Is reverse ageing a possibility within our lifetime?

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brianjones said:
it's unfair that we have to die.

if we did have to then we shouldn't have been given the capacity to think about it.
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Well, we have our time on Earth, then someone new comes into being to replace us. It's the circle of life, mang.

Look at it this way, we were once part of a star. One day, we'll be part of something else.
 
Mama Robotnik said:
Our last, best hope: Cross breeding with Turritopsis Nutricula, one of nature's few biologocally immortal creatures.

It grows then reverts to a younger form, and can effectively live forever.

2ms0iv4.jpg


So, who's gonna go first?
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Christ! I'm surprised the Chinese haven't harvested and cooked this thing into some sort of delicacy yet!
 
there was just news in science like last week about some isolated genes or something that can stall or reverse some ageing

:lol

beaten nicely, i didnt feel like searching for an article
 
It's a small possibility.
Aubrey De Gray believes that aging is caused by seven different factors and in order to reverse aging we'd need to tackle these seven different aging causing problems, which are as follows:

  1. Cell loss and cell atrophy — Stem cells and tissue engineering
  2. Nuclear [epi]mutations — WILT, short for "Whole-body Interdiction of Lengthening of Telomeres"
  3. Mitochondrial mutations — Allotopic expression of 13 proteins
  4. Death-resistant cells — Targeted removal
  5. Extracellular crosslinks — AGE-breaking molecules and tissue engineering
  6. Extracellular aggregates — Stimulating of the immune system to clear out the aggregates
  7. Intracellular aggregates — Equipping the lysosome with enzymes capable of degrading the aggregates
 
Sorry to break it to you, you're going to grow old and die. Of course that is assuming you don't get slaughtered by something else on the way.
 
replacing telomerase would not stop aging in humans. in the study they give telomerase to telomerase-deficient mice, it's not like they're taking normal mice that are aging and give them telomerase. it would have SOME effect, but not REVERSE aging. aging is multifactorial - it's an accumulation of damage to your DNA over time. e.g. mitochondrial damage is thought to play an important role in the aging process, it's DNA is much smaller than the cell genome and prone to damage, plus it replicates much more often and there are more chances for mutations to occur.
 
Sinatar said:
Sorry to break it to you, you're going to grow old and die. Of course that is assuming you don't get slaughtered by something else on the way.
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50 years ago I would have agreed with you.
Nowadays I'm not so sure that there won't be enough progress made in life-extension sciences for us to live on indefinitely.
 
Shanadeus said:
50 years ago I would have agreed with you.
Nowadays I'm not so sure that there won't be enough progress made in life-extension sciences for us to live on indefinitely.
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8 years ago, I said to a friend that we won't be the generation who can live indefinitely (theortically), and it seems that science hasn't made that much progress since then. In my country, the life expectancy goes up 3 years after every ten years. It hasn't changed much in the last 30 years. Some mind-blowing stuff must happen to kick the life expectancy into stratosphere.
 
Neo C. said:
8 years ago, I said to a friend that we won't be the generation who can live indefinitely (theortically), and it seems that science hasn't made that much progress since then. In my country, the life expectancy goes up 3 years after every ten years. It hasn't changed much in the last 30 years. Some mind-blowing stuff must happen to kick the life expectancy into stratosphere.
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Its getting there a lot faster. Computers are progressing at a ridculous speed. Soon we will have the ability to compute AI that could concievably solve our problems. It has to do with the fact that no single human can be experts in every single field. Thus making it remarkably harder to solve problems that might require many great minds of science to solve. But if an AI can know all there is to know about every field of science, then maybe it can come up with solutions for aging, space travel, nuclear fission, ect.
 
Mama Robotnik said:
The So say the Star Trek transporter was invented - would you use it? GAF thread went on for seven pages about copying of consciousness.

It taught me that I'm on the non-copying side cos you'll still die, its just that a copy of you (that thinks its the original due to copied memories) will live on.



No you wouldn't. Memories aren't a magical energy you can put into another body, they are an arrangement of various brain bits. You can copy the layout of the bits if you like, and you'll be creating a copy of your consciousness, but the original will still exist/be killed.

There will be no transfer. You'll die, your copy will live on.
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I really hate quoting such an old post, but imagine if a person has an artificial brain working in tandem with their biological brain. Everything is shared, including memories, experience, thoughts and aspirations, knowledge, etc. Now, when the biological brain dies, the conciousness continues in the artificial brain uninterrupted. Would this equate to immortality, and would it solve the clone problem?
 
Link Man said:
I really hate quoting such an old post, but imagine if a person has an artificial brain working in tandem with their biological brain. Everything is shared, including memories, experience, thoughts and aspirations, knowledge, etc. Now, when the biological brain dies, the conciousness continues in the artificial brain uninterrupted. Would this equate to immortality, and would it solve the clone problem?
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I'd say that it's a possible solution to a problem that is hard to define.
 
Mama Robotnik said:
I'm not sure its a possibility ever.

How can we reverse decay?
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That's the thing, I saw a documentary that mentioned that aging isn't a decaying process, but a natural process actually activated by the body itself at certain moment of your life. I guess if you can turn that switch off, you can live forever. But it's till something to think about, why would we evolve to automatically decay over time?


Brettison said:
Not sure if this will happen in our life times, but I'd see more likely of finding a way to move our conscious self to a non carbon self that wouldn't degrade like our current selves and has a faster neural network.
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Now I find this impossible in our lifetime, because we barely know what the conscious is, or how it works. I read recently neurologists found out that the brain wasn't as simple as they thought, and one single brain has a more complex network than all networks of the world combined, or something like that.

fake edit: oh I found the article http://med.stanford.edu/ism/2010/november/neuron-imaging.html
 
Maybe if we find a solution to this quandary we can finally get moving on colonizing the cosmos afterwards.
 
Can't wait for the GAF topic: "French people living to 120, Government wants to raise retirement age, high schoolers protest"

If I live to 70s or 80s and have a good life I won't be complaining about death, as long as its not painful.
 
Mama Robotnik said:
But you'd be just copying your consciousness. You'd still die.
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This is why I figure storing my head in a nutrient vat will be the preferable way to go about it. Probably much easier than recreating an entire person and brain within the digital domain too, but the main draw would be the continuance of the original "bits and bobs".
 
SnakeswithLasers said:
Scientists believe that the first human being who will live 150 years has already been born. I believe I am that human being.
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My son is living until he is 200 so go ahead and aim low.
 
This brain vat thing gets better the more I think about it. You'd have so much time freed up for intellectual pursuits. You could hit the books, become a polymath, contribute significantly to the scientific process and write yourself onto the pages of history. Who wouldn't want twilight years like that? :D
 
Link Man said:
I really hate quoting such an old post, but imagine if a person has an artificial brain working in tandem with their biological brain. Everything is shared, including memories, experience, thoughts and aspirations, knowledge, etc. Now, when the biological brain dies, the conciousness continues in the artificial brain uninterrupted. Would this equate to immortality, and would it solve the clone problem?
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Yes, this makes sense conceptually. Who knows if it's possible though.

Incidentally, your post reminded me of a post I made in the "What would "heaven" really be like?" thread:

Goya said:
For evolved creatures like us, "seek pleasure" and "avoid pain" are excellent rules-of-thumb for achieving the goals of survival and reproduction (though they aren't flawless--fucking someone with AIDS is pleasurable and amputating a gangrenous leg is painful). Pleasure wouldn't be a useful guide anymore if we experienced it constantly; likewise, we would be at a severe disadvantage if we did not ever feel pain. On the other hand, I would not exclude the possibility that one day a designed (as opposed to evolved) creature, like a robot, might be built so that it possesses consciousness and yet does not experience pain or boredom. Then, one could imagine the process of entering heaven as a mind upload of sorts; our consciousness transforms in such a way that it is freed from the thought-patterns of the evolved, human brain and adopts the thought-patterns of the designed, robotic brain--a brain that is conscious but cannot feel pain or boredom.
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http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=23309062&postcount=174
 
Mama Robotnik said:
I'm not sure its a possibility ever.

How can we reverse decay?
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Sohter.Nura said:
Dude, you can't fight gravity. That's what aging is :/ Your skins starts falling down not just because you're getting more birthdays, but because gravity has been acting on your body for over 60 years =P we'll all get old, no matter how much botox there is in this world.
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This is actually not true. Aging is not caused by the body as a whole decaying or wearing down.

The more research is done on aging, the more we find out that it's caused by a "trigger" like many other body functions. If we can turn the trigger off, we can make cells renew themselves for longer (and probably increase the occurrence of cancer cells -- until we find a solution for that, too).

I think it's entirely possible that it will happen within our lifetime. Then again...

VLdU5.gif

(SMBC)
 
even if it was accomplished within our lifetime, i doubt it would just be released to the public. there would be ethical issues, testing and a load of other stuff surrounding it.

but i do wonder how many people would actually opt in and how many would want to die normally.

its a cliche, but just live life, enjoy it and go out with no regrets
 
Shanadeus said:
It's a small possibility.
Aubrey De Gray believes that aging is caused by seven different factors and in order to reverse aging we'd need to tackle these seven different aging causing problems, which are as follows:

  1. Cell loss and cell atrophy — Stem cells and tissue engineering
  2. Nuclear [epi]mutations — WILT, short for "Whole-body Interdiction of Lengthening of Telomeres"
  3. Mitochondrial mutations — Allotopic expression of 13 proteins
  4. Death-resistant cells — Targeted removal
  5. Extracellular crosslinks — AGE-breaking molecules and tissue engineering
  6. Extracellular aggregates — Stimulating of the immune system to clear out the aggregates
  7. Intracellular aggregates — Equipping the lysosome with enzymes capable of degrading the aggregates
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It seems so easy with this recipe... :lol
 
Say this DID work, what would be the implications? It will only make our earth a more corrupt place as the medicine to do it would be amazingly expensive, so therefore it'd be only for the rich, powerful and greedy. You know that's not going to end well.
 
POWERSPHERE said:
Say this DID work, what would be the implications? It will only make our earth a more corrupt place as the medicine to do it would be amazingly expensive, so therefore it'd be only for the rich, powerful and greedy. You know that's not going to end well.
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It wouldn't necessarily stay amazingly expensive though after a couple of years or decades.
 
POWERSPHERE said:
Say this DID work, what would be the implications? It will only make our earth a more corrupt place as the medicine to do it would be amazingly expensive, so therefore it'd be only for the rich, powerful and greedy. You know that's not going to end well.
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It depends on what age reversal would entail - would it only prolong/prevent death by natural causes, or would other chronic conditions be wiped out with it? The cost might not be much higher for healthcare, considering most chronic conditions (aside from Alzheimer's, osteoporosis, etc.) would manifest themselves before the current life expectancy.

But if I were in charge, and age-reversal/stasis became a reality, I would take that to be a strong reason why we need to start terraforming Mars.

Edit: Or Venus. Just reading about it now :)
 
Sinatar said:
Sorry to break it to you, you're going to grow old and die.
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Yeah but the question is....when? ;)
 
I saw a thing on how they figured out how to reverse aging in mice, and it even went as far to repair their brains (reversing the age of their brain.) So I think we could see it possible in the future but that would require us to someone alter our genetic makeup which if even remotely possible would be a long process and very painful.

Also what sort of effects would it have on our knowledge if our brains are aged backwards?
Also isn't the brain constantly breaking connections and neurons and dying and its constantly making new connections and repairing neurons? So genetically it could become possible, but there are other things we would have to overcome such as organ failure and lifespan and possibly mental side effects.
 
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