Anti-ageing protein injection boosts monkeys’ memories | Hacker News Reader

Anti-ageing protein injection boosts monkeys’ memories

nature.com

181 pointsmfiguiere229 comments

Regarding the immortality talk around the topic. I am not an expert and this is not an informed argument, but intuitively feels this whole ”anti-ageing by chemical cocktails” cannot be sustainable forever. There must be a price for injecting increasing quantities of proteins to the body to turn back the clock. Imagine a headline from 1893 about discovery of meth: ”Japanese scientists invent an injection that cures humans from the need to sleep”. It turns out there is a price for messing with the system.

So I do not believe any immortality of the human body by these synthetic interventions is possible. Kicking the can down the road certainly and would be nice to live healthy longer.

Yeah, I mean life expectancy has made great strides in the past 100 odd years worldwide; what we see is a higher occurrence on things like cancer and heart disease or other diseases that become more and more likely with age. There's the pressure on the health care / social systems as well, which is partially compensated now by having people work longer - either by raising the retirement age, or having no state pension so that the elderly are forced to keep working for longer.

But your point also stands, treatments like this, IF they become commonplace, may have far-reaching effects that we can't oversee yet.

Hello to Justices Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett sitting on the SCOTUS bench in 2060 or 2070 or possibly even 2100.

Many of our political systems are based on the expectation that people grow frail and retire earlier than they actually already do today. The US Senate is becoming a geriatric institution that would put Brezhnev's politburo of 1980 to youthful shame.

So what are you saying, that we shouldn't have technological innovation because our governments have stagnated?

Or are you saying that we need to have governmental innovation concurrent with technological innovation?

The latter. The institutions need to adapt, much like they did adapt to instant communication and the printing press before.

We can hope.

On the political scale, I am fairly to the libertarian (not religious) right, but personal ossification is bad regardless of its political flavor.

Moderate term limits (e.g. no more than 25 years in public offices in your lifetime) should certainly be at least tested.

No idea why you're downvoted. The idea that the human body has the formula for immortality 99% right and it just "forgot" to make enough of protein X which has no downsides seems hopelessly naive to me.

Just look at existing health interventions, like HGH, and see all the side-effects and risks associated with it.

Alternative/fun sci-fi plot: The aliens who sped up our evolution by artificially limiting our lifespans did so via relatively sloppy means and there is in fact an “off” switch waiting on some grad student to stumble upon

Some alien crashed on this planet about 4.5 Gy ago so made some proteins and nucleic and released them on the planet.

Once it started recombining the alien went to sleep or maybe to play some video games while waiting for this process to develop space flight and send some probes that the alien's buddies might encounter and read the message encoded in the DNA: "Hey, could you please swing by and pick me up? My ship got a flat and I don't have a spare"

Now make the same argument about proteins and other nutrients in general.

Like, 'The idea that the human body has the formula for living 99% right and it just 'forgot' to make enough of protein X...' and if we just eat enough, often enough...

Our bodies weren't designed to work in this environment. They just came to work well enough in an environment like this. That means that there are issues with them, and that they eventually fail. That doesn't mean that we can't overcome these issues like we have overcome others with the use of technology.

Anti-aging is like any other technology that we use. It modifies us or our environment for a desired purpose. Is any technology flawless? No. Have they revolutionized our lives and made how the average human lives almost inconceivable to humans from 100kya? Totally.

Are we on the cusp of technological developments that will make how we live further unrecognizable. Totally.

IVG, artificial wombs, anti-aging/age-reversal, lab grown organs, automatic limb generation (like a salemander). Are all coming and will irrevocably change the human condition. And some of these things are coming in the next decade.

Maybe you're right, and we can't have an infinite life span, but I bet we could double life/healthspan, and I think that is coming very soon.

Double lifespan sounds like a nightmare if we don't dramatically change all of society first. I don't think it's possible to make that work unless we're talking about raising a retirement age to something like 130. In that case you better be actually be roughly halving aging so that a person can still work at 130, not adding a bunch of low quality years to life.

It would be great if we could hit the pause button and 'fix' society exactly the way we want it, but that isn't how it works, so we'll have to roll with the technological innovations and adapt society as they come.

> Double lifespan sounds like a nightmare if we don't dramatically change all of society first.

See I'm not worried because odds are this won't be a simple intervention. It won't be "take this pill daily to 2X your lifespan". It will likely be an incredible effort that takes constant discipline and daily commitment. And most people simply are incapable or unwilling to do that.

I expect only fraction of a percent to maybe do the work necessary, and even then, it will come at a huge personal expense.

There's a simple recipe for ultra-long life that's guaranteed to work, and would work via the traditional mechanisms of evolution: progressively raise the childbearing age for a group of people over many generations. Start by only allowing childbirth at age 30 or so, then every few generations you raise it more. It would take time, but eventually you could have people living for centuries. It would have the advantage that society would slowly and naturally adapt to it as longevity increased.

Good luck with your eugenics project. Society rejected the notion quite a while ago.

Aside from the eugenics nature of it, this is an experiment we're gradually trying naturally.

High-SES people are having children at later ages and are mostly having children with each other. If there's selection effects to be reaped, we'll witness them.

But I suspect we won't, because not enough people die before these later childbearing ages to affect things much. Neither do a great enough fraction die before said later children reach adulthood, and high-SES children have prospects of reproducing affected less by loss of a parent, anyways.

Note that I'm not saying it should be done, just that this is how evolution can accomplish it. It should go without saying that breeding humans like cattle is wildly unethical.

Good luck "only allowing" a common result of sex under a certain age but well above sexual maturity. Somehow I have my doubts about implementation.

Do you have any evidence for your imaginations of how people lived in the past?

My understanding is that a healthy old age in the past was rarer, but that we've not really changed the limits, just improved the median experience. See, e.g.: https://sc.edu/uofsc/posts/2022/08/conversation-old-age-is-n...

> Are we on the cusp of technological developments that will make how we live further unrecognizable. Totally.

I too like science fiction. But we've been "on the cusp of" a lot of those things for quite a long time. I think that's more indicative of what people who are afraid of death want than a cold-eyed analysis of current tech and rates of progress.

> My understanding is that a healthy old age in the past was rarer, but that we've not really changed the limits, just improved the median experience.

Even if your premise is true: there's still a whole lot of room to improve the median experience.

And I don't think it's really true, but it's hard to say exactly. Part of the reason why we have people make it to 110 now versus that not happening a couple centuries ago is that we have more people and thus more rolls of the dice, but it's not the entire reason.

> But we've been "on the cusp of" a lot of those things for quite a long time.

I haven't felt like we've been very close. But now, I think we have a reasonable chance of a couple therapies that each buy few years of QALY for the entire population in the next 30 years, and when you look 50 years out maybe you even stack several of these things.

There's room to improve the median experience, sure. Maybe not a whole lot, though. And I'm not sure people making it to 110 is positive; I'm interested in actually living, not a couple decades of being warehoused.

> I haven't felt like we've been very close.

I'm not saying you personally felt like that. I'm saying that that the "sci fi things are just around the corner" routine is perennial. AGI and robots and flying cars have been coming soon for longer than most people have been alive.

I also note that "couple therapies that each buy a few years" is a major retreat from the point I was actually adressing which was life made unrecognizable by salamander limbs, etc.

> And I'm not sure people making it to 110 is positive; I'm interested in actually living,

Centenarians don't do so badly in a lot of quality of life measures. They actually have a lower level of dependency, on average, than those in their late 80s.

But in any sense, this is why I mentioned QALYs (quality-adjusted life years).

> AGI and robots and flying cars have been coming soon for longer than most people have been alive.

I think this misstates what most people have felt was imminent. Occasional luminaries feeling that flying cars were close (e.g. Ford), and breathless media pieces does not a consensus view make.

In any case, this whole line of argument ("Lots of people have believed this forever@!(!") even if it were true, would not be a great argument against assessing the current prospects as pretty good.

> I also note that "couple therapies that each buy a few years" is a major retreat from the point I was actually adressing which was life made unrecognizable by salamander limbs, etc.

3 years of QALY for the population would likely look like 30% of the population getting some crazy-ass therapy that adds many years of QALY, and many other people dying too soon or having other ailments that are not addressed.

Alternatively it could come from finding something unexpectedly cheap and broadly helpful that you could treat a very large percentage of the population from and that most people benefit and get 5 years.

When I point out your handwaving, I am not looking for more handwaving in response. My impression stands. I think you, like many, are indulging in technoutopian wishful thinking.

> When I point out your handwaving, I am not looking for more handwaving in response.

??? You seemed to broadly agree with the one and only comment that I made, and then I offered some nuanced disagreement to your statement. And then you have this, frankly, hostile response.

It's really rich for someone with this in their profile:

> than people being respectful and/or standing behind their words.

Exercise some respect. We're talking about assessing probabilities of distant events on multi-decade horizons. It's going to be hand-wavy, just like your dismissal of the prospects is hand-wavy (it's unlikely because allegedly people were too optimistic about flying cars??)

> I think you, like many, are indulging in technoutopian wishful thinking.

Well, the horizon I pointed out is long enough that I've got relatively poor prospects of benefitting from it myself...

I believe the response is appropriate and on target. My preference for respectful dialog in general does not mean I have to put up with politely worded jackassery. Indeed, given that I was specifically challenging what looked to me like bullshit, I think your comments were not at all respectful, even if they were politely written.

If you real goal was to make some sort of unrelated point to the discussion you chimed in on, maybe try posting a top-level comment of your own, as I find your participation here unwelcome and borderline incoherent.

I think the way you're choosing to treat other people is well outside the site guidelines, and I think the way that it violates norms is documented pretty well in the voting history here.

> If you real goal was to make some sort of unrelated point to the discussion you chimed in on

This is a discussion forum. The whole point is for people to "chime in on" things. You're not the top-level commenter here. You make assertions, and you should not be too surprised if people have a range of reactions to those assertions: agreement, disagreement, nuanced agreement with some caveats. It may even be a small part of your comment that people respond to.

For sure. It's as foolish to me as somebody thinking they can keep a classic car going forever if they just use a better motor oil.

In the early days of the automobile, Ford sent people around to junkyards to look at their cars. They were looking for two things. One was obvious; they were looking for things that consistently failed too soon, so they could make them better. The other was to look for things that had a lot of life left in them, so they could make them cheaper. The net result: a car that was great when new, did pretty well for a while, and then had thing after thing going wrong with it, such that it was just time to get a new one.

Evolution is, like Ford, an unsentimental optimizer. I believe bodies are basically the same deal as cars. That's certainly how people talk about getting old; everything starts to wear out at around the same time. Doctors are happy to fight individual problems, but even in the best hospitals, doctors will get to the point where somebody has too many problems, is too medically fragile, for them to treat anything.

And from the perspective of one's genes, that's fine. Like people buy new cars, genes build shiny new bodies so they can continue roving the world. With an infinite supply of new bodies available, why would they make any individual one such that it could last forever? Much better to build cheap and replace every so often. The frequency of "so often" changes for the circumstance, but the pattern doesn't.

> Evolution is, like Ford, an unsentimental optimizer.

I certainly won't argue with this position, but note that evolution is a peephole optimizer, rather than trying newton's method, much less trying to optimize with a goal in mind. It does seem most people draw the wrong conclusion from the ape-to-man drawing (e.g. https://www.kindpng.com/picc/m/408-4084640_evolution-ape-to-... )

It's a random walk: each set of die rolls is continually tested on local (i.e. contemporary) conditions. You may have superior lifespan but live where people commonly die in floods. Only broad signals (e.g. ambient temperatures ranging between -10 and 40 C) really determine widespread attributes.

So what? Well 300 My of human evolution has included feedback loops uncommon and later unknown to other animals: speech, writing, and the social structures they afforded; hygene and other medical intervention; etc, and they do feed back into evolution even at the slow rate at which humans reproduce. Now we can (poorly) do genetic intervention, it's quite possible to subject humans to more rapid evolutionary pressure (most of it likely driven by fashion), with an attempt to move to goal-directed rather than peephole optimization.

I agree with what you said, but I don't see how it relates to the question of whether the sort of silver bullets the forever-young crowd want actually exist.

I was mainly expanding on your optimizer point.

But the last point gets to the longevity issue: now part of the selective pressure can be genetic intervention and highly directed social pressures which could drive changes for longevity in ways that natural selection previously could not.

There's nothing foolish about it at all, it's just not simple. You can keep a classic car going forever if you keep replacing parts when they wear out. Of course, you eventually end up with the Classic Car of Theseus, but so what? Humans are already like this: your cells have all died out and been replaced over the course of ~7 years. I don't see why the same won't be true of humans eventually: it'll require constant maintenance of course, and maybe artificial parts or implants, but there are other organisms out there that are biologically immortal, so it's certainly not impossible.

It's deeply disappointing to me when somebody here responds to one part of a sentence. I get that sometimes people get excited and don't read a whole comment. But I think making it all the way through a sentence is a reasonable minimum bar.

It's deeply disappointing to me when somebody here can't seem to understand the point of my post. I DID read your whole sentence. What exactly are you not understanding? I even acknowledged that keeping a classic car is not as simple as a different motor oil, and eventually ends up with a car that isn't even the original car. Did you somehow miss all that?

I was agreeing with zug_zug's point: "The idea that the human body has the formula for immortality 99% right an it just 'forgot to make enough of protein X which has no downsides seems hopelessly naive [...]"

That was specifically what I was calling foolish. That is what my metaphor was referring to.

You leapt into say, "There's nothing foolish about it at all", suggesting that the ”anti-ageing by chemical cocktails” approach was in fact reasonable.

You from there went on to make a different car analogy, one I also think hopelessly naive. But if even you don't support the magic chemicals option, then again, it looks like you didn't really read what you were replying to, just in a different way.

You can keep a car going forever. Just replace what is not working well. Will it still be classic? Probably not but it’ll work just fine.

There is still the Ship of Theseus argument - if we replace everything in your body, is that still you? I’d argue yes - as long as the memory is intact and the brian is alive - producing and consuming signals throughout.

I guess - a test could be, can you be “awake” through any procedure done to your body? (if we had advanced ways to block all associated pain with the surgery)

Perhaps there’s no need for that as long as the brain can be kept alive in a state like being in a nap.

> You can keep a car going forever.

Sure, but not by just replacing the motor oil. Which was my point.

You also can't replace "everything in your body" without replacing the brain. Which, given that the prevalence of dementia increases every year somebody lives, and given the general well-known cognitive effects of ageing, is a key problem here. And that also ignores that we can't swap body parts like we can swap car parts, even if we had infinite spare parts.

Human evolution doesn't care about life after prehistoric child-rearing. It has no reason to optimise for longevity.

HGH has deleterious health effects when abused. But it can also make you a famous movie star living a life of luxury whose children will never have to work. Our personal goals have very different parameters to what defined our evolution.

There are also other things that the human body benefits from but can't make itself. Creatine, essential amino acids, essential minerals and vitamins.

I'd disagree that evolution doesn't care about longevity. There could be survival benefit to have grandparents around to help take care of kids while the parents are hunting or whatever. But after a point, it's a negative, as the young would have to spend disproportionate resources caring for and feeding the elderly who don't really provide any value anymore.

The old of all species die and make room for the (hopefully larger) generation of the young.

This is not true if all creatures, Human Fish, Lobsters etc.

I know exactly why. And I agree with our parent commenter, BTW.

The down votes are from people who want to believe. And I won't blame or judge them. It is an ugly, extremely likely truth.

Who wants to die?

Not me, not on current timelines. After a longer time? Maybe. We may tire of the world or something.

But otherwise, yeah. Our condition is amazing! We all get this free ticket to our world, and there is no where near enough time to fully appreciate it.

I think they're being downvoted for the meth comment. I agree with everything OP and you said, but the meth example is a bit hyperbolic - the downsides to meth consumption would surely be felt much sooner than any theoretical downsides of the protein mentioned in the article.

I think it’s more analogous to our body sustaining damage it can’t reverse on its own. Think about clogged arteries or bad lungs.

Using external intervention (aka surgery), we can already remedy these situations to an extent. The methods aren’t great today (immunosuppressants suck), but soon - we’ll be able to grow organs compatible with our DNA using our own stem cells.

So hypothetically, you can live eternally if you can figure out a way to solve every possible breakdown before the heart stops or neurons start dying.

It’s a bit like keeping a car running forever, and maintaining it without ever turning it off. Will it be a massive engineering challenge? Yes. Will it be expensive? Likely. Is it impossible? No - nothing jumps at me that would make it impossible.

For the heart and lung part, we already have ways to keep the body functioning without a working heart or lungs temporarily[1]. We can even handle failed kidneys[2].

As far as I can see, our biggest challenge is identifying the point where physiological processes stop working, causing irreversible damage. And the biggest unfixable damage is losing your memory (if the respective neurons die). Everything else is akin to changing a tires or batteries or engine.

1. Cardiopulmonary bypass machine, or a heart-lung machine 2. Kidney Dialysis

I think aging exists because it enables/speeds up evolution.

There are a few organisms that don't seem to age at all. They're very marginal, but prove it's possible.

Is immortality a genetic advantage? I'd imagine it could create a lot of infighting.

I bet societies without immortality progress faster than societies with immortality socially. A large portion of opinion change occurs intergenerationally with old views dying off, some people change their opinions on major values over time but far fewer people do than we like to think. I think for example it would be far harder to get things like gay marriage passed if people born in 1000 AD were still around today.

I think the definition of progress is a key consideration here.

I don't buy that argument. Just look at the frankly staggering culteral change in the last 20 years. The majority of people alive 20 years ago are alive now. And it still was possible to transform the entire cultural landscape.

An entirely new generation of people became voting age and that generation is quite progressive on average. A second generation of fairly progressive people aged from unlikely voters to likely voters. And we had 20 years of people worth of deaths with many of those deaths concentrated in an elderly conservative generation. That has huge impacts on issues like gay marriage. Yes, some people did change their minds but not nearly as many as we like to think.

You don't go into my main point. The majority of people existing then exist now. The cultural shift is very thorough. Even if all new people are super progressive and all old people are super conservative it does not explain the shift. There must be a significant group of the majority which has internalized these cultural changes.

Immortality is a big genetic disadvantage when you want the species to be able to evolve and adapt to its environment. This might have something to do with why most species have limited lifespans.

Humans aren't bound by their environment any more though: they can actively control and change their environment, and their own biology. Humans stopped evolving by natural selection ages ago, so there's no good genetic reason to not explore technological means of extending lifespans.

> There must be a price for injecting increasing quantities of proteins to the body to turn back the clock.

Cancer.

So many cell death pathways are to guard against cancer.

Nevertheless, humans aren't that much optimized against cancer.

The really big mammals such as elephants and whales seem to be very cancer-resistant. So many more cells to go haywire and still they only suffer cancer at a low rate compared to, say, mice. Or even us.

It is unlikely that anti-aging will rely on chemical cocktails forever. The entire field is still fairly new, somewhere where aviation was in 1908 or so.

I would guess that the really efficient anti-aging interventions will rejuvenate cells, including stem cells.

Interestingly, Dr. Gregory Fahy has some positive results with rejuvenation of the thymus in humans (not in mice). It seems that a well-functioning immune system is a must for longer life.

Once a person is past child-rearing age, there is little evolutionary advantage for a longer lifespan—so perhaps it's just a trait that hasn't been prioritized by evolution?

Interesting thought.

I think this is clearly false for humans. I think it is unquestionable that kids do better when parents have actively involved grandparents in their lives. Raising a kid without a support network is overwhelming, and even more so in modern culture where so many kids are raised in single-parent homes. If you measure success of a lineage over time, having the grandparents die off before they get grandkids would have significant adverse effects.

Grandparents sure, but great grandparents? Great great grandparents? I think at a certain point additional surviving generations would be either a neutral or even net disadvantageous change for the greater population. Assuming 20 years per generation, there wouldn't be a huge pressure to live longer than 60-70. We clearly didn't evolve to naturally live forever.

The village/community would be the most successful support model.

No, not at all. In more advanced social species, there is an evolutionary advantage to older individuals helping their young.

Though I would very much like to live a lot longer, the society I would live in would be somewhat suckier because of it. The consequences have been extensively explored in the literature for the last 3,500 years at least.

Failing that, making QoL a square wave would be a massive win.

Would they duck for those of us alive today? We (those of us alive today) would like be the absolute masters of the universe.

Well, from literature there’s always the Tithonus problem (hence my point about the square wave), plus boredom or, if few have immortality, loneliness.

But what I was really thinking was widespread longevity, at least among the wealthy (basically this exists today in all societies): without death things don’t change. Imagine if bezos or musk or Charles Koch, or Murdoch or Xi could live to 150. Imagine if Reagan had lived for six presidential terms…shudder. There would be less “creative destruction” as the old power structures would drag on, and less progress happening. A stagnant, static society seems pretty sucky to me.

While I agree in principle and I am also not an expert by any means, I think it should be possible to inject a finite amount of substances that eventually cause a change to the composition of the human body to make it functionally immortal, in theory.

I think this can be reasoned from three observations:

1. That it is possible to change the DNA of the cells of a living organism by injecting substances in said organism (as evidenced by genetic advances in recent decades?).

2. That the DNA of an organism has an extreme amount of control over the composition of said organism (as evidenced by the amount of diversity in all DNA-based organisms and species and also by the known fact that changes in the DNA of an organism also change how it evolves).

3. That biologically immortal species already exist (e.g. hydras?).

That said, I'm pretty sure we're extremely far away from achieving this (unless we can create superintelligent AIs soon).

More benefits of Klotho in model organisms:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6335176/

The best anti-ageing cure that works now might be an optimized diet, exercise, and sleep routine. No protein injections required!

And expose your skin to the sun for few minutes. Vitamin D is important too.

The wikipedia page for klotho has an informative section re: anti-aging effects

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klotho_(biology)#Effects_on_ag...

The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed. You can already get your genes changed to express more klotho. It's a mid-six figure price tag. They've been doing it for at least a year. Don't tell the muggles.

https://www.integrated-health-systems.com/specialist-areas/k...

Planet of the apes beginnings

This reminds me of when telomere extension was all the rage in futurology forums... Turns out it's a recipe for cancer.

I can't help but wonder if this wont have a similar result.

Luckily, my wife just made me a rhubarb cake.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27692562/

> There must be a price for injecting increasing quantities of proteins to the body to turn back the clock.

Go read Flowers for Algernon

I assume there is already a black market for klotho injections?

These glimpses of powerful, future anti-aging treatments is why AGI research must not be slowed down under any circumstances. Immortality is in sight.

I have to say, it's annoying to have been born before radical life-extending technology becomes available, but late enough in the timeline to consider it an actual possibility.

We need to counterbalance that with a chance of extinction. /s

cheer up, we will be the last to die

It’s an interesting concept that, just a couple generations down the road, there will be relatively few people who have experienced aging and the death that comes with it.

I remember in Cocoon, one of the most touching scenes is between a husband who just lost his wife and an alien captain who just lost a friend for the first time in his multi millennium life. The alien’s empathy towards the tragedy of human condition drives him to offer immortality to the old humans he befriended. And all of them accept, with the exception of the one who lost his wife.

Not particularly interested in immortality, but I sure could do with some restoration of my memory.. which used to be nearly photographic but is now more like now here, now gone with the wind.

I'm half way through a year of not drinking alcohol. I cannot tell you what it had done for my memory.

I think I'll drink beer again someday but the increased memory has really made me question whether I actually will if presented with it.

Not sure if you drink or not but if you do, I'd recommend trying it. For me it was an unexpected benefit.

I basically stopped drinking much of anything alcoholic many decades ago, for no particular reason. No interest, I presume. In general a healthy lifestyle as well, so my reduced memory function seems to be purely an age issue, not that I feel particularly old.

Sounds like you’re not drinking enough alcohol!

Maybe we can apply the anthropic principle to feel a bit better about it. I.E. we observe the universe to be the way it is because if it were any different, we wouldn't be here to observe it.

We could be alive now because it's the statistically most likely time for most humans to be alive, right between the time it took us to slowly explode in population and the time we implode and make ourselves extinct. Otherwise we'd more likely live further in the future since if we continue growing then there's vastly more humans that will live then. We could very well be living in the best time ever, full stop. Food for thought.

I used to be more worried about an anthropic argument that we are living in end times. (If population growth is exponential then you are most likely to be born near end times)

But, most people have already died https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12288594/#:~:text=Assuming%2.... And population growth is shrinking. So I think we're safe

Well the variance on it is definitely huge by human timespan standards, but I think it's not entirely unlikely that most humans that have ever lived will live between something like 1700-2200 AD. Could be 1700-3500 as well if we're lucky.

It's also entirely possible that ancient Greeks had a discussion like this and decided that they'll all be dead soon, and couldn't have been more wrong, so the error bars are obviously massive when dealing with only an arbitrary fraction of the distribution.

I think we are still too early. Better to be just a few years old right now.

> I have to say, it's annoying to have been born before radical life-extending technology becomes available, but late enough in the timeline to consider it an actual possibility.

(Justin Timberlake) "Cry me a river"

Alchemy promised similar goals by more mystical means. Taoist practices for life extension go back thousands of years. They would have seemed like actual possibilities to someone living then, too. Just providing some perspective. Medical technologies certainly hold promise, but it may well be another 1000+ years before a meaningful breakthrough occurs. Or it may never.

> Alchemy promised similar goals by more mystical means. Taoist practices for life extension go back thousands of years.

Neither of these were based on the scientific method, a proven process for discovery and knowledge refinement.

Animal models do not always, and in fact quite often not at all, translate over to humans.

We all know this, but it is worth bringing it up on a regular basis.

Can you name a 'model'? Not sure what you mean?

"animal models" is a fairly standard phrase in research: When people research depression, alzheimers, cancer, etc., they generally start with mice and work their way up through monkeys before coming to human trials. For many conditions there's specific "lines" of mice that have been bred or even genetically modified to exhibit those conditions in a reliable or extreme way. Depression is particularly challenging since you can't ask an animal how it's feeling, and frankly nearly all animals used in laboratories are understimulated, removed from their natural habitat, and probably a little "depressed". (see e.g. the "rat park" studies (https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/view/what-does-rat-park-tea...) that showed that rats were much less likely to self-administer cocaine if they were in an environment that let them have a more enjoyable/fulfilling/natural life otherwise.)

So anyway "animal models" just means "an animal mice/rats/monkeys/etc. that we have decided has enough of the same symptoms of the human disease that we can use it to study treatments of that disease", and it's fairly common for something to work in mice but fail in monkeys, or even to work in both mice and monkeys but not work or have very undesirable side-effects in humans. (side note: one of the least discussed things in pharma is how they source the first humans for trialling a new treatment, which does carry non-trivial risk to the human "guinea pigs" - it's generally people who are poor and desperate.)

Thalidomide tested harmless in murine models but was a famously potent teratogen when tested in pregnant humans. 1

1 https://embryo.asu.edu/pages/studies-thalidomides-effects-ro...

At some point stuff gets tested in humans.

Science is not magic. It has produced some magical results but it is just one way of obtaining knowledge. I have seen nothing in my casual perusal of the age extension literature that makes me think it’s any more than modern day alchemy, hoping for some magical compound that grants immortality, from trace evidence of beneficial properties.

I think age extension is likely possible, and that it will require continual rewriting of the human genome to regress cellular aging, fight cancer, and repair damage to the brain and vascular systems - and all other organs, really. It will require a stupendous technological investment and infrastructure and require much better knowledge of the human brain and cognition than we have today. Certainly nowhere in the next 100 years, we do not even know the causes of or have effective treatments for common forms of dementia, and our cancer treatments are frankly barbaric.

Immortality for the extremely wealthy perhaps. The rest of us, at best, will have just enough to keep being productive, until we are no longer needed.

What if becomes super cheap?

I think immortality would be bad for humanity, but ~40 more productive years would be beneficial. Currently we take 25 years of preparation in order to work 35.

but there's a premium on our youth -- The people who complain that it's harder to find a job in their 50s and 60s can't _all_ be wrong or mistaken. I feel like we like to imagine that these treatments would extend our 20s and 30s, but what if they extend our 60s instead?

Most people I know in their 60s would way rather be in their 60s than dead

They can't all be wrong or mistaken, but there can be a very strong sample bias.

I can go into a longer diatribe here, but the short story is:

1) Most people have a hard time finding jobs at any age. Recent college grads can't all be wrong. :)

2) There is always a strong reversion to mean

3) Most of the people in their 50s or 60s whom I hear complaining were an outlier for employability for their age group in their 20s and 30s (e.g. straight out of Stanford).

Most older people I know are /very/ employable, and don't complain. Another pathway:

- Finish a state college. Have a very hard time finding a first job.

- Work up the career ladder, and build up a resume, reputation, and track record.

- Much easier time finding jobs in their 50s and 60s than straight out of college or early career.

Some of this also has to do with bust/boom cycles. People who entered the workforce during recessions had a hard time finding a job in their 20s, and then found things comparatively easy. People who entered during a boom cycle are the opposite.

That is kind of what I am saying. I think it would be better if we had 25 years of preparation, followed by 75 productive years followed by 25 years of retirement. The current 25,35,15 split isn’t very efficient.

Ageism might still exist but significantly pushed back.

The you’ll see wealth inequality skyrocket as rich people enjoy wealth compounding for an additional X years.

If most people can live forever, they’ll rebel against the conditions they live in. I suspect the rich would actually perish.

A lot of life now is ordained on the idea that we don’t live forever and we can’t see change in our lifetimes… but if the lifetime is forever - well, I’m gonna fight to make it better immediately cause then I have forever to enjoy it.

Seems rather backwards to me. Insurrection doesn’t take very long and the stakes are much higher when you have immortality.

Unless we get rid of capitalism as well. Or, at least, force these people to pay taxes that prevent the accumulation of wealth and its undue influence in politics.

Hard. While capitalism may be an established societal practice, accumulation of wealth and power is also the natural state of things. You need an incredibly cohesive society to prevent that, the likes of which humanity has never seen imo.

Humanity has never seen a lot of things that are now ubiquitous. Have hope.

What happened before capitalism?

Oneguyism. It is still pretty popular.

Communism is way better: everyone is poor except one guy.

Looks like I’m getting downvoted by CCP bots.

“bUt tRuE CoMMunISM^TM hAS nEVEr bEEN TriED!!”

True actually, oneguyism is often disguised as communism.

I think the ultimate solution is to get to the point where everything is very cheap. With AI and robotics, maybe this will be possible. Then wealth doesn't matter that much - everyone could be relatively much wealthier than they are today. Truly scarce things will only be for the rich. Who cares, let them have their gold and premium real estate.

So what if this becomes super cheap? Would dental treatments or insulin or whatever other basic medication become affordable too? Because otherwise that's a hell of immortality being offered to the masses...

Even on a forum where really smart people congregate, the "everywhere is America" syndrom is easily seen - even though Americans only constitute about 4 per cent of the world population.

Where I live, no one struggles to buy insulin. And if there is any kind of anti-aging treatment available, I don't doubt it will be offered to the general population without much ado. Compared to the rising cost of the pension systems in aging populations, treatments like that would be probably "dirt cheap".

I also live in a “cheap insulin” location. However, I’m pretty sure the Americans ultimately subsidize a lot of drug discovery. Even better would be to have stronger humans that require no healthcare.

With more productive years it seems like a reasonable conclusion would be that wealth would generally increase. Of course I have no idea what actual age extension would look like, but it seems pointless to extend the 80s or 90s. More years like 30s would be ideal.

Think of rich people as beta testers.

It's in the interest of the rich for the poor to be the beta testers.

When anti-aging becomes real rather than fantasy, there are going to be so many mutually incompatible conspiracy theories.

>It's in the interest of the rich for the poor to be the beta testers.

You're assuming the rich are rational. The billionaires on the OceanGate Titan didn't think this way; they were perfectly happy to beta-test a shoddily-designed sub.

I was half tempted to reference that myself, but if I had, someone else would have replied with all the testing SpaceX does.

(The recent explosion was such a test).

(And that sub had apparently been to depth before? I didn't follow the details…)

The fact that one billionaire's company does a decent job testing doesn't mean that billionaire customers are paying attention, or that other billionaires aren't happy to be beta-testers for a different company that doesn't believe in testing or safety or regulation.

I think the OceanGate disaster just shows that billionaires aren't any smarter or more rational than the rest of us.

Can you reason through the gloom? Unless immortality comes with built in invincibility, I don't see how it would not have to be democratized pretty much immediately to avoid civil unrest of the outmost proportions.

Also I don't see what would be to gain to not do it for those in power.

Just look at what we let them get away with now.

I’m sure a lot of people would defend the arrangement. “Of course Elon Musk can have inmortality and you don’t. He’s a genius”.

Is there anything in terms of healthcare that is only available to billionaires today (not available to middle class)?

Not going bankrupt

Again, not everywhere is America. In fact, most of the world isn't America.

Don't judge the prospects of the entire humanity by the pathology that is called the US healthcare system.

Ironically, Musk is a longevity skeptic himself.

Bezos would be the guy, spending billions on Altos Labs.

I am sure most would not.

Only if they don’t live. Doing anything in life has risk: flying, driving etc

People in their twenties have an annual chance of dying of about one in a thousand, so effective anti-aging would give an expected lifespan of about a thousand years.

https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html

Based on the rates of various types of accidental deaths, you could extend that quite a bit by avoiding dangerous drugs and and living in an area where you're unlikely to get shot. If we figure out really safe self-driving cars, that'll make a big difference too. In much of Europe you can already get the same effect by taking public transport everywhere. Air travel is quite unlikely to kill you.

https://www.iii.org/fact-statistic/facts-statistics-mortalit...

Put all that together and a 10,000-year expected lifespan looks pretty achievable.

And some cells do not reproduce (neurons, etc), so you have to keep them in good shape, except this is impossible. For example 1/3 people are infected with Herpes virus which stays in their neurons.

In addition some cells reproduce only a few times, often only during youth.

And there is sometimes involution like in thymus.

those cells reproduce at some point, I imagine that if aging can be reversed new cell growth could also be stimulated.

> "those cells reproduce at some point,"

No some cells never reproduce, for example motor neurons.

> "I imagine that if aging can be reversed new cell growth could also be stimulated."

I have a hard time to imagine how to replace a up to one meter/yard long cell with sometimes hundred of synapses which is surrounded by cells such as astroglia and microglia that are equally important.

Now you get to rent your youthful body for a low fee of 5000€ per month. [0]

[0] Cancelling the subscription may result in accelerated aging and immediate organ and heart failure.

If it's technological and not limited by some natural scarcity of components, there's no reason for this to be the case, just like everyone these days can afford a smartphone that looks like sci-fi to someone from the year 2000.

The problem with immortality is how does society create room for the next generation?

Each generation gets a moon to terraform.

These maybe? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Neill_cylinder

Yep. Go with that and the solar system has room for trillions of people.

If we invent practical fusion power by then, we can also spread out into the Oort Cloud.

Just make it a choice, immortality or have children.

I have to mention this book:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Million_Tomorrows

Or have one every few decades, with plenty time to assess what worked and what didn’t.

Or a better choice of one child per immortal couple.

Ask China how that worked for them... Too many men, too few women.

Better than being allowed no kids like the GP mentioned.

That's were going multi-planetary is attractive.

Oh yes please. I look forward to being kept alive forever by a machine god with incomprehensible motivations.

Lol jk I still don't want to age and die to be honest

The only difference from our current most likely future is the immortality part, so why not?

I was thinking of more of a "i have no mouth and yet I must scream" or a black mirror "white Christmas" scenario

Edit: to be clear I would still take the immortality like 100%

Wouldn’t modern medicine would be considered “radical life-extending technology” to people living 200 years ago?

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1040079/life-expectancy-...

AFAIK, it's a bit misleading. Much of that increase is due to a decrease in infant mortality and childhood related illnesses.

I wonder if this would be true in all cultures though? Australian Aboriginals lives incredibly healthy lifestyles and had access to an abundance of incredible foods.

I don't know if they'd live as long as people today but I'd be surprised if many didn't at least go till at least 70+?

Most adults lived to about 60 in most places and times. 70+ is not noteworthy.

"Most adults lived to about 60 in most places and times."

Medieval European burials at least tend to cluster way lower than that. In the Dark Ages, skeletons of people older than 60 are rather uncommon (like 1:30), in the High Middle Ages, they become somewhat more common, but still less than 1:10.

Of all the population groups, the clergy was by far the most long-lived in pre-modern times. A nonviolent line of work, plus almost guaranteed supply of food.

Even in the 18th century in fairly developed Britain, only about 70 per cent of adults (18+) celebrated their 40th birthday.

If 70% of 18 year olds make it to 40, then so long as 5/7 of them can survive another 20ish years, you have “most” people making it to 60. If we’re cool with a +/- 5 years on the “about 60” figure I think this tracks just fine.

Nevertheless, that was the 18th century in industrializing Britain, which was becoming a lot more efficient at agriculture etc. From many aspects, it was already a fairly modern society, with an emerging literate middle class etc.

Even then the mortality was still quite high compared to today.

And most agricultural societies before that were regularly swept by famines, which disproportionately took the young and the aging ones.

When judging historic lifespans, we tend to judge by the famous people. Cardinals, popes, kings, emperors. The population average was way, way lower, and the bones from churchyards tell the real story.

I’m judging by just glossing through some tables of data.

The median death for 25 year olds was about 58 in Ancient Rome for example

Surviving death records from Ancient Rome are far from representative. Contemporary record keepers were mostly interested in heads of households, and not, say, slaves. So this again skews the statistics towards richer and more influential people.

Also, Rome itself (as a city) had never problem supplying its population with food. There was a special office (Cura Annonae) that coordinated import of food from Hispania, Africa and Egypt to Rome so that the city was never threatened with starvation. I just recently visited Ostia Antica, the main port of Ancient Rome; it was absolutely massive. Rome certainly had a lot of problems, but it was fairly secure in food.

Things were different in 11th century Germany or Sweden. Without an extensive network of long-distance trade, if crop failed in your region, there wasn't any way to prevent famine.

Even deep in the 18th century, during the last peacetime famine in Czechia (1770-3 approx., caused by rainy and cold weather), the attempts to alleviate the hunger by importing food from Hungary were only partly successful; even though by that time, the road network was fairly developed and the state capacity was orders of magnitude higher than several centuries ago. As a result, something between 5 and 10 per cent of the population died.

Can you find some data to support your claim? Ideally one not cherry picked to a known famine/plague/war?

This was likely due to the population density and sanitation conditions of city living causing infectious disease related deaths, no?

I imagine the risk of contracting fatal diseases in a rural setting was much less.

Crop failures were a major factor in mortality. Subsistence grain farmers in pre-modern times could expect a crop failure once in 5-7 years, sometimes back to back.

Modern medicine is a relatively small factor for increased life spans.

The earth has a carrying capacity of less than one billion people if those people have a USA level of consumption. How would we deal with this problem if people stopped dying or had their lifespans increased dramatically?

Well, that really speaks to your worldview and your ideas on the meaning and purpose of life. Why is that a problem?

Is the purpose of life hedonic consumption, where there seems to be no other point than racking up a high score? Is there something more?

I'm actually for us -- especially in the west -- to significantly reduce our carbon footprint and consumption. My personal consumption habits are well-below the average in the west. I think hedonistic consumption is a hollow pursuit. But, I understand that most people will not voluntarily reduce their consumption habits.

If people could live for ~ 500 years, the preservation of the Earth would turn into a much more important. Anyone who is alamost 100 would have cause for concern about climate change immediately.

Why do you think the Earth has a fixed carrying capacity?

As with Moore's Law for decades, there have been many similar predictions in the past, and they fell by the wayside as technology, output, and productivity improved. At some point, Moore's law gave way to more gradual increases, and the same may happen here, but we have no idea how or when.

I'd say human contributed greenhouse gas emissions are the main limiting factor for the earth's carrying capacity for human lives. We're already experiencing many more severe climate related weather events and the problem is only going to get worse each year.

We have multiple power sources that don't release significant greenhouse gases.

We do, but they only contribute a small portion of the world's energy. It will take a long time to get to a point where most energy generated is renewable, and by that point, the climate is going to be a much much bigger problem.

That's a big problem for the next several decades, but by the time longevity tech is mature enough to significantly affect populations, either we'll have converted to non-carbon energy or longevity tech will be pretty much irrelevant anyway.

I'm not sure:

- We might be sitting at a 500M population after the [climate / pandemic / AI / nuclear / system collapse / etc] apocalypse.

- We might be sitting on a terraformed Mars (or in bubbles under the ocean)

- We might be sitting in glass domes in the middle of an increasingly climate-hostile Earth

... and so on. We're very bad at predicting the future; it's hard to pick from thousands of (individually highly unlikely) possibilities.

Right, but I didn't mean humans would be extinct necessarily, just that longevity tech would be mostly irrelevant to population counts. In a lot of those scenarios, the main causes of death are likely to be things like starvation, disease, or accidents, rather than old age.

Admittedly this isn't true of all possible scenarios. And in some, longevity would be really helpful.

There's so much unused space on Earth, and people still make this ridiculous comment.

Although I agree antiaging interventions need to be pursued completely — I'm aware of arguments against them but am not sure there's any serious opposition to them? — there are systemic physical reasons to think there might be hard limits on age.

We're already immortal, just that this body made up of ever-changing physical elements isn't.

We should also strive to reach to a state where we realize experientially our true nature of eternal, pure consciousness, and then we can manufacture whatever body we would need just like our mind manufacture new worlds, objects and different bodies for us in dreams during sleep.

How to know whether 'Consciousness' is just an output of ever-changing physical element too - in this case flow of energy in neurons.

These flow of energy changes the states of neurons and sum total of that is perception of the 'world' which we think is the consciousness.

Corollary - Due to the quantity and 'quality' of each neuron in each individual, the perception of the world or the reality would also vary for each individual.

While the patterns engraved in the past cannot be changed, they also cannot be easily retrieved and my own perception of self ends when there is no longer a brain changing my “state vector”.

I really improved my lifestyle (exercise, diet, etc.) once I realized that right now, living longer has whatever the opposite of diminishing returns is. Each year that I live doesn't just give another year, it also gives me whatever additional time that life extension technology comes up with that year. It's plausible that the value of some extra year is infinite, because that's when we get to the point of immortality. I hate running, but given that math I feel compelled to get up and put on my running shoes.

However much you exercise your body becomes less efficient at producing and absorbing any number of amino acids and proteins, including arginine, creatine, taurine, etc. It’s not unreasonable to supplement exercise with safe anti aging regimes, and it’s absurd to have an anti aging regime without improved diet, regular mixed exercise, etc. There’s no reason to willfully ignore the science, which says aging comes with an inexorable decline in various crucial amino acids, etc, and that exercise/diet improves the entire system. Doing a sensible and safe total system regime that optimizes along a typical decline curve has all sorts of benefits, including the ability to better take advantage of exercise and diet, but also reduces systemic dysfunction due to imbalances in the availability of basic building blocks like amino acids, minerals, etc, that can be difficult to get in sufficient quantity from the best of diets for an aged person.

TL;DR these aren’t mutually exclusive and are synergistic approaches

I didn't see a single reference to AI in the article, so what does AGI have to do with anything?

See, there's this prospective thing called AGI that would hypothetically carry out scientific research much faster than humans.

You can get started by reading the following article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence

Don’t be a dork.

Only one around here is the person asking the ridiculous question of how AGI is related to this.

Immortal is not eternal

I mean sure, but only if all other health problems are also solved, not to mention society which is already struggling under the pressure of an aging population - causing retirement ages to increase, employment under elderly increasing, and health care systems like the NHS or the US system to crumble to the point of people dying while waiting to be seen by a GP or being referred to A&E to sit and wait for hours waiting for underpaid and overworked staff for something a GP should be looking at.

> is already struggling under the pressure of an aging population

Wouldn’t making them healthier increase their economic output at the same time it’d decrease their cost to the healthcare system?

The health problems that kill the most people are consequences of aging. People in their twenties have only about a one in a thousand chance of dying each year, and a lot of those deaths are avoidable. Avoid dangerous drugs, live in a safe area, and take public transport, and you'll likely live for thousands of years if you maintain the biology of a 25-year-old. (Sources in another comment I posted here.)

If that were an option, I'd be happy to forgo social security. If everyone were biologically young, there'd be a lot less for a healthcare system to do.

The difference between an AI which helps speed up medicine development by simulating drug safety, and one which finds tens of thousands of deadly neurotoxins, is a single "min" -> "max" or equivalent.

(And that was something that happened about a year ago already).

Assume that someone will always be using the best tools available (some illegally) for the most nefarious purposes.

With that in mind, the moral thing is to use the very best tools available to at least counter those efforts.

Nick Harkaway (world-class author, son of John Le Carre) explores this idea in his highly-entertaining, extremely well-written, and thought-provoking novel, Titanium Noir. Highly recommended!

So any safety concerns that would lead to slower development should be cast aside because your life is more important than future lives?

Pet peeve:

Defeating aging does not make anyone immortal!

True. One can still die of disease or accidents. That’s why so many stories about immortal humans also have them making backup copies of their minds.

I'm surprised at how much scrolling I had to do in order to find this "little" problem.

But it does get you to a lifespan of several thousand years, as long as you're reasonably careful. I posted sources in another comment here.

Very good point. And with very long lifespans (thousands of years), all of those low-probability events that may cause accidental death (airplane crash, getting hit by a car crossing the street, violence, etc.) may really start to add up to a not-so-low probability of at least one of them happening within your extended lifespan.

Please stop. Not all of us want a future where everyone is an immortal, useless consumer ruled over by AGI gods or the select few who own them.

I don't think we've yet learnt that technological progress today comes with much more risk and is not an automatic good. The atomic bomb probably should have woken us up to this, but I worry we'll need to learn this lesson the hard way eventually.

For example, a forest fire in California isn't a big deal in the context of global ecosystem, but if that forest is your world then it's everything. The invention of fire might come at the risk of burning down a forest or two, but it doesn't come at the risk of burning down the entire Earth. If fire did come at that cost humans wouldn't have made it.

AGI doesn't just have the ability to make you a useless immortal meat bag as you apparently desire. It also has the ability to provide the intelligence and knowledge needed so that every human on Earth can create create a civilisation destroying virus if they so choose.

I know it's weird, but I like the present. We have problems, but all in all it's a great time to be alive. I'm not immortal, but I think that's okay.

We should be more careful about seeking to make radical changes which could destabilise the progress we've made.

Speak for yourself. I’d take immortality without thinking twice.

Immortality in this universe is a physical impossibility, and even if it were medically possible, it is easily lost.

Great, so we can look forward to having presidents who are 200yo instead of 100yo?

People living longer makes the world worse.

Maybe there’s an economic system that would not do this, but currently most people’s lives are not improved with increased longevity across the board.

It’s one of the reasons I left my job in pharma. The constant circle jerk about making the world better + comparative low pay when so few could afford a condo on their own salary. Whose lives are we making better? Certainly not the lives of the people I see every day.

> AGI research must not be slowed down under any circumstances. Immortality is in sight.

wow. So progress at any cost? Seems misguided to me

You will never find yourself in a timeline in which you're not alive. Perhaps you've already died in all the other timelines; this is the one where you live long enough to benefit from life-extending technology and eventually immortality.

The thought of everlasting life seems at first glance to be quite enticing, yet the inevitability of death is what gives life its value and meaning. In some ways, this reminds me of a metaphor: a fetus not wishing to leave its mother's womb. The womb is comfortable, familiar, and safe - much like our lives. However, without birth, the opportunity to experience the world in all its beauty and complexity, in all its highs and lows, would remain unrealized.

We find ourselves fearful of death, not because it is inherently terrifying, but due to our limited comprehension of its nature. Our collective fear of the unknown compels us to seek perpetual life as a means to sidestep this uncertainty. Yet, death is as much a part of life as birth, and perhaps our trepidation stems from misunderstanding, rather than the event itself.

In much of life, as with the natural world, there exists a cyclical pattern of transformation - not an abrupt cessation. If we look to Buddhist philosophy, for example, we see the belief that our ego-mind, the part of us that clings to transient moments and shies away from change, is what dreads the idea of letting go. It's this ego-mind that is afraid of losing itself, of losing control.

Yet, Buddhism also teaches us the concept of Anatta, or non-self, a notion that suggests that this clinging ego-mind isn't our true nature. By holding on so tightly to our lives, we may be disregarding the beauty and wisdom inherent in change, in letting go, and perhaps, in death itself.

Just as a caterpillar morphs into a butterfly, maybe death is not an end but a metamorphosis, a transcendence into a different state of existence that our current understanding simply cannot grasp. After all, every living being encounters death. This universality suggests that it holds purpose and significance in the grand scheme of life's narrative.

I think, before we leap into the pursuit of eternal life, perhaps we should first strive to better understand, accept, and make peace with the cycle of life and death.

> the inevitability of death is what gives life its value and meaning.

By what mechanism does it do that? How do you conclude that life has any meaning or value? What is the value and meaning of life according to you?

I believe the concept of 'meaning' is inherently human because we are intrinsically teleological beings. We habitually seek meaning, purpose, or goal-orientation in every aspect of our existence.

I also believe that the concept of 'meaning' exists only within the realm of human consciousness. Outside the human experience, the concept of 'meaning' is virtually non-existent. For instance, the cosmos doesn't assign 'meaning' to celestial events; they simply occur in adherence to the laws of physics.

Well, that partly answers the second question but what about the other two? As for the second, how does the fact that we seek it and that it is would have to be psychological entail that it exists and that we find it?

You sound like a Cartesian dualist. Consider the following:

1. Why should "human consciousness" have a teleological character, while everything else in the universe should be devoid of it? This means that "human consciousness" is different from the rest of the universe in some intrinsic, substantial way. Hence, dualism, and in the Cartesian scheme, this division is expressed in the distinction between res cogitans and res extensa. But then if human consciousness (or res cogitans) is distinct, then we can at least entertain the possibility of the immortality of personal human consciousness as it is not subject to the flux of the remainder of the universe in which things pass into and out of existence.

2. What is a law of physics? Where can I find one? Does it haunt the universe like a ghost, enforcing obedience to its will on otherwise inert "stuff"? That sounds like either another consciousness, or a third category of thing. Or it is perhaps just a convenient way of summarizing observed regularities, regularities that must be accounted for by, say, appealing to the the nature of a kind of thing? The difference matters, because now we must begin to talk telos.

3. How do you explain efficient causality without final causality? How can you account for regularity? If I strike a match against a matchbox, I can predictably cause fire. Fire is predictably the result, not the manifestation of an elephant or a cheeseburger or Beethoven's 9th symphony. The match is causally ordered in a way that, when the right cause comes along, the effect of fire is achieved. That is all that telos is, the ordering of things toward effect or end. The nature of a thing is realized--actualized--in the effecting of what it is ordered toward. (People confuse telos with conscious, deliberative purpose, but that is but a species.)

4. What is meaning? Do you deny that things are what they are, that they are intelligible for what they are? If you do, then what business do you have telling us what the universe and human consciousness is like? Are you a nominalist[0]? If so, what business do you have making general statements about the universe and human consciousness?

[0] https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/11090c.htm

I guess we have to accept that this perspective will be at the bottom of such threads.

But this is the conclusion I’ve come to as well. I used to fear death, now I fear wasting my life.

The more I learn about the natural world, the more I can see that death is a gift, a mechanism for renewal as well as for protecting things which have existed for millions of years.

Nothing I have in my brain is that special, compared to what the collective of life has created. I’m happy to give up living and become a more background part of what comes next. It’s an honor. And I hope I can honor it.

It’s very interesting to read this thread though and remember that so many people see death as a simple black line that might just as well be evaded as understood.

I feel similarly to you, and yet there is always such a strong negative reaction to this sort of sentiment in anti-aging threads. I wonder what people outside the HN bubble think of this, since I've always thought that coming to terms with death and your own mortality was just a part of growing up.

Coming to terms with death is a necessary adaption to the fact that we're all going to die in a fairly short time. If we had an expected lifespan of ten thousand years, then I wonder how many people would think that the way to "grow up" is to give up 99% of that time, rather than living those years and learning whatever lessons they bring.

Perhaps, when the solar system is full of 5000-year-olds, they'll marvel that we infants were able to muddle through at all.

Buddhism's "solution" is essentially personal suicide. "How can I die, if I am not, save in some non-personal sense?" But nobody really cares about a "non-personal" survival, making this an effectively nihilistic way of dealing with the subject.

(A nice, short summary of various positions you might find interesting: https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/07687a.htm)

Perhaps. But if I had the opportunity to investigate those concepts by meditating for several centuries, as one part of an even longer life, I'm not so sure that'd be a bad idea. Buddhism also, after all, includes the concept of Bodhisattvas, who don't need to incarnate but choose to do so anyway, out of compassion for others.

I cannot comprehend people who say things like this... Unless they believe in an afterlife (which is also some kind of immortality).

The only reason to accept death would be if it was inevitable. But if we'd have the chance...

I urge you to read The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant

https://www.nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html

PSA - If you think you're never going to die, you're wrong and you are in emotional denial and talk it over with a therapist or something.

The human body is a machine with so many failure modes that we don't even remotely understand all the ways you can die. The idea that we'll find 1 magical variable (telomere length or some protein) that can be fixed and ALL the changes of aging (from growth, sexual development, menopause, brain shrinkage, skin wrinkles, bone density loss) will go back to exactly perfect AND any other ways you can die will all be prevented (car accident, cancer, diabetes, etc) is just about zero.

For example the human brain in constantly losing brain cells (which don't grow back obviously). Many body cells don't regrow at all[1]. I'm sure there are many other mechanisms in the human that never evolved to the point of >100 year reliability.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permanent_cell

On the bright side is there anything we can do to limit this loss of brain cells?

I guess my grand parents suggestion of eating almonds isn’t viable..

There's never going to be a single treatment for aging, but there's an intervention everyone knows theycan take to slow down the inevitable decline until medicine improves to the point it can aid in in slowing and then reversing the decline.

Mostly, it involves exercise of various kinds.

Is this how you walk around talking to people? Get off your pedastal, mate. It comes across as rude, take a day off. Nobody needs to be informed about your "PSA".

Who hasn't had had someone close to us die?

Yes, I'm rude. And so are you. I don't care whether you like it.

I'm a participant in this forum and it's my perrogative to get people who post stupid stuff, like attempts at immortality, to stop, by downvotes and comments. Moreover from MY perspective you should have learned understand this forum isn't a place for a friendly speculation with people who know nothing relevant on a topic like your local pub.

PSA - your comments are never going to stop people from posting or commenting.

This forum has many different personalities and perspectives. People with soft skills and people with almost none.

Work on the soft skills mate. No need to be so abrasive.

You are well aware that every remark everyone says has some small impact on those around us, otherwise you wouldn't be making such remarks yourself.

Like I said, if you want a forum for jabbering on topics you know nothing about with friendly people, I'm sure you can find a local pub. I want a forum where inside experts who read peer-reviewed studies or have first-hand experience give a download, and the rest to hold their tongue.

I think you may be in the "the rest."

Do you think your comments are effective? People don’t generally react well to someone telling them “your idea is stupid, you need to see a therapist”.

Yes, I think my comments are effective, but I don't think they are pleasant.

It seems like you think it's wrong to give great advice that might hurt feelings, if that's what you think then I think you're wrong and possibly causing more harm in the long term.

If someone close to you was getting so obsessed with longevity that it was negatively affecting the other aspects of their life, then it might be reasonable to talk them about getting professional help. It could be a difficult discussion, but it might be the right thing to do.

But c’mon, suggesting the same to someone on the internet who hasn’t displayed any of those issues is ridiculous.

You don’t actually stand by that do you? Everyone who thinks longevity is a realistic possibility has some deep-seated issue about death?

Thank you for your efforts. Sadly, despite the image of rationality, the delusional thinking you infer to is widespread in industry.

I've had a manager telling me that aliens were going to offer us the secrets of immortality and "zero point energy", while another one seriously claimed that "We will develop time travel, and we will all rescue each other at the end of our lives in a chain of immortality". These are the more extreme examples, but the wishful thinking component is common. What is also common is that most of these people never spent time in a university biochem or genetics class.

If the idea of chemically-induced immortality gives one comfort, sure, I am irrational at times too so I understand. However, the complexity and depressing nature of human biology and human genetics will relieve you of this wishful thinking if you so choose. Feel free to look at reptile regeneration models; I did and I'm glad I had the sense to get out before it ruined my life.

For those naysayers desperate for their immortality fix, perhaps a fresh round of teenage blood transfusions[1] are in order?

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/feb/02/could-young-...

> The idea that we'll find 1 magical variable (telomere length or some protein) that can be fixed and ALL the changes of aging...

Agree with this, but on the other hand: the idea that the body is "a machine" that comes out of the factory in "new" condition and slowly degrades by wear, accidents and corrosion is also a wrong analogy. The body doesn't just degrade because of entropy. Bodies bootstrap themselves to some pristine state and can return to it, after injuries or illness, for tens of years. The ability to restore an optimal state is just lost, it's not something that needs to be invented again.

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