Unusual Ways to Live Forever
jamesaltucher.com
jamesaltucher.com
But really - a whole screed on what to do about aging and you don't mention biotechnology once? That is a hot startup market, in which amazing things are taking place, and there are at least three competing visions of how to significantly extend human life currently battling it out in the scientific press and pop-science translation of that.
As your future arrives, there are two things you can do: either (a) accept suffering and death and do only the things you list in your article, or (b) materially help the nascent industry of rejuvenation biotechnology.
We are entering an age in which you can turn money into years of life. If you aren't noticing that, and you don't understand how to do that, then you have not been doing your research.
If you can buy time with money, then the worth of money becomes very different, and you should be giving a lot more of it to the right sorts of science:
http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2010/10/the-rational-use-...
And all technologists should have a better grasp of what aging is, and how it can be ameliorated within the next 20 years with the right research path:
http://www.sens.org/sens-research/research-themes
It isn't as complex as you might think - it only takes a couple of years of reading around to come to a good understanding as to why most of what you read is unscientific nonsense, and why despite that fact there are still functionally useful paths ahead:
http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2008/09/the-scientific-de...
http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2006/12/magical-thinking-...
http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2011/03/money-making-webs...
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And finally:
http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2011/03/is-prevention-of-...
"Yes, prevention of aging is within our grasp - in the sense that a package of foreseeable medical technologies could enable repair of the low-level biochemical damage that causes aging, and those technologies might take only twenty years or so to develop. Unfortunately, that timeline is dependent on a large amount of funding and a dedicated research community, neither of which presently exists for many of the essential parts of this research program. While the regenerative medicine and cancer research communities are populous, well funded, and achieving progress, very few researchers are presently working on other goals necessary to halt the aging process - such as repair of mitochondrial DNA.
"So when I say "within our grasp," I mean "if we all get up and do our part to make it happen." It takes a wave of public interest and advocacy to steer the scientific community and large funding institutions - and they presently need steering towards repair-based strategies to deal with aging, otherwise the first working rejuvenation therapies will arrive too late for those in middle age today."
I think this post does a great job at highlighting those stats of the top 10 killers and showing how little things and some common sense everyday can go a long way at improving your odds at preventing them. I'm a huge Buffett fan, and I really dig the analogy of looking after your own health and lifestyle the same way you would with your finances.
Interest accruing on your bank account doesn't seem like much in the near-term, but compound it over several years and it yields a huge reward, hand-in-hand with having the common sense to steer clear from risky disasters. The same is true of developing good long-term habits like exercising, watching your nutrition, having a positive mentality, etc. Sure, it doesn't sound all cool and sexy, and it doesn't gratify you in the short-term, but they're time-tested principles and they put time (or the effect of compounded growth) on your side - just like Buffett's investing habits.
Depending on how you calculate it, something like one quarter of the world's population live on less than 2$ a day. Many of them die due to a lack of absolute basics, like food, or basic, cheap, medicines.
Surely, the place to put 'excess money' is towards improving the lifespans of the people dying in their 30s, rather than of the people dying in their 70s?
Poverty problems are really hard to solve, and longevity research is good stuff; but you can't make global arguments about where we should put our resources, to improve overall human well-being, and ignore the vast numbers of people barely surviving.
(Note that I'm not taking a position here one way or another. If I were, I might point out that new technology generates jobs that can alleviate poverty more effectively than most forms of aid. Then I might argue with myself, saying that there are some forms of aid which are actually very, very cost-effective, and link to GiveWell. Then I might point out that we can do more than one thing, and that it's probably most effective to try to get people to more effectively contribute to things they do care about, rather than trying to change what they value. If you want to directly help people living in poverty, consider going to http://givewell.org/ and looking at what they recommend. If you want to live longer, the SENS Foundation is doing some good work there and could definitely use donations. Damn, I thought I wasn't going to take a position, and now I just took three of them.)
What's rational does of course depends on what axioms you have.
I guess its not obvious, so I'll explain my thinking. I think there are two broad scenarios.
Scenario 1: You care about increasing well-being and life-expectancy globally in the system. In which case the money better spent making those who currently die young, live longer. After all, if nothing else, it is extremely inefficient to have all those people dying in their prime.
Scenario 2: You care solely about increasing your own well-being, and not about whats best for the group. In which case, you'll keep your money to yourself, and try freeload off other peoples investment in longevity research. Because, unless you are exceedingly wealthy, your contributions will make very little difference to the overall research effort, but will make a very large difference to you. (Maybe you get sick, or circumstances change; for most people, their money has higher utility kept for such circumstances, than donated to a common research effort).
“[Instead of surgery], find out first if there’s any other non-surgical procedures. (…) first check with an acupuncturist (a good one that is recommended by friends who were actually helped by that acupuncturist) or a chiropractor.”
He refers to some pop-science articles here and there, but overall it's just a ‘common sense’ advice, which you must decide for yourself whether is valuable or not.
For example, although probably everyone here would agree that tobacco is very bad for you, please note that his method of arguing for that (“Of the 250 known harmful chemicals in tobacco smoke...”) is one that can be (and has been[1]) used to argue against vaccines.
I didn't say you were. I've said that your argument can be (and has been) used to prove or disprove almost any theory—including that of vaccines conspiracy. You have to either accept all the conclusions and uses of said argument or you must acknowledge that said argument was flawed to begin with.
And I'm sorry but you can't start your sentence by saying that you're not advocating people to avoid surgery and then go ahead and do exactly that.
Furthermore, dr. Gawande is not arguing what you do by a long shot. Your medical treatment options are always presented to you and you're free to chose a non-invasive one if you wish to. You're however advocating for choosing a non-medical treatment instead of a medical one, and in case of both acupuncture and chiropractic, ones that have no scientific basis whatsoever, and have not been proven to work or have been proven to not work.
Posted March 5, 2011: http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2010/03/12-unusual-ways-to-how-...
Isn't this the same article, republished?
I'd say most people want to live a long healthy life but only if it's easy instead of consuming fewer calories and exercising so really a pneumonia vaccination is as easy as it gets.
Vitamin D is also a fantastic thing, being in a northern climate and inside most of the time it's hard to get enough vitamin D. I started taking a 1,000IU chewable chocolate vitamin D each day and haven't been sick once. It's not a cure it's long term prevention but its effects are quickly noticed.
By following your advice you add maybe 10 years to your life expectancy. Not bad, but "forever" is a long time.
As I get older, I find that time seems to pass faster (and right now, I don't see how it could perceptively pass any faster than it currently is).
By contrast, techniques that reverse aging damage would allow biological humans to survive for many centuries. Nothing on your list comes close.
In short, your comment is also a lie.
Calorie restriction is not realistic for most people but all of my techniques are
That sentence fails to rise to the level of coherence. What are "the things that increase aging"? What is their usual velocity? How much do they increase aging? What's the relationship between their velocity and the speed of aging?
If you mean "all of the techniques slow the processes of aging", you're absolutely wrong. Exercise accelerates your metabolism, which accelerates some of the known aging processes. Of the other 11, most have no known connection to aging at all.
> Calorie restriction is not realistic for most people but all of my techniques are
Caloric restriction is easier for many people than quitting smoking, having sex, sleeping a lot, avoiding hospitals, or avoiding accidents.
Also true: nothing mentioned in your article can do as well as calorie restriction and exercise.
But calorie restriction and exercise cannot enable a person to live much longer. It helps you reach what will be your maximum optimal natural life span under today's medical technology, which might be a century if you are exceptionally fortunate.
The thing that will determine your life span is none of the above, however. It is future medical technology. Therefore the thing happening today that most greatly determines your future longevity is the level of investment and progress in the right sorts of technological development.
This is a stark change from the 50s or the 70s. There, no amount of foreseeable technological progress was going to impact the future life course of a 40 year old to the same degree as exercise and calorie restriction. Today, however, whether you die at 80 or whether you life for hundreds of years is absolutely a function of the degree to which rejuvenation biotechnology is realized over the next two to three decades.
This degree of realization can be swayed, now, today, by sufficiently motivated individuals. Such as the people who founded the SENS Foundation, or the Methuselah Foundation, or who persuade million-dollar donations into fundamental research into the repair of biochemical damage that drives aging.
This is an important era, and to focus on health in the sense that your parents did is to bury your head in the sand.
By the way, I looked up lung cancer rates in the US and the UK, and they've both been going down quite significantly among men, who were at a higher risk to begin with, and rising slowly among women -- a trend which has tapered off more recently.
http://www.cdc.gov/cancer/lung/statistics/trends.htm
http://info.cancerresearchuk.org/cancerstats/types/lung/inci...
Looking at correlations between smoking rates and lung cancer rates in various countries, there's strong evidence that most of the mortality gap between men and women can be explained by the greater prevalence of smoking among men: