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Comment by yes_man | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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