How long could the human lifespan realistically be extended

[Junghalli]

A while ago I made a thread on whether radical life extension was plausible. This is a follow up.

How far do you think the human lifespan could plausibly be stretched in, say, 200 years? Using straightforward improvement in medical care and living standards, genetic engineering, and whatever else you can think of providing it's relatively plausible (i.e. no boosterspice-style magic wonderpill - unless you think that's plausible and if so explain why).

[Darth Raptor]

Aging is the net accumulation of damage to both an organism's genetic code and tissues that stop regenerating at a certain point. Find a remedy for these (admitedly daunting) problems and barring accidents, you could extend a single human's lifespan indefinately.

I don't know what would be easier though; to remedy these fundamental problems via genetic engineering or to repair damage periodically with wank tech. It's unlikely such advances will be made in the next 200 years, at this rate.

Perhaps easier than both these approaches would be to gradually borg people until there's no organic components remaining. That would be my preference anyway. Some futurists are predicting computers on par with the human brain by the 2030s. I don't know how accurate that prediction is, though.

[Shinova]

There'd eventually be a point where the human brain runs out of space and it forgets too many things to keep the new ones in. That would be a problem to fix as well.

[Darth Raptor]

There'd eventually be a point where the human brain runs out of space and it forgets too many things to keep the new ones in. That would be a problem to fix as well.

My psychology is limited to a single introductory course, but I believe the human brain has limitless data compression ability. Your brain can't become "full" of knowledge. At least not in the sense that a binary electric computer can.

[Junghalli]

To clarify the OP. I was more thinking of how long you could see the average human lifespan being in 1-300 years, rather than whether you think an indefinite lifespan is plausible.

[Mr Bean]

160 years is the figure I most often here tossed around when refering to maxium "natural" human life span, assuming we locked you in a perfectly sterile box, padded the walls and fed you only "heathy" foods.

Also of course, made you live well(Exercise) and kept you sane somehow,

[Darth Raptor]

120 seems like an intuitive glass ceiling without measures specifically directed at retarding the aging process. I would be very surprised if the average human lifespan exceeded that in the next three centuries. Hell, that estimate may even be inordinately liberal. Though a few individuals may approach bicentennial status, they'll be the exception.

[Broomstick]

The problem with encouraging regeneration in the human body is that regeneration is, essentially, a type of growth and with greater growth always comes a greater risk of cancer. So it's a balancing act between runaway cell reproduction and gradual deterioration. You can use the immune system to weed out defective cells, but the more highly tuned the immune system in this regard the more likely you are to have an auto-immune disease.

Better sanitation, reduction of disease load in youth, better nutrition, and less physical overwork have contributed the most to extended and healthy lifespans. Better technology has mitigated some significant disabling effects of aging such as cataracts and deteriorating joints. Even so, by 80 or 90 there are definite signs of decline in even the healthiest humans. 120 is commonly bandied about as an upper limit on the human lifespan. Very very few have reached that age, and when they do they inevitably have serious disabilities.

At that, humans have a much longer lifespan than most other mammals. Our nearest relatives, the apes, seem to have an upper maximium of 50 or 60 even with the best conditions and medical care.

I think we'll see a lot more people reaching 100 with decent health and still able to live on their own before we'll see folks reaching 200. Certainly, the public seems to have accepted cataract surgery, joint replacement, and various other medical enhancements without much problem. Hell, among the older folks I hang out with those things seem about as common place as bifocals. If we did come up with artifical enhancements/replacements for worn out body bits I'd think they'd be embraced as long as the benefits clearly outweigh any side effects, there aren't very many side effects, and the technology is priced within reach.

[Shinova]

My psychology is limited to a single introductory course, but I believe the human brain has limitless data compression ability. Your brain can't become "full" of knowledge. At least not in the sense that a binary electric computer can.

The brain has finite dimensions. The buck's gotta stop somewhere.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

My psychology is limited to a single introductory course, but I believe the human brain has limitless data compression ability. Your brain can't become "full" of knowledge. At least not in the sense that a binary electric computer can.

The brain has finite dimensions. The buck's gotta stop somewhere.

Oh, that's simply not a problem. Your brain will simply overwrite everything that it doesn't use very often. So if you lived for several centuries, you'd go through several iterations of "you," as the sum of your experiences gradually shifts as neural patterns representing older memories are co-opted for the brain's use in stuff it thinks is more important.

To answer the original question, though. In two centuries, I predict that the standard life-expectancy for the average person born in the industrialized world will be on the order of 90 to 100 years, with people routinely hitting 110-130. Beyond that, you have to go through more hoops for comparatively less gain, and you have to have widespread acceptance of somewhat more wankish biotechnical/genetic engineering solutions.

<ADDENDUM>

By "routinely" I mean routinely enough that it won't make news, or serious ripples when someone dies at 120 years or age. The people lucky enough to make it to the far end of the bell curve may only gain another decade or two, barring some fantastic advances in cybernetics, bioengineering, or genetic engineering.

[Admiral Valdemar]

Indefinitely. There is no real reason, other than cancer, why we can't live forever using regenerative therapies to aid in making cellular repair more efficient. As it is, the only reason we die is because we are programmed to die, not because we acquire too much damage, though that is a result of this programming.

Our cells are all meant to senesce after around 20 generations, give or take a few. Once that is done, the cell line is finished and imperfect copies takeover, if at all. Look at HeLa cell lines and bacteria or nematodes. Those guys can live for ever, or at least a damn sight longer than us simply by altering their diet or doing a bit of gene knockout with regards to cell cycle limits. We are under the illusion that we cannot match this longevity simply because we are far more complex. But we are no different to masses of such long lived algae or other simpler systems when you get down to it. We're talking cellular, not tissue or organ system level here, which inevitably suffer because of the cellular level of things. Beat the evolved limits, and there's nothing saying we can't, and you get a chance at immortality. The questions about the brain, given its lack of regeneration (something already being worked on given new Alzheimer's therapies) are null and void given what Terwynn mentioned and that's something we've gone over before in this forum with regards to what makes self.

To be honest, listening to those working in regenerative anti-ageing technology, I get the impression most accept no limits, but that it's not desirable simply because of the repercussions. We have a limit to our lifespan for a reason, and this limit varies between species with no hard and fast rules bar the r- and K-species variable. Living for a couple of centuries, without the current rate of age related hindrance, would do most people. But, biologically, there's not a whole lot physically keeping us down bar the risk of cancer and mass apoptosis.

[Lord Zentei]

To be honest, listening to those working in regenerative anti-ageing technology, I get the impression most accept no limits, but that it's not desirable simply because of the repercussions. We have a limit to our lifespan for a reason, and this limit varies between species with no hard and fast rules bar the r- and K-species variable.

Somehow, I imagine that humanity will not seek to limit the duration of their lifespan if given the opportunity to gain limitless regeneration.

[Darth Raptor]

Immortal humans aren't as inherently problematic as they would be in the modern world. The technology to extend lifespan indefinately also brings with it crazy-go-nuts food productivity. I don't think any futurist seriously expects humanity to contain itself on Earth anyway.

[PainRack]

Since the bones will be worn out by normal wear and tear(the spinal cord starts degenerating by the age of 10!!!!), you're talking about a lot of surgery once you go past 100.

You need to replace the heart, the kidneys, your blood vessels, your bones...........

[His Divine Shadow]

Why not just put the brain in a new body and fix the old brain with regenerative therapies? Sure a brain transplant is massively complex and would even with futuristic super-nerve-grafting technologies require you to re-learn walking and talking as if you where a baby, but is that operation more complex than replacing systems one by one?

It'd be like when a mechanic says fuck it and replaces the engine in a car because it's too much work to fix all the small things wrong with it.

[Admiral Valdemar]

Since the bones will be worn out by normal wear and tear(the spinal cord starts degenerating by the age of 10!!!!), you're talking about a lot of surgery once you go past 100.

You need to replace the heart, the kidneys, your blood vessels, your bones...........

You know, bones actually regenerate. People that break them don't fill the gaps up with cement, they knit together. Any structural problems would be negated by having far more efficient bone marrow and general cellular processes. Osterporosis or osteogenesis imperfect would be eradicated.

And since your tissues are always being replaced, I don't see what the last statement even means. Do you think you start out with the same cells you had at birth? Your entire body is brand new every 10 years, not just cells, but at the atomic scale.

[Count Dooku]

Can you alter the aging process genetically? Or, I should so, do we have a general idea of how that would be done. . .

[Darth Raptor]

Can you alter the aging process genetically? Or, I should so, do we have a general idea of how that would be done. . .

I think it would be easier to repair the damage with periodic treatment than to actually address the fundamental problem. That would require the reprogramming of certain cell types like neurons, and a drastic change in the basic DNA replication process.

[Ariphaos]

There are seven main aging problems (at least according to SENS, and I've seen no serious refutation of them). The only one of which that does not have any active progress towards a real solution is the breakdown of mitochondrial DNA.

So yes, I'd say immortality is possible. I'd say we'll see it before the end of the century even, and stopgap treatments available before then.

[Uraniun235]

120 seems like an intuitive glass ceiling without measures specifically directed at retarding the aging process. I would be very surprised if the average human lifespan exceeded that in the next three centuries. Hell, that estimate may even be inordinately liberal. Though a few individuals may approach bicentennial status, they'll be the exception.

The oldest recorded person was 122 years old.

[Admiral Valdemar]

There are seven main aging problems (at least according to SENS, and I've seen no serious refutation of them). The only one of which that does not have any active progress towards a real solution is the breakdown of mitochondrial DNA.

So yes, I'd say immortality is possible. I'd say we'll see it before the end of the century even, and stopgap treatments available before then.

It's been a few months, but I recall a paper being published on a technique discovered that may allow mitochondrial DNA to be reset to an earlier form. Details are fuzzy, but I believe it involved retroviral therapy to replace mtDNA in cells with earlier, uncorrupted copies from a donor or cyrogenic bank holding your own previous material. This, of course, is just one of what would be a cocktail of treatments to prolong youthful life, assuming radical geneering isn't resorted to.

[Gil Hamilton]

Plus, it depends on how you define humanity and alive. If you extend the definition to include mental conversion to digital media and artificial bodies, a person could exist virtually indefinitely as long as your replication errors are fixible or negligable. I'm thinking Ghost in the Shell stuff there.

Biological immortality might be less probable, but I think human life spans can be extended significantly and have much longer useful years in that life span. What will be interesting (and painful) is when medical technology extends peoples useful lives well beyond the retirement age in the law and when people can collect social security. That's going to be a fun legal battle when they try to alter it to reflect human life and health, particularly if the life extending technology is something that not a majority of people can afford. A situation where you have relatively wealthy people "retiring" at 75 and collecting large pensions for the next forty years while they live well whilst less wealthy people are becoming elderly at the same age and needing that pension to survive.

[His Divine Shadow]

Well in addition to youth-restoring therapies new and old memories could possible in the future be stored onto digital storage and other such cybernetic implants, eventually blurring the line and eventually the cybernetic parts will stand for most of the memories and most of the thinking of the whole. That is one way of moving away from the biological without loosing the "self" in a copy and paste process.

[Admiral Valdemar]

Plus, it depends on how you define humanity and alive. If you extend the definition to include mental conversion to digital media and artificial bodies, a person could exist virtually indefinitely as long as your replication errors are fixible or negligable. I'm thinking Ghost in the Shell stuff there.

The problem with that, though, is the Ship of Theseus scenario all over again. The idea of having an atomically accurate simulation of you encoding every engram into a computer, is intriguing, but you'd still be biologically around, unless you euthanised or the scanning procedure was destructive. On the plus side, you could keep around the most intelligent minds known and let them influence society long after their organics have failed.

Biological immortality might be less probable, but I think human life spans can be extended significantly and have much longer useful years in that life span. What will be interesting (and painful) is when medical technology extends peoples useful lives well beyond the retirement age in the law and when people can collect social security. That's going to be a fun legal battle when they try to alter it to reflect human life and health, particularly if the life extending technology is something that not a majority of people can afford. A situation where you have relatively wealthy people "retiring" at 75 and collecting large pensions for the next forty years while they live well whilst less wealthy people are becoming elderly at the same age and needing that pension to survive.

The problem with pensions is already critical today in the first world. And this is down simply to the advent of antibiotics, better surgical procedures, sanitation and diet. We've gone from living 40 years to over double that on average, and if you factor in the ever growing advances in medicine and technology, it'll only be exacerbated. The hurdle then becomes whether we can afford to have this longevity treatment, not whether it is possible. I see the rich and powerful being the sole benefiters of this new tech.

[Darth Raptor]

God, I hate that fucking boat. Borg your brain gradually and maintain that module at all costs. You'll just believe you're immortal otherwise.