I don’t agree with them, probably because it’s too ‘sci-fi’ for me. I believe we’ll reach a plateau around 110. If we didn’t mess up earth and ourselves we could’ve reached higher, but we’re too busy destroying ourselves to achieve anything better.
I wouldn’t mind having more time on earth though (time alive, doesn’t have to be on earth), and If I could, I’d take treatment to make me live longer (if I could remain healthy doing so).
Do you think we’ll ever live beyond the 120’s?
What’s your opinion of aging and death?
Live fast, die young
Your death is set in stone, can’t change the date
Live a healthy life and hope for the best
I’m obsessively trying everything to live longer
I will drink the blood of cute ginger kittens to live longer
I’m totally on board with the idea of longer lifespan technology. I find the idea fascinating that through technology and science, human life can be expanded to well over 100 years. I am a bit skeptical about the 1000 year claim though. That is just too sensationalist. Most research right now will most likely only increase human life by a 100 years or so.
But the idea shouldn’t be all that foreign or sci-fi at all. Just 1000 years ago, human life expectancy was much lower than it is right now. People are already living longer and healthier lives than our forefathers did. We can reasonably expect to reach our 80’s relatively easily, while only a very lucky reached such age ranges in the past.
Would I want to live for such a long time? Absolutely!! Do I have a say in the matter? Absolutely not! I firmly believe that we all have an expiration fate, the date that will be your last on earth. This belief stems from my religious convictions.
For those that have not yet seen this video, I urge you to watch CGP Grey’s video on the subject. It is presented in a allegorical manner, but brings home the message about life extension and death
I know I am in the minority, but I don’t want to live a long life, I shorter one suits me fine. I know what is waiting for me, alzheimer’s, dementia, cancer. No thanks.
Let me say this, getting quality of life treatments correct is the foundation of longevity studies. Adding years to your life is not a case of curing aging, but curing the things that causes us to die. Things like cell damage, cell degeneration, cancer cell formation.
What does it mean to die from old age? It’s not like you just one day keel over. There are ailments and reasons for every single person to die. Curing and treating these reasons is the key to longer lifespans. So inadvertently, cracking longevity also means better quality of life.
Indeed, improved treatments to medical illnesses would logically follow with increased lifespans, or be the root cause thereof.
There are other non-medical aspects to what I would consider quality of life that would also need to be considered. People not dying would cause a huge boom in population growth. Would there be enough food security, economic growth, viable living space, and a stable climate?
For people to live so much longer, the entirety of society and all of our ways of life would have to change drastically. If the people to live these long lives have already been born, then there will likely be some problems.
I dread living long.
Think of retiring at 65 after working for 40-45 years and now having to fund 50 years worth of retirement.
Getting frail and not being able to enjoy life as much as a 60 year old.
Not for me. I’m happy to go when my body is ready to go
That’s the crux: you don’t just die from old age, you die from heart failure, kidney failure, messed-up lungs, cancer, heart attacks, strokes. Diseases of old age, diseases caused my many years insults to your body - smoking, unhealthy foods, not exercising. All things you can change.
Believe me, I’m also happy to go when my body is caput, but why not keep your body healthy so that it won’t give in “prematurely”?
Oh absolutely!! This is already a reality for developed countries where the average life expectancy mean people needs to sustain themselves for at least 20 years with their current pension funds. If adds more strain on all systems of economics. Not to mention then impact that such a global population growth will have on the environment.
Now if you add even further complications that automation is adding to the possible availability of jobs on the entire system, and you have a large population of people that need to work 30+ years longer, but not enough jobs potentially to sustain them.
There are so many people looking into this from so many different perspectives. Someone like Ben Greenfield who is 37 and claims he brought down his biological age to 20.
Every time I see something about nano tech I’m like inject me now, I want to live to see at least another 100 years of technological improvements, that or the hell scape that global warming is going to cause.
This particular Joe Rogan podcast was super interesting this guy is a Professor in the Department of Genetics and co-Director of the Paul F. Glenn Center for the Biology of Aging at Harvard Medical School
one of the things he said which makes sense is aging is a disease we just don’t see it that way because its happens to “90%” of the population , that and the fact that getting old is a big drain on the economy and healthcare system so why not fix that.
This is a difficult one. On the one hand I’m right there with @DieGrootHammer’s idea of having an expiration date, but on the other hand @Pr0fPyr0’s notion of living to see the future appeals to me as well. So I guess I’m in the “I have an expiration date, but would like to inject some longevicide into my veins to extend it as far as possible”. I don’t believe eating super healthy, jogging 100km each day and drinking a swimming pool worth of water each day will make me achieve that - I’ve known too many people in my life that did just that, but died of genetic diseases that they couldn’t avoid.
I honestly don’t think that people will be able to pass 120 years. Sure, you’ll get exceptions that go a couple of years over that but at that age, a wrong sneeze might rupture something.
From a health perspective, everybody goes on about how healthy people are eating these days, but science don’t even always know what is considered healthy. Between all the junk they inject the animals we eat to the genetically modified foods and even poor quality of drinking water, you pretty much have to go organic all the way as there is no way to know what the long term effects of some of those things are. Then on top of that, you get diets like Banting which goes completely against everything that “science” today teaches. I visit a relatively up-to-date dietitian once a year who isn’t very impressed with Banting, but yet on “Banting” so far, I’ve lost about 6kg and dropped my LDL cholesterol by 1 point in a couple of months without exercise and a lot of cheating (hence the quotes).
From a medical perspective, there are thousands of diseases and cancers that we’re not even close to a cure for. Besides that, people are dying from things we know a lot about. We know more about the heart than we’ve ever known before, have done heart transplants, you name it… yet more people are dying of heart related issues than ever before.
From a global perspective, I think humans in general are pretty selfish and will most probably end up destroying ourselves and the planet in maybe the next 50 years. My feeling is that tensions all over the world is rising and it is building up to something bad and combine that with people voting for populist idiots to run the various countries… sounds like a great recipe for disaster. Besides that, companies would do something that is hazardous to the environment and people, just for the sake of making money. So if a war, crime or terrorists doesn’t get us, global warming probably will.
From a Christian perspective, there is actually a reason why the “maximum” age was reduced to 120 years. If you combine that with the viewpoint that being human is just a temporary point in time to something better anyway, then aging isn’t so bad.
I’m personally fine with aging (and eventually dying). It is good to let old ideas / perspectives die to make place for new and better ones. Also knowing that there is a limit is motivation for living the one life you have to the fullest. Heck, even with the age limit you see people all over just in a state of existence and not living.
Also as mentioned in other posts, the world isn’t really geared for old people all of a sudden not dying.
I am however not opposed to living longer. I just don’t think we’ll really break past the 120 limit.
This is the first time I see this 1000 year claim. I’ve seen the “the first person to reach 200 years has already been born” claim quite a few times though. Still, I’m not sure if either of those 2 are true.
This is so much to say about this paragraph, too much for this thread. You are right. What is being portrayed as “healthy” is not only very controversial but differs depending on who you ask.
I am going to summarize a few points:
Ask for references. Look at studies that were done showing benefit/harm from eating certain foods or following certain diets. For instance, they’ve shown that cured and smoked meats causes cancer and is a major cause of cardiovascular-related illnesses. The WHO even released a warning a few years ago. (Everyone is still eating bacon??)
Banting might be good for one thing, the Mediterranean diet good for another, and so on. This group wants to prevent heart illnesses, that group focuses on diabetes, and that one on cancer. Which one is better for you? What diseases run in your genes?
We cannot run away from the polluted air we breathe, the hormone-stained water we drink. But we can eat less antibiotic-resistant pork, less steroid-injected chickens, etc.
There are more and more people that don’t live “healthy” lives, regardless of what we know about the heart now. Not everyone is up to date with the latest research, and McD’s couldn’t care less of what’s healthy and what isn’t.
This. /Close thread
Also this.
Yes, the genetic disease can’t be avoided, but rather live to die from your genetics than before then from eating too much rubbish? You could argue your death is “programmed” into your genetics. Live to complete your life rather than die from something you could’ve prevented?
Read this study a few years ago, looking at the effect of exercise on frail care. I drew is a fancy graph to show their findings: Whether we can move our date of death is debatable, but we can improve our quality of life during the last few years we have:
