[Fast Eddie]

I am still in my mid 20s, and sometimes I like to comfort myself by thinking the future is unknowable. It will be 50 years before I am in my 70s, and anything can happen by then. I certainly hope aging can be forestalled. And I have no problem with such an advance being denied to the vast majority of people, so long as I can benefit. I also have no problem with anyone else thinking the same thing about themselves and not giving a shit about me. Losers lose winners win, nothing at all wrong with that. It's the very thing that motivates us to get out of bed each morning. Raising the stakes by playing for that most precious of commodities, time, just make the contest all the more worthwhile.

Now, can we actually tackle aging? I don't think anyone really knows at this point. The way I see it, two eventualities are possible:

1) We can simply amp up the activity of our bodies' existing repair mechanisms.
2) We can't do 1) above, and in order to fight aging, we will have to do wholesale genetic reprogramming or institute some kind of extraneous repair with pharmaceuticals or nanomachines.

To elaborate more on the first eventuality, try to think of the human genome as a computer operating system and of human scientists as neophyte end-users. Think of yourself, even, and how you use your OS on your laptop, be it Windows 7, OSx, or whatever.

I think we all have the notion that a modern OS is an extremely complex, sophisticated construct that even most professional developers would have a hard time tweaking. But today's biologists with respect to the genome are nowhere near the level of even a novice programmer and Windows 7. They're more like your Grandma, who has miraculously managed to boot into windows and is trying to figure out how to make the screen brighter.

Is Grandma able to open up a text editor and start writing code to create a program that will interface with the kernel and allow her to adjust screen brightness? Not in a million years. But she doesn't have to, because through trial and error she's figured out that the OS comes with a built-in user interface that allows her to go to the control panel and use the "adjust screen brightness" feature.

That's very analogous to steroids and HGH, for example. If you think about it, it's almost magical that we have the ability to create monstrosities like this guy:



The human body cannot achieve such a physique out of the box, not even close, no matter the diet or workout regimen. Yet even with our extremely superficial understanding of human biology, we were able to create the monster above. How? Because like Grandma in the previous example, we found a built-in user interface. Steroids are a way for us to amp-up our bodies' already existing growth-mechanisms past the default factory settings. Like overclocking the processor in your PC.

As it happens, just like our bodies have built in growth mechanisms, they also have built in repair mechanisms. If they didn't, we'd all turn to smelly goo shortly after conception rather than living an average of 70 some years. It's fairly obvious that the body isn't all that interested in repairing itself however: evolution doesn't give a fuck how long you live, so long as you survive to reproduce. So there is almost certainly at least some spare capacity to ramp-up the repair mechanisms, just like there is with growth.

The only problem is, we so far have not been able to find a user interface for these repair mechanisms. There have been attempts to, like resveratrol and sirtuins, but nothing remotely as efficacious as the androgens and HGH are for growth. Maybe there is a user interface somewhere, but it's just deeply buried. After all, it's a lot more intuitive to adjust screen brightness than to make changes to the registry, for example. Or maybe there really isn't a built in interface, and in order to adjust the activity of these repair functions we'll actually have to roll up our sleeves make changes to the code itself.

Even if the latter is true, it's still possible we'll be able to make significant progress within our lifetime. For all we know, it may just take the deletion or modification of a few nucleotides in a gene that codes for a protein in some central metabolic pathway somewhere in order to shift more resources towards repair. Or maybe it will prove to be an intractable issue that will not be resolved until we achieve full understanding of genetics, proteomics, and metabolics some centuries from now. At this point, it's impossible to say which way the tree will fall.

[Genghis Khan]

Analogies can be great to explain complex ideas, but only because it enables you to superficially understand something better. From my own experiences, analogies break down very quickly once you start going deeper into a concept.

Although I do like the elegance of the analogy of a computer/OS to the human body/human genome, I would be surprised if it actually holds well once you start digging into the actual physiology of complex living organisms such as mammals.

For example, operating systems...the underlying code doesn't mutate. The diseases that can hurt a computer are external (i.e. computer viruses), while cancer cells for example are human cells. Another example: what's the equivalent of the repair mechanisms in a human body in a computer? What part of the OS can be considered repair mechanisms?

My take on analogies for the human body:

In all honesty, a more appropriate analogy to the human body may be a complex system of materials. Let's for example take the Si transistor, which contains of at least 3 different materials (Si, gate oxide and contact metals), while each type of material can come in different forms (e.g. n-type or p-type silicon, aluminum or gold for metals).

And here's the kicker: there's a very particular reason why some materials are in use. Making a transistor with helium wouldn't work. The gate oxide has its limitations: to get smaller transistors, the thickness of the oxide needs to be decreased. But doing so leads to more leakage current across the oxide, which leads to performance degradation. Making the next generation transistors has been a huge challenge (as have making solar cells or any other complex materials science-based structure) because every change almost inevitably leads a negative consequence. Any type of solar cell will degrade eventually (on the order of 20-30 years - same order of magnitude as human bodies). Why? Because solar cells interact with the real world. This is why the OS analogy doesn't work well, because software does not get worse by the laws of physics and chemistry.

(As a side note, I think it is telling that Aubrey de Grey is a computer scientist by training. Also telling is that almost everyone trying to reverse aging, e.g. Google, don't have a background in the physical world).

Regarding self-repair mechanisms

That said, even my transistor analogy has its limitations. Transistors don't have self-repair mechanisms. But even with super amped up self-repair mechanisms, it is almost a certainty that we would never have a perfect self-repair mechanism. My understanding is the idea behind slowing down aging is to reduce the damage caused by aging, i.e. the mistakes made when making new cells, but NOT that we would actually slow down the rate of cell replacement (i.e. which would mean our cells would get damaged less often - something that goes against laws of physics). So as I highly doubt we would ever have a perfect self-repair mechanism, eventually the mistakes will add up and we'll die.

The computer analogy would be to go inside the code and fix a forgotten colon. The more accurate analogy would be: you drop a glass on the floor (cell damage) and you use glue to put it together (self-repair mechanism). Yeah, it'll work, but not as well. And if you keep dropping the glass and gluing it, over and over again, eventually you'll be left with such a fragile object you won't even need to drop it for it to break.

PS the self-repair mechanisms complex organisms exhibit...there is nothing in the physical world that comes close. To this date, we still don't have a glue that can come close to fixing a broken glass the way our bodies can repair themselves.

Regarding extraneous repairs

What happens when we take the most complex thing we've ever created (a chip with billions transistors) and it breaks? We throw it away. We can't figure out a way to repair our most complex engineering accomplishments and we're going to figure out how to repair the human body?

Note that we do know how to repair simple systems. You can fix a broken glass with glue. OR you can melt the glass at high enough temperatures, melt it and blow it back into the original shape. Perfect 'repair'. Only problem? Once again, it's a simply system. Say one of your copper wires in your transistors breaks, melting the copper to 'repair' it would destroy everything else.

Nanobots to me seem like a oxymoron. A robot requires a operating system, which requires transistors to run. Transistors are on the order of nanometers. So how are you going to make nanobots (scale of nanometers) when you need millions of nanometer scale transistors. Microbots...maybe. But once again, I think you'd be limited by what they could actually accomplish. Anyone imaging a miniature complex robot is dreaming. Maybe the future will make it a reality, but realistically you'd need transistors going smaller than nanometer scale. Atoms are on the order of 0.1 nm, so transistors that are as small as an atom (maybe 10). Don't hold your breath for that one.

I'll leave the discussion of pharmaceuticals and genetic reprogramming for another time.

Bodybuilder - analogy: concentrator solar cell

Researchers have figured out how to make solar cells with 40%+ efficiencies (compared to ~20% for rooftop solar panels). How: you use concentrators to focus light of a very large area into a small area. Effectively, it's as if the solar cell got the light of 100 suns (in fact concentrator solar cells are expressed in the unit of "suns"). In effect these solar cells are boasted artificially with external help - the same way a bodybuilder can boast his muscle mass by looking at the underlying mechanism and improving certain rates (e.g. steroids to increase cell repair rate and thus grow faster).

But at the end of the day, even concentrator solar cells will eventually break down because they will still degrade under the laws of physics (gotta love entropy).

This is the real analogy to bodybuilders

software analogy

I didn't give the highest opinion of the software analogy presented in the post above. But in reality, even the software analogy presented has physical limitations: screens degrade over time and their brightness will either dim over time or the screen will break altogether (or maybe a line of pixels will give out). Overclocking your processor will most definitely lead to excess heat and transistors burning out over time, slowly one by one probably until all redundancies fail and your computer stops working. In that sense, it is very similar to the human body. [/b]

[Fast Eddie]

Yeah man, you raise some good points. Not to quibble, but my analogy with the OS wasn't meant to say the human body/genome is analogous to an OS. I was using the analogy to try and explain how today's scientists interact with human physiology and how limited our ability to carry out this interaction is at this point. Hence the whole "adjust screen brightness using widget" vs modify OS code and so on. So again, OS analogy is meant to model how we interact with biological systems rather than model the biological systems themselves.

[Genghis Khan]

(05-07-2015 03:44 PM)Fast Eddie Wrote:  

Yeah man, you raise some good points. Not to quibble, but my analogy with the OS wasn't meant to say the human body/genome is analogous to an OS. I was using the analogy to try and explain how today's scientists interact with human physiology and how limited our ability to carry out this interaction is at this point. Hence the whole "adjust screen brightness using widget" vs modify OS code and so on. So again, OS analogy is meant to model how we interact with biological systems rather than model the biological systems themselves.

Thanks for the clarification. That makes a lot of sense. I just wanted to highlight some of the issues I foresee with trying to create immortality vis-a-vis having an eternally youthful body. I love this forum for this reason, such good conversations.

[magicone]

(05-06-2015 11:57 PM)Genghis Khan Wrote:  

What happens when we take the most complex thing we've ever created (a chip with billions transistors) and it breaks? We throw it away. We can't figure out a way to repair our most complex engineering accomplishments and we're going to figure out how to repair the human body?

We throw the chip away simply because repairing it may cost $ 400,
while buying a new one costs only $ 100.

There is no life inside the computer chips, they are easily replaceable,
computer chips don´t have a family or loved ones.

Human life is much more important than any computer chip.

And we do repair humans in hospitals for a long time now.

And the progresses made by stem cells or new organs transplants for example are quite amazing:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/articl...e-jab.html

On another hand, Maria moved recently to San Francisco
and already seems that she got a little bit more "plump".



Large YouTube channels with over 1.2 million subscribers
lately have very interesting science videos
on the posibility of curing and reversing aging:

[Genghis Khan]

Interesting, I need to think about this more, especially about injecting stem cells into organs to repair them.

[PaulBrown]

That's one hot biologist

[Atlanta Man]

(05-08-2015 11:08 AM)magicone Wrote:  

(05-06-2015 11:57 PM)Genghis Khan Wrote:  

What happens when we take the most complex thing we've ever created (a chip with billions transistors) and it breaks? We throw it away. We can't figure out a way to repair our most complex engineering accomplishments and we're going to figure out how to repair the human body?

We throw the chip away simply because repairing it may cost $ 400,
while buying a new one costs only $ 100.

There is no life inside the computer chips, they are easily replaceable,
computer chips don´t have a family or loved ones.

Human life is much more important than any computer chip.

And we do repair humans in hospitals for a long time now.

And the progresses made by stem cells or new organs transplants for example are quite amazing:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/articl...e-jab.html

On another hand, Maria moved recently to San Francisco
and already seems that she got a little bit more "plump".



Large YouTube channels with over 1.2 million subscribers
lately have very interesting science videos
on the posibility of curing and reversing aging:

My girlfriend is russian, their cheeks are just like that. Trust me my girl is skinny as a rail but her cheeks are plump and pink.

[Atlanta Man]

(05-08-2015 11:08 AM)magicone Wrote:  

(05-06-2015 11:57 PM)Genghis Khan Wrote:  

What happens when we take the most complex thing we've ever created (a chip with billions transistors) and it breaks? We throw it away. We can't figure out a way to repair our most complex engineering accomplishments and we're going to figure out how to repair the human body?

We throw the chip away simply because repairing it may cost $ 400,
while buying a new one costs only $ 100.

There is no life inside the computer chips, they are easily replaceable,
computer chips don´t have a family or loved ones.

Human life is much more important than any computer chip.

And we do repair humans in hospitals for a long time now.

And the progresses made by stem cells or new organs transplants for example are quite amazing:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/articl...e-jab.html

On another hand, Maria moved recently to San Francisco
and already seems that she got a little bit more "plump".



Large YouTube channels with over 1.2 million subscribers
lately have very interesting science videos
on the posibility of curing and reversing aging:

My girlfriend is russian, their cheeks are just like that. Trust me my girl is skinny as a rail but her cheeks are plump and pink. The cheeks don't represent the woman's weight when dealing with Russian/EE girls.

[magicone]

Maria Konovalenko is holding a Longevity Party in San Francisco
where she is the host: an opportunity for anyone here on the forum
who lives in San Francisco to meet her and maybe bang her ?

http://www.facebook.com/events/1750304398529385/

Maria lists few reasons why everyone should join her Longevity Party:

1. Do you want your friends to have better and longer lives? Take care of them! Let them know that they can extend their lives and the lives of many people around them.

2. To slow down and eventually defeat aging people should unite. Longevity Cookbook Party is an amazing opportunity to meet like-minded people, think of new projects together and have fun.

3. Longevity Cookbook is the strategy of defeating aging. We are launching a project that is going to change everything. Participate in this historic event! Our book will save millions of lives because we will provide scientifically proven information about how to preserve your life.

Reposting this is making a contribution to an action of peace, goodness and fairness.

I wish there would be more girls in United States like Maria...



In another blog post, Maria explains what each person can do:

- Organize scientific research. Steve Jobs wasn’t treating his cancer during the first several months; he was relying on yoga and meditation. What he should have done was building an institute for bioengineering pancreas and liver and engage in scientific studies. There are a lot of great experiments that need to be organized, for example, studying integrated longevity gene therapy, or one can become a citizen-scientist and build a lab at home and test geroprotector candidates in old mice.

- Be friends with people with no harmful habits, who are on low calorie diets, physically active and interested in science. Be yourself that way.

- Increase your own competence. Knowledge quite literally extends lifespan. The mechanism of this is not clear yet, but maybe it is due to neurogenesis. New neurons are formed in our brains, but if we don’t use them to form new knowledge, they die. Perhaps it is best to study molecular biology, because this kind of knowledge can be applied to your own health.

- Promote the value of human longevity. Public opinion defines government policy. It is necessary to make the government realize the main right of every citizen – the right to live. Aging kills the majority of the people. Various social institutions have to understand this and start solving this problem.

[Libertas]

Would bang if she came to New York.

[kbell]

If you bang her do you live longer?

[Porfirio Rubirosa]

WB furiously.

[magicone]

In her newest video she seems to be lighthearted and in a good mood:

[magicone]

Does Maria sound like a traditional loving wife material ?



WYW ?

"I know a bunch of people who support life extension, but they are very busy. They are going to first of all deal with their stuff and only then become involved in anything related to longevity. It’s just that there is always stuff to do every day. Meanwhile, life is passing by. We may be simply late. Late by 10 years, by 1 year, by only 1 day. There can be no situation more stupid than being late to get «my life» ticket. There is so few people in our field. To fight aging you don’t really need motivation, you need discipline."

[Bad Hussar]

Yes to the question. Obviously.

As to whether aging is curable. My view is that it is an extremely difficult problem to solve, but that it is solvable. In contrast to "Strong AI" which I think is as close to impossible to develop as it is possible to say anything is "impossible". In other words a cure for aging, or at least significantly longer(multiple "three score and ten") functional lifespans, are infinitely more possible than strong AI.

I realise that most techies have the opposite view. That AI is much easier than anything biological. But that is because they haven't got the tech tools to run the code they need to to develop AI. My view is that if/when processors and storage mediums are developed that can make a stab at AI (1000's of times faster/more dense than at present) and they actually run the code they will be getting cascades of error messages and "stack over flows" before making even modest progress. Basically there will be too many variables(trillions) and relationships(trillions of trillions) to keep tied together, even with much better tools.

My optimism for biological progress is that you really only need a few, or maybe even only one, intervention at a particular (biological) location and time and then can use the bodies own systems to create the cascading effects. i.e. You develop something and rely on the body to do most of the work. While this requires deep understanding of cause and effect, it doesn't require nearly as much as is required for strong AI because you can still have big gaps in your knowledge and have your intervention work. Richard Dawkins mentions a possible life extender in his 1970's work "The Selfish Gene". In his view if you can "fool" the genes into believing that the body they are inhabiting is young, rather than old, they either suspend, or even reverse, actions that they are coded to take when the body gets older. And if the genes change presumably everything else changes as well...

[magicone]

(05-13-2015 09:58 AM)Bad Hussar Wrote:  

My optimism for biological progress is that you really only need a few, or maybe even only one, intervention at a particular (biological) location and time and then can use the bodies own systems to create the cascading effects. i.e. You develop something and rely on the body to do most of the work. While this requires deep understanding of cause and effect, it doesn't require nearly as much as is required for strong AI because you can still have big gaps in your knowledge and have your intervention work. Richard Dawkins mentions a possible life extender in his 1970's work "The Selfish Gene". In his view if you can "fool" the genes into believing that the body they are inhabiting is young, rather than old, they either suspend, or even reverse, actions that they are coded to take when the body gets older. And if the genes change presumably everything else changes as well...

Bad Hussar: very good ideas!

The hot russian microbiologist Maria got Steve Aoki (one
of the most loved musicians in United States, Steve has over 30 millions
fans) on her team and together they are writing a book:
Longevity Cookbook.

On the video that Maria just made,
for launching the campaign for the book,

she is crying and saying that aging is
killing her family and all the loved ones
of every human on the planet... which is true:

http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/longevity-cookbook

[studmuffin52]

Would bang too.

[magicone]

(05-10-2015 12:36 PM)kbell Wrote:  

If you bang her do you live longer?

If you bang her and you make her addicted to you,
for sure she will try to keep you young and healthy
as long as possible.

We are already using so many "unnatural" technologies
everyday as : Internet, airplanes, smartphones, etc etc

To cure aging is just a matter of time. It may take 5-10 years,
it may take 20-30 years.

Important is that we should be well and healthy
and to support the medical researches into curing aging,
so we can benefit as well from all the scientific advancements
and discoveries, the same way as we benefit now from Internet and smartphones (which never existed in the history
for billions of years, and are very "unnatural").

[Simeon_Strangelight]

(05-17-2015 07:47 AM)magicone Wrote:  

To cure aging is just a matter of time. It may take 5-10 years,
it may take 20-30 years.

In that case we will be moving towards insterstellar travel in 3 years. I should best order my spaceship now.

[magicone]

there are a lot of scientifical discoveries made about reversing aging and curing aging.

however the large masses of people do still feel it is somehow "unnatural" so they have
just automated "lizard brain" reactions of rejection, the same like the fear of the unknown,
as they didn´t really follow the scientific discoveries, nor they do not understand
stem cells, DNA, and gene therapies:

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/...-longevity

[turkishcandy]

Why would you want to live forever? Serious question. I understand the longer, but why forever? What will you do when you run out of things to do? It sounds depressive. I'm more looking forward to technologies that would make our lives easier and more interesting. Kind of like The Matrix. I would bang the women in red dress every night.

[Genghis Khan]

(05-17-2015 12:45 PM)magicone Wrote:  

there are a lot of scientifical discoveries made about reversing aging and curing aging.

however the large masses of people do still feel it is somehow "unnatural" so they have
just automated "lizard brain" reactions of rejection, the same like the fear of the unknown,
as they didn´t really follow the scientific discoveries, nor they do not understand
stem cells, DNA, and gene therapies:

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/...-longevity

Not exactly, first of all the media doesn't talk that much about scientific discoveries related to curing/reversing aging. I didn't know this was a thing until I read about it on RVF.

The media's been focused on obesity. Although recently it's been to hate on fat-shaming, obesity is still the big topic health-wise across the country. If these new scientific discoveries could cure obesity, that would show up immediately in the media.

I think you'll be hard-pressed to find anyone who is against increasing the health span of human beings (by reversing aging and fixing its symptoms). Immortality is another matter. But once again, unless there's a clear benefit especially relating to obesity, cancer, heart disease or diabetes the media isn't going to care.

[jariel]

So the solution is throw money at?

I guess they can cure aging, but what does aging have to do with a billionaire dying as the result of falling off a treadmill?

This only makes sense if old age is the only reason people die.

P.S. WBNR

[magicone]

(05-17-2015 03:55 PM)turkishcandy Wrote:  

Why would you want to live forever? Serious question. I understand the longer, but why forever? What will you do when you run out of things to do? It sounds depressive. I'm more looking forward to technologies that would make our lives easier and more interesting. Kind of like The Matrix. I would bang the women in red dress every night.

A better question may be: why would you want to be dead forever?

To not exist, to feel nothing, to experience nothing, to be nothing?
And this for the infinity of the future, after billions and billions of years
to continue to be nothing, no memories, no heart beating,
nothing at all? Why would anyone want that?

But anyway here it was not a discussion about living forever:
because there may be no such thing:
noone can ever predict the future, and even if we cure aging,
there would be still millions of people dying
because of accidents, infectious diseases, wars, suicides,
other rare diseases, etc etc.

Those who get bored can always take themselves out of the life.

It is better to just be a choice: those who want to live and experience the beauty of human life, are free to do it.

Those who got bored with life, can take themselves out.