11 ms·

The thought has recently occurred to me that we should all be working on the "aging problem", until it's solved, and then spending all our extra time on other p

by b_emery 11y ago

The thought has recently occurred to me that we should all be working on the "aging problem", until it's solved, and then spending all our extra time on other pursuits.

derefr 11y ago
The one other thing that might tail into that is working on the "sleeping problem."
- jjaredsimpson 11y ago
  If sleeping were eliminated we would all have to work more.
  - derefr 11y ago
    The idea would be that ideally—assuming sleep isn't actually necessary for anything (and it seems not to be, in most species, but our brains might make us a special case)—we would have 50% more man-hours to put on the aging problem. (And solving the sleep problem would likely require solving the tiredness problem, which would then solve quite a large part of the motivation problem, so we could put much of those hours to use.)
    - gress 11y ago
      If sleep is actually unnecessary, how do you account for it having evolved in almost all species? It seems highly implausible, given that a predator that didn't need sleep would seem to have a great advantage over prey that do.
      - dzhiurgis 11y ago
        Clearly sleep has to do a lot with earth rotation & day/night pattern. Physiologically, IIRC, sleep cleans brain up from certain metabolites, which happens in REM state. If we eventually manage to induce REM artificially, I assume you wouldn't want to experience REM in awake mode, during your job.
        jjaredsimpson 11y ago
        Artificial REM would be a trillion dollar drug.
        dzhiurgis 11y ago
        After reading wiki further (which has quite an extensive description), it looks it is somewhat possible: Injections of acetylcholinesterase inhibitor, which effectively increases available acetylcholine, have been found to induce paradoxical (REM) sleep in humans and other animals already in slow-wave sleep. Carbachol, which mimics the effect of acetylcholine on neurons, has a similar influence. In waking humans, the same injections produce paradoxical sleep only if the monamine neurotransmitters have already been depleted. Based on the last sentence (and provided the Carbachol mechanism of action is the same), it looks like you can't enter REM sleep if you aren't 'tired' enough.
        gress 11y ago
        Thanks - mostly I was curious about what leads the parent poster to believe that sleep is unnecessary.
calibraxis 11y ago
Yes, it's a crime that such an obviously desirable thing has been pushed out of common discussion, so many of us focus on absurdities like advertising.
ChrisArgyle 11y ago
People may stop dying but they won't stop reproducing. Let's make sure we master space exploration and terraforming before we start overpopulating the earth.
- toomuchtodo 11y ago
  Birthrates are declining across the world. While everyone won't stop having children, lots of countries are already below replacement rate, and other countries will follow as they industrialize.
- BurningFrog 11y ago
  Space exploration and terraforming will need a lot of manpower. We should overpopulate first to shorten the schedule!
  - afarrell 11y ago
    Actually, it will need a lot of well-coordinated brainpower. We don't really need to send a 1000-man chain gang to suffocate on mars. This is likely to come from the sort of societies that have low infant mortality rates and high levels of education.
- vectorjohn 11y ago
  Why would you assume this? Space exploration and terraforming are absolutely never going to solve the population problem. Population problems need to be solved with (possibly government enforced) fucking restraint. You don't get to have kids if you're going to live forever. Or the option to reproduce could be handed out on a lottery basis to replace losses from people who decide to stop living forever or die from accidents / not yet cured disease. That's the only solution. Space travel isn't it.
  - AnonNo15 11y ago
    That's incredibly defeatist approach. Space travel it is.
mtbcoder 11y ago
There's still the matter of war and poverty to be solved.
- vectorjohn 11y ago
  What are you doing at work or on your computer not off solving the war and poverty problem? Get on that!
  - mtbcoder 11y ago
    We can't since the OP would like us to first solve the "ageing problem" before anything else. But I suppose war wouldn't easily nullify your potential of advanced age if you close your eyes hard enough? Perhaps those living on $2/day will be comforted by the fact that they can continue to do so for another 150 years.
Cshelton 11y ago
Many do not view aging as a problem. In fact, if we didn't age, we would be trying to solve the "aging is not a thing" problem and figuring out how to humanely eliminate ourselves after living for so long.
- forthefuture 11y ago
  People already do that, it's called Suicide, and is generally frowned upon.
  - Cshelton 11y ago
    I said humanely...like the euthanasia that is becoming legal in some places in the states, with much controversy o course. Ordering people to commit suicide would generally be frowned upon. But...if we were to live forever, that time would be so different than anybody could think of today, and the ethics, relative to ours, would be pretty incomprehensible today. So...doesn't matter right now I suppose.
duaneb 11y ago
Maybe we need to work on how humans tend to prioritize longevity over things like whether your neighbor can eat. I don't think that the "aging problem" is even in the top 100 of "problems humanity needs to solve." Reproduction has been working great for keeping population up, and "defeating death" has always been seen as somewhat quixotic of a quest.
- knodi123 11y ago
  > Reproduction has been working great for keeping population up Well, if keeping population up is your goal, then fine, sure. Obviously some people have different priorities.
  - pavlov 11y ago
    Phrased like that, it's basically "myself before the children". A lot of people have an emotional response to that. Most people want to have children, and many even see the cyclic regeneration of the entire population as a net benefit to humanity. If anti-aging is to become a popular movement, it needs to have better answers to the questions of how to solve overpopulation and what a world with nearly no children should be like to be livable.
    - gknoy 11y ago
      I would rather die by my own choice, once I no longer feel I contribute to the world(s) that I and my progeny inhabit. Even then, there are things I might want to do -- learn languages, master calligraphy, etc. In a hypothetical diaspora of space exploration, the option to be immortal sounds like a HUGE benefit.
    - vectorjohn 11y ago
      The question of overpopulation is a non-problem. You can't have children, period. It has to be regulated. There will have to be replacement for accidental death and people who choose to end their life early (or people that leave to space, which I think will never be a big number, but who knows). To replace those, either a random lottery or a lottery for "qualified parents" (who want to), whatever that is. I say lottery because anything other than basic requirements would get really controversial really fast. I'm not sure what you mean "what a world with nearly no children should be like to be livable"? I don't see how it would be any more or less livable. That doesn't even seem to make any sense.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
fchollet 11y ago
Imagine that we figured out a remedy to aging 1000 years ago. Then 90% of the people today would be, say, 500+ years old. What an interesting world that would be, a world where we would still be burning witches. You wouldn't be typing this on a computer musing about ending aging; computers would not exist and neither would you.
- anoonmoose 11y ago
  Don't you think that's kind of a reach? I feel like you could just as easily guess that the smartest people of 1000 years ago, given an extra couple hundred years of lifetime, would have come up with computers way before we did. Edit: Not that I consider either answer particularly likely; I have no idea what would happen.
  - fchollet 11y ago
    Most people's ideas and worldview get basically frozen in time when they reach 25. Maybe not everyone, but a large enough majority that a death-free society would be effectively stagnant, socially and technologically.
    - xixixao 11y ago
      > technologically Seems many invent at an old age. Also seems that some few are responsible for great many breakthroughs, only stopping at their death beds...
    - Turing_Machine 11y ago
      "Most people's ideas and worldview get basically frozen in time when they reach 25." Not by choice, in most cases. N.B. There's also a lot of research on restoring neural plasticity.
    - drcross 11y ago
      That's quite an assumption. I'm guessing you are young.
- bronson 11y ago
clusterfoo 11y ago
Tangential pet peeve: but this kind of thinking, while noble in principle ("let's not waste resources / brain power on what doesn't matter"), tends to lead to stagnation, not innovation. Paradigm-shifting discoveries tend to come from unexpected, unexplored territory. By taking away funding from "useless" pursuits (like pure maths, arts, theoretical researchers) and focussing solely on the bottom line (i.e: what matters, what is profitable), we make advances in a given field less likely, not more. Reminds me of the Louie bit where David Lynch instructs Louie to "Be funny: 3... 2... 1... Go". -- That's not how things work. Achieving that level of mastery of his craft is 90% non-funny related activities (life experiences, personality, self-reflection etc.), and 10% actually focusing on "being funny" in itself. What if the key to longevity comes from a cancer researcher, what the techniques needed come from an applied mathematician researching complex systems? What if the technology required to even model the problem in order to ask the right question is developed by computer scientists modelling data in a completely different field of research? There's just no way to know.
- nitrogen 11y ago
  Tangential pet peeve: but this kind of thinking, while noble in principle ("let's not waste resources / brain power on what doesn't matter"), tends to lead to stagnation, not innovation. I don't think, in this case, it's a "let's not waste resources" argument being made. The GP post wasn't saying "Hey, cancer! AIDS! Lazy non-cancer/non-AIDS scientists!" but rather, "Fixing aging will give us the time and resources we need to do everything else." In other words, investing in a cure for aging will pay huge dividends in other areas of research. It's like earning $0/yr going to college for four years so you can get $100+k/yr for the next 60, instead of $50k/yr.
  - b_emery 11y ago
    My thoughts exactly, except more fleshed out and well worded!
- dzhiurgis 11y ago
  We still do not have enough computing power to model human body A to Z, so the next logical solution would be working on graphene based or biological computers. Quantum is still too far.
melling 11y ago
Too bad you didn't get past the vague thought because there must be things we can do to accelerate health research, in general. Should we donate money? Should we all become scientist? Should we all start wearing wearables and try to make some sense out of the data? Should we submit our DNA and data to a research center? At any rate, aging is going to take a long time to solve. Throwing time and money directly at it might not be the most effective solution. Maybe we invent an AI to do research and it eventually solves the problem, for example.
- fchollet 11y ago
  Step 1: solve the problem of AI Step 2: use your AI to solve every other problem.
  - melling 11y ago
    That's 30 years away with the accepted guesses. Can we do it in 15 years? Too bad Elon is afraid of AI. He's the type of person who would take on a crazy project like that.
  - danieltillett 11y ago
    Step 3. The AI decides that the atoms that make up your body are being very innefficently used and decides to rearrange them into a computationally more efficient structure with a sorry-this-is-the-price-of-progress excuse.
    - charlieflowers 11y ago
      For example, to make way for a hypergalactic bypass.
codecamper 11y ago
What about maybe solving the global warming problem? The where does all this energy come from to feed & provide for all the people on the planet, eensy teensy weensy little problem that it may be.
the_kingsley 11y ago
There's evidence in the scientific literature that we already know how to slow aging. Hundreds of leads are summarized in the histogram at http://morse.kiwi.nz/kingsley/lib/exe/fetch.php?cache=&media=science:life_extension_leads.png http://morse.kiwi.nz/kingsley/lib/exe/fetch.php?cache=&media... The May 22 paper by Hashizume et al suggests glycine[1]. I took the liberty of data mining my big spread sheet of life span experiments[2] for it. It turns out that it was reported in 2011 that adding glycine to the diet of lab animals let them live 28% longer[3]. A ton of other cool experiments have already been done[2]. References [1] Epigenetic regulation of the nuclear-coded GCAT and SHMT2 genes confers human age-associated mitochondrial respiration defects, Nature, May 22, 2015, Hashizume et al. http://www.nature.com/srep/2015/150522/srep10434/full/srep10434.html http://www.nature.com/srep/2015/150522/srep10434/full/srep10... [2] The World's Biggest Spread Sheet of Life Span Experiments http://morse.kiwi.nz/kingsley/doku.php?id=science:kingsleys_big_spread_sheet_of_life_span_experiments http://morse.kiwi.nz/kingsley/doku.php?id=science:kingsleys_... http://morse.kiwi.nz/kingsley/lib/exe/fetch.php?media=:science:opportunity.1.pdf http://morse.kiwi.nz/kingsley/lib/exe/fetch.php?media=:scien... [3] The FASEB Journal. 2011;25:528.2, Dietary glycine supplementation mimics lifespan extension by dietary methionine restriction in Fisher 344 rats, Brind et al. http://www.fasebj.org/cgi/content/meeting_abstract/25/1_MeetingAbstracts/528.2?s http://www.fasebj.org/cgi/content/meeting_abstract/25/1_Meet...
- kenjackson 11y ago
  So where do I get high quality glycine? Seriously. :-)
DennisP 11y ago
That assumes our other problems can wait. Climate change is one that won't. It'd be pretty sad to solve aging but irreversibly lose most of the planet's food production.

by b_emery 11y ago

The thought has recently occurred to me that we should all be working on the "aging problem", until it's solved, and then spending all our extra time on other pursuits.

derefr 11y ago

The one other thing that might tail into that is working on the "sleeping problem."

jjaredsimpson 11y ago
If sleeping were eliminated we would all have to work more.
- derefr 11y ago
  The idea would be that ideally—assuming sleep isn't actually necessary for anything (and it seems not to be, in most species, but our brains might make us a special case)—we would have 50% more man-hours to put on the aging problem. (And solving the sleep problem would likely require solving the tiredness problem, which would then solve quite a large part of the motivation problem, so we could put much of those hours to use.)
  - gress 11y ago
    If sleep is actually unnecessary, how do you account for it having evolved in almost all species? It seems highly implausible, given that a predator that didn't need sleep would seem to have a great advantage over prey that do.
    - dzhiurgis 11y ago
      Clearly sleep has to do a lot with earth rotation & day/night pattern. Physiologically, IIRC, sleep cleans brain up from certain metabolites, which happens in REM state. If we eventually manage to induce REM artificially, I assume you wouldn't want to experience REM in awake mode, during your job.
      - jjaredsimpson 11y ago
        Artificial REM would be a trillion dollar drug.
        dzhiurgis 11y ago
        After reading wiki further (which has quite an extensive description), it looks it is somewhat possible: Injections of acetylcholinesterase inhibitor, which effectively increases available acetylcholine, have been found to induce paradoxical (REM) sleep in humans and other animals already in slow-wave sleep. Carbachol, which mimics the effect of acetylcholine on neurons, has a similar influence. In waking humans, the same injections produce paradoxical sleep only if the monamine neurotransmitters have already been depleted. Based on the last sentence (and provided the Carbachol mechanism of action is the same), it looks like you can't enter REM sleep if you aren't 'tired' enough.
      - gress 11y ago
        Thanks - mostly I was curious about what leads the parent poster to believe that sleep is unnecessary.

calibraxis 11y ago

Yes, it's a crime that such an obviously desirable thing has been pushed out of common discussion, so many of us focus on absurdities like advertising.

ChrisArgyle 11y ago

People may stop dying but they won't stop reproducing. Let's make sure we master space exploration and terraforming before we start overpopulating the earth.

toomuchtodo 11y ago
Birthrates are declining across the world. While everyone won't stop having children, lots of countries are already below replacement rate, and other countries will follow as they industrialize.
BurningFrog 11y ago
Space exploration and terraforming will need a lot of manpower. We should overpopulate first to shorten the schedule!
- afarrell 11y ago
  Actually, it will need a lot of well-coordinated brainpower. We don't really need to send a 1000-man chain gang to suffocate on mars. This is likely to come from the sort of societies that have low infant mortality rates and high levels of education.
vectorjohn 11y ago
Why would you assume this? Space exploration and terraforming are absolutely never going to solve the population problem. Population problems need to be solved with (possibly government enforced) fucking restraint. You don't get to have kids if you're going to live forever. Or the option to reproduce could be handed out on a lottery basis to replace losses from people who decide to stop living forever or die from accidents / not yet cured disease. That's the only solution. Space travel isn't it.
- AnonNo15 11y ago
  That's incredibly defeatist approach. Space travel it is.

mtbcoder 11y ago

There's still the matter of war and poverty to be solved.

vectorjohn 11y ago
What are you doing at work or on your computer not off solving the war and poverty problem? Get on that!
- mtbcoder 11y ago
  We can't since the OP would like us to first solve the "ageing problem" before anything else. But I suppose war wouldn't easily nullify your potential of advanced age if you close your eyes hard enough? Perhaps those living on $2/day will be comforted by the fact that they can continue to do so for another 150 years.

Cshelton 11y ago

Many do not view aging as a problem. In fact, if we didn't age, we would be trying to solve the "aging is not a thing" problem and figuring out how to humanely eliminate ourselves after living for so long.

forthefuture 11y ago
People already do that, it's called Suicide, and is generally frowned upon.
- Cshelton 11y ago
  I said humanely...like the euthanasia that is becoming legal in some places in the states, with much controversy o course. Ordering people to commit suicide would generally be frowned upon. But...if we were to live forever, that time would be so different than anybody could think of today, and the ethics, relative to ours, would be pretty incomprehensible today. So...doesn't matter right now I suppose.

duaneb 11y ago

Maybe we need to work on how humans tend to prioritize longevity over things like whether your neighbor can eat. I don't think that the "aging problem" is even in the top 100 of "problems humanity needs to solve." Reproduction has been working great for keeping population up, and "defeating death" has always been seen as somewhat quixotic of a quest.

knodi123 11y ago
> Reproduction has been working great for keeping population up Well, if keeping population up is your goal, then fine, sure. Obviously some people have different priorities.
- pavlov 11y ago
  Phrased like that, it's basically "myself before the children". A lot of people have an emotional response to that. Most people want to have children, and many even see the cyclic regeneration of the entire population as a net benefit to humanity. If anti-aging is to become a popular movement, it needs to have better answers to the questions of how to solve overpopulation and what a world with nearly no children should be like to be livable.
  - gknoy 11y ago
    I would rather die by my own choice, once I no longer feel I contribute to the world(s) that I and my progeny inhabit. Even then, there are things I might want to do -- learn languages, master calligraphy, etc. In a hypothetical diaspora of space exploration, the option to be immortal sounds like a HUGE benefit.
  - vectorjohn 11y ago
    The question of overpopulation is a non-problem. You can't have children, period. It has to be regulated. There will have to be replacement for accidental death and people who choose to end their life early (or people that leave to space, which I think will never be a big number, but who knows). To replace those, either a random lottery or a lottery for "qualified parents" (who want to), whatever that is. I say lottery because anything other than basic requirements would get really controversial really fast. I'm not sure what you mean "what a world with nearly no children should be like to be livable"? I don't see how it would be any more or less livable. That doesn't even seem to make any sense.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

fchollet 11y ago

Imagine that we figured out a remedy to aging 1000 years ago. Then 90% of the people today would be, say, 500+ years old. What an interesting world that would be, a world where we would still be burning witches. You wouldn't be typing this on a computer musing about ending aging; computers would not exist and neither would you.

anoonmoose 11y ago
Don't you think that's kind of a reach? I feel like you could just as easily guess that the smartest people of 1000 years ago, given an extra couple hundred years of lifetime, would have come up with computers way before we did. Edit: Not that I consider either answer particularly likely; I have no idea what would happen.
- fchollet 11y ago
  Most people's ideas and worldview get basically frozen in time when they reach 25. Maybe not everyone, but a large enough majority that a death-free society would be effectively stagnant, socially and technologically.
  - xixixao 11y ago
    > technologically Seems many invent at an old age. Also seems that some few are responsible for great many breakthroughs, only stopping at their death beds...
  - Turing_Machine 11y ago
    "Most people's ideas and worldview get basically frozen in time when they reach 25." Not by choice, in most cases. N.B. There's also a lot of research on restoring neural plasticity.
  - drcross 11y ago
    That's quite an assumption. I'm guessing you are young.
bronson 11y ago

clusterfoo 11y ago

Tangential pet peeve: but this kind of thinking, while noble in principle ("let's not waste resources / brain power on what doesn't matter"), tends to lead to stagnation, not innovation. Paradigm-shifting discoveries tend to come from unexpected, unexplored territory. By taking away funding from "useless" pursuits (like pure maths, arts, theoretical researchers) and focussing solely on the bottom line (i.e: what matters, what is profitable), we make advances in a given field less likely, not more. Reminds me of the Louie bit where David Lynch instructs Louie to "Be funny: 3... 2... 1... Go". -- That's not how things work. Achieving that level of mastery of his craft is 90% non-funny related activities (life experiences, personality, self-reflection etc.), and 10% actually focusing on "being funny" in itself. What if the key to longevity comes from a cancer researcher, what the techniques needed come from an applied mathematician researching complex systems? What if the technology required to even model the problem in order to ask the right question is developed by computer scientists modelling data in a completely different field of research? There's just no way to know.

nitrogen 11y ago
Tangential pet peeve: but this kind of thinking, while noble in principle ("let's not waste resources / brain power on what doesn't matter"), tends to lead to stagnation, not innovation. I don't think, in this case, it's a "let's not waste resources" argument being made. The GP post wasn't saying "Hey, cancer! AIDS! Lazy non-cancer/non-AIDS scientists!" but rather, "Fixing aging will give us the time and resources we need to do everything else." In other words, investing in a cure for aging will pay huge dividends in other areas of research. It's like earning $0/yr going to college for four years so you can get $100+k/yr for the next 60, instead of $50k/yr.
- b_emery 11y ago
  My thoughts exactly, except more fleshed out and well worded!
dzhiurgis 11y ago
We still do not have enough computing power to model human body A to Z, so the next logical solution would be working on graphene based or biological computers. Quantum is still too far.

melling 11y ago

Too bad you didn't get past the vague thought because there must be things we can do to accelerate health research, in general. Should we donate money? Should we all become scientist? Should we all start wearing wearables and try to make some sense out of the data? Should we submit our DNA and data to a research center? At any rate, aging is going to take a long time to solve. Throwing time and money directly at it might not be the most effective solution. Maybe we invent an AI to do research and it eventually solves the problem, for example.

fchollet 11y ago
Step 1: solve the problem of AI Step 2: use your AI to solve every other problem.
- melling 11y ago
  That's 30 years away with the accepted guesses. Can we do it in 15 years? Too bad Elon is afraid of AI. He's the type of person who would take on a crazy project like that.
- danieltillett 11y ago
  Step 3. The AI decides that the atoms that make up your body are being very innefficently used and decides to rearrange them into a computationally more efficient structure with a sorry-this-is-the-price-of-progress excuse.
  - charlieflowers 11y ago
    For example, to make way for a hypergalactic bypass.

codecamper 11y ago

What about maybe solving the global warming problem? The where does all this energy come from to feed & provide for all the people on the planet, eensy teensy weensy little problem that it may be.

the_kingsley 11y ago

There's evidence in the scientific literature that we already know how to slow aging. Hundreds of leads are summarized in the histogram at http://morse.kiwi.nz/kingsley/lib/exe/fetch.php?cache=&media=science:life_extension_leads.png http://morse.kiwi.nz/kingsley/lib/exe/fetch.php?cache=&media... The May 22 paper by Hashizume et al suggests glycine[1]. I took the liberty of data mining my big spread sheet of life span experiments[2] for it. It turns out that it was reported in 2011 that adding glycine to the diet of lab animals let them live 28% longer[3]. A ton of other cool experiments have already been done[2]. References [1] Epigenetic regulation of the nuclear-coded GCAT and SHMT2 genes confers human age-associated mitochondrial respiration defects, Nature, May 22, 2015, Hashizume et al. http://www.nature.com/srep/2015/150522/srep10434/full/srep10434.html http://www.nature.com/srep/2015/150522/srep10434/full/srep10... [2] The World's Biggest Spread Sheet of Life Span Experiments http://morse.kiwi.nz/kingsley/doku.php?id=science:kingsleys_big_spread_sheet_of_life_span_experiments http://morse.kiwi.nz/kingsley/doku.php?id=science:kingsleys_... http://morse.kiwi.nz/kingsley/lib/exe/fetch.php?media=:science:opportunity.1.pdf http://morse.kiwi.nz/kingsley/lib/exe/fetch.php?media=:scien... [3] The FASEB Journal. 2011;25:528.2, Dietary glycine supplementation mimics lifespan extension by dietary methionine restriction in Fisher 344 rats, Brind et al. http://www.fasebj.org/cgi/content/meeting_abstract/25/1_MeetingAbstracts/528.2?s http://www.fasebj.org/cgi/content/meeting_abstract/25/1_Meet...

kenjackson 11y ago
So where do I get high quality glycine? Seriously. :-)

DennisP 11y ago

That assumes our other problems can wait. Climate change is one that won't. It'd be pretty sad to solve aging but irreversibly lose most of the planet's food production.