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Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

I always wonder about this quote,

“Whether that means we’ll all live to 150, I don’t know, but the important part is that we don’t spend the last 20 to 30 years of our lives in bad health.”

Imagine a process that makes you feel like you are 25 right up until you body gives up at a physical age of 100 or something. Do you end up doing riskier things because you don't "feel" old? And if you did would you die sooner? Its an interesting question for me. I'm not sure how that would work.

(and of course if they are successful (which I hope they are) then we're talking about pushing back retirement until 90 or maybe 95 right?)

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if they are successful (which I hope they are) then we're talking about pushing back retirement until 90 or maybe 95 right?

Which I would be totally OK with. Imagine how much more scientific progress we could make if we had 70-year veterans of their field with the sharp mind of a 27-year-old!

That's an interesting question, but I think it could be less helpful for scientific progress than you might imagine. It could even be a hindrance. As Max Planck put it, "A scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." Extending scientific careers could effectively slow the rate of Kuhnian revolution.

Alright, maybe I'm more excited specifically for engineering then. I'm an engineer, really, not a scientist, and I'm always blown away by some of the old stalwarts in my field.

Who says their minds will be sharp? This discovery is about muscle aging.

Good point indeed, that said, even physical health can be a toll on your mind. Freed from that you can spend more time thinking instead of aching.

We're just speculating here :)

Is that the goal of life? Incessant scientific progress?

For me? Yeah, pretty much.

Yup. There may be thousands of earth like planets in our galaxy alone. Shouldn't we explore them some time in future ?

With 100 billion stars in the Milky Way, we're talking millions (or more), not thousands.

Making eradicating aging even more important.

Wouldn't it make more sense to live well wherever we are? I'm not saying we have to settle for Earth, but the focus should be on how people are living and not how many planets get checked off.

Living longer means signification rise in population on earth and given the unsustainable state of our planet, it makes more sense to look for other similar planets for habitation. And if we invent faster than light travel in future it will be natural for people to leave earth in the spirit of exploration just like Europeans did to find the New World.

Why should we explore?

What confuses me is that they seem to be making the assumption that if they are able to give good health in the later years, that the person will die at the same age they would have. Which seems unlikely.

Seems to me if they are in good health, they won't die (healthy people don't tend to). Eventually, though, they will be in bad health enough to die. In which case, it IS about longer life spans, since we'll still have the same problems, just at a later age.

I'm all for longer life (and I imagine they are too), but it seems to me that they are just trying to be politically correct by saying things like the above.

Well... in this particular case it really won't extend life, though. Not by much, quite possibly not at all; it could easily be somewhat of a carcinogen.

It'll make you feel better, and give you more energy, and that's about it. Think of it like a kind of amphetamine, only not (hopefully not) that bad for you.

I'd rather have the choice. I have no choice with ageing. The same is true of "immortality". What immortality really means is that you kind of have a choice of not disappearing forever (well unless a car runs you down or something, but in the future that can probably be fixed, too, by "backing ourselves up").

Rather selfish? We'll have enough problems in the coming decades with geriatric baby boomers, you now want to give people the option to live forever?

No. Survival is our strongest instinct. Besides, human population will plateau around 10 billion or so, and we're already seeing trends, from very early ones to pretty advanced ones (Japan), where people decide not to have kids anymore in modern societies, or even have sex with other humans.

You're thinking immortality would be a problem given the current conditions. But the conditions will be different in the future. The same will be true for food production, which should be vastly more efficient in the future, and enough to feed everyone.

We can already feed everyone. The problem is distribution, not production.

First of all, generations are pipelined. If we live twice as long, the world needs to support twice as many people, not infinitely many.

Secondly of all, one of the problems with the baby boomer generation was just the "boom". The growth was not continued/sustained.

Thirdly of all, I figure with people spending proportionally more of their lives in a field instead of in school, plus population pressures, we'll figure out how to colonize other planets pretty quick :)

This comment must fall under some FAQ. Someone always brings it up in the "What if humans could live a lot longer."

I'm sure that it's trivial to answer and has been answered a million times.

If they have fewer kids then where's the harm?

This is very true. It's proven itself over and over in history. The more stable, healthy, and developed a country is the less children it has. Europe and East Asian countries are having this problem right now as both have negative population growth. In fact this might be the solution to over population. If I knew I'd live to 150 I'd probably wait till I'm 75 to reproduce and replace myself with children.

Well, you've outed "Chris" as the male form of the name "Chris" as there are certain female reproductive system issues where once you're outta eggs thats all folks. Dudes are fertile to a ripe old age. So at 75 you need a wife 1/3 your age.

The cultural issues could be pretty huge if women are only fertile for a small fraction of their life and dudes are fertile for X times as long as women. Or maybe it becomes a cultural "job" of young people to churn out kids as fast as possible for old people to raise them, which we seem to already be implementing in certain socioeconomic classes.

Good point. But I'm sure that's a problem that will be solved by that time.

Not sure if this is 100% true but "It had been widely accepted that a woman was born with a limited number of eggs [...] But, in 2012 this dogma was challenged in a paper that found proliferative germ cells that sustain oocyte and follicle production in the postnatal mammalian ovary. This means that women do not have a limited number of eggs."

OK interesting, but the larger scale problem exists now where most 75 year old women are infertile. That could be "fixed" by yet another medical breakthru.

that's an ongoing debate but does not change the fact that women hit menopause in their mid 40's right now.

disclaimer: my wife and I have spent about $100K over the past 6 years trying to get pregnant, including several IVFs and a failed donor cycle (that's where you write a check for $30000 and flush it down the toilet).

I have a hunch this is a technology that will take very long to 'trickle down' the forbes list.

I don't. An effective anti-aging treatment would likely pay for itself in Medicare savings alone.

Obamacare won't cover it, then?

You want to let everyone die to maintain solvency?

> we're talking about pushing back retirement until 90 or maybe 95 right?

This is the first thing I thought about when reading the article. It sounds like the dream of countries like Japan where retirement is costing a lot of money.

I'd love to read the comment of an economist (or a sociologist) on this.

Personally, I probably do riskier things when I do feel old.

Tick... tick... tick....

It's not the feeling old, it's the realization that you have, in fact, spent the first half of your life not doing the things you wanted to do. And then the realization that you better get a move on if you want to get them done.

Motorcycles, Porsches, divorce + remarriage to a much younger woman, angel investing. You know, the mid-life crisis.

I always picture some poor guy who spends decades dreaming of the day he can buy a fancy sports car. Finally he can afford it, he buys the car he's wanted since he was 15, and people say "hey look, he's having a midlife crisis."

There is a NoSQL joke floating around in here somewhere.

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