We will be able to live to 1,000
news.bbc.co.uk
news.bbc.co.uk
Sadly, because aging isn't considered a disease by the FDA and other regulatory bodies, there is actually very little research being done on it if you take into consideration the fact that it kills more people than anything else in the rich countries (100-150k/day, usually after a long period of suffering).
If you want to learn more about what they are doing and why they think their engineering approach has a chance of success, check out Aubrey's book (the paperback version contains a new chapter, afaik):
http://www.amazon.com/Ending-Aging-Rejuvenation-Breakthrough...
It contains a lot of biology, but should be understandable to the lay person.
And if all you want is a really quick intro, check out his TED talk (it's a bit old now (2005), but the general concepts have stayed mostly the same despite recent progress):
http://www.ted.com/talks/aubrey_de_grey_says_we_can_avoid_ag...
or the talk that he gave at Google (2007):
If you think you have a good argument that would invalidate his theories, please first make sure that he hasn't answered it a thousand times first.
As usual, Wikipedia has mostly neutral info:
That question doesn't make a lot of sense. This is not a Web 2.0 startup. It's a lot more fundamental than that, and a lot of the required tools and technologies have not been invented yet - that's what they are trying to do.
http://www.sens.org/sens-research/research-themes/mitosens
and you can look at Corral-Debrinski's breakthrough here:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18771762
Basically it's now shown possible to move a mitochondrial gene into the nucleus and then have the proteins produced pushed back to the mitochondria for use. When done for the 13 important mitochondrial genes whose mutation damages us, then this will make it possible completely remove their contribution to aging.
There is good reason to think that this is a large contribution.
Context:
http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2006/10/how-age-damaged-m...
How much money: $1 billion over ten years to implement SENS fully in mice. Incremental amounts obtain incremental progress.
It's interesting stuff. It makes me wonder whether I should be studying biology :)
http://www.mfoundation.org/?pn=mj_donations_funding
http://www.mfoundation.org/?pn=donors
These are just ("just") a few millions - though I'm sure the folk reading HN will appreciate how much work went into raising those funds for a visionary project. By any account, a grand success in putting forward a new idea and bringing on board people who think the same way. Like all grand successes, it's the first step on a much longer path.
(You may or may not know that one of the largest donors is Peter Thiel).
In essence, SENS is still looking for the big hit, the scale up to mid-7-figures. By donating modestly now you add your name to hundreds of others who have already stepped up to help make the ramp needed for that goal.
http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2009/12/lysosomal-activit...
The links at the bottom of this page outline progress to date - some potential enzymes are found, which could feed into a larger scale project to develop them if funding arrives:
http://www.sens.org/sens-research/research-themes/lysosens
Meanwhile, small scale funding can keep people working on screening bacteria for more enzymes to break down more types of chemical gunk that cause your cellular systems to fail with advancing age.
Cell loss, tissue atrophy
Nuclear [epi]mutations
Mutant mitochondria
Death-resistant cells
Tissue stiffening
Extracellular aggregates (Cleaning crap out of our bodies that shouldn't be there and isn't in cells)
Intracellular aggregates (Cleaning crap out of cells that shouldn't be there and is in cells)
1. Cell death and atrophy: Treatable with exercise, stem cells, and chemicals which stimulate cell division.
2. Cancerous cells: Theoretically treatable with a type of gene therapy being developed, called Whole Body Interdiction of Lengthening of Telomeres (WILT).
3. Mutant mitochondria: Mutated DNA in the mitochondria causes a number of diseases. These can be prevented by moving the mitochondrial DNA into the cell nucleus, where the rest of the DNA resides.
4. Death Resistant Cells or Cell senescence (unwanted cells): Fat cells and other unwanted cruft can be removed surgically, or by stimulating the immune system to attack unwanted cells.
5. Tissue stiffening or Extracellular crosslinks (loss of elasticity): Certain proteins, such as those in cells making up the arteries, become too rigid over time because they bond to each other. These bonds can be broken with certain chemicals (some in clinical trials even today).
6 Extracellular aggregates or junk: “Plaque” which collects between cells can be eliminated by stimulating the immune system, and/or by using peptides called “beta-breakers.”
7. Intracellular aggregates or junk: Molecular garbage can be prevented from overwhelming certain cells by introducing enzymes which are known to be effective against such molecules.
In my opinion aging is no different to any other disease and like all diseases aging is ultimately treatable given the requisite technology. We cannot afford to sit back and simply accept that because everyone in history has lived and died we must follow the same path. It is a mistake to view aging as a fact of life set in stone when science has progressed to the level where we have the ability to begin the search for a cure. We might not be there yet but we are within striking distance of adding 20 or 30 years to our life expectancy and as Aubrey himself points out increases in life expectancy will be incremental and there is not going to be a sudden magic pill which you take and live forever. The essence of the engineering approach advocated by Aubrey is to manage aging, what he proposes is not a cure but a case of repairing the damage that occurs as we age at various intervals and not to stop the process but to allow the aging process to continue and repair the damage as it arises in the same way you maintain a house or car. This engineering approach is a case of taking advantage of improvements in technology as they occur and not to attempt to cure aging in its entirety and it is in this area that people fail to grasp what Aubrey de Grey is seeking to achieve. I recommend the two books below as great reading and all will be revealed!
Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation Breakthroughs That Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime (Aubrey de Grey and Michael Rae) ISBN-10: 0312367066 ISBN-13: 978-0312367060
Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever (Ray Kurzweil and Terry Grossman MD) ISBN-10: 1605299561
I would also check out the following regarding Aubrey de Grey http://www.citywire.co.uk/personal/-/retirement/news-and-fea...
and also the following about Ray Kurzweil if this lot does not wet your appetite for joining the war on aging nothing will!
The debate is - whether this can be done soon, as opposed to 10000 years from now.
I certainly wish that AdG was right. But is he? I'm not sure. Maybe he is (yay!), maybe not.
Edit: for what it's worth, the 1000 year figure is something that was calculated by estimating the chances of a person with the health characteristics of a young adult dying of any reason other than age - about 1 in 1000 per year, or an average of 1000 years life. That's just an average though - after early die-off of careless people, you might reasonably expect a 200-year-old to easily outlive 1000. And of course during that time technology won't have stood still - 1000 years ago, it was the dark ages.
If you get rid of aging (and other time-clock issues like menopause, though it would be stupid to get rid of menopause if people are going to be essentially immortal), life expectancy will be dictated almost entirely on these remote risks. Being more risk-averse might change your expected lifespan from 100 to 1000 to 10,000. And the less risk-averse people will die sooner, while the less risk-averse people (who are still unaging) will have free reign to change social norms in the long run.
This doesn't only apply to fatal risks. If you can work for 100 years at a day job and save up enough salary to live off the interest perpetually (and quite well), people are going to think it's crazy to do a startup. There's no sense of urgency when you don't age.
I think a world of immortal people would be very boring. And I haven't even gotten into the "slow-to-change" part (if someone living in the Middle Ages was still alive today, they'd probably be some kind of violent religious fanatic or something).
An indefinite lifespan will change the world ridiculously, however you're completely ignoring human nature. Those who take risks tend to be the ones who reproduce the most, and assuming fertility remains sustainable throughout life, those risk-averse will be quickly out bred. However, even considering the considered longevity of frozen sperm and embryos (women can still carry a child post-menopausal through egg donation - incidentally same odds as a younger woman).
You're considering risk aversion as the winner, when in reality it will be those who procreate frequently. If a couple produces 2 kids roughly every 20 years, that's 100 children they will produce meaning the risk averse will have to last 100,000 years just to match the genes of those who reproduce if their offspring never reproduce. Assuming a predisposition to reproducing at 20 (I've known all too many people with 4-generations of teenage mothers in their family, so it's certainly not an absurd prospect) and each two children produce two children in 20 years, you'd hit 1 peta-offspring by the 1000 year mark.
Your risk-averse would be marginally existent, similar to a dust mite next to an elephant. Their effect on society would be negligible to none existent. Compound interest has got nothing on exponential birthrates vs death rates.
Second, there's no necessary reason fecundity should be related to risk aversity.
On the other hand, he seems to be a smart, well-intentioned guy who has spent a lot of time developing a theoretical knowledge of how biological systems work. De Grey's not going to spend your money on coke and whores, and he's not going to spend it developing the ultimate power crystal. He's just underestimated the difficulty of solving the problem.
So if you think aging is a disease and not a natural process, it's probably underfunded and you should consider giving him money. Just understand that you're probably going to die of an aging-related complication regardless of how much money you or anyone else gives him.
I would define a disease as something which harms people (i.e. curtailing their cognitive or physical abilities) or kills them. Then I exclude a bunch of stuff which has traditionally not been called disease (like accidents, murder, suicide, etc.). Using that definition aging is most definitely a disease.
1913 Webster has: 1. Lack of ease 2. An alteration in the state of the body or of some of its organs, interrupting or disturbing the performance of the vital functions, and causing or threatening pain and weakness
Now that does fit aging.
As Aubrey points out we have already discovered the seven biochemical processes which are the root cause of aging. The first was discovered in the mid 1950s, the last almost 30 years ago in 1981. The importance of the amount of time that has elapsed since the discovery of the last of the seven is that it took less time to discover the entire list than has passed since and nothing else has been found. Now factor in the massive increase in our knowledge of biology that has taken place over that time and it seems virtually certain that these seven causes are all there are - cure those and you cure aging! The following is the list with potential solutions some of which are either confirmed or where progress is already at an advanced stage.
1. Cell death and atrophy: Treatable with exercise, stem cells, and chemicals which stimulate cell division.
2. Cancerous cells: Theoretically treatable with a type of gene therapy being developed, called Whole Body Interdiction of Lengthening of Telomeres (WILT).
3. Mutant mitochondria: Mutated DNA in the mitochondria causes a number of diseases. These can be prevented by moving the mitochondrial DNA into the cell nucleus, where the rest of the DNA resides.
4. Cell senescence (unwanted cells): Fat cells and other unwanted cruft can be removed surgically, or by stimulating the immune system to attack unwanted cells.
5. Extracellular crosslinks (loss of elasticity): Certain proteins, such as those in cells making up the arteries, become too rigid over time because they bond to each other. These bonds can be broken with certain chemicals (some in clinical trials even today).
6 Extracellular junk: “Plaque” which collects between cells can be eliminated by stimulating the immune system, and/or by using peptides called “beta-breakers.”
7. Intracellular junk: Molecular garbage can be prevented from overwhelming certain cells by introducing enzymes which are known to be effective against such molecules.
In my opinion aging is no different to any other disease and like all diseases aging is ultimately treatable given the requisite technology. We cannot afford to sit back and simply accept that because everyone in history has lived and died we must follow the same patch. It is a mistake to view aging as a fact of life set in stone when science has progressed to the level where we have the ability to begin the search for a cure. We might not be there yet but we are within striking distance of adding 20 or 30 years to our life expectancy and as Aubrey himself points out increases in life expectancy will be incremental and there is not going to be a sudden magic pill which you take and live forever. The essence of the engineering approach advocated by Aubrey is to manage aging, what he proposes is not a cure but a case of repairing the damage that occurs as we age at various intervals and not to stop the process but to allow the aging process to continue and repair the damage as it arises in the same way you maintain a house or car. This engineering approach is a case of taking advantage of improvements in technology as they occur and not to attempt to cure aging in its entirety and it is in this area that people fail to grasp what Aubrey de Grey is seeking to achieve. I recommend the two books below as great reading and all will be revealed!
Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation Breakthroughs That Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime (Aubrey de Grey and Michael Rae) ISBN-10: 0312367066 ISBN-13: 978-0312367060
Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever (Ray Kurzweil and Terry Grossman MD) ISBN-10: 1605299561
I would also check out the following regarding Aubrey de Grey http://www.citywire.co.uk/personal/-/retirement/news-and-fea...
and also the following about Ray Kurzweil if this lot does not wet your appetite for joining the war on aging nothing will!
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 like she's 50; the issue society faces today with the elderly is one of them not being able to take care of themselves).
Additionally, with the aging of Europe and Japan, 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.
The growth of productivity will always be an issue.
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.
Also, just like we've seen in the last 200 years, people's education requirements would continue to grow. If you live to 1000, maybe the first 50 years of your life are spent as a student.
This is one of those problems that seems easy to solve in principle, but the details are nasty. Frankly, I think there's a reason complicated life evolved so that it would age. The standard reason given is that eventually errors in replication accumulate and cancer results. I.e. we age to avoid cancer. But that is a ridiculous reason. There is a chance we might die of cancer if we grow too old, so we trade that possibility of death by cancer for a certainty of death by aging? It just doesn't make evolutionary sense.
I have a feeling that whatever the real reason for aging is, it will take us a long, long time before we find a way around it.
We've proven time and again that those run exponentially and are not perfectly accurate, especially in the presence of a dynamic environment.
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.
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.
(There's several points of 'selection' for sex cells- error free ones are, loosely speaking, more likely to successfully fertilize/get fertilized, and more likely to create viable offspring that themselves reproduce.)
Edit: It's like the difference between being able to select the top 10% and selecting those with a score above 90%. The chain gets to "select" only those that perform above a set threshold, but the organism has to play out every hand it's dealt.
I think it is the same for aging. There isn't really a reason for aging, it just happens because there is less evolutionary pressure once humans pass the age when they normally procreate.
Of course I don't have any qualifications and this is just my hypothesis so take it as you will.
See, if you predict a breakthrough in five years and are then awarded a seven-year grant, you're setting yourself up for a lot of embarrassment when it comes time to apply for a renewal.
The future is in the future, and until you're absolutely certain of success it's important to keep it there. ;)
---
[1] that's the predicted future. The actual future isn't in the future at all. It arrives every day, without warning, as a fait accompli. There's no money in predicting the near future: you must either predict the far future, or make the near future.
Exactly. Any justification along those lines falls flat on its face when you realize it should also apply to the sperm and egg. Yet it doesn't apply in that case.
Hypothetical populations that didn't age and die would have killed themselves off due to lack of food.
I'm sorry, that's 3000+ years where we know our longevity hasn't changed, especially considering all of these men entered warfare. People living to 100 with all their mental and physical strength is rare, however people living to their 60's is not and has never been.
Our genes evolved to fight childhood diseases and injuries, so that those who make it through have the potential to live well into their 60's without a problem. Incidentally, those who get sick less frequently in childhood tend to have a longer lifespan as is. However the whole notion that humans only lived till 30 is absurd, because it's simply not true for any of recorded history. Yes it was the average, however that was under a very different culture.
Ramesses II successor was his 13th son, who lived to his early 80's. Many of his other children either died very early or died through injury or mid-life disease. His first born for instance died from a blow to the head in his 40's.
Please, don't confuse life expectancy and longevity, the two are vastly different. The former has changed drastically, the latter hasn't. Regardless of whether we avoid disease today or 3000 years ago, we'll likely hit 90 years before dying of old age 'naturally' (IE from a lack of longevity).
I agree. That's the only mechanism that seems to have the power to explain aging, other than magic or the Invisible Hand of the Creator (but the latter two have a huge assortment of other issues).
A non- or post-reproducing individual can still improve the fitness of their genome by supporting closely related individuals, or even simply their species by supporting any other member.
Starvation is not the only way living creatures can die.
Just up the aggression a little, for example, and the death rate returns to a self-sustainable level.
It's a much more realistic approach than "finding a way around aging," which is how the problem is usually miscast.
That doesn't mean that we can't come up with out own motivations and schemes.
There is also (afaik) at least one organism that can live forever, a jellyfish.
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 :-(.
If your problems aren't worse than 100-150k people dying per day after a prolonged period of frailty and suffering, causing suffering to their families and friends too and costing tons in healthcare, then I'd say it's worth it.
However long you live, you live one day at a time. If you are happy today and in good health, you'll want to live until tomorrow, and so on. But if for some reason you want to stop taking the rejuvenating therapies or throw yourself off a cliff, that's your choice. Let's just not make the choice for everybody else and all future generations by not developing these therapies...
Most biologists in the field of aging hold that aging is the result of the decreased force of natural selection with age. This is somewhat difficult to explain even with diagrams, but I'll try anyway.
Let's imagine three forms of a gene. One causes you to die at the age of eight, another causes you to die at eighty, and the third never causes you to die. We would expect that the form of the gene that causes you to die at eight would be removed from the population very quickly, since anyone who has it will die before they can reproduce and pass it on. In contrast, the gene that causes you to die at eighty will be rather prevalent, since by that age you'll have already passed on your genes to your progeny. In fact, it will probably exist at about the same frequency as the gene that didn't cause you to die at all.
This is the mutation accumulation theory of aging. Because natural selection acts more strongly early in life, we tend to accumulate genes with mutations that are detrimental later in life. There's also a variant called antagonistic pleiotropy, where you have genes that have a beneficial effect early in life having a negative effect in old age.
That makes a lot of sense. Passing on the genes seems to over-ride a lot of other things, just look at the crazy stuff most (all) creatures do to find and attract a mate.
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.
Last Updated: Friday, 3 December, 2004, 00:01 GMT
This kind of sensationalism is silly.
Falls under: It has not been conclusively proven impossible.
We don't know what kind of roadblocks there will be for this kind of development, we can't even guess - claims of 10-20 years are beyond silly, they are crazy and ignoring the concept of "what we don't know".
ps. Can you imagine how overpopulated the world would be?
How we would strip every resource bare?
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!
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? Horseback riding? In a world where life expectancy is ten times longer, is everything an order of magnitude more dangerous?
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.
But remember, if someone who is 60 now lives to 999, I still win the bet. So I feel like I might have to wait more than 50 years.
Everyone was worried in the 1970's that the 1990's would have massive overcrowding and famines, but it didn't happen. Instead, the world population growth rate has begun to level off.
Why? In affluent countries, people no longer have children out of necessity, but of desire. In fact, many first-world nations are actually now undergoing population contraction (Japan, much of Europe).
If you eliminate aging across the world, the necessity of children will go away. People will only have children if they want them.
We'd end up with government controlling the number of children, possibly even a lottery system. The overcrowding worries of the 70s and 90s were not because of a 1200% increase, rather a 10-20% increase.
And it would, if you knew you'd live that long most wouldn't tie themselves down with kids while they're still young, they'd wait much much longer and go out and live life.
As it stands now, if you don't have kids by the time you're 30 you risk not being able to have them at all and having to suffer though months of fertility treatments and such just to try.
People could want kids for a variety of reasons (to pass on their genes, the utility of having children, etc) and you'd have to maintain that you could only have two children max at one point in your life to effectively replace yourselves and not increase the population.
Not to mention if you'd want to have kids 2 or 3 times over, now that they're growth is only a small percentage of your total life.
All that said: Then if that happens, war will happen. I predict population will stabilize still (remember, accidents and unsolved diseases and violence and suicide will still kill). If it doesn't happen then we condemn the whole world to die.
I for one am for giving the chance for us or our children the chance to make it work, and find it overwhelmingly arrogant to think we know well enough to judge they won't handle it.
Death is wasteful and it’s monstrous. Those problems you mentioned seem like small obstacles compared to the much bigger problem of death.
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 of things that kill people before they can live a "whole life" which I think we should work on first (not that we can't do both).
Hopefully with some of these aging technologies, quality of life for the 'elderly' would also improve. I would hate if I couldn't play sports for 90% of my life.
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
But even if you could? Shakespeare as a Hollywood screenwriter makes for an intriguing idea, I admit. But I think we would get sick of even him.
I don’t know how productive Newton with hundreds of years to live would be, nobody really knows. It’s just that losing perfectly good brains to death (or disease) seems like such a waste to me.
We developed pretty good methods of storing some brain content for posterity (writing still seems like the dominant one) and just look at what kind of leverage that gave us. We truly stand on the shoulders of giants but it sure would be damn cool if the giants could still be among us.
We gain a lot by standing on the shoulders of giants, but we also gain a lot by having fresh eyes look at their work. Slow the rate of population churn and you slow the rate of fresh eyes. Newton was the man, but wasn't it awesome to have Lagrange come along with a fresh eye and make things a little easier and simpler? I think we get a lot more work done in 200 years of science if we have more generations of scientists, not fewer.
Or even just knowing when to step aside and let the next (evolved) generation take over? (or will that still naturally just happen, via accidental death or death by lack of resources to live)
"If you are a reasonably risk-aware teenager today in an affluent, non-violent neighbourhood, you have a risk of dying in the next year of well under one in 1,000, which means that if you stayed that way forever you would have a 50/50 chance of living to over 1,000."
If you assume 1/1000 chance of death in a year, and 1000 years (1000 trials), your probability of living to 1000 is only 37%, not 50%. I don't know if I would trust the scientific analysis of someone who doesn't understand basic binomial probability.
I know there is a shortcut to this but for this to be true you need a constant rate of 1 death in 1415.78389 per year.
1 / (1 - 10 ^ ((log .5) / 981)) = 1415.78389 so (1-1/1415.78389) ^ (1000-19) = .5
If you can live to 1k, and give birth for most if not all of your life, I think many people would think "being a parent" is something that could be put off a couple decades/centuries. Birth is not a pleasant process, and women aren't usually eager to have 10 kids.
There's also several financial methods that could be used to prevent undesirable wealth accumulation.
I own my own body, does that mean nobody should be able to say I'm not allowed to, say, defecate? What if I'm positioned directly above them?
Simply being able to do something doesn't make it a right.
(I, and nobody else, own my car. I.e., nobody should be able to say I'm not allowed to max out the speedometer?)
A trade off would be ok but hard to enforce, as right now we don't even let people want to die, die legally for the most part.
Now we're trying to extend the amount of time that we live 10 fold because things are so great right now. I'm not saying either is right, just an observation.
We don't even know what we don't know. How many times have we been at this place in the history of biology, where we honestly believe that we are just "that" close to figuring out the processes of life. We were wrong then, and we are wrong now.
We do not know or understand the over-arching cause of cancer, nor the cause of its radical increase. Similarly with heart disease: after a generation of assurances that the cause is a high-fat diet, the premise itself is being rejected. I could go down the list of major congenital diseases, and tell the same story. Even the most basic assumptions which we have about disease are being overturned. And whatever replaces them will likely be overturned yet again.
Totally agreed-- it's insane to think that because you can do some stuff in isolated cases, the combination is a trivial extension.
Aubrey's point is that we don't need to understand metabolism to repair the damage of aging, just like you can maintain and repair a house or a car without understanding in detail all of the mechanisms that cause damage and failure. You just clean up some of the damage and change some parts periodically so that it never reaches a threshold at which failure is possible.
Our bodies already do this quite well for the first 20-30 years of our lives, but after that, we're in an evolutionary blind spot and long-lived molecules accumulate and eventually make maintenance and repair mechanisms stop working for long enough to lead to pathologies. If we clean up these long-lived molecules, that'll be a very good start.
Look at it this way: crude principles applied at the macro level have extended our lifespan by decades. As scientists get better and better at piecing together the building blocks from the bottom, they'll likely find principles at the micro level that improves our lifespan as well
I disagree. Until we find a way to support a population that grows at a rate like that, we would be forced into one of several possible situations, none of which are pleasant:
1: starvation
2: endless war
3: iron-fisted birth regulation, only allowing one new child per legally documented death
3.5: The implications of couples who really want children + a rule saying they can have one, if someone has died
Until the question of resources is answered, granting people the right to live (longer) equates to denying other people either quality of life (starvation/war) or the chance to live at all (birth regulation). Which brings up another interesting question; if everyone alive has a right to life, do those who have not yet been born have a right to live as well?
Call me utilitarian and get pissed that I might stand in your way of living forever, but we have to consider the bigger picture.
Aubrey de Grey is 43, and he's predicting that this might be in place in 20 years.
I don't know that anyone can reasonably object to the theoretical possibility that an individual human life could be sustained indefinitely.
If we want to live long and fruitful lives, how do we slow down aging? I prefer that question over, how do we live until 1,000?
Personally, I expect false starts in the next couple centuries. The beta testers will be healthy and fit into their hundreds, but those that follow may get to 200-400, then possibly further. There are just too many engineering issues to work out in a single iteration.
(Truthfully, some cancer research benefits older people, as cancer has a much higher incidence as you age, however, much research out there is for middle of life diseases).
If my grandmother could play basketball again, she's love to.
Remember, people lived to 70 thousands of years ago.
Remember Ben Franklin lived to 84.
Also what is the most promising research being done?
I am a pretty big fan of Arthur C. Clarke.
Nothing good comes of it.
I don't think we should fund research based on what storytellers wrote to entertain us.
Boredom is infinitely better than nothingness.
Which, at least for me, is less about avoiding death (which doesn't actually scare me all that much) and more about just getting to see what sort of cool stuff the future holds.