You are appreciated for that info, I had to look this up, you are correct. I also looked up the current oldest person and Maria Branyas Morera popped up as the current one at 117 and noticed how similar she looks to Jeanne Calment, a little creepy, LOL. Thanks for sharing. May you be enjoying a wonderful summer season with loved ones.
To pay for elderly care, Jeanne Calmemt, then aged 90 sold her house against a life annuity. The buyer was her solicitor, then aged 47. He died 30 years later while she was still alive. His widow has to continue to pay the life annuity two more years.
There is definitely a bunch of controversy and doubters. However, i'm a strong believer that she lived so long because of how she seemingly managed stress so well coupled with exercise. She was headstrong enough to "do" without regret and active enough to ride a bike on her 100th birthday. If I ever live that long I hope to keep myself fit enough to ride a bike. But getting a moderate inheritance from here father (1926) and owning the building where her apartment was meant she never had any stress over food, shelter, or work, and with the exercise meant her physical fortitude matched her mental toughness. You'd have to be to live that long.
My grandfather died at 92, a week before he died he had a stroke which is what did him in. Prior the stroke he loved by himself in a townhouse, drove his own car, did the cross word everyday, and everyday of his life since his twenties he’d do 50 sit ups, push ups and a bunch of other abs and strength exercises, he was still doing his daily work out up until the morning of his stroke He was a good role model for healthy living, and I’ll take any help we can get for slowing down or halting the negative impacts of aging.
my grandfather turned 92 this year, he goes to the gym every morning and walks and swims. lately hes been concerned about his high blood pressure and is worried about a stroke occuring so every time its high he wants us to take him to the emergency
Sounds like he did well.I've known and know people in their early 60s who are effectively immobile for health related reasons. I try to keep doing moderate exercise so I am still mobile and I'd take croaking at 92 after a fully active life over longer but confined to the couch for a few decades.
Idk why but, *It reminds me of the guy who was jogging everyday and explains everyone the good effect of jogging dies due to heart stroke while jogging one day!*
My Grandpa just died at 93. I don't have anything else to add. His funeral is in the morning. He decided he wanted to "go home" and eventually had a stroke and a seizure then died in his sleep.
My sister-in-law was very healthy most of her life; never smoked, drank, only ate a bit of fish in an otherwise vegetarian diet, hiked, biked, swam, and lived a largely athletic lifestyle. She died of colorectal cancer at age 70. Sometimes, your genetic makeup is just against you.
Sure maybe a person's fate is already given at birth but I believe that doing healthy things like your sister can actually help decrease the chance of getting cancer at a much younger age.
Could she had lived more if her cancer was detected earlier and fixed earlier? Most people who lived to 100 or more even women survived multiple cancers.
@@carlrodalegrado4104 While it's true that early detection can sometimes make a difference, cancer is an incredibly complex disease, and outcomes aren't always predictable. Her healthy lifestyle and the love she shared with her family are what should be remembered most. It's important to acknowledge that sometimes, despite our best efforts, some things are beyond our control.
My great grandfather was living alone and doing all his own cooking, cleaning, driving, etc until 103, he was taken out by a tree falling on his house during the blizzard of 1993.
@@TheEnderCycloneEnd what I meant was more like having enough health to live comfortably dill the end. My grandparents both pretty much passed away on foot. Not like drop dead suddenly but more like felt really ill suddenly and got hospitalized and past after couple of days. But before final hospitalization they where fully cognitively intact and were able to move and drive around and fully spent time with people. Of course they had many health problems by then but they had necessary medications and still got to be fully present. This in my opinion beats the fate were you slowly but surely become bed ridden vegetable some years before proper end.
Not always. Some animals are programmed to die after certain events in life like after mating. It's one of the sad reasons why octopus or many fish don't live very long. With octopus they found if they removed the pineal gland from females it would cause them to live for over a year after mating.
As a paraplegic, one issue with life extension research is that it never seems to account for black swan events that the body can't heal from. Without treatments for disabilities like Spinal Cord Injury, Traumatic Brain Injuries, Amputations, etc. any possible eternal life will just continuously get more disabled due to black swan events every few hundred years. Car crashes, shootings (like me), pandemics even. Even though only 0.1% of the US population has a Spinal Cord Injury, if people start having 70 super active years instead of 30, that's going to be a huge increase in injuries that society will need to heal.
Medical recovery research is taking huge strides though. They managed to grow a mexican lady a new ear. In Germany they are close to being able to regrow some organs mainly kidneys and liver but lungs and heart are not that far of either. There is also new research into how to help regrow things like bone and some nerves now even.
Look up Michael Levin's research on anti-aging and regenerative medicine. His research essentially combines them into the same problem, that of being able to reprogram the body into doing what we want it to do. So most likely the solution to disabilities and to aging will be the same.
I'd say unlimited regeneration capability is almost a prerequisite for the kind of radical longevity you talk about. The research doesn't "account" for that simply because after dealing with everything else we need to fix, it becomes almost an afterthought, if not already solved in the process.
Consider this, though: immortality also means our best and brightest researchers no longer need to retire. Human knowledge and wisdom no longer needs to be lost. How skilled might a team of biologically 30 year old scientists with 80 years of experience be? How much longer could people who aren't on a clock spend in education and training to become even more effective? And everybody who's currently trying to treat age related declines would shift to these types of problems, assuming those were solved - and that consumes a pretty big proportion of our resources, currently. The increase in the tax base alone due to the elimination of aging could expand public funding by hundreds of times. Plus, assuming you are of average age, most types of spinal cord injury will probably be solved in your lifetime, even if it isn't extended. Tons of progress recently.
I also want to see the galaxy and even explore the rest of the Universe, and if one is immortal with infinity before them until the heat death of the Universe then it is very much possible, but honestly before anything else I just want to live. To live as long as I want, to be able to feel, to experience, to see all that I want. And if one day I deem that I had enough, that I've done all that I wanted to do, then I suppose I wouldn't mind resting in peace. But it needs to be my choice, not somebody else's. If some people are fine with their "natural" lifespans, all the power to them and I respect their choices, even if I might not understand them, but they need to also respect mine to live forever, even if they don't understand it. I also don't expect them to accept it, but I do expect them to respect my choice, my decision, in sum my free will just like I'd respect theirs.
That last bit is the most important, I'd say. My knees started giving out when I hit 25...living to 90 using a diaper and not knowing where I am half of the time...that's just not worth it.
@@Dan-dy8zp Well there are at lest two kinds of health - physical and mental. I know of several people whose bodies continued on for years even after their minds were essentially gone. It is hard to think of a worse fate than that.
I've been interested in this idea for over 15 years. I worked in science education and whenever I brought it up, people reacted like I was a mad scientist, lol. Really glad the field is starting to be taken more seriously. Also glad they have the new X prize for longevity. It seems insane to me that we are seemingly so close to significant life *and health* extension, but we're just not devoting a lot of resources to it. Personally, I don't want to get a single day biologically older for the foreseeable future.
It’s crazy to think it wouldn’t ever be possible. In just the past 1-200 years we’ve extended our lives like 4-fold. I’ve been hearing about the research in the field for awhile now, like they believe we die or “age” due to our telomeres unraveling and breaking down which allows our DNA to accumulate more mutations. I swear, listening to these SciShow videos makes me wanna live forever to see all the cool things that occur on a timescale wayyy too big compared to human life.
@@shnilikmw it's closer to 20 years than a 4x increase. famously, most of the gains come from decreasing child mortality, but it's still significant progress.
It's shitty to think about being one of the last people to ever die. Like a couple more years and you could have lived for centuries, but nah, you die in your 70s byee
The thing is, medical treatment in and of itself is life extension. Illness and injury are just the low hanging fruit. Nowadays we've got things like genetic and immune therapies that would be considered almost magic 100 years ago. Research into these new potential treatments are just the next step in medicine.
Yeah that's what immortal means, we are not talking about magic nonsense where you are cursed to watch everybody and everything turn to dust. Fun fact: at the current rate of accidental death not due to age related decline, the average person would live to be about 700 years old.
@@XIIchiron78 I think some people confuse Immortality with Invincibility. Like for example, you may be able to live as long as you like (be it 100 or 1 million more years), but you can still die if say, somebody shoots you
My great grandma, Ivah Elizabeth Livermore Lovell-Rose (whose last names are actually two streets that intersect in my hometown. No connection, just neat happenstance), lived to 97. She was born in 1905 and was beautiful, so I'm sure being 15-25 during the Roaring Twenties was a wild time. She wasn't particularly healthy. Smoked cigarettes for decades, drank a fair bit, had a drunk as her first husband, and a drunk for a son, who died from prostate cancer a few years prior. Yet somehow, she suffered what her doctors called a "massive heart attack" at the age of 95 and bounced right back. She got ill about five or six months before finally passing in 2002, when I was 10. She was such an icon where she lived, that her other son, a very wealthy (and kinda crazy) doctor living in a remote cabin on a mountain in Colorado, hired people to continue yardwork and even turn on and off the lights for years in her estate, which was a beautiful Victorian mansion located in the heart of her little town (and across the street from the funeral home where her funeral was held).
The original plan was for Adam and Eve to live forever. They sinned then the Holy Spirit left them. That caused humanity’s life to shorten and shorten. Sooo technically it was the plan, but not anymore.
Whether or not I live forever only time will tell, but I'm 72 now and I'm healthier metabolically than I've been in many years simply by changing what I eat. I've eliminated most sugar and most refined carbohydrates but have increased fats and protein. I'm looking forward to seeing if these changes increase my chances for a longer and more rewarding life.
crazy the way I've seen the public's attitude towards fats nutritionally change in my comparatively puny little lifespan thus far. I've genuinely lost weight by incorporating having more of (the right kinds of) fat in my diet (which in turn means there's less room for sugars and other carbs)
William Clark, Ph.D., emeritus chair of immunology at UCLA, perfectly addressed this topic in his 1996 book "Sex and The Origin of Death" Senescence and death were the consequence of sexual reproduction, the segregation of germinal DNA away from the somatic variety which powers the cells. Clark poetically referenced this as the ultimate loss of innocence.
Can something we don't fully understand now really be "perfectly addressed" by a nigh 30-year-old book? We didn't even have the full human genome sequenced until 2003.
I've followed the list of verified oldest people for decades. When I started watching back when Wikipedia was very new, there were two people verified to have made it to 119 and three that made it to 117. Now there are 3 that have made it to 119, 4 to 118, and 12 to 117 including one still living. It's hard to filter out noise related to better documentation standars and just better data availability, so clear conclusions are hard to draw. But if there really are so many more contenders making it to 117, 118, and 119, it's very possible someone will break Jeanne Calment's 122 years sometime fairly soon.
I track that too! It's crazy to see that out of the 100 oldest verified people currently, 6 are living. The current oldest is mentally well enough to post to twitter
@@uncroppedsoop Lmfaoo fair point It's just interesting someone born in 1907 is cognizant enough to use our generation's way of communicating For her part she probably isn't very aware of twitter toxicity
Sees title, and immediately realize that it's about SENS. (Strategies for engineering of negligible senescence) Thanks for covering this, more people should know about it.
Really? You looked at the title and figured it was about senescence? Somebody call NASA, we have a savant! Mars here we come! Let's get that big brain working!
This is a huge topic and they really didn't have time to cover everything here, but a leading hypothesis of aging is that due to pleiotropy, there is genetic conflict between traits that will make you more successful when you are young but at the cost of your long term health. A classic example is cancer and wound healing. Regeneration is very beneficial for your short term health, but opens pandoras box to cancer by encouraging rapid cell replication that could become exploited by oncogenic mutations later on.
Yeah you know how they said most scientists don't think there's an evolutionary advantage. I'm going to assume the most refers to people who aren't evolutionary biologists nor ecologist. Or really stubborn people in denial? If you run simulations of population dynamics you'll learn real quick that there's a lot of advantages to rapid turnover of generations. Being multicellular is difficult, being able to reset to single cellular briefly and then go back to being multicellular has massive advantages but you need to clear out the old multicellular form regularly before parasites and diseases come up with exploits that wipe them out all in one go otherwise they will keep out competing the new generation.
although better regeneration also gives you better chance of recovering well from things like chemotherapy, right ? so would you be like, more likely to get cancer, but also more likely to be able to go through the treatment for it ?
I think there are 4 reasons for us dying: 1. Hayflick limit. 2. Senescence. 3. Buildup of damage, especially from oxygen radicals, which also cause senescence. 4. End replication problem.
Those are all just reasons for aging, not problems for which there is any proof that science and technology can't resolve. It would be like saying gravity is a reason why man could never invent any flying machine...
Great overview! I look forward to deep dives on some of the topics brushed through quickly in this one, if your team gets a chance to do some thorough explainers on these topics. Since "Lifespan" came out in 2019, these have all been increasingly part of the public conversation, and it'd be great to keep the actual science at the forefront to hold the enthusiasm in check.
Is it possible, yes. Why? Every time an organism (including humans) reproduces, the cell clock is reset. You may say that it is because of the re-shuffling of genetics so this becomes a "new" cell. But this does not account for parthenogenesis, and it is my suspicion that here is the key. Biology is at the point that physics was at the end of the 19th century. When it was believed that all of physics was understood and all was just smoothing out the rough edges. Then nuclear theory happened and we realized that we indeed had just scratched the surface of physics. Biology is just in it's infancy and our understanding of how our own cells work is just starting. I find this to be both exciting and terrifying,
@@MissyMona As a biological entity, yes. As an individual with memories and personality, no. Of course if you hang with people from the medical community, neural surgeons and geriatric specialists in particular, you quickly see that we are all just a fall or trauma away from loosing those memories or even who we perceive ourselves to be. One head bump and you can be a different person.
@@garydzidowski1134 It's interesting I think, how quickly the medical evidence causes those philosophical questions about consciousness. I watched another video from SciShow that was talking about surgeries which separated the sides of the brain. Which included each side communicating differently.
Well, there is the Hayflick limit. And the main limiter is our brain. If we can keep that running for a thousand years, the other organs are a cakewalk.
@@TojiFushigoroWasTaken our brains shrink as we age even with no disease at all, a healthy 80 year old has less brain matter than a 50 year old. You won't be doing well mentally very far past 100 even with no diseases
Some guy got a titanium heart with a maglev pump a few weeks ago. It was used as bridge but the doctors and the inventor etc think it can probably become a permanent fix.😮
Neuroscientist Robert McIntyre of Nectome and the Brain Preservation Foundation are working on saving the connectome and genome, maybe on revival those telomere problems would be figured out.
Also could we talk about the strange properties bats display i.e., dramatically longer lifespans by mammalian size, immune system behaviors, and body temperature during flight.
A profound question! As humans, we have to die because: 1. *Evolutionary cycle*: Death is a natural part of the life cycle, allowing for the passing of genes to the next generation and evolution to occur. 2. *Cellular limitations*: Our cells have a limited lifespan and can only divide a certain number of times before they deteriorate. 3. *Aging and wear*: Our bodies are subject to wear and tear, leading to age-related decline and eventual failure. 4. *Genetic programming*: Our DNA is programmed for a finite lifespan, with built-in mechanisms that contribute to aging and death. 5. *Ecological balance*: Death helps maintain ecological balance, making way for new life and preventing overpopulation. Death is an intrinsic part of life, and it's what makes life precious and meaningful. It's a natural process that allows for growth, renewal, and the continuation of our species. (Side note: While we can't escape death, modern medicine and technology have significantly increased human lifespans, and researchers continue exploring ways to extend healthy life and understand the aging process.)
i had exploding head syndrome & sleep apnea at the same time once & i experienced death. it was the scariest thing id ever experienced. i dont want to die again
@@Stierenkloot i was on the edge of the cliff of awareness and i could "see" a endless bottomless horizon cavern of unawareness/infinite-time-passing-before-me-&-without-me, and i looked in, and in a darkness-of-zero-sensory-data i heard my thoughts say "oh.. im dead" and i ***SCRAMBLED*** back up the cliff of awareness and suddenly i was awake in my bed all at once but there was what felt like zero oxygen in my lungs & i ***GULPED*** down air & i ***GULPED*** down air again & i kept gulping down oxygen for what felt like Ten Minutes before suddenly realizin that i already had oxygen in my lungs and i was fine and i didnt need to keep gulping down oxygen (but i kept gulping air for a while just to be safe). it was the most terrifying thing ive ever experiencd & i relly dont want to experience it again
You are a terrific, likable and engaging host. Great job! As for the topic, at 45 years old, the Grimm spectre of death isn’t as far away as it once was lol. I’m counting on those sweet, sweet life extension options by the time I am staring down the reaper 🤞
Good video, though I feel that 'Do we have to age?' would have been a better title. I find it surprising that the question of whether we should attempt to cure aging is such a divisive one. We recognise that any other cause of suffering and death (disease, crime, accidents) is best avoided, but when it comes to biological aging, many commentators seem to imagine that it's something we shouldn't do. I believe aging is the mother of all disease, and defeating it will bring benefits that far outweigh any drawbacks. Future generations will find it baffling that there was ever a debate to be had.
No, we don't HAVE TO die. Our medical science is advanced enough to where we can actually start tinkering with living longer far more than we do. The only problem is when you look at the "ethics" of performing trials for living longer (religious lunacy and determining who gets the ability to live longer).
I am happy that Unlike other videos on aging your does not harp on why we must die. You concentrated on biologic causes of aging without unscientific moralizing. Thanks
Another question the demographers weren't asking is were those final years of a person's life desirable. Living with some health problems can be worse than death. You also touched on the point that if we don't die off we would continue to compete for resources with our offspring, this is a huge problem to overcome.
this is a dilemma tho. you do not want to die, but you also live a life you’d rather choose death over it (as in it’s just suffering and pain beyond your control). a dilemma that no one will ever be able to solve (just to point out, people commit sui cide not because they want to die, but simply to not exist or escape the pain; had there been a non-death option, they’d choose it right away)
Most offsprings would rather have their parents with them for longer if they can stay health. Yes, some health problems can be worse than death, but leting old but healthy people die so that they dont "compete" with their offspring is not aceptable.
We can leave the planet if it gets too crowded. Space is big and the part we occupy is infinitesimal. Life is the rarest thing in the universe for all intents and purposes. There's no reason to squish it all on one tiny spec.
@@Vivian2290 If humans were already immune to death by old age we would be in a position of go extinct or start killing off the elderly so the young don't starve. Remember, immune to death by old age not immune to death period, there's a big difference. Also there's the issues of living while people you care about weren't lucky enough to avoid dieing from something other than age. Don't get me wrong, most of us love our parents and would love to be able to keep them around and not have to deal with that loss. However think about the parent who hasn't died due to age and has survived their own child, this already happens and is considered by some to be the worst tragedy possible.
@@The_Savage_Wombat Perhaps in the future that will be an option, it isn't yet and is not likely to be within the next 20 years. Imagine for a moment all the people who die specifically of old age in a 20 year span, now imagine that many extra mouths to feed when some would say there's already a global shortage on many staple food items. I would not want to live in that world.
For me personally, I plan on hitting 150 years prior to passing. So every day after may the 20th 2121 will in my opinion be borrowed time. But prior to that I plan on filling that remaining 97 years with an amazing adventure and share the insights I"ve learned with everyone who will listen.
I'm totally on board with this, but I think people tend to dramatically overestimate how long people live. You included. It's like 50/50 you'll get past around 70 or 80 or so. Basically nobody gets to 100, and everybody thinks they're the exception. The national institute of aging has about a 4B budget, half of which goes to alzheimers, and 350M of which goes to basic research. Given that most healthcare spending is due to aging-degraded health, and we spend over 1T on healthcare in the US, we need way more research funding for you to reach that 150 yo goal.
@@goodfortunetoyou It's not about hitting the goal. It's about purposefully inflating expectations so as to avoid an early demise. If I don't hit that mark, I'll never know it. So it's not about being right. It's about living in a manner that takes longevity as a given. And to plan accordingly. Look on the flip side of this. Suppose I were to hit that mark. Doesn't it make sense to have taken this in account for a variety of reasons? Not the least of which are financial considerations. There is also something very true about the following statement: "The man who expects to die tomorrow, will usually find a way to make it happen." Cheers mate! I hope your day treats you well.
The comparison to humans vs animals is, we do a lot more than anyone else. We're overly stressed, work constantly sometimes, deal with medical and mental problems on a daily, etc. I'm 44 so I doubt I'll ever see advancement in this area before I'm gone.
Keep going for another 44 years and it's 2 years to 2070. Having the first more widely available treatments ready by then seems pretty realistic, I wouldn't be surprised if we see a few coming out before that. You might just make it, stay healthy mate.
I think most animals undergo just as much if not more stress than humans. Just take a look at a squirrel and see how easy it is to make it start running for its life. Maybe those tortoises and jellyfish have a really chill life though.
Yeah you never know. Sometimes throughout history there have been eureka moments. Agree with the above at least do the basics of staying healthy and see what happens! I’m 34 that’s my strategy
I've been obsessed with older folks doing deadlifts on youtube. There are people twice my age also lifting twice what my good form deadlifts are. I don't need to live forever, but being able to have strong muscles and bones in old age would be great. I'm a dad right now and things have gotten a lot physically easier since I started going to the gym. The idea that I could be a physically active parent to not just my daughter's generation, but my grandchildren's generation if I'm careful and keep consistent and safe training is too tantalizing to pass up.
Most compelling argument my friend told me pro-immortality: Age-related complications and diseases are but a small fraction of possible causes of death, so immortality would have surprisingly little effect on the overall human population.
"The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant" is a wonderful take on whether humanity needs to accept death. Written by Nick Bostrom and animated by CGP Grey over on CGP Grey's channel. Phenomenal stuff.
urggghh my main problem with that story though is that it does not remotely touch on the actual reasons I and a lot of people are wary of the notion of living forever, that being that with the way our society is currently structured and distributes resources, we're going to have to worry about dying early from age-unrelated illnesses or mental conditions that we can't afford to treat, while people with money to spend are gonna get to sit in their positions of power forever the argument stands for the very specific objection of "why spend so many resources to commit an act against the natural order", but unless we can stop the sun from exploding or the earth from boiling itself, we're still gonna have to live with the specter of death and the parable is too limited to address that anxiety
2:10 I think, statistically, that makes sense anyway. You would expect, given the number of people, for someone to reach just about the maximum natural age by sheer luck, at some point, basically as soon as it became plausible. Advances in medicine would just increase the number of people who do so, eventually pushing the limit just a little higher, but not by much, without more fundamental changes.
I remember reading about an East Asian man living to upper 140's, it was simply a claim. Of course, documenting that would be next to impossible(at the time)
I agree. I don't really want to live longer if that just means more years of physical disability and dementia. If I can be myself, doing the things I enjoy, sure id love to live longer! But i have watched my grandparents and parents lose the ability to do much of anything for themselves, and become confused and worried, unable to recognize friends and family. I don't want extra years of that, thanks anyway.
All I can say is from a biological perspective it makes sense to have generations of organisms, and for older organisms to eventually die, not only does it allow for new mutations to be put to the test in the environment allowing for adaption to actually take place, but it removes the competition that parents can pose to their offspring in an environment. With out death, new life has no room to grow.
There has been some controversy over Jeanne Calment's claims about her age, with some suspecting she had passed away earlier than that and her daughter took her place. I don't know how much this claim holds water nowadays of course.
Hey just a reminder that the phrase "begs the question" is not an expression that means something like "it brings up the question...". It is actually a logical fallacy that relates to circular reasoning or assuming a key part of your argument is true without proving it!
There IS an evolutionary advantage to aging; not to the individual, but to the community. This is well studied in genetic algorithms. When a "most fit" algorithm is allowed to continue to compete with offspring generation after generation, then the community of algorithms gets trapped in a "local maxima". That is, the community hasn't found the best answer to the stresses it faces, but it's found the best answer that resembles the ones its already explored. By removing the "most fit" contestants after a maximum number of generations, even if they're currently scoring best against the reaper algorithm, the community explores more possible avenues. It doesn't stick with the best answers it knows, as far as genetics goes; it goes out and tries new things, now that the old leader has aged out. In the short term, the community becomes "less fit". But in the long term, it can discover entirely new gene mixes that are better than the old best could have been. It can escape the trap of the "local maxima". You can visualize this if you imagine a map, covered in hills. The "most fit" contestant in the breeding game is the one highest on the map. Generation after generation, the new contestants that land higher on the hill are even more fit. Eventually, a contestant lands on top of the hill. It's not possible to get any more fit. Except there's another hill, father away, that's even taller. No one's going there, though, because the new generations are spawned near the old "best fit", and it's already at the top of this hill. No one's setting foot on that taller hill over there, and starting the climb. When the top fitting algorithm is forced to die after X generations, instead of just camping at the top of its hill forever, the population explores more. They find that next neighboring hill, and some start exploring it. They find a higher peak. That's the value of death by aging, not to the individual, but to the community. It prevents the "best answer we've found yet" from getting stuck as "the best answer forever", when there are better answers out there. Put it another way: Imagine our stone age ancestors found a magic plant that repairs the damage of aging. Everyone who does well has all of the magic herb they need to remain young, healthy, and breeding forever. Eventually, they breed a flawless Conan, stronger and faster than everyone else in the tribe. Conan has tons of kids, but none of them can surpass him. Conan is the best Conan that genetics can produce. All his children and children's children are similar, but Conan is forever the chief because no one is a better Conan than Conan. This tribe carries on for thousands and thousands of years, with Conan the eternal patriarch. And they never create a Napoleon, or a Nikola Tesla, or an Ada Lovelace, etc.. There's nothing stopping us from replicating the improved genetic exploration produced by death after we sort out biological aging, and we'll need to. If we don't take steps to keep change going after mortality ends, our species will hit a local peak, and then, genetically speaking, decide that's as good as it gets.
That's only if we are interested in keeping evolving biologically. Advancing technology has mostly overridden most of our evolutionary limitations, much faster than evolution has. We have no good reason to give back control to natural selection. Besides, the idea of a "best answer" in an anthropological context is kinda eugenics-y.
What a well articulated answer! And one that seems to fit with what we already see in things like small towns or big families where when the oldest generation or matriarch/patriarch dies the community spreads out or falls apart
I'm struggling to sort out the normative from the descriptive here. Is your point just that group selection can explain why aging is a dominant trait, or is it that there is some sort of imperative to preserve the purported advantage that aging gives to our species? If it's the latter then I'm not sure why becoming more fit should be our goal.
Life Extension by Durk Pearson and Sandy Shaw came out in 1982 42 years ago. I was interested in Life and Health Extension long before this, but I think this book was groundbreaking.
"Should we live forever" Tbh taking a possibility like that from someone is like killing someone, after all both shorter someone's life, so the question itself should be "is it worth living longer" and I can answer with 100% certainty, yes it is, I want to live longer, experience more, see the future, there is nothing good in death
The question is never live forever. It's live for tomorrow. 1000 years from now will eventually just be a tomorrow after all, if you get my meaning. I'm 50 and when I was a depressed teenager, this age seemed like a silly pipe dream, but it's now my present everything. The future has potential for surprises beyond our imaginations. Not just for society or tech, but ourselves. I know more about myself than I guessed there was to know.
"There is nothing good in death?" Tell that to someone in "hell." (Not *literal hell* hopefully, but there are fates worse than death, as I'm sure people would be acutely aware of if they couldn't or wouldn't die.)
Exactly this. So long as I'm happy and healthy, I see no reason I'd want life to end. It's bizarre how many comments I see declaring that defeating aging would somehow be immoral or undesirable. The death worshippers literally believe we should all suffer and die while somehow imaging they have the moral highground for saying so.
7:47 "So looking at DNA methylation gives you a pretty sensitive age, it just is one that might not match up with what day you were born" That's a really good sign, since it tells us that the age that matters is the molecular one (which should be something we'd eventually be able to manipulate with DNA editing techniques). It really seems like with perfect DNA repair mechanisms (without mutations and that can preserve all epigenetic modifications, such as DNA methylation) and perfect replication (no end of DNA - telomere - shortening), immortality (or more accurately, agelessness) should be a reality (and those "immortal" organisms could be the key to achieving it).
As I age I am more and more convinced that kidneys are a big factor in the overall deterioration of he body perceived as aging. Buildup of toxins and proteins around the body lead to a lot of bodily mishaps, maybe even Alzheimer. I am sure there are more factors, but I am willing to bet kidney malfunction is one of the big ones. Do kidneys age solely due to wear and progressive decline of kidneys caused by the very same kidneys malfunctioning or they start failing due to other unrelated causes.
One thing to keep in mind is the brain stuff. It's hard to imagine how our memory capacity could be infinite, barring advanced BCI. Seems like then the options are living until you've replaced all your memories with new ones or living until you're incapable of forming new ones. Niether sounds great to me but I'd take the first, even if in some sense it does mean that I gradually "die" from a continuity of memory perspective on personal identity.
For the first one, I think that would just mean that physical media holding your memories would be that much more important. And I don't even mean scifi stuff, I'm talking about pictures, stories, and even journaling. Even with our current lifespans, we end up forgetting things that we could record and reflect on later.
@@OceanBagel Fair point. I mean if you go full extended mind thesis then it’s no bother. But personally I’d like to remember first hand rather than trusting a journal or a photo. I mean if I’m truly forgetting then those things won’t register with me as having anything to do with my consciousness. It’d be like seeing a baby in a photo and recognizing that it has your face.
There's also kind of a middle ground. Even though the total memory capacity is finite, some memories are more vivid than others, requiring a different amount of storage. Even at present, I cant recall what I've had for breakfast two weeks ago but have no trouble remembering what I did or where I've been. I can easily imagine that if you live to say, 500, you wont be able to recall every single month but you will still have a general outline on a yearly basis of your life abd you will recall particularly important events without external memory devices
@@yakovdan I mean I was thinking about functionally infinite timescales, so that even significant events will be too numerous to reasonably prioritize. But 500 years or so, yeah I think I could see memory capacity doing just fine. But then again I’m not a neuroscientist.
@@Polyfoci Well, if functionally infinite time is in play then all bets are off. Might as well imagine a BCI of your choice. However, to avoid plain pointless speculation, here's an idea: what will advance faster - human healthspan or BCI? Will memory requirements outpace BCI progress or the other way around, or neither? Interestingly, healthspan and BCI progress are correlated to some extent.
I know a few pensioners in their 90's, but it is true, as fit and energetic as they are, they still take medicine to control their blood pressure, cholesterol and blood sugar. My Dad is the same. He is 76 and as fit as I am, 35 years his junior, but he still has a fatty liver and has to take cholesterol tablets. I am a Health Science graduate, and I also find this topic fascinating. How do we live better and longer lives? Biochemistry in particular is forever a mystery.
My 94 year old grandfather is still living on his own, driving, and hanging out with his own friends. He's a bit of a jerk in mindset, but that's not age related. My 70 year old mother is still working full time as the head of accounting for a multi-national company and is in excellent health. It is possible to age without "dying longer".
That’s nonsense. Many people are living healthy and rich lives far beyond their pre-modern medicine life expectancy. Most of the change in life span comes from those people whose lives are not cut short by things like childbirth complications and other highly treatable conditions, not by severely impaired and infirmed elderly with degenerative diseases holding on just a couple more months or years because care has improved- in many cases the very OPPOSITE is true
@@LGrian Based on what, your bias? 🙃 Being slaves to capitalism longer isn't living longer, it's dying longer and the fact that you don't get that says everything I need to know about you, Dunning-Kruger
having a greater proportion of the years we do get, be happy and healthy, is a worthwhile endeavour. I would be interested to know, of the people who want to live longer (or forever), how much is because they're genuinely enjoying life and are excited to see what comes next, how much is fear of death, and how much is a kind of greed (often seen in billionaires for example), that is, a pathological inability to feel "enough".
I think all three are intertwined. I fear death because I enjoy life. As for greed, if wanting to live as long and healthy a life as possible is greedy then I'm as greedy as they get. But so long as my existence isn't hurting anyone, then why would it be a problem?
There is a limit even to that incredibly unlikely scenario. There is only so much you can consolidate in a system like an economy. This is kinda like your body heat in the winter. There is a finite amount, but your body will take care of your core and brain before anything else. BUT, you WILL still die if too much goes there and not enough to the rest. Of course, in the economic scenario we still have "competition" in the mix.
Another thing to the "Humans aren't lab mice" is the fact that ethics aside, humans can live a LONG time compared to a lot of animals. By the very nature of the problem we are trying to solve, a trial to "make people live longer" will IDEALLY take a long time--if the treatment doesn't have an immediate negative effect, it'll take a long time to figure out if it worked, and how well. That kind of long-term science ain't cheap or easy.
@scishow i always hear about long living animals, but what about bugs and stuff that die really fast? whats that all about, and is there a comparison to be made there with older life forms?
What’s the benefit of living longer if you are a feeble old person unable to function once you reach your 60’s and onward? Is there a way to stretch out our “prime” days?
My great-aunt Ethel lived to be 104, and until she was 102, she was driving on her own, tending her own garden, doing her own grocery shopping and making her delicious family-famous fudge. Since she died, the family has made the fudge using her recipe, but it’s just not the same. Some of the magic is gone.
Yes… we do. No amount of molecular biology/biochemistry, synthetic bioorganic or medicinal chemistry, molecular genetics etc will change this. We’ve only really just begun to understand our own genome… we STILL haven’t delved into the overlaps and exactly how things are regulated and the cascading mechanisms that govern every single process in our cells. We’re trying but we, sadly, to put it into vernacular… “don’t know crap”
Even if ageing was defeated, there would still be ways to die. Wouldn’t that actually make death even more horrifying since peaceful death would be even rarer? Plus, only rich people would have access to eternal youth...
I don't have any doubt we'll solve aging eventually, barring mass societal collapse. Might not be this century but absolutely we will. It's odd to me you think that we can't solve a problem in the future just because we don't have the answers or technology at this very moment, especially with the explosion of medical advancements in the last few decades
So afaik depending on a species, evolution always works out what is the best for a population. How long a lifespan, how long a childhood, the size of brood, etc. - it figures out by trial and error what works best, and if we made ourselves sort-of-immortal/immune-to-natural-causes it would vastly throw things out of balanc (modern medicine and modern mass food production actually already have, but adding longevity to that would make things exponentially worse). So one important thing is that we would need to somehow now only extend the lifespan, but also youth. What's the point of living until age of 500 if you had a menopause at 50 and life is just torture? Now, if you were to slow down aging so that you hit menopause at 500 and were basically at the same stage of aging progression, same level of health as now people are at 50, that would be a totally different thing. But that has one more limitations from what I heard. So basically once your brain stops developing around 30, you can no longer grow new brain cells, they can only die - hence dementia and such start to kick in. Any damage is basically irreversible. So if we made it possible that you body ages slow enough you hit menopause at 500, your brain would still be developing to maybe around 300 (assuming that if 500 is the equivalent of 50, then 300 will be of a bit over 30 - cause we also assume we're not extending childhood but slowing down aging since 20 or so), which then means that once you reach 300 you're gonna have a geriatric demented brain by maybe 350 whilst looking as-if mid-30s. You will still have a good healthy body, but a broken, dysfunctional brain. And that there does not appear a way to work around it. And that is still a generous version of the problem assuming that the brain will be still developing until that 300 and not stop at 30 like now, so then at 80+ you still look like a late teen or 20-ish, but you have that geriatric demented brain...
Perhaps you heard that the brain doesn't stop developing until around 30. You grow new brain cells all through adult life. There's no reason that old people can't learn new things. www.theguardian.com/science/2019/mar/25/humans-can-make-new-brain-cells-into-their-90s-scientists-discover
Would be nice if we didn't have to. I'm like a late bloomer and sometimes feel like I have to do things quickly to catch up, doing things when you are a young adult, halted aging would help alleviate the pressure.
![Megan Thee Stallion - Bigger In Texas [Official Video]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/QxTkZTLWdo4/mqdefault.jpg)
Jeanne Calment died in 1997. She was so old, she sold paint to Vincent van Gogh in the 1880s as a child in Arles..
You are appreciated for that info, I had to look this up, you are correct. I also looked up the current oldest person and Maria Branyas Morera popped up as the current one at 117 and noticed how similar she looks to Jeanne Calment, a little creepy, LOL. Thanks for sharing. May you be enjoying a wonderful summer season with loved ones.
@@soulcandyalmadulce5885 👀
To pay for elderly care, Jeanne Calmemt, then aged 90 sold her house against a life annuity. The buyer was her solicitor, then aged 47. He died 30 years later while she was still alive. His widow has to continue to pay the life annuity two more years.
@@soulcandyalmadulce5885 Jeanne Calment was also smoking an entire pack of cigarette every single day as well as a daily glass of wine
There is definitely a bunch of controversy and doubters. However, i'm a strong believer that she lived so long because of how she seemingly managed stress so well coupled with exercise. She was headstrong enough to "do" without regret and active enough to ride a bike on her 100th birthday. If I ever live that long I hope to keep myself fit enough to ride a bike. But getting a moderate inheritance from here father (1926) and owning the building where her apartment was meant she never had any stress over food, shelter, or work, and with the exercise meant her physical fortitude matched her mental toughness. You'd have to be to live that long.
My grandfather died at 92, a week before he died he had a stroke which is what did him in. Prior the stroke he loved by himself in a townhouse, drove his own car, did the cross word everyday, and everyday of his life since his twenties he’d do 50 sit ups, push ups and a bunch of other abs and strength exercises, he was still doing his daily work out up until the morning of his stroke
He was a good role model for healthy living, and I’ll take any help we can get for slowing down or halting the negative impacts of aging.
my grandfather turned 92 this year, he goes to the gym every morning and walks and swims. lately hes been concerned about his high blood pressure and is worried about a stroke occuring so every time its high he wants us to take him to the emergency
Sounds like he did well.I've known and know people in their early 60s who are effectively immobile for health related reasons. I try to keep doing moderate exercise so I am still mobile and I'd take croaking at 92 after a fully active life over longer but confined to the couch for a few decades.
Idk why but, *It reminds me of the guy who was jogging everyday and explains everyone the good effect of jogging dies due to heart stroke while jogging one day!*
My Grandpa just died at 93. I don't have anything else to add. His funeral is in the morning. He decided he wanted to "go home" and eventually had a stroke and a seizure then died in his sleep.
@@taffypulller sorry for your loss. 93 is a good long life for what its worth. At least he died peacefully. My condolences 🌹
My grandmother is 102 and only had to get some assisted living help in the past 2 years. She drove, and shopped, and cleaned with no help from anyone.
Sound cute, greet her from the internet or idk atleast from me c:
What a trooper!
Before covid there was a local man here in sac that was still going to the bar at 105.
She needs help
Usually the people who reach extreme ages have that kind of story. The activity and independence itself seems to stave off the decline.
My sister-in-law was very healthy most of her life; never smoked, drank, only ate a bit of fish in an otherwise vegetarian diet, hiked, biked, swam, and lived a largely athletic lifestyle. She died of colorectal cancer at age 70. Sometimes, your genetic makeup is just against you.
Sure maybe a person's fate is already given at birth but I believe that doing healthy things like your sister can actually help decrease the chance of getting cancer at a much younger age.
Could she had lived more if her cancer was detected earlier and fixed earlier? Most people who lived to 100 or more even women survived multiple cancers.
Against? 70 was long last time I checked
@@carlrodalegrado4104 While it's true that early detection can sometimes make a difference, cancer is an incredibly complex disease, and outcomes aren't always predictable. Her healthy lifestyle and the love she shared with her family are what should be remembered most. It's important to acknowledge that sometimes, despite our best efforts, some things are beyond our control.
@@Lerence-t5mthat sounds like an ai reply
Figuring out how to keep cognitive and psychical health intact within the lifetime we already have would be amazing achievement on its own
Yes. QUALITY of life. Not quantity.
My great grandfather was living alone and doing all his own cooking, cleaning, driving, etc until 103, he was taken out by a tree falling on his house during the blizzard of 1993.
But then how would you die if you were completely healthy intact?
@@TheEnderCycloneEnd what I meant was more like having enough health to live comfortably dill the end. My grandparents both pretty much passed away on foot. Not like drop dead suddenly but more like felt really ill suddenly and got hospitalized and past after couple of days. But before final hospitalization they where fully cognitively intact and were able to move and drive around and fully spent time with people. Of course they had many health problems by then but they had necessary medications and still got to be fully present. This in my opinion beats the fate were you slowly but surely become bed ridden vegetable some years before proper end.
"Aging" is just the accumulation of damage, not the passage of timing.
Not always. Some animals are programmed to die after certain events in life like after mating. It's one of the sad reasons why octopus or many fish don't live very long. With octopus they found if they removed the pineal gland from females it would cause them to live for over a year after mating.
@@patrickmccurry1563we are not some animals though. We are humans.
@@Batmans_Pet_Goldfish Biologically speaking, we are 100% some animals
@@patrickmccurry1563 That isn't "aging", you said yourself what it is, which is programming.
@@antonco2 we are not the "some animals" that were being spoken of. I thought that was pretty clear, given the context of what I was responding to.
As a paraplegic, one issue with life extension research is that it never seems to account for black swan events that the body can't heal from. Without treatments for disabilities like Spinal Cord Injury, Traumatic Brain Injuries, Amputations, etc. any possible eternal life will just continuously get more disabled due to black swan events every few hundred years. Car crashes, shootings (like me), pandemics even. Even though only 0.1% of the US population has a Spinal Cord Injury, if people start having 70 super active years instead of 30, that's going to be a huge increase in injuries that society will need to heal.
Medical recovery research is taking huge strides though. They managed to grow a mexican lady a new ear. In Germany they are close to being able to regrow some organs mainly kidneys and liver but lungs and heart are not that far of either. There is also new research into how to help regrow things like bone and some nerves now even.
Look up Michael Levin's research on anti-aging and regenerative medicine. His research essentially combines them into the same problem, that of being able to reprogram the body into doing what we want it to do. So most likely the solution to disabilities and to aging will be the same.
I'd say unlimited regeneration capability is almost a prerequisite for the kind of radical longevity you talk about. The research doesn't "account" for that simply because after dealing with everything else we need to fix, it becomes almost an afterthought, if not already solved in the process.
Well the new yamanaka factors can do that based on the eye nerves that were healed in human trials
Consider this, though: immortality also means our best and brightest researchers no longer need to retire. Human knowledge and wisdom no longer needs to be lost. How skilled might a team of biologically 30 year old scientists with 80 years of experience be? How much longer could people who aren't on a clock spend in education and training to become even more effective?
And everybody who's currently trying to treat age related declines would shift to these types of problems, assuming those were solved - and that consumes a pretty big proportion of our resources, currently. The increase in the tax base alone due to the elimination of aging could expand public funding by hundreds of times.
Plus, assuming you are of average age, most types of spinal cord injury will probably be solved in your lifetime, even if it isn't extended. Tons of progress recently.
i want to live forever, i want to see the galaxy
Never to late to start your journey, just a few hundred years to early. 😂
nah, let me outta here
just look up?
I also want to see the galaxy and even explore the rest of the Universe, and if one is immortal with infinity before them until the heat death of the Universe then it is very much possible, but honestly before anything else I just want to live.
To live as long as I want, to be able to feel, to experience, to see all that I want.
And if one day I deem that I had enough, that I've done all that I wanted to do, then I suppose I wouldn't mind resting in peace. But it needs to be my choice, not somebody else's.
If some people are fine with their "natural" lifespans, all the power to them and I respect their choices, even if I might not understand them, but they need to also respect mine to live forever, even if they don't understand it. I also don't expect them to accept it, but I do expect them to respect my choice, my decision, in sum my free will just like I'd respect theirs.
@@DeathBean89😂
That last bit is the most important, I'd say. My knees started giving out when I hit 25...living to 90 using a diaper and not knowing where I am half of the time...that's just not worth it.
If we slow senescence that'd move the problems you cite further back too
That's not anyone's goal. Also, the only way to make people live longer is to make them healthier.
@@Dan-dy8zp Well there are at lest two kinds of health - physical and mental. I know of several people whose bodies continued on for years even after their minds were essentially gone. It is hard to think of a worse fate than that.
"People aren't living longer, they're dying longer" heh
@@Dan-dy8zp Which is opposite to the goal of Big Pharma under capitalism heh
I've been interested in this idea for over 15 years. I worked in science education and whenever I brought it up, people reacted like I was a mad scientist, lol. Really glad the field is starting to be taken more seriously. Also glad they have the new X prize for longevity. It seems insane to me that we are seemingly so close to significant life *and health* extension, but we're just not devoting a lot of resources to it. Personally, I don't want to get a single day biologically older for the foreseeable future.
It’s crazy to think it wouldn’t ever be possible. In just the past 1-200 years we’ve extended our lives like 4-fold. I’ve been hearing about the research in the field for awhile now, like they believe we die or “age” due to our telomeres unraveling and breaking down which allows our DNA to accumulate more mutations. I swear, listening to these SciShow videos makes me wanna live forever to see all the cool things that occur on a timescale wayyy too big compared to human life.
@@shnilikmw it's closer to 20 years than a 4x increase. famously, most of the gains come from decreasing child mortality, but it's still significant progress.
@@crediblesalamander8056 Yeah lol, that’s mostly why I said 4 times cause of childhood mortality.
It's shitty to think about being one of the last people to ever die.
Like a couple more years and you could have lived for centuries, but nah, you die in your 70s byee
The thing is, medical treatment in and of itself is life extension.
Illness and injury are just the low hanging fruit. Nowadays we've got things like genetic and immune therapies that would be considered almost magic 100 years ago. Research into these new potential treatments are just the next step in medicine.
Personally, I don't want to be immortal. What I _do_ want, is to be the one who decides when I bow out.
The term might be Biological Immortality; a living being can still die from means other than senescence. That's the way I'd like it.
I don't want immortality either, and also want to decide how to bow out after millions of years.
Like the elves from LOTR, they only die when they get "weary".
Yeah that's what immortal means, we are not talking about magic nonsense where you are cursed to watch everybody and everything turn to dust.
Fun fact: at the current rate of accidental death not due to age related decline, the average person would live to be about 700 years old.
@@XIIchiron78 I think some people confuse Immortality with Invincibility. Like for example, you may be able to live as long as you like (be it 100 or 1 million more years), but you can still die if say, somebody shoots you
My great grandma, Ivah Elizabeth Livermore Lovell-Rose (whose last names are actually two streets that intersect in my hometown. No connection, just neat happenstance), lived to 97. She was born in 1905 and was beautiful, so I'm sure being 15-25 during the Roaring Twenties was a wild time. She wasn't particularly healthy. Smoked cigarettes for decades, drank a fair bit, had a drunk as her first husband, and a drunk for a son, who died from prostate cancer a few years prior. Yet somehow, she suffered what her doctors called a "massive heart attack" at the age of 95 and bounced right back. She got ill about five or six months before finally passing in 2002, when I was 10. She was such an icon where she lived, that her other son, a very wealthy (and kinda crazy) doctor living in a remote cabin on a mountain in Colorado, hired people to continue yardwork and even turn on and off the lights for years in her estate, which was a beautiful Victorian mansion located in the heart of her little town (and across the street from the funeral home where her funeral was held).
For anyone who's like, "bluh it's against god's plan," there are dudes in the Old Testament living to like 900 allegedly 😂
Yeah but according to them the old testament is irrelevant and that's why the new testament exists I'm pretty sure
My man's talking to himself 😂
@@scruffles87 Who is "them"?
The original plan was for Adam and Eve to live forever. They sinned then the Holy Spirit left them. That caused humanity’s life to shorten and shorten. Sooo technically it was the plan, but not anymore.
NOO DON'T SUMMON THEM
Whether or not I live forever only time will tell, but I'm 72 now and I'm healthier metabolically than I've been in many years simply by changing what I eat. I've eliminated most sugar and most refined carbohydrates but have increased fats and protein. I'm looking forward to seeing if these changes increase my chances for a longer and more rewarding life.
crazy the way I've seen the public's attitude towards fats nutritionally change in my comparatively puny little lifespan thus far. I've genuinely lost weight by incorporating having more of (the right kinds of) fat in my diet (which in turn means there's less room for sugars and other carbs)
I haven't seen this girl up until recently. If you are a new addition to the channel, it's a great one. Very easy to hear your voice.
@@caitlinforster8189 Actually, she enunciates very well.
@@alchang1515 thank you! spellcheck was failing me miserably
Yeah she enunciates well. But also, her hand/arm/body movements and gestures are a bit too erratic. Good video though
You like hearing the word, "like", apparently.
Right? Great host! Warm, likable and engaging
Love the narrator for this one. Very easy to listen to voice.
Plus she is gorgeous 😍
Best host since Hank. Don't let this one get away
William Clark, Ph.D., emeritus chair of immunology at UCLA, perfectly addressed this topic in his 1996 book "Sex and The Origin of Death" Senescence and death were the consequence of sexual reproduction, the segregation of germinal DNA away from the somatic variety which powers the cells. Clark poetically referenced this as the ultimate loss of innocence.
Can something we don't fully understand now really be "perfectly addressed" by a nigh 30-year-old book? We didn't even have the full human genome sequenced until 2003.
@@ajchapeliere Omit the word "perfectly." Read Clark's work and decide for yourself.
I've followed the list of verified oldest people for decades. When I started watching back when Wikipedia was very new, there were two people verified to have made it to 119 and three that made it to 117. Now there are 3 that have made it to 119, 4 to 118, and 12 to 117 including one still living.
It's hard to filter out noise related to better documentation standars and just better data availability, so clear conclusions are hard to draw. But if there really are so many more contenders making it to 117, 118, and 119, it's very possible someone will break Jeanne Calment's 122 years sometime fairly soon.
I track that too! It's crazy to see that out of the 100 oldest verified people currently, 6 are living.
The current oldest is mentally well enough to post to twitter
@@Abby-ug4xcThat's really impressive, especially when you consider that most people on Twitter aren't mentally well enough to post on Twitter.
@@Abby-ug4xc not a very effective measure of cognitive capacity ngl
@@uncroppedsoop Lmfaoo fair point
It's just interesting someone born in 1907 is cognizant enough to use our generation's way of communicating
For her part she probably isn't very aware of twitter toxicity
Sees title, and immediately realize that it's about SENS.
(Strategies for engineering of negligible senescence)
Thanks for covering this, more people should know about it.
Really? You looked at the title and figured it was about senescence? Somebody call NASA, we have a savant! Mars here we come! Let's get that big brain working!
@joshyoung1440 did someone back over your head w a semi?
@@robocu4 I was gonna reply to similar effect but I read yours and honestly it's way funnier than anything I would've come up with
I think I prefer the idea of not living longer, but having more years where I'm able bodied and as healthy as I treat myself.
I'll never forget the Aglet!
Phineas and Ferb have a whole episode based on Aglets
You are going to waste a whole day promoting aglets? Who is going to care?
- Baljeet
Never, no never!
I remember it from Terraria.
Congratulations on reaching 8 million subscribers!
This is a huge topic and they really didn't have time to cover everything here, but a leading hypothesis of aging is that due to pleiotropy, there is genetic conflict between traits that will make you more successful when you are young but at the cost of your long term health. A classic example is cancer and wound healing. Regeneration is very beneficial for your short term health, but opens pandoras box to cancer by encouraging rapid cell replication that could become exploited by oncogenic mutations later on.
Yeah you know how they said most scientists don't think there's an evolutionary advantage. I'm going to assume the most refers to people who aren't evolutionary biologists nor ecologist. Or really stubborn people in denial? If you run simulations of population dynamics you'll learn real quick that there's a lot of advantages to rapid turnover of generations. Being multicellular is difficult, being able to reset to single cellular briefly and then go back to being multicellular has massive advantages but you need to clear out the old multicellular form regularly before parasites and diseases come up with exploits that wipe them out all in one go otherwise they will keep out competing the new generation.
although better regeneration also gives you better chance of recovering well from things like chemotherapy, right ? so would you be like, more likely to get cancer, but also more likely to be able to go through the treatment for it ?
I think there are 4 reasons for us dying:
1. Hayflick limit.
2. Senescence.
3. Buildup of damage, especially from oxygen radicals, which also cause senescence.
4. End replication problem.
Isn’t 2 just 1?
You just repeated yourself with fancy wording,shame most folk wouldn't understand
Those are the "how" not the why. Maybe leave the thinking to people who actually understand concepts and not just regurgitate information.
Those are all just reasons for aging, not problems for which there is any proof that science and technology can't resolve. It would be like saying gravity is a reason why man could never invent any flying machine...
#5 Embarrassment
This host is mad good.
Agreed
Looking
Yeah she's a fantastic addition
Yeah she's a fantastic addition
I don't mind dying...
I don't like getting old, though
Sport!
Great overview! I look forward to deep dives on some of the topics brushed through quickly in this one, if your team gets a chance to do some thorough explainers on these topics. Since "Lifespan" came out in 2019, these have all been increasingly part of the public conversation, and it'd be great to keep the actual science at the forefront to hold the enthusiasm in check.
Is it possible, yes. Why? Every time an organism (including humans) reproduces, the cell clock is reset. You may say that it is because of the re-shuffling of genetics so this becomes a "new" cell. But this does not account for parthenogenesis, and it is my suspicion that here is the key. Biology is at the point that physics was at the end of the 19th century. When it was believed that all of physics was understood and all was just smoothing out the rough edges. Then nuclear theory happened and we realized that we indeed had just scratched the surface of physics. Biology is just in it's infancy and our understanding of how our own cells work is just starting. I find this to be both exciting and terrifying,
So, does that mean having children actually would extend your life?
@@MissyMona As a biological entity, yes. As an individual with memories and personality, no. Of course if you hang with people from the medical community, neural surgeons and geriatric specialists in particular, you quickly see that we are all just a fall or trauma away from loosing those memories or even who we perceive ourselves to be. One head bump and you can be a different person.
@@garydzidowski1134 It's interesting I think, how quickly the medical evidence causes those philosophical questions about consciousness. I watched another video from SciShow that was talking about surgeries which separated the sides of the brain. Which included each side communicating differently.
Well, there is the Hayflick limit.
And the main limiter is our brain.
If we can keep that running for a thousand years, the other organs are a cakewalk.
Saw in another video that a healthy brain that never had or will have any neuro degenerative disease can last for 200 years.
@@TojiFushigoroWasTaken our brains shrink as we age even with no disease at all, a healthy 80 year old has less brain matter than a 50 year old. You won't be doing well mentally very far past 100 even with no diseases
Some guy got a titanium heart with a maglev pump a few weeks ago.
It was used as bridge but the doctors and the inventor etc think it can probably become a permanent fix.😮
Neuroscientist Robert McIntyre of Nectome and the Brain Preservation Foundation are working on saving the connectome and genome, maybe on revival those telomere problems would be figured out.
@@Highlyskeptical ohhhhh that would be awesome. So mapping your mind?
Also could we talk about the strange properties bats display i.e., dramatically longer lifespans by mammalian size, immune system behaviors, and body temperature during flight.
Learning how to partition your immune system is imperative.
A profound question! As humans, we have to die because:
1. *Evolutionary cycle*: Death is a natural part of the life cycle, allowing for the passing of genes to the next generation and evolution to occur.
2. *Cellular limitations*: Our cells have a limited lifespan and can only divide a certain number of times before they deteriorate.
3. *Aging and wear*: Our bodies are subject to wear and tear, leading to age-related decline and eventual failure.
4. *Genetic programming*: Our DNA is programmed for a finite lifespan, with built-in mechanisms that contribute to aging and death.
5. *Ecological balance*: Death helps maintain ecological balance, making way for new life and preventing overpopulation.
Death is an intrinsic part of life, and it's what makes life precious and meaningful. It's a natural process that allows for growth, renewal, and the continuation of our species.
(Side note: While we can't escape death, modern medicine and technology have significantly increased human lifespans, and researchers continue exploring ways to extend healthy life and understand the aging process.)
i had exploding head syndrome & sleep apnea at the same time once & i experienced death. it was the scariest thing id ever experienced. i dont want to die again
You did not experience death
@@Stierenkloot i was on the edge of the cliff of awareness and i could "see" a endless bottomless horizon cavern of unawareness/infinite-time-passing-before-me-&-without-me, and i looked in, and in a darkness-of-zero-sensory-data i heard my thoughts say "oh.. im dead" and i ***SCRAMBLED*** back up the cliff of awareness and suddenly i was awake in my bed all at once but there was what felt like zero oxygen in my lungs & i ***GULPED*** down air & i ***GULPED*** down air again & i kept gulping down oxygen for what felt like Ten Minutes before suddenly realizin that i already had oxygen in my lungs and i was fine and i didnt need to keep gulping down oxygen (but i kept gulping air for a while just to be safe).
it was the most terrifying thing ive ever experiencd & i relly dont want to experience it again
@@Stierenklootyou can’t tell someone what they experienced 🤓
@@sushidog5312 oh no? I can’t tell a living person that they did not die? I can tell you that you never experienced life on the moon.
@@AuntBibby that’s called hallucinating you genius. Death is literally just lights out. No bells and whistles. Grow up.
it's great to have you guys on board!
"Millions long for immortality who don't know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon." --Susan Ertz
rain is always nice for spacing out
Amazing, informative, well-researched and comprehensive video, thank you so much!!
Do we have to age?” might have been a better title
You are a terrific, likable and engaging host. Great job! As for the topic, at 45 years old, the Grimm spectre of death isn’t as far away as it once was lol. I’m counting on those sweet, sweet life extension options by the time I am staring down the reaper 🤞
Pleeeeeeeeaassseeee keep. This. Host. She's. awesome!!
Good video, though I feel that 'Do we have to age?' would have been a better title. I find it surprising that the question of whether we should attempt to cure aging is such a divisive one. We recognise that any other cause of suffering and death (disease, crime, accidents) is best avoided, but when it comes to biological aging, many commentators seem to imagine that it's something we shouldn't do.
I believe aging is the mother of all disease, and defeating it will bring benefits that far outweigh any drawbacks. Future generations will find it baffling that there was ever a debate to be had.
“I don’t want to go, I don’t want to go, please sir, I don’t want to go “
Living to over 120 years is kind of miserable. Many were blind and deaf while outlived loved ones and friends.
The blindness and deafness would be not present if they get there due to longevity and healthspan.
No, we don't HAVE TO die. Our medical science is advanced enough to where we can actually start tinkering with living longer far more than we do. The only problem is when you look at the "ethics" of performing trials for living longer (religious lunacy and determining who gets the ability to live longer).
I like this host, her voice is relaxing.
Yo I've never caught a Scishow fresh outta the oven! Welcome everyone to sick science
damn, some bot sniped first comment
@@Amongus-xh3rf don't even know why they keep doing it. All shock value has left just a mild annoyance now.
Same, love it.
I am happy that Unlike other videos on aging your does not harp on why we must die. You concentrated on biologic causes of aging without unscientific moralizing. Thanks
Another question the demographers weren't asking is were those final years of a person's life desirable. Living with some health problems can be worse than death. You also touched on the point that if we don't die off we would continue to compete for resources with our offspring, this is a huge problem to overcome.
this is a dilemma tho.
you do not want to die, but you also live a life you’d rather choose death over it (as in it’s just suffering and pain beyond your control).
a dilemma that no one will ever be able to solve (just to point out, people commit sui cide not because they want to die, but simply to not exist or escape the pain; had there been a non-death option, they’d choose it right away)
Most offsprings would rather have their parents with them for longer if they can stay health. Yes, some health problems can be worse than death, but leting old but healthy people die so that they dont "compete" with their offspring is not aceptable.
We can leave the planet if it gets too crowded. Space is big and the part we occupy is infinitesimal. Life is the rarest thing in the universe for all intents and purposes. There's no reason to squish it all on one tiny spec.
@@Vivian2290 If humans were already immune to death by old age we would be in a position of go extinct or start killing off the elderly so the young don't starve. Remember, immune to death by old age not immune to death period, there's a big difference. Also there's the issues of living while people you care about weren't lucky enough to avoid dieing from something other than age.
Don't get me wrong, most of us love our parents and would love to be able to keep them around and not have to deal with that loss. However think about the parent who hasn't died due to age and has survived their own child, this already happens and is considered by some to be the worst tragedy possible.
@@The_Savage_Wombat Perhaps in the future that will be an option, it isn't yet and is not likely to be within the next 20 years. Imagine for a moment all the people who die specifically of old age in a 20 year span, now imagine that many extra mouths to feed when some would say there's already a global shortage on many staple food items. I would not want to live in that world.
Thanks for the video, y'all!
Let's leave the "priests" out of decision making. And philosophers are unlikely to be of much practical help.
Same goes for hindu priests who think they are somehow better
Let's also leave people saying "priests" out of decision making.
@@thstroyur ???
@@uncroppedsoop Nani?!?
Let’s study age reversal, maybe we get lucky or end up just slowing it as a kind of consolation prize
She's back!
For me personally, I plan on hitting 150 years prior to passing. So every day after may the 20th 2121 will in my opinion be borrowed time. But prior to that I plan on filling that remaining 97 years with an amazing adventure and share the insights I"ve learned with everyone who will listen.
I'm totally on board with this, but I think people tend to dramatically overestimate how long people live. You included.
It's like 50/50 you'll get past around 70 or 80 or so. Basically nobody gets to 100, and everybody thinks they're the exception.
The national institute of aging has about a 4B budget, half of which goes to alzheimers, and 350M of which goes to basic research. Given that most healthcare spending is due to aging-degraded health, and we spend over 1T on healthcare in the US, we need way more research funding for you to reach that 150 yo goal.
@@goodfortunetoyou
It's not about hitting the goal. It's about purposefully inflating expectations so as to avoid an early demise. If I don't hit that mark, I'll never know it. So it's not about being right. It's about living in a manner that takes longevity as a given. And to plan accordingly.
Look on the flip side of this. Suppose I were to hit that mark. Doesn't it make sense to have taken this in account for a variety of reasons? Not the least of which are financial considerations.
There is also something very true about the following statement: "The man who expects to die tomorrow, will usually find a way to make it happen."
Cheers mate! I hope your day treats you well.
@@empathyisonlyhuman7816 Makes sense to me. Cheers to you as well :)
The comparison to humans vs animals is, we do a lot more than anyone else. We're overly stressed, work constantly sometimes, deal with medical and mental problems on a daily, etc. I'm 44 so I doubt I'll ever see advancement in this area before I'm gone.
Keep going for another 44 years and it's 2 years to 2070.
Having the first more widely available treatments ready by then seems pretty realistic, I wouldn't be surprised if we see a few coming out before that.
You might just make it, stay healthy mate.
I think most animals undergo just as much if not more stress than humans. Just take a look at a squirrel and see how easy it is to make it start running for its life.
Maybe those tortoises and jellyfish have a really chill life though.
Yeah you never know. Sometimes throughout history there have been eureka moments. Agree with the above at least do the basics of staying healthy and see what happens! I’m 34 that’s my strategy
I've been obsessed with older folks doing deadlifts on youtube. There are people twice my age also lifting twice what my good form deadlifts are.
I don't need to live forever, but being able to have strong muscles and bones in old age would be great.
I'm a dad right now and things have gotten a lot physically easier since I started going to the gym. The idea that I could be a physically active parent to not just my daughter's generation, but my grandchildren's generation if I'm careful and keep consistent and safe training is too tantalizing to pass up.
When people reach over a century, many lose the will to live due to quality of life.
That is the factor, quality of life with stable mental acuity.
I'm only fifty and my quality of life already sucks. Fibromyalgia, arthritis and a knee that keeps giving out, plus other health problems.
YES! It's hosted by Niba, NOT Savannah Geary!! Yes! A SciShow video that I can watch!
Most compelling argument my friend told me pro-immortality:
Age-related complications and diseases are but a small fraction of possible causes of death, so immortality would have surprisingly little effect on the overall human population.
Sad coincidence but you guys released this video 8 days after my mom passed away, and 3 days before my birthday. It’s been a heck of a ride
"The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant" is a wonderful take on whether humanity needs to accept death. Written by Nick Bostrom and animated by CGP Grey over on CGP Grey's channel. Phenomenal stuff.
Omg I love that video
urggghh my main problem with that story though is that it does not remotely touch on the actual reasons I and a lot of people are wary of the notion of living forever, that being that with the way our society is currently structured and distributes resources, we're going to have to worry about dying early from age-unrelated illnesses or mental conditions that we can't afford to treat, while people with money to spend are gonna get to sit in their positions of power forever
the argument stands for the very specific objection of "why spend so many resources to commit an act against the natural order", but unless we can stop the sun from exploding or the earth from boiling itself, we're still gonna have to live with the specter of death and the parable is too limited to address that anxiety
by all means though we should continue researching senescence and how to mitigate its effects, i just hate that story specifically
2:10 I think, statistically, that makes sense anyway. You would expect, given the number of people, for someone to reach just about the maximum natural age by sheer luck, at some point, basically as soon as it became plausible. Advances in medicine would just increase the number of people who do so, eventually pushing the limit just a little higher, but not by much, without more fundamental changes.
Anecdotal from the native communities tell of a man who lived to 147. My great grandmother lived to 114.
I remember reading about an East Asian man living to upper 140's, it was simply a claim. Of course, documenting that would be next to impossible(at the time)
I agree. I don't really want to live longer if that just means more years of physical disability and dementia. If I can be myself, doing the things I enjoy, sure id love to live longer! But i have watched my grandparents and parents lose the ability to do much of anything for themselves, and become confused and worried, unable to recognize friends and family. I don't want extra years of that, thanks anyway.
The older i get the less i care if i live forever.
All I can say is from a biological perspective it makes sense to have generations of organisms, and for older organisms to eventually die, not only does it allow for new mutations to be put to the test in the environment allowing for adaption to actually take place, but it removes the competition that parents can pose to their offspring in an environment. With out death, new life has no room to grow.
"Aglet (Don't forget it)"
Insert "I GOT THAT REFERENCE" meme here.
Fascinating tangle of enigmas and paradoxes😊
0:47 I bet the priest will touch up on it later lol
Lawd have mercy!! 😂😂🤣👍✌️
💀💀💀
Lmao
It's called getting Holy Ghosted.
There has been some controversy over Jeanne Calment's claims about her age, with some suspecting she had passed away earlier than that and her daughter took her place. I don't know how much this claim holds water nowadays of course.
Hey just a reminder that the phrase "begs the question" is not an expression that means something like "it brings up the question...". It is actually a logical fallacy that relates to circular reasoning or assuming a key part of your argument is true without proving it!
I don't think I'd even want to continue indefinitely. Better to end naturally, than to live endlessly being bored of it all.
Couldn’t agree more.
There IS an evolutionary advantage to aging; not to the individual, but to the community.
This is well studied in genetic algorithms.
When a "most fit" algorithm is allowed to continue to compete with offspring generation after generation, then the community of algorithms gets trapped in a "local maxima". That is, the community hasn't found the best answer to the stresses it faces, but it's found the best answer that resembles the ones its already explored.
By removing the "most fit" contestants after a maximum number of generations, even if they're currently scoring best against the reaper algorithm, the community explores more possible avenues. It doesn't stick with the best answers it knows, as far as genetics goes; it goes out and tries new things, now that the old leader has aged out. In the short term, the community becomes "less fit". But in the long term, it can discover entirely new gene mixes that are better than the old best could have been. It can escape the trap of the "local maxima".
You can visualize this if you imagine a map, covered in hills. The "most fit" contestant in the breeding game is the one highest on the map. Generation after generation, the new contestants that land higher on the hill are even more fit. Eventually, a contestant lands on top of the hill. It's not possible to get any more fit.
Except there's another hill, father away, that's even taller. No one's going there, though, because the new generations are spawned near the old "best fit", and it's already at the top of this hill. No one's setting foot on that taller hill over there, and starting the climb.
When the top fitting algorithm is forced to die after X generations, instead of just camping at the top of its hill forever, the population explores more. They find that next neighboring hill, and some start exploring it. They find a higher peak.
That's the value of death by aging, not to the individual, but to the community. It prevents the "best answer we've found yet" from getting stuck as "the best answer forever", when there are better answers out there.
Put it another way:
Imagine our stone age ancestors found a magic plant that repairs the damage of aging. Everyone who does well has all of the magic herb they need to remain young, healthy, and breeding forever. Eventually, they breed a flawless Conan, stronger and faster than everyone else in the tribe. Conan has tons of kids, but none of them can surpass him. Conan is the best Conan that genetics can produce. All his children and children's children are similar, but Conan is forever the chief because no one is a better Conan than Conan. This tribe carries on for thousands and thousands of years, with Conan the eternal patriarch. And they never create a Napoleon, or a Nikola Tesla, or an Ada Lovelace, etc..
There's nothing stopping us from replicating the improved genetic exploration produced by death after we sort out biological aging, and we'll need to. If we don't take steps to keep change going after mortality ends, our species will hit a local peak, and then, genetically speaking, decide that's as good as it gets.
That's only if we are interested in keeping evolving biologically. Advancing technology has mostly overridden most of our evolutionary limitations, much faster than evolution has. We have no good reason to give back control to natural selection.
Besides, the idea of a "best answer" in an anthropological context is kinda eugenics-y.
What a well articulated answer! And one that seems to fit with what we already see in things like small towns or big families where when the oldest generation or matriarch/patriarch dies the community spreads out or falls apart
Which is where we seem to be now because capitalism has caused stagnation in all creative endeavors heh
I'm struggling to sort out the normative from the descriptive here. Is your point just that group selection can explain why aging is a dominant trait, or is it that there is some sort of imperative to preserve the purported advantage that aging gives to our species? If it's the latter then I'm not sure why becoming more fit should be our goal.
Underrated comment of the year
Life Extension by Durk Pearson and Sandy Shaw came out in 1982 42 years ago. I was interested in Life and Health Extension long before this, but I think this book was groundbreaking.
3:44 - OK so you're saying don't squeeze fresh free radical orange juice on my DNA.... Got it. 😁👍
But... Free Radicals juice is so tasty :(
I personally find that to be a major flaw in human design,more specifically getting sick,but in short I find it to be a major flaw
getting sick is not a flaw, its just an endless war between us and micro organisms, its only a flaw for autoimmune diseases
"Should we live forever" Tbh taking a possibility like that from someone is like killing someone, after all both shorter someone's life, so the question itself should be "is it worth living longer" and I can answer with 100% certainty, yes it is, I want to live longer, experience more, see the future, there is nothing good in death
The question is never live forever. It's live for tomorrow. 1000 years from now will eventually just be a tomorrow after all, if you get my meaning. I'm 50 and when I was a depressed teenager, this age seemed like a silly pipe dream, but it's now my present everything. The future has potential for surprises beyond our imaginations. Not just for society or tech, but ourselves. I know more about myself than I guessed there was to know.
"There is nothing good in death?" Tell that to someone in "hell." (Not *literal hell* hopefully, but there are fates worse than death, as I'm sure people would be acutely aware of if they couldn't or wouldn't die.)
Exactly this. So long as I'm happy and healthy, I see no reason I'd want life to end. It's bizarre how many comments I see declaring that defeating aging would somehow be immoral or undesirable. The death worshippers literally believe we should all suffer and die while somehow imaging they have the moral highground for saying so.
Worth mentioning that Jeanne Calment's age is also disputed
7:47 "So looking at DNA methylation gives you a pretty sensitive age, it just is one that might not match up with what day you were born" That's a really good sign, since it tells us that the age that matters is the molecular one (which should be something we'd eventually be able to manipulate with DNA editing techniques). It really seems like with perfect DNA repair mechanisms (without mutations and that can preserve all epigenetic modifications, such as DNA methylation) and perfect replication (no end of DNA - telomere - shortening), immortality (or more accurately, agelessness) should be a reality (and those "immortal" organisms could be the key to achieving it).
As I age I am more and more convinced that kidneys are a big factor in the overall deterioration of he body perceived as aging. Buildup of toxins and proteins around the body lead to a lot of bodily mishaps, maybe even Alzheimer. I am sure there are more factors, but I am willing to bet kidney malfunction is one of the big ones. Do kidneys age solely due to wear and progressive decline of kidneys caused by the very same kidneys malfunctioning or they start failing due to other unrelated causes.
One thing to keep in mind is the brain stuff. It's hard to imagine how our memory capacity could be infinite, barring advanced BCI. Seems like then the options are living until you've replaced all your memories with new ones or living until you're incapable of forming new ones. Niether sounds great to me but I'd take the first, even if in some sense it does mean that I gradually "die" from a continuity of memory perspective on personal identity.
For the first one, I think that would just mean that physical media holding your memories would be that much more important. And I don't even mean scifi stuff, I'm talking about pictures, stories, and even journaling. Even with our current lifespans, we end up forgetting things that we could record and reflect on later.
@@OceanBagel Fair point. I mean if you go full extended mind thesis then it’s no bother. But personally I’d like to remember first hand rather than trusting a journal or a photo. I mean if I’m truly forgetting then those things won’t register with me as having anything to do with my consciousness. It’d be like seeing a baby in a photo and recognizing that it has your face.
There's also kind of a middle ground. Even though the total memory capacity is finite, some memories are more vivid than others, requiring a different amount of storage. Even at present, I cant recall what I've had for breakfast two weeks ago but have no trouble remembering what I did or where I've been. I can easily imagine that if you live to say, 500, you wont be able to recall every single month but you will still have a general outline on a yearly basis of your life abd you will recall particularly important events without external memory devices
@@yakovdan I mean I was thinking about functionally infinite timescales, so that even significant events will be too numerous to reasonably prioritize. But 500 years or so, yeah I think I could see memory capacity doing just fine. But then again I’m not a neuroscientist.
@@Polyfoci Well, if functionally infinite time is in play then all bets are off. Might as well imagine a BCI of your choice. However, to avoid plain pointless speculation, here's an idea: what will advance faster - human healthspan or BCI? Will memory requirements outpace BCI progress or the other way around, or neither?
Interestingly, healthspan and BCI progress are correlated to some extent.
I know a few pensioners in their 90's, but it is true, as fit and energetic as they are, they still take medicine to control their blood pressure, cholesterol and blood sugar.
My Dad is the same. He is 76 and as fit as I am, 35 years his junior, but he still has a fatty liver and has to take cholesterol tablets. I am a Health Science graduate, and I also find this topic fascinating. How do we live better and longer lives? Biochemistry in particular is forever a mystery.
"People aren't living longer, they're dying longer"
My 94 year old grandfather is still living on his own, driving, and hanging out with his own friends. He's a bit of a jerk in mindset, but that's not age related. My 70 year old mother is still working full time as the head of accounting for a multi-national company and is in excellent health. It is possible to age without "dying longer".
@@patrickmccurry1563 Only if you're well enough off 🙃
@@patrickmccurry1563_whoosh_
That’s nonsense. Many people are living healthy and rich lives far beyond their pre-modern medicine life expectancy. Most of the change in life span comes from those people whose lives are not cut short by things like childbirth complications and other highly treatable conditions, not by severely impaired and infirmed elderly with degenerative diseases holding on just a couple more months or years because care has improved- in many cases the very OPPOSITE is true
@@LGrian Based on what, your bias? 🙃
Being slaves to capitalism longer isn't living longer, it's dying longer and the fact that you don't get that says everything I need to know about you, Dunning-Kruger
having a greater proportion of the years we do get, be happy and healthy, is a worthwhile endeavour. I would be interested to know, of the people who want to live longer (or forever), how much is because they're genuinely enjoying life and are excited to see what comes next, how much is fear of death, and how much is a kind of greed (often seen in billionaires for example), that is, a pathological inability to feel "enough".
I think all three are intertwined. I fear death because I enjoy life. As for greed, if wanting to live as long and healthy a life as possible is greedy then I'm as greedy as they get. But so long as my existence isn't hurting anyone, then why would it be a problem?
The rich and powerful gaining the ability to live and accumulating resources and power indefinitely does not seem very appealing to me personally...
☝🏾✨ This right here
There is a limit even to that incredibly unlikely scenario. There is only so much you can consolidate in a system like an economy. This is kinda like your body heat in the winter. There is a finite amount, but your body will take care of your core and brain before anything else. BUT, you WILL still die if too much goes there and not enough to the rest. Of course, in the economic scenario we still have "competition" in the mix.
If they lived forever they'd get bored eventually and start spending way more money, which could be good. I hope so at least
There are many ways to lose power though, and still other ways to die besides aging
sounds like ww should fund that research via national laboratories etc. (and even produce therapies) to make sure thats available to anyone
Another thing to the "Humans aren't lab mice" is the fact that ethics aside, humans can live a LONG time compared to a lot of animals. By the very nature of the problem we are trying to solve, a trial to "make people live longer" will IDEALLY take a long time--if the treatment doesn't have an immediate negative effect, it'll take a long time to figure out if it worked, and how well. That kind of long-term science ain't cheap or easy.
We need to be funding this stuff.
@scishow i always hear about long living animals, but what about bugs and stuff that die really fast? whats that all about, and is there a comparison to be made there with older life forms?
What’s the benefit of living longer if you are a feeble old person unable to function once you reach your 60’s and onward? Is there a way to stretch out our “prime” days?
Getting rid of senescence would probably mean you can still function later on
"122 is great,"
I disagree. The last 40-50 years of a life that long are often full of pain, dementia, loss of friends, & general suffering.
That depends on the health span.
I know lobsters are biologically immortal. However once it reach a certain age it becomes extremely hard for them to molt and they die
My great-aunt Ethel lived to be 104, and until she was 102, she was driving on her own, tending her own garden, doing her own grocery shopping and making her delicious family-famous fudge. Since she died, the family has made the fudge using her recipe, but it’s just not the same. Some of the magic is gone.
Yes… we do. No amount of molecular biology/biochemistry, synthetic bioorganic or medicinal chemistry, molecular genetics etc will change this. We’ve only really just begun to understand our own genome… we STILL haven’t delved into the overlaps and exactly how things are regulated and the cascading mechanisms that govern every single process in our cells. We’re trying but we, sadly, to put it into vernacular… “don’t know crap”
Even if ageing was defeated, there would still be ways to die. Wouldn’t that actually make death even more horrifying since peaceful death would be even rarer?
Plus, only rich people would have access to eternal youth...
I don't have any doubt we'll solve aging eventually, barring mass societal collapse. Might not be this century but absolutely we will.
It's odd to me you think that we can't solve a problem in the future just because we don't have the answers or technology at this very moment, especially with the explosion of medical advancements in the last few decades
"I intend to live forever, or die trying!" - Groucho Marx
If you want to understand the secret to immortality, study Keith Richards liver.
Longer lifespans will mean more time working, and I don't want to retire at 102.
No matter what there's always the heat death of the universe
If a species cannot figure out how to travel to other universes or reverse entropy in 1.7×10^106 years, then that species sucks.
So afaik depending on a species, evolution always works out what is the best for a population. How long a lifespan, how long a childhood, the size of brood, etc. - it figures out by trial and error what works best, and if we made ourselves sort-of-immortal/immune-to-natural-causes it would vastly throw things out of balanc (modern medicine and modern mass food production actually already have, but adding longevity to that would make things exponentially worse).
So one important thing is that we would need to somehow now only extend the lifespan, but also youth. What's the point of living until age of 500 if you had a menopause at 50 and life is just torture? Now, if you were to slow down aging so that you hit menopause at 500 and were basically at the same stage of aging progression, same level of health as now people are at 50, that would be a totally different thing.
But that has one more limitations from what I heard. So basically once your brain stops developing around 30, you can no longer grow new brain cells, they can only die - hence dementia and such start to kick in. Any damage is basically irreversible. So if we made it possible that you body ages slow enough you hit menopause at 500, your brain would still be developing to maybe around 300 (assuming that if 500 is the equivalent of 50, then 300 will be of a bit over 30 - cause we also assume we're not extending childhood but slowing down aging since 20 or so), which then means that once you reach 300 you're gonna have a geriatric demented brain by maybe 350 whilst looking as-if mid-30s. You will still have a good healthy body, but a broken, dysfunctional brain. And that there does not appear a way to work around it.
And that is still a generous version of the problem assuming that the brain will be still developing until that 300 and not stop at 30 like now, so then at 80+ you still look like a late teen or 20-ish, but you have that geriatric demented brain...
Perhaps you heard that the brain doesn't stop developing until around 30. You grow new brain cells all through adult life. There's no reason that old people can't learn new things.
www.theguardian.com/science/2019/mar/25/humans-can-make-new-brain-cells-into-their-90s-scientists-discover
Love scishow, but absolutely no decisions about the future of humanity should be made by priests
Would be nice if we didn't have to. I'm like a late bloomer and sometimes feel like I have to do things quickly to catch up, doing things when you are a young adult, halted aging would help alleviate the pressure.
I wonder how long before this comment section is flooded with religious people mainly Christians, that are furious we're even trying to live longer.
No one wants to actually live longer though.
You will eventually stop caring about everything.
@@TessaBain "No one wants to actually live longer though."
@@TheDanEdwards You must have a bunker to ride out climate change in 😮
@@TessaBain Speak for yourself. For as long as I'm healthy and happy I see no reason to stop living.
What if the video was just a yes followed by 10 minutes of silence