6 ms·

The Italian study argues after a certain threshold age, lets say 105, Italians hit a constant, "mortality plateau, which was 50:50 odds of living to your next b

The Italian study argues after a certain threshold age, lets say 105, Italians hit a constant, "mortality plateau, which was 50:50 odds of living to your next birthday, and thus since mortality is not increasing year on year, theoretically there is no upper bound on the age of a person. This may be true theoretically, but mathematical reasoning clarifies this somewhat. Even if you have 1 million humans aged 105 right now, which is probably a vast overstatement, they would diminish to 100,000 humans in less than 4 years, then diminishing to 1,000 humans aged 115 in 10 years' time. After this point, it's basically a question of statistics, as we keep halving the population yearly and get into statistically unsubstantial cohorts of humans. So, while it may be that some humans could live to 130-140 naturally, without fountain-of-youth innovations, the VAST majority of us will die much, much earlier. The low-hanging fruits of obesity, heart disease, and diabetes are calling to public health far more urgently than this pie in the sky limitless life.

kbenson 8y ago
> mortality plateau, which was 50:50 odds of living to your next birthday Isn't the question whether or not we can affect the odds here? If we can increase it to 75:25 at this plateau, then we also are also increasing the age longest lived of these people are predicted to live for immensely, and the last person of this example group of 1 million starting at age 105 you give would expect that last person to die not 10 years later (at 115) on average as with a 50:50 mortality, but around 48 years later, at 153. Every slight change in that mortality rate affects that long tail quite a bit, relatively speaking. I for one believe that might have an immense effect on how people view their health and longevity. If people believe that taking care of themselves might give them many decades of additional life instead of a few years, that could lead to a wider shift.
- Something1234 8y ago
  How did you come to 48 years later? When I calculated it came to about 21 years. In [2]: def reduce_pop(pop, prob): ...: if pop <= 1: ...: return 1 ...: return 1 + reduce_pop(pop * prob, prob) ...: In [3]: reduce_pop(1000000, 0.5) Out[3]: 21 Where pop is the initial starting group, and prob is how many die off(with 50:50 I expected half of them die off each year). Please correct me if my math is wrong or if I'm miss interpreting how to calculate this.
  - kbenson 8y ago
    48 is for the 75:25 probability. I did have the wrong number of years for 50:50 though, it's not the 10 I stated. This problem is the reverse of binary doubling, and I knew 10 bits are a needed to get to 1024, and my brain just sealed out thousand and million. It takes 20 bits to get to over 1 million, so 20 halvings from exactly 1 million should get you to less than 1.
JoshCole 8y ago
> The low-hanging fruits of obesity, heart disease, and diabetes are calling to public health far more urgently than this pie in the sky limitless life. Still, it's definitely worth it to continue research along these lines and plenty of other ridiculous lines. Even if they don't come to anything. We have such a tremendous abundance of intellectual capacity as a species. If we dedicate all our intellectual capacity to solving the low-hanging fruits in healthcare (or to increasing the click-through rates of ads, among other things) it would require us to allocate many people to no task at all, just because there was already an excessive abundance of resources already dedicated to the tasks. It's a little fun and encouraging to think about, but the more people there are alive, the more important unimportant things become, because with more people there are more problem solvers.
- TimTheTinker 8y ago
  > with more people there are more problem solvers I really appreciate this perspective. More people is fundamentally a good thing. Some would vehemently argue otherwise, but I believe the problems they bring up come down to a calculus that depends first on other things, like profit vs. environmental stewardship, etc., not primarily the birth and death rates.
  - Koshkin 8y ago
    > More people is fundamentally a good thing. "Fundamentally," perhaps. In all other cases, not so much. Having more people in my house or even in the city where I live would be a bad thing.
  - Iv 8y ago
    More educated people who can spend some time on problem solving, yes, it is a good thing. People starving or kept busy in bullshit jobs, we have plenty and they just put a burden on the whole ecosystem. Now problem solvers are very busy trying to find ways to produce food and energy for the 11 billion people we should reach in a few decades. Seriously, until we don't reach 100% of well-fed educated people, demographic growth will be more of a problem than a solution to anything.
garmaine 8y ago
> The low-hanging fruits of obesity, heart disease, and diabetes are calling to public health far more urgently than this pie in the sky limitless life. Vastly more people die each year of age-related causes than obesity, heart disease, and diabetes combined. It's an unrecognized holocaust inevitably terminating the potential of all humans on this planet, and it is going entirely unrecognized because if you work on solving aging you are a crackpot, whereas "obviously" obesity, heart disease, and diabetes are more deserving of our time and grant money.
- sgt101 8y ago
  What is your view of the lives of elderly people? I would trade health, mobility and my intellectual capabilities intact to 90 for 20 years of problems (70->90) followed by another 20 years of geriatric life (90->110). I would agree with you if the common experience of old age was positive and healthy; but it seems to me that the priority for research should be to alleviate the problems and suffering we will all face should we be lucky enough to get there, especially now that the majority of people are lucky. Perhaps healthier older people will live a lot longer as well?
  - garmaine 8y ago
    > I would agree with you if the common experience of old age was positive and healthy It’s not positive and healthy because you age. You fix aging and people will have a physical age of 25 forever and do all sorts of fun things with perfectly capable bodies. That’s the point. I don’t know what sort of counter factual world you are describing where we have “alleviated aging” but people still age...
    - Koshkin 8y ago
      > age of 25 My daughter would say "ew"
EamonnMR 8y ago
Humans have a 1/3 lifetime cancer risk, and I suspect it will go up if we extend lifetimes. It's a wall to longevity. If we get past that wall, there's still proteopathys. There's no real approach to curing those yet (at least not that I'm aware of.)
- magduf 8y ago
  >Humans have a 1/3 lifetime cancer risk, and I suspect it will go up if we extend lifetimes. It's a wall to longevity. No, it's not. Cancer is just a form of malfunction of cellular machinery, and as such, can certainly be mitigated or cured at some point. There's already lots of promising research in eliminating it, such as by re-purposing viruses to program the body's immune system to recognize and eliminate the cancerous cells. It might require artificial intervention, but I believe cancer will be mostly eliminated before too long. And artificial intervention shouldn't be a problem: we have to do this on all our other machines too, we just call it "repair" or "maintenance". There's no such thing as a machine which never needs maintenance from an external source.
- JamesBarney 8y ago
  Why do you think cancer is undefeatable? The risk of cancer rises substantially with age, and much of the increase in risk is probably due to the immune system malfunctioning.
  - EamonnMR 8y ago
    We aren't there yet.
    - ethbro 8y ago
      http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-breast-cancer-immunotherapy-20180604-story.html http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-breast-c... Oncology + new genetic tools (just sequencing, not even CRISPR/CAS9) is making amazing progress. Things that would have been a death sentence 20 years ago now have reasonably hopeful mortality rates.
Amygaz 8y ago
They also agree with that, but they use a model that can never reach 0. So starting with nearly 4000 105yo individuals, only one remains at 115 years and never dies.

kbenson 8y ago

> mortality plateau, which was 50:50 odds of living to your next birthday Isn't the question whether or not we can affect the odds here? If we can increase it to 75:25 at this plateau, then we also are also increasing the age longest lived of these people are predicted to live for immensely, and the last person of this example group of 1 million starting at age 105 you give would expect that last person to die not 10 years later (at 115) on average as with a 50:50 mortality, but around 48 years later, at 153. Every slight change in that mortality rate affects that long tail quite a bit, relatively speaking. I for one believe that might have an immense effect on how people view their health and longevity. If people believe that taking care of themselves might give them many decades of additional life instead of a few years, that could lead to a wider shift.

Something1234 8y ago
How did you come to 48 years later? When I calculated it came to about 21 years. In [2]: def reduce_pop(pop, prob): ...: if pop <= 1: ...: return 1 ...: return 1 + reduce_pop(pop * prob, prob) ...: In [3]: reduce_pop(1000000, 0.5) Out[3]: 21 Where pop is the initial starting group, and prob is how many die off(with 50:50 I expected half of them die off each year). Please correct me if my math is wrong or if I'm miss interpreting how to calculate this.
- kbenson 8y ago
  48 is for the 75:25 probability. I did have the wrong number of years for 50:50 though, it's not the 10 I stated. This problem is the reverse of binary doubling, and I knew 10 bits are a needed to get to 1024, and my brain just sealed out thousand and million. It takes 20 bits to get to over 1 million, so 20 halvings from exactly 1 million should get you to less than 1.

JoshCole 8y ago

> The low-hanging fruits of obesity, heart disease, and diabetes are calling to public health far more urgently than this pie in the sky limitless life. Still, it's definitely worth it to continue research along these lines and plenty of other ridiculous lines. Even if they don't come to anything. We have such a tremendous abundance of intellectual capacity as a species. If we dedicate all our intellectual capacity to solving the low-hanging fruits in healthcare (or to increasing the click-through rates of ads, among other things) it would require us to allocate many people to no task at all, just because there was already an excessive abundance of resources already dedicated to the tasks. It's a little fun and encouraging to think about, but the more people there are alive, the more important unimportant things become, because with more people there are more problem solvers.

TimTheTinker 8y ago
> with more people there are more problem solvers I really appreciate this perspective. More people is fundamentally a good thing. Some would vehemently argue otherwise, but I believe the problems they bring up come down to a calculus that depends first on other things, like profit vs. environmental stewardship, etc., not primarily the birth and death rates.
- Koshkin 8y ago
  > More people is fundamentally a good thing. "Fundamentally," perhaps. In all other cases, not so much. Having more people in my house or even in the city where I live would be a bad thing.
- Iv 8y ago
  More educated people who can spend some time on problem solving, yes, it is a good thing. People starving or kept busy in bullshit jobs, we have plenty and they just put a burden on the whole ecosystem. Now problem solvers are very busy trying to find ways to produce food and energy for the 11 billion people we should reach in a few decades. Seriously, until we don't reach 100% of well-fed educated people, demographic growth will be more of a problem than a solution to anything.

garmaine 8y ago

> The low-hanging fruits of obesity, heart disease, and diabetes are calling to public health far more urgently than this pie in the sky limitless life. Vastly more people die each year of age-related causes than obesity, heart disease, and diabetes combined. It's an unrecognized holocaust inevitably terminating the potential of all humans on this planet, and it is going entirely unrecognized because if you work on solving aging you are a crackpot, whereas "obviously" obesity, heart disease, and diabetes are more deserving of our time and grant money.

sgt101 8y ago
What is your view of the lives of elderly people? I would trade health, mobility and my intellectual capabilities intact to 90 for 20 years of problems (70->90) followed by another 20 years of geriatric life (90->110). I would agree with you if the common experience of old age was positive and healthy; but it seems to me that the priority for research should be to alleviate the problems and suffering we will all face should we be lucky enough to get there, especially now that the majority of people are lucky. Perhaps healthier older people will live a lot longer as well?
- garmaine 8y ago
  > I would agree with you if the common experience of old age was positive and healthy It’s not positive and healthy because you age. You fix aging and people will have a physical age of 25 forever and do all sorts of fun things with perfectly capable bodies. That’s the point. I don’t know what sort of counter factual world you are describing where we have “alleviated aging” but people still age...
  - Koshkin 8y ago
    > age of 25 My daughter would say "ew"

EamonnMR 8y ago

Humans have a 1/3 lifetime cancer risk, and I suspect it will go up if we extend lifetimes. It's a wall to longevity. If we get past that wall, there's still proteopathys. There's no real approach to curing those yet (at least not that I'm aware of.)

magduf 8y ago
>Humans have a 1/3 lifetime cancer risk, and I suspect it will go up if we extend lifetimes. It's a wall to longevity. No, it's not. Cancer is just a form of malfunction of cellular machinery, and as such, can certainly be mitigated or cured at some point. There's already lots of promising research in eliminating it, such as by re-purposing viruses to program the body's immune system to recognize and eliminate the cancerous cells. It might require artificial intervention, but I believe cancer will be mostly eliminated before too long. And artificial intervention shouldn't be a problem: we have to do this on all our other machines too, we just call it "repair" or "maintenance". There's no such thing as a machine which never needs maintenance from an external source.
JamesBarney 8y ago
Why do you think cancer is undefeatable? The risk of cancer rises substantially with age, and much of the increase in risk is probably due to the immune system malfunctioning.
- EamonnMR 8y ago
  We aren't there yet.
  - ethbro 8y ago
    http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-breast-cancer-immunotherapy-20180604-story.html http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-breast-c... Oncology + new genetic tools (just sequencing, not even CRISPR/CAS9) is making amazing progress. Things that would have been a death sentence 20 years ago now have reasonably hopeful mortality rates.

Amygaz 8y ago

They also agree with that, but they use a model that can never reach 0. So starting with nearly 4000 105yo individuals, only one remains at 115 years and never dies.