A new treatment that blocks an aging-related protein restored lost cartilage in old mice and helped prevent arthritis after knee injuries. Human cartilage samples showed similar signs of regeneration, raising hopes for a future drug that could repair joints instead of replacing them.
Good. Biological aging is nothing more than a series of processes, not an inherent property of atoms, and it’s time we start getting serious about anti-aging and life extension.
But probably not, seeing what the world is like.
Its mostly billionaires who will be able to benefit from life extension… do you really want a world where trump, musk, and all their silicon valley friends rule the world until they turn 300 years old?
Luckily there’s no vaccine against guillotines.
No worries about that, there is no changing the maximum age seemingly, not unless you genetically engineered babies with tech we don’t have yet.
Everyone is born with stem cells that carry so many copies of cells that are preprogrammed to die after a point to then be replaced by those stem cells. No drug can make more copies after the fact.
Then of course the dna gets denatured just by radiation and pollution and time.
Neither of these will or can be solved after someone is born. They can extend the average lifespan of a group, but they can’t exceed the maximum, which has remained constant throughout human history even as the average has changed drastically.
I thought the central problem was telemore degeneration, not anything to do with stem cells per se.
Happy to be corrected if wrong; I never worked anywhere near this category in my very long ago now pharma/biotech phase.
That is part of it, which is what I alluded to in the degeneration of the dna. The stem cell thing too though. Our bodies aren’t programmed to live beyond a certain point. We learned about this in a Nature of Disease course at University.
What’s the maximum? About 120?
Imagine having 100 or more healthy years. That seems like sci-fi, but may be possible one day still.
It will also mean working until you’re 100 before the national pension kicks in unfortunately lol
Ngl, you had me in the first half…
They nearly had me in the first quarter, but now I no longer believe I’ll ever see it. Not enough young people are born. My generation is enough to support the current old people, but there won’t be enough people to support my generation.
Are there enough people at the current system where the top 1% get 99% of the resources? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
But there will 100% be enough people to keep the basics going
We are thousands of times more efficient than we were a couple hundred years ago.
The top 1% don’t get 99% of the resources, they get 99% of imaginary wealth. It can’t be sold off en masse.
Ergo, we don’t have a magical extra 100x increase in actual goods and other physical resources per person coming if we just kill the 1%. Things could be distributed much more fairly for sure, but it’s not as simple as “these few people own everything so if they’re gone, everyone else is a millionaire”.
Anyway, much of the “basics” is going to be in person care work with an aging society. We haven’t handed that off to AI yet, nor medicine, but once that’s happened then yes we can actually handle social safety nets in an aging society. Right now the solution they’re going for is a constant increase in retirement age to keep the tax revenue high enough to pay for retired people’s needs.