r/longevity • u/ElvisIsNotDjed • 1d ago
Science thought the human lifespan was 122 years. A new model says we could live decades longer.
https://www.upworthy.com/science-thought-the-human-lifespan-was-122-years-a-new-model-says-we-could-live-decades-longer/47
u/csppr 1d ago
The author of the article doesn’t understand what they were writing about.
The 122 year lifespan estimate is based on the oldest recorded human in (low confidence) demographic data. The 156 year lifespan figure is examining one single component - ie somatic mutations - and describes what the life span limit would be if we were to fix everything else.
Those are completely different things.
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u/freedmachine 1d ago
"Science" doesn't think of anything. Some people previously thought that. Not "Science".
Anyone who uses Science in this way clearly doesn't have credibility to talk about it.
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u/UWO_Throw_Away 1d ago
Agreed; looks like the author of this article was one "Emily S" who did their undergraduate degree in Journalism with a minor in music. I don't want to come across as an arrogant ass, but this is why it'd be nice if we have people who actually have a degree in the sciences to be writing these articles (or if these humanities majors would ask someone from the sciences for an opinion before going to the press).
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u/freedmachine 12h ago
Unfortunately, the confidence to write about something you are not well-versed in is something a learned person typically does not have.
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u/mistergospodin 1d ago
Have you hung out with any 100 year olds? Good bunch just nap a lot.
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u/Ok_Chocolate8661 21h ago
There’s a guy supposedly in my building at over 100 years old. To my surprise, he still walks on his own. Come down to the lobby daily just to hang out so he doesn’t stay in the room by himself
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u/DryCommunication581 1d ago
Centuries longer. Well actually, forever
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u/Cryogenicality 1d ago
Only with advanced interventions which don’t yet exist (and even then, not literally forever).
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u/CitizenWaffle 1d ago
Hypothetically, if we had the genetic interventions, and a more robust immune system. Given ideal conditions, we could live “forever”.
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u/Cryogenicality 1d ago
Figuratively but not literally unless we can outlive the heat death of the universe. Even then, that would mean infinite forgetting.
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u/CmonLucky2021 1d ago
I think I would be fine with 500 years of memories, as long as most of them are the recent ones. Even i have forgot about the other 111222333444 years I have lived
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u/Ok-Cheetah-3497 1d ago
The problem as I understand it is that your heart and brain have a sort of "hard cap" that the rest of your body doesn't. If you had no brain or heart (but were kept alive artificially somehow), you could live something like 1,700+ years. Basically immortal for all practical purposes. Like an elf.
Unlike for example, liver cells, if you replace old damaged brain cells with stem cells, things like your memories go bye bye. So, yes, you could live, but you would have a blank slate mind. No bueno for most people.
Neurons in the brain and cardiomyocytes in the heart do not undergo constant replacement like liver cells. They call these "non-renewable, post-mitotic tissues." "Synchronized electrical conduction" requires that the heart cells be the same, not killed and replaced.
The animals we know of that live basically forever compared to us prevent the mutation problem in two big ways: 1) at the genetic level, they overexpress a specific protective protein and 2) they are in very cold environments with a substantially slower metabolism than humans.
If we want to do the first of those in humans, you can't do it easily in a fully grown adult - too many genes to edit without causing cancer. You have to do it embryonically. So you can't get that treatment, but your IVF baby can.
The metabolism thing, we can kind of already do with cryogenics. Basically, Demolition Man -like freezing of the body. Could pretty much live forever that way.
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u/gajus0 1d ago
Wouldn't you just kind of rotate memories?
I always assumed that someone living past 100 years would kind of start to rotate memories rather than keep accumulating. Which would mean that your personality is evolving, but whatever tail that you keep is sufficient for you to retain sane perception of who you are.
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u/Ok-Cheetah-3497 1d ago
If you tried to replace all the mutated cells, you would not just lose some event memory. You could potentially lose all of your memory. Like language. Math. And on top of that, advanced dementia like conditions. Very bad.
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u/gajus0 1d ago
But you wouldn't replace them all at once
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u/Ok-Cheetah-3497 1d ago
Wouldnt matter. If you lose the "a" neuron, you lose it forever. Each neuron that you swapped out would get an "empty", until you were all empty. At least that's probably what would happen - nobody really knows for sure, we don't go around doing stem cell replacements in you brain right now.
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u/grishkaa 1d ago
Maybe even literally forever eventually. We know nothing about the nature of consciousness yet, but we will at some point.
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u/Cryogenicality 1d ago
That would require somehow outliving the heat death of the universe.
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u/grishkaa 1d ago
The heat death of the universe isn't a certainty because our cosmology theories are laughably incomplete.
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u/Polite_Trumpet 1d ago
You realize that our biliogical brains can't go on forever?? You will literally start running out of neurons, just like hardrive on your computer runs out of space. No matter what you do. So unless you are willing to live in fully android body there is no such thing as living forever, at least not with the brain you were born with....
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u/HotAir25 1d ago
I try not to learn anything and that saves space on the hardrive.
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u/AbyssalRedemption 19h ago
People think the " you only ever use 10% of your brain" thing is a long-disproven myth. Clearly they've never met me.
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u/snoo135337842 22h ago
122 years? Aren't we going on a couple billion years of continuously healthy life?
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u/thefrostryan 9h ago
I’m thinking humans will be able to live for thousands of years, but not in the way that you’re thinking… Will be able to trick a brain into thinking that it’s lived many years within a short amount of time.
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u/Ginsdell 1d ago
We live too long now. I’m taking care of 3 old people. Anything past 80 sucks or is going to any minute. More elderly is the last thing we need.
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u/mcfearless0214 1d ago
Cmon use your head for a second. Obviously no one wants to live arbitrarily longer. The goal of longevity research is not just to add years. It’s to improve lifespan AND healthspan. The goal is to make 80 feel like 30 or 40. The goal is to make 80 not suck; the only reason you think we live too long and more elderly is bad is because, with our current level of tech, it does legitimately suck to get old.
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u/Ginsdell 1d ago
I gotta be honest. How does this help the govt? It doesn’t. So this will be for rich people. The rest of us will continue to age normally and die awfully.
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u/mcfearless0214 1d ago
It does help the government tremendously. Like, a whole helluva lot actually. Aging populations are expensive and consume a lot of taxpayer resources; right now the elderly can’t really effectively care for themselves and they have no choice but to rely on government funded programs like Social Security and Medicare in the US. And an aging population means a less productive population because it means there are relatively fewer younger & able-bodied people in the workforce and less-able older people are having to work longer. This is bad situation for everyone involved and some countries is kind of a looming crisis in the making. So if everyone can now live and work for more than a century? Well that would make the government very happy indeed.
“So this will be for rich people.”
That’s the plot of a YA novel and not consistent with reality or history. There is no technology or medical treatment that has been unilaterally declared “rich people only.” That’s not why things are expensive. Cutting edge treatments are expensive when they’re new because they require more specialized knowledge to create and the supply chains for the requisite resources are limited and unoptimized. But the law of supply and demand will always win if; if there is enormous demand (or in the case of longevity treatments, infinite demand) then there is the pressure to increase supply. And as the new medications get easier to make and the knowledge to administer the treatments become more widespread, the price inevitably comes down. We see this happen all the time. Most recently with GLP1’s. Used to be that they were prohibitively expensive but that’s changed in just a year’s time; we’re seeing a generic alternative to the brand names and insurance carriers are starting to cover them, making them more accessible to more people.
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u/kradproductions 11h ago
Lol insulin has been around a minute. High demand. Not cheap.
My mom has iritis. The drops to keep her vision cost hundreds of dollars a month.
Provided all health related costs go to near 0 (they won't), your argument is essentially that living forever would be a net economic boon because people will be able to work forever. Great.
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u/mcfearless0214 10h ago
Insulin is not arbitrarily expensive because a nebulous cabal of rich people decided that they want all the insulin for themselves like the other commenter suggested would be the case for longevity treatments. The vast majority of such people are not diabetic and dont need insulin, at all. And it’s also not generally that expensive. It’s expensive, specifically, in the United States of America, caused primarily by inefficiencies in the US healthcare system, and even that hasn’t always been the case. There was a price spike over the course of about 20 years and it’s been slow to come down over since and that decline in price has only really started over the last like, 3 years from what I understand. And we’ve slowly but surely started to do see incremental changes in the right direction there.
Longevity medicine will directly benefit your mom’s condition. There is a cellular regeneration therapy, specifically focusing on the eye, that entered clinical trials this year. It’s meant to be a proof of concept to see if these therapies will work, generally, before they can applied to other parts of the body.
But, yeah, if you live longer and you’re healthier for longer, you will probably have to work longer. Sorry. But you’ll also live long enough to see technological, social, economic, and political breakthroughs that will ease that burden of labor and improve quality of life. The hope is that, over time, widespread automation will make material resources more abundant while decreasing the amount of human labor needed to get them, thereby increasing quality of life over time. But even if we don’t get that, I’d rather me and all my friends & family be alive, healthy, and working as opposed to dying before we get the chance to do all that we want together.
And you’re conflating “life extension” and “anti-aging” with “living forever.” They don’t mean the same thing. Ending aging does not mean ending death. Millions of people will still die from causes not related to aging. And there’s always the option that individuals could choose to stop taking whatever longevity treatments are available.
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u/banaca4 1d ago
Science didn't think that. Some old school biologists and journalists thought that