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The probability really says no here - while it is possible for biological organisms to persist, it’s something else entirely to rewrite the biology of an already grown organism.
You’re essentially balancing spinning plates while the universe pelts you with gravel. You’ll live with one or two plates gone, but eventually something critical fails.
To reliably live beyond 70, we’d already need to cure dementia (we’re still not sure what many types are) and cancer (unlikely for a while yet); that’s not even getting into solving the problem of restoring lost function (which we’re really bad at).
Thats why I don’t usually get excited when I hear about revolutions in reversing aging. You really think you’re gonna get one of those treatments? Or will it be for Musk, Bezos, Putin, etc.?
It will be for the worst people you know.
And if it takes fresh organs to pull off, selling your own organs for cash will suddenly become legal.
They are not invulnerable to bullets or drone strikes
I’ve always wanted my own Pocket Putin! I’d get to see him in all my favorite games.
I said exactly this about Bryan Johnson a little while back. Someone was trying to defend his weirdness by claiming he was just trying to help humanity, and I was like BS. He’s trying to help himself. If he ever DOES find a way to significantly extend human life, you can bet your ass that it’ll be patented and cost a fucking fortune. Only him and his billionaire cronies will be able to afford it.
they can afford the initial release. sure. but lets not pretend the world best and brightest wont attempt day and night to steal the information needed to make it public.
the dam will break, eventually.
Then you get a whole different problem, politics among elf-length lifespans of humans. With a side of feeding a population that gets even more exponential the better the tech gets.
yep
Nah, it’ll be expensive but just barely affordable for a decent size of the population.
The retirement age will be increased to 150.
You can still just blow their heads off.
Seems like nobody is doing that though. So that’s a bummer.
Will do!
WTF happened to the linked picture? Looks pretty deep fried.
Good eye
For a more in depth illustration of this concept, see Altered Carbon.
I loved the first season of this show. Second season was rough.
yeah thought the same, apparently the new actor flat out refused to try to act like the guy from season 1 which is a big reason why it fell off so hard imo
Yeah, I feel the same as you and darkdemize.
The new actor is also… The Falcon, in the Marvel Universe…
But anyway, the first season is quite good!
Also the show is based off of… either one or multiple books… I should probably read 'em at some point.
Book tastes being subjective, I actually found myself feeling the same way about the books. I loved the first one, and struggled to get through the second one, and DNF the third one.
We’re not going to live 200 years the rich and wealthy will. We’re going to be short-lived slaves
We’re kinda already in that situation. The wealthy can afford medical treatments and life prolonging procedures, as well as healthier food and circumstances. They already live longer while we suffer and die.
But governments will see a way to turn expensive retirees (in civilized countries that look after them) into taxpayers again. So, long lived slaves…
Depends on how expensive it is to increase a person’s lifespan.
It’ll be biotech, so low production cost, high IP gatekeeping costs (pharma patents). Something on this scale of financial and political (once people know it’s out there riots will be just the beginning) implication will lead to some government somewhere nationalizing it and then it’ll be on for young and old (pun intended).
Would you like to build a better future?
Let’s see…. Ultra wealthy exchanging their blood for the blood of young people to live longer, and in the meantime US life expectancy dropping… yep. Checks out
Dick Cheney is still alive. The future is now
Remember, “humanity” hasn’t had a significant increase. The only increases are for the ridiculously wealthy. For the rest of us, they keep us alive just until we can’t work anymore.
that’s too pessimistic. I got a pacemaker and defibrillator implanted in my chest, I’m on the transplant list waiting for a new heart and I’ve taken like 10 normal heart meds and some that weren’t even fully released. without that I would’ve been dead at 15
was all of that treatment available to the average citizen?
yes, I live in Germany. the most expensive part was ordering food. I got free food from the hospital too but it doesn’t taste good.
Depends what country you’re in. In the UK thanks to the NHS, yes.
And how much has that cost you and your family?
Also - congratulations to you, I respect the struggle you’ve faced.
nothing expect the food I sometimes ordered because the free hospital food isn’t that good
I’m so happy for you! Today you learn the world has gotten better! https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy
Just improved hygiene and treatments for babies have essentially doubled humanities life expectancy in the last century. But even restricting to older cohorts (ie, assuming you live to 70, how many more years?), life spans have grown. The vast majority of people are not wealthy, so these gains are very much seen by the poorer folks.
That’s not true look at Loma Linda your regular people live up to 86 years, longer than any regular sized state.
I originally wrote this as a reply to another thread, but this one seems better fitting.
I wish billionaires, leaders and all the power-greedy alike, those who dream of Übermensch-esque cheating on Death so to keep exploiting humans and other lifeforms, a nice and inescapable immortality, full of health and vitality!
Sure, let 'em have it, why not?
Let 'em be fully alive while the entire surface of the Earth exceeds 100°C (~210°F) and melts every single AC unit after so much greed led by the fairy tale of Industrial Revolution’s infinite growth. Let 'em be fully alive to powerlessly watch as entire oceans boil up and the Earth Venusforms.
Let 'em be fully alive when Sol morphs into a Red Giant, swallowing the Earth together with mansions, artificial isles, yachts, jets, jewelry, costly art and furniture, and other wealthy. Let 'em be fully alive to see as their gold melts with the heat, their money bills start to carbonize and their bodies are somehow immune to it.
Let 'em be fully alive when every cosmic body from Andromeda turn the Milky Way into a chaotic bowling game, as they pointlessly try to deflect from countless debris so not to be spaghettified and flattened by cosmic boulders like petty Looney Tunes characters.
Let 'em be fully alive when the entire Cosmos reach the ultimate fate of either Big Freeze, Big Rip, Big Bounce or Big Crunch. Let them feel as their molecules can’t undergo chemical reactions anymore, let them find themselves stuck alive inside amorphous, halted goo. Let 'em feel as their individual atoms split at the subatomic level led by infinite cosmic expansion. Let them be cosmically cornered like tiny scared mice, either by a highly-energetic wall of plasma from the Big Bang of another universe, or by the entire fabric of spacetime continuum as it converges into a singularity point again.
Last but not least, let 'em be fully alive when the almighty Reaper comes and knocks at their biological doors, but since they can’t die, they’ll be stuck into inescapable and endless “nuisance” from an invisible scythe.
Let 'em wish they could be mortal again, let 'em beg Death Herself to grind their pitiful existences to a halt while She beautifully ignores their cries: “So you chose immortality, dear hominid? How nice is it to feel my utter-sharp scythe poking you without you ending up dying? How nice is to feel my blazingly-cold touch without being consumed spiritually as you got no spirit anymore, Sir Monopoly Monocles?”
Death is too easy of a punishment for 'em: the Dark Scarlet Goddess is too beautiful and lovely with Her sharp yet tender claws and long scythe. Rather, I wish 'em the entirety of cosmic eternity, with all whistles and bells inseparable from an untamed cosmos whose laws they can’t change, no matter how much wealthy or military titles they got to themselves, because the cosmos doesn’t give a nought about hominid self-awards.
“Live longer as imposter, Speck of stardust!” 🖖
I propose we find a better way to deal with horrible world leaders than waiting for them to die of old age.
It is not possible for a human to live 200 years. 150 would be more than about the absolute maximum. Your body has stem cells and they put forth cells for the body pre-programmed for cell death after a term where they’re replaced by new stem cells.
There are only so many copies in those stem cells to say nothing of the degradation of the DNA over time. For human history the maximum age has never changed, the average age has wildly fluctuated but they have had super old people going back into antiquity.
No advances in medicine have changed either the degradation of DNA or the lack of stem cell copies in the body to live beyond the maximum age.
The maximum age hasn’t changed because its increase is irrelevant for the sake of trait propagation. In fact, fast breeding population with regular turnaround can deal with environmental fluctuations way better than a long living one.
There’s nothing inherent to multicellular biology that prevents immortality. Every problem preventing us from living longer and healthier has been solved by evolution somewhere else. Often in a way that’s insultingly similar to how our bodies already work. Hell, good chunk of solutions is present in our genome never to be expressed!
But then evolution is all about populations of borderline inadequate survivors. Turns out, being depressed, hurting, and cancerous in your fifties is just good enough.
Exactly. We’re programmed to die of old age, not because it’s impossible for things to be otherwise, but because it was so darn advantageous. It speeds up iteration, allowing the genes to evolve at a faster rate. Evolving immortally would be an expense without much benefit, so it generally wouldn’t happen naturally.
Yes we could evolve to live longer, but as you point out we are not, and science is no where near rewriting the code to fix that in designer babies let alone already old rich pricks.
Naturally it would take a long time and it is hard to see how we would evolve there, but parrots, some turtles, tortoises, sharks, sturgeon, and idk what else have done it.
Greenland sharks live over 500 years I think I saw on a post on the big site.
It’s not an inherent property of matter. The fact that two 30 years old can make a zero year old baby means it’s strictly a software issue.
But also: good leaders would live longer.
Evil ones are always stressed something will come topple them. You cannot be a dictator without living in fear yourself.
Fear creates hatred, and hatred greed.
The only cure to an evil leader is being shot.
Good leaders usually step down on their own anyway so a longer lifespan won’t change much
Something about prefering a decent retirement instead of being power hungry until the last second i guess. Then again, we have dudes like Bernie Sanders out there speaking up and fighting well past what he would need to retire comfortably.
When we deal with fascists, all rules must be broken.
Safeguard socioeconomic safety, harass them, intimidate them, silence them, every single one, til the last one is gone, and no new ones rise up. Only then may we be truly liberated and go back to normal levels of combatting fascism.
If anything, I might expect that if life expectancy increased enough, that in itself might create some pause for authoritarian leaders. Consider that it is rather rare for the dictator type to peacefully retire, they usually either die of some age/disease related cause, or they get overthrown in some way (rebellions, coups etc.) Its probably not possible to entirely eliminate the risk that such a thing will happen, so long as you actually require people to do things somewhere in your system. As such, there should be a theoretical amount of time before which it becomes statistically likely that a leader will be overthrown, and when overthrown, theres a high risk of death, or at least a lot of unpleasantness (imprisonment, exile with loss of quality of life).
What happens if you manage to extend lifespans enough that the average lifespan, especially for someone with excellent health monitoring like a world leader, significantly exceeds the span of time in which it can be expected an overthrow will occur? At that point, anyone that becomes a dictator is essentially signing up for a violent end and a life shorter than it could be if they didnt earn the ire of a country’s population (one that either will have more time to build up resentments if they have access to the tech too, or who will each feel personally doomed to an early death and therefore resentful if they dont).
I dont expect that this kind of thinking would mean no more authoritarians, I suspect greed for power is a bit too strong an impulse for them all to limit themselves in their own long term interest, but it might prevent some of them, and it isnt like not having longer lifespans prevents a new generation of evil world leaders from simply taking the place of the old.
I’ll take headlines that aged badly for 200, Ken.
