Ageing is not an inevitable fact of life

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150915-the-secrets-of-living-to-200-years-old

by d_a_robson • 11 years ago

80 66 11 years ago

melling2• 11 years ago

The BBC has a few interesting articles on aging. Here's another:

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140520-the-girls-who-never...

If you read these articles, you're left wondering if there's some existing genetic solution waiting to be found that'll add a healthy 50 years to our lives.

wobbleblob2• 11 years ago

If I could only live to be 80, but as healthy as I am now, I'd sign for it

mikekchar• 11 years ago

Exercise. It's not "as healthy as I am now", but it makes a big difference. Anecdotal evidence, but my 73 year old father still rides his bike over mountains (and shot his best ever golf score last month). He does complain that he wishes he had the body of a 60 year old ;-) My wife's uncle has to be pushing 90 and still runs 2 km every day. If you just keep going, it's amazing what you can accomplish even in the later stages of life.

Obviously this is survivor bias, but if you look after yourself and have a bit of luck, there's no reason you can't be healthy enough to enjoy life well past 80.

sanxiyn• 11 years ago

Re: the title. What are inevitable facts of life?

user9756• 11 years ago

Death? I mean, if you will not die, you could die? And taxes of course.

williamhpark• 11 years ago

I prefer the original title of the article: "The secret of living to 200 years old". Does what it says. Not sure why it was changed.

coldtea• 11 years ago

Well, until now (and in the foreseeable feature) death is one of them.

eli_gottlieb2• 11 years ago

Well, there's the laws of physics, and the Second Law of Thermodynamics pushing the arrow of time forwards. Beyond that, not much is actually inevitable: people just prefer to rationalize anything awful as Inevitable because this gives them a comforting sense of metaphysics.

azatris2• 11 years ago

2nd law of thermodynamics only applies on macroscopic scale. So not really inevitable.

Plus, the laws of physics are based on a set of axioms, which don't necessarily have to be true.

kitd• 11 years ago

Well, the good news is that there's still taxes.

azatris2• 11 years ago

I guess one would be that for life to exist it needs to use energy.

mandelken• 11 years ago

Funny they don't mention the hydra, an amazing little creature, almost(?) immortal: http://www.wired.com/2015/02/absurd-creature-of-the-week-hyd...

s_dev• 11 years ago

Lobsters and some jellyfish are functionally immortal as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turritopsis_dohrnii

fsloth• 11 years ago

Smithsonian magazine disagrees on the immortality of lobsters:

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/dont-listen-to-...

Although, since they will eventually die of energy depletion from growing too large, if they actually stopped growing they might go on ... a lot longer?

reasonattlm• 11 years ago

A few years back researchers found a way to measure lobster age, something that had been a challenge until then:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/30/lobster-age_n_22159...

So give it a few more years and there should be some firm data on how negligibly senescent they actually are. Much of the present situation was a lack of good data.

odabaxok• 11 years ago

They mention it with a link to this: http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150622-can-anything-live-fo...

yread• 11 years ago

Well, mole rats and whales are a lot closer to us so there is a higher probability that they will find something that translates well. Although even mice have their limits

http://www.pnas.org/content/110/9/3507.abstract

ionwake• 11 years ago

Other animals that are negligibly senescent: Aldabra Tortoise, Rockfish, Red woods, Koi

skarap3• 11 years ago

Not only it is an inevitable fact of life, it (and death) is the single most important attribute of life. Especially in the case of humans aging and death limit the amount of damage one single person can do.

I'm not saying it's absolutely impossible to change. Just that it shouldn't.

nabla9• 11 years ago

What I suspect is true but obviously can't prove: Person with completely healthy brain at age 200 would not be well functioning human being in the society.

When we grow we gain experience. That experience shows as habits, perceptions, attitudes and thought trains that makes functioning in the society easy. We learn to see the world trough the past experience. All this turns from asset to liability when society where you live changes beyond the global parameters our cognition settles into.

In other words: Our 'mental posture at large' is path dependent and it gradually settles into some state and becomes less malleable over the years. We can still learn new things and change our thinking, but internalizing the changes becomes increasingly harder in the core level. We don't even want to try to change certain notions because our identity is tied to our 'core beliefs'.

Society where people (especially rich and powerful people) would live 200s would be some kind of dystopia of geriatric thinking. Young wold have to kill the old or stage revolutions from time to time.

kaffeemitsahne3• 11 years ago

Society would adapt.

What's with the contempt for rich people in debates like this? Being mad at rich people for living longer is no less silly than being mad at them for having cars, mobile phones, personal computers back in the day.

animal531• 11 years ago

This could be true. But on the other hand it could also be that if we modify people to live longer lives that our brains will also remain plastic and malleable for longer.

PepeGomez3• 11 years ago

You know how tatoos will look ridiculous on you when you get older? That never happened because by the time it could become a concern, older peole with tatoos became common too.

For your second concern - How do you know that this loss of adaptability isn't an effect of aging?

slfnflctd4• 11 years ago

I'm not saying you're wrong, but I completely disagree with you.

I would argue that the primary reasons people fail to better fulfill their potential are lack of time, poor health and grief or hopelessness in the face of death. I also strongly believe that the epidemic of disastrous short-term thinking among us (particularly our 'leaders') is directly linked to the fact that each of us knows we're going to die all too soon.

I could meet you halfway and say that in our current form, we may not be ideally suited for significantly longer lifespans-- but we can change ourselves with drugs, technology and genetic engineering, so it would be a temporary problem.

The only paradise I believe is possible is one we create, and we cannot do it with this pathetically paltry handful of decades we're allotted.

01Michael104• 11 years ago

Sorry but no...

We have 7 billion people on this planet already and the last thing we need is for them to be living longer.

You can't fulfill your potential in 75 years? Why would that change if you had 150 years? Hopelessness in the face of death? I am 46 and that is not even in my thought process yet...

We don't need drugs, technology and genetic engineering to live longer. We need less poverty (better/fairer distribution of wealth), less disease, and less war for a better quality of life.

Who wants to be here in 100 years anyway? I don't want to live in a world of 20 billion people with little resources on a barley habitable world.

saiya-jin2• 11 years ago

This could well be said about Hitler for example. He sure aimed high, and could achieve much more if more time was given to him (albeit ageing wasn't what stopped him, luckily).

I am slowly starting to believe the biggest threat to mankind are idealists living in their own tiny little mental bubble, far outside of harsh, unjust selfish real world. their well-intended ideas are based on some theoretical human beings that are selfless, pure hearted and will dedicate their life to help others. Usual Star trek thingie. Just that no human like that ever walked on this planet, and probably never won't (fingers crossed for that).

We have elections every 4 year to reflect just that - limit the damage that can be done by a single group of people in full control. it works, within its own limitations of course. All other options are well proven to be worse.

Next time you'll have an idea how to singlehandedly solve all mankind's problems, sit back, think about it one more time (no, 10 more times) and then go for a coffee. there has been countless individuals before with same/similar ideas. For some reason, world still works as it does.

skarap3• 11 years ago

The thought of an eternal life obviously raises questions about the meaning of (eternal or not) life. Nobody has the right answer to those questions. That's why I think there will always be different (but equally valid) opinions about eternal (or very long) life.

I, for one, think that immortal humans will be less like elves and more like Gollum.

melling2• 11 years ago

Yeah, someone always says something like this. I don't think humans living to 120-150 is going to destroy the world as long as we're productive. People like Warren Buffet or Stan Lee, for instance.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stan_Lee

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Buffett

The universe is enormous. Perhaps if we live to be old enough we'll get really bored and head off to other planets.

PepeGomez3• 11 years ago

I don't think so, I think it greatly increases the amount of damage they do.

First, some people are willing to harm society, because the effects are so slow there is no way they could live through the consequences. It encourages short term goals over long term ones.

Second, evil people could be weeded out of society over time. There is only so much wrong one person can do before people realize what's going on. And there would be fewer inexperienced people they could abuse.

astazangasta3• 11 years ago

This is wrong. Whales live longer because they are bigger. Larger animals have slower metabolisms and consequently longer lifespans. See this paper: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15855403

DennisP• 11 years ago

But the article also mentions the naked mole rat, which is about the size of a mouse but lives ten times longer, and Brandt's bat, which weighs as much as a sugar cube but lives 40 years.

astazangasta3• 11 years ago

Not sure about the mole rat, but bats cheat by shutting down their metabolism (basically hibernating) most of the time.

debacle• 11 years ago

Whales also live longer because it's evolutionarily advantageous for them to live longer (they have a long, fragile reproductive cycle). There's little need for a fruit fly to live 100 years and historically it doesn't seem that there has been a great need for humans to do the same, either.

x5n1• 11 years ago

death and taxes next on list of problems to be tackled by scientists.

BoppreH• 11 years ago

Just three days ago The New York Times published a piece about immortality through cryonics: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/13/us/cancer-immortality-cryo...

Now BBC publishes an anti-aging piece. They feel like "submarines", paid/encouraged pieces to promote a certain point of view.

Yudkowsky, is that you? I'm all for it and I'm glad someone is doing this, but curiosity is killing me.

cryoshon• 11 years ago

Yeah, a big PR push for these anti-aging concepts and technologies has been underway since a year or so before Calico was announced.

The idea is that people need to be primed and gradually brought around to believe that these impossible things are worth chasing.

meeper16• 11 years ago

Try Google/Calico Labs, Genentech, Aubrey de Grey, Peter Thiel/SENS.org, Craig Venter/Human longevity, GenoPharmix, The Buck Institute, Berkeley Labs, Cynthia Kenyon, Brin, Page, Jack Ma, AOL 2.0.zuckerberg and the list goes on... this is real and it's happening.

“What controls aging? Biochemist Cynthia Kenyon has found a simple genetic mutation that can double the lifespan of a simple worm, C. elegans. The lessons from that discovery, and others, are pointing to how we might one day significantly extend youthful human life.” — http://www.ted.com/talks/cynthia_kenyon_experiments_that_hin...

“Google Launches New Company, Calico, to Extend the Human Life Span” - http://goo.gl/2LgUKd “The Race To Extend The Human Lifespan Is Heating Up: Google & Craig Venter Leading the Pack" - http://goo.gl/xrHWgv

“For too many of our friends and family, life has been cut short or the quality of their life is too often lacking. Arthur Levinson is one of the crazy ones who thinks it doesn’t have to be this way. There is no one better suited to lead this mission and I am excited to see the results.” - Apple CEO Tim Cook

“Ten years ago, we thought aging was probably the result of a slow decay, a sort of rusting. But Professor Kenyon has shown that it’s ... controlled by genes. That opens the possibility of slowing it down with drugs.” — Jeff Holly, Bristol University

Also see, "The Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences honors transformative advances toward understanding living systems and extending human life. The prize was founded in 2013 by Sergey Brin and Anne Wojcicki, Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, Yuri and Julia Milner, and Jack Ma and Cathy Zhang." https://breakthroughprize.org/Prize/2

Real space travel is not solved until aging and extending human life for a bit is solved. This is why I admire companies and individuals in this area over any other area. It's simply the most innovative accomplishment that can be done in the history of humankind and with the largest rewards.

scotch_drinker• 11 years ago

"They live a lot longer than human beings, yet they are living in the wild, without going to the doctor or any of the perks of human society.."

Followed by:

"By studying these whales and other extraordinarily long-lived creatures, de Magalhaes and colleagues hope we can find new medicines that will similarly slow down the human body’s decay and delay death."

Has to be one of the most ironic things I've seen lately and that's saying something. We are studying organisms that live long lives without medical intervention in hopes of creating medical interventions to keep humans alive longer. Take more pills, go to the doctor more, pay more money for "health". At some point, surely we will begin to question what it means to be alive. I'd love to live longer but not at the expense of quality of life and taking pills for the rest of my life is lower quality in my view.

Mz• 11 years ago

Maybe human understanding will evolve and we will start studying these things in order to better understand the lifestyle that gets them this result rather than how to make a pill to replicate some piece of the chemistry.

Great comment. Thank you for making it.

Ageing is not an inevitable fact of life

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