Biological immortality

edited 19th Nov '15 7:11:16 AM by Khazzadumm

Honestly, I feel that biological immortality in the sense of anti-aging is kind of impossible without causing an new problem or two.

Let me put it like this: If your cells stop dying from natural age and your body is constantly making more of them. What happens next?

Cells have controlled death mechanisms that are much more important than natural aging. So nothing would change.

I would like to remind all of the nay sayers that 50 million people die every year. Whether Whether it's natural, is so entirely unimportant it's down right offensive. The current arbitrary 120 limit might as well be a built in time bomb.

What every arguments you give has to out weigh millions of nonconsensual deaths per.

Not necessarily. I believe the reduced ability of cells to reproduce is an important part of limiting cancer in old people. That's a problem you're probably going to run into if you start delaying the aging of cells.

Um, we were talking about cell death. That has nothing to do with telomerase, which is what you are talking about.

I wouldn't want to live forever - and I most likely won't, unless I find a way to reverse entropy or something - but I would like to live for as long as I feel like. A few thousand years or so at peak health wouldn't be too bad.

Well in a way, I was right that biological immortality in the sense of Wolverine's healing factor isn't an perfect solution.

We'll have to deal with overpopulation if immortality is widely available and a certain surgery or two isn't performed. But if said operation was mandatory, cue shitstorm. If immortality was expensive and controlled, cue shitstorm. If the immortal turns out to be unproductive to society, you know the punchline...

I dont much care for immortality as a squishy carbon-based lifeform that can suffer enslavement or a Fate Worse than Death down the road. I want an immeasurably more potent, aware and resilient form to go with it. One that doesn't require food, water, or air and can safely and quickly travel light years (especially when this planet and its sun dies).

edited 26th Nov '15 8:49:41 AM by nervmeister

Lots of valid posts here. I would essentially accept biological immortality out of several reasons:

1.It allows for mutability, one of the greatest qualities of life. 2.You have the opt-out option in case something goes wrong. 3.You have a greater degree of control for your existence.

Now onto the problems/dilemmas/solutions etc. Biological immortality WILL NOT LEAD TO A PARADISE just as electricity, nuclear power or internet didn't, they improved the quality of life to a whole lot of people but didn't change the fundamental nature of man.

It also probably won't change the nature of society, love, hate, greed, fear, hope, faith and other emotions and human qualities would still exist. Also, tyrants and other evildoers will still exist as they have since dawn of time and as they will 'til the end of time, it is an immutable property of life one has can choose to accept or does not.

A society of immortals would have to undergo a drastic change in practically all of it's aspects (doable) with potentially a high price (acceptable) but would probably pull through.

The greatest danger to this society would be not boredom (remember, many people today are bored out of their minds and they have a LOT of things to do) but saturation. This could be avoided by memory manipulation, maintenance of mental plasticity, or it simply would not be a problem (in the same vein that people in the past feared enlightenment, machines, communism, computers, television, disco would bring about the end of all that is good in mankind).

Additionally, whoever says that our descendants will even be human? Already you have people who would be happy to modify/alter themselves with synthetic tissues or add new senses and such. Would our altered children and grandchildren really have the same values as we do? Or believe in the same truths that we do?

Also as a side note, i read in some previous post how experiences early in our life have a significant impact to you and your development and how you are more excited about it then and less when you are older (the Arab Spring was an example). Well i'm in my early 20's and the whole deal was kinda-sorta meh, i know the historical significance and i know now with the migrant crisis and the rise of ISIS that i'm living in a significant period of history...but i feel nothing, no excitement, no fear, no joy, only a sense of distant interes (oh hey, major geopolitical changes are occurring, how interesting will it be to observe what happens next). I mention this because it resembles the bored immortal and is supposed to be terrible, but it's not. I also graduated recently and it wasn't a crowning moment of joy, it was kinda neat but nothing like zomgoneofthecrowningmomentsofmylife. Along with this i have been eating the same thing for breakfast for 20 years and i still have not gotten bored of it.

There are some web pages like Orion's Arm and Future Timeline that deal with a society of eventually immortal humans. OA has rare-ish individuals that have been going for 2000-4000 years whilst most others effectively upgrade themselves to the next cognitive level, it is a decent look at how the whole thing could be resolved in the long run. FT meanwhile has the beginnings of immortality in the 2060s but society has been changed to a such degree by 2100 (by climate and technology) that the way we think and live now is, to put it mildly, really antiquated.

I think the biggest downside to inventing biological immortality would be that lots of people would be killing each other to obtain it.

Not really, unless it was some kind of Applied Phlebotinum. You already have biohackers, people who are manipulating biological substances practically in their garages. So if a working principle was discovered it wouldn't be long before someone would be able to concoct their own bioimmortality-brew/formula. Also, if we ever achieve it, it will probably be through a combination of factors and scientific breakthroughs over a period of time. This article describes it in a nice way: http://www.futuretimeline.net/21stcentury/2060-2069.htm#longevity.

At the very least, some sort of immortality potion would probably be incredibly expensive, exclusive to the highest bidders.

edited 31st Dec '15 10:58:25 AM by AHI-3000

In the current system, probably. Though once we would reach thet kind of tech, society as itcis today would probably be significantly different (check out the entry for 2050 on the link, and 2100, though it is hypothetical it illustrates nicely how society would change with time). Also, such a potion would be very, very attractive target for all sorts of groups and people. And rest assured that others would soon produce their own versions. The A-bomb was to be solely in the hands of USA and was thought to be the best-kept secret. Not a decade later, the USSR detonated it's first atomic bomb (nowadays you can find schematics for one on the net and build it out of semi-readily available materials). It is interesting to debate and discuss such topics, but we will never find a definitive answer weather it would be "right" or "wrong" to achieve BI, just as we can't say for sure weather us developing a civilization or intelligence was good or bad.

Generally for most optimization criteria, the existence of intelligent organized optimizers is helpful. Unless their just really really bad optimizers.

I was considering making a thread dedicated to Geroscience and life extension, but as it turns out one already appears to exist, which is nice.

I’ve recently been accepted into a doctoral program in biology with a biotech oriented faculty, and the biology of aging is my central area of interest. Looking through the last page of discussion, there’s been quite a lot of progress in the field of Geroscience; we now have multiple ongoing clinical trials involving CR-mimetic candidates, namely the TAME trial of Meltafofmin and a study of NAD+ precursor NMN. One obstacle though is that both trials aren’t targeting aging officially, since the FDA doesn’t recognize aging as a disease or indicator, which makes it considerably more difficult to test getoprotector candidates in humans than it ought to be.

When it comes to the sociological implications of life extension, I’m disinclined to think it would be exclusively the domain of the ultra-wealthy, at least in developed countries. Now, very early interventions will undoubtedly be prohibitively expensive, but there are major incentives for governments of countries with demographic problems such as Japan and Germany to subsidize widespread distribution of such treatments if and when they become a well tested reality.

edited 10th Feb '18 7:12:19 AM by CaptainCapsase

In order to prevent the issues of overpopulation and economic unsustainability, that a system of Artificial Afterlife ala San Junipero would be much better to fullfill the desire of immortality. Not quite the same thing, but I have trouble seeing how actual immortality could be feasible.

For a biologically immortal population, with current rates of non-aging related death in the US, the mean lifespan would be 1000 years. Birth rates would probably also drop with rising life expectancy, which prevented the so-called population bomb projected to occur in the late 20th century. But even ignoring that, the increase in population growth that life extension would cause is not exponential, and ultimately doesn’t make the problem worse than it already is.

As far as the how part, we have a much better understanding of the underlying biological mechanisms of aging now than we did a decade ago, and while some of the factors implicated in cellular aging are daunting, none of them seem insurmountable. If you can stomach some light technical reading, the 2013 review “The Hallmarks of Aging” is an up to date overview of the major cellular mechanisms of aging.

edited 10th Feb '18 7:13:26 AM by CaptainCapsase

That seemed like an interesting article. My understanding is that true biological immortality is impossible for entropy related reasons.

Uh, what? Living beings are not closed systems.

Personally, I think that an intergenerational conflict is the second most likely risk of anti-aging medicine, if the normal turnover between generations doesn't happen. The first most likely risk is exaggerated overpopulation, of course - that people live forever does not by default stop them from having children.

Finally, anti-aging medicine will likely have side-effects. Metformin increases energy consumption, for example. Medicines acting on post-natal development may result in sterility, delayed brain development and neoteny.

If you mean immortality in the sense of eternal life, that's true, but the only absolute thermodynamic limit on life extension to the best of our understanding is the projected heat death of the universe hundreds of trillions of years from now. It doesn't help that some though that extremely well regarded biologists have argued against the possibility of anti-aging medicine on a thermodynamic basis. (I'm specifically thinking of Dr. Leonard Hayflick)

The rise in life expectancy associated with the industrial revolution was followed about a generation later by large drops in fertility rates in developed countries, and I'd expect a significant rise in healthspan to have similar consequences. Btw you just gave me a possible dissertation idea.

edited 9th Feb '18 1:25:48 PM by CaptainCapsase

From what I'm seeing on this thread, it seems that a more synthetic future with humanity using artificial replacement organs, and eventually full-body transfers similar to Ghost in the Shell, would be the future, if only due to practicality. Your lungs are starting to show signs of weakness and aren't processing oxygen as efficiently anymore? Get an artificial set. Suffered a stroke recently, with a part of your body becoming unresponsive due to dead nerves and age? Re-wire the nerves, or if that fails, get a new limb altogether.

Of course that obviously raises the question of expense - I'd imagine none of these treatments would come cheap, and we'd see the rich extending their lives to ridiculous levels. But like some other Tropers mentioned, a society that has a low birth-rate and a high amount of senior population members would likely see strong incentives into keeping their taxpayers alive and functional for as long as possible.

Oh, and another issue... one might argue that keeping around the elderly for too long may actually be detrimental to a society's growth, and in fact cause stagnation to set in. We can see this in a limited extent within communities that are set in their ways and disinterested in encouraging any new technological or social developments, so what's to say that politicians with extended lifespans wouldn't do their damnest to keep "alive" what they consider to be valuable social mores that have in fact become obsolete?

That's really not what Geroscience/Gerontology is looking at right now, and frankly the current issues with getting nerves to talk with micro-circuitry are severe enough that it doesn't seem like a particularly good path forwards at this time. Your lungs aren't working as well as they used to, but that's not because of mechanical wear and tear like you see in an automobile, it's because of imperfections in the various mechanisms of self repair found in cellular and tissue level systems which, over time lead to an accumulation of errors and the gradual deterioration of the overall organism's ability to maintain homeostasis, giving rise to age related pathologies and ultimately resulting in death when the functional decline is severe enough.

Nor is it—and I'm verging into opinion here—correct to regard aging as simply an extension of the developmental processes that occur between conception and maturity. At least in humans, aging as a sequence of planned metabolic events is increasingly disfavored by the scientific community.

What's being discussed are a variety of pharmacological, cellular, and genetic interventions targeting one or more of the previously posted hallmarks of aging. Some of them may be quite daunting to overcome completely, and there are lingering questions about how post mitotic tissues such as the brain would fare were the various factors implicated in age related degneration eliminated, however the fact that neurodegenerative disorders, while somewhat more common among centenarians and supercentenarians than among younger cohorts, are far from universal, and the fact that many such individuals retain most or nearly all of their faculties until the very end would seem to suggest that such systems are not the limiting factor constraining human lifespan.

As far as the sociological concerns you raise, I've seen them before and really don't find them terribly compelling. For starters, there's some evidence to suggest that elderly people being stuck in their ways and complacent is the result of neurological and endocrine changes that occur as a result of the aging process. Intergenerational social mobility would be impacted by such innovations, but I lay that at the feet of the present economic paradigm which requires anyone not born to considerable wealth to spend most of their life working. Customs of rotating in and out of retirement would be a potential resolution to intergenerational conflict, and there's one potential and very significant advantage to significantly longer life/healthspans, namely people taking more of a long term view and caring more about issues like climate change that would otherwise be unlikely to have a significant impact within their lifetime.

edited 10th Feb '18 7:08:31 AM by CaptainCapsase

That's right, aging is not a developmental process. That's not a favoured theory anymore.

I am more inclined to consider "antagonistic pleiotrophy"; certain phenotypes that are advantageous in early life can be detrimental in late life, and they will nevertheless be favoured because a 80 year old has had time to pass their genes on while a 10 year old has not. And I'd further propose that neurodegenerative diseases are an example of such a trait, since in a number of them it has been noted that affected individuals have a lower cancer risk.

I mean that all patterns of information undergo decay eventually. Whatever medium you are using to record the information (human bodies in this case) has to be maintained, but transcription errors will occur, governed by some statistical probability. If this is the case, then I doubt the accumulation of errors would occur more slowly than the heat death of the universe, so acheiving immortality would seem unlikely. That said, I don't doubt that science will find a way to greatly extend our current lifespans.