Happiness in a world that doesn’t age

 

Allowing people to radically enjoy more years of youthfulness seems like something that no one in their right mind would refuse. And yet one of the most common response that people give when they first hear of it is “Why would anyone wish to love forever?” The most common reason why people see it that way is that they imagine that longevity enhancement would mean experiencing the crippling frailty of aging for a longer period of time, perhaps even forever. This is obviously not what approaches like the SENS research are aiming for, since repairing the damage of aging would effectively mean keeping the youthful vigor well into old age. However, this view is relevant in an important issue about longevity: Without happiness, longevity enhancement is nothing but a condemnation to longer suffering in an unjust world.

For this reason, I believe that any transhumanist advocating for radical life extension should also be a strong voice for an equitable society that allows everyone to live a happy, satisfying life. This is where I believe that it becomes very important for the movement to become intersectional with pretty much every other social right movement, and to become a strong ally for the advancement of every marginalized group. This also needs to be done in a way that is truly empowering for the different communities, by allowing them to be the leaders of their own social movement.

However, I believe that even while advocating for more rights for everyone, some people simply won’t be happy. I have great hopes that the advances in psychology will allow people who struggle with mental disorders will see their pain and suffering go down, but in some chronic cases, whatever you do, there still is some level of helplessness from the caring community. The same could be said of people with chronic physical illness that cripple them and for which the science of aging and longevity might be powerless to help. In all these cases, I think it would be completely immoral to force longevity treatments on people whom only escape is the knowledge that death will put them out of their misery in the long run. The ethical concerns with this question are obviously very high, especially when it comes to people for whom the notion of consent and their ability to truly understand the consequences of refusing treatments would bring. Then there is everyone who is incapable of communicating. How can we know if they wish to go through the types of treatments that could give them more years of suffering?

In all these cases, we could hope that longevity enhancement would provide these people with the hope that, given enough time, the medical community might come up with a solution to whatever chronic illness they are facing. In the end, however, the decision should always be left in the hand of the person, when it’s possible.

Beside the people who might not want to live because of their lack of happiness, there is also the issue of all the people who might want to benefit from life extension therapy even as they might be crushing other people’s happiness. Disruptive tyrants, criminals and otherwise dangerous people might not have a problem with living forever, but is it beneficial to society to keep them around for so long? What about those who get a “life” sentence of prison? Would it be ethical to keep someone in prison for hundreds of years? Could we even understand someone who’s served 50 years in jail or more to be the same person who entered prison initially?

I personally believe that longevity technology should be available to anyone who expresses the desire to benefit from it. If we want to make our world safer from people who would give us harm, then I think it is our responsibility to work at the root of the problem and start working more into rehabilitation rather than punishment and to attack the social causes of crime. As for the “Toughened criminals” and tyrants, I honestly believe that it is impossible for someone who knows they are going to live forever to hold onto a vision of themselves for such a long time. In the long run, long sentences with a strong emphasis on rehabilitation might be the solution for such “hardened cases”.

In any case, I believe that longevity enhancement is going to radically alter the way society considers happiness.

To think further about it:

http://aeon.co/magazine/society/should-biotech-make-life-hellish-for-criminals/

Ageism in a world that doesn’t age

If we are to conceive radical longevity enhancement as a real possibility, it stems from this idea that society itself is going to undergo radical changes in the way it is organized. Ageism is a systematic bias that uses age as a mean of discrimination. In one of its manifestation, ageism stems from a belief that older people are frail and diminished, which leads to decisions that robs them from their autonomy and of their empowerment. Such a vision of ageism would likely be greatly reduced, if not completely eradicated, by the types of treatments that would provide the ability to remain youthful even as the years go by and by. However, another type of ageism, one that considers youth to be immature and lacking in experience is going to become a lot more problematic as the general active population is going to become older and older.

In a society where experience is one of the most important factor for employment, and where employment is effectively vital to a person’s well-being, how will a 30 year old young adult be able to have any hopes of competing with someone who has a hundred years of experience in any given field? If radical longevity enhancement were to become a reality, we would soon end up living in a world of elders where the place of the much smaller younger generations is going to be increasingly hard to take. Market as it is now is highly dependent on older people going on retirement to free up spaces for the younger workers to take over. If people can keep their jobs for hundreds of years, what is it going to mean for the people who don’t have one?

I think this problem could be easily overcome by putting measures that are going to change the way people perceive work. By implanting a minimum income measure, jobs would turn from a life-line people have to cling onto for their own survival to something you do for you own self-growth and the good of society. If people are able to leave their jobs to start working on personal projects, the job market will become much more flexible and is going to have the space necessary for younger people to take their places. Furthermore, there could be other measures implanted within the system to allow for even more flexibility. Free education seems like a no brainer, since it would allow people to get the type of knowledge and abilities that do compensate for a lack of experience in any given field. Free schooling, when combined with minimum income measures, are also going to allow anyone to leave their fields whenever they feel the need to in order to take on new challenges. This combination is probably the best way to ensure that people will be able to live happy productive lives at pretty much any age.

In conclusion, I believe that ageism in a society that progressively gets older and older will indeed become a serious concern for the younger generations. However, I believe that there are measures that we can take that are going to make the transition much smoother and allow everyone to benefit from a society in which people no longer age.

The end of aging (and the seven deadly damage)

Indefinite youthfulness is typically one of the most common subjects of discussion among transhumanists, and is probably one of those which is mostly displayed in media. Traditional transhumanists will usually argue that such a feat would be best achieved through cybernetics, slowly replacing our bodies with machines until our mind run from a super computer that can be fixed by any specialist in electronics, and therefore has the potential to stay functional indefinitely as long as proper maintenance and backup is performed. This vision tends to forget that the human body is in itself a formidable machine, and that aging is not as mysterious as it once was. Typically, when it comes to aging, the scientific understanding of how aging damages the body and brings us closer to death is relatively well understood. Aging basically causes seven types of damage to the body. These types of damage are not controversial in and by themselves, although scientists might argue about the relative importance of them in degenerative aging, it remains that all these signs are found in older bodies and are absent from youthful ones. All of these seven types of damage have potential treatments that could be merely a few decades away with proper funding and all of them are targeted by the SENS research foundation project, on which I will come back later.

1. Extracellular junk: It’s basically the stuff that accumulates outside your cells and that your body can’t get rid of. One of the best known effects of this type of accumulation is Alzheimer’s disease, which has been speculated to be mostly the result of an accumulation of proteins around the neurons, which cause them to die, with all the consequences that come with such a result. This accumulations also happens in normal aging and could play an important role in the normal decline of cognitive functions that comes with aging. This type of damage could be solved with a vaccine that could train the immune system to recognize the offending proteins and get rid of them.
2. Intracellular junk: Well… it’s pretty much the same as extracellular junk, but inside the cell. The lysosome is the organelle inside the cell that is normally responsible of clearing the innards of a cell, but sometimes, it just can’t process some types of waste products. The waste will then start accumulating inside the cell, which will impact its functioning and can even make it harmful to the rest of the body. Think of atherosclerosis, which is composed of immune cells that just can’t digest their last meals and start accumulating in the arteries, forming clogs. One solution to this phenomenon is to inject enzymes into the patient’s body, which would be delivered inside the cell to clear the waste and restore it to function.
3. Extracellular crosslink: This basically happens when the proteins that build all the supports for our cells start bonding with sugars and become more stiff and breakable. This is the kind of damage that causes arterial stiffening which can lead to strokes or other vascular problems. Such types of damage could be targeted by a chemical that aims to undo the bonds and restore flexibility to membranes.
4. Cell loss and atrophy: It’s probably one of the best known damage that comes from aging, which is the loss of stem cells in the body. As they age, cells progressively lose their ability to replicate, which eventually make it impossible for them to replenish the body with fresh cells. Other cells just don’t replicate a lot in the first place and therefore cannot be replaced once they start aging and malfunctioning. This type of damage causes some of the most visible signs of aging, such as the loss of muscle mass and the malfunction of organs. The solution for such a problem is pretty popular these days: Stem cell therapy. It basically consists into turning any cell in the body into a stem cell, which can then be matured into any cell we need to replenish the body with a fresh supply.
5. Death resistant cells: This one might seem counter-intuitive, but the body needs its cells to die on a regular basis to be able to keep working. This process, called apoptosis, allows for old cells to give their place to younger fresher cells to take their place. An example of this process would be the degeneration of the immune system as we age, which start being cluttered with memory cells that aren’t actually doing anything good for the health of the body. Simply clearing those cells out by sending them a targeted chemical messenger that tells them to go into apoptosis would do much to restore function to the rest of the immune system, by allowing new immune cells to take over and start recognizing the new treats. Such treatment could be used on any senescent cell population and could obviously be very efficiently be combined with stem cell therapies to replace them with younger cells.
6. Cancerous cells: Another type of damage that happen to the body is the inclusion of mistakes in the DNA, mutations. Mutations are typically irrelevant in normal aging except in one aspect: Cancer. When a piece of miswritten code leads to anarchic reproduction of one cell, all hell breaks loose and the growing population of dangerous cells can soon become a threat to the whole organism. Research on cancer treatments is already well funded, but should the ever more novel types of therapies to target and destroy cancer fail, there would still be the option to alter our DNA so that it simply became impossible for cells get into this anarchic reproductive state. The downside of this procedure would be that all fast reproducing cells would be affected, which would cause a complete dependency on stem cell therapies. However, this would be a fair price to pay to be completely rid of cancer, especially if stem cell therapies are widely available and used as a treatment against aging anyway.
7. Mitochondrial mutation: This type of damage, and its role in degenerative aging, is more controversial and less understood. Mitochondria are basically the furnace for our cells, responsible of transforming sugars into usable energy. As an organelle, the mitochondrion’s got its own DNA, passed on by the mother’s mitochondria in the egg cell. As we age, this DNA can become damage, which can lead to a malfunction of the “furnace”. Since this furnace works by combine sugar and oxygen to produce CO2 and energy, malfunctions means that it’s going to start throwing reactive oxygen, or oxidizers, all around the place. While the process through which this becomes important in overall aging is still controversial, it remains that these molecules of reactive oxygen have the potential to do a lot of damage in the body. While this effect is one of the reasons behind the popularity of “antioxidant” supplements, the effect that these might have on aging is poorly understood and probably largely useless in actually preventing degenerative aging. A more functional solution would be to implement a genetic therapy that would provide the broken mitochondria with fresh proteins that could replace those that the defective DNA couldn’t produce, which would repair the “furnace” and insure that oxygen stays where it is needed.

This list of damage is an exhaustive one, considering what we know of the human body. While there is a lot of debates about the specific molecular processes of how this damage happens and the all the pathways involve, fixing this damage would be a simple engineering problem which wouldn’t require us to know everything about the biochemistry of it all. Sadly though, most of the research that has been done in aging has been focusing on accumulating knowledge about the intricate biochemical details in the hope of someday tinkering with it in the hope of making it more efficient. But this approach is long and costly, and people are still dying of old age by the millions in the meantime. Furthermore, even the best machine wears out, and therefore the priority should go to the knowledge of how to fix it in the first place. The only organisation that embraces this approach is the SENS research foundation, a private initiative by Aubrey de Grey who has been working on this for more than a decade now. If such research were to become mainstream, it could be feasible that our own generation could see the advent of regeneration therapies that would allow us to reach indefinite youthfulness.

Sources:

A great introduction to the SENS research foundation project! Don’t forget to donate and share the idea!

http://www.sens.org/research/introduction-to-sens-research

A daily source of information for research on degenerative aging and longevity.

https://www.fightaging.org/

Aubrey de Grey’s book about his SENS project

De Grey, A., & Rae, M. (2007). Ending aging: The rejuvenation breakthroughs that could reverse human aging in our lifetime. Macmillan.

The food we love

If humanity is going to be a thing for long enough, perhaps it should question the way it plans to obtain its food in the long run. Finding food is a time consuming, energy greedy process that occupies a lot of our time and money, and is also one of the major source of energy consumption. Even in our everyday life, choosing, buying and consuming food is often considered a costly and time consuming activity, even when it is perceived as a pleasant activity. In that context, having access to a source of food that would be simple, easy to produce in any setting, nutritious and easily available would go a long way toward eating better.

I argue that the basis for such a food might lie in algae. In and by itself, algae is already pretty nutritious. With the proper technique, algae can be grown inside a bioreactor, something that is already being undertaken in the process of making biofuels. The biggest advantage of bioreactors is that you can pretty much put them in any place that is exposed to light and the algae, in our case, food, is going to grow. Since algae are so tiny, most of their energy is used in producing biomass, once again in our case, our food, which would make it the most energy efficient way to produce our food.

Add to this the fact that bioreactors are closed environments and this leads us to the crucial point of this point: It would then become possible to genetically modify them to make them as nutritious as possible. One of the most controversial aspects of genetically modified organisms is the fact that it can contaminate the environment and cause an ecological collapse as it starts competing with the indigenous beings of an ecosystem. If proper containment measures are taken with the bioreactors, this risk would drop significantly. Furthermore, the bioreactor environment would be very controlled in and by itself, which means that the genetically engineered algae could be tailored made to it so that it would in all likelihood become unable to compete with wildlife outside of tank.

By combining different types of algae with different genetic modifications, it might then become possible to make the equivalent of a complete source of food available anywhere that has light. This would give another meaning to urban food and certainly do a lot for food security. Further than that, it would make it a lot easier to eat healthy by simply ingesting the algae, with other types of food being used mostly for recreational purposes. Of course, we might become bored of always eating the same food, but even integrating this way of eating as a small part of our diet could make a big difference in the way we interact with food and everything that comes around it. If we were to effectively switch our food production to bioreactors instead of fields, it would mean that we could let hundreds of acres of fertile grounds go back to wildlife while simultaneously allowing us to turn dry land and unused city spaces for growing food. This would be a lifestyle, economic and ecological revolution.

Sources

About getting all your nutrition from one food

http://www.soylent.me/

http://aeon.co/magazine/health/would-we-opt-out-of-food-if-given-the-chance/

Algae and bioreactors

Hankamer, B., Lehr, F., Rupprecht, J., Mussgnug, J. H., Posten, C., & Kruse, O. (2007). Photosynthetic biomass and H2 production by green algae: from bioengineering to bioreactor scale‐up. Physiologia Plantarum, 131(1), 10-21.

Burtin, P. (2003). Nutritional value of seaweeds. EJEAFChe, 2(4), 498-503

GMO

Uzogara, S. G. (2000). The impact of genetic modification of human foods in the 21st century: A review. Biotechnology Advances, 18(3), 179-206.