Is Aging Inevitable? | Hacker News Reader

Is Aging Inevitable?

joshmitteldorf.scienceblog.com

80 pointsevo_9123 comments

Anti-aging and longevity are two different things. My parents haven't stopped aging, but they are living longer than any of their parents did. not only are they living longer, they are living better.

We work in the sleeptech space, and sleep degrades as we age, beginning in late 30s. This degradation of sleep is closely linked to degenerative brain disease such as Alzheimer's and dementia. By improving sleep we aim to improve cognitive function longer in life, and improve immune system as well.

So yes, aging is inevitable, but I believe so is extending the human lifespan.

Can you elaborate on ‘sleeptech’? Are you doing more than simply monitoring sleep quality?

No, sleep monitoring isn't helpful for most people, what do you do with the data?

We're focused on improving the neurological functioning of your brain during sleep. We talk a bit about it on our (very fluffy) website https://soundmind.co - and link to the research on the "how it works" page.

We put up the website before we really understood our target market, and even the long-term impact, so we'll be updating it as we get closer to launching. We're working on improving comfort so we can properly get into trials.

I’ve never dreamed (to the best of my knowledge, but I doubt it, I’m 50 years old and I think by now I’d have some inkling if I dreamed at night). Do you have any data on longevity of non-dreamers?

Everyone dreams, you just don't remember your dreams. Though we're interested in REM, it isn't our focus atm...and yes, you dream in non-REM sleep, but those sorts of dreams are different.

REM (dream sleep) is thought to be connected to resolving emotional stresses. I haven't seen any research on the reduction of REM sleep and the impact. Sorry.

Is there actual proof that everyone dreams?

My understanding is that neurologists are taking this from EEG readings and that even people who say they "don't dream" show the same telltale markers of dream as people who do dream.

Sounds really interesting, best of luck!

You mentioned trials, are you trying to get FDA approved?

We're just looking at FDA atm. We don't have to get approval, but we're looking at registering as a medical device (Class 1, maybe Class 2).

Do you have any experience with that process?

We're implementing existing research, with a bit of our own spin on it. My co-founder and I both come from CSIRO (Australia's Science and Technology Org), so our trial is a combination of measuring that we've implemented the science correctly, it's having the impact we want/expect, and we can prove it.

This isn't a medical trial, but we are following regular research protocols.

> Your sleep is unique to you, which is why SoundMind monitors your sleep in real-time and with subtle tones guides your sleep cycles for your ideal recovery

how would this work if you have a partner?

We're only measuring your brain waves, not your partners :) we play sound through bone-conduction, so nothing in your ears, nothing covering your ears, only you can hear it (there is some sound leakage, but minimal).

Completely forgot about bone conduction (I was thinking bed side speakers disturbing your partner, or conventional headphones disturbing you), but still you need it strapped on - a slight discomfort. Also, since you mention measuring, there is another component strapped on (unless it is a fabric woven sensor). An image search on EEG produces cumbersome looking devices.

yeah, we've got soft fabric sensors and the bone conduction speakers are amazingly small. We're still working on comfort with our prototypes - but we're getting pretty good.

Our industrial design firm has nocked it out of the park with design, and we think there stuff will have a huge impact on comfort. Still needs to be tried.

So, I'm interested.

There is a clear link between Benadryl and dementia. Many say that you shouldn't take it as a result.

I've posited that people with 'broken sleep' due to overactive thoughts or anxiety may raise the risk of dementia and benadryl is caught in the crossfire of suffering folks.

Do you have any opinion?

I have never heard of the link to Benadryl, unless they are taking benadryl to "help" with sleep.

In your deepest sleep, there are bursts of brain activity called Slow Wave Oscillations. These have a strong impact on memory consolidation, as well as the clearing of amyloid (beta-amyloid) plaques (think of them like cholesterol in your veins, but amyloids are in your brain).

If you don't get enough deep sleep, and therefore reduce the SWOs, you get a buildup of amyloid plaques.

As we age, we get less deep sleep, less SWOs, you can see where this is going.

It isn't "overactive thoughts" specifically, but again, if you're not getting enough deep sleep due to anxiety I suspect you'd see the same result - but I haven't seen research on that specifically.

However, there is also the issue of us generally having high cortisol levels due to constant fight or flight. There is some research that shows that these high cortisol levels keep our brains in lighter levels of sleep, and therefore reduce deep sleep, making us feel more tired, and damaging our brains. This is connected to the "tired and wired" phenomenon.

It's really a fascinating area.

Thanks for replying. Here is one among many, and I'm a bit surprised you hadn't come across it yet - https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/common-anticholinergic-d...

Are you saying the drug prevents slow wave oscillations?

The main reason for my whole position is that my wife's village believes people who have an 'over-active' brain get dementia, and can all name examples. They have nothing like benadryl there.

Wow, that is fascinating. The reason I likely haven't come across it is that my interest/research with regards to dementia is sleep specific. I'll definitely be keeping my eyes open for more acetycoline in the further research I come across. Thanks for bringing that to my attention.

I see where you're coming from re: "over-active" brain, and so I'd question if they're equating "over-active" with "reduced sleep", and if there is a commonality there.

I'm not a neurologist, I come from a software engineering background. I've always had an interest in neurology, and got into the sleep-tech field because I've always been an insomniac and started learning more about sleep.

Yeah I listened to a podcast recently about sleep, and how 'sleep' medications such as Ambien are only a partial method of inducing sleep, more like inducing unconsciousness and thus it changes your sleep architecture and prevents you from entering the proper deep sleep cycles. Wouldn't be surprised that benedryll has a similar problem if you use it to help you sleep and not just as an anti-histamine that you stay awake throughout.

https://www.peak-human.com/post/dr-kirk-parsley-md-is-sleep-...

The correlation between amyloid plaques and Alzheimer's has long been known, but how well established is the causation? All of my information is dated, but last I read, causation still hadn't been conclusively established.

Do you have any books to recommended to someone that wants to focus on improving their sleep?

If I did, we wouldn't be going this challenging and hi-tech route :)

You can try all the sleep hygiene stuff you want, but if you're not improving the neurological function of your brain while you sleep, you're not improving the effectiveness of sleep, and since your natural ability to sleep degrades as you age...

The Oxford University Neurology of Sleep textbook is surprisingly approachable. Most people start with Dr Matthew Walkers, Why We Sleep. There are websites dedicated to tearing apart his science, but that goes a bit far. The guy does an excellent job of bringing the importance of sleep to light, and explaining the basics. He also owns up to the "mistakes" or things that have been learned since the book was published.

Had a conversation with a psychiatrist about this recently. The correlation is not between Benadryl exactly, but a class of drugs called anticholinergics of which Benadryl is one. Specifically, there is only a causal link between specific types of anticholinergic drugs (antidepressants, antipsychotics, antiparkinson, bladder antimuscarinic drugs) and not all anticholinergics - Benadryl doesn't fall into any of the categories I just mentioned. Specifically, the largest study (in terms of sample size) showed that there only a slight increase in your odds of getting dementia (6% higher odds) for people older than 55 after taking < 1095 total daily standard doses for over three years (for Benadryl, that's 25-50 mg daily)[1]. That's already a reasonably high dose.

This and other studies have not found correlations between antihistamine anticholinergics and dementia.

[1]: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...

"Anti-aging and longevity are two different things."

Depends on what you precisely mean by longevity. The word used to mean "living long naturally", but the meaning has been shifting towards lifespan and healthspan extension in the last decade or so. So if someone now says that they are interested in science of longevity, they probably mean "reaching 110 years of age in good health".

For that, you need anti-aging tech definitely. Our natural lifespan is shorter and breeding humans for natural longevity [0], while theoretically possible, would take several thousand years.

[0] Theoretically, you could take a big group of humans who are still fertile at 40, let them reproduce and, in the next generation, lift the limit slightly, say, to 40,5. After tens of generations, you will have a group selected for longevity, because late fertility tends to align with longevity. But given how long our generations are, that would take a long, long time.

"Over several decades, Vaupel has been the optimist of demography, telling us that somewhere in the world, human lifespan is always continuing to increase, as it has done since 1840, at the rate of about 1 year of new lifespan for every 4 years that passes. For the first 130 years of this advance, the improvement in lifespan was predominantly about preventing infant mortality and combatting infectious disease. But since about 1970, lifespan improvements have continued to benefit the elderly."

But what kind of life is it?

Many elderly have lived miserable, hopeless lives, and when they age not only do they suffer bodily infirmities, but they're desperately lonely as for many of them all of their friends and family have died, or they've been abandoned by their families, they have no one to support them, and suffer from mental issues like dementia and depression on top of that.

Little wonder that so many of the elderly commit suicide.

Not to discourage anti-aging research, but if I had to prioritize I'd choose focusing on eliminating poverty, improving social safety nets, and building stronger communities.

Improving mental health and helping people to live healthier lives while they're young so their bodies aren't in horrible shape by the time they're old would also make for good priorities.

While I agree those will yield a saner society and are worthy causes to focus one (personally, I still can’t get over the fact that you have to be at least a $50M+ net worth individual in US to truly not have to ever worry about medical-related bankruptcy - it won’t happen to most, but that fact that it can, short of a huge fortune, is just mind-boggling to me).

The deeper driver for this loneliness is how fractured family and community ties have gotten over the last 50 years. When growing up outside of US, it was u thinkable that my elders could be left alone without much contact. It seems to be the norm here and thinking to my eventual future, I really don’t know what it will hold.

Having visited nursing homes many times, what is going on in there can barely be considered living, even though many of the inmates linger for years in it.

I say linger because that's what it looks like. I'd rather die before being placed in one.

I can't speak for you of course and I have had a similar instinct, but I think there's another perspective that I personally don't yet grasp.

Think of the famous Dylan Thomas poem, Do not go gentle into that good night

    Do not go gentle into that good night
    Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
    Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

    Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
    Because their words had forked no lightning they
    Do not go gentle into that good night.

    Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
    Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
    Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

    Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
    And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
    Do not go gentle into that good night.

    Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
    Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
    Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

    And you, my father, there on the sad height,
    Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
    Do not go gentle into that good night.
    Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

I suspect many HN users have a similar perspective, as I have had. But one day I realized that the poem was published when Thomas was ~37 years old and dedicated to Thomas' father. I realized that it is not the wisdom of an elderly person, but a young person who (in my reading) realizes their parent's mortality and morbidity, and pleads desperately against it. Elderly people I know don't say these things.

The parent's comment and Thomas' perspective make perfect sense for a younger person: If you are young, do not go gentle, and do not linger in a place like a nursing home - to demonstrate the difference in stages of life, a nursing home is accepted for elderly people, but just imagine the absurdity of a healthy 37 year old living in one; at that age, it would be indeed be barely living. An opium den would almost be seen as more acceptable.

But in my experience and understanding, and again for reasons some of which I guess at but don't yet grasp, for elderly people it's very often different. Some elderly people I know well are much more accepting of death, in ways they don't often discuss with young people, just like they don't discuss many physical issues of aging - death is all around them; they have growing maladies and can't avoid risking death (a flu, a broken hip, Covid, etc., all carry that risk); their business includes planning their own deaths via wills, DNR instructions, etc.; and their friends and colleagues are not getting married, getting new jobs, having new kids, they are dying - and they are more tired of life.

But what do I know? I think I know nothing, like a 13 year old talking about life at 37. Maybe Dylan Thomas (at age 37) and I are not quite ready to know the truth of old age. I don't tell teenagers many of the worst elements of adulthood; why burden them and take away the optimism and energy of youth? They will learn anyway, and now is their chance to enjoy what they have.

Thomas would die at 39, 2 years after he wrote that.

If more people are going to live longer, so will more of their friends and more will retain fitness and health

You chose to focus on that many, while ignoring the other many

Family is of utmost importance. A faceless entity, whether government run or private, doesn’t ultimately care about you as a person. An elderly person in nursing home care is a check, and a statistic, and something that a low-paid, low-skilled person has to bathe, clean up after, feed, etc.

You need family to look after you - children, grand children, nieces, nephews, and so on. They are the people that will truly care and advocate for you, if you become incapable.

There was a documentary in the UK which I just cannot remember the name of anymore. They have an African tribe (father and mother) exchange places with a middle class father and mother in a UK suburb. One interesting element was how the Africans were appalled that they put their mother into a care home, this was just unacceptable in their view.

100-150 years ago it was common to have your elderly relatives home, too. But many people either worked in the fields around the same village or in a workshop located in the same house.

The "commute 60 minutes to an office" culture is rather hostile to community living. As is the fact that many people aged 80 or so are alive, but not self-sufficient and need nursing.

If you get a stroke in rural Africa (or in 19th century Europe), you just die and that's it. Your descendants do not need to worry about keeping you alive but bedridden for five more years.

While I understand the general point, not all families care, or care well. See King Lear.

Robotz! iCare

I'm not sure that I'd want to burden my family with my old-age care, I'd rather they lived their lives to the fullest than had me as a millstone around their necks preventing them from achieving their dreams. If I was ever incapacitated in a way that required 24/7 care in my old age I'd far rather make a dignified exit and have my descendants remember me by doing something meaningful to them than waste time and money on me when I'm too demented to even appreciate it.

Of course, this will always be a deeply personal decision and there's no universal answer to this question.

It's not that they care for you 24/7 - it's that they are keeping an eye on you, auditing that your care is truly what was agreed and paid for, the quality, etc. And if an issue arises, that it is dealt with. This is not a significant burden for children to help their parents, but a duty that should be performed. Without family, an unrelated third-party may care enough to do this, especially if you set up a paid trustee with third-party verification. But even then, no one ultimately cares about you but your family, and failing that very solid friends, assuming they are also healthy and not in similar age and circumstances as you yourself.

I think it depends on the family and on the person. I for one hugely value autonomy and the ability to change my life on a whim, I've been working towards a very self-sufficient lifestyle of sailing the world and working in a location-independent manner. If I have kids they'll likely inherit at least some of my nature which drives them away from a traditional life and towards the semi-nomadic life I'm embracing, so it would be immensely cruel (as well as hypocritical) of me to bring a human life into the world knowing full well I'd be denying them the chance of such a life themselves. My future children would honour my wishes far better by living in a way that makes them happy (whatever that may be) rather than shackling themselves to a particular location or burning up their inheritance for the purpose of keeping what remains of my demented mind alive beyond its time.

I don't like this idea kids owe their parents anything simply for existing. Nobody asks to be born, and since there's no meaningful consent it would be wrong of me to impose a duty of care on my future children when they have no say in the matter. I owe them a decent childhood because I chose to bring them into existence, they don't owe me a decent old age just because of social expectations. In fact, I'd be proud of them for rejecting those expectations because grudgingly making those kind of sacrifices can only breed resentment.

Parents don’t bring let their child decide to be born, but they do care for them unconditionally. I believe it is the duty of the child to care for their parent if the parent did not do something irredeemable to them. But this is an ethical belief.

This is more of an artifact of Western society's relatively new and absurdly antisocial aversion to extended family, along the complete and utter failure of modern public planners, who design cities optimized for cars as opposed to walking and public transit, preventing the formation of close-knit communities.

And when you can’t afford a house for one person, there’s little hope of letting grandma live your guesthouse.

And you can chalk this down to more urban planning failure. Urban planners have so thoroughly ruined the social fabric of society with ideas they once thought "new" and "novel", and only just now have they realized the damage their choices have caused.

The damage will take decades or even centuries to undo, as traditional towns and cities are replaced with walkable ones, an effort that will undoubtedly meet significant resistance as most people have dumped a sizable portion of their net worth into their vehicle.

If one were conspiratorially minded, they could see this as by design, so people give their loyalty to the employer and state only.

I think it was just sheer incompetence. If you look at subreddits like /r/urbanplanning, the mistakes are clearly recognized and modern urban planners are desperately trying to undo their predecessors' mistakes, but the hole has been dug, and these things take time.

Wouldn’t people on that subreddit be similar to people on HN: fringe and rather ahead of the curve (relatively speaking)?

I don’t know much about urban planning but I see it in tech: the stuff discussed on HN and presented as more or less normal/best practice isn’t being done or even thought of as “best practice” outside of the HN crowd. See enterprise development and a vast number of agencies or other companies that, together, make the bulk of the software being made and sold today where basic things like unit testing or the open/closed principle are seen as a waste of time and unnecessary.

> helping people to live healthier lives while they're young so their bodies aren't in horrible shape by the time they're old would also make for good priorities.

Agree. But let me add that finding that sweet spot where the body isn't in horrible shape is not as easy as it might seem, based on my observation.

My father-in-law was a Minnesota dairy farmer all his life. By his early 60's his body was utterly beat up by the hard work. I, on the other hand, got a little too soft and CRT-tanned over the years, so while not as beat up at the same age in some ways, my cardio health is not what it should be and I am rearranging my life to make room for more exercise and have made radical changes to my diet. But on the other, other hand, a friend's mom was a competitive athlete and active coach all of her life, and by her early 60's is as beat up as my father-in-law was. So there is such a thing as unhealthy exercise.

Good diet, and the right amount of low-impact exercise would seem to be the path to enjoyable golden years. Which is such a broad statement as to be utterly un-actionable.... cue the arguments over diet and exercise. And then, of course, there is the issue of motivation, even if you could be told the One Correct Way.....

(107 days without BBQ ribs... but who is counting??)

Most of what I've read about anti-aging suggests that the same treatments would allow people to live longer and _healthier_ lives, which solves half the problems you're mentioning. But hey, maybe it doesn't and just pushes it back another 10 years. Still, I'll take an extra 10 healthy years.

I'm not disagreeing with your premise that we should fix these social problems, but it feels a bit orthogonal. In addition to that, it seems like human policies are reactionary. So making people live longer seems like a good way to make these things more important to more people, and thus sufficient enough to pass the threshold to actually do something about it.

His suggestion seems to be to stop trying, but this is far from obvious.

One possible explanation of aging is that natural selection forces living organisms to die if they are no longer capable of reproduction or compete for resources with those who can reproduce. For modern human the right balance was determined by evolution hundreds of thousands years ago in a very different environment. We do not know yet which age is now sustainable for nature, but we are powerful enough to adjust the environment, thus natural constraints of human age shall no longer apply. But the selection criteria can give us a hint on what science must focus on to reach longevity: it is female well-being, female fertility age and aging processes that increase competition for resources (i.e. keeping people at work as much as possible). Of course, if we are going to reproduce and live longer, we also need to develop sustainable economy and use resources of our planet wisely.

The word the author seems to look for is "evolvability" [0].

> Evolvability is defined as the capacity of a system for adaptive evolution. Evolvability is the ability of a population of organisms to not merely generate genetic diversity, but to generate adaptive genetic diversity, and thereby evolve through natural selection.

In changing environment organisms have to be able to quickly adapt.

You can compare organisms like Greenland Shark with lifespans of up to 400 years with a common mouse. Mice will go trough some 100-1000 generations in lifespan of a Greenland Shark. Which one is more likely to adapt to changes in the environment induced by humans and which will go extinct?

Anthropocene extinction event will eliminate a lot of life forms with long lifespans, many are already gone, and previous extinction events probably did it too.

BTW - This is a falsifiable hypothesis in a fairly simple simulation.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolvability

Ginkgo biloba, the maidenhair tree, shows no apparent signs of senescence. The tree is eventually dying because for a tree it's impossible to escape from environmental changes like land-slides, lightnings striking it's canopy.

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/01/how-ginkgo-biloba-ac...

> As we extend human lifespan, there is an urgent need to move toward sustainable agriculture and to adopt energy-efficient technologies.

I wonder if we'll reach a point where someone's life can be saved but doctors will choose not to if that person is of a certain age - because of the impact on the planet. It seems like a grisly future, but if it were possible to live to 200 or 300, the population could get out of control pretty fast.

edit: This is getting a lot of downvotes - if you downvote can you please explain why? I'm not advocating for this, I simply thought it was an interesting possibility.

By the time anyone is 200, much less 300, assuming we have truly managed to cure ageing, I don't think we're going to be worrying about the impact on this particular planet. There's a whole universe out there to spend the next centuries of your life seeing.

This assumes we can live in space indefinitely without any problems or that settling other planets won't be a problem. Both of those could be great filters.

Imagine this hypothetical discussion is discovered and read by someone in 10,000 years from now, when living over 300 years is already a reality and the normal. What a feeling to realize that the things you now take for granted, were at one point simply out of reach. I wonder if we have specific examples of such recorded discussions of things that today are a reality.

Future societies will definitely look back at the "age of death" with complete horror. How could humans accept aging while at the same time desperately clawing for life when death came near? How could they move the world and spend trillions fighting COVID while not even spending a billion fighting aging? People will shake their heads in fascination and perhaps a feeling of disgust at our obvious shortsightedness.

In the future, even a single death will be a very significant event, similar to how we might see a high-mortality catastrophe like 9/11 today.

90% of covid deaths are people over 70, most with multiple co-morbidities and thus a very limited remaining life expectancy any way. We went to such extreme lengths to prevent the deaths of these people from covid, yet so many are willing to see those same people die just a few years later from other aging-related illnesses, when it is within our power to cure aging.

Deaths. There is so much beyond "merely" dying within the actual events that unfolded and continue.

Only less than 60,000[0] people die per year from influenza, a family of viruses that is well understood, vaccines somewhat effective and available, and almost everybody has some immunological response against due to previous exposure. Tens of millions are affected by influenza yearly, it stops their work for weeks, causes their family to stop their work and care for them, causes errors and economic cost, social cost, etc. People hate influenza and it does result in critical hospitalizations and death among people all over the place. Mostly old people die from that too, but it ruins everybody's productivity.

A novel virus that is at best like influenza, with an additional asymptomatic cadre, affecting the entire country or world, with a completely naive immune response? You should read Guns, Germs, and Steel[1]

We are clearly capable of acting against and preventing Sars-CoV-2 infection, we are as yet unable to cure aging. How preposterous.

[0] - https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel

People are not fighting COVID because of the productivity impact but because of the deaths, otherwise we'd treat it like the flu.

> we are as yet unable to cure aging. How preposterous.

We put zero effort into anti-aging research but we moved the world for COVID. If we put the same amount of effort into anti-aging research, a cure to aging could be well within most people's lifetimes, effectively saving billions of lives.

My impression is that COVID is problematic because a lot of people spend weeks on the ICU. The death toll itself is not that big, but having ICUs overflowing is a bad thing.

ICUs were built to take care about acute problems and there is a silent expectation that most patients admitted into ICU care either die quickly or recover enough within 2-3 days to be transferred into regular care. Having people around on ventilators for weeks destroys logistics of ICU systems.

We put way more than zero research into anti-aging research. Granted, COVID attracted a lot more money and attention, but anti-aging research is gaining traction. And with the tech moguls of SV aging, you can bet on some extra investments.

I for one don't believe that people like Bezos (a notorious fitness and health fanatic) are just going to succumb to natural aging without a fight.

The number of deaths has been the overwhelming concern of public health authorities and other major decision makers. Even the concern over ICU capacity depletion has largely stemmed from the concern that this would increase covid mortality.

we are treating it like a flu to which we are completely immunogically naive. this kind of thing is not mysterious.

its a natural disaster or global catastrophe and its happened before.

we have also had the mrna technology for over a decade.

if we put the coronavirus effort into aging or global warming, we would not have solutions in 1year. masks and hygeine dont work for aging.

it is a totally different problem space and not comparable in the least.

I feel like HN'ers interested in curing aging could make a fantastic thinktank/action group, and provide a meaningful purpose to our lives where most of us have "meaningless" jobs at some big Big N.

I genuinely think that this site's users could be an impressive force for anti-aging technology research and implementation.

I fully agree.

Citation needed. I doubt very much that percentage.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-73777-8/figures/1

Depends on what consciousness turns out to actually be in my opinion (which is another unknown that'll no doubt be looked back on in amazement). If it's something that can be recorded in a sense then I imagine death without having first "backed up" will be seen as a tragedy! It might be the case one day that biology is simply be the first stage of the human lifecycle and just like birth, puberty etc "death" becomes a major life milestone that involves exchanging our frail bodies for something much more durable.

If even if we manage to colonize other worlds, exponential population growth can't be sustained. The habitable space scales at most as the volume of a sphere growing and light-speed centered around Earth, so subexponential. You'd also need to constantly ship people from inner space to ever more distant new colonies.

Fortunately humans seem to have the tendency of having fewer children as they become more wealthy and educated. Many countries already are below replacement rate. It is plausible that birth rates would drop even further if death became optional.

If you truly cured death you'd have to worry about the exponent eventually, but realistically people would start pushing back childbearing even further (dramatically further potentially).

And it's possible that the TFR for any individual would not increase meaningfully (not clear to me that a 300 year old would feel the need to continue having children). Could just have 2.1 children and then call it quits and enjoy your great-great-great grandchildren, in which case population growth is only linear, not even exponential.

It sort of already happens but not in that way where a doctor makes a choice. Those without means do no even intersect with the system in a way that that choice is possible. Those with means will be opted in automatically.

>if it were possible to live to 200 or 300, the population could get out of control pretty fast.

Seems unlikely.

Females generally decline in their ability to create children, males less so, but it is for sure a thing.

People might crank them out like crazy, as we currently do, and the people who don't die in war, accident, disease, or whatever else will just be out there. Hopefully they will also be out there bestowing their considerable wisdom upon their clan and humankind as a whole. One can dream.

>doctors [might not] if that person is of a certain age - because of the impact on the planet.

I don't think so. In this grisly, sort of insane scenario (we have plenty of those, thank you) it usually operates from the other chronological direction.

I was considering if people might wait longer if they had more time to live, but people really like to bang I've noticed. Seems quite unlikely for young adults to pass up. Nonetheless, I don't think it will cause an insane explosion beyond the geometric growth that this thing could do anyhow. However, consider the decline in birth rates of western countries, japan, and now china[0], the numbers simply don't substantiate this hypothesis. I don't know how the math works out wrt population growth, or why this is happening to advanced nations, but it seems like there is the possibility of numbers to plateau for some murky reason.

Plus, the best doctors are most likely gonna be old as hell or under the guidance of one who is. They might be able to see the utility.

FWIW, I think it is a reasonable, if malinformed, question.

[0] - https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.CBRT.IN?location...

Mortality is absolutely a feature of evolution. Sticking around after you reproduce and helping your offspring is great, but beyond some point you've done what you can to improve the viability of your offspring and are just competing with them for resources.

Just because it's a feature of evolution doesn't mean we shouldn't try to stop it. Evolution does not care about how you or your offspring feel. Literally the only thing evolution cares about is achieving cancerous growth at all costs. I don't think that's a worthy goal.

*Achieving exponential growth until we as a species reach our environment’s resource limit, and then a plateau, not a crash; Evolution’s “goal” then is to try to ensure the survival of the species.

https://www.britannica.com/topic/exponential-growth

Indeed, survival of the species with no regard to the happiness of the members therein. I think we can do better ourselves at this point, which would be in itself arguably part of evolution.

Meh, I disagree. It is not a feature of evolution, it is completely accidental.

Evolution doesn't give a damn about any of that at all. All that it is doing is selecting for survival and reproduction. Things find a niche that allow them to survive and reproduce, if they only need to live days like a fly, or a hundred years like some lobsters, turtles, birds, and even hundreds or possibly thousands like some trees[0] are able to do, they will go ahead and do that.

What happens is old ones that become weakened die from predation, or reduced hunting capacity, or some kind of senescence from something like molting, cell division, disease or injury.

Typically, reproduction can happen relatively quickly so there isn't much selection pressure towards extremely long lives in general. Some things are able to live incredibly long, but that again is mostly an accident. Either for or against, evolution doesn't favor anything but enough, after that--its gravy.

The thing about humans is that we are the ultimate generalist in the evolutionary kingdom. We can work in any niche, we could probably live on a scorching Venus in small numbers for a while--who knows?

Communication has allowed us to find survival traits in the knowledge of our elders, stories, and later in societies and writing and large scale organization. Now that we have evolved science and soon, if we slide through the filter, post-industrial technology, we might just find that our selection pressure leads up to increased lifespans, or at least the possibility. We certainly have the urge here and there ...

Perhaps it would enable us to colonize extrasolar planets, or maybe gain a perspective of scale that allows us to break free of the local minimum of the economics that is fossil fuel usage, planetary destruction events, knowledge transfer, or just plain ole' happiness, if living a long time somehow turns out granting us that. Can always pull the plug (in the space suit's oxygen tank or perhaps space-narcotic micro-drip injector) if it turns out to be terrible.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_trees

I wonder how many of the people cheerleading for indefinite lifespan technology also believe in heaven. I'm curious how they explain the desire to live a long time in this imperfect world when heaven awaits. Of course, if they think they are hell-bound, then there is nothing to explain.

That can be easily answered - just look at the decline of Christianity (and other global religions) in the Western World [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_Christianity_in_the...

The link says Christianity is on the decline in terms of the percentage of adherents, and in many geographies in absolute numbers.

My question was: of the group of people who believe in heaven and also want indefinite life on earth, how do they reconcile those two ideas? The article has no bearing on that. Even if there was one person who believed in heaven, if they also wanted unlimited life on earth, I'd be interested to hear why they believe both.

This would be a personal opinion so take it for what it's worth. I doubt that on a relative basis we have as many people left today who are as convinced in the concept of heaven as compared to a thousand years ago. Just think of all the instances where you would give someone a choice to denounce their religion or get burnt alive, and people chose the latter. Comparing that on a relative basis, I think fewer of those choices would be made today.

As to why, a thousand years ago you didn't really have a strong counterthesis to the Intelligent Design thesis. As the Evolutionary principles became better understood and more accepted, religions have had to shift their position a bit (initially the Earth was the center of the universe, etc).

Long story short, even if people do believe in heaven, they wouldn't mind having a small hedge, just in case.

Kinda like how many believers cry at funerals. Not to be dismissive, but why? (Yes I know not all cultures)

Your chain of arguments seem to cling on that "a lot of people seeking long lifespan are also religious"

Seems to be quite a flex to reach a certain conclusion.

You are strawmanning by putting words in my mouth.

"I wonder how many of the people cheerleading for indefinite lifespan technology also believe in heaven."

How did that turn into "a lot of people"? Whether it is 1% or 90% doesn't enter into my hypothetical.

Second, I didn't "reach a conclusion." I asked a sincere question, and it would be great if someone who is in that intersection gave a sincere answer.

Finally, using loaded terms like "cling" and "quite a flex" is just unnecessary attitude.

Biological life can't escape death, but future artificial life forms will.

Previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27794018

FYI "the author also believes that, "it is difficult to escape the inference that powerful people and organizations have engineered this pandemic with deadly intent," believing that Bill Gates' TED talk indicated that he knew that COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2) was coming. He thinks that the pandemic was planned to profit the pharmaceutical industry, and that vaccines are sometimes maliciously manufactured to induce infertility." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27794425

Anyone with a deep interest in science knew that some "pandemic" was coming. We've seen it before, and therefore knew it was possible, and we've had scientists warning us for ages now that the more we invade and destroy the natural systems of the planet that sustain us, the more chance there is that we end up releasing or coming in contact with some new (novel) viruses and diseases we've not seen before. Humanity chose the "business as usual" approach to all warnings we were given by those in a position to know something about it, and now we're all paying the price of that willful ignorance.

Why doesn’t anyone see death as a feature not a bug?

Our environment is always changing so is it wise to throw away the opportunity to adapt?

We can adapt without dying, thank you very much. In fact, traditional death-based evolution is probably hindering our adaptation more than it helps, since it takes a few hundred thousand years to do what we can now accomplish in just a few decades.

Not to get political but have you seen the makeup of the US Congress? The world is ruled by octogenarians that never seem to die.

Not really an argument against curing aging, but rather an argument for age limits or age-based representation.

We've already thrown out evolution, which isn't a huge deal because our environment is changing far too quickly for it to be helpful.

But even if none of that were the case, arguments that death is a positive and should be kept around have a huge burden to meet. When your argument is "we should murder everyone who will ever exist because X," then the value X had better be pretty fucking huge.

God, I hope so. And glad the research suggests it.

I've been downvoted a billion times for my opinion, but I hold steadfast. Nothing is meant to live forever.

The one equalizer we all have is we all end up in a pine box(figure of speech). The last thing the world needs is a 500 year old Bezos.

Arguably even Bezos doesn't really need 500 years, unless some magic happy pills pop up I can't see how that won't turn into a miserable existence eventually.

>And glad the research suggests it.

The article is actually arguing against aging being inevitable (in the article, "My answer may be right or wrong" and below).

The author also links to a blog titled "Age reduction breakthrough"~[1].

[1] https://joshmitteldorf.scienceblog.com/2020/05/11/age-reduct...

He admits it's a minority opinion, though. It seems based on a little research and a lot of theory, for the time being.

I actually like the entropy comment a lot. Cancer seems to be the great equalizer. The biggest things we can do today to extend life reliably are a) cure cancer, b) lab grow vital organs, and everything that goes along with that, and c) clear arteries. That would by far extend our lives, without looking to theories and such.

One day, death from aging will be as much of an anachronism as half of children dying before the age of five, as they did throughout human history until the 19th century, is today.

In almost any case where someone is dying, both them, and their loved ones, are devastated by the unfolding tragedy, and go to incredible lengths to prevent that outcome. There is nothing more human than to work to prevent death, and no outcome more inevitable, if the human race can survive long enough, than to provide people with biological immortality.

A 500 year old Musk or Bezos will be building out space colonies for us to live in and funding the development of ever more advanced and affordable spacecraft to help us get there. I also don't think biological immortality will lead to individuals remaining the wealthiest in the world for ever. In the rapidly evolving economy of the modern age, every generation will see new entrepreneurs disrupt the old guard and become the new top players. This has more to do with the advantage of having a fresh prespective, than aging making the previous generation feeble.

Without death, time has no value. Good luck peeing in bottles for 7 cents an hour to support these spacecraft.

The first smartphones, in 2007, cost $750 in inflation adjusted terms. Only 40 million people worlwide, almost exclusively living in the developed world, could afford one.

Today, smartphones are in the hands of over 3.8 billion people (approaching 50% of the human population) [1], with the most affordable today going for $50, and with far more capabilities than the 2007 iPhone.

[1] https://www.bankmycell.com/blog/how-many-phones-are-in-the-w...

Pff, no thanks. 'Neverending story' is a concept for children, same as 'the song that never ends' and other cartoons of infinity. In reality I get as much enjoyment from finishing a book as starting it. I'm not rejecting the idea of technological progress, I'm rejecting the whole idea of wanting to live indefinitely. Shrinking from death misses the point of life.

There is nothing meaningful in death. It's a meaningless tragedy. If and when we can give humans the option of living forever, you're always free to not avail yourself of that option, if that is your preference.

Sure there is, the fact of its apparent permanence provides and ordering criteria for a value system. Are you saying that there's nothing - nothing at all - for which you'd be willing to sacrifice your life?

You can have an ordering criteria without having lifespans limited to 7-8 decades. Time still matters in the absence of death from aging.

You can, and you'll also end up with a gerontocracy. I see you don't address the sacrifice question so I guess that means there isn't any such thing. Perhaps that will change in the future.

Issues like gerontocracy will be completely irrelevant when we're spanning the solar system, and especially when we're sending colony ships to star systems light years away.

>Nothing is meant to live forever.

And you, axaxs, are the righteous and true arbiter of who lives and who dies? I'd rather make that decision for myself thank you.

> I'd rather make that decision for myself thank you.

Are you filthy rich? Because if you aren't, then you don't get that choice. If cures for aging become a reality, you don't think the filthy rich will hoard it for themselves and deny or ration everyone else's access, just as they do with so many other resources? The richest of the rich will decide who lives or dies even if such research yields any results.

Maybe in countries like the US where healthcare is run by predatory loan sharks, in the civilised world the economic advantages of keeping skilled workers with plenty of knowledge in the workforce longer will be obvious.

Yes, because of entropy.

edit: I don't understand why my comment is so controversial. We are all subject to the laws of thermodynamics. DNA, proteins, cells, and body structe is basically matter in low entropic state. Its interaction with the environment will inevitably lead damage or erosion of said structures, a basic process of entropy increasing in the system. Nobody is exempt from this process.

Do you think we have the least entropy when we are born, or when we're at peak physical and mental performance, like mid 20's to mid 30's?

The question seems poorly worded but I’ll do my best guess here.

As long as you are gaining weight/height, you should be decreasing the entropy of the system around you. Your body’s entropy should be increasing in absolute terms but staying the same/decreasing as a percentage of your overall body.

Growth without order is cancer. It's a form of entropy, not extropy. Extropy is measured as the increasing signal to noise ratio in a system, not how much space it occupies. The systems least prone to entropy are often the most compact. This is also why it's astonishing that elephants defy entropy by not getting cancer at the same rate per cell as smaller mammals.

Most human beings don’t experience growth in childhood as cancer.

Most growth in childhood is making order out of chaos and reducing noise, so it's extropic. The point was that continued growth is not always a sign of reduced entropy.

Entropy maxing out is more of a 10^100 year problem than a 100 year problem.

Completely miss the point there. The basic principle behind entropy is that any ordered system will eventually become disordered over time and reaches equilibrium. Some systems go easily disordered within within a human lifetime, or even in seconds. For example, add milk to you coffee and watch it become diffused.

In the context of a human body, the coded information in our DNA, the structured cell walls in our body, are states of matter that is low in entropy. They will eventually get damaged due to interactions with other matter around us. The damage in this case will manifest itself as "aging".

How is GP missing the point? They're arguing about the timescale of entropy, not the basic principle. You're right that ordered systems eventually become disordered, but "eventually" can mean 10^100 years, and you haven't provided any evidence to the contrary.

Isn't the second paragraph not self explanatory?

No, it doesn't say anything about timescale. That's what GP was arguing.

your body is getting damaged constantly and it is repairing the damage constantly. You are able to do this - in terms of entropy - because you are not a closed system, you are eating food and breathing air. Entropy is not an insurmountable problem for an animal unless it stops eating and breathing, just as entropy is not an insurmountable problem for an electric refrigerator unless it stops receiving power

The original comment just says "because of entropy". It's not an explanation, it's an appeal to a black-box technical term. So I pointed out an obvious way in which that term did not apply, since we're rather further than 100 years from the heat death of the universe.

Yes, human bodies by default incur damage and stop functioning within ~100 years. But what prevents that damage from being repaired, other than our ignorance? Are you/they actually claiming it literally violates the laws of physics to repair a human body? Because if not, I reject the appeal to entropy. Entropy is a very specific thing; it is not a generic stand-in for "stuff must break down".

I’d recommend reading this article[1] which goes into more depth than the article here with a detailed critique of the entropy theory.

1. https://link.medium.com/CGktsSNhcib

I suspect you're being downvoted because you're simply wrong as a matter of physics. Your body isn't a closed system. Entropy is a global variable, it's entirely possible to have subparts of a system (often called things like "engines" or "HVAC systems") experience net decrease in measured entropy just by moving energy around. And your body does that every day. The overwhelming majority of all identifiable entropy transfer in an organism happens as part of "metabolism", not "aging".

That the engine doesn't work forever may very well have a thermodynamic expression, but "because of entropy" is basically missing the point.

Entropy applies to any closed system, and we are far from closed. We take in external energy every single day, and reply on external order with every breath. There is zero reason to think that over the time frame of hundreds to thousands of years that entropy is the limiting factor on human survival.

Entropy is a condition where a system becomes more chaotic over time when energy isn't added to a system. Otherwise life itself wouldn't occur due to entropy, life is precisely possible because energy is added to a system to prevent entropy.

Humans eat and poop, so they're not closed systems. Entropy doesn't apply until the stars start running low on fuel.

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