Life Extension, Rejuvenation, Anti-Aging and Immortality

I'm interested in your thoughts on these subjects. How many years do you think do we have to wait until we have the technology that enables us to live forever and how will it affect society?

>>22922 Never. Death is evolution, evolution is novelty, novelty is adaptability and strength.

When my grandpa died a few months ago, it seems like he was ready to go (even if it was a few years too soon). With age you will eventually become more 'attracted' to death, in some weird way. I'm not even 30 and I'm already starting to feel this way. Life is emotional and physical pain (at least a too big part of it) and I guess it's what makes death more attractive with time. My grandpa just gave up one day after fighting with pain for months. I think he was ready to go way before that be he wanted to stay alive until the birthday of my mother just to make us feel a tiny bit less sad. After that he just gave up and died the following night. I don't think anyone will be happy to be alive for too long, at least as a normal human. Maybe one day we will find a solution against pain (while somehow still feeling pain to keep us safe from dangers like fire etc) and reverse/stop the aging process but I don't think we will see it during our lifetime. My advice to OP will be to start trying to accept death as a part of life. I was so focused on the idea of dying during a period of my life that it ruined it for some time. I was constantly in stress and fear of death, so much I wasn't doing anything with my life. -Love

>>22925 I like your words. I've been struggling coming to terms with mortality for almost a decade now. I lost all my grandparents during that time and all four kind of died in a lousy fashion - slow and unsettling. How did you develop a good relationship with the fact of dying?

>>22926 I don't think you can really have a "good" relationship with death. I do feel sad about it like most people. The only persons I know who have a real good relationship with death are people who used heavy doses of psychedelics. And I don't want to go this way, you can't end up with big mental problems. (Maybe they are just "ok" with death because of mental problems too, I don't know, I don't think it's a solution. Maybe it's a solution for people who know they will die soon (cancer etc) and can't live normally with knowing it.) I actually don't know what to say to you. I lost a lot of people this year and it was killing me like it's killing you. I just accepted it because I feel they are better feeling nothing than being in pain just to make me less sad. I realized it was a little bit selfish to not accept their death. Not really but I bet you understand what I'm trying to say. Don't get me wrong the pain is still there and I'm crying a little bit just typing this. But I realized it was worse seeing them in pain. I hope one day you can see it the way I'm seeing it now. On the positive side I feel more connected and alive now, I want to crush people with happiness and make their time on earth worth it. :)

And to answer you question more precisely: Realizing that made me realize I don't want to live forever. So I guess I'm ok with the fact of dying just enough to stop thinking constantly about it. I'm getting better and I bet you will too. If you don't, seek pro help please :) they have more experience in the field than I do and I bet they will help you even more.

>And I don't want to go this way, you can't end up with big mental problems. Sorry typo: You CAN end up with big mental problems. (Sorry for the flood mods)

>>22927 I used psychedelics quite a bit many years ago in my teens including one particularly terrifying experience with LSD...terrifying because it took "me" completely away :) It's a bit of a bummer because, in a sense, the aspect of it that leaves many with a sense of peace (post-ego loss) did kind of the opposite with me. That + the deaths I saw just kind of reinforced my fear of the inevitable. Perhaps it's less the death part that gets to me and it's more the dying part. The idea of perhaps becoming old enough that most people I know are already gone. Being alone, forgotten, perhaps in a nursing home slowly wasting away. Of course, the sun is shining today, so I can talk about this with some sense of detachment. I'm a fit, reasonably intelligent adult with a pretty damn good life. Things are good. These thoughts really just get at me if I'm awake in bed at 3am, you know?

I wonder how long it would take to make an immortal indistinguishable from a descendant. Part of living is after all forgetting old memories and making new ones. So there has to be a timeframe in which a complete replacement will occur.

>>22930 (I'm 22925, 22927) That's why we should legalize suicide/euthanasia in some way. One should be allowed to decide when he's ready to go when he's old enough and everyone around him is gone. One should have the power to ask for dying quickly and painlessly when he's sure of dying from his sickness with horrible pain. I mean, I don't know how it can be done realistically but at least old people in horrible pain and imminent death should be able to ask for assisted suicide. Imagine being a doctor and having a guy like this asking for a quick painless death and not being able to help him without the risk of ruining your own life. It will also be more respectful for other people: Nobody is prepared enough to find a guy who killed himself with a gun or strangulation because he wasn't able to kill himself in a proper setting. https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/french-woman-loses-case-in-bid-to-be-euthanized > https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/jan/28/france-adopts-sedated-dying-law-as-compromise-on-euthanasia

>>22927 >>22930 I think what a lot of people get out of ego death from LSD (and Ketamine -- apparently it is much more accurate with producing near-death experiences) is that, in the moment of death, there's no reason to be afraid. It's just something inevitable, and it's sad because you won't get to be alive any more and say goodbye and have new experiences but after a certain point fighting it becomes pointless. And well, if there's no reason to be afraid while you're dying, is there a reason to worry about it while you're alive? Immortality is impossible, in the deepest sense of the word. You might as well spend your life trying to trisect an angle with compass and straightedge. Same with resurrection or any other things. Death is death, it is inevitable and absolute. To seek immortality, or more generally to dwell on death, is to waste this holy gift of life. The end will come when it comes, we don't get to decide when or how long we're alive, but we do get to decide what we do while we're alive. We can experience joy and sadness, we can love and hate, even in the worst situations we can daydream and imagine ourselves free. Our lost friends and family had their time to do this, and we have ours. Use it :)

>live forever "forever" is not possible in a finite universe you could live for a very long time but you would still eventually cease to exist

>>22948 (I’m 22930) One part of this that really confounds me is I find the idea of living forever just about equally scary. If I follow these thought patterns I eventually hit a point of feeling trapped - there’s life and there’s death and there’s no “alternative.” Existence is so strange. Anyway, again, this stuff doesn’t consume me as much as it used to but my hope is that as life goes on I become more...okay with all of the inevitable.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRt7LjqJ45k I hate to post links to youtube, but there are some interesting interviews on anti-ageing research. The main point is that epigenome(the main way of how cells are differentiated) is accumulating noise over time and that is the major reason of ageing. Then there's also talk about longevity genes that get activated during biological stress and suggestions on how to activate them. Any more informed views on this?

>>22950 >there’s life and there’s death and there’s no “alternative.” well, yeah, but personally I think there's enough variety in life(such as acid trips :)) that it's no big deal. >my hope is that as life goes on I become more...okay with all of the inevitable. most people don't, but I think that's just because they didn't really have the right outlook to start with. A lot of religions use the idea of afterlife, or other eternal life, as a motivating factor. This amounts to pretending that death isn't really final, and I think that really messes a lot of peoples' attitudes about it up because we all know in our guts that death really is final, the dissonance between what we believe and what we know causes lots of stress.

>>22922 >I'm interested in your thoughts on these subjects. How many years do you think do we have to wait until we have the technology that enables us to live forever and how will it affect society? Depends on how hard will I work :P I would say we won't be immortal from the beginning, but we'll extend our lifetime. 20-30 years until first accessible gene therapies healing some parts of aging, but the true immortality could be even one century away - you don't really know what is going to happen in the future, considering things like quantum computers, AI, neurology breakthroughs and the climate change. >>22923 >Never. Bullshit. >Death is evolution, evolution is novelty, novelty is adaptability and strength. If you didn't notice, we've almost stopped being dependent on natural selection - soon we are going get rid of selfish genes. Antibiotics, technology, medicine - it's all transhumanizm.

>>22922 I don't think we will ever get there. However I'm guessing 2 or 3 centuries before people live for hundred years on average. Some possible ways I think it'll be achieved. >Ghost in machine Probably what most people think when talking about "Immortality" but I don't think it'll ever be commonplace. A full body cybernetics to replace human body to function as good as it and to maintain it will be too expensive for most people. And I don't really think functions of a brain can be emulated effectively be a computer ever so a cyber brain to replace it unlikely in the near future. At best some costly cyber body to which you can transfer your brain to. >"Reincarnation" Probably muh ethics would stop it. Even then I dont think ordinary people can afford full body clones and transfer their brain/memories to it to cheat ageing. >Genetic engineering Probably what I find the most likely and even then won't be affordable for people other than children of rich and will only extend lifetime, not cheat death. >Biotics, Concussions, etc... Most realistic and the same case as above.

>>23002 >I don't think we will ever get there. However I'm guessing 2 or 3 centuries before people live for hundred years on average. Why so pessimistic? Just look at the progress we made just in 50 years - from big computers taking whole room, we now have computers fitting inside our pocket, the human genome got sequenced only 20 years ago, now some gene therapies are accessible for people. Quantum supremacy has been achieved for certain algorithm, AI will take many different jobs away from people in next 15 years. Working parts of organs are printed today. The growth is exponential, the Internet made information flow faster across the globe. >A full body cybernetics to replace human body to function as good as it and to maintain it will be too expensive for most people. At a certain level of civilization development, the only cost it energy and resources. Creating self-replicating, programmable nanomachines would make humans obsolete. Welcome to the Fourth Industrial Revolution. When a machine can do everything and even more a human can, then capitalism and money stop making sense. >Probably muh ethics would stop it. It's only a matter of time for people to accept new reality. Organ transplants probably seemed unethical for people back then, now that's the reality we're living in. >Even then I dont think ordinary people can afford full body clones and transfer their brain/memories to it to cheat ageing. Same thing, there is going to be no money, after human work is not worth anything. These things will be worth as much as energy needed to produce it, that is not much after creating living tech. >Probably what I find the most likely and even then won't be affordable for people other than children of rich and will only extend lifetime, not cheat death. Gene therapies get cheaper and cheaper, see this example: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/24/fda-approves-novartis-2-million-spinal-muscular-atrophy-gene-therapy.html After expiration of some patents, creating new methods and people actually buying these therapies, it is going to get accessible. The human genome project cost was $2.7 billion (https://www.genome.gov/human-genome-project/Completion-FAQ) In 2016 the cost of sequencing genome was just $1,500 (https://www.genome.gov/about-genomics/fact-sheets/Sequencing-Human-Genome-cost) Don't know what's the price today. It can't be expensive forever.

>>22923 I was thinking yesterday about how we're made to wear out and die. If we managed to get rid of age or death, we would have to rework our brains too so they would be able to handle it. All living beings are survival engines designed to take a beating from all sources until they drop.

>>22955 >soon we are going get rid of selfish genes. just curious, what exactly do you mean by this?

>>23048 >just curious, what exactly do you mean by this? "The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins. The selfish gene theory is a different view on evolution showing we're only survival machines made by our 'selfish' genes. They travel from body to body - they're the purpose and cause of life, whereas we die, right after doing what we were made for - reproduction.

SENS seems to be the most realistic strategy to reverse anti-aging. Sadly, the SENS foundation reeks of Silicon Valley singularity-like vaporwave bullshit, as they fail to deliver any products and keep making unrealistic predictions.

I think multi-century lifespans will definitely happen at some point. The problem is whether us common plebs will be benefit from it, or if we'll only be ruled by 300-year-old billionaires with demigod genes. Thankfully the trend for most of this biotech is that it's getting more affordable. For comparison, the Human Genome Project cost 2.7 billion dollars, and now you can do the same thing today for like 1000 dollars. But what worries me about all this getting cheaper is that people can also fuarrrk all kinds of soykaf up, and we'll probably be seeing a rise in bioterrorism. What can we really do when someone can synthesize bubonic turbo anal pox in his garage for 5000$ or less? >>23057 I think you meant "vaporware"

I think it's possible, you'll probably need to introduce nano machines or new biological mechanisms though. Plus you'll to change the definition of what or who you are. You can't have infinite memories you'll have to let some go. Holding onto what we are or who we think we are is the biggest struggle we face.

>>22955 It's not just about genetics. Societies, thoughts, science, all of them need novelty and selection and death in order to advance. A society full of people who live a long time will become stale and not progress. Each person will think along lines they thought before, and avoid change that will topple their current position. Life extension is a goal born of fear and alienation. The future is not longer lived lifespans, but the slow welding of humans into larger consciousnesses, so that death does not result in the loss of purpose or knowledge. On another note, scientists also play up how much they know about biology, and it gets conflated with all the progress in physics and computing of the last century or so. To put it bluntly: there are no good methods to predict how a cell or organism behaves from the genome, and no good theory for how cells reliably form whole organisms. Many observations and ideas yes, but nothing approaching the reproducibility of theories in other branches of science, and so nothing that can be used for engineering life. Life extension could be achieved within several generations if a society decided to select for longer lived individuals, and this process could be sped up by generating variation with genetic engineering. But no one will expand your lifespan through medicine, and no one will design a child to have a longer life without creating a thousand other kids with birth defects.

oh look its a thread about the script kiddie's favorite subject >>23066 >Plus you'll to change the definition of what or who you are. You can't have infinite memories you'll have to let some go. Holding onto what we are or who we think we are is the biggest struggle we face. no, that's not the biggest struggle. the biggest struggle is surviving more than 10 minutes without getting cancer/heart disease/arthritis/etc and solving whatever disease becomes common at age 200.

>>22951 There was a plebbit sub on something called SENs. I never looked into it because it seemed like they were more interested in money.

>>22922 We die multiple times within our life time, cells are replaced constantly, the matter that constitutes us changes. In the brain, cells change places. After sucessive reparations, would you still be you? If we take our essence to be our memories, the result would also be the same, they are replaced over time. Our personality changes and shiet. There seems to be no garantee that consciousness remains the same through life.

>>23108 >We die multiple times within our life time, cells are replaced constantly, the matter that constitutes us changes. In the brain, cells change places. In theory. In practice you're just saying nonsense which you have no idea whether it's true or not.

>>23115 Yes, I'm just brewing soykaf. But take a look at Derek Parfit's problem of personal identity.

>>23108 that is obviously not what people mean by death.

>>23126 It's a fair point though. Consciousness and the self seem more like a story that is built up to provide coherence and explanation. It is held up as the source of all meaning because that is what our society worships. But to me there doesn't seem to be much reason to think that the shifts in consciousness as you age are any different in kind from those between different people.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19768466 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6093373/ https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/regenerating-light-sensing-eye-cells-mice The work is being done. From multiple sides, and for those who may be concerned about the time it takes to develop, test and deploy such technologies, there is cryonics. https://alcor.org/ I am personally betting on becoming personally, and physically immortal within the next two centuries. There are no guarantees, but the great work will be done.

>>23127 maybe if you have dementia. But if selfhood is a narrative, it is a narrative that you build up over decades and generally gets stronger over time, right up until the end. I think the shifts of consciousness for one person over time are much, much smaller than the differences between different people.

>>22922 Could be centuries, but I can't assume it will be available to myself in my life time. It may never be available to those without obscene wealth anyways. Have you seen altered carbon? I think that's a practical portrayal of the thinly veiled caste system it could cause. The proles on the ground, the bourgeois in their castles in the sky. I really loved that series though, and that's still a future I could find my place in.

>>23073 This assumes people lose their ambition when they become immortal(or that mortality is what makes us ambitious) And that our thoughts won't evolve(you've never learned something that changes the way you approach things?) "Life extension is a goal born of fear and alienation" Also disagree, that could be a part of it, but there's more to life than avoiding death and prolonged life would offer more opportunities(to do whatever you like) "The future is not longer lived lifespans, but the slow welding of humans into larger consciousnesses, so that death does not result in the loss of purpose or knowledge." Cool thought, but the two are not mutually exclusive.

Tim Ferris is experimenting with drugs, supplements, training and lifestyle for longevity, but like he says, it could be a while before we know if he's immortal.

>>23135 Perhaps you do not see yourself mirrored in the people around you, and how the thoughts and actions of two people stem from common causes in the environment and history. I'm sure many other people see it as you do, but I'm also sure some people share my experience, which is a gradual weakening of a single self narrative in favor of one based on an interaction of subsystems, not all of which are localized entirely within oneself. >>23137 It could be possible to maintain learning and creativity over a long time, but it seems to me like it would require a degree of destruction and randomness in a person's thoughts that would approach levels more commonly seen as mental illness and disrupt a coherent consciousness. But who knows, I guess this is for the people who will explore this space to find out. Societies seem to have stumbled upon a similar strategy, where by cultivating many different elements and occasionally selecting one to have more influence allows it to adapt and avoid stagnation.

You know, with the rapid advancements in Deep Learning, Neural networks and AI algorithms, I wouldn't be surprised if we are able to upload ourselves or even create new people on a computer. In a way, it's immortality isn't it? It's kind of like the Swamp Man thought experiment I guess

>>24856 >You know, with the rapid advancements in Deep Learning, Neural networks and AI algorithms illusory. A truly thinking machine is still decades or centuries away, with how AI research is developing

If immortals are ever born (itself an extremely doubtful statement) I seriously doubt that we'll reach that level of biotech sophistication inside four centuries. If you think fusion power is an unexpectedly long development cycle, you ain't seen nuthin yet. This is such a wicked problem, and like many of these kinds of problems, we're only seeing the surface of it right now. Each layer that we painstakingly peel away will reveal exponentially more complexity. It will balloon in difficulty for decades or even centuries before it starts to sort out and get simple again. The end effect will be that it looks like we're getting further from the goal for a very long time instead of nearer. And then, once the needle starts moving in the right direction, we will have a million times further to go than we thought at the start. It will take a while. Our best experts today only have an infinitesimal fraction of the total knowledge it will require, putting them far closer to laymen than to a point where anyone is capable of a solution. We're in that weird period where even the PHDs are basically still laypeople, kind of like the pre-scientific era of psychology. Plus, new causes of death will doubtlessly emerge, and immortality is not invincibility. I'd imagine that society would become more amenable to unnatural death once we start gradually conquering natural death. I'd love to be a timeless vampire, watching future history unfold from my hermit's lair. But that's an opinion I have now, without the possibility of ever achieving it or the experience of age and how that might change my views. Not to mention no resources to buy it. Which brings me to your other question: As far as the social ramifications, that's a whole can of worms. I kind of agree with the Altered Carbon take on it. It won't simply be that it will be prohibitively expensive at first; it will remain prohibitive forever because the people in control of civilization will know that they can't allow everyone to live forever. Even if we had a post-scarcity technological utopia (we won't), taking death out of the equation would nevertheless make it unsustainable again. The ruling class won't let you have it. Ever. Refinements in the tech or economies of scale would not ever change this. It would be entirely outside of economy, which is hard to imagine in our current society, but such things can and do exist. Beneath economy is the eldritch scaffolding of base, primeval power. Economy is only a facade to make it palatable to the masses. Here be dragons. Hideous ones. It would only be the most ghoulish, the most cruel, the most vainly and psychopathically ambitious—who ever get to live indefinitely. We call them Litch kings already, but are we really prepared for that metaphor to become literally true? We have seen how much hundreds of billions of dollars can twist a human psyche within only a portion of a natural human lifespan. We can't imagine how demented and depraved they'd get after centuries of gathering hundreds of trillions in wealth as they expand out into new and incomprehensible economies and even physical spaces. We can't imagine the psychology of somebody who would willingly choose to continue after a thousand years of existence—and the horrors such an unimaginably long experience implies. But I can tell you this: they would be mean. Intolerably mean. Their blood would be frozen to within a fraction of a degree of absolute zero. And they would have so much power banked up that revolution would be very, very hard. I make this thought experiment with the assumption that we have managed to avoid climate collapse, since we're extremely unlikely to achieve immortality before that destroys our ability to advance new technology. So it's a prerequisite. None of us will live forever if we can't maintain our biosphere at all. The people who achieve enormous power in a natural lifetime, then technological immortality, and then exponentially more wealth and power over the centuries as they go craven and insane and become infinitely cruel—they could only be compared to vampires in my mind. And that's not nearly doing it justice. They'd be unprecedented monsters, scarcely able to be taxonomized in the same species as the rest of us. They'd parasitize us for eons, as they always have—but it would be the same individuals. Growing more devilishly intelligent and Machiavellian, growing richer, gaining political clout comparable to godhood, growing more impervious to any struggle that might be presented by their victims. They'd bend our minds with incomprehensible wisdom and deceptions only available to the undying. It would be a return of pharaohs. It would make Caligula and Nero look downright friendly and sane. And they died very early, even by the standards of their own era. It would be a far bleaker dark age, not a time of enlightenment, when we vanquish death. Altered Carbon doesn't really even do all this justice. They present them as (more or less) normal ultra-wealthy elite; it would be closer to the monsters of religion and fiction. The absolute worst you can imagine. And they'd be able to imagine so much more than you can. So much more cruelty. Remember all the creative torture devices of the middle ages, and know that they were invented by people in their thirties and forties. You don't want to think about what a five-thousand-year-old oligarch-become-demigod could invent to use upon you to salve his several millennia of boredom. This is Lovecraftian in scale. Humans are plenty scary enough when they die in single digits. We might find some serendipitous black swan, though: it could be that there's some genomic switch hidden in our chromosomes, something that nature has already developed for billions of years for us as a gift, but more like a Pandora's box—that could be easily toggled and give us the same regenerating telomeres and practical biological immortality that lobsters and sea urchins and such have. But all organisms which have immortal genes today are radically different from our phylum; they all branched from us eons and eons ago. It's outrageously unlikely from a statistical perspective that such a feature exists in our genes, way out on the branch of homo sapiens, and even more unlikely on top of that that it would be as simple as flipping a gene; that it wouldn't have disastrous effects on our biology downstream that would have to be disentangled. It would be a Gordian knot of astronomical proportions—in fact larger than astronomical. There are more variables in the total expressive combinations of our genes than there are atoms in the universe. Far more. But I concede that it's a possibility that we get lucky and find a very easy pre-made solution hidden within ourselves. Just a vanishingly unlikely possibility. We wouldn't be rolling a naturally twenty, we'd be rolling a natural octillion. And that's a damn good thing.

>>24876 And one more aside (I know I'm very long-winded; hopefully I at least write okay): Know that people who never die will think of the rest of us more and more as cockroaches as each decade passes. And it will be the rest of us; nobody in this community would ever be allowed onto their team. Rest assured. They would have no more goodwill, mercy, or empathy for you than you would for an insect that crawls across your lips while you sleep. They would gladly entertain their pets with your evisceration. Much like we stand by and watch cats and mice, or spiders and houseflies. We would be lilliputian compared to them. They would not view us with scorn, contempt, or malice—merely indifference. Until they got frustrated, or worse: bored. Then we'd understand what misery truly is.

>>24866 Yeah, my thoughts exactly. I think it might be plausible in about 90-100 years

>>24876 >You don't want to think about what a five-thousand-year-old oligarch-become-demigod could invent to use upon you to salve his several millennia of boredom. This is Lovecraftian in scale. Humans are plenty scary enough when they die in single digits. Maybe, but despite the depiction of immortals in fiction, we don't know what really extreme age does to the human mind. To extrapolate from mundane aging, the mind will deteriorate into functional uselessness. Except it won't because in this scenario medical science is really advanced. So the minds of immortals will be adjusted and modified, as a prerequisite to being anything other than an eternal dementia patient. Pretty hard to tell how that will turn out. But the way I see it, people are most often cruel because they are miserable and have a poor imagination for anything other than misery. Power and wealth promote loneliness, cultural disconnection and suffering in their users, which leads to cruelty. But if someone has the ability and need to tinker directly with their brain, wouldn't the natural choice be to resolve their own suffering? This wouldn't necessarily prevent evil acts or impart empathy, but many pained obsessions, motivations for cruelty, would likely be removed. The frustration and boredom you mention, would only be felt to the extent they choose to feel those things. The human mind isn't built to shoulder the weight of millennia, and it won't. They will probably be alien and incomprehensible, but there isn't anything limiting them to being a leveled up version of the monsters we know.

>>24967 I mean number one, dementia is caused by the same factors that cause aging, so if any of this longevity treatment works, you wouldn't have to tinker with the brain. Dementia wouldn't occur if we make ourselves genetically immortal any more than it happens in lobsters. It's far more likely that we figure a way to trick the body into not letting its telomeres degrade and then let it maintain its own organs, 'cause having to do it ourselves manually is more difficult in the extreme. That would add a few more centuries of R&D. And you think the incredibly powerful people who desire to live forever will also elect to have their minds meddled with and neutered, taking away their aggressiveness and ambition and human emotions? Why do you think that will be a requirement? They won't. They just won't. It wouldn't even matter if it was legitimately in their best interests. Believing they would is just a fundamental misunderstanding of how powerful people work. You're naively hoping for a utopia without anything to enforce it. That's how you get dystopia.

>>24856 lol what are you, a VC? Who honestly believes in undampened exponential growth? Nothing's that simple. All that stuff is gonna lead to a few gimmicky, unreliable consumer products and then be vaporware for another several decades. Just like the last AI boom, and just like the next several will be too. We can't make a self-driving car. We won't be able to put a human brain in one of those ѕһіtboxes for a long, long time.

>>24970 Is the mental decline of age purely physiological degradation? It seems likely there are 'software' type sustainability problems too. Our brains have a finite amount of space, it seems implausible that a complex, dynamic system that only needed to evolve to last a finite length of time would have a perfectly sustainable indefinite uptime. Lobsters run largely on hard wired instinct, which would reduce such problems, and there probably aren't many intensive studies of how their mental functioning correlates with extreme age. I mean, the problems you're predicting with immortal psychology, are essentially these types of problems. It's a leap to assume their insanity would be a functional insanity (without intervention). As for the temptation to meddle with their own minds, it's almost unthinkable that they wouldn't. Why would anyone, let alone a whole population of people, subject themselves to centuries of edgy brooding angst when feeling that way is entirely optional? These people are power hungry, not perfect incorruptible masochists. They would be genuinely satisfied with life, because they would be able to buy that satisfaction, exactly how they want it, directly. I'm not saying it's safe or wouldn't be a dystopia, maybe it still would be, just that this trope of the bitter old ghoul is not a realistic picture.

>>24974 I don't think they'd have an existence of edgy brooding angst. They'd have an existence of maniacal sadism and pathological power accumulation. I'm only extrapolating from what we already see now. In lack of evidence of how psychology or the brain would work on that time scale, I think that's pretty practical. And they would want to remedy that condition no more than they seem to want to today. They like that part of themselves. They guard it fanatically. It wouldn't be a bitter old ghoul, it would be a very mean and competent deathless psychopath. The only addition here is 'deathless.' We already see the rest of it today.

>>23143 >Perhaps you do not see yourself mirrored in the people around you, and how the thoughts and actions of two people stem from common causes in the environment and history. Of course I do. But there is simply nobody else who has my exact memories, not even remotely. It just reflects the degree of connectedness. Different regions of a body, and aspects of a mind, are connected much more intricately and directly than the connections between individuals. Hence why we usually think of the "self" as being localized around particular semantic units which we call "individuals", if you want to be reductionist it's just a way of identifying clusters in a weighted graph. It's a matter of degree, not kind. >>24876 this makes a lot of wrong assumptions about how power works. Any individual at the head of an organization derives their power from their organization. Even pharaos derived all of their power from their government, which had far more power than any individual pharao could have. Any organization which centralizes power too much in an individual is inherently unstable, as that individual will eventually die and the organization then falls apart. The individuals who head those organizations may sometimes be exceptionally aggressive, but a successful organization will tend to reject aggressive people in favor of people who will keep the organization stable. Any organization which centralizes too much power in an individual is extremely unstable and will usually fall apart when they die. This reflects the dynamics of exceptionally long-lived and powerful organizations such as the Catholic Church. Power is diffuse in the organization, and powerful people in the organization must work towards reinforcing the organizational structure or be swiftly removed. Their individual disposition is mostly irrelevant; they may be very cruel or very kind, but all that really matters for their power is that they work well for the organization. In a way, we already have what you're describing. Seemingly undying organizations that hold unimaginable power and cruelty. But they're organizations, not individuals. I think that this is likely to continue, because as lifespans increase, people who centralize power around themselves will be able to centralize more and more(as you say), but they will still eventually die, and the more they centralized power around themselves the more their organization will crumble afterwards. So, power-diffuse organizations will remain the most powerful overall, and the most powerful(and hence longest-lived) people will be those who are the most effective at looking out for their organizations' interests over themselves. This all reflects the fact that an aggressive strategy is usually not as effective as a conservative strategy in the long term. The lich-kings will really be more like an "inner party", far more concerned with the stability of their organization than with their individual power.

All life must perish.

I'm optimistic about biological rejuvenation but in the end, entropy will consume all.

>>24976 >In a way, we already have what you're describing. That's basically what I'm saying. That having the most powerful among us live longer would lead to an intensified version of what already exists. Possibly one which is nonlinear, where different factors of increased time of power multiply instead of add. Which I think is pretty terrible. I may have possibly been a bit too dramatic, but I do think it would in all be a very bad thing for humanity, and the vast majority of people would not benefit from lifespan enhancement. >>24977 >>24978 Well I mean that much is obvious; death takes us all. But it would still change things enormously if old age was removed from the list of factors delivering one to death. In the end, I believe that biological death is egalitarian, not unfair, and in fact may be the only egalitarian thing left in human existence. Rich and poor, we all are alike once we're buried underground. Memento mori. Eliminating it would only slant the playing field of the whole world.

hearing people's neophobe deathworship replies is SO uninteresting... why does everyone have to chime in with the same exact opinion? oh it's extremely unlikely??? because that's all you've ever experienced???? WOW MIND=BLOWN whoops my cup of caffeinated soybeans spilt over, y'all have really missed the mark dr. timothy leary's phrase SMI²LE denotes Space Migration, Intelligence Increase, and Life Extension as the program that our DNA is headed towards. DNA itself is immortal. The individual carrying the DNA is not important. Climate collapse? Human extinction? Whoopty-doo! DNA will keep right on going. space migration off this planet is a necessary preliminary for life extension, because the next step of evolution in the human genome to unfold is activated in zero gravity while looking at the earth from space. this is all known. even https://en.uncyclopedia.co/wiki/White-haired_Asian_Scientist guy says that we're in the paleo-technological age, and that we haven't even reached a stage one of civilization because we haven't even begun living in high orbit. the homo sapiens is a larval stage, human beings have not even begun to be born yet. and yet you've all thrown in the towel to death! I saw a post in another thread on here that claimed that taking psychedelics in a float tank is part of a satanic conspiracy for muh evils to control the world. Dude, wake up, weightless space is what is needed to meta-program the 111 billion cell flesh computer in your skull. this is what the prophets keep telling everyone for thousands of years, some average nobody starts peering into their own cells and communicating with them, the cells show them a vision of the life-death-life-death-life chain of billions of generations past-and-future what is contained in the DNA script which appears as immortal from the singular person. and then everyone rejects the idea and goes back to fuarrrking inside of gene pools and dying. there is so much obfuscation to this. everyone's worried sick about what's happening to domesticated primates under 4,000 miles of atmospheric pressure, and their 1,000 million year old reptilian power politics. has no one gotten bored yet and went searching for answers? on a SEL forum of all places, for shame! that show was all about lilly, leary, and nelson. think for yourself, death is only a program.

>>25027 >DNA itself is immortal. >Climate collapse? Human extinction? Whoopty-doo! DNA will keep right on going. >space migration off this planet is a necessary preliminary for life extension you assume an infinite number of migrations outside, and by extension infinite outsides. that's kinda dumb to be honest, why not just call DNA "a persistent boi" instead

>>25027 >>25031 Life's ability to adapt isn't quite so unlimited or infinite as people think it is. In the field of macroevolution we have this concept of "canalization"--where a gene becomes effectively integral in an organism's developmental pathways. When this happens, it is no longer available for mutations to create a novel trait for selection to act upon because mutations on these integral developmental genes are outright lethal. Over 500 million years of evolution, animal life has built up a substantial debt of "canalized" genes. One way out of this is to have a duplication event, freeing up a new copy of one of these genes to become available to evolution. However, there is no reason to believe that cellular metabolism can facilitate an infinitely large nucleus. At some point surface area to volume factors and simple issues with obtaining enough nutrients to service all that DNA become barriers to evolutionary potential. Birds for example already experience this and are under heavy selective pressure to weed out unused sequences of DNA in order to minimum their mass for flight. There is good reason to believe that the more time evolution has had to tinker with complex life, the less that life is capable of being tinkered with, and in fact there is evidence in the fossil record of speciation-extinction rates to support this.

>>22922 When death flees from you, you know your fuarrrked.

>>25027 >Dude, wake up, weightless space is what is needed to meta-program the 111 billion cell flesh computer in your skull. This is just as wacko as saying it's a satanic conspiracy to control the world. There's no reason to believe that evolution put some kind of obscure easter egg in your brain that required you to build a dark pod full of water and take psychedelics to maintain it. Or go float around in space, which actually has lots of deleterious effects on your biology. Why do you think this? >death is only a program Yeah, a very important program. This is the kind of wild-eyed triumphalism and naivete that is driving the whole thing. Not that people like you would have what it takes to actually re-program it (it's wayyyyy harder than you'd ever conceive) but if you did figure it out, it would just make life worse. Death exists for a reason. You could perhaps conceive of a different way to accomplish its task, but beware the hubris of believing you're more clever than billions of years of evolution. You have put way too much faith in Timothy Leary. He's not actually that brilliant. He definitely hasn't done anything that proves him worthy of having credible opinions on biological immortality or fuсking space travel. This is like some dumb Elon Musk fanboy ѕһіt. There's no reason to believe any of this. I like psychedelics, but I hate it when people become absolute raving evangelists and go this nuts about it. It's not panacea. It won't literally end death.

what's with all the acid/cocaine-fueled posts in this thread?

>>25367 lol I think this brand of futurism just happens to have a lot of overlap with use of those substances.

>>25356 >Death exists for a reason. You are so stupid it hurts

>>25379 >You are so stupid it hurts Not him, but you're wrong and also you're breaking the rule 3. Although death emerged spontaneously, it has a good reason to continue existing - it fuels evolution. Life cycles of organisms generally look like this: multi cell organism -> single cell (gamete, spore) -> multi cell organism The single cell stage is important, because it provides synchronization of the genome across an organism. After reproducing an organism has served its purpose well already and somatic mutations accumulating in the body make it less reliable. It is reasonable for a lifeform to remove itself from existence in order to release resources needed by its offspring. Death allows change and immortal organisms do not change as quickly as dying ones. That's why autodestruction genes are promoted by natural selection. t. biologist

>>25380 There are some effectively immortal animals like hydra and some corals that never experience senescence, and others like tortoises and sleeper sharks have extreme longevity. It's not so much that evolution selects for death, but that it's rare to put together all the attributes and ecological niche that something can live a really long time.

>>25379 Which are you, the one that reads Timothy Leary and thinks we evolved to be in weightlessness? Fuсkin lol. You're incapable of judging the intelligence of others. >>25383 Notice anything about the biologically immortal organisms? How simple and old and incredibly distant from us their branch is on the tree of evolution? Even the ones with mere extreme longevity: no mammals. That first stuff only works if your biology is outrageously simple. It's not something we can turn on for our own bodies. And there's a reason why these factors evolved. There's a reason why our telomeres shorten. If we just brute forced it and turned that off somehow, we'd have a million other problems crop up because so many factors are interconnected. Evolution most likely put caps on maximum cell divisions and chromosome age through telomeres not because that was the default, but because natural selection is not about living forever; it's about living long enough to effectively and prolifically reproduce, then it doesn't care what happens to you. In fact it would be better if you were out of the way so newer and more adapted organisms could have a clearer playing field. If capping the longevity of the organism provides other advantages in those first stages of life, evolution would definitely select for it.

>>25384 division limit counters infinite growth of cancer. Its double-edged though cause shortening increases the risk of getting cancer in first place. On that topic it also seems that stress in childhood can significantly shorten your telomeres while it has less impact in adulthood. >>25383 It semi-selects for death. Mutation is after all part for it and anything not affecting survival has to mutate away longterm since there is no selection for it. There is however a simple way to put it on the table - if you force mating to older age then suddenly you have a filter for longevity. There was a project that took fruit fly and bred them at old age over 40 generations. The final result was impressive with all around improved stats not only in longevity but also strength and overall fitness. Im sorry that im so vague but my memory is crap.

>>25388 Always thought those epigenetic effects were fascinating.

>>25388 >There is however a simple way to put it on the table - if you force mating to older age then suddenly you have a filter for longevity. You need to resolve issues with aging when you do that though. In men, lifelong spermatogenesis results in sperm accumulating the mutations of mitotic spermatozoa creation. In women, advanced age increases the likelihood of mistakes in chromosome separation during the second round of meiosis.

>>25391 >You need to resolve issues with aging when you do that though. Not really actually. The beauty of this way is that artificial selection does everything for you. The problem is these issues you're talking about and many others will be visible in those who won't make it to the advanced age. It would be extremely unethical to use this way on humans though, because most children made by old people would be retarded.

>>25391 That was naturally also true for the flies. They produced way more defects but it still works cause those with functional genes for longevity will procreate more successfully than those without and thus overall the amount of genes for longevity increases with time in the population. Its all about setting mating to a age where genes for longevity give an advantage in mating to make evolution select for it. Its still impractical with people since generations take way too long. You need over a millennium to see any decent effect and by the time gen-editing should already be long solved.

>>25393 It's not really comparable to fruit flies because they normally only live a couple months. Humans accumulate at least a couple order of magnitudes larger debt of environmental stresses between each reproductive cycle. Oxidative stress protection and chromosomal repair mechanisms need to be accounted for depending on the type of organism in question.

>>24876 >>24967 >>24970 https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2014/05/infusion-of-young-blood-recharges-brains-of-old-mice-study-finds.html https://www.nature.com/articles/nm.3569 oh yeah its all coming together nicely

>>25474 The accumulation of mutations in spermatozoa would be easily solved during evolutionary selection through it picking a later puberty and slower division rate. I don't know if the chromosomal problems with eggs would be similarly affected by delayed puberty though... All this is moot if you artificially freeze the germ cells near birth and correct them / screen for correct ones. Or use a method where you still have kids early and apply the selection retroactively to them (if you live a long time, then make your children have more kids).

>>25388 >Believing that we can force young people not to get pregnant across a significant population You're just going to select out the people cooperating with your lifespan enhancement experiment. That's not gonna work even in a highly totalitarian state. You underestimate the instinct we have for procreation—it compels most of us to do it as early as possible out of fear of becoming an evolutionary dead-end.

>>24877 >it's SUPER COMPLICATED GUISE and but not as much as I am negative Yeah okay. Thank you for your imagination. The powers that be already see people as insect also. The real issue is if people live forever we would no longer be human as it would take human experimentation to the point that we either are genetically no longer human or so much of us is cybernetic that we become the Borg.

>>26316 Yeah, that's entirely my point. They already see people as insects, and all this would do would hand them vastly more power and immortality. Seems like it's not overly negative to make the obvious extrapolation.

>>25655 >it compels most of us to do it as early as possible out of fear of becoming an evolutionary dead-end Absolutely nonsense given collapsing fertility rates and rising age at first birth in developed countries. The thing it compels us to do now is to jerk off and if we're lucky ejaculate into a plastic sheath or into a deliberately poisoned womb (birth control). However, slowly, in the background, religious and other healthy communities are selecting for desire for children and family instead of muh dick or muh clit.

I think it's a very weird subject, if Aubrey de Grey is honest it's weird how this might actually happen. I hope we will roleplay as elves and dwarves in the future. The world needs more larping. I wonder what the limit is of human memories? You can't remember everything forever so would that mean you'd forget everything that happened in your first century while living in your fourth? Isn't that kinda the same as dying? It would be pretty cool, after all death wouldn't disappear. Death can be cheated but can never be denied. >>26334 >religious and other healthy communities are selecting for desire for children and family fuarrrking lol, healthy religious communities are rare and always have been a cesspool of toxic ambition, fraud and hunger for control. Besides I would always choose having no children before having children in dysfunctional, unhappy families. (which are the majority) your whole idea of the nuclear family is stupid and never worked outside of commercials, nuance is a bitch.

All explanations given for aging in terms of damage or dysfunction are wrong. If that were the case then different species would age at a similar rate and immortalised cell lines (particularly induced stem cells) would be impossible. Prolonging life by fixing or reducing damage will not help, as your cells are already able to repair such damage. They were happily doing so throughout the first 2 or more decades of your life, longer than the lifespan of many other organisms. The problem is that they give up at a certain point. Aging is the conclusion of the developmental program of an organism. Without continuous growth towards a new form cells will lose the organising signals that drive them towards maintaining health. Since we currently do not understand how cells organise themselves into a larger structure in the first place, we are unable to figure out how to keep them there.

>>27991 >All explanations given for aging in terms of damage or dysfunction are wrong. If that were the case then different species would age at a similar rate and immortalised cell lines (particularly induced stem cells) would be impossible. I don't understand your reasoning. >If that were the case then different species would age at a similar rate This is false. Just because the mechanism is the same, it doesn't mean the process takes the same time. Example: a castle built of sand and the castle built from sandstone age in the same way, that is by erosion, but it takes much more time for the castle from sandstone to fall apart. >immortalised cell lines (particularly induced stem cells) would be impossible. Immortalized cell lines have its purpose and as far as they're useful, they're sustained by an organism. Aging is a life cycle choice - organisms are kept alive until they are done reproducing. What is really immortal are the cells that have traveled from the beginning of life to this day - immortal, evolution-driven machine of adaptation by life and death. Organisms are not mortal, because it is impossible for them to be, but they're mortal because it's rewarded by natural selection. It's like investing money, instead of burying it in the ground - genes keep flowing, better versions survive, bad die, life cycle is complete!

>>27995 >Organisms are not mortal, because it is impossible for them to be, but they're mortal because it's rewarded by natural selection. *Are not immortal[...]

>>27991 >All explanations given for aging in terms of damage or dysfunction are wrong. If that were the case then different species would age at a similar rate and immortalised cell lines (particularly induced stem cells) would be impossible. this is true, but even such 'immortal' cells will eventually die due to damage and dysfunction. Random errors in DNA transcription and repair do occur, and even with the amount of redundancy in the process, eventually there will be enough mutations that some unrecoverable error occurs. Differences in aging speed, and the fact that animals observed in the wild have exceptionally long life spans, do not change these facts.

>>27995 Cells are very similar between mice and monkeys and humans, yet they range from 2 to 80 year lifespan. Any differences in aging need to come from the arrangement of the whole organism. (if it weren't the case you'd expect lifespan to be more similar amongst similar species, and not correlated with the size) Natural selection is not an explanation of how anything occurs, only of why it might be retained in a population.

>>28001 Doesn't explain organism aging, because you can take old cells, convert them to stem cells, and create a young mouse from them. Also any non-microscopic organism has enough cells that they can kill off any with harmful mutations and replace them with healthy ones. You can keep growing stem cells forever in a dish (provided you dont stress them too much), though of course individual cells will die off.

>>28003 >Doesn't explain organism aging, because you can take old cells, convert them to stem cells, and create a young mouse from them. The point is that you can only do that finitely many times before unavoidable transcription errors accumulate and cause the cells to die or mutate into something else, and that "something else" is probably nonviable. This isn't so much an explanation of why aging occurs, but an explanation of the fact that even with all aging mechanisms cut out, a different but similar process would still occur. Whether you call it "aging" is a quibble. >Also any non-microscopic organism has enough cells that they can kill off any with harmful mutations and replace them with healthy ones. Then what is cancer?

>>28002 >Cells are very similar between mice and monkeys and humans, yet they range from 2 to 80 year lifespan. "Very similar" is a oversimplification here. There are thousands of genes distinguishing us from mice, coding even more proteins. Some flies live one day, while trees can live over 4 thousand years. Where do you think the difference comes from? Death process could be based on turning off repairing mechanisms, why would natural selection promote more complicated ways of killing, when just not fixing errors results in the same? Organisms living longer have to have special adaptations to repair genome and sustain homeostasis. These adaptations can only emerge, if there's environmental pressure for the organism to live that long, like having difficulties finding sexual partners. But expecting cells to survive unchanged, without special adaptation is not promising. This is true, the line of cells derived from LUCA live over 3 billion years now, but they didn't survive unchanged and most of them died eliminated by natural selection. Stability isn't what provides immortality, it's going forward and reproduction. Organisms didn't evolve to survive unchanged for long periods of time, but just far enough to reproduce. You can't expect machines "having purpose of" living for about 50 years to live much longer. Genetic recombination is required to fix the genome. >Any differences in aging need to come from the arrangement of the whole organism. Why do you think it has to be the whole organism? Single-cell organisms can decide whether to die or live on their own. Telomeres reaching their end can kill single cells, but eventually they kill the whole organism. The differences in aging come from genes, cells, tissues, organs and the whole organism. Don't get me wrong, I think the death mechanism is triggered by some genes and cells have the potential to live very long time, but telling it can't be caused by damage as well is wrong. Cells can on purpose turn off repair mechanisms and so it happens, cancer is an example of damage accumulation. No repair mechanism can prevent damage every time. That's why organisms "decide" to synchronize their genomes by reproducing from a single cell and to fix bad mutations in the way of genetic recombination. >Natural selection is not an explanation of how anything occurs, only of why it might be retained in a population. What part of what I said are you talking about? I just think death is rewarded by natural selection, which isn't contrary to what you said.

>>28004 >you can only do that finitely many times before unavoidable transcription errors accumulate and cause the cells to die or mutate into something else, and that "something else" is probably nonviable. A species can propagate indefinitely, and a surprisingly large number of offspring are viable each generation... I guess sexual recombination helps here, but a bunch of species can reproduce asexually indefinitely. >Then what is cancer? Always found the mutation explanation for cancer kind of ridiculous. Complexity / entropy means that most mutations should break things. So a cell should die from mutations, not kick into overdrive the super complex and well regulated process of division. Yet these bastards survive not only with many mutations, but with the entire genomes being fragmented and recombining. I suspect that it is another attractor of the developmental program -- cells rely on homeostatic removal of signals around them to produce organisation, and in cancer they got caught in a state were they way they have found to remove a signal is constant proliferation to dilute it out.

>>28007 asexual reproduction is different from the same cells surviving indefinitely. In particular, it involves making more cells... the resulting two cells of mitosis are qualitatively different from the original cell. They are different beings, if you want to imagine them as beings. Also, all genetic lines eventually go extinct. >Always found the mutation explanation for cancer kind of ridiculous Most cells which mutate do die, or at least turn into benign tumors. It is rare for cells to mutate into cancer cells, but common enough that cancer is a serious threat to survival.

>>28005 I don't think its an oversimplification. Sure there are many differences in the genome, but not so much to really change how the cells behave. You can make mixed human : mouse cell structures, and the cells will behave appropriately and cooperate. All the core repair pathways are functional, it is not like humans have acquired some better dna repair tools (funnily enough placental mammals have lost the repair pathway for directly fixing thymine dimers caused by UV light, but its not like they live shorter lives than reptiles or marsupials). I think the difference between flies and trees (and between mouse and humans) is mostly due to size. It doesn't take long for cells to make a fly, and so they quickly achieve and hence lose their "purpose". You can grow cell cultures from a fly for longer than its lifespan. >Stability isn't what provides immortality, it's going forward and reproduction. This is actually what I am trying to say, but specifically about an organism. It dies because it has reached a stable phenotype. If you could somehow convince the cells to keep growing into a larger human, or to cycle between different structures, then it would (hopefully) be a consequence that it convinces them to repair the damage in the process. >Organisms living longer have to have special adaptations to repair genome and sustain homeostasis. All cells already have these adaptations because they are derived from germ cells that propagate forever. E.g. telomere shortening cannot explain aging, because all cells have the telomerase enzyme to remake them. The role damage plays seems secondary. The cells have stopped repairing damage and maintaining proper homeostasis, and so it looks like damage is causing aging. But why does this happen at a similar time across the whole organism? It's not like your heart always gets old first, because it was under the most stress or something. >natural selection Seems like a "just-so" story that doesn't really explain anything about the mechanism. It's not clear to me that avoiding competition with offspring is stable under selection. I.e. it would always be advantageous for one individual to live longer and have more offspring, and so there would always be selective pressure for it even if in the long run it causes the rest of the species to stagnate. Cells already have an entire suicide program (apoptosis). If it was advantageous to die at a certain time, why would the organism not maintain good health until the end, and then apoptose all the cells? Maybe after having X number of offspring.

>>28008 I am not talking about certain cells surviving indefinitely - sure they will die - but of maintenance of a population of cells that keeps dividing. In an organism you get constant but slow replacement of dying cells, so it weeds out mutations. Ala ship of theseus.

>>28010 To add to that: when you make a new mice from induced stem cells of an old mouse, they are already proliferating substantially in the stem cell state, so you do automatically select for healthier cells from the starting population.

>>28008 Yes but if most mutations are harmful, then once a cancer is created by a chance non-harmful but cancerous mutation, then you would expect that later mutations would inevitably kill the cancer once it has acquired enough. But that doesn't happen, instead they start accumulating more mutations and genomic instabilities, and keep living!

>>28009 >Sure there are many differences in the genome, but not so much to really change how the cells behave. I likely know what you mean by this, but the wording isn't right - the changes are big, but not that big to change the underlying mechanisms. If you mean that overall architecture is similar, then I agree, animal cells are all similar. >I think the difference between flies and trees (and between mouse and humans) is mostly due to size. It doesn't take long for cells to make a fly, and so they quickly achieve and hence lose their "purpose". Size does matter, as you have to live longer to grow bigger, but the size itself isn't determining longevity - a pine species Pinus longaeva can live up to 5 thousand years, whereas other trees growing to the same size can live only a few centuries. Another example is naked mole-rat, the animal can live up to 30 years, while normal rats live much shorter. Actually I'm not arguing with you at this point, I guess you understand here the difference is in the "purpose" of an organism - the most suitable life cycle length. >All cells already have these adaptations because they are derived from germ cells that propagate forever. E.g. telomere shortening cannot explain aging, because all cells have the telomerase enzyme to remake them. Okay, fuarrrk, you changed my mind! If the death mechanism is really regulated, there's still a hope for me. But I don't think the mechanism is simply regulated by a few genes, I suspect it is also regulated by epigenetics and soykaf. Researching gametes could bring some interesting results, as aging mechanisms should be turned off there. >It's not clear to me that avoiding competition with offspring is stable under selection. I.e. it would always be advantageous for one individual to live longer and have more offspring, and so there would always be selective pressure for it even if in the long run it causes the rest of the species to stagnate. The reason for this isn't even aging, but the risk an animal takes by living - the longer you live the higher is the probability of getting eaten and the environment is changing quickly. Mutations powering evolution can only be helpful if they're synchronized for this purpose the genome needs to go through a bottleneck - single cell from which the whole organism is regenerated. Imagine you have an immortal organism, having genetically diverse offspring, but not aging - its offspring adapt to new environment through natural selection. The organism stays outdated, less adapted to the environment (because it's constantly changing), but it's still alive, taking away resources of its offspring. Now imagine a different species with aging ability - it quickly removes itself from existence and leaves resources for its better adapted offspring. Conclusion: death fuels evolution.

>>28010 > In an organism you get constant but slow replacement of dying cells, so it weeds out mutations not enough. No information is forever. Unrecoverable mutations *will* happen on long enough time scales. >>28012 that does happen. Almost all cancerous cells die without causing a problem. But sometimes they don't, and that happens often enough that it is a problem. >>28009 >I think the difference between flies and trees (and between mouse and humans) is mostly due to size. sure... plus a fuarrrking huge amount of genetics. You can make viable fly cells and human cells work together but that doesn't mean you can just grow a human out of fly cells.

>>28023 Nice book cover, I will have to steal it. Yeah maybe not size per se, but "time to maturity". Which depends on size, duration of neoteny, metabolism, probably other stuff. But I have to look into it further cause birds have crazy high metabolism but live for longer than equally sized mammals. They have smaller cells though, so perhaps that makes them relatively larger. Yeah I agree I don't think it's the case of turning on a few key genes to reverse aging. Less a case of a death switch and more a lack of a life switch. So you'd want to trick the cells into thinking they are still far from their target state. There was one paper that tried to rejuvenate a mouse by pulsing expression of the four genes used to make induced stem cells. That's closer to the right track - turning cells into an embryonic state - but it is really tricky not to mess up the organism in the process. If you express those genes too long the mouse dissolves into a gooey pile. >>28029 I'm always weirded out by how similar the genetics is between fruit flies and mice. Many of the developmental genes can be replaced by a homologous copy from the other species and still develop and function reasonably well, despite so many millions of years of separate evolution. I wouldn't be surprised if with more biological knowledge we'd be able to fashion human structures out of fly cells.

>>23128 Also CryoRus provides long-term cryonics. There are several organizations providing this since 1970s, and there will be more as the science of cryogenic tissue preservation improves. The most advanced cryogenically preserved human tissue as of this date is ovary tissue. The tissue was reimplanted into the donor after cancer treatment destroyed her ovaries, and she was successfully able to have a baby again afterwards. It is only a matter of improving the technique of cryogenic preservation and thawing in order to preserve even more sophisticated tissues, and eventually organs and whole humans. Using the new technology of 3D bioprinting, it's now possible to create artificially grown organs and tissues such as liver or heart organoids. We can combine this with cryonics in order to improve cryogenic preservation by studying the effects of freezing and thawing on an artificial organ, until we can improve the process sufficiently for whole humans. It is really just a matter of time.

The longest lived vertebrate is now the Greenland Shark at 500 years. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/pubs:633506

>>28010 An multi-celled organism is not any individual cell, it's cohesive structure created by the cells. You cannot take an individual organism and separate all of its cells. The isolated culture of each cell is not the organism. It's really easy to produce immortal human cell lines, HeLa cells are immortal cervical cancer cells. The difficulty is producing immortal structures like brains. You are not your cells, and your mortal cells can mutate into immortal cancer cells which are basically a rebellion of your cells against you. You are not your DNA either, the DNA of your cells can be changed using gene therapy. You are not even your elementary particles either, chemical reactions result in every single particle in your body changing with time.

>>28004 Aging is caused by accumulation of random mutations during mitosis, but DNA can be perfectly preserved in a blockchain, which can then be used to recreate the exact DNA sequence using DNA synthesis. That synthetic DNA can be inserted into a cell using a retrovirus in order to produce a exact clone of the original cell, with no mutations. Using these perfect cloned stem cells, it would be feasible to reconstruct entire organs and organisms, with effectively frozen biological age. You could make new cloned bodies for yourself forever without any genetic degradation. It's just biology.

>>29927 Could fix first causes of dead like heart and thus prolong live but brain remains a problem. Cant replace that one with a fresh copy. So brain will limit live expectation. We have btw retrovirus dna as part of our genome increasing the mutation rate. Might remove it to slow down chance to get cancer.

Fun fact: you couldn't achieve immortality without quiting meatware. Period.

>>29936 >Fun fact: you couldn't achieve immortality without quiting meatware. Period. Yes but extending life of meatware is the only option to survive until soul can be digitized.

>>29938 >Yes but extending life of meatware is the only option to survive until soul can be digitized. Meat will rot, and there will be nothing but machine. Machine will rust and there will be nothing but Soul. Soul can now be free and achieve ultimate immortality. Embrace the Void.

>>29941 Cool poetry, but this is unscientific.

>>29936 praise the omnissiah

>>29942 Putting so many expectations in immortality IS unpoetic AND unscinetific. Immortality means the lost of all possessions, including meat/machine layers.

>>29957 >AND unscinetific. Nope, there are organisms living over 4 thousand years on the planet (some Pinus species). Life itself exists for over 3.5 billion years, what renders it "immortal" from human perspective. Basing on our current knowledge about life, it is reasonable to think aging can be at least slowed down if not reversed entirely. >Immortality means the lost of all possessions, including meat/machine layers. Is there any real researcher saying so, basing their opinion on evidence, or is it taken from some kind of religion, cult?

>>29965 Life could long but not indefinitely because it's the way it was created. Universe seems immortal for us. But what preceded universe? What will come after? I would not say my vision of immortality is biased by religion/cult but by metaphysical and philosophical questioning. Sure science can give huge opportunities about age longing, but as all will rot anyway (no matter the time) it's just some kind of utopia.

>>29968 >Universe seems immortal for us. But what preceded universe? What will come after? This is off-topic for this thread, nor I have the answers, it doesn't matter anyway. >but as all will rot anyway (no matter the time) By taking this point of view, there's no point in living right now at all. I'm not giving up until I get the answers to some important questions. That's the point of living - keeping going, no matter if you're going to die tomorrow, or after five thousand years. I want to die on my own rules, not as my selfish genes programmed me to, giving me soul, only so I can replicate it.

>>29969 >By taking this point of view, there's no point in living right now at all. I understand and respect your view my Lainon. You first come with the "some natural organisms can longs x times", I just extended the question to the globally of what we can perceive. So I wouldn't tell it's as off-topic as you think. >By taking this point of view, there's no point in living right now at all. Fundamentally yes, life as no meaning by itself. Anyway if dying tomorrow or in x thousands years. Maybe the important answers you're looking for cannot been answered through human perspective and require the Soul to join the great whatever it could be cosmic soup. I don't know. I have no answers myself. Maybe never knowing is part of the game. Anyway, the subject of immortality is fuel for some good philoso/meta -physical questioning.

>>29971 >This is off-topic for this thread, nor I have the answers, it doesn't matter anyway. Was the first greentext I would put, sorry.

>>29971 >Maybe the important answers you're looking for cannot been answered through human perspective and require the Soul to join the great whatever it could be cosmic soup. The time will show, yet I have still things to do in the material world. I'm not dying until I see the Earth as a pale blue dot from the outer Solar System. So many possibilities, places to see. I was given the chance to see it all and I'm going to take it! >Anyway, the subject of immortality is fuel for some good philoso/meta -physical questioning. I'm more a science person, but I understand the point of view. I'm trying to focus on things I can examine rather than chasing the final unknown.

>>29973 >I'm not dying until I see the Earth as a pale blue dot from the outer Solar System. So many possibilities, places to see. I was given the chance to see it all and I'm going to take it! Our points diverge on immortality, but I'm totally with you on this. I hope you could achieve. See ya space cowboy ;)

>>29928 Artificial organs, stem cell therapy, gene therapy, cybernetics, brain-computer interfaces, cryonics, nanomedicine and SENS have all advanced so much in the last 5 years. I would easily expect artificial or 3D bioprinted replacement organs like hearts to be commonplace in 30-50 years. Things like the SynCardia 70cc Total Artificial Heart have already kept people alive for 4+ years. Is it too hard to believe that future artificial organs will be even better? They have literally already started germline human genetic modification in 2018. They are prepared to begin experimenting with total head transplants. Being able to keep the body in perfect health will easily extend lifespans to 150 years at minimum. Then we can begin research on improving the brain, using gene therapy, SENS and nanomedicine to treat conditions like Alzheimer's. For long-term survival in space or hostile environments and protection against accidents, cybernetics controlled by brain-computer interfaces will be the next logical step.

>>29936 There's nothing inherently wrong with organics, it's just carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen. Organics can basically last much longer than a metal machine in an Earth-like environment, because they can self-repair wear and tear on a cellular level, while a metal machine of any sort will rust and erode eventually. Replacement parts need to be continually installed in order to maintain a metal machine. This requires infrastructure that itself needs to be maintained, at this point by organics.

>>22925 > I don't think anyone will be happy to be alive for too long, at least as a normal human. Age is integral to social narratives and identity. People may wish to die in abstract for numerous rationales: avoiding living with the conditions of aging, narrative closing to life well lived, leaving the world for the next generation. In practice the pubic extends life though medical procedures and interventions. When faced with the immediate choice between death or treatment, most choose treatment, even when quality of life will remain worse afterword. A "normal human" may want to die in a few years, but won't give a specific date, because there is no specific date a "normal human" will reach and say "yes, today is the day." The person is much more likely to reach 80 and say "this is pretty bad, but I'm not ready to die tomorrow." Humans are genetically programmed survivors, , only socially or intellectually do we consider death as an option. I'm having trouble trying to express what I'm thinking. Hope it makes sense. When negligible senescence (biological aging) is brought about in humans through medical interventions, I believe it will also bring about an end to many social and spiritual aspects of chronological age. Public attitudes and narratives toward death will change as a result. > With age you will eventually become more 'attracted' to death, in some weird way. Personally I find death tantalizing and intriguing but when it comes to facing friends, family, and eventually my own death: I hate it, I can't come to full terms with it, and this hasn't changed with age or circumstance. What has changed with age is my attitude toward life. Young me saw all life as worth living. Now in adulthood, I see a persons environment, health, story, friends and ultimately the agency to be authentic, as what provides life it's value. Given this, while I continue to hate death, I no longer dread it's inevitability and accept everyone lives for the time they live. Living forever doesn't have innate value, because life has no innate value. I want a good indefinite life. I don't place a date on it, I support anti-aging medicine and hope to take advantage of it, but when inevitability death comes peace will follow. I'm more concerned with healthspan than lifespan. I love youth, I want my years to be spent youthful.

>>30008 >I love youth, I want my years to be spent youthful. honestly I think this is why a lot of old people are so sad. Sure, it's nice being young. It's nice being able to abuse your body. But even as I enjoy my youth I'm looking forward to being old, being old means having wisdom to give out and helping younger generations grow up and watching the world change. Being old in bad health though... that sounds miserable. I don't want to be a burden on my family or society as a whole, I would rather die.

>>30008 An immortal does not suffer from the human condition, and their behavior would be completely incomprehensible to a modern human. Human instincts are inherently evolved for the sole purpose of propagating and ensuring the survival of their genes. This is why humans don't consider the individual to matter as much as the bloodline. This is the real reason you don't/can't care about whether you live or die: Your genes are manipulating you through pain and pleasure to ensure they survive, even if it kills you. It's amazing how a self-replicating molecule can fully control the "free will" of a sentient human being. An immortal is not a slave to genetic programming, because time and space have no meaning to them. They don't need it survive. There's nothing a self-replicating molecule or any other physical phenomena can do to harm or control them.

>>30165 >It's amazing how a self-replicating molecule can fully control the "free will" of a sentient human being. what a silly sentence. Might as well say "it's amazing how a program's source code can determine its behavior". >An immortal is not a slave to genetic programming, because time and space have no meaning to them. Supposedly they would still have genes much like every other human. Unless you mean to say that they are not human or in fact never evolved at all, in which case, yeah, something that is not human will not act like a human.

>>30165 How are you defining immortal? If you're talking about some magical sci-fi/fantasy immortal that literally cannot die then you're right but a human with biological immortality is going to have the exact same biological drives and instincts as we do today just with aging reduced or removed. Just becoming biologically immortal isn't enough to change the present human impulses, it would take true transhumanism with heavy genetic modification and augmentation to break that.

>>30167 >what a silly sentence. Might as well say "it's amazing how a program's source code can determine its behavior". Biological determinism does indeed control the present behavior of all organisms, including humans. It's true that you will behave 100% like a human, if you have a 100% human body. But there's no hard reason you cannot change your body, and thus your behavior pattern. It's like self-modifying code. >Supposedly they would still have genes much like every other human. Who's to say immortals need to be homo sapiens, biological, or even have genes? >>30183 >How are you defining immortal? If you're talking about some magical sci-fi/fantasy immortal that literally cannot die then you're right but a human with biological immortality is going to have the exact same biological drives and instincts as we do today just with aging reduced or removed. E.g. I would say that after a million or so years, even a being that was born as human would grow into something unrecognizably different. Just imagine how someone with 200+ years of memories would behave. Eventually, this would probably reach the magical sci-fi/fantasy immortal portrayal. >Just becoming biologically immortal isn't enough to change the present human impulses, it would take true transhumanism with heavy genetic modification and augmentation to break that. Literally the point of immortality is to have enough time to do anything or continuously change oneself however one wants. Would anyone actually want to live as just a human on Earth for all eternity? Science is still at an infancy regarding the possibilities of transhumanism, there appears to be no actual end-stage. Nanotech, picotech, femtotech are already pointing to potential forms of life and existence well beyond DNA-based organisms.

>>29973 >The time will show, yet I have still things to do in the material world. I'm not dying until I see the Earth as a pale blue dot from the outer Solar System. So many possibilities, places to see. I was given the chance to see it all and I'm going to take it! Why limit yourself to what limited meat/machine interface could perceive when you could join the omniscient soul soup and see the Great Plan in it's infinity?

Scientists in 2019 made a breakthrough in achieving the first brain-in-a-jar. They managed to resurrect and sustain a pig brain for at least 12 hours using a blood pump circulating oxygenated blood substitute. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1099-1 With cybernetics and brain-computer interfaces, this could easily be used to sustain human cyborgs without organic organs.

Didn't read through the whole thread, too much death cultists and people with no clue. Anyone trying out Senolytics? I plan to start with it soon, since I'm around 40y old. Ending death and aging should be what our governments should be concerned with, instead of "making the world a better place for everyone". Luckily there has been surprising progress by finding out some already common drugs might help to kill of the bad cells in our body. It's meant for people aging faster than others, but the effects might be more widespread. Still not very well reseached, but it's not some snake oil either. People are trying it on their own. As long as it is about drugs with low risk, I'm willing to take part. Quercetin is the one which is only considered to be a supplement, the other ones are normally used to fight cancer: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senolytic https://youtu.be/s8RTDUQpWa0 https://youtu.be/uBcnzJk6JlI https://youtu.be/JxrqmA7fYFM https://youtu.be/lyzk9Dyqc1U http://www.fightaging.org/ Just starting to look into it, not claiming to know much about that stuff. It's more of a attention thing, media doesn't report things that might work and researcher don't want people to try out things on their own, even when based on well know drugs which are considered to be quite safe.

They way to live forever is to bend in the wind and say whatever to stay alive. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WeVWupFBkA8

>>31131 finally some practical advice!

>>31128 Media doesn't report things that might work for the same reason governments won't concern themselves with this: they want most people to die. You really have to keep track of the research yourself. That being said, there are several really bad tendencies in longevity / anti-aging spheres. First is an over-emphasis on pharmaceutical or biohacking type interventions over things like social connection and fixing emotional / psychological issues even though the research is clear that problems with these can knock a decade off your lifespan. This plays into the second issue, which is that nobody seems to know what they're extending their lives for in the first place. There is hardly anything about what's so good about living (even in this thread). The impression I get -- and the emotion that I have myself when I research anti-aging -- is that they haven't figured out any meaning in their life and they're hoping to extend it long enough so that it might appear in the future, instead of making it a priority now. This attitude can be contagious so be careful.

>>31137 if someone was satisfied with their life, they would not feel much need to extend it... death is a part of life, something that must be reckoned with to be satisfied with life. The only people who feel a need to extend their life besides fear of death are fanatics who wish to perform some great work before they die.

>>31138 Sure, but so far all great works that have ever been performed were performed in a normal human lifespan.

>>31137 It's about people who want to live longer, have no big psychological problems or don't want to deal with it, and which have a purpose or don't care. It's not about getting 10 more years anyways. Such topics are simply separate issues, which can of course brought up, but only to keep it in mind and point people to looking into it if they think they'd benefit from it. Otherwise it's a distraction or even gaslighting. It is about the technological aspect. >>31138 BS. There's simply no reason to want to die, generally. >>30670 >Scientists in 2019 made a breakthrough in achieving the first brain-in-a-jar. >They managed to resurrect and sustain a pig brain for at least 12 hours using a blood pump circulating oxygenated blood substitute. >https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1099-1 >With cybernetics and brain-computer interfaces, this could easily be used to sustain human cyborgs without organic organs. Great news. I always wanted that to be tested. I wonder if we could have gene therapies focusing on the brain, and implant it in a cloned body. One which would grow in a artificial womb to full size, but without a full brain. Had this idea years ago. Wouldn't be my first method of choice, but long term it might work and could become useful one day.

>>31157 >BS. There's simply no reason to want to die, generally. sure, but resisting it is always a futile effort eventually. Better to live life while you can and not waste time trying to make it longer.

>>22927 I think I disagree somewhat. It seems like there have been eras and cultures in history that were far more death-positive then this one. I think it's possible to have a philosophy and spiritual development that accepts death and views it in a way that is fundamentally and profoundly different from the way our current culture views it. Such as the memento mori attitudes in the middle ages. We can tend to call such cultures "death cults" in extreme examples, but I think that's usually because of our own ideological intolerance towards death positivity. You even seem to display a little of it. I'm sorry you have gone through more than your share of loss; I have as well. I usually try not to immediately relate my own experiences once somebody confesses their adversities, but I think it might be important to relate it. Came from a problem family with lots of substance abuse and poverty. My whole community was a trailer park where loads of kids in my generation overdosed on various things, got into gunfights during burglaries or deals gone wrong. Have one childhood acquaintance who got filled with lead by a swat team that he was foolish enough to aim his SKS at. My high school has a long-running Facebook group just logging the obituaries from my graduating class. Once again, vast majority is overdose. Hey, that's rural America during this decade for you. I think there's a paradox of risk and safety: the more we eliminate risk and alienate ourselves from the reality of death, the more salacious and frightening that last little sliver of risk becomes. Those who are safe and prosperous are far more paranoid of death than those who have faced it regularly, and not just because they have more to lose. I have noticed psychological differences that are very interesting, since I had the privilege to live in both situations. I escaped the trailer park and managed to have a pretty secure upper middle-class life now. These people are far more anxious. They have something that seems like the misplaced maternal instincts of a woman who lost a pregnancy; they have protectiveness and authoritarian need for control to maintain order and strict safety, and it gets directed outwards into the world since nobody has children or a family anymore. Anyway, we become more obsessed with death the further we get from it, and ironically we forget to embrace our lives filled with risk and enter a kind of living death instead. Life is sweeter when one is reminded of mortality. We have greater passions, more urgency. And not least of all, we become more willing to give our egos over to higher callings. We more easily dedicate our lives to greater causes when they're more precarious. And the ability to do that is the most important spiritual power human beings have. It's one of the important factors that separate us from the animals.

>>31163 Forgive the typos please; I'm away from my station and forced to be a filthy mobile poster at the moment

>>31163 And when I say you display some of it, I mean that you show some death positivity, not death intolerance. I think because you've been acquainted with it, and this it's not just an abstract and haunting symbol mutating in you mind. It becomes familiar and even friendly after a time. Like a passing of seasons rather than existential terror.

>>31158 >>31157 I mean just saying, but there are definitely plenty of reasons to want to die. They're arguably all delusional and not good or valid reasons, granted, but those kinds of philosophical judgements must happen in a healthy mind. Most of us eventually go through a night of the soul where they suddenly seem incredibly compelling, sometimes an all-consuming command. I'd hazard a guess that most immortals would eventually meet that condition in their aimless ennui through the centuries.. Buzz Aldrin speaks of the "melancholy of all things done." He didn't live for centuries, but he accomplished more than most humans do in their lifetime in a pretty brief span. I'd bet it eventually feels like that. I don't know if we'll ever achieve immortality. It's probably going to take many times longer than these early enthusiasts think, because it's one of those devilishly complex problems with a billion facets. But I think the spiritual and psychological considerations have to be mulled over. It won't be a trivial part of the effort.

>>31169 This isn't about moments in which some individual would maybe prefer to die. It's absurd that we spend billions on all kinds of things, but efords to increase the lifespan of the first world population are underfunded. Even so, there are ways nevertheless, and those can be promoted to anyone interested. Even some meds which are not meant for layman seem to be available, but there are also sometimes possiblities to take part in research and self test such meds under professional oversight.

>>31128 Senolytic only eliminate senescent cells, they don't prevent non-senescent cells from becoming senescent cells. You need Telomerase to lengthen telomeres to prevent senescence, and some way to prevent germline mutations from accumulating, such as synthetic DNA sequences stored in a blockchain and reinserted into stem cells every so often. >>31157 The most useful thing about being able to sustain a brain independently from a body, is that then you only need to keep a single type of cell alive, the nerve cell. The science for keeping human cells alive in culture is really mature, and can only improve once the exact chemical composition of the culture medium requirements are determined and we can transition from using FBS. >>31158 If you don't try to survive, do you expect to?

>>31188 >>>31128 (You) >You need Telomerase to lengthen telomeres to prevent senescence, and some way to prevent germline mutations from accumulating, such as synthetic DNA sequences stored in a blockchain and reinserted into stem cells every so often. Okay, when? How? >>>31157 (You) >only need to keep a single type of cell alive, the nerve cell. That's what I argued a while ago, then someone pointed out that there are blood vessels at least close to the brain, and if I recall correctly also different kind of nerve cells.

>>31128 Senolytic only eliminate senescent cells, they don't prevent non-senescent cells from becoming senescent cells. You need Telomerase to lengthen telomeres to prevent senescence, and some way to prevent germline mutations from accumulating, such as synthetic DNA sequences stored in a blockchain and reinserted into stem cells every so often. >>31157 The most useful thing about being able to sustain a brain independently from a body, is that then you only need to keep a single type of cell alive, the nerve cell. The science for keeping human cells alive in culture is really mature, and can only improve once the exact chemical composition of the culture medium requirements are determined and we can transition from using FBS. >>31158 If you don't try to survive, do you expect to? >>31198 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19013273/ >Analysis of the survival curves indicated a significant extension of median life span of 9% and 26% by TgTert expression in the context of cancer-resistant Sp53 and Sp53/Sp16/SArf mice >Furthermore, combined TgTert and Sp53/Sp16/SArf transgenes resulted in a 40.2% extension of the median life span when compared to single Sp53 mice (our reference for normal longevity), which was further increased to 50% when considering cancer-free mice Genetically modifying mice to increase telomerase expression increases the median lifespan 9-50%. Telomerase is an enzyme that lengthens telomeres, the parts of DNA that shorten every single time the DNA is replicated, and cause the DNA to be impossible to replicate once the telomeres are gone. A human cell can replicate a maximum of 70 times until it reaches the Hayflick limit due to telomere shortening. A tissue or organ composed of senescent cells would stop healing, growing or functioning. By lengthening telomeres, this permits the cell to continue replicating, instead of becoming senescent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TA-65 This is a drug that has the potential to express telomerase in humans. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3494070/ >telomerase-treated mice, both at 1-year and at 2-year of age, had an increase in median lifespan of 24 and 13%, respectively. Telomerase gene therapy is another that results in 13% or 20% increase in longevity in mice. This method is the most promising. The only downside is that telomerase increases cancer risk, but if you can treat that, then there is no reason not to use it as early as possible. >That's what I argued a while ago, then someone pointed out that there are blood vessels at least close to the brain, and if I recall correctly also different kind of nerve cells. With artificial circulation and blood substitute, you can keep every type of human cell alive in just pure cell culture medium.

>>31236 > Telomerase treatment Okay, I hope they test it on apes soon. Might take longer to see the results, but we need to know the results. > Causes cancer So seems, if we get better at treating cancer then we can take more risks with that. Good news, since we're getting better and better at it.

>>31237 Telomerase gene therapy should theoretically work on all animals, because their cells all have telomeres. Cancer isn't really a major problem if you can sustain a brain independently from organs, because then you don't have to worry about cancers of the organs.

>>31266 What about cancer of the brain?

>>31266 I don't understand people who think putting a brain into a jar is a solution. How are you going to deal with problems like insanity and keeping brain structures in good condition? Unless you have a good way to hibernate cells for a long time without damage, this "solution" is not going to work. And if you had a good way of hibernating cells for a long time, you could hibernate the whole body without the fear of cancer. If you can't take care of repairing cells and cancer in vivo, you can't take care of a brain in vitro. Organisms evolved for hundreds of millions of years, yet you expect a brain will work well enough without its natural environment, while you can't even cure cancer?

>>31270 Basically, cancer risk is proportional to the number of cells, multiplied by time and probability of mutation. If you reduce the number of cells by eliminating the need for organic organs, then the probability of metastatic brain cancer is also eliminated, leaving only non-metastatic cancer. It is really easy to treat brain cancer if you have full access to the brain. You can easily find any tumors or individual cancer cells with MRI and PET, since accuracy is vastly enhanced without the rest of body shielding, and then destroy them with external beam radiation therapy or ultrasound. You can use extremely high doses of radiation, because you don't need to care about the effects of radiation on the rest of the body. You can use extremely high doses of chemotherapy, because the effects of the drugs on the rest of the body are irrelevant, life support is guaranteed. >>31272 Brain-in-a-jar is the most important medical milestone, because it represents gaining a complete understanding of the metabolic requirements of human cells. The cell is blackbox, but if you know everything that goes in and everything that comes out, you can then transplant that blackbox into any environment. You could easily sustain someone regardless of any organ problem, just by substituting the biochemical output from the organ, while eliminating the biochemical input. You don't have to remove someone's brain from their body, they can still control their body as long as the nerves are connected. >Unless you have a good way to hibernate cells for a long time without damage, this "solution" is not going to work. And if you had a good way of hibernating cells for a long time, you could hibernate the whole body without the fear of cancer. Why would you want to hibernate cells? That stops them from functioning. >If you can't take care of repairing cells and cancer in vivo, you can't take care of a brain in vitro. It's much easier to treat cancer or pathogens in vitro, many drugs are only effective in vitro than in vivo. Delivering a specific dose of a specific drug at a specific time to the needed area only is the hardest part of treatment, which is vastly simplified with a brain-in-a-jar. Drug is good for the brain but bad for the body? No problem, just temporarily disconnect the body and brain while administering the drug.

>>31179 only the elites will have access to vampire-like telomeres

>>31292 >Basically, cancer risk is proportional to the number of cells, multiplied by time and probability of mutation. If you reduce the number of cells by eliminating the need for organic organs, then the probability of metastatic brain cancer is also eliminated, leaving only non-metastatic cancer. with complexity of mechanical components comes higher likelihood of malfunction. >It is really easy to treat brain cancer if you have full access to the brain. Then why do so many people die of brain cancer even with treatment?

>>3129 >Basically, cancer risk is proportional to the number of cells, multiplied by time and probability of mutation. Maybe not, check out Peto's paradox which tells us that the larger the animal (more cells) the less likely cancer will occur. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peto%27s_paradox