Without having read more than the title and the first 3 lines, it's all bull.

The assumption that "we" as humanity live longer and longer is fundamentally wrong. People live 80-90 years today, and they lived 80-90 years some 2000-3000 years ago, if nobody killed them and if they did not die from the pestilence. Diogenes, Plato and Socrates are examples (of which exist many) that people did not necessarily die at 40 as we usually like to assume.

The only difference today is that the average lifespan is higher, the reasons being mostly that today

• birth and child mortality is by order of magnitude lower
• incidentially having an appendicitis or some infective disease such as typhus does not automatically mean death
• it is less likely that some Roman chops off your head or some Hun burns down your house unexpectedly
• you are not as likely to be forced going on a crusade, and rogue knights does not break down your door twice per year, looting, raping, and killingSo, today, certainly more people live for 80-90 years (and some over 100 years), but people do not live longer in general.
  
  Fighting aging is not as trivial as it sounds either, because apoptosis is a very important and necessary mechanism. If you manage to "cheat" your body over that, worse things than just aging will happen (it's the primary countermeasure to cancer, for example). Other factors, such as uptake of (ever increasing!) environmental poisons are also unlikely to be "under control" any time soon, as are factors like calcification. The ever-decreasing (and increasingly decreasing) quality of food during the last 25 years is not something that would sustain the hypothesis of increased life spans for the future, nor is the increasing high-calory diet, which even in development countries is kind of "normal" now.
  
  The claim that the first person to live 150 years is already born is ridiculous, too. The oldest living person is 114 years old. Which means that under the best conditions, the claim cannot possibly be verified for at least another 36 years. Assuming that this first person to live 150 years is not among the already 90-110 year olds, what avail is there in verifying the claim at all, none of us, including Mr. de Grey, will be left.

Without having read more than the title and the first 3 lines, it's all bull.

That's a shame, because you would have looked much less foolish had you read anything about his proposal for how to get humans to live that long.

I had read this article on it a while back. It gave me an impression that it is possible in principle but there is a lot of invention and "grunt work" so that it'll happen in any sort of time frame is only a guess, or bet. Apparently it's the same guy. I can't judge whether it really is a piece of shit, but, it's certainly not what samoth is talking about.

As far as I know, neither is apoptosis; this is something that occurs continually, daily. It's not like when you hit 80 all your cells suddenly start to die. Apoptosis lets cells off themselves when they shouldn't exist. It even happens before birth when cell death splits your webbed fingers.

[quote name='samoth' timestamp='1309988999' post='4831991']
Without having read more than the title and the first 3 lines, it's all bull.

That's a shame, because you would have looked much less foolish had you read anything about his proposal for how to get humans to live that long.
[/quote]
Maybe. Though reading a fool's ramblings does not make you less of a fool. And frankly, someone seriously considering humans to live for 1000 years is a fool. Yes, many people have been called fools throughout history even though they were right. But that doesn't mean that any fool isn't a fool. Gosh, those were many fools in a single paragraph...
Anyway, my point is that this guy just doesn't understand (or rather, doesn't want to understand, because he makes his living from it) how nature works. Ridley Scott knows more about aging than Mr. de Grey.

Plus, his facts aren't quite right. For example, the claim about "currently adding 3 months every year" is a wrongful interpretation (seeing how Mr de Grey has a grade in the matter, and thus an accidential misunderstanding is rather unlikely, one should probably say "lie") of average life statistics -- which, by the way, is no longer true for some EU countries, the trend has inverted.
If you consider the life spans of the 100 eldest verified living persons and compare the 1990 and the 2000 deaths among them, the average life span among them is 115,7 years for the 1990s group, and 114,6 years for the 2000s group. Admittedly the sample size is not terribly great, but according to Mr. de Grey's claim of adding 3 months per year, the 2000s group should live very significantly (2 1/2 years) longer, which should show even at a modest sample size. The data not only doesn't show that, it suggests the opposite. The oldest overall person is in the 1990s group too, by the way.

The magical anti-aging treatments mentioned in his article are science fiction at best, unrealistic otherwise. A human body is not a car, as for "maintenance". Gene therapy and immune stimulation are nice buzzwords, and sure enough Mr. de Grey will find enough idiots giving him money for those, akin to the people who pay a fortune for being deep-frozen after their death. But if you have only a little insight, you will know that gene therapy is... problematic at best (to use an optimistic wording) and stimulating the immune system is exactly what you would not want to do at the same time (as it would worsen the problems). As I've pointed out in my earlier post, making cells live longer is not a working solution either. Cells are meant to die, they do all the time. One of the main reasons why we can live as long as we do is that cells die.
Stem cells are interesting and amazing, and they might indeed be used to repair some defects in the future, but they won't magically keep you young either. They won't for example remove calcification, and they won't solve other issues that arise with prolonged life.

The technical part aside, even assuming Mr. de Grey's claims were in principle possible, it would be most unlikely to happen, except for singular cases ("all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others"). The reason being that there are extremely strong financial motives for people not to live too long. Governments and insurance companies are currently working very hard to decrease the average life span (e.g. by insufficient diabetes treatment and insufficient primary care), because there is not enough money left for either patient-care, elderly-care, and old-age pensions. If everyone lived 100 years, it would be a desaster.

The magical anti-aging treatments mentioned in his article are science fiction at best, unrealistic otherwise.

The magical anti-aging treatments already have prototypes that are working on mice.

Glad to see someone standing up to this bullshit, for bullshit it is.

Death is designed into our whole being. You dying happens not by accident any more than you shedding skin cells. As the multicellular organism you are, it is advantagous to continue working with a subset of them every now and then, whether its you shedding skin cells or shedding all cells but your germ line. Infact it is an essential mechanism for maintaining cooperation between these multiple cells.

Our body emerges by a route of embryological development which generally does not carry any explicit information as to how our body is to be organized. If you cut off your finger, it does not grow back, and thats but a metaphor for the vast majority of processes going on in our bodies which are irreversible, taking damage from the forces of entropy without having anything resembling a clue or even a will as to how to counter that. We are as close to designing humans from scratch as we are to having them regrow a finger; similarly, we have nothing even resembling anything of a clue how to redesign our brain from the ground up to be entirely renewable indefinitly (and thats what it would take), rather than the machine designed to wither that it in fact is.

Not that longlevity research is a waste of time; I dont doubt that pushing our design to its best could easily yield a decade of good health here and there. But there is nothing to believe anyone is going to grow a thousand years old, anytime soon.

It saddens me to see that so many otherwise intelligent people fall for the silly mixture of extrapolations and plain science fiction that entertainers like this peddle. Youve got to love like his pretending to actually 'work' on any of these therapies; i used to dwell in a bay area social circle buzzing with these types, knowing some of the figurehead personally, and trust me, there isnt any person who actually ever enters a biology lab who pays any mind to these people (SENS, methusula foundation, whathaveyou). They are just a bunch of grown up science fiction geeks that like to make themselves feel important by making it seem like they are the leader of a movement. And it gives the papers something to write about, so everybody is happy, no?

Glad to see someone standing up to this bullshit, for bullshit it is.

Death is designed into our whole being. You dying happens not by accident any more than you shedding skin cells. As the multicellular organism you are, it is advantagous to continue working with a subset of them every now and then, whether its you shedding skin cells or shedding all cells but your germ line. Infact it is an essential mechanism for maintaining cooperation between these multiple cells.

Cellular level life and death are not exactly the same as the life and death of an intelligent being. A cell doesn't become more productive the longer it ages. A human very realistically could if we overcame the limitations of our bodies should they be allowed to age naturally. If you just think about the portion of your life you spend learning the stuff we already know it's horribly inefficient for us not to try to live longer.

From a natural evolution standpoint sure it makes sense for us to die, but we don't really need natural evolution anymore. We needed it when we had to adapt to our environments, but we are at a state where we can adapt our environments to us.

[quote name='Eelco' timestamp='1310070556' post='4832474']
Glad to see someone standing up to this bullshit, for bullshit it is.

Death is designed into our whole being. You dying happens not by accident any more than you shedding skin cells. As the multicellular organism you are, it is advantagous to continue working with a subset of them every now and then, whether its you shedding skin cells or shedding all cells but your germ line. Infact it is an essential mechanism for maintaining cooperation between these multiple cells.

Cellular level life and death are not exactly the same as the life and death of an intelligent being. A cell doesn't become more productive the longer it ages. A human very realistically could if we overcame the limitations of our bodies should they be allowed to age naturally. If you just think about the portion of your life you spend learning the stuff we already know it's horribly inefficient for us not to try to live longer.

From a natural evolution standpoint sure it makes sense for us to die, but we don't really need natural evolution anymore. We needed it when we had to adapt to our environments, but we are at a state where we can adapt our environments to us.
[/quote]

Yes, there is no reason why a living organism Must die. As it is we already replace basically every cell in the body multiple times over a normal life cycle. If we can find a better way to do this that ensures there is no degradation, then there is no reason for the greater life form to not continue for greater periods of time.

I don't expect that I will live to 1000, but I expect my chances of surviving past 100 aren't that bad. And I wouldn't expect the chances of living to 150 being the expected norm to be all that bad in another few generations.

This is kinda inevitable, technology is advancing at such a rate that we can replace organs, re-write genes, etc..within 50 years.. The bigger question is what will a society of near immortal humans look like? Most people are not gonna like working in a minimum wage job for eternity.. I suspect human society will go through a critical phase change within 20 years due to the advances of life extension technology and the advent of strong AIs.. A phase change meaning a near instantaneous re-ordering of society and social networks, the biggest question is will human society change into a solid, locked into a rigid immutable form, or a gas infinite variable possibilities.. We'll see soon enough..

-ddn

This is kinda inevitable, technology is advancing at such a rate that we can replace organs, re-write genes, etc..within 50 years.. The bigger question is what will a society of near immortal humans look like?

We will look like energy balls.