Ladies and Gentlemen, We Are All Dying
Ladies and gentlemen, we are all dying. Our bodies and brains will fail gradually over the next few decades, rendering us first incapacitated, and later dead. Our children will not be spared; they too will suffer this fate a few decades after we do. We face nothing less than a rolling, continual apocalypse. Everyone we know will die. Everything we maintain will crumble in our absence. All we understand and feel, save for the tiny portion of the human experience that we can record, will vanish. We will end.
Do you like life? It is being stolen from you. Inexorable physical processes are degrading the bodily systems needed to walk, think, and enjoy a sunny day for what it is. Muscles weaken. The mind slows. The skin becomes fragile. A billion tiny failures in our cells and their chemistry cascade forward over the years. We rust like iron, distortions and accretions and structural failures taking place in an accelerating and ultimately fatal corrosion.
Ah, but we are complacent in its slowness! To be young is to take function for granted. The old are not real - to be old is not real. Yet the day will come when you can look back and remember a stronger arm and faster mind. The grasping delays when a word or a concept will not come to you, because the internal mechanisms of your brain are faltering? That will happen sooner than you would like. You do not have as much time as you might think. How many summers are there in a life? How many victories? Countless when they lie ahead. All too few when they are half done.
Friends, the progression of medical science from idea to therapy in the clinic is the work of a career. Fifteen to twenty years can pass from start to finish. The young adults who today look upon the opening years of rejuvenation research with interest will no longer be young when the first generation biological repair toolkit of the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence is complete. They will be discovering the first small and concerning failures of their own personal supporting infrastructure. The researchers who led the effort will be retired or retiring, insofar as researchers ever choose to do that. The watch will have changed, the apocalypse taken place, another part of the world lost, destroyed, and mourned again.
And the new young people will be immortal, in their own slow time.
To live is to change. The rolling apocalypse will not go away, but it will be made kind, almost gentle. All that we build will crumble in time, as interest is lost, individuals will evolve to the point of disavowing their earlier selves, knowledge will come and go, and the time after will always be a foreign country to the time before. But there will be no death, no suffering on the vast scale that causes our present world to end over and again. To effect this transformation is the point of our efforts, to sustain human health for as long as we choose through periodic repair of the biological damage that causes aging.
How could we do otherwise? To let aging continue would be barbarism, a rejection of the core precepts of medicine and progress. If we are not building a better world, then why act at all? The capacity to build a better world is the only thing distinguishing us from a rabbit or a rockfall. Everything other than this we do because we must, driven by the biology we inherited, rolling downhill for no reason other than gravity. Are we to be human in truth rather than only in name? Then then we must break all of our physical constraints, not just the few achieved so far. We must prevent all of the suffering, not the little so far addressed. We must bring an end to the poor hand that nature has dealt us, and indeed stop playing the game entirely. In this new era of biotechnology, it is time to grow up, to become adult, to take ownership.
Good piece of reflection!, Will be nice reading this in just 10 years and see what will have happened then! ;)
Hi there, just a 2 cent.
Until SENS has happened, I'm not sure what, if any, impact or change will happen
in the next 20so years. I think it will take min. 30-50 years, almost another full half-life of time before the world
sees dramatic change (it does not seem for next 20y).
I'm even waging the entirety of my 2 cents that SENS will happen and be just like BioViva Telomerase therapy.
Therapies that will be forced to medical tourism = obscure/will pass under the public radar 'in their face' yet they will ignore it. Only if a Rich Billionaire like Mr.Musk or Mr.Zuckerberg get suddenly rejuvenate to their 20y old body will this be news(newsworthy) that the lazy or fatalistic public will be act on it in any way/be interpellated.
Think of it like marketing, what is the pitch that will sell it, because the public is antqgonistic towards longevity rejuvenation and stubbornly holds ethical fatalistic 'natural' views, on top on supplements/other methods of slowing aging that faiiled; public apathy, jaded, unconvinced, unimpressed, wanting to die, FDA/bodies helping a lot and rejuvenation getting tiny crumbs of funds to create SENS and other rejuvenation therapy of the future.
In a sense we are againt a tidal wave counter-current and there much false hope/weak unconvincing results an failed attempts in recent past that do not inspire much hope or muster enough to convince the general populace to get on the rejuvenation bandwagon, like an abadon or indifference. People are embracing death more than ever because they are faced to these ethical questions and they respond antqgonistically/defensevily towards the ''natural'' cycle of life/death of humans. Their entire being is put in question with deep introspective soul searching and the meaning of (their) life and (their) death.
Despite all best efforts to democratise longevity and health, and offer it free on a silver platter, there is immense collective thought resistance and indifference.
I feel it's a bit like cryogenics problems, almost like obscure pseudo scifi that never is taken seriously or rather is taken seriously but it remains unknown/hated by a large majority. It takes decades or even centuries to convince people who are dead set on being dead when is it How it is, humans, live, and die.
It's like a 'fatalistic placebo' group. They convince themselves so hard it's BS that you could make
an Eternal mouse as proof. There would still be many who would manifest their ill (pun intended) in the streets with slogans readiing : '' Abortion is not natural. Eternal life is not natural . Playing God is not natural. Embrace death. Yours."''
Sigh.
Just a 2 cent. (we will be Very Few who get access to rejuvenation in the future, indifference will stay, only us few will act on it and reap benefit, sadly others will wither in their fatalistic stubborness and lack of adaptability/open mind. Life does not care, you have to care about your life (and how quck death comes to you. Make it a Life Priority - For Your Life. It will thank you later and so will you, Alive, towards it)).
If you invent a cure for a disease, that benefits every human being who will ever be born for as long as the human race endures. If you invent cures for all diseases, including aging, that transforms the nature of human existence for as long as humans exist.
cheer up @CANanonymity
things are moving in the right direction in terms of advocacy
I think it will happen once it gets popular enough. It is becoming popular at a seemingly increasing rate so I think it will be a matter of time until TV picks up on the movement. People are waking up out of the trance I think.
@CANanonymity
The public accepts that the is natural because it is inevitable. With the best efforts you could show the wedding with calorie restriction (funnily my auto-correct was insisting on going "calorie Resurrection") and exercise can barely give a few years.
So the emotionally wise response is to choose one's battles and don't bother with he things you cannot do anything about and even find positive elements, accept, and love them...
But that's because there is no proven working therapy for humans. If there was any the Beatty industry would immediately embark on it. Actually there are already skin care products containing revestaril and quercetine which even help with exema. Besides, the first successful treatments will not turn back the clock but merely treat a condition like reduced immune function or help reduce our name bad cholesterol, or fight cancer. No rejuvenation here you feel five years younger because you were sick with such and such age related condition but now we massage it and you feel better. If we could print functioning organs is replacing your aging great, kidneys and bone marrow really a rejuvenation? Probably not, if you replace a single failing organ. But what if you replace the heart, lungs and a set of arteries in one go through on an update times while opening the chest? What if we could induce salamander-like regeneration? Bad joints? Just cutoff your limb and let it regrow. No real rejuvenation so far. Potbelly even riding your body's stem cells population with brand new ones doesn't count as real rejuvenation. But will help of not doing from old age immediately and probably buy you 20 years...
Even in our slow regulatory system there is place for optimism!
'I've gone on record to say that by 2025, cancer researchers will have developed curative therapeutic approaches for most if not all cancers.
2017 was a landmark year for accelerating cancer cures, ushering in a spate of new FDA approvals for cancer drugs. These include approval of two different CAR T-cell therapies - a type of cancer immunotherapy that uses a patient's own engineered immune cells to attack and kill cancer cells.
I've been a cancer researcher for my entire career. And I've seen more progress in the field in the last few years than in the previous five decades. I can't wait to see what 2018 will bring.'
Gary Gilliland, President and Director, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/cancer-research-2018-advances-propel-us-cures-dr-gary-gilliland
I don't really have a comment, but I sure wish there was a "Like" button to click. Thanks for the post!
People are stupid and their arguments against this ar bullshit. But, frustrating as it is, it is what it is. Be pragmatic and deal with what's in front of us in the most efficient way possible.
This was magnificent, Reason; thank you.
@Reason, 'And the new young people will be immortal, in their own slow time.' -- I hope you don't mean that currently living people loose the game? I believe (maybe naively) that our future in our hands. And if one is not too old he or she have an increasing chance to change his or her future.
@Ariel, you can always plan to do cryonics. Admittedly, that is not an ideal choice.
I hope to make it to LEV, though I will be 60 in under 2 years. Just hoping we will see huge advancement over the next 10 years, even if it is via medical tourism.
I'd love to see Reason new medical company be wildly successful and help propel rejuv over this period of time. Hey, I am ready to mortgage my house for reducing damage to my body.
BRILLIANT ARTICKLE!!!!!!!!!!
@Robert, I have no money for 'back up plan' and if / when I have I would prefer to make a bioengineering company. My hope is that I am relatively young -- 30 years younger than you -- though have poor health. I work on my health now. As for you -- hope you achieve LEV!
@Ariel: Cryonics in the US is quite expensive, but Kriorus is cheaper. Neuro is $12k.
@Antonio
The current state of cryonics is more like wishful thinking. We don't even know for sure whether the memories are stored in the connectome. The ice crystals destroy cellular walls and structures. And that's provided you freeze a living brain and not something that has been decaying got a few hours. So to restore the memories, provided tht are stored in the connectome of the neocortex alone would require printing the whole brain as standard plugin base and build the restored neocortex connectome on top of it. Creating the rest of the body is trivial in comparison to the complexity of restoring the brain and the memories. However, this talk is well beyond SENS. On the other hand, if you can reliably freeze and unfreeze a living human that would allow to freeze event sick until there are therapies to cure everybody or even until LEV had been reached. This would imply stage of billions of corpsicles...
@Cuberat:
Honestly, you should take the time to educate yourself about cryonics, at least at a basic level, before giving an opinion about it. Cryonics has nothing to do with freezing, and of course we know that memories are preserved.
http://www.alcor.org/Library/pdfs/Lemler-Annals.pdf
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4620520/
Thank you for this inspirational description of the status-quo. I find that one of the main opposition to fighting old age and death are the churches with their respective Gods. I can see why, because thy have the monopoly to immortality at the present time. I just put http://www.transdeism.com on the internet.
It has a few interesting links, like Immortality Systems IS Extra Terrestrial Migration - Gene Engineering.
First link had to many"assuming" and provided and just says restoring is not impossible.
The second link successfully thawed a nematode,
But can you thaw a living mouse ?
Without a successful revival the "preservation" part of the cryopreservation is unproven. It is like storing your digital archives on a write only storage. Very difficult to prove whether it actually preserved the important parts
The first link shows that nobody freezes people since long ago.
The second link shows that memories are preserved.
Worse than ignorance is persisting on it.
@Antonio
So you can show me a mammal that was preserved and restored ?