There are way too many people for the available resources on Earth as it is. What's going to happen when old people can get younger and live indefinitely? I don't mind as long as they live somewhere else.
Society spends a lot of resources educating people. This would mean society can get much greater ROI, possibly compensating with technological progress any additional resource consumption.
On the other hand, think of career politicians and of dictators for life. Later-borns will have a hard time catching up to the experience, life-savviness, networks, and other moats, of the multi-centennials they’re competing against. Also, who will be allowed to have children when the population can’t grow indefinitely? Things could get pretty dystopian.
> There are way too many people for the available resources on Earth as it is.
This is just simply nonsense. A far -better- argument would be essentially Steve Job's take on death. Which was "I think death is the most wonderful invention of life. It purges the system of these old models that are obsolete....Without death, there would be very little progress." Your argument has been disproven countless times, and will continue to be.
I agree. I think people that envision a world without death as a good thing are basically insinuating that the quadrillions of phases of evolution that brought them the intelligence and ability and forethought to make that comment in the first place are no longer relevant anymore. “We have evolved as far as we need to” is the basic statement. To call that arrogant would be a charitable take.
Your head is full of nonsense. Something like 85% of animal and plant diversity on Earth has disappeared in the last 50 years. According to a study by the World Wildlife Fund, more than a third of Earth's natural resources have been destroyed by humans in just thirty years. And yet deforestation has increased to an alarming rate. Have you heard of Climate Change? Guess what's causing that? It is estimated that humans use 173% of the earth's resources every year. You mind explaining how that is sustainable? We're pretty much screwed, and the last thing we need is more people.
None of this is a problem. Earth can easily support 1000x more people, and that should be our goal. We are the only intelligent species in this part of the universe, and we are the only species which can protect other lifeforms and take them to other planets. We should multiply and spread life throughout the galaxy.
Biocapacity can be increased with technology and sustainable energy. Our impact on environment can be eliminated with technology and sustainable energy. These are not a problem at all; we just need to utilize more energy.
People have claimed humans couldn't sustain themselves for hundreds of years now, yet we have grown, and made major advancements to support more people. The air in many parts of the world is cleaner now than they were just 20 years ago, water is cleaner in many parts of the world than 30 years ago, etc. It's not like humans are stagnant. Things are actually getting better for most people on earth. Less poverty, less war, less hunger, less disease.
One devil’s advocate I haven’t seen discussed: let’s say 99% of species die off via a harmful intervention. Once the harmful intervention stops, new species will naturally branch out from the survivors to fill the now-vacant environmental niches. This will result in an increase in the number of “species” back to the original level or beyond.
Assuming humans never destroy literally all multi celled organisms on Earth, I think this rediversification is guaranteed to happen after some amount of time.
Is the number of species really important at all, or is the preservation of the basic genetic drive the important thing?
There is a race between humans destroying their own capacity to destroy and humans destroying all life on Earth. I would bet on the former.
Less people live in poverty now than at any point in human history, but we have more people. There is more food now than at any point in human history, but we have more people. Nothing you've said has anything to do with there being "too many people." The "too many people" argument is just a hidden genocidal argument, as usually people only want -certain- people to stop reproducing (hint, it's the poor). Everything you've mentioned can be addressed through human progress, and some of the species dying can't even be attributed to humans at all. Prior to humans, 99% of all species that ever lived on earth had become extinct.
The parent says, "There's too many people on earth already", you reply "Steve Jobs said Death is great and necessary", these seem like sympathetic points to points.
What's hard to follow? Too many people exist vs old ideas need to die which often requires death...is not remotely the same argument. One says we need to cull the herd out of an imaginary number that is viewed as "too many people;" the other says you can have tons more people and have no problems, but old ideas can hold back social and scientific progress which is a problem death of older generations helps to alleviate.
No, that isn't the same at all. One is about ideas evolving through new generations of thought not held back by the old, the other is about there being overpopulation. Imagine if we still had people still alive from the Civil War...advancement would have likely been less (many old ideas, people stuck in their ways would have thwarted human progress.) What does that have to be with there being too many humans on earth? I don't see how you can even say these are the same argument, if you had actually copied the FULL quote, it would have been very apparent.
As the saying goes, time is a pyramid scheme. People who are alive when indefinite life becomes possible (if ever) will be at its top. It's a valid concern despite OP not noticing own chance of being a candidate for that role
And yet, as population continues to grow, people keep living longer and better lives.
My interpretation is that the most important resource is not minerals or land, but people! The more people who work on improving things, the better the world becomes.
8 billion heads is better than [your preferred population number]!
For one thing, many developed nations would have solved their projected geriatric population problem where way more people are retired and have all those old-age health problems compared to the working population compared to today.
Dr. David Sinclair (who led this study) has a fascinating book about this topic. He discusses this result and many others from his team, and the theory of epigenetics.
Lifespan (2019) by David Sinclair.
Also he narrates the audiobook, and he has a very suave and calming voice.
Not disputing this, but my observation is that if that’s true he is hardly alone amongst people working in this space.
I’ve seen multiple people over the last 15 years say that we’re 3-5 years out from a breakthrough that will result in 120-200 year lifespans. Yet those breakthroughs have yet to materialize.
Of course that alone doesn’t mean they are trying to scam people or are perpetrating a fraud, but there seems to be a lot of hype with little to show.
He pushes some theoretical "cell repair" supplements like NMN and resveratrol, but he is repetitively clear they're experimental, and that his evidence is anecdotal.
I understand he is invested in them, but I don't jump to "fraud" because of that.
His team had other groundbreaking results, such as partially restoring damaged optical nerves in mice by injecting a virus in the eye[1].
Someone can be fraudulent in some aspects while still being legitimate in others. Many many well published professors are full of crap in sub-topics within their own field due to egotistical and financial reasons. This guy has a conflict of interest and just because he’s proud of it doesn’t mean we should ignore it.
The burden of proof lies with the accuser(s). The argument cannot be that he's fraudulent because he could be fraudulent. What has this particular scientist done ?
I'm not saying this is the case here. This Doctor could be a total grifter... but all the same. I've noticed a trend where a person can get _one_ thing wrong and be written off as a "liar" or a "fraud" for the rest of their life. It's annoying.
There's a lot of evidence that he popularized NMN and helped build market demand for it only to later use some regulatory trickery to ensure that a company he's involved with is the only one who's licensed to sell it in the US. This behavior is hostile towards consumers and would only financially benefit him and related parties. It's been frowned upon in NMN circles.
It puts a bad taste in my mouth given the fact that Sinclair tries to brand himself as someone who puts the interests of humanity over his own.
In the video below Dr. Brad Stanfield discusses the controversy:
Some NMN are fake or shown to have lack of NMN, as far as MAAC10, ProHealth, DoNotAge and probably others provides more than the amount as advertised is genuine.
Sure, but the claim was that there's only one company licensed to sell NMN. If that were true, there wouldn't be a dozen companies selling NMN or something they claim to be NMN, regardless of purity/content.
Reverse signs of aging = cosmetics ...unless it can also reverse aging = immortality!
Immortality is a problem though unless it comes with complete independence/freedom and lots of variety. I'd hate to be immortal and still have to work, pay rent/mortgage/taxes :)
Given the current way things run in the world with balance of power I can’t imagine immortality being anything good. Altered Carbon explores this concept and some of the many possible pitfalls.
I wouldn't call altered carbon the same as traditional life extension ideas. But what puzzles me most is assuming we could live 1000 years, after 500 years would it still be you? I'm in my 40s and tend to forget parts of my earlier life, how much memories for far earlier days would my brain would retain after half a millennium?
For a low low cost of 200$, you can buy a lifetime subscription to Google Glass Mk 2 which records your entire life as you experience it, trains a Chat GPT model on it and allows you to query your own life experiences instantly.
I am joking of course, but with the rise of the internet and digital media, I think it will become easier (and more common) to rely on storage other than our own memory to keep track of our lives. From personal experience, small things like phone numbers and birthdays have already moved from my memory to digital storage and I am not sure if it is a bad thing overall.
> I'd hate to be immortal and still have to work, pay rent/mortgage/taxes :)
I don't pay rent, mortgage and taxes already as mortal. Well at least not income tax, can't avoid health insurance and social insurance, which ain't called taxes. But I still have to technically work, although if I really wanted I could already retire with my savings.
Though I'd still prefer to be immortal paying all of those, I mean if you don't like it I assume you could always killed yourself or visit Canada, where they do it for you.
> the company has so far found no obvious negative effects in mice given the gene therapy.
Yeah, stopped reading at that point, there are always negative/side effects, unless you clearly state them, I don't trust you. We are only slowly learning truth about COVID vaccine, which affected DNA much less than this would.
Why even publish incomplete research missing important data? Pretty much everything has negative/side effects even if they are rare, but to claim they don't see any is just premature publishing.
If they said they don't see any obvious side effects so far then it is a factual statement. Your interpretation is that there are no side effects. In this case luckily you know side effects always exist so you blame authors for your error, but in another case you may fall to subtle misinformation this way.
You know what definitely affects DNA? Viruses. It’s literally how they reproduce. In fact the genome of every animal is littered with thousands of partial copies of ancient viruses that are now permanent parts of the human genome. So many that the human genome is 8% virus. Every time you catch a cold your dna is being altered. Covid messes with your dna orders of magnitude more than any vaccine- if the vaccine does at all, which is dubious.
They did an experiment that makes mice appear old and be old by every metric we know of. Frailty, organ degradation, everything. And they did this with a specific mechanism. This is literally the most important step in solving aging that has ever happened. There is a high probability that we have discovered the cause of aging. Nobody gives a shit? Was it even in the news? A post on the front page about teslas crashing has 2000 comments and there’s a few people in here and only to move the goalposts? What the hell is going on?
First time, eh? These articles appear twice a week on here.
We’ve made cured nearly all diseases in mice, including baldness, Covid, cancers, heart disease, and now have made them reverse aging and practically immortal.
Very few of those treatments have worked in humans and even fewer have made it into commercial viability.
I’ve been looking at these headlines for 13 years with science literacy. I’ve become jaded as well. But this is the real deal. The idea that epigenetic model of aging is different in mice than any other mammal is so off base that it’s not even worth considering. This is nothing like those experiments that show apricots reduce cancer by 2% in mice — highly subject to mouse physiology with negligible results. Whatever animal they apply this cleaving to will display the same results, namely accelerated aging by every metric… this is massive and groundbreaking. Anyone who has any biochemistry literacy should know that
> Whatever animal they apply this cleaving to will display the same results
That’s the kicker isn’t it. “will”, not “does”. As someone who is not in the field it’s hard for me to get excited before you can at least say they’ve reproduced it with another species
Why didn't that experiment start with real old mice? And reversed their age to young again? That could be more convincing that "reversing" ageing of artificially aged mice.
Because they haven’t reversed aging in this experiment and the partial reversal they did achieve was using tools that already exist. The point of the experiment was to prove that epigenetic information loss is the cause of aging. The next step is to figure out how to completely reverse epigenetic information loss.
Sounds theoretically possible. I mean it definitely happens at conception, and methylation happens at specific sites where it should, and not where it shouldn’t. So there should be a mechanism.
Even if it’s trickier than that, there are probably lots of ways to selectively restore the epigenetic information in specific patterns or specific sites that might help chip away at disease.
In “The Oldest Cure In The World” (by Steve Hendricks) I’m reading about researchers who discovered that mice lived to be the human equivalent of 120+ years old just by fasting them.
The book really likes to crap on big pharma and conventional medicine for largely ignoring fasting as a medical treatment for a litany of diseases, since it’s not very profitable to tell your patient to just stop eating for a while.
While I think the discoveries are cool, I can’t help but wonder if the ultimate goal is to encapsulate anti-aging in a profitable pill form that might have the same effect as a dietary fast.
Yoshinori Ohsumi won a Nobel Prize for his work on autophagy, which is triggered by fasting and has anti-aging properties. And yet it seems you have to go seek out low-carb/fasting sources in order to hear about it. As if people who care about anti-aging directly wouldn’t care about it. (Well, maybe I’m wrong and autophagy is more well-known than I have the impression of.)
I would caution against using “Qui bono” as a heuristic; you will end up believing in a lot of BS using that as a tool. It can only ever be a piece of evidence alongside others. I benefit immensely from sunlight, but that doesn’t mean I am implicated in the rotation of the earth.
In this particular case, there are many natural experiments we can conceive of that demonstrate why fasting alone is highly unlikely to significantly impede “normal” aging in humans in the lab. That’s before we get to how effective it could actually be as a treatment.
And while we’re following the money, there are many powerful entities that would love a “free” aging cure to juice their demographics…so why don’t they use it?
I say that it is a heuristic, you conflate it with evidence, and then you say that’s exactly the point (that it’s not evidence)? You’re not saying anything that I haven’t said originally.
Your supposed counter-example is beyond facile. Who-benefits presupposes that the agent has the means to affect some outcome. But no human could have arranged the rotation of the Earth.
The Sinclair study is pretty contrived work frankly, as the commentary points out. We use cancer treatments in humans which can induce the same sort of DNA damage, and those people don’t seem to exhibit dramatically accelerated ageing.
It finds that activation of endogenous retroviruses induces cell senescence and is associated with ageing phenotypes. It also affords a more tractable therapeutic approach eg antivirals or vaccines.
The results appear promising, but to validate its value they will want to get it to work on other related mammals. From a commercial and ethical perspective, I suspect that there will be customers who would want to their aging pet's life with 50% probability, even if it carries a 50% chance of immediate death.
> The Dog Aging Project will follow tens of thousands of companion dogs for<br> ten years in order to identify the biological and environmental factors that<br> maximize healthy longevity.
I’m in my early thirties now and I would like to think I am leading s comparably healthy life: no smoking, no alcohol, no drugs, resistance training 3 times a week, running 2-3 times a week maintaining a lean athletic physique, balanced vegetarian diet without sweets or salty snacks, good meaningful relationships, taking hyloraunic acid supplements and using Retinol cream on my skin while making sure to use sunscreen, regular mindfulness meditation sessions, proper sleep hygiene and challenging my brain regularly by learning new languages. Some of these factors I have only introduced in the last couple of years, some have been with me for more than a decade. I often get told that I look like I’m in my mid 20s. However most of those lifestyle choices I specifically and only made because I absolutely hate to age and it terrifies me.
And yet over the years I can see (but still hide) the hair at my temples receed ever so slightly, some wrinkles on my forehead get a little more pronounced, I notice my energy levels are not what they used to be and my pace of learning has ever so slightly slowed down. When I think about it it frustrates me to no end that these things will probably only go down hill from here. Slowly but surely. And so if I could I would love to intervene even more. There are so many things to experience, so many things to learn, so many things to create, I feel like I could comfortably fill 200 years worth of stuff in my life simply based on my bucket list but most of them either require or are more fun in a young, healthy body. So for purely egotistical reasons I want research like that to succeed and be available to me rather sooner than later.
It would probably be best for me to come to terms with the fact that aging just happens and make the best of it but this attitude feels impossible to adopt.
You're certainly doing a good job of keeping young but maybe you could pick your battles instead of trying to win them all?
I've been bald-ish since I turned 20. I'm nearing 40 now and baldness has had zero negative impact on my life as far as I can tell. It certainly has zero impact on my longevity or my ability to enjoy myself into midlife.
The same can't be said of getting fat, or weak, or immobile. I'm fitter than 90% of my peers and that's been a great investment.
So why not focus on the stuff that will make you last longer/better? Including mental health and acceptance ;)
You seem to have built a whole fitter-happier-healthier lifestyle around the fear of aging. The fear itself could affect you. Or at least your mind.
EDIT: Something tricky about this thing is that once we reach that magical cut-off where we are supposed to dread the Grim Reaper (26 years +) then any kind of deficiency can be attributed to Getting Old and something that can’t be remedied if you have already filled up your whole life with anti-Grim Reaper activities. But it could also be a temporary phase. Maybe one, for example, isn’t really getting slower mentally but might just need a little vacation?
There’s a small chance it increases your chance of death [1]
Results: The intervention was terminated 6 months early because of an excessive number of deaths in the tretinoin-treated group. Post hoc analysis of this difference revealed minor imbalances in age, comorbidity, and smoking status, all of which were important predictors of death. After adjusting for these imbalances, the difference in mortality between the randomized groups remained statistically significant.
Conclusions: We observed an association of topical tretinoin therapy with death, but we do not infer a causal association that current evidence suggests is unlikely.
At this point it should be clear to everyone that very few treatments that work on mice actually translate effectively to larger animals, not to mention primates. We've been curing diseases in mice for decades, including aging, yet very few of those have produced meaningful treatments for humans.
Not that we shouldn't keep doing research, but maybe wait for primate studies before getting exited about it.
Because I don’t see much explanation in the comments, I’m going to give my layman understanding of how this works.
When an egg and a sperm cell come together to form a new cell, you have two aged cells coming together and somehow from that you get a cell with age zero. In 2006 a Japanese scientist named shinya yamanaka discovered that this age reset actually happens a few days after fertilization, in a process where the epigenome gets reset to baseline by a chemical signal of 4 different factors. Express those factors, and any cell in your body becomes a pluripotent stem cell. For this he won the Nobel prize.
What this new research is attempting to do is to do a soft reset of the epigenome- to reset cells to a youthful state without completely reverting them to stem cells. They are also attempting to show that you can cause a mouse to age by inducing breaks in non-coding parts of dna, which indirectly causes degradation of the epigenome. They claim that it is epigenetic drift, not genetic alterations, that causes aging.
There’s nothing about this research that seems peculiar to mice. I’m not a biologist but to me, it passes the smell test of at least being plausible- although I think that correctly resetting the epigenome of every different type of cell in the body is going to be a very, very complicated task.
> The team genetically engineered a mouse strain that, when given a particular drug, makes an enzyme that cuts their DNA at 20 sites in the genome, which are then faithfully repaired. Widespread changes in cells’ DNA methylation patterns and gene expression followed, consistent with Sinclair’s theory. The mice ended up with an epigenetic signature more like that of older animals, and their health deteriorated. Within weeks, they lost hair and pigment; within months, they showed multiple signs of frailty and tissue aging
Maybe in the future the prison system will allow inmates to choose between serving a full sentence or taking enough specific epigenetic damage which equates with a particular sentence.
For instance, a prisoner is given a 10 year sentence: 1 year must be served but the other 9 can be deferred by taking the injection, damaging the epigenetic modifications, and synthetically aging 9 years.
Does the 1 year need to be particularly brutal so that synthetic sentencing is a viable option? I don't know - maybe it already is. I think I would take the injection.
Or, here's another idea - how about we just imprison people for less time? Since the largest portion of their sentence is meant not as an actual punishment, but as a deterrent for others anyway.
(Also, I find it amusing how people find increasingly inhumane ways to treat their fellow humans, and with such imagination. It's also sad that this idea of excessively long, "Monte Cristo-style" punishment has become the norm, especially for non-violent crimes.)
That might be an idea. Perhaps give very short sentences but increase the severity of what were previously qualified as misdemeanor offenses? Such that speeding or running a stop sign incurred a 1 year sentence but it could be deferred with a 1 year injection. I think you’re right, that may indeed be a better solution.
101 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 178 ms ] threadDo cameras and screens often end up reversing images due to base assumption mismatch / confusion?
This is just simply nonsense. A far -better- argument would be essentially Steve Job's take on death. Which was "I think death is the most wonderful invention of life. It purges the system of these old models that are obsolete....Without death, there would be very little progress." Your argument has been disproven countless times, and will continue to be.
Your head is full of nonsense. Something like 85% of animal and plant diversity on Earth has disappeared in the last 50 years. According to a study by the World Wildlife Fund, more than a third of Earth's natural resources have been destroyed by humans in just thirty years. And yet deforestation has increased to an alarming rate. Have you heard of Climate Change? Guess what's causing that? It is estimated that humans use 173% of the earth's resources every year. You mind explaining how that is sustainable? We're pretty much screwed, and the last thing we need is more people.
Biocapacity can be increased with technology and sustainable energy. Our impact on environment can be eliminated with technology and sustainable energy. These are not a problem at all; we just need to utilize more energy.
Assuming humans never destroy literally all multi celled organisms on Earth, I think this rediversification is guaranteed to happen after some amount of time.
Is the number of species really important at all, or is the preservation of the basic genetic drive the important thing?
There is a race between humans destroying their own capacity to destroy and humans destroying all life on Earth. I would bet on the former.
The parent says, "There's too many people on earth already", you reply "Steve Jobs said Death is great and necessary", these seem like sympathetic points to points.
If this happens, that's your future, you will be the old person that you're consigning to "live somewhere else".
My interpretation is that the most important resource is not minerals or land, but people! The more people who work on improving things, the better the world becomes.
8 billion heads is better than [your preferred population number]!
Lifespan (2019) by David Sinclair.
Also he narrates the audiobook, and he has a very suave and calming voice.
I’ve seen multiple people over the last 15 years say that we’re 3-5 years out from a breakthrough that will result in 120-200 year lifespans. Yet those breakthroughs have yet to materialize.
Of course that alone doesn’t mean they are trying to scam people or are perpetrating a fraud, but there seems to be a lot of hype with little to show.
He pushes some theoretical "cell repair" supplements like NMN and resveratrol, but he is repetitively clear they're experimental, and that his evidence is anecdotal.
I understand he is invested in them, but I don't jump to "fraud" because of that.
His team had other groundbreaking results, such as partially restoring damaged optical nerves in mice by injecting a virus in the eye[1].
1. https://www.science.org/content/article/researchers-restore-...
Used to be that the burden was laid on scientists not to be merchants...
It puts a bad taste in my mouth given the fact that Sinclair tries to brand himself as someone who puts the interests of humanity over his own.
In the video below Dr. Brad Stanfield discusses the controversy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GugcLJ9xvE
Immortality is a problem though unless it comes with complete independence/freedom and lots of variety. I'd hate to be immortal and still have to work, pay rent/mortgage/taxes :)
I am joking of course, but with the rise of the internet and digital media, I think it will become easier (and more common) to rely on storage other than our own memory to keep track of our lives. From personal experience, small things like phone numbers and birthdays have already moved from my memory to digital storage and I am not sure if it is a bad thing overall.
OTOH, I'd love to, because the former is WAY more important than the latter
Work would be more relaxing, knowing it isn't make or break, lol
People will continue to die from many reasons if aging is somehow cured.
I don't pay rent, mortgage and taxes already as mortal. Well at least not income tax, can't avoid health insurance and social insurance, which ain't called taxes. But I still have to technically work, although if I really wanted I could already retire with my savings.
Though I'd still prefer to be immortal paying all of those, I mean if you don't like it I assume you could always killed yourself or visit Canada, where they do it for you.
Yeah, stopped reading at that point, there are always negative/side effects, unless you clearly state them, I don't trust you. We are only slowly learning truth about COVID vaccine, which affected DNA much less than this would.
Different from a claim that there are none.
We’ve made cured nearly all diseases in mice, including baldness, Covid, cancers, heart disease, and now have made them reverse aging and practically immortal.
Very few of those treatments have worked in humans and even fewer have made it into commercial viability.
That’s the kicker isn’t it. “will”, not “does”. As someone who is not in the field it’s hard for me to get excited before you can at least say they’ve reproduced it with another species
I hope you are correct
https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/12/health/reversing-aging-scn-we...
Even if it’s trickier than that, there are probably lots of ways to selectively restore the epigenetic information in specific patterns or specific sites that might help chip away at disease.
Somewhat related link from quick googling:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002192582...
https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/fasting...
The book really likes to crap on big pharma and conventional medicine for largely ignoring fasting as a medical treatment for a litany of diseases, since it’s not very profitable to tell your patient to just stop eating for a while.
While I think the discoveries are cool, I can’t help but wonder if the ultimate goal is to encapsulate anti-aging in a profitable pill form that might have the same effect as a dietary fast.
I’m more in the thoroughly convinced category.
“Who profits?” is a great heuristic.
Yoshinori Ohsumi won a Nobel Prize for his work on autophagy, which is triggered by fasting and has anti-aging properties. And yet it seems you have to go seek out low-carb/fasting sources in order to hear about it. As if people who care about anti-aging directly wouldn’t care about it. (Well, maybe I’m wrong and autophagy is more well-known than I have the impression of.)
In this particular case, there are many natural experiments we can conceive of that demonstrate why fasting alone is highly unlikely to significantly impede “normal” aging in humans in the lab. That’s before we get to how effective it could actually be as a treatment.
And while we’re following the money, there are many powerful entities that would love a “free” aging cure to juice their demographics…so why don’t they use it?
A heuristic is not evidence, as you should know.
I say that it is a heuristic, you conflate it with evidence, and then you say that’s exactly the point (that it’s not evidence)? You’re not saying anything that I haven’t said originally.
Your supposed counter-example is beyond facile. Who-benefits presupposes that the agent has the means to affect some outcome. But no human could have arranged the rotation of the Earth.
This article is much more interesting and well developed IMHO: https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(22)01530-6
It finds that activation of endogenous retroviruses induces cell senescence and is associated with ageing phenotypes. It also affords a more tractable therapeutic approach eg antivirals or vaccines.
https://dogagingproject.org/
And yet over the years I can see (but still hide) the hair at my temples receed ever so slightly, some wrinkles on my forehead get a little more pronounced, I notice my energy levels are not what they used to be and my pace of learning has ever so slightly slowed down. When I think about it it frustrates me to no end that these things will probably only go down hill from here. Slowly but surely. And so if I could I would love to intervene even more. There are so many things to experience, so many things to learn, so many things to create, I feel like I could comfortably fill 200 years worth of stuff in my life simply based on my bucket list but most of them either require or are more fun in a young, healthy body. So for purely egotistical reasons I want research like that to succeed and be available to me rather sooner than later.
It would probably be best for me to come to terms with the fact that aging just happens and make the best of it but this attitude feels impossible to adopt.
I've been bald-ish since I turned 20. I'm nearing 40 now and baldness has had zero negative impact on my life as far as I can tell. It certainly has zero impact on my longevity or my ability to enjoy myself into midlife.
The same can't be said of getting fat, or weak, or immobile. I'm fitter than 90% of my peers and that's been a great investment.
So why not focus on the stuff that will make you last longer/better? Including mental health and acceptance ;)
EDIT: Something tricky about this thing is that once we reach that magical cut-off where we are supposed to dread the Grim Reaper (26 years +) then any kind of deficiency can be attributed to Getting Old and something that can’t be remedied if you have already filled up your whole life with anti-Grim Reaper activities. But it could also be a temporary phase. Maybe one, for example, isn’t really getting slower mentally but might just need a little vacation?
There’s a small chance it increases your chance of death [1]
Results: The intervention was terminated 6 months early because of an excessive number of deaths in the tretinoin-treated group. Post hoc analysis of this difference revealed minor imbalances in age, comorbidity, and smoking status, all of which were important predictors of death. After adjusting for these imbalances, the difference in mortality between the randomized groups remained statistically significant.
Conclusions: We observed an association of topical tretinoin therapy with death, but we do not infer a causal association that current evidence suggests is unlikely.
1. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19153339/
At this point it should be clear to everyone that very few treatments that work on mice actually translate effectively to larger animals, not to mention primates. We've been curing diseases in mice for decades, including aging, yet very few of those have produced meaningful treatments for humans.
Not that we shouldn't keep doing research, but maybe wait for primate studies before getting exited about it.
When an egg and a sperm cell come together to form a new cell, you have two aged cells coming together and somehow from that you get a cell with age zero. In 2006 a Japanese scientist named shinya yamanaka discovered that this age reset actually happens a few days after fertilization, in a process where the epigenome gets reset to baseline by a chemical signal of 4 different factors. Express those factors, and any cell in your body becomes a pluripotent stem cell. For this he won the Nobel prize.
What this new research is attempting to do is to do a soft reset of the epigenome- to reset cells to a youthful state without completely reverting them to stem cells. They are also attempting to show that you can cause a mouse to age by inducing breaks in non-coding parts of dna, which indirectly causes degradation of the epigenome. They claim that it is epigenetic drift, not genetic alterations, that causes aging.
There’s nothing about this research that seems peculiar to mice. I’m not a biologist but to me, it passes the smell test of at least being plausible- although I think that correctly resetting the epigenome of every different type of cell in the body is going to be a very, very complicated task.
Maybe in the future the prison system will allow inmates to choose between serving a full sentence or taking enough specific epigenetic damage which equates with a particular sentence.
For instance, a prisoner is given a 10 year sentence: 1 year must be served but the other 9 can be deferred by taking the injection, damaging the epigenetic modifications, and synthetically aging 9 years.
Does the 1 year need to be particularly brutal so that synthetic sentencing is a viable option? I don't know - maybe it already is. I think I would take the injection.
(Also, I find it amusing how people find increasingly inhumane ways to treat their fellow humans, and with such imagination. It's also sad that this idea of excessively long, "Monte Cristo-style" punishment has become the norm, especially for non-violent crimes.)