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A few years ago I did watch one of de Grey's presentations online. While certainly interesting, I found it somewhat dis-satisfying because he left out a lot of important things, such as the issue of what we do and don't know about the relation of cellular senescence to the senescence of the multicellular organism.
He also didn't discuss epigenetic drift with age.
Nevertheless, he did make a case that I found convincing that many age-related diseases can be brought under more control over the course of the next two decades.
The question is, how much control? And what will be the limits of genetic modification in the absence of germline engineering, which of necessity would only benefit people who haven't been born yet?
At this point the field is not yet mature enough to answer these questions, and thus in the interest of intellectual humility, we ought to suspend judgment.
I have been studying this topic for about 10 years now. When I first read about it in the Scientific American I thought interesting but I need more information before I am really convinced. Since then I have spent hundreds if not thousands of hours studying this, looking at both the pro and con, and I am now convinced it will happen. That is why I tell people as long as you do not get hit by the proverbial bus in the next decade or two you will live forever.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Valmond
That is Ray Kursweils prediction (in Transcend?) and I think they will work in parallel. De Greys approach will make us younger and Kurzweils way will take us there. Well, the day there are nanobots or APM we could just create whatever we like and most probably cure / remove altogether disease and ageing.
I see at least three paths leading to longevity: the SENS approach, nanobots reparing us and APM creating new organs and protections. Bet there are more and that they, whoever will arrive first will just produce a lot of accelerating returns for the rest of them and for longevity.
Hopefully we'll have what it takes to do it til the 2030-2040, it's just some decades away
Actually life 2.0 and the biotech revolution starts in 2020 just 6 years away.
Yeah this is true but it isn't happening today and for what I know, no one predict it happening in the forseable future (did you check out the link about limits in computation Limits to computation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia ?).
Ha ha ha I see. A student!
Yes you are 100% right in the assumption that parallel computer won't make some algos go faster (the halting problem is a badly choosen example though as it doesn't work even on any computer, check out SAT/3SAT / TSP or any other NP complete algo).
But you are also 100% wrong thinking that it matters for the future development In The Real World (you know, the place you will go to when your studies are finished *joke* )
(.....)
HA HA HA!
All joking aside, an example of a "Real World" application of computation that I think serves as a counterexample is the modeling of a chaotic system in e.g. weather forecasting.
This cannot be fully parallelized, as the atmospheric state at each time is dependent on that at the previous time step. It is thus similar to the simpler but less "real world" case of the Mandelbrot set. If you iterate using z ---> z ^ 2 + C for many iterations, there is clearly both a parallelizable and a non-parallelizable part of this. The parallelizable part of course is the different starting complex numbers C. Of course you could have a separate thread for each starting value, no problem there.
However, the iteration process for a given starting C value cannot be parallelized, as each iteration needs the calculation of the previous one.
A similar argument applies to the case of atmospheric modeling in weather forecasting. It is a chaotic system just like the Mandelbrot set, and this time, it is a "Real World" application! Furthermore, unlike the Mandelbrot set, you cannot parallelize an atmospheric model by dividing the system up into starting points, because the system is an interacting one. Each volume of air influences not only itself at the next time step $\Delta_t$ , but also the neighboring ones. Thus, it is far less parallelizable than the Mandelbrot set, and the maximum gain factor over fully serial computation in Amdahl's law is correspondingly lower.
I have been studying this topic for about 10 years now. When I first read about it in the Scientific American I thought interesting but I need more information before I am really convinced. Since then I have spent hundreds if not thousands of hours studying this, looking at both the pro and con, and I am now convinced it will happen. That is why I tell people as long as you do not get hit by the proverbial bus in the next decade or two you will live forever.
Actually life 2.0 and the biotech revolution starts in 2020 just 6 years away.
Live forever?
No way you could know that without more knowledge of biology than all of mankind do today.
Someone alive and aged X in year Y has a probability of dying during the year of, let's call it P(X,Y).
In order to live forever starting in 2020, you need
[1-P(X,2020)] * [1-P(X+1,2021)] * [1-P(X+2,2022)] * [1-P(X+3,2023)] * [1-P(X+4,2024)] * ...... to be close to 1. (Product 1)
All the knowledge in the world and all the computation that even Ray Kurzweil believes will exist in the world by 2020 does not allow us to calculate the values P(X,Y) from any fundamental law or first principles. How can you prove the infinite product (1) is near unity?
And physics for that matter - don't forget the heat death of the universe means we will all die eventually even if not for any currently relevant biological processes.
A few years ago I did watch one of de Grey's presentations online. While certainly interesting, I found it somewhat dis-satisfying because he left out a lot of important things, such as the issue of what we do and don't know about the relation of cellular senescence to the senescence of the multicellular organism.
He also didn't discuss epigenetic drift with age.
Nevertheless, he did make a case that I found convincing that many age-related diseases can be brought under more control over the course of the next two decades.
The question is, how much control? And what will be the limits of genetic modification in the absence of germline engineering, which of necessity would only benefit people who haven't been born yet?
At this point the field is not yet mature enough to answer these questions, and thus in the interest of intellectual humility, we ought to suspend judgment.
I saw him at a SENS meetup (that beard truly sticks out!), that was what got me interested in this whole senescence thingy.
I read his book, subscribed to Fight Ageing! (https://www.fightaging.org/newsletter/), checked out information on the web and so on. This is complicated business at the least, but I think he have the whole region (of rejuvenation techniques) covered on the global scale I know/understand.
When you say "the senescence of the multicellular organism" do you think of what will happen after this potential longevity therapy have occurred for some long time (ie. we don't know what will happen with 'rejuvenated' bodies living for 200 years)?
Senescence is for me much more important for the old, will they get the therapies to save them from death and horrible disease in time?
Quote:
Originally Posted by ncole1
And what will be the limits of genetic modification in the absence of germline engineering
I didn't know what germline engineering was (before googling it), but I think that if our lifespan can be greatly augmented, our kids will benefit from that too, and secondly, come on, Gene Therapy is already here.
Now, I think that in say 20 years (or well before) we will be able to change our genetics easily (by said gene therapy), including for our reproduction genes, actually for all our genes. At that time though, I think many people wont go through the hassle of gestation but for those who do, I bet there will be techniques altering the blastocyte / creating it from scratch (using whatever human/improved genome) etc. etc.
I saw him at a SENS meetup (that beard truly sticks out!), that was what got me interested in this whole senescence thingy.
I read his book, subscribed to Fight Ageing! (https://www.fightaging.org/newsletter/), checked out information on the web and so on. This is complicated business at the least, but I think he have the whole region (of rejuvenation techniques) covered on the global scale I know/understand.
When you say "the senescence of the multicellular organism" do you think of what will happen after this potential longevity therapy have occurred for some long time (ie. we don't know what will happen with 'rejuvenated' bodies living for 200 years)?
Senescence is for me much more important for the old, will they get the therapies to save them from death and horrible disease in time?
I didn't know what germline engineering was (before googling it), but I think that if our lifespan can be greatly augmented, our kids will benefit from that too, and secondly, come on, Gene Therapy is already here.
Now, I think that in say 20 years (or well before) we will be able to change our genetics easily (by said gene therapy), including for our reproduction genes, actually for all our genes. At that time though, I think many people wont go through the hassle of gestation but for those who do, I bet there will be techniques altering the blastocyte / creating it from scratch (using whatever human/improved genome) etc. etc.
Gene therapy has its limits though. Otherwise there wouldn't still be children suffering and dying in the world today of genetic diseases.
Yes, there are advances in the biogerentology field; but I am arguing that making claims about what we will get in 20 years in terms of lifespan is a fallacy of false precision.
Actually life 2.0 and the biotech revolution starts in 2020 just 6 years away.
Yeah, just being cautious here
It might come not evenly distributed at first too, like those old billionaires will get the first proverbial nokia 3410 longevity treatment and we will have to wait a bit before we can get a smartphone-level-treatment (for cheap). Thinking of it, the time between those two events, really expensive but working longevity treatments and cheap very well functionning ones might be only a couple of years... It is so easy to forget how fast things move.
Come on, "live forever" is as Josseppie said, "as long as you do not get hit by the proverbial bus".
Or if really you don't understand, it means that your body have the capacity of living for a really really long time, say centuries for starters (I'm not even talking about uploading minds or replacing the brain with "silicon" or whatever, just the physical human body).
You are on the Halting problem here sonny, can't solve those kind of problems even if your CPU goes at banana speed!
1. So you therefore admit that there ARE real-world applications, unlike your earlier claim.
2. The simulation CAN be done in a finite time to arbitrary precision so it's a bit misleading to the non-scientists on this forum to say it can't be solved.
3. The point is, it is NOT true that real world problems are parallelizable to arbitrary degree. Therefore, your earlier argument that single-core CPU speed is irrelevant, is a failed argument.
4. I'd appreciate if you stopped being so condescending and calling me "sonny". We are on this forum for discussion and exchange of ideas, and I hope we can all learn something. Not for some sort of parent-to-child type lecturing.
Come on, "live forever" is as Josseppie said, "as long as you do not get hit by the proverbial bus".
Or if really you don't understand, it means that your body have the capacity of living for a really really long time, say centuries for starters (I'm not even talking about uploading minds or replacing the brain with "silicon" or whatever, just the physical human body).
Living for 200 years? Maybe. But it's inadvisable not to have a will.
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