40 thoughts on “Aging”

      1. I’m in AZ. Gov. Mecham actually tried to control spending in this state, but “MLK had a dream and we had a nightmare” won the day. So yes, very scary.

  3. Aging is not a disease. It is the second law of thermodynamics applied to our own DNA and mitochondria and other cellular structures. The only immortal human cells are cancer.

    By all means, extend human life as much as possible. However, ZeroHedge is right: on a long enough timeline, everyone’s survival rate drops to zero. That includes theoretical transhumans and uploads and so forth. There is no escaping the heat death of the universe or the Big Crunch.

    1. “Aging is not a disease. It is the second law of thermodynamics applied to our own DNA and mitochondria and other cellular structures.”
      Assuming our current inability to repair/replace damaged DNA than it (the accumulating damage) mimics a “closed system” in a thermodynamic sense; if I can access energy outside the system (your body) new ball game. The ability to implant grown from your own cells bioprinted new organs, tissues, joints, even CNS cells is a game changer. Not even counting improved versions of said organs, tissues, joints etc.; given the ability to repair/replace upgrades are inevitable. Not only for purposes of improved longevity but better overall performance, resistance to injury etc.

      “By all means, extend human life as much as possible. However, ZeroHedge is right: on a long enough timeline, everyone’s survival rate drops to zero. That includes theoretical transhumans and uploads and so forth. There is no escaping the heat death of the universe or the Big Crunch.”

      If the Universe itself is a closed system we don’t know that for certain; also it is hard to take seriously something that won’t happen for uncounted billions of years. Likely we would be extinct long before that anyway.

      1. our current inability to repair/replace damaged DNA

        This is a curious statement because the rate of repair that naturally occurs is astounding. The rate of damage we all suffer constantly is so high that evolution should be happening observably with every birth. It doesn’t.

    2. “There is no escaping the heat death of the universe or the Big Crunch.”

      In principle, you can perform an infinite amount of computation with a finite amount of energy, but I doubt it’s possible in practice. Computation may not take much energy at 0.000001K, but computers probably won’t work well at those kind of temperatures.

      As for the Big Crunch, you’re assuming we won’t have learned to create new universes in the next 100,000,000,000 years.

    3. There is no law of physics that demands that only non-cancerous cells can be immortal. And immortality of cells isn’t necessary if they can be replaced.

      1. Replaced with what? Perfect copies of our own (younger) DNA, with telomeres intact and no degradation in the pattern?

        Entropy is a quality of information. Increasing entropy means that information degrades. Some of my old Vic-20 software still works, but most of my 5-1/4″ floppies have degraded beyond use. It is the same with any pattern of information, whether we’re talking the information encoded in our brains or our DNA.

        Sure, we could replace cells individually, or make new bodies entirely. We could scan a brain and upload it into a computer, and upgrade and replace faulty storage units as necessary. However, at some point there will be an unrecoverable transcription error. And then another. And another.

        The subset of “ways to get it right” is static, whereas the subset of “things that could go wrong” is unrelentingly increasing.

        There is no immortality this side of the grave. That makes what you do in the time you’ve got important.

        1. Entropy is a quality of information. Increasing entropy means that information degrades. Some of my old Vic-20 software still works, but most of my 5-1/4″ floppies have degraded beyond use. It is the same with any pattern of information, whether we’re talking the information encoded in our brains or our DNA.

          That’s not true. Loss of information is in no way thermodynamically inevitable. With backups and error checking, we are now capable of maintaining data intact indefinitely.

          There is no immortality this side of the grave.

          This discussion is about indefinite lifespan, not immortality.

          2. “Don’t we have “indefinite lifespans” now?”

            Uh, no. Everyone dies before they hit 130. It’s a hard limit of natural human genetics.

            Cure aging, and there’s a fair chance a few of us will still be around at the end of the universe.

          3. “Indefinite” means “undefined” or “non-specific.” People die at birth, all the way to 116 (for the oldest verified). That’s pretty non-specific, if you ask me. Which, of course, you didn’t.

    6. It is the second law of thermodynamics applied to our own DNA and mitochondria and other cellular structures.

      So does disease. So would any schemes for human longevity.

      By all means, extend human life as much as possible. However, ZeroHedge is right: on a long enough timeline, everyone’s survival rate drops to zero. That includes theoretical transhumans and uploads and so forth. There is no escaping the heat death of the universe or the Big Crunch.

      How many orders of magnitude greater is that than a current human life?

  4. Consider objects that have finite volume but infinite surface.

    According to the bible, the stars exist because of the abundance of god’s energy. How did they know about E=MC^2?

    Infinity… when finity just isn’t enough.

  5. Please, Second Lawyers, spare me your legal opinions on heat death, etc. Thermodynamic properties such as internal energy, enthalpy, and entropy exist only in systems at or near thermodynamic equilibrium – an axiomatic state in thermodynamics which exists almost nowhere in the Universe. It’s axiomatic because we live in one of the vanishingly small enclaves in existence where it almost exists all around us.

    Work out the rate of change of entropy of the Sun-earth system sometime, being careful to preserve the algebraic signs. You’ll be astonished at the result.

          4. It’s funny. Asimov wrote that story 60 years ago, and this thread is the exact same argument. And all of us big brains commenting here haven’t come up with an idea on this issue that he didn’t already lay out in that story.

          5. Asimov worked darned hard to document every possible idea of man. We’ll be discovering them in his work hundreds of years from now or longer. How many books on how many genres did he write?

            Unless of course… entropy!

        2. Not perpetual motion. The entropy of the earth is constantly decreasing. So is the entropy of any non-stellar celestial body orbiting a star. It follows that if the temperature range and available elements are right, that they will assemble in increasingly ordered systems. I think that life on planets orbiting stars is inevitable by the Second Law (or by it’s relationship to order).

          1. Entropy increases. Any decrease of entropy is local and does not change the overall entropy.

            You can only decrease entropy by going outside the system.

          2. Entropy increases in a closed system. The Earth is not a closed system. Radiation comes in from the Sun. The same amount of energy is radiated back into space, keeping the planet’s temperature constant. The change in entropy over an arbitrary period of time is ΔS = (-Qin – Qout)/T, which is a negative quantity.

          3. Entropy increases in a closed system.

            I believe that’s exactly what I said. Entropy may decrease locally for a time, but as part of a larger system it increases.

            If there’s another layer to the onion, if part of the physical universe, the entropy of that larger system would also increase even if it allowed the illusion of a local decrease (in this case local meaning the entire known universe.)

  6. “I believe that’s exactly what I said.”

    I still don’t know what you said, or are saying. A “system” in thermodynamics is a region in space bounded by an imaginary surface. If no mass or energy crosses the boundary, the system within is closed. If either mass, energy, or both can cross it, the system is open. In a closed system, any change that takes place is accompanied by an increase in entropy. In an open system, the direction of entropy change can be positive or negative.

    Draw an imaginary sphere around the earth at the top of the atmosphere. Solar radiation comes in. Some is reflected back out immediately. The rest is radiated away as infrared. Mass comes in in the form of meteors. Mass goes out in the form of spacecraft, the very occasional debris from the impact of a giant meteor or comet, and atomic species ricocheting from cosmic ray impacts.

    The radiation in and out dwarfs everything else. And the entropy change resulting from that is negative. There’s no “illusion” involved. It’s as real as the entropy decrease in the bottom of a heat engine cycle. Just look at a T-s diagram for the Carnot cycle (a rectangle in the T-s plane).

    1. If no mass or energy crosses the boundary, the system within is closed.

      There is no such thing. Unless the gateway demon is real?

      1. I should clarify. It is that imaginary boundary that doesn’t exist. ‘Closed systems’ are all a part of a larger system and thus are not closed. Decrease in entropy is an illusion because it is never closed off from a larger system. I don’t believe the universe itself is closed, but that remains to be determined.

  7. Human beings are not closed systems. If we were, our lifespans would be measured in minutes, not ~100 yrs. The Earth is not a closed system. If it was, life would have never developed.

    The universe might be a “closed system”, but it might also be literally infinite in spatial extent, so we don’t really know what “closed” means in that context.

    So I see no reason why humans need to die earlier than lobster or redwood trees. Certainly nothing in biology or physics would prevent an appropriately designed organism from living for thousands of years. Considering that we all want to live to see tomorrow, and that doesn’t seem to change as time advances, I see no reason why it is somehow wrong to try to meet this desire of ours.

    (That said, it’s probably a hard problem.)

  8. Also, the 2nd law is interesting, in that what it talks about is the evolution of *our knowledge* of the state of a system, which cannot become more precise than a certain limit given an energy-conserving closed system. There is a certain inherent subjectivity to entropy: It isn’t really a physical property in the same sense as mass, energy, pressure, etc. Jaynes had a good paper on this.

  9. People have weird attitudes about trying to avoid death. Look at every cultural artifact ever: Trying to not die is always something the villains do, the consequences are always tragic/horrifying, the ‘moral’ of the story is that we should never attempt to mess with nature. We are drowning underneath a tide of Romantic literature that paints mankind’s attempts to solve his problems as damnable hubris. It’s noble to die for the tribe, fighting the tribes enemies, and to hold your life to be cheap. It’s suspicious and weird to try to use technology to do unnatural things. This near universal frame of evaluation is the song our culture sings to us in the background of every movie, every book, every legend and myth.

    Aaand, it’s bullshit. Every single comfort we enjoy, every advance and advantage that mankind has, everything we’ve managed to constructively accomplish since we crawled out of the great rift valley was done in rebellion to that stasis-seeking backwards looking Romantic worldview.

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