Kirk Douglas: ‘I never thought I’d live to 100. That’s shocked me’ | Hacker News Reader

Kirk Douglas: ‘I never thought I’d live to 100. That’s shocked me’

theguardian.com

68 pointsdavidf1823 comments

TIL that Kirk Douglas isn't dead.

He seems surprised too.

To be honest, I'd be surprised if most of the crowd in HN knows who Kirk Douglas is. Maybe the smarter ones will figure out he's Gordon Gecko's dad.

I would hope that people know who Sparticus really is.

No, I am Sparticus!

Aging is an illness, a degenerative process for which evolution has optimized against by reproducing before it takes its toll (death). It is entropy maximizing, dissolving the body. Those processes can be reverted by correctly directing outside energy into the system, in order to achieve reordering (reduce entropy); we just need to find the proper way to do it.

Once we find the root cause of aging, and we devise a cure for it, we will be surprised at why it took so long to understand such a simple problem. The same way we are surprised to hear that people 200 years ago were convinced that heavier-than-air objects could not fly, or that trains traveling at high speed (50 Km/h) would cause irreparable damage to the body.

My assumption is that the piwepkants of the body take the heaviest toll

"people 200 years ago were convinced that heavier-than-air objects could not fly"

Did they not have birds back then?

They did. People who thought the Earth was flat also had an Earth to check, but it was not enough.

Side note: one son overdosed and one nephew in prison, maybe having everything (post-scarcity, basic income, etc.) could be an issue for society.

ashkenazi jews live very long lives. There are plenty of articles about this.

Current oldest person still living -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yisrael_Kristal

Nope: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_verified_oldest_pe...

The article on Kristal says "oldest living man". Looks like the grandparent misread this as "oldest living person". He's "only" #19 on the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_living_people, by the way.

There are over 53,000 people 100 or older in the US. I imagine with a few advances in medicine, that number could increase 10x, or even 100x, within the next half century.

I wont rule out that posibility, but it is much more complex than that.

There is a qualitative difference between causes of death before and after ~75 yo. People in their 60s and 70s have a tendency to die from specific organ failure, - heart disease, liver disease, kidney disease, etc, - modern medicine has gotten really good at dealing with this kind of health problems.

People 80+, on the other hand, have a tendency to die from ageing itself. The deterioration in their body is generalized and they find it harder to bounce back after common illnesses and mild accidents, with a non trivial risk of complications always present. And even if they kind of recover, this just adds to the teardown of general health and it will be a little bit harder to recover the next round.

IMHO, the increase we see in people who reach the 100+ mark has more to do with they being people that have won the "genetics lottery". Their families just seem to age more gracefully and/or slowly than average; we are seeing them appear in greater numbers now because they would have died of specific organic disease a generation ago.

However, I am afraid that in order to see the kind of dramatic increase in maximum life expectancy, we would need to develop a different kind of medicine, one that deals directly with the aging problem, not with specific diseases. I don't think we are that close to such breakthrough as to expect to personally benefit from it, so I will count my blessings if I make it to age 80 or so.

We do have Blue Zones from which we can study the genetic aspect:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Zone

It's a very young science so it's hard to say what we'll be able to do with it. To date, not much research has been done on aging. We could learn a lot in 50 years. The world of 1967 was a lot different than today, for example.

And I would think that the world will change more in the next 50 years than it has in the last 100.

Mostly agreed, though I would hedge this to include the fact that it is a non trivial effort to move from basic science to applied science, and from there to professional best practices.

Even if we crack the aging problem within 15-20 years, I do not think that the bulk of doctors that are going to learn the procedures that come out of it in Med school have been born yet. The doctors that would be in a position to invent such procedures might have been born already, but they will reach middle age themselves before they get a chance to develop their breakthroughs.

That being the case, please forgive me if I do not hold my breath.

Honestly it seems like doing procedures is less likely to extend your life, unless someone figured out head transplants. ;)

Much more likely that gene therapy will drive therapeutic advances for the next 50 years.

Interesting to note that we might be seeing more people make it to the 90-100 yr club but we don't see a jump into the 120 club

We're going to solve the aging genetic lottery factor in the next 30 years with gene editing. We'll be doing it successfully at an experimental level within 10 to 15 years, and we'll be practicing it commercially in that 30 year time frame. The extreme speed at which CRISPR is moving forward makes this an unavoidable outcome, the genie is way out of the bottle. 30 years out we'll be able to buy people at least a decade of high quality life extension.

And still people won't make it to 120.

No one said that you would.

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