Well, that's another data point to suggest that we remain a culture of suicidal, negligent barbarians - quick to accept the suffering and death of billions, and happy to condemn our future selves to the same.
Any present horror is accepted, indeed mandated, by the ape inside - conform, conform, it cries, so hungry to belong and be inside the visible peer group that this instinct overrides any rational consideration of what it actually means to age to death, and just how much might be done to prevent that from happening in this age of biotechnology.
Nobody is quick to accept aging or death. But it's understood that we are very far from medical technology that can tackle the problem. Aging is deeply ingrained in our DNA. So far the world has spent countless billions trying to cure cancer and has largely failed. We can't even control the growth of a few measly cells with mutated DNA. Yet we are composed of trillions of cells, all 'programmed' to deteriorate over time.
The idea that we can cure aging with some miracle cure is a pipe dream until we have a far better understanding and control of biological processes.
Please see the following links on the two broad and very different approaches to research into interventions in aging. Your comment is only reflective of one of them, the slow and very hard task of slowing aging by reprogramming metabolism and epigenetics, which is an immense and very poorly understood challenge at this time. The research community is struggling to fully figure out calorie restriction - a billion dollars on sirtuin biochemistry alone, and next to nothing to show for it - which itself is just a tiny slice of the realm of evolved alterations to aging:
The other path ahead is much more clear, however: it is based on identifying and reversing fundamental changes/damage/lesions at the level of cells and biomolecules, and sidesteps much of the complexity of metabolism by focusing only on reversing these changes, not on the vast networks of reaction in our biochemistry that spiral outward from these comparatively few changes.
There is in fact a very detailed set of proposals out there on how to reverse aging and make its root causes go away, including everything from broad cost and time estimates through to exact descriptions of the biotechnologies needed, some of which are partially realized already. See this is a starting point for a layperson's overview, and then feel free to delve as deeply into the papers and ongoing research as you like:
People who offer solutions and timetables are researchers trying to get funding(always overly optimistic).
The fact is that we have a relatively tiny amount of understanding and control over organic matter. And far more basic research breakthroughs are required before aging can seriously be discussed. SENS and transhumanists are like a primitive civilizations enchanted by the prospect of landing a man on the moon before the horse and buggy was invented, which is why most biologists don't take them seriously.
Most biologists do in fact take SENS seriously - you are very behind the times, and your characterization of the technologies involved is outright wrong.
See the SENS Foundation advisory board, for example, as a representative sample of influential figures in the life sciences:
Equally, see the proposed plan for moving thirteen mitochondrial genes into the cell nucleus: this has been achieved over the past five years for three of the thirteen, and last year someone came up with a generalizable method that should be applicable to all of them, rather than having to hack a separate methodology for each one.
I agree with the gist of your comment (that we're VERY far away from anything like conquering mortality) but I am a biologist and I would describe myself as a transhumanist — not the Ray Kurzweil, this-is-happening-in-the-next-50-years sense, just in the sense that I think the transhumanist vision is something we should strive for (however far away it may be) and use an inspiration.
> Yet we are composed of trillions of cells, all 'programmed' to deteriorate over time.
That is incorrect. The diseases of aging are the result of evolutionary neglect, they aren't 'programmed in' as if there was a timer running. They're a bug, not a feature.
The lack of progress so far certainly doesn't mean that we can't make progress, especially if we take a different approach and we use tools that weren't available before (and never underestimate using a different angle/mindset -- as long as we consider aging itself 'normal' and just something to be slightly delayed, we certainly won't make progress). The SENS 'engineering' approach mean that we don't have to understand metabolism or fix everything that goes wrong, just to periodically do repairs on whatever long-lived molecules are accumulating over time to cause pathologies. That's a lot easier than the past gerontological approaches of trying to understand and cure everything.
>> Yet we are composed of trillions of cells, all 'programmed' to deteriorate over time.
> That is incorrect. The diseases of aging are the result of evolutionary neglect, they aren't 'programmed in' as if there was a timer running.
No, the earlier poster is exactly right -- all living cells are programmed to deteriorate over time. There are no examples of immortal cells, with one exception -- cancer cells, like those that were harvested from Henrietta Lacks in 1951 and live on today in Petri dishes all over the world (so-called HeLa cells).
A quote from the second article: "Programmed cell-death (or PCD) is death of a cell in any form, mediated by an intracellular program.[1][2] PCD is carried out in a regulated process, which usually confers advantage during an organism's life-cycle. PCD serves fundamental functions during both plant and metazoa (multicellular animals) tissue development."
There is a reason we die -- it makes evolutionary sense. If there was an advantage to living longer, we would live longer. If there was an advantage to living a shorter time, we would live a shorter time. Our present lifetimes result from natural selection and evolution.
You are looking at it the wrong way. Yes, from the point of view of an individual cell, you are correct. But from the point of view of a whole human, that's not how it works. At 25 pretty much all your cells have died and been replaced many times, and if over evolutionary times we had lived to be 500 years on average, we'd have mechanisms to keep up healthy that long. But we haven't, and so we don't, which is why everything starts going wrong as soon as you get to evolution's blind spot, past the age at which most of us lived and reproduced.
If damage didn't accumulate past thresholds that cause various pathologies, we'd basically stay young adults forever. If we can figure out how to fix that damage before it reaches those levels, that's what is going to happen. It's a lot easier to figure out how to fix those few kinds of damages than to change metabolism so that damage doesn't occur, or to cure diseases after they begin.
> There is a reason we die -- it makes evolutionary sense. If there was an advantage to living longer, we would live longer. If there was an advantage to living a shorter time, we would live a shorter time. Our present lifetimes result from natural selection and evolution.
What is "good enough" for our genes isn't always good for us as people. Most of what can be called "modern progress" is about protecting us from what would happen to us if nature was left to itself. Curing the diseases of aging is just the continuation of that (unless you don't wear glasses, don't live inside a building, don't wear shoes, don't get vaccinated, don't take antibiotics, don't wear any kind of protection, don't brush your teeth, would never have surgery, wouldn't get hearing aids, dentures, etc).
> At 25 pretty much all your cells have died and been replaced many times, and if over evolutionary times we had lived to be 500 years on average, we'd have mechanisms to keep up healthy that long.
You're missing the point that some cells, essential to our survival, are never replaced, and when they decay, we die. One example is brain cells -- they're never replaced, and when they're done, so are we. This means that, unless we can get around apoptosis (programmed cell death), then we won't ever move beyond a certain age. We aren't close to understanding apoptosis.
> What is "good enough" for our genes isn't always good for us as people.
Ah, someone who thinks he can outwit nature. When we try to outwit nature, we end up outwitting ourselves.
> Most of what can be called "modern progress" is about protecting us from what would happen to us if nature was left to itself.
You mean, like antibiotics? The antibiotics that we have foolishly mismanaged to the extent that they simply don't work any more?
Contrary to your thesis, we need to figure out how to get along with nature, not pretend we can dominate nature. We've tried to run the show, and nature has responded by showing us how naive we are.
And this idea isn't some airy-fairy New Age philosophy, it's the result of careful scientific work. We're just getting started in figuring out how to get along with nature, and everything we've tried to date has backfired:
Medical and nutritional advances -> overpopulation
Antibiotics and other medical breakthroughs -> the gradual evolution of antibiotic-immune microbes.
Longevity extension -> overcrowding, a plague of chronic diseases in the elderly, deep philosophical questions about meaningless long lives.
> Curing the diseases of aging is just the continuation of that
Curing the "diseases of aging" is not your topic. Your topic is the disease of age. That's not the same thing at all.
> You're missing the point that some cells, essential to our survival, are never replaced, and when they decay, we die. One example is brain cells -- they're never replaced, and when they're done, so are we. This means that, unless we can get around apoptosis (programmed cell death), then we won't ever move beyond a certain age. We aren't close to understanding apoptosis.
These cells can be replaced via stem cell therapy, and the more we look into things, the more we find that certain types of cells that we thought weren't replaced actually are.
> Ah, someone who thinks he can outwit nature. When we try to outwit nature, we end up outwitting ourselves.
That sounds really good, but I believe it's BS. You are anthropomorphizing nature. And every day you are "outwitting it" I'm sure. I bet you are quite happy for yourself and your loved ones not to be living like humans were living 20,000 years ago. And who's to say that technological and scientific progress isn't part of nature anyway? Why is curing diseases "against" nature? Not that nature is an entity in the first place.. All there is are the laws of physics.
> Curing the "diseases of aging" is not your topic. Your topic is the disease of age. That's not the same thing at all.
"age" is not an abstract thing that kills you. There are specific diseases of aging - which are diseases that old people get that young people do not get - that are curable, and that includes all the things that make us frail but aren't usually categorized as diseases (loss of muscle mass, change in texture of skin, etc).
Are you saying that Alzheimer's disease and heart disease and going blind and getting fat and arthritis and losing your muscles and sex drive are good things? If so, you are welcome to refuse these therapies when they are developed, but I will gladly take them, just like I'm sure you are taking advantage of all the other modern ways of making human life easier and more enjoyable.
You seem to be under what Aubrey de Grey calls the "pro-death trance"; happy that we cured smallpox and you wish we could cure AIDS and whatever, but you don't think we can cure the diseases of aging, so you find excuses for why they are actually good.
>> You're missing the point that some cells, essential to our survival, are never replaced, and when they decay, we die.
> These cells can be replaced via stem cell therapy ...
Brain cells replaced by stem cell therapy? Have you given this any thought? A brain cell replaced by stem-cell therapy is empty -- it's not a replacement for the cells that contain the memory of your fifth birthday party, or that contain your knowledge of Calculus.
There's a reason brain cells aren't replaced -- it's the same reason you can't swap a running hard drive for a replacement that has no data written to it.
> "age" is not an abstract thing that kills you.
No, not abstract -- apoptosis is not abstract, it is a fact of life. And we have a very poor understanding of it.
> Are you saying that Alzheimer's disease and heart disease and going blinde and getting fat and losing your muscles and sex drive are good things?
Only you said that, and the remainder of your post relies on an argument only you have made.
> but you don't think we can cure the diseases of aging, so you find excuses for why they are actually good.
1. Stop making arguments for other people.
2. Learn the science. You have suggested stem cell therapy to replace brain cells, but without asking yourself what brain cells do, how they function. You would do well to learn that first.
> Brain cells replaced by stem cell therapy? Have you given this any thought? A brain cell replaced by stem-cell therapy is empty -- it's not a replacement for the cells that contain the memory of your fifth birthday party, or that contain your knowledge of Calculus.
Maybe if you replaced all cells at once or something stupid like that, but that's not what is being suggested here.
> No, not abstract -- apoptosis is not abstract, it is a fact of life. And we have a very poor understanding of it.
You have a poor understanding of it. First of all, a lot of the diseases of aging come about because apoptosis stops working and these malfunctioning zombie cells hang around and gum things up and produce erroneous signals/proteins. Rejuvenating the apoptosis process is part of the SENS platform. Cells that commit apoptosis are replaced all through your life.. It's when that process stops working well that things go wrong; they don't go wrong because of that process.
In other words, apoptosis doesn't make us old, it keeps us young. It's when it stops working well - along with other things - that we get frail and sick.
I asked you questions, and you didn't answer them.
> 2. Learn the science. You have suggested stem cell therapy to replace brain cells, but without asking yourself what brain cells do, how they function. You would do well to learn that first.
Have you read Aubrey de Grey's book? It goes quite deep into the biology of his proposals (and he cites the papers that go even deeper). If you haven't, you don't even know what is being proposed so how can you know if it makes sense or not?
This is where I think we're headed. We're going to figure out exactly what all the moving bits do in our DNA and mitochondria and we'll be in a position to re-write it at will. When that happens, the question of what it means to be 'you' is going to get very pertinent, a safe example if it turns out your love of certain foods is a result of wiring in your brain due to your DNA makeup, do you change it? Do you add new foods? Do you delete old foods?
What happens to social justice when one person can afford gene therapy to make their children 99% more capable than average and others can't? If you ever saw the movie Gattica (not a great movie but it tried) don't worry about people who are born 'perfect' or born the 'natural' way, think about people who re-write their own genetics to have the mutation that gives Sherpa in the Himalayas more, and more efficient red blood cells. Very scary tech talk at Google on this once where a researcher in gene therapy was getting approached by trainers already.
Well, the people were asked how long they wanted to live, not what they believe is medically achievable within their livetime. Only one percent wanted to live forever. That sounds like acceptance of death for me.
>But it's understood that we are very far from medical technology that can tackle the problem.
That's not what the question in the survey was. The question was "how long do you WANT to live?", not "how long do you think you WILL live?". Saying you don't want something just because you can't have it is just sour grapes.
>The idea that we can cure aging with some miracle cure is a pipe dream until we have a far better understanding and control of biological processes.
I don't think any informed people believe that some "miracle cure" is going to come along and cure death and aging. Curing death and aging is going to be a slow, incremental process because aging is made up of many components (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aubrey_de_Grey#The_seven_types_...)
In the bigger picture of the species, death and birth are what prevents stagnation and enables the next generation tackle new challenges. We are imperfect copying machines, both at biological and intelectual level. Stop the renewal cycle and not enough copy errors happen anymore, leading to the ultimate failure of the species in front of the fast pace of change in the surrounding environment.
That sounds nice and tidy in the abstract. Make it more concrete: do you, personally, want to die to fulfill some perceived evolutionary imperative? If so, feel free. I don't, ever.
Are you saying you don't ever want to die at all?
That's interesting because there are some people who feel very strongly that they should die, and there are those who feel that they would never want to and should not need to.
Some people faced with certain death will go to very extreme lengths to prolong their lives by the tiniest amount. Others will accept it.
There's a sort of "natural way of things" mentality that is very pervasive. People believe that we are meant to die. I think this is another very difficult barrier that the SENS community faces.
> Are you saying you don't ever want to die at all?
Emphatically yes.
> That's interesting because there are some people who feel very strongly that they should die
People often accept what they feel they can't change, more because they don't see any obvious way to change it rather than actually liking the situation they find themselves in. That can lead to rather impressive rationalizations of why we "need" to die, but that seems like sour grapes to me. I think a majority of that set of people would choose to live forever if they actually had the option. If the option actually existed in practice, rather than in philosophical conversations, intentionally choosing not to use it would amount to suicide. I'm not suicidal, so I want to live forever; I really don't see a middle ground there, other than indecision and procrastination.
Frame the question inductively instead, to help people think about it less abstractly; I bet you'd get an almost universally positive response to "do you want to live at least one more day?". Or phrase it negatively and count the "no"s: I doubt you'll get many positive responses to "do you want to die tomorrow?", and the ones you do get probably indicate a need for immediate psychological help.
> Some people faced with certain death will go to very extreme lengths to prolong their lives by the tiniest amount. Others will accept it.
Depends on whether you think of "dead" as the absolute zero point on your value scale or not. If you don't, you can imagine scenarios in which you'd prefer death. Personally, I do see that as the zero point, so no scenario exists for which I'd consider death a preferable alternative.
> There's a sort of "natural way of things" mentality that is very pervasive.
I think almost all instances of this argument would very quickly dissolve in the face of an actual option to live forever, leaving only a few random fanatics who really believe that they "should" die.
Say you were given some gene therapy at age 15 or so, and you will never die of natural causes. Would you take a pill at age 80 to end it?
The way the survey questions were asked must have just been terrible. I think what happens is people get this picture in their mind of someone that looks like a damned ghoulish skeleton if they live to be 150, which is just silly.
One of the commenters on the site was a good example. He said something along the lines of "people start losing their senses, things stop working..." etc. No. No they don't - these are the things that kill you which would not exist if we could allow people to live indefinitely.
That started as a concise response to you, and went on to be me venting about the subject. Of course I want to live forever!
>I think what happens is people get this picture in their mind of someone that looks like a damned ghoulish skeleton if they live to be 150, which is just silly.
Far from silly it is what has happened to everyone who lived to be even 120 or 90. And the people know enough people to know it.
So they answered based on actual experience and observation instead of wishy washy Kurzeill-like hopes...
Why would one call this silly?
It's like calling someone who thinks that travelling to Africa and back to SF every day tiring "silly", because he doesn't take into account the possibility of tele-portation...
I don't want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying. I don't want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen; I want to live on in my apartment.
>Some people faced with certain death will go to very extreme lengths to prolong their lives by the tiniest amount. Others will accept it.
And I wouldn't want to be with the first guys company. They would screw you or everybody to achieve it.
One would never want to experience war, mass violence or extreme events of course. But ever more so, one would never want to experience war or mass violence near those kind of people.
Remember those taking the place of kids in the lifeboats of Titanic? You think in another, non life and death, social situation, but one that could have great benefit for them, they would be more graceful?
On the contrary, I can easily see a pile of fascinating societal consequences if everyone lives forever. Sounds like an awesome set of problems to have; bring them on.
There is only a finite number of living beings this planet can sustain at any given moment - if there really is a possibility to "disable" aging, how do you think we should decide which of all those potential beings will be given a chance to live? Who are we to consider ourselves more worthy of life than any of the previous or possible next generations?
"on this planet." Maybe that would give people motivation to get off it. Regardless if you want to weigh counter-factual people against living people your moral system will have some curious implications which you might not like. If someone threatens to not have children if you don't give them your money are you going to take into account the non existent future lives snuffed out and give in?
Most of the major causes of suffering have already been fixed by 'biotechnology' eg vaccines, condoms, sanitation, basic nutrition, obstetrics. But we still fail to apply them in many places due to well, negligent barbarianism as you put it. Will it really fix these problems if we start embalming billionaires and dictators?
Your blog seems free of any consideration of the social consequences of anti-ageing technology. Do you worry about it? For example, Neil Armstrong died today, and by all accounts he was a great man. But recently he stood up and decried NASA funding private space ventures like SpaceX. Now if the next dragon probe punches a hole in the ISS he may turn out to be right. But all these historical figures who are proven to be wrong or misguided won't be historical figures if you make them live forever... is this unequivocally positive? And if it isn't, how do we deal with it?
Doesn't your Neil Armstrong argument kind of undermine itself given that Armstrong did live long, did decry private space venture, and yet private space ventures are happening anyways?
I think the GP's point is that, as more people live longer, more people with "antiquated", or even "Luddite" world-views will be around, creating friction for the technophiliacs and their notions of how things "should be."
Yes, my characterization is hyperbolic, and pretty blatantly so. I'm trying to stand out from the subtle ageism, couched as progress-ism, in the GP post and countless other poorly thought-out screeds like it.
Your point that progress occurs regardless of that friction is exactly the right counter-argument. In fact, I'd even suggest that the friction being decried is a necessary sanity check on our progress. With every advance we make, we should be asking ourselves how it improves the world, and if the improvement it brings is worth its cost, or its consequences. For private spaceflight, that's a pretty unqualified yes in most peoples' books (Armstrong notwithstanding), but consider all the pharmaceuticals given fast-track approval that turn out to have horrible side-effects, which even token further testing could have uncovered.
But all these historical figures who are proven to be wrong or misguided won't be historical figures if you make them live forever... is this unequivocally positive? And if it isn't, how do we deal with it?
We already have political dissenters: how do you currently "deal with it"? Do you murder them? Do you selectively deny them life-saving medical treatment, so as to silence their views and improve society?
I have a modest proposal. Why not just let poor Neil Armstrong live, and merely censor his writings? The effects are the same, and there's less blood.
There may be some long-term bias going on here. It would be interesting to see what correlation there is between current age and preferred age of death. You'll might find that 60 year olds (with death only 20 years away) would answer differently to 18 year olds.
Can you point me to where it says this in the article? Because I don't see it - he mentions talking to people from "all walks of life", but that's different to having no correlation.
>These percentages have held up as I’ve spoken to people from many walks of life in libraries and bookstores; teenagers in high schools; physicians in medical centers; and investors and entrepreneurs at business conferences.
The percentages are the same for groups of teenagers, and for groups of physicians investors and entrepreneurs. There could be a jump at 60+, but based on his data there isn't a difference between teenagers and working adults.
>Well, that's another data point to suggest that we remain a culture of suicidal, negligent barbarians - quick to accept the suffering and death of billions, and happy to condemn our future selves to the same.
Actually it's a sign that we are NOT a culture of negligent barbarians.
It's a sign that we are mature individuals, with an understanding of the cycle of life, and not me!me!me! egoists that seek to prolong their lives forever, earth, resources and other generations be damned.
How you approach death is the ultimate test of a civilisation's sophistication.
>It's a sign that we are mature individuals, with an understanding of the cycle of life, and not me!me!me! egoists that seek to prolong their lives forever, earth, resources and other generations be damned.
Not hardly. Keep in mind that most people believe in some form of afterlife, so they don't actually think they're going to die at all. If the approach to death is the ultimate test of a civilization's sophistication (which, frankly, is just a silly thing to say, even if it does sound Deeply Wise), then surely it would be the infantile civilization that deals with death by making up a bunch of fairy tales to convince itself that death doesn't really happen after all.
>Not hardly. Keep in mind that most people believe in some form of afterlife, so they don't actually think they're going to die at all.
I don't think people believe that "realistically" to that afterlife, including religious people. Else they would not be sad at funerals.
>If the approach to death is the ultimate test of a civilization's sophistication (which, frankly, is just a silly thing to say, even if it does sound Deeply Wise
Actually it's a common theme in philosophy and religion, far for a "silly thing to say".
One might hope for some Kurzweil like magic cure, but for several millennia of civilisation we had to make do without it (and will have to for quite a while). And people that couldn't accept that cycle made society hell. How a civilisation approaches death says the most about their way of life as well (e.g clinging to money, sex and stuff like it's the be all end all instead of creating things).
>then surely it would be the infantile civilization that deals with death by making up a bunch of fairy tales to convince itself that death doesn't really happen after all.
Nothing infantile about it. Those 'fairytales' are the basis of civilisation. They were forms of reasoning about the universe and existence, but their utility was not on their validity in the physics sense, but on the lessons they gave about current life. Put another way, they really were morals, philosophy and law, not physics and cosmology, even if they seemed like the latter. The important part of the Bible was not "god created this or that in x days", but the keeping-a-civilisation-together part (the creationist loonies in the Bible Belt mostly keep the first part of course).
So, if you think the 10 commandments are silly, you should have witnessed the society without them or something analogous. It's easy to pass judgement upon such things with some milleniums of hindsight and the benefit of a modern upbringing.
>I don't think people believe that "realistically" to that afterlife, including religious people. Else they would not be sad at funerals.
No, most probably don't believe believe in the afterlife, but they escape the reality of the situation by pretending, and if you point out that they are pretending, they will actually become more convinced that they truly do believe in an afterlife.
Arguably, though, they would still cry at funerals even if they did really believe, just as you might cry when a friend or family member leaves and you have no idea when you will see them again.
>Actually it's a common theme in philosophy and religion, far for a "silly thing to say".
Religion and philosophy are full of very silly things to say. My point is that there is no basis for the claim that the approach to death is the "ultimate test". "Ultimate" in what sense?
>And people that couldn't accept that cycle made society hell.
Evidence, please.
>Nothing infantile about it.
Roughly everything you said after this sentence is inaccurate, but more importantly it is all completely irrelevant. Whatever guidance religions may provide about morality will not change the fact that they also provide the primary approach to handling death for most of their adherents. And that approach is to hide behind fanciful lies and ridiculous stories built to replace the terrifying realization that your life is finite and can end at any moment, really and forever, with the feel-good belief that when you die, you will get to go and see everyone who died before you and spend eternity with blah blah blah.
You know how misguided parents sometimes tell their kids, when a dog has to be euthanized, that they are taking him to a "new home" where he will "play in the yard every day with all of the other dogs"? That's exactly how most religious people approach death, except in their case it is self deception rather than lying to a kid.
And if that's how they want to cope with it, that's fine. But don't try to tell me that it's "sophisticated".
http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2011/05/when-did-we-becom...
Any present horror is accepted, indeed mandated, by the ape inside - conform, conform, it cries, so hungry to belong and be inside the visible peer group that this instinct overrides any rational consideration of what it actually means to age to death, and just how much might be done to prevent that from happening in this age of biotechnology.