141 comments

[ 13.9 ms ] story [ 232 ms ] thread
> The results revealed that Jonathan has “unique gene variants in most aging pathways” including DNA repair, insulin regulation, mitochondrial function, and “low entropy” methylation, reports the study.

min-maxing longevity vs speed and charisma

I dunno, I think he's pretty charismatic. He has all these researchers wanting to spend time with him.
Sure but biologists will talk to anything. You know what happened to the other tortoises? Bored to death.
Yeah, but is he more charismatic than Bryan Johnson?

Wait till he gets his hands on turtle semen and peptides

My supplement company has a product, PeptiShell Vital Peak, that has been selling in volume to a mystery buyer for the past few months. Things that make you go hmmm.
The oldest gay tortoise there is. You can hear the grunts when he and Frederick are fucking from the other side of the valley.
He's basically been networking for 194 years without ever leaving the garden
To be fair, he's had 194 years to work on his charisma. At this point it's a choice
whats the point to living longer if you're not living life
He doesn't look a day over 90!
> He doesn't look a day over 90!

He still has quite a ways to go to 1485715964481761497309522733620825737885569961284688766942216863704985393094065876545992131370884059645617234469978112000000000000000000000. :-)

194 is the new 90 apparently
Can't we just appreciate that exceptionality as it is?

Somehow, I wish we would leave that creature alone. For once.

They did opt to swab his mouth rather than draw blood to minimize his discomfort. That seems like a pretty reasonable compromise for the value of learning and science
Because a spit swab is so invasive?
In the Leftovers people think living in Jarden is why they were left. Maybe St Helena is the new Jarden.
Interesting so the oldest land animal hasn’t cracked 200 but stuff that lives in the sea can go for five or 600 years or more.
Maybe leaving the water is a mistake...
Whales seemed to have figured that out.
I mean their ancestor was a land mamal that decided to go live in water so they kind of did figure it out.
That's the point ...
Apparently the secret to living 500 years is to move somewhere cold, avoid sunlight, and never be in a hurry
But what if I already live somewhere cold, avoid sunlight and am never in a hurry?
I do IT, poorly, in a basement in Canada. I will live to 500.
As a person that absolutely loves hundred plus degree weather and is constantly outdoors I’ll take 20 years of a hot, sunny life over 500 years of that.
This is the oldest land animal currently living and whose age is known with certainty.

It is believed that other tortoises may have lived close to 300 years.

The greater age reached by animals living in an environment that is cold and with a constant temperature and which need a much lower average power for living (i.e. a lower energy consumption and a slower metabolism) is very much expected.

> the samples were delivered from Saint Helena to Florida by the U.S. Space Force.

...why space force?

It's a remote area and USSF has operations in nearby Ascension Island.
St Helena is where the minimum wage workers on Ascension come from. It only exists to provide cheap labour to Britain's Atlantic territories.
Because Trump, Musk, et al are hoping to live forever but their lifestyle is not very forgiving - hence all haste.
Y'all see Trump and Elon in everything.
Well considering the cringe Space Force was created by them…
You think it's cringe because it was created by Trump (Musk wasn't involved, not sure where you got that).

The Space Force's role was previously split across military branches with overlapping budgets and poor communication. And since space duties weren't the primary focus of any of those branches, they weren't taken seriously and career tracks within them were stunted, making it hard to attract talent.

Hate Trump all you want, but if your analysis stops at "cringe", consider that you have nothing to contribute to the conversation.

(comment deleted)
Life extension is a popular area of focus and investment in the current crowd of powerful folks. They obviously don’t want it for everyone, musk even talks about how destabilizing it will be for broadly available life extension. See altered carbon dystopian life extension vision
he's so old, he's completely lost the hare /j
Hare dropped out ages ago. He won the long game.
> Stephen Clark, an aging researcher

Shouldn’t they find a younger researcher?

Ideally one called Jonathan?
Every couple Summers

Me and a couple hunters

Like to row in from the Isle of

Astonishing M*erf*ers

Why was the us space force involved?
I'd guess that the samples got flown through RAF Ascension Island which the Space Force operate at.
Hell yeah I’m down to become a turtle. Lay by the beach. Eat kelp. Awesome
it kinda looks like he was taken from his home as a toddler and put in jail for like... 180 years or so?. very romantic indeed.
You can already do that in Bali without tortoise conversion therapy.
So being Mitch McConnell in other words, just without the waterfront living? I'm pretty sure he's a turtle, and is at least as old as Jonathan.

But then so is half the US Senate.

> He Could Hold the Secrets to Defying Death

The struggles for limited resources among humans marooned in a finite ecosystem will not allow us to defy death. When natural causes no longer reduce our numbers sufficiently, we will be winnowed through an unceasing epidemic of violence. So long as there are births, there will be deaths.

If you thought the dementia dystopia brought about by modern medicine's gradual reduction of quick death was grim, just wait until medicine solves natural death entirely.

Tortoises who give up their secrets to humans won't survive the cataclysm.

No point staying alive if you're not healthy. This is a great podcast about the difference between lifespan and healthspan: "To start our new series about what it means to live in a world of ageing populations, David talks to geneticist Adam Rutherford about the benefits and pitfalls of increasing longevity. Are GLP-1s – drugs like Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro – miracle cures that will extend human lifespans? What happens if longer lives do not coincide with better health? How far can life extension be pushed? And who wants to live forever anyway?" https://www.ppfideas.com/episodes/an-ageing-world-lifespan-v...
> No point staying alive if you're not healthy.

Maybe not for you, but others would beg to differ?

Darwin apparently had debilitating illnesses at 72 (one year before his death) when he published a book on earthworms and their role in forming soil. And Pasteur was apparently paralyzed at 63 when he developed the rabies vaccine. Etc.

Should they have just kicked the bucket when they lost their health, because of the pointlessness of living past that?

Chopin had tuberculosis most of his life and died at 39 weighing only 45kg. Give a chance to sick and feeble, folks.
A bit more charitable read on the GP is that people should focus on having as many healthy days as possible rather than as many total days as possible.

That doesn't mean those already I'll should just give up, it means those looking to their future should consider whether living 20 more healthy years is better than living 40 more years if 30 of those are increasingly focused on just treating symptoms to wake up tomorrow.

That's an uncharitable reading of what I mean, but I suppose I could have been clearer. Perhaps "no point staying alive if you're so unhealthy that you're perpetually miserable" would be closer to what I meant, particularly having seen a number of elderly relatives living through their last years in unrelenting misery, impatient for death. One in particular sticks with me, an uncle who had been a doctor and knew exactly what was coming because he'd seen plenty of it in his career, but without the means to end it in a dignified way. These people absolutely didn't want to be kept alive longer - which is the point of the distinction between lifespan and healthspan in the podcast.
My paternal grandfather starved himself death because of health issues. My paternal grandmother died in agony from colorectal cancer. My maternal grandfather faded away and died not recognizing most of his children. My maternal grandmother was trapped in a noisy ICU where she couldn't sleep until her heart finally failed.

We can all come up with shitty anecdotes.

Was your grandfather a jain? They have a end of life ritual called sallekhana where old people fast to death.
No. He was just in pain and had no other way out.

Canada has medical assistance in dying now that lets people avoid this.

With your disrespect to other human experiences, I hope you get cancer.
I wonder where else the oldest land animal could be, if not on Earth?
There might be older land animals on other planets…

(writing that just gave me mini goosebumps)

A greenland shark, just with lots of water on top of the land too.
We don’t need to cure death. Just hair loss and old skin, it will create 50T market cap in new companies.
The hair one is a fascinating one to me... We have some many examples of people like Bezos, Jobs, Ballmer, Brin, Slim... I mean, if the ultra rich have not figured it out, I don't think there much hope for anyone else really... haha of they can pull a Musk, but that's not the point, the point is to reverse balding...
(comment deleted)
> can pull a Musk, but that's not the point, the point is to reverse balding

How much such hairline can cost, $10?

nah, but I mean, the guy went trough the same instant pipeline as Steven Seagal where he was definitely all thin in Above the Law and a film later his hairline had won the battle. Come on!
I thought he used a mascara brush?
It's not what you meant but toupees have gotten really good, the only problem is you can't be a public figure and have pattern baldness one day and a full head of hair the next. There's actually something called "the toupee fallacy" which means assuming an entire category of something is bad based on only noticing bad examples.
I Think You Should Leave had a sketch that's a fake ad for bald men who have been wearing toupees and want to stop but don't want to show up to work one day bal, making everyone think they've been lying to them. So the service is they send you a new toupee every week, each one balder than the last over the span of 52 weeks, so you can look like you're progressively going bald.
I'm not usually into cringe humor, but IMHO "I Think You Should Leave" is its own category. Episodes like Hat and Hot Dog Car ... I almost hurt myself laughing.
In the same sketch there's also an option for a man in a gorilla suit to come to your workplace and rip out your "hair" in one go.
Trump, the most vain of them all, has tried pretty much every way for the last 40 years. It's likely mostly glue at this point.
I’m actually more interested in hair removal. There should be better methods than what we have now.

If I’m going bald, then I’d love to shortcut the process.

Shaving is awful no matter where it is on your body. It takes time, it’s irritating and you never look fresh for more than a day.

Just grow a scraggly and comb it down. Venture capitalists wear t-shirts that show their nipples on stage, so what’s the shame in a long scraggly.
There's nothing shameful about nipples anyway.
Not the nipples, but the t-shirts that let them through. Unless you’re JVN put them away!
Isn't this solved with laser hair removal?
Sort of. It's often not perfect, and often not permanent.
Laser hair removal only works if there's contrast between the skin and the hair. So if you have white or blonde hair and white skin, it doesn't work; or if you have brown skin and brown hair, it also doesn't work.

For cases where laser hair removal won't work, there's electrolysis, which involves inserting an acupuncture needle in each and every hair follicle, but it's expensive, slow, and can be pretty painful.

But, hair can be dyed?
When you have laser hair removal, the laser flash pumps a ton of energy into the hair follicle which essentially roasts the shit out of the hair follicle so it dies, usually it will re-product hair at some point but very thin, wispy white hair if any at all.

You need to shave your hair for laser hair removal since you don't want a long melting chunk of hair on your body that will cause serious burns. Hair dye will not color the root base of the hair meaning that heat energy will not travel down to the base as well and probably just destroy the pigment dye instead of the hair itself.

Laser is painful too even when it does work :(
Laser tech is definitely improving on that front! I've done laser hair removal off and on for a while, and the clinic I go to recently got a new laser to replace their old unit that kept breaking down (hence some of those "off" periods)... and this new model is legitimately almost painless. The old one zapped me pretty bad in certain areas, so it's not like I'm immune to laser pain, but in those same areas I never felt more than a tiny snap/pinch from the new one.

The technician also mentioned that this new model works on a wider array of skin tones--if I remember correctly, I think she said that it works all the way up to a Fitzpatrick 6, as long as the hair itself has melanin (still no way to target white/light hairs).

mostly, but not always, and it's harder if there is less contrast between hair color and skin color.
I've moved to designer stubble. You can leave it 2 or 3 days and the lawnmower like stubble trimmers are quite quick.
Is market value the only important thing?
In a market-driven economy, yes sadly.
Not everything is about the economy. Even when you have a market-driven economy I'd say most things that people value aren't even represented by the economy.
Yes, which is the biggest issue of our time. Fixing climate change runs afoul of what the markets want, so it isn't done and the problem gets worse.
How about just reversing grey hair. I’m surprised no one figured that out yet.
No, we need to cure death. I have no problems having old skin and being bald if I can live for 1000 years.
The goal is to lengthen human lifespan? Like the planet doesn't have enough humans already.
The problem is not with the number of human but with our lifestyle...
It's both, though. Yes, the Earth can support more humans with a lifestyle closer to that of the West in the 19th century than with a lifestyle closer to the the West in the 21st, but even in the 19th (and earlier) deforestation and the like were happening. And it's just reality that as societies prosper they use more resources per person. 50 years ago the vast majority of Chinese didn't use cars but walked and and bicycled. Now they are quite car dependent.
I'm not sure that's an easy argument to hold up. Where would you draw the line on lifestyle that can and should reasonably change?

We've populated large portions of the planet that we really have no business living in without climate controlled indoor environments. HVAC is also a huge energy suck with all the externalities that come along with it. If we were to really want to cut energy use, for example, and climate control had to go we almost certainly couldn't continue to sustain as many people as we have today.

[delayed]
Yep, totally agree on the observations and concerns. Maybe I'm too pessimistic, but I don't expect major changes in lifestyle until its too late and we're forced with no other choice.
People have lived all over the planet without these things, I don't think you can say we have no business living there.

Think of the aboriginals and nomads roaming the deserts and the inuit in the icy north. All before hvac.

And hvac isn't really as much of an energy problem as heating is. Because when hvac is needed it is during a time of abundance of sunlight.

Yes, people at a much smaller scale figured out how to make it work and through many generations both adapted physically to the environment and found clever ways to work with the environment.

I can't imagine Canada or Europe could support their current population sizes without HVAC, or refrigeration, or pesticides and herbicides.

The list goes on, but in my opinion and understanding there is too strong of a correlation to ignore between those types of modern inventions and population growth.

It's usually not the most frugal humans that want to defeat death.
Well, they dont want more for you, but more for “them”.
Wake up grandpa, human population is on the cusp of beginning to decline.
Wouldn't a decline be good? Or is the theory that we can only do collapse, not decline?
Depends how it's done I guess. France has a decent population tower, for lack of a better expression:

https://www.populationpyramid.net/france/2026/

If they keep it up, their population will remain stable up to the 22nd century. There will be no further noticeable ageing and thus no threat to anyone's retirement.

Decline fails to uphold the prevailing world economic ideology. That's the real problem with population decline the way I see it. We will need to adjust in ways that don't support the idea of "unlimited growth".
Line must go up. Part of me wonders if the economic ideology might be what causes more than just a gradual decline.
> Wake up grandpa

Just imagine how many more grandpa and great grandpas will be around for you to shout this at.

The problem with the population isn't (yet? only?) the absolute number of individuals but the age distribution. Most societies rely on young people to support themselves and the old, and this only works if there's a good balance between the numbers of each. Living longer isn't guaranteed to offer a longer productive period. We might just end up with more old people in need of support and not necessarily more children. This is already a major problem today in most developed countries.

"on the cusp of beginning to"

This will happen no earlier than the 2080s. The world population is expected to increase every year until then. We will add nearly 2 billion people in that time. Consider that the entire world population was less than 1 billion for all but the last 221 years.

I continue to not worry.

(comment deleted)
Horrific research! Imagine the possibility of DJT being around for another 50 years.
What's the use of living longer, all we do is leech, kill. I am glad and sad at the same time that humans are mortals.

[I am being sarcastic here, XD]