Experiencing scientific revolutions: the 1660s and the 2020s
resobscura.substack.com
resobscura.substack.com
> This remarkable book looks at hundreds of autobiographies penned between 1760 and 1900 to offer an intimate firsthand account of how the Industrial Revolution was experienced by the working class. The Industrial Revolution brought not simply misery and poverty. On the contrary, Griffin shows how it raised incomes, improved literacy, and offered exciting opportunities for political action. For many, this was a period of new, and much valued, sexual and cultural freedom.
* https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300205251/libertys-dawn/
Asimov's 1966 Fantastic Voyage was likely more inspirational to the 1970s _Ant Man_ than Boyle. I wonder if Asimov knew of Boyle (or was derivative of other things - no dis meant to Asimov - dude was The Master).
Just to point out the perhaps obvious, though, in terms of the history of that specific idea, long shadows of things / your body / arms / head around sunrise / sunset could probably inspire this vague concept (in the embiggen direction) in people pre-historically. The idea can be re-cast as just "make such projection/optics 'more' real".
No it's not, there is just a lot of hype and a lot of money behind that hype.
They cannot even cure the most basic aging diseases like Raynauds and so many others, they don't even really understand them.
They can't even detect long-covid, forget treating it and definitely not curing it.
Basically the world ends with half the population getting long-covid over the next 100 years if they don't figure it out because for all the studies there is zero true understanding and zero cures.
Forgive a twitter link but he said it well
But life extension is already here! We used to be quite old by 65, now you have people completing iron mans in their 80's.
One of the biggest looming economic threats is that everyone is old and there aren't enough young'uns. That sure sounds like we're dying a lot later than we used to.
Data says we've gone from 5-20% of the population over 65yo in the 1950's to 15-75% in 2023. 36% of americans are older than 65, that's a lot.
But if we assume a fertility rate of 1, which is the direction most developed countries are headed, then each successive (younger) generation will be half as large as the (older) one before. This means society will be disproportionately composed of the ever-more elderly, with socioeconomic chaos, or Logan's Run, soon to follow. This would, counterintuitively, be true even if life expectancy was low. If we all died at 50 you'd just end up with a society with a larger and larger chunk of your population around 50 years old, until eventually there was no population left at all.
And, vice versa, a fertility rate of e.g. 6 (as is the case in some places in Africa), means that each successive (younger) generation will be 3x as large as the previous (older) one. So you will always have extremely low mean and median ages in this context, again regardless of whether life expectancy was high or low.
> One of the biggest looming economic threats is that everyone is old and there aren't enough young'uns.
If you can complete an iron man, you are also suitable for work.
Long covid is three years old. That’s absurd to use as a comparison.
The last paper I saw had some great results in primates, human trials maybe this year. https://twitter.com/davidasinclair/status/167917867074373224...
So while we’ve “always” been about to cure aging, this time its actually closer to real than ever before.
More over, since we understand the reasons for aging, there are things you can do to extend life that don’t involve medication. Like traditional techniques that we know work, but now we’re aware exactly why. Like fasting for example. And its not just the actual age you die that can be affected but how you feel throughout your life - e.g. how “young” you feel. And the great thing is that those techniques have been tested in various cultures around the world for centuries, so there is some actual data to back things up, and with the recent discoveries we can separate the things that actually made a difference with the pageantry and the irrelevant or bad stuff, and get you to live at the longest your genes can do, maybe even a bit longer.
The truly great thing for me is that we now apparently can measure biological age accurately without having to wait for people to die to add to a datapoint, so that we can quickly iterate, and obviously we’ll need to wait for decades to be sure and prove stuff without a shadow of doubt, but seems to me we might be closer than ever before!
I mean actually extending it. For example if the natural lifespan is 3 years, can we now reliably get 4 or 5 years?
I have not seen any studies that clarify whether calorie restriction has any effects beyond those caused by the protein restriction included in the calorie-restricted diet and whether protein restriction has any effects beyond those caused by the methionine restriction inherent to a protein-restricted diet.
Methionine is required for the initiation of any protein synthesis, so presumably when it is deficient the global rate of protein synthesis in the body is lowered, which is what might be the cause of the extension of the lifespan.
However this may cause problems when a high rate of protein synthesis is needed, e.g. in cases of diseases or accidents.
https://peterattiamd.com/category/nutritional-biochemistry/p...
Also west =/= usa, europe is not as obese and maintaining a healthy lifestyle is actually quite easy, since most of it is far from car dependent, lots of nature and healthy food options.
I’ve recently found out it’s actually way harder to do all that in south asia where a lot of the fasting traditions come from, since most people live much further away from nature (big unregulated cities) and transport options are as bad if not worse than USA
It's getting there don't worry
> Overweight and obesity affect almost 60% of adults and nearly one in three children (29% of boys and 27% of girls) in the WHO European Region.
https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/353747/9789...
There isn't a single country in EU with under 50% overweight rate
> since most of it is far from car dependent, lots of nature and healthy food options.
We must not be living in the same world then, every mid sized / big city is the same in every country in the west, people barely walk or exercise and everybody's overweight
Where can get a scientifically validated test for "biological" age? What does that even mean?
Most people know about low life expectancies in the past, but then extrapolate that to your expected age of age of death, but that's completely wrong. Low life expectancies were owing almost entirely to extremely high rates of infant mortality. If one guy lives to 80, and another dies shortly after birth - you now have a life expectancy of 40 years. The peaks of human longevity don't seem to have changed much, if at all, for millennia.
More people are able to hit those peaks, but that's generally owing to pretty simple advancements like antibiotics, as well as doing away with what were probably overtly harmful treatments. For instance George Washington died relatively young at 67. And while there is some debate on the exact cause, there's reason to believe that his treatment contributed to it. He was being leeched, which was supposed to balance out the 4 humors of the body by drawing out 'bad blood.' And people were reaching the same heights of longevity in the context of that being the bleeding edge of medicine.
This probably dates back to the early bronze age or even the neolithic. For all the hype it seems human biology hasn't changed since the appearance of humans.
Among the very long-lived in my own family, until the end and final decline, they have often never been seriously sick and have never had any major medical care in their adult lives. Such good luck seems to have also been known to happen to the ancients, if perhaps slightly less often.
But today everything is toxic, there is still leaded gas being sprayed in the air everywhere by propeller craft. Fracking fumes poison the water and air up to 50 miles downwind. All the freshwater fishing is toxic in the USA, there are industrial zones pollution like crazy right over where people live in density. All the food and milk (even breast milk) has forever chemicals in them now.
None of that toxicity existed previous century.
Making it to 50 or 60 without getting some kind of cancer or other fatal diseases in another generation will be impossible. And even if it's not a fatal disease there are plenty to make life miserable every day.
I think the science on "the Attaining Gigantick Dimensions" is more robust and widely implemented
Eric Topol is an alarmist attention seeker and not taken seriously in the field. I wouldn't believe anything he says without extensive independent validation.