive period of some bacteria.

Basically , if you ( the species ) live forever then how would expect the natural selection occurs? This underpins That you have reach the pinnacle and no can adapt in any kind of environment

“Not getting old” does not mean “not having offspring”, competition of slightly mutated offspring is what evolution is driven by.

And the expectation is that no ageing and no disease will give us a 50% chance of surviving any given (IIRC) 1000-ish year period, because accidents will still happen.

In nature, you still have predators and lots of diseases that limit lifespan even of those species which have biological immortality: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_immortality

Wow, all I have to do is take some chemical they discovered to stop aging?

Has God indeed said that there is a limit to human lifespan?

No. Some take a verse from the story of Noah to mean man is limited to 120 years but that verse actually meant the flood would happen 120 years later.

Additionally, the ages and years in Genesis are wrong. They were mistranslated from Sumerian. If you translate them back and re-translate them properly, people in the Bible all lived normal ages. For example, instead of living 930 years, Adam lived 81 years.

Methuselah appears to have died in the flood but there are additional manipulations of the ages. This is apparent if you compare the ages in the Masoretic, Samaritan and Septuagint texts. Methuselah's age was reduced by some scribe when they noticed his age would have meant he survived the flood, and they couldn't have that.

Well, we disagree on how to interpret Scripture. The most interesting tidbit about the Flood (to me, anyway) is the fact that Methuselah means (I've been told) "After this, the end" -- which I take to mean that God gave Methuselah extraordinary longevity as an indication of his patience in waiting for that evil generation to repent.

Yes, so they changed his name as well.

The most interesting tidbit about the Flood for me is that the idea of it being global is a recent belief. Long ago it was not thought as such. The only reason to think it was global is the Hebrew 'eretz' translated as 'earth', which is a poor word to choose because it means a lot more to modern ears than to the ears of those it was written for. When we think of earth, we think of planet, but those it was written for would not have thought that.

Also, if you look through Genesis, the only place 'eretz' is translated as 'earth' is in the Noah story. Everywhere else it is translated as 'soil', 'ground' or 'land'. If you replace 'eretz' and therefore 'earth' in the Noah story with 'ground' or 'land', suddenly it doesn't say the flood was global, and neither does it in the original Hebrew because it never did, and it wasn't.

I suppose we bring some of our own theology to bear on 'eretz'. If you believe that after the flood only 6 persons remained alive on the earth, then that suggests that the flood was global.

Six? Don't you mean eight?

No, I don't believe all humans were killed by the flood. There are no reasons to think it was. There are at least 5 other copies of Noah's flood story: Gilgamesh, Atrahasis, Ziusudra, Berossus, and Moses of Khoren, some of which are older than Genesis and were direct or indirect sources for Genesis, and none of them are global floods. I'd suggest reading the other sources. They are obviously the same story but the differences are interesting.

Regardless, eretz definitely doesn't mean planet.

If you are interested, I'd recommend Robert M. Best's book Noah's Ark and the Ziusudra Epic.

Thanks for engaging with me. I had heard of Gilgamesh, but not the others. And I suppose you're right about the six vs eight -- I don't have a Bible with me.

I realize that my views could be viewed as fideist and anti-intellectual. On the other hand, it would be a shame if great learning were to keep someone from accepting the simple truth of the Gospel. Or am I extrapolating too far to think that someone who rejects a world-wide Noahic flood also rejects the literal bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ?

Conflicts of Interest: Prefer not dying. :)

Has anyone translated some long living people's 'years' into Quality-adjusted life years?

It feels like that's the more important metric and there must be a bunch of low hanging fruit like "get vaccinated" that score highly without needing sci-fi breakthroughs. Or is it all so boringly predictable that no one bothers?