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Whether ageing can be cured or not, there are arguments for thinking about it like a disease. But there are major pitfalls, too.
The first depiction of humanity's obsession with curing death is The Epic of Gilgamesh—which, dating back to at least 1800 B.C., is also one of the first recorded works of literature, period. Centuries later, the ancient Roman playwright Terentius declared, "Old age itself is a sickness," and Cicero argued "we must struggle against [old age], as against a disease." In 450 B.C., Herodotus wrote about the fountain of youth, a restorative spring that reverses aging and inspired explorers such as Ponce de León. But what once was a mythical holy grail is now seemingly within tantalizing reach. As humans' understanding and knowledge of science and technology have increased, so too have our life spans.
[...] Maybe the ancients weren't wrong, and aging can be not only delayed but cured like a disease. Over the years, the movement to classify aging as a disease has gained momentum not only from longevity enthusiasts but also from scientists. In 1954, Robert M. Perlman published a paper in the Journal of American Geriatrics Society called "The Aging Syndrome" in which he called aging a "disease complex." Since then, others have jumped on board, including gerontologists frustrated by a lack of funding to study the aging process itself.
[...] However, labeling aging itself as a disease is both misleading and detrimental. Pathologizing a universal process makes it seem toxic. In our youth-obsessed society, ageism already runs rampant in Hollywood, the job market, and even presidential races. And calling aging a disease doesn't address critical questions about why we age in the first place. Instead of calling aging a disease, scientists should aim to identify and treat the underlying processes that cause aging and age-related cellular deterioration.
Medical understanding of that cellular deterioration began in 1962, when Leonard Hayflick, professor of anatomy at the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine, made fundamental breakthroughs to understanding aging: He discovered a limit to how many times typical human cells divide before they become senescent, or exhausted. Before then, scientists had assumed human cells were immortal. Hayflick also figured out that telomeres, which cap the ends of chromosomes and prevent them from fraying, much like plastic tips preserve the ends of shoelaces, shorten each time a cell divides. When the telomeres get short enough, a cell stops dividing.
[...] Many gerontologists distinguish between "health span" and "life span," the length of time someone enjoys relative good health versus the length of someone's life. Longevity while in poor health, pain, or with limitations that sap quality of life makes little sense. Fleming urges "regulators and public policy makers to embrace healthspan as an organizing focus for facilitating the development of medicine that target aging and chronic diseases." This shift would promote research on disease-causing processes, which could help us prevent more age-related diseases, not just manage them.
As gerontologists Sean Leng and Brian Kennedy put it, "Aging is the climate change of health care." The Population Reference Bureau predicts that 100 million Americans will be 65 or older by 2060. How will we care for this population? It's daunting to think about one's own aging, let alone the 16 percent of the world's population who will be seniors[sic] citizens by midcentury. A big-picture approach focused on the processes of aging—processes we share with nearly all living organisms—will put us on a path not only to longer lives but to healthier ones.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 03 2020, @06:28PM (14 children)
Dying in those causes is trivial to prevent compared with aging. There are very, very few accidents that aren't preventable. Natural disasters can't be prevented, but the death rates from those had been plummeting as we get better at predicting them and mitigating the effects.
So, curing aging would more or less be immortality for all practical reasons, as everything else is trivial to solve by comparison.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Hartree on Tuesday March 03 2020, @06:36PM (7 children)
"Dying in those causes is trivial to prevent compared with aging."
And your evidence of this is what? A well thought out "gut feeling"?
Unless you get full Drexlerian nanotech, backup copies and automated reconstitution (of something that is identical to you but may not be you, BTW), the chunky salsa rule still applies. (And my semi-educated guess is that's a lot more than trivial compared to retarding the course of aging.)
Oh, you can put it off for a time depending on how much resources you spend on it, but probability is inevitable. And again, not matter how long that is, it's an eyeblink compared to forever.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday March 03 2020, @07:37PM (5 children)
Even Vorlons apparently have occasional deaths.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by Hartree on Wednesday March 04 2020, @12:15AM (4 children)
"You are not ready for immortality."
With the helpful assistance of Morden and a couple of Shadows, Kosh proved that neither were the Vorlons.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday March 04 2020, @03:08PM (3 children)
Maybe in the B5 universe, nobody is every ready? After all, the Vorlons eventually seemed to have their own agenda which wasn't necessarily in mankind's best interest.
OTOH, the fact that a Vorlon could be killed, although it doesn't naturally age and die, doesn't mean that they aren't ready for immortality either.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by Hartree on Wednesday March 04 2020, @09:00PM (2 children)
"Maybe in the B5 universe, nobody is every ready?"
I suppose we could ask JMS. He's on twitter. He might well give a Kosh-like answer. :)
Then again, we don't know about what the deal is with either Lorien or the other first ones.
And then we have the case of Sheridan. If you die and then come back, does that rule out immortality because you definitely died according to Lorien?
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday March 04 2020, @09:40PM (1 child)
Unfortunately (or Fortunately!) I don't plan to ever have Twitter.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by Hartree on Wednesday March 04 2020, @11:49PM
I have a twitter account mostly to hold a particular online name so it can't be abused. I check it once every couple of months whether it needs it or not.
I work with people with phones that beep twitter notifications every couple of minutes or more. I wonder how they can get anything useful done.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 03 2020, @08:37PM
Look at the death rates of just about every cause other than ones related to aging, most of them are already on a downward trend in places with the resources to put known best practices in place.
They'll keep going lower as safety measures improve and risk management improves. Really, the position that requires evidence is that this trend won't get within a statically blip of zero eventually as most dangerous activities are either eliminated or farmed out to robots.
(Score: 1) by Kitsune008 on Tuesday March 03 2020, @11:01PM (5 children)
If all you say comes to be true, you are still overlooking human nature and behavior.
Don't discount boredom-driven suicide. Think about it.
IMHO, very few would make it past 1,000 years.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Wednesday March 04 2020, @12:08AM
I think you would have more of a dichotomy, and much sooner than 1000 years. People would either boredom out and suicide within an extra hundred years, or they would settle into a mindset/lifestyle that goes on indefinitely.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 04 2020, @05:47AM (3 children)
Suicide doesn't really count. It's incredibly easy to end your own life prematurely when compared with trying to extend it to arbitrary lengths. It would take an extraordinary length of time to truly become bored of everything. Just listening to every song on iTunes would take nearly 150 years. Similarly reading every novel would likely also take centuries. Not to mention various other things that one could do to fill the time. Then there are activities like sports where the outcome isn't the same each time and can take a rather long time to grow old. People often only stop playing sports when their health no longer allows it because they're still getting something out of it. Sure, the specific sports likely would change over the course of a lifetime measured in millenia, but you'd likely still be enjoying life if that's the biggest problem.
Yes, at some point, everything would likely become boring, but you're likely talking a very long time when you factor in that you're not likely to bother doing anything in the most efficient way possible. With that much time on your hands, you'd probably avoid doing things like flying in planes preferring slower modes of transportation like driving or perhaps walking.
Ultimately, you'd likely hit the limits of what the brain can store without re-allocating the capacity to other things at some point and get to do a lot of the same things over again having largely forgotten what it was like the previous time. That's likely to be the next big barrier after just solving the problem of aging, the fact that the brain just can't store that many memories.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 04 2020, @09:45AM (2 children)
It's not like your brain store all that memories since birth either. Something will likely go. Only most important things to you remain. Blurred as they might be. Then, maybe those will have to go too.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 04 2020, @03:34PM (1 child)
Unless we develop a way of getting bigger brains, that would be inevitable. Either that or at some point we'd lose the ability to form new long term memories or outsource that to a computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 04 2020, @03:52PM
Personal digital diaries (on your own hardware) with a good search and tags might work wonders. Assuming you ain't just twitter posting in it.