Living to 120 is becoming an imaginable prospect::undefined
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Who the hell wants to do that?
In good health obviously.
im imagining someone rotting from 90-120 but still conscious then making this news story
im joking tho i only read the headline
When we can live to 150, I’ll believe we can live to 120 in good health. In reality I’m watching 80yo people around me deteriorate into shells of their former selves.
Sure, and 50 years ago people un their sixties looked like they just saw the grim reaper.
Maybe, though I think that’s a bit overstating it. 50 years ago, leading men in romance movies were sometimes 50+
Lead, smoking, post war trauma… all less of an issue in today’s generations. What are the big longevity extenders for the next generation? I don’t think projections are very good.
The projection is that we’ll repair the damage regular living does to us (basically metabolism).
And I disagree with you, it will help us better than penicillin or what ever other progress that made us live longer and healthier in the past.
Most problems are based largely on aging, it’s because our body wears out. Very few people get cancers, heart attacks, alzheimers or die from simple infectious diseases in ther twenties.
The theory exists since a couple of decades and althought being challenged thoroughly no cracks has been found up to today at least, we can repair the damage done and cure ageing, and today funding is there.
On a side note, senolytics and some other first gen treatments are probable for say in ten years or earlier (some experimental stuff already exist too), if they roll back your age just by a meager 10 years when you’re 60, it’s 10 years of research and new treatments that you can have access to and so on.
I see… anti aging.
Well, if that technology ever actually lands, then I agree with you, it will be momentous.
However, we’ve been 30 years away from being able to slow/stop/reverse aging for the last 30 years. It’s like fusion. It’ll be facking great if it happens, but no one should talk about it like it’s a sure thing.
Well 30 years ago was when it all started (basically Dr de Grey shaking up gerontology, and the subsequent book Ending Aging), and the first ten years he fought all the problems in old academia and funding research himself. The next 10 was more fighting the “deathists” and trying to get at least some seriously funded adventures on the road and now ten years after that we have bio gerontologists not only wanting to push forward but they also can without jeopardizing their careers, lots of well funded biotech startups (rich people did finally get it) and the first treatments (Dasatinib + Quercetin was the first one IIRC, which can be had over the counter. It’s a senolytic and removes senescent cells) actually exists.
Now we need ways to assess the effectiveness of those treatments in humans (better ways than trying and waiting for 30 years), and see if they actually do rejuvenate, and that’s one another tricky question that lots of people are working on right now, so for me the future is bright.
I do
Why?
I would want to too, but not on this planet with these people and the very uncertain future.
Why? There’s so much to experience! If I could stay healthy, age more slowly or not at all, it would be great to try and experience as many good things as possible.
Oh you were talking about living longer if you were in a utopia or something close to it. Ok yeah I agree with you there, but unfortunately that’s not reality xD
I doesn’t have to be a utopia, it just has to be better than this.
And just in case you didn’t know, aging has been reversed in mice and the existence of biologically “immortal” species (“immortal” jellyfish) means it’s possible to achieve the same in humans.
It’s hypothetically possible that we could hack biology enough to become functionally immortal, but do you really want that? Considering the impact 90 year old Senators are having I’m just imagining an ever more out of touch gerantocracy. Imagine young people being born into a world where no one ever retires or dies, and their opinions are fixed based on what they experienced 100 years ago. Change is good.
Change is good indeed. Maybe if people didn’t think “eh, I can fuck up the world as I won’t be alive to live with the results” they might care a little more. Also, if were able functionally immortal, traveling to a new star system would be well within our possibilities.
I think people are confusing “people want to live to 120” with “people want to be 120.”
Actually being 120 would probably be awful. But seeing the year 2130 might be truly wild. On a basic level, it’s the same as wanting to live to see tomorrow.
What age do you want to die at?
This is actually a really interesting question, personally never. Not like heat death of the universe never but I don’t feel like there’s a point in theoretical forever young immortality where I would want to die, there’s always more shit to do and I’ve never felt like I need to up my game or something. I’m curious what you guys think though
About the same. I should up my game though.
The age where I can no longer do things that I like to do, code and workout.
Cause life’s nice :)
Me
Me
Me
Is this the sign up? I’m in
Just give me something for the pain and let me die
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Whatever makes you live to 120 will probably improve the quality of life at 80. And if you are bored of it, take a trip on the euthanasia coaster.
Who thinks that is even remotely desirable?
Average life expectancy is, what, 75 years? I’m 31, so rough estimate, I have 44 years left, and that’s not nearly enough time to conquer the galaxy
Your goals are both legal to aspire to, and possible.
That’s life expectancy from birth. Once you’ve made it to your 30s it’s probably more like 85
Average life expectancy in the US is ca 80, a few years above that in most of Europe, and highest in Japan, Macau, Hong Kong, at 84-85 years (this is across everyone - typically there’s a 3-4 year spread between men and women, so e.g. Hong Kong is 83.2 for men and 87.9 for women)
After seeing my parents lose mobility as they age, I don’t know why I’d want to live even longer with a broken body.
I work in hospice and see a variety of conditions. Some people in their 60’s with significant mobility issues that are chronically exhausted, but then there’s the patients in their 90’s who just recently started cutting back on social events and activities due to injury/illness.
Seeing these differences was why I started roller skating (again) at 49 and increased other activities to keep my ass moving and challenge my coordination and balance. I want to get everything I can out of this life.
You can’t control how or even if you will arrive at old age but you can swing the odds dramatically in your favor by the choices you make when you are younger. Eat healthily, avoid hard drugs and tobacco, drink alcohol only in moderation and get plenty of excercise that consists of four categories: resistance (aerobic), VO2 max (anaerobic), strength and stability.
Healthy people with good genes that have relatives who are mentally fit up to thier last days. And people who think that all the money being dumpped into longevity by billionaires will increase the amount of time people in general can maintain a decent quality of life. And then me, who is curious about how the world changes over long periods of time and just wants to be there to see it. And maybe see a breakthrough that somehow keeps us alive even longer. Death is so final.
Soon it will be possible to cling to the broken shell of what you once were, a mere vessel for arthritis pain and bittersweet memories of a time when you used to be able to walk to the bathroom. Hooray!
The point isn’t just extending a vegetative state but a livable state. If life expectancy expands to 85, then you live comfortably until 65 or so. That means you can more or less be physically active just fine.
Look up on Google images old grandpa bodybuilders. There are 70 year olds that are stronger than majority of young men.
If life expectancy shifts upwards to 120 presumably the age of comfort also expands to 100, or what have you. Then it’s a slow deterioration until 120 where you’re basically a zombie. Of course this age depends on genetic variables as well as your personal health decisions.
My great grandma died this year at 100 and she was only a zombie from like 95. Until that point she was walking by herself and giving speeches, hosting parties, etc. 96 she caught dengue fever and lived, but was weakened. Then she caught covid a year later and lived, but was further weakened.
The final nail in the coffin was her falling and breaking her hip in January of this year. She was dead about a month later.
I want to live as long as possible because I want to know what humans discover. What is the fundamental nature of reality? Will we find life in the cosmos? Will we explore other planets? What is the secret behind the brain and consciousness? What maths is left to be discovered? How will human society develop? Will we fall into authoritarian surveillance states or break free into a post-scarcity classless utopia?
So many curiosities sometimes I wish I was like a vampire, just floating around the world forever seeing what happens.
I want to live long enough to see society deteriorate into nothing more than a roaming band of cannibalistic motorcycle mutants.
Let’s see if we make life expectancy consistently go up again before we start talking about 120. I could just as easily see it fall to 60 before going up to 120.
…for the ultrarich.
Yeah the quality of my Healthcare is decreasing
I see the quality of life people have when they start approaching 100, and lemme tell you I wouldn’t want an extra 20 years of that. Living in the US sucks for healthcare, you’re gonna be miserable if you live that long.
And it sucks because usually when your that old you can’t do much besides sit. Sucks that are body’s don’t last long.
You need to learn more about what a blue zone is.
Or you could share this weird esoteric knowledge that other people don’t know about but you do.
Obviously he’s talking about hockey, and means blue lines - it’s to help with calling off-sides
So instead of being a prick like the person you’re actually replying to I’ll answer you. Blue zones are areas where the population regularly reaches over 100. The point they’re making is the people over 100 in those areas usually seem to be doing pretty well, moving, some even run, and die suddenly (things just happen to turn downhill very fast when you’re that old, nothing sinister implied)
Well If you’re posting here you have access to internet too.
And that’s as far as I’m willing to help you without a ‘please’ and ‘ thank you’.
Please eat a dick
Thank you😘
And you can huff farts. 😘
But why would you want to
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I’ve not been enjoying the last 30 all that much, I don’t think I want another 90 or nearly that far even
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My dad died a few days ago. In the last months he told me more than one “I could use three lives to do all that I’m interested in”.
I’m sorry for your loss
Sorry for your loss
Because a world in which people live to 80 tend to live well till 65, And a world in which people can live to 120 might open up the possibility of living well to 90.
Stretching out life expectancies tends to stretch out the length of quality time too.
We should just die at 30 again huh?
I’m 30 now, having a hard time looking at the next 40-50 and thinking I want that. Definitely not 90
Are you suicidal? Longer life does not mean living as a cripple, we can extend our health if we research more. And exercise and lower calorie diet seems to improve health a lot. A 70 year old who exercises and eats lightly will be healthier than a 30yr who eats like an American and drives without walking much.
I’m close to your age and I’m excited for the next 40-50 years. It often surprises me when I get perspectives like yours. I have to remember people have different opinions on things I take for granted.
We can have a tendency to project our views onto everyone else and assume everyone thinks the same thing. False consensus effect
I think people are fundamentally different because of some stuff that happened in childhood. There are people who are negative about the past and positive about the future. I fall into this.
There are others that are positive about the past and negative about the future. Maybe you’re here.
Oh, I do look forward to living through the climate wars and AI ascendancy. Amazing prospect.
No shit. Depending on how things are going in the next 10-15, I might retire way early, do as much bucketlist type stuff as possible until the money runs out, and then check out early. I probably have enough to live for 5 or 10 years if I move somewhere with a lower cost of living, and better that than working until I’m 75 while the world burns.
Perhaps you are half joking or not, but I used to think like this in my younger years. I spent a heck of a lot of time in my 20s and 30s doing all the bucket list stuff. Bunch of sex, drugs, traveling, wild adventures, starting a company, etc. Having gone through that I can tell you that I am much happier now than I was when I thought all those bucket list items were going to make me happy. Sure, they felt good and some were amazing, but it wears off and before you know it you’re chasing the next thing again.
A while ago I came across a nice, although a somewhat simplistic, equation that said that happiness equals the number of things you have divided by the number of things you want. I find that wanting less is a much easier route to increase that metric than getting more. Easier said than done though, but I found that silent meditation retreats do the trick for me.
I’m 39, and my bucket list mostly involves traveling to historical sites and trying lots of different food, so I don’t think we’re particularly comparable.
We don’t need to be compatible for the point to stand
A middle aged person saying, “I would rather retire young and do things that are important to me before those things are no longer possible, instead of spending another 30 years working my ass off hoping I’m financially and physically capable of doing anything at the end and that the world isn’t literally on fire” is hardly the same as a 20-something doing a bunch of drugs, but sure. Silent mediation. That’ll solve global warming and capitalism.
Have you ever considered asking a question or are you only just interested in misrepresenting what I said?
My retirement plan is a bullet
My mantra.
Well I, for one, would like to live for as long as I want. I understand the sentiment here, though a little depressing, is against that concept. I understand people’s reticence toward extending a painful life, particularly if that comes with strings attached. Life extension would need to be paired with a basic income and the rich will need to foot the bill.
I think we can all agree that George R R Martin should be put on this regimen immediately. We’re going to need 16 or more years for this dude to finish the series.
I too want to see the completion of George’s masterpiece,
Elden Ring.
Just because you’d live long enough, doesn’t mean he would
Wild Cards?
How are we supposed to afford paying pensions that long if people retire before 70?
By properly taxing companies and rich individuals? Besides, those leaving to 120 would most likely be among the richest of us. Do they really need a pension at all?
That’s just not happening.
It should be though, we need to demand change rather than just saying “oh they’ll never do it” and giving up.
Sorry, but if one can dream of properly taxing companies and rich individuals, there’s plenty of other shit to fix with that money first.
Making living until 120 sustainable is not on the list, or very, very low on it.
That’s the neat part, you will now work until you’re 85
If political leaders can work into their 80s, you can also.
Their work amounts to sitting in a hearing non-coherent and voting yes when an aide tells you to. Real people on the other hand spend all day actively doing work for pennies.
Universal basic income. Make work optional.
If work is optional then who is paying that income?
I would advise to look up some information yourself. You can either read about the pilots and their results or find a video if you prefer that format.
And these final things to consider:
- optional != won’t be done
- work isn’t just one definition: housework is unpaid for example but it is still work
- UBI doesn’t mean all expenses are paid for, it’s “basic” - luxury goods like iPhones aren’t “basic”
- it’s a complex issue, inform yourself with pro and contra sources
Should have pulled themselves up by the bootstraps.
By fully funding them. The return from a lifetime annuity bought at 65 is just marginally higher than a reasonable expected safe return from the same investment. (A lifetime annuity pays out on the basis that the provider needs to guarantee an income until you die, so if it returns so much that it eats too much into the capital, it’ll be unprofitable for the provider). At the margins, the expected remaining life years of someone at 65 in a developed country is long enough that you can’t safely offer that much more without eating away too much at the capital too quickly.
God damn it LET ME LIVE FOREVER LET ME LIVE FOREVER LET ME LIVE FOREVER I’m sick of lying in bed every night scared of the nothingness of death
Immortality really just means that the odds of you dying by accident becomes 100%.
Not if I live in a geodesic dome sealed off from outside harms until the heat death of the universe, and hopefully by then we’ll have warmed up the universe so I can continue with immortality
I’d say the probability approaches 1 but we can’t know for sure that it actually reaches 1
I’m with you bud :/
Have a look at the seventh jhana. Maybe it’ll help.
seventh Jhāna, defined as infinite nothingness
😨😨😨😨
Man imagine how fucking boring it’d be after only a few hundred years.
Everything ends, and if it didn’t the thing in question would lose all value.
You sit awake scared of the nothingness of death, do you ever contemplate the nothingness before life? You are what the universe is doing in the here and now, like the crest of a wave in the ocean. The oceans waves, while the universe ‘peoples’.
I will never get this attitude. If you were born in the 1800s would you call today boring? There is just so much to experience and we always have new things being invented. If I had infinite time I would still never run out of things I want to do.
That talk that “death is what makes life worth living” feels like a coping mechanism people invented to make peace with mortality. Everything that makes life worth living only happens while we are alive. The only thing that makes long lives so tragic is death itself.
Also to respond to your example - yeah, I reckon seeing civilization repeating the same dumb patterns every hundred years would get boring fast. “Oh, facism is on the rise again, better grab the popcorn”.
In my country there are people who are still alive who lived during a military dictatorship and I cannot imagine of all things that they would be bored by its resurgence. The ones I hear speaking in the media seem livid if anything.
I could see someone ending their immortal life out of desperation, but boredom? Only if they completely give up on themselves and the world. Even that sounds like a treatable form of depression.
And that’s not even bringing up all the technology and arts that advance every day. In the most mundane sense I could think of several franchises I’m constantly waiting on the next entries, without mentioning all that I haven’t yet tried and ones that haven’t even been invented that I might like.
Funny, what you wrote sounds to me like a coping mechanism in itself haha.
Which is cool, like 90% of what we humans do is in some way a coping mechanism for our own mortality. We are all still going to die though, accept it or rage against it, it makes no difference in the end.
In what way? I don’t deny that I’m going to die, I don’t think this kind of life extension medical technology will become widely available quick enough and affordably enough to help me. But I also don’t romanticize the prospect. It’s one of those common mundane tragedies that happen every day.
Frankly, sounds like you are trying to Uno Reverse Card me but I don’t even get what point you are trying to make. What, is just cherishing life a coping mechanism now?
Can a common mundane thing not still possess some beauty? And even in having beauty or not, must we judge it to be good or bad?
I’m not trying to do anything except talk shit on the internet. But yes, absolutely! It can be a coping mechanism, and there are definitely people who try to live to the fullest in the hopes that if they do it enough they’ll be able to forget their own impermanence.
I mean, I spent most of my life trying not to die so it seems pretty bad to me. I can’t exactly contemplate it like the falling leaf. I can see what you mean by how momentous it is but even if you can find beauty in it… it’s in someone else’s. You cannot really witness your own death to regard it as beautiful or horrible or anything.
Yeah there are people who fill their lives with noise not to think about their own mortality but I don’t think that’s my case. We are talking about it right now. I don’t seek all my experiences as a checklist for death either. I won’t be the one keeping track. I won’t be the one remembering.
Death is the cessation of self, and as much as I don’t fool myself into thinking I’d be immortal, I’d like to have as lengthy a self as I am afforded. Everything I cherish, I can only do so because I am. I can’t see death as bringing meaning to anything. More like the ultimate meaninglessness. How could people define themselves by something which, as far as we understand, they won’t even get to experience themselves?
I suppose there is spiritual belief, but even then it’s ultimately unknown. However people believe they may exist past their deaths, it won’t be like this.
But really, I feel really skeptical when people talk about the beauty and meaning of death because, if they truly believed that, wouldn’t they be more proactive about it? Though that’s pretty unhealthy to consider. Far from me to convince anyone they really truly see death as so wondrous.
I’m not interested to 70 let alone 120. What a nightmare.
Aw c’mon! Just think, at ninety you could be hiking the Appalachian trail with a Camelbak tactical colostomy bag and a keen sense of wonder
Shit, I didn’t want to hit 12 much less 120, and now I’m in my 40s. If some jerkass figures out life extension even for the poor, I’m gonna give that a hard pass. Just because I’ve chosen not to kill myself doesn’t mean I have to drag it out one day longer than necessary.
Even longer time to make the rich richer woohoooo!!!
Yeah, do we really want Trump to make it to 80, let alone 120?
I’m not thrilled with him making it to tomorrow
Getting Altered Carbon vibes here
Putting aside world inequality and the grim future that awaits us for a sec, medical science keeps moving forward… It took us 13 years to even sequence all the human genome (which was a tremendous effort done by many universities and researchers). Predicting the structures of proteins was an immense problem in biology that was finally solved with AI like 2~ years ago. mRNA vaccines were a super theoretical thing many years ago, but served us to fight covid. There’s a growing number of scientists (like david sinclair) that aren’t afraid of openly taking immortality as an academical challenge and publish research without fear of mockery
People forget technological progress is driven by an exponential growth, seeing all the things we have discovered in the past decades I can’t help but be optimistic about treatments or medicines available for the general public that slow down aging
