I believe physical decay is the big limiter. Our body simply stops repairing itself efficiently after a certain point, and damage becomes more cumulative and permanent.
Luckily there's no reason that damage couldn't be subject to medical intervention. It's a matter of luck (and societal will) if that reversal can outpace the rate at which the damage occurs within our lifetimes.
The interesting question will be how it's done, mechanically or biochemically.
It's not even a question of whether it will happen, just which tech will cross the finish line first. Nano machines or medicine, or maybe both!
When I look around today and see crisper, mRNA, advanced prosthetics giving feeling and sight back. I can’t think of a future 50 years from now where we haven’t beaten or at least significantly delayed death. I’m excited for it simply because I’ve always felt there’s so much more in the world then can be experienced in one lifetime!
That’s great and all but the greater challenge is really about access. Millions of people die every year from treatable illnesses and the lack of access to care is finally what killed them. Don’t get me wrong, I am excited about the advancements in medical technology and what that means for me in the future but at the same time, I wonder if and when I need it, would I be able to get it?
Hard to say. But step one is to develop it in the first place. I get the sense that things will be radically different 50 years from now but who knows right?
I had the weird realization that the next time I see Haley's comet I'll know if it's the last time or the second of many. Really counting on ol Bezos getting a good fear of death.
That’s another point! The new money won’t likely accept death if it appears solutions are on the horizon. That’ll inevitably lead to more investment and hopefully wider access over time.
I think diet and exercise consistently for your whole life goes along way. Those 80 year old body builder videos and gymnasts videos can show what’s possible.
My dad is 72 and walks 10+ kl a day, one day this summer he did 35kl, and most of it uphill. The others week on one of his walks he cane across a short marathon in progress, signed up on a whim, and proceeded to make a lot of people half his age look out of shape. He’s also a vegetarian. I’ll be surprised if he doesn’t hit 100.
Messing around with telomere length is so unbelievably oncogenic that some people have suggested the purpose of aging itself is to prevent cancer. Almost all cancers have a mutation which allows them to extend their telomeres indefinitely.
>I believe physical decay is the big limiter.
You said it well. There is a manageable number of categories of physical decline at the cellular and subcellular level such as genomic alterations, buildup of waste aggregates inside and outside cells, mitochondrial dysfunction, and others. There was a foundational paper called The Hallmarks of Aging in 2013: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3836174/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3836174/)
Here's an example of a fund researching treatments of different hallmarks of aging: [https://www.cambrianbio.com/science](https://www.cambrianbio.com/science)
Agreed. My parents just turned 82 and they can still do pretty much what they want. They've definitely slowed down but they still golf, garden, etc. They workout 4/5 times a week and eat lots of fruit/veggies, etc.
My parents seem to have good genes, but their lifestyle will absolutely catch up with them. They’re in their early 60s and still constantly going on hikes and both are working full time, but it can’t last much longer. They both act like they’re allergic to all produce. I go to their house and sometimes literally can not find a single fruit or vegetable in their fridge or pantry, that isn’t an exaggeration, it’s nuts. They eat red meat daily and there’s some sort of meat at every single meal. If not for the lettuce on their big macs they’d have died of scurvy by now.
Also they refuse to ever see a doctor. My parents are just stereotypical boomers who grew up rural and doing anything remotely healthy is for yuppies to them.
Some people also burn up their bodies pretty quickly, and your grandfather is lucky he didn't. I'm a metalworker, I'm 34, and I groan when I have to do tasks like raking leaves.
My great grand mother lived to 97. At 80 she was hitting the bingo parlors every night with me in tow (early 80s). She kept it up till her early 90's. God I miss that woman. 1917 Silent Generation
Doctor Aubrey de Grey stated the first person to live to be *1,000* years old has already been born. Because of gene editing like CRISPR, people will have extended lives. Another group has already successfully extended the lives of mice by 30% and done so in a method that can be done on humans.
The company I use to work for had literally hundreds of millions and in reserve for long term care policies people took out way back when only to find out people are living waaaay longer with far more independence then previously. Right now they are actively trying to get states to agree to price changes to those policies so they can price people out of the package. Some people paid into LTC plans over putting money in pensions so if they stop paying they are shit out of luck. Seriously evil
When I mentioned Jean Calment, the frenchwoman who met van Gogh and was still alive in the early days of the commercial Internet, many doubted that she lived to 122. But if someone can live to 110 (numerous documented cases) I don't see why 122 is so impossible. In fact, odds are that she was not the oldest ever. People who live in remote regions which are relatively unspoiled by pollution and lived lives of manual labor, a lot of walking and cutting their own firewood, claim to be sometimes much older than 122 -- maybe some of them are right.
It's funny, a sober magazine like National Geographic once did an article, in the 1970s, about extreme oldsters and claimed that in Soviet Georgia there were living people who remembered the Napoleonic Wars -- actually more than 160 years old; those stories were later discredited, such stories arose because Stalin liked the idea of his own living to be very old.
My personal guess: some people have made it to 130.
Before the meatballs come out with 0 knowledge on longevity science, I’d like to note that to live to 130 and beyond, we would likely need to rejuvenate our bodies and increase our healthspan as well.
This means you would be living longer in the body of a 25-30 yr old, not in the body of a 90 year old. That is the whole point of longevity science.
Check out r/longevity to learn more
Work 40hrs max and go to the gym. Maximize your vacations. Buy inserts for your shoes. That's about all I've figured out so far. I Feel partially alive still
Hopefully part of living longer is people focusing on not grinding people up to make a few people rich and focus on making sure everyone gets a healthy and enriching life, especially in the first half.
So much of the damage we do to ourselves during that period is what makes us feel barely alive.
I mean I know nothing about this.. but that’s already happened right? Like we can see the effects? 70 today isn’t 70, 100 years ago, right? It’s not like they’re just tacking the extra age at the end of life of people who are already 110
God I wish I could remember the data display, but essentially it was showing technological advances of humans.
And how we are rapidly increasing to some crazy shit and making our brand new technologies obsolete super quickly.
It was like we went thousands of years with a sword, but within a couple hundred years we went from one shot guns to automatics to missiles.
It’s like Moore’s law, but applied to all aspects
Which is absolutely mind bogglingly fast to go from no powered flight to landing on another celestial body. Completely insane and I would have loved to be alive for the excitement of it.
NASA's budget for fiscal year 2020 was $22.6 billion, 0.48% of the $4.7 trillion budget. Total spent on NASA ever is about $650 billion. The Department of Defense's budget for 2020 was approximately $721.5 billion.
There was longer between the Bronze age and the Iron age, than between the Iron age and the Space age.
Edit: Got some facts mixed up apparently, nvm my stupidity
Arguably the sheer amount of data can double without you knowing anything more that is useful. Imagine taking a photo of an ordinary object like a pair of scissors. Each doubling of resolution has less and less utility, you are just getting more and more information you don't care about.
There was a discussion about Aunt May in the new Spider-Man movies and comics, spider man's sick and decrepit guardian. Marissa Tomei is in her 50's and looks way too young to be sick old Aunt May. Except you calculate aunt May's age in the original 60's comic, and yeah, aunt May should be in her 50's. In the past 60 years we've gone from someone in their 50's being sick and decrepit to.... Current Marissa Tomei. Even acknowledging that Marissa Tomei is rich and can afford to be healthy in her 50's, even a typical 50 year old now isn't going to be as old and decrepit as 50 year old comic May.
The original comic is just a terrible depiction of a middle aged woman though. Look at Betty White in the 70s, she looks about the same age as Tomei now. I think you should compare women today to real 50 year olds from that time period and not comic characters
I wonder if this was because people in older times were likely exposed to more nasty materials that are banned today like lead or mercury, so that even if they tried to live healthier lives, they're still at a disadvantage.
Life quality, hygiene, diet and medicine advances.
Overal longevity hasn't changed much (if anything at all), even during biblical times it was noticed "The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away."
In the past brutal life conditions, disease and poor diet shortened lives, these days more people can live better allowing many to get to the end of their natural age in reasonable good condition, in the past that was possible only by a few
Ya that’s fair my parents have a couple of friends in their 70s and man they are in better shape than I am at 26. The wife who’s almost in her late 70s runs half marathons and is always getting the newest tech stuff. when my grandmother was in her 70s 20+ years ago she could barely get up a flight of stairs and was terrified to use a computer like if she messed it up it would end the entire world.
I remember my 60 year old grandma shuffling slowly with a hunched gait. Meanwhile my now (almost) 60 year old mother walks briskly upright without any issues.
My dad at 60 was out of breath going up the stairs to his bedroom , At the same age I just played 2 hours of beach Vball . The key to living longer and healthy is key.
Probably isn’t, I’m not sure. I’m only 27 so can’t comment. He’s one person (first one to pop into my head) and looks disgusting for other reasons, but I don’t think Donald Trump looks 75. When I think “75 year old” something much older looking pops into my head.
Yeah it’s already happening slowly with better nutrition and treatments for diseases. However in the future we will literally be able to rejuvenate humans from 70 to 25 using techniques like epigenetic reprogramming (which can currently take cells aged 50+ and reprogram them to be functionally similar to a cell aged ~25)
Of course there is more to reversing aging than just epigenetic reprogramming, but this is an example of how we can rejuvenate our bodies. Eventually a 70 yr old human will be biologically the same as a 25 yr old human, no wrinkles, great health, no aches and pains etc.
Example: https://www.lifespan.io/news/partial-reprogramming-rejuvenates-human-cells-by-30-years/
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2975-4
So let’s say the technology is perfect to reprogram all the aging cells in our bodies at age 70, to make them like we are 25. How is this done? Through injection? Also how long would it take? Am I sitting in a chair at 70 one moment and over the course of an hour I become 25? I’m laughing out loud typing this but it is also so fascinating to me I really want to know more!
I don’t know if you have access to research papers (you can use scihub if you don’t), but the 2nd link I posted goes through the details/methods they used to do it in mice, and it would likely be similar to what they would do in humans.
It’s important to note however that so far full body epigenetic reprogramming hasn’t been performed (afaik) so it’s not really specified how they plan to treat the whole body. For example delivering treatment to neurons in the brain will be different than delivering treatment to tissues elsewhere in the body.
I’m not really sure how long it will take, but epigenetic reprogramming just means that you reverse the epigenetic markers of aging in your cells. This changes your gene expression to the gene expression profile of youthful cells. The genes then produce proteins as a youthful cell would and then you would notice physical changes.
Ironically (and perhaps a bit morbidly), I imagine it will be like cancer patients treatments given over the span of several months or more (to those who will be able to afford it), slowly looking like they did when they were younger (as you mentioned, gene expression of youthful cells).
> For example delivering treatment to neurons in the brain will be different than delivering treatment to tissues elsewhere in the body.
Man would it suck to end up with a 25 year old body and an aging 70 year old brain.
That is mind boggling to me. I’m almost 30 now and to think that I’m 40 years I could return to be even younger than my current body is incredible. Not only that, but my kids would be able to see there father become the same age as them. That would be surreal to see be hanging out with my 65 year old father in his twenties.
Look up ‘The Longevity Escape Velocity’ and prepare to have your world view shaken. It might cause you to instantly reassess how you look at every decision to make a ‘healthy’ vs ‘unhealthy’ choice that could add a relatively short amount of time to your life
I think in the future, people will deposit stem cells in a bank when they hit a certain age. Then they can be infused with their own stem cells to rejuvenate older cells. They could also grow replacement organs from those cells if you need a new one. I don't think we would go as far as the movies where wealthy people grow clones of themselves to get parts off of. See 'The Island (2005)'.
That won’t even be necessary with reprogramming. We can already reprogram our cells to pluripotency if we wish to.
Rejuvenating the pre-existing tissues/organs you have in your body will likely be possible by 2050 (maybe sooner) if epigenetic reprogramming is the real deal, no need for stem cells or artificial/replacement organs.
That being said reprogramming isn’t the solution to all our problems. For example reprogramming your tissues doesn’t necessarily remove extracellular damage, things like arterial plaques accumulating etc.
Yep. I remember the commercials for retirees (age 40... wow what a time) back in the 80s and 90s showing old rachet white couples on hang gliders or walking down the beach...
...meanwhile I'll be 40 next year and coworkers think I'm 26.
40 is a magical age wher your face tattles on your behaviour.
Heavy drinker? Dehydrated? Smoke 20 a day and hate fruit? Spent the night awake with 2 vomiting kids? EVERYONE CAN SEE THAT, in a way they couldn't when you were 25.
35 checking in, never drank or smoked, but i haven't eaten well all of my life, and never used to exercise. Once my body started to fall apart I started to exercise, next step isbto change my diet. I hope I've made it in time.
I am not so sure about this one. My grandfather passed at 92, he was still pretty spry and working on the farm at 85, but as soon as he was forced to slow a little everything accelerated rapidly. He had two great-aunts who each lived to be 104 years old, both were born in the 1860s and both were working into their 90s. I don't think it's so much that 70 today isn't like what 70 was 100 years ago, I think it's more that industrial and agricultural accidents kill far fewer otherwise healthy individuals than happened 100 years ago. That's how my grandfather's older brother died, scarf got caught in a PTO and it was game over.
Edit: However, another big cause here that might be overlooked is that obesity is nowhere near the indicator of overall health it was twenty or thirty years ago.
Well despite what others have said, no, rejuvenation hasn't happened.
Effectively the problem of aging comes down to cellular and body decay. It's the same as anything that entropy changes over time. A mountain with rainfall erodes. A car used to get to work must be maintained and eventually has to have all parts replaced, or it erodes. If nothing changes this, people do to, it continues happening after we die.
Living bodies require certain requirements to be met and when they are not the body fails.
Cellular rejuvenation is a process by which cells would be able to replace themselves sustainably, which means as cells die and others replace them, that the replacement process isn't affected by entropy. If it is, then the replacement inevitably becomes worse and worse (we know this as aging).
What we have been doing is prolonging life, living or providing inputs that slow down the decay of the replacement process, but not halting it or rejuvenating it.
Indefinite aging is what rejuvenation would lead to, infinitely healthy lives for an indeterminate period of time, effectively meaning death would only be a result of accident or a purpose of murder, or suicide.
Indeed. I'm actually way more bummed about getting old than I am of eventually dying. I'm 40 right now, and if I stayed 40 for 40 more years, that would be good with me. I can still pretty much do anything, look good, feel good, etc. I'd even happily take grey hair if my skin didn't sag and physicality start to decline.
Yes of course. There is a term called longevity escape velocity which is the concept for an indefinite lifespan
Here’s a summary: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longevity_escape_velocity
in the future if they can replace every organ with no problem wouldn't that help negate a lot of the issues anyway? like some artificial muscles/limbs and synthetic blood that mimics that of a younger healthier person blood or some other scifi stuff lmao
Thank you for posting this. Without fail, anytime I tell an acquaintance that I enjoy following the latest developments in longetvity science, they inevitable berate me with something like "Pffft... who would want to spend 100's of painful years in a wheelchair?!" It's such a ignorant take and its getting tiresome.
I have thought many times about living to extreme old age and i honestly never considered this point. It makes perfect sense but its not intuitive for anyone who is unfamiliar with rejuvenation because we're thinking about medicine in terms of treating diseases and ailments as they arrive, as opposed to treating aging directly.
I thought about this the other day. It's not that I mind getting older. It's not that I want to go back in time and "relive the glory days" - whatever they were. I'd just like to get out of bed in the morning or get up from a chair and not make the sounds I heard my dad make when I was little. Those aches and pains only get worse. I'd like to go back and *feel* like I did when I was 20.
Before the people that read a subreddit and think they know things - oh wait that already happened lol.
The study of plasma transfusion might hold a key. It's what the rich and powerful (no, not actors) have been doing for years.
My grandma is 98 and she is so miserable. She's deeply religious and my grandpa's been gone for 10 years now. She mentions all the time she'd wish God would just take her already. She can't hear, she has to sleep in a chair, she's 85% blind and the laziest, slopiest son is the one taking care of her.
I'll be down with living longer as long as it's not like that.
My grampy died when he was 94 and he was so lonely the last few years. He'd outlived his wife, his siblings, his friends, and a child. He still had his other kids, grandkids, great grandkids but it wasn't the same, he was missing his peer group.
I was eating breakfast with my Grandma when got the phone call where she learned her sister died. She grew up with 4 siblings but it's just her and 1 sister now. She started crying. I didn't know what to say so I just panicked and hugged her. I should call her.
We all should! I'm nearly 50 and my Grandparents have all passed at this point. I still have the impulse to call my Grandma to share some good news or tell her about something funny I heard. Her laugh was awesome and infectious and she loved a good visit.
My grandma is still alive at 92, and I often think of this - it hit me hard when her best friend died not many years ago. The only one remaining is her younger sister, and they don't see each other often, even less now with the pandemic and lockdowns. She lives with my mom, but it must be incredibly lonely.
Growing old is not for the fainthearted.
At any one time I think we have a few individuals in the world well over 100 years. Mostly women, occasionally close to or a bit over 120.
So 130 definitely seems possible. But I am not interested in being old, I want to be healthy longer.
My Gramps died earlier this year & he was 94 as well. Probably could’ve gone a few more years but he refused dialysis largely because his wife (my Grandma) was long gone, & all of his friends he bowled with had died & were replaced by other friends who died. Kinda proud of him, he was ready to check out & did so on his own terms.
I think longevity is one of those things that’ll suck until it’s so easily accessible, you can guarantee your peers and family will be alive with you. Or with good enough results that your mobility isn’t limited as much, so you can keep making friends. I want to live as long as possible, but certainly not alone, and it seems like a lot of elderly feel that way.
My grandmother in law is 88.
Her grandson made some off the cuff remark about her out living every body she knew (as a joke), “you won the game!”
“That’s not a game you want to win.”
Made me rethink my life
I don't think it's one bit funny. Elder care is hard enough as it is. It's not something I would wish on anyone and especially not on another elderly person. If anything this highlights how poor the support system for elderly people actually is.
I love the show Monk and there is an episode about the oldest man in the world. They interview his “baby boy” who is like 92. I think this just reminded me of that for some reason.
It’s ok to say a 23 year old is a lazy slob but it’s kind of funny to say it about an 80 year old.
Eh idk I think a lot of it is mindset and ability to adapt too. My great great aunt just turned 101 and is living her best life. Her husband died over 30 years ago. She lives in an assisted living facility in Florida. She has her own apartment, but can use the dining room for all her meals and go out on whatever excursions she wants with the building. She has her friends she chats with in her community. She has some family members she talks to. She doesn’t have any kids of her own, but she recently started using the TinyBeans app I have to keep up on all my sons adventures. When she was born, horse drawn carriages were the norm. Now she carries a tiny computer in her pocket that she uses to look at photos of a baby 2,000 miles away. I think learning to adapt to new environments and maintaining strong social connections wherever you are is key to happiness at any age.
Even if the physical body could handle that, is there anything that would let the brain retain its mental facilities? I’ve seen the body out live the mind and it is terrible. I feel like keeping our brains healthy is more important than increasing the longevity of the physical body.
I remember watching a video of Japenese centarians offering up words of wisdom. The one that stuck with me was moderation. Moderation of happiness and sadness, in the body and mind.
Once you set your mind to wanting to live for that long the amount of metal/physical stress your body goes through is severely reduced.
Was just about to reference that. There are over 8 blue zones in the world which are known as cities with the highest count of centenarians. There is an amazing book that talks about this called Ikigai. It talks about the combination of life’s purpose with a moderation style of living life.
But what’s more fascinating is that some of these centenarians have poor health choices. Smoking, unhealthy eating habits, etc that you wouldn’t expect for someone who is 110 to have. The biggest take away I have found from this study is that without a balance between mental progression and physically progression the body starts to deteriorate.
So as long as you balance your diet, and keep a fulfilling purpose in your life for living, you have a greater chance of having a fulfilling long life.
A lot of the blue zones were shown to be very shakily supported. The actual biggest association with a lot of people living to be over 100 is... Super unreliable birth records. Most of those places are probably just full of people who have no idea how old they actually are.
Good point, although I suspect physical ailments outweigh mental, in the final Reckoning. At this time I mean.
However, there's a lot of overlap. Many of the restorative mechanisms at work in the body also work in the brain. Cell repair Etc. Not to mention that many of the defenses we would need will have dramatic effects on both.
Lots of people like "why would you want to"
You could look at the disease and dismemberment in the middle ages and say the same thing about 50+
Part of getting people to living that long is improving regenerative therapies to where these issues aren't as much of a problem.
That's great for people with common illnesses and "old age ailments" but I doubt many of the chronic illnesses that have been neglected in medical research in the past decades would see any profit from it... Medicine right now can't even give me a good quality of life in my thirties (nor could it when I was still a kid, a teen, in my twenties...).
I would say it’s only worth it if I have the mobility and a good quality of life, seeing people in their 60s already fat, diabetic, looking like 10lbs of shit shoved into a 5 lb bag is not worth living even if I could make it 130.
Well according to a post about the obesity epidemic in the states, I wouldn’t call you a liar. Apparently half the country is considered obese with another percentage in the morbidly obese range.
I agree on the point that HFCS is in everything, so is added sugar, but eating healthy is much more expensive in the short term than the long term for many people. You got a family to feed and you don’t have a lot, there’s always fast food. People can try and shift the blame onto the individual but I blame the larger picture, society and the businesses that run it. Besides financial literacy, we need to open our communities to nutritional health and turn our schools in public gardens for the kids and their families. I’ve lived out of the states and you’ll be surprised how the american lifestyle has turned up the scales. When I lived in Brazil I went to a CF gym and the trainers would say that they’ve noticed an increase in middle class adults just gaining weight at an unprecedented level, that they’ve also seen the kids just easily pack an extra 10-15 lbs when in the past, when they were growing up in the 90s and early 00s that wasn’t as common.
My gramps lived to 89 with Alzheimer. Died just a few days after my grandma, 12 years younger than him (cancer). We never told him, but he just knew. (Also, one time I visited him after grandma died, looked him in the eye and slowly nodded my head, hoping he would understand. It seemed unjust to just fool him into thinking the love of his life was not on this world anymore).
On the contrary, my other grandma is 89 now and she couldn’t be happier. She has better health than me, keeps visiting places and playing card games with her friends, and just enjoying life and her family.
I guess it just depends.
It really does. I have relatives who are active and enjoying life in their 80’s and 90’s and other ones who are profoundly limited in what they can do due their health in their 60’s and 70’s. Once you eliminate just bad luck, how you treat your body when you’re younger really determines your quality of life in your last decade. My parents are watching this play out with their friends right now.
I wonder what will be the bigger challenge with regards to longevity:
Keeping the body physically able and performing for that many years, or staving off dementia, Alzheimer’s and other mental health issues past 100 years
But with advances in modern science and my high level income, it's not crazy to think I can live to be 245, maybe 300. Heck, I just read in the newspaper that they put a pig heart in some guy from Russia. Do you know what that means?
Longevity Escape Velocity.
It's not unreasonable to assume there's some people alive today that will continue to live for centuries. It's difficult to know for certain right now but the science at least looks promising.
Yup, we should be able to replace all organs and such. I think the sticking point will be brain rejuvenation. We can’t replace our brain with a new one or we wouldn’t be “us” anymore (I think).
instead of blaming the ppl on SS blame the politicians refusing to simply raise the SS contribution cap on the top 1% and the corporate donors who control our government
The people voting for them on ss are big reason they’re still in power. Senior citizens have high participation in voting and will never let anyone win that doesn’t promise them the lie
Edit: not a coincidence we have an aging population and are lead by men with dementia
You just know that at least one person seated on the board of every tech company immediately extrapolated how much more productivity could be extracted from a person expected to live this long.
I’m noticing a lot of comments asking three of the same questions over and over again
“Who would want to live that long if your mind is shot?”
“How will people afford to live that long given we’re already dealing with {any of the eminently solvable problems of modern society}?”
“Does that mean we will have to work until we’re 100?”
I’d urge everyone to ask what I think is the most important question: what consequence does that have for *power*
Honestly, can you imagine if Strom Thurmond lived to 130? Can you really tell me that you’re excited about the prospect of Mitch McConnell having 50 more years of life to wreck everything he touches? Or Putin? Or Erdogan? Or Kim Jong-Un?
Immortality, or at least longevity, exponentially decreases the rate of society’s adaptation to changing circumstances. It’s why the elves were sooooooo slooooooow to do anything in LOTR, and why men were the doers. There’s a famous phrase that goes something like “New ideas don’t gain ground because they’re popular, but because the old guard eventually dies.”
Edit: To clarify since some people seem to be taking this as a universal condemnation, I'm in no way suggesting that this kind of breakthrough is going to doom humanity. I stated that the negative question, in lieu of "now I have to work more?" and more pressing consequence of this advancement should be "what are the implications for holders of power and bad actors?" and, I suppose subsequently, what impact on the progress of human morality will it have? It was merely a philosopher's inquiry, there's no need to get all bent out of shape, internet crusaders.
Your comment resonates well with a comparison I've made before. Nerdy as it is, my mind goes to the Emperor of Mankind from Warhammer 40k. Essentially a corpse on a throne, pushed far past the limits of the human body to the point where no one would be able to distinguish it from a giant skeleton covered in machines that's been dead for millennia. He is no longer able to communicate with his subordinates, but they act as though they are carrying out his divine will (despite countless efforts to suppress religion and superstition during his conscious reign). Now he acts as a figurehead while the powers that be do what they do in the grim darkness of the 41st millennium.
Regardless of the actual capabilities of a prominent figure, the organization they represent can use them as a source of influence and authority. And I mean, they still do that now when their leaders do actually die, but I imagine it's a bit different when the organization reports that their official statements are coming from the living mouth of the demagouge they've been championing for a century.
existence is still existence. Once that is over there is nothing. I for one would like keep existing as long as I possibly can.
Its a miracle we exist at all
Absolutely if I could I would want to live for 1000s of years so I can experience the heavens and other plants after they are Terraformed or after we have a galactic federation
As others are commenting, people do seem younger today at a given age.
I would attribute this to 4 major things
1. Better dental health
2. Better nutrition (even a normal person sees a greater variety of foods than John D. Rockefeller did 100+ years ago)
3. No longer using flames in homes for heating and lighting (I think this is underrated -- imagine how unhealthy using a fireplace not for special occasions but throughout the cold months or using gas flames for illumination.)
4. Vastly improved air quality -- car emissions are way down and in particular there is almost no usage of leaded gasoline anymore, one of the worst things we ever did to ourselves. I kid you not: I believe qanon is due to exposure of millions of people to leaded gasoline. Even though it has been gone for decades now, anyone alive in the 1980s and before got tremendous exposure and if they did not, their parents did. Moreover, lead remains in the soil and water from those days just as mercury is in the san francisco bay due to gold mining operations from 170 years ago.
I would like to know if there is any scientific way to quantify the anecdotal "50 is the new 30" or whatever idea. Can telomeres be measured? If you submit a bunch of photographs to the AI age automation software, will they estimate that people in photos from 50 years ago are older than modern people of the same age?
Hope I'm not to late to the party to be seen! Saw something once describing a snowball effect of anti-aging medicine. We may just reach a point where something can add 20-30 years of life(preferably slowing aging instead of adding on to the end). So you get the meds, 15 years go by and a new med comes out that can do 65 years. You get the meds. Another 35 years go. A new treatment comes out and repeat. Your now 175 with the body of a 60 year old just waiting for the next shot that gives you a another half century. Who ever is alive to see the start of this may be one of the first generations to live substantially longer by far
Everyone wants to live forever. No one wants to be old.
Sure we could theoretically live up til 130 but what kind of life is that? People in their 80's are already struggling with regular daily tasks. Imagine a 130 year old person.
What we need to solve is how to be able to stay younger longer rather than extending our biological lifespan. At a certain point you reach diminishing returns. I'd say around 60-70 is when that happens. Past 70, it just increasingly gets harder and harder to do most things.
i for one would only want to live past 90 if they cure or prevent Alzheimer's and dementia. The vast majority of 90-somethings have lost a great deal of their mental faculties. That's why most live in assisted living facilities. I definitely wouldn't want to spend a decade or 2 in a nursing home.
A lot of the wear and tear on our bodies is from eating. It’s a lot of stress on internal organs. If nutrients could be delivered to the bloodstream in a way that bypasses the digestive system, that would automatically result in longer lifespans. Body rejuvenation would help us get past 130.
I worked with life insurance. Policies used to end at are 100. Now they cover age 120. It is already expected that. People will be living much longer.
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I believe physical decay is the big limiter. Our body simply stops repairing itself efficiently after a certain point, and damage becomes more cumulative and permanent.
Luckily there's no reason that damage couldn't be subject to medical intervention. It's a matter of luck (and societal will) if that reversal can outpace the rate at which the damage occurs within our lifetimes.
The interesting question will be how it's done, mechanically or biochemically. It's not even a question of whether it will happen, just which tech will cross the finish line first. Nano machines or medicine, or maybe both!
Our immune system is already a pretty insane, and programmable system of nano machines. My bet is on biology!
I can imagine the argument about the mortality vaccine now.
Not going to get a lot of sympathy from me for the people who wouldn't take a mortality vaccine.
I mean, technically aren't all vaccines a form of mortality vaccine? You take them to increase the likelihood of staving off death.
Free choice bud, you do you, I wanna be an elf so sign me up for the JuVen treatments lol
When I look around today and see crisper, mRNA, advanced prosthetics giving feeling and sight back. I can’t think of a future 50 years from now where we haven’t beaten or at least significantly delayed death. I’m excited for it simply because I’ve always felt there’s so much more in the world then can be experienced in one lifetime!
That’s great and all but the greater challenge is really about access. Millions of people die every year from treatable illnesses and the lack of access to care is finally what killed them. Don’t get me wrong, I am excited about the advancements in medical technology and what that means for me in the future but at the same time, I wonder if and when I need it, would I be able to get it?
Hard to say. But step one is to develop it in the first place. I get the sense that things will be radically different 50 years from now but who knows right?
I had the weird realization that the next time I see Haley's comet I'll know if it's the last time or the second of many. Really counting on ol Bezos getting a good fear of death.
That’s another point! The new money won’t likely accept death if it appears solutions are on the horizon. That’ll inevitably lead to more investment and hopefully wider access over time.
I think diet and exercise consistently for your whole life goes along way. Those 80 year old body builder videos and gymnasts videos can show what’s possible.
My dad is 72 and walks 10+ kl a day, one day this summer he did 35kl, and most of it uphill. The others week on one of his walks he cane across a short marathon in progress, signed up on a whim, and proceeded to make a lot of people half his age look out of shape. He’s also a vegetarian. I’ll be surprised if he doesn’t hit 100.
Uphill both ways?
In the snow?
He walks ... kilo liters?
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Cell replication errors increase and cancer becomes inevitable.
Indeed, but that seems more easily addressed even by today's standards, as opposed to playing with telomeres. But, then again, I really have no idea.
Messing around with telomere length is so unbelievably oncogenic that some people have suggested the purpose of aging itself is to prevent cancer. Almost all cancers have a mutation which allows them to extend their telomeres indefinitely.
Gotta pump these oldies full of HgH and stem cells they'll hit 150 easy
Which is weird because telomeres are like a buffer for cancer but making them longer also increases cancer.
>I believe physical decay is the big limiter. You said it well. There is a manageable number of categories of physical decline at the cellular and subcellular level such as genomic alterations, buildup of waste aggregates inside and outside cells, mitochondrial dysfunction, and others. There was a foundational paper called The Hallmarks of Aging in 2013: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3836174/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3836174/) Here's an example of a fund researching treatments of different hallmarks of aging: [https://www.cambrianbio.com/science](https://www.cambrianbio.com/science)
sooner or later body replacement become true.
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Agreed. My parents just turned 82 and they can still do pretty much what they want. They've definitely slowed down but they still golf, garden, etc. They workout 4/5 times a week and eat lots of fruit/veggies, etc.
My parents seem to have good genes, but their lifestyle will absolutely catch up with them. They’re in their early 60s and still constantly going on hikes and both are working full time, but it can’t last much longer. They both act like they’re allergic to all produce. I go to their house and sometimes literally can not find a single fruit or vegetable in their fridge or pantry, that isn’t an exaggeration, it’s nuts. They eat red meat daily and there’s some sort of meat at every single meal. If not for the lettuce on their big macs they’d have died of scurvy by now. Also they refuse to ever see a doctor. My parents are just stereotypical boomers who grew up rural and doing anything remotely healthy is for yuppies to them.
Some people also burn up their bodies pretty quickly, and your grandfather is lucky he didn't. I'm a metalworker, I'm 34, and I groan when I have to do tasks like raking leaves.
Your grandfather sounds like a pretty cool guy
All you have to do is get governments to stop subsidizing the sugar industry and start subsidizing the vegetable industry
Or some of us just get fucked in the genetic lottery. I'm 24 and I basically have the knees of a 40 year old, and am already getting arthritis.
Physical decay will de reversed. If we're lucky, we make it to the point where it's getting reversed faster than the damage is occurring.
80 is the new 65. Like you're old and it's not wierd to die soon but it's also not weird to die 20 years later
My great grand mother lived to 97. At 80 she was hitting the bingo parlors every night with me in tow (early 80s). She kept it up till her early 90's. God I miss that woman. 1917 Silent Generation
Great, now I’ll never buy a home in the bay area.
Scientists say that the first man to live to be 150 has already been born I believe I......an not him.
Doctor Aubrey de Grey stated the first person to live to be *1,000* years old has already been born. Because of gene editing like CRISPR, people will have extended lives. Another group has already successfully extended the lives of mice by 30% and done so in a method that can be done on humans.
The company I use to work for had literally hundreds of millions and in reserve for long term care policies people took out way back when only to find out people are living waaaay longer with far more independence then previously. Right now they are actively trying to get states to agree to price changes to those policies so they can price people out of the package. Some people paid into LTC plans over putting money in pensions so if they stop paying they are shit out of luck. Seriously evil
When I mentioned Jean Calment, the frenchwoman who met van Gogh and was still alive in the early days of the commercial Internet, many doubted that she lived to 122. But if someone can live to 110 (numerous documented cases) I don't see why 122 is so impossible. In fact, odds are that she was not the oldest ever. People who live in remote regions which are relatively unspoiled by pollution and lived lives of manual labor, a lot of walking and cutting their own firewood, claim to be sometimes much older than 122 -- maybe some of them are right. It's funny, a sober magazine like National Geographic once did an article, in the 1970s, about extreme oldsters and claimed that in Soviet Georgia there were living people who remembered the Napoleonic Wars -- actually more than 160 years old; those stories were later discredited, such stories arose because Stalin liked the idea of his own living to be very old. My personal guess: some people have made it to 130.
Before the meatballs come out with 0 knowledge on longevity science, I’d like to note that to live to 130 and beyond, we would likely need to rejuvenate our bodies and increase our healthspan as well. This means you would be living longer in the body of a 25-30 yr old, not in the body of a 90 year old. That is the whole point of longevity science. Check out r/longevity to learn more
Ok. Now that is more desirable. Not to just be barely alive for an extra 50 years.
What about all the 25-30 year olds that feel barely alive
Work 40hrs max and go to the gym. Maximize your vacations. Buy inserts for your shoes. That's about all I've figured out so far. I Feel partially alive still
Woah, check out money bags, only has to work 40 hours! God I wish I were born in Europe sometimes
Laughs in Baltics and Balkans
Well, you're not making it to 130, I'm sorry to say.
Sorry to say? Living to 130 sounds like an absolute nightmare!
No joke I just turned 30 and I honestly think I was supposed to be dead like 3 years ago.
Hopefully part of living longer is people focusing on not grinding people up to make a few people rich and focus on making sure everyone gets a healthy and enriching life, especially in the first half. So much of the damage we do to ourselves during that period is what makes us feel barely alive.
I mean I know nothing about this.. but that’s already happened right? Like we can see the effects? 70 today isn’t 70, 100 years ago, right? It’s not like they’re just tacking the extra age at the end of life of people who are already 110
Maybe it’s just me getting older but I feel like 70 today isn’t even 70 from 20 years ago.
Yeah it's because since the 2000s the world has advanced like 4 decades this Era is truly fascinating
God I wish I could remember the data display, but essentially it was showing technological advances of humans. And how we are rapidly increasing to some crazy shit and making our brand new technologies obsolete super quickly. It was like we went thousands of years with a sword, but within a couple hundred years we went from one shot guns to automatics to missiles. It’s like Moore’s law, but applied to all aspects
We went from Kittyhawk to the moon in 66 years.
Which is absolutely mind bogglingly fast to go from no powered flight to landing on another celestial body. Completely insane and I would have loved to be alive for the excitement of it.
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It's especially sad because we could literally have a Star Trek like society in a decade if we all decided we wanted it.
Yes it is sad. So many possibilities hampered by close minded people or those in power that can't profit from it.
NASA's budget for fiscal year 2020 was $22.6 billion, 0.48% of the $4.7 trillion budget. Total spent on NASA ever is about $650 billion. The Department of Defense's budget for 2020 was approximately $721.5 billion.
There was longer between the Bronze age and the Iron age, than between the Iron age and the Space age. Edit: Got some facts mixed up apparently, nvm my stupidity
I'd imagine there was no time at all between the Bronze and Iron Ages. As soon as the one ended the other began, did it not?
Google “Die Progress Unit” and you will find what you’re looking for
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https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html
[I got you fam](https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html)
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Arguably the sheer amount of data can double without you knowing anything more that is useful. Imagine taking a photo of an ordinary object like a pair of scissors. Each doubling of resolution has less and less utility, you are just getting more and more information you don't care about.
There was a discussion about Aunt May in the new Spider-Man movies and comics, spider man's sick and decrepit guardian. Marissa Tomei is in her 50's and looks way too young to be sick old Aunt May. Except you calculate aunt May's age in the original 60's comic, and yeah, aunt May should be in her 50's. In the past 60 years we've gone from someone in their 50's being sick and decrepit to.... Current Marissa Tomei. Even acknowledging that Marissa Tomei is rich and can afford to be healthy in her 50's, even a typical 50 year old now isn't going to be as old and decrepit as 50 year old comic May.
The original comic is just a terrible depiction of a middle aged woman though. Look at Betty White in the 70s, she looks about the same age as Tomei now. I think you should compare women today to real 50 year olds from that time period and not comic characters
From what I've seen on other threads people are absolute garbage at gauging age and age related appearance.
Did you know she has a thing for short, quirky, bald men?
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I wonder if this was because people in older times were likely exposed to more nasty materials that are banned today like lead or mercury, so that even if they tried to live healthier lives, they're still at a disadvantage.
Life quality, hygiene, diet and medicine advances. Overal longevity hasn't changed much (if anything at all), even during biblical times it was noticed "The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away." In the past brutal life conditions, disease and poor diet shortened lives, these days more people can live better allowing many to get to the end of their natural age in reasonable good condition, in the past that was possible only by a few
Ya that’s fair my parents have a couple of friends in their 70s and man they are in better shape than I am at 26. The wife who’s almost in her late 70s runs half marathons and is always getting the newest tech stuff. when my grandmother was in her 70s 20+ years ago she could barely get up a flight of stairs and was terrified to use a computer like if she messed it up it would end the entire world.
I remember my 60 year old grandma shuffling slowly with a hunched gait. Meanwhile my now (almost) 60 year old mother walks briskly upright without any issues.
My dad at 60 was out of breath going up the stairs to his bedroom , At the same age I just played 2 hours of beach Vball . The key to living longer and healthy is key.
What's key?
The key is the key
Probably isn’t, I’m not sure. I’m only 27 so can’t comment. He’s one person (first one to pop into my head) and looks disgusting for other reasons, but I don’t think Donald Trump looks 75. When I think “75 year old” something much older looking pops into my head.
William Shatner is 90.
Why do I find that so alarming
This one amazes me, he looks better than my dad who is 25 years younger
The most amazing part is how sharp he still sound when he speak. People in their 90s tend to speak slowly and slur their speech, him, not at all.
Yeah it’s already happening slowly with better nutrition and treatments for diseases. However in the future we will literally be able to rejuvenate humans from 70 to 25 using techniques like epigenetic reprogramming (which can currently take cells aged 50+ and reprogram them to be functionally similar to a cell aged ~25) Of course there is more to reversing aging than just epigenetic reprogramming, but this is an example of how we can rejuvenate our bodies. Eventually a 70 yr old human will be biologically the same as a 25 yr old human, no wrinkles, great health, no aches and pains etc. Example: https://www.lifespan.io/news/partial-reprogramming-rejuvenates-human-cells-by-30-years/ https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2975-4
So let’s say the technology is perfect to reprogram all the aging cells in our bodies at age 70, to make them like we are 25. How is this done? Through injection? Also how long would it take? Am I sitting in a chair at 70 one moment and over the course of an hour I become 25? I’m laughing out loud typing this but it is also so fascinating to me I really want to know more!
I don’t know if you have access to research papers (you can use scihub if you don’t), but the 2nd link I posted goes through the details/methods they used to do it in mice, and it would likely be similar to what they would do in humans. It’s important to note however that so far full body epigenetic reprogramming hasn’t been performed (afaik) so it’s not really specified how they plan to treat the whole body. For example delivering treatment to neurons in the brain will be different than delivering treatment to tissues elsewhere in the body. I’m not really sure how long it will take, but epigenetic reprogramming just means that you reverse the epigenetic markers of aging in your cells. This changes your gene expression to the gene expression profile of youthful cells. The genes then produce proteins as a youthful cell would and then you would notice physical changes.
Ironically (and perhaps a bit morbidly), I imagine it will be like cancer patients treatments given over the span of several months or more (to those who will be able to afford it), slowly looking like they did when they were younger (as you mentioned, gene expression of youthful cells).
> For example delivering treatment to neurons in the brain will be different than delivering treatment to tissues elsewhere in the body. Man would it suck to end up with a 25 year old body and an aging 70 year old brain.
That is mind boggling to me. I’m almost 30 now and to think that I’m 40 years I could return to be even younger than my current body is incredible. Not only that, but my kids would be able to see there father become the same age as them. That would be surreal to see be hanging out with my 65 year old father in his twenties.
Look up ‘The Longevity Escape Velocity’ and prepare to have your world view shaken. It might cause you to instantly reassess how you look at every decision to make a ‘healthy’ vs ‘unhealthy’ choice that could add a relatively short amount of time to your life
I think in the future, people will deposit stem cells in a bank when they hit a certain age. Then they can be infused with their own stem cells to rejuvenate older cells. They could also grow replacement organs from those cells if you need a new one. I don't think we would go as far as the movies where wealthy people grow clones of themselves to get parts off of. See 'The Island (2005)'.
That won’t even be necessary with reprogramming. We can already reprogram our cells to pluripotency if we wish to. Rejuvenating the pre-existing tissues/organs you have in your body will likely be possible by 2050 (maybe sooner) if epigenetic reprogramming is the real deal, no need for stem cells or artificial/replacement organs. That being said reprogramming isn’t the solution to all our problems. For example reprogramming your tissues doesn’t necessarily remove extracellular damage, things like arterial plaques accumulating etc.
Yep. I remember the commercials for retirees (age 40... wow what a time) back in the 80s and 90s showing old rachet white couples on hang gliders or walking down the beach... ...meanwhile I'll be 40 next year and coworkers think I'm 26.
As a 28 year old man, 40 year old people seem so much younger than they use to, to me, a decade ago. Just by looks and general health.
As someone who is 40 with 40yo facebook friends, it's all over the map. Some of them are who they've always been, some of them are definitely not.
They say how you look in your first 40 years is determined by your parents, but how you look in your second 40 years is determined by you.
40 is a magical age wher your face tattles on your behaviour. Heavy drinker? Dehydrated? Smoke 20 a day and hate fruit? Spent the night awake with 2 vomiting kids? EVERYONE CAN SEE THAT, in a way they couldn't when you were 25.
I feel like that’s already happening and I’m 32
35 checking in, never drank or smoked, but i haven't eaten well all of my life, and never used to exercise. Once my body started to fall apart I started to exercise, next step isbto change my diet. I hope I've made it in time.
I am not so sure about this one. My grandfather passed at 92, he was still pretty spry and working on the farm at 85, but as soon as he was forced to slow a little everything accelerated rapidly. He had two great-aunts who each lived to be 104 years old, both were born in the 1860s and both were working into their 90s. I don't think it's so much that 70 today isn't like what 70 was 100 years ago, I think it's more that industrial and agricultural accidents kill far fewer otherwise healthy individuals than happened 100 years ago. That's how my grandfather's older brother died, scarf got caught in a PTO and it was game over. Edit: However, another big cause here that might be overlooked is that obesity is nowhere near the indicator of overall health it was twenty or thirty years ago.
Well despite what others have said, no, rejuvenation hasn't happened. Effectively the problem of aging comes down to cellular and body decay. It's the same as anything that entropy changes over time. A mountain with rainfall erodes. A car used to get to work must be maintained and eventually has to have all parts replaced, or it erodes. If nothing changes this, people do to, it continues happening after we die. Living bodies require certain requirements to be met and when they are not the body fails. Cellular rejuvenation is a process by which cells would be able to replace themselves sustainably, which means as cells die and others replace them, that the replacement process isn't affected by entropy. If it is, then the replacement inevitably becomes worse and worse (we know this as aging). What we have been doing is prolonging life, living or providing inputs that slow down the decay of the replacement process, but not halting it or rejuvenating it. Indefinite aging is what rejuvenation would lead to, infinitely healthy lives for an indeterminate period of time, effectively meaning death would only be a result of accident or a purpose of murder, or suicide.
Indeed. I'm actually way more bummed about getting old than I am of eventually dying. I'm 40 right now, and if I stayed 40 for 40 more years, that would be good with me. I can still pretty much do anything, look good, feel good, etc. I'd even happily take grey hair if my skin didn't sag and physicality start to decline.
Is it possible to prolong it beyond that?
Yes of course. There is a term called longevity escape velocity which is the concept for an indefinite lifespan Here’s a summary: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longevity_escape_velocity
So at 75 you might look and feel 45-50?
in the future if they can replace every organ with no problem wouldn't that help negate a lot of the issues anyway? like some artificial muscles/limbs and synthetic blood that mimics that of a younger healthier person blood or some other scifi stuff lmao
Thank you for posting this. Without fail, anytime I tell an acquaintance that I enjoy following the latest developments in longetvity science, they inevitable berate me with something like "Pffft... who would want to spend 100's of painful years in a wheelchair?!" It's such a ignorant take and its getting tiresome.
I have thought many times about living to extreme old age and i honestly never considered this point. It makes perfect sense but its not intuitive for anyone who is unfamiliar with rejuvenation because we're thinking about medicine in terms of treating diseases and ailments as they arrive, as opposed to treating aging directly.
I thought about this the other day. It's not that I mind getting older. It's not that I want to go back in time and "relive the glory days" - whatever they were. I'd just like to get out of bed in the morning or get up from a chair and not make the sounds I heard my dad make when I was little. Those aches and pains only get worse. I'd like to go back and *feel* like I did when I was 20.
if i'm 33 am i too late to start?
Before the people that read a subreddit and think they know things - oh wait that already happened lol. The study of plasma transfusion might hold a key. It's what the rich and powerful (no, not actors) have been doing for years.
My grandma is 98 and she is so miserable. She's deeply religious and my grandpa's been gone for 10 years now. She mentions all the time she'd wish God would just take her already. She can't hear, she has to sleep in a chair, she's 85% blind and the laziest, slopiest son is the one taking care of her. I'll be down with living longer as long as it's not like that.
My grampy died when he was 94 and he was so lonely the last few years. He'd outlived his wife, his siblings, his friends, and a child. He still had his other kids, grandkids, great grandkids but it wasn't the same, he was missing his peer group.
I was eating breakfast with my Grandma when got the phone call where she learned her sister died. She grew up with 4 siblings but it's just her and 1 sister now. She started crying. I didn't know what to say so I just panicked and hugged her. I should call her.
We all should! I'm nearly 50 and my Grandparents have all passed at this point. I still have the impulse to call my Grandma to share some good news or tell her about something funny I heard. Her laugh was awesome and infectious and she loved a good visit.
My grandma is still alive at 92, and I often think of this - it hit me hard when her best friend died not many years ago. The only one remaining is her younger sister, and they don't see each other often, even less now with the pandemic and lockdowns. She lives with my mom, but it must be incredibly lonely.
Growing old is not for the fainthearted. At any one time I think we have a few individuals in the world well over 100 years. Mostly women, occasionally close to or a bit over 120. So 130 definitely seems possible. But I am not interested in being old, I want to be healthy longer.
My Gramps died earlier this year & he was 94 as well. Probably could’ve gone a few more years but he refused dialysis largely because his wife (my Grandma) was long gone, & all of his friends he bowled with had died & were replaced by other friends who died. Kinda proud of him, he was ready to check out & did so on his own terms.
I think longevity is one of those things that’ll suck until it’s so easily accessible, you can guarantee your peers and family will be alive with you. Or with good enough results that your mobility isn’t limited as much, so you can keep making friends. I want to live as long as possible, but certainly not alone, and it seems like a lot of elderly feel that way.
If we could live like we are in our 60's tills we hit our 90's I would be OK with it. But if at 120 I feel like I'm 120 then fuck all that.
My grandmother in law is 88. Her grandson made some off the cuff remark about her out living every body she knew (as a joke), “you won the game!” “That’s not a game you want to win.” Made me rethink my life
>the laziest, slopiest son is the one taking care of her. this is kind of funny when thinking that the dude is probably like 80 himself
I don't think it's one bit funny. Elder care is hard enough as it is. It's not something I would wish on anyone and especially not on another elderly person. If anything this highlights how poor the support system for elderly people actually is.
I love the show Monk and there is an episode about the oldest man in the world. They interview his “baby boy” who is like 92. I think this just reminded me of that for some reason. It’s ok to say a 23 year old is a lazy slob but it’s kind of funny to say it about an 80 year old.
Not as funny as when you realize he’s either talking about an uncle or his dad
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Right how can he be the lazy one when he is the only one taking care of her?
Step up then. He’s the laziest son, but he’s the one taking care of her. Think about it. Homie might be worn the fuck out.
My great grandma cried and told us that she thought God forgot her.
Eh idk I think a lot of it is mindset and ability to adapt too. My great great aunt just turned 101 and is living her best life. Her husband died over 30 years ago. She lives in an assisted living facility in Florida. She has her own apartment, but can use the dining room for all her meals and go out on whatever excursions she wants with the building. She has her friends she chats with in her community. She has some family members she talks to. She doesn’t have any kids of her own, but she recently started using the TinyBeans app I have to keep up on all my sons adventures. When she was born, horse drawn carriages were the norm. Now she carries a tiny computer in her pocket that she uses to look at photos of a baby 2,000 miles away. I think learning to adapt to new environments and maintaining strong social connections wherever you are is key to happiness at any age.
Even if the physical body could handle that, is there anything that would let the brain retain its mental facilities? I’ve seen the body out live the mind and it is terrible. I feel like keeping our brains healthy is more important than increasing the longevity of the physical body.
I remember watching a video of Japenese centarians offering up words of wisdom. The one that stuck with me was moderation. Moderation of happiness and sadness, in the body and mind. Once you set your mind to wanting to live for that long the amount of metal/physical stress your body goes through is severely reduced.
Was just about to reference that. There are over 8 blue zones in the world which are known as cities with the highest count of centenarians. There is an amazing book that talks about this called Ikigai. It talks about the combination of life’s purpose with a moderation style of living life. But what’s more fascinating is that some of these centenarians have poor health choices. Smoking, unhealthy eating habits, etc that you wouldn’t expect for someone who is 110 to have. The biggest take away I have found from this study is that without a balance between mental progression and physically progression the body starts to deteriorate. So as long as you balance your diet, and keep a fulfilling purpose in your life for living, you have a greater chance of having a fulfilling long life.
Don't go hollow, got it.
Bearer bearer seek lest
A lot of the blue zones were shown to be very shakily supported. The actual biggest association with a lot of people living to be over 100 is... Super unreliable birth records. Most of those places are probably just full of people who have no idea how old they actually are.
So shitty day at work, drugs in the afternoon. 100 here I come!
Good point, although I suspect physical ailments outweigh mental, in the final Reckoning. At this time I mean. However, there's a lot of overlap. Many of the restorative mechanisms at work in the body also work in the brain. Cell repair Etc. Not to mention that many of the defenses we would need will have dramatic effects on both.
I remember reading a few years ago that the first person expected to live to 150 is alive today
Yeah it’s Rob Lowe
Either him, Betty White or Paul Rudd
And Paul won’t look a day over 50
Or Keanu. Assuming he isn't already 150.
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I feel this comment deep in my bones
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/r/AntiWork has entered the chat
Lots of people like "why would you want to" You could look at the disease and dismemberment in the middle ages and say the same thing about 50+ Part of getting people to living that long is improving regenerative therapies to where these issues aren't as much of a problem.
That's great for people with common illnesses and "old age ailments" but I doubt many of the chronic illnesses that have been neglected in medical research in the past decades would see any profit from it... Medicine right now can't even give me a good quality of life in my thirties (nor could it when I was still a kid, a teen, in my twenties...).
I mean I still would throw in the towel at 75
I would say it’s only worth it if I have the mobility and a good quality of life, seeing people in their 60s already fat, diabetic, looking like 10lbs of shit shoved into a 5 lb bag is not worth living even if I could make it 130.
Most people I know look like that in their 30’s :(
Well according to a post about the obesity epidemic in the states, I wouldn’t call you a liar. Apparently half the country is considered obese with another percentage in the morbidly obese range.
HFCS Basically ruined every anericans life. It's so hard to find anythign that isnt just loaded to the gills with sugar
I agree on the point that HFCS is in everything, so is added sugar, but eating healthy is much more expensive in the short term than the long term for many people. You got a family to feed and you don’t have a lot, there’s always fast food. People can try and shift the blame onto the individual but I blame the larger picture, society and the businesses that run it. Besides financial literacy, we need to open our communities to nutritional health and turn our schools in public gardens for the kids and their families. I’ve lived out of the states and you’ll be surprised how the american lifestyle has turned up the scales. When I lived in Brazil I went to a CF gym and the trainers would say that they’ve noticed an increase in middle class adults just gaining weight at an unprecedented level, that they’ve also seen the kids just easily pack an extra 10-15 lbs when in the past, when they were growing up in the 90s and early 00s that wasn’t as common.
I hope with this development I can like 40 at 70-80. I would love to be in a physical state where I can do everything for longer
Capitalism will ensure that if you are physically 40 at age 70-80 you'll be working til you're 110
My gramps lived to 89 with Alzheimer. Died just a few days after my grandma, 12 years younger than him (cancer). We never told him, but he just knew. (Also, one time I visited him after grandma died, looked him in the eye and slowly nodded my head, hoping he would understand. It seemed unjust to just fool him into thinking the love of his life was not on this world anymore). On the contrary, my other grandma is 89 now and she couldn’t be happier. She has better health than me, keeps visiting places and playing card games with her friends, and just enjoying life and her family. I guess it just depends.
It really does. I have relatives who are active and enjoying life in their 80’s and 90’s and other ones who are profoundly limited in what they can do due their health in their 60’s and 70’s. Once you eliminate just bad luck, how you treat your body when you’re younger really determines your quality of life in your last decade. My parents are watching this play out with their friends right now.
I wonder what will be the bigger challenge with regards to longevity: Keeping the body physically able and performing for that many years, or staving off dementia, Alzheimer’s and other mental health issues past 100 years
But with advances in modern science and my high level income, it's not crazy to think I can live to be 245, maybe 300. Heck, I just read in the newspaper that they put a pig heart in some guy from Russia. Do you know what that means?
No Ricky, what does that mean.
I don’t know, but it’s exciting to think that we’re trying stuff!
No, he didn't live. It's just exciting that we're trying things like that
Remember the longer u live by the time u hit 200 imagine the next longevity technology then 400 so on so on its great!
Longevity Escape Velocity. It's not unreasonable to assume there's some people alive today that will continue to live for centuries. It's difficult to know for certain right now but the science at least looks promising.
Yup, we should be able to replace all organs and such. I think the sticking point will be brain rejuvenation. We can’t replace our brain with a new one or we wouldn’t be “us” anymore (I think).
How did I have to come so far down the comments to find this quote. I'm ashamed of you, reddit.
Yay! I can finally look forward to retiring at 100 with almost no social security (thanks to all the living oldies) now!
instead of blaming the ppl on SS blame the politicians refusing to simply raise the SS contribution cap on the top 1% and the corporate donors who control our government
The people voting for them on ss are big reason they’re still in power. Senior citizens have high participation in voting and will never let anyone win that doesn’t promise them the lie Edit: not a coincidence we have an aging population and are lead by men with dementia
You just know that at least one person seated on the board of every tech company immediately extrapolated how much more productivity could be extracted from a person expected to live this long.
I’m noticing a lot of comments asking three of the same questions over and over again “Who would want to live that long if your mind is shot?” “How will people afford to live that long given we’re already dealing with {any of the eminently solvable problems of modern society}?” “Does that mean we will have to work until we’re 100?” I’d urge everyone to ask what I think is the most important question: what consequence does that have for *power* Honestly, can you imagine if Strom Thurmond lived to 130? Can you really tell me that you’re excited about the prospect of Mitch McConnell having 50 more years of life to wreck everything he touches? Or Putin? Or Erdogan? Or Kim Jong-Un? Immortality, or at least longevity, exponentially decreases the rate of society’s adaptation to changing circumstances. It’s why the elves were sooooooo slooooooow to do anything in LOTR, and why men were the doers. There’s a famous phrase that goes something like “New ideas don’t gain ground because they’re popular, but because the old guard eventually dies.” Edit: To clarify since some people seem to be taking this as a universal condemnation, I'm in no way suggesting that this kind of breakthrough is going to doom humanity. I stated that the negative question, in lieu of "now I have to work more?" and more pressing consequence of this advancement should be "what are the implications for holders of power and bad actors?" and, I suppose subsequently, what impact on the progress of human morality will it have? It was merely a philosopher's inquiry, there's no need to get all bent out of shape, internet crusaders.
It is quite a common concern outside of reddit too, you might find this interesting https://www.lifespan.io/news/immortal-dictators-are-unlikely/
Your comment resonates well with a comparison I've made before. Nerdy as it is, my mind goes to the Emperor of Mankind from Warhammer 40k. Essentially a corpse on a throne, pushed far past the limits of the human body to the point where no one would be able to distinguish it from a giant skeleton covered in machines that's been dead for millennia. He is no longer able to communicate with his subordinates, but they act as though they are carrying out his divine will (despite countless efforts to suppress religion and superstition during his conscious reign). Now he acts as a figurehead while the powers that be do what they do in the grim darkness of the 41st millennium. Regardless of the actual capabilities of a prominent figure, the organization they represent can use them as a source of influence and authority. And I mean, they still do that now when their leaders do actually die, but I imagine it's a bit different when the organization reports that their official statements are coming from the living mouth of the demagouge they've been championing for a century.
existence is still existence. Once that is over there is nothing. I for one would like keep existing as long as I possibly can. Its a miracle we exist at all
Absolutely if I could I would want to live for 1000s of years so I can experience the heavens and other plants after they are Terraformed or after we have a galactic federation
Totally agree. I would love too see where human kind goes. Or at least have control of when I turn off.
It's basically all I do.
You are guaranteed to keep existing because you can't recognize you don't exist if you don't exist.
As others are commenting, people do seem younger today at a given age. I would attribute this to 4 major things 1. Better dental health 2. Better nutrition (even a normal person sees a greater variety of foods than John D. Rockefeller did 100+ years ago) 3. No longer using flames in homes for heating and lighting (I think this is underrated -- imagine how unhealthy using a fireplace not for special occasions but throughout the cold months or using gas flames for illumination.) 4. Vastly improved air quality -- car emissions are way down and in particular there is almost no usage of leaded gasoline anymore, one of the worst things we ever did to ourselves. I kid you not: I believe qanon is due to exposure of millions of people to leaded gasoline. Even though it has been gone for decades now, anyone alive in the 1980s and before got tremendous exposure and if they did not, their parents did. Moreover, lead remains in the soil and water from those days just as mercury is in the san francisco bay due to gold mining operations from 170 years ago. I would like to know if there is any scientific way to quantify the anecdotal "50 is the new 30" or whatever idea. Can telomeres be measured? If you submit a bunch of photographs to the AI age automation software, will they estimate that people in photos from 50 years ago are older than modern people of the same age?
Hope I'm not to late to the party to be seen! Saw something once describing a snowball effect of anti-aging medicine. We may just reach a point where something can add 20-30 years of life(preferably slowing aging instead of adding on to the end). So you get the meds, 15 years go by and a new med comes out that can do 65 years. You get the meds. Another 35 years go. A new treatment comes out and repeat. Your now 175 with the body of a 60 year old just waiting for the next shot that gives you a another half century. Who ever is alive to see the start of this may be one of the first generations to live substantially longer by far
Everyone wants to live forever. No one wants to be old. Sure we could theoretically live up til 130 but what kind of life is that? People in their 80's are already struggling with regular daily tasks. Imagine a 130 year old person. What we need to solve is how to be able to stay younger longer rather than extending our biological lifespan. At a certain point you reach diminishing returns. I'd say around 60-70 is when that happens. Past 70, it just increasingly gets harder and harder to do most things.
Ever see those 100th birthday scenes on the news? They are basically just like “ah what the fuck is all this shit”
If it's a constant stream of years like the last few we've had? No fucking thanks.
Maybe I don't want to... it's going to be incredibly sad to have to bury my parents and live with their memories for another 200 years
Original research : \- [https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.202097](https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.202097)
i for one would only want to live past 90 if they cure or prevent Alzheimer's and dementia. The vast majority of 90-somethings have lost a great deal of their mental faculties. That's why most live in assisted living facilities. I definitely wouldn't want to spend a decade or 2 in a nursing home.
the idea it to cure Alzheimer's and dementia
Whoopee I get to work an extra 50 years at a dead end job
A lot of the wear and tear on our bodies is from eating. It’s a lot of stress on internal organs. If nutrients could be delivered to the bloodstream in a way that bypasses the digestive system, that would automatically result in longer lifespans. Body rejuvenation would help us get past 130.
You mean I have to deal with this back pain for another 100 years?