Eternal Youth for All!
Why I want to live forever and you should too.
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GoogleAs the Gilgamesh saga, Ponce de Leon's quest for the Fountain of Youth, and the alchemists' search for the philosopher's stone all attest, the yearning for eternal life and youth has been a preoccupation of humans for millennia. Yet quite a few people remain unconvinced that cheating death is a good idea.
"Living too long is a loss," the oncologist and bioethicist Ezekiel Emanuel wrote in a widely cited Atlantic article this October, provocatively titled "Why I Hope to Die at 75." "It renders many of us, if not disabled, then faltering and declining, a state that may not be worse than death but is nonetheless deprived." Emanuel added, "It robs us of our creativity and ability to contribute to work, society, the world."
"The longer lives that medical advances have given us have run exactly parallel to the increase in chronic illness and the explosion in costs," wrote Daniel Callahan, founder of the Hastings Center, a bioethics think tank, in a 2013 New York Times op-ed. "Can we possibly afford to live even longer—much less radically longer?"
"It's worse than you think," fretted the Harvard political scientist Gary King and the Dartmouth demographer Samir Soneji in a New York Times op-ed on the future of Social Security the same year. "If the amount of money coming in through payroll taxes does not increase and if the amount of money going out as benefits remains the same, the trust funds will become insolvent less than 20 years from now."
For every promising advance in cancer treatment or hip replacement, a chorus chimes in with a warning about being careful what we wish for: Sure, we're curing diseases and easing pain, but perhaps the cost—in health and in dollars—is too high.
This approach isn't just wrong; it's almost criminally obtuse. These objections conflate the physical process of aging with the mere passage of years. Our quest must be—as it has been for all of recorded history—not merely to live a long time, but to slow and stop the process of aging. Eternal youth, not just long life.
The current medical paradigm is to go after each individual disease as it emerges in a perpetual game of therapeutic whac-a-mole. The result is that individuals begin to accumulate infirmities. About 50 percent of Medicare beneficiaries are being treated for five different chronic conditions. This is ultimately a losing proposition, because aging bodies accrue more and more lethal and disabling conditions that compete to kill them. Patients routinely survive health crises that would have done them in even a generation earlier, but to what end? If an older patient doesn't die of a heart attack, prostate cancer could do him in. If a stroke doesn't get her, the Alzheimer's will. Ultimately, more than 25 percent of Medicare spending goes toward the 5 percent of beneficiaries who die each year.
Dan Prince/cultura/Corbis
There is a better way. We must look beyond individual pathologies to their root, aging itself. If anti-aging treatments can maintain people in the state of health of the average 30-year-old, the onset of chronic illnesses will be forestalled and health care and pension expenditures will be much lower. And it increasingly looks like we may actually be able to slow or even stop the aging process, to the tremendous benefit of humanity.
What Doesn't Kill Me Makes Me Older
Everyone knows that as people get older they become more vulnerable to all sorts of diseases and chronic disabilities. The annual incidence rate for heart attacks, for example, is just 0.3 per 10,000 people before age 35. This rises inexorably to 66 per 10,000 for people who are between 65 and 74 years of age, eventually reaching 190 per 10,000 people for those over age 85.
The good news is that the age-adjusted death rate from coronary artery disease has fallen enormously over the past six decades, dropping from its peak of 482 deaths per 100,000 Americans in 1968 to 114 per 100,000 in 2010. This trend means that 1,223,000 deaths from coronary artery disease were averted in 2010 alone. Nevertheless, cardiovascular disease remains the leading cause of death and disability in the United States.
Similarly, the probability of developing cancer goes up with advancing age. According to the National Cancer Institute, Americans have a 5.4 percent chance of developing cancer and a 2.2 percent chance of dying from the disease before age 45. The probability of developing cancer climbs to 24 percent between ages 55 and 64, while the chance of dying increases to nearly 19 percent. About 77 percent of all cancers are diagnosed in people 55 years of age and older. In 2012, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services reported that 71 percent of Medicare beneficiaries suffer from at least two chronic conditions. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that treating chronic diseases accounts for about 75 percent of total health system costs. In a 2013 report, the Congressional Budget Office projected that two-thirds of 65-year-olds will likely need assistance to deal with a loss in physical and/or cognitive functioning at some point during their remaining years of life.
All this treatment is expensive. Really expensive. In 2013, U.S. health care spending reached $2.9 trillion, more than 17 percent of the country's gross domestic product (GDP). Medicare spending was $586 billion, about 20 percent of all national health spending in 2013. Nearly 30 percent of Medicare spending—about $170 billion—was spent on patients' last six months of life.
There are also old-age entitlements to consider. At the moment, the elderly expect to be showered with retirement and medical benefits as soon as their cake has enough candles. U.S. life expectancy was just 63 years in 1940 when the first monthly Social Security check was made to Ida May Fuller in the amount of $22.54. Ms. Fuller, who had paid a total of $24.75 into Social Security, eventually received $22,888.92 in benefits by the time she died in 1975 at the age of 100. But she was lucky: In 1940, the percentage of the men who survived from age 21 to 65 (their working lives) was 54 percent, and for women it was 61 percent. By 2010, those figures rose to 78 and 87 percent, respectively. Since 1940, life expectancy has risen to 78.8, an increase of nearly 16 years. The Social Security Administration currently projects that the average life expectancy will be 84.8 years in 2060.
Absent significant policy change, longer lives mean larger outlays. In July, the Congressional Budget Office identified an aging population as the key driver of increased retirement and medical spending, accounting for 55 percent of the projected growth in federal spending for Social Security and the major health care programs as a share of GDP through 2039.
What's more, when you ask people about whether they'd like to live longer lives they have decidedly mixed feelings. A 2012 poll commissioned by the drug company Pfizer reported that 64 percent of those surveyed said they were most afraid of losing independence or living in pain. Even more starkly, in a 2005 survey by the Massachusetts AARP, nine out of 10 respondents answered that total physical dependency would be worse than death. In other words, their primary worry is a drawn-out period of infirmity, with very low quality of life. And they're also worried about who's going to pay for all of those extra years. A 2010 poll of Americans ages 44 to 75 by the Allianz Insurance Company found that 61 percent said they fear depleting their assets more than they fear dying.
Of Young Mice and Young Men
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That Dan prince picture will haunt my nightmares
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It's creeping me out. I demand a Lobster Girl pic every time this runs, as sort of an anti-trigger.
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AGREED!
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I just hope we don't become debt slaves to pay for these "longevity treatments". I'm sure it's going to be figured out this century, but how much will they charge for it?
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You mean the first generation of beneficiaries? If you have to ask, you won't be able to afford it.
Maybe it will get cheaper over time?
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When longevity treatments become propagated on the market, I suspect there will be every incentive in the world to make these procedures as affordable as possible to as many people as possible. Not only from a commercial perspective, but from a government one as well (e.g. reduced costs for end-of-life care).
The dystopian outcome of longevity medicine would be a scenario where only politically-connected elites are allowed access to such procedures, essentially becoming immortal rulers over the hoi polloi. But all things considered, I just don't really see that happening.
Also, anyone interested in this topic should check out Aubrey de Grey: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXJzvo0Jekc
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If I could reclaim my health and live another decade, I would not retire completely at all. Not only would I continue to work, I would continue to pay taxes and to spend. Moreover, I would continue to learn As things are now, I am not only getting older and more frail, but I am spending at the rate of about 30% of what I spent while working.
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"If I could reclaim my health and live another decade, I would not retire completely at all"
Yes you would because the artificial intelligence machines will be taking over and putting you out of work.
You could continue to live and learn forever but you would never catch up to the exponential learning increase rates of AI.
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What makes you think WE won't be the artificial intelligence machines? I have always seen machine augmentation of human intelligence as far more likely than truly artificial intelligence. It's just clearly more in our interest to improve ourselves. Also, it's much easier to start with a fully functioning mind than it is to create a new one from scratch.
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If Searles Chinese room argument is correct then integration of machine and biological minds are the only way to achieve super intelligence. I hesitate to call the intelligence artificial because it would simply be enhanced in this case.
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"I have always seen machine augmentation of human intelligence as far more likely than truly artificial intelligence. "
It's possible but not guaranteed.
Just because you think it's more likely to play out that way doesn't make it so.
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Agreed. Your statement that the machines will take over is just as possible but also not guaranteed.
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Pretty sure we're all going to have sexy robot bodies and live forever in about 30 years or so.
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When are they going to re-animate Ted Williams head?
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Ron Bailey lived 900 years
Ron Bailey lived 900 years
But who calls that livin'
When no gal would give in
To no man who lived 900 years?Ron, throw in a four-hour erection, and I'm totally down with your plan.
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Stossel's mustache laughs at that picture.
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I thought we were all going to drown from global warming within the next twenty years anyhow?
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When there is a way to fix the DNA replication errors in cells copying themselves, then the rest becomes easy.
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Not necessarily. Epigenetics (regulation of expression of genes via chemical modification of underlying DNA) is just as important as DNA. This is where we think all of the nurture part of the nature vs. nurture debate comes in. Something happens in your life (stress, etc) that causes a change in which proteins are expressed which changes you as a person. It can lead to positive or negative changes, including massive health problems in some cases. This will remain true even once we've figured out the DNA replication/telomere problem. And we've only just started having a grasp on simple epigenetic problems.
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Maybe all our bodies will have millions of nanobots swimming in them constantly repairing everything at the cellular level.
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Certainly possible. I'm just responding to the notion that it's easy once we figure out how to do repair of the basic genetic material. There's a lot more than DNA involved. Not only DNA methylation, but transcriptases, post-translational modification, chaperones, and a huge number of other systems, any of which can go haywire for any number of reasons. All need to be accounted for. Whether that's nanobots or whatever, who knows. But it's certainly a gigantic task.
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"Maybe all our bodies will have millions of nanobots swimming in them constantly repairing everything at the cellular level."
I don't see the "nanobot" smallness as being necessary.
Imagine if all solid cancers could be identified and removed at less than, say, 2 mm in size. I'll bet that would really reduce age-adjusted cancer death rates.
Or imagine if there was--well, there already is--a cell phone device that could identify problematic electrocardiogram readings well before a heart attack ever occurred. The patient could then go in and get the heart problem addressed long before any heart attack occurred.
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I read a scifi book about a high exec in the medical-industrial complex who is offered a new longevity treatment. It gives her the body and mind of a 17 year old. After a short recovery, she's sitting in her office and feeling like a restless, horny and flighty 17 year old, says "fuckit" and hits the road.
A 30 year-old body is one thing. A hormone-jazzed body of a 18 year-old would be a dangerous thing.
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Given the history of nations with an over-abundance of young men, there is some reason for concern.
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Why? Won't the government just put them to work building a five thousand mile long wall like last time?
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Eternal Youth for All!
Good luck getting the ratfucking teathuglicans to pass a common sense law like that!
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That kid looks like John Maynard Keynes. Creepy...
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Live longer? For what? Talk about the Patriots cheating? That was the more important thing in the cosmos a month ago, wasn't it?
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I'm with you. I can't fathom spending eternity reading the comments on H&R. It would be like a bad rerun of the twilight zone.
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Everyone knows that as people get older they become more vulnerable to all sorts of diseases and chronic disabilities. The annual incidence rate for heart attacks, for example, is just 0.3 per 10,000 people before age 35. This rises inexorably to 66 per 10,000 for people who are between 65 and 74 years of age, eventually reaching 190 per 10,000 people for those over age 85.
Could this mean that if people don't wake up and stop needlessly getting older they run a very serious and real risk of of becoming ill or even dying? Would've been nice if some one had told me before I went ahead and grew old without knowing any better.
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The first step towards "living forever"? You guessed it: getting vaccinated!
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The mustache kid pic is really creepy.
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Someone's been watching those infomercials they run on PBS on Sunday mornings again.
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When I was a child, there was a TV Show called "Logan's Run".
In it, a group of elites called (The Elders) saw to it that no one lived passed the age of 30.
That would keep costs down and even eliminate the crisis the Rabble keep bringing up.
Kill off everyone once they turn 30 that is not in the top 1%.
Of course there would be an exemption list:
1. The wealthy
2. The top 1% salary earners
3. The police and military people needed to carry out the deed
4. Perhaps a couple of doctors here and thereCan't wait.
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Dumb scaremongering.
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Sometimes, the only inoculate against unbridled optimism;
Bodies age in much the same way that automobiles do.
Do they age the same was cars do or do they become obsolete the same way horse carriages and steam engines do?
The wet biology road to immortality is a retardedly laborious one, IMO. And pretending like all roads inherently lead to utopia ignores the legions that blindly followed roads that led elsewhere.
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Yeah, old B-movie scifi is totally an argument for what would happen in reality.
Do you spend your remaining free time terrified of the coming of the Triffids?
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Yeah, old B-movie scifi is totally an argument for what would happen in reality.
You'd be silly to suggest computers and robots aren't going to surpass us just because that's what they were originally conceived of doing *in fiction*.
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There were no 'elders' in Logan's Run. The 'government' was a computer.
Everyone died at Carrousel unless they ran.
there aren't any elders in the books either.
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He's actually talking about the TV Show, where the city was run by a bunch of old people who evaded the death at 25 thing.
The TV Show is actually surprisingly good. Logan and Jessica and a robot (a humanoid one) go from place to place finding strange pockets of survivors.
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When I was a child, there was a TV Show called "Logan's Run".
'Twas also a movie. Who's ready for carousel?
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The TV show actually makes more sense.
Rather than the computer just blowing up when he comes back and saying "There's no sanctuary", (which is really silly), they keep going and looking for the place all over the country, finding pockets of survivors.
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The end of marraige?
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This is a good question. I have a good friend who works in anti-aging research who is very optimistic about the prospects. She and I have had numerous conversations about how it would radically change the very concept of human relationships. Things that are now considered lifelong pass in the blink of any eye and so on. Clearly that would have huge social implications, marriage being among the least of them. Yet, she still ended up getting married and having a kid. Hmm...
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*Cue Queen's "Who Wants To Live Forever"*
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Great song! That brings up another point about a new immortality program though: do we have to use swords like or can we decapitate each other with modern technologies?
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Eternal Youth for All!
Isn't that what Twitter and Facebook Likes gives us?
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As death slowly approaches every science correspondent, suddenly immortality is just around the corner. There is, to some degree, a basic psychological denial of reality built into it; the fear of death and the failure to recognize that everything has an end. Aubrey de Grey may cite the "Tithonus error" as a problem with his critics, but this obsession with extending your own life as you age speaks of a kind of hilarious mid-life crisis. Also, way to quote Kurzweil in 2014 but ignore the times he said similar things a decade or so earlier.
That being said, I do think life-extension will become more likely in the near future, likely as a product of transhumanism. But it will likely happen long after Bailey and I are dead.
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This is probably an accurate way to look at things. It's like fusion power. We know how to do fusion (done it since 1948). We understand all the basic physics from the strong interaction to plasma instabilities, etc. And we're still learning the engineering principles. A breakthrough could happen at any time, but it could also take quite awhile.
Life extension is at a similar place to fusion power in the late 1970s/early 1980s. We have had a lot of fast results and there is a lot of reason for optimism. But we haven't yet hit any really big unforeseen obstacles.
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I'd love to believe that life extension may keep me alive for a very long time and that it will happen in my lifetime. I'm only 28, so I've got a better chance than many. I think it's worth keeping this possibility in mind and thinking about it as a future contingency. It would require significant financial investment, maintaining good health, etc. You know, things I'm doing anyway... Fun to think about, but it doesn't change the way that one should live their life. Clearly, taking 500 pills/day like Kurzweil is batshit insane.
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"It's worse than you think," fretted the Harvard political scientist Gary King and the Dartmouth demographer Samir Soneji in a New York Times op-ed on the future of Social Security the same year. "If the amount of money coming in through payroll taxes does not increase and if the amount of money going out as benefits remains the same, the trust funds will become insolvent less than 20 years from now."
So, kill off all those old bastards so your treasured government program can avoid being shut down for a bit longer?
Do these progs ever listen to what they are proposing?
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Do these progs ever listen to what they are proposing?
Possibly. One thing for sure is that they are not proposing it for themselves.
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If we move towards this, wouldn't it necessitate forced sterilization? If people are living infinitely longer and populations continue to rise then we won't have the resources. We barely have the resources now to support 8 billion. If fewer people are dying then that number will explode.
That's why I think this is only going to be available for the rich. They'll get to live for centuries, continue building their wealth, and rule over the poor folks who only get to live their natural allotment of years.
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"We barely have the resources now to support 8 billion."
Citation needed.
"That's why I think this is only going to be available for the rich."
Because the evil rich control vaccines and other medical technologies that extend life now right? To prevent the proles from living their natural allotment of years?
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GMO crops would help a lot in increasing yields farmland areas. Vertical farming practices would allow production of food in more urban areas. 3D printing of meat would basically eliminate the need to raise cattle, freeing up grazing land for crop production. And so on. Some of these things will come to pass. Some of them won't. The point is that food technology will continue apace. We'll most likely be fine in this realm. Same for other realms (energy, land, etc). If not, colonize other worlds.
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If people are living infinitely longer and populations continue to rise then we won't have the resources.
Misconception. World population growth is greatly slowing as age increases.
Also, as "we" get more tech, we use fewer resources.
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This is partly true. World population growth is definitely slowing. Whether this would remain true if you could live forever is another matter. People tend to only have kids during a part of their life which is particularly biologically conducive to doing so. If that amount of time is radically extended, who knows? Maybe we'll begin to think of kids more like pets, which many people replace over and over throughout their lifetimes. It's hard to know, as this sort of technology would change how we think of lifelong human relationships on a fundamental level.
As to your other comment, where is there any evidence that we use fewer resources? Within a particular market, we get more efficiency over time. But we get many more markets as well. No culture has ever consumed more than the U.S. circa now.
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I'm not saying that consumption is a bad thing, either. It's a biological imperative to consume as much as possible.
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http://mic.com/articles/13057/.....retirement
Not 100% libertarian, but could make for a soft landing where people are eventially given back their full health freedom (while the government bails itself out of $trillions in liabilities)
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That is a really awesome read! I am glad I came across your site. Right now I have been reading personal development.
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A quibble:
the onset of chronic illnesses will be forestalled and health care and pension expenditures will be much lower.
Healthcare? Sure, arguably.
Pensions? How does extending the amount of time someone spends collecting a pension reduce pension expenditures?
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It doesn't. The only manner in which this could happen is if pensions are fundamentally altered as a result of people living a very long time. I wouldn't be surprised if we did away with the idea of people drawing a paycheck for the rest of their days if they remain productive for a very long time. But you're right that it does require some change beyond just living longer.
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I turned 65 last week and officially became a geezer. I don't know whether I'll live as long as my aged mother has, but as she often says: I think I'll live until I die. ;-)
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Yeah, I can't imagine living forever. I'd be bored to death
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very good
