I don’t remember the exact numbers, but even if we found complete, lasting cures for the top three killers, then the average human life span might go up a decade or so, to 85 or so. Really, even if we found a cure for most everything, we’d all probably still top out at around 100, with quite a few people dying along the way from the causes further down the list (e.g. struck by dog?). By no means am I questioning the value of an extra decade of life for one person or a whole society. What I am trying to tease out is the fact that our bodies just, well, stop after a while. The leading cause of death is our own biology, not disease.

The problem is that our entire medical paradigm is built around the idea of “cures” and not preventions. The very idea of insurance is based on the premise that I might get sick or hurt, which is why insurance was originally for catastrophic injury and illness, not doctors visits etc. Now that we understand health care is as much prevention and anticipation as it is curing and restoring, shouldn’t our system of both care and research change? The question is astronomically complex and involves the third-rail health care debate I’d rather not latch onto at the moment. But even if we cured every cause on that list, most of us would would die around 100 from a legion of tiny internal failures.

There are several theories of ageing.   The evolutionary “pleiotropy” theory says that it pays organisms to reproduce earlier rather than later, so genes that enhance early reproduction even if they cause later problems such as tissue senescence will often be favored.  There’s also a “physical breakdown” theory: the thousand natural shocks that flesh (or stem) is heir to will eventually wear out an organism so that it simply ceases to be.  A variant of this is the mutation-accumulation theory, in which mutations simply accumulate in the somatic (i.e., non-reproductive) tissue over time, and bad mutations that have their effects later in life will be less disadvantagous than those whose effects show up in youth.  This could lead to the accumulation of “ageing genes” and hence produce senescence—the physical breakdown of individuals as they age.

There are other theories, too, and they’re nicely summarized in the Wikipedia article on senescence. But I think none of these are solely explained by “the arrow of time” and entropy.  If organisms could simply take energy from the environment (ultimately, of course, derived from the Sun’s increasing entropy), it’s possible to repair mutations (this is already done to some extent) or fix bodily damage and prevent ageing.  Another way is to reproduce by splitting or by nonsexual reproduction (parthenogenesis), which is practiced by many organisms like the rotifers.  Indeed, the fact that an ageing organism can reproduce at all and produce new, non-senescent offspring is evidence against Carroll’s assertion.  Reproduction, sexual or otherwise, shows that it’s not entropy alone that causes ageing, for reproduction completely nullifies the ageing process, and, when an old decrepit soul like me produces a child, the increase in entropy is reversed.

Coyne’s analysis points out the simple fact that lots of animals seem to fend off entropy better than others and, furthermore, that reproduction itself proves biology has developed a way to get around it. Life finds a way.

Her four points, summarized:

1. We will no longer be human.

2. Whatever body you’re in, there you are.

3. Our augmented bodies and minds will be hackable.

4. We’ll have to deal with the immortality divide.

Newitz is about as far as one can get from being uninformed or dismissive of the topic of immortality and transhumanism, so to treat her arguments as such would be a major mistake. The central point Newitz is making with her argument is not that immortality/extreme life-extension is immoral or unethical, but that the technology required to make it a reality open up a huge number of other ethical conundrums.  For example, regarding the “immortality gap” (I can walk, mein furer!) Newitz was clear that we shouldn’t be limiting tech to the lowest common denominator but doing our best to make sure “everyone is up to the highest common denominator.” A tall task, but her arguments are in many ways akin to mine against the Singularity: don’t get so lost in the goal that you forget all the steps in between.

I was originally going to single out some comments, but the way the thread ended up working out, it’s almost more fun to just read through all the “featured conversations” (don’t forget to expand the replies). Some of Newitz’s retorts are clarifying.

In response to tetracycloide, who stated “The social argument is pretty tired as well. Pretty much every piece of advanced technology enjoyed today started out as something only a handful of mega-elites could afford.” Newitz wrote:

My point is that we need to allocate time and funds to innovations that will lead to species immortality as well as personal niftiness. Right now I think the system is off-balance – just look at the difference between the pharmaceutical industry and environmental/sustainable industries. I’m not saying we shouldn’t aim to make human life last longer, or forget about augmentation. I’m just saying that we need to put just as much energy into extending the lives of people who will live after us. And after them, to something approaching infinity

SupaChupacabra made the point that immortality wouldn’t be boring, Newitz responded:

I agree. I’m not worried about boredom. I’m worried most about the immortality divide and being hacked by a neuro-virus that makes me go Stepford.

And adding a point to the discussion that I actually haven’t heard yet, JetRink (whose comment Newitz promoted) gave the whole thing a North-vs-South (as in hemispheres! not union/confederacy) twist:

One possible upside: war will suddenly look less desirable. Just as wealthy, happy countries are much less likely to sacrifice their quality of life by making war on each other, countries inhabited by immortals would be much less likely to go to war when they had been planning on living for 1000 years.

I’m sure some third world countries will drag the wealthy countries into conflict, but the rich nations will just fight them with robots. It will be even less symmetric than it is now.

All good stuff. Give it a ponder.

Unlike life-extension or immortality, anti-aging is merely research into technology and medicine that would prevent our bodies from beginning to decay and shut down, albeit very slowly, after about the age of twenty-five. Let us presume that science discovers the trigger that starts the slow version of aging, but is unable to find the trigger that causes the  degradation we see in someone who is approaching the 80 year mark.  In short, my question is: what if there was no middle age? What if you turned 21 and then maintained that youth, vigor, and mental flexibility for the next fifty years? You would still know you were probably going to die around age 70 or 80. You would still know that you weren’t immortal or invulnerable. You would still die at approximately the average age for a human being in the developed world. The aging/longevity debate suddenly changes: Malthusian horrors are irrelevant; the “old guard” will still die off, leaving room for youthful ideas and change; mental problems of super long life (existential boredom, cynicism, etc) are gone; and “nursing home” time will remain what it is now.

So what you have is people living a normal life-span, but with none of the physical ailments of middle-age. Problems such as a risk of pregnancy complication or birth defects after the age of 35 would be gone in women, meaning that a couple could wait until they were in their late forties before having a family with no risk of complications. Age related diseases, particularly cancers, would be as likely for someone at the age of sixty as someone at the age of twenty. All the aches, pains, strains, creeks, wrinkles, gray hairs, saggy skin, and countless other tiny problems associated with aging either wouldn’t exist or would be dramatically slowed to the point that a sixty-five year old might look like your average thirty-year old today. This isn’t an issue of pure vanity, but simple biological signaling. Youth is often immediately visible, but what if it wasn’t?

The first, and perhaps weirdest thought that came to mind is how this would affect the dating scene. Whether or not it’s right, the prevailing trend is for men to date younger women – this trend works in both directions, with women often preferring older men and men often preferring younger women. I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, endorsing this norm. In fact, I think it’s likely that a scenario in which age was not immediately visible would do wonders for balancing out the sexes. As it stands, a man can largely eschew serious relationships/ family in his early years to establish a career, earn wealth and reputation, and then begin a family with a woman significantly his junior without much controversy. There are myriad exceptions and reasons why this isn’t a great idea, of course, but my point is that a woman doing the same thing is almost inconceivable, both because of beauty norms (though it seems “cougars” are having a moment) and because older mothers simply have more biological complications. People wouldn’t have to focus so much on dating someone their “age” but instead someone their “maturity” and who is in the same life stage as they are.

Here is the kicker. In a society where everyone looks like a twenty-year old, vanity would become significantly less important. Instead of desperately trying to prevent aging or fight its effects, people could just do their thing. A twenty-year old who fell for a fifty-year old wouldn’t have to worry about people raising their eyebrows as they walked hand-in-hand down the street because no one could tell. Ever notice that, no matter how ridiculously a twenty-something dresses, they can usually pull it off, but not so for a sixty-something? Aging almost mandates we “mature” at a certain rate in a certain way. So what if we didn’t? Sex-drive wouldn’t flag, mental flexibility would remain high, health care costs would plummet and that would all be great, but on top of it one wouldn’t instantly be discriminated against for looking too old or too young. My little thought experiment exposes just how much truck visible-aging has with other forms of signaling, like wealth and fashion.

Even if we slowed aging a bit, say, stretching genuine youthful vigor and health into our forties, it would be a huge boon for society. There have got to be a hundred variables and possible effects this would have on society that I left out, but that’s what I’ve got at the moment.

“Lets say that I have in my hand, right now, a pill,” he said, holding up an invisible tablet between his thumb and index finger. “This pill, if you take it, will make you ageless. You will not age or suffer the diseases of aging if you take this pill. You can still die, commit suicide, etc, but you will not age. There is, however, a catch. The catch is that you don’t get to think about this decision. You have to choose right now, will you take this pill. Alright, if you would take this pill, raise your hand.”

My hand, tentatively went up. This all occurred before I was interested, heck, had ever heard of transhumanism, mind you. The professor was notoriously difficult (by that I mean stubborn and odd, not smart and challenging) and I had little reason to want to incur one of his rants, but my hand went up all the same. I was the only one in the room, and whether he noticed me or not is irrelevant. His point was not that people want to age and die but that we naturally distrust such offers. It simply sounds too good to be true.

Our brains are trained, over time, to understand what a reasonably possible benefit can exist for a given price. A free pill that has no side-effects and no Twilight Zone caveats (you have to be alive, can’t die so are tortured, etc) seems more impossible than the idea of anti-aging itself. The problem is that this protective aspect of our mind can become over excited, so we stop believing certain solutions are ever possible. To cure, or even significantly reduce the damages caused by aging, are such an epic benefit that it seems our minds will actively manufacture problems, because the benefit must have some sort of epic cost associated.

So we tell ourselves curing aging will cause too many problems and that aging has a lot of natural beauty to it and creates a lot of meaning and that all of that is good. But I think there is one other reason. Imagine we suddenly discover we can cure aging. It’s simple, cheap, universal, and we manage to quickly adapt society to deal with an undying population. All of the impacts described by bioconservatives don’t exist, anti-aging is a glorious and beautiful time and everyone lives for centuries.

The cost is the realization that every death was preventable. That billions of people have been, in effect, tortured for decades by nature and because we could not change it we described it as beautiful and honorable. The crisis in our collective psyche would be something of unparalleled magnitude. Our species is a master at making virtue of necessity, but what becomes of our virtue when that necessity ceases to be? Does it cease as well?

The question one is asked and must ask oneself: what would you do with all of that time? Wouldn’t you get bored? What would you do?

I asked myself those questions and realized that right now I feel impossibly rushed. There is so much life to experience, in so many ways that I feel compelled to try and do everything at once. Some people spend their teens and twenties partying and living paycheck to paycheck in a visceral, hedonistic, perpetual Bacchanalia of youth. Others cloister themselves away in libraries and academia to emerge in their late twenties/early thirties as The Next Big Thing in their field, granting them a position of influence for decades to come. Others travel, seeing the world, discovering who they want to be and meeting their fellow human beings. Still others start their careers, steadily moving up the ranks and in the process have the financial stability to settle down and have a family.

Yet for everyone of these potential ways of living comes at a cost of all the others. The very process of aging forces a choice. But what if I didn’t have to choose because I wasn’t aging? What if raising a family didn’t take half of my adult life, but barely a tenth of it? What if I could be a reckless youth, traveling, partying, living on a shoe-string budget and making loads of mistakes, for decades without worrying that I was “too old” or not “preparing for the future.” What if I could work for a couple years, putting most of it into savings, and then, 100 years down the road when I decided to have kids, have an enormous nest egg? There are so many questions we don’t even consider because we frame our lives as windows of time, wherein we get to do somethings but not others, because you only get that one chunk of time once. But what if instead of a couple decades of youth and vigor with another several decades of slow decline and aging, what if a person lived for over three centuries, with nearly all of it in a state of youth akin to a twenty-five year old. What would it be like?

Had I world enough, and time, here is how I would spend it.

I would grow up, I presume, as normal, but after undergrad, I wouldn’t have immediately started fretting and panicking about careers or graduate school or “what are you going to do with your life?” Instead, I’d spend a few decades, say three or four, living the life of a bachelor. No marriages, no living in one place for more than a couple years, career changes constantly, living with low inhibitions, thrill seeking, unworried about mistakes, bank accounts, savings, or nice things. I would take my time with everything. I’d try living for a while with almost no worldly possessions, going from hostel to hostel, working odd jobs and making barely enough money to pay for the next ticket or meal. I’d meet people and interact and learn. Then maybe I’d spend a few years just partying, embracing utter hedonism. Maybe after that, as a sort of cleansing, I’d go volunteer in one of the countries I’d visited a decade before, spending a few years giving myself freely to others. Thirty years of youth.

Perhaps somewhere in there I discovered a career I loved. Let’s say it’s marketing. I don’t want a family yet, don’t want to settle down, but I love this job: the people, the work, the company, all of it. I do well, make big bucks, put a bunch into savings and use the rest to live it up in a nice apartment, buy flashy crap I don’t need, go for the gusto with materialism. Just to see if I like it. Play the stock market with my extra bucks. Maybe I’d have a long term relationship, maybe I’d date, maybe I’d be so involved in work I’d barely have time for more than the occasional fling. I could live the life of a man about town, doing a job I loved, with money to spare.

But after a while, maybe fifteen years, I’d feel I’d done all I could in marketing, and my arm chair study of economics has really been intriguing me, so I decide to use some of my savings to go back to school. Maybe before I retired from marketing, I’d take some refresher courses, and then dive into things full time in a grad program. With my savings, I can pay tuition and go to school full time while still living comfortably. Having traveled and partied and worked for almost half a century, I’d revel in the solitude of study, spending whole weeks cooped up in the library or my home office, investigating nuanced, esoteric trains of thoughts and reading the enormous tomes of the greats at my leisure. I graduate in a decade with a Ph.D. and go out into the field.

Maybe I end up with a job at the IMF, over seeing development in South East Asia, a place I know well after traveling there for two years a few decades before. I speak Thai and Vietnamese, of course. I see it as one of the many homes I’ve had and take a personal investment in working to do the best for the region because of the time I spent there. While working for the IMF, I meet a woman. We fall in love, courting, dating, and experiencing each other over the next several years while working in Asia. We decide to get married.

Anticipating kids, we both quit our jobs at the IMF and get stable, low demand jobs back in the states in our respective fields. As we plan the wedding, we put most of our earnings into savings. A decade and a half after we first meet, we decide to have kids. We both take work off for a decade to raise the kids, living off of our enormous next egg from our previous decades of work and nearly century old savings accounts. I’d be able help my kids go through school, being deeply involved in their lives, continuing my learning with them, helping them discover as much of the world on their own terms as possible. Instead of supporting my family and having it at the same time, I’d support it first, then have it.

With our kids grown and happy, going off into their own lives and adventures, I’d still have nearly two hundred years of life left. By now, I’m approaching 110 years old. Maybe my travel itch is back, and probably the itch for week-long parties too. Maybe my wife has got the same urges, and now, instead of traveling, partying, living recklessly, and on a shoestring budget alone, I’m doing it with a partner, re-seeing the world again with her.

And so the cycle would continue. I wouldn’t live one life, I would live lives, experiencing being every version of the good life out there. Imagine being able to genuinely start over, to be always able to live your life as if you’ve just turned twenty-five and your whole life is ahead of you to explore, but you’ve already lived a century and a half. Life goals wouldn’t just be to read the great works, but maybe every work by every great writer. Or maybe not to learn just an instrument, but perhaps how to play every instrument in the orchestra. The options are so preposterously wonderful that they are hard to contemplate not because they are impossible to imagine but because they remind us of how little time we really have.

There is too much to do, how could one not want enough life to be able to do it?

But imposing population control measures should be morally suspect to someone who advocates maximizing total utility over time. Why? As Blackford points out, Singer’s utility logic leads to the irresistible “conclusion that a sufficiently large population with people whose lives are barely worth living would be a better outcome than a much smaller population of people who are very happy.” This is what philosopher Derek Parfit called the “repugnant conclusion.” Parfit never believed that he had resolved the paradox at the heart of a total utilitarian calculus that leads to the repugnant conclusion. One consequence of this line of argument is that people should have as many children as possible in order to maximize the total amount of happiness just so long as they could eke out some minimal amount of pleasure. In fact, it would be immoral for people to restrict the number of children they bear because they would be reducing the overall amount of possible happiness in the world.

If you’re utilitarian, there is math aplenty to pour over. If you’re not, the other moral arguments are well articulated.

(h/t R.U.’s blog.)

The scientists have discovered that a variant of the TERC gene determines not only how long the telomeres are when someone is born but also how quickly they shorten.

Prof [Nilesh] Samani, who reported his findings in the Journal Nature Genetics, discovered the variant by comparing the genetic make-up and biological age of more than 10,000 people.

He said: “In this study what we found was that those individuals carrying a particular genetic variant had shorter telomeres i.e. looked biologically older.

“Given the association of shorter telomeres with age-associated diseases, the finding raises the question whether individuals carrying the variant are at greater risk of developing such diseases.”

[“Ageing gene found by scientists could be key to longer lifespans” – The Telegraph via Popsci