We will be able to live to 1,000

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4003063.stm

77 150 16 years ago

news.bbc.co.uk

MikeCapone8• 16 years ago

We might or might not defeat the diseases of aging anytime soon, but if you want to help the people who are trying to make it happen, consider donating to the SENS Foundation (money goes directly to research):

http://www.sens.org/

Sadly, because aging isn't considered a disease by the FDA and other regulatory bodies, there is actually very little research being done on it if you take into consideration the fact that it kills more people than anything else in the rich countries (100-150k/day, usually after a long period of suffering).

If you want to learn more about what they are doing and why they think their engineering approach has a chance of success, check out Aubrey's book (the paperback version contains a new chapter, afaik):

http://www.amazon.com/Ending-Aging-Rejuvenation-Breakthrough...

It contains a lot of biology, but should be understandable to the lay person.

And if all you want is a really quick intro, check out his TED talk (it's a bit old now (2005), but the general concepts have stayed mostly the same despite recent progress):

http://www.ted.com/talks/aubrey_de_grey_says_we_can_avoid_ag...

or the talk that he gave at Google (2007):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEyguiO4UW0

jules4• 16 years ago

Before donating you should ask yourself whether Aubrey de Grey is a crackpot or not. I'm not sure myself. Can somebody shed some light on this?

MikeCapone8• 16 years ago

He used to be a lot more controversial a few years ago (Technology Review even had a challenge, asking biogerontologists to debunk his claims, though none really did a convincing job). He's slowly but surely making his ideas more mainstream by tirelessly speaking, debating anyone who wants to, organising conferences and editing a respected peer reviewed journal (Rejuvenation Research, iirc).

If you think you have a good argument that would invalidate his theories, please first make sure that he hasn't answered it a thousand times first.

As usual, Wikipedia has mostly neutral info:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aubrey_de_Grey

gte910h10• 16 years ago

He's looking for cures to issues that are real problems. If you fix any of the problems, even partially, they show great promise for helping older people to be decrepit, even if they don't actually extend lifespan. His hope is curing these types of damage will cause humans to functionally stop aging, but curing these types of damage are useful in and of themselves:

Cell loss, tissue atrophy

Nuclear [epi]mutations

Mutant mitochondria

Death-resistant cells

Tissue stiffening

Extracellular aggregates (Cleaning crap out of our bodies that shouldn't be there and isn't in cells)

Intracellular aggregates (Cleaning crap out of cells that shouldn't be there and is in cells)

FlorinAndrei11• 16 years ago

I don't think there's any debate on the fact that, given enough time, research will eventually figure out how to stop and reverse the changes brought by aging.

The debate is - whether this can be done soon, as opposed to 10000 years from now.

I certainly wish that AdG was right. But is he? I'm not sure. Maybe he is (yay!), maybe not.

JulianMorrison2• 16 years ago

He sounds like a crackpot when his theories are misrepresented. He's not saying "here's how I'll make you live to 1000". He's saying "If we solve this list of things, medical science will be able to give you on maybe another 30 healthy years of lifespan - and by doing this I can convince the world that ageing is so important, we will use those 30 years figuring out how to give you the next 30, and so on".

Edit: for what it's worth, the 1000 year figure is something that was calculated by estimating the chances of a person with the health characteristics of a young adult dying of any reason other than age - about 1 in 1000 per year, or an average of 1000 years life. That's just an average though - after early die-off of careless people, you might reasonably expect a 200-year-old to easily outlive 1000. And of course during that time technology won't have stood still - 1000 years ago, it was the dark ages.

mikedmiked• 16 years ago

I've met him and he seems like a crackpot. Extremely nice, gentle and loveable; but a crackpot.

danielford2• 16 years ago

That's complicated. My criticism of Aubrey de Grey is one I have of transhumanism in general, which is that it's mostly CS people taking Moore's law and applying it to biological problems without having any experience in biology. Aubrey de Grey's degrees are not in the life sciences, and to my knowledge he's never been directly engaged in a biological research project. Those of us who have done aging research understand how ridiculously difficult it can be to do things that sound simple on paper, and De Grey isn't even making proposals that are simple on paper.

On the other hand, he seems to be a smart, well-intentioned guy who has spent a lot of time developing a theoretical knowledge of how biological systems work. De Grey's not going to spend your money on coke and whores, and he's not going to spend it developing the ultimate power crystal. He's just underestimated the difficulty of solving the problem.

So if you think aging is a disease and not a natural process, it's probably underfunded and you should consider giving him money. Just understand that you're probably going to die of an aging-related complication regardless of how much money you or anyone else gives him.

tome• 16 years ago

You should also carefully consider the ethical implications of extending human life indefinitely.

pohl• 16 years ago

Thank you. I added them to my list at givv.org

yan• 16 years ago

Just FYI: This article is from 2004.

rmorrison• 16 years ago

I don't see how humanity could handle something like mass distribution of a magic treatment that allowed people to live to 1,000. The world would quickly get over crowded, resources would dry up, world wars would follow, and who knows what else.

sshumaker• 16 years ago

This is silly.

Everyone was worried in the 1970's that the 1990's would have massive overcrowding and famines, but it didn't happen. Instead, the world population growth rate has begun to level off.

Why? In affluent countries, people no longer have children out of necessity, but of desire. In fact, many first-world nations are actually now undergoing population contraction (Japan, much of Europe).

If you eliminate aging across the world, the necessity of children will go away. People will only have children if they want them.

gte910h10• 16 years ago

It's not just the first world. Women in even the poorest countries are simply just choosing to have less children.

biggitybones3• 16 years ago

If people lived 10x longer than they do now, the birth rate would have to drop dramatically (my rudimentary math would assume that it would require 10% of the amount of births we have now) or you'd risk overcrowding.

We'd end up with government controlling the number of children, possibly even a lottery system. The overcrowding worries of the 70s and 90s were not because of a 1200% increase, rather a 10-20% increase.

sgk284• 16 years ago

Eh... humanity will always find a way. We've done pretty good so far. If nothing else, spending a few years flying to mars seems a lot more reasonable when you've got 1,000 to spare. Space colonization is one solution to overpopulation.

smallblacksun3• 16 years ago

The problem is that we have no evidence that any planet/moon/etc. that we have discovered can support the level of ecosystem required for humans on that planet to be self-sufficient.

gte910h10• 16 years ago

He's not talking about a magic treatment, he's talking about raising the life expectancy gain per decade by more than 10.

All that said: Then if that happens, war will happen. I predict population will stabilize still (remember, accidents and unsolved diseases and violence and suicide will still kill). If it doesn't happen then we condemn the whole world to die.

I for one am for giving the chance for us or our children the chance to make it work, and find it overwhelmingly arrogant to think we know well enough to judge they won't handle it.

ugh5• 16 years ago

But people die! Wouldn’t you want to stop that if you could? I don’t know how you could consider death some sort of necessary evil. That seems like a pretty cynical and cruel view to me. Think of all the intelligent, experienced and capable people who die every day (or are slowly losing their intelligence due to aging). Wouldn’t it be great if Shakespeare were still alive? Newton? Darwin? Einstein? Crick?

Death is wasteful and it’s monstrous. Those problems you mentioned seem like small obstacles compared to the much bigger problem of death.

colonelxc• 16 years ago

His argument is that there would be overcrowding. Then, we potentially wouldn't be able to sustain the large population... then people would die from lack of food/water. This can probably be overcome with new technology, much like in Asimov's robot books (the "Cities").

Anyways, while death from old age is sad, I think premature death is worse. The 5 year old kid with leukemia, the car accidents, wars. There are tons of things that kill people before they can live a "whole life" which I think we should work on first (not that we can't do both).

Hopefully with some of these aging technologies, quality of life for the 'elderly' would also improve. I would hate if I couldn't play sports for 90% of my life.

philwelch4• 16 years ago

Newton wasted the bulk of his life on theology. I don't think giving him a few more hundred years would have given the world anything else that was useful. I suspect the others would have been disappointments to keep around as well--except for Shakespeare, all of them did a finite number of interesting things early in their lives and already seemed to have retired. You can't conflate indefinite lifespan with indefinite creative steam.

But even if you could? Shakespeare as a Hollywood screenwriter makes for an intriguing idea, I admit. But I think we would get sick of even him.

joubert3• 16 years ago

I bet that cure would be so expensive only a few people could access it.

awt2• 16 years ago

Just going based on the title here. But if we let people live to 1000, that will deny many people the right to have children. The long term consequences of such a change could be a drastic slow down in technological innovation as the super-elderly are able to accumulate vast sums of wealth. Just think of the advantage you'd have as a 500 y/o over a 25 y/o.

gte910h10• 16 years ago

Childbearing age may also be increased though. SO if you can have a kid at 200 who's perfectly healthy, why would you necessarily spurt one out at 20?

pixelbath• 16 years ago

I don't think the parent post was talking about childbearing age; I interpreted it as being more of a society-imposed restriction based on the practicality of having a population that can be up to 1000 years old.

crystalis10• 16 years ago

Why is childbirth a right? Would you accept a trade of a parent's life for a child's life, perhaps with a time delay?

There's also several financial methods that could be used to prevent undesirable wealth accumulation.

joubert3• 16 years ago

You, and nobody else, own your body. I.e., nobody should be able to say you're not allowed to have children.

awt2• 16 years ago

You may be right -- it is not currently guaranteed under the constitution that I'm aware of.

A trade off would be ok but hard to enforce, as right now we don't even let people want to die, die legally for the most part.

gte910h10• 16 years ago

When I donate to research, I like to see what the "partial failure result" is.

One of the neat thing about sens research is that if you happen to even get one or two of the parts of damage fixable or even moderated, then you have a much less inactive old age period, even if no actual longevity is gained.

I find decrepit old age to be one of the biggest issues of our time (who cares if grandma is 80 if she can move like she's 50; the issue society faces today with the elderly is one of them not being able to take care of themselves).

Additionally, with the aging of Europe and Japan, prolonging the useful life of the workforce is a big worry.

mechanical_fish3• 16 years ago

prolonging the useful life of the workforce is a big worry

Not in my world. The world where we are at the tail end of the largest recession in two or three generations, with danger of double-dip; we have lots and lots of surplus productive capacity, productivity just keeps going up, and unemployment is between 10% and 25% in the US depending on how you count it.

gte910h10• 16 years ago

Raise taxes, do make work projects.

The growth of productivity will always be an issue.

tansey3• 16 years ago

Think about how much more efficient and productive an economy could be if the oldest members didn't have to retire due to old age?

More poignant to the current recession-- imagine how much better things would be now if people who lived through the great depression were still around (in large numbers) and running for office.

tyree7313• 16 years ago

Life expectancy has increased a good amount in the past 50 years, raising by ~8.5. That is to say, for the exponentially increasing abilities of modern medicine, we have increased linearly in life expectancy. Maybe there is some breaking point, such as a universal cure for cancers and/or the end of heart disease, but regardless it seems like a huge leap to go from ~78 to ~1000 in life expectancy.

elidourado• 16 years ago

Let's say that life expectancy is now increasing at a rate of 2 years per decade. If you want to live to 1000, you just need to increase that to 10 years per decade. You don't have to go from 78 to 1000 all at once.

DrSprout• 16 years ago

Maintaining two per year for 500 years is more than sufficient.

Personally, I expect false starts in the next couple centuries. The beta testers will be healthy and fit into their hundreds, but those that follow may get to 200-400, then possibly further. There are just too many engineering issues to work out in a single iteration.

tyree7313• 16 years ago

Very true.

gte910h10• 16 years ago

Much of life expectancy gains though are for the area south of 70. Much of SENS research hold's promise for the area north of 70. That's what's exciting. Especially if that we can live a healthy older age, even if it's not any longer.

(Truthfully, some cancer research benefits older people, as cancer has a much higher incidence as you age, however, much research out there is for middle of life diseases).

If my grandmother could play basketball again, she's love to.

Remember, people lived to 70 thousands of years ago.

Remember Ben Franklin lived to 84.

tyree7313• 16 years ago

That is sort of what I'm getting at I guess. We haven't progressed much further than what was possible thousands of years ago.

jpablo• 16 years ago

There's a book by Asimov, Please Explain, that has a list of science questions.

I remember the very last question is about "what point does getting old has?".

He argues that without aging and dying, populations will stop getting better and will stagnate.

It seemed very appropriate to link here, but I couldn't get a link. Other than a Spanish translation :-(.

helwr• 16 years ago

Also check out "The Immortal" by Borges

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Immortal

MikeCapone8• 16 years ago

Curing the diseases of aging might cause problems, but what we must ask ourselves is: Are those problems bigger or smaller than the problems caused by the diseases of aging in the first place?

If your problems aren't worse than 100-150k people dying per day after a prolonged period of frailty and suffering, causing suffering to their families and friends too and costing tons in healthcare, then I'd say it's worth it.

However long you live, you live one day at a time. If you are happy today and in good health, you'll want to live until tomorrow, and so on. But if for some reason you want to stop taking the rejuvenating therapies or throw yourself off a cliff, that's your choice. Let's just not make the choice for everybody else and all future generations by not developing these therapies...

danielford2• 16 years ago

That's an explanation that rests on group selection, which tends not to be taken very seriously by most biologists. Similarly, group selection explanations of why we age are held only by a handful of researchers in the field of aging.

Most biologists in the field of aging hold that aging is the result of the decreased force of natural selection with age. This is somewhat difficult to explain even with diagrams, but I'll try anyway.

Let's imagine three forms of a gene. One causes you to die at the age of eight, another causes you to die at eighty, and the third never causes you to die. We would expect that the form of the gene that causes you to die at eight would be removed from the population very quickly, since anyone who has it will die before they can reproduce and pass it on. In contrast, the gene that causes you to die at eighty will be rather prevalent, since by that age you'll have already passed on your genes to your progeny. In fact, it will probably exist at about the same frequency as the gene that didn't cause you to die at all.

This is the mutation accumulation theory of aging. Because natural selection acts more strongly early in life, we tend to accumulate genes with mutations that are detrimental later in life. There's also a variant called antagonistic pleiotropy, where you have genes that have a beneficial effect early in life having a negative effect in old age.

FlorinAndrei11• 16 years ago

"There's also a variant called antagonistic pleiotropy, where you have genes that have a beneficial effect early in life having a negative effect in old age."

That makes a lot of sense. Passing on the genes seems to over-ride a lot of other things, just look at the crazy stuff most (all) creatures do to find and attract a mate.

logic2• 16 years ago

A specific concern I've always had about this idea of indefinite lifespan is that of monoculture. How often have you heard a phrase along the lines of "this is a temporary problem; once the 'old guard' is no longer in charge, society can move forward on issue XYZ"? Make "XYZ" any major social issue we've had in the past thousand years; from fiefdoms to gay rights to democracy.

It's effectively the end of generational cultural change, which might be a good or bad thing, depending on which generation you most identify with.

devinj• 16 years ago

People still die, from accidents and what have you. In terms of multiples of the average death rate, generational change will be exactly the same. But generations are 10+ times as long in this view.

teilo• 16 years ago

I just have to shake my head at this. The only adequate word for this is arrogance. The arrogance to believe that we know enough about the processes of life to extend them indefinitely.

We don't even know what we don't know. How many times have we been at this place in the history of biology, where we honestly believe that we are just "that" close to figuring out the processes of life. We were wrong then, and we are wrong now.

We do not know or understand the over-arching cause of cancer, nor the cause of its radical increase. Similarly with heart disease: after a generation of assurances that the cause is a high-fat diet, the premise itself is being rejected. I could go down the list of major congenital diseases, and tell the same story. Even the most basic assumptions which we have about disease are being overturned. And whatever replaces them will likely be overturned yet again.

pingswept• 16 years ago

From TFA: "And each method to do this is either already working in a preliminary form (in clinical trials) or is based on technologies that already exist and just need to be combined."

Totally agreed-- it's insane to think that because you can do some stuff in isolated cases, the combination is a trivial extension.

MikeCapone8• 16 years ago

> We don't even know what we don't know. How many times have we been at this place in the history of biology, where we honestly believe that we are just "that" close to figuring out the processes of life. We were wrong then, and we are wrong now.

Aubrey's point is that we don't need to understand metabolism to repair the damage of aging, just like you can maintain and repair a house or a car without understanding in detail all of the mechanisms that cause damage and failure. You just clean up some of the damage and change some parts periodically so that it never reaches a threshold at which failure is possible.

Our bodies already do this quite well for the first 20-30 years of our lives, but after that, we're in an evolutionary blind spot and long-lived molecules accumulate and eventually make maintenance and repair mechanisms stop working for long enough to lead to pathologies. If we clean up these long-lived molecules, that'll be a very good start.

rabidgnat• 16 years ago

I disagree with your perspective. Scientists don't need to understand everything about life to make meaningful contributions to our lifespan. This stuff isn't magic - there are sound, repeatable principles at the bottom of everything you mention, and the principles are possibly within our grasp. The technology needed for making these discoveries only gets better with time, never worse.

Look at it this way: crude principles applied at the macro level have extended our lifespan by decades. As scientists get better and better at piecing together the building blocks from the bottom, they'll likely find principles at the micro level that improves our lifespan as well

logic2• 16 years ago

Hubris is the hallmark of entrepreneurial endeavors. I don't know how many sympathetic ears you'll have here if you're concerned about the "arrogance" of scientists.

die_sekte• 16 years ago

And after living a 1000 years one is going to walk into the central computer, edit their memories and be born again a few millenniums later.

I am a pretty big fan of Arthur C. Clarke.

tingley• 16 years ago

Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy (Red/Blue/Green) has this sort of development as a backdrop.

Nothing good comes of it.

gte910h10• 16 years ago

And Heinlein had tons of novels where it worked out fine.

I don't think we should fund research based on what storytellers wrote to entertain us.

rauljara• 16 years ago

When my intro to genetics teacher in college explained to us how aging in cells worked, he told us that one of his professors had explained to him that a "cure" for aging was about 10 years away. But that had been more than ten years earlier. My professor said that he had recently talked to that same professor again. The new ETA: about 10 years.

This is one of those problems that seems easy to solve in principle, but the details are nasty. Frankly, I think there's a reason complicated life evolved so that it would age. The standard reason given is that eventually errors in replication accumulate and cancer results. I.e. we age to avoid cancer. But that is a ridiculous reason. There is a chance we might die of cancer if we grow too old, so we trade that possibility of death by cancer for a certainty of death by aging? It just doesn't make evolutionary sense.

I have a feeling that whatever the real reason for aging is, it will take us a long, long time before we find a way around it.

javanix• 16 years ago

I doubt that we'll ever find a "reason" for aging. It's the result of an imperfectly optimized biological system - after all, humans are the result of one great big evolutionary algorithm.

We've proven time and again that those run exponentially and are not perfectly accurate, especially in the presence of a dynamic environment.

FlorinAndrei11• 16 years ago

If it's an imperfect mechanism, then look back at the huge chain linking you to the first living creature: adult body / sperm & egg / adult body / sperm & egg / adult body / ...

How come that chain hasn't failed?

Basically, you're just rephrasing the "aging through accumulation of errors" hypothesis. The problem is, errors should accumulate along the chain mentioned above, too. Yet they don't.

jwegan• 16 years ago

I think part of it might be that evolution only cares about how successful you are in passing on your genes. Why do salmon die after mating (its due to exhaustion)? There isn't really any reason they have too, but they successfully passed on there genes so there is little evolutionary pressure on what happens afterward.

I think it is the same for aging. There isn't really a reason for aging, it just happens because there is less evolutionary pressure once humans pass the age when they normally procreate.

Of course I don't have any qualifications and this is just my hypothesis so take it as you will.

FlorinAndrei11• 16 years ago

IIRC, either Kurzweil or de Grey said exactly the same thing.

v3rt• 16 years ago

I believe the predominant evolutionary theory actually does have an explanation - sexual reproduction serves to produce offspring that are different from their parents and have a better shot of being adapted to a constantly changing environment on average (particularly relevant to parasites/diseases). These children still carry their parents' genes, though, so it is in the parents' best genetic interests to die once the kids are self-sufficient so as to avoid out-competing their own offspring.

tansey3• 16 years ago

The reason for sticking around after mating is to protect your children. In this sense, there is definitely an evolutionary pressure to live longer. The longer an organism takes to mature, the more advanced it can become. Consequently, the longer you live as a mature individual, the longer you can mate to produce more children and protect the ones you already produced.

gte910h10• 16 years ago

I honestly don't think we're throwing very much effort into the work.

rosser• 16 years ago

So we're perpetually closer to curing aging than we are to energy-positive fusion? If only they were reversed, we'd be able to support the population explosion in millenarians before they got here...

mechanical_fish3• 16 years ago

Hee hee. All in support of my cynical hypothesis: the predicted future is always at least ten years away because that's slightly longer than the longest research grants. [1]

See, if you predict a breakthrough in five years and are then awarded a seven-year grant, you're setting yourself up for a lot of embarrassment when it comes time to apply for a renewal.

The future is in the future, and until you're absolutely certain of success it's important to keep it there. ;)

---

[1] that's the predicted future. The actual future isn't in the future at all. It arrives every day, without warning, as a fait accompli. There's no money in predicting the near future: you must either predict the far future, or make the near future.

FlorinAndrei11• 16 years ago

"I think there's a reason complicated life evolved so that it would age. The standard reason given is that eventually errors in replication accumulate and cancer results. I.e. we age to avoid cancer. But that is a ridiculous reason."

Exactly. Any justification along those lines falls flat on its face when you realize it should also apply to the sperm and egg. Yet it doesn't apply in that case.

s3graham2• 16 years ago

The "reason" for aging seems almost self-evident to me. The goal is to pass on [mutated] genetic information. Post-reproduction, you're simply a drag on local resources.

Hypothetical populations that didn't age and die would have killed themselves off due to lack of food.

MikeCapone8• 16 years ago

Anything that happens after reproduction is in an evolutionary blind spot. Aging is the result of evolutionary neglect, not design.

FlorinAndrei11• 16 years ago

"Hypothetical populations that didn't age and die would have killed themselves off due to lack of food."

Starvation is not the only way living creatures can die.

Just up the aggression a little, for example, and the death rate returns to a self-sustainable level.

sketerpot• 16 years ago

And there's the beauty of Aubrey de Gray's plan: it's not about finding a Cure for Aging. It's about finding a number of techniques that will allow us to extend people's life-spans long enough to find out how to extend their life-spans more, which will give more time for research, and so on.

It's a much more realistic approach than "finding a way around aging," which is how the problem is usually miscast.

jacquesm2• 16 years ago

And Achilles never really overtook the hare right ?

Tichy• 16 years ago

I think it likely that aging has evolved, that is, nature wants us to die (or some organisms at least). It certainly doesn't care how long we live.

That doesn't mean that we can't come up with out own motivations and schemes.

There is also (afaik) at least one organism that can live forever, a jellyfish.

quizbiz• 16 years ago

I heard some interesting insight recently. I am not sure how correct it is but it suggested that while we have made a lot of progress in living longer (allowing us to be old for longer) we have not made much progress at slowing down the process of aging (making it take longer to get old).

If we want to live long and fruitful lives, how do we slow down aging? I prefer that question over, how do we live until 1,000?

rleisti• 16 years ago

I wonder if this would change the popular morality of suicide? What if you're 800 years old, and you truly feel that you've had enough? Should you be forced to keep on going, potentially indefinitely?

Or even just knowing when to step aside and let the next (evolved) generation take over? (or will that still naturally just happen, via accidental death or death by lack of resources to live)

WiseWeasel• 16 years ago

Hell, give us another 50 years and I'm sure we'll all have our minds cloned into an army of robot bodies and computer brains for, uh, let's say longevity.

ck2• 16 years ago

That article is from 2004 (from top of page)

Last Updated: Friday, 3 December, 2004, 00:01 GMT

This kind of sensationalism is silly.

http://xkcd.com/678/

Falls under: It has not been conclusively proven impossible.

We don't know what kind of roadblocks there will be for this kind of development, we can't even guess - claims of 10-20 years are beyond silly, they are crazy and ignoring the concept of "what we don't know".

ps. Can you imagine how overpopulated the world would be?

How we would strip every resource bare?

jeremyawon• 16 years ago

instead, let's engineer away our anxieties about not existing.

jrockway2• 16 years ago

Can I bet on the opposite side of this? I bet that nobody who is 60 now will live to 1000.

Don't get me wrong, I would like to live to 1000... but I would be pretty surprised if my kids live past 150. I will be surprised if I live to 100. It's sad to think about, but our bodies wear out over time (cosmic rays and whatnot), and we don't have the technology to repair them efficiently yet. People still die from the flu!

mechanical_fish3• 16 years ago

A fun exercise for a high school class: Get some basic mortality tables off the Internet. Now, tell me -- to first order, of course -- all the causes of death we'd have to eliminate in order for, say, 25% of the population to live to be 1000.

What I really want to know is what common everyday activities we'd all have to give up. I bet motorcycling and scooter-riding are right out, but what about, say, swimming? Horseback riding? In a world where life expectancy is ten times longer, is everything an order of magnitude more dangerous?

alan-crowe• 16 years ago

It would be a good idea if safety laws, such as speed limits, where constructed around formula with life expectancy as one of the variables. Plug in 70 years and get out 30mph. Plug in 140 years and get out 25mph.

Since you are going to grow old and die anyway, spending too much time trying to avoid accidental death is self-defeating. Acknowledging this would provide a check on the tendency towards super-safety in public policy.

dkarl• 16 years ago

You'll have to wait fifty years to collect. How confident are you that you'll live that long?

jrockway2• 16 years ago

I have no doubts about living to 75.

But remember, if someone who is 60 now lives to 999, I still win the bet. So I feel like I might have to wait more than 50 years.

benofsky• 16 years ago

Ignoring any claims that the man is a crackpot and any other problems one might have with the science. Does anyone really want to live to 1000? I think you might get a little bored :-/

FlorinAndrei11• 16 years ago

"Does anyone really want to live to 1000? I think you might get a little bored"

Boredom is infinitely better than nothingness.

ubernostrum2• 16 years ago

I've always preferred the idea of immortality on the installment plan -- get frozen/stored/whatever, then woken up every couple hundred or couple thousand years, do stuff, go back into freeze/storage/whatever.

Which, at least for me, is less about avoiding death (which doesn't actually scare me all that much) and more about just getting to see what sort of cool stuff the future holds.

FlorinAndrei11• 16 years ago

You will live in a perpetual state of cultural shock. You can't possibly be useful to the society in that situation.

biggitybones3• 16 years ago

It's amazing to think that just 500 years ago things were so bad that people awaited death patiently and willingly because they believed life was a punishment rewarded with an afterlife.

Now we're trying to extend the amount of time that we live 10 fold because things are so great right now. I'm not saying either is right, just an observation.

kscaldef• 16 years ago

Maybe you don't talk to religious folks much, but that attitude hasn't changed all that much.

JustinSeriously• 16 years ago

Someone smarter than me noted that all predictions of living forever always have one thing in common: it places the time when people start living forever within the lifetime of the predictor.

Aubrey de Grey is 43, and he's predicting that this might be in place in 20 years.

crystalis10• 16 years ago

Could you care to point out the number of correct predictions that take place well after the point of time they were made?

smallblacksun3• 16 years ago

A number of Da Vinci's "inventions" were really just predictions of things that were invented much later (like his helicopter).

sardonic• 16 years ago

I can't believe no one has called out the bogus math in the article:

"If you are a reasonably risk-aware teenager today in an affluent, non-violent neighbourhood, you have a risk of dying in the next year of well under one in 1,000, which means that if you stayed that way forever you would have a 50/50 chance of living to over 1,000."

If you assume 1/1000 chance of death in a year, and 1000 years (1000 trials), your probability of living to 1000 is only 37%, not 50%. I don't know if I would trust the scientific analysis of someone who doesn't understand basic binomial probability.

jarek• 16 years ago

You are assuming this based on a mainstream media article. First of all, you have no idea if he knows the right answer and is just dumbing it down for those who don't understand basic binomial probability. Second, the quote says "well under one in 1000", not "one in 1000". The correct value of one in 1415.8 as calculated by Retric in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1368664 is, in fact, under one in 1000.

Retric• 16 years ago

I know there is a shortcut to this but for this to be true you need a constant rate of 1 death in 1415.78389 per year.

1 / (1 - 10 ^ ((log .5) / 981)) = 1415.78389 so (1-1/1415.78389) ^ (1000-19) = .5

ibagrak• 16 years ago

While I was interning at Google in 2006 I heard the guy speak in one of the Google Talks there. Going to the talk I thought this would just be some outrageous crackpot theory, but he seemed very thoughtful and the approaches he talked about sounded very sensible (although I knew and still know too little about the subject to invalidate his claims).

mattiss• 16 years ago

Is there any practical ways to apply some of this research today? It seems like there must be something out there we can be doing right now to help ward off aging?

Also what is the most promising research being done?

niallsmart• 16 years ago

I'm pretty sure that beard will need a trim by 3010.

Zak• 16 years ago

This article, and a few others covering exactly the same thing keep getting posted here ever few months. I hope Mr. de Grey is right, and I hope I live long enough to find out. That said, until there's some progress to announce, please stop re-posting this here.

mitjak3• 16 years ago

Where do I donate to ensure I don't live till 1,000? Nuclear weapon research?

crystalis10• 16 years ago

I understand you might not want to live that long, but why would you want to take that away from others?

mitjak3• 16 years ago

Because the world is already overpopulated and we don't currently have any means to spread our virus to a different planet.

sliverstorm3• 16 years ago

The article claims that to suggest we should NOT defeat aging is ageism and denying people the right to live.

I disagree. Until we find a way to support a population that grows at a rate like that, we would be forced into one of several possible situations, none of which are pleasant:

1: starvation

2: endless war

3: iron-fisted birth regulation, only allowing one new child per legally documented death

3.5: The implications of couples who really want children + a rule saying they can have one, if someone has died

Until the question of resources is answered, granting people the right to live (longer) equates to denying other people either quality of life (starvation/war) or the chance to live at all (birth regulation). Which brings up another interesting question; if everyone alive has a right to life, do those who have not yet been born have a right to live as well?

sliverstorm3• 16 years ago

I'm not saying we shouldn't extend our lifespans- I would love to live to see a lot of things come to pass, like leaving our own galaxy- but to blindly proclaim anyone who opposes the goal is ageist is to ignore that the benefits have costs, especially considering we already have population issues looming on the horizon.

Call me utilitarian and get pissed that I might stand in your way of living forever, but we have to consider the bigger picture.

pedrokost• 16 years ago

Yesterday my goal was to live 150 years. I am expanding it to 250 now :D

We will be able to live to 1,000

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