Which Culture Can Make 120 Years Old the Prime of Life?

[Ed Hudgins]

Which Culture Can Make 120 Years Old the Prime of Life?
By Edward Hudgins

March 18, 2014 -- Emma Morano, age 116, is the last person alive born in the nineteenth century. New cutting-edge technologies could mean that more than a few people born at the end of the twentieth century will be in the prime of life when they reach that age. But this future will require a culture of reason that is currently dying out in our world.

Is the secret to a long life raw eggs or genetics?

Signorina Morano was born in Italy on Nov 29, 1899. On the recent passing of Susannah Mushatt Jones, who was born a few months before her, Morano inherited the title of world’s oldest person. She still has a ways to go to best the longevity record of the confirmed oldest person who ever lived, Jeanne Calment (1875-1997) who made it to 122.

Every oldster offers their secret to long life. Morano attributes her feat to remaining single, adding that she likes to eat raw eggs. But the reason living things die, no matter what their diet, is genetic. Cellular senescence, the fancy word for aging, means the cells of almost every organism are programmed to break down at some point. Almost, because at least one organism, the hydra, a tiny fresh-water animal, seems not to age.

 

Defying death

Researches are trying to discover what makes the hydra tick so that they find ways to reprogram human cells so we will stop aging. As fantastic as this sounds, it is just one part of a techno-revolution that could allow us to live decades or even centuries longer while retaining our health and mental faculties. Indeed, the week the Morano story ran, both the Washington Post and New York Times featured stories about scientists who approach aging not as an unavoidable part of our nature but as a disease that can be cured.

Since 2001, the cost of sequencing a human genome has dropped from $100 million to just over $1,000. This is spurring an explosion in bio-hacking to

figure out how to eliminate ailments like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. We also see nanotechnology dealing with failing kidneys. New high-tech devices deal with blindness and other such disabilities.

 

An achievement culture and longevity

But this bright future could be fading. Here’s why.

The source of all human achievement is the human mind, our power to understand our world and thus to control it for our own benefit; Ayn Rand called machines “the frozen form of a living intelligence.”

But America ... (Continue reading here.)

[BaalChatzaf]

12 hours ago, Ed Hudgins said:

Which Culture Can Make 120 Years Old the Prime of Life?
By Edward Hudgins

March 18, 2014 -- Emma Morano, age 116, is the last person alive born in the nineteenth century. New cutting-edge technologies could mean that more than a few people born at the end of the twentieth century will be in the prime of life when they reach that age. But this future will require a culture of reason that is currently dying out in our world.

Is the secret to a long life raw eggs or genetics?

Signorina Morano was born in Italy on Nov 29, 1899. On the recent passing of Susannah Mushatt Jones, who was born a few months before her, Morano inherited the title of world’s oldest person. She still has a ways to go to best the longevity record of the confirmed oldest person who ever lived, Jeanne Calment (1875-1997) who made it to 122.

Every oldster offers their secret to long life. Morano attributes her feat to remaining single, adding that she likes to eat raw eggs. But the reason living things die, no matter what their diet, is genetic. Cellular senescence, the fancy word for aging, means the cells of almost every organism are programmed to break down at some point. Almost, because at least one organism, the hydra, a tiny fresh-water animal, seems not to age.

 

Defying death

Researches are trying to discover what makes the hydra tick so that they find ways to reprogram human cells so we will stop aging. As fantastic as this sounds, it is just one part of a techno-revolution that could allow us to live decades or even centuries longer while retaining our health and mental faculties. Indeed, the week the Morano story ran, both the Washington Post and New York Times featured stories about scientists who approach aging not as an unavoidable part of our nature but as a disease that can be cured.

Since 2001, the cost of sequencing a human genome has dropped from $100 million to just over $1,000. This is spurring an explosion in bio-hacking to

figure out how to eliminate ailments like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. We also see nanotechnology dealing with failing kidneys. New high-tech devices deal with blindness and other such disabilities.

 

An achievement culture and longevity

But this bright future could be fading. Here’s why.

The source of all human achievement is the human mind, our power to understand our world and thus to control it for our own benefit; Ayn Rand called machines “the frozen form of a living intelligence.”

But America ... (Continue reading here.)

Currently,  living beyond life expectancy is a matter of genetics,  not culture.  If one has the right genes and does not wreck his/her body with bad food, lack of exercise or bad habits,  if the genes are just right one can live to the nineties  or even beyond.  First step to living at least into the mid seventies is  not to have ever smoked or quit smoking  young.  After that exercise  and after that avoid too much weight.

[jts]

Enzyme telomerase may be a key to some kind of immortality. You might be chronologically hundreds of years old and physiologically 20 years old.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telomerase

But it would not make you indestructible. You could get diseases and injuries.

 

[Ed Hudgins]

JTS - Quite correct! Work on telemeres is what could extend life and keep us healthy.

Baal - Genetics is the key factor though environment and lifestyle do contribute to longevity. But biohacking and other technologies that could radically extend life could be reaching that exponential takeoff point. In 2001 it cost $100 million to sequence a human genome. In 2007 it cost $10 million, Now it costs just over $1,000.

As they say, we older guys need to aim to life long enough that we can life forever!

[Ed Hudgins]

FYI: You'll see more about this in the future:

THE HUMAN ACHIEVEMENT ALLIANCE

Exponential technologies in information, nanotech, biotech, robotics, and AI promise a future of unimaginable prosperity with longer, healthier, even transhuman lives for all. But these changes are producing radical economic, social, and moral challenges, with reactionary pushback from left and right and with calls for government controls. Worse, our increasingly nihilist culture is eroding the value and joy of productive achievement. But the good news is that otherwise cynical young people do love technology. Further, entrepreneurs creating this tech are individualists who love their work and want to prosper, but who need to understand better the need for free markets if they are to achieve their goals.

A Human Achievement Alliance can meet these challenges. This initiative exploits the synergy between the values of Millennials, a new breed of entrepreneurial achievers, and friends of freedom. It offers an optimistic, exciting, empowering vision of the world as it can be and should be. In operation, it seeks:

●Celebrate and promote through our institutions and through a Human Achievement Day, the value of achievement and Enlightenment virtues of reason and entrepreneurship from which achievements emerge.

●Raise public awareness of the potential of exponential technology and the necessity of economic liberty in coalitions, media, political circles, and the wider culture.

●Develop cutting-edge thinking on deep issues concerning exponential technologies: Should we reject the “precautionary principle’ for a “proactionary” principle?” Why are robots and AI do not threaten jobs? Will human-machine mergers pose ethical problems? Could we actually live 500 years?

●Promote free-market public policies that remove barriers to exponential tech.

“We are all achievers, whether nurturing a child to maturity or business to profitability, writing a song, poem, business plan or dissertation, laying the bricks to a building or designing it.”

To help ensure this bright future, and for further information, contact Edward Hudgins at edward@edwardhudgins.com.

 

[BaalChatzaf]

On 5/19/2016 at 0:58 AM, Ed Hudgins said:

 

An achievement culture and longevity

But this bright future could be fading. Here’s why.

The source of all human achievement is the human mind, our power to understand our world and thus to control it for our own benefit; Ayn Rand called machines “the frozen form of a living intelligence.”

But America ... (Continue reading here.)

If it does not happen here,  then what about Canada or even China.  The Chinese are making good progress in certain line of scientific  applications.  They also train good geneticists.  A certain amount of compartmentalization possible with regard to science and math.  Stalinism in Russia did not slow down the advance of mathematics in the former Soviet Union. One can be a first rate mathematician  and a political moron. Ditto for physics and chemistry.  Unfortunately not so for biology.  The Stalin-Lysenko alliance  stymied biology in Russia for 30 years.  But after the death of Stalin and the toppling of Lysenko and his buddies, biology began to catch up in Russia.

[anthony]

11 hours ago, Ed Hudgins said:

FYI: You'll see more about this in the future:

THE HUMAN ACHIEVEMENT ALLIANCE

Exponential technologies in information, nanotech, biotech, robotics, and AI promise a future of unimaginable prosperity with longer, healthier, even transhuman lives for all. But these changes are producing radical economic, social, and moral challenges, with reactionary pushback from left and right and with calls for government controls. Worse, our increasingly nihilist culture is eroding the value and joy of productive achievement. But the good news is that otherwise cynical young people do love technology.

 

All very fine and dandy. Except, has anyone considered that those cynical young people who do "love technology", could be cynical - because of technology? Cynics -and nihilists- are usually philosophically skeptics, and vast streams of incoming data, exponentially increasing all the time - without an integrating, conceptual and evaluative mind - only consolidate skepticism, and remove many people from reality (and from other people), I think. Hi-tech is only a tool, but two-edged depending on the tool user: to the rational it's a boon. Data/information doesn't teach one to be rational but just compounds what already exists.

As for total and permanent connectivity to technology, the Cloud, etc., no thanks. Is that some new Collective Utopia...? It's a pleasure, more often, to disconnect and switch it off.  

[BaalChatzaf]

46 minutes ago, anthony said:

All very fine and dandy. Except, has anyone considered that those cynical young people who do "love technology", could be cynical - because of technology? Cynics -and nihilists- are usually philosophically skeptics, and vast streams of incoming data, exponentially increasing all the time - without an integrating, conceptual and evaluative mind - only consolidate skepticism, and remove many people from reality (and from other people), I think. Hi-tech is only a tool, but two-edged depending on the tool user: to the rational it's a boon. Data/information doesn't teach one to be rational but just compounds what already exists.

As for total and permanent connectivity to technology, the Cloud, etc., no thanks. Is that some new Collective Utopia...? It's a pleasure, more often, to disconnect and switch it off.  

At this stage, technological expansion is a nearly unstoppable force.  It would take the physical destruction of civilization (a nuclear war, a plague or a collision with a large celestial body) to halt  technology.  Aside from large university and government funded technology centers, there is also technological innovation coming from many small undertakings,  even individual invention.  Recall that Apple Inc.  started in a garage and the first all electronic computer was built by two or three workers in private. 

[anthony]

1 hour ago, BaalChatzaf said:

At this stage, technological expansion is a nearly unstoppable force.  It would take the physical destruction of civilization (a nuclear war, a plague or a collision with a large celestial body) to halt  technology.  Aside from large university and government funded technology centers, there is also technological innovation coming from many small undertakings,  even individual invention.  Recall that Apple Inc.  started in a garage and the first all electronic computer was built by two or three workers in private. 

It's the "government funded" part that should worry you. For different reasons, any g-ment assistance, or interference, or curtailment of tech growth, must be viewed with extreme suspicion. Left alone, I'm all for technology evolving as it will, "naturally" and independently. It's a far different animal when government's power, approval and ambitions become involved.

 

[BaalChatzaf]

7 hours ago, anthony said:

It's the "government funded" part that should worry you. For different reasons, any g-ment assistance, or interference, or curtailment of tech growth, must be viewed with extreme suspicion. Left alone, I'm all for technology evolving as it will, "naturally" and independently. It's a far different animal when government's power, approval and ambitions become involved.

 

government can distort research goals, but government cannot stop technological innovation. There are too many private garages and workshops.

[anthony]

13 hours ago, BaalChatzaf said:

government can distort research goals, but government cannot stop technological innovation. There are too many private garages and workshops.

To me it doesn't need re-stating, men and women will look for every potential, and produce, no matter what; here's to them and to their minds. It's not on the productive side, but the consumer end I was on about. You were apparently framing my comments as being 'anti-technology'? I only maintain that not even (/especially) technology is a universal, intrinsic good. Nothing can escape the query: Of value? - to whom? For what? I alluded to information tech specifically, and the plain fact that floods of incoming info and opinion is not automatically "good" for every individual equally, in every circumstance and at any given time. No mind can cope with it all, exacerbated if some won't/can't *think*. Tech can only be as 'good' as its user, and his purpose.

[BaalChatzaf]

2 hours ago, anthony said:

To me it doesn't need re-stating, men and women will look for every potential and produce, no matter what; here's to them and to their minds. It's not the productive side, but the consumer end I was on about. You were apparently framing my comments as being 'anti-technology'? I only maintain that not even (/especially) technology is a universal, intrinsic good. Nothing can escape the query: Of value? - to whom? For what? I alluded to information tech specifically, and the plain fact that floods of incoming info and opinion is not automatically "good" for every individual equally, in every circumstance and at any given time. No mind can cope with it all, exacerbated if some won't/can't *think*. Tech can only be as 'good' as its user.

I never though (ever) that you are anti-technology.  I thought, perhaps, that you think government has more influence than it actually has.