Huh? Think of a healthy 30-year-old. Did she age since the time she was twenty? Certainly so. Was cancer and heart disease part of that? Nope, very probably not.
Maybe you mean that cancer and heart disease are a mandatory part of being old. But I see no reason for that to be true. Cancer and CVD rates are certainly correlated with age, now, but that doesn’t necessarily tell you what is par of aging per se and what is not.
If you were able to fix or prevent the kind of mollecular damage that Grey mostly talks about when he talks about aging, it would probably reduce your odds of getting a heart attack in any given year, but I’m not convinced that it would eliminate it. After all, some people do get heart attacks when they’re 30, it’s just more rare.
Which means that for extreme longevity you would probably have to still find better ways to deal with, cure, or prevent heart attacks, even if we’ve already “cured aging” by the narrow definition of aging you seem to be using.
Also, in a related note, if we’re talking about “longevity escape velocity” (the point where science and technology adds 1 year of lifespan for each year that passes, making it possible for you to live indefinitely), anything that treats any of the diseases of aging would help with that. Right now, heart attack and cancer are the two big killers in the first world; cure either of those, and you’ve extended lifespan by several years already.
for extreme longevity you would probably have to still find better ways to deal with, cure, or prevent heart attacks, even if we’ve already “cured aging”
Yes, of course. “Curing aging” by itself does little to help with a variety of fatal diseases. People who don’t age will still die from infections, strokes, etc. etc.
For infections, of course. For things like strokes and heart attacks, it partly depends on what you mean by “aging”. Even if your cells aren’t aging, if your organs accumulate larger-scale damage over time and eventually fail, would that be considered aging? It’s a question of definitions, more then anything else, but I would think it would be.
I think you’re in a terminology muddle. Locaha clearly means “aging” as senescence, not just the passage of time. “Aging” and “senescence” are often used interchangeably, which leads to confusion.
Locaha’s comment still doesn’t really make sense. Senescence is a specific mechanism that makes you more susceptible to cancer and heart disease, among other things. Curing cancer and heart disease won’t cure senescence, though curing cancer probably would help. Curing senescence should cause a clear decrease in cancer and heart disease when you improve the ability of human bodies to repair themselves.
To cure cancer and heart disease (as opposed to postponing death caused by cancer and heart disease) you would have to stop senescence. As long as senescence continues, heart disease and cancer will occur.
When viewed in this light, you can see that Locaha’s comment makes perfect sense.
Huh? Think of a healthy 30-year-old. Did she age since the time she was twenty? Certainly so.
Think of a healthy 20-year-old. Did she age since the time she was 15? (I’m trying to figure what exactly you mean by “aging”—if you define it too broadly, then aging is not necessarily a bad thing.)
I would say, rather, ”...to which we don’t differentially attribute causes other than the passage of time.”
The distinction is important to me, because it gets at what I expect progress in fighting “aging” to look like: as we understand more about the causes and characteristic properties of various physical and mental changes, we are less inclined to describe them as caused by “age” in some vague handwavy way, even if they normally come with the passage of time… we will think of them as caused by a wide range of mostly unrelated diseases and syndromes, all of which happen to become more likely as we age for various different reasons.
And as we learn to prevent or treat those changes, we won’t think of that as defeating “aging,” we will think of it as defeating those specific diseases and syndromes. After a few generations of this, we will not think of ourselves as having made any progress on defeating “aging”, even though most people will live longer healthier lives than their grandparents did.
I would say, rather, ”...to which we don’t differentially attribute causes other than the passage of time.”
OK, I’ll accept that. I see your point.
However such an approach would require flexibility with what you’d call “disease” or “normality”. For example, old people lose muscle mass and cannot acquire it as easily as young people. It it “normal”? It it a “disease”? If you develop a drug that you can take to fix that problem (but you’ll have to keep on taking it forever), will you describe it as having defeated a disease?
Well, I’m not exactly sure what we mean by requiring flexibility here, but I would certainly agree that our flexibility with respect to what’s a disease and what’s normal aging are related.
To put this another way, I would say “effects of disease D” and “natural effects of aging” are both social constructs, and that the psychological/cultural constraints that cause some pattern of observations X to get tagged with the first label also inhibit X from getting tagged with the second label.
None of which really has a damned thing to do with whether people live longer healthier lives, so to the extent that we care about that, we may do better to not get caught up in worrying about these categories.
There are a lot of diseases which are different enough from aging to make the distinction more than a social construct: infectious diseases, congenital abnormalities, etc.
But yes, you can say: this is the ideal stable state, I want to maintain it forever, whatever causes it break, be it disease or aging, is bad and we want to fix that. Sure.
I expect that approach to hit diminishing returns, i.e., each aditional year of expected lifespan will require solving a greater number of distinct deceases than the previous one.
Huh? Think of a healthy 30-year-old. Did she age since the time she was twenty? Certainly so. Was cancer and heart disease part of that? Nope, very probably not.
Maybe you mean that cancer and heart disease are a mandatory part of being old. But I see no reason for that to be true. Cancer and CVD rates are certainly correlated with age, now, but that doesn’t necessarily tell you what is par of aging per se and what is not.
If you were able to fix or prevent the kind of mollecular damage that Grey mostly talks about when he talks about aging, it would probably reduce your odds of getting a heart attack in any given year, but I’m not convinced that it would eliminate it. After all, some people do get heart attacks when they’re 30, it’s just more rare.
Which means that for extreme longevity you would probably have to still find better ways to deal with, cure, or prevent heart attacks, even if we’ve already “cured aging” by the narrow definition of aging you seem to be using.
Also, in a related note, if we’re talking about “longevity escape velocity” (the point where science and technology adds 1 year of lifespan for each year that passes, making it possible for you to live indefinitely), anything that treats any of the diseases of aging would help with that. Right now, heart attack and cancer are the two big killers in the first world; cure either of those, and you’ve extended lifespan by several years already.
Yes, of course. “Curing aging” by itself does little to help with a variety of fatal diseases. People who don’t age will still die from infections, strokes, etc. etc.
For infections, of course. For things like strokes and heart attacks, it partly depends on what you mean by “aging”. Even if your cells aren’t aging, if your organs accumulate larger-scale damage over time and eventually fail, would that be considered aging? It’s a question of definitions, more then anything else, but I would think it would be.
I think you’re in a terminology muddle. Locaha clearly means “aging” as senescence, not just the passage of time. “Aging” and “senescence” are often used interchangeably, which leads to confusion.
Locaha’s comment still doesn’t really make sense. Senescence is a specific mechanism that makes you more susceptible to cancer and heart disease, among other things. Curing cancer and heart disease won’t cure senescence, though curing cancer probably would help. Curing senescence should cause a clear decrease in cancer and heart disease when you improve the ability of human bodies to repair themselves.
To cure cancer and heart disease (as opposed to postponing death caused by cancer and heart disease) you would have to stop senescence. As long as senescence continues, heart disease and cancer will occur.
When viewed in this light, you can see that Locaha’s comment makes perfect sense.
Think of a healthy 20-year-old. Did she age since the time she was 15? (I’m trying to figure what exactly you mean by “aging”—if you define it too broadly, then aging is not necessarily a bad thing.)
Yes.
By aging I mean “changes in body and mind that normally come with passage of time”.
Then aging is not always a bad thing.
I would say, rather, ”...to which we don’t differentially attribute causes other than the passage of time.”
The distinction is important to me, because it gets at what I expect progress in fighting “aging” to look like: as we understand more about the causes and characteristic properties of various physical and mental changes, we are less inclined to describe them as caused by “age” in some vague handwavy way, even if they normally come with the passage of time… we will think of them as caused by a wide range of mostly unrelated diseases and syndromes, all of which happen to become more likely as we age for various different reasons.
And as we learn to prevent or treat those changes, we won’t think of that as defeating “aging,” we will think of it as defeating those specific diseases and syndromes. After a few generations of this, we will not think of ourselves as having made any progress on defeating “aging”, even though most people will live longer healthier lives than their grandparents did.
OK, I’ll accept that. I see your point.
However such an approach would require flexibility with what you’d call “disease” or “normality”. For example, old people lose muscle mass and cannot acquire it as easily as young people. It it “normal”? It it a “disease”? If you develop a drug that you can take to fix that problem (but you’ll have to keep on taking it forever), will you describe it as having defeated a disease?
Well, I’m not exactly sure what we mean by requiring flexibility here, but I would certainly agree that our flexibility with respect to what’s a disease and what’s normal aging are related.
To put this another way, I would say “effects of disease D” and “natural effects of aging” are both social constructs, and that the psychological/cultural constraints that cause some pattern of observations X to get tagged with the first label also inhibit X from getting tagged with the second label.
None of which really has a damned thing to do with whether people live longer healthier lives, so to the extent that we care about that, we may do better to not get caught up in worrying about these categories.
There are a lot of diseases which are different enough from aging to make the distinction more than a social construct: infectious diseases, congenital abnormalities, etc.
But yes, you can say: this is the ideal stable state, I want to maintain it forever, whatever causes it break, be it disease or aging, is bad and we want to fix that. Sure.
I expect that approach to hit diminishing returns, i.e., each aditional year of expected lifespan will require solving a greater number of distinct deceases than the previous one.
Yes, I agree.