Extending maximum human lifespan in our lifetimes?

[Dan Druff]

While life expectancy has improved a lot over the years, as has modern medicine (obviously closely related), we've had a hard time extending maximum human lifespan. No man has lived to 117, and no woman has lived to 120. (I don't count Jean Calment, supposedly 122, because that's been mostly debunked as a fraud).

Andrew Barber today tweeted out that he and Justin Bonomo are interested in "life extension", which is basically a group of people obsessed with finding ways to extend the human life far past expected ranges. This is most common among atheists, who believe that there is no afterlife, and you're simply gone when you die. However, obviously even those believing in an afterlife could easily have a desire to live a lot longer.

Anyway, I don't believe this will happen in our lifetime. The cellular structure of the human body makes it incredibly difficult to extend maximum possible lifespan. On a personal sidenote, I'm also facing an uphill battle being a tall male, as very few tall males even reach their 100th birthday, for reasons which aren't completely understood. (Andrew Barber, by the way, is about the same height as me.)

Here's our exchange, in which Barber eventually degrades into a condescending douche, as he often does on Twitter. (Funny enough, he's been pleasant when I've had him on radio, and we always get along well in person when I see him in the poker room.)

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https://twitter.com/ToddWitteles/status/1369422072439529474

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https://twitter.com/ToddWitteles/status/1369454354286047232

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https://twitter.com/ToddWitteles/status/1369462899555536897

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https://twitter.com/JustinBonomo/status/1369471167837270018

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https://twitter.com/JustinBonomo/status/1369475897644904450



Opinions?

[jsearles22]

You both could be right. Neither proved their point either way.

[1marley1]

I don’t think you’ll make it. Too many hotdogs on sticks

[Dan Druff]

You both could be right. Neither proved their point either way.

There's no way to prove our points, because we're talking about the future.

However, I'm asking for opinions. Do you think significantly extending maximum human lifespan will happen in, say, the next 50 years?

I'm not talking about some 5-foot, 90 pound woman scratching out an existence until her 120th birthday. That already almost happened. I'm talking about people living to 150 or whatever.

[jsearles22]

You both could be right. Neither proved their point either way.

There's no way to prove our points, because we're talking about the future.

However, I'm asking for opinions. Do you think significantly extending maximum human lifespan will happen in, say, the next 50 years?

I'm not talking about some 5-foot, 90 pound woman scratching out an existence until her 120th birthday. That already almost happened. I'm talking about people living to 150 or whatever.

Significantly, like 150? No, I don’t think so. But I think 100 is kind of the bar now, maybe even 90. Very few people live to 90. Says it’s 3% (I honestly have no idea). If 50 years from now 3% all of a sudden live to 105, I call that significant.

[BCR]

I don’t find either of you particularly douchey imo. You’re correct. I agree with your stance that it’s unlikely.

I would not expect this to occur in our lives. Not in any real significant way. Bonomo is younger than us, so smaller chance he sees some slightly larger incremental change.

When I’ve ventured down that rabbit hole, I’ve found most of the adherents aren’t looking for an extra 5 years, they are looking for a significant upgrade. Essentially eliminating aging and death.

I find that incredibly unlikely in anyone’s life alive today. I don’t know it, but that’s what I’d bet. We will absolutely straight up cure things that keep adding to the average lifespan. This MRNA mechanism will cure things beyond Covid. But something else will get us still. I think from everything I’ve read we are a long way from curing death and aging itself.

If I was all in on wanting what I’ve seen most of the life extension people want, I’d legit go for the cryogenic freeze. We are pretty much at the point we can grow body parts in petri dishes and do shit in lab animals that suggest somewhere down the line , as crazy as the idea is, that it could become reality. To essentially bring someone back to life in a few hundred years. Would require an ability to download brain activity.

That would require massive ethical changes, a movement to stop overpopulation, a cure to global warming, etc. Even if a few hundred years from now they could bring you back, they wouldn’t unless it made sense to. It would require there to not be people starving and a host of other factors even if they could.

[shoeshine box]

I speak with Old Man Hal from the Bronx Daily and he is 95 bed ridden last 6 months, Bladder C.... He is 6-3......but yes tall folks rare... Plus Life extension is sucky if you wind up bed bound, I'd rather live to 60 healthy than 90 and in bed 10 yrs,. Plus who will take care of you at 115,120? fk at 75,80? it is no joke.. Not everyone has a Good Son(daughter). Guaranteed health and immunity from Diseases (C*r dementia, heart probs etc.). Quality over Quantity I see is better...

[gimmick]

There are some bets based on replicating a blank human body that could receive the functionality and memories of your brain. By bets i mean there people that have frozen their brain after they have been technically declared dead, but before significant damage has occurred. That's one way to extend life by leaping from vessel to vessel.

The other way would be re-coding relevant parts of cell recreation. I think oldest cells in the human body are somewhere around 7 years. What qualifies as something that should be healed/fixed vs what grows the way it was we don't really know. We don't know how to fuck with blueprints. I think some birth defects can be fixed now but i don't think there have been any leaps in "fixing" adults.

I doubt we have a very good idea how the coding works other than it's a million on/off switches that relate to each other and some have priority.

Fucking with mice is something like a first step out of 1000 you need to get right before you're even close. That said if by our lifetime you mean 40-50 years then maybe. There's also the part where our biggest problem in about 20 years is that people don't die fast enough. Our current technology doesn't support doubling the population.

[Dan Druff]

The problem with current cryogenic freezing is that it's probably not sufficient in order to revive people later on. It's non-trivial to freeze someone without doing irreversible damage. I don't believe we're there yet. For example, right now you couldn't freeze someone for a month and unfreeze them, and then revive them. I think by the time that's possible, they'll find that these people would either be nonviable, or brain dead/damaged.

Here's a philosophical question I like to pose:

Say the technology existed to make a complete 100% copy of your brain and body. Say that this required completely rendering you lifeless for a minute, then copying, then reviving both bodies.

Assuming this could be done perfectly, when both versions of you wake up, which one is you?

Bodies are the same. Brains are the same. Memories are the same.

Which one is actually you? That is, which person do you wake up as?

This, by the way, is the religious argument for the existence of a soul. The soul would be what separates you from the cloned you.

[Sanlmar]

I don’t find either of you particularly douchey imo. You’re correct. I agree with your stance that it’s unlikely.

I would not expect this to occur in our lives. Not in any real significant way. Bonomo is younger than us, so smaller chance he sees some slightly larger incremental change.

When I’ve ventured down that rabbit hole, I’ve found most of the adherents aren’t looking for an extra 5 years, they are looking for a significant upgrade. Essentially eliminating aging and death.

I find that incredibly unlikely in anyone’s life alive today. I don’t know it, but that’s what I’d bet. We will absolutely straight up cure things that keep adding to the average lifespan. This MRNA mechanism will cure things beyond Covid. But something else will get us still. I think from everything I’ve read we are a long way from curing death and aging itself.

If I was all in on wanting what I’ve seen most of the life extension people want, I’d legit go for the cryogenic freeze. We are pretty much at the point we can grow body parts in petri dishes and do shit in lab animals that suggest somewhere down the line , as crazy as the idea is, that it could become reality. To essentially bring someone back to life in a few hundred years. Would require an ability to download brain activity.

That would require massive ethical changes, a movement to stop overpopulation, a cure to global warming, etc. Even if a few hundred years from now they could bring you back, they wouldn’t unless it made sense to. It would require there to not be people starving and a host of other factors even if they could.

I don’t know if “they” will solve sleep. That’s your next deep dive if you haven’t yet. It’s not one state ... it’s a delicate series of states. Don’t know how that can ever be induced.

Increasingly, scientists are discovering that how much and how well you sleep throughout adulthood can be a big factor in how healthy you stay into your golden years. Insufficient sleep increases the risk of disorders, such as high blood pressure, diabetes, obesity, stroke and depression. It's also associated with cognitive decline and Alzheimer's disease.

older people who are otherwise healthy who start to have sleep struggles can describe the subsequent decline. sleep allows brain restoration which I can’t begin to describe casually. More direct restorative physiology aside from brain too, of course.

There are drugs that will knock you out but they miss a few tricks.

We will see.

Loved the old saying “sleep is the cousin of death” btw. Just the ring of it. Didn’t actually mean what I thought it might.

I have known many older relatives who approaching 100 say, “I’m ready”. Not that they were suffering but thet they were tired and weak. Hmmm.

[gimmick]

The problem with current cryogenic freezing is that it's probably not sufficient in order to revive people later on. It's non-trivial to freeze someone without doing irreversible damage. I don't believe we're there yet. For example, right now you couldn't freeze someone for a month and unfreeze them, and then revive them. I think by the time that's possible, they'll find that these people would either be nonviable, or brain dead/damaged.

Here's a philosophical question I like to pose:

Say the technology existed to make a complete 100% copy of your brain and body. Say that this required completely rendering you lifeless for a minute, then copying, then reviving both bodies.

Assuming this could be done perfectly, when both versions of you wake up, which one is you?

Bodies are the same. Brains are the same. Memories are the same.

Which one is actually you? That is, which person do you wake up as?

This, by the way, is the religious argument for the existence of a soul. The soul would be what separates you from the cloned you.

They're both you. It's worthless philosophical masturbation. Say like Schrödinger's cat, the cat knows, the observer doesn't matter. When kids cover their eyes the world doesn't disappear.

Freezing something so it remains relatively unchanged can be done now. The code is intact. We don't have means to restart the heart, lungs and million other functions after they fail for a longer period of time. Freezing the brain is saving the hard drive. Also when we duplicate hard drives the concept of original doesn't matter. We only are care about the data.

We can mix and match quite a few internal organs. Brain isn't currently one of those and we can't keep organs live for a long period of time outside the body.

[gimmick]

Mildly related to original things, when around 500k masters for music titles were burned...

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/11/m...ecordings.html

"For years, what people were able to record was of greater quality than what they were able to play back. “Most people don’t realize that recording technology was decades more sophisticated than playback technology,” Sapoznik says."

...we are often in this same state with a lot of things.

In the same vein, what is the original Shania Twain The Woman in Me CD out of all the 7.6 million sold copies? They're all roughly equally shitty copies of the production master tape. That tape itself is a mash-up of multiple mixes made out of a copy of the few "original" masters. The original masters being the first compositions made out of the multi track recordings. So every CD is a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy assuming they didn't send copies of production master tapes overseas or other parts of the country to be pressed into CDs. If they did, then there's one more copy added to the chain.

[mulva]

[FRANKRIZZO]

https://www.thv11.com/article/news/l...6-f1cecb218f26

God bless

[Dan Druff]

The problem with current cryogenic freezing is that it's probably not sufficient in order to revive people later on. It's non-trivial to freeze someone without doing irreversible damage. I don't believe we're there yet. For example, right now you couldn't freeze someone for a month and unfreeze them, and then revive them. I think by the time that's possible, they'll find that these people would either be nonviable, or brain dead/damaged.

Here's a philosophical question I like to pose:

Say the technology existed to make a complete 100% copy of your brain and body. Say that this required completely rendering you lifeless for a minute, then copying, then reviving both bodies.

Assuming this could be done perfectly, when both versions of you wake up, which one is you?

Bodies are the same. Brains are the same. Memories are the same.

Which one is actually you? That is, which person do you wake up as?

This, by the way, is the religious argument for the existence of a soul. The soul would be what separates you from the cloned you.

They're both you. It's worthless philosophical masturbation. Say like Schrödinger's cat, the cat knows, the observer doesn't matter. When kids cover their eyes the world doesn't disappear.

Freezing something so it remains relatively unchanged can be done now. The code is intact. We don't have means to restart the heart, lungs and million other functions after they fail for a longer period of time. Freezing the brain is saving the hard drive. Also when we duplicate hard drives the concept of original doesn't matter. We only are care about the data.

We can mix and match quite a few internal organs. Brain isn't currently one of those and we can't keep organs live for a long period of time outside the body.

Not so fast. They can't both be "you". One of them is you, one of them isn't.

Much like if you're born as one of two identical twins. You're not interchangeable. If you die, you're gone. You don't become your twin.

Regarding the rest, while I agree the primary challenge is reviving someone into a viable state, there are serious doubts that current cryogenic technology is sufficient for preserving the brain and its functionality. It's not as simple as throwing it in the freezer, and it's not the same as reusing other organs. There's a good chance that, even with a perfect revival process in the future, people frozen with today's technology will not be viable.

[Cerveza Fria]

[limitles]

Instead of science extending lifespans it should concentrate efforts to telling us how much time we have left. The world would be even wilder. We know we’re walking dead anyway why the surprise? Also, notice how well science and left go together

[Texter]

Replicating a human body with your memories....

First he multi accounts on the felt...now he wants to do it in life, guys a dick..

[gimmick]

They're both you. It's worthless philosophical masturbation. Say like Schrödinger's cat, the cat knows, the observer doesn't matter. When kids cover their eyes the world doesn't disappear.

Freezing something so it remains relatively unchanged can be done now. The code is intact. We don't have means to restart the heart, lungs and million other functions after they fail for a longer period of time. Freezing the brain is saving the hard drive. Also when we duplicate hard drives the concept of original doesn't matter. We only are care about the data.

We can mix and match quite a few internal organs. Brain isn't currently one of those and we can't keep organs live for a long period of time outside the body.

Not so fast. They can't both be "you". One of them is you, one of them isn't.

Much like if you're born as one of two identical twins. You're not interchangeable. If you die, you're gone. You don't become your twin.

From each of their perspectives both of them believe they are "me" and before they are awaken they are identical. The second they are awaken they start to differ from one another.

Identical twins are in that state months before they are born. They don't receive identical nutrition, identical injuries or have identical perception. Usually all those are fairly close before they are born, but the most extreme example is that only one them is born alive.

If you die before your copy is awaken, then he is you. Or for our purposes close enough. If you move you hard drive to another computer, there is no change in data from the moment you unplugged it, before you turned it on again. For people we might have to assume that CPU, motherboard and memory are all part of what makes it you. And maybe few extra parts. I think fans and power supply we think of as least personal. Incidentally those two kill most computers.

[VaughnP]

I think we will be able to significantly slow or even eventually entirely stop aging at some point in this century. Google telomeres, which is the key piece to the puzzle. The other big piece is reversing DNA damage caused over time. What he mentions about the mice is significant. From what I've read and researched out of curiosity, I wouldn't bet against it happening sooner rather than later.