Humans Could Live up to 150 Years, New Research Suggests
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
We’ll just consume the chemical cocktails that normalize us: https://youtu.be/RjD1aLm4Thg
They were big in the Czech Republic in the early 1990s. A Brazilian band, but resonated with Central European metalheads a lot.
I think mRNA production will help in quite a few rare genetic diseases, but also that we’re far away from being able to safely make the myriads of subtle changes needed to make otherwise healthy people live longer.
I compare it to heart surgery. It is quite a miracle that we can do it, but the risks are so high that we only do it when people’s hearts have lost significant portion of their pumping capacity. You don’t see cross-country skiers who are just not good enough get heart surgery to make it to the olympics, for example.
Edit: adding from a comment below, there are real world instances of lab grown tissues being transplanted into patients. That is also in the early stages, but has evidence of real world progress.
The point is that if we made the effort, there’s likely easy things we can do to extend life beyond 100.
Studying Blue Zones, for example
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Zone
We really haven’t made an effort to study aging.
Why do some people live well into their 90’s and appear to be in good health?
Unlike modern developed countries where we have pretty good records of the exact moment of birth for people, in a lot of areas in the past, there could be a lot of guesstimating about the actual age of someone.
To me, that looks pretty damning to the theory that blue zones somehow are good for longevity.
We haven't? Just 2 seconds of googling "study aging" brings up results from places like Harvard, the NIH, RAND and hundreds of other universities where people study aging all day everyday.
I’m sure it’s getting some research but compared to other medical research I don’t think it amounts to much
[1] https://www.nia.nih.gov/about/budget/fy-2020-justification-b...
[2] https://www.aip.org/fyi/2020/final-fy20-appropriations-natio...
https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/benzodiazepine-use-may-r... 2014 - People who had taken a benzodiazepine for three months or less had about the same dementia risk as those who had never taken one. Taking the drug for three to six months raised the risk of developing Alzheimer’s by 32%, and taking it for more than six months boosted the risk by 84%.
https://www.aarp.org/health/dementia/info-2019/dementia-slee... 2019 - The study, released today at the Alzheimer's Association International Conference 2019, included a racially diverse group of 3,068 people, ages 70 to 79, who were cognitively healthy when the study began. Researchers questioned the participants about their use of sleeping pills and culled information about them from medical records and tests of brain function over a 15-year period.
Through traffic is physically constrained in each case - due to them being islands or peninsulas or mountain villages.
Better make do with what we have! Life is short, even if you make it to 130. Take advantage of it before you’re dead.
I have some pretty serious qualms with the topology traversal routes over the DOSI vs age manifold — they seem unfounded. This isn’t inherently problematic, but that seems like a core assumption - that the steepness and thus likelihood of falling off the DOSI associated cliff increases with age. The idea being once you fall off the cliff you die.
I don’t think it is a bad hypothesis, it just isn’t a result?
They renamed DOSI from “Age independent mortality” and changed the traversal examples since their 2018 paper [0] - honestly I don’t know how this paper has gotten so much press this week. It is only interesting for the title (Might’ve answered my own question there), but once you dig into it isn’t all that rigorous.
[0] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fgene.2018.0048...
It still embeds some of the same problems, though, mainly how an individual actually interacts with it and why their interpretation is correct.
Worth pointing out the concept of "healthspan," which is pretty much like it sounds like: how long you stay healthy to do the things you want to do.
Long lifespan seems worthwhile if it's accompanied by a long healthspan as well.
who wants to live to 150 is you’re in constant pain, take 150 medications/day and you cannot move?
now, let’s say that at 90s you could do what a 40yo can do. GAME CHANGING!
It's definitely not going to work such that someone lives to 80 with a health of a 25-year-old and then something clicks and they start having age-related conditions, all of them at once for good measure.
Basically the odds of death don’t drop, you simply have 2 years vs 1 year at every stage of decline. Which means you end up with fewer people that are living to the equivalent of 70 as they had twice as many chances of dying before 70. And reaching the equivalent of 80 means surviving 20 years with the body of someone in their 70’s etc.
Thus the number of people living in nursing homes drops.
Another way of thinking about things, if you slow down physical aging to 1/10th, few people would live to reach a 650 year old retirement age unless you also reduce all other risks of death per year to 1/10th.
Some died, some simply moved away, or I moved away.
I wouldn't expect outliving my friends to be much different.
That said, I noticed diminished capability in life shortly before turning 40 and my mom is really struggling at 80.
Longevity does not seem like a good deal to me.
It also might work the other way round. Delaying aging might be exactly the same as prolonging healthspan. In that case, you basically have nothing natural to die of.
TL/DR: on balance the author concludes that it's easier to believe that she was genuine, all in all.
Citation needed.
With that said, I do think you have a point--spending ~90 years in a nursing home because you're unable to take care of yourself sounds like a miserable existence straight out of a dystopian novel.
This sort of research is tailored to the infantile concerns of narcissists who believe their individual lives matter more than the health and longevity of the species and the planet. Is death really so scary? Is it so difficult to imagine that it might be important for our lives to end? Oh you poor, mistreated mortals, the heavens weep for you.
The only way life extension really makes sense to me is if we imagine that humans have reached the zenith of their evolution, which is just laughable. Just remember,the last laugh is on you ;)
I don't think it would be uniquely bad for old people to vote though, plenty of brand new ideas are terrible too.
- old people should have less voting power bacause they wont live to see the results of their votes
- old people should have more voting power because they are older and have seen more of history
I guess they balance out and everyone gets an equal vote.
Have you ever heard a great retelling of history? It always seems to come from those who have invested Serious Effort to master a historical narrative, especially when they work with a community of fellow peers.
It’s about the general tendencies of humans, patterns, that you start to be able to perceive when you live a lot of life.
What tells you more about poverty — learning that an individual lives on less than a dollar a day or, say, spending 24 hours without food and shelter?
I would argue that the experience of lived history and the “facts” of history cannot be separated, and both must be equally valued.
There are those who do nothing more than collect information on homeless people, documenting them for various organizations or gov't agencies, sometimes paid. They are doing the fundamental work of demonstrating a phenomena whose scale would otherwise be belittled or denied. Some would say SF is actually pretty nice, with only a small homeless population.
When experiences disagree with each other, how should we move forward with discussion? With personal experience or with data?
My guess is having lots of older voters would make it so people stop falling for the same scams over and over, and are less prone to hysteria.
If that were the case, governance should improve dramatically.
A major part of Fox News’ business model is built around creating FUD amongst senior citizens. They seem to be very successful at it.
I think education, ideology, and sensationalism have more (everything?) to do with it.
The only big difference between Fox and other networks is that they have way less college educated viewers as a percentage of total viewers.
Not sure how good of a source that is, though. There's several (not great) sources online I can see that say the average FOX News viewer is >65. I also see that the average CNN & MSNBC viewer is >59.
But according to that POS survey, only 20% of viewers are >65 - which must mean a significant portion of their viewers are REALLY old like 80+ (or the surveys are just bad).
538 gives POS an A- for polls: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/pollster-ratings/public... - which is pretty good. So who knows?
There's probably no real way of knowing exactly why Fox News has the viewers it does. We can only guess.
Older people — not all of them, there are many exceptions, but as a group — are more rigid in their thinking and less open to new ideas. Some of this is due to acquired wisdom, but it is also due to decreased ability to imagine the world any other way.
And to counteract it, a sufficiently long-lived humanity might actually have to deal with the consequences of their own actions. Right now, there's quite a lot of folks who are of the mindset that they'll die in ten to twenty years, so why should they care? It's a generational pass-the-buck.
The referent as it relates to science probably has to do more with corruption, incentives, and careers being built on certain ideas and having pre-existing knowledge rather than anything specifically age-related.
In any case, whatever longevity treatment is applied may actually reverse or reduce whatever part of your claims have some physiological truth. It could mean more wisdom and less curmudgeonry.
if there is a lot of old people their vote matters less. if there is a whole lot more younger people their vote matters less.
i’m sure this would work great. also sure i’m the first person to have thought about this. /s
As evidenced by... the ever present red-scare in the US? It has been decades and people still going on with this bullshit.
It’s very easy to observe how older generations have a hard time getting rid of their zeitgeist.
This doesn’t mean they suck, because there are things that lose impact over time and older generations are the to say: listen, it was way worse then it seems, I was still a child when that atomic bomb fell and the repercussions were immense.
So I think they are valuable voters, but because they’re scam-resistant. On the contrary, they’re historically charged and can help us remember relevant stuff, but their emotionally bagged opinions are almost immutable and a vulnerability.
Just because someone is N years old does not necessarily mean they have N years of experience from which to derive wisdom. They could very well have done nothing but meet the most basal needs to sustain life for N years, having nothing to contribute to a greater dialogue.
I think we already live with this kind of tension much more than in the past, as made clear by the voting patterns of young vs old.
Sharing a country with people of such different values is hard. Particularly when the older generation is always the shrinking demographic and feels its way of life is at risk.
What can alleviate this? More federalism? More geographic clustering by age? A culture that puts empathy over shame?
I don't just want to exist longer - I want to live longer.
Humans are fundamentally adapted to live/reproduce on the oxidizing and wet environment on Earth. Rather than bring out a mini Earth environ each time we go to space, we should start thinking about how we can just bring out our mind. It would be much more sustainable in the long run, maybe even on Earth itself.
Of course, that's all the same tech that space habitats would use too, so why not do both?
If this continues, the world population, while still growing due to people living longer, [2] will not grow due to more births anymore. All things being equal, after a while, population would start decreasing.
None of this is necessarily cast in stone: people could start having more children again, or life expectancy could massively drop. But as things are trending right now, population will stabilize relatively soon and then decrease (it's already happening in some countries).
How crowded the Earth needs to be to be considered overpopulated is debatable and a separate question. But if the population does not keep growing there is a path to getting there, assuming the peak population is considered too high.
People used to live in caves in a static way of life that persisted for generations. Hunter gatherer societies still exist. While I can't speak for them I'm very happy that I live in modern society as compared to theirs.
> There's just not any benefit to exploring space.
I strongly disagree, what are the benefits of living? Benefits are relative and arbitrary, there are no universal definition of 'benefits'. Access to more resources and potential to leave solar system would count as benefit to me. The simple experience of just not being stuck on Earth would be another one for me.
What about all the technology that, while developed for spaceflight, provides huge benefits to the earthbound masses?
What about meeting other civilizations if they exist, or else learning why they don't?
Most heavy industrial processes and power generation have substantial ecological consequences so I envision nearly all of this being taken off world into orbital factories and power collectors. Microwave wireless energy transfer has achieved greater than 80% efficiencies in the lab and solar power collectors in space can achieve a 24/7 operation and park themselves in geosynchronous orbits so a mini dyson swarm around Earth could power the world's economy comfortably and be far more distributed and safe against shutdowns. Manufacturing in microgravity offers unique opportunities and advantages for many processes in industry and the advantages of floating in vacuum cannot be understate for bulk transportation of goods.
There is a trick that exploits the conservation of momentum that allows for very cheap transfer of cargo and people from and to Earth without having to rely on the magically strong materials of space elevators: by having a ring of ferromagnetic material around the Earth that rotates and greater than orbital velocity, you can then have an outer shell around it that is either at rest or moving in the opposite direction (preferably at the rotational speed of the Earth that can be kept suspended from the inner coil via a magnetic field. As long as the net momentum of the inner and outer ring is zero, it will remain stable and now you have a platform that is at rest relative to the ground and from which you can have cable cars running to the ground from without requiring fictional materials. One thing to note is that with these largely stationary (save for counterbalancing against the rotation of the earth) platforms is that you are still experiencing most of the earth's gravity when standing on them. This makes it a good option for long term habitats for baseline humans. Of course, because it has a coil that winds around the entire circumference of the Earth, you can use it to propel one hell of a mass driver for cargo to the point where you could just not bother with chemical rockets altogether and rely on magnetic trains to do most of the heavy lifting into LEO with ion drives or solar sails are for long term maintenance.
This formula works for every planet but it makes the most sense to target Earth because of the highly challenging escape velocity it imposes on our current launch capabilities. This allows you to skip the rocket equation and as a consequence make travel to space genuinely affordable with potentially less than a dollar per kg costs. Once you get to space, travel is actually incredibly easy since you have mostly empty space between you and your target and there is no air resistance to slow you down.
We can also protect the Earth from coronal mass ejections and asteroid strikes and even counteract global warming by dimming the sunlight received from earth by a percent or two. This won't magically turn the clock back on climate change but it would be one hell of a slowdown to allow for other changes in our manufacturing and energy generation processes.
Besides that, extrapolating from very recent trends in population dynamics in "developed" (which is such a relative term anyway) countries that overpopulation is not going to be a problem anymore is absurd. People do on average want to have kids and the real reason why some countries are beginning to go below replacement rates of growth has more to do with the collapse of the middle class and the uncertain economic future of many young adults. Once we have radical life extension technology (something I consider largely inevitable) and people in their late 80's are still as sexually virulent as if they were in their 20's, we are likely to see another population boom within this century. While we could probably continue to house more people past a trillion within Earth, you are going to have to start either living more frugally or damage the ecosystem or at least reduce it's priority.
An Ecumenopolis (planet-wide city) could actually be a very comfortable place to live and house many trillions but it's a process that is inherently destructive to the landscape and life as it is now. You are essentially turning the entire surface (and ideally some or all of the interior) of a planet into a machine - and a lot of that would be necessary once we are talking multiple trillions because at that scale, we have a very different heating problem from the comparatively measly effects of greenhouse gases that are already wrecking havoc on our ecosystems. When you have that much waste heat being generated on a planet, you need to start constructing giant radiators that extend out of the atmosphere on space towers. Once you have such numbers, even if less than a percent of the population have any wish of colonising other worlds, you will have billions of colonists and our entire solar system will be colonised.
There is also the undeniable appeals of claiming territory over a truly virgin land without the evil of colonialism over past natives. That land might be hostile as it is but the opportunity to transform it into an oasis of life is going to become a more and more attractive proposition once have a truly abundant and clean source of energy because matter then becomes the real bottleneck. Land prices on Earth will continue to rise to the point where suburbs in the form of O' Neil Cylinder habitats will become the suburbs and rural area of humanity. Or if we switch to a form of land allocation that does not involve money, we would still commission the construction of rotating habitats to keep the population density of Earth below a amount (what amount that is depends both on your values as a civilisation and the degree of verticality of your settlements.
Expanding beyond that lush environment needed technology. Even flintstone and animal hides are a technology.
Expanding to space needs better technology, but the first step was done when some of our ape-like ancestors bashed an antelope's skull with a rock.
Oxygen, Temperature where water is liquid or barely frozen (water is basically rock at -200), Pressurized Environment, abundance of organic material for ingestion. That's true for most of inhabited locations on Earth.
I'm not strongly attached to my meat vessel, I think my consciousness defines me, even though it currently runs off my brain.
But the possibility of terraforming planets or moons cannot be ruled out in the future. We are quite capable of altering environment, actually, even to our detriment (climate change). Maybe we can do it better on Mars or Titan.
A lot of these questions might not be resolved in another 100 years, but certainly the state of the world will be flipped from my developmental years in that time. I have a feeling that will result in a satisfied conclusion to the story of the world as I see it.
Imagine the world 120 years ago in 1900. The airplane hadn’t been invented. Cars were still a novelty. Special Relativity hadn’t been discovered.
My grandma is 105 years old and is pretty much waiting for it to be over. If you live a full life it's not about how old you get, 90 is more than enough to experience the world and see your grand child grow up.
it’s not living 120 or 150 or 200 that matters. it’s the quality of your life. i think working to improve that vs some arbitrary number (that by the time you hit you see death as a release) is what we should target. the term for this is healthspan vs lifespan.
There were plenty of people in their 60s and 70s riddled with cancer and decrepit old bodies from back breaking labor before our lifetimes that probably were waiting for death too.
Now that's the age of retirement and a time to explore hobbies and the world for large portions of the population.
Personally the one thing I fear is that it will be discovered that it's possible to pause/slow aging but not effectively reverse it. If you start taking the aging pills in your 20s maybe you look and feel 50 when you're 100 but if you start the pills when you're fifty maybe you're feeling like a current 100 year old by your 150th birthday.
I'm curious - are those her words or yours?
Of course, that's assuming our species doesn't suffer a biotech apocalypse before then.
space and space colonization? really hard with the current tech and even if the tech was there only a few people will get to do that. the costs will be absurdly high and we also have physical constraints that we cannot bypass.
biotech? in the first few waves it’s gonna be a rich person game. money is literally going to buy you more years.
We have science.
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Edit: I really don't understand the downvoters. This specific passage was written 6000 years ago, give or take. It's from a religious holybook that has no bearing on technology, medicine, or science. Germ theory was nonexistent, most forms of medicine were in their most rudimentary levels. They didn't even have the technology or know-how for basic ironworking.
If you're an adherent to a religion, good for you. Its simply that - a mythology, a belief.
And we should be bearing no credence to the writings of religion in our sciences, unless it stated physical fact (think anthropology, geology, architecture - sciences), or if you're a religious historian and trying to understand how human religions change.
I thought we worked with sciences here, not superstition.
However, as with any information, bias hurts any analysis (in any form data is presented). A quote is just that, a quote.
No matter your beliefs, information is neutral and should be inquired for curiosity purposes in HN, not personal opinion.
In our world, it's trivially easy to get hold of any major religion's works, and only moderately difficult to get hold of smaller religion's works, primarily due to translation issues.
And in light of context, you weren't comparing the writings or showing different religions' thoughts on human longevity - you were implicitly stating that your choice of religion was the right one, by stating it matter-of-factly.
Going ham on religion/myth/worldview isn't the scientific approach at all
Had nothing to do with lifespans.
(Biblical characters — contemporary with when the passage was written — were living past 120.)
You can argue that Noah was "grandfathered in" since he was born before the 120 year rule. But..
"And Arphaxad lived after he begat Salah four hundred and three years, and begat sons and daughters." - Genesis 11:13
I suspect you might feel differently when you're older.
The earth is already packed with billions of people, most of whom live rather miserable existences. It seems like there are nearly infinite other things we ought to improve before we start trying to keep them along for many extra decades.
Reality is that so much research focuses here because the rich and powerful desperately want to defeat death, not because it will be good for humanity in general. On toward the age of the methuselahs, I suppose.