Anti-aging won't save you

[jordansparks]

I think it's time to remind everyone again that the mainstream consensus on aging is that longevity escape velocity (LEV) is actually not even accepted to be possible at all. It's a fringe idea supported by very few scientists whose timelines are very far outside the mainstream. Just because a few of them are vocal and overly confident does not make them right, and it actually should just serve to remind people that confidence has absolutely nothing to do with correctness. Even stating that LEV is 70 years away is more generous and optimistic than the mainstream position.

Solving the aging problem will be nearly impossible. Remember that your cells do not actually have good enough tools to solve it on their own. That's a huge fundamental problem. Here's how you exist from a lineage that's billions of years old. You are composed of lots of cells that are constantly degrading. You can generally make it to reproductive age, but not with certainty. So then you try to make a baby. The vast majority of sperm are abnormal, approximately 96%. The bad ones mostly get weeded out trying to make the long journey to the egg. After fertilization, up to 75% of zygotes fail to result in a live birth. So this filtering during reproduction is one of the main mechanisms for how our cells have survived for billions of years. Our somatic cells truly lack the ability to ever get restored to full health, no matter how much we might try to help them. For example, with the OSK approach, our built-in toolkit will result in some sort of marginal success in less than 30% of the cells or even lower. What do you do with all the rest? Kill off some of the worst senescent ones? OK, but you're quickly getting into chaotic territory. For example, you would still need to somehow replace the mitochondria -- not just add new ones, but also remove the old ones. That won't happen. Sure, we might make some sporadic progress, but I strongly suspect that it will be very gradual and very minor. There is no anti-aging revolution coming and there's no such thing as longevity escape velocity. The problem is fundamentally too hard. By the time of the Great Upload Event in 60 years, my guess is that we will only have added about 10 or 15 years to maximum life span.

However, there is one glimmer of hope: the replacement approach. That's where you just grow new organs and body parts from your own stem cells. That will eventually work because we can do our own filtering for good cells in the lab. But it won't be easy. It does seem basically doable, but that's not what most people think of for anti-aging. The timeline seems very uncertain.

Until then, people will just keep dying of old age, so brain preservation should surge in popularity long before aging is solved. In short, LEV is fake.

[jordansparks]

Oh, wait. I just saw in the news the Putin is spending $26 billion to try to grow new organs for himself. I can't think of any good reason why that wouldn't sort of work to maybe buy him a few more years.