Scientist David Sinclair on why we age and why he thinks we don’t have to (2019)
outsideonline.com
outsideonline.com
Here is a talk he did at Google [1] He briefly talks about the ethics of this here [2].
I assume the process may be similar to do the same with other cranial nerves? Eg hearing
Thing is, you estimate age mostly based on someone's skin, and with clothes on, that means face. It's very superficial. If you've got good skin, you'll look younger. There's a ton of products that will help. There are plenty of celebrities that are older but look younger. (Did you know Cher is 74?)
The most interesting part is really the health benefits: less degradation of various bodily functions, more stamina, better quality of life.
So 6 years later he looks like 10 years younger. That's the most mind-blowing part.
Here are some links for you to learn more about this:
https://joshmitteldorf.scienceblog.com/2020/05/11/age-reduct...
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/275360486_Towards_a...
I recently began sleeping when ever I felt tired, disconnected from stressful colleagues, and generally brought down my stress levels further by not signing up for more than what I can handle.
I’ve concluded that Low stress + adequate sleep + good food Together are like NZT for me.
I’m no longer tired and I can think better than I can remember during the past 15 years.
For the past three weeks, I’ve been sleeping without interruptions ( waking up suddenly) until today, having encountered a problem person yesterday and flew into a minor rage at certain recollections of unfair actions by them.
I can also look back now and see how many things that I was sure I would do in my life haven't happened yet. Plus, like another commenter pointed out, life obligations keep mounting up.
Capitalism, all other things disregarded, would just keep the price high so long as the demand is high and the supply low.
Human nature plus immortality is not a pretty thing to think about.
A few millions here and there, no matter what they do or how much happiness they cause, is nothing compared to billions upon billions^(TM) continuesly pumped out of the world into one person's coffers.
I don't care what kind of persons billionaires are, allowing someone to have wealth equivalent to several countries' economies is ugly and injust. No amount of gift-giving and hospital-visiting is gonna make that any less of a moral disaster. Maybe when we discover arbitary-destination wormholes can we be that inefficient and injust with resources distribution, but with just one freaking planet? good luck convincing me (and the several billions who are not billionaires) that philanthropist billionaire overthere isn't stealing somebody's (probably several million somebodies) food in their pointless unending quest to pile wealth they're not going to use 10% of in their wildest dreams.
And how is a monopoly going to form? You think people are going to refuse to eat synthetic diamonds-that-make-you-stop-aging because of marketing around getting "the real thing"? And you can't buy out all the mines for something that isn't dug up.
> Human nature plus immortality is not a pretty thing to think about.
Whatever. People are still going to get cancer.
You're confusing capitalism the system with individual businesses.
From this perspective, Capitalism (or "the market") can be viewed as a tool governments can use to increase the quality of life of its citizens.
Granted this explanation is a bit banal and hand wavey and leaves out a ton of stuff (consider impacts on jobs for instance); this is an internet post not a thesis on economics. :) Hayek, Mises, and Friedman are good sources if you care to explore more.
Guy says "post-scarcity" but what does that really mean? Even if we have cheap energy and cheap raw goods, there will still be things that are limited, perhaps open space, nature preserves, beach property.
Or maybe even in a land of plenty, there will still be those who live in poverty (some would argue that poverty is a choice today).
I'm not sure what will be valuable in the future, but I am sure the rich will hoard it.
Further, under capitalism, you only get money from working. Minimum human work implies that most humans won't have any money of their own at all.
And it's not an individual business thing. Capitalism is amoral (note: not immoral), with a value function. If in a scenario it behaves what we consider "badly", we provide incentives to skew that value function towards what our society wants. For example through taxes or subsidies.
There is effectively no reward for the rich to make this technology broadly available. There's every incentive to keep their workforces and consumers ignorant and short-lived.
This was also the attitude in the 1700s and 1800s there were several revolutionary wars to fix it.
Anti-aging treatments won't stop bullets.
I think it might make things more egalitarian. A hard working genius born to poverty only has 80 years to work their way into the upper echelons. Removing senescence means such people will have more time to rise to elite positions and demonstrate track records of competence and merit.
I don't agree that anti-aging would be restricted to the richest. One simple reason is that anyone with the know-how could make vast wealth by making anti-aging available to the masses.
Social Darwinism? You can do it today, just stop providing medical care for the poor... wait, this is already happening in the US.
We heard that with the Internet too. And 25 years later: while certain metrics like poverty and standard of living have improved globally, things have gotten worse in Western countries. Why do you think something as Holy Grail-esque as anti-aging tech will be any different?
What about reduced training costs because you can keep your existing expert staff instead of needing to constantly hire fresh but clueless youngsters?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_F._Hamilton_bibliography
No, not really. What sounds crazy is "people have always died of pneumonia, we don't understand the reason, but that's how it's always been, and so that's how it will always be, and even trying to understand why it happens or change it is against nature and crazy talk."
Involuntary death is obviously a problem. Sure, overpopulation is too, and there's a conflict, but there may be other solutions than letting people die against their will.
Not that you said we did, but many kind of think like that's the case, for hand wavy reasons, like "the sky is the limit", "human ingenuity is limitless", etc...
What are you even talking about? Humans have existed something like 200,000 years. In 500,000 years from now (or less), evolution will have changed us into something entirely different.
The better rebuttal is that currently it looks like we'll crash the planet's ecosystems and with them technological civilization within the next century or two, long before we've reached the point of curing all disease.
Species will evolve to thrive in the new ecosystem. Perhaps that will be a subset of humans evolving into something else, perhaps not. But life won’t disappear because we raise global temperatures.
Give it another 10 years or so and we will be able to target any kind of cancer cell and destroy it. A harder task might be to prevent cancer, but in the end it doesn't really matter. It will be like the common cold.
For details I recommend the Peter Attia podcast episode: "#121 – Azra Raza, M.D.: Why we’re losing the war on cancer". It's long but packed with accurate scientific information by someone at the forefront of research and patient care.
/s
It would still be fantastic improvement to have the body of a 25-year-old for all my adult years even if my lifespan didn’t change — but while I assume [0] it would extend life expectancy, preventing aging isn’t enough by itself to prevent all illnesses.
[0] I am not involved in medicine or biology and this would be way outside my area even if I had gone down that path, so my knowledge is “watched documentaries” level
If you could hold the probability at the level of an 18 year old, that would massively reduce the incidence.
There are factors - diet - that contribute to cancer and vice versa.
(0 external references supporting mentioned statements, statements referring to results without providing supporting evidence, etc...).
It seems that in perfect conditions cells can live forever.
Obviously a few cells are very different than an entire organism where a small thing going wrong can compound exponentialy over time.
But in theory it does seem that cells can live forever if you remove contaminants and provide required nutrition.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_immortality [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pando_(tree)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenland_shark
"The oldest of the animals sampled, which also was the largest, had lived for 392 ± 120 years and was consequently born between 1504 and 1744"
Listed here though:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_longest-living_organis...
2. This time, it says scientist believes (note the singular)
“Scientists” doesn’t mean all scientists; I agree. But:
“Scientists say the world is flat”
“Two scientists high on crack say the world is flat”
You’d agree that the latter provides some vital context whilst the two don’t exclude each other.
Nice try, HN. You always cease to amaze me. :)
We don't "believe" in scientific concepts. Their being a fact has no precondition on whether (or how many) people believe in them. Evolution didn't begin when Darwin started studying it.
That being said, you're right. We have to start somewhere. For example, scientists just a hundred or so years ago believed in the existence of something called aether. I believe many (most?) scientists will change their opinion if we can provide them evidence contrary to their belief. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson%E2%80%93Morley_exper...
On the other hand, scientists are just human as well and are subject to the same flaws and limitations as the rest of us. Facts are only facts, until they are not (that sounded weird, I am not actually against evidence based decision-making). I mean we make what we think is our best attempt at describing our world given the tools we have and the reality we live in. I wouldn't put too much weight that scientists believe aging is optional any more than I'd put weight on scientists saying technically it is possible for us to fly in a metal tube across the Atlantic Ocean or that technically we can put a man on the moon... until it happens.
I don’t understand the point you’re making here. Surely your second sentence contradicts the first?
I rarely have a point to make. I started off thinking I disagree with the parent comment but as I started typing I realized I agree with them more than not. It is more of a thinking out loud. It helps me a lot because I have very simplistic opinions that are sometimes VERY incorrect so when I think out loud, people can correct me. I guess where I thought I differed from the parent is that when you "believe" in something, you will dig into your position given contrary evidence. I like to believe this is not true with scientists.
I'm happy to settle for a "only" a couple millennia of life. More than I get now.
Bits rot, things break down, and it tends to happen to technology more quickly in most cases than to the human body. The more complex technology is, the faster it fails. We measure the life cycle of our most modern tech in months, not centuries.
The idea that you're going to surf the universe in an immortal, inviolate android body untouchable by aeons of time is closer to a religious hope than likely reality.
Neurons are created and die all the time. Replacing them one at a time, with their virtual equivalent, would not be entirely different to what is already happening.
However , in the scenario that single neurons are replaced with artificial copies with exact same synaptic weights, then yes they are functionally equivalent. It's already happening, with deep brain implants etc.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3106107/ https://www.nature.com/articles/nm1198_1313 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4812798/
from the pov of your current consciousness, does it really matter to be copied?
At least, you would leave an old you behind. Which from my intuition would be "me".
I understand "me" would also live on, but at that point I think I would just prefer to die.
I'd settle for 50x. Damn, even 5x would be a great improvement over current affairs.
That’s someone famous enough to be memorable, presumably he wasn’t the record holder 2270 years ago. Most medical progress has been around avoiding people dying young rather than actually extending lifespans after 90. So moving the needle when life expectancy hits 85+ becomes far more difficult.
In some distant future maybe making a copy of your brain in a simulator would be possible, but the copy would live on, you'd still die.
There are many different brain-machine interfaces and probes , it s an active field of research for decades. Wikipedia must have an overview.
> maybe making a copy of your brain in a simulator would be possible, but the copy would live on
We know from conjoined twins that they can share brain structures, so maybe it is possible that only half of the person dies
Can you just imagine if people could live that long? If people started applying it now, it would make our overpopulation situation even worse.
We are not prepared to live that long, either, emotionally or physically. The more we use technology and bioscience to alter our basic physiology and life history, the more trouble we will be in.
I seriously hope this never works.
You find it sickening? Don’t worry, you probably won’t even notice the new “stars” twinkling around you, even in the unlikely event of self replacing factories on Mercury being developed in an un-augmented human lifetime and therefore you living long enough to know about it.
More healthy, longer lived people doesn't just equal more mouths to feed. It means there are more productive members of society with vast troves of experience and skill, all of whom no longer have the excuse of "I'll be dead by the time this becomes a problem". The solution to limited resources isn't rationing, it's to get more resources and make more efficient (not limited) use of them.
> We are not prepared to live that long, either, emotionally or physically
That's, like, your opinion man. Me, I'm incredibly excited to spend as long as it takes to see and learn everything I can in this universe. The idea of a time limit does more emotional harm to me than the idea of infinity.
> The more we use technology and bioscience to alter our basic physiology and life history, the more trouble we will be in
This is just an appeal to nature. Plainly wrong, you may think you would be a happy hunter gatherer but I'd strongly recommend you try before you buy that one. Nature, for all its temporary beauty, sucks when there is no escape from it. We developed technology to separate ourselves from nature when it gets nasty. Don't believe me? Drive out to the country at 2am, strip naked and try lying in a field for as long as you can. See how much sleep you get. Bonus points if you do it in winter.
I seriously hope biotech becomes the next darling of industry and research. We're starting to hit the wall with electronics, there are still gains to be made but the low hanging fruit is gone and it's going to take much longer between breakthrough advancements. Biotech is just getting started, with enough of a push we can grow by leaps and bounds in the next decades. I hope my children will grow up in a world free from the miseries of disease and death.