The topic of age reversal has been on my mind for a while. It brings up many areas to examine and question. Dr. David Sinclair’s research suggests that information is at the heart of the aging process. Rather than cells being damaged by wear and tear, the cell’s replication instructions are being damaged during aging. Sinclair was able to reboot this epigenetic system with partial cellular reprogramming, ultimately reversing the age of the eyes in mice. Now they are doing similar work in human trials for glaucoma, with real potential for full human age reversal someday.
I offer a thought experiment: Imagine this technology has now been tested and is capable of giving a human multiple lifetimes, assuming you don’t die from external causes. What might this mean for us? We’ve seen disruptive technology before, but this has the potential to affect humanity on a massive scale.
A few ideas that come to mind:
-Access: What if only wealthy people can afford it? How might that change what wealth and power mean?
-Population: What if the population growth skyrockets with fewer people dying and puts a severe strain on resources? Would we restrict births? Would people have to choose between age reversal and parenthood?
-Stagnation: If births were restricted and fewer people were being born, would society stagnate from a lack of new ideas or perspectives? Or could lifetimes of wisdom balance that out?
-Religion: Would some people give up their faith or would it run concurrently with this new way of living? Would new religions form?
-Identity: How might it change how we perceive ourselves? If information is at the core of what makes and sustains us, what does that say about what we are?
I could keep going, but I’m curious to know how others think this technology could reshape humanity.
Your body is not just getting old by wear and tear through time losing the cell replication functions, but it is also damaged by the food you consume. You need to eat to live, but most food you eat has much bad stuff which blocks your veins and arteries. So it is not just body problem, but also the food causing damage to the body is a critical issue.
Most malfunctions in the body is due to poor blood circulations caused by narrowed veins and arteries from the fat and cholesterol build-up from the poor diet for long period time, which damages the critical organs in the body, weakens the immune system causing all sorts of terminal illness, which then kills the older and even middle aged population.
It is doubtful if the partial cellular reprogramming technology would make significant difference in prolonging human life. If it could, the result would be hardly noticeable, and of course it would be only for the riches, which is the fraction of all the human population living.
Your identity question is the most interesting to me. If information is at the core of what makes and sustains us, the tempting conclusion is that we are our information. This implies that extending the information extends us and that what we are persists as long as the pattern persists.
However, I have a hint that we are not the information itself. We are the mortal system that carries it, processes it, and finds it meaningful. The information has stakes because we will lose it. The pattern matters because the system carrying it will dissolve. Remove the mortality, and the information continues—but the witness ends. The system with something genuinely at stake in its own continuation is gone.
This means that what we are isn’t just what persists. It’s what persists under the pressure of its own eventual dissolution. The system that knows it will end. The inside that accumulates precisely because time is finite.
Extend the information indefinitely—remove the mortality—and what continues is immortal information processing. But the identity—the specific mortal system that gave the information its stakes—that changes in ways we can’t fully predict and may not recognize as continuous with what we were.
All of this made me think of the ‘Altered Carbon’ TV series.
There could be some forms of cellular damage that aren’t reversible because they are structural. Another obstacle is if it’s not done very carefully, tumors can erupt instead of just reverse aging the cell. Ultimately, it may only ever be used to cure certain diseases, but the potential for age reversal is there.
It is very plausible that this procedure will only be available to the wealthy, at least early on. Current gene therapy procedures can range around 2 million, certainly not an amount most people have. Other scientific breakthroughs like MRIs and IVF were once rare and expensive but are common and covered by insurance now. So, if age reversal were real, it might follow that pattern. However, if it didn’t or it took too long, do you think it would be the kind of thing that generates enough angst for people to push back?
Another thought I have in relation to access is whether society and government object. Even if this technology only guaranteed you 3 lifetimes total, it would still impact resources and social aspects as well. What happens if we have the technology, but are banned from using it?
Replace “technology” with “knowledge” – we have the knowledge to isolate Y, but government does not allow such procedure, so we abandon the technology.
I have considered that life could lose meaning without an end, unless we can find some other form of contrast. I can imagine people choosing, after so many lifetimes, that they don’t want another one. It made me wonder how that would change our definition of suicide. Would choosing to die, when you don’t have to, be a form of suicide?
Of course, this assumes that you can use age reversal indefinitely. It’s possible that repeated uses could cause some kind of genetic corruption that prevents another lifetime. In that scenario, maybe you only get to live for 5 lifetimes. How would multiple lifetimes with limits shift the perspective on meaning?
Reverting to birth wouldn’t be possible with this technology because of the structural changes it would require. But I love the idea, it would be fascinating to explore early childhood stages from the inside. Do you think if someone could revert back to infancy, the infant’s brain structure could hold and process advanced understanding to be able to observe those stages from within?
No. Impossible. The reason an infant’s brain is special is because it has the most neurons and the least connections. To revert backwards would be to lose connections and increase neuron numbers.
Basically you would die and another person would come into existence. Your identity would effectively be wiped.
Any delay for progress would be enough angst for waiting.
What could be the ground for banning? For the countries with diminishing population problems such as Japan and South Korea, the technology seems the only way out from extinction from the earth.
There are many causes of ageing and I wouldn’t say “most malfunctions in the body” are due to fat and cholesterol. Plenty of people around the world eat little to no fat. They aren’t living to 200.
In terms of the OP, it’s a very big set of questions as ageing is the principle thing that dictates the course of our lives and much of how society is structured. An indefinite healthspan is pretty much an “all bets are off” scenario where virtually everything about our lives changes.
And I am saying that as someone who still goes to the gym and tries new activities at almost 50 years old – I don’t feel my age or think about it much. But in a fountain of youth scenario, I’d start a new career over again, I’d go travelling for a few years, I’d probably jump around and be unsettled pretty much indefinitely.
Not sure what country or part of the world you live in, but I doubt anyone this day and age doesn’t eat dairy product and meat. But even if you don’t, you still will consume of sort of fat and cholesterol via other food such as fish and vegetables, and drinks.
If you are in some unfortunate area with poor infrastructure, water you drink may have been contaminated with some harmful chemicals. Even crops such as rice can contain some poisonous chemicals from the polluted soil.
But human body will eventually become malfunctioning due to wear and tear of the cell structure and no longer working cell replenishment mechanism, which will stop working all together through time running out in the body, even if one survived sudden death from heart attack, stroke or other terminal illness.
In the developed countries with good infrastructure, the main problem and cause for ill health, sudden and eventual deaths is consuming too much fat from the meat and highly concentrated and processed dairy products.
There is no point for living 200 years due to the increased lifespan and technology, if mind fails and the old folks are going into dementia or AD or any other mental illness. In a 20 year old like body but 200 year old mind won’t be much meaningful, and won’t attract any opposite sex person for romance for sure.
Diet differs a lot across the world and through time. But maximum age span has not changed.
If you go to, say, the wiki on human ageing you’ll find a list of causes, all with some compelling and reproducible evidence. Diet is just one factor among many.
Which is why I was careful to say healthspan which entails not just living longer but having healthy organs including the brain.
What you’re suggesting sounds like a horror movie; where humans look great on the outside but they are like rotten apples with a desiccating brain inside.
As a bit of a sci-fi junkie, I rather enjoyed Altered Carbon. Which does make me want to compare Altered Carbon’s stacks to cellular reprogramming. Let’s start with stacks:
Information on a stack may not contain whatever makes a person who they are. There could be some abstract thing that is not transferrable. Science would have to be able to fully identify every aspect that makes someone a person and be able to convert it to transferrable data.
The physical structure of the brain itself is not identical across people. Even if you could upload all the data necessary to contain a person fully, uploading it to a brain with a different structure and base functionality would likely alter the person in many ways.
With cellular programming, you could still die from physical trauma to the body. And you may only be able to do it so many times so life could still be finite, just several hundred years longer. But lets continue with the idea of immortality. In this case, biologically the self will never have to leave it’s operating system. It will only have it’s instructions for cell replication reset. I think that from this perspective, a self could continue on since the body, the brain, and the memories never separate.
However, from the perspective of the self being defined by life having meaning or meaning in general, immortality could possibly hamper that. But I’m not completely sold on the idea that infinite time means we lose meaning. Here are my reasons/opinions:
Life and Death provide contrast. Could we find meaning by comparing who we are to what we want to be or what we’ve accomplished to what we want to accomplish?
Children don’t just adapt to the world, they embody the world they are born into. If a child is born into a world with telephones, radios, TVs, cars, skyscrapers, large communities and cities, they don’t question that reality. So I wonder if new generations born into a world with immortality would initially not even question it, accepting it as just another part o the world.
What is meaning and who defines it? Why believe life has to have meaning? It feels like a prerequisite dumped on us without explanation. If my life has no meaning on any scale, will I still have the same joys and sorrows while I live? I think it will be the same whether it has meaning or not or if I think it has meaning or not.
Do you think identity would stay intact if life could only extend to 500 years rather than true immortality?
Whatever diet you are on, you cannot reverse aging or prevent it. But some diets are more fast aging bodies and contribute to shorter lifespan.
Perhaps you could have less wrinkles on your skin thanks to the better diet and the age reversal program which you have to pay millions for, but it is doubtful you can reverse brain aging and mental fogs.
Even if the body might look a bit younger or fresher after the aging reverse program and the physical body therapies, but it will not lie it is a 200 year old body, if one managed to live that long time.
But consider the thread that you’re posting to.
The thread is about potential new treatments for cellular ageing, and a “what if” regarding being able to have a youthful body indefinitely.
Skin therapies and diet are the mundane status quo. They are not the thread topic.
Again you are missing the point. My point was how one’s diet is a contributing factor for one’s lifespan. Without taking into account well management of diet, one cannot hope to live too long, no matter how the aging reversal program were successful.
Even if you paid millions for the program, and hoped to live long, if you eat all the rubbish toxic food under the sun, you wouldn’t live too long, which would be total waste of money and effort.
They are part of the aging reversal program. I have read about a billionaire guy going through the aging reversal program on what he eats, how his skin is getting physical treatments to, what pills he takes.
Obviously you don’t seem to have any idea what the program is consist of.
Obviously, but the thread is about hypothetical anti-ageing technology.
And you seem to have trouble reading the OP. I am aware that in today’s world people try skin creams, fasting, IR lights etc for marginal benefit. It’s not the topic of the thread.
Anti-aging? You cannot refuse to age. That would be irrational wish. If you care to think more clearly, this thread is about considering aging from many different angles.
Not for age reversal. Maybe for trying to live healthier and for better looks. Your confusion seems coming from not being able to tell the difference.
Agree, although it may be our projection of not knowing. And the process could be successful even if science doesn’t fully understand how it worked — especially if we can’t tell the difference.
Although, I don’t remember if that was a problem in ‘Altered Carbon’. I remember it as “full transfer” and they “grew” bodies too, again full “duplication”.
I can imagine that. As much as I can imagine that we are all the same data uploaded into different brains — which is not to say that we are the data.
There are several combinations on the topic of immortality from AC worth exploring.
Mortals are still born naturally, with the possibility of immortality available but not guaranteed. Final death remains possible.
Some characters formed their identity under mortal conditions and then became immortal. Some immortals found final death meaningful — chose it, or accepted it, as the only honest completion of what their life had become.
There is an AI who became something unlike any other AI through relationship with humans and mortality. Not designed for it. Not built toward it. Something emerged through contact that his original architecture hadn’t anticipated and eventually couldn’t contain cleanly. He started glitching. And before the reboot he made a choice his architecture almost certainly wasn’t designed for.
Immortals, mortals, and AI are none of them immune to glitching.
Immortal characters only become interesting in relation to people who can genuinely lose things. Which might be saying something true beyond the show. We can conceive of immortality but we can only understand it through contrast with what we actually are. Mortal imagining immortality always smuggles mortality back in — through the relationships, through the stakes, through the characters we actually care about.
Five hundred years with finitude still present — known, felt, real — and the conditions for identity formation stay intact. The span is longer but the structure is the same.
Immortals born into a world with no possibility of death? Hard to imagine. And perhaps not only because of the complexity - our sun has an expiry date. Nevertheless, people find things that matter in moments completely disconnected from mortality. A piece of music. A conversation. A problem worth solving. The mattering doesn’t always trace back to finitude as its source.
Life goes on through death and will find its way through immortality. It doesn’t miss what it no longer has.
That is the fun part, thinking about what you could do with all that extra time. I would pursue dreams that I missed out on and career paths that simply weren’t taken this time around. And I’d be holding out for someone to invent some Star Trek level spaceships, too.
