The Italian study argues after a certain threshold age, lets say 105, Italians hit a constant, "mortality plateau, which was 50:50 odds of living to your next birthday, and thus since mortality is not increasing year on year, theoretically there is no upper bound on the age of a person. This may be true theoretically, but mathematical reasoning clarifies this somewhat. Even if you have 1 million humans aged 105 right now, which is probably a vast overstatement, they would diminish to 100,000 humans in less than 4 years, then diminishing to 1,000 humans aged 115 in 10 years' time. After this point, it's basically a question of statistics, as we keep halving the population yearly and get into statistically unsubstantial cohorts of humans. So, while it may be that some humans could live to 130-140 naturally, without fountain-of-youth innovations, the VAST majority of us will die much, much earlier.
The low-hanging fruits of obesity, heart disease, and diabetes are calling to public health far more urgently than this pie in the sky limitless life.
> The low-hanging fruits of obesity, heart disease, and diabetes are calling to public health far more urgently than this pie in the sky limitless life.
Still, it's definitely worth it to continue research along these lines and plenty of other ridiculous lines. Even if they don't come to anything. We have such a tremendous abundance of intellectual capacity as a species. If we dedicate all our intellectual capacity to solving the low-hanging fruits in healthcare (or to increasing the click-through rates of ads, among other things) it would require us to allocate many people to no task at all, just because there was already an excessive abundance of resources already dedicated to the tasks.
It's a little fun and encouraging to think about, but the more people there are alive, the more important unimportant things become, because with more people there are more problem solvers.
I really appreciate this perspective. More people is fundamentally a good thing. Some would vehemently argue otherwise, but I believe the problems they bring up come down to a calculus that depends first on other things, like profit vs. environmental stewardship, etc., not primarily the birth and death rates.
More educated people who can spend some time on problem solving, yes, it is a good thing. People starving or kept busy in bullshit jobs, we have plenty and they just put a burden on the whole ecosystem. Now problem solvers are very busy trying to find ways to produce food and energy for the 11 billion people we should reach in a few decades.
Seriously, until we don't reach 100% of well-fed educated people, demographic growth will be more of a problem than a solution to anything.
A bullshit job is one that is either not productive (ie society's output would be the same without it) or that is automatable but hasn't been because of political reasons.
The level education people should have is the one that allows them to become useful problem solvers. Depends on character and domain of problems considered.
I am not saying reaching 100% education will solve a problem. I am saying that before that point, population growth will feed more problem making than problem solving
Not necessarily my point of view but I keep seeing the term bullshit jobs being used frequently, this is the best summary I could find:
In Bullshit Jobs, American anthropologist David Graeber posits that the productivity benefits of automation have not led to a 15-hour workweek, as predicted by economist John Maynard Keynes in 1930, because of "bullshit jobs": workers who pretend that their role isn't as pointless or harmful as they know it to be. Graeber contends that more than half of societal work is pointless, both large parts of some jobs and, as he describes, five types of entirely pointless jobs:
- flunkies, who serve to make others feel important, e.g., receptionists, administrative assistants, door attendants
- goons, who act aggressively on behalf of their employers, e.g., lobbyists, corporate lawyers, telemarketers, public relations
- duct tapers, who fix problems that shouldn't exist, e.g., programmers repairing shoddy code
Graeber argues that these jobs are largely in the private sector despite the idea that market competition would root out such inefficiencies. In companies, he credits "managerial feudalism" as employers need underlings to feel important.
In society, he credits the Puritan-capitalist work ethic for making the labor of capitalism into religious duty: that workers did not reap advances in productivity as a reduced workday because, as a societal norm, they believe that work determines their self-worth, even as they find that work pointless. Graeber describes this cycle as "profound psychological violence".
Graeber holds that work as a source of virtue is a recent idea, that work was disdained by the aristocracy in classical times, but inverted as virtuous through radical philosophers like John Locke. The Puritan idea of virtue through suffering justified the toil of the working classes as noble.
As a potential solution, Graeber suggests universal basic income, a livable benefit paid to all without qualification, which would let people work at their leisure
One notable predicate of UBI is more aggressive population control. Either positively or negatively.
If we're allocating a portion of production to all people, but have finite energy resources (e.g. current state), then there exists a range of population (and demographics therein) where this is practical.
Why is this not also true of the functioning of every other resource allocation strategy, such that it is especially notable to universal basic income in particular? It seems to me that resources inherently constrain population size. So every allocation strategy has this problem, making it unworthy of note and outweighed by other factors which do differentiate resource allocation strategies, like the differences between what they incentivize and what we want.
All other allocation strategies in practice (that come to my mind) pretty cold-bloodedly control access to life requirements. Communism probably being the notable exclusion, but I'd say my point is born out there too.
In that in non-communist allocation systems, if one does not produce value (somewhat arbitrarily defined, but usually semi-attached to actual value) then neither one nor one's children eat.
UBI fundamentally changes this, in that hypothetically people could do nothing (and reproduce), thereby eventually exhausting available energy resources.
If your point is that everything has an absolute carrying capacity, then agreed. But here I'm assuming UBI is implemented before resource scarcity is truly eliminated by technological progress.
Thereby leaving the equation in an "It balances, but only if these percentage of people work, age demographics don't get too out of whack, and population growth falls in range" state.
Oh, I get what you're saying now. Thanks for the clarification. You're right that without anything in place to prevent it, universal basic income can fall prey to something similar to a tragedy of the commons. You're also right that its vulnerable to changes in population, with both huge swings up and down turning into a tax with low projected benefit once its split among the population. Definitely a severe structural problem, which would make putting more explicit population control mechanics into the system important if it were widely adopted.
> mortality plateau, which was 50:50 odds of living to your next birthday
Isn't the question whether or not we can affect the odds here? If we can increase it to 75:25 at this plateau, then we also are also increasing the age longest lived of these people are predicted to live for immensely, and the last person of this example group of 1 million starting at age 105 you give would expect that last person to die not 10 years later (at 115) on average as with a 50:50 mortality, but around 48 years later, at 153. Every slight change in that mortality rate affects that long tail quite a bit, relatively speaking.
I for one believe that might have an immense effect on how people view their health and longevity. If people believe that taking care of themselves might give them many decades of additional life instead of a few years, that could lead to a wider shift.
I did have the wrong number of years for 50:50 though, it's not the 10 I stated. This problem is the reverse of binary doubling, and I knew 10 bits are a needed to get to 1024, and my brain just sealed out thousand and million. It takes 20 bits to get to over 1 million, so 20 halvings from exactly 1 million should get you to less than 1.
> The low-hanging fruits of obesity, heart disease, and diabetes are calling to public health far more urgently than this pie in the sky limitless life.
Vastly more people die each year of age-related causes than obesity, heart disease, and diabetes combined. It's an unrecognized holocaust inevitably terminating the potential of all humans on this planet, and it is going entirely unrecognized because if you work on solving aging you are a crackpot, whereas "obviously" obesity, heart disease, and diabetes are more deserving of our time and grant money.
What is your view of the lives of elderly people? I would trade health, mobility and my intellectual capabilities intact to 90 for 20 years of problems (70->90) followed by another 20 years of geriatric life (90->110).
I would agree with you if the common experience of old age was positive and healthy; but it seems to me that the priority for research should be to alleviate the problems and suffering we will all face should we be lucky enough to get there, especially now that the majority of people are lucky.
Perhaps healthier older people will live a lot longer as well?
> I would agree with you if the common experience of old age was positive and healthy
It’s not positive and healthy because you age. You fix aging and people will have a physical age of 25 forever and do all sorts of fun things with perfectly capable bodies. That’s the point.
I don’t know what sort of counter factual world you are describing where we have “alleviated aging” but people still age...
Humans have a 1/3 lifetime cancer risk, and I suspect it will go up if we extend lifetimes. It's a wall to longevity. If we get past that wall, there's still proteopathys. There's no real approach to curing those yet (at least not that I'm aware of.)
>Humans have a 1/3 lifetime cancer risk, and I suspect it will go up if we extend lifetimes. It's a wall to longevity.
No, it's not. Cancer is just a form of malfunction of cellular machinery, and as such, can certainly be mitigated or cured at some point. There's already lots of promising research in eliminating it, such as by re-purposing viruses to program the body's immune system to recognize and eliminate the cancerous cells.
It might require artificial intervention, but I believe cancer will be mostly eliminated before too long. And artificial intervention shouldn't be a problem: we have to do this on all our other machines too, we just call it "repair" or "maintenance". There's no such thing as a machine which never needs maintenance from an external source.
Why do you think cancer is undefeatable? The risk of cancer rises substantially with age, and much of the increase in risk is probably due to the immune system malfunctioning.
They also agree with that, but they use a model that can never reach 0. So starting with nearly 4000 105yo individuals, only one remains at 115 years and never dies.
So biologists say there is a limit. But if you only look at the statistics from extreme examples of people over 105, mortality looks flat for a few years, so statisticians say we can live forever.
It's not bad logic, but it is a non-obvious conclusion. Which is why it gets misreported.
One of two things may be true:
1) As we age, mortality rate increases until certain
2) As we age, mortality rate increases, and then levels off at some point
The latter doesn't mean you'll live forever: you're still already rolling the dice at the highest handicap every year. But it does mean there's no fundamental age everyone MUST die by (aka "live forever", if you're one in a billion).
The more interesting differentiation between the two, and the reason biology is interested in the question, is as an answer to "If we want to maximally prolong life, what do we do?"
If the flattening risk (option 2) model is correct, then we could extend life very far indeed by simply preventing people from dying of things that normally kill them by age 85 (e.g. disease, cancer) and then provide them with high quality medical support (to best fight the risk of their expiring from "normal" causes, e.g. accidents).
On the other hand, if it's ever-increasing risk (option 1), we should instead spend our effort at untangling the microbiology mysteries at the root of aging, and see if we can instead re-engineer systems to not work the way they currently do.
Or as my father (PhD in pathology) quips on the whole matter, "At some point, old folks are past the point that all of things that normally kill people would have killed them. And by virtue of still being alive, it's probable they're more resistant. We say they've reached escape velocity."
Imagine you keep flipping 10 coins, stopping each once it has come up heads. Eventually all will have come up heads. But if you do this a bunch of times and keep track of how many times you flipped the last coin, there will be a certain number of flips at which the end is most commonly reached.
The "mortality rate" increasing then flattening out is just this curve reaching its peak then declining. The math of this is easy enough to figure out so not sure why there is a mystery amongst biologists about it.
Well hopefully one person actually writes the simulation, etc then calculates the hazard rate curve.
I guarantee that once you understand how universal and simple the phenomenon is that's going here on you will be stunned at the ridiculousness of this "lifespan controversy".
People have a 50% chance of dying each year over 105 translates to there is no limit to longevity?
Also, the critic in me makes me want to see the actual distribution because I would think there is a tail effect going on and a small group of people are just genetically living much longer.
Death rates increase every year due to naturally occurring mechanisms in the body. Consider those mechanisms as a function with the body as a parameter and the output as a more aged body (or rather a body with higher probability of failure).
If the body reaches a point where the death rate ceases to increase year per year, it would suggest that those same naturally occuring mechanisms, thought of as a function, approaches some asymptote.
Note this doesn't necessarily mean you stop aging (in appearance), just that your body's rate of failure no longer increases. This suggests that if the reasons for failure can be treated properly, perhaps the body can remain in that equilibrium state indefinitely.
This study provides some preliminary evidence that such an asymptote may exist in the body's natural mechanisms. Both controversial and exciting. Worth exploring further.
Because there are essentially two things that kill you. Either you die of something you get, or you die because your body wears out (as others have pointed out, we know body systems wear and become less effective with aging).
Therefore, if mortality stops increasing with respect to age at a certain point, but we know the body is accumulating additional wear that makes it less resilient, there must also be a corresponding decrease in mortality risk with respect to random things killing you.
So essentially, if you're 100 already... you might have a statistically smaller risk to die from heart disease, cancer, etc than someone who is only 92.
> Therefore, if mortality stops increasing with respect to age at a certain point, but we know the body is accumulating additional wear that makes it less resilient, there must also be a corresponding decrease in mortality risk with respect to random things killing you.
Agreed. I assume older people are receiving higher levels of care, and therefore have a lower risk of dying from random things.
For example, someone age 100 has a small chance of falling and receiving a life threatening injury when they go to get a glass of water from the kitchen. Someone age 115 might have a smaller risk, because they're more likely to be in a wheelchair, and therefore will not stumble and fall. Do they need to change a light bulb? The 100 year old might try to stand on a chair and risk falling. The 115 year old will probably have full-time care, and push a button to alert someone else about the light bulb. Older people usually travel less often, so their chance of dying in a car crash starts to decrease. They're no longer diving with sharks, so shark attack deaths decrease. They're less likely to be outside in a thunderstorm, so lightning related deaths decrease.
Some of those examples are a little silly, but I think the idea is right. When you go from 100 to 115, you decrease your risk of dying from random things (usually because you're no longer doing those things), but you increase your risk of dying from age related factors. These two cancel each other out, and the chance of dying on any given year appears equal. This would mean the study is wrong, and there is a limit to longevity.
> Note this doesn't necessarily mean you stop aging (in appearance), just that your body's rate of failure no longer increases. This suggests that if the reasons for failure can be treated properly, perhaps the body can remain in that equilibrium state indefinitely.
So sooner you start the "treatment" the better as it is more fun to stop aging around 30 than 70 (which currently is already a thing, people aging a lot better than their parents).
More "journalism" with no understanding of numbers? That can't be. (Sarcasm). Just the same, this is also the same profession that still doesn't know the difference between cause and correlation. How can you be allowed to graduate with a degree in journalism and not understand cause v correlation?
That being said, it seems that reading just about an scientific study these days makes you wonder if those doing the publishing understand data analysis, statistics, etc. It seems that too often they find some date, retro-fit a conclusion, ignore the flaws and holes, but still publish because they know the "journalists" won't figure it out either.
And then science complains about the public not buying into ever word science mutters? I don't get it.
No, in the case of Zeno, we all agree that the arrow would impact at time t, we just argue that you can take tiny timesteps so you never get there. But after time t, the target has definitely been hit.
It means that they found data not agreeing with the model of limitless increase of mortality with age. This is just a statistical observation, not physics yet, not by a long shot.
If the statistical claim is true, that morality rates don't increase after 105, then it is "suggestive of the idea" that there isn't a structural limit to age, even if this doesn't in any way yield some immediate immortality (notice how weakly I phrase that). If the chance of dying is the same at 105 and 115, then maybe the things killing one at 105 and at 115 have the same root cause and heading them off could significantly increase lifespans. The alternative scenario is new things appear that would kill one at 115 but not at 105 but one would naively assume that the mortality increases (it may be old things retreat and new things appear however).
Obviously, there are a lot of "ifs" here but the result seems interesting and suggestive.
A 50% mortality rate per year translates into there being a <0.1% chance of living for 10 years. How does that translate into there being "no limit to longevity?" I seriously don't get the claim.
It's not a valid claim IMHO.
If you look at the sample size that they're basing it on, you can see that it's shrinking at the attrition rate for what they are measuring.
Once you get to 117 years old, there are only a few people worldwide that can be used to determine that survival rate, and those people are already subject to a selection bias of people that are exceedingly long-lived.
As we live, we forget stuff, we change, the situation around us changes. So it's as if we gradually die every day, to be replaced with a new self. The day we physically die is just the last time we die. Not to mention that we experience nothingness and coming back every night.
By analogy, is a continually trained neural net the same as a previous version of itself? Is it a different one, especially after a long time? Did the old version end/die by continuous accumulation of changes?
Contrast your idea to the ideas used in the search for life on Mars. The Martian atmosphere is very near its chemical equilibrium, the Earths atmosphere is dynamic; Mars is (more or less) dead, Earth is (not as) alive (as it should be if we weren't messing it up). My point is that change is life; stasis is death. On the day we die our body begins a journey to chemical equilibrium, our brains reach electrical equilibrium rather quickly. Then they stop there.
This was the insight of the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus: “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.”
I would have thought it's intuitively obvious that there's "no fixed limit on human longevity", and it's therefore obvious that mortality "flattens out": how else could it avoid going over 100%? It presumably is possible to say something interesting and non-trivial about the shape of the curve but it seems to be beyond the mathematical competence of the people writing these journalistic reports to do so.
Looking at the Wikipedia list of longest-lived people (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_verified_oldest_pe...) I get the impression that the top two (Jeanne Calment and Sarah Knauss) don't fit, though I know that the case of Jeanne Calment is very well documented.
It's not intuitively obvious at all, since each replication of our cells leads to our chromosomes getting ever smaller until presumably it starts eating into genes that do useful things. Unless it's intuitively obvious to you that you could live without genetic material at all, it seems quite obvious that -- given current biological processes -- there is a limit, even if that limit is longer than where we've gone before.
Even if it were the case that each replication made the chromosomes smaller (personally I would guess that there is a non-zero probability of them not getting smaller and even a non-zero probability of them getting larger thanks to a mutation) that would still only imply a hard limit on the number of replications. You would also need to find a hard limit for how long a cell can survive without replicating. Good luck with that.
I content that there are no limits: however old you are, you have a non-zero chance of surviving another picosecond. The product of a finite number of non-zero real numbers is non-zero, therefore...
Some people may wish to retort that at some point these numbers become so small that they are no different from zero in practice. Those people are probably not mathematicians. They're not wrong, either, of course, but they're not making a valid argument for there being a limit.
There's no limit for the number of successive heads you can get when tossing a coin, either, though you won't in practice see more than a hundred if it's a reasonably fair coin. If there's no limit in that simplified, mathematical situation, does it make sense to hypothesise that "there is a limit" in the case of highly complex biochemical processes?
This is all very philosophical. It doesn't help us to estimate the chances of a given person who is alive and 115 years old today (there seem to be about five of them) one day breaking Jeanne Calment's record of 122. Are any bookmakers taking bets?
>Even if it were the case that each replication made the chromosomes smaller (personally I would guess that there is a non-zero probability of them not getting smaller and even a non-zero probability of them getting larger thanks to a mutation) that would still only imply a hard limit on the number of replications.
The fact that chromosomes get shorter during DNA replication is a scientific fact. Chromosomes have padding at the end called telomeres that provide a buffer from the 'useful' DNA. There is an enzyme that can lengthen telomeres, and its of great interest to scientists interested in extending human life.
There is almost no chance that mutations:
a) regularly occur in such a way that makes the chromosomal DNA longer, especially in a way that offsets the base pairs lost during every transcription.
and b) occur in the telomere area of the genetic code, after all the useful bits of DNA.
If mutations did occur at a rate that would counteract the shortening of the telomeres, the rest of your genome would be mutating so quickly you would almost certainly die rather quickly.
There are a whole host of other reasons why what you wrote is nonsense, and I don't have the time or the space to address them all. There is literally no fact to what you have written. It is clear you don't have even a rudimentary understand the biology of genetics. An understanding of math doesn't preclude the need for understanding the actual mechanism of how things work.
The following articles are a useful primer to understanding the flaws in your reasoning:
That's my point, really. It might not be a terribly interesting point, but you're conceding it, not refuting it.
Does genetics actually provide a useful estimate of the probability of someone reaching the age of 123 years? I mean: something a bookmaker could use? Is there any evidence that telomeres are practically relevant to the longevity of humans in particular, as opposed to organisms in general, some of which live very much longer than humans?
I humbly suggest that you turn down the pomposity a tiny bit. Read what you wrote there:
> There are a whole host of other reasons why what you wrote is nonsense, and I don't have the time or the space to address them all.
What kind of impression do you think you're making?
I majored in Biology, with a focus in genetics and computer science because I wanted to go into bioinformatics. I could literally write 30 pages about why what you wrote is incorrect, and it would take several orders of magnitude more time than it took you to write out your hypothesis.
I provided resources for you to educate yourself. If you believe that it isn't a good use of your time, that's exactly how I feel about addressing the points you made beyond broadly saying 'this won't work, here are resources that address this on a level which you can understand.'
In this case 'almost no chance' is somewhat analogous to shuffling a deck of cards and finding them in order by suit and value, and then shuffling them again and finding them in reverse order by suit and value, and repeating that feat 10 times over.
The length of a human's telomeres when they are born is about 11k base pairs. Chromosome 21 is the shortest chromosome, and has 46.7 million base pairs. That means with random chance a mutation is 4200 times more likely to occur in the coding region of the chromosome than in the telomere.
Due to the way DNA Polymerase works, you will lose 20 base pairs of DNA on every replication. Ignoring everything about rate of mutations and the likelihood of insertion mutation, this means your chance of lengthening your chromosome through mutations is (1/4200)^20, or 1 in 2.6x10^72.
The odds of shuffling a deck of cards and having it come out in suit and value order is somewhere around 1x10^68.
That's using a best-case scenario as an example. Chromosome 1 has more than 5 times as many base pairs as chromosome 21, and you'd literally need to have this happen on every single chromosome every single time you had cell division.
A quick follow-up to this point. The exome, or coding region of the DNA is approximately 1% of the genome, so arguably the chances of a mutation randomly occurring in a coding region are 1/100 as probable as I suggested here.
There are a few caveats:
1) The non-coding region appears to be less useless than previously assumed. There are still 'highly preserved' areas in non-coding regions. If a section of the genome is highly preserved, it means that a mutation in that region probably results in death/non-viability of the organism.
2) We know the rate of mutation of the genome. If random mutations were really adding enough base pairs in the telomere region to lengthen it, the genome would be growing at an incredible rate.
There are a lot of reasons why it's also implausible, but they have to do with the amount of energy in a bond, etc. and other biochemistry stuff that I'm not qualified to comment on.
I mean, there is a non-zero chance of basically everything interesting, but that is meaningless. You're right that those who don't acknowledge this are not mathematicians. On the other hand, any mathematician with a passing interest in calculus realizes that the limit of the product of an infinite number of non-zero numbers less than one is exactly zero. To use your own phrasing, those that cling to these essentially meaningless likelihoods are probably not familiar with calculus.
That being said, the shortening I am referring to is the simple mechanical fact that we know with absolute certainty that your chromosomes shrink by 6 base pairs at each division. This is a simple biological fact.
There are a finite number of protein molecules on a human, and a finite number of humans. Given a available days, ut is impossible to assign an accurate arbitrarily small nonzero probability of incremental survival.
"Not being mathematicians" is exact what you want when making predictions about the real world.
There's the natural limit and the theoretical limit. In theory, some future gene therapy may swap out your chromosomes for ones that don't decay (while somehow not causing negative side effects) while you're still an embryo or gamete, and do all sorts of other things to make you nearly biologically immortal. And in some even more distant future, maybe consciousness upload (with the "copy conundrum" somehow resolved) will be a real thing, in which case living for thousands or millions of years seems plausible.
That last case, "consciousness upload", means providing a new definition of "living". Nothing wrong with that, but worth noting, particularly since it's not at all clear what the new definition should be.
Yes, but it's not so discrete a difference. We change every second of our lives physically and mentally. We have ever increasing complexity of drug, surgical, and bionic therapies.
Running a simulation of a person would probably enable different kinds of change to be made, and some of those may be qualitatively very different from anything that has happened before. One also has to think about running multiple instances of a person, running a person in a non-real-time simulated environment, taking a checkpoint, restoring from back-up, and so on. At what point do you start to treat two instances of the same person as different people? If you stop running any instances of a person, have no particular plan to run one in the future, but you think you still have a snapshot in an archive somewhere, is that person still "living"?
Even if there were a hard-coded expiration mechanism, that mechanism would presumably have limited precision and a non-zero failure rate (assuming it's implemented with biochemistry rather than magic). Looking at the list I linked to, it does rather look as if there were a cunning device to kill people towards the end of their 118th year, and that device failed in two cases... but I can't imagine why there should be such a device or how it might be implemented, so I don't really believe that.
Even if the chances of surviving another year did stabilise around 50% after the age of 100, say, you still wouldn't have enough people living beyond 130 for you to be able to measure with reasonable accuracy the mortality rate of people aged over 130. So the hypothesis that a person aged 140 would still have a 50% chance of surviving another year would be totally untestable.
If you think about it, there's also no hard limit for how tall or how short an adult human could be. Except the limit of zero for the height. Again, beyond a certain point there will be, in practice, no data available for testing any hypothesis about the distribution.
In the terms of probability aging distribution becomes memoryless for very old people. This would mean that the remaining lifespan for really old people would follow exponential distribution. Just like with radioactive decay, you could determine their half life. The half life could be as short as one year.
>At that point, the researchers say, the odds of someone dying from one birthday to the next are roughly 50:50
This really has nothing to do with limits to longevity in any practical sense. That's just the publicity machine at work, the first line in mangling and misrepresenting the relevance of research. This paper is to do with a long-running debate over whether or not mortality risk reaches a high, flat plateau in extreme old age. The difference between limit and high flat plateau is academic for those involved. The outcome is much the same.
It does in flies, and there is very clear evidence for that. The evidence in humans to date is very sparse, and where people have done good work on the numbers, they have not seen signs of a plateau. So in that sense, that people have found a larger data set that shows it, that is fuel for the fire.
No-one has the slightest idea as to how you can balance the fundamentals of reliability theory with a late life mortality plateau. If damage is accumulating, and no-one really believes it stops accumulating, then your risk of mortality should keep on going up. What sort of mechanisms in a highly damaged biology could buffer that underlying reality? And why in very late life versus other times?
None of this, of course, has anything to do with efforts to treat aging or extend human life. It is an academic debate that will likely fade out before answers are found, made irrelevant by the advent of ways to treat aging and its causes. Methods of extending life will work by putting off or repairing the very damaged state. There will likely never be a large multiple of the present count of exceptionally physiologically aged individuals. Rejuvenation therapies are just around the corner.
I wonder if there is something like the study I heard of once that said, if an electronic or mechanical device lasts at least X years, it will almost always last X + Y years where Y is a much longer period of time. I heard that related to design, manufacturing process and material selection.
If it's true for things, it makes sense it might be true for humans.
Yes, but not much. Since mortality is about 50% for people over 100 (according to the article), doubling the population of humans should only see an increase of one year.
I'm sorry to say it, but I always feel incredibly cynical about longevity tech. If we had a treatment that could extend people's lives indefinitely, what would that do? It would essentially put a price tag on life in a more direct way than we've seen before. It's hard to imagine that the powers that be would want everyone to have fair access to it.
Obviously, this kind of treatment wouldn't at first be widely available even if it worked. So how do we decide who gets it?
Well, you mentioned you "feel incredibly cynical about longevity tech", which seems to suggest that you feel differently on this particular type of research compared to others.
Who wants to live long without staying young? I'd rather choose to die in my 40-es if I would get 25-yr-old body until the end of the life in exchange. Body/health (skin, brain, immune system, muscles etc.) anti-aging is the thing we need first, not longevity/immortality.
People talk about the singularity and GCP Grey has that new video with the parable of the dragon, but I think before we can really tackle longevity, we need to first address resource scarcity.
Humanity needs to fundamentally change the way it consumes goods if we want to sustain populations that cannot die. There is also the question as to who would get such treatments? The rich? Everyone?
Kim Stanley Robin's book Red Mars deals with a lot of these issues in a fiction future where human colonize mars. It's a really good book.
I don't think it's a matter of resource scarcity but rather the incentives. If you only need to beat your competition to make a profit, then most incremental progress will come in the form of reinventing a slightly better wheel. Likewise, incentives to mass-market more advanced things are not going to be strong.
Doesn't mean it can't be done, but it's hard to change an economic system that is embedded into our culture.
I'm in my early 30-ies. I'm alright generally (I also look rather young and the doctor says my health is great) but I already feel loss of vitality, stamina, flexibility and regeneration. I felt like an invincible superhuman when I was 24 and now, despite maintaining fairly healthy lifestyle, my knee and back hurt occasionally, I can't f-ck without making a pause every couple of minutes (used to do it for hours contiguously and vigorously until 28), I have to eat healthy to maintain satisfyingly low weight (no wildly bad diet could cause a fluctuation in my weight until 24) etc. I also feel very satisfied by the life I have lived and occasionally think I wouldn't mind to die happily at any time the G-d would decide my time on Earth to end (yet I absolutely do mind to live long enough to get Alzheimer's, cancer etc, I don't fear death yet I do fear senility). I have started to work-out vigorously to revitalize and develop my body and mind recently so perhaps everything is going to change as I achieve the results yet I doubt things like my knee are going to regenerate (this has been scientifically proven impossible in 2017 or 2016 as far as I can remember although I can't find a link to the paper now). It seems it's a fact that 30+-yr-old bodies are generally more fragile and less powerful than 20-yr-old ones.
It's a 50/50 change once 105, and given that the odds of 32 coin tosses all coming up heads is 1 in 4,294,967,296 does that mean there's a 137 year old person running around somewhere?
No. Ignoring the running around, we would only expect there to be one alive, if, about 30 years ago, there were about 4 billion 105 year olds on the planet.
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/04/21/worlds-cente... claims there are about half a million centenarians now. At 50% mortality/year, half of them should be between 100 and 101 years old, but chances are it’s higher because the world’s population was growing fast a century ago.
That would give us one or two 118 to 119 year olds 18 years from now. I wouldn’t rule that out.
I'm only in my early 30's and I am already considering myself 35, at 969 you'd think you'd round up to an even thousand. I'll only believe that exact time if someone counts the rings.
The Hebrews took from the Egyptians a great love of numbers and numerology. 969 probably rolled off the tongue really well in their language. It was all originally passed orally in verse.
I once took up the Ussher chronology thing, wading through the begats, just to see if there was any sort of basis on which a person could legitimately convince themselves they were doing a proper chronology. Turns out that 969 means ol' Meth drowned in the Flood his grandson was known for - or at least kicked off in the few months preceding it. I'm thinking "drowned in the Flood" is something you're supposed to carry away from the tale, in much the same way as he's listed as somebody's son and somebody's father, without any accomplishments worth mentioning, nor any notable piety. There's probably another part of the tale, now lost, that folks were originally supposed to know.
You are forgetting you first need to reach 105, which very few do, so the population you apply the coin toss to is much smaller. While not impossible according to the article, it would be incredibly unlikely anybody lived to 137. There is a reasonable chance someone around 118-119 is living somewhere though.
Statistics. The article says mortality after 100 is about 50%. Which means out of everyone who reaches 100 years, only one in a million will reach 120 years. Since there are only half a million humans in the world who are older than 100 years, people over 120 years should be exceedingly rare.
So even if there is no upper limit to the human lifespan, and mortality doesn't increase after 100, it would be very rare to see people older than 120.
What's more likely: this guy actually lived to be twice the age of the oldest (confirmed) person ever - or the guy overstated his age to make people more inclined to buy his medicine?
Any time I see these kinds of claims, I like to take a step back and think through a few points. Does it happen frequently? How much evidence would I need to shift my prior from unlikely to likely? Is someone trying to sell me something, literally or metaphorically?
This skepticism is borne from living a life of being gaslighted and conned in a high-demand religion, and breaking away. I don't doubt there are occasionally a few long-tail events that skepticism causes one to miss its reality, but as far as seeking mysticism or a hidden reality (hidden by whatever underlying power, be it gods or billionaires, pick your poison) I find life much less stressful and more fulfilling with a healthy dose of skepticism.
I don't want to threadjack, just will point out many of these stories can be found in Reddit's EX communities: exjw, exmuslim, exmormon, and similar. The evolution of these communities into support groups over time has been fascinating.
Not to rain on your parade, but it would still be very wise to have contingency plans around dying after age 30 (will, insurance) and to assume otherwise you'll die around 75-80.
The article is much less optimist than you seem to be interpreting it. It's basically "is there a hard cap on the age you'll die, or is it just random and independent of age past a certain point".
It says nothing about the aging process. Being older than 90 still sucks for the most part, and this article says nothing about quality of life.
It also is a very minor point, in a practical sense: is it impossible to live past 120, or is it possible with then odds of 1:10^9?
It always comes to mind how many fictional immortal characters and creatures just basically choose to go into an eternal slumber. There seems to be a de facto consensus that it is actually pretty boring stuff.
Perhaps it is a way to deal with limitations of their brains. They usually have finite brains, which presumably have a limit on how much information they can store and organize and process.
Suppose you are an immortal working on some long term goal, some plan that will take a few hundred years to complete. It is a complicated plan and you will need to keep it all in your mind, along with its history as it progresses, in order to guide it to success.
If you try to lead an active life throughout all this, perhaps your brain will acquire too much irrelevant information, interfering with your ability to carry out your plan.
So you sleep for decades at a time, just waking up long enough to check on the plan, learn about changes to the world since your lest check, and make adjustments. Then back to sleep.
It'll certainly be the wealthy's greatest accomplishment. They get to live forever off a permanent underclass of slaves. Congratulations, you have 'fixed' humanity.
Well, one problem is that longevity may not mean youth at all. Increasing longevity may simply mean getting (and looking/feeling) older and older.
Even if we perfect the art of 3d printing new body parts and using gene-targetted cancer treatment, that may not make you spry, less forgetful, or less wrinkly
Biology isn't the only way to remove wrinkles. Our nervous system isn't very good at interfacing with electronics, but technologists will find a reliable way some day.
The low-hanging fruits of obesity, heart disease, and diabetes are calling to public health far more urgently than this pie in the sky limitless life.