6 ms·

Experiencing scientific revolutions: the 1660s and the 2020s

70 points by arbesman 3y ago

ck2 3y ago
My pet peeve is when people start saying life-extension is around the corner. No it's not, there is just a lot of hype and a lot of money behind that hype. They cannot even cure the most basic aging diseases like Raynauds and so many others, they don't even really understand them. They can't even detect long-covid, forget treating it and definitely not curing it. Basically the world ends with half the population getting long-covid over the next 100 years if they don't figure it out because for all the studies there is zero true understanding and zero cures. Forgive a twitter link but he said it well https://twitter.com/EricTopol/status/1689303073494335488 https://twitter.com/EricTopol/status/1689303073494335488
- Swizec 3y ago
  > My pet peeve is when people start saying life-extension is around the corner. But life extension is already here! We used to be quite old by 65, now you have people completing iron mans in their 80's. One of the biggest looming economic threats is that everyone is old and there aren't enough young'uns. That sure sounds like we're dying a lot later than we used to. Data says we've gone from 5-20% of the population over 65yo in the 1950's to 15-75% in 2023. 36% of americans are older than 65, that's a lot. https://ageingshift.economist.com/ https://ageingshift.economist.com/
  - suslik 3y ago
    I suspect OP means life extension through directly targeting the nmolecular mechanisms of aging - "Howarth's clock", telomerases, transcription factors etc.
    - rnk 3y ago
      David Sinclair has entered the chat.
      - seer 3y ago
        Not sure the satire at play here? Is it because he gets mentioned a lot when people refer to outdated science about aging, or that he himself is quite active in the media?
      - suslik 3y ago
        Not really, I am not a big enthusiast of all that stuff to put it mildly - just saying that’s what prople usually mean by life extension these days.
  - somenameforme 3y ago
    The primary reason populations are getting older is due to lower fertility rates. A fertility rate of "N" results in a generational ratio of 1 person of the current (older) generation to (N/2) of the next (younger) generation. So a fertility rate of 2 means the current (older) generation will be exactly the same size as the subsequent (younger) generation. But if we assume a fertility rate of 1, which is the direction most developed countries are headed, then each successive (younger) generation will be half as large as the (older) one before. This means society will be disproportionately composed of the ever-more elderly, with socioeconomic chaos, or Logan's Run, soon to follow. This would, counterintuitively, be true even if life expectancy was low. If we all died at 50 you'd just end up with a society with a larger and larger chunk of your population around 50 years old, until eventually there was no population left at all. And, vice versa, a fertility rate of e.g. 6 (as is the case in some places in Africa), means that each successive (younger) generation will be 3x as large as the previous (older) one. So you will always have extremely low mean and median ages in this context, again regardless of whether life expectancy was high or low.
  - aleph_minus_one 3y ago
    > now you have people completing iron mans in their 80's. > One of the biggest looming economic threats is that everyone is old and there aren't enough young'uns. If you can complete an iron man, you are also suitable for work.
- fnordpiglet 3y ago
  I’m not entirely sure I agree - the advances we’ve made in cancer treatment certainly will improve life expectancy and will improve quality of life in aging. Further a lot has been accomplished in terms of identifying amino acids and other gross systemic declines that can easily be supplemented and improve aging. A lot of aging pathways are being explored and identified. I think we are not going to see a juice box elixir of youth but a steady improvement that accelerates. Long covid is three years old. That’s absurd to use as a comparison.
- seer 3y ago
  Maybe you’ve missed the longevity science developments in the last 5-10 years. We’ve mostly understood exactly what “aging” is, and are now on our way of nudging it in various directions with very promising results in mice. The lifespan podcast can be a nice primer to where we are right now. Though its such a fast moving field it might be out of date now already. The last paper I saw had some great results in primates, human trials maybe this year. https://twitter.com/davidasinclair/status/1679178670743732249?s=46&t=A3w55ED5PoLZYl-V8kz81g https://twitter.com/davidasinclair/status/167917867074373224... So while we’ve “always” been about to cure aging, this time its actually closer to real than ever before. More over, since we understand the reasons for aging, there are things you can do to extend life that don’t involve medication. Like traditional techniques that we know work, but now we’re aware exactly why. Like fasting for example. And its not just the actual age you die that can be affected but how you feel throughout your life - e.g. how “young” you feel. And the great thing is that those techniques have been tested in various cultures around the world for centuries, so there is some actual data to back things up, and with the recent discoveries we can separate the things that actually made a difference with the pageantry and the irrelevant or bad stuff, and get you to live at the longest your genes can do, maybe even a bit longer. The truly great thing for me is that we now apparently can measure biological age accurately without having to wait for people to die to add to a datapoint, so that we can quickly iterate, and obviously we’ll need to wait for decades to be sure and prove stuff without a shadow of doubt, but seems to me we might be closer than ever before!
  - p1esk 3y ago
    Other than calorie restriction, is there a method to extend mice lifespan? I mean actually extending it. For example if the natural lifespan is 3 years, can we now reliably get 4 or 5 years?
    - adrian_b 3y ago
      Lifespan extension has been observed in studies which have restricted either calorie intake or protein intake or only methionine intake. I have not seen any studies that clarify whether calorie restriction has any effects beyond those caused by the protein restriction included in the calorie-restricted diet and whether protein restriction has any effects beyond those caused by the methionine restriction inherent to a protein-restricted diet. Methionine is required for the initiation of any protein synthesis, so presumably when it is deficient the global rate of protein synthesis in the body is lowered, which is what might be the cause of the extension of the lifespan. However this may cause problems when a high rate of protein synthesis is needed, e.g. in cases of diseases or accidents.
- f6v 3y ago
  Two things can be true at the same time. Long Covid is not understood well. Still, senolytics are already in the clinical trials. And we’re getting better and better at understanding the underlying molecular mechanisms or ageing.
- somenameforme 3y ago
  This is also a pet peeve of mine, but I think an even more compelling argument is simply to look at how long people lived in the past. For instance, just among the Founding Fathers - John Adams lived to 90, Sam Adams to 81, Ben Franklin to 84, John Jay to 83, Thomas Jefferson to 83, James Madison to 85. The only person that didn't make it to their 50s, Alexander Hamilton, was killed in a duel (by the current vice president, at the time, no less). Most people know about low life expectancies in the past, but then extrapolate that to your expected age of age of death, but that's completely wrong. Low life expectancies were owing almost entirely to extremely high rates of infant mortality. If one guy lives to 80, and another dies shortly after birth - you now have a life expectancy of 40 years. The peaks of human longevity don't seem to have changed much, if at all, for millennia. More people are able to hit those peaks, but that's generally owing to pretty simple advancements like antibiotics, as well as doing away with what were probably overtly harmful treatments. For instance George Washington died relatively young at 67. And while there is some debate on the exact cause, there's reason to believe that his treatment contributed to it. He was being leeched, which was supposed to balance out the 4 humors of the body by drawing out 'bad blood.' And people were reaching the same heights of longevity in the context of that being the bleeding edge of medicine.
  - otabdeveloper4 3y ago
    When mankind had become corrupted in the period preceding the flood, God said: 'My spirit shall not abide in man for ever, for he is flesh; his days shall be a hundred and twenty years' (Gen. 6:3). This probably dates back to the early bronze age or even the neolithic. For all the hype it seems human biology hasn't changed since the appearance of humans.
    - dtho 3y ago
      Another biblical example is Psalm 90:10: "Our days may come to seventy years, or eighty, if our strength endures; yet the best of them are but trouble and sorrow, for they quickly pass, and we fly away."
  - retrac 3y ago
    That sounds about right. Though George Washington was probably about average age for his time. I did some back of envelope math once which came to about 10 years. That is to say, absent wars and famines, through most of human history, if you made it to the age of ten, you had about equal odds to making it to 70. Today it's about 80. Among the very long-lived in my own family, until the end and final decline, they have often never been seriously sick and have never had any major medical care in their adult lives. Such good luck seems to have also been known to happen to the ancients, if perhaps slightly less often.
- notahacker 3y ago
  Even worse, this claims the goal has been "achieved" I think the science on "the Attaining Gigantick Dimensions" is more robust and widely implemented
- nradov 3y ago
  Long COVID isn't worth worrying about for most of us. Most any serious viral infection can potentially cause post-viral fatigue syndrome and SARS-CoV-2 is nothing special. Only a small fraction of the population is susceptible, way less than "half". While we should try to find effective treatments for those patients it's hardly the end of the world. Stop being a catastrophist. Eric Topol is an alarmist attention seeker and not taken seriously in the field. I wouldn't believe anything he says without extensive independent validation.
  - AniseAbyss 3y ago
    [dead]
upwardbound 3y ago
Boyle's goals were super creative! A lot of them have been reiterated by the modern-day Transhumanist movement (longevity, expanding the mind, reducing the need for sleep, etc etc), and some of them sound like Marvel superpowers (e.g. the ability to grow gigantic is one of Ant-Man's powers). And he foresaw the need for a way to remain and work underwater! Super imaginative.
- notahacker 3y ago
  "The Emulating of Fish without Engines by Custome and Education only" is certainly not a futurist goal I was expecting to see
- cb321 3y ago
  Boyle's "growing giant" idea probably at least partly inspired Jonathan Swift's Brobdingnagians in Gulliver's Travels several decades later in 1726.. maybe the natural inverse the Lilliputians. By the 1800s Mary Shelly & Jules Verne would strike out a bit further on speculative-technologico-science fiction. Things picked up with HG Wells, and by The Atomic Age imagination literally exploded even before comic books got popular.. :-) Asimov's 1966 Fantastic Voyage was likely more inspirational to the 1970s _Ant Man_ than Boyle. I wonder if Asimov knew of Boyle (or was derivative of other things - no dis meant to Asimov - dude was The Master).
  - stonogo 3y ago
    I'd wager pretty heavily that Asimov, with a doctorate in chemistry, would have been exposed to Boyle at some point, what with the ideal gas law bearing his name.
    - cb321 3y ago
      Agreed! I would not take the other side of that bet! :-) Asimov sure liked to type words on a typewriter, too. So, he may well have even documented such. Just to point out the perhaps obvious, though, in terms of the history of that specific idea, long shadows of things / your body / arms / head around sunrise / sunset could probably inspire this vague concept (in the embiggen direction) in people pre-historically. The idea can be re-cast as just "make such projection/optics 'more' real".
hexo 3y ago
90% of those arent real or anything particularly new in 2020s era. boring
frereubu 3y ago
There's a fascinating book containing short first-person accounts of living through the industrial revolution called Pandaemonium: Coming of the Machine as Seen by Contemporary Observers edited and with notes by Humphrey Jennings. It covers 1660-1886, and it's one of the few books that genuinely blew my mind. It's extremely accessible because of the first-person nature of the accounts, and I think one of the reason it's so compelling is that you can feel the change sweeping through so many aspects of daily life. I find it a very interesting lens through which to look at the current digital revolution.
- nerdponx 3y ago
  I've been looking for exactly this: first-hand accounts of technological progress and societal change in the 17th and 18th centuries. It's a fascinating time in history.
  - throw0101a 3y ago
    You may be interested in Liberty's dawn: a people's history of the Industrial Revolution > This remarkable book looks at hundreds of autobiographies penned between 1760 and 1900 to offer an intimate firsthand account of how the Industrial Revolution was experienced by the working class. The Industrial Revolution brought not simply misery and poverty. On the contrary, Griffin shows how it raised incomes, improved literacy, and offered exciting opportunities for political action. For many, this was a period of new, and much valued, sexual and cultural freedom. * https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300205251/libertys-dawn/ https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300205251/libertys-dawn/
- jmacd 3y ago
  That book sounds like a great read. It appears to be hard to find however!
  - synkarius 3y ago
    It's on Amazon. https://www.amazon.com/Pandaemonium-1660-1886-Machine-Contemporary-Observers-ebook/dp/B00KFEJKTS https://www.amazon.com/Pandaemonium-1660-1886-Machine-Contem...
hcmacro 3y ago
And not too many years later, Northern Europe went to war with the Sun King. Longevity regression is equally likely if that happens again.

70 points by arbesman 3y ago

ck2 3y ago

My pet peeve is when people start saying life-extension is around the corner. No it's not, there is just a lot of hype and a lot of money behind that hype. They cannot even cure the most basic aging diseases like Raynauds and so many others, they don't even really understand them. They can't even detect long-covid, forget treating it and definitely not curing it. Basically the world ends with half the population getting long-covid over the next 100 years if they don't figure it out because for all the studies there is zero true understanding and zero cures. Forgive a twitter link but he said it well https://twitter.com/EricTopol/status/1689303073494335488 https://twitter.com/EricTopol/status/1689303073494335488

Swizec 3y ago
> My pet peeve is when people start saying life-extension is around the corner. But life extension is already here! We used to be quite old by 65, now you have people completing iron mans in their 80's. One of the biggest looming economic threats is that everyone is old and there aren't enough young'uns. That sure sounds like we're dying a lot later than we used to. Data says we've gone from 5-20% of the population over 65yo in the 1950's to 15-75% in 2023. 36% of americans are older than 65, that's a lot. https://ageingshift.economist.com/ https://ageingshift.economist.com/
- suslik 3y ago
  I suspect OP means life extension through directly targeting the nmolecular mechanisms of aging - "Howarth's clock", telomerases, transcription factors etc.
  - rnk 3y ago
    David Sinclair has entered the chat.
    - seer 3y ago
      Not sure the satire at play here? Is it because he gets mentioned a lot when people refer to outdated science about aging, or that he himself is quite active in the media?
    - suslik 3y ago
      Not really, I am not a big enthusiast of all that stuff to put it mildly - just saying that’s what prople usually mean by life extension these days.
- somenameforme 3y ago
  The primary reason populations are getting older is due to lower fertility rates. A fertility rate of "N" results in a generational ratio of 1 person of the current (older) generation to (N/2) of the next (younger) generation. So a fertility rate of 2 means the current (older) generation will be exactly the same size as the subsequent (younger) generation. But if we assume a fertility rate of 1, which is the direction most developed countries are headed, then each successive (younger) generation will be half as large as the (older) one before. This means society will be disproportionately composed of the ever-more elderly, with socioeconomic chaos, or Logan's Run, soon to follow. This would, counterintuitively, be true even if life expectancy was low. If we all died at 50 you'd just end up with a society with a larger and larger chunk of your population around 50 years old, until eventually there was no population left at all. And, vice versa, a fertility rate of e.g. 6 (as is the case in some places in Africa), means that each successive (younger) generation will be 3x as large as the previous (older) one. So you will always have extremely low mean and median ages in this context, again regardless of whether life expectancy was high or low.
- aleph_minus_one 3y ago
  > now you have people completing iron mans in their 80's. > One of the biggest looming economic threats is that everyone is old and there aren't enough young'uns. If you can complete an iron man, you are also suitable for work.
fnordpiglet 3y ago
I’m not entirely sure I agree - the advances we’ve made in cancer treatment certainly will improve life expectancy and will improve quality of life in aging. Further a lot has been accomplished in terms of identifying amino acids and other gross systemic declines that can easily be supplemented and improve aging. A lot of aging pathways are being explored and identified. I think we are not going to see a juice box elixir of youth but a steady improvement that accelerates. Long covid is three years old. That’s absurd to use as a comparison.
seer 3y ago
Maybe you’ve missed the longevity science developments in the last 5-10 years. We’ve mostly understood exactly what “aging” is, and are now on our way of nudging it in various directions with very promising results in mice. The lifespan podcast can be a nice primer to where we are right now. Though its such a fast moving field it might be out of date now already. The last paper I saw had some great results in primates, human trials maybe this year. https://twitter.com/davidasinclair/status/1679178670743732249?s=46&t=A3w55ED5PoLZYl-V8kz81g https://twitter.com/davidasinclair/status/167917867074373224... So while we’ve “always” been about to cure aging, this time its actually closer to real than ever before. More over, since we understand the reasons for aging, there are things you can do to extend life that don’t involve medication. Like traditional techniques that we know work, but now we’re aware exactly why. Like fasting for example. And its not just the actual age you die that can be affected but how you feel throughout your life - e.g. how “young” you feel. And the great thing is that those techniques have been tested in various cultures around the world for centuries, so there is some actual data to back things up, and with the recent discoveries we can separate the things that actually made a difference with the pageantry and the irrelevant or bad stuff, and get you to live at the longest your genes can do, maybe even a bit longer. The truly great thing for me is that we now apparently can measure biological age accurately without having to wait for people to die to add to a datapoint, so that we can quickly iterate, and obviously we’ll need to wait for decades to be sure and prove stuff without a shadow of doubt, but seems to me we might be closer than ever before!
- p1esk 3y ago
  Other than calorie restriction, is there a method to extend mice lifespan? I mean actually extending it. For example if the natural lifespan is 3 years, can we now reliably get 4 or 5 years?
  - adrian_b 3y ago
    Lifespan extension has been observed in studies which have restricted either calorie intake or protein intake or only methionine intake. I have not seen any studies that clarify whether calorie restriction has any effects beyond those caused by the protein restriction included in the calorie-restricted diet and whether protein restriction has any effects beyond those caused by the methionine restriction inherent to a protein-restricted diet. Methionine is required for the initiation of any protein synthesis, so presumably when it is deficient the global rate of protein synthesis in the body is lowered, which is what might be the cause of the extension of the lifespan. However this may cause problems when a high rate of protein synthesis is needed, e.g. in cases of diseases or accidents.
f6v 3y ago
Two things can be true at the same time. Long Covid is not understood well. Still, senolytics are already in the clinical trials. And we’re getting better and better at understanding the underlying molecular mechanisms or ageing.
somenameforme 3y ago
This is also a pet peeve of mine, but I think an even more compelling argument is simply to look at how long people lived in the past. For instance, just among the Founding Fathers - John Adams lived to 90, Sam Adams to 81, Ben Franklin to 84, John Jay to 83, Thomas Jefferson to 83, James Madison to 85. The only person that didn't make it to their 50s, Alexander Hamilton, was killed in a duel (by the current vice president, at the time, no less). Most people know about low life expectancies in the past, but then extrapolate that to your expected age of age of death, but that's completely wrong. Low life expectancies were owing almost entirely to extremely high rates of infant mortality. If one guy lives to 80, and another dies shortly after birth - you now have a life expectancy of 40 years. The peaks of human longevity don't seem to have changed much, if at all, for millennia. More people are able to hit those peaks, but that's generally owing to pretty simple advancements like antibiotics, as well as doing away with what were probably overtly harmful treatments. For instance George Washington died relatively young at 67. And while there is some debate on the exact cause, there's reason to believe that his treatment contributed to it. He was being leeched, which was supposed to balance out the 4 humors of the body by drawing out 'bad blood.' And people were reaching the same heights of longevity in the context of that being the bleeding edge of medicine.
- otabdeveloper4 3y ago
  When mankind had become corrupted in the period preceding the flood, God said: 'My spirit shall not abide in man for ever, for he is flesh; his days shall be a hundred and twenty years' (Gen. 6:3). This probably dates back to the early bronze age or even the neolithic. For all the hype it seems human biology hasn't changed since the appearance of humans.
  - dtho 3y ago
    Another biblical example is Psalm 90:10: "Our days may come to seventy years, or eighty, if our strength endures; yet the best of them are but trouble and sorrow, for they quickly pass, and we fly away."
- retrac 3y ago
  That sounds about right. Though George Washington was probably about average age for his time. I did some back of envelope math once which came to about 10 years. That is to say, absent wars and famines, through most of human history, if you made it to the age of ten, you had about equal odds to making it to 70. Today it's about 80. Among the very long-lived in my own family, until the end and final decline, they have often never been seriously sick and have never had any major medical care in their adult lives. Such good luck seems to have also been known to happen to the ancients, if perhaps slightly less often.
notahacker 3y ago
Even worse, this claims the goal has been "achieved" I think the science on "the Attaining Gigantick Dimensions" is more robust and widely implemented
nradov 3y ago
Long COVID isn't worth worrying about for most of us. Most any serious viral infection can potentially cause post-viral fatigue syndrome and SARS-CoV-2 is nothing special. Only a small fraction of the population is susceptible, way less than "half". While we should try to find effective treatments for those patients it's hardly the end of the world. Stop being a catastrophist. Eric Topol is an alarmist attention seeker and not taken seriously in the field. I wouldn't believe anything he says without extensive independent validation.
- AniseAbyss 3y ago
  [dead]

upwardbound 3y ago

Boyle's goals were super creative! A lot of them have been reiterated by the modern-day Transhumanist movement (longevity, expanding the mind, reducing the need for sleep, etc etc), and some of them sound like Marvel superpowers (e.g. the ability to grow gigantic is one of Ant-Man's powers). And he foresaw the need for a way to remain and work underwater! Super imaginative.

notahacker 3y ago
"The Emulating of Fish without Engines by Custome and Education only" is certainly not a futurist goal I was expecting to see
cb321 3y ago
Boyle's "growing giant" idea probably at least partly inspired Jonathan Swift's Brobdingnagians in Gulliver's Travels several decades later in 1726.. maybe the natural inverse the Lilliputians. By the 1800s Mary Shelly & Jules Verne would strike out a bit further on speculative-technologico-science fiction. Things picked up with HG Wells, and by The Atomic Age imagination literally exploded even before comic books got popular.. :-) Asimov's 1966 Fantastic Voyage was likely more inspirational to the 1970s _Ant Man_ than Boyle. I wonder if Asimov knew of Boyle (or was derivative of other things - no dis meant to Asimov - dude was The Master).
- stonogo 3y ago
  I'd wager pretty heavily that Asimov, with a doctorate in chemistry, would have been exposed to Boyle at some point, what with the ideal gas law bearing his name.
  - cb321 3y ago
    Agreed! I would not take the other side of that bet! :-) Asimov sure liked to type words on a typewriter, too. So, he may well have even documented such. Just to point out the perhaps obvious, though, in terms of the history of that specific idea, long shadows of things / your body / arms / head around sunrise / sunset could probably inspire this vague concept (in the embiggen direction) in people pre-historically. The idea can be re-cast as just "make such projection/optics 'more' real".

hexo 3y ago

90% of those arent real or anything particularly new in 2020s era. boring

frereubu 3y ago

There's a fascinating book containing short first-person accounts of living through the industrial revolution called Pandaemonium: Coming of the Machine as Seen by Contemporary Observers edited and with notes by Humphrey Jennings. It covers 1660-1886, and it's one of the few books that genuinely blew my mind. It's extremely accessible because of the first-person nature of the accounts, and I think one of the reason it's so compelling is that you can feel the change sweeping through so many aspects of daily life. I find it a very interesting lens through which to look at the current digital revolution.

nerdponx 3y ago
I've been looking for exactly this: first-hand accounts of technological progress and societal change in the 17th and 18th centuries. It's a fascinating time in history.
- throw0101a 3y ago
  You may be interested in Liberty's dawn: a people's history of the Industrial Revolution > This remarkable book looks at hundreds of autobiographies penned between 1760 and 1900 to offer an intimate firsthand account of how the Industrial Revolution was experienced by the working class. The Industrial Revolution brought not simply misery and poverty. On the contrary, Griffin shows how it raised incomes, improved literacy, and offered exciting opportunities for political action. For many, this was a period of new, and much valued, sexual and cultural freedom. * https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300205251/libertys-dawn/ https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300205251/libertys-dawn/
jmacd 3y ago
That book sounds like a great read. It appears to be hard to find however!
- synkarius 3y ago
  It's on Amazon. https://www.amazon.com/Pandaemonium-1660-1886-Machine-Contemporary-Observers-ebook/dp/B00KFEJKTS https://www.amazon.com/Pandaemonium-1660-1886-Machine-Contem...

hcmacro 3y ago

And not too many years later, Northern Europe went to war with the Sun King. Longevity regression is equally likely if that happens again.