Last week I gave a talk at the Singularity University about how we can extend life. Those who have never heard about the Singularity University, should definitely check out what the SU is all about. I talked about the current records in life extention achieved in model animals, overviewed the main scientific approaches to fighting aging and looked at why activation of stress resistance genes may be a very good idea for extending our longevity. I wrapped up by noting the potential profitable business side of life extension, which is creation of geroprotective drugs.
You can find the presentation “The Best Strategy for 5,000,000,000 people” here.
A couple of pictures from the place where great ideas and poeple are mixed together with the common goal of transforming the humanity. Although, it’s such a pity that life extension doen’t get much attention.
Maria Konovalenko 
Any chance of posting video of the actual presentation (if it was filmed)? I watched the slide-show presentation, but the actual talk would add a lot.
As a matter of fact, I have the lecture on video, but it’s huge and I’m not sure I’ll be able to post it. Need to check out how I can reduce its size.
I second the question. If you can post the video (for example on youtube or vimeo) that would be great.
Aging is not mainly a problem of genetic code.
Aging is a fundamental phenomenon caused by the second law of thermodynamics.
Atomic nuclei age as well as clusters of galaxies.
Every protein in the human body ages!
Success in anti aging in small animals is possible because these animals do not need to live long. The human being must live long to develop the full potential of his brain. Thus, human beings are NOT comparable with mice with respect to aging. The set of common genes is not important. Proof: Despite the common genes, a worm lives only weeks and a human being lives decades. Anti aging in a worm or a mouse should be far more simple than additional anti aging in a human body.
Anti aging research has still no concept, which is proven even just theoretically that a certain still to be developed therapy would extend human life span by 3 decades.
The only approach of this theoretically foreseeable quality would be to transplant the brain into a brainless body clone or to do minduploading.
I admit that these approaches are not simple. But they are the only approaches which could foreseeable extend the human livespan many decades and more.
The replacing approach is always necessarry if the repairing appraoch becomes economically not feasible anymore. And every system has by construction the point where repairing becomes not possible for economical reasons.
Complex systems do tend to deteriorate over time, but this can be corrected by sufficiently-sophisticated attention.
A car could be kept running indefinitely if the owner were willing to invest enough money in repairing and maintaining it. The same applies to the human body; it’s just that since the human body is far more complex, the repair and maintenance needed are far more sophisticated. But in principle it’s the same kind of problem.
In the long run, mind uploading is the only guarantee of immortality, but since it will be another 30 years or so before we can do that, biological life-extension technology can help great numbers of people survive long enough to reach that day.
The “aging” of atomic nuclei or galaxies are totally different processes than aging in living organisms; also, aging in living organisms has nothing to do with the second law of thermodynamics.
A car is an extreme simplification. A single cell has millions of DIFFERENT kinds of proteins = functional elements which age.
But even the extremely simple example of a car shows that the repairing approach rises increasing costs which makes anti aging more and more difficult.
Minduploading within 30 years is complete nonsense. Do not believe in this wichfull thinking.
Your view about the role of the second law of thermodynamics in aging is wrong. It is the key of every process of aging.
And note that the temperature of the body = temperature to do natural anti aging is already at an important limit. A little more heat within the body and its proteins would degenerate. The human beeing would die because of fever..
@lesslimits,
i agree with your assertion that a car is an extreme simplification, but i am not entirely clear about your assertion that ‘a single cell has millions of DIFFERENT kinds of proteins’. how are you defining ‘DIFFERENT? there are approximately 20,000-25,000 distinct loci within the human genome that are thought to encode proteins. a recent paper in plos computational biology (http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000598) estimated that 10,000-15,000 of the genes are being expressed dependent on the tissue type. they looked at mRNA in this study, so they did not specifically examine the proteome. if you consider splice variants and post-translationally modified proteins to be different, then perhaps you may come close to millions when you take into consideration combinatorics. though, like gene expression, these isoforms are generally context (i.e., cell/tissue type) specific. (if anyone has a proteomics reference that they know of delineating the proteome it would be great if you could post it.) on page 11 of molecular cell biology by Harvey F. Lodish extrapolates from yeast that a liver cell (doesn’t mention an organism) has an approximate total number of 7.9 x 10^9 protein molecules.
The importance of genetic and organ repair-replacement is in gaining time to improve the chances and quality of uploading.
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but some complex animals live to 200 years so humans should aim for at least that minimum.
As a matter of fact, if we’re be able to live for 200 years, this will mean we’ll be able to live up to whatever age we’d like to live to. That’s because while we are getting 200 years old a lot of new technological advances will be achieved and mind uploading will be among them. Therefore I believe we absolutely have to pay attention to bilogical ways of life extension, because we need this time to create more complex solutions.
Здорово, а видео доклада где-то есть? Что-то на ютьюбе найти не могу…
No, there’s no video anywhere online. I still can’t figure out how to combine the two pieces that I have into one and upload it. I’m not really video-savvy. Just yet)