The author believes that aging is not inevitable. He suggests supplementing with NAC, one of few anti-aging supplements that actually works.
The author also believes that, "it is difficult to escape the inference that powerful people and organizations have engineered this pandemic with deadly intent," believing that Bill Gates' TED talk indicated that he knew that COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2) was coming. He thinks that the pandemic was planned to profit the pharmaceutical industry, and that vaccines are sometimes maliciously manufactured to induce infertility.
My purpose was to help us avoid wasting time reading long articles written by a person who has evinced poor/compromised critical thinking skills.
If longevity research is important to you, you could help push the discussion by submitting something that is:
A) interesting
B) from a credible source
Please do. For what it's worth, I myself believe that increasing human lifespans is immensely important. I'd love to see a trillion dollar budget for it. I think you might be of similar disposition.
I'd suggest we're not helping our cause by throwing the spotlight on the people among us with conspiratorial delusions. There are plenty of legitimate and level-headed anti-aging scientists who would serve as better representatives.
Every day over 100,000 humans die due to age-related disease. The lack of research in aging and life extension is one of the biggest resource misallocation of our times, and it is leading to massive welfare losses.
There are so many entrenched beliefs that curb research in this field: 'Aging is "natural"', 'Who would want to live until they are xxx years old, anyway?', 'Aging keeps population levels down', 'Aging removes bad people (dictators etc.)', 'Death makes life scarce and therefore valuable', ...
No, aging is fixable and all other problems, real or imagined, have more direct solutions.
We have to realize this, as a society, immediately and stop all the nonsense prevarications.
Parents should not have to outlive their children, and neither should children have to outlive their parents.
Mathematical models that claim to “prove” that aging is inevitable are trivial to construct by introducing assumptions that fit your narrative. The assumptions are biologically plausible in isolation but fail to account for the full complexity of biological life and, indeed, reality [1].
While I disagree about banning this research, I totally agree with the main point about this paper: it amounts to fitting several parametric curves to historical population lifespan data for several species.
This class of models is a simple extrapolation of historical aggregate lifespan time-series, and thus cannot model non-trivial pharmacological and genetic manipulations even in principle, unless these are a part of a large smooth sub-trend that has already begun.
One wouldn't be able to predict that some random flavonoid molecule extends lifespan of lab mice by 10-15%[1], and if we took the [overstated] paper's title claim uncritically, this research wouldn't happen. And yet it happened, and more than a dozen clinical trials in humans are underway.
> While I disagree about banning this research ...
For context to other readers, I had the following phrasing at the end of my comment: "This research is extremely damaging and should not be allowed". I removed it shortly after posting before I had seen sinenomine's comment, since, ultimately, I'm not in favor of censoring research (as along as limitations are clearly stated). My original comment was mostly a knee-jerk reaction knowing the uphill battle that life-extension research faces in the public discourse.
Not much interesting here. I recommend “The Abolition of Aging” for a good primer on the possibilities of affecting aging (including socio-economic questions).
The article mentions both physical limits, and geneticly encoded aging, and argues for the latter. In reality it’s a combination of both. But it doesn’t matter, as we should theoretically be able to affect both.
Another interesting question regards the brain’s capacity to store memories. If you live for 500 years instead of 80, but all of your memories are eventually overwritten by more recent experiences, are you even the same person anymore? Is the old you “alive” in that case? And what is the threshold at which this occurs?
Current understanding of amyloid diseases is improving due to race to find a treatment for Alzheimer's, so it's not inconceivable that a focused effort could find a therapy ameliorating this condition.
Young organisms seemingly carry defenses against cancers that atrophy with age. There is no cross species correlation which says that cancer is inevitable.
Not only that, there is a well-known https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peto%27s_paradox highlighting that per-cell cancer rate has to drop to support long lifespans of large animals with huge amount of cells, and indeed it does.
The assumption that "natural selection has been trying to maximize lifespan, because the longer an individual lives, the more opportunity it has to reproduce" has an easier refutation: it clearly doesn't apply to a species where half the population goes through menopause (and stops being able to produce offspring) well before death.
(There are plenty of other species whose reproductive cycles are inconsistent with this assumption -- most notably all those with members that only mate once.)
I'm not sure this is really a refutation. There's something interesting in the idea that evolution has decided the old need to leave to make room for the new to prosper. Evolution acts on populations, not just individuals. Helping closely related individuals in the next generation survive is advantageous, and if that help is by being removed, then it could be programmed.
Even frailty and decreased brain function might be programmed if it means that other individuals take over related tasks to gain experience.
i think the assumption is fine as long as the individual reaches sexual maturity. Ie: natural selection will favor individuals but past that age all bets are off
menopause is aging. there is an equivalent process for testosterone called andropause, it's just less dramatic and not as culturally prominent. hormone replacement therapy and other treatments exist for both.
Maybe I'm too cynical, but I think instead of worrying about extending our lives we should focus instead on making the most out of the time we've got.
In our modern era I think most would benefit from having a healthier relationship with death as well. Death is inevitable to us all but modern life shields us from much of this. I know many people my age who are frightened by the concept and go through an existential crisis whenever they contemplate death.
Maximizing longevity is increasing the quality of the time we do have. More time available equals more time you are able to spend doing things you actually enjoy. I feel a great deal of pressure to accomplish certain things given the very little and limited time I have available to me. It's a source of stress that would be alleviated if there were more time available to me.
I doubt that added longevity would alleviate the pressure to accomplish. Few things in life work that way. Rather, I expect ambitions would expand to fill the available years.
That is true to some extent, but I'd argue that there are diminishing returns on this. That is to say that ambitions would certainly be greater if we had more time, but I don't think it'd scale linearly.
Another way to look at it would be -- How much more stressful would our lives be if the average lifespan was 40 years instead of 70+?
I don’t think your question can be truly answered, but as a thought experiment, do you suppose the average person 200 years ago experienced more, less, or the same amount of stress that we do?
It’s tempting to say less, since they arguably had “simpler lives.” But it’s also easy to say “more,” since they had a much more present risk of death than we do.
My hunch is that stress is (mostly) relative, and that (outside of trauma) how much one experiences is determined more by ones worldview than ones circumstances.
But have you tried not wasting time now which is far easier than adding more years to life?
If you lived longer, would you feel better or just feel the same pressure with different goals?
Accomplishing something is great, but it's not quality time. Quality time is the time spent working on the accomplishment, which doesn't depend on living to see the result.
There are so many resources on how to make the most of the time we have. All sorts of philosophies, teachers, books, etc. Undoubtedly people would benefit from engaging with this more, but there is a lot of effort already going into this.
Anti-aging, on the other hand, has basically no resources spent on it, and would benefit everyone if we could figure it out. It’s definitely worth putting way more effort into.
It’s also not zero sum. We can and should do both.
Is there any indication that some immortal human species would be superior to what we currently are?
My intuition is that it would be worse for said species in the same way goats with no predators are worse for goats in the end (overpopulation followed by rapid consumption of the environment and the collapse).
It depends on the value system of immortalized humans.
Are they democratic, egalitarian, respectful of the environment and biodiversity, and long-term thinkers? Such humans might be better than the short-term, biased mortals we have now.
Of course, there's no indication it would turn out that way. Given the prevalence of fascism and monopolization of power, bad outcomes seem more probable. Selfish, egotistical, power-hungry immortals that feed off the backs of mortals sounds like a dystopia that could happen.
Should AGI or brain uploads happen before human body life extension becomes limitless, we'll probably see a rapid proliferation of a "monoclonal intelligence" that has a singular disposition towards the rest of us. Who can say what that will be?
Why do you humans always connect immortality of new intelligent species to overpopulation or a similar viral or negative trait? Wouldn’t it be nice to not feel the urge to reproduce and just live in comfort for eons with millions of friendly non-competing peers? The only thing to overcome is your destructive all-consuming nature, which harms the nature itself.
Why do you believe we are capable of this friendly world with immortality when we are not capable of it without?
History has already shown us that made bad ideas only went away bad we cause people died. It’s not exactly controversial to say immortality will lengthen the time in which bad ideas persist, environmental concerns aside.
That is a valid question, but not what I believe. A friendly world begins with a reduced demand, and demand is driven up by reproduction, not by mortality (quite the opposite). Your species’ logistic map could autobalance around some happy value even with reproduction still on, but you throw all your forces to both reproduction and a reduction of starvation factors. There is no stable point to converge to with these parameters, and humans will always fluctuate from cleanup to rebuild to shortages to destruction. You consume too much, too effectively and double in size in quickly decreasing intervals, that’s the problem.
It seems the author is reasoning more in the philosophic realm than in evolutionary biology.
In this podcast [1] an evolutionary biologist goes into depth about telomeres, evolution and how cancer and longevity are two sides of the same coin.
Long story short, having cells die after a number of replications is a postive trade off. It means that when a cell replicates too fast it also dies fast.
The opposite are cancer cells, which replicate too fast and don't die.
One might argue we live in a “sneak preview” of that world now, given how much of the present senior generation is outliving their parents by 20+ years.
Well yeah, but the young people can take their ideas to space!
Also, IMHO conservatism is based on fear. Perhaps stability could help us resolve the fears people have, and much older people would see that many of their previous fears never materialized, thus becoming less conservative.
You have not really restored the omelette to its original state. That just destroys the egg and uses its energy to power a machine that creates a new one.
The aging analogy would be destroying old people and feeding them to pregnant mothers. This is obviously not a solution to aging.
Specifically: the cells you're made of are the product of an older organism. We all descend from older people yet are born as young people. So clearly, the progression is not inevitable, otherwise the human race wouldn't be here.
Let's not focus too much on the messenger and ad hominems, and focus on the message instead: "Is aging inevitable?", and does this Nature Communications paper[1] (note, that this isn't Nature proper, by the way) tell us something new about the answer?
Well, the paper does not deal with genomic or molecular underpinnings of life, it only models the curves of species' lifespans and mortalities, and fits these to simple equations ... to find that the curves can indeed be fit, and the parameters indicate that the variability of lifespan in primates, as captured by the equation, is mostly explained by variability of early mortality. Mostly expected result, given no interventions significantly slowing/reversing aging have been approved by FDA as of now. Still, it's questionable as to why we don't see social stratification as a driver of human lifespan variability, as found in [2]. Overall, the paper is underwhelming compared to its title.
Thus, the question remains open. The answer, at the very least, should explain the following:
1) How come some species[4], vertebrate species even, have more or less negligible senescence? [3][5]
2) How do specific alleles from lifespan GWAS influence human aging? [6]
3) What are precise molecular mechanisms underlying hallmarks of aging?[7]
4) Can these natural mechanisms be manipulated via therapeutic interventions to significantly change organism's lifespan? [8]
If we accept the challenge and look at molecular biology of mammalian aging, we'll see whole new fields of science right there, waiting to be explored, some already bearing fruit, given we are witnessing more than a dozen human clinical trials on various senolytics[9]
Reading this article reminded me of the Komogorov axioms[1], which are basically a way to define probability "by the envelope", that is, without dealing with the serious and complicated essence of it. Mitteldorf and the authors he criticizes, Colchero et. al., all seem to be trying to go the same way with aging.
So I wonder, how can age and aging be defined mathematically, the messy way? If age were related to entropy, one could think of age as some sort of function on entropy. But despite all the hand-waving, I haven't found any evidence of biological age being related to physical or information entropy. Rather, I think people like to connect them to show that aging is inevitable and irreversible. Which, by the way, Colchero et. al. seem to be doing too by looking at some pitifully small amount of data. It is not[2]. IMO, the purported connection is more of a political, moral or religious statement than a scientific one.
Here is a simple definition of biological age I like to use: an organism which is not at its prime, is old. Basically, one picks an _arbitrary state_ in the lifetime of the organism, the "prime" state, and builds the notion of age as how far in state space the organism is from it. By this definition, a newborn human is (by my fuzzy idea of prime state) 21 years old at birth, and then during the next 21 years, for each birthday, their biological age decreases by one. At what we call the age of 21 years old, the "prime" state, the person is 0 years old by this definition, and from there on, the age goes up.
If describing the biological state of a human being seems overwhelming (it most certainly is), one could start with something simpler, say a bacterium, or even a totally made-up organism living in a computer, and try to model all the ways state can fluctuate. If one does that, I bet we will find the following:
- It is possible to design/find an organism state which is a stable attractor[3], and it is possible to make that state arbitrary close to "prime", or close enough to be considered "eternal youth".
I'm pretty sure that from the point of view of natural selection and population dynamics, such a state attractor would be a death end more often than not. But for the question of human immortality or eternal youth, it could be a really nice start. In particular, it will change the question from "is aging a physical/biological inevitability?" to the more constructive "how does one create unaging organisms?". This last question has more of a heretic charm than the (insert-your-adjective-here) take from Colchero et. al.
The author also believes that, "it is difficult to escape the inference that powerful people and organizations have engineered this pandemic with deadly intent," believing that Bill Gates' TED talk indicated that he knew that COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2) was coming. He thinks that the pandemic was planned to profit the pharmaceutical industry, and that vaccines are sometimes maliciously manufactured to induce infertility.
Take of that what you will.