Age Reversal

[Assume Nothing]

... this thread isn't really worth commenting on unless you answer these questions, OP:

 

• How do you propose to stop/slow death? I'm not entirely sure what it entails, precisely. If we're saying 'we shall make a wonderpill that reverses your physical age to 'x' years back', that's rather different than saying 'we shall continue to age forever and fail to die even if we were stabbed/shot/whatever from taking a wonderpill.'
   
  
• Is it going to be universal, and how would it be funded? If it's not universal, how is it distributed? Can they change their minds? Is it exploitable? - e.g. could it be used against someone's will, like poison?
   
  
• Is it worthwhile?

[Riku3220]

I don't see anything wrong with having something that makes you physically younger so that you're still able to work in old age or something as long as people still die timely, natural deaths.

[Assume Nothing]

If it's exclusively available for the rich, then it's unfair. If it's going to be taxing on resources, then it'll pose a lot of issues. If it allows a longer lifespan without the health and fitness of youth, then it'll be a little fruitless.

 

I foresee many issues with this...

[Plugpoint]

Based on the crap I learnt for my molecular genetics exam last week I can't see this happening. Our cells age naturally because as time goes on they make more and more mistakes during replication which causes them to age and this is what leads to all sorts of diseases and conditions associated with old age such as dementia. Even if it was possible (hypothetically, because it's probably not) to significantly increase our lifespan to the extent that people on this thread are suggesting, all sorts of new diseases would spring up (back when humans only lived about 30-40 years these sorts of diseases were incredibly rare so a massively increased lifespan would only add to this), placing a massive burden on not only hospitals but the scientists who would have to research all these conditions as a priority. Bit of a daft idea so thank god it'll never happen in our lifetime.

 

Sorry that's not the easiest thing to read but I'm pretty tired lol.

[TTanT]

Ethically: Some people would be able to afford these pills, other wouldn't. That isn't ethical.

Socially: Crime rates could spike due to people stealing pills. (50 years in prison isn't as bad if you can live an extra 200 years.)

Religiously: Religions everywhere would flip their shit.

Ecologically: Our expanding population would demolish rainforests and other life-harboring areas of Earth. Thousands of species would fall.

Economically: Prices would skyrocket of food, fuel, energy, housing, etc.

 

Only plus side would be people dying less from natural causes.

 

I think old people SHOULD die. Death is a part of life. If you can't except that then either you're too young to (understandable), or are clinging to what is a brief part of a greater cycle far too fiercely.

Even if you're an atheist, death is what makes life sweet. Immortality would get boring fast.

 

Accept* First time I've seen that misused. Sorry lol but I had to do it.

I can't believe I did that. <_<

I KNOW BETTER, I KNOW I DO.

I'm just going to go ahead and lie and say I was really tired while typing that or something.

 

Also, when did this get its own thread? I could've sworn this started off as a tangent in the Today thread or something....

[Vezon Dash]

Ethically: Some people would be able to afford these pills, other wouldn't. That isn't ethical.

Socially: Crime rates could spike due to people stealing pills. (50 years in prison isn't as bad if you can live an extra 200 years.)

Religiously: Religions everywhere would flip their shit.

Ecologically: Our expanding population would demolish rainforests and other life-harboring areas of Earth. Thousands of species would fall.

Economically: Prices would skyrocket of food, fuel, energy, housing, etc.

 

Only plus side would be people dying less from natural causes.

 

I think old people SHOULD die. Death is a part of life. If you can't except that then either you're too young to (understandable), or are clinging to what is a brief part of a greater cycle far too fiercely.

Even if you're an atheist, death is what makes life sweet. Immortality would get boring fast.

 

Accept* First time I've seen that misused. Sorry lol but I had to do it.

I can't believe I did that. <_<

I KNOW BETTER, I KNOW I DO.

I'm just going to go ahead and lie and say I was really tired while typing that or something.

 

Also, when did this get its own thread? I could've sworn this started off as a tangent in the Today thread or something....

 

It was in the "real life help and advice" thread. Randox made it its own thread.

[Bonez899]

Ethically: Some people would be able to afford these pills, other wouldn't. That isn't ethical.

Socially: Crime rates could spike due to people stealing pills. (50 years in prison isn't as bad if you can live an extra 200 years.)

Religiously: Religions everywhere would flip their shit.

Ecologically: Our expanding population would demolish rainforests and other life-harboring areas of Earth. Thousands of species would fall.

Economically: Prices would skyrocket of food, fuel, energy, housing, etc.

 

Only plus side would be people dying less from natural causes.

 

I think old people SHOULD die. Death is a part of life. If you can't except that then either you're too young to (understandable), or are clinging to what is a brief part of a greater cycle far too fiercely.

Even if you're an atheist, death is what makes life sweet. Immortality would get boring fast.

 

Ethically: In the start the pills would only be available to the super rich, eventually the average joe would be able to buy them, but an older less effective version. Same with almost all technolodgy.

Socially: You would scale the time sentences accordingly, and if you are talking about pills you would have to take them atleast once a week for full effects, therefore you can remove the pills from them.

Religiously: True, with those pills almost every god and diety would be null and useless in their greatest sense.

Ecologically: We are already looking into colonizing other planets and which will be first, I think that before we reach breaking point that will be feasible. Along with them developing new and better ways to feed more people with less space/time.

Economically: Everything is becoming renewable for most of those. We can assume other planets would have more minerals, along with the proven fact that many, many minerals on in the sea along the bottom.

[Tim]

Watch Doctor Who - The Lazarus Experiment episode. A perfect example as to why we shouldnt be dabbling around in bio-engineering our bodies for extended life and why I personally feel, especially in this age, that aging just needs to happen as it currently is.

[Assume Nothing]

You can't base your predictions on a science fiction series. I don't think we have any idea of what might happen if we do bioengineer our bodies, but a reasonable prediction would be that there's some rather unsavory effects that old-age could have. We could only speculate, and it's pretty difficult if we don't even know what this wonderpill does.

[Randox]

Religion was an interesting point, and lithe as I am to draw attention to it here, because I've had my fill, I would like to point out that not all life forms on earth suffer from senescence (cellular old age). I think its only known to exist in either very simple life, or in cold blooded animals (so there aren't any immortal mammals known to us). Lobsters are thought to be one of these creatures, since they become increasingly fertile with age, and only seem to die when they either suffer physical injury, or succumb to disease. It is thought that if you could prevent either of these things from happening to them, they could probably indefinitely will no ill effects (physically) from age. My point being it doesn't defy the natural order (well, it does for us) because there are a few life forms on Earth that simply don't ever die of old age.

 

It is suspected that in the case of lobsters, and other 'immortal' creatures, that they constanly rebuild the telomeres on their genetic code which would allow their cells to multiply indefinately without any ill effect, and by keeping them long, might also prevent cancer, since cancer tends to be found in individuals (humans) who have shorter telomeres. Eventually, the cells of most animals become unable to reproduce when they don't have enough telomere left to protect the part of a chromosone that actually contains information (in computers, if you had a copying system that removes the last 8 bits off any copied data, you could build in a long string of say zeroes at the end which mean nothing, and are just sacrificial so that the data can be copied many times before you start losing data). There are ways around it I think, but they lead to very high cellular mortality and rapid corruption of the genetic code, until there is not enough information left to produce a viable cell anymore.

 

The resource issue should be obvious. Either we would have to stop reproducing entirely, or eventually there are going to be too many people. It might take a very long time, but it will have to happen eventually if the number of people alive is constantly rising. On the other hand, we are doing an excellent job of making that problem a reality without the aid of immortality.

 

Some other issues:

- Crimminal system. As mentioned, this would make life sentances in particular a huge problem (if its literal) since it makes it ludicrously expensive (this would happen across the board as all sentences get lengthened), and will lead to an even larger crowding crises than the one we are already facing. In short, the death penalty will probably stop being optional because no one wants to actually pay for someone to sit through their 300 year sentence (which by the way are things that really exist today. You don't need to change anything, because those are already very real).

-Social issues which I don't care to get into right now. Other people are covering that nicely.

-A different social issue where if you think death is devestaing to people now, think about how much worse its going to be when a child is robbed of their 3,000 years, or your wife of 2,000 dies. When other people die (because other people will still die to disease and violence), it is going to be a whole lot worse, because it will be an even larger tragedy. It will also breed a culter where we will at least for a time, be terrified of death, because it will become an even less accepted part (and risk) of our lives.

-Not that we aren't already messing with it, but this will halt evolution (we mess with it by defying natural selection and allowing people that would have died of their genetic defects such as myself, to live and potentially procreate. With everyone living, all the mutations get kept and the best genes are not being preserved). Now, if we don't procreate, this wont kill us, but it will still keep our biology from advancing, and that might kill us when things like diseases which already evolve as if everything else is at a standstill have a few thousand years to work out something that our immune systems can't deal with, and our medicine can't keep up.

 

And as a last point, there are biological problems besides age that mess you up when you live too long. Everyone here has probably lived long enough to notice that years go by faster the older you get, and even hours in the day might seem shorter. An hour for me seems to be about half as long (or less) than when I was half my current age. That doesn't stop. The older you get, the more time flies by. You also run into the fact that the brain doesn't have a delete system for its memory, and at some point it is going to get bogged down. We are potentially capable of storing a lot more information in our heads than we can actually deal with, and sooner or later your brain is going to get clogged up, and everything is going to blur together. Our brains were not built to accommodate unlimited life, and sooner or later, if they get the chance, it is going to get really messy as your brain has to try and cope with thousands of years of memories, and all the accociations that come with them, which will eventually slow your cognative processes down as your brain has to go through ever expanding piles of data to make a decision on anything.

 

 

Oh, and suicide will have to become legal, because sooner or later, we are going to get tired of living, and we are going to be ready to die.

[Vezon Dash]

I don't really know how we would go about lengthening/replacing telomeres. It is my understanding that we would have to make the DNA Polymerase III and Primase more efficient/precise to accomplish this. (biology majors, correct me if I am wrong)

 

 

I think that they would need to make suicide clinics with humane forms of suicide such as a lethal injection after you get put under anesthesia or something of the sort.

[Will H]

My current position when it comes to immortality is this: I would love to live youthfully for 300 years, because I don't see the story of interstellar exploration finishing in any satisfactory way during my lifetime. I don't particularly mind the concept of out-living people I know, I think there's far more to the world than that, but the world will get stale, and I think that's at the 300 year mark.

[Randox]

I don't really know how we would go about lengthening/replacing telomeres. It is my understanding that we would have to make the DNA Polymerase III and Primase more efficient/precise to accomplish this. (biology majors, correct me if I am wrong)

 

 

I think that they would need to make suicide clinics with humane forms of suicide such as a lethal injection after you get put under anesthesia or something of the sort.

Biology is not my strong suit, and most of my hobby study of bio is the nervous and immune systems, so I hope I am not talking completely out of my ass here.

 

My understanding is that there is a chemical that your body can use to rebuild the telomeres, and that the trick would be to activate whichever gene it is that gets your cells to start using it for that function (which is probably what the immortal creatures like lobsters are doing, except without the need for drugs). The point being, our bodies can rebuild them on their own (which makes sense, seeing as our bodies built themselves in the first place), you just need to get it to actually do it.

 

And until we manage to do this, we can't really prove that it works. I guess we are still at the mice stage, and getting them to rebuild their telomeres does at least slow down their signs of aging, so even if it can't make us immortal, it can probably make us live longer (because there might be another ingredient that we are missing).

[Tim]

You can't base your predictions on a science fiction series. I don't think we have any idea of what might happen if we do bioengineer our bodies, but a reasonable prediction would be that there's some rather unsavory effects that old-age could have. We could only speculate, and it's pretty difficult if we don't even know what this wonderpill does.

 

my point (if for once you listen) was that in 2012, RIGHT NOW, The limited technology we have and this planet, we cant support something like age-reducing drugs. if the average person slowed their age 50%, then think about how many extra children each day will be born on an already increasing populated world? We probably wont be shooting off to new planets in the next 200 years, inventing something to create more humans is foolish. I know dieing and aging isnt something anyone wants, but the point is if we altar how we are right now in this Century, well basically it'll be a shitstorm.

[Assume Nothing]

If that was your point, you could have referenced the recent Torchwood episodes on 'Miracle day' and the potential implications of population booms.

[Vezon Dash]

If that was your point, you could have referenced the recent Torchwood episodes on 'Miracle day' and the potential implications of population booms.

 

Maybe he doesn't watch Torchwood. You are making an assumption.

[Assume Nothing]

What's your point? 'Oh, it is an ASSUMPTION.' 'You're making an ASSUMPTION.' 'You're ASSUMING that a god doesn't exist.' 'That's an ASSUMPTION.' Is there anything you're trying to imply here? Anything specific? If it's an assumption, what's wrong with it? Is it necessarily evil? Do you know what an 'assumption' is, without going into a dictionary to get the definition? This specific criticism that you seem to enjoy is rather moot, especially so without explanation which you seem to enjoy not including. It would almost seem as though you know your criticisms are flawed, but you say them intentionally to invoke reactions.

 

It is only reasonable to suggest that he does watch Torchwood, since the series are of the same genre (whereby one is a parent series of the other). It's bitterly ironic that you're assuming that I'm making an assumption, now who's the fool here?

[Vezon Dash]

you say them intentionally to invoke reactions.

 

I got a reaction didn't I?

 

now who's the fool here?

 

I never said I wasn't a fool. I gracefully accept the fact that I have an inferior mental capacity to yours.

 

In any case, I just glanced over at your user name and it said "Assume Nothing." I just thought that it was slightly ironic.

 

 

And more so on topic.

 

And until we manage to do this, we can't really prove that it works. I guess we are still at the mice stage, and getting them to rebuild their telomeres does at least slow down their signs of aging, so even if it can't make us immortal, it can probably make us live longer (because there might be another ingredient that we are missing).

 

Does this mean that we actually have slowed the aging of mice or that we are working on slowing the aging process? If you have a link or something, I'd like to see more information about this.

[Assume Nothing]

you say them intentionally to invoke reactions.

 

I got a reaction didn't I?

Of course you did, that's the point of debate. It was somewhat less than cordial because you seem rather intent on getting some form of twisted gratification from receiving a response.

 

 

now who's the fool here?

 

I never said I wasn't a fool. I gracefully accept the fact that I have an inferior mental capacity to yours.

 

In any case, I just glanced over at your user name and it said "Assume Nothing." I just thought that it was slightly ironic.

It should be interpreted colloquially. I chose the name from the phrase 'assume nothing, question everything', for your info. I'll submit that your posts are irritating, because it seems that you can't seem to convey an ambiguous point without some unnecessary snark.

 

I'm curious though, when have I ever stated and/or suggested that I have a superior mental capacity, precisely? I hardly think raising an objection to unsound logic is indicative of that.

 

 

And more so on topic.

 

And until we manage to do this, we can't really prove that it works. I guess we are still at the mice stage, and getting them to rebuild their telomeres does at least slow down their signs of aging, so even if it can't make us immortal, it can probably make us live longer (because there might be another ingredient that we are missing).

 

Does this mean that we actually have slowed the aging of mice or that we are working on slowing the aging process? If you have a link or something, I'd like to see more information about this.

As for this, I'd guess it would be useful to find out what aging really is - for that is to say, to pose the question 'why does aging cells deteriorate?' It could be possible that, in theory, we should be able to live forever. I think that would be more so of a curse than a gift, though - our mortality is what gives purpose to life (request elaboration if you wish, we could make this a philosophical topic if you want).

[Vezon Dash]

Well as Randox pointed out on the last page, it is the fact that DNA replication becomes faulty over time due to the degradation of the telomeres on the ends of each strand of DNA. Just in case you didn't know, the telomeres are small stands of non-coding DNA on the end of the DNA strand. These non-coding strands inevitable become damaged, erased, or lost (which is their purpose, to protect the important part of the DNA). After millions of replications though, these telomeres get damaged to the point where they no longer protect the DNA.

[Assume Nothing]

I'm not entirely sure how the wonder-pill will work, as this is entirely abstract until we can analyze the effects of a proposed 'solution'.

[Vezon Dash]

All that it would need to do is perfect DNA replication I suppose, but there is probably quite a bit that we don't honestly know. I wonder if there is a coding in the DNA that makes our bodies age?

 

You're going to hate me referencing this, but in the Bible God did state that after the death of Moses that no man will live over the age of 120. Since his recorded death, nobody has actually lived to be that old. Maybe there is a higher reason that we all eventually die. (of course, the majority of people would call this complete bullshit)

[Assume Nothing]

You know my stance on that: it's a meaningless claim because it is based on rather obvious human limitations, e.g. calculated by the deterioration rate of organs. It's a bit like the claims that pork should not be consumed - it's based on the likeness of the pig to a human (in terms of organs like the heart), and because pigs didn't eat very selectively so they'd get a lot of disease. The point is, it's based on obvious facts that we can observe, rather than divinely inspired wisdom.

 

According to a quick Google search, Jeane Calment lived until the age of 122, so the '120 limit' claim seems a little inaccurate. It would be interesting to see if there's any correlation between the people with the longest lives; I'd imagine vegetarianism would be rather common amongst them?

[Vezon Dash]

Most of them are probably women.

[My_Eggs]

I haven't read all the posts in this thread, so I don't know if this has been brought up yet (it probably has), but just because they may be able to reverse the aging process one day, it doesn't mean there will be no more having to worry about dieing too soon. There's plenty of ways to die that aren't old age, in fact, there are a lot of other ways to die that reversing the aging process wouldn't solve. I'm not saying it wouldn't be cool to live long enough to see this happen, but after they figure this out they need to figure out a way to bring people back to life after they die from one of the numerous other ways out there. Once they do that, then the issue of "what if I die before they come out with something amazing that I would really like to see" will be solved.

 

Though if they were to figure out a way to solve death entirely, I imagine we would have some serious overcrowding issues relatively shortly afterwards. :thumbdown: