Well, I see that there’s a lot of research, but it’s all quite minor, like allowing a specific species to live 10% longer by messing with a few genes. This is more or less rounding-errors in the grand quest for human immortality, at least from my birds-eye perspective. If we can’t make a simple insect or plant live forever, then I don’t think we understand death well enough to warrant experimenting with dogs and humans. Ethically, it’s also better to experiment with very simple life-forms, and if we can’t make those live forever, then we have no hope with humans.
To begin with, death is fascinating in that things generally grow bigger and stronger and better, and then just suddenly start to degenerate despite still having all the resources which lead to growth. Logically speaking, death isn’t actually required in any sense, and yet it seems to happen in basically all forms of life ever discovered or created. More interestingly, it also seems to happen for things like countries, companies, products and communities, even as they change for the sake of “improvement”, so if some natural law was to limit the life-span of all things to some level of total internal activity (perhaps entropy?), we could prove immortality to be impossible.
This “activity” law seem to be true, you can probably make things live longer by decreasing the rate of metabolism, but the total amount of actions is the same, you’re just making them happen more slowly. So it’s likely that a lot of drugs can make us live longer, but that there’s a hidden cost (another post suggests that igf-01 could lead to slower recovery of injury, so perhaps the drug just makes one live ‘slower’ rather than ‘longer’). That said, life appear to have a optimal amount of resistance optimal for growth, both too little exercise and too much exercise will cause us to die faster.
Not to downplay the value or difficulty of more tedius and “safe” approaches to science. Immortality is obviously a very difficult topic.
I think using dogs for life extension research makes at least as much sense as raising pigs for food.
More interestingly, it also seems to happen for things like countries, companies, products and communities
I think this is a function of “create a new instance of something” being an easier problem than “fix a broken instance of that thing”. If there are any types of damage that you can’t fix, you will accumulate those types of damage over time. Consider teeth—pretty simple to grow, but once they’re exposed to the world your body can’t repair them, so they’ll degrade over time.
Relatedly, I’m pretty bullish on the “grow a new copy of the things that are breaking down and replace the worn out ones with new ones” approach for those organs where it’s viable to do so. Unfortunately that does not include brains.
That makes sense! If it’s ‘cheaper’, then evolution will choose it. Thinking about it, I also think that we sometimes kill or replace parts of something so that the rest can live. If we have bad habits, then we need to kill said habits before they kill us.
I’ve long thought that adaptability is important to survival, and that inflexibility means death, but it makes sense that we haven’t evolved ways to heal all kind of damage, and that certain noise/damage/waste accumulate until we break.
Well, I see that there’s a lot of research, but it’s all quite minor, like allowing a specific species to live 10% longer by messing with a few genes. This is more or less rounding-errors in the grand quest for human immortality, at least from my birds-eye perspective. If we can’t make a simple insect or plant live forever, then I don’t think we understand death well enough to warrant experimenting with dogs and humans.
Ethically, it’s also better to experiment with very simple life-forms, and if we can’t make those live forever, then we have no hope with humans.
To begin with, death is fascinating in that things generally grow bigger and stronger and better, and then just suddenly start to degenerate despite still having all the resources which lead to growth. Logically speaking, death isn’t actually required in any sense, and yet it seems to happen in basically all forms of life ever discovered or created. More interestingly, it also seems to happen for things like countries, companies, products and communities, even as they change for the sake of “improvement”, so if some natural law was to limit the life-span of all things to some level of total internal activity (perhaps entropy?), we could prove immortality to be impossible.
This “activity” law seem to be true, you can probably make things live longer by decreasing the rate of metabolism, but the total amount of actions is the same, you’re just making them happen more slowly. So it’s likely that a lot of drugs can make us live longer, but that there’s a hidden cost (another post suggests that igf-01 could lead to slower recovery of injury, so perhaps the drug just makes one live ‘slower’ rather than ‘longer’). That said, life appear to have a optimal amount of resistance optimal for growth, both too little exercise and too much exercise will cause us to die faster.
Not to downplay the value or difficulty of more tedius and “safe” approaches to science. Immortality is obviously a very difficult topic.
I think using dogs for life extension research makes at least as much sense as raising pigs for food.
I think this is a function of “create a new instance of something” being an easier problem than “fix a broken instance of that thing”. If there are any types of damage that you can’t fix, you will accumulate those types of damage over time. Consider teeth—pretty simple to grow, but once they’re exposed to the world your body can’t repair them, so they’ll degrade over time.
Relatedly, I’m pretty bullish on the “grow a new copy of the things that are breaking down and replace the worn out ones with new ones” approach for those organs where it’s viable to do so. Unfortunately that does not include brains.
That makes sense! If it’s ‘cheaper’, then evolution will choose it. Thinking about it, I also think that we sometimes kill or replace parts of something so that the rest can live. If we have bad habits, then we need to kill said habits before they kill us.
I’ve long thought that adaptability is important to survival, and that inflexibility means death, but it makes sense that we haven’t evolved ways to heal all kind of damage, and that certain noise/damage/waste accumulate until we break.