The end of aging? If Govt's allow us...

[Zero]

The people who believed that anti-aging programs will eventually be a reason to go forward with space exploration programs aren't thinking very logically. You can't transport very large populations of people offworld at any given time. At absolute best, the population offworld would grow, and the global population on earth wouldn't be effected in the least. The only incentive for such programs would be not population decreasing on earth, but the thought of escaping to a place that was less crowded. Most people would recognize that they couldn't afford it, so the majority would have little to no potential gain from all this.

[Admiral Valdemar]

Y'know, if you keep patronising me like this, I'm going over to Lancaster with a cricket bat... I do know all that.

Be sure to say hi to whoever lives in my flat now, got a lot of fond memories of that place, and that city.

Now that you mention it *gets out the 'live forever as a necron' sales pitch.*

I'm going to look over this article now and see if I can't pick some of it out as fact or fiction. You never know, you may just get your wish of becoming a malevolent, undead space monster. May have to go on Bupa with that, don't see the NHS picking up on it.

[NecronLord]

Be sure to say hi to whoever lives in my flat now, got a lot of fond memories of that place, and that city.

You've graduated?

Oh well, I'll just have to hide in Worlds Apart and interrogate everyone that comes in...

I'm going to look over this article now and see if I can't pick some of it out as fact or fiction. You never know, you may just get your wish of becoming a malevolent, undead space monster. May have to go on Bupa with that, don't see the NHS picking up on it.

Hey, assuming you're not mentally conditioned to support evil gods, it might not be so bad.

[Admiral Valdemar]

You've graduated?

Oh well, I'll just have to hide in Worlds Apart and interrogate everyone that comes in...

I understand that my inability to have the national papers broadcast this news when it was hot off the press isn't acceptable, I did try though.

And you're living in the olden days. I found a place in Manchester now. That's two cities you're going to have to stake out. Oh, I'm too nice really. It's under "W" in the Yellow Pages.

Hey, assuming you're not mentally conditioned to support evil gods, it might not be so bad.

I'm an atheist and my own boss, so I don't see it being too much of a threat.

[Nephtys]

Overcrowding is seriously not a problem for the kinds of people who can afford this. I'll assume very generously that a treatment costs 100 grand per person. That's dirt cheap, really. Given that, how many people can actually afford to do this? Upper middle class american families will seriously need to save up for this, and most below that will never afford it. No nation on earth would have widespread usage outside of a few nations, and even there the percentage using it would be small from costs.

We've got the ability to feed rich people, easilly. So why is the OH NOE, OVERCROWDING!!! card coming up again? The demographic has a slow growth rate, few kids usually... and even with clinical immortality, your chances of dying by accident means your lifespan's probably going to be 'only' 600-700 years.

[Zero]

That can actually be worse. If only certain groups can pay for these anti-aging drugs, heirarchies will immediately develope, and only worsen with time, because it's always the same people at the top. That won't create population problems, but it'll create other problems.

[HemlockGrey]

That can actually be worse. If only certain groups can pay for these anti-aging drugs, heirarchies will immediately develope, and only worsen with time, because it's always the same people at the top. That won't create population problems, but it'll create other problems.

No worries, someone will assassinate them eventually.

[Justforfun000]

Assuming this is even possible - I still haven't read the article to its fullest and would love to hear his solution to apoptosis - sure, make life a better thing. That's not my problem. Let him research until his ass turns blue. It is the suggested or intended application that I disagree with, and, in other words, the basis of his intentions.

Oh that one scientist I can understand. He's the equivalent of a fundie really, but based in potential science. But he's not the only person referenced or involved. There are many facets of this actually, he was just quoted and because of his dramatic statements, a little more 'visible'.

but SENC or whatever the acronym was IS prohibited. I don't know WHY that is, but I'll wager it isn't over stem cells or religious lunacy.

I would realy like an answer to that myself. That sounds very fishy..

[Lagmonster]

We've got the ability to feed rich people, easilly. So why is the OH NOE, OVERCROWDING!!! card coming up again? The demographic has a slow growth rate, few kids usually... and even with clinical immortality, your chances of dying by accident means your lifespan's probably going to be 'only' 600-700 years.

What makes you think it would be an expensive treatment, or an expensive treatment forever? There's no rational reason that I can think of to suppose that a truly regenerative process would be some sort of fanciful technological procedure which costs millions to perform and will never be available in public health care.

[Kazuaki Shimazaki]

Anti-stem cell objections are generally stupid, yes, but that might not be the only reason his peers aren't taking him seriously. You'll notice the article quotes the fact that in Canada, embryonic stem cell research is legal, but SENC or whatever the acronym was IS prohibited.

I think you refer to SCNT. Reading that short blurb at least, I can't come up with a reason why it is "dangerous to the researcher" (except the risk of fundie terrorists doing suicide bomb attacks on the labs) and the "subjects" at this stage are animals like mice, and likely to remain so for the foreseeable future given the relatively primitive understanding of the process so far.

And if it is the companies that are having problems in research quality, then improve regulation on companies in general. The solution is not to ban a potentially useful field of research.

[Lagmonster]

I think you refer to SCNT.

Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer, thank you.

Reading that short blurb at least, I can't come up with a reason why it is "dangerous to the researcher" (except the risk of fundie terrorists doing suicide bomb attacks on the labs) and the "subjects" at this stage are animals like mice, and likely to remain so for the foreseeable future given the relatively primitive understanding of the process so far.

Competency and harm were simply common options, naturally, and may be cited as reasons to prohibit an *individual's* work even if the field they are pursuing is allowed under law. As an aside, given the interest, I looked it up with CIHR: http://www.cihr-irsc.gc.ca/e/1489.html
I suggest you give that a read if you want to learn more about what considerations were made. I'm not posting it as a defence, since the exact reasons for prohibition of SCNT are not harm to the researchers at all, so in that respect you're partially correct, but it's an interesting read on the subject.

As for this one guy, however, I'd bet that if he went to, say, OIHR Ottawa and asked for green light his research, he would be shown the door. I even bet that the considerations of professional competency and potential harm would be cited, too; It's hard to miss the part in the article where this guy is ignored by the mainstream scientific community - too similar to the row raised by fundie 'creation scientists' when they aren't taken seriously.

[outcast]

If you have the cure to aging, then to deny people the use of it, for any reason, then you're condemning to death. And personally, i'd grab arms to defend my right to live life eternal, or at least longer than usual. The stuff about resources being too scarce and that we're overpopulated don't jive either. Hell, we could fit the entire population of the planet in a single city if we were willing to compromise some elements of our lifestyle and resort to some pretty impressive engineering. We have an entire ocean ready to be colonized with water habitats. And then there's always space. As for resources? We have MORE than enough food on the planet to feed everyone. Hell, we have more than enough food to feed everyone 10 times over. Problem isn't resources, the problem is infrastructure.

There are allready well established plans to conduct such research in international waters if banned. There are even plans to use mercenary forces to protect such endeavours from government interference.

If they ban the research, the only thing that they'll accomplish is that it'll be done outside their sphere of influence. Brilliant thinking.

Ethics? Ethics are an individual concern, a belief that varies from person to person. As far as science goes, there are no ethics. Ethics be damned!

[Ghost Rider]

If you have the cure to aging, then to deny people the use of it, for any reason, then you're condemning to death. And personally, i'd grab arms to defend my right to live life eternal, or at least longer than usual. The stuff about resources being too scarce and that we're overpopulated don't jive either. Hell, we could fit the entire population of the planet in a single city if we were willing to compromise some elements of our lifestyle and resort to some pretty impressive engineering. We have an entire ocean ready to be colonized with water habitats. And then there's always space. As for resources? We have MORE than enough food on the planet to feed everyone. Hell, we have more than enough food to feed everyone 10 times over. Problem isn't resources, the problem is infrastructure.

There are allready well established plans to conduct such research in international waters if banned. There are even plans to use mercenary forces to protect such endeavours from government interference.

If they ban the research, the only thing that they'll accomplish is that it'll be done outside their sphere of influence. Brilliant thinking.

Ethics? Ethics are an individual concern, a belief that varies from person to person. As far as science goes, there are no ethics. Ethics be damned!

1. If you think food is the only problem with people living longer, you obviously pay for nothing.

2. If you also think the people who utilize science have nothing to do with ethics, then you're a moron.

[Gandalf]

That can actually be worse. If only certain groups can pay for these anti-aging drugs, heirarchies will immediately develope, and only worsen with time, because it's always the same people at the top. That won't create population problems, but it'll create other problems.

No worries, someone will assassinate them eventually.

Or you can just create term limits.

IIRC the Romans did it back in the Republic days.

[outcast]

1. If you think food is the only problem with people living longer, you obviously pay for nothing.

2. If you also think the people who utilize science have nothing to do with ethics, then you're a moron.

1 is not a problem, we have plenty of resources across the solar system which we could get to.

and 2 is irrelevant. ethics are a purely personal concern.

[Tsyroc]

Just think how long political careers could be if people start living for a 1000 years?

[Ghost Rider]

1. If you think food is the only problem with people living longer, you obviously pay for nothing.

2. If you also think the people who utilize science have nothing to do with ethics, then you're a moron.

1 is not a problem, we have plenty of resources across the solar system which we could get to.

and 2 is irrelevant. ethics are a purely personal concern.

Wow, not the dumbest response, but up there, dumbfuck

As for the first....you are truly an ignorant fool if you believe that solar system exploration is going to be inexpensive and not drive our limited resource even more so.

You do understand why people aren't mining the moon anytime soon, right?

As for the second....you're just a fucking idiot. Science on it's own as pure knowledge is not an ethical concern. Science being used.....well let's just say you're demonstrating the basic lack of actually linking events.

[Ghost Rider]

Just think how long political careers could be if people start living for a 1000 years?

Senators who have entrenched careers would be a scary sight indeed.

[Justforfun000]

As for this one guy, however, I'd bet that if he went to, say, OIHR Ottawa and asked for green light his research, he would be shown the door. I even bet that the considerations of professional competency and potential harm would be cited, too; It's hard to miss the part in the article where this guy is ignored by the mainstream scientific community - too similar to the row raised by fundie 'creation scientists' when they aren't taken seriously.

Just for the record, I went back and reexamined the article. The main person they are quoting is simply the scientist who got the ball rolling, and was responsible for pulling together MANY top scientists in the field of senescence. Regardless of how far the technology can really go to extend lifestyle far beyond normal, or reverse cellular ageing, the discoveries and progress they have made have been quite stunning, and I'm truly surprised that the government is in their way. From a purely disease treatment perspective, this research shows incredible promise.

[Tsyroc]

Just think how long political careers could be if people start living for a 1000 years?

Senators who have entrenched careers would be a scary sight indeed.

Strom Thurmond would still be a Junior Senator.

A couple hundred years of Senator Byrd might be amusing. It'd certainly be good for West Virginia with all the pork he'd throw their way.

Massachusets would keep on voting for Ted Kennedy.


What would be worse would be all the Ex-Presidents, Ex-Senators, Ex-Representatives that would be hanging around mooching benefits and perks after only being in office for a short time.

If people really did start living that long there'd have to be lots of changes (hopefully well thought out) or there could be some serious societal issues.

Certainly progress/change would be difficult if people continued to become set in their ways when this still have several hundred more years to live and vote.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

1. If you think food is the only problem with people living longer, you obviously pay for nothing.

2. If you also think the people who utilize science have nothing to do with ethics, then you're a moron.

1 is not a problem, we have plenty of resources across the solar system which we could get to.

and 2 is irrelevant. ethics are a purely personal concern.

Wow, this has got to be one of the stupidest things I've read all week.

1) Resources are a problem, dipshit. There is an unquantified amount of mineral resources locked up in the solar system, yes. Here are the problems:

A) We don't have the infrastructure in place to go out and mine those resources. It will take a very long time before resources on Earth become so scarce that resources coming from space will be priced competitively (it will be very, very expensive to extract space-based resources in the short-term. In the very long term, yes, the costs will be trivial, but by that time, we'll have killed ourselves by overpopulation and overexploitation.)

B) And don't say we can found lots of colonies in the short term to offset the population burden on Earth. The costs of getting people into orbit are so high that you'd not even make a small dent in the population, even if you had rockets packed with people launching daily from every suitable launch site on Earth.

2) Ethics are not just a personal concern, dipshit. The next time you fly on an airplane and the windows don't blow out, or the engines don't blow up, realize that is because the engineers who designed and built the plane had the ethics necessary to not keep an unsafe product on the market. The next time you eat food and don't die from pesticide poisoning, realize it's because someone had the ethical oversight needed to discourage the use of pesticides lethal to people.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

Just think how long political careers could be if people start living for a 1000 years?

What's scarier is if the senior politicians and the wealthy could live for hundreds of years, and the rest of us were only stuck with our century and a half. Now imagine what happens if we get a president who makes himself the de-facto dictator due to his long life.

Now, imagine that, after a thousand years, he dies . . . after having all that time to craft a personality cult about himself.

[outcast]

Wow, this has got to be one of the stupidest things I've read all week.

1) Resources are a problem, dipshit. There is an unquantified amount of mineral resources locked up in the solar system, yes. Here are the problems:

</quote>

First of all, there's no need to get insulting. Secondly, i don't think you have a clear idea of the simply *insane* amounts of resources that are available in the solar system.


<quote>
A) We don't have the infrastructure in place to go out and mine those resources. It will take a very long time before resources on Earth become so scarce that resources coming from space will be priced competitively (it will be very, very expensive to extract space-based resources in the short-term. In the very long term, yes, the costs will be trivial, but by that time, we'll have killed ourselves by overpopulation and overexploitation.) </quote>

Not really, building the infrastructure is just a matter of will and money, we have the technology, next-gen space propulsions will increasingly lower the cost of space travel. A single average NEO asteroid contains roughly 40 trillion dollars worth of minerals, once a facility is in place on such an asteroid, you could theoretically outproduce any earth-based mining operation. China is allready planning for a lunar mining base.


<quote>

B) And don't say we can found lots of colonies in the short term to offset the population burden on Earth. The costs of getting people into orbit are so high that you'd not even make a small dent in the population, even if you had rockets packed with people launching daily from every suitable launch site on Earth.</quote>

With modern propulsion yes, but we're not at the dawn of the commercialization of space, once this truly kicks into gear we'll see the cost go drown drastically.


<quote>2) Ethics are not just a personal concern, dipshit. The next time you fly on an airplane and the windows don't blow out, or the engines don't blow up, realize that is because the engineers who designed and built the plane had the ethics necessary to not keep an unsafe product on the market. The next time you eat food and don't die from pesticide poisoning, realize it's because someone had the ethical oversight needed to discourage the use of pesticides lethal to people.

Yeah their ethics consist of making sure people don't die...funny, i thought that an anti-aging drug would fit right into that.

[outcast]

1. If you think food is the only problem with people living longer, you obviously pay for nothing.

2. If you also think the people who utilize science have nothing to do with ethics, then you're a moron.

1 is not a problem, we have plenty of resources across the solar system which we could get to.

and 2 is irrelevant. ethics are a purely personal concern.

Wow, not the dumbest response, but up there, dumbfuck

As for the first....you are truly an ignorant fool if you believe that solar system exploration is going to be inexpensive and not drive our limited resource even more so.

You do understand why people aren't mining the moon anytime soon, right?

As for the second....you're just a fucking idiot. Science on it's own as pure knowledge is not an ethical concern. Science being used.....well let's just say you're demonstrating the basic lack of actually linking events.

What is it with you people and insults? Bad hairday or something? I never said it would be inexpensive, i said that it would be worth the cost and t hat over time as technology advances the cost will be driven down. This is pretty much common sense so i don't see how me mentioning it makes me an 'ignorant fool'. And for the record, China is planning a lunar mining base to be established within the next few decades. The reasons it isn't being done are numerous, but the primary one isn't cost. The initial investment would be huge yes, but well worth it. Once the infrastructure is there, cost itself will be drastically lower, and this trend would continue as technology advances. I find it hard to believe you don't understand this.

And again, as for ethics, they are a personal opinion. There is no absolute morality/ethics as is well understood in modern philosophy. Only someone with a narrowminded rusted down view of right and wrong would believe anything other than that they are relative. Some people consider abortion to be the most evil thing ever, others consider it to be a person's own choice. This ofcourse applies to everything. Just because most of us believe that nuking a city for no reason for instance is wrong, doesn't mean it is. It's just an act, it has no inherent qualities of good or evil. That's a value *we* ascribe to it. As long as you can find someone who disagrees with your sense of ethics (and i assure you, you won't find a single rule of ethics that doesn't have people disagreeing with it), it isn't a universal sense of ethics, or absolute.

Ofcourse we must all live together in some sort of harmony as the vast majority of us don't quite like smashing each other's skulls in on a daily basis so a form of concensus must be reached. This is where we simply state that you are free to do whatever you want so long as it doesn't harm other people. If i want to live forever, you have no right to deny me that, and you certainly can't justify it with some weak argument about how it affects the scarce resources and overpopulates the planet.

Besides, you seriously think that people will sit just idly by and die of old age whilst there's a means to avoid that? Ofcourse not, they'll grab the biggest guns they can and track down the people that prevent them from using such means to gain enhanced life, and blow their fucking brains out.

I know i would.

[Lord of the Abyss]

and 2 is irrelevant. ethics are a purely personal concern.

Ethics by definition are not a purely personal concern. Ethics are all about how we deal with other people/creatures. If you lived in a universe where you were the only living thing, nothing you did would be a matter of ethics.

And again, as for ethics, they are a personal opinion. There is no absolute morality/ethics as is well understood in modern philosophy. Only someone with a narrowminded rusted down view of right and wrong would believe anything other than that they are relative. Some people consider abortion to be the most evil thing ever, others consider it to be a person's own choice. This ofcourse applies to everything. Just because most of us believe that nuking a city for no reason for instance is wrong, doesn't mean it is. It's just an act, it has no inherent qualities of good or evil. That's a value *we* ascribe to it. As long as you can find someone who disagrees with your sense of ethics (and i assure you, you won't find a single rule of ethics that doesn't have people disagreeing with it), it isn't a universal sense of ethics, or absolute.

Of course some people disagree with ethics; thats while they are called "rules" and not "laws" or "facts". Killing people for no reason is by definition to ethical; ethics are about self restrait in ones behaivior towards others ( among other things ) so unprovoked, purposeless killing is the antithesis of ethics.

Back on topic : With a low enough reproduction rate, the population won't explode even with agelessness. People will still die of disease and accident and violence; I once read a life insurance company's estimate that even if aging was eliminated, we'd live no more than 200 years on average.

No one should be surprised at the government opposing anti-aging research; it always has. If you don't believe me, go to the library. Pick up any pre-90s book on the subject, and you'll see the same pattern. Scientist makes fruit flies or or mice live longer, scientist loses all funding and is driven out of science or finds some rich individual to support him. Up until recently, success in this field was forbidden. Most of those books have a speech from a Catholic priest/bishop/Jesuit about how bad life extension is, because it reduces despair and therefore endangers faith.

I don't think it's a coincidence that the field has suddenly started to progress after the last decade or so; the Baby Boom is getting old, and many of them don't want to hear speeches about the virtues of death.