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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: 2) by Hartree on Tuesday March 03 2020, @06:22PM (19 children)
Often, those who oppose postponing or reversing aging start arguing against "immortality".
This is a false argument. If we cure aging, that won't keep you from dying. Even if you get to 300 years before dying in an accident or natural disaster (and it's likely something will get you before then) it's still an eyeblink compared to immortality.
Let's say you find a way to armor yourself as a brain in a box or transfer your consciousness to some very basic protected level of the universe, quess what. The universe won't last forever. The big rip, or heat death or whatever cosmic destiny is most favored at the moment will get you.
So, bottom line: No one gets out alive.
Now, given that reality, I'm strongly in favor of research that increases the healthy lifespan of humans. We have a period of increasing infirmity that can turn old age into a living hell when modern medicine keeps us barely alive but completely incapacitated. It would be far better to have a longer period of life where the person is still active and in pretty good health and then a quick decline, or sudden end in an accident.
(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.
If you think a fertilized egg is a child but an immigrant child is not, please don't pretend your concerns are religious
(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.
If you think a fertilized egg is a child but an immigrant child is not, please don't pretend your concerns are religious
(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.
If you think a fertilized egg is a child but an immigrant child is not, please don't pretend your concerns are religious
(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.
No problem is insoluble, but at Ksp = 2.943×10−25 Mercury Sulphide comes close.
(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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 04 2020, @06:31AM (1 child)
It would be nice to increase the healthy lifespan of humans, but if that means humans live considerably longer on average than we do now, that also means we'll have to deal with a significantly larger world population, unless we simultaneously manage to reduce our fertility. To lead a healthy long life you also need a world capable of sustaining all those healthy people, and to me it's quite obvious the world needs fewer people rather than more. Somehow I see a lot more enthousiasm for living longer and healthier lives than for producing fewer kids.
(Score: 2) by Hartree on Wednesday March 04 2020, @02:01PM
I remember a cartoon with the punch line: There will be a population problem as long as people would rather screw than die.
But, we may be seeing that it's not as much of a problem as one might think. If you can get the standard of living up to a certain level, educate the women and make birth control available, the population seems to level out (or even go down). Look at the demographic problems in Japan, Germany and a number of other countries. They aren't producing the numbers of replacements needed to balance those retiring. These are the countries with some of the highest life expectancies.
The world has already shown that you can overpopulate with quite short life expectancies just fine, so we have to solve that problem anyway, and in some other way than just restricting lifespan.
(Score: 1) by r_a_trip on Wednesday March 04 2020, @02:31PM (1 child)
The problem is not immortality. The problem is old farts overstaying their welcome. Older people don't push the envelope as much as young people do. Humanity ruled by a caste of wealthy elders would stagnate. All timescales would stretch. The good, but also the bad.
Most probably it would cause another vast divide between the haves and the have nots. The haves accumulating more and more wealth with their extra allotted time, the have nots being forced out more and more to the fringes and getting poorer, because they don't have enough time to get their hands on the pie.
Death with comparable lifespans is the great equalizer.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday March 06 2020, @03:46AM
Unless, of course, pushing the envelope is rewarded.
We're all equally wealthy once we're dead?