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There is no physical/chemical/biological reason you can’t live indefinitely with the health and vitality of a 25-35 year old. Aging isn’t a law of nature.
by adastra22 1y ago
There is no physical/chemical/biological reason you can’t live indefinitely with the health and vitality of a 25-35 year old. Aging isn’t a law of nature.
- wslh 1y agoAre you watching "Alien: Earth" series?
- tokai 1y agoIt out of my wheelhouse but isn't telomeres a physical/chemical/biological reason we can't live forever?
- andrewflnr 1y agoI believe the argument would go "there's no fundamental reason we can't fix telomeres".
- chpatrick 1y agoIsn't the reason cancer? Eventually the DNA copying errors add up.
- sodality2 1y agoCancer is not fundamentally unsolvable (AFAIK?). This is a tough question to answer though. Can we prove cancer to be solvable without solving it?
- andrewflnr 1y agoThere are a handful of animals, mammals even, that essentially don't get cancer (some/all large whales and naked mole rats IIRC). So that might be solvable other ways.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- AngryData 1y agoNitpick, it is far less likely, but they can still get cancer.
- adastra22 1y agoYou also fix the copying errors.
- __turbobrew__ 1y agoWe need ECC for DNA, I could probably use a deep scrub.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> isn't telomeres a physical/chemical/biological reason we can't live forever? It’s one component, but not the only reason [1]. Naked mole rats’ telomeres do “not shorten with age but rather showed a mild elongation” [2]. They are long lived, for rodents, and don’t degrade into balls of cancer [3]. They nevertheless age. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senescence#Theories_of_aging https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senescence#Theories_of_aging [2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6651551/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6651551/ [3] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abe0174 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abe0174
- SoftTalker 1y agoOdd then that every living thing ages and eventually dies?
- conception 1y agoThis is not true and easily countered by any sort of investigation. Lobsters, flatworms, immortal jellyfish and hydras are all believed to be immortal. In fact we know how to live forever, control our telomeres. We know it works because cancer exists. We just can’t control it but controlled cancer is effectively immortality.
- jebarker 1y agoIs it true that those creatures are believed to be immortal or we’ve just never seen one die of natural causes?
- pests 1y agoI believe one listed converts back to a polyp form under bad conditions and just has another go.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago[EDIT: Biologically] immortal doesn’t mean indestructible. It just means they don’t age. Lobsters aren’t truly biologically immortal. They “continue to grow throughout their lives,” with “increasing amounts of energy” being needed to mount ans they grow larger [1]. “Eventually the cost is too high and lobsters can die from exhaustion.” (That said, if our cells aged like lobsters we’d live something like thousands of healthy years.) For true biological immortality, look to some jellyfish [2]. You literally can’t tell if a cell is taken from an old or juvenile. [1] https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/are-lobsters-immortal.html https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/are-lobsters-immortal.html [2] https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/immortal-jellyfish-secret-to-cheating-death.html https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/immortal-jellyfish-secret-to-...
- latexr 1y ago
- VincentEvans 1y agoYou haven’t quite come to grips with mortality, I think.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> You haven’t quite come to grips with mortality This is unfair, and akin to branding anyone who takes medicine as being unhinged. There is evidence we can extend our health spans. By how much and how are open questions. And if we can actually stop aging, versus slow it down, has not been demonstrated. Some people engage with this unhealthily, just as many terminally-ill cancer patients unhealthily engage with long-shot treatment options. That doesn’t make everyone taking those treatments delusional. I’d hope we more mature as a society than decrying real medical research that could materially increase our health spans because they’re heretical.
- anigbrowl 1y agoIt's the 'indefinite' part that I react negatively to. I don't have a good impression of people who are obsessed with abolishing death, as opposed to your example of maximizing quality of life (or minimizing illness) without getting too hung up on overall age.
- danielmarkbruce 1y agoThe person just said aging isn't a law of physics. They are right, you are the fool here.
- AlexandrB 1y agoActually they said: "Aging isn’t a law of nature." But it kind of is. Almost all biological organisms age and the ones that don't are much simpler than us. That's not to mention entropy which is both a law of physics and dictates an inescapable form of aging for the universe as a whole.
- 1y ago
- goeiedaggoeie 1y agoentropy comes for us all
- tristramb 1y agoBut that doesn't mean that it will be economically feasible.
- tristramb 1y agoAnd I wouldn't expect it to be, given that were are the product of billions of years of an evolutionary process that has relied on 'scrap and rebuild from scratch' as a mechanism to control errors.
- BriggyDwiggs42 1y agoThe cost of tech tends to fall as a rule. Why wouldn’t it eventually become feasible?
- croes 1y ago>There is no physical/chemical/biological reason you can’t live indefinitely Given that that the universe hasn't an indefinite life span there is at least physical reason why we can't live indefinitely.
- c22 1y agoWhen is the universe definitely going to die?
- adastra22 1y agoIndefinite doesn’t mean infinite.
- A_D_E_P_T 1y agoAssuming no proton decay, its life span (for baryonic beings such as us) is far beyond 10^1500 years, so I don't think that "lifespan of the universe" is a limiting factor here. Nobody's speaking of living an infinitely long life.
- close04 1y agoPhysical/chemical maybe not, but biologically there might be strong reasons to not allow a complex organism to live forever. Evolution might be accounting for a lot of the reasons leading to the death of the individual organism. For one it would stimulate evolution itself and also alleviate the inevitable resource pressure. A species that lives forever must adjust to reproduce relatively slowly to not overwhelm the local environment. A species that lives short lives will reproduce at much higher rates. So at any time the fewer “immortal” individuals would be vulnerable to competition from the many “mortals”, or to predators. Humans are a special case because we don’t operate only on biological imperatives so you could make immortal humans but with implications we can’t even think of now. Maybe our limitation will not be biological but societal.
- adastra22 1y agoYou are mixing up evolutionary incentives with real chemistry-driven biological constraints. The base incentives of reproduction-driven natural selection may make aging inevitable under natural selection, but that says nothing of artificial selection or bioengineering.
- close04 1y ago> You are mixing up evolutionary incentives with real chemistry-driven biological constraints > but that says nothing of artificial selection or bioengineering Feel free to be specific. Start from here and describe your revelation about my “confusion”: >> Humans are a special case because we don’t operate only on biological imperatives so you could make immortal humans Natural life o overwhelmingly selects for well defined, limited lifespans. Engineered human life likely won’t see any natural pressure but rather societal pressure to set a well defined, limited lifespan.
- adastra22 1y agoThere’s a well-known short story called “ The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant” meant to reveal how ridiculous and nonsensical society’s attitude towards death is. You seem to be taking the opinion that the society shown within, in which death is artificial and societally enforced, is ideal and something to emulate. I truly don’t know how to respond to this. If you want to die on a rigid time table, fine. Don’t take the rest of us out with you. [0]: The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant: https://nickbostrom.com/papers/the-fable-of-the-dragon-tyrant/ https://nickbostrom.com/papers/the-fable-of-the-dragon-tyran...
- vaenaes 1y ago[dead]
- tietjens 1y agoInteresting claim. Care to state your age?
- adastra22 1y agoWhy is that relevant.
- echelon 1y agoOxygen is on oxidizer and evolution only needed to keep our gene carriers optimized to reproduce within our fitness landscape trough.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> no physical/chemical/biological reason you can’t live indefinitely with the health and vitality of a 25-35 year old We don’t know this. We know of no creatures as biologically complex as humans that demonstrate biological immortality. That might be because nature never bothered. It might be because it can’t. But you are generally correct: we have strong evidence healthspan-increasing interventions are not only possible, but proximate. That research could move faster with more funding, particularly from the public, since if we relinquish this funding to the rich it will not prioritize treatments which may be slightly less effective but much cheaper and thus broadly applicable.
- adastra22 1y agoTwo points: (1) Yes we do have an example: us. Why is a baby’s cells young and healthy, and not the age of the parents? Dormant eggs are not the answer as you’d still get accumulating damage over time. Turns out there are mechanisms for cellular reprogramming which rejuvenates cells. There are mechanisms for making ages cells indistinguishable from young cells. We just haven’t fully harnessed this capability on therapeutics yet. (2) The deeper point is one of logical necessity. No bird flies faster than the speed of sound, yet that doesn’t work as an argument for the impossibility of the SR-71 or Concorde. No physical law prevents restoring tissue to healthy young state. We just haven’t developed the tools to do so (yet).
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> No physical law prevents restoring tissue to healthy young state. We just haven’t developed the tools to do so (yet) You’re speculating too far beyond what we know to speak so definitively. Plenty of biology and even thermodynamics suggests there may be limits. That doesn’t prove they exist. But it’s in the same category as saying there are no know physics which prohibit time travel or transcending the human condition into a state of pure consciousness. Like, sure, there aren’t, but to use your analogy, ancient Romans didn’t know about the speed of light.
- adastra22 1y ago
- frankzander 1y agoGood point. Glad someone pointed this out
- EasyMark 1y agoI'm not saying this isn't possible, as some simple lifeforms seem to be basically immortal but our systems are much more complex and consist of many more moving parts and we are just meat machines. Machines wear out and you have to replace the parts. We're no where near being able to replace all of our parts. So there is a pretty good reason why at least the people currently alive aren't going to see what you're saying come to fruition. Entropy is a bitch.