There's no limit to longevity, says study that revives human lifespan debate

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05582-3

by mrfusion • 8 years ago

176 114 8 years ago

nabla9• 8 years ago

If I understand this correctly,

In the terms of probability aging distribution becomes memoryless for very old people. This would mean that the remaining lifespan for really old people would follow exponential distribution. Just like with radioactive decay, you could determine their half life. The half life could be as short as one year.

At that point, the researchers say, the odds of someone dying from one birthday to the next are roughly 50:50

fjsolwmv5• 8 years ago

This could also be a subtle variation of the classic fallacy of confusing exponential functions with sigmoids

yazaddaruvala• 8 years ago

I'm so excited! Every time I read an article about longevity, its like Christmas morning.

Everlasting youth is going to be humanity's greatest accomplishment, and its biggest weakness.

gldalmaso• 8 years ago

It always comes to mind how many fictional immortal characters and creatures just basically choose to go into an eternal slumber. There seems to be a de facto consensus that it is actually pretty boring stuff.

meiraleal3• 8 years ago

There seems to be a de facto consensus that it is actually pretty boring stuff.

Consensus created not by people with experience de facto. At least not the majority.

pmoriarty• 8 years ago

"many fictional immortal characters and creatures just basically choose to go into an eternal slumber"

This just indicates a failure of imagination on the part of the author.

tzs• 8 years ago

Perhaps it is a way to deal with limitations of their brains. They usually have finite brains, which presumably have a limit on how much information they can store and organize and process.

Suppose you are an immortal working on some long term goal, some plan that will take a few hundred years to complete. It is a complicated plan and you will need to keep it all in your mind, along with its history as it progresses, in order to guide it to success.

If you try to lead an active life throughout all this, perhaps your brain will acquire too much irrelevant information, interfering with your ability to carry out your plan.

So you sleep for decades at a time, just waking up long enough to check on the plan, learn about changes to the world since your lest check, and make adjustments. Then back to sleep.

throwaway5752• 8 years ago

Not to rain on your parade, but it would still be very wise to have contingency plans around dying after age 30 (will, insurance) and to assume otherwise you'll die around 75-80.

The article is much less optimist than you seem to be interpreting it. It's basically "is there a hard cap on the age you'll die, or is it just random and independent of age past a certain point".

It says nothing about the aging process. Being older than 90 still sucks for the most part, and this article says nothing about quality of life.

It also is a very minor point, in a practical sense: is it impossible to live past 120, or is it possible with then odds of 1:10^9?

opportune2• 8 years ago

Well, one problem is that longevity may not mean youth at all. Increasing longevity may simply mean getting (and looking/feeling) older and older.

Even if we perfect the art of 3d printing new body parts and using gene-targetted cancer treatment, that may not make you spry, less forgetful, or less wrinkly

red75prime• 8 years ago

Biology isn't the only way to remove wrinkles. Our nervous system isn't very good at interfacing with electronics, but technologists will find a reliable way some day.

tathougies3• 8 years ago

It'll certainly be the wealthy's greatest accomplishment. They get to live forever off a permanent underclass of slaves. Congratulations, you have 'fixed' humanity.

codingdave• 8 years ago

So biologists say there is a limit. But if you only look at the statistics from extreme examples of people over 105, mortality looks flat for a few years, so statisticians say we can live forever.

Is it just me, or is this just bad logic?

std_throwaway• 8 years ago

It means that they found data not agreeing with the model of limitless increase of mortality with age. This is just a statistical observation, not physics yet, not by a long shot.

tomrod3• 8 years ago

"Selection" bias takes over at some point. Good genes, good habits, and luck result in a flat mortality rate. Nothing fishy here.

dibujante• 8 years ago

It means you have a chance of living forever that asymptotically approaches, but does not reach, zero.

goatlover• 8 years ago

Assuming you can survive the heat death of the universe, and other events not so friendly to biology prior to that point.

It just sounds dumb because it doesn't take into account any physical limitations that would make the curve reach zero.

frgtpsswrdlame• 8 years ago

Isn't that just Zeno's paradox rephrased for aging? If I shoot this arrow it will asymptotically approach but never actually reach you.

bcheung• 8 years ago

It's bad logic and bad journalism.

People have a 50% chance of dying each year over 105 translates to there is no limit to longevity?

Also, the critic in me makes me want to see the actual distribution because I would think there is a tail effect going on and a small group of people are just genetically living much longer.

chiefalchemist• 8 years ago

More "journalism" with no understanding of numbers? That can't be. (Sarcasm). Just the same, this is also the same profession that still doesn't know the difference between cause and correlation. How can you be allowed to graduate with a degree in journalism and not understand cause v correlation?

That being said, it seems that reading just about an scientific study these days makes you wonder if those doing the publishing understand data analysis, statistics, etc. It seems that too often they find some date, retro-fit a conclusion, ignore the flaws and holes, but still publish because they know the "journalists" won't figure it out either.

And then science complains about the public not buying into ever word science mutters? I don't get it.

bthornbury• 8 years ago

My interpretation:

Death rates increase every year due to naturally occurring mechanisms in the body. Consider those mechanisms as a function with the body as a parameter and the output as a more aged body (or rather a body with higher probability of failure).

If the body reaches a point where the death rate ceases to increase year per year, it would suggest that those same naturally occuring mechanisms, thought of as a function, approaches some asymptote.

Note this doesn't necessarily mean you stop aging (in appearance), just that your body's rate of failure no longer increases. This suggests that if the reasons for failure can be treated properly, perhaps the body can remain in that equilibrium state indefinitely.

This study provides some preliminary evidence that such an asymptote may exist in the body's natural mechanisms. Both controversial and exciting. Worth exploring further.

ethbro5• 8 years ago

It's not bad logic, but it is a non-obvious conclusion. Which is why it gets misreported.

One of two things may be true:

1) As we age, mortality rate increases until certain

2) As we age, mortality rate increases, and then levels off at some point

The latter doesn't mean you'll live forever: you're still already rolling the dice at the highest handicap every year. But it does mean there's no fundamental age everyone MUST die by (aka "live forever", if you're one in a billion).

The more interesting differentiation between the two, and the reason biology is interested in the question, is as an answer to "If we want to maximally prolong life, what do we do?"

If the flattening risk (option 2) model is correct, then we could extend life very far indeed by simply preventing people from dying of things that normally kill them by age 85 (e.g. disease, cancer) and then provide them with high quality medical support (to best fight the risk of their expiring from "normal" causes, e.g. accidents).

On the other hand, if it's ever-increasing risk (option 1), we should instead spend our effort at untangling the microbiology mysteries at the root of aging, and see if we can instead re-engineer systems to not work the way they currently do.

Or as my father (PhD in pathology) quips on the whole matter, "At some point, old folks are past the point that all of things that normally kill people would have killed them. And by virtue of still being alive, it's probable they're more resistant. We say they've reached escape velocity."

nonbel2• 8 years ago

Imagine you keep flipping 10 coins, stopping each once it has come up heads. Eventually all will have come up heads. But if you do this a bunch of times and keep track of how many times you flipped the last coin, there will be a certain number of flips at which the end is most commonly reached.

The "mortality rate" increasing then flattening out is just this curve reaching its peak then declining. The math of this is easy enough to figure out so not sure why there is a mystery amongst biologists about it.

joe_the_user• 8 years ago

If the statistical claim is true, that morality rates don't increase after 105, then it is "suggestive of the idea" that there isn't a structural limit to age, even if this doesn't in any way yield some immediate immortality (notice how weakly I phrase that). If the chance of dying is the same at 105 and 115, then maybe the things killing one at 105 and at 115 have the same root cause and heading them off could significantly increase lifespans. The alternative scenario is new things appear that would kill one at 115 but not at 105 but one would naively assume that the mortality increases (it may be old things retreat and new things appear however).

Obviously, there are a lot of "ifs" here but the result seems interesting and suggestive.

unit91• 8 years ago

Given that theory, we never see people over about 120 because...?

meiraleal3• 8 years ago

Some speculations:

1. there are few, as the world has 7billion++ people today and 120 years ago it was around 1 billion. You certainly are not going to meet them.

2. Someone that is still sane past 100 years will not care about bragging his age to us younglings.

3. Finally, we don't ask these people their age. And when we do, we don't believe the answer.

There are some histories of people with more than a hundred year. Li Ching Yuen[1] was a Chinese herbalist that lived more than 250 years.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Ching-Yuen

furgooswft13• 8 years ago

claimed lifespans, of 197 and 256 years

Ah! Clearly the human age register is only 8 bits and when it overflowed his body crashed.

Try to plan ahead a little better when designing human 2.0 God!

opportune2• 8 years ago

What's more likely: this guy actually lived to be twice the age of the oldest (confirmed) person ever - or the guy overstated his age to make people more inclined to buy his medicine?

tomrod3• 8 years ago

Any time I see these kinds of claims, I like to take a step back and think through a few points. Does it happen frequently? How much evidence would I need to shift my prior from unlikely to likely? Is someone trying to sell me something, literally or metaphorically?

This skepticism is borne from living a life of being gaslighted and conned in a high-demand religion, and breaking away. I don't doubt there are occasionally a few long-tail events that skepticism causes one to miss its reality, but as far as seeking mysticism or a hidden reality (hidden by whatever underlying power, be it gods or billionaires, pick your poison) I find life much less stressful and more fulfilling with a healthy dose of skepticism.

dmichulke• 8 years ago

One of the claimed reasons in the article for the longevity is Baguazhang, a modern variant of which is taught in Brazil under the name of Pakua.

Just in case you want to try it out for yourself.

olavk3• 8 years ago

Statistics. The article says mortality after 100 is about 50%. Which means out of everyone who reaches 100 years, only one in a million will reach 120 years. Since there are only half a million humans in the world who are older than 100 years, people over 120 years should be exceedingly rare.

So even if there is no upper limit to the human lifespan, and mortality doesn't increase after 100, it would be very rare to see people older than 120.

SketchySeaBeast2• 8 years ago

It's a 50/50 change once 105, and given that the odds of 32 coin tosses all coming up heads is 1 in 4,294,967,296 does that mean there's a 137 year old person running around somewhere?

vinceguidry2• 8 years ago

Methuselah lived 969 years, so there's that data point. ducks

SketchySeaBeast2• 8 years ago

I'm only in my early 30's and I am already considering myself 35, at 969 you'd think you'd round up to an even thousand. I'll only believe that exact time if someone counts the rings.

tpeo2• 8 years ago

Probably not running, and probably not within our time. World population in 1881 was a couple of billion short of that.

Someone• 8 years ago

No. Ignoring the running around, we would only expect there to be one alive, if, about 30 years ago, there were about 4 billion 105 year olds on the planet.

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/04/21/worlds-cente... claims there are about half a million centenarians now. At 50% mortality/year, half of them should be between 100 and 101 years old, but chances are it’s higher because the world’s population was growing fast a century ago.

That would give us one or two 118 to 119 year olds 18 years from now. I wouldn’t rule that out.

olavk3• 8 years ago

You are forgetting you first need to reach 105, which very few do, so the population you apply the coin toss to is much smaller. While not impossible according to the article, it would be incredibly unlikely anybody lived to 137. There is a reasonable chance someone around 118-119 is living somewhere though.

jkingsbery• 8 years ago

A 50% mortality rate per year translates into there being a <0.1% chance of living for 10 years. How does that translate into there being "no limit to longevity?" I seriously don't get the claim.

tpeo2• 8 years ago

It means that mortality rate doesn't approach 100% around some given age, which would be the hypothetical biological limit. I don't see the issue.

repsilat• 8 years ago

Right. "You don't get worse at living after a certain point." Sounds like big news to me even if the "half life" was shorter.

Rantenki• 8 years ago

It's not a valid claim IMHO. If you look at the sample size that they're basing it on, you can see that it's shrinking at the attrition rate for what they are measuring.

Once you get to 117 years old, there are only a few people worldwide that can be used to determine that survival rate, and those people are already subject to a selection bias of people that are exceedingly long-lived.

mrfusion2• 8 years ago

If this is true shouldn’t we see the maximum lifespan increasing as population has doubled several times?

olavk3• 8 years ago

Yes, but not much. Since mortality is about 50% for people over 100 (according to the article), doubling the population of humans should only see an increase of one year.

sixdimensional• 8 years ago

I wonder if there is something like the study I heard of once that said, if an electronic or mechanical device lasts at least X years, it will almost always last X + Y years where Y is a much longer period of time. I heard that related to design, manufacturing process and material selection.

If it's true for things, it makes sense it might be true for humans.

elihu• 8 years ago

It depends on the device, but there's also the phenomenon where failures go up after a certain amount of time just because parts wear out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathtub_curve

fjsolwmv5• 8 years ago

This is well known in humans as the "infant mortality rate" vs "adult life expectancy".

bloak6• 8 years ago

I would have thought it's intuitively obvious that there's "no fixed limit on human longevity", and it's therefore obvious that mortality "flattens out": how else could it avoid going over 100%? It presumably is possible to say something interesting and non-trivial about the shape of the curve but it seems to be beyond the mathematical competence of the people writing these journalistic reports to do so.

Looking at the Wikipedia list of longest-lived people (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_verified_oldest_pe...) I get the impression that the top two (Jeanne Calment and Sarah Knauss) don't fit, though I know that the case of Jeanne Calment is very well documented.

mattnewton• 8 years ago

I don’t find it obvious that there shouldn’t be some hard coded expiration mechanism- lots of insects have effective experation dates, for example.

bloak6• 8 years ago

Even if there were a hard-coded expiration mechanism, that mechanism would presumably have limited precision and a non-zero failure rate (assuming it's implemented with biochemistry rather than magic). Looking at the list I linked to, it does rather look as if there were a cunning device to kill people towards the end of their 118th year, and that device failed in two cases... but I can't imagine why there should be such a device or how it might be implemented, so I don't really believe that.

Even if the chances of surviving another year did stabilise around 50% after the age of 100, say, you still wouldn't have enough people living beyond 130 for you to be able to measure with reasonable accuracy the mortality rate of people aged over 130. So the hypothesis that a person aged 140 would still have a 50% chance of surviving another year would be totally untestable.

If you think about it, there's also no hard limit for how tall or how short an adult human could be. Except the limit of zero for the height. Again, beyond a certain point there will be, in practice, no data available for testing any hypothesis about the distribution.

tathougies3• 8 years ago

It's not intuitively obvious at all, since each replication of our cells leads to our chromosomes getting ever smaller until presumably it starts eating into genes that do useful things. Unless it's intuitively obvious to you that you could live without genetic material at all, it seems quite obvious that -- given current biological processes -- there is a limit, even if that limit is longer than where we've gone before.

meowface• 8 years ago

There's the natural limit and the theoretical limit. In theory, some future gene therapy may swap out your chromosomes for ones that don't decay (while somehow not causing negative side effects) while you're still an embryo or gamete, and do all sorts of other things to make you nearly biologically immortal. And in some even more distant future, maybe consciousness upload (with the "copy conundrum" somehow resolved) will be a real thing, in which case living for thousands or millions of years seems plausible.

bloak6• 8 years ago

Even if it were the case that each replication made the chromosomes smaller (personally I would guess that there is a non-zero probability of them not getting smaller and even a non-zero probability of them getting larger thanks to a mutation) that would still only imply a hard limit on the number of replications. You would also need to find a hard limit for how long a cell can survive without replicating. Good luck with that.

I content that there are no limits: however old you are, you have a non-zero chance of surviving another picosecond. The product of a finite number of non-zero real numbers is non-zero, therefore...

Some people may wish to retort that at some point these numbers become so small that they are no different from zero in practice. Those people are probably not mathematicians. They're not wrong, either, of course, but they're not making a valid argument for there being a limit.

There's no limit for the number of successive heads you can get when tossing a coin, either, though you won't in practice see more than a hundred if it's a reasonably fair coin. If there's no limit in that simplified, mathematical situation, does it make sense to hypothesise that "there is a limit" in the case of highly complex biochemical processes?

This is all very philosophical. It doesn't help us to estimate the chances of a given person who is alive and 115 years old today (there seem to be about five of them) one day breaking Jeanne Calment's record of 122. Are any bookmakers taking bets?

reasonattlm• 8 years ago

This really has nothing to do with limits to longevity in any practical sense. That's just the publicity machine at work, the first line in mangling and misrepresenting the relevance of research. This paper is to do with a long-running debate over whether or not mortality risk reaches a high, flat plateau in extreme old age. The difference between limit and high flat plateau is academic for those involved. The outcome is much the same.

It does in flies, and there is very clear evidence for that. The evidence in humans to date is very sparse, and where people have done good work on the numbers, they have not seen signs of a plateau. So in that sense, that people have found a larger data set that shows it, that is fuel for the fire.

No-one has the slightest idea as to how you can balance the fundamentals of reliability theory with a late life mortality plateau. If damage is accumulating, and no-one really believes it stops accumulating, then your risk of mortality should keep on going up. What sort of mechanisms in a highly damaged biology could buffer that underlying reality? And why in very late life versus other times?

None of this, of course, has anything to do with efforts to treat aging or extend human life. It is an academic debate that will likely fade out before answers are found, made irrelevant by the advent of ways to treat aging and its causes. Methods of extending life will work by putting off or repairing the very damaged state. There will likely never be a large multiple of the present count of exceptionally physiologically aged individuals. Rejuvenation therapies are just around the corner.

qwerty4561272• 8 years ago

Who wants to live long without staying young? I'd rather choose to die in my 40-es if I would get 25-yr-old body until the end of the life in exchange. Body/health (skin, brain, immune system, muscles etc.) anti-aging is the thing we need first, not longevity/immortality.

grepthisab• 8 years ago

Out of curiosity, how old are you now?

qwerty4561272• 8 years ago

I'm in my early 30-ies. I'm alright generally (I also look rather young and the doctor says my health is great) but I already feel loss of vitality, stamina, flexibility and regeneration. I felt like an invincible superhuman when I was 24 and now, despite maintaining fairly healthy lifestyle, my knee and back hurt occasionally, I can't f-ck without making a pause every couple of minutes (used to do it for hours contiguously and vigorously until 28), I have to eat healthy to maintain satisfyingly low weight (no wildly bad diet could cause a fluctuation in my weight until 24) etc. I also feel very satisfied by the life I have lived and occasionally think I wouldn't mind to die happily at any time the G-d would decide my time on Earth to end (yet I absolutely do mind to live long enough to get Alzheimer's, cancer etc, I don't fear death yet I do fear senility). I have started to work-out vigorously to revitalize and develop my body and mind recently so perhaps everything is going to change as I achieve the results yet I doubt things like my knee are going to regenerate (this has been scientifically proven impossible in 2017 or 2016 as far as I can remember although I can't find a link to the paper now). It seems it's a fact that 30+-yr-old bodies are generally more fragile and less powerful than 20-yr-old ones.

landryraccoon• 8 years ago

I'm going to guess you're in your 20s.

Being 40 is pretty alright. I'd rather live in the body of a 40 year old for 40 years than the body of a 25 year old for 25 years.

djsumdog• 8 years ago

People talk about the singularity and GCP Grey has that new video with the parable of the dragon, but I think before we can really tackle longevity, we need to first address resource scarcity.

Humanity needs to fundamentally change the way it consumes goods if we want to sustain populations that cannot die. There is also the question as to who would get such treatments? The rich? Everyone?

Kim Stanley Robin's book Red Mars deals with a lot of these issues in a fiction future where human colonize mars. It's a really good book.

celdon25• 8 years ago

I don't think it's a matter of resource scarcity but rather the incentives. If you only need to beat your competition to make a profit, then most incremental progress will come in the form of reinventing a slightly better wheel. Likewise, incentives to mass-market more advanced things are not going to be strong.

Doesn't mean it can't be done, but it's hard to change an economic system that is embedded into our culture.

ilaksh• 8 years ago

I always link to http://www.sens.org when aging comes up because their approach makes the most sense to me.

jz_• 8 years ago

I've donated 300 USD to them this month.

WhompingWindows• 8 years ago

The Italian study argues after a certain threshold age, lets say 105, Italians hit a constant, "mortality plateau, which was 50:50 odds of living to your next birthday, and thus since mortality is not increasing year on year, theoretically there is no upper bound on the age of a person. This may be true theoretically, but mathematical reasoning clarifies this somewhat. Even if you have 1 million humans aged 105 right now, which is probably a vast overstatement, they would diminish to 100,000 humans in less than 4 years, then diminishing to 1,000 humans aged 115 in 10 years' time. After this point, it's basically a question of statistics, as we keep halving the population yearly and get into statistically unsubstantial cohorts of humans. So, while it may be that some humans could live to 130-140 naturally, without fountain-of-youth innovations, the VAST majority of us will die much, much earlier.

The low-hanging fruits of obesity, heart disease, and diabetes are calling to public health far more urgently than this pie in the sky limitless life.

kbenson2• 8 years ago

mortality plateau, which was 50:50 odds of living to your next birthday

Isn't the question whether or not we can affect the odds here? If we can increase it to 75:25 at this plateau, then we also are also increasing the age longest lived of these people are predicted to live for immensely, and the last person of this example group of 1 million starting at age 105 you give would expect that last person to die not 10 years later (at 115) on average as with a 50:50 mortality, but around 48 years later, at 153. Every slight change in that mortality rate affects that long tail quite a bit, relatively speaking.

I for one believe that might have an immense effect on how people view their health and longevity. If people believe that taking care of themselves might give them many decades of additional life instead of a few years, that could lead to a wider shift.

Something1234• 8 years ago

How did you come to 48 years later? When I calculated it came to about 21 years.

    In [2]: def reduce_pop(pop, prob):
       ...:     if pop <= 1:
       ...:         return 1
       ...:     return 1 + reduce_pop(pop * prob, prob)
       ...: 

    In [3]: reduce_pop(1000000, 0.5)
    Out[3]: 21

Where pop is the initial starting group, and prob is how many die off(with 50:50 I expected half of them die off each year).

Please correct me if my math is wrong or if I'm miss interpreting how to calculate this.

JoshCole3• 8 years ago

The low-hanging fruits of obesity, heart disease, and diabetes are calling to public health far more urgently than this pie in the sky limitless life.

Still, it's definitely worth it to continue research along these lines and plenty of other ridiculous lines. Even if they don't come to anything. We have such a tremendous abundance of intellectual capacity as a species. If we dedicate all our intellectual capacity to solving the low-hanging fruits in healthcare (or to increasing the click-through rates of ads, among other things) it would require us to allocate many people to no task at all, just because there was already an excessive abundance of resources already dedicated to the tasks.

It's a little fun and encouraging to think about, but the more people there are alive, the more important unimportant things become, because with more people there are more problem solvers.

TimTheTinker• 8 years ago

with more people there are more problem solvers

I really appreciate this perspective. More people is fundamentally a good thing. Some would vehemently argue otherwise, but I believe the problems they bring up come down to a calculus that depends first on other things, like profit vs. environmental stewardship, etc., not primarily the birth and death rates.

garmaine2• 8 years ago

The low-hanging fruits of obesity, heart disease, and diabetes are calling to public health far more urgently than this pie in the sky limitless life.

Vastly more people die each year of age-related causes than obesity, heart disease, and diabetes combined. It's an unrecognized holocaust inevitably terminating the potential of all humans on this planet, and it is going entirely unrecognized because if you work on solving aging you are a crackpot, whereas "obviously" obesity, heart disease, and diabetes are more deserving of our time and grant money.

sgt1012• 8 years ago

What is your view of the lives of elderly people? I would trade health, mobility and my intellectual capabilities intact to 90 for 20 years of problems (70->90) followed by another 20 years of geriatric life (90->110).

I would agree with you if the common experience of old age was positive and healthy; but it seems to me that the priority for research should be to alleviate the problems and suffering we will all face should we be lucky enough to get there, especially now that the majority of people are lucky.

Perhaps healthier older people will live a lot longer as well?

EamonnMR2• 8 years ago

Humans have a 1/3 lifetime cancer risk, and I suspect it will go up if we extend lifetimes. It's a wall to longevity. If we get past that wall, there's still proteopathys. There's no real approach to curing those yet (at least not that I'm aware of.)

JamesBarney• 8 years ago

Why do you think cancer is undefeatable? The risk of cancer rises substantially with age, and much of the increase in risk is probably due to the immune system malfunctioning.

magduf• 8 years ago

Humans have a 1/3 lifetime cancer risk, and I suspect it will go up if we extend lifetimes. It's a wall to longevity.

No, it's not. Cancer is just a form of malfunction of cellular machinery, and as such, can certainly be mitigated or cured at some point. There's already lots of promising research in eliminating it, such as by re-purposing viruses to program the body's immune system to recognize and eliminate the cancerous cells.

It might require artificial intervention, but I believe cancer will be mostly eliminated before too long. And artificial intervention shouldn't be a problem: we have to do this on all our other machines too, we just call it "repair" or "maintenance". There's no such thing as a machine which never needs maintenance from an external source.

Amygaz• 8 years ago

They also agree with that, but they use a model that can never reach 0. So starting with nearly 4000 105yo individuals, only one remains at 115 years and never dies.

davesque2• 8 years ago

I'm sorry to say it, but I always feel incredibly cynical about longevity tech. If we had a treatment that could extend people's lives indefinitely, what would that do? It would essentially put a price tag on life in a more direct way than we've seen before. It's hard to imagine that the powers that be would want everyone to have fair access to it.

Obviously, this kind of treatment wouldn't at first be widely available even if it worked. So how do we decide who gets it?

vagab0nd2• 8 years ago

May I ask, why you don't feel the same way for any other medical research that saves lives? What's so different about curing aging?

davesque2• 8 years ago

Why do you assume I don't feel the same way about the things you mention?

In general, I think the economic incentives for medical tech are fucked up.

visarga• 8 years ago

As we live, we forget stuff, we change, the situation around us changes. So it's as if we gradually die every day, to be replaced with a new self. The day we physically die is just the last time we die. Not to mention that we experience nothingness and coming back every night.

By analogy, is a continually trained neural net the same as a previous version of itself? Is it a different one, especially after a long time? Did the old version end/die by continuous accumulation of changes?

newman8r• 8 years ago

Reminds me of the ship of Theseus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus

sgt1012• 8 years ago

Contrast your idea to the ideas used in the search for life on Mars. The Martian atmosphere is very near its chemical equilibrium, the Earths atmosphere is dynamic; Mars is (more or less) dead, Earth is (not as) alive (as it should be if we weren't messing it up). My point is that change is life; stasis is death. On the day we die our body begins a journey to chemical equilibrium, our brains reach electrical equilibrium rather quickly. Then they stop there.

llamaz• 8 years ago

This was the insight of the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus: “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.”

There's no limit to longevity, says study that revives human lifespan debate

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