Last weeks article was 130. Clearly take this all with a grain of salt, and realize that bioengineering is having an explosion that will redefine everything we think about medicine and the human body.
Is having? Where? I see nothing that leads to me believe the evidence-free hype around longevity. I think it's early to say it's happening now. Eventually? Sure...maybe.
So do understanding the role of DNA and understanding it’s chemistry: necessary, but not sufficient.
I think mRNA production will help in quite a few rare genetic diseases, but also that we’re far away from being able to safely make the myriads of subtle changes needed to make otherwise healthy people live longer.
I compare it to heart surgery. It is quite a miracle that we can do it, but the risks are so high that we only do it when people’s hearts have lost significant portion of their pumping capacity. You don’t see cross-country skiers who are just not good enough get heart surgery to make it to the olympics, for example.
We can now make the safest, most effective vaccines ever in 2 days. We're making huge advancements with mRNA. CRSPR is still a new technology that is being rapidly improved. Last years big biotech story was that we have more or less solved the protein folding problem, which effectively gives us strong predictive power. So yes, it's happening now. We're still in the early stages of it, but it is without a doubt happening.
Edit: adding from a comment below, there are real world instances of lab grown tissues being transplanted into patients. That is also in the early stages, but has evidence of real world progress.
mRNA gave us a vaccine - very good but not a revolution by any means. We would've gotten effective vaccines from other sources. Nothing else has done anything. CRISPR hasn't done anything in humans. Protein folding prediction hasn't done anything. Lab grown tissue hasn't done anything in humans. It is not happening in any way.
One thing to be careful with “Blue Zones” is that a lot of blue zones didn’t have that great record keeping, especially 50-100 years ago.
Unlike modern developed countries where we have pretty good records of the exact moment of birth for people, in a lot of areas in the past, there could be a lot of guesstimating about the actual age of someone.
Yeah, places without great record keeping when people were born, but with fantastic age-contingent state pensions today. What actually unifies the blue zones is the ability and incentive to fudge numbers.
> We really haven’t made an effort to study aging.
We haven't? Just 2 seconds of googling "study aging" brings up results from places like Harvard, the NIH, RAND and hundreds of other universities where people study aging all day everyday.
Indeed. Geriatric medicine has been a thing for millennia. [1] I worked at the UW Alzheimer's Disease Research Center in Seattle for several years in the 1980s. Research on aging was a major topic. The minimal progress on cures for Alzheimer's since that time should be sobering to anyone claiming that we can hack humans to extend lifespan significantly.
Long-term side effects of drugs, and lack of accountability of these companies is certainly an issue and sometimes takes decades to come out.
https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/benzodiazepine-use-may-r...
2014 - People who had taken a benzodiazepine for three months or less had about the same dementia risk as those who had never taken one. Taking the drug for three to six months raised the risk of developing Alzheimer’s by 32%, and taking it for more than six months boosted the risk by 84%.
https://www.aarp.org/health/dementia/info-2019/dementia-slee...
2019 - The study, released today at the Alzheimer's Association International Conference 2019, included a racially diverse group of 3,068 people, ages 70 to 79, who were cognitively healthy when the study began. Researchers questioned the participants about their use of sleeping pills and culled information about them from medical records and tests of brain function over a 15-year period.
I don't feel there is any theoretical reason why humans could not live forever. Biology has already solved this problem in some organisms. Whether we are capable of solving it is a different question. But I think it's certain that it's possible for humans to become biologically immortal.
The 2020 budget request for the National Institutes on Aging was ca. $2.7B US. [1] The overall budget of the National Institutes of Health for 2020 was $42B US. [2]
I think the biggest step will come once we start transplanting organs from clones of ourselves. Apart from traumatic or infectious diseases, being able to replace most vital organs would extend our lives to the last remaining non-transplant-able organ.
Back in 2020, a Japanese team did the worlds first transplant of lab grown heart cells into a patient. There is definitely progress being made on this.
I have some pretty serious qualms with the topology traversal routes over the DOSI vs age manifold — they seem unfounded. This isn’t inherently problematic, but that seems like a core assumption - that the steepness and thus likelihood of falling off the DOSI associated cliff increases with age. The idea being once you fall off the cliff you die.
I don’t think it is a bad hypothesis, it just isn’t a result?
They renamed DOSI from “Age independent mortality” and changed the traversal examples since their 2018 paper [0] - honestly I don’t know how this paper has gotten so much press this week. It is only interesting for the title (Might’ve answered my own question there), but once you dig into it isn’t all that rigorous.
They’d probably argue that this same model works for that - you just update the manifold. That’s probably fair, the model isn't really powered to be predictive just correlative.
It still embeds some of the same problems, though, mainly how an individual actually interacts with it and why their interpretation is correct.
That's like disagreeing with a paper on orbital mechanics because it neglects the possibility of inventing a warp drive. So far there is no clear engineering path for reversing the mechanisms of ageing; that remains in the science fiction realm.
I don't understand this whole idea of "healthspan". Making people not age at all is the endgame for medicine as a science. Anything lesser would still be putting an enormous strain on healthcare systems to make dying people die a bit slower. And if you've solved aging, there's not such a thing as a lifespan any more because people would only be dying of accidents.
It's definitely not going to work such that someone lives to 80 with a health of a 25-year-old and then something clicks and they start having age-related conditions, all of them at once for good measure.
It doesn’t actually work that way. Assuming a treatment that effectively slows aging by half...
Basically the odds of death don’t drop, you simply have 2 years vs 1 year at every stage of decline. Which means you end up with fewer people that are living to the equivalent of 70 as they had twice as many chances of dying before 70. And reaching the equivalent of 80 means surviving 20 years with the body of someone in their 70’s etc.
Thus the number of people living in nursing homes drops.
Another way of thinking about things, if you slow down physical aging to 1/10th, few people would live to reach a 650 year old retirement age unless you also reduce all other risks of death per year to 1/10th.
Oh I see, you're from the US. In most other countries, healthcare isn't much of an industry, but is funded by the government. Taxes are a limited resource. There isn't an infinite supply of people with relevant education either.
Taxes can be increased to cover higher usage of benefits, and people can be trained. The same principles apply in the end. This doesn't happen over night so there's time to increase capacity.
I always think about the scenario that I have outlived everyone I ever knew. Not sure if that is a good thing necessarily. I wonder how many new people you can meet or make friends after say 80 especially if you are not very healthy.
Also if everyone I really love dies at 90 and I live to 150 I'm pretty sure I say to myself it's sad they are gone but I'm sure there is something to do with those extra 60 years than mope about!
The year that I was 26, over two dozen people that I knew died. All separately. I was a wreck that year but learned early that everything is fleeting and precious.
That said, I noticed diminished capability in life shortly before turning 40 and my mom is really struggling at 80.
This type of longevity (extension of maximal lifespan) cannot probably at all be achieved unless healthspan is extended as well. Otherwise all the diseases of aging would overwhelm the organism.
It also might work the other way round. Delaying aging might be exactly the same as prolonging healthspan. In that case, you basically have nothing natural to die of.
If you could hop in a time machine at age 80 and go another 80 years into the future, would you? I absolutely would. Even if you do nothing with those 80 years, you're traveling forward in time, seeing technological advances, and watching the future unfold. And this is not even considering the chance that we discover a cure for senescence.
While it's cool that many people are doing research on extending human life span, I think it's equally important (if not more) to think about how to enhance the quality of life when people get old. A lot people retire when they are ~60 yo. If they live up to 150 years, that is 90 years of retirement, which is ridiculers. I do wish that people can be "young" for longer. To me, that is more important than just living longer.
The cynical part of me wants to sarcastically respond "Yeah, let's make sure everyone can contribute 120 years to making corporations richer instead of just 60 years!"
With that said, I do think you have a point--spending ~90 years in a nursing home because you're unable to take care of yourself sounds like a miserable existence straight out of a dystopian novel.
Not sure I see the point in extending our lives. All the problems we have with history being forgotten and humanity repeating the same mistakes won't go away, the cycle will just take 150 years instead of 100. It will take longer to evolve, longer to learn our lessons, but in the meantime the wealthy get a few more good decades riding high on the backs of the billions living in poverty around the world. Hurray for that I guess.
This sort of research is tailored to the infantile concerns of narcissists who believe their individual lives matter more than the health and longevity of the species and the planet. Is death really so scary? Is it so difficult to imagine that it might be important for our lives to end? Oh you poor, mistreated mortals, the heavens weep for you.
The only way life extension really makes sense to me is if we imagine that humans have reached the zenith of their evolution, which is just laughable. Just remember,the last laugh is on you ;)
Seems cool, not sure if I want a bunch of 150 year olds voting (relatively, that would be like people born in 1870 voting today, 5 years after slavery ended).
> would make it so people stop falling for the same scams over and over
As evidenced by... the ever present red-scare in the US? It has been decades and people still going on with this bullshit.
It’s very easy to observe how older generations have a hard time getting rid of their zeitgeist.
This doesn’t mean they suck, because there are things that lose impact over time and older generations are the to say: listen, it was way worse then it seems, I was still a child when that atomic bomb fell and the repercussions were immense.
So I think they are valuable voters, but because they’re scam-resistant. On the contrary, they’re historically charged and can help us remember relevant stuff, but their emotionally bagged opinions are almost immutable and a vulnerability.
Have you heard the phrase “science advances one death at a time”?
Older people — not all of them, there are many exceptions, but as a group — are more rigid in their thinking and less open to new ideas. Some of this is due to acquired wisdom, but it is also due to decreased ability to imagine the world any other way.
My own personal experience of aging is that the opposite is true. Young me thought in very black-and-white terms and knew everything. I now live in the grey and although I find it more difficult to deal with new ideas (partly because of age, partly because of the grey), I’m a lot more open to those ideas and willing to give them serious and fair consideration. YMMV, but a blanket statement that old people generally are stuck in their ways doesn’t match with my personal experience and when I think of the old people I know, to the extent that it’s true it’s true for a minority.
The referent as it relates to science probably has to do more with corruption, incentives, and careers being built on certain ideas and having pre-existing knowledge rather than anything specifically age-related.
In any case, whatever longevity treatment is applied may actually reverse or reduce whatever part of your claims have some physiological truth. It could mean more wisdom and less curmudgeonry.
And to counteract it, a sufficiently long-lived humanity might actually have to deal with the consequences of their own actions. Right now, there's quite a lot of folks who are of the mindset that they'll die in ten to twenty years, so why should they care? It's a generational pass-the-buck.
The only big difference between Fox and other networks is that they have way less college educated viewers as a percentage of total viewers.
Not sure how good of a source that is, though. There's several (not great) sources online I can see that say the average FOX News viewer is >65. I also see that the average CNN & MSNBC viewer is >59.
But according to that POS survey, only 20% of viewers are >65 - which must mean a significant portion of their viewers are REALLY old like 80+ (or the surveys are just bad).
Your argument is fundamentally wrong in that it assumes age is a good approximation of wisdom.
Just because someone is N years old does not necessarily mean they have N years of experience from which to derive wisdom. They could very well have done nothing but meet the most basal needs to sustain life for N years, having nothing to contribute to a greater dialogue.
Setting aside other common issues like senility with age which could impact a person's competency to vote, do you hold a similar prejudice for people born before desegregation of schools and other institutions?
But most people's account of any national, state, or city history for any event whatsoever cannot beat a quick search on Wikipedia. I'm not sure how much value there is in informal recollections of past events.
Have you ever heard a great retelling of history? It always seems to come from those who have invested Serious Effort to master a historical narrative, especially when they work with a community of fellow peers.
The "whole of human experience" is a formal concept, since you surely don't believe any of us can informally experience it. Societies formalize it by collecting data and debating theories. And big human stories are the ones which are difficult to intuit.
There are those who do nothing more than collect information on homeless people, documenting them for various organizations or gov't agencies, sometimes paid. They are doing the fundamental work of demonstrating a phenomena whose scale would otherwise be belittled or denied. Some would say SF is actually pretty nice, with only a small homeless population.
When experiences disagree with each other, how should we move forward with discussion? With personal experience or with data?
A story of history, humans, patterns on race and class, told without any mastery of any specifics in history? I mean, sure, but I'd just call that canned gossip. And don't we All have something to say about human sexuality?
I think we already live with this kind of tension much more than in the past, as made clear by the voting patterns of young vs old.
Sharing a country with people of such different values is hard. Particularly when the older generation is always the shrinking demographic and feels its way of life is at risk.
What can alleviate this? More federalism? More geographic clustering by age? A culture that puts empathy over shame?
Along those lines: given how quickly things change these days, I can imagine that living to 120 would be quite bewildering, even if you you could be healthy and mentally coherent at 100.
I don't think it would be uniquely bad for old people to vote though, plenty of brand new ideas are terrible too.
If I could live to 150 and have a reasonably good quality of life (i.e. I still have my mental faculties, move around, see & hear well enough) - that would be ideal. But not if I can't see, hear, think or move around without assistance.
I don't just want to exist longer - I want to live longer.
Even if we can, there is no harm in hoping for the best, and expecting the worst. There is no real evidence that any of us are going to live this long, so while it may be fun to read about this, we're not going to be the ones to do so.
I hope that we eventually get the number up much higher than that- provided they are healthy years, not years lying in bed hooked up to a bunch of tubes. Life doesn’t just seem short, it is short.
That's why the fundamental solution to both the ageing problem and space exploration is not biological.
Humans are fundamentally adapted to live/reproduce on the oxidizing and wet environment on Earth. Rather than bring out a mini Earth environ each time we go to space, we should start thinking about how we can just bring out our mind. It would be much more sustainable in the long run, maybe even on Earth itself.
The difference between African Savanna and other places on Earth is minuscule compared to the difference between Earth and Space.
Oxygen, Temperature where water is liquid or barely frozen (water is basically rock at -200), Pressurized Environment, abundance of organic material for ingestion. That's true for most of inhabited locations on Earth.
I'm not strongly attached to my meat vessel, I think my consciousness defines me, even though it currently runs off my brain.
Well, living in space proper (zero gravity) probably won't be a mass thing. We will only cross space without living in it, just like we do with the ocean.
But the possibility of terraforming planets or moons cannot be ruled out in the future. We are quite capable of altering environment, actually, even to our detriment (climate change). Maybe we can do it better on Mars or Titan.
Simply conquering the challenge of going to and/or colonizing Mars will result in many inventions and technique developments in science and tech that trickle back into everyday life on Earth. So it was with Apollo, so it shall likely be in future space exploration.
Why do we even need to colonize space anyways? It's not like overpopulation is going to be a problem anymore, and someday in the future, we'll be able to solve problems like environmental degredation and climate change. There's just not any benefit to exploring space. Besides asteroid mining (which can be done with robots), there's not much up there worth our time, except scientific research.
Non-zero chance that an astronomical event could wipe out earth's human population.
We can study effects of low-g environment on human body.
Because its hard. And when doing a project which is hard, we could discover technology which helps others on Earth.
People used to live in caves in a static way of life that persisted for generations. Hunter gatherer societies still exist. While I can't speak for them I'm very happy that I live in modern society as compared to theirs.
> There's just not any benefit to exploring space.
I strongly disagree, what are the benefits of living? Benefits are relative and arbitrary, there are no universal definition of 'benefits'. Access to more resources and potential to leave solar system would count as benefit to me. The simple experience of just not being stuck on Earth would be another one for me.
Maybe because the world's total fertility rate has been consistently coming down and might soon get lower than the replacement rate. [1]
If this continues, the world population, while still growing due to people living longer, [2] will not grow due to more births anymore. All things being equal, after a while, population would start decreasing.
None of this is necessarily cast in stone: people could start having more children again, or life expectancy could massively drop. But as things are trending right now, population will stabilize relatively soon and then decrease (it's already happening in some countries).
How crowded the Earth needs to be to be considered overpopulated is debatable and a separate question. But if the population does not keep growing there is a path to getting there, assuming the peak population is considered too high.
The oceans are big. Think how many floating (or submerged) apartment could exist, each a pressure vessel with links to air, power and heat, fresh water, and a personal shuttle to visit other modules.
Of course, that's all the same tech that space habitats would use too, so why not do both?
Well, first of all I do not consider colonising a place a synonymous with living there. Space offers revolutionary technology that can tangibly affect what happens on Earth.
Planets that are substantially smaller than Earth (which is pretty much all the rocky planets in our solar system bar Venus) are far less painful to mine even without getting into the fact that there is (or so we hope) no ecosystem to destroy from our mining practices so it's not just asteroids that are attractive targets for resources. It's not just the lower gravity, it's that smaller bodies tend to have less stratification of geological layers so instead of having nearly all metals concentrated underneath gigapascals of pressure at the core (like on Earth), smaller bodies will have such valuable booty more evenly distributed across the crust. That's not even getting into the abundance of gases like hydrogen and helium that can be scooped from gas giants that are often quite expensive on Earth.
Most heavy industrial processes and power generation have substantial ecological consequences so I envision nearly all of this being taken off world into orbital factories and power collectors. Microwave wireless energy transfer has achieved greater than 80% efficiencies in the lab and solar power collectors in space can achieve a 24/7 operation and park themselves in geosynchronous orbits so a mini dyson swarm around Earth could power the world's economy comfortably and be far more distributed and safe against shutdowns.
Manufacturing in microgravity offers unique opportunities and advantages for many processes in industry and the advantages of floating in vacuum cannot be understate for bulk transportation of goods.
There is a trick that exploits the conservation of momentum that allows for very cheap transfer of cargo and people from and to Earth without having to rely on the magically strong materials of space elevators: by having a ring of ferromagnetic material around the Earth that rotates and greater than orbital velocity, you can then have an outer shell around it that is either at rest or moving in the opposite direction (preferably at the rotational speed of the Earth that can be kept suspended from the inner coil via a magnetic field.
As long as the net momentum of the inner and outer ring is zero, it will remain stable and now you have a platform that is at rest relative to the ground and from which you can have cable cars running to the ground from without requiring fictional materials. One thing to note is that with these largely stationary (save for counterbalancing against the rotation of the earth) platforms is that you are still experiencing most of the earth's gravity when standing on them. This makes it a good option for long term habitats for baseline humans. Of course, because it has a coil that winds around the entire circumference of the Earth, you can use it to propel one hell of a mass driver for cargo to the point where you could just not bother with chemical rockets altogether and rely on magnetic trains to do most of the heavy lifting into LEO with ion drives or solar sails are for long term maintenance.
This formula works for every planet but it makes the most sense to target Earth because of the highly challenging escape velocity it imposes on our current launch capabilities. This allows you to skip the rocket equation and as a consequence make travel to space genuinely affordable with potentially less than a dollar per kg costs. Once you get to space, travel is actually incredibly easy since you have mostly empty space between you and your target and there is no air resistance to slow you down.
We can also protect the Earth from coronal mass ejections and asteroid strikes and even counteract global warming by dimming the sunlight received from earth by a percent or two. This won't magically turn the clock back on climate change but it would be one hell of a slowdown to allow for other changes in our manufacturing and energy generation processes.
Besides that, extrapolating from very recent trends in population dynamics in "developed" (which is such a relative term anyway) countries that overpopulation is not going to be a problem anymore is absurd. People do on average want to have kids and the real reason why some countries are beginning to go below replacement rates of growth has more to do with the collapse of the middle class and the uncertain economic future of many young adults. Once we have radical life extension technology (something I consider largely inevitable) and people in their late 80's are still as sexually virulent as if they were in their 20's, we are likely to see another population boom within this century. While we could probably continue to house more people past a trillion within Earth, you are going to have to start either living more frugally or damage the ecosystem or at least reduce it's priority.
An Ecumenopolis (planet-wide city) could actually be a very comfortable place to live and house many trillions but it's a process that is inherently destructive to the landscape and life as it is now. You are essentially turning the entire surface (and ideally some or all of the interior) of a planet into a machine - and a lot of that would be necessary once we are talking multiple trillions because at that scale, we have a very different heating problem from the comparatively measly effects of greenhouse gases that are already wrecking havoc on our ecosystems. When you have that much waste heat being generated on a planet, you need to start constructing giant radiators that extend out of the atmosphere on space towers. Once you have such numbers, even if less than a percent of the population have any wish of colonising other worlds, you will have billions of colonists and our entire solar system will be colonised.
There is also the undeniable appeals of claiming territory over a truly virgin land without the evil of colonialism over past natives. That land might be hostile as it is but the opportunity to transform it into an oasis of life is going to become a more and more attractive proposition once have a truly abundant and clean source of energy because matter then becomes the real bottleneck. Land prices on Earth will continue to rise to the point where suburbs in the form of O' Neil Cylinder habitats will become the suburbs and rural area of humanity. Or if we switch to a form of land allocation that does not involve money, we would still commission the construction of rotating habitats to keep the population density of Earth below a amount (what amount that is depends both on your values as a civilisation and the degree of verticality of your settlements.
That seems like a good length. I don't know what my worldviews will be in 10 years, let alone 100. I do know that the things I am most invested in now will take 100-200 years to bear out. I want to see where climate change is going. I want to see what solutions will be implemented and how extreme they will. What will the unintended consequences be? Similarly, how will social and political issues evolve? Will we continue on this trend of humanism? Will violence continue to decline? How will we mitigate our existential threats?
A lot of these questions might not be resolved in another 100 years, but certainly the state of the world will be flipped from my developmental years in that time. I have a feeling that will result in a satisfied conclusion to the story of the world as I see it.
Then the Lord said, “My Spirit shall not strive with man forever, because he also is flesh; nevertheless his days shall be one hundred and twenty years.” -Genesis 6:3
Median scenario: so you grow up in that world, then go through 2 world wars, a few pandemics, the loss or death of most of your friends and family, gradually disconnect from the rest of society, just so you can see what amazing thing humanity will invent next (spoiler alert: it's more phones and huge cars and maybe a dozen folks living in tunnels on mars), while the forests are ripped out and the oceans boil and nature is paved over and your body turns to crap. Amazing, sign me up.
My grandma is 105 years old and is pretty much waiting for it to be over. If you live a full life it's not about how old you get, 90 is more than enough to experience the world and see your grand child grow up.
This comment assumes that improvements in longevity will come by themselves with no quality of life improvements.
There were plenty of people in their 60s and 70s riddled with cancer and decrepit old bodies from back breaking labor before our lifetimes that probably were waiting for death too.
Now that's the age of retirement and a time to explore hobbies and the world for large portions of the population.
Personally the one thing I fear is that it will be discovered that it's possible to pause/slow aging but not effectively reverse it. If you start taking the aging pills in your 20s maybe you look and feel 50 when you're 100 but if you start the pills when you're fifty maybe you're feeling like a current 100 year old by your 150th birthday.
Agreed 100%. I hope that medically assisted suicide becomes more widely legal and acceptable by the time I get towards my end. I didn't ask to be brought into this world and when my body and mind start to really deteriorate, and I can no longer enjoy life the way I want then I'd like to check out on my own terms.
lol. let me ask you this: if your life quality was the same as 90 as it was at 50 would you still look forward to death?
it’s not living 120 or 150 or 200 that matters. it’s the quality of your life. i think working to improve that vs some arbitrary number (that by the time you hit you see death as a release) is what we should target. the term for this is healthspan vs lifespan.
I seriously feel pissed about all the wonders of the future I'll never get to witness. All the things the human race is going to do. All the places it will go.
Of course, that's assuming our species doesn't suffer a biotech apocalypse before then.
But also think about how jealous future generations are going to be of us, born in space, never being able to walk on a beach, always having to worry about their space station’s life support systems failing.
If you reverse that and think about all the wonders and scientific progress that’s been made up till now, it’s easy to say that’s it never been a better time to be alive.
It's pretty interesting how people are always upset about not living forever or getting to witness the future while nobody ever seems to be bothered that they were born too late to see incredible sights like dinosaurs or getting to see the Incan empire at its peak or something.
yeah. don’t be. you’re thinking about the best case scenario probably. in reality if we keep doing the things we do we’re headed towards a world where it would be really hard to survive.
space and space colonization? really hard with the current tech and even if the tech was there only a few people will get to do that. the costs will be absurdly high and we also have physical constraints that we cannot bypass.
biotech? in the first few waves it’s gonna be a rich person game. money is literally going to buy you more years.
It's interesting to note that people long ago contemplated whether there was some physical limit to longevity, and what number they thought that was. Nobody's attacking you. Calm down.
These are 'God Days' which are special days used to make our equations line up. They have not been observed directly but most experts think that God Days are abundant in the universe and that they have had a strong influence on its structure and evolution.
It could be evidence that ancient people knew from their own experience that the natural upper limit was somewhere around 120 years. Which, in turn, would mean that this limit hasn't really changed much over the millennia.
Sorry, but I dont base my worldview on what a bunch of bronze-age people said. It's a good mythological story, though.
We have science.
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Edit: I really don't understand the downvoters. This specific passage was written 6000 years ago, give or take. It's from a religious holybook that has no bearing on technology, medicine, or science. Germ theory was nonexistent, most forms of medicine were in their most rudimentary levels. They didn't even have the technology or know-how for basic ironworking.
If you're an adherent to a religion, good for you. Its simply that - a mythology, a belief.
And we should be bearing no credence to the writings of religion in our sciences, unless it stated physical fact (think anthropology, geology, architecture - sciences), or if you're a religious historian and trying to understand how human religions change.
I thought we worked with sciences here, not superstition.
In our world, it's trivially easy to get hold of any major religion's works, and only moderately difficult to get hold of smaller religion's works, primarily due to translation issues.
And in light of context, you weren't comparing the writings or showing different religions' thoughts on human longevity - you were implicitly stating that your choice of religion was the right one, by stating it matter-of-factly.
Those are a "philosophy" or "ethical framework" or "moral code", not a religion. Religion by definition entails belief in the supernatural - i.e., that which there is no evidence for, or we would simply call it "physics".
If you de facto deny that supernatural events can’t happen, I’d say you have some pretty strong religious beliefs. If you want to deny that, I’d say that just means you’re not particularly self aware. You can play word games all day, but at the end of the day you’re operating from a set of unproven religious presuppositions about how the world operates (naturalism) and filtering everything through that lens. But I don’t think we’re going to get any further. Good day, sir.
I think extending longevity is a negative with regard to human beings as a collective. I think it would be intelligent from a group point of view to create disincentives for individuals to live beyond a certain age.
This always strikes me as one of those "too busy thinking about whether they can to ask if they should" scenarios.
The earth is already packed with billions of people, most of whom live rather miserable existences. It seems like there are nearly infinite other things we ought to improve before we start trying to keep them along for many extra decades.
Reality is that so much research focuses here because the rich and powerful desperately want to defeat death, not because it will be good for humanity in general. On toward the age of the methuselahs, I suppose.
