5 ms·

No idea why you're downvoted. The idea that the human body has the formula for immortality 99% right and it just "forgot" to make enough of protein X which has

No idea why you're downvoted. The idea that the human body has the formula for immortality 99% right and it just "forgot" to make enough of protein X which has no downsides seems hopelessly naive to me. Just look at existing health interventions, like HGH, and see all the side-effects and risks associated with it.

newZWhoDis 3y ago
Alternative/fun sci-fi plot: The aliens who sped up our evolution by artificially limiting our lifespans did so via relatively sloppy means and there is in fact an “off” switch waiting on some grad student to stumble upon
- gumby 3y ago
  Some alien crashed on this planet about 4.5 Gy ago so made some proteins and nucleic and released them on the planet. Once it started recombining the alien went to sleep or maybe to play some video games while waiting for this process to develop space flight and send some probes that the alien's buddies might encounter and read the message encoded in the DNA: "Hey, could you please swing by and pick me up? My ship got a flat and I don't have a spare"
Teever 3y ago
Now make the same argument about proteins and other nutrients in general. Like, 'The idea that the human body has the formula for living 99% right and it just 'forgot' to make enough of protein X...' and if we just eat enough, often enough... Our bodies weren't designed to work in this environment. They just came to work well enough in an environment like this. That means that there are issues with them, and that they eventually fail. That doesn't mean that we can't overcome these issues like we have overcome others with the use of technology. Anti-aging is like any other technology that we use. It modifies us or our environment for a desired purpose. Is any technology flawless? No. Have they revolutionized our lives and made how the average human lives almost inconceivable to humans from 100kya? Totally. Are we on the cusp of technological developments that will make how we live further unrecognizable. Totally. IVG, artificial wombs, anti-aging/age-reversal, lab grown organs, automatic limb generation (like a salemander). Are all coming and will irrevocably change the human condition. And some of these things are coming in the next decade. Maybe you're right, and we can't have an infinite life span, but I bet we could double life/healthspan, and I think that is coming very soon.
- TimPC 3y ago
  Double lifespan sounds like a nightmare if we don't dramatically change all of society first. I don't think it's possible to make that work unless we're talking about raising a retirement age to something like 130. In that case you better be actually be roughly halving aging so that a person can still work at 130, not adding a bunch of low quality years to life.
  - Teever 3y ago
    It would be great if we could hit the pause button and 'fix' society exactly the way we want it, but that isn't how it works, so we'll have to roll with the technological innovations and adapt society as they come.
  - tenpies 3y ago
    > Double lifespan sounds like a nightmare if we don't dramatically change all of society first. See I'm not worried because odds are this won't be a simple intervention. It won't be "take this pill daily to 2X your lifespan". It will likely be an incredible effort that takes constant discipline and daily commitment. And most people simply are incapable or unwilling to do that. I expect only fraction of a percent to maybe do the work necessary, and even then, it will come at a huge personal expense.
  - mullingitover 3y ago
    There's a simple recipe for ultra-long life that's guaranteed to work, and would work via the traditional mechanisms of evolution: progressively raise the childbearing age for a group of people over many generations. Start by only allowing childbirth at age 30 or so, then every few generations you raise it more. It would take time, but eventually you could have people living for centuries. It would have the advantage that society would slowly and naturally adapt to it as longevity increased.
    - SoftTalker 3y ago
      Good luck with your eugenics project. Society rejected the notion quite a while ago.
wpietri 3y ago
For sure. It's as foolish to me as somebody thinking they can keep a classic car going forever if they just use a better motor oil. In the early days of the automobile, Ford sent people around to junkyards to look at their cars. They were looking for two things. One was obvious; they were looking for things that consistently failed too soon, so they could make them better. The other was to look for things that had a lot of life left in them, so they could make them cheaper. The net result: a car that was great when new, did pretty well for a while, and then had thing after thing going wrong with it, such that it was just time to get a new one. Evolution is, like Ford, an unsentimental optimizer. I believe bodies are basically the same deal as cars. That's certainly how people talk about getting old; everything starts to wear out at around the same time. Doctors are happy to fight individual problems, but even in the best hospitals, doctors will get to the point where somebody has too many problems, is too medically fragile, for them to treat anything. And from the perspective of one's genes, that's fine. Like people buy new cars, genes build shiny new bodies so they can continue roving the world. With an infinite supply of new bodies available, why would they make any individual one such that it could last forever? Much better to build cheap and replace every so often. The frequency of "so often" changes for the circumstance, but the pattern doesn't.
- gumby 3y ago
  > Evolution is, like Ford, an unsentimental optimizer. I certainly won't argue with this position, but note that evolution is a peephole optimizer, rather than trying newton's method, much less trying to optimize with a goal in mind. It does seem most people draw the wrong conclusion from the ape-to-man drawing (e.g. https://www.kindpng.com/picc/m/408-4084640_evolution-ape-to-man-theory-of-evolution-illustrated.png https://www.kindpng.com/picc/m/408-4084640_evolution-ape-to-... ) It's a random walk: each set of die rolls is continually tested on local (i.e. contemporary) conditions. You may have superior lifespan but live where people commonly die in floods. Only broad signals (e.g. ambient temperatures ranging between -10 and 40 C) really determine widespread attributes. So what? Well 300 My of human evolution has included feedback loops uncommon and later unknown to other animals: speech, writing, and the social structures they afforded; hygene and other medical intervention; etc, and they do feed back into evolution even at the slow rate at which humans reproduce. Now we can (poorly) do genetic intervention, it's quite possible to subject humans to more rapid evolutionary pressure (most of it likely driven by fashion), with an attempt to move to goal-directed rather than peephole optimization.
devnullbrain 3y ago
Human evolution doesn't care about life after prehistoric child-rearing. It has no reason to optimise for longevity. HGH has deleterious health effects when abused. But it can also make you a famous movie star living a life of luxury whose children will never have to work. Our personal goals have very different parameters to what defined our evolution. There are also other things that the human body benefits from but can't make itself. Creatine, essential amino acids, essential minerals and vitamins.
- SoftTalker 3y ago
  I'd disagree that evolution doesn't care about longevity. There could be survival benefit to have grandparents around to help take care of kids while the parents are hunting or whatever. But after a point, it's a negative, as the young would have to spend disproportionate resources caring for and feeding the elderly who don't really provide any value anymore. The old of all species die and make room for the (hopefully larger) generation of the young.
  - etothepii 3y ago
    This is not true if all creatures, Human Fish, Lobsters etc.
ddingus 3y ago
I know exactly why. And I agree with our parent commenter, BTW. The down votes are from people who want to believe. And I won't blame or judge them. It is an ugly, extremely likely truth. Who wants to die? Not me, not on current timelines. After a longer time? Maybe. We may tire of the world or something. But otherwise, yeah. Our condition is amazing! We all get this free ticket to our world, and there is no where near enough time to fully appreciate it.
dempedempe 3y ago
I think they're being downvoted for the meth comment. I agree with everything OP and you said, but the meth example is a bit hyperbolic - the downsides to meth consumption would surely be felt much sooner than any theoretical downsides of the protein mentioned in the article.
sheepscreek 3y ago
I think it’s more analogous to our body sustaining damage it can’t reverse on its own. Think about clogged arteries or bad lungs. Using external intervention (aka surgery), we can already remedy these situations to an extent. The methods aren’t great today (immunosuppressants suck), but soon - we’ll be able to grow organs compatible with our DNA using our own stem cells. So hypothetically, you can live eternally if you can figure out a way to solve every possible breakdown before the heart stops or neurons start dying. It’s a bit like keeping a car running forever, and maintaining it without ever turning it off. Will it be a massive engineering challenge? Yes. Will it be expensive? Likely. Is it impossible? No - nothing jumps at me that would make it impossible. For the heart and lung part, we already have ways to keep the body functioning without a working heart or lungs temporarily[1]. We can even handle failed kidneys[2]. As far as I can see, our biggest challenge is identifying the point where physiological processes stop working, causing irreversible damage. And the biggest unfixable damage is losing your memory (if the respective neurons die). Everything else is akin to changing a tires or batteries or engine. 1. Cardiopulmonary bypass machine, or a heart-lung machine 2. Kidney Dialysis

newZWhoDis 3y ago

Alternative/fun sci-fi plot: The aliens who sped up our evolution by artificially limiting our lifespans did so via relatively sloppy means and there is in fact an “off” switch waiting on some grad student to stumble upon

gumby 3y ago
Some alien crashed on this planet about 4.5 Gy ago so made some proteins and nucleic and released them on the planet. Once it started recombining the alien went to sleep or maybe to play some video games while waiting for this process to develop space flight and send some probes that the alien's buddies might encounter and read the message encoded in the DNA: "Hey, could you please swing by and pick me up? My ship got a flat and I don't have a spare"

Teever 3y ago

Now make the same argument about proteins and other nutrients in general. Like, 'The idea that the human body has the formula for living 99% right and it just 'forgot' to make enough of protein X...' and if we just eat enough, often enough... Our bodies weren't designed to work in this environment. They just came to work well enough in an environment like this. That means that there are issues with them, and that they eventually fail. That doesn't mean that we can't overcome these issues like we have overcome others with the use of technology. Anti-aging is like any other technology that we use. It modifies us or our environment for a desired purpose. Is any technology flawless? No. Have they revolutionized our lives and made how the average human lives almost inconceivable to humans from 100kya? Totally. Are we on the cusp of technological developments that will make how we live further unrecognizable. Totally. IVG, artificial wombs, anti-aging/age-reversal, lab grown organs, automatic limb generation (like a salemander). Are all coming and will irrevocably change the human condition. And some of these things are coming in the next decade. Maybe you're right, and we can't have an infinite life span, but I bet we could double life/healthspan, and I think that is coming very soon.

TimPC 3y ago
Double lifespan sounds like a nightmare if we don't dramatically change all of society first. I don't think it's possible to make that work unless we're talking about raising a retirement age to something like 130. In that case you better be actually be roughly halving aging so that a person can still work at 130, not adding a bunch of low quality years to life.
- Teever 3y ago
  It would be great if we could hit the pause button and 'fix' society exactly the way we want it, but that isn't how it works, so we'll have to roll with the technological innovations and adapt society as they come.
- tenpies 3y ago
  > Double lifespan sounds like a nightmare if we don't dramatically change all of society first. See I'm not worried because odds are this won't be a simple intervention. It won't be "take this pill daily to 2X your lifespan". It will likely be an incredible effort that takes constant discipline and daily commitment. And most people simply are incapable or unwilling to do that. I expect only fraction of a percent to maybe do the work necessary, and even then, it will come at a huge personal expense.
- mullingitover 3y ago
  There's a simple recipe for ultra-long life that's guaranteed to work, and would work via the traditional mechanisms of evolution: progressively raise the childbearing age for a group of people over many generations. Start by only allowing childbirth at age 30 or so, then every few generations you raise it more. It would take time, but eventually you could have people living for centuries. It would have the advantage that society would slowly and naturally adapt to it as longevity increased.
  - SoftTalker 3y ago
    Good luck with your eugenics project. Society rejected the notion quite a while ago.

wpietri 3y ago

For sure. It's as foolish to me as somebody thinking they can keep a classic car going forever if they just use a better motor oil. In the early days of the automobile, Ford sent people around to junkyards to look at their cars. They were looking for two things. One was obvious; they were looking for things that consistently failed too soon, so they could make them better. The other was to look for things that had a lot of life left in them, so they could make them cheaper. The net result: a car that was great when new, did pretty well for a while, and then had thing after thing going wrong with it, such that it was just time to get a new one. Evolution is, like Ford, an unsentimental optimizer. I believe bodies are basically the same deal as cars. That's certainly how people talk about getting old; everything starts to wear out at around the same time. Doctors are happy to fight individual problems, but even in the best hospitals, doctors will get to the point where somebody has too many problems, is too medically fragile, for them to treat anything. And from the perspective of one's genes, that's fine. Like people buy new cars, genes build shiny new bodies so they can continue roving the world. With an infinite supply of new bodies available, why would they make any individual one such that it could last forever? Much better to build cheap and replace every so often. The frequency of "so often" changes for the circumstance, but the pattern doesn't.

gumby 3y ago
> Evolution is, like Ford, an unsentimental optimizer. I certainly won't argue with this position, but note that evolution is a peephole optimizer, rather than trying newton's method, much less trying to optimize with a goal in mind. It does seem most people draw the wrong conclusion from the ape-to-man drawing (e.g. https://www.kindpng.com/picc/m/408-4084640_evolution-ape-to-man-theory-of-evolution-illustrated.png https://www.kindpng.com/picc/m/408-4084640_evolution-ape-to-... ) It's a random walk: each set of die rolls is continually tested on local (i.e. contemporary) conditions. You may have superior lifespan but live where people commonly die in floods. Only broad signals (e.g. ambient temperatures ranging between -10 and 40 C) really determine widespread attributes. So what? Well 300 My of human evolution has included feedback loops uncommon and later unknown to other animals: speech, writing, and the social structures they afforded; hygene and other medical intervention; etc, and they do feed back into evolution even at the slow rate at which humans reproduce. Now we can (poorly) do genetic intervention, it's quite possible to subject humans to more rapid evolutionary pressure (most of it likely driven by fashion), with an attempt to move to goal-directed rather than peephole optimization.

devnullbrain 3y ago

Human evolution doesn't care about life after prehistoric child-rearing. It has no reason to optimise for longevity. HGH has deleterious health effects when abused. But it can also make you a famous movie star living a life of luxury whose children will never have to work. Our personal goals have very different parameters to what defined our evolution. There are also other things that the human body benefits from but can't make itself. Creatine, essential amino acids, essential minerals and vitamins.

SoftTalker 3y ago
I'd disagree that evolution doesn't care about longevity. There could be survival benefit to have grandparents around to help take care of kids while the parents are hunting or whatever. But after a point, it's a negative, as the young would have to spend disproportionate resources caring for and feeding the elderly who don't really provide any value anymore. The old of all species die and make room for the (hopefully larger) generation of the young.
- etothepii 3y ago
  This is not true if all creatures, Human Fish, Lobsters etc.

ddingus 3y ago

I know exactly why. And I agree with our parent commenter, BTW. The down votes are from people who want to believe. And I won't blame or judge them. It is an ugly, extremely likely truth. Who wants to die? Not me, not on current timelines. After a longer time? Maybe. We may tire of the world or something. But otherwise, yeah. Our condition is amazing! We all get this free ticket to our world, and there is no where near enough time to fully appreciate it.

dempedempe 3y ago

I think they're being downvoted for the meth comment. I agree with everything OP and you said, but the meth example is a bit hyperbolic - the downsides to meth consumption would surely be felt much sooner than any theoretical downsides of the protein mentioned in the article.

sheepscreek 3y ago

I think it’s more analogous to our body sustaining damage it can’t reverse on its own. Think about clogged arteries or bad lungs. Using external intervention (aka surgery), we can already remedy these situations to an extent. The methods aren’t great today (immunosuppressants suck), but soon - we’ll be able to grow organs compatible with our DNA using our own stem cells. So hypothetically, you can live eternally if you can figure out a way to solve every possible breakdown before the heart stops or neurons start dying. It’s a bit like keeping a car running forever, and maintaining it without ever turning it off. Will it be a massive engineering challenge? Yes. Will it be expensive? Likely. Is it impossible? No - nothing jumps at me that would make it impossible. For the heart and lung part, we already have ways to keep the body functioning without a working heart or lungs temporarily[1]. We can even handle failed kidneys[2]. As far as I can see, our biggest challenge is identifying the point where physiological processes stop working, causing irreversible damage. And the biggest unfixable damage is losing your memory (if the respective neurons die). Everything else is akin to changing a tires or batteries or engine. 1. Cardiopulmonary bypass machine, or a heart-lung machine 2. Kidney Dialysis