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Live to be 1000

Third Eye Open

Graduate Poster
Third Eye Open
Joined
Mar 13, 2008
Messages
1,400
This article seems to me to be mostly fluff and exaggeration,

Cambridge University geneticist Aubrey de Grey has famously stated, “The first person to live to be 1,000 years old is certainly alive today …whether they realize it or not, barring accidents and suicide, most people now 40 years or younger can expect to live for centuries.”
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How close to reality is this article?

What is a 'bioethicist' and why do they want to stop us from living longer?
 
Sure, some one will live to be 1000 years old. Just not in Earth years.

-PbFoot :rolleyes:
 
This is pure conjecture.

I would say a bioethicist is an individual who concerns themselves with acting in a manner that prioritizes our natural resources over our natural instinct to life and reproduce. Bioethicists would most likely support the use of birth control, family planning, and abstinence in order to curtail the world's population, and would also probably support assisted suicide and oppose the practice of keeping individuals with brain stem injuries or extraordinarily damaging brain injuries on life support.

They would most likely oppose us living longer because of the fact that it would give us a longer time to live and thus, reproduce - in addition to sapping the resources of the future generations and of the planet. Imagine the population boom that would occur if several prior generations were still alive.
 
Third Eye Open said:
How close to reality is this article?

What is a 'bioethicist' and why do they want to stop us from living longer?
Click to expand...

I've seen quite a few articles regarding this topic in recent months. Not being a geneticist, I'm unqualified to state categorically how close to reality this might be, but I'd suspect it's quite closer to being technically feasible than most of the public might suspect.

I see bioethics as having positive and negative connotations.

On the one hand, it seems to be concerned about upsetting the natural balance of the cycle of life and death and all the problems that might be caused by an ever increasing population that never grew old and died off as it has for countless millions of years before.

On the other hand, it seems to be concerned with making sure that said cycle does indeed continue, whether the rest of us like it or not, when it does become technically feasible to implement on a wide scale.

I don't really want to start a debate about Eugenics, but Bioethics, when studied in a certain light, can conceivably be seen as an old idea with a new name.
 
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I heard the same stuff being spouted 25 years ago. I don't think we're any closer now than we were then.

Rolfe.
 
Third Eye Open said:
This article seems to me to be mostly fluff and exaggeration,



How close to reality is this article?

What is a 'bioethicist' and why do they want to stop us from living longer?
Click to expand...

Sounds a lot like " Some here won't taste death til the see me coming again".
 
Rolfe said:
I heard the same stuff being spouted 25 years ago. I don't think we're any closer now than we were then.

Rolfe.
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I agree.

We're constantly making finds that make relationships between certain environment or genetic factors and lifespan, usually in nematodes or drosophila. Connecting it with humans is a different ball game.

Athon
 
Who on eath would want to live for 1000 years in this boring reality?

I still put my faith in the amazingly prophetic and truly beyond repute scientist and philosopher, that went by the well known name of Captain Hook from Peter Pann. "To the prepared mind, Death is but the next great adventure."

People who fear death as being 'ultimate oblivion' are likely to have mental health issues later in life, which decrease their age. Having a committed spiritual practise, and an acceptance as death as merely a moving on that everyone must go through (not stupid religion, or a belif in 'heaven' or 'hell) has been shown continually in studies to be a major contributing factor in peoples longetivity.
 
Whoops. Forgot this was the science section. Ignore the above post. Or this thread is heading for another Zeuzzz derail.
 
Ah, Aubrey de Grey.

Now I'm not opposed to research into aging processes. And if he can discover anything useful, more power to him.

But I've read his foundation's site before and it's full of claims that... trip suspension of disbelief, to say the least. He proposes not just to slow down aging, but to reverse existing DNA damage, make new neurons where the old ones died off, and other such stuff.

Basically what he's proposing is no less than some kind of elixir of youth that you can give to some old guy and make him young again.

And I'm not aware of any peer-reviewed results that show him being even close to what he claims on that site.

I don't know if he does it intentionally or he's himself a self-deluded idealist, but that kind of promising eternal life seems to help a lot with parting fools with their money.

It seems to work sorta like Pascal's Wager on some people. Basically if he's right, you get to live for millenia, if he's wrong, well, you couldn't take your money with you anyway.
 
I think they accidentally added an extra "0" to that number. Otherwise, it's not impossible.

;)

~Dr. Imago
 
Zeuzzz said:
Who on eath would want to live for 1000 years in this boring reality?

I still put my faith in the amazingly prophetic and truly beyond repute scientist and philosopher, that went by the well known name of Captain Hook from Peter Pann. "To the prepared mind, Death is but the next great adventure."

People who fear death as being 'ultimate oblivion' are likely to have mental health issues later in life, which decrease their age. Having a committed spiritual practise, and an acceptance as death as merely a moving on that everyone must go through (not stupid religion, or a belif in 'heaven' or 'hell) has been shown continually in studies to be a major contributing factor in peoples longetivity.
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Hmm, I guess I should start another thread exploring why people are so hostile to this idea.

I find it very strange how angry some people get about this. It's not as if anyone is going to force you to live longer than you want. How could they anyway?

This is about improving and extending the quality of life. Even if you only want to live for 75 or 100 years, wouldn't you want to live those years in a healthy young body?
 
Ok, I just read Zeuzzz's next post, well, I'll just put a spoiler tag around my answer then.

Zeuzzz said:
Who on eath would want to live for 1000 years in this boring reality?
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What?

*raises hand*

I would, and I suspect many others on this forum alone would too. Oh, and reality is pretty much the opposite of boring to me. Maybe you need to look a bit deeper.
 
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Third Eye Open said:
This article seems to me to be mostly fluff and exaggeration,



How close to reality is this article?

What is a 'bioethicist' and why do they want to stop us from living longer?
Click to expand...

I can see why a person might get the impression that its fluff and exageration. Its a relatively new concept, but then also you would probably agree that the times are moving fast. Computing power doubles every x many years now. The amount of knowledge available to people doubles every x many years. Science, technology, etc.. keep getting better and better. We have been able to see inside our cells for a while now. We are getting better at working with them. Mechanism that bring about the accumulation of damage that causes our cells to age to death are there in our cells. I mean, its getting clearer and clearer every day how the defeat of aging is becoming possible. Will it be easy? No. Will it happen for sure? We dont know, but we can get bold and go there and see. This is further explained a bit in articles like one called "A Response to the "Compression of Morbidity" Mindset".

Another thing that this has going for it is that cellular afflictions that are like those that cause the accumulation of damages that age us to death, have already had successes in the lab. They can already work with things that are like the things we need to now gain the support for to defeat aging.

I know it can seem like fluff but its not. Check it out, the science is under way, the movement is underway. We can see if the defeat of aging is there now. It will only take us as long to find out as the combined amount of support we have to go there now.
 
Harpyja said:
This is pure conjecture.

I would say a bioethicist is an individual who concerns themselves with acting in a manner that prioritizes our natural resources over our natural instinct to life and reproduce. Bioethicists would most likely support the use of birth control, family planning, and abstinence in order to curtail the world's population, and would also probably support assisted suicide and oppose the practice of keeping individuals with brain stem injuries or extraordinarily damaging brain injuries on life support.

They would most likely oppose us living longer because of the fact that it would give us a longer time to live and thus, reproduce - in addition to sapping the resources of the future generations and of the planet. Imagine the population boom that would occur if several prior generations were still alive.
Click to expand...

I think you are confusing the term 'bioethicist' with 'ideologue'.
 
Zeuzzz said:
Who on eath would want to live for 1000 years in this boring reality?
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I could possibly excuse this if you lived as an average European in the 800 years or so fallowing the last of the Roman emperors. Being a surf, living exactly as people did 100 years before you and will 100 years after, was probably pretty stultifying.

But you - particularly you in a university. You have no excuse.
 
shadron said:
I could possibly excuse this if you lived as an average European in the 800 years or so fallowing the last of the Roman emperors. Being a surf, living exactly as people did 100 years before you and will 100 years after, was probably pretty stultifying.

But you - particularly you in a university. You have no excuse.
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Exactly. If we began drawing up a list of things we could do, and things that the future is likely to bring us the ability to do soon, it would take a while to draw that up. We could probably fill 100 years just drawing up the list. Executing it then... a few more.
 
Here's the guy's TED talk. Interesting ideas, but not entirely convincing, IMHO. He assumes that when the breakthrough in life extension will happen, improvement in the technology will grow exponentially. He compares it with improvement in speed of airplane, which I think is doesn't entirely support his argument. There is at the moment not too much improvement in plane speeds; and the only supersonic passenger plane we had is taken out of service because there simply no profitable market for it. The same might happen with life extension; it could be that there is a market for life extension to for example 150 years, but not for much more than that. If there is only one person who would be willing to pay to be 1000 years, it would likely not be technology that is going to be developed.

He also assumes that people who might benefit from the first generation of moderate life extension will be able to live long enough to benefit from the next generation of even better life extension. But perhaps the pill you started taking at 50 to get 30-40 years of extra life will have adverse side effects that will become apparent at age 120, which may not be reversed by the new pill that let's 120 year olds live another 30 years. As an early adopter it will seem like a good deal to get an extra 30-40 years to your life expectancy 80 in exchange for problems later, but it might exclude you from the group of people who get even more life extension.

And then there is the matter that testing whether life extension drugs/procedures actually work might take a looooong time.
 
What's with the zombie threads here, guys! You're replying to posts well over a year old!

Rolfe.
 
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