13 ms·

Humans Could Live up to 150 Years, New Research Suggests

• Aperocky 5y ago
  That's why the fundamental solution to both the ageing problem and space exploration is not biological. Humans are fundamentally adapted to live/reproduce on the oxidizing and wet environment on Earth. Rather than bring out a mini Earth environ each time we go to space, we should start thinking about how we can just bring out our mind. It would be much more sustainable in the long run, maybe even on Earth itself.
  • HDMI_Cable 5y ago
    Why do we even need to colonize space anyways? It's not like overpopulation is going to be a problem anymore, and someday in the future, we'll be able to solve problems like environmental degredation and climate change. There's just not any benefit to exploring space. Besides asteroid mining (which can be done with robots), there's not much up there worth our time, except scientific research.
    • lostinroutine 5y ago
      Could you explain why overpopulation will not be a problem?
      • busterarm 5y ago
        Especially if we start expecting everyone to live to 150...
      • mLuby 5y ago
        The oceans are big. Think how many floating (or submerged) apartment could exist, each a pressure vessel with links to air, power and heat, fresh water, and a personal shuttle to visit other modules. Of course, that's all the same tech that space habitats would use too, so why not do both?
      • ebruchez 5y ago
        Maybe because the world's total fertility rate has been consistently coming down and might soon get lower than the replacement rate. [1] If this continues, the world population, while still growing due to people living longer, [2] will not grow due to more births anymore. All things being equal, after a while, population would start decreasing. None of this is necessarily cast in stone: people could start having more children again, or life expectancy could massively drop. But as things are trending right now, population will stabilize relatively soon and then decrease (it's already happening in some countries). How crowded the Earth needs to be to be considered overpopulated is debatable and a separate question. But if the population does not keep growing there is a path to getting there, assuming the peak population is considered too high. [1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN [2] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.LE00.IN https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.LE00.IN
    • aero-glide2 5y ago
      Non-zero chance that an astronomical event could wipe out earth's human population. We can study effects of low-g environment on human body. Because its hard. And when doing a project which is hard, we could discover technology which helps others on Earth.
    • austinkhale 5y ago
      We are one large asteroid hitting earth or nuclear war from an extinction event. Being multi planetary is a hedge for the continuation of the species.
    • beckingz 5y ago
      Because we can?
    • Aperocky 5y ago
      It's not about overpopulation. People used to live in caves in a static way of life that persisted for generations. Hunter gatherer societies still exist. While I can't speak for them I'm very happy that I live in modern society as compared to theirs. > There's just not any benefit to exploring space. I strongly disagree, what are the benefits of living? Benefits are relative and arbitrary, there are no universal definition of 'benefits'. Access to more resources and potential to leave solar system would count as benefit to me. The simple experience of just not being stuck on Earth would be another one for me.
    • mLuby 5y ago
      What about innate human curiosity, and our drive to explore? What about all the technology that, while developed for spaceflight, provides huge benefits to the earthbound masses? What about meeting other civilizations if they exist, or else learning why they don't?
    • vimacs2 5y ago
      Well, first of all I do not consider colonising a place a synonymous with living there. Space offers revolutionary technology that can tangibly affect what happens on Earth. Planets that are substantially smaller than Earth (which is pretty much all the rocky planets in our solar system bar Venus) are far less painful to mine even without getting into the fact that there is (or so we hope) no ecosystem to destroy from our mining practices so it's not just asteroids that are attractive targets for resources. It's not just the lower gravity, it's that smaller bodies tend to have less stratification of geological layers so instead of having nearly all metals concentrated underneath gigapascals of pressure at the core (like on Earth), smaller bodies will have such valuable booty more evenly distributed across the crust. That's not even getting into the abundance of gases like hydrogen and helium that can be scooped from gas giants that are often quite expensive on Earth. Most heavy industrial processes and power generation have substantial ecological consequences so I envision nearly all of this being taken off world into orbital factories and power collectors. Microwave wireless energy transfer has achieved greater than 80% efficiencies in the lab and solar power collectors in space can achieve a 24/7 operation and park themselves in geosynchronous orbits so a mini dyson swarm around Earth could power the world's economy comfortably and be far more distributed and safe against shutdowns. Manufacturing in microgravity offers unique opportunities and advantages for many processes in industry and the advantages of floating in vacuum cannot be understate for bulk transportation of goods. There is a trick that exploits the conservation of momentum that allows for very cheap transfer of cargo and people from and to Earth without having to rely on the magically strong materials of space elevators: by having a ring of ferromagnetic material around the Earth that rotates and greater than orbital velocity, you can then have an outer shell around it that is either at rest or moving in the opposite direction (preferably at the rotational speed of the Earth that can be kept suspended from the inner coil via a magnetic field. As long as the net momentum of the inner and outer ring is zero, it will remain stable and now you have a platform that is at rest relative to the ground and from which you can have cable cars running to the ground from without requiring fictional materials. One thing to note is that with these largely stationary (save for counterbalancing against the rotation of the earth) platforms is that you are still experiencing most of the earth's gravity when standing on them. This makes it a good option for long term habitats for baseline humans. Of course, because it has a coil that winds around the entire circumference of the Earth, you can use it to propel one hell of a mass driver for cargo to the point where you could just not bother with chemical rockets altogether and rely on magnetic trains to do most of the heavy lifting into LEO with ion drives or solar sails are for long term maintenance. This formula works for every planet but it makes the most sense to target Earth because of the highly challenging escape velocity it imposes on our current launch capabilities. This allows you to skip the rocket equation and as a consequence make travel to space genuinely affordable with potentially less than a dollar per kg costs. Once you get to space, travel is actually incredibly easy since you have mostly empty space between you and your target and there is no air resistance to slow you down. We can also protect the Earth from coronal mass ejections and asteroid strikes and even counteract global warming by dimming the sunlight received from earth by a percent or two. This won't magically turn the clock back on climate change but it would be one hell of a slowdown to allow for other changes in our manufacturing and energy generation processes. Besides that, extrapolating from very recent trends in population dynamics in "developed" (which is such a relative term anyway) countries that overpopulation is not going to be a problem anymore is absurd. People do on average want to have kids and the real reason why some countries are beginning to go below replacement rates of growth has more to do with the collapse of the middle class and the uncertain economic future of many young adults. Once we have radical life extension technology (something I consider largely inevitable) and people in their late 80's are still as sexually virulent as if they were in their 20's, we are likely to see another population boom within this century. While we could probably continue to house more people past a trillion within Earth, you are going to have to start either living more frugally or damage the ecosystem or at least reduce it's priority. An Ecumenopolis (planet-wide city) could actually be a very comfortable place to live and house many trillions but it's a process that is inherently destructive to the landscape and life as it is now. You are essentially turning the entire surface (and ideally some or all of the interior) of a planet into a machine - and a lot of that would be necessary once we are talking multiple trillions because at that scale, we have a very different heating problem from the comparatively measly effects of greenhouse gases that are already wrecking havoc on our ecosystems. When you have that much waste heat being generated on a planet, you need to start constructing giant radiators that extend out of the atmosphere on space towers. Once you have such numbers, even if less than a percent of the population have any wish of colonising other worlds, you will have billions of colonists and our entire solar system will be colonised. There is also the undeniable appeals of claiming territory over a truly virgin land without the evil of colonialism over past natives. That land might be hostile as it is but the opportunity to transform it into an oasis of life is going to become a more and more attractive proposition once have a truly abundant and clean source of energy because matter then becomes the real bottleneck. Land prices on Earth will continue to rise to the point where suburbs in the form of O' Neil Cylinder habitats will become the suburbs and rural area of humanity. Or if we switch to a form of land allocation that does not involve money, we would still commission the construction of rotating habitats to keep the population density of Earth below a amount (what amount that is depends both on your values as a civilisation and the degree of verticality of your settlements.
  • Vrondi 5y ago
    Simply conquering the challenge of going to and/or colonizing Mars will result in many inventions and technique developments in science and tech that trickle back into everyday life on Earth. So it was with Apollo, so it shall likely be in future space exploration.
  • inglor_cz 5y ago
    We are fundamentally adapted to the African savanna. Expanding beyond that lush environment needed technology. Even flintstone and animal hides are a technology. Expanding to space needs better technology, but the first step was done when some of our ape-like ancestors bashed an antelope's skull with a rock.
    • Aperocky 5y ago
      The difference between African Savanna and other places on Earth is minuscule compared to the difference between Earth and Space. Oxygen, Temperature where water is liquid or barely frozen (water is basically rock at -200), Pressurized Environment, abundance of organic material for ingestion. That's true for most of inhabited locations on Earth. I'm not strongly attached to my meat vessel, I think my consciousness defines me, even though it currently runs off my brain.
      • inglor_cz 5y ago
        Well, living in space proper (zero gravity) probably won't be a mass thing. We will only cross space without living in it, just like we do with the ocean. But the possibility of terraforming planets or moons cannot be ruled out in the future. We are quite capable of altering environment, actually, even to our detriment (climate change). Maybe we can do it better on Mars or Titan.
        • Aperocky 5y ago
          Instead of making everywhere more like Earth, how about making ourselves more adaptable to everywhere?
• nscalf 5y ago
  Last weeks article was 130. Clearly take this all with a grain of salt, and realize that bioengineering is having an explosion that will redefine everything we think about medicine and the human body.
  • marcodiego 5y ago
    I think the biggest step will come once we start transplanting organs from clones of ourselves. Apart from traumatic or infectious diseases, being able to replace most vital organs would extend our lives to the last remaining non-transplant-able organ.
    • meh99 5y ago
      Transplant medicine is going to seem like archaic nonsense in the future. We’ll just consume the chemical cocktails that normalize us: https://youtu.be/RjD1aLm4Thg https://youtu.be/RjD1aLm4Thg
    • sdenton4 5y ago
      Just get a nice brain transplant every eighty years or so and you, too, can live forever...
    • nscalf 5y ago
      Back in 2020, a Japanese team did the worlds first transplant of lab grown heart cells into a patient. There is definitely progress being made on this.
      • elcritch 5y ago
        Even more fun is 3D printing the desired structure and scaffolding of the target tissue or organ.
    • kyriakos 5y ago
      Or transplant brain to clone body. As long as brain survives longer than the body
  • 5y ago
• codegeek 5y ago
  I always think about the scenario that I have outlived everyone I ever knew. Not sure if that is a good thing necessarily. I wonder how many new people you can meet or make friends after say 80 especially if you are not very healthy.
  • ben_w 5y ago
    Whenever this gets raised I wonder why the person raising it is implicit assuming they will be only one of their social circle with the longevity.
    • amirkdv 5y ago
      Because all other scenarios are uninteresting to the deceased?
    • andy_ppp 5y ago
      Also if everyone I really love dies at 90 and I live to 150 I'm pretty sure I say to myself it's sad they are gone but I'm sure there is something to do with those extra 60 years than mope about!
    • lebuffon 5y ago
      Probably related to the way most people believe they are an "above average" driver. :)
  • k__ 5y ago
    I'm only 35 and besides my family I don't have much to do with most of the people I met in my life. Some died, some simply moved away, or I moved away. I wouldn't expect outliving my friends to be much different.
  • busterarm 5y ago
    The year that I was 26, over two dozen people that I knew died. All separately. I was a wreck that year but learned early that everything is fleeting and precious. That said, I noticed diminished capability in life shortly before turning 40 and my mom is really struggling at 80. Longevity does not seem like a good deal to me.
• mgh2 5y ago
  Then the Lord said, “My Spirit shall not strive with man forever, because he also is flesh; nevertheless his days shall be one hundred and twenty years.” -Genesis 6:3
  • melling 5y ago
    120 years would be a great start. Imagine the world 120 years ago in 1900. The airplane hadn’t been invented. Cars were still a novelty. Special Relativity hadn’t been discovered.
    • throwawaygh 5y ago
      The image in the article is of a woman who died at 122.
    • stfp 5y ago
      Median scenario: so you grow up in that world, then go through 2 world wars, a few pandemics, the loss or death of most of your friends and family, gradually disconnect from the rest of society, just so you can see what amazing thing humanity will invent next (spoiler alert: it's more phones and huge cars and maybe a dozen folks living in tunnels on mars), while the forests are ripped out and the oceans boil and nature is paved over and your body turns to crap. Amazing, sign me up. My grandma is 105 years old and is pretty much waiting for it to be over. If you live a full life it's not about how old you get, 90 is more than enough to experience the world and see your grand child grow up.
      • deleted 5y ago
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      • clpm4j 5y ago
        Agreed 100%. I hope that medically assisted suicide becomes more widely legal and acceptable by the time I get towards my end. I didn't ask to be brought into this world and when my body and mind start to really deteriorate, and I can no longer enjoy life the way I want then I'd like to check out on my own terms.
• HDMI_Cable 5y ago
  Even if we can, there is no harm in hoping for the best, and expecting the worst. There is no real evidence that any of us are going to live this long, so while it may be fun to read about this, we're not going to be the ones to do so.
  • analog31 5y ago
    That's a relief. I wouldn't look forward to 70 years of being deaf and broke.
• pyrrhotech 5y ago
  All these types of articles always include photos of Calment, even though it's highly likely she was a fraud
  • bpodgursky 5y ago
    Well, she was dead, her daughter was a fraud : )
  • mrwh 5y ago
    There's a good New Yorker piece on this: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/02/17/was-jeanne-calment-the-oldest-person-who-ever-lived-or-a-fraud https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/02/17/was-jeanne-cal... TL/DR: on balance the author concludes that it's easier to believe that she was genuine, all in all.
  • ebruchez 5y ago
    > highly likely Citation needed.
• narush 5y ago
  Taking this with a grain of salt, of course, but cool! Worth pointing out the concept of "healthspan," which is pretty much like it sounds like: how long you stay healthy to do the things you want to do. Long lifespan seems worthwhile if it's accompanied by a long healthspan as well.
  • rantwasp 5y ago
    this person gets it. who wants to live to 150 is you’re in constant pain, take 150 medications/day and you cannot move? now, let’s say that at 90s you could do what a 40yo can do. GAME CHANGING!
    • varjag 5y ago
      Long life in poor health is statistically possible but at the same time not very frequent.
  • grishka 5y ago
    I don't understand this whole idea of "healthspan". Making people not age at all is the endgame for medicine as a science. Anything lesser would still be putting an enormous strain on healthcare systems to make dying people die a bit slower. And if you've solved aging, there's not such a thing as a lifespan any more because people would only be dying of accidents. It's definitely not going to work such that someone lives to 80 with a health of a 25-year-old and then something clicks and they start having age-related conditions, all of them at once for good measure.
    • thebean11 5y ago
      Healthcare isn't really a limited resource though, there's nothing stopping the healthcare industry from just growing until it meets demand.
      • grishka 5y ago
        Oh I see, you're from the US. In most other countries, healthcare isn't much of an industry, but is funded by the government. Taxes are a limited resource. There isn't an infinite supply of people with relevant education either.
• zug_zug 5y ago
  Seems cool, not sure if I want a bunch of 150 year olds voting (relatively, that would be like people born in 1870 voting today, 5 years after slavery ended).
  • Jtsummers 5y ago
    Setting aside other common issues like senility with age which could impact a person's competency to vote, do you hold a similar prejudice for people born before desegregation of schools and other institutions?
  • everdrive 5y ago
    Along those lines: given how quickly things change these days, I can imagine that living to 120 would be quite bewildering, even if you you could be healthy and mentally coherent at 100. I don't think it would be uniquely bad for old people to vote though, plenty of brand new ideas are terrible too.
  • Buttons840 5y ago
    I have two thoughts on this: - old people should have less voting power bacause they wont live to see the results of their votes - old people should have more voting power because they are older and have seen more of history I guess they balance out and everyone gets an equal vote.
    • threatofrain 5y ago
      But most people's account of any national, state, or city history for any event whatsoever cannot beat a quick search on Wikipedia. I'm not sure how much value there is in informal recollections of past events. Have you ever heard a great retelling of history? It always seems to come from those who have invested Serious Effort to master a historical narrative, especially when they work with a community of fellow peers.
      • nimbleal 5y ago
        Surely the whole of the human experience is, in the end, “informal recollections of past events”? What tells you more about poverty — learning that an individual lives on less than a dollar a day or, say, spending 24 hours without food and shelter? I would argue that the experience of lived history and the “facts” of history cannot be separated, and both must be equally valued.
• seneca 5y ago
  This always strikes me as one of those "too busy thinking about whether they can to ask if they should" scenarios. The earth is already packed with billions of people, most of whom live rather miserable existences. It seems like there are nearly infinite other things we ought to improve before we start trying to keep them along for many extra decades. Reality is that so much research focuses here because the rich and powerful desperately want to defeat death, not because it will be good for humanity in general. On toward the age of the methuselahs, I suppose.
• GiorgioG 5y ago
  If I could live to 150 and have a reasonably good quality of life (i.e. I still have my mental faculties, move around, see & hear well enough) - that would be ideal. But not if I can't see, hear, think or move around without assistance. I don't just want to exist longer - I want to live longer.
• willis936 5y ago
  That seems like a good length. I don't know what my worldviews will be in 10 years, let alone 100. I do know that the things I am most invested in now will take 100-200 years to bear out. I want to see where climate change is going. I want to see what solutions will be implemented and how extreme they will. What will the unintended consequences be? Similarly, how will social and political issues evolve? Will we continue on this trend of humanism? Will violence continue to decline? How will we mitigate our existential threats? A lot of these questions might not be resolved in another 100 years, but certainly the state of the world will be flipped from my developmental years in that time. I have a feeling that will result in a satisfied conclusion to the story of the world as I see it.
• scandox 5y ago
  I think extending longevity is a negative with regard to human beings as a collective. I think it would be intelligent from a group point of view to create disincentives for individuals to live beyond a certain age.
  • onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
    How old are you? I suspect you might feel differently when you're older.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  • cecilpl2 5y ago
    Logan's Run was a dystopia.
• alextheparrot 5y ago
  Has anyone actually read the paper? I have some pretty serious qualms with the topology traversal routes over the DOSI vs age manifold — they seem unfounded. This isn’t inherently problematic, but that seems like a core assumption - that the steepness and thus likelihood of falling off the DOSI associated cliff increases with age. The idea being once you fall off the cliff you die. I don’t think it is a bad hypothesis, it just isn’t a result? They renamed DOSI from “Age independent mortality” and changed the traversal examples since their 2018 paper [0] - honestly I don’t know how this paper has gotten so much press this week. It is only interesting for the title (Might’ve answered my own question there), but once you dig into it isn’t all that rigorous. [0] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fgene.2018.00483/full#B37 https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fgene.2018.0048...
  • bionhoward 5y ago
    I disagree with the paper because it neglects the possibility of engineered approaches to reverse the mechanisms of ageing
    • alextheparrot 5y ago
      They’d probably argue that this same model works for that - you just update the manifold. That’s probably fair, the model isn't really powered to be predictive just correlative. It still embeds some of the same problems, though, mainly how an individual actually interacts with it and why their interpretation is correct.
    • nradov 5y ago
      That's like disagreeing with a paper on orbital mechanics because it neglects the possibility of inventing a warp drive. So far there is no clear engineering path for reversing the mechanisms of ageing; that remains in the science fiction realm.
      • bionhoward 5y ago
        It's real -- look at biogerontology
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• tmp231 5y ago
  “No more shall an infant from there live but a few days, nor an old man who has not fulfilled his days; for the child shall die one hundred years old, but the sinner being one hundred years old shall be accursed” (Isaiah 65:20 NKJV). It’s happening just as predicted.
• avip3d 5y ago
  This is all theoretical... I think we will get exactly what we wished for and then discover the next worst thing since cancer...
• seemuch 5y ago
  While it's cool that many people are doing research on extending human life span, I think it's equally important (if not more) to think about how to enhance the quality of life when people get old. A lot people retire when they are ~60 yo. If they live up to 150 years, that is 90 years of retirement, which is ridiculers. I do wish that people can be "young" for longer. To me, that is more important than just living longer.
  • tolbish 5y ago
    Longevity research includes not just increasing lifespan, but increasing quality lifespan (i.e. slowing down aging). See Calico [0] as an example. [0] https://calicolabs.com/publications https://calicolabs.com/publications
  • LambdaComplex 5y ago
    The cynical part of me wants to sarcastically respond "Yeah, let's make sure everyone can contribute 120 years to making corporations richer instead of just 60 years!" With that said, I do think you have a point--spending ~90 years in a nursing home because you're unable to take care of yourself sounds like a miserable existence straight out of a dystopian novel.
• courtf 5y ago
  Not sure I see the point in extending our lives. All the problems we have with history being forgotten and humanity repeating the same mistakes won't go away, the cycle will just take 150 years instead of 100. It will take longer to evolve, longer to learn our lessons, but in the meantime the wealthy get a few more good decades riding high on the backs of the billions living in poverty around the world. Hurray for that I guess. This sort of research is tailored to the infantile concerns of narcissists who believe their individual lives matter more than the health and longevity of the species and the planet. Is death really so scary? Is it so difficult to imagine that it might be important for our lives to end? Oh you poor, mistreated mortals, the heavens weep for you. The only way life extension really makes sense to me is if we imagine that humans have reached the zenith of their evolution, which is just laughable. Just remember,the last laugh is on you ;)
• fallingfrog 5y ago
  I hope that we eventually get the number up much higher than that- provided they are healthy years, not years lying in bed hooked up to a bunch of tubes. Life doesn’t just seem short, it is short.
• coldelectrons 5y ago
  Just great; adding another 50 years I have to wait for certain (corrupt, well-funded) people to stop obstructing improvement.
• tmp231 5y ago
  “No more shall an infant from there live but a few days, nor an old man who has not fulfilled his days; for the child shall die one hundred years old, but the sinner being one hundred years old shall be accursed” (Isaiah 65:20 NKJV). It’s happening just as predicted.