Implausibility of life extension in humans in the twenty-first century | Hacker News Reader

Implausibility of life extension in humans in the twenty-first century

nature.com

9 pointsrntn3 comments

Oh man, this one hits close to home! I for one am deadset on setting foot on Luna one day, so I need this to work. Ever since reading the incredible treatment of this issue in the Red Mars trilogy, I’ve been on board! And with intuitive algorithms we now have an even better shot than before; not only will they help speed up research, they will also necessitate reduced inequality, which in itself is a huge boon to paradigm-shifting breakthroughs. After all, how many Einsteins never get to attend secondary education in todays world?

Substantively;

  unless the processes of biological aging can be markedly slowed, radical human life extension is implausible in this century.

This paper is fantastic science, but the title/conclusion is just lazy rhetoric. “If we don’t get a breakthrough, we won’t have a breakthrough” is just tautological, and high-resolution recent trend analysis is not a meaningful tool for answering that question, anyway.

It’s not tautological, it’s the difference between giving someone twice as many heart beats, vs making their heart beat half as fast.

Even if we figure out how to do the latter, it doesn’t help folks who have already had most of their heart beats. It’s not actually life extension.

And what is life like lived at half speed? Let’s say we can get people to 200 by keeping them immobile and cold and nearly starving them of calories and oxygen—dramatically suppressing their metabolism. Who would want that?

>Let’s say we can get people to 200 by keeping them immobile and cold and nearly starving them of calories and oxygen—dramatically suppressing their metabolism. Who would want that?

I can imagine quite a few people. Maybe they are already in pain or have mobility issues. At that point why not say "yeah just feed me painkillers and keep me half-frozen. i can do everything in VR/online"? It's better than hospice.

https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Robert_House

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