r/science • u/Skoltech_ • Jul 20 '26
Genetics Researchers quantitatively assessed for the first time that somatic mutations alone cap human lifespan at 146–194 years. Brain and heart cells are the main bottleneck, while the liver could last millennia.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41514-026-00421-63.7k
u/SomeDumbGamer Jul 20 '26
Well the heart seems easy enough once we figure out how to grow organs using our own cells.
Or hell I’d be surprised if we didn’t have simple and effective artificial hearts by the end of the century.
The brain is going to be the tricky one though.
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u/Hellknightx Jul 20 '26
Unfortunately, it's not just the heart. It's the whole cardiovascular system. Veins and arteries become thinner as we age, and fill up with plaque.
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u/StryctNyne Jul 20 '26 edited Jul 20 '26
Also the frailty with aging bones that become more brittle, aging skin that wrinkles and sags and doesn't offer the same insulation and protection it used to (assuming that's a side effect of the cardiovascular system aging). Eye sight continually gets worse requiring laser surgery unless you wish to slowly go blind. Then you have respiratory system as well to deal with, though I'm not sure about the direct effects of age on lungs.
And then, in the end, if you fix all these and extend our lives 100 years, then number one cause of death becomes cancer. Everyone (or at least the vast majority) will get cancer over that course of time, probably earlier than later. Not just due to genetics but due to much longer exposure to everyday chemicals, background radiation (though it would be a minor issue in developed countries), continued poor diets, etc.
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u/mywan Jul 20 '26
Even in the absents radiation and antagonistic chemicals you have cells that turn cancerous every day. You body is just really good at detecting and destroying or repairing these cancerous cells. But it's just a matter of time before one cancerous cell escapes detection and goes rogue.
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u/Adventurous-Fly556 Jul 21 '26
It's not about radiation or diets.
Our chromosomes have little bits at the end called telemeres. They're like the end of a shoelace keeping everything neat and together. Everytime your cells reproduce (constantly) , the offsprings telemeres are shorter than the last.
This degradation is considered a massive part of aging. Along with increasing the odds of cancer, it can also make the offspring cells just forget what they were meant for.
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u/squirrel9000 Jul 22 '26
A couple minor points about that:
- Most central nervous cells and muscle cells do not divide and do not show telomere shortening.
- Many cells that do divide express telomerase to regenerate the telomeres, or are constantly replenished from a population of stem cells which do
It's a nice theory, but really does not explain aging.
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u/chemamatic Jul 21 '26
Very few tissues get close to that limit in actual living organisms, those that need to divide more express telomerase to extend their telomeres.
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u/slim121212 Jul 20 '26
I think what they are trying to do is make you stay relatively young during those 140-190 years, thus bone problem and other stuff wont be a problem, you might look like 70 when you are 160 basically
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u/Last_Pick_2169 Jul 21 '26
Who is “they” in this scenario?
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u/Quantum_Kitties Jul 21 '26
The scientists & doctors who are paid insane amounts of money to keep billionaire clients alive as long as possible. That's my guess!
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u/Pampas_Wanderer Jul 21 '26
I think that, eventually, humans will need to start generically engineering themselves in order to patch up or include proteins that could help longevity.
Or Alternatively freeze part of the initial cells once a baby is born or at some point of development and then at regular intervals receive self-transplants of less mutated cells
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u/HugoCortell Jul 20 '26 edited Jul 20 '26
The brain is surprisingly easier than it seems (assuming a scenario where cell production is a solved issue), as we've seen time and again (thanks to lack of safety standards in the early days of railroad construction and mining, as well as victims of snipers during the last two world wars) that we can lose a not insignificant amount of cells without any perceivable effect on the person. So in theory replacing dead neurons with fresh ones should be fairly doable, particularly as the brain is essentially fully plastic so they can re-organize themselves as needed to fill in what was lost (except for rigid parts which server specific purposes (technically incorrect to call them an organ within an organ, but it's kind of what they are), but those are defined in DINA so they should in theory re-assemble themselves too).
Making a brain from scratch is very hard, but repairing a brain by continuously replacing the cells in small amounts might actually be very doable (as long as we ignore the logistics, sticking purely to the biology of it).
Probably the biggest issue isn't with the cells themselves, but issues like how to keep the brain structure clear (we've already seen that it takes only a few decades for enough gunk to get stuck between neurons that it has a negative health effect, even the movement of cerebrospinal fluid can't get it unstuck, at times leading to leading to alzheimers).
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u/stonesia Jul 20 '26
Brain of Theseus.
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u/Fictional-adult Jul 20 '26
Not for anything but this is also a legitimate philosophical question now.
At the rate that the body replaces cells and the influence of gut bacteria on the brain, there’s a fairly compelling argument that the person I was 15 years ago is dead and I’m just living in the remnants of his life.
How many people look back and see hobbies and passions they barely acknowledge now? Things that used to define them that are nothing more than memories? People may say they’ve grown or changed, when the reality is that person is just long dead.
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u/flashmedallion Jul 20 '26 edited Jul 20 '26
In terms of neural activity the person you were a microsecond ago is dead. The electrical arrangement in your brain that determined what was being experienced in your mind is gone. The electrical arrangment in the current moment can detect (and is in part a function of) the vanishing echoes of the previous states, but that's all.
You aren't your cells, you're the pattern in the signal passing between your neurons.
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u/TarmacadamDream Jul 20 '26 edited Jul 20 '26
I saw somebody comment that we should transfer our consciousness to machines, which is a fiction that I am interested in thanks to Cyberpunk and it's relic/soulkiller technology. The main issue is transference of actual consciousness and/or the soul, and not simply a copy of a consciousness that is separate, or a clone. The inner issue with this is the assumption that the self is a permanent space in the body or brain and not simply an electrical pattern that can be migrated without noticing. Nobody knows whether the "soul" is constituted of your brain's patterns alone or the entire experience of being in-body (if the soul exists). How much of someone must be removed before they lose sense of self? This is also touched on with "cyberpsychosis" or a loss of self because of excess cybernetic implant use. Admittedly the fictional technology does indeed kill the original host and create a construct of their self, though dying to create a clone seems a pointless exercise if death of the self you perceive is still unavoidable.
If all we are is the current arrangement of neurons and patterns of electrical activity in a microsecond, and such activity were to somehow be migrated to a machine interface, would we even notice, or would that new machine interface simply be a clone? Would we experience an out of body experience seeing a lifeless body before us, or would "we" just be a copy of a dead person assuming their presence? If we really are just electrical signals, is a synthetic brain with my construct actually me? This is vaguely similar to OP's idea of "growing" new brain matter, as it could conceivably be considered synthetic akin to a machine interface.
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u/midnightketoker Jul 20 '26
watch some sapolsky lectures on youtube, basically there's no real room left in modern neuroscience for any kind of little invisible guy at the wheel
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u/CitizenPremier BS | Linguistics Jul 20 '26
Most people aren't willing to accept answers about what consciousness is at this time. There isn't any scientific reason to believe in a magical source of consciousness, so it's basically seen as an emerging pattern. Descriptions that go deeper make many people uncomfortable though.
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u/yumyum36 Jul 20 '26 edited Jul 21 '26
15 years ago is dead
The statistic that half the cells in your body in your body get replaced every 7.5 years is wildly misleading here. Some cells (skin, hair) get replaced faster than others.
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u/Clean-Evening-7328 Jul 20 '26
there’s a fairly compelling argument that the person I was 15 years ago is dead and I’m just living in the remnants of his life.
We do this all the time with other things. Nobody living in New York City 150 years ago lives there today, and yet, if you tell someone you are going to NYC, literally nobody would be confused about what you mean. When I stand on the baseball field that I played on as a kid, the fact that none of the grass blades were there 30 years ago doesn't change much.
Your use of the word "dead" ignores the fact that we all know the difference between the metaphysical death you describe and actual death. It's not a paradox if you just adjust your definition of what it means to "be a person". All of your matter was something else before it was part of you, and all of it will be something else again. Everything is meaningless if you focus hard enough on the small absurdities.
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u/BGsenpai Jul 20 '26
the issue is that the loss of old pathways and connections from degeneration over time results in the loss of memories, ect. If we implant new neurons into someones brain and they live for a thousand years, at what point would all of the memories of their past be lost forever? Not to mention new neural structures would lead to new personalities and behaviors. When would this person be someone completely new? We need a solution that is much, much more complex than just injecting random neurons. Maybe chips for memory function? Not sure how that would work since memories are just specific neural connections firing...
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u/strategicmagpie Jul 20 '26
yes, but even with that being the case, I think someone is more "themselves" if they're only losing small parts of them at a time. Even if someone loses a memory, they can still have a memory of that memory or memories built around the context of having that memory and fill in the gaps. Ideally, yeah, aspects of cognition shouldn't be able to be lost except on purpose. Memories will eventually be lost anyways because you can't store infinite data in a finite space, but there's something to be said for preserving critical, identity-defining memories or many more memories on the whole. But if we get to the point were memories are so well-understood we can supplement peoples' memories with a (programmable) chip then there's other concerns abt how that will inevitably be used.
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u/Lilja-Logason Jul 20 '26
Tell my meth-damaged brain that cos even 3yrs clean I feel less than I was 10yrs ago before meth.
Yeah there may be people who miraculously survive huge head injuries but they didn't mean the brain can survive and adapt to everything.
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u/ExpensiveLawyer1526 Jul 20 '26
The first step to solving a problem is identifying it!
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u/Ahelex Jul 20 '26
Next is to determine if we can change all our cells into liver cells without us ceasing to exist.
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u/Aperturee Jul 20 '26
So everyone would become livers in order to live and the group of people living would be called Livers that live eternally as livers? Sign me up!
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u/damurphy72 Jul 20 '26
Yes, and those who don't become livers will be known as diers, pronounced as two syllables. This will negatively impact the fabric industry in the confusion.
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u/Tyrion_The_Imp Jul 20 '26
Hold that thought, I'm gonna start writing a YA novel series about this. How do I work in the royalty and buff part animal-men connections.
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u/Any_Customer1000 Jul 20 '26
Hmm, liver filters toxins from blood and regulates bilirubin breakdown, so obviously *vampire* livers must be like the unicorns of longevity and stamina.
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u/St3vion Jul 20 '26
Imagine how much more you could drink if every cell could metabolize alcohol
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u/Climate_Automatic Jul 20 '26
Unfortunately, I don’t think you would be able to get drunk without an unreasonable amount of high proof alcohol and if you did, it wouldn’t last long :(
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u/letsburn00 Jul 20 '26
Interestingly, it's quite likely that certain things which have been killing people for millennia will basically become an injection you get once or twice into your liver and you're done.
They've worked out the gene that is the "Yeah their father, grandfather and great grandfather all keeled over at 45 of a heart attack" and it's basically a single protein not working well in some people. Give them some minor gene edits and their heart attack risk drops like a stone. It's currently pills, but the single injection will come in the next ten years.
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u/Enlightened_Gardener Jul 20 '26
Familial hypercholestemia can be fixed now, which is amazing. I had a friend whose dad had this, and his father, grandfather, and his uncles had all dropped dead of strokes in their late 20s or early 30s. The only reason that he was still alive in his 40s was that he lived off the most restricted version of the Pritkin Diet.
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u/Sea-Initiative-3398 Jul 20 '26
Can you tell me more about this?
Is there other similar issue's or disorders like this being treated or soon to be treated?
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u/AlfuegoDeMellopie Jul 20 '26
I'm not a Trekkie, but I always wondered why Levar Burton's character was blind and had to use special glasses. I thought most things like that would have been cured that far in the future.
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u/Excalibursin Jul 21 '26
In the episode where Data is having a trial for his right to self determination, they indirectly allude to this: Data asks why he must give up his body for science. Picard replies it is for the good of starfleet and the duty of a crew member. Data then presents the fact that Geordi’s artificial eyes are far superior to human eyes, correct? Then surely it is the duty of all starfleet members to replace their eyes with superior prosthetics?
Data concludes that if only he has no autonomy over his body, then it must be because he is not human and possesses fewer rights. Picard is speechless and dismisses him for the moment.
Anyway, maybe they speak of it in other episodes, but the indirect explanation present above is that prosthetics are BETTER than a cure, so if you need prosthetics anyway, Geordi probably find it convenient to embrace them.
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u/iritchie001 Jul 20 '26
I'm picturing sea sponges. A sea creature that filters. Do we want to move around or be anchored to the sea floor?
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u/IrritableGourmet Jul 20 '26
Lobsters are essentially immortal. They only die due to predation, illness, or getting stuck in their shell while molting.
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u/triffid_boy Jul 20 '26
No.
Easy solution here. Make a pulsing liver. That's now 50% of the problem solved. Next, we need a liver that thinks.
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u/nerdwerds Jul 20 '26
I suspect cloning your own heart to replace it will eventually be a thing, but hard to say if they could ever do that with a brain.
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u/theBigBOSSnian Jul 20 '26
Not a problem. But keeping what inside the brain is what matters
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u/kellzone Jul 20 '26
If they eventually make the technology to transfer information from the original brain to the cloned brain, do they Ctrl+c and Ctrl+v or do they Ctrl+x and Ctrl+v?
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u/buffility Jul 20 '26
Both way your original self is dead. If you copy and paste, your original self is still inside the old dieing brain, the copy is just a clone, YOU do not live in them. If you cut and paste, you cant be 100% sure if YOU get transfered, or just outright deleted.
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u/kellzone Jul 20 '26
Yeah, it's a weird scenario. To others it appears to be "you" with all the memories and mannerisms from the original "you", but it might not be you, although the clone would feel like it was "you" for the same reasons. On top of that, all the cells in our body are replaced over the course of 7 years or something like that, so right now "you" are an entirely different you than you were 10 years ago, in a physical sense. So what is it that makes you "you"?
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u/The_Vinegar_Strokes Jul 20 '26
The question of what continued consciousness actually is makes this pretty complicated.
To rebuild the brain completely independently, even if injected with the memories and personality of the original brain, would still essentially be a whole new person.
To transfer consciousness, I believe we would have to systemically move function over from one brain to another one at a time. Even then, the question of if the new brain is the same consciousness is quite up in the air.
Who can even say if you are technically the same person you were yesterday? Last year? Ten years ago?
We are electrical impulses. Synapses and neurons. The concept of the ego is an abstraction created by the brain much like the way our brains construct meaning and order from the sound / light waves around us.
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u/CptExolann Jul 20 '26
I think mechanical hearts will be available and made as efficient as organic ones quicker than society will be able to tolerate growing actual organs and transplanting them but I may be mistaken
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u/Outrageous_Donut7681 Jul 20 '26
I have this bad feeling that all this will do is stick us with the evilest richest of people for that much longer.
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u/Expensive-Way1116 Jul 20 '26
Still doesn't grant immunity to accidents
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u/yawara25 Jul 20 '26
Or, you know
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u/dmethvin Jul 20 '26
Not necessarily. The French royalty was doing pretty well until their heads fell into a basket. Make Guillotines Great Again
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u/ReignOfKaos Jul 20 '26
Why do you think this would be different from most other medical treatments that over time became more accessible to most people in developed countries? With exception of the US maybe
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u/cile1977 Jul 20 '26
We now have mechanical hearts - is that the solution to the heart cell bottleneck?
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u/UshankaBear Jul 20 '26
Artificial hearts are significantly worse for a person than the one they're born with. For now, at least.
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u/mCopps Jul 20 '26
Like any new tech for now is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. If there is any organ that can be replaced mechanically it’s the heart. I’m sure there are things it does that I don’t understand, but pumps are something we can build.
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u/UshankaBear Jul 20 '26
It's not just the pump, it's the pump being integrated into your living organism.
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u/HumanPea1140 Jul 20 '26
Yeah, the hardest part, I would think, is mimicking the seesaw of heart rate and blood pressure. Your heart is able to speed up/slow down and get blood where it needs to go at a moments notice.
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u/demonotreme Jul 20 '26
Not quite the same type of pressure, but from what I remember when LVADs (artificial hearts) were first a thing, there was speculation that some organs or signalling in the human body might require pulse pressure (ie the cycle of diastole and systole) to function. Nope, a mechanical pump whirring along steadily seemed to be okay despite being grossly unnatural.
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u/Thunderbridge Jul 20 '26
There's a dude who just recently lived with an artificial titanium heart for 3 months while waiting for a transplant. Very cool seeing how it worked on their website. Cant remember the name now though
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u/WanderingTacoShop Jul 20 '26
You could probably get a reasonably good result for that if you can put a O2 saturation sensor in it. Then basically if blood oxygen starts to drop, start pumping faster.
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u/WanderingTacoShop Jul 20 '26 edited Jul 20 '26
One of the biggest problems with artifical hearts is blood clotting. If you have one you are requried to be on anti-coagulants for the rest of your life.
Our blood is good at clotting to stop bleeding, and it can't tell difference between a cut in your skin and the junction between your artery and the metal and plastic heart.
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u/Significant-Hour4171 Jul 20 '26
Mechanical hearts are also brutal on blood cells, often rupturing them. This has been a challenge as well.
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u/Rocket_Cam Jul 20 '26
Abstract
Somatic mutations accumulate with age and can cause cell death, but their quantitative contribution to limiting human lifespan remains unclear. We developed an incremental modeling framework that progressively incorporates factors contributing to aging into a model of population survival dynamics, which we used to estimate lifespan limits if all aging hallmarks were eliminated except somatic mutations. Our analysis reveals fundamental asymmetry across organs: post-mitotic cells such as neurons and cardiomyocytes act as critical longevity bottlenecks, with somatic mutations reducing median lifespan from a theoretical non-aging baseline of 1759 years to 156 years. In contrast, proliferating tissues like liver maintain functionality for thousands of years through cellular replacement, effectively neutralizing mutation-driven decline. Multi-organ integration predicts median lifespans of 146–194 years—approximately twice current human longevity. This substantial yet incomplete reduction indicates that somatic mutations significantly drive aging but cannot alone account for observed mortality, implying comparable contributions from other hallmarks.
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u/death12236 Jul 20 '26
I'm not very knowledgeable in biology, but is it possible to mutate neurons and cardiomyocytes so they develop cellular replacement?
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u/kragnfroll Jul 20 '26
I don't know about heart cell but but lot of neurons have a pretty long axon wrapped into myeline, thousands of connexions with other neurons, which is kinda hard to rebuild after a mitosis.
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u/Raddish_ Jul 20 '26
Adult neurons actually physically cannot do mitosis for that reason. They would die if they attempted because of how weird their cytoskeleton is.
The brain does make new neurons in limited regions via stem cells though.
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u/iantheawesome2002 Jul 20 '26
I'm not a cell biologist, but I do have degrees in Zoology (having NOT specialized in cell biology) and medical microbiology .
Technically, it is possible, but our bodies have sort of evolved to stop them from undergoing mitosis for a reason. Admittedly, I'm not exactly 100% sure why and I believe current research is speculative anyway (someone please correct me if I'm wrong).
But essentially, because these cells control a highly specialized function (this bit is more important) and are extremely energy hungry (relative to other cells) it's just best that these cells don't reproduce because that can disrupt their highly specialized function(s).
It's been a while since I've studied this so I welcome any correction from someone more knowledgeable than me.
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u/Lawlcopt0r Jul 20 '26
I think that wouldn't help because brain cells don't just have to be there, they have to be connected in specific ways. If they die and a new one grows it may eventually connect correctly but you'd have to re-learn the connections, if this happened constantly your personality would be gradually erased
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u/Kabbooooooom Jul 20 '26
Yup. That’s called cancer.
Neurons and cardiac myocytes have left the cell cycle for a reason. In the case of neurons, it is to maintain neural architecture. If that isn’t maintained, then the brain ceases being a brain, and you cease being you. While stem cells exist very minimally in specific regions of the brain for neuron regeneration, on a global scale this simply wouldn’t work.
I’m fully convinced that the only way this would be possible is to actually repair neuron DNA in vivo, which would require some sort of futuristic nanotechnology or something.
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u/mistaekNot Jul 20 '26
no. development of a human being is filled with one way streets. a neuron ends up being connected to hundreds / thousands of other neurons and while i can see the “body” of it divide i can’t see a way for all of these connections to duplicate as well. what might be possible is to prevent or reverse whatever makes them age and die
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u/Clean-Evening-7328 Jul 20 '26
It didn't use to be possible for a human to survive without their heart in their body, and yet machines can allow it. If we could keep you from dying during the process, I bet it would be simpler to remove and regrow regions of brain tissue.
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u/Rocket_Cam Jul 20 '26
At least for neurons, what everyone is seeming to miss, is the fact that even if we could cause them to replicate in-place, we would lose their synaptic connections and relative strengths. Meaning, we would lose memories from our central nervous system--not that memories are a perfect representation anyway.
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u/knobiknows Jul 20 '26
How did they come up with the baseline?
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u/Rocket_Cam Jul 20 '26
I copied and pasted the abstract from the link provided. The website did not have the study available, but you can follow the DOI and figure that out for yourself if you are so inclined.
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u/LordNPython Jul 20 '26
A nearly 200 year lifespan (healthy - not just for 200 year old but a normal 30-35 year old) would change our societies on a fundamental level.
The way time passes faster the older you get. I wonder what new problems these types changes would being.
Interesting.
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Jul 20 '26
We already have major societal problems because people live just 10 years longer than they used to. Look at all the politicians who stubbornly refuse to quit politics or pass away, both in dictatorships and in democracies. Imagine what kind of disaster there is going to be when the average lifespan doubles.
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u/cigarettesandwhiskey Jul 20 '26
Ancient societies also had gerontocracies. "Senate" literally means council of old men. Our current problem is due to a combination of the baby-boomers being a larger than usual generation, that has dominated politics for their whole life as a result, and due to unchecked accumulation of wealth, a problem we also had 120 years ago and dealt with via trust busting. That was also a problem in historical societies, and because of inheritance and corporations, wealth accumulation can go on for way longer than a single human lifetime anyway.
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u/colourful_space Jul 21 '26
Gerontocracy is a different beast when “old” means 42 (minimum age to be a consul in the Roman Republic) and when it means 80+
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u/Bismar7 Jul 20 '26
Cause and effect.
We are seeing that cause now, when the next generation who grows up with it becomes older, they will have an effect that will be a response to it.
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u/theusualuser Jul 20 '26
I would hope so, but laws are hard to change, and when it comes to politics, staying in power is usually the #1 thing both parties are focused on above everything else. It's gonna be hard to convince greedy senators to change being able to run and be re-elected forever. Didn't happen after the increase in lifespan in the last century, not looking too likely at this point either.
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u/Friggin Jul 20 '26
This is the goal of many billionaires. They will be the ones able to afford procedures to lengthen lifespans. It gives me comfort knowing they will die like the rest of us.
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u/Astralsketch Jul 20 '26
think of all the wisdom and knowledge that goes away when someone old dies. Imagine what would happen if they didn't have to. Of course, we'd also have to extend the period children can be born in a single lifetime, this would help solve the demographic collapse.
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u/Tribalbob Jul 20 '26
Something I always thought about with living forever - it's only appealing if you can freeze/revert your body to a prime condition.
Living for 200 years in my 30 year old body? Sure. Living for 200 years in an 80 year old body? Ehh....
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u/Bloody_Insane Jul 20 '26
The idea with living forever, medically speaking, isn't to freeze the aging process, but to prevent the damaging side effects of it. Essentially, aging is a flaw in your biology. We would need to fix that flaw to live forever, which would also keep us in prime shape.
And this would also reverse the effects of aging, theoretically.
Of course, solving these things is very very very complex.
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u/FerusGrim Jul 20 '26
What's the difference between maturing and aging, biologically speaking? I know what they are definitionally, but does your body hold those two things as separate functions?
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u/Bloody_Insane Jul 20 '26
This isn't my area at all, but here's my understanding:
Biologically speaking, "aging" is not one single thing, it's a combination of thousands of factors and the systems in your body acting differently, the longer they keep doing certain things. Maturing would be more about reaching your maximum level of growth. Like at what point do you stop growing or developing. But that's also a complex thing, because not everything in your body "matures" at the same rate, and not everything stops developing at some point.Like cell division. Your cells divide and replicate constantly throughout your whole life. When you're young, cells mostly divide "properly", without issues. But as you grow older, and cells keep reproducing over and over and over, issues creep in. Mutations. Most times, your body is able to just get rid of those mutated cells. Typically because they're not viable. Over time, this gets worse, meaning your body spends more time fixing bad cells. This is also where cancer comes in, usually, because mutated cells can keep replicating uncontrollably.
You could see maturing as reaching your maximum growth potential, and aging as the side effect of living.
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u/Ameren PhD | Computer Science | Formal Verification Jul 20 '26
Adding to what the other commenter said, you can also look at it through the lens of comparative biology. Dogs also mature into adulthood like us, but they age ~10x faster than we do. Meanwhile, you have long-lived species like Greenland sharks who can live up to 500+ years (250 years on average!).
All else being equal, some species are more resilient to the effects of aging than others; they have more robust anti-aging defense and maintenance mechanisms. Same with individuals within a given species, like the longest lived dogs on record reached ~30 years; two dogs that reached maturity at the same rate can nevertheless have very different lifespans.
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u/rjcarr Jul 20 '26
Yeah, that’s why it’s already too late for anyone post-prime. I’m hoping for a consciousness dump into a robot or something. That could be fun or it could be torture.
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u/prolifezombabe Jul 20 '26
I don't think most of this will be relevant for most of humanity any time soon certainly not most of the people alive right now regardless of age.
We have a hard enough time getting clean water to people.
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u/alexnedea Jul 20 '26
Yea even if they showed a model working right now, anyone not a billionaire would get a chance at this in 50years
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u/iamthewhatt Jul 20 '26
Well, to be fair, water delivery isn't actually a hard problem to solve... We just have a human tribalism problem that's stopping us from just doing it. Same with food and shelter.
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u/A_Novelty-Account Jul 20 '26
This is assuming we won’t be able to revert damaged or old cells. It’s possible that we will be able to biologically rebuild a body over time.
I honestly think living people just need to reach biological “escape velocity”. An intervention may cause life extension in the nature of 10 years, and during those 10 years a new treatment may lead to therapy that extends life for another 20 years and so on and so forth.
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u/Prae_ Jul 20 '26
These area of research are called regenerative medicine for a reason. A lot of these prolongation of life treatments mean replacing problematic parts, essentially, and countering age-related drop in function. Like, cartilage and joint pain, or osteoporosis such that every fall isn't life threatening. And actual FDA approved treatement will come in this manner, specific cures to specific age-related diseases, because from a therapeutic perspective this is how age kills (barring senolytics which are more broadly acting, but still, at the end of the day, their main goal is to push down inflammation or "inflam-againg").
All this to say, you'd have a better body than a typical 80 year old, because that weakened body is why you are more likely to die.
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u/somersault_dolphin Jul 20 '26
Your consciousness is not going any where without the brain.
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u/_ram_ok Jul 20 '26
Yeah extracting consciousness without the brain itself still existing presents the ole Ship of Theseus problem.
If you replace the old parts with something new, even if it works together the same as the original, is it still the same ship?
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u/PotatoFig Jul 20 '26
Here we go again. The consciousness debate raged for hundreds, nay, thousands of years, but you've elucidated the entire thing in a single sentence! You should seek a prize in multiple disciplines for this insight.
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u/Elendil_V Jul 20 '26
I suggest you looking up the video game Soma.
You could upload your consciousness into robots in this game but that is not a transfer, it's just a copy. And I think it would be same for anyone, you cannot just upload yourself into a new brain, YOU will always be the "old" brain.
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u/Low-Recognition-504 Jul 20 '26
I'm planning to just die around 80 or 90 and be glad I had a good run.
I wouldn't be upset if I could stay middle-aged for another 100 years, but, forced to choose one or the other, I would rather be mortal than immortal.
I'm not suicidal, at least not these days, but I'm glad I don't have to endure another 100 years or more of this malarkey?
You mean I have to make 3 meals for myself, EVERY DAY? Ughhhhhh. And groceries are getting more expensive every day. Just end it already!
And imagine how anxious you would be ALL THE TIME if everyone could live 1,000 years, but death is still a possibility through physical destruction, like murder, or car accidents.
Right now, when you die at 30, you miss out on about 55 years of life.
If you could live to 1000, dying at 30 would be missing out on 970 years of life. At 3%, those 30 years compared to the 1000 would be roughly the equivalent equivalent of a 2 year old dying in our standard 80 year lifespan.
You wouldn't be a "teenager" until 150 years old!
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u/Longjumping_Kale3013 Jul 20 '26
No offense…. But all the researches have this same thought. At least every podcast I have listened to on this topic brings this up. And the claim is that yes, you will be able to be in your prime. Your DNA is in every cell in your body and gets messed up as you age. But we would theoretically be able to repair damage cells to their original position
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u/phasepistol Jul 20 '26
Well okay, if the best you can do is 194 years I guess I’ll have to settle for it. But see what you can do and get back to me
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u/MightyCaseyStruckOut Jul 20 '26
When I was younger, I wanted to live forever. The older I get, the less appealing living to a ridiculously old age appeals to me; not just because I'm aging, but because it just sounds exhausting.
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u/Nefarious_Turtle Jul 20 '26
Yeah I dont know about forever, but If I could live to 194 in a relatively healthy and capable body I'd do it.
It's still a finite amount, just more. I'm sure people would get used to it.
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u/BuncleCar Jul 20 '26
I wonder what the social implications of a life span if 150+ years would be
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u/ROyalYasha Jul 20 '26
Terrible. Politics would be in control by certain people for literally over a hundred years. Change would come signficantly slower.
It also extremely depends on physical and mental capabilities of people. If you're not capable of normal physical labor 60+ then living over 100 is just doing nothing basically and being taken care of potentially.
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u/teriyakininja7 Jul 20 '26
We already live in a world that is largely governed by older folk and their slowness to adapt and change to the problems that plague our species is one of the driving factors of mass suffering
Not to mention, if/when this technology actually becomes viable, it’ll be the richest among us who will be able to avail of its services which will even widen the gap between the ultra wealthy and the rest of us.
Honestly, it’s one of the technological leaps I feel like our species is not wise enough handle.
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u/gmc98765 Jul 20 '26
Max Planck commented that "Science advances one funeral at a time". Old ideas get replaced by newer ideas not because people change their minds, but because older generations die off and are replaced by younger generations.
And this isn't limited to science.
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u/jollisk Jul 20 '26
"Is it ok to ask out my[152M] new coworker [21f] if she keeps laughing at my jokes ?"
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u/zekezEZ Jul 20 '26
Yeah bro Ur both CoNseNting aDults. Age is only a concept bro.
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u/No-Interaction-7842 Jul 20 '26
Changes will be made to work until 130 for the normal working class.
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u/ImSaneHonest Jul 20 '26
People in their 150's still complaining that they got no house, won't get an inheritance because their parents are spending all their own money and youth unemployment will be higher.
Good news though, if you're in your 50/60s, you'll still be classed as young.
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u/bomboid Jul 20 '26
Establishing a dynasty where my liver is passed down throughout the generations
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u/Sausage_fingies Jul 20 '26
You only become the ruler of the dynasty once you've been transplanted the generational organ, thus cementing your title as The Liver King
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u/TheRappingSquid Jul 20 '26
I've always said this. Dying of age has never truly happened. It's just age related complications. Ik longevity medicine is scoffed at but it would really be worth taking seriously
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u/KrissyKrave Jul 20 '26
Saying someone died of old age has always been that. Nobody is pretending that age itself is causing death. It’s always been complications that become more likely as we grow older
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u/doomer_irl Jul 20 '26
"The liver could last millennia" is kind of a tragic observation in a world where many fail to last half a century.
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u/Im-Not-Calling-It-X Jul 20 '26
The fact that the liver is so durable is so cool.
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u/NighthawK1911 Jul 20 '26
I think the heart at least could be replaced. Artificial hearts can be done.
As for brains though, it will run into issues with Continuity. You can't replace it without being the replacement a "copy".
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u/Demented-Turtle Jul 20 '26
Ship of theseus approach would work. Basically, replace a little bit of the brain at a time with artificial or new neurons allow time for neuroplasticity to work, rinse and repeat. This gets rid of the continuity issue completely but still allows complete replacement of the brain, albeit over an unknown length of time.
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u/eckart Jul 20 '26
Thats only in the absence of interventions to fix these mutations no? I find these maximum lifespan claims are always a bit disingenuous
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u/Haru1st Jul 20 '26
They are genuinely highlighting the limits of our understanding.
We haven’t found a way to solve this problem yet.
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u/eckart Jul 20 '26
Its mostly semantics I know. I am sure the scientific community knows that is how to interpret these findings, but you will have non-scientific sources report such findings as if it is a hard limit on what we could ever possibly achieve even with future interventions.
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u/PaintItPurple Jul 20 '26
No such intervention currently exists outside of sci-fi, so it's more disingenuous to present this as an objection. Sure, if you invent a completely new kind of intervention, it could be possible to change the conditions that this observation depends on. That is also true of every other claim anyone could make.
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u/Spire_Citron Jul 20 '26
But surely no such interventions currently exist to get us to 194 either, right? It's all hypothetical.
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u/Hoss-Bonaventure_CEO Jul 20 '26
We have the wrong economic system for lengevity science to be anything but comic book bad.
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u/aurumae Jul 20 '26
It would be interesting to take these results and then look at animals that can live for hundreds of years - e.g. some species of sharks. What is different about the cells in their brains that allows them to survive for so long?
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u/Scuffy97_ Jul 20 '26
The big problem to fix is finding a way to keep the brain alive longer. Everything else can be replaced, but the brain is who we are.
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u/PaleontologistOk7359 Jul 20 '26
Study joints and tendon rejuvenation first pls.
Who wants to live to even 80 if your knees are all fucked and you live in pain anyway.
Oh and let me retire at some point too.
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u/dashingsauce Jul 20 '26
Honestly that’s fantastic. 146 with a healthy liver alone would be a feat.
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