How old are you?

A month from now, I’m going to celebrate my 25^th birthday. That makes me officially a quarter of a century old! But how old can we really say that is? If I were a mouse, I would have outlived the oldest one ever recorded by a factor of more than five. As a dog, I’d be mightily close to the world record for the oldest, and as a cat I might still make it for about ten more years. As a human being, I’m about one third into my average expectancy, but about only one fifth of the oldest living human on record: Jeanne Calment, who died at a whopping 122 years old. That being said, I’d be even younger to a Galapagos tortoise, a tuatara or a bowhead whale, which can all live up to around 200 years old! That would be height times how old I am right now! Some molluscs have been known to live up to 400 years while some other animal species, such as the so-called “immortal jellyfish” could live indefinitely by reverting back to its immature stage, although this is very unlikely given the high predation they are subjected to.

On the plant spectrum, the oldest know tree, a Great Basin Bristlecone Pine called Methuselah, is 4,846 years old and still kicking! That is almost 40 times as old as Jeanne Calment was when she died and 194 times as long as I’ve personally been alive! For even more mind boggling numbers, a clonal tree colony of quaking aspen called Pando, considered as a single super organism has been estimated to be 80 000 years old while some dormant bacteria have been revived after periods of dormancy of 34 000 years!

Clearly, from a living being point of view, it seems difficult to say how old I am. Furthermore, am I really going to be 25 years old when I blow my candle lights? After all, my conception actually happened nine months before I was born, meaning I will have been 25 years old for a little while when I celebrate my birthday. That being said, the cell that was going to be me was actually already there when my mother was in the womb of my grandmother, some 50 years ago. Should I say I’m going to enter my 50’s, then? If I look up the germ line, shouldn’t I go back all the way back to my first homo sapiens ancestor, some 250 000 years ago? That would put even Pando to shame! But why stop there? My immortal germ line can most likely be traced back to the very first living organism! Perhaps next time someone asks me how old I am, I should say I’m 3,6 billion years! And even then, it could date to an even older time, since there are some solid theories that life could have actually originated outside the solar system! My germ line could then be as old as the Milky Way, which is 13,2 billion years old.

All that being said, as a transhumanist, one of my main goals in life is to live for as long as I can. From that transhumanist perspective, just spreading my germline by reproducing doesn’t seem good enough because there one factor that I care about which isn’t taken into consideration by it: My consciousness. Since I want my consciousness to survive for as long as I can make it, it would make sense to actually start calculating how old I am from the point where my consciousness started existing: From my first memories as a child about 22 years ago. This would mean I’m actually younger than my birthday would make it seem. Furthermore, I could consider that my consciousness wasn’t actually developed until it matured into its adult stage, some five’ish years ago. We could even argue that a year ago, or a month ago, I wasn’t the person I am today and that every day brings something new to who I am! In that line, it would be very difficult for me to answer the question: How old are you?

Sources

http://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/oldest-known-living-organisms-world

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_evolutionary_history_of_life

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximum_life_span#In_other_animals

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_verified_oldest_people

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy

The environment in a world that doesn’t age

In my last blogpost, I have discussed the issue of overpopulation in a world where degenerative aging would be eliminated. If overpopulation were to become an issue, it seems obvious that the environment, with problems such as climate change, ecosystem destruction and resource crisis would come about very quickly. However, as I have pointed in my previous entry, I do not believe that overpopulation will become an issue to the point that such problems would become too serious.

That being said, it is obvious today that, regardless of our numbers, there are serious issues with the way we tend to the environment we live in and that, unless we seriously change the way we relate to it, it would be utterly pointless to live for hundreds of years only die from an ecological disaster brought on by our carelessness. While bringing awareness to the case is definitely an issue today, I believe that radical longevity enhancement would go a long way in solving the problems we are facing today. After all, how many times have you heard (and perhaps thought yourself) that if an issue will take a few hundred years to become a problem, why would you care about it since you would be long dead when it starts becoming serious? Knowing that it is very likely that whatever you do that might affect the environment long term would then obviously go a long way into implementing long term thinking into politics and decisions.

However, I don’t think that this is a good reason to start advocating that we stop funding for the advocacy of environmental causes and put everything we got in longevity treatments. After all, humans are wired for very short time thinking, and merely knowing that something is going to affect us personally in a long time is not necessarily a guarantee that we are going to act in an adequate manner to prevent it. Just think about the number of people who are ready to sacrifice their long term health for the fleeting pleasure of their daily cigarettes, despite a mountain of evidence that such behavior is deleterious. One of the reason such behaviors are a happening is that, when we think about future us, we think about that person as if it was someone different than who we are now. This effect has actually been measured with brain imaging in an experiment where people have been asked to think about themselves now, their future self, and a different person. The experiment has shown that the brain area that activate when you think about your future self are closer to the one that activate when you think about a different person than to the one that activate when you think about yourself now. (McGonigal, 2011) (Mitchell, Schirmer, Ames, & Gilbert, 2011)

One way that has been shown to help is to imagine your future self as someone you care about, someone for whom you want to work now in order to help. The website futureme.org gives you the awesome possibility of writing an email to your future self. (“Futureme.org,”)Having used it myself, it is really a great way to connect with the consequences of the actions we are taking now and to have respect for the person we are going to be in the future. Plus, it is absolutely awesome to receive an email from past you that you wrote a year ago and totally forgot. There is also the Long Now foundation that aims to foster long term thinking. Among its projects, the building of a clock that will last for 10 000 years is extremely inspiring in terms of long term thinking. (“The long now fondation,”)

In conclusion, I believe that  while enable radical longevity enhancement is certainly going to be very helpful when it comes to environment issues, there is still a lot of work to do in order to ensure we as humans are capable of the long term thinking it takes to implement the kind of measures that would prevent most major problems. However, if you’re willing to put money and energy into longevity enhancement therapy, the chances are high that you are already thinking more long term than just your next vacation, and I see this as a very positive measure for our common future.

Sources:

Futureme.org. from https://www.futureme.org/

The long now fondation. from http://longnow.org/

McGonigal, K. (2011). The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do to Get More of It: Penguin.

Mitchell, J. P., Schirmer, J., Ames, D. L., & Gilbert, D. T. (2011). Medial prefrontal cortex predicts intertemporal choice. Journal of cognitive neuroscience, 23(4), 857-866.

Reproduction in a world that doesn’t age

One of the main concerns that people have when there is a discussion about radical longevity enhancement is that if people stop dying of old age, population is going to explode and cause a major overpopulation problem. I believe this fear to be unfounded, for many reasons. First, it would certainly be important to define what overpopulation actually is. Overpopulation could be defined as the moment in a population growth where the productivity of the environment can no longer sustain the population growth. In fruit flies or other simple being in a closed, controlled environment, it is typically shown that population will grow exponentially until there is no more resources available, at which point the population drops dramatically as every member starves to death. It is obvious that we wouldn’t want to see such a scenario happen to human civilizations, which would seem to indicate that a warning against overpopulation might be wise. After all, there has been a faster than exponential growth of human population since the industrial revolution. Are we doomed to death by starvation?

First and foremost, contrary to fruit flies in a glass box filled with sugar, our food sources are renewable. Not only are they renewable, but the productivity has been growing over the years, and will probably keep doing so as technologies allow us to generate food in a more sustainable way than they do right now. Non-renewable resources, such as gas, oil and minerals might become more of a problem in the future if the population keeps growing, especially if we don’t find a way to use them more sparingly or to find renewable alternatives.

However, I don’t believe that the populations will keep growing at the kind of rates we have been seeing in the last decades. Especially if there is going to radical longevity enhancements.

I believe it won’t be a problem because of trend that has already been observed among developed countries, which is called the demographic transition theory. It has been around for a while and so far its predictions have been following reality relatively closely. Basically, populations can be described in three categories: Those with high deaths rate and high birth rates, those whose death rates have lowered but have kept high birth rates and finally populations with low birth rates and low death rates. The first group is characteristic of pre-modern societies, where childhood mortality is still very high and people don’t generally have access to modern hygiene and medical technology. The second group generally includes the developing countries where the death rates are lowering as a result of better access to the different technologies, but where birth rate is still very low. The final group, which includes pretty much includes every modern westernized countries are populations the lowest death rates as a result of their very high standards of living, but that are also having less children than any other population.

The explanations for the lower birth rates are numerous. As people live with better conditions, it becomes much easier to become individualists and having a big family no longer is a priority, since it effectively become possible for an individual to take care of themselves on their own. Easier access to contraception is also characteristic of these societies, and they are generally viewed as a positive measure for someone to take in their lives. People have other priorities than having children and getting married to have a family is no longer the main goal of many people. There is also a rise in the numbers of same-sex couples or couples who chose not to have children and it is less and less seen as something that is stigmatized.

Furthermore, if longevity enhancement were to become more popular, I believe the desire to have children would decline even more. For what would the point be in having children if you know for a fact that, a hundred years from now, you would be just as likely as any of your children to still be alive and active in society? Surely some people would still want to have a child or two, but I don’t believe that this would be a problem at all. After all, longevity enhancement through the medical treatment against degenerative aging would certainly help us to live longer, but it wouldn’t grant us immortality. People would still die from car accidents, rare sickness and whatever else that wouldn’t be covered by the longevity treatments.  Therefore, I honestly don’t think overpopulation in civilisations that have access to better lifespans would be a problem. We would simply have a lot less children than we do today.

That being said, I don’t have a crystal ball that can predict the future with certainty. Maybe there will be overpopulation problems to deal with if longevity technologies were to become a thing. However, from an ethical point of view, I believe it would be morally wrong to let billions of people die from degenerative aging simply because we couldn’t be sure that keeping them from dying wouldn’t bring about some challenge we would have to overcome as a society.

Sources:

Kasun, J. (1989). Too many people? The myth of excess population. Economic Affairs, 9(5), 15-18.

Cutas, D. E. (2008). Life extension, overpopulation and the right to life: against lethal ethics. Journal of medical ethics, 34(9), e7-e7.

Kirk, D. (1996). Demographic transition theory. Population studies, 50(3), 361-387.

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.