8 ms·

We will be able to live to 1,000

MikeCapone 16y ago
We might or might not defeat the diseases of aging anytime soon, but if you want to help the people who are trying to make it happen, consider donating to the SENS Foundation (money goes directly to research): http://www.sens.org/ http://www.sens.org/ Sadly, because aging isn't considered a disease by the FDA and other regulatory bodies, there is actually very little research being done on it if you take into consideration the fact that it kills more people than anything else in the rich countries (100-150k/day, usually after a long period of suffering). If you want to learn more about what they are doing and why they think their engineering approach has a chance of success, check out Aubrey's book (the paperback version contains a new chapter, afaik): http://www.amazon.com/Ending-Aging-Rejuvenation-Breakthroughs-Lifetime/dp/0312367066 http://www.amazon.com/Ending-Aging-Rejuvenation-Breakthrough... It contains a lot of biology, but should be understandable to the lay person. And if all you want is a really quick intro, check out his TED talk (it's a bit old now (2005), but the general concepts have stayed mostly the same despite recent progress): http://www.ted.com/talks/aubrey_de_grey_says_we_can_avoid_aging.html http://www.ted.com/talks/aubrey_de_grey_says_we_can_avoid_ag... or the talk that he gave at Google (2007): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEyguiO4UW0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEyguiO4UW0
- jules 16y ago
  Before donating you should ask yourself whether Aubrey de Grey is a crackpot or not. I'm not sure myself. Can somebody shed some light on this?
  - MikeCapone 16y ago
    He used to be a lot more controversial a few years ago (Technology Review even had a challenge, asking biogerontologists to debunk his claims, though none really did a convincing job). He's slowly but surely making his ideas more mainstream by tirelessly speaking, debating anyone who wants to, organising conferences and editing a respected peer reviewed journal (Rejuvenation Research, iirc). If you think you have a good argument that would invalidate his theories, please first make sure that he hasn't answered it a thousand times first. As usual, Wikipedia has mostly neutral info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aubrey_de_Grey http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aubrey_de_Grey
    - jules 16y ago
      What are the results of his research or related research? How much money does he think he'll need to meet his goal?
      - FlorinAndrei 16y ago
        "How much money does he think he'll need to meet his goal?" That question doesn't make a lot of sense. This is not a Web 2.0 startup. It's a lot more fundamental than that, and a lot of the required tools and technologies have not been invented yet - that's what they are trying to do.
        jules 16y ago
        Of course, but he should be able to give a ballpark figure. Are we talking about millions, billions or trillions?
        MikeCapone 16y ago
        afaik, in the millions. Mostly, once enough progress has been made, the money should pour in because people will now know it's possible and demand it.
      - reasonattlm 16y ago
        You might look at the mitochondrial work which recently focused on Corral-Debrinski's lab as the most likely prospect for getting the job done. A brief outline is at the end of this page: http://www.sens.org/sens-research/research-themes/mitosens http://www.sens.org/sens-research/research-themes/mitosens and you can look at Corral-Debrinski's breakthrough here: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18771762 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18771762 Basically it's now shown possible to move a mitochondrial gene into the nucleus and then have the proteins produced pushed back to the mitochondria for use. When done for the 13 important mitochondrial genes whose mutation damages us, then this will make it possible completely remove their contribution to aging. There is good reason to think that this is a large contribution. Context: http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2006/10/how-age-damaged-mitochondria-cause-your-cells-to-damage-you.php http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2006/10/how-age-damaged-m... How much money: $1 billion over ten years to implement SENS fully in mice. Incremental amounts obtain incremental progress.
  - gte910h 16y ago
    He's looking for cures to issues that are real problems. If you fix any of the problems, even partially, they show great promise for helping older people to be decrepit, even if they don't actually extend lifespan. His hope is curing these types of damage will cause humans to functionally stop aging, but curing these types of damage are useful in and of themselves: Cell loss, tissue atrophy Nuclear [epi]mutations Mutant mitochondria Death-resistant cells Tissue stiffening Extracellular aggregates (Cleaning crap out of our bodies that shouldn't be there and isn't in cells) Intracellular aggregates (Cleaning crap out of cells that shouldn't be there and is in cells)
    - JulianMorrison 16y ago
      In fact, the SENS foundation is ignoring some of those - because medical research is already attacking them as problems in their own right.
      - MikeCapone 16y ago
        Yep, SENS isn't duplicating already existing research. If you support them, you are supporting research that might not take place otherwise.
    - DrJohnty 16y ago
      In some areas we are making rapid progress on some rather less but solutions are know to all 7 causes of aging as outlined below. 1. Cell death and atrophy: Treatable with exercise, stem cells, and chemicals which stimulate cell division. 2. Cancerous cells: Theoretically treatable with a type of gene therapy being developed, called Whole Body Interdiction of Lengthening of Telomeres (WILT). 3. Mutant mitochondria: Mutated DNA in the mitochondria causes a number of diseases. These can be prevented by moving the mitochondrial DNA into the cell nucleus, where the rest of the DNA resides. 4. Death Resistant Cells or Cell senescence (unwanted cells): Fat cells and other unwanted cruft can be removed surgically, or by stimulating the immune system to attack unwanted cells. 5. Tissue stiffening or Extracellular crosslinks (loss of elasticity): Certain proteins, such as those in cells making up the arteries, become too rigid over time because they bond to each other. These bonds can be broken with certain chemicals (some in clinical trials even today). 6 Extracellular aggregates or junk: “Plaque” which collects between cells can be eliminated by stimulating the immune system, and/or by using peptides called “beta-breakers.” 7. Intracellular aggregates or junk: Molecular garbage can be prevented from overwhelming certain cells by introducing enzymes which are known to be effective against such molecules. In my opinion aging is no different to any other disease and like all diseases aging is ultimately treatable given the requisite technology. We cannot afford to sit back and simply accept that because everyone in history has lived and died we must follow the same path. It is a mistake to view aging as a fact of life set in stone when science has progressed to the level where we have the ability to begin the search for a cure. We might not be there yet but we are within striking distance of adding 20 or 30 years to our life expectancy and as Aubrey himself points out increases in life expectancy will be incremental and there is not going to be a sudden magic pill which you take and live forever. The essence of the engineering approach advocated by Aubrey is to manage aging, what he proposes is not a cure but a case of repairing the damage that occurs as we age at various intervals and not to stop the process but to allow the aging process to continue and repair the damage as it arises in the same way you maintain a house or car. This engineering approach is a case of taking advantage of improvements in technology as they occur and not to attempt to cure aging in its entirety and it is in this area that people fail to grasp what Aubrey de Grey is seeking to achieve. I recommend the two books below as great reading and all will be revealed! Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation Breakthroughs That Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime (Aubrey de Grey and Michael Rae) ISBN-10: 0312367066 ISBN-13: 978-0312367060 Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever (Ray Kurzweil and Terry Grossman MD) ISBN-10: 1605299561 I would also check out the following regarding Aubrey de Grey http://www.citywire.co.uk/personal/-/retirement/news-and-features/content.aspx?ID=399808&Page=3 http://www.citywire.co.uk/personal/-/retirement/news-and-fea... and also the following about Ray Kurzweil if this lot does not wet your appetite for joining the war on aging nothing will! http://www.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DtQitQH8Fu_8 http://www.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DtQitQH8Fu_8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntY01qoIdus http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntY01qoIdus
  - FlorinAndrei 16y ago
    I don't think there's any debate on the fact that, given enough time, research will eventually figure out how to stop and reverse the changes brought by aging. The debate is - whether this can be done soon, as opposed to 10000 years from now. I certainly wish that AdG was right. But is he? I'm not sure. Maybe he is (yay!), maybe not.
  - JulianMorrison 16y ago
    He sounds like a crackpot when his theories are misrepresented. He's not saying "here's how I'll make you live to 1000". He's saying "If we solve this list of things, medical science will be able to give you on maybe another 30 healthy years of lifespan - and by doing this I can convince the world that ageing is so important, we will use those 30 years figuring out how to give you the next 30, and so on". Edit: for what it's worth, the 1000 year figure is something that was calculated by estimating the chances of a person with the health characteristics of a young adult dying of any reason other than age - about 1 in 1000 per year, or an average of 1000 years life. That's just an average though - after early die-off of careless people, you might reasonably expect a 200-year-old to easily outlive 1000. And of course during that time technology won't have stood still - 1000 years ago, it was the dark ages.
    - philwelch 16y ago
      As it is, your expected lifespan is based largely on a finite clock, so any fatal risk factors are of limited value--if your odds of dying in a car crash are 1/1000/yr that barely affects your life expectancy, and if your odds of birth control failing are 1/100 you can go your entire fertile lifespan (30-40 years) without expecting to conceive. If you get rid of aging (and other time-clock issues like menopause, though it would be stupid to get rid of menopause if people are going to be essentially immortal), life expectancy will be dictated almost entirely on these remote risks. Being more risk-averse might change your expected lifespan from 100 to 1000 to 10,000. And the less risk-averse people will die sooner, while the less risk-averse people (who are still unaging) will have free reign to change social norms in the long run. This doesn't only apply to fatal risks. If you can work for 100 years at a day job and save up enough salary to live off the interest perpetually (and quite well), people are going to think it's crazy to do a startup. There's no sense of urgency when you don't age. I think a world of immortal people would be very boring. And I haven't even gotten into the "slow-to-change" part (if someone living in the Middle Ages was still alive today, they'd probably be some kind of violent religious fanatic or something).
      - electromagnetic 16y ago
        Perfect use of the COCP lands your odd of getting pregnant at 0.3% in a year. However typical use lands you at about 8% (condom is 10-18% of typical use) risk, meaning you're doing good if you get a decade without getting pregnant (on average). An indefinite lifespan will change the world ridiculously, however you're completely ignoring human nature. Those who take risks tend to be the ones who reproduce the most, and assuming fertility remains sustainable throughout life, those risk-averse will be quickly out bred. However, even considering the considered longevity of frozen sperm and embryos (women can still carry a child post-menopausal through egg donation - incidentally same odds as a younger woman). You're considering risk aversion as the winner, when in reality it will be those who procreate frequently. If a couple produces 2 kids roughly every 20 years, that's 100 children they will produce meaning the risk averse will have to last 100,000 years just to match the genes of those who reproduce if their offspring never reproduce. Assuming a predisposition to reproducing at 20 (I've known all too many people with 4-generations of teenage mothers in their family, so it's certainly not an absurd prospect) and each two children produce two children in 20 years, you'd hit 1 peta-offspring by the 1000 year mark. Your risk-averse would be marginally existent, similar to a dust mite next to an elephant. Their effect on society would be negligible to none existent. Compound interest has got nothing on exponential birthrates vs death rates.
  - mikedmiked 16y ago
    I've met him and he seems like a crackpot. Extremely nice, gentle and loveable; but a crackpot.
    - crystalis 16y ago
      I've met mikedmiked and he seems like a crackpot. Extremely nice, gentle and loveable; but a crackpot.
  - danielford 16y ago
    That's complicated. My criticism of Aubrey de Grey is one I have of transhumanism in general, which is that it's mostly CS people taking Moore's law and applying it to biological problems without having any experience in biology. Aubrey de Grey's degrees are not in the life sciences, and to my knowledge he's never been directly engaged in a biological research project. Those of us who have done aging research understand how ridiculously difficult it can be to do things that sound simple on paper, and De Grey isn't even making proposals that are simple on paper. On the other hand, he seems to be a smart, well-intentioned guy who has spent a lot of time developing a theoretical knowledge of how biological systems work. De Grey's not going to spend your money on coke and whores, and he's not going to spend it developing the ultimate power crystal. He's just underestimated the difficulty of solving the problem. So if you think aging is a disease and not a natural process, it's probably underfunded and you should consider giving him money. Just understand that you're probably going to die of an aging-related complication regardless of how much money you or anyone else gives him.
    - ugh 16y ago
      Aging certainly is a natural process. So is Aids. I always assumed that a disease can be both and most of time is both. I don’t even know whether it makes sense to define disease with the help of a term like “natural”. I would define a disease as something which harms people (i.e. curtailing their cognitive or physical abilities) or kills them. Then I exclude a bunch of stuff which has traditionally not been called disease (like accidents, murder, suicide, etc.). Using that definition aging is most definitely a disease.
      - sesqu 16y ago
        Well, unless you exclude it, and it's pretty biased not to. I think you need a better definition. 1913 Webster has: 1. Lack of ease 2. An alteration in the state of the body or of some of its organs, interrupting or disturbing the performance of the vital functions, and causing or threatening pain and weakness Now that does fit aging.
        ugh 16y ago
  - tome 16y ago
    You should also carefully consider the ethical implications of extending human life indefinitely.
    - asdflkj 16y ago
      You should first consider ethical implications of being able to cure aging-caused diseases, and choosing not to do so.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
  - MikeCapone 16y ago
    Could you please be specific in your criticism? Why would the engineering approach that he advocate not work? Why specifically is he a hack in your opinion? Otherwise, it's just ad hominem.
  - abstractbill 16y ago
    Aubrey is a hack and about as far from being a scientist as I am from passing a Google technical interview. Cambridge University awarded him a PhD for his work, and they don't exactly give those away on the back of cereal boxes. Do you have any hard evidence that he's not doing valid work?
- pohl 16y ago
  Thank you. I added them to my list at givv.org
yan 16y ago
Just FYI: This article is from 2004.
rmorrison 16y ago
I don't see how humanity could handle something like mass distribution of a magic treatment that allowed people to live to 1,000. The world would quickly get over crowded, resources would dry up, world wars would follow, and who knows what else.
- sshumaker 16y ago
  This is silly. Everyone was worried in the 1970's that the 1990's would have massive overcrowding and famines, but it didn't happen. Instead, the world population growth rate has begun to level off. Why? In affluent countries, people no longer have children out of necessity, but of desire. In fact, many first-world nations are actually now undergoing population contraction (Japan, much of Europe). If you eliminate aging across the world, the necessity of children will go away. People will only have children if they want them.
  - gte910h 16y ago
    It's not just the first world. Women in even the poorest countries are simply just choosing to have less children.
  - biggitybones 16y ago
    If people lived 10x longer than they do now, the birth rate would have to drop dramatically (my rudimentary math would assume that it would require 10% of the amount of births we have now) or you'd risk overcrowding. We'd end up with government controlling the number of children, possibly even a lottery system. The overcrowding worries of the 70s and 90s were not because of a 1200% increase, rather a 10-20% increase.
    - gnaritas 16y ago
      > If people lived 10x longer than they do now, the birth rate would have to drop dramatically And it would, if you knew you'd live that long most wouldn't tie themselves down with kids while they're still young, they'd wait much much longer and go out and live life. As it stands now, if you don't have kids by the time you're 30 you risk not being able to have them at all and having to suffer though months of fertility treatments and such just to try.
awt 16y ago
Just going based on the title here. But if we let people live to 1000, that will deny many people the right to have children. The long term consequences of such a change could be a drastic slow down in technological innovation as the super-elderly are able to accumulate vast sums of wealth. Just think of the advantage you'd have as a 500 y/o over a 25 y/o.
- gte910h 16y ago
  Childbearing age may also be increased though. SO if you can have a kid at 200 who's perfectly healthy, why would you necessarily spurt one out at 20?
  - pixelbath 16y ago
    I don't think the parent post was talking about childbearing age; I interpreted it as being more of a society-imposed restriction based on the practicality of having a population that can be up to 1000 years old.
    - gte910h 16y ago
      I'd say that's not really going to be an issue. Children, as is, are already encouraged by tax subsidies. You'd at worse have to take those away; people the world over are already limiting the birth rate (even places where birth control and a nice standard of living are unavailable). Additionally, the SENS plan isn't about a magical 1000yr life expectancy treatment, it's about increasing the rate of life expectancy gain up to an excess of 10 years per decade (for non-violent/non-accident deaths). If you can live to 1k, and give birth for most if not all of your life, I think many people would think "being a parent" is something that could be put off a couple decades/centuries. Birth is not a pleasant process, and women aren't usually eager to have 10 kids.
- crystalis 16y ago
  Why is childbirth a right? Would you accept a trade of a parent's life for a child's life, perhaps with a time delay? There's also several financial methods that could be used to prevent undesirable wealth accumulation.
gte910h 16y ago
When I donate to research, I like to see what the "partial failure result" is. One of the neat thing about sens research is that if you happen to even get one or two of the parts of damage fixable or even moderated, then you have a much less inactive old age period, even if no actual longevity is gained. I find decrepit old age to be one of the biggest issues of our time (who cares if grandma is 80 if she can move like she's 50; the issue society faces today with the elderly is one of them not being able to take care of themselves). Additionally, with the aging of Europe and Japan, prolonging the useful life of the workforce is a big worry.
- mechanical_fish 16y ago
  prolonging the useful life of the workforce is a big worry Not in my world. The world where we are at the tail end of the largest recession in two or three generations, with danger of double-dip; we have lots and lots of surplus productive capacity, productivity just keeps going up, and unemployment is between 10% and 25% in the US depending on how you count it.
  - gte910h 16y ago
    Raise taxes, do make work projects. The growth of productivity will always be an issue.
  - tansey 16y ago
    Think about how much more efficient and productive an economy could be if the oldest members didn't have to retire due to old age? More poignant to the current recession-- imagine how much better things would be now if people who lived through the great depression were still around (in large numbers) and running for office.
    - smallblacksun 16y ago
      Think about how impossible it would be for the young to get a job if they had to compete against people who had been doing a job for 50, 100, 500 years.
tyree731 16y ago
Life expectancy has increased a good amount in the past 50 years, raising by ~8.5. That is to say, for the exponentially increasing abilities of modern medicine, we have increased linearly in life expectancy. Maybe there is some breaking point, such as a universal cure for cancers and/or the end of heart disease, but regardless it seems like a huge leap to go from ~78 to ~1000 in life expectancy.
- elidourado 16y ago
  Let's say that life expectancy is now increasing at a rate of 2 years per decade. If you want to live to 1000, you just need to increase that to 10 years per decade. You don't have to go from 78 to 1000 all at once.
  - DrSprout 16y ago
    Maintaining two per year for 500 years is more than sufficient. Personally, I expect false starts in the next couple centuries. The beta testers will be healthy and fit into their hundreds, but those that follow may get to 200-400, then possibly further. There are just too many engineering issues to work out in a single iteration.
  - tyree731 16y ago
    Very true.
- gte910h 16y ago
  Much of life expectancy gains though are for the area south of 70. Much of SENS research hold's promise for the area north of 70. That's what's exciting. Especially if that we can live a healthy older age, even if it's not any longer. (Truthfully, some cancer research benefits older people, as cancer has a much higher incidence as you age, however, much research out there is for middle of life diseases). If my grandmother could play basketball again, she's love to. Remember, people lived to 70 thousands of years ago. Remember Ben Franklin lived to 84.
  - tyree731 16y ago
jpablo 16y ago
There's a book by Asimov, Please Explain, that has a list of science questions. I remember the very last question is about "what point does getting old has?". He argues that without aging and dying, populations will stop getting better and will stagnate. It seemed very appropriate to link here, but I couldn't get a link. Other than a Spanish translation :-(.
- helwr 16y ago
  Also check out "The Immortal" by Borges http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Immortal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Immortal
- MikeCapone 16y ago
  Curing the diseases of aging might cause problems, but what we must ask ourselves is: Are those problems bigger or smaller than the problems caused by the diseases of aging in the first place? If your problems aren't worse than 100-150k people dying per day after a prolonged period of frailty and suffering, causing suffering to their families and friends too and costing tons in healthcare, then I'd say it's worth it. However long you live, you live one day at a time. If you are happy today and in good health, you'll want to live until tomorrow, and so on. But if for some reason you want to stop taking the rejuvenating therapies or throw yourself off a cliff, that's your choice. Let's just not make the choice for everybody else and all future generations by not developing these therapies...
- danielford 16y ago
  That's an explanation that rests on group selection, which tends not to be taken very seriously by most biologists. Similarly, group selection explanations of why we age are held only by a handful of researchers in the field of aging. Most biologists in the field of aging hold that aging is the result of the decreased force of natural selection with age. This is somewhat difficult to explain even with diagrams, but I'll try anyway. Let's imagine three forms of a gene. One causes you to die at the age of eight, another causes you to die at eighty, and the third never causes you to die. We would expect that the form of the gene that causes you to die at eight would be removed from the population very quickly, since anyone who has it will die before they can reproduce and pass it on. In contrast, the gene that causes you to die at eighty will be rather prevalent, since by that age you'll have already passed on your genes to your progeny. In fact, it will probably exist at about the same frequency as the gene that didn't cause you to die at all. This is the mutation accumulation theory of aging. Because natural selection acts more strongly early in life, we tend to accumulate genes with mutations that are detrimental later in life. There's also a variant called antagonistic pleiotropy, where you have genes that have a beneficial effect early in life having a negative effect in old age.
teilo 16y ago
I just have to shake my head at this. The only adequate word for this is arrogance. The arrogance to believe that we know enough about the processes of life to extend them indefinitely. We don't even know what we don't know. How many times have we been at this place in the history of biology, where we honestly believe that we are just "that" close to figuring out the processes of life. We were wrong then, and we are wrong now. We do not know or understand the over-arching cause of cancer, nor the cause of its radical increase. Similarly with heart disease: after a generation of assurances that the cause is a high-fat diet, the premise itself is being rejected. I could go down the list of major congenital diseases, and tell the same story. Even the most basic assumptions which we have about disease are being overturned. And whatever replaces them will likely be overturned yet again.
- pingswept 16y ago
  From TFA: "And each method to do this is either already working in a preliminary form (in clinical trials) or is based on technologies that already exist and just need to be combined." Totally agreed-- it's insane to think that because you can do some stuff in isolated cases, the combination is a trivial extension.
- MikeCapone 16y ago
  > We don't even know what we don't know. How many times have we been at this place in the history of biology, where we honestly believe that we are just "that" close to figuring out the processes of life. We were wrong then, and we are wrong now. Aubrey's point is that we don't need to understand metabolism to repair the damage of aging, just like you can maintain and repair a house or a car without understanding in detail all of the mechanisms that cause damage and failure. You just clean up some of the damage and change some parts periodically so that it never reaches a threshold at which failure is possible. Our bodies already do this quite well for the first 20-30 years of our lives, but after that, we're in an evolutionary blind spot and long-lived molecules accumulate and eventually make maintenance and repair mechanisms stop working for long enough to lead to pathologies. If we clean up these long-lived molecules, that'll be a very good start.
- rabidgnat 16y ago
die_sekte 16y ago
And after living a 1000 years one is going to walk into the central computer, edit their memories and be born again a few millenniums later. I am a pretty big fan of Arthur C. Clarke.
tingley 16y ago
Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy (Red/Blue/Green) has this sort of development as a backdrop. Nothing good comes of it.
- gte910h 16y ago
  And Heinlein had tons of novels where it worked out fine. I don't think we should fund research based on what storytellers wrote to entertain us.
rauljara 16y ago
When my intro to genetics teacher in college explained to us how aging in cells worked, he told us that one of his professors had explained to him that a "cure" for aging was about 10 years away. But that had been more than ten years earlier. My professor said that he had recently talked to that same professor again. The new ETA: about 10 years. This is one of those problems that seems easy to solve in principle, but the details are nasty. Frankly, I think there's a reason complicated life evolved so that it would age. The standard reason given is that eventually errors in replication accumulate and cancer results. I.e. we age to avoid cancer. But that is a ridiculous reason. There is a chance we might die of cancer if we grow too old, so we trade that possibility of death by cancer for a certainty of death by aging? It just doesn't make evolutionary sense. I have a feeling that whatever the real reason for aging is, it will take us a long, long time before we find a way around it.
- javanix 16y ago
  I doubt that we'll ever find a "reason" for aging. It's the result of an imperfectly optimized biological system - after all, humans are the result of one great big evolutionary algorithm. We've proven time and again that those run exponentially and are not perfectly accurate, especially in the presence of a dynamic environment.
  - FlorinAndrei 16y ago
    If it's an imperfect mechanism, then look back at the huge chain linking you to the first living creature: adult body / sperm & egg / adult body / sperm & egg / adult body / ... How come that chain hasn't failed? Basically, you're just rephrasing the "aging through accumulation of errors" hypothesis. The problem is, errors should accumulate along the chain mentioned above, too. Yet they don't.
    - crystalis 16y ago
      The chain gets to weed out errors by starting with cells that got through functionally unblemished courtesy functioning error correcting mechanisms. Each new cycle gets a fully functional error correction mechanism, and is fault tolerant to the theoretical point of repopulation from a small point of individuals. An individual human body has error correcting mechanisms that do not benefit from being renewed every cycle- they deteriorate over time, Individuals suffer from problems larger systems don't - a few cancerous cells can poison the whole individual, but a few cancerous individuals are likely to die with few offspring, and their offspring are also more likely to die with few offspring. If an individual is left with only a few correctly functioning cells, they have no recourse for rebuilding themself. Species get a constant influx of fresh water, as it were, and individuals have to make do with a set quantity.
quizbiz 16y ago
I heard some interesting insight recently. I am not sure how correct it is but it suggested that while we have made a lot of progress in living longer (allowing us to be old for longer) we have not made much progress at slowing down the process of aging (making it take longer to get old). If we want to live long and fruitful lives, how do we slow down aging? I prefer that question over, how do we live until 1,000?
rleisti 16y ago
I wonder if this would change the popular morality of suicide? What if you're 800 years old, and you truly feel that you've had enough? Should you be forced to keep on going, potentially indefinitely? Or even just knowing when to step aside and let the next (evolved) generation take over? (or will that still naturally just happen, via accidental death or death by lack of resources to live)
WiseWeasel 16y ago
Hell, give us another 50 years and I'm sure we'll all have our minds cloned into an army of robot bodies and computer brains for, uh, let's say longevity.
ck2 16y ago
That article is from 2004 (from top of page) Last Updated: Friday, 3 December, 2004, 00:01 GMT This kind of sensationalism is silly. http://xkcd.com/678/ http://xkcd.com/678/ Falls under: It has not been conclusively proven impossible. We don't know what kind of roadblocks there will be for this kind of development, we can't even guess - claims of 10-20 years are beyond silly, they are crazy and ignoring the concept of "what we don't know". ps. Can you imagine how overpopulated the world would be? How we would strip every resource bare?
jeremyawon 16y ago
instead, let's engineer away our anxieties about not existing.
jrockway 16y ago
Can I bet on the opposite side of this? I bet that nobody who is 60 now will live to 1000. Don't get me wrong, I would like to live to 1000... but I would be pretty surprised if my kids live past 150. I will be surprised if I live to 100. It's sad to think about, but our bodies wear out over time (cosmic rays and whatnot), and we don't have the technology to repair them efficiently yet. People still die from the flu!
- mechanical_fish 16y ago
  A fun exercise for a high school class: Get some basic mortality tables off the Internet. Now, tell me -- to first order, of course -- all the causes of death we'd have to eliminate in order for, say, 25% of the population to live to be 1000. What I really want to know is what common everyday activities we'd all have to give up. I bet motorcycling and scooter-riding are right out, but what about, say, swimming? Horseback riding? In a world where life expectancy is ten times longer, is everything an order of magnitude more dangerous?
  - alan-crowe 16y ago
    It would be a good idea if safety laws, such as speed limits, where constructed around formula with life expectancy as one of the variables. Plug in 70 years and get out 30mph. Plug in 140 years and get out 25mph. Since you are going to grow old and die anyway, spending too much time trying to avoid accidental death is self-defeating. Acknowledging this would provide a check on the tendency towards super-safety in public policy.
- dkarl 16y ago
  You'll have to wait fifty years to collect. How confident are you that you'll live that long?
  - jrockway 16y ago
    I have no doubts about living to 75. But remember, if someone who is 60 now lives to 999, I still win the bet. So I feel like I might have to wait more than 50 years.
benofsky 16y ago
Ignoring any claims that the man is a crackpot and any other problems one might have with the science. Does anyone really want to live to 1000? I think you might get a little bored :-/
- FlorinAndrei 16y ago
  "Does anyone really want to live to 1000? I think you might get a little bored" Boredom is infinitely better than nothingness.
- ubernostrum 16y ago
  I've always preferred the idea of immortality on the installment plan -- get frozen/stored/whatever, then woken up every couple hundred or couple thousand years, do stuff, go back into freeze/storage/whatever. Which, at least for me, is less about avoiding death (which doesn't actually scare me all that much) and more about just getting to see what sort of cool stuff the future holds.
  - FlorinAndrei 16y ago
    You will live in a perpetual state of cultural shock. You can't possibly be useful to the society in that situation.
    - ubernostrum 16y ago
      Meh. If the technology existed to do that, society would have to find ways to cope with it anyway.
biggitybones 16y ago
It's amazing to think that just 500 years ago things were so bad that people awaited death patiently and willingly because they believed life was a punishment rewarded with an afterlife. Now we're trying to extend the amount of time that we live 10 fold because things are so great right now. I'm not saying either is right, just an observation.
- kscaldef 16y ago
  Maybe you don't talk to religious folks much, but that attitude hasn't changed all that much.
JustinSeriously 16y ago
Someone smarter than me noted that all predictions of living forever always have one thing in common: it places the time when people start living forever within the lifetime of the predictor. Aubrey de Grey is 43, and he's predicting that this might be in place in 20 years.
- crystalis 16y ago
  Could you care to point out the number of correct predictions that take place well after the point of time they were made?
  - smallblacksun 16y ago
    A number of Da Vinci's "inventions" were really just predictions of things that were invented much later (like his helicopter).
    - crystalis 16y ago
      I think that's setting a low bar for "prediction" next to dated predictions like "In the next x years, we will be able to extend human lifespan by y years every z years." I don't know that anyone can reasonably object to the theoretical possibility that an individual human life could be sustained indefinitely.
sardonic 16y ago
I can't believe no one has called out the bogus math in the article: "If you are a reasonably risk-aware teenager today in an affluent, non-violent neighbourhood, you have a risk of dying in the next year of well under one in 1,000, which means that if you stayed that way forever you would have a 50/50 chance of living to over 1,000." If you assume 1/1000 chance of death in a year, and 1000 years (1000 trials), your probability of living to 1000 is only 37%, not 50%. I don't know if I would trust the scientific analysis of someone who doesn't understand basic binomial probability.
- jarek 16y ago
  You are assuming this based on a mainstream media article. First of all, you have no idea if he knows the right answer and is just dumbing it down for those who don't understand basic binomial probability. Second, the quote says "well under one in 1000", not "one in 1000". The correct value of one in 1415.8 as calculated by Retric in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1368664 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1368664 is, in fact, under one in 1000.
Retric 16y ago
"If you are a reasonably risk-aware teenager today in an affluent, non-violent neighbourhood, you have a risk of dying in the next year of well under one in 1,000, which means that if you stayed that way forever you would have a 50/50 chance of living to over 1,000." I know there is a shortcut to this but for this to be true you need a constant rate of 1 death in 1415.78389 per year. 1 / (1 - 10 ^ ((log .5) / 981)) = 1415.78389 so (1-1/1415.78389) ^ (1000-19) = .5
ibagrak 16y ago
While I was interning at Google in 2006 I heard the guy speak in one of the Google Talks there. Going to the talk I thought this would just be some outrageous crackpot theory, but he seemed very thoughtful and the approaches he talked about sounded very sensible (although I knew and still know too little about the subject to invalidate his claims).
mattiss 16y ago
Is there any practical ways to apply some of this research today? It seems like there must be something out there we can be doing right now to help ward off aging? Also what is the most promising research being done?
niallsmart 16y ago
I'm pretty sure that beard will need a trim by 3010.
Zak 16y ago
This article, and a few others covering exactly the same thing keep getting posted here ever few months. I hope Mr. de Grey is right, and I hope I live long enough to find out. That said, until there's some progress to announce, please stop re-posting this here.
mitjak 16y ago
Where do I donate to ensure I don't live till 1,000? Nuclear weapon research?
- crystalis 16y ago
  I understand you might not want to live that long, but why would you want to take that away from others?
  - mitjak 16y ago
    Because the world is already overpopulated and we don't currently have any means to spread our virus to a different planet.
    - crystalis 16y ago
      So your solution to alleviate potential suffering is to induce immediate suffering?
      - mitjak 16y ago
        Exactly.
sliverstorm 16y ago
The article claims that to suggest we should NOT defeat aging is ageism and denying people the right to live. I disagree. Until we find a way to support a population that grows at a rate like that, we would be forced into one of several possible situations, none of which are pleasant: 1: starvation 2: endless war 3: iron-fisted birth regulation, only allowing one new child per legally documented death 3.5: The implications of couples who really want children + a rule saying they can have one, if someone has died Until the question of resources is answered, granting people the right to live (longer) equates to denying other people either quality of life (starvation/war) or the chance to live at all (birth regulation). Which brings up another interesting question; if everyone alive has a right to life, do those who have not yet been born have a right to live as well?
- sliverstorm 16y ago
  I'm not saying we shouldn't extend our lifespans- I would love to live to see a lot of things come to pass, like leaving our own galaxy- but to blindly proclaim anyone who opposes the goal is ageist is to ignore that the benefits have costs, especially considering we already have population issues looming on the horizon. Call me utilitarian and get pissed that I might stand in your way of living forever, but we have to consider the bigger picture.
pedrokost 16y ago
Yesterday my goal was to live 150 years. I am expanding it to 250 now :D

We might or might not defeat the diseases of aging anytime soon, but if you want to help the people who are trying to make it happen, consider donating to the SENS Foundation (money goes directly to research): http://www.sens.org/ http://www.sens.org/ Sadly, because aging isn't considered a disease by the FDA and other regulatory bodies, there is actually very little research being done on it if you take into consideration the fact that it kills more people than anything else in the rich countries (100-150k/day, usually after a long period of suffering). If you want to learn more about what they are doing and why they think their engineering approach has a chance of success, check out Aubrey's book (the paperback version contains a new chapter, afaik): http://www.amazon.com/Ending-Aging-Rejuvenation-Breakthroughs-Lifetime/dp/0312367066 http://www.amazon.com/Ending-Aging-Rejuvenation-Breakthrough... It contains a lot of biology, but should be understandable to the lay person. And if all you want is a really quick intro, check out his TED talk (it's a bit old now (2005), but the general concepts have stayed mostly the same despite recent progress): http://www.ted.com/talks/aubrey_de_grey_says_we_can_avoid_aging.html http://www.ted.com/talks/aubrey_de_grey_says_we_can_avoid_ag... or the talk that he gave at Google (2007): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEyguiO4UW0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEyguiO4UW0

jules 16y ago
Before donating you should ask yourself whether Aubrey de Grey is a crackpot or not. I'm not sure myself. Can somebody shed some light on this?
- MikeCapone 16y ago
  He used to be a lot more controversial a few years ago (Technology Review even had a challenge, asking biogerontologists to debunk his claims, though none really did a convincing job). He's slowly but surely making his ideas more mainstream by tirelessly speaking, debating anyone who wants to, organising conferences and editing a respected peer reviewed journal (Rejuvenation Research, iirc). If you think you have a good argument that would invalidate his theories, please first make sure that he hasn't answered it a thousand times first. As usual, Wikipedia has mostly neutral info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aubrey_de_Grey http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aubrey_de_Grey
  - jules 16y ago
    What are the results of his research or related research? How much money does he think he'll need to meet his goal?
    - FlorinAndrei 16y ago
      "How much money does he think he'll need to meet his goal?" That question doesn't make a lot of sense. This is not a Web 2.0 startup. It's a lot more fundamental than that, and a lot of the required tools and technologies have not been invented yet - that's what they are trying to do.
      - jules 16y ago
        Of course, but he should be able to give a ballpark figure. Are we talking about millions, billions or trillions?
        MikeCapone 16y ago
        afaik, in the millions. Mostly, once enough progress has been made, the money should pour in because people will now know it's possible and demand it.
    - reasonattlm 16y ago
      You might look at the mitochondrial work which recently focused on Corral-Debrinski's lab as the most likely prospect for getting the job done. A brief outline is at the end of this page: http://www.sens.org/sens-research/research-themes/mitosens http://www.sens.org/sens-research/research-themes/mitosens and you can look at Corral-Debrinski's breakthrough here: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18771762 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18771762 Basically it's now shown possible to move a mitochondrial gene into the nucleus and then have the proteins produced pushed back to the mitochondria for use. When done for the 13 important mitochondrial genes whose mutation damages us, then this will make it possible completely remove their contribution to aging. There is good reason to think that this is a large contribution. Context: http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2006/10/how-age-damaged-mitochondria-cause-your-cells-to-damage-you.php http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2006/10/how-age-damaged-m... How much money: $1 billion over ten years to implement SENS fully in mice. Incremental amounts obtain incremental progress.
- gte910h 16y ago
  He's looking for cures to issues that are real problems. If you fix any of the problems, even partially, they show great promise for helping older people to be decrepit, even if they don't actually extend lifespan. His hope is curing these types of damage will cause humans to functionally stop aging, but curing these types of damage are useful in and of themselves: Cell loss, tissue atrophy Nuclear [epi]mutations Mutant mitochondria Death-resistant cells Tissue stiffening Extracellular aggregates (Cleaning crap out of our bodies that shouldn't be there and isn't in cells) Intracellular aggregates (Cleaning crap out of cells that shouldn't be there and is in cells)
  - JulianMorrison 16y ago
    In fact, the SENS foundation is ignoring some of those - because medical research is already attacking them as problems in their own right.
    - MikeCapone 16y ago
      Yep, SENS isn't duplicating already existing research. If you support them, you are supporting research that might not take place otherwise.
  - DrJohnty 16y ago
    In some areas we are making rapid progress on some rather less but solutions are know to all 7 causes of aging as outlined below. 1. Cell death and atrophy: Treatable with exercise, stem cells, and chemicals which stimulate cell division. 2. Cancerous cells: Theoretically treatable with a type of gene therapy being developed, called Whole Body Interdiction of Lengthening of Telomeres (WILT). 3. Mutant mitochondria: Mutated DNA in the mitochondria causes a number of diseases. These can be prevented by moving the mitochondrial DNA into the cell nucleus, where the rest of the DNA resides. 4. Death Resistant Cells or Cell senescence (unwanted cells): Fat cells and other unwanted cruft can be removed surgically, or by stimulating the immune system to attack unwanted cells. 5. Tissue stiffening or Extracellular crosslinks (loss of elasticity): Certain proteins, such as those in cells making up the arteries, become too rigid over time because they bond to each other. These bonds can be broken with certain chemicals (some in clinical trials even today). 6 Extracellular aggregates or junk: “Plaque” which collects between cells can be eliminated by stimulating the immune system, and/or by using peptides called “beta-breakers.” 7. Intracellular aggregates or junk: Molecular garbage can be prevented from overwhelming certain cells by introducing enzymes which are known to be effective against such molecules. In my opinion aging is no different to any other disease and like all diseases aging is ultimately treatable given the requisite technology. We cannot afford to sit back and simply accept that because everyone in history has lived and died we must follow the same path. It is a mistake to view aging as a fact of life set in stone when science has progressed to the level where we have the ability to begin the search for a cure. We might not be there yet but we are within striking distance of adding 20 or 30 years to our life expectancy and as Aubrey himself points out increases in life expectancy will be incremental and there is not going to be a sudden magic pill which you take and live forever. The essence of the engineering approach advocated by Aubrey is to manage aging, what he proposes is not a cure but a case of repairing the damage that occurs as we age at various intervals and not to stop the process but to allow the aging process to continue and repair the damage as it arises in the same way you maintain a house or car. This engineering approach is a case of taking advantage of improvements in technology as they occur and not to attempt to cure aging in its entirety and it is in this area that people fail to grasp what Aubrey de Grey is seeking to achieve. I recommend the two books below as great reading and all will be revealed! Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation Breakthroughs That Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime (Aubrey de Grey and Michael Rae) ISBN-10: 0312367066 ISBN-13: 978-0312367060 Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever (Ray Kurzweil and Terry Grossman MD) ISBN-10: 1605299561 I would also check out the following regarding Aubrey de Grey http://www.citywire.co.uk/personal/-/retirement/news-and-features/content.aspx?ID=399808&Page=3 http://www.citywire.co.uk/personal/-/retirement/news-and-fea... and also the following about Ray Kurzweil if this lot does not wet your appetite for joining the war on aging nothing will! http://www.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DtQitQH8Fu_8 http://www.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DtQitQH8Fu_8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntY01qoIdus http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntY01qoIdus
- FlorinAndrei 16y ago
  I don't think there's any debate on the fact that, given enough time, research will eventually figure out how to stop and reverse the changes brought by aging. The debate is - whether this can be done soon, as opposed to 10000 years from now. I certainly wish that AdG was right. But is he? I'm not sure. Maybe he is (yay!), maybe not.
- JulianMorrison 16y ago
  He sounds like a crackpot when his theories are misrepresented. He's not saying "here's how I'll make you live to 1000". He's saying "If we solve this list of things, medical science will be able to give you on maybe another 30 healthy years of lifespan - and by doing this I can convince the world that ageing is so important, we will use those 30 years figuring out how to give you the next 30, and so on". Edit: for what it's worth, the 1000 year figure is something that was calculated by estimating the chances of a person with the health characteristics of a young adult dying of any reason other than age - about 1 in 1000 per year, or an average of 1000 years life. That's just an average though - after early die-off of careless people, you might reasonably expect a 200-year-old to easily outlive 1000. And of course during that time technology won't have stood still - 1000 years ago, it was the dark ages.
  - philwelch 16y ago
    As it is, your expected lifespan is based largely on a finite clock, so any fatal risk factors are of limited value--if your odds of dying in a car crash are 1/1000/yr that barely affects your life expectancy, and if your odds of birth control failing are 1/100 you can go your entire fertile lifespan (30-40 years) without expecting to conceive. If you get rid of aging (and other time-clock issues like menopause, though it would be stupid to get rid of menopause if people are going to be essentially immortal), life expectancy will be dictated almost entirely on these remote risks. Being more risk-averse might change your expected lifespan from 100 to 1000 to 10,000. And the less risk-averse people will die sooner, while the less risk-averse people (who are still unaging) will have free reign to change social norms in the long run. This doesn't only apply to fatal risks. If you can work for 100 years at a day job and save up enough salary to live off the interest perpetually (and quite well), people are going to think it's crazy to do a startup. There's no sense of urgency when you don't age. I think a world of immortal people would be very boring. And I haven't even gotten into the "slow-to-change" part (if someone living in the Middle Ages was still alive today, they'd probably be some kind of violent religious fanatic or something).
    - electromagnetic 16y ago
      Perfect use of the COCP lands your odd of getting pregnant at 0.3% in a year. However typical use lands you at about 8% (condom is 10-18% of typical use) risk, meaning you're doing good if you get a decade without getting pregnant (on average). An indefinite lifespan will change the world ridiculously, however you're completely ignoring human nature. Those who take risks tend to be the ones who reproduce the most, and assuming fertility remains sustainable throughout life, those risk-averse will be quickly out bred. However, even considering the considered longevity of frozen sperm and embryos (women can still carry a child post-menopausal through egg donation - incidentally same odds as a younger woman). You're considering risk aversion as the winner, when in reality it will be those who procreate frequently. If a couple produces 2 kids roughly every 20 years, that's 100 children they will produce meaning the risk averse will have to last 100,000 years just to match the genes of those who reproduce if their offspring never reproduce. Assuming a predisposition to reproducing at 20 (I've known all too many people with 4-generations of teenage mothers in their family, so it's certainly not an absurd prospect) and each two children produce two children in 20 years, you'd hit 1 peta-offspring by the 1000 year mark. Your risk-averse would be marginally existent, similar to a dust mite next to an elephant. Their effect on society would be negligible to none existent. Compound interest has got nothing on exponential birthrates vs death rates.
- mikedmiked 16y ago
  I've met him and he seems like a crackpot. Extremely nice, gentle and loveable; but a crackpot.
  - crystalis 16y ago
    I've met mikedmiked and he seems like a crackpot. Extremely nice, gentle and loveable; but a crackpot.
- danielford 16y ago
  That's complicated. My criticism of Aubrey de Grey is one I have of transhumanism in general, which is that it's mostly CS people taking Moore's law and applying it to biological problems without having any experience in biology. Aubrey de Grey's degrees are not in the life sciences, and to my knowledge he's never been directly engaged in a biological research project. Those of us who have done aging research understand how ridiculously difficult it can be to do things that sound simple on paper, and De Grey isn't even making proposals that are simple on paper. On the other hand, he seems to be a smart, well-intentioned guy who has spent a lot of time developing a theoretical knowledge of how biological systems work. De Grey's not going to spend your money on coke and whores, and he's not going to spend it developing the ultimate power crystal. He's just underestimated the difficulty of solving the problem. So if you think aging is a disease and not a natural process, it's probably underfunded and you should consider giving him money. Just understand that you're probably going to die of an aging-related complication regardless of how much money you or anyone else gives him.
  - ugh 16y ago
    Aging certainly is a natural process. So is Aids. I always assumed that a disease can be both and most of time is both. I don’t even know whether it makes sense to define disease with the help of a term like “natural”. I would define a disease as something which harms people (i.e. curtailing their cognitive or physical abilities) or kills them. Then I exclude a bunch of stuff which has traditionally not been called disease (like accidents, murder, suicide, etc.). Using that definition aging is most definitely a disease.
    - sesqu 16y ago
      Well, unless you exclude it, and it's pretty biased not to. I think you need a better definition. 1913 Webster has: 1. Lack of ease 2. An alteration in the state of the body or of some of its organs, interrupting or disturbing the performance of the vital functions, and causing or threatening pain and weakness Now that does fit aging.
      - ugh 16y ago
- tome 16y ago
  You should also carefully consider the ethical implications of extending human life indefinitely.
  - asdflkj 16y ago
    You should first consider ethical implications of being able to cure aging-caused diseases, and choosing not to do so.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
- MikeCapone 16y ago
  Could you please be specific in your criticism? Why would the engineering approach that he advocate not work? Why specifically is he a hack in your opinion? Otherwise, it's just ad hominem.
- abstractbill 16y ago
  Aubrey is a hack and about as far from being a scientist as I am from passing a Google technical interview. Cambridge University awarded him a PhD for his work, and they don't exactly give those away on the back of cereal boxes. Do you have any hard evidence that he's not doing valid work?
pohl 16y ago
Thank you. I added them to my list at givv.org

yan 16y ago

Just FYI: This article is from 2004.

rmorrison 16y ago

I don't see how humanity could handle something like mass distribution of a magic treatment that allowed people to live to 1,000. The world would quickly get over crowded, resources would dry up, world wars would follow, and who knows what else.

sshumaker 16y ago
This is silly. Everyone was worried in the 1970's that the 1990's would have massive overcrowding and famines, but it didn't happen. Instead, the world population growth rate has begun to level off. Why? In affluent countries, people no longer have children out of necessity, but of desire. In fact, many first-world nations are actually now undergoing population contraction (Japan, much of Europe). If you eliminate aging across the world, the necessity of children will go away. People will only have children if they want them.
- gte910h 16y ago
  It's not just the first world. Women in even the poorest countries are simply just choosing to have less children.
- biggitybones 16y ago
  If people lived 10x longer than they do now, the birth rate would have to drop dramatically (my rudimentary math would assume that it would require 10% of the amount of births we have now) or you'd risk overcrowding. We'd end up with government controlling the number of children, possibly even a lottery system. The overcrowding worries of the 70s and 90s were not because of a 1200% increase, rather a 10-20% increase.
  - gnaritas 16y ago
    > If people lived 10x longer than they do now, the birth rate would have to drop dramatically And it would, if you knew you'd live that long most wouldn't tie themselves down with kids while they're still young, they'd wait much much longer and go out and live life. As it stands now, if you don't have kids by the time you're 30 you risk not being able to have them at all and having to suffer though months of fertility treatments and such just to try.

awt 16y ago

Just going based on the title here. But if we let people live to 1000, that will deny many people the right to have children. The long term consequences of such a change could be a drastic slow down in technological innovation as the super-elderly are able to accumulate vast sums of wealth. Just think of the advantage you'd have as a 500 y/o over a 25 y/o.

gte910h 16y ago
Childbearing age may also be increased though. SO if you can have a kid at 200 who's perfectly healthy, why would you necessarily spurt one out at 20?
- pixelbath 16y ago
  I don't think the parent post was talking about childbearing age; I interpreted it as being more of a society-imposed restriction based on the practicality of having a population that can be up to 1000 years old.
  - gte910h 16y ago
    I'd say that's not really going to be an issue. Children, as is, are already encouraged by tax subsidies. You'd at worse have to take those away; people the world over are already limiting the birth rate (even places where birth control and a nice standard of living are unavailable). Additionally, the SENS plan isn't about a magical 1000yr life expectancy treatment, it's about increasing the rate of life expectancy gain up to an excess of 10 years per decade (for non-violent/non-accident deaths). If you can live to 1k, and give birth for most if not all of your life, I think many people would think "being a parent" is something that could be put off a couple decades/centuries. Birth is not a pleasant process, and women aren't usually eager to have 10 kids.
crystalis 16y ago
Why is childbirth a right? Would you accept a trade of a parent's life for a child's life, perhaps with a time delay? There's also several financial methods that could be used to prevent undesirable wealth accumulation.

gte910h 16y ago

When I donate to research, I like to see what the "partial failure result" is. One of the neat thing about sens research is that if you happen to even get one or two of the parts of damage fixable or even moderated, then you have a much less inactive old age period, even if no actual longevity is gained. I find decrepit old age to be one of the biggest issues of our time (who cares if grandma is 80 if she can move like she's 50; the issue society faces today with the elderly is one of them not being able to take care of themselves). Additionally, with the aging of Europe and Japan, prolonging the useful life of the workforce is a big worry.

mechanical_fish 16y ago
prolonging the useful life of the workforce is a big worry Not in my world. The world where we are at the tail end of the largest recession in two or three generations, with danger of double-dip; we have lots and lots of surplus productive capacity, productivity just keeps going up, and unemployment is between 10% and 25% in the US depending on how you count it.
- gte910h 16y ago
  Raise taxes, do make work projects. The growth of productivity will always be an issue.
- tansey 16y ago
  Think about how much more efficient and productive an economy could be if the oldest members didn't have to retire due to old age? More poignant to the current recession-- imagine how much better things would be now if people who lived through the great depression were still around (in large numbers) and running for office.
  - smallblacksun 16y ago
    Think about how impossible it would be for the young to get a job if they had to compete against people who had been doing a job for 50, 100, 500 years.

tyree731 16y ago

Life expectancy has increased a good amount in the past 50 years, raising by ~8.5. That is to say, for the exponentially increasing abilities of modern medicine, we have increased linearly in life expectancy. Maybe there is some breaking point, such as a universal cure for cancers and/or the end of heart disease, but regardless it seems like a huge leap to go from ~78 to ~1000 in life expectancy.

elidourado 16y ago
Let's say that life expectancy is now increasing at a rate of 2 years per decade. If you want to live to 1000, you just need to increase that to 10 years per decade. You don't have to go from 78 to 1000 all at once.
- DrSprout 16y ago
  Maintaining two per year for 500 years is more than sufficient. Personally, I expect false starts in the next couple centuries. The beta testers will be healthy and fit into their hundreds, but those that follow may get to 200-400, then possibly further. There are just too many engineering issues to work out in a single iteration.
- tyree731 16y ago
  Very true.
gte910h 16y ago
Much of life expectancy gains though are for the area south of 70. Much of SENS research hold's promise for the area north of 70. That's what's exciting. Especially if that we can live a healthy older age, even if it's not any longer. (Truthfully, some cancer research benefits older people, as cancer has a much higher incidence as you age, however, much research out there is for middle of life diseases). If my grandmother could play basketball again, she's love to. Remember, people lived to 70 thousands of years ago. Remember Ben Franklin lived to 84.
- tyree731 16y ago

jpablo 16y ago

There's a book by Asimov, Please Explain, that has a list of science questions. I remember the very last question is about "what point does getting old has?". He argues that without aging and dying, populations will stop getting better and will stagnate. It seemed very appropriate to link here, but I couldn't get a link. Other than a Spanish translation :-(.

helwr 16y ago
Also check out "The Immortal" by Borges http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Immortal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Immortal
MikeCapone 16y ago
Curing the diseases of aging might cause problems, but what we must ask ourselves is: Are those problems bigger or smaller than the problems caused by the diseases of aging in the first place? If your problems aren't worse than 100-150k people dying per day after a prolonged period of frailty and suffering, causing suffering to their families and friends too and costing tons in healthcare, then I'd say it's worth it. However long you live, you live one day at a time. If you are happy today and in good health, you'll want to live until tomorrow, and so on. But if for some reason you want to stop taking the rejuvenating therapies or throw yourself off a cliff, that's your choice. Let's just not make the choice for everybody else and all future generations by not developing these therapies...
danielford 16y ago
That's an explanation that rests on group selection, which tends not to be taken very seriously by most biologists. Similarly, group selection explanations of why we age are held only by a handful of researchers in the field of aging. Most biologists in the field of aging hold that aging is the result of the decreased force of natural selection with age. This is somewhat difficult to explain even with diagrams, but I'll try anyway. Let's imagine three forms of a gene. One causes you to die at the age of eight, another causes you to die at eighty, and the third never causes you to die. We would expect that the form of the gene that causes you to die at eight would be removed from the population very quickly, since anyone who has it will die before they can reproduce and pass it on. In contrast, the gene that causes you to die at eighty will be rather prevalent, since by that age you'll have already passed on your genes to your progeny. In fact, it will probably exist at about the same frequency as the gene that didn't cause you to die at all. This is the mutation accumulation theory of aging. Because natural selection acts more strongly early in life, we tend to accumulate genes with mutations that are detrimental later in life. There's also a variant called antagonistic pleiotropy, where you have genes that have a beneficial effect early in life having a negative effect in old age.

teilo 16y ago

I just have to shake my head at this. The only adequate word for this is arrogance. The arrogance to believe that we know enough about the processes of life to extend them indefinitely. We don't even know what we don't know. How many times have we been at this place in the history of biology, where we honestly believe that we are just "that" close to figuring out the processes of life. We were wrong then, and we are wrong now. We do not know or understand the over-arching cause of cancer, nor the cause of its radical increase. Similarly with heart disease: after a generation of assurances that the cause is a high-fat diet, the premise itself is being rejected. I could go down the list of major congenital diseases, and tell the same story. Even the most basic assumptions which we have about disease are being overturned. And whatever replaces them will likely be overturned yet again.

pingswept 16y ago
From TFA: "And each method to do this is either already working in a preliminary form (in clinical trials) or is based on technologies that already exist and just need to be combined." Totally agreed-- it's insane to think that because you can do some stuff in isolated cases, the combination is a trivial extension.
MikeCapone 16y ago
> We don't even know what we don't know. How many times have we been at this place in the history of biology, where we honestly believe that we are just "that" close to figuring out the processes of life. We were wrong then, and we are wrong now. Aubrey's point is that we don't need to understand metabolism to repair the damage of aging, just like you can maintain and repair a house or a car without understanding in detail all of the mechanisms that cause damage and failure. You just clean up some of the damage and change some parts periodically so that it never reaches a threshold at which failure is possible. Our bodies already do this quite well for the first 20-30 years of our lives, but after that, we're in an evolutionary blind spot and long-lived molecules accumulate and eventually make maintenance and repair mechanisms stop working for long enough to lead to pathologies. If we clean up these long-lived molecules, that'll be a very good start.
rabidgnat 16y ago

die_sekte 16y ago

And after living a 1000 years one is going to walk into the central computer, edit their memories and be born again a few millenniums later. I am a pretty big fan of Arthur C. Clarke.

tingley 16y ago

Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy (Red/Blue/Green) has this sort of development as a backdrop. Nothing good comes of it.

gte910h 16y ago
And Heinlein had tons of novels where it worked out fine. I don't think we should fund research based on what storytellers wrote to entertain us.

rauljara 16y ago

When my intro to genetics teacher in college explained to us how aging in cells worked, he told us that one of his professors had explained to him that a "cure" for aging was about 10 years away. But that had been more than ten years earlier. My professor said that he had recently talked to that same professor again. The new ETA: about 10 years. This is one of those problems that seems easy to solve in principle, but the details are nasty. Frankly, I think there's a reason complicated life evolved so that it would age. The standard reason given is that eventually errors in replication accumulate and cancer results. I.e. we age to avoid cancer. But that is a ridiculous reason. There is a chance we might die of cancer if we grow too old, so we trade that possibility of death by cancer for a certainty of death by aging? It just doesn't make evolutionary sense. I have a feeling that whatever the real reason for aging is, it will take us a long, long time before we find a way around it.

javanix 16y ago
I doubt that we'll ever find a "reason" for aging. It's the result of an imperfectly optimized biological system - after all, humans are the result of one great big evolutionary algorithm. We've proven time and again that those run exponentially and are not perfectly accurate, especially in the presence of a dynamic environment.
- FlorinAndrei 16y ago
  If it's an imperfect mechanism, then look back at the huge chain linking you to the first living creature: adult body / sperm & egg / adult body / sperm & egg / adult body / ... How come that chain hasn't failed? Basically, you're just rephrasing the "aging through accumulation of errors" hypothesis. The problem is, errors should accumulate along the chain mentioned above, too. Yet they don't.
  - crystalis 16y ago
    The chain gets to weed out errors by starting with cells that got through functionally unblemished courtesy functioning error correcting mechanisms. Each new cycle gets a fully functional error correction mechanism, and is fault tolerant to the theoretical point of repopulation from a small point of individuals. An individual human body has error correcting mechanisms that do not benefit from being renewed every cycle- they deteriorate over time, Individuals suffer from problems larger systems don't - a few cancerous cells can poison the whole individual, but a few cancerous individuals are likely to die with few offspring, and their offspring are also more likely to die with few offspring. If an individual is left with only a few correctly functioning cells, they have no recourse for rebuilding themself. Species get a constant influx of fresh water, as it were, and individuals have to make do with a set quantity.

quizbiz 16y ago

I heard some interesting insight recently. I am not sure how correct it is but it suggested that while we have made a lot of progress in living longer (allowing us to be old for longer) we have not made much progress at slowing down the process of aging (making it take longer to get old). If we want to live long and fruitful lives, how do we slow down aging? I prefer that question over, how do we live until 1,000?

rleisti 16y ago

I wonder if this would change the popular morality of suicide? What if you're 800 years old, and you truly feel that you've had enough? Should you be forced to keep on going, potentially indefinitely? Or even just knowing when to step aside and let the next (evolved) generation take over? (or will that still naturally just happen, via accidental death or death by lack of resources to live)

WiseWeasel 16y ago

Hell, give us another 50 years and I'm sure we'll all have our minds cloned into an army of robot bodies and computer brains for, uh, let's say longevity.

ck2 16y ago

That article is from 2004 (from top of page) Last Updated: Friday, 3 December, 2004, 00:01 GMT This kind of sensationalism is silly. http://xkcd.com/678/ http://xkcd.com/678/ Falls under: It has not been conclusively proven impossible. We don't know what kind of roadblocks there will be for this kind of development, we can't even guess - claims of 10-20 years are beyond silly, they are crazy and ignoring the concept of "what we don't know". ps. Can you imagine how overpopulated the world would be? How we would strip every resource bare?

jeremyawon 16y ago

instead, let's engineer away our anxieties about not existing.

jrockway 16y ago

Can I bet on the opposite side of this? I bet that nobody who is 60 now will live to 1000. Don't get me wrong, I would like to live to 1000... but I would be pretty surprised if my kids live past 150. I will be surprised if I live to 100. It's sad to think about, but our bodies wear out over time (cosmic rays and whatnot), and we don't have the technology to repair them efficiently yet. People still die from the flu!

mechanical_fish 16y ago
A fun exercise for a high school class: Get some basic mortality tables off the Internet. Now, tell me -- to first order, of course -- all the causes of death we'd have to eliminate in order for, say, 25% of the population to live to be 1000. What I really want to know is what common everyday activities we'd all have to give up. I bet motorcycling and scooter-riding are right out, but what about, say, swimming? Horseback riding? In a world where life expectancy is ten times longer, is everything an order of magnitude more dangerous?
- alan-crowe 16y ago
  It would be a good idea if safety laws, such as speed limits, where constructed around formula with life expectancy as one of the variables. Plug in 70 years and get out 30mph. Plug in 140 years and get out 25mph. Since you are going to grow old and die anyway, spending too much time trying to avoid accidental death is self-defeating. Acknowledging this would provide a check on the tendency towards super-safety in public policy.
dkarl 16y ago
You'll have to wait fifty years to collect. How confident are you that you'll live that long?
- jrockway 16y ago
  I have no doubts about living to 75. But remember, if someone who is 60 now lives to 999, I still win the bet. So I feel like I might have to wait more than 50 years.

benofsky 16y ago

Ignoring any claims that the man is a crackpot and any other problems one might have with the science. Does anyone really want to live to 1000? I think you might get a little bored :-/

FlorinAndrei 16y ago
"Does anyone really want to live to 1000? I think you might get a little bored" Boredom is infinitely better than nothingness.
ubernostrum 16y ago
I've always preferred the idea of immortality on the installment plan -- get frozen/stored/whatever, then woken up every couple hundred or couple thousand years, do stuff, go back into freeze/storage/whatever. Which, at least for me, is less about avoiding death (which doesn't actually scare me all that much) and more about just getting to see what sort of cool stuff the future holds.
- FlorinAndrei 16y ago
  You will live in a perpetual state of cultural shock. You can't possibly be useful to the society in that situation.
  - ubernostrum 16y ago
    Meh. If the technology existed to do that, society would have to find ways to cope with it anyway.

biggitybones 16y ago

It's amazing to think that just 500 years ago things were so bad that people awaited death patiently and willingly because they believed life was a punishment rewarded with an afterlife. Now we're trying to extend the amount of time that we live 10 fold because things are so great right now. I'm not saying either is right, just an observation.

kscaldef 16y ago
Maybe you don't talk to religious folks much, but that attitude hasn't changed all that much.

JustinSeriously 16y ago

Someone smarter than me noted that all predictions of living forever always have one thing in common: it places the time when people start living forever within the lifetime of the predictor. Aubrey de Grey is 43, and he's predicting that this might be in place in 20 years.

crystalis 16y ago
Could you care to point out the number of correct predictions that take place well after the point of time they were made?
- smallblacksun 16y ago
  A number of Da Vinci's "inventions" were really just predictions of things that were invented much later (like his helicopter).
  - crystalis 16y ago
    I think that's setting a low bar for "prediction" next to dated predictions like "In the next x years, we will be able to extend human lifespan by y years every z years." I don't know that anyone can reasonably object to the theoretical possibility that an individual human life could be sustained indefinitely.

sardonic 16y ago

I can't believe no one has called out the bogus math in the article: "If you are a reasonably risk-aware teenager today in an affluent, non-violent neighbourhood, you have a risk of dying in the next year of well under one in 1,000, which means that if you stayed that way forever you would have a 50/50 chance of living to over 1,000." If you assume 1/1000 chance of death in a year, and 1000 years (1000 trials), your probability of living to 1000 is only 37%, not 50%. I don't know if I would trust the scientific analysis of someone who doesn't understand basic binomial probability.

jarek 16y ago
You are assuming this based on a mainstream media article. First of all, you have no idea if he knows the right answer and is just dumbing it down for those who don't understand basic binomial probability. Second, the quote says "well under one in 1000", not "one in 1000". The correct value of one in 1415.8 as calculated by Retric in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1368664 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1368664 is, in fact, under one in 1000.

Retric 16y ago

"If you are a reasonably risk-aware teenager today in an affluent, non-violent neighbourhood, you have a risk of dying in the next year of well under one in 1,000, which means that if you stayed that way forever you would have a 50/50 chance of living to over 1,000." I know there is a shortcut to this but for this to be true you need a constant rate of 1 death in 1415.78389 per year. 1 / (1 - 10 ^ ((log .5) / 981)) = 1415.78389 so (1-1/1415.78389) ^ (1000-19) = .5

ibagrak 16y ago

While I was interning at Google in 2006 I heard the guy speak in one of the Google Talks there. Going to the talk I thought this would just be some outrageous crackpot theory, but he seemed very thoughtful and the approaches he talked about sounded very sensible (although I knew and still know too little about the subject to invalidate his claims).

mattiss 16y ago

Is there any practical ways to apply some of this research today? It seems like there must be something out there we can be doing right now to help ward off aging? Also what is the most promising research being done?

niallsmart 16y ago

I'm pretty sure that beard will need a trim by 3010.

Zak 16y ago

This article, and a few others covering exactly the same thing keep getting posted here ever few months. I hope Mr. de Grey is right, and I hope I live long enough to find out. That said, until there's some progress to announce, please stop re-posting this here.

mitjak 16y ago

Where do I donate to ensure I don't live till 1,000? Nuclear weapon research?

crystalis 16y ago
I understand you might not want to live that long, but why would you want to take that away from others?
- mitjak 16y ago
  Because the world is already overpopulated and we don't currently have any means to spread our virus to a different planet.
  - crystalis 16y ago
    So your solution to alleviate potential suffering is to induce immediate suffering?
    - mitjak 16y ago
      Exactly.

sliverstorm 16y ago

The article claims that to suggest we should NOT defeat aging is ageism and denying people the right to live. I disagree. Until we find a way to support a population that grows at a rate like that, we would be forced into one of several possible situations, none of which are pleasant: 1: starvation 2: endless war 3: iron-fisted birth regulation, only allowing one new child per legally documented death 3.5: The implications of couples who really want children + a rule saying they can have one, if someone has died Until the question of resources is answered, granting people the right to live (longer) equates to denying other people either quality of life (starvation/war) or the chance to live at all (birth regulation). Which brings up another interesting question; if everyone alive has a right to life, do those who have not yet been born have a right to live as well?

sliverstorm 16y ago
I'm not saying we shouldn't extend our lifespans- I would love to live to see a lot of things come to pass, like leaving our own galaxy- but to blindly proclaim anyone who opposes the goal is ageist is to ignore that the benefits have costs, especially considering we already have population issues looming on the horizon. Call me utilitarian and get pissed that I might stand in your way of living forever, but we have to consider the bigger picture.

pedrokost 16y ago

Yesterday my goal was to live 150 years. I am expanding it to 250 now :D