How do we get from here to there? The phases might look something like this:

Life Extension

Durable Digital Replacements

Substrate Mobility

Immortality

So, will some of us live forever? And what does that even mean? Join us!

For those who have asked: the image shown is a woman emerging from the mythical Fountain of Youth. Presumably she looked a lot older when she jumped in, but we don’t have that picture…

Brain with Alzheimer’s (left) vs. normal brain (right)

Fasting can help protect against brain diseases, scientists say

Researchers at the National Institute on Ageing in Baltimore said they had found evidence which shows that periods of stopping virtually all food intake for one or two days a week could protect the brain against some of the worst effects of Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and other ailments.

“Reducing your calorie intake could help your brain, but doing so by cutting your intake of food is not likely to be the best method of triggering this protection. It is likely to be better to go on intermittent bouts of fasting, in which you eat hardly anything at all, and then have periods when you eat as much as you want,” said Professor Mark Mattson, head of the institute’s laboratory of neurosciences.

“In other words, timing appears to be a crucial element to this process,” Mattson told the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Vancouver.

Cutting daily food intake to around 500 calories – which amounts to little more than a few vegetables and some tea – for two days out of seven had clear beneficial effects in their studies, claimed Mattson, who is also professor of neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore.

If you’re really serious about getting started with life extension, don’t miss Christine Peterson’s Personalized Life Extension Conference. Here’s our recent interview with Christine for those who missed it.

Cross-posted from Better All the Time.

Optimal vitamin D serum blood levels, attained through sunlight or supplementation, dramatically reduce the risk of many diseases other than bone maladies. Many of the most serious are ameliorated by an astonishing 50 to 85 percent. These diseases include cancers, from breast and colon to deadly melanoma skin cancers.

The big killers and most expensive diseases respond similarly to adequate D. I’m talking about hypertension, cardiovascular disease, and stroke. So do type 1 diabetes, type 2 diabetes (to a lesser extent), rheumatoid arthritis, peripheral vascular disease, multiple sclerosis, dementia, autoimmune diseases, and apparently even viral diseases such as H1N1 and AIDS.

Want to live longer? Cut your chances of suffering from the afflictions listed above (and many others.) Make sure you’re getting enough Vitmain D.

Simple.

And if you’re really serious about getting started with life extensions, don’t miss Christine Peterson’s Personalized Life Extension Conference. Here’s our recent interview with Christine for those who missed it.

The second Personalized Life Extension Conference is coming to the South San Francisco Conference Center March 31- April 1 2012. This looks like a tremendous follow-up to the 2010 event, with a program focused on anti-aging strategies and tactics for a long, healthy life.

A jam-packed agenda will cover myriad important topics, including

Food wars: Paleo, Mediterranean, vegan, raw?
To supplement or not to supplement?
Does a DNA test give actionable results?
Can too much exercise hurt lifespan?

The event boasts a terrific lineup of speakers, including World Transformed / FastForward radio guests David Asprey, Terry Grossman, and Christine Peterson.

Christine will also be joining us on FastForward Radio next week, 1/25 to talk about the conference.

When you register, don’t forget to use the code SPECULIST to get the discounted rate of $100

Over at The World Transformed site, Brian Wang explains why accelerating technological development should be happening faster. Lives are at stake. A lot of lives:

Currently we have 55 million people dying every year and we are still stuck on earth. If we did things right in 20-30 years we could be flying the solar system as easily as we fly around the world today and have lifespans and health that are radically better. The transformed world would be better and more of us around now would live to see it if it happens sooner. If it happens in 2081 instead of 2031 then 3-5 billion more would have died before it happened.

Virtually everyone reading this is one of those four billion who won’t be here in 2081. Isn’t Brian’s alternative worth pursuing?

Maria Konovalenko says yes:

A paper of extreme importance for fighting aging came out in the Nature journal on Thursday. A research group from Buck Institute lead by Professor Gordon Lithgow was able to prolong life of nematodes by 78% by adding one compound to the worms’ diet – a dye Thioflavin T. The authors showed that the effectof the dye was due to activation of stress resistance mechanisms, which lead to significant increase in median (60%) and maximum lifespan (43-78%). Thioflavin T is used to mark the amyloid protein aggregates inAlzheimer’s disease. Dr. Lithgow’s group showed that this compound regulates protein homeostasis, which leads to life extension in nematodes and improvement of their health later in life.

This article proves the possibility to prolong life by activating  stress resistance using chemical compounds simply added to the diet.

Konovalenko points out that the word “stress” here is being used in its technical / biological sense to refer to a broad range of damage. And yet apparently this one agent, Thioflavin T, was effective against stress generally, leading to this significant increases in lifespan.

In principle, a change in diet here brings about a major increase in life span. If there is a something we can add to the human diet that will have anything like the impact that Thioflavin T has on these worms…we’re talking about a huge marekt for some ambitious supplement distributor.

100 Year Old Man Starts PhD

Anybody who has decided against taking something like this on just because they have passed their 40th or 50th or 60th (or whateverth) birthday ought to take a lesson from this man.

I’ve often thought about going back for my PhD. And maybe I will…in 50 years or so.

• Adopt a hunter-gatherer lifestyle after 35 to 40 if Eurasian, earlier if ancestry is less Eurasian.  
• If younger than 30 and Eurasian, continue on a post-agricultural revolution diet (or Andrew Weil-style diet).
• Use the best modern medicine
• Use autologous (from your own cells) tissue repair as it becomes available in five or more years
• Use next-generation pharmaceuticals in the next 10 or more years

As reported by Kurzweil AI, this outline for how to put aging in check comes from evolutionary biologist Michael Rose as expounded at the Humanity+ conference at Caltech.

Rose isn’t the first to suggest that diet could be a key in slowing aging, but his ideas about changing diet throughout the course of one’s life are certainly unusual.

Sounds good — maybe a little too easy?

Image via Wikipedia

Stop the presses.

Before you complete our latest survey, consider this:

Scientists Find Way to Partially Reverse Aging in Mice

U.S. scientists say they have partially reversed age-related degeneration in mice, leading to new brain and testes growth, improved fertility and the return of lost cognitive function, or thinking skills.

The advance in aging science was achieved by working with telomerase genes in the mice, said the team at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston.

The researchers developed mice with a controllable telomerase gene. (Telomerase is an enzyme that helps maintain telomeres — the protective “caps” on the ends of chromosomes.) As people age, low levels of telomerase lead to progressive erosion and shortening of the telomeres, resulting in physical and mental decline, the study authors explained in a news release from the institute.

Creating mice with a controllable telomerase switch enabled the scientists to create prematurely aged mice. The switch also enabled the team to determine that reactivating telomerase in the mice could restore telomeres and reduce the signs and symptoms of aging.

In addition, the mice did not show signs of cancer — a key concern because cancer cells can use telomerase to make themselves virtually immortal. Researchers noted that this is an important area of study for future investigation.

One important note: the aging that is reversed in this study is a rapid-aging effect due to disease a la Benjamin Button. It’s great if this rare form of rapid aging becomes treatable, but the extent to which such treatments would be applicable to regular aging is not known.

Even so, it’s definitely a step in the right direction.

In which decade do you think medicine will enable a human life expectancy of 200 years, and why in this particular decade?

I was swamped with pre-holiday work and then the holiday itself, so I didn’t get my answer back to Christian before he published responses from Aubrey de Grey (cautiously optimistic) and David Brin (skeptical).

My own response was:

It’s very difficult to pin something like this down to a decade, or even a quarter or half century. I think there are people alive today who will live to see 200 — I would like to be one of them. But when does that possibility begin to materialize? I think we might see life expectancy pass 100 by mid-century, and 100 years after that (2150) we’ll have many individuals hitting the 200 mark, and good reason to believe that others will do so.

Of course, the arrival of molecular nanotechnology or strong AI (either or both of which could happen before 2150) will make those time frames obsolete.

As always, I’m interested to learn what you think.

Before the question comes up, yes I DO believe that it’s possible to establish a life expectancy of, say, 300 even if no one has yet reached that age. If you disagree, please choose time frames that you think are appropriate.

Survey Results are here.

Welcome Instapundit readers, and thanks for taking the survey. Here’s some late-breaking news that might give you cause to reconsider your answers. 

“Other” responses below.

Death Sucks

Reader Mary (Definitely on the Outer Ring) posed the following question in a recent comment:

Why are you so scared of dying?

(She wrote some other provocative questions as well, but I want to focus on this one for now.)

From the context, I’m going to assume that what Mary is asking is a philosophical question. She doesn’t want to know why I would get out of the way of a speeding truck. All mentally healthy human beings are “scared of dying” in that sense; it’s something we share with virtually every living being on the planet.

What Mary wants to know is this: why am I not resigned to my own mortality? Why would I want to engage in this unseemly practice of exploring alternatives to dying?

I’ll tell you why, Mare.

Death sucks.

Image by E L O via Flickr

Some say that dying is as natural as being born. I say, so what? Vomiting is as natural as eating, but I happen to like eating a lot more.

Some say that death is a part of life. I contend that, by definition, it is not.

Some say that death is the threshold to the next stage of existence. I say maybe so. But this stage seems to have a natural built-in aversion to the threshold to that stage, and I’m going to go with that.

Many believe that the fear of death is a primitive relic, a lingering superstition. Fear of death, they will tell us, is what originally led humanity to irrational thinking. We invented gods and spirits primarily to assuage this fear. Now we live in an age when rational thinking might once again hold sway, although irrationalism persists all around. To differentiate themselves from the irrational throng, rational thinkers proudly state that they are not afraid of dying.

I remember years ago, when I went to see Scorcese’s Last Temptation of Christ, there were two groups of sign-carrying protestors standing out front of the theatre. One group was Christian, the other was Atheist. The box office line was rather long, and those of us standing in it were stuck between these two groups: one warning us not to go see this shocking piece of blasphemy, the other encouraging our support of free speech. Needless to say, there was a good deal of verbal sparring between the two camps. Some comments were good natured and even a little funny, but it got heated from time to time. I remember one exchange ended with these very words:

Yeah? Well, I’m not afraid of dying.

Hey, good one. Sign-carrying atheists, one; sign-carrying fundamentalists, zero.

Unfortunately, that’s a load of crap. No, I don’t mean that I doubt that guy’s sincerity when he said that he was not afraid to die. I’m sure he meant it, and wasn’t just trying to score points against those polyester-clad, big-haired fundamentalists in front of his cool sign-carrying atheist friends. But the notion that the fear of dying is uniquely linked with irrational thinking is just about as wrong as it can be.

Let’s go back 50,000 years or so ago and take a look at our primitive ancestors. It’s true that somewhere along the line they developed burial rituals and a belief in an afterlife. Maybe this was just an irrational response to their fear of death and the grief of losing a loved one. But it was just a small part of what they were doing. What, then, were they spending most of their time doing?

Figuring out how the world worked.

These plants will make you sick. These are good for food. Spears with sharp stone heads are better than pointed sticks at bringing down game and warding off predators. This is a good place to stay; predators don’t usually come here. After the moon changes three more times, we’ll start heading south. We used to wait until it got cold, but this way works better and we lose fewer members of the tribe.

Our ancestors relentlessly pursued an empirical investigation into the nature of…everything. Science didn’t begin with Newton or Bacon or the ancient Greeks. It started way back when. All mathematics, physics, biology, astronomy — all rational human thought — has as its foundation the pioneering work of these our ancestors.

Now what do you suppose motivated them to do all this hard investigative work, to engage in all this rational thinking. Could it have been the fear of death?

Absolutely. They were besieged by threats on all sides. A rational, empirical approach to the world emerged as the soundest way of warding off those threats. If our fundamentalist-taunting friend could go back in time and somehow convey to a group of his ancestors his basic credo of intellectual superiority — “I’m not afraid of dying” — they’d think he was nuts. And not because they were so irrational.

But we’re only halfway there.

Paradoxically, the self-satisfied volley of “I’m not afraid of dying” might just as easily have come from the religious side of the ticket line as it did from the non-believing side. Religious and spiritually oriented people are often quick to tell you that they have no fear of death. And if you really got it, — whatever that means to the particular believer — you wouldn’t be afraid of death, either. If you only understood about Jesus‘ victory on the cross, or reincarnation, or nirvana, or even just the Natural Order of Things, you would be as resigned to your own eventual demise as the rest of us.

Yeah, well, that’s a load of crap, too.

I’m going to restate that so I’m not misunderstood. Any religion that teaches that you should be okay with the fact that you’re going to die is a load of crap. Christianity (to use the religion I’m most familiar with) most assuredly does not teach this. As C. S. Lewis famously put it:

But here is something quite different. Here is something telling me — well, what? Telling me that I must never, like the Stoics, say that death does not matter. Nothing is less Christian than that. Death which made Life Himself shed tears at the grave of Lazarus, and shed tears of blood in Gethsemane. This is an appalling horror; a stinking indignity. (You remember Thomas Browne‘s splendid remark: “I am not so much afraid of death, as ashamed of it.)

I believe that all human beings, including people of faith, share the same natural revulsion for death. We can blot these feelings out and cover them up, but to do so is to become like those rabbits in Watership Down who sang melancholy songs while trading their lives for some lettuce and carrots.

Those who claim to have no fear of death, whether they be an Objectivist or the Dalai Lama or some Palestinian strapping dynamite to his chest, have lost touch with a primary truth of human existence: a truth which has lead us both to science and to faith. Those who seek to prolong human life — whether via antioxidants or cryonics or standard medical procedures — have tapped into that same fundamental truth:

Death sucks.

Join us for two days of practical, realistic exploration of what each of us can do to slow individual aging and live the longest, healthiest, most active life possible.

A terrific lineup of speakers includes Esther Dyson, Peter Thiel, and Greg Fahy as well as some folks we’ve been fortunate enough to have as guests on FastForward Radio: Terry Grossman, Sonia Arrison, Gregory Benford, and of course Christine — with whom we’ll also be chatting on our upcoming podcast.

The Conference will be October 9-10 at the San Francisco Airport Marriott. I personally can’t make it to California that weekend but I’m hoping we get a Speculist regular to cover it for us.

You can be that person! Register here. Get a $100 off the cost of registration by using the discount code SPECULIST.

Cover via Amazon

Instapundit quotes Robin Hanson making some good points about lifespan, but getting way too literal about what “immortality” means:

“But finite increases in lifespan really have little to do with immortality. Immortality means you never die, ever. But forever is a really really long time! In fact, nothing you can imagine is remotely as long. . . . A thousand year lifespan would be fantastic, relative to our lifespan. I want it! But it is nothing like immortality.”

By the most literal definition, immortality would be impossible to achieve or prove. Even somebody who lives 25 quintillion years isn’t immortal — they just haven’t died yet. The only way to ever establish that anyone is immortal is to go all the way to the end of time and confirm that that individual is still alive.
 
But what do I mean by “the end of time?”
 
I have no idea.

On the other hand — can’t we be a little more flexible with our definitions? A guy who lives to be a thousand is clearly not immortal. However, if he hasn’t died yet, he’s just as immortal as the guy who makes it to 25 quintillion, or the guy who makes it to the end of time.

We are all effectively “immortal” until things go amiss and we die. The trick is to get better and better at being immortal.

 I see Robin’s point about not wanting to be distracted by crazy increments like “25 quintillion” or “to the end of time,” but immortal is too good a word not to use. It has a lot of appeal. I’ve stated my view of the future of humanity many times — we’re going to be sexy immortal billionaires with superpowers.

Every term on the list is arguable, but if you put them all together you start to get a feel for where we’re going with this thing.

The “immortal” that we’re shooting for right now is not the God model (which is appropriately pursued, if at all, via religious belief) but rather a modified version of the Highlander model. Those “immortals” in Highlander lived for hundreds of years. They were called immortals, but their lifespan was only indefinite. However, if they could avoid coming to a catastrophic end, they were good for several centuries at least, and maybe longer.

That’s a good goal for us. And we can just skip the decapitations, thank you very much.

Always remember: in the end, there can be a whole lot of us. 

Then there are the survivors. Some of them hang in for a remarkably long time, living as long a life as any of their contemporaries can hope for. By the time I was born, the last of the Civil War veterans had died. Apparently there were veterans of the Spanish American War among us until the early 90′s, although this group has never received the kind of attention bestowed on the veterans of the bigger wars.

When I was a kid, the term “veteran” applied to three groups: Korean War veterans, who were guys about the same age as my dad; World war II veterans who were a bit older than my Dad, and therefore old; and World War I veterans who were a bit older than my grandfather, and therefore unimaginably old. (Vietnam vets started emerging as a distinct class in my early teen years.)

Today the remaining World War I veterans really are quite old, even by my vastly adjusted definition of the term. There are only six left, according to the linked article, and two of those have not met the documentation requirements to be confirmed as bona fide World War I vets, although I will personally take their word for it. The youngest members of that group are 106 years old. Sadly, it’s clear that the Memorial Day is coming very soon when there will be no more surviving World War I veterans.

I heard not long ago that we are currently losing World War II veterans at a rate of 1000 a day. That estimate seems high to me, well over a quarter of a million a year, but it is possible. I wonder how that rate compares to the death rate during the war years? Has the death rate caught up? It’s very sad that we would regard a death rate of 1000 per day during wartime as a tragic necessity — with equal emphasis on the “tragic” and “necessity” parts — but today we view the same rate of loss as unremarkable as it is unavoidable.

In 25 years, the remaining World War II veterans will be abut the same age as the remaining World War I vets are today. There will be many more of them, in part a testament to improvements in medical technology, and in part a reflection of the difference in scale between the two wars. However, there may be another important difference between the two groups. Perhaps some of those surviving World War II vets in 2035 will have something that I wish the World War I vets could have, but I think very unlikely at this point — an open-ended life expectancy.

If so, that means that Memorial Day 50 years from now, or even 125 years from now, we may still have World War II survivors among us. To them, and to all of us, I offer my Memorial Day wish:

Live to see it.

Let’s begin.

1. We will no longer be human.

…What if all those implants and genome hacks transform us into Locutus of Borg or the Daleks? What good is living forever if you are just a shell of your former self? If you have lost your individuality and become a killing machine?

Okay, first off the specific examples given here seem to more in support of the third argument (which we’ll get to in a moment) than they do a generalized fear of no longer being human. As Jamais Cascio argues (I think very convincingly) elsewhere on i09, we have always been posthuman. Humanity is a process. It has already taken us far from what we were when it started. Maybe some of Lucy’s contemporaries argued that if we continue down this road of walking upright and developing bigger brains, we’ll no longer be australopithecines. If so, well, I guess in a sense they were right. But fortunately, their arguments did not hold sway.

As to the points supporting this argument, I would like to abstract them just a bit. There is no question that technology may lead us in some gruesome and horrifying directions, but I don’t take either the Borg or Daleks scenarios terribly seriously. Let’s just say that life extension, continued modification of the human genome, and a merger of human biology with technology could lead to some very bad outcomes: some expected, some not.

Therefore, the argument goes, we should avoid these technologies.

Allow me to make a similar argument regarding a completely different set of circumstances where things can go horribly wrong. While the percentages are pretty small, every year a certain number of people are emotionally and/or physically abused, sometimes even murdered, by their spouses.

Therefore, we must conclude, no one should ever get married. In a similar vein, no one should ever ride a bicycle, seeing as people sometimes die in bicycle accidents. Also, we should never build power plants of any kind — terrorists might blow them up.

Obviously that’s absurd. For any proposed action, the possibility of bad things happening, even horrible things happening, has to be weighed against the benefits of acting and the cost of not acting. We have to look at how serious the risks are and how they might be mitigated. If the fact that something terrible might happen was reason enough not to do something, without a careful analysis of costs and benefits, we would never do anything.

2. Whatever body you’re in, there you are.

So you’ve ported your consciousness into a cyberheaven, or a giant blue alien with sexytime hair, or a deadly robot who wears a plunger on his head. The thing is, you still have the same problems.

Sounds good! I like being me. And I like being alive, problems and all.

What an awesome alternative outlook on life we are offered here. “I can put up with my loathsome existence for 70 years or so, but that’s it.” Frankly, anyone who thinks life is not worth extending because one will still be oneself and one will still have problems needs to explain what exactly the rationale is for not having committed suicide already.

3. Our augmented bodies and minds will be hackable.

As computer security nerds already know, every new release means a new vulnerability. Your awesome brain-computer interface may give you unlimited memory but it also means that an evil hacker can take over your consciousness by exploiting a buffer overflow in your brain.

Okay, terrible things might happen. (See item 1, second counter-argument.) This particular horrible thing is that we might get hacked. Everyone reading this post on a computer device, please stop reading and destroy that device right now. Don’t you realize that it’s potentially hackable?

If the fear is that it’s specifically people who are hackable, it seems that’s a risk we face socially and culturally (perhaps memetically?) anyway. How do things like this occur?

4. We’ll have to deal with the immortality divide.

In a future where people have access to live-extending biotech, wealth could mean living for centuries, growing more powerful. People born into poverty will have even fewer chances to compete against the rich, and the free market could stagnate. Democratic human societies might ossify into rigid, caste-based feudalism once again.

Isn’t this just the digital divide argument all over again? Technology is going to create a permanent barrier between the digital haves and have-nots. Only about 20% of people in the developing world (as of a few years ago) had access to the internet. On the other hand, nearly half had access to a mobile phone. Let’s just assume for a moment that those are fixed percentages (which is nonsense, see how the lines are trending up?) and that one or the other might be comparable to the distribution we are eventually able to achieve for life extension technologies.

If 50% of the developing world is denied life extension technologies, should we all be denied life extension technologies? Maybe we should give the people in the developing world a vote on this. If I were one of them, I think I’d rather take my chances on the coin flip than deny the technology to everyone. Even if 80% were denied these technologies, it’s not just the large percentage in the developed world who gets punished if we don’t adopt them. We just end up leaving 100% of the developing world out rather than 80%.

If the argument is that it’s not fair that people get left out, I agree. Life is shockingly unfair. If the argument is that those technologies should be available to everyone, I agree with that, too. It’s just a question of how we get there. There will probably be some imbalance along the way, just as there currently is with internet and mobile phone connections.

That’s not a reason to relinquish those technologies. It’s a reason to move ahead with them.

Newitz ends by saying that she really isn’t against moving ahead with life extension technologies, as long as we don’t do it in such a way as to impoverish other areas of life. Well heck — one could make the same argument about research into, say, heart disease. She concludes with an argument for “social” immortality, which I of course am all for. The she gives us this tidbit:

But this can only be accomplished if people today are willing to pursue forms of science that aren’t just aimed at augmenting the mega-elites, but will also lead to species longevity.

Darn that cabal of mega-elites! They’re so sneaky getting people like me to support their cause, all the while thinking that I’m working on eliminating poverty and illness for everyone. If only I realized that it’s a stark and unavoidable binary choice. Either I sacrifice my own existence for the greater good or I greedily benefit myself at the expense of others. Believing that new technologies can benefit us both individually and socially simply doesn’t fit well with the literary tropes about class warfare and scarcity — mostly drawn up in the 19th through mid-20th centuries, although still popular today — on which Newitz apparently bases her worldview.

How oddly unfuturistic for someone who “comes from the future!”

UPDATE: Michael Anissimov comments, “This appears to be an early form of co-processing, where content from an external device (in this case, poor television shows) heavily intertwines itself with the thinking processes of the writer, to the point where reality cannot be distinguished from fiction.”