504 Gateway Time-out nginx/1.18.0 (Ubuntu)
It would likely only be the uber-wealthy and powerful who would have access to this technology. Picture a world where a slew of today's despots (including the current American president) get to live for two, or three human lifespans.
If that doesn't cool your jets, let's say the treatment is so cheap it can be widely available to everyone. Now you have prisoners, slaves, exploited labourers who live for centuries. It's madness. I don't think we've evolved enough, ethically speaking, as a species to wrestle with such long lifespans.
If by uber-wealthy you mean most people in rich countries, sure. Otherwise, I don't see why this would progress in a way all other medicine has not.
This study appears to have used "human embryonic stem cells (hESCs)" [1]. We haven't tested this with iPSCs [2].
Even if it only works with hESCs, if the part of the population that thinks blastocysts are people wants to live a third or a quarter as long as the part that doesn't, I don't see a problem with that. We're basically going in that direction with vaccination anyway.
[1] https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(25)00571-9?_re...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_pluripotent_stem_cell
I meant where do you get enough stem cells to make the procedure widely available to the developed world? Stem cells are kinda scarce, as far as I know, so it may gate such a thing.
Embryonic stem cells are rare in America because of religious types. They're not particularly difficult to manufacture or extract--the limit is really human eggs, and we can make those in the lab [1]. (Human sperm are not, for many reasons, difficult to secure.)
I'd actually guess hESCs would be the cheapest route. If we insist on iPSCs, then this turns into a personalised medicine treatment. But in that, it's no different from e.g. oncology.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2025/09/30/nx-s1-5553322/ivg-human-eggs-...
I want this longevity to be real. I have to stick around long enough to see if people respond differently to me when they are older.
'If You Are Not a Liberal When You Are Young, You Have No Heart, and If You Are Not a Conservative When Old, You Have No Brain' Nobody seems to agree on who actually said that.
What makes the current lifespan any more correct than 2x or 3x, or 0.5x of a century or two ago? Given that life expectancy was much shorter a century ago, should we start randomly executing people to keep "the uber-wealthy and powerful" from living too long? That would probably have kept "the current American president" from being in power.
Or put differently: it’s a request, given limited resources let’s expend effort on a fairer society, not one with longer lived people.
Sure. One of which would be broadly granting access to it.
Like, if a country tried to restrict such technology to its leaders, you could probably trigger regime change by simply promising to share the technology in the event of deposement. Every party member who barely missed the cut would become your revolutionary.
Nihilistic Luddism. It works against any argument for making the world a better place.
> For example: labor camps
...what's the connection between longevity and labor camps? Empirically, as life expectancies (at birth and in adulthood) have risen, the prevalence of labor camps has gone down. We can see this both longitudinally and between countries.
Whereas if you live a super long life, you can't afford to be risk averse and hope for a dictator to die of old age and hope that will somehow magically change thing.
The technology would have to be accessible to everyone, otherwise "the wealthy" would be murdered. And no, some futuristic sci-fi bullshit isn't going to save them.
> Now you have prisoners, slaves, exploited labourers who live for centuries.
I don't really understand this line of reasoning at all. Slaves exist, and slavery is miserable, therefore nobody on the planet should live beyond current human lifetimes? If a slave or exploited person is going to get healthcare for something that might otherwise cause them to die, are you arguing healthcare should be withheld?
The odds of this actually happening are about about zero anyway, so this is not something to be concerned about. I am more optimistic, if it were to happen ,in unlocking economic potential. Why would we not want some of society's most productive people to live longer. Think of all the careers derailed by illness, lives separated by death.
“Everyone can live 500 years but I think we should set up a program to randomly murder them at around 60-90 years old.”
Uprisings or outright assassinations would become much more common.
Seriously. Every senior government official or sniper in Russia who isn't happy with Putin is placated by telling themselves "everybody dies sooner or later". Take that away and you'll force people to do something instead of just waiting out the clock.
Edit: The Last Question reference seems to have not hit. My bad.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_and_life#Negative_entr...
These treatments aren't panaceas. The benefit would almost certainly accrue inversely with age.
150 is the new 70
People will still die, even in a world without ageing, which this treatment doesn't promise.
Without that people have lived longer are more likely to have lower risks of death per year. And thus older people in such a society would on average live longer.
If someone has an increased risk of death per year from cancer or whatever because something is failing over time they are still aging.
If the rate per year stays the same IE being 20 or 20,000 has no impact on your risks of cancer each year then someone that’s 20,000 likely takes very few other risks and is more likely to live another 20,000 years than the random 20 year old.
> it isn't the "primary cause
Only if you’re using an inaccurate definition of aging. If everyone over 20 should have the same risk of cancer as 20 years olds the total number of cancers would drop by more than half.
Then, one day, the are told their important and distant "parents" are finally arriving to bring them away to their new life...
Anyway, the point is that any aging wealthy pedicidal murderers are also gonna insist the body is perfect before they move in. The easiest way to do that without conjuring more new technology is the force the future-victim to do it.
And you also reminded me of the flawed but moving film "Never Let Me Go" from 2010 about a more present version of this. Oh, and there's also Michael Bay's "The Island".
(In practice, almost everything over 5 years away, even when already in early human trials, has this property; the only reason the Covid vaccines happened faster is that everyone was willing to throw unlimited resources at the problem and do simultaneous tests on all candidates, and in a pipeline, rather than cost-efficiently and slowly like everything else has been).
In-vitro tissue culture is already a thing (including brain organoids, if you want a brain to control a robot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerebral_organoid), as is 3D bio-printing.
IIRC, there's no current way to scan even a single living synapse/synaptic cleft/dendrite combination to read out the corresponding connection strengths, let alone for the whole brain, so we can't yet scan a brain — but if we could do that, writing it back to a fresh blank one currently seems(!) like the easy part, as neurons change shape and grow in response to electrical gradients.
This, er, Brain of Theseus would retain operational patterns even if the individual cells have been replaced.
A variation on that would be too do it stochastically, constantly substituting a miniscule percentage of cells evenly across the entire brain.
This thread is about stem cells in monkeys.
https://blanu.net/curious_yellow.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glasshouse_(novel)
h/t HN user cstross
Many of the worst people in humanity, seem(ed) to act like they thought they were immortal.
Even being grazed by a bullet didn't stop Trump praising the second amendment.
(Though I say that as a non-American, and someone for whom the 2nd was part of why I never even considered attempting to migrate to the US; I do recognise the language used to support it as a quasi-religious badge of identity, i.e. hard to shake).
This at least gives the semblance of Trump having and sticking to a set of principles (though I suspect it's more to do with what his supporters would accept)
There are a million problems that will arise if people won't be able to die and that's just another one of them.
And that's good because, for my part, I plan to shuffle off this mortal coil in time not to see America elect Nick Fuentes as President.
I have heard variants on this assertion:
"Two of the most prominent purported underlying causes of aging are chronic inflammation and senescent cells."
One thing that surprises me is that telomeres aren't mentioned.
I also don't understand how this is happening (is apoptosis somehow triggered?):
"Now, the Academy researchers demonstrate that SRCs reduce senescent cells, measured using a blue dye called SA-β-Gal, in multiple organs, including the brain, heart, and lungs."
The main mechanism of action appears to be:
"The therapeutic efficacy of MPCs is largely attributed to their paracrine actions, with exosomes playing a pivotal role in mediating these effects."
The researchers do not appear to fully understand how this is happening:
"Among the diverse geroprotective functions of SRCs in the brain and ovary, the restorative effect of SRC-derived exosomes on aged cells and their surroundings emerges as a key mechanism. Rejuvenation of aged cells by exosomes likely involves multiple pathways and targets."
Hitler ultimately died from the sheer gambler's recklessness of reaching for far too much that belonged to too many other powers, and being burned by all the consequences. Had he not started a multi-front world war against almost every single one of the world's other major nations, he could have stayed safely in power as Germany's beloved dictator right up until any old age he managed to reach (as Franco pulled off by much more wisely focusing on consolidating domestic power and avoiding wars)
Societies do have ways of dealing with tyrants, yes, and mostly it's just by rewarding them with more. The bad parts mostly happen to utterly foolish tyrants who make tremendous missteps.
The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish…”
I don't really blame humans in particular, a bear can eat it's prey alive and feel nothing at all about it, and many other similar examples of cruelty exist in nature, many even eat their own species in special circumstances, despite that I don't consider any of them evil.
Nothing short of a highly contagious virus that affects the brain and makes us more emphatic (with no other side effect) would break the cycle, but that's just sci-fi talk.
It's also not particularly challenging to see society lacks any intrinsic defence from the most ruthless and greedy from advancing in any given power structure inside of it, it's a long term damage so it's abstracted away while more immediate issues take presedence, it's in our DNA to give too priority to immediate threats, while long term problems such as this don't make the top 10 (another example being climate change, etc)
For every evil old person today, there's a handful of evil younger people behind them, just because of demographics.
Right now generational wealth fizzles out due to idiot heirs eventually appearing. Imagine if someone could ride a thousand years of exponential gains.
In reality all we have are humans, and humans are bastards.
Or Lord of the Rings and Elves.
Immortality likely breeds ossification. Stasis.
since the end of monarchies autocracy has been impersonal and institutionalized. You can think of the Pope or Dalai Lama as software, the latter literally being rebooted when the last one kicks the bucket, the substrate doesn't matter much.
In the words of Jung: people don't have ideas, ideas have people. Big Brother is a program, not a person and so physical death doesn't help you much in that regard.
An autocracy is an idea but an autocrat is a human who cares about himself. Anyone capable of carrying the torch is seen as threat and gets exiled, imprisoned or killed. In the end it's scorched earth within the current elites so instead of succession you get revolution with say 40-50% chance. You may get the succession to work once, maybe two-three times if you're lucky, but that's it.
Now contrast it with a world where an autocrat doesn't actually need a successor and can run the country indefinitely.
A modern autocracy has the incentive to keep the population dumb to stay existing. Old monarchies have the incentive to make their population more intelligent, so it has more power than the neighbor.
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/resveratrol-resear...
If this ever goes mainstream, I'll head off to live on Mars - provided that is solved beforehand.
The spam blog is just promoting it. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40516525/
E.g. figure 1G... naive image analysis (to me) does not match the claimed statistics. And the statistics are all on n<10, which also adds a lot of uncertainty.
Before that, we had... mailing lists? Web forums?
Before that? BBSs and in-person meetings.
Cheap and easy world-scale communication has fucked us at the same time it has helped us.
The rest of the world, at that time? Probably not so great.
As Max Planck observed: "Science progresses one funeral at a time".
And really, the same can be said for political beliefs.
Humans are stubborn creatures that stratify power. Death has always been the great equalizer. But perhaps soon, no longer.
Politics is treated by most people as essentially a religion. And religion does not progress with death. It just cycles through periods of greater fundamentalism and less fundamentalism.
There aren't enough people studying political science and studying it rigorously enough for the Planck observation to apply.
Religion is also a human endeavor full of interests, and can also ascertain certain truths. Often people who subscribe to scientism gloat that even in the farthest reaches of space, other aliens will arrive at the same equations. Similarly, I think at the farthest reaches of space aliens will have to reckon with wickedness, duty, hospitality, forgiveness, etc. It can even make numerical predictions like "there will always be the poor". So far so true.
There are reasonable things to say about science, but the anti-objectivity bit was an attempt to undermine science and reduce opposition to political rule by fiat. The rise in authoritarian rhetoric and beliefs is why we're seeing the anti-science and anti-expert ideas become fashionable again.
Notice that the anti-expert/anti-intellectual/anti-science people always have something else they're selling you that conflicts with the experts/intellectuals/science.
Anyway, good luck.
The tobacco-funded studies that failed to prove cigarettes harmful? Those were scientists doing "objective methodology." Pharmaceutical companies suppressing unfavorable trials? Scientists. The replication crisis? Scientists following the same process.
These aren't exceptions. They show that science is a human practice embedded in institutional and economic contexts.
Acknowledging that science involves human interests doesn't undermine it. It's how you maintain critical perspective when bad actors claim scientific authority. Or should I trust the current experts that Tylenol causes Autism?
Also I really dislike the categorisation into scientists and non-scientists, this really makes science sound like a dogma. I prefer inventors, pioneers, or simply curious people.
Which these stem cells, if they pan out, very specifically fix
I have never seen someone which is left on the political spectrum at 30 become a Keynesian by 50.
I know such people exist, but they are the exception.
Personality psychology shows personality does not change much after 30.
And there is even some theories such as the “impressionable years” (15-25) which are even more extreme in that respect, stating that basically very little changes after 25.
Overall this makes me doubt stem cells can change any of this.
But I am myself way past my impressionable years, my mental flexibility is lessened, I may be wrong and not open to new ideas.
It would feel sad though, having civilisation lead by the same people over hundreds of years if not more, somewhat stratified, predictable, dull.
Yes that was obvious in your first post.
Feyerabend was writing during the cold war and was influenced by Marx (an authoritarian) and Marxist critiques of science promoted by the Soviets at the time. You get the same threads running through people like Kuhn and Popper.
The backdrop of these ideas is that the authoritarian Soviet state wanted to undermine faith in science within the US for the same reason it wanted to undermine democracy. They also wanted to promote the idea of alternative views of science at home because Soviet science was constrained by needing to be consistent with Marx. These ideas percolated for a few decades as propaganda before people like Feyerabend gussied them up and tried to publish them as academic works.
First, state communists kill anarchists. That's history.
Second, the Soviets were incredibly dogmatic about science because they used it to justify their materialist ideology. They promoted Lysenkoism (fake genetics) to conform to Marxist doctrine. That's literally the opposite of epistemological questioning.
Third, claiming Kuhn and Popper were Soviet mouthpieces is unhinged. Popper wrote "The Open Society and Its Enemies" as an anti-communist text. Kuhn taught at Harvard, MIT, and Princeton. They were Western academics, not agents.
You've gone from defending naive scientism to claiming anyone who critiques it is a communist propagandist. That's McCarthyism, not an argument.
The problem you're facing is you don't believe in any sort of objective reality so you're acting as if ideas are about which team you're on instead of how they relate to the truth.
We see your other posts where you're asking why murdering your enemies isn't okay and promoting conspiracy theories. I don't have to imagine who you are, you've told us.
Sigh this is the most annoying thing on the internet. It's like every online debate a leftist post-structuralist has to say "nuh uh actually everything is relative because it's all about structure and there's no objective truth man." It's a lazy critique. You can aim post-structuralist critique at literally anything. You're right, science is an artifact of the society it's in, and actually society is based on the Wim Hof breathing technique so really science is in service of Wim Hof Breathing. You can't argue with me because everything is relative and based on structures and Wim Hof breathing is the root of all social structure.
If you're going to trot out a post-structuralist critique, build an alternate theory, don't just pick an argument apart. I'm hardly the first person to note this continental Leftist weakness. Zizek has written about this extensively. I don't need to believe in Soviet conspiracy theories to think your argument is weak.
It's furious cherry picking. The scientific consensus is that cigarettes are harmful, the globe is warming, Tylenol DOES NOT cause autism, etc.
This is, ironically, an absurd echo of every autocrat's self-defense. "It is just the commies/right-wingers who hate our Dear Leader and want to undermine his benevolent authority for their own nefarious purposes."
Scientists are humans, prone to every vice that plagues humanity: jealousy, lust for power, greed, willingness to bend data to make their theory work, plagiarism, and, lately, blatant misuse of AI without even acknowledging it aloud.
The scientific community absolutely needs both internal self-policing, external policing, and mechanisms that limit abuse of power by the elders against their subordinates, or it will lose the necessary integrity and thus also any trust of the outsiders.
If you deny this, you basically deny humanity of everyone involved. And I say this as a former young scientist with a PhD from algebra. I have seen enough, with my own eyes.
I have no problem with you "drawing everyone's attention" to the fact that I think so. Indeed I consider the above to be self-evident, because humans aren't angels.
Maybe you confuse policing with censorship or political pressure? That is not the same thing.
"The rest is just rhetoric."
Nope, you just prefer to ignore the 800 pound gorilla in the room whose name is "replication crisis". Partly caused by outright fraud.
I think it's nonsense. Society is the way it is because of the prevailing conditions. We haven't really had to deal with getting rid of dead wood in science because death always did that anyway, if death goes away then we'll just adapt. That witticism from Planck is just an observation of the times, not some universal, uh, constant.
> There is plenty of reason to welcome death
Maybe we should welcome it even faster then! If death speeds up science so much, then maybe society shouldn't provide health care to scientists at all. In fact maybe we should euthanize all scientists at age 50 - or earlier. Right?
If the answer is "No, they don't," then it follows that part of progress is newer generations moving into positions of authority and bringing their new ideas with them.
Which closes the circle, nature already invented all that: your kids are a version of you that's free from both the baggage of harmful mutations and the baggage of harmful presuppositions.
Not at all clear to me why we want to reinvent an inferior version of this process, it works remarkably well.
That sounds like something that someone who is not open to change would say.
Not all change is worth accepting, but if I'm wrong about this one my death will eventually put an end to me being wrong.
It's not scary to make a mistake if any decision you make is temporary anyhow. Knowing that I die no matter what I do with my life gives me so much more freedom in how I can live it.
The second sentence deserves some response, but I don't know what to make of it. Mistakes are good, surely? More mistakes faster. Well, I suppose you mean something like life-ruining mistakes, but in the first place I'm not sure there really can be any - unless you have a low threshold for "ruined" - and in the second place, immortality gives you endless hope of staging a comeback.
Literally everyone operates within some framework of unprovable dogmas to be able to tell good from evil and to decide how to act. Accepting that fact is a IMO a better path than striving for some sort of non-existent objective skepticism (but that's only better within my framework of what better is, of course).
And surely I worry whether I'm right, and all the time. It's just that when I worry and estimate the expected value of my decisions, I don't get NaNs and INFs. My life is not infinitely valuable to me, engaging in activities that involve possible loss of my life is often a good decision because the upside is good. That's largely true because I die anyway, I'm not sure the same calculations would hold if I were immortal.
UPD to respond to the second part that was added later
> Well, I suppose you mean something like life-ruining mistakes, but in the first place I'm not sure there really can be any - unless you have a low threshold for "ruined" - and in the second place, immortality gives you endless hope of staging a comeback.
It's remarkably easy to ruin your life by dying or getting a permanent disability. Would you climb a mountain with a risk of avalanches and rockfalls if you were otherwise immortal? Even commuting to work by bicycle becomes questionable, chances of getting hit by a car on a crossing are pretty high compared to taking the metro.
More to the point, you can refrain from being unnecessarily dogmatic. As I'm sure you do really. But that means anticipation of death, to wipe out your ideas, shouldn't diminish your will to filter them through argument or thought. It just acts as a safety mechanism against your possibly losing your grip on rationality and becoming an intransigent old nuisance, I suppose.
So the second point is that self-sacrifice is less expensive for the mortal. I guess that could be seen as a rather cold fact that a mortal person is less valuable. But immortal people could be hindered by being all neurotic about risks to their lives, if that even is how we make decisions about self-sacrifice and mortal danger (however mild - germs?) ... but I suspect that isn't a calculation we'd do, even if immortal. I suspect the basis for these decisions is something different. This makes me scratch my head, I may come back to it.
...OK, ready. This is really about a certain puzzle to which immortality is irrelevant, which is: how can we take risks at all? If you cross the street you might lose your life, and since that's everything you've got, the cost is infinitely large, so you can never cross the street.
There are numerous tangents to go on from there. If you're being objective, your value is your ideas, your relationships, and your potential to have future ideas. With the last in mind, maybe immortality does change the calculation? Maybe risk-taking for mortal people should increase with age. Well, we do tend to self-sacrifice in a crisis, and to save children preferentially (though I'm not sure why future potential should trump existing ideas in a person). And there's this "I've lived a full life, I'll be the one" trope, which really means "I'm nearly dead already, so I'm expendable." And sure, immortal people can't say that. But that doesn't have bearing on how young people can complete routine life goals such as crossing the street.
You could also claim that a decision like deciding to stay in bed is risky in itself, and that we take risky actions in order to minimize risk. But I don't think that's truly the normal way to operate.
The main thing is, we do decide to take risks somehow. We know that decision paralysis is bad: we're morally opposed to it. And this would remain true even if we were immortal and were risking the loss of much longer lives. Mortal or not, we risk all we've got, all the time, by living lives. The difference is only in an extreme self-sacrifice situation, where relative to one other younger person an immortal person would feel less disposable than an old mortal might.
I understand you're trying to perform reductio ad absurdum but I would like to point out that the proposition is less absurd than you make out.
E.g. if Ancel Keys died at 50 then health risks of sugar consumption would have been accepted by the scientific community decades earlier saving tens of millions of lives. I certainly don't suggest to euthanize anyone however I'm glad he died eventually. In fact I'm glad everyone dies eventually me included.
Now if my world model is correct, the immortal societies will see a decline akin to the Byzantine empire (which never actually declined, just progressed slower than it's neighbors). As the result they will either succumb and integrate into their mortal counterparts or perhaps continue existing like some sort of native tribal reservations. If I'm wrong, the inverse will happen.
In the end the more effective and stable socioeconomic model wins because it's the only thing that matters in the long run. It may take a while to reach the equilibrium though.
Only when painfully ill, this reverses old age symptoms correlated with some of those painful conditions.
> As Max Planck observed: "Science progresses one funeral at a time".
If the aphorism was causally true, Spanish Flu, the Nazi's death camps, and Pol Pot's Cambodia would've created a lot more science than they did.
Even for politics: the Holodomor didn't end Stalin; the deaths in WW1 didn't change the world order enough to prevent WW2.
It means something else. When old, entrenched scientists die, they lose their ability to prevent younger scientists from studying topics they personally don't like. Dead people cannot deny the living use of labs, grants etc.
Plenty of otherwise impeccable great minds died "stuck" on bad ideas. For example, the great German pathologist Rudolf Virchow utterly rejected the idea of archaic humans existing, and did his best to slow down the research on the Neanderthals etc.
Einstein himself rejected the quantum theory, though, to his credit, he didn't prevent others from studying it.
Ancel Keys, who lived to be almost 100, tried to destroy career of every nutritional scientist who toyed with the idea that saturated fats may not be the killers he pronounced them to be, and defended sugar from more scrutiny.
Maybe someone else can explain it better than I can.
even if not, the aphorism is not a necessity. scientific progress is a very soft thing anyway in most fields (medicine for example), and just because nowadays when the old guard dies off a new paradigm takes over doesn't necessarily mean that were the old guard alive there wouldn't be paradigm shifts!
simply accumulating the necessary data to convincingly be able to claim that the new model is better takes decades ... which conveniently coincidences with some old dog dying.
sure, likely if the old guard would be alive for a few more decades maybe they would insist on even more convincing data.
but that would at least help us to have better science!
and no one is prohibited from exploring applications of the new models before they became de facto dogma!
... and so on.
most of the time progress is limited by methods (data collection, precision - repeatability, and of course replicability), but those are usually limited by engineering, culture, funding, etc.
see the whole story with Alzheimer's and the first mouse model problem, and the failed clinical trials of various treatments, and ... despite all this how still we have no better idea, despite decades of effort!
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/in-defense-of-the-amyloid-h...
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-of-mice-mechani...
For example: History is written by the winner.
Certainly not true on its face. The South managed to convince people that the confederacy cause was noble. It certainly wasn't. They managed to reshape popular narrative.
"The South managed to convince people that the confederacy cause was noble. "
A certain percentage of people will believe in anything. Putin is a virtuous peacemaker, Nazis didn't murder people in industrial ovens, Stalin was a good person, the American Civil War wasn't about slavery, you name it.
That still does not negate the overall observation expressed in the aphorism: winners have a lot more clout when determining how the war will be seen by future generations. The percentage of Confederacy supporters in the Western civilization is fairly small. They may be visible, but the vast majority of the Western population, to the extent that they think of ACW at all, don't support the cause of continuing enslavement of blacks.
Anyway, aphorisms shouldn't be treated like mathematical theorems. Their validity isn't as "hard" as that of maths, but in human society, nothing is. Aphorisms are the sort of model which is "wrong, but sometimes useful".
I am not treating them as mathematical statement, I just don't take it for granted that these "aphorism" are in fact historical truth.
Cursory search of "winners write history" already reveal to me a far more complex and nuanced reality. Indeed, such a statement is considered harmful.
Already when living to our 80s and 90s, we can see the top strata of the society (CEO level, Parliaments) overflowing with very old people who don't want to relax their grip on power. The current US Senate is older than the Brezhnev politburo, widely considered a gerontocracy, once was. It is the same elsewhere. Few powerful people are as self-aware as Benedict XIV. was, or their lust for power is simply too big.
In autocracies, people like Putin, Erdogan, Khamenei and Xi built very resilient systems that could support them for decades, if not centuries, and death is the only way that can reliably get them out of the way.
I suppose that not even the Americans would like to see various replays of Biden vs. Trump for several election cycles, and the Supreme Court is a veritable gerontocracy as well. If longevity research succeeds, the younger justices like Gorsuch and Barrett may well stay on the bench until 2070 or even longer, shaping rules for a world they will no longer understand.
If we ever are to achieve very long lives, we need to expand into the universe as well, so that the younger generations can build their own domains somewhere else, unburdened by the dictates of the old.
I always loved going into HN comments, because the insights you could read here were very often of better quality than linked sources.
Now it's mostly doom and despair
I really agree with you. I wish I could find somewhere with as many interesting people to discuss technology and/or science without so much pavlovian cynicism.
Accumulating traumas across an eternity would harm society
And I think it's unfair to reserve that for the wealthy, if anything, eugenics should determine who gains access, only the most genetically advantaged should be allowed, in an effort to protect and strengthen humankind
But I don't think our society is ready to have this discussion, hence why, aging and death should not be frowned upon
Because this technology won't be available to these raising the humanity, but to those ruthless.
I don’t see any problems. If you want to kill someone, go ahead, that’s between you and them and your reasons for thinking they should die at a certain age. But I have no qualms about anyone living longer, healthier lives. This includes you.
I'm at an age where many of my friends have died and many more soon will. Even in the most optimistic scenario this technology will not become normalized in my lifetime--and if it does become normalized there will be many undesirable consequences. In any case, global warming will destroy human civilization and this technology will die with it.
In fact, even in our world, age-related death is an evolved trait, this isn't something obvious but that's something that arised through the natural selection because it improves fitness.
Regarding NAD, not the article but it pertains to the subject, I actually think it has promise and as an older person take NMN to very (like... WOW, very) positive result (an NAD precursor that is arguably better as it is used by the body to create NAD whereas the consumption of NAD itself via the digestive system is in need of study as the suspicion is that it doesn't make the journey very successfully).
Can you someone provide a summary of this breakthrough?
China has one of the lowest retirement ages in the world for men[0] and they have the lowest retirement age in the world for women[1]
[0] https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/retirement-age-men
[1] https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/retirement-age-womenhttps://healthland.time.com/2012/08/21/legitimate-rape-todd-...
choeger•4mo ago
piker•4mo ago
tomhowsalterego•4mo ago
PUSH_AX•4mo ago
inglor_cz•4mo ago
Would they get cancer if they lived for 400 years? Maybe not either. Their immune systems are very good, better than ours.
(We humans don't really want to acknowledge that some other animals may have better immune systems, or any other systems, at their disposal.)
On the other end of the scale, mice die of cancer while not even three years old, because their immune systems are really bad at fighting cancer cells.
Cancer in mammals seems to be a function of failing immune systems rather than raw age in numbers. In some species, including us humans, weakening of the immune system goes hand in hand with aging. But in others it does not.
echelon•4mo ago
Our evolutionary biology doesn't "care" if we get cancer. Just that we have healthy children and can rear them for one or two generations. That was a (locally) optimal algorithm.
We have plenty of in-built checks and protections in our molecular biology, and they are sufficient to expand the species.
andrewl•4mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peto's_paradox
ACCount37•4mo ago
If cancer really is an inevitability, then whales, who have both livespan limits longer than that of humans, and enormous bodies with a staggering amount of living cells, would be full of cancer. They aren't.
Clearly, humans must have better innate cancer suppression than mice, and whales must have better innate cancer suppression than humans.
There are some hints that this may come down to programmed cell death and DNA repair mechanisms (i.e. the p53 pathway) more than the immune system tweaks - with immune response being the "last resort" of cancer suppression. But we also don't know enough about the immune system to be able to examine it the same detail we can examine the DNA repair pathways.
JumpCrisscross•4mo ago
"Notably, none of the cell transplant recipients developed tumors (n = 16)."
https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(25)00571-9?_re...
mullingitover•4mo ago
fragmede•4mo ago
bitwize•4mo ago
paulpauper•4mo ago
JumpCrisscross•4mo ago
The implanted stem cells, however, were human. (The fact that that the treatments did not cause "fever or substantial changes in immune cell levels (lymphocytes, neutrophils, and monocytes), which are commonly monitored for xenograft-related immune responses," is itself surprising.)
> promises of extending life have always fallen short of hype, and odds are this will too
Correct, though I'd say because this is early-stage medical research. Not because it's targeting longevity. I'd be similarly sceptical of an N = 16 early-stage drug trial for the flu.
SubiculumCode•4mo ago
In terms of replicatability, it is also not always the sample size, it is the effect size. Small samples do affect ability to generalize, but the point is that sample size isn't everything.
JumpCrisscross•4mo ago
Which effect size do you find lacking?
SubiculumCode•4mo ago
JumpCrisscross•4mo ago
SubiculumCode•4mo ago
jasondigitized•4mo ago
SubiculumCode•4mo ago
lukan•4mo ago
SubiculumCode•4mo ago
lukan•4mo ago
jl6•4mo ago
As well as the undeniable benefit to individuals, a cure for aging would unleash a whole new bunch of problems that have been kept in check through the mechanism of people dying off regularly. A society of immortals could be quite alien to us.
somesortofthing•4mo ago
JumpCrisscross•4mo ago
Good example is vitamin supplementation. There isn't a downside. It's just a fuck-up we can't synthesise vitamin C. (There may be path-dependent benefits, e.g. our jaw muscles getting smaller thereby permitting a larger brain. But we don't need to be vitamin C restricted anymore.)
throwuxiytayq•4mo ago
sebastialonso•4mo ago
Every action in the known universe (and surely in some unknown ones too) results in a trade-off. This is maybe the only precept on software architecture that doesn't "depends" on anything and is closer to natural law.
ACCount37•4mo ago
Human body isn't exactly bottlenecked by energy availability. Calories are getting cheaper and cheaper, with obesity rates as a testament to that.
jdiff•4mo ago
ACCount37•4mo ago
There are old people who remain lucid and active well into their nineties, not getting dementia or cancer - through some combination of good luck, good genes and good lifestyle choices. They live a good life - until a stroke cripples them, or the heart fails them, or a very mundane illness like flu puts them in bed and they never quite recover from it. If that couldn't happen to them, how many more good years would that buy them?
Any treatment that addresses the aging-associated systematic decline in bodily functions should be extremely desirable. Even if it wouldn't help everyone live longer, it would help a lot of people live better lives nonetheless.
neom•4mo ago
Atomic_Torrfisk•4mo ago
We are consistently sold ideas that do not meet expectation, the catch is expected.
"Hey everyone we discovered X breakthrough!" It only has Y constrains or consequences which make it not so useful, or at worst, harmful later.
onionisafruit•4mo ago
SirFatty•4mo ago
chrisco255•4mo ago
nikkwong•4mo ago
"The super stem cells prevent age-related bone loss while rejuvenating over 50% of the 61 tissues analyzed." (including the brain).
What do people die of when they die of 'old age'? There's the 3 pillars: cancer, cardiovascular, neurodegenerative. These are often (but not always) metabolic diseases; i.e. cardiovascular death often arises from kidney insufficiency. If you can regenerate the liver, kidney, etc. indefinitely, a large vector of metabolic disease is probably diminished or disappears.
In the paper, monkeys restored brain volume. They reduced the levels of senescent cells to youthful levels. They increased bone mass. This reduces or eliminates many of the threats that inflict casualties among the centenarian population.
Sure, something else could come up that the monkeys start dying from instead. But, given the way humans and monkeys die of old age—by reducing or eliminating all known threats—it's hard to see how this wouldn't extend lifespan.
chrisco255•4mo ago
nikkwong•4mo ago
ikrenji•4mo ago
disambiguation•4mo ago
Unclear from the study what the stem cells are doing to address either problem.
pas•4mo ago