Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by martyb on Tuesday October 31 2017, @09:59AM   Printer-friendly
from the getting-old-is-not-for-sissies dept.

Aging is a natural part of life, but that hasn't stopped people from embarking on efforts to stop the process. Unfortunately, perhaps, those attempts are futile, according to University of Arizona researchers who have proved that it's mathematically impossible to halt aging in multicellular organisms like humans. "Aging is mathematically inevitable - like, seriously inevitable. There's logically, theoretically, mathematically no way out," said Joanna Masel, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and at the UA.

Masel and UA postdoctoral researcher Paul Nelson outline their findings on math and aging in a new study titled "Intercellular Competition and Inevitability of Multicellular Aging," published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Current understanding of the evolution of aging leaves open the possibility that aging could be stopped if only science could figure out a way to make selection between organisms perfect. One way to do that might be to use competition between cells to eliminate poorly functioning "sluggish" cells linked to aging, while keeping other cells intact. However, the solution isn't that simple, Masel and Nelson say.

Two things happen to the body on a cellular level as it ages, Nelson explains. One is that cells slow down and start to lose function, like when your hair cells, for example, stop making pigment. The other thing that happens is that some cells crank up their growth rate, which can cause cancer cells to form. As we get older, we all tend, at some point, to develop cancer cells in the body, even if they're not causing symptoms, the researchers say. Masel and Nelson found that even if natural selection were perfect, aging would still occur, since cancer cells tend to cheat when cells compete.

https://phys.org/news/2017-10-mathematically-impossible-aging-scientists.html

[Abstract]: Intercellular competition and the inevitability of multicellular aging

So, either you die of old age or you die of cancer. Choose wisely !!


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Tuesday October 31 2017, @04:25PM (8 children)

    by TheRaven (270) on Tuesday October 31 2017, @04:25PM (#590068) Journal

    Yup, I think Frank Herbert wrote about this. The longer you live, the greater the probability of experiencing a fatal accident. If an accident has a probability of 0.01 of happening to a given individual in a year, then there's a probability of 0.63 that it will happen to you over 100 years, but a probability of 0.99996 that it will happen to you over 1,000 years. Even if all illnesses are cured and your body never ages, eventually you're going to be hit by a truck (or a meteor, or whatever). You can increase these odds if you are able to back up your consciousness, but eventually the probability of all of your backups failing simultaneously gets high enough that you'll probably die.

    That said, living for a few hundred, maybe a few thousand years doesn't sound too implausible.

    --
    sudo mod me up
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday October 31 2017, @05:38PM (4 children)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Tuesday October 31 2017, @05:38PM (#590113) Journal

    The oldest person alive is 117. That person is old enough to have interacted with a lot of cars.

    Widespread adoption of driverless cars will reduce the accident rate to a fraction of what it is today.

    Other advances will keep people alive longer on the way to the hospital.

    Meteors and space junk will be taken care of by redirection + lasers. We can break junk into multiple pieces to increase surface area, and then deorbit it. We will probably put asteroids in orbit around the Moon for mining, or tweak trajectories so that we can avoid a big hit. We just need to be able to detect smaller asteroids capable of harming a city [wikipedia.org] but not considered dire threats.

    If you get rid of the age 110-120 biological "wall", you have a lot more time to handle other threats.

    --
    [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 01 2017, @01:49AM (3 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 01 2017, @01:49AM (#590324)

      We are 7-bit creatures. No one lives past 127. I celebrated getting my last bit at 64.

      • (Score: 2, Funny) by khallow on Wednesday November 01 2017, @02:00AM (2 children)

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday November 01 2017, @02:00AM (#590332) Journal
        Obviously the solution is to have longer years, duh. I'm not even 1 yet.
        • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday November 01 2017, @03:28AM (1 child)

          by JoeMerchant (3937) on Wednesday November 01 2017, @03:28AM (#590356)

          Depends on the goal, those biblical people lived to 900 and more - most likely due to shorter "years."

          --
          🌻🌻 [google.com]
  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday November 01 2017, @03:26AM (2 children)

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Wednesday November 01 2017, @03:26AM (#590353)

    The fun thing about backups, stored in diverse locations, is that if one backup has 0.98 probability of surviving to be used, then two backups have .99 probability, 10 backups are 0.998, and 1000 backups have .99998 probability of coming through when needed.

    If there were such a thing as a 500TB file that could restore your consciousness into a new body, I would think that all kinds of service providers would pop up with backup sites located in hundreds of diverse locations around the globe, and beyond when that becomes practical. If you could take just one day out every year to make a backup, then when you do eventually die from an accident (on average once per 100 years), you'd lose, on average, 6 months of experiences and with 1000 mostly reliable backups, you're going to average 50,000 successful restorations before backup failure gets you altogether. So, half of the people who start on this scheme will make it to 5 million years old, by which time I would hope that they have learned how to improve their odds against accidental death and multiple backup failure, at least by an order of magnitude or more.

    --
    🌻🌻 [google.com]
    • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Wednesday November 01 2017, @07:44AM (1 child)

      by maxwell demon (1608) on Wednesday November 01 2017, @07:44AM (#590433) Journal

      I guess your biggest risk would be that for some reason, someone decides that not you will not be restored from backup (you maybe forgot to pay the latest rate of the backup service?).

      Or that someone destroys all your backups. I mean, murder might be harder in that world, but it is still not impossible. And you've got plenty of time to make enemies … and the enemy has plenty of time to figure out how to do it.

      --
      The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.