Ageing studies in five animals suggests how to reverse decline
nature.com
nature.com
Now, imagine them living forever. You could almost guarantee how crummy the world would become, with an elite few running everything.
On top of that, if you believe that adding new people is important, eventually you run out of room/resources/etc.
So, for these reasons, death as part of our life cycle is a good thing. Fortunately, we didn't have to invent it.
I do not think death is going away any time soon, we are not even able to extend lifetimes by a meaningful amount yet. For now, we can more meaningfully discuss a world where poeple are living for 150 years.
Running out of resources is not necessarily an eventuality. Arguably, it would be possible to live sustainably but regardless of people dying or not, we are not doing that anyway. That's a separate discussion.
Running out of room is a serious concern. I do not have a good answer to that.
I just hate it when people talk about not having kids or not curing cancer because of some Malthusian desire to see humanity wither and die
To me it's always seemed like an interesting and somewhat fair trade. Also prevents the whole "perpetual population expansion" issue.
If you look at the demographics for most countries, we're not running into an overpopulation problem anywhere in the developed world.
If banning medical care after 50 reduced inequality by reducing lifespans should we do it?
I immediately thought of Logan's Run as well. In the movie it was 30(?) years old and in the book 21(?). I would have died some time ago in that world...
"Input too long, submit something shorter."
In a kingdom plagued by a dragon that demands a daily human sacrifice, the people have come to accept the beast as an inevitable fact of life. The dragon represents human aging and the sacrifices symbolize the lives lost to senescence. Eventually, a boy challenges the kingdom's resignation to the dragon's tyranny, igniting a movement to find a way to kill the dragon.
Technological advancements lead to the development of a missile capable of killing the dragon. Despite initial resistance from the king and his advisors, who worry about the social ramifications of killing the dragon, the beast is eventually slain, and the people celebrate their newfound freedom.
The fable teaches several moral lessons:
Acceptance of the "inevitable" can blind us to the suffering it causes. A static view of technology may cause us to underestimate the possibility of finding solutions to seemingly insurmountable problems. Society may prioritize damage control over addressing the root cause of an issue. Societal good must ultimately benefit individuals. A sense of proportion and priority is essential. Rhetoric can obscure the truth and hinder progress. Addressing urgent problems, like aging, should be a top priority. Societal reorganization and adaptation will be necessary after overcoming long-standing challenges. In conclusion, the fable urges society to invest in research to extend the human health-span, combat aging, and improve the quality of life, rather than merely accepting it as an inescapable fact.
That said, death is rather terrible so I am in favor of curing aging to the extent that we can, while working hard to ensure things don’t go into the shitter in the process.
> The problem is, continuously educating new people to know ever more and to be able to handle more and more sophisticated systems has a continuously increasing cost to society too, since we don't live any longer than before.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35470905#35477122
This is one thing where aging slower could be very important for us. Increasing complexity alone requires more time for developing, planning, handling and maintaining a lot of our devices and infrastructure. Experience gained over long periods is worth much more. It also requires a higher up-front "penalty" in the form of more education before we can even get started with being productive in many interesting and worthwhile projects. For example, compare starting with Linux kernel programming in the 1990s vs. now, or building a house many decades ago vs. now.
On the other hand, our capacity to place the anto-aging benefits with the right people are questionable. We can only hope that higher-level processes, not controlled by us, will still lead us to good outcomes overall. Similar with a lot of stuff already going on which we hardly have any direct control over, even in cases where "in theory" (meaning a theory that does things like "if we all just..", disregarding that coordination and information are physical and cost time and energy and a working algorithm) we could. So adding one more thing for the universe to sort out for us may not make much of a difference anyway, and having the moneyed classes go first, probably for a long time because the anti-aging solution probably won't be a simple pill, but a complex ongoing long-term process, might still work out. For humanity as a whole, if not for the (less lucky) individuals. It probably widens the gaps even more, in wealth and in education and in opportunities. Might still be worth a shot.
People a 120 years ago had to memorize trig tables.
People 60 years ago had to learn how to operate a slide rule and understand how to handle accuracy.
People 30 years ago had to learn how to do algebra and calculus.
People 10 years ago needed to know how to set up the equations to ask Wolfram Alpha to solve the problem.
Today, we're closing in on being able to say, "Draw up plans to build a mixed-use building on this plot with at least 20,000 square feet of retail and 60 residential units." And getting back an answer.
Heh Heh Heh
People -20 years ago need to learn algebra, calculus, slide rules, accuracy, and trig tables as the answers they're getting don't work and they're not sure what to do.
* Nobody ever had to memorize trig tables (unless you mean the values for 30, 45 and 60 degrees)
* Understanding accuracy is not associated with just slide rules. It is ubiquitous whenever you make measurements. Moreso if you calculate with these measured values.
* People have been learning algebra and calculus for hundreds of years. They still are doing so.
* Symbolic math programs like maxima, maple, wolfram alpha, sage and others only solve some problems, but they have been used for 40 years or more for particular situations.
Given this, forgive me if I think your conclusion is flawed. You can ask a LLM model that answer today. And you will get an answer.
Understanding what that answer means and how it is a form of hooey still requires domain knowledge. And it will for a very long time.
Accuracy: first, I can't believe I cross-wired accuracy and precision. Still, you seem to be responding as if I had gotten it right, so I'll respond in kind: sure, understanding precision is still an important concept, but it was much more so when working with a mechanical device that managed at most 2-4 digits of precision. I'm guessing that with 64-bit values, precision isn't a big topic of conversation outside of NASA. (That's hyperbole)
You're saying that algebra and calculus are just as tedious/necessary now as they were 30 years ago? To be clear, I'm sort of fudging -- Mathematica is actually 34 years old. But my point is that tools like it have changed who needs to learn the techniques, and what learning the techniques look like. And of course it's easier to be certain that basically no one today needs to know how to use a slide rule than to say no one needs to be able to solve a quadratic -- the more recent the change, the less absolute it will be.
Finally, "a very long time" seems optimistic. As an analogy, there were articles written in 2010 saying that it would be "a very long time" before computers beat anyone reasonably skilled at Go. It was less than ten years later that the very best humans couldn't beat computers.
It's impossible to know where fast progress will be made vs. slow. I purposefully chose a hyperbolic example to illustrate the point, and it's entirely possible that architecture won't be a field handled well by AI/ML in ten years. But I think it's certain that over the next several years, multiple fields that humans regard as being as complex and domain-knowledge-dependent as architecture will be automated.
>It means that many of us would be in for a very difficult time if the zombie apocalypse happens
People grossly overestimate the amount of knowledge you'd need to learn and retain to survive one of these. Mostly, we're just lazy and don't do it because we think our computers will do it for us.
There are whole shelves of books on how to grow food, and other shelves on how to build shelter. I haven't watched a lot of Survivor or Naked and Afraid, but what I have seen makes me think there's more to survival than can be learned in a few months, let's say. And that's just basic survival. If we want to retain even an 18th century standard of living, we'd need to understand how to build steam engines, a cotton gin, etc., etc. I don't like our odds. To be clear: some people would survive. But my half-assed guess would be that the human population might drop to less than a million.
As for old people in politics, it's because there's a lot of old people who get to vote.
If it were up to me, your vote would depend on some rough measure of remaining time in the society, plus you'd get to vote for your underage children.
Too many people are voting emotionally based on something someone told them one time about how the world should be.
Not enough people voting based on having to grapple with accomplishing something difficult, wanting to improve the circumstances of their community, and seeing what human nature looks like over time.
But no one asked me.
Or are you suggesting they don't vote based on what they've been told the world should be?
I'll note many countries did have voting restrictions like that, and it did nothing good.
"An educated citizenry is a vital requisite for our survival as a free people" - Probably Jefferson?
I wish that the voting population were more knowledgeable about civics, the issues at hand and basic economic theory (i.e. no such thing as free money/services, that someone pays and not just everyone but you). I get a spew of party talking points for any interaction. I don't get a sense they even understand what they are saying. (Hence the reason for the first quote).
A lot of people I see (or am exposed to), don't read the news and base their decisions on clickbait-y articles (without even reading it) or shared/liked articles with dubious authenticity from their family/friends.
I get a sense of massive tribalism and am completely dumbfounded about it all.
To quote Jefferson again: “The government you elect is the government you deserve.”
What a great way to jumpstart a new feudal age. Lawmakers start pandering those two groups, eventually burning the bridge of mobility and turning all the renting working people into de-facto slaves.
I am very relieved that nobody asked you.
But restricting vote to property owners is the kind of thing that'd make me seriously consider fomenting armed insurrection.
Most HN commenters seem to not understand that the majority of Americans are homeowners. The “mobile” city dweller is an exception. And although it might hurt feelings, most Americans probably don’t want to have policy shaped by people who are so mobile they can vote in bad policy and then move to somewhere else with little cost to themselves.
Similar to most commenters on the internet don’t realize the TSA didn’t use to exist. The airlines dealt with security and everything was faster and more pleasant.
Not all progress is good. Sometimes society makes mistakes and we need to figure out how to course correct.
And as I said, if I was a citizen of a country that decided to disenfranchise 35% of the population, then despite being a homeowner it'd be time to organise an armed insurrection; it's totally intolerable and a government that tries something like that needs to be overthrown with force.
Our current politics isn’t even representative of what people want, it is a mind control contest. Whoever can manipulate the population the best wins.
What if I changed my suggestion to only people who pay net taxes get to vote. This would disqualify people living on social security so the comment I was replying to would get their wish.
Voting isn’t a natural right, the way speech or self defense is. Voting is participating in making decisions about how the country will be run and what force can be used to curtail other members of the society.
The whole concept of universal suffrage was probably silly to begin with. There should be a buy-in. If you can’t even pull your life together, why should you be empowered to influence how I live mine?
Also, why is is somehow less radical to want to disenfranchise the elderly?
Then the richest 49% will need to decide if the society they live in is worth that, or if they want to leave or otherwise separate.
> Our current politics isn’t even representative of what people want, it is a mind control contest. Whoever can manipulate the population the best wins.
I agree with that, but the solution is not to strip people of rights out of the assumption you know who knows best - that's the playbook of a substantial proportion of brutally oppressive, authoritarian movements who started with a notion of wanting what was "best" only to find out the people they claimed to want the best for had their own ideas of what that meant.
> The whole concept of universal suffrage was probably silly to begin with. There should be a buy-in. If you can’t even pull your life together, why should you be empowered to influence how I live mine?
The whole concept of universal suffrage is based on the concept that if you're not willing to give me a say, you have no legitimacy for demanding any say over my life whatsoever, and so can expect to face years or decades of resistance - however long it takes until you lose. No government will in the long run survive ongoing disenfranchisement, because a proportion of those you oppress will always be prepared to fight for freedom.
> What if I changed my suggestion to only people who pay net taxes get to vote. This would disqualify people living on social security so the comment I was replying to would get their wish.
Property requirement by proxy. Time for an armed revolution.
> Also, why is is somehow less radical to want to disenfranchise the elderly?
It's only marginally so as long as the proposal you replied to was vague on the extent of it, proposing to weight the value of the vote somehow based on the time they'd have to live with the consequences. That could be taken to outright disenfranchise the oldest, or slightly skewing it. Had they come out with something firmer, and you hadn't proposed something very direct with clear parallels to past real-life disenfranchisement they might have been the focus of the same level of opposition instead of you.
To be very clear, I think any disenfranchisement is unjustified. As it is, the US, and the UK where I live, can hardly be considered democracies given their horrible electoral systems have a similar effect for anyone who disagrees with the main options, but at least they don't go so far as to openly deprive any significant competent population group the vote (though I do consider the disenfranchisement of portions of convicted felons to be blatantly undemocratic and unjustified as well).
No more get out the vote campaigns. No more encouraging people to vote. The new message is ‘voting is your right, use it wisely.’
‘Vote responsibly.’
Everyone would have the right to vote, but would be encouraged only to vote when they feel educated about the issues and/or candidates.
And encouraged to abstain if and when they are unclear about what they are voting for.
‘I voted’ would no longer be a point of pride. Voting would be messaged as something to be done carefully, and anything resembling ballot harvesting would be totally illegal. In the broadest possible terms. People would need to care enough to actually figure when and how to vote.
That’s only a small part of it. You can’t get anywhere in US politics without being in one of the two main parties, both of which have become in-effect oligarchies. Age and wealth are big factors in getting ahead in oligarchies.
So voters have little choice but to vote for one of these two oligarchies which are both stacked with rich old people. It’s not that much different from the Roman republic, except that instead of a single senatorial class you get to choose between two competing parties of patricians.
One, all those in favor of living forever will out live the detractors.
Two, enshrine the right to die before making everybody live forever. Our bodies break down, parts stop working. Sure you might cure death, but what happens to those that will forever suffer due to some ailment that isn't curable? Do you let masses of people endlessly suffer just because someone can't fathom letting go?
It’s more of a question of whether somebody would want to stay in this world forever vs go elsewhere after death.
Political, legal, and economical systems would have to be prepared before that, otherwise countries would stagnate as undying parasites embed themselves in society for centuries. As they won't want competition, the most effective antiaging treatments would be priced out of the commoners forever. In some countries like USA people struggle to pay for insulin, much less antiaging treatments.
Edit: regarding your question, if people lived naturally forever, and it became a problem just recently, I think they're already adapted to living forever, and the problems come from something new. Anyway, let's suppose the problems are caused by overpopulation, then the solution would be to limit reproduction, and let the population fall down a bit as accidents/murders happen naturally.
In a world where the status quo is "nobody ages", then having everyone die after a certain age is also a drastic change to the already proven equilibrium.
In both cases, it's a drastic change, so in both cases we should proceed with caution.
(Related) I seem to recall an example of wolves and rabbits in equilibrium, with the wolves controlling the rabbit population. Take away the wolves and the rabbit population increases to the point where they eat all the vegetation and eventually all starve. (I'm not sure where I remember this from, or if it's even true)
We're talking about people dying. Would you "proceed with caution" pulling a person from a burning building, because of some vague reasons about status quos and upsetting balances? No, you'd save their life. There are times to proceed with caution, but it's not when billions of lives are at stake, equilibrium or not.
Freeing the slaves was a drastic change to a "proven equilibrium" economic situation. If we could have done it even a year earlier than we did, we should have. It was unconscionable that it even took that long. And messing up the comfy status quo and throwing the economy out of balance were absolutely reasons that slave-owners gave as to why they should be allowed to own humans forever. It was all bullshit. Fuck your equilibrium; billions of people are dying!
I'm sure most people have seen their parents or grand-parents decline cognitively. This is sad for the individual, the family and also effects society by draining resources. Any research that can mitigate this is worthwhile in my opinion.
Wonder why nucleosomes become less frequent as we age ... I know cancer mitigation can sometimes be the reason for these kinds of dimunitions.
I said "you're not trying to solve a problem, you're trying introduce problems into a working solution".
I see I got downvoted up there, as if I'll steal your life by openly sharing a valid opinion. Humans are such a sorry species sometimes.
I’ve spent time with friends and relatives who were 80+, many of whom told me them were tired of life and ready for “something new”, they had good lives but had enough.
Sure if they had younger bodies they might feel differently but most were quite able bodied and just felt it was time.
Perhaps you should be careful what you wish for ?
Yes, many people don't enjoy life, especially when their health deteriorates. I'm saying that to me, the fact that your health gradually gets worse until you die is a bug.
> Perhaps you should be careful what you wish for ?
Nah, I don't think so.
Condemning everyone to death, even the not-stuck-in-the-mud old people sounds pretty abhorrent, or maybe "tragic" might be the better word.
> Notice I've not mentioned yet also that we can't have infinite people on that planet.
Well, fortunately there's more than a single planet in this universe.
How feasible it becomes to live on planets-other-than-this-one over time is clearly not something we can say with any certainty at the moment though.
Hopefully that works out to be possible (in some good way), otherwise we're stuck with what you're suggesting. Which would suck. :(
Be extremely suspect of patterns of the kind "we'll do X now, which will work when we invent Y far in the future". Say, electric cars can use clean energy now, so they'll be clean when we move to mostly clean energy in the future. OK, but today they indirectly run on oil, gas & coal. Or "we'll work on immortality now, which will be fine when we spread over the galaxy in the future".
These things need to co-happen at the same time, instead of dooming us all to a fruitless endeavor only to then realize the second critical part of the equation may never happen the way we thought it would.
Did you know your neurons can't go through mitosis? You can't regenerate a damaged brain. And it does get damaged in time, nothing can fix that. When you use something you wear it down, it deals with harsh environment that the organism tries to prevent as much as possible, but something's gotta give eventually.
When I said people settle mentally I didn't mean it CULTURALLY. I meant it BIOLOGICALLY. In ignorance one can claim that dead neurons may just get better and maybe we'll find ways to make them regenerate, but that's because they're clueless, so every implausible scenario seems equally likely to them as what's plausible.
In theory, a "life" may be possible to factor so it's infinitely flexible in infinite time. Whatever that life is, it won't be human at all. It won't be you, or anyone your know. We're built the way we're built and you can't change this without losing yourself in the process.
We have an 80 year old president in the US, Trump was also old, Putin is old, Xi is old, everyone is going incredibly old up there among the ruling elite, and may they be blessed with great health and all, but even when healthy, their decisions are firmly planted into the 20th century, you can't help that. And this matters. It's holding us back and in some cases threatening world peace and safety.
And by the way! The reason our biology makes us SETTLE DOWN in our concepts, knowledge, behavior, is because the alternative IS EVEN WORSE, and it is degradation, mental illness, loss of memory and so on. This is not about some problem with our health. It's a problem of entropy and it includes also machine models, not just human brain: https://www.nannyml.com/blog/91-of-ml-perfomance-degrade-in-...
We're all doomed to "either die a hero, or live long enough to see ourselves become the villain". I prefer to die a hero, and let other heroes grow in my place. How about you?
Wow. Did you learn biology in 1970 or something, and not bother keeping an interest in the field?
You seem to have built a large amount of mental scaffolding on a foundation built of sand. Very, very, very loose sand. ;)
What I said stands. If you need the details, adults see specialized neuron reproduction in he granule cell layer of the olfactory bulb & the dentate gyrus of the hippocampus. The connectivity of these neurons is also strictly local. It's unclear if there's purpose to these divisions, or it's merely a sign of imperfect specialization & process.
If you wanna play with DNA and make forever living tumors, you may change this limitation. But as I said, the result won't be a human. And it will absolutely not be you.
To assume we’ve reached the upper limit of longevity and medicine is a bold claim.
It's highly beneficial to keep around older members that can 1) work for their offspring or 2) provide important guidance and knowledge transfer.
Moreover, that precise example hints that it shouldn't be so difficult to tweak the human substrate to improve the lifespan since Nature was able to do it in such a short time.
I also expect there to be tradeoffs, as there so often are in life. Perhaps, though, we will be able to trade those costs for other costs that we prefer or can more easily afford.
Some species have adapted better error correction.
The accumulated state of "errors" on other levels (e.g. misfolded proteins and heavy metals which the organism doesn't have any mechanisms to discard) also play a major role.
As far as I know, this is the most widely accepted theory for aging.
The body will repair if it can. Even things like re-growing limbs are theoretically possible but are prevented by tissue damage such that the body doesn't "remember" what used to be there. Aka scar tissue. https://www.livescience.com/59194-could-humans-ever-regenera...
No it is not. Sure, you could try to frame everything as DNA errors, but at some point that just becomes so convoluted and out of touch with what's actually happening that it fails to be a useful model.
Wikipedia article you link also doesn't state that DNA errors are the _only_ cause of aging. Overall I would say that the article mostly represents the view from 15-20 years ago. That's ages in biochemical research times. I would in part ascribe that view to the fact that DNA sequencing was a hot research topic back then and for the first time became accessible to a wide audience of researchers. That hype cooled off a bit once it was recognized that mostly static snaphots of DNA only offer a limited picture of what happens in organisms, and research focus shifted more towards all the more dynamic processes in organisms (some of which are quite far removed from DNA interactions).
> As far as I know, this is the most widely accepted theory for aging.
As mentioned in a sibling comment, the "current" most widely accepted framework is the "hallmarks of aging"[0], where DNA errors and epigentic alterations (points accounted for in the DNA damage theory), cover only 2 out of 9 hallmarks. That paper is cited in basically every introduction of a paper that is tangentially related to longevity research and their mechanisms nowadays. The same authors also recently published an updated list of hallmarks[1], adding 3 new ones (also all non-DNA error related).
[0]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3836174
[1]: https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(22)01377-0
Each of those areas has different and often vast variations of sub-mechanisms that need to be tackled and worked around, to ultimately "reverse"/stop aging. Some are being more concretely researched than others (.
The impact of tackling some of those areas are also smaller than some of the others, and to my knowledge there is no clear picture yet which of those are "low hanging fruits" (or if there are any), where solving e.g. 3 of them will increase average lifespan by 20 years. It could also be the case that it's mostly a long tail were each if them makes up for minor lifespan increases.
I am not sure why the title is written as «reverse decline»: I have not read that in the article. (Did I miss something?)
I'm satisfied with my looks, but the heat (sun rays) and cold impact from the environment were significantly reduced with hair. I still notice the difference when I let my remaining hair grow longer during winter, and then cut it short again.
This winter I even had to wear something on my head in my apartment after cutting the hair, because I kept it pretty cool and just wore a bit thicker clothes. Except, my head.
It's a problem with sun and with cold. I now understand why people would ear it long in the past, before hats. It's such a great insulator!
Especially if you are tall, the hat will prevent you from walking into low-hanging obstacles and winding up with scars on your head.
That said, don't run off and by just any old fedora or bucket hat. Get something cool, that works for your head and body shape. Pick something that says you.
Hats, along with socks and watches, are the only accessories that men can really show personality with in this day and age. It's a real same that so much of men's fashion is so devoid of personality.
However, his amount of muscle isn't actually outside the realm of pure hard work unlike some of the Hollywood guys.
Rob McElhenney has a funny bit about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPOzOanrNyg
Does this mean that the newer diet medications like Semaglutide could be accelerating aging since they increase the secretion of insulin from the beta cells?
Does this mean that this statement would not be true for cells that reproduce very slowly (fat, skeleton) or not at all (lens cells, neurons)?
Death provides an opportunity for change. Often in the form of upheaval to political structures but more frequently in opening up social opportunities.
Removing death from the equation introduces either: stagnation, if it is made available to everyone; or a new kind of inequality that I can't comprehend being accepted.
Humans do okay with certain rates of change, but right now, the more nightmarish business is a problem for your great grandkids.
I think that's an unfortunate example: burning fossil fuels is a much bigger problem, and it is not even long-term (most of us will be around for the consequences). Still we do it virtually without planning at all.
Years spent observing a field or topic with a well-trained eye is incredibly valuable. But by the time you're an expert, you typically have at best 3 decades and often much less to practice before serious decline kicks in. It would be a very different world where the number of experts and veterans rose by an order of magnitude.
Also, as I've come to see with my own advancing years, humans are very good at forgetting history and its lessons. The best way to maintain historical awareness is to simply have people around who lived through it. The current historical moment is an illustration of this - the world is sliding toward large-scale war just as the last of those who saw ww2 with their own eyes are leaving the scene. I don't think that's a coincidence.
In our world, barring catastrophic collapse (which IMO is not at all unlikely within Bezos's lifespan), the latter seems almost certain.
https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2017/03/28/stories-that-should-...
Immortality becoming a possibility is also an opportunity for changing our social structures. There's nothing wrong with Bezos or Gates living forever, as long as their social and financial dominance isn't also guaranteed to live forever.
> Removing death from the equation introduces either: stagnation, if it is made available to everyone
Stagnation follows from an assumption that neuroplasticity is zero. That is one of the problems that need solving for immortality anyway, but I don't see why it's unsolvable. If some technique rejuvenates at the cellular level, it could also work on neurons.
While that moment may provide an opportunity, my view is that a ossification will set in more broadly in the long term.
> Stagnation follows from an assumption that neuroplasticity is zero. That is one of the problems that need solving for immortality anyway, but I don't see why it's unsolvable. If some technique rejuvenates at the cellular level, it could also work on neurons.
Possessing the capability for change is not the same as possessing the desire to see that change through. Those with power seek to hold on to it. An extreme example would be that of dictatorships and monarchies. Death ultimately limits the harm those people can cause while also providing a moment of instability which may be seized to alter the system.
Unless practical immortality coincides with fundamental and extreme shifts in our society and economy, it'd be a catastrophe.
Phew, so lucky we got this alternative scenario where literally everyone dies.
Pretty sure this problem has been around since the dawn of civilization. It's not simple to keep money and power from concentrating in society
A proposal that makes this problem worse does not seem likely to make the opportunity easier to take advantage of.
But what if Einstein had lived a few more decades?
I think we'd have to ban compound interest, somehow.
Some new competitor will eventually crush MS and Amazon. To stay extremely rich forever, Bezos and Gates will have to also be great investors.
Then some other person like Musk comes with new ideas that blow even their massive fortunes out of the water.
Long term dominance in an eternal-life society is certainly not possible.
Take those things away through bad/ineffective government and you could very easily end up in a society where those in power use their power to stop others from innovating or accumulating any wealth.
Long lived institutions focused on consolidating and preserving their power can have a similar effect to long-lived people. The Catholic church's role in the Middle Ages, for example.
I’m not sure those are great examples of people clinging to power forever, considering they’re semi-retired / retired and neither were heavily involved in politics in the first place.
Just because most people with political power are old rich white men doesn’t mean all old rich white men run the world.
The desire to retire may have something to do with mortality.
> Just because most people with political power are old rich white men doesn’t mean all old rich white men run the world
It's hard to understand why you went in this direction. The parent comment didn't mention race or sex, and there are entire continents of people that ought to disprove your world view.
And that's ignoring any of the economic transformation that AI will bring even without any genuinely novel breakthroughs.
Well, given that ageing seems to affect cellular process across five very different kinds of life, the most obvious conclusion is that defeating the process has some unavoidable, bad tradeoffs. I mean, I'm 55 years old and not looking forward to dying, but let's be realistic here: we're not going to "reverse" ageing. Evolution has had billions of years to do it, and for whatever reason the conclusion is that either it's not possible, or the cost is not worth it. I don't think we are smarter than evolution, in this regard.
Evolution’s response to massive physical trauma can be things like wariness of heights rather than a body that can fall arbitrarily distances.
> Evolution’s response to massive physical trauma can be things like wariness of heights rather than a body that can fall arbitrarily distances.
It can be either or both. Cats tend to survive falls very well, as do insects, but for different reasons.
Also, species level survival is based around fairly large families you see before birth control. Not everyone needs to make it.
A frog egg would presumably prefer an evolutionary strategy that involved fewer eggs and a more caring parent. However, the willingness to fail allows for more long term flexibility. Which is presumably why many species place their young in an immediate live or death struggle with their siblings.
Anyway - there are dangers we've evolved resistance to. We have powerful immune systems that fights off tons of diseases. But they fail against some diseases, and medicine helps us there (sometimes). Some of these diseases are extremely widespread and threaten populations.
Am I misunderstanding your comment?
For example Rabies has close to 100% fatality rate when untreated and has been a threat for vastly longer, but COVID more people over the last 100 years. So what’s a serious threat to an individual doesn’t necessarily mean a major threat to a larger population.
In that context there was likely significant protection offered by our aversion to the ill when we were primitive tribes with limited contact to each other. Such aversion could act as an external immune system causing most excessively deadly to burn out and pushing for ever less deadly strains over time.
“Pathogen avoidance: Uncanny stimuli may activate a cognitive mechanism that originally evolved to motivate the avoidance of potential sources of pathogens by eliciting a disgust response. "The more human an organism looks, the stronger the aversion to its defects, because (1) defects indicate disease, (2) more human-looking organisms are more closely related to human beings genetically, and (3) the probability of contracting disease-causing bacteria, viruses, and other parasites increases with genetic similarity."[8] The visual anomalies of androids, robots, and other animated human characters cause reactions of alarm and revulsion, similar to corpses and visibly diseased individuals.[9][10]” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley
People’s near universal aversion to the smell of rotting flesh and human shit are similar examples. Of course at the individual level this is less universal. Another possibility is heightened pain response around minor skin damage compared to larger injuries. Aka thorns and paper cuts hurt so much because that kind of injury was actually more dangerous than moderate blunt force trauma which damages more flesh but doesn’t risk infection.
PS: That said it’s not like we can actually test these theories. It’s mostly an interesting idea that seems plausible.
Among them the Naked Mole Rat, a mammal.
So it looks like evolution can do it. But it usually doesn't.
For these species most of the new born are babies of very old females.
I think the reason this isn't a pretty solid argument for its infeasibility is that evolution optimizes for different things than we might choose to.
For all we know ageing might be an evolutionary process to free future generations from crappy dictators and absolute rulers.
For a lot of history dying young was common due to forces that have nothing to do with our own biology. So maybe it's more that environmental conditions did not give any reason for evolution to select for longer life, or select against cells that age. Also it might be that there are trade offs about selecting against cells that age that may have been sucky in the past and not led to fast reproduction, but that those trade offs don't matter now.
That's what we call a "patch". A systemic patch, in this case.
To be fair, in the "eyes" of evolution, once you stop breeding, you are effectively dead weight and a resource sink - there's been no benefit to evolving hyper-age solutions. I guess mayflies are the ur-example here - they grow, they breed once, they die and leave all the resources to the new crop.
Even if you kept breeding, as your age goes up, your ability (absent modern medicine and luxuries) to get your children to breeding age goes down (a 20 year old has a much better chance against a sabre-tooth tiger / flu / cold weather / etc. than a 70 year old...)
Nowadays people don’t have kids until 30, so maybe there is some pressure towards 30+30+10?
[0]: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/scientists-figure-...
Evolution is not smart at all. It trends toward reproductive success and that's all. At the most basic level, natural selection is an emergent phenomena of an energy-scarce environment. That is no longer the case for humans. A single human now has access to orders of magnitude more energy than any of our ancestors. It no longer matters if keeping an individual from aging requires ten times the energy input of creating and raising a child. That entire realm of biological innovation is completely invisible to traditional evolution.
Now, but it's not clear at all how it will evolve in the fairly near future :-).
But I generally agree with your point on evolution: it is a random process. We tend to "personify" it ("evolution chose to make us like this"), but that's wrong: species that evolved to being less fit died, those that evolved to be more fit survived. Pure chance.
I guess my point is that there is a tendency to say "evolution chose to make this because that's the optimal solution", where actually evolution may have "missed" the optimal solution.
But evolution is not an active process (of something choosing what's optimal), but a passive process (it does change, and some of those (random) changes win).
Or am I missing something?
In general it's unsurprising that selection misses hypothetical universal optima for the same reason it's unsurprising we didn't evolve wings even though that'd be an optimal way to escape lions. Evolution moves traits around fitness landscapes heavily contrained by exaptation. But interestingly many highly conserved mechanisms, e.g. essential cell machinery or metabolic pathways shared widely across the tree of life, have been shown to be maintained at absolute energetic and informational optima.
Do you have a link for your number, would be very interested.
This is rando google search for it (so double check) but material looks correct to me:
"An average inhabitant of the Earth nowadays has at their disposal nearly 700 times more useful energy than their ancestors had at the beginning of the 19th century. Moreover, within a lifetime of people born just after the Second World War the rate had more than tripled, from about 10 to 34 GJ/capita between 1950 and 2020. Translating the last rate into more readily imaginable equivalents, it is as if an average Earthling has every year at their personal disposal about 800 kilograms (0.8 tons, or nearly six barrels) of crude oil, or about 1.5 tons of good bituminous coal. And when put in terms of physical labor, it is as if 60 adults would be working non-stop, day and night, for each average person; and for the inhabitants of affluent countries this equivalent of steadily laboring adults would be, depending on the specific country, mostly between 200 and 240."
So looks like my number was quite low.
The references to "Earthlings" makes me suspect this quote was pulled from "How the World Really Works", since it starts out with a thought exercise using an extraplanetary observer watching the progress of human civilization over millennia. If you like this kind of information, I would highly recommend Energy and Civilization, it's a fantastic and eye-opening book.
Edit: confirmed, above quote is from "How the World..".
We are not slaves to biological statistical optimization. Haven't been for what? half a million years.
I think it's related to reproduction - immortality would mean you're competing against your offspring for resources.
It also touches on a theme of The Hydrogen Sonata (and elsewhere in the Culture series): with unlimited time to practice, how far will one go to perfect one's art (music in this case)?
It’s just better for you to die. Your DNA sucks, make room for your superiors (your children).
I jest, but dying is the smart choice. It’s like a giant AGI system letting a few of its minor instances being cut off: no problem, we’ll fork a few new ones. They might even be better.
I fail to see many win-win scenarios in a world where population density only increases.
Bad stuff also has more opportunity..
Evolution has two things over us: it has infinite time, and infinite resources. It can afford to wait 200000 years, and to kill millions of individuals, to produce a change.
That's impressive, but it is also the opposite of smart.
as far as your genes are concerned, it's just as good if two of your children carry them on as if you carry them on yourself; there is no particular reason a priori for evolution to favor one over the other
however, your gametes form a genetic bottleneck which reduces genetic diversity (chimerism) among the cells of your children compared to the genetic diversity among your own cells
due to mutations during your lifespan, genetic diversity within your body increases, which increases the prevalence of genes that cause individual cells and tissues to compete with one another rather than cooperating; in the extreme, we call this 'cancer'
so we have genes like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P53 which both cause aging (by suppressing stem cells, so you can't regenerate) and suppress cancer; more generally, many aging processes are known to suppress cancer directly
but more generally you can see genes' investment of resources in your offspring, rather than in you, as a way to protect that investment from cancer: if you get cancer, it almost never kills your offspring, so your genes can toss your worthless body onto the trash heap and continue on their merry way unmolested
of course you may feel differently about the importance of your own body surviving than (the optimization goals of the natural selection process selecting) your genes do
This is a good summary. Only thing to keep in mind is that an increase in genetic diversity need not imply a unidirectional march towards cancer, but an increase in risk. One of the most interesting paradoxes of cancer initiation research currently is the presence of "cancer-causing" mutations in phenotypically normal cells for decades prior to the appearance of the first cancer cell (see https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27059373/ for instance).
What's remarkable to me about this aging study and others like it is that they are able to reverse some aspect of aging despite the accumulation of genetic diversity with age as you point out. Perhaps what they're reversing was never really dependent on mutation accumulation with age, or that the presence of mutations does not fully explain the age-related degeneration they're interested in reversing.
The article title is unfortunate. A better description of what may be possible, per language deeper down in the article -- and what would be arguably much more feasible -- is "drugs that slow the aging process".
I don't think we are smarter than evolution, in this regard.
Evolution "designed" us to drop off by age 45 or so due to some combination of poor nutrition, opportunistic infections, etc (and other factors, like violence from other humans). Yet we've managed to tweak that built-in expiration date, not just by qualitative factors (like better nutrition, basic healthcare) but to a significant extent by "structural" interventions like antibiotics, antivirals, and vaccines of various sorts.
I suspect that -- if indeed anti-aging treatments become available -- they'll eventually be seen as part of the latter category. As with these, there will be side effects (and just the same, the hope will be they can also be managed).
Eventually, it'll be just another pragmatic thing that people do (alas, the wealthier among us at first most likely).
With that in mind, there's no need to anthropomorphize evolution any more than necessary. It's just a mathematical framework to describe what's been happening over billions of years. There's no hidden "intelligent design" (sorry to use the phrase) behind it, on whose toes we need to be leery of stepping upon.
It may be more helpful to think of evolution as, if anything -- more of a giant hack, on top of an endless series of kludges. Some of which may turn out to be easily patched, or otherwise mitigated.
Evolution only prioritizes lifespan as much as it needs to vs other reproductive goals.
I get it, for example, in botany where genetic diversity is crucial for the survival of a plant species.
We could engineer away things that might eventually in some future crisis prove to be a deciding factor in our survival. We could easily engineer away genes that might have gone on to outlive us as humans, and then end up outcompeted by them. Or we could engineer ourselves into different variants, and compete with each other.
In the end you can’t second guess evolution.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/nchs_press_releases/2022/...
Huh? Who said anything about prohibiting death? Nobody is going to demand that you take anti-aging therapies if you don't want them. Who are you to tell everyone else that they're not allowed to live?
No one said that.
People are arguing against immortality and in favor of death. People who believe that can still choose death
> Yes, we should always leave death as an option. Conversation over.
Weird to say "no one said that" in the comment threat that literally opened with that line. "Death is a feature not a bug" means "we should make sure people continue to die." Then you seem to agree (that "yes" is rather out of place if you don't), but I admit to not being 100% clear on what you mean. Either way, it's absolutely not true that "no one" is demanding that I die of old age for the greater good. The originator of this comment thread is absolutely saying that, and he's not the only one.
If one felt a resource is not to be wasted just because of scarcity, that would be a subjective naïve misperception.
This really just feels Malthusian. Many of the elements that are currently 'scarce' are not actually scarce, just not found in extremely high concentrations elsewhere. There's essentially a maximum price that these resources will reach (often not much higher than they currently are), before other methods/locations of extraction become viable. To suggest we'll revert to preindustrial squalor is absurd.
That was an argument decades ago, but today, a) if we keep extracting more and more, then climate change will be worse and worse (all ready not looking good) and b) it seems like we are around the production peak of oil (of all kinds), while conventional peak oil was around 2008.
So yeah, energy is going down, because we don't have viable alternative to fossil fuels. What is unfortunate is that the end of fossil fuels is coming too slowly, so we still have plenty to mess up the climate. And then we won't have it anymore to face the consequences.
Drawing ball after ball has kept humanity progressing. Extend his analogy a little further. What if there are no more white balls to draw? What if we are "impeded" from drawing them by the fact that there are now more gray and black balls to draw instead of white? Or, since we have to reach further into this lottery jar, what if we don't reach them in time?
Malthus rested his conclusion on the assumption that we would never hack agriculture the way we have (nitrogen, phosphorus, etc). You rest your conclusion on the assumption that we will always successfully draw a new trick out of the hat, like find ways to recover all the rare earth metals from phones for which we have no current mechanism for economic recycling. You rest your worldview on the idea that our potential is limitless, that humanity's progress is inevitable, a god-given right if you will. I rest my worldview on the idea that nothing is guaranteed, that complexity begets fragility and diminishing returns, and that entropy will always, always, have the last laugh.
I come to think about the adage that scientific answers often bring with them more questions. Those ever expanding questions I sometimes imagine as an exponentially growing circumference of unknowns, surrounding a circle of what’s currently known.
Perhaps those unknowns could be thought of as corresponding to the gray and black balls, so that what’s dangerous is essentially that which we don’t fully understand and therefore cannot fully control.
Finally, I’m thinking that the area covered by all previously gathered knowledge (area because knowledge synergies with itself) will increasingly likely outweigh the danger that we uncover as the circumference of unknowns grows and dangers are discovered along the perimeter.
The natural world alone has disease, disaster, predators, and threats from space but would exist independent of knowledge. Technology allows us to mitigate those, and as a trade-off we get biological and chemical weapons, mass shootings, the Tsar Bomba, etc.
Yes, eventually we will find our hands empty for resource solutions. I do not expect it to be in my lifetime, whether it end by old age or nuclear fire.
Burning gasoline is known to give off pollutants that shorten our lives today but millions of peopole choose driving over health every day.
Which makes perfect sense, since you are in fact built to move (the brain is the natural boost of the organ for movement - for exploiting freedom).