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Comment by neaden | Hacker News Reader

I'm on the side of the pessimists here. Medicine for elderly people increasingly seems to become plugging holes on a sinking ship. Sure as more and more people get old and medicine increases the current record might be broken by a year or two, I'm very skeptical people will ever routinely live older than 120, and the average person will probably not make it past 100.

I'm also very suspicious of people who advocate turning to wonder drugs or treatment to stop aging. For the most part these are just untested treatments that do not have any clear criteria for what they should be doing.

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The treatments don't exist yet apart from a few stem cell treatments e.g. for Parkinson's disease.

But there are clear criteria: there are the seven categories of cell damage proposed by Aubrey de Grey over a decade ago:

https://lostempireherbs.com/anti-aging-7-types-cell-damage/

If treatments are developed to tackle these types of damage then I suspect they will rapidly supersede conventional geriatric care in terms of cost and convenience, a significant side-effect being that the patient subsequently fails to die of natural causes.

I mean, sure if someone invents a wonder drug that will be different. But for now we have people advocating for taking off label medications like metformin to increase longevity despite no trials showing that.

Medicine still has a long way to go. I wish there were way more studies exploring the fundamentals of aging processes vs unproven miracle drugs

They're doing that because diabetics on metformin have been living longer than non-diabetics. The TAME trial in progress now is trying it on healthy people; it's the first such trial because until now the FDA wouldn't approve trials for anti-aging treatments.

Agreed, what you describe is the status quo, where we have small evolutions through diets and drugs.

But I'm not completely on the pessimistic side because there's one thing that could change everything: the moment someone discovers how to effectively revert human cell decay (which has already been done in lab rats btw), then reality changes completely and living to 200 and beyond is achievable.

It could very well be like turning lead into gold, an ideal so close but never achieved. But on aging, I think humans already know what needs to be done, so I wouldn't put all my bets against it.

Pedantic quibble, but by "never achieved" you probably mean "too inefficient to do in practice?" For lead to gold in particular, all you really need is a particle accelerator, a steady supply of energy, and a lot of patience.

Not until the human genome gets some redesign work. That's going to be a really long debug cycle. There's no fundamental reason that some of the timeout aspects of aging can't be eliminated from the genome. But that is for new babies, not a retrofit for existing humans.

Yep, retrofitting can be hard. But if you figure it out for babies, Im not sure why you couldnt ultimately use the same ideas to also start changing genome of existing bodies. Obviously, there are more cells to change. But at least you dont have to wait as long to see the effect.

The interesting thing about the timeout genes, is that they are there for a "reason". It's a species' built-in population control mechanism to ensure that resources are spared for the younger generations. Evolution has put these genes in almost every living thing, to ensure that they eventually die.

So there is a "meaning" to death, when understood from nature.

Can you be more specific? I've heard the argument, for example, that cell death is a defense against tumor growth, but we do not observe that across all living things - we have Peto's paradox where large animals have almost no incidence of cancer.

I'd be really hesitant to try to attribute any one specific reason as to why we age, or why that has benefited some life.

There’s also no fundamental reason that all this bioengineering will not result in a new ‘species’ with say an average IQ of 200 and a consciousness five times as large as humans’. How long would they want to live?

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