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Comment by rantwasp | Hacker News Reader

Improving longevity is what the people at https://www.lifespan.io/ have been trying to do for ages. The research is being done, there are tons of new promising things - with the catch that they are experimental / not tested on humans.

Before you get too excited and wonder where you can buy these magic pills, remember that there are things you can do right now to improve both your longevity and your quality of life: 1) sleep properly 2) eat properly 3) exercise 4) reduce stress

That being said I think that the next 20-30 years are going to be really interesting in this space, and if we indeed have any sort of proven breakthrough this will force us to rethink how we think about our society and our mortality.

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I believe the most impactful thing you can do is drastically reduce caloric intake - like by 50%.

Experiments have show large increases in lifespan, across mammals.

It's weird to me to say so but this intervention is one of the few things that, even if it were to demonstrably increase my lifespan from ~80 to ~120 years, I probably wouldn't do.

I don't know if that's because I enjoy food and bodily activity too much to value a longer life without them or because I'm addicted to food. I've wondered.

What wouldn't you be willing to give up for a much longer life?

there is a huge difference between enjoying food and being a slave to food.

the best example I have in this bucket is sugar. If you depend on sugar you're basically a drug addict (i know, i know, but just because it's socially acceptable does not make it okay. there is research out there that show sugar is as bad as cocaine when it comes to how addictive it is and on the health effect).

if you could pick just one intervention you could do quitting sugar is what you want (maybe if you're smoking, quitting smoking, but after that sugar is the nastiest thing you can put into your system)

Well we were talking specifically about reducing calories by something like 50%, which automatically cuts out sugar, grains, probably meat. But what really kills it for me is not being able to move, dance, play sports.

I understand how people can have fulfilling lives after losing the ability to do those things. Would I voluntarily give them up for a longer life? Probably not.

> which automatically cuts out sugar, grains, probably meat

Not necessarily. There's some evidence that when you eat might matter more than what you eat (given essential nutrition):

>Increasing daily fasting times, without a reduction of calories and regardless of the type of diet consumed, resulted in overall improvements in health and survival in male mice [1]

[1] https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/fasting...

Depends which parts gets prolonged - if you are at 80 deteriorated +-same as somebody who dies at 80, and they just keep fixing the next thing that is going to kill ya, then yes, that's a pure physical misery and spiral down progressive dementia (almost all old folks suffer from some form of it).

Now if we would be 40-like in our 60s and so on, that's another story. But first thing that would probably change is retirement age.

yes, the longevity "movement" actually talks about this. nobody want to live to be 130 if it sucks. but if you have the same quality of life like a 40yo all of a sudden people are waaay more open to living longer (I have also observed a huge pushback against living longer from most people I've chatted about this - it's so ingrained in our way of thinking that saying you want to live to be 130 is heresy)

Is being 40 and not being able to play tennis or go on long walks because you're too calorie-deprived that different from being 80?

That isn't the outcome though. Those on these strict diets are not lethargic.

From my own experience doing extreme diets I highly disagree. As soon as your own bodyfat starts getting low, being on a ~1500 calorie diet as an adult male is extremely exhausting by itself. No chance of enjoying physical activity whatsoever.

Just try fasting. I'm on a fast right now (500kcal max for 3 days, day 2 ongoing), and I'm much more focused & energetic than I've been in weeks. If I haven't fasted in a long time, getting through the "low energy" phase can be rough. If it's been say, less than a couple of months, it's a breeze. From experience I can tell that fasting will bring me calm, easier sleep, and reduced tendency to overeat (except maybe the day after) that will visibly linger for at least a week or 2.

If you enjoy bodily activity and experiences, why not try fasting too :)

reducing caloric intake may work, but it's also as important when you eat (ie fasting / intermittent fasting).

also, you can reduce caloric intake all you want, if you eat crap and don't sleep properly you're still going to have a bad time

By 50% TDEE, or by 50% of what? And for how long? If that's the most impactful thing, these factors should very much be included

> And for how long?

Permanently.

50% of TDEE permanently? Goodbye muscle tissue, hello injury, hello terrible moods. Life will not feel like it's worth living. (You must be joking?)

If not joking: Have you tried this? I lost 36% of my bodyweight by eating under TDEE. It requires huge amounts of effort to even hit 25% under TDEE consistently. A lot of that effort involves annoying your friends and family by not eating the way they do. We're social animals. It's hard. Plus when you get to a certain weight you will realize you have to regain muscle tissue, and the question of a bulk/cut cycle will come to mind. Goodbye 50% under TDEE.

Except that worldwide, life expectancy has increased along with increases in caloric intake. Of course there can be other factors involved, but everywhere you had increases in caloric intake, you've had significant increases in life expectancy.

yes and no. if you look at how the numbers are collected and aggregated life expectancy was actually a bimodal distribution and the average was impacted by infant mortality. If you remove that you will see that the improvement in life expectancy is not as impressive. Also, it may be that the increase is not due to caloric intake as much as it is due to technological progress.

see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy#Life_expectanc...

Can you cite this research across mammals? As far as I am aware it is only in lab rats.

While I generally support these efforts, I have feeling it would be easier to engineer a way to escape these meat bag prisons we live in, and construct an android body that isn't built from the worst form of spaghetti DNA code imaginable.

it is not easier. you cannot engineer what you don't understand. for all the progress that has been made there is still a lot we don't know about how life works in general. not to mention the ethical can of worms this opens.

This meat bag is made from star dust, self-assembling from a single microscopic machine, into a form so complex that it's complexity, adaptability and computing power dwarves by several orders of magnitude all the machines and computers we have built or will build in the foreseeable future, combined. And billions of them exist, doing things like inventing imaginary worlds, loving each others, gardening and playing soccer. And they work only with a bit of water and food.

We'll get some sort of usable artificial intelligence (meaning robot slaves and autonomous rovers) at some point, but I think it's a mistake to underestimate human intelligence.

it depends. in the next 10 years, no. next 100 years, probably no.

but if you have thousands or millions of years ahead I think artificial intelligence is going to become a thing. also we'll drop the artificial and call it what it is going to be: intelligence.

This is not a logical comment.

Everything is made of stardust - including the androids we'd construct. ...and while "complexity" is one word for our DNA - another more accurate term would be "complete fucking mess of code". It breaks frequently, is nearly impossible to model and predict, and can only be modified with agonizing inaccurate testing.

Your only reasonable argument here is that computing power isn't up to snuff. That's true - but that argument is rapidly dwindling.

> another more accurate term would be "complete fucking mess of code"

That just tells me you didn't write it, but I guess I already suspected that.

Maybe it seems like a "complete fucking mess of code" because it's not code at all!

See https://phys.org/news/2020-04-dna-life-bookjust-jumbled-ingr...

Also relevant XKCD https://xkcd.com/1605/

The first link is essentially a description of epigenetics - which I'm not arguing against. It's "part of the mess".

The second link is funny, but not an accurate comparison because when decompiled/deobfuscated, the google.com page resolves to well structured code. The human genome does not - there are interdependencies that have no logical purpose - pure happenstance.

...but that's not really my point anyway. My point is simply that it would be easier to build a better system from scratch. It might not be able to self-replicate from a single unit in the wild, but that no longer needs to be a requirement for us as a species.

Maybe it would be easier, maybe not. My point is that we don't understand how the brain, intelligence, consciousness and emotions works. We try really hard to, in many different ways, and it's anything but easy. Every time artificial intelligence gets popular, we get the impression that we are on the grasp of understanding it, until we hit a wall. I'm pretty sure the robots we send on other planets or around other stars will be very capable, but I don't think we can just reinvent our humanity from scratch.

The eternal struggle between "rewrite it from scratch" and "build upon legacy code"

In this case, we're trying to build upon compiled assembly code that's been re-obfuscated every generation.

I'm not even kidding. Almost every protein in the human body has multiple unrelated functions, just because evolution says "hey, this is here, let's use it for something new".

Every new human is an experiment in code chaos.

> Almost every protein in the human body has multiple unrelated functions

That is why the phrase "DNA is the blueprint of the cell" is terrible. In a blueprint, one can move a door 6" to the right without affecting the rest of the structure, add or remove a window, etc.

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