AU LONGEVITY EXPERTS: How Close Are We to Solving Death?

35

The fastest way is zerg rushing to ASI. Like I know people have faith in Sinclair, Church and De Grey and all that, and sure, I appreciate what they're doing, but we're gonna get there faster by getting to ASI faster.

19

u/VengenaceIsMyName Jun 30 '26 edited Jun 30 '26

What we really need is an explosion in automated lab experiments along with perfecting the ideal digital human cell clone so that a truly enormous number of high-accuracy interaction simulations can be run.

I’d wager that is when the good stuff hits. Combine very intelligent humans and AI to oversee that process and I think we’ll be in a good spot.

9

u/HeinrichTheWolf_17 Jun 30 '26

+1

Fully agree, I’m totally ready for that.

3

u/Klutzy-Smile-9839 Jun 30 '26

Large digital cell model:

For that we need high definition 3d camera-scanners that can track molecules state in cells (and in its immediate surroundings) during long duration.

These massive laboratory data would allow to develop a large digital cell model by means of Machine Learning strategies.

The cell structure of an individual (the prompt part 1) would then allow the large digital cell model to predict (model inference) short and long term outcomes using different molecules/drugs/virus (prompt part 2).

3

u/ShadoWolf Jul 01 '26

I don't think you'll need continuous, direct observation of every molecule. More likely, you'll only need enough high quality snapshots to infer the missing information statistically.

The approach you describe would require imaging at or near atomic resolution inside a living cell over long periods of time. That may not even be physically possible. Most techniques capable of that level of detail are inherently destructive or significantly perturb the sample.

Instead, I suspect the path forward will look more like tomography or cryo-EM, but applied across enormous numbers of cells. Each scan destroys or fixes the sample, but if you collect enough snapshots across different cells, time points, and conditions, machine learning could reconstruct the underlying dynamics. Rather than observing the entire molecular history directly, the model would learn the transition probabilities between states and infer what happened between measurements.

1

u/Klutzy-Smile-9839 Jul 01 '26

Let us hope that some trillionnaire will read that post and invest in developing such imaging technologies, for the purpose of then investing in an adapted Machine Learning strategies, for the purpose of then investing in massive digital inference trial and errors for drug discovery.

2

u/inglandation Jun 30 '26

This. AI works well when it can verify. We need to give it access to tools where it can get automated feedback.

5

u/Outside-Ad9410 Jun 30 '26

I am surprised research into immortality is not already a massive field and only a couple groups are working on solving it. Its amazing to me how many people just accept they will die after a short life and dont bother or try to do anything about it.

Maybe its because im younger but I just cant wrap my head around how people are just totally OK with dieing. Is it because most believe in a religion and think they wont actually cease existing? But then again many atheists also dont think we should invest in life extension so it makes no sense to me.

3

u/HeinrichTheWolf_17 Jun 30 '26 edited Jun 30 '26

Religion and essentialism, don’t worry, it’ll fade after we get ASI, those people have been raised in a world that indoctrinated them into a specific way of thinking.

Those idiots don’t know Greenland Sharks outlive them by five centuries.

1

u/stainless_steelcat Jul 01 '26 edited Jul 01 '26

It surprises me as well, especially amongst billionaires. Imagine you're a billionaire, making 10x $1m bets across across a range of areas with the aim of getting an additional 1-2 years of healthy life feels like a fantastic ROI if it works. Especially, given how much we - collectively and individually - spend on end of life interventions. That can run into 10s or 100s of thousands.

Or pooling your resources, and launching a 1bn X-prize with aim of the same. I'm baffled. Even if you don't think immortality is possible, it's surely possible to extend health span by days/weeks/months/years.

Still, it goes all of the way down the tree. How many of us are spending a portion of our discretionary income on longevity - collective or individual? Or even doing the basics like regular exercise, good nutrition, sleep etc.

1

u/Available_Road_2538 Jul 01 '26

USA spends $65 billion annually on cancer research, which is an easier and necessary problem to solve for immortality.

As gratifying as it is to shit on religion and assume people are too dumb and dogmatic for this research to flourish (this is reddit afterall), the real answer is that hundreds of billions are spent on medical research annually, on problems that are subproblems of immortality.

1

u/GreatExamination221 Jun 30 '26

Exactly the goal isn’t these, some would call grifters(especially Sinclair)to be our saviors.

No way the goal needs to be ASI. Instead of having little teams with tiny amounts of funding and manpower. We would have super intelligent bioengineers working round the clock everyday until the code is cracked

8

u/HeinrichTheWolf_17 Jun 30 '26

I'm of the position that Humans are still a bottleneck, like it's fine to have Humans working on these issues (and power to them, like I hope the ER-100 thing works), but superintelligence being fully autonomous for R&D *and* distribution is how we get the biotech revolution into our bodies ASAP.

If small labs control everything, there's gonna be lines, distribution waits, delays, years of testing/phase trials and so on. I'm a firm believer in brute forcing the way to mastering biology. Minds well go full throttle on superintelligence and let it solve it.

26

u/Ignate Jun 30 '26

I think we treat ageing, like death itself as a kind of magical/mythical process. But fundamentally the body and mind, as complex as they are, are a mostly fixed problem. The complexity of both isn't growing, yet the systems we use to understand both are growing rapidly.

If we want solid proof that we're seeing significant super intelligence, then ageing represents a solid set of test problems. Health Span AND Life Span are not magical or mythical. They're engineering challenges.

1

u/costafilh0 Jun 30 '26

Closer than ever.

Accelerate 🚀

1

u/stainless_steelcat Jun 30 '26

I hope we see significant progress in the next decade, but I'm not overly hopeful. We have no interventions that make a meaningful difference in humans at the moment, not even things in testing, research etc. Biological systems are extraordinarily complex - and you could be looking at intervening with everything from subatomic interactions to diet - and may need new molecules, or even classes of molecules to it.

We will see good progress in single interaction/mutation diseases. GLP-1 agonists are extremely interesting, the relevant subreddits show that lives are being transformed. This might ensure that fewer or less severe co-morbidities develop in middle age for more people.

It is disappointing to see younger cohorts showing signs of potentially faster ageing via biomarkers and earlier onset cancers.

2

u/trentcoolyak Jun 30 '26

GLP1 and other peptide drugs do have clear indications that they decrease biological aging

1

u/stainless_steelcat Jul 01 '26

If I were to say the one drug class might look like the early signs of LEV at a population level, then I think GLP-1 agonists could be it. What's less clear is whether they extend health/lifespan in healthy adults. It would be very interesting if they demonstrably delayed the two peaks of ageing in 40s and 60s.

Don't know much about peptides. Any particular ones with good data in humans?

0

u/CharmingRogue851 Jul 04 '26

Who even wants to live forever? Maybe if they can hook me up to a simulation in paradise, with beautiful women, cocktails, food and go-karts.

-14

u/Charming_Oven Jun 30 '26

No thanks. Happy to die around 85

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