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It should be noted that, on balance, everything except physical health becomes better with age. Outside of degenerative aging, becoming older is so good that pe

It should be noted that, on balance, everything except physical health becomes better with age. Outside of degenerative aging, becoming older is so good that people are driven to apologism for the fact that aging cripples and kills them - they conflate being old and being aged, seeing two very different things as one, and a certain confusion arises after that point. Consider how much better it will be to be older once we start being able to treat the root causes of the degenerative medical condition called aging. If you're not there yet, consider just how good being older must be in order for people to be able to say they are well off even while their health is crumbling. http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-12/uoc--poa120312.php http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-12/uoc--poa12031...

mtgx 14y ago
Imagine how much wiser we'd be as humans if we'd all live 500 years, and be in good physical health most of that time.
- dllthomas 14y ago
  Well, that partly depends. There's some talk - I don't know how accurate - that scientific thought is actually updated when the people holding the old views start dying out... If that's really true, and we wind up holding on to the same wrong ideas for 500 years instead of 100, I'm not sure we'd be lots further along. Of course, we might well have noticed the problem and done more about it, or something... or the effect may not be real (or particularly strong) in the first place.
  - xaa 14y ago
    Yes. Although I am in favor of life extension, I worry about the consequences for politics if people like Fidel Castro or Kim Jong Il were to live for 500 years. Or for that matter, for tech if Steve Jobs or Larry Ellison lived that long.
    - reasonattlm 14y ago
      http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2012/08/a-terrible-reason-to-oppose-healthy-life-extension.php http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2012/08/a-terrible-reason... Here is a short piece on the immortal dictator argument that shows up from time to time as one of the reasons given to continue to let billions die of aging: "But what if, the critics continue, you had a dictator who could live more or less for thousands of years? Wouldn't it be a good thing if he was guaranteed to die at some point and the people he oppressed had a chance to start anew? Wouldn't the sacrifice be worth it? No, it wouldn't, and here's why. Basically, we're being asked to give a potential means of extending our life spans so we can be sure that just a small handful of people and their cronies would be dead at some point in time. We can't always kill them or depose them, so we'll be outsourcing the assassination to nature. Anyone see the problem here? Of the over seven billion people who aren't dictators, who do we think is expendable enough to die alongside our targets for the sake of the anti-dictator cause? If I may reach for a little hyperbole, how different is the logic that all the billions who will die in the process are fair game because their death helps the cause from that of all terrorist groups who believe that civilians of the countries they hate can be on the hit list because killing them hurts an enemy and may force him to retreat? This is a rather crass way of saying that the ends justify the means and I doubt that they really do in this case. We could take this logic further and cast all modern medicine as being a dictator enabling technology. Maybe last week Assad would've tripped, fallen, hurt himself, then got his wound infected and was soon dead from septic shock, helping to end the civil war in Syria. Does this mean we must now give up our disinfectants and advanced medical treatments to make sure bad people die easier?"
      - xaa 14y ago
        A true dictator could reserve life extension technology only for himself and his cronies. It would be the ultimate weapon for political control. I actually agree that the potential benefits outweigh the risks. But as with all transhumanist technology, the risks are quite enormous.
        jbverschoor 14y ago
        There is ALWAYS a way to assasinate someone
  - kiba 14y ago
    Didn't Albert Einstein and his generation lived through two revolutions in physics? The problem with your idea is that history is changing constantly(and more so these days). What we come to believe in one decade will probably change drastically in the next decade as we accumulate new experience.
elemeno 14y ago
And, potentially, mental health - though the variance between people is huge. While my grandfather (mother's side) was mentally as sharp as he'd ever been when he died at 92 and my 94 year old grandmother (father's side) still plays bridge several times a week and has a fantastic memory for everything related to the family, it's also all too easy to find people who have been afflicted with dementia and alzheimer's from their 70s and 80s.
- reasonattlm 14y ago
  Mental health in that sense is physical health - age-related mental decline is caused failure in the physical processes of the brain. E.g. loss of blood vessel integrity, buildup of aggregates, diminished stem cell activity in response to rising cellular damage, etc.
rgbrenner 14y ago
Yes, everything except physical health becomes better with age. Oh, better add mental health to the list of exceptions: http://www.cdc.gov/aging/pdf/mental_health.pdf http://www.cdc.gov/aging/pdf/mental_health.pdf http://www.livestrong.com/article/186637-about-senile-dementia/ http://www.livestrong.com/article/186637-about-senile-dement... Wait a sec.. if you're declining physically and mentally, then what else is there?
akurilin 14y ago
Ever heard of the SENS Foundation and Aubrey de Grey? They seem to be working on what you described.

mtgx 14y ago

Imagine how much wiser we'd be as humans if we'd all live 500 years, and be in good physical health most of that time.

dllthomas 14y ago
Well, that partly depends. There's some talk - I don't know how accurate - that scientific thought is actually updated when the people holding the old views start dying out... If that's really true, and we wind up holding on to the same wrong ideas for 500 years instead of 100, I'm not sure we'd be lots further along. Of course, we might well have noticed the problem and done more about it, or something... or the effect may not be real (or particularly strong) in the first place.
- xaa 14y ago
  Yes. Although I am in favor of life extension, I worry about the consequences for politics if people like Fidel Castro or Kim Jong Il were to live for 500 years. Or for that matter, for tech if Steve Jobs or Larry Ellison lived that long.
  - reasonattlm 14y ago
    http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2012/08/a-terrible-reason-to-oppose-healthy-life-extension.php http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2012/08/a-terrible-reason... Here is a short piece on the immortal dictator argument that shows up from time to time as one of the reasons given to continue to let billions die of aging: "But what if, the critics continue, you had a dictator who could live more or less for thousands of years? Wouldn't it be a good thing if he was guaranteed to die at some point and the people he oppressed had a chance to start anew? Wouldn't the sacrifice be worth it? No, it wouldn't, and here's why. Basically, we're being asked to give a potential means of extending our life spans so we can be sure that just a small handful of people and their cronies would be dead at some point in time. We can't always kill them or depose them, so we'll be outsourcing the assassination to nature. Anyone see the problem here? Of the over seven billion people who aren't dictators, who do we think is expendable enough to die alongside our targets for the sake of the anti-dictator cause? If I may reach for a little hyperbole, how different is the logic that all the billions who will die in the process are fair game because their death helps the cause from that of all terrorist groups who believe that civilians of the countries they hate can be on the hit list because killing them hurts an enemy and may force him to retreat? This is a rather crass way of saying that the ends justify the means and I doubt that they really do in this case. We could take this logic further and cast all modern medicine as being a dictator enabling technology. Maybe last week Assad would've tripped, fallen, hurt himself, then got his wound infected and was soon dead from septic shock, helping to end the civil war in Syria. Does this mean we must now give up our disinfectants and advanced medical treatments to make sure bad people die easier?"
    - xaa 14y ago
      A true dictator could reserve life extension technology only for himself and his cronies. It would be the ultimate weapon for political control. I actually agree that the potential benefits outweigh the risks. But as with all transhumanist technology, the risks are quite enormous.
      - jbverschoor 14y ago
        There is ALWAYS a way to assasinate someone
- kiba 14y ago
  Didn't Albert Einstein and his generation lived through two revolutions in physics? The problem with your idea is that history is changing constantly(and more so these days). What we come to believe in one decade will probably change drastically in the next decade as we accumulate new experience.

elemeno 14y ago

And, potentially, mental health - though the variance between people is huge. While my grandfather (mother's side) was mentally as sharp as he'd ever been when he died at 92 and my 94 year old grandmother (father's side) still plays bridge several times a week and has a fantastic memory for everything related to the family, it's also all too easy to find people who have been afflicted with dementia and alzheimer's from their 70s and 80s.

reasonattlm 14y ago
Mental health in that sense is physical health - age-related mental decline is caused failure in the physical processes of the brain. E.g. loss of blood vessel integrity, buildup of aggregates, diminished stem cell activity in response to rising cellular damage, etc.

rgbrenner 14y ago

Yes, everything except physical health becomes better with age. Oh, better add mental health to the list of exceptions: http://www.cdc.gov/aging/pdf/mental_health.pdf http://www.cdc.gov/aging/pdf/mental_health.pdf http://www.livestrong.com/article/186637-about-senile-dementia/ http://www.livestrong.com/article/186637-about-senile-dement... Wait a sec.. if you're declining physically and mentally, then what else is there?

akurilin 14y ago

Ever heard of the SENS Foundation and Aubrey de Grey? They seem to be working on what you described.