May 12, 2011 • 35 mins
The Hayflick limit posits that we can live for 120 years. But recent research suggests we could live to for 1,000 years. Enter maverick biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey, who has pulled the rug out from under his entire field. Tune in to learn more.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. And
you know, humans have always been pretty interested in the
idea of living longer, living forever, even it's uh, it's
(00:26):
pretty much the thing we're most into. Oh yeah, the
fountain of youth, right, that that trophy that we continue
to pursue. Yeah. I I always think back to the
line and Blade Runner with Rudgar Howard's character Roy Batty. Yeah,
Roy Batty, where he says I want more life father, Yes, yeah,
and sometimes he says other things to slightly different things
depending on the cut. But that's the director's the most
(00:47):
recent director's cut, and I think that's the final word
on the matter. It's a little creepy too, right, yeah,
because I think then you like poke somebody's eyes out
or something. Yeah, and then there's a couple of backflips. Yeah,
because he's in shape. He only lived to be like three.
That was the thing. The uh, the fake people and
that the replicants, um, they had very short lifespans and
(01:08):
they were kind of pissed about it. They only lived
to be three years old, even though they were they
were full grown, you know, sexy adults, but they were
they were only three years old when they died, that's right.
And if they all wore makeup or was it just
Darryll Hannah who uh, Darrell Hannah were makeup? I think
Rugger Howard just went around shirtless and whip that's right.
And it was this blazing blue eyes. That's what I'm
thinking about the makeup. Well, I guess that if they
(01:30):
were if replicants were real, and and and if Blade
and I actually happened and they found about this guy,
this dude named Aubrey de Gray, Yeah, this is the
guy they would be running down. Because the whole sci
fi thing of like, oh, I'm not gonna live very long.
I need to fix it. I mean, that's just an
amplification of the very real life scenario that everybody's in,
(01:50):
except I mean some people are more denial. They're just
kind of like, oh, I guess I'm gonna get old
and die and you know, there's nothing I can do
about it. And some would arguable that's the healthy approach
that you're you know, you're but but not but no,
not Aubrey to Gray right like he's he's this biogerontologist,
self taught by the way, but at the same time
is just has pulled the rug out from under the
(02:11):
whole field of gerontology, and um, he's sitting there saying,
you know what, it's it's not that we can't live
much longer. It's just that we are we are sitting
there just sort of giving up, when in fact, there
there are things that we can pursue and do today,
and that it's very possible that the first person to
live to one thousand years old has been born is
(02:34):
in and it could be you or I or both
of us. Are all of us depending on what sort
of research and what sort of breakthrough has happened. It's
not gonna be me. I'm gonna cut it off around
five hundred years, you know, because I think five that's
a good that's a good cut off point. After that
it gets kind of tacky. I mean, how bad of
a driver am I going to be by five? Well?
(02:55):
I mean according to him though that you there's good.
You know, I'm jumping ahead a little bit, but there
are all sorts of cellular rejuvenations happening that are kind
of keeping you at this baseline level, always feeling like
you're thirty years old. Well, that's his thing. His his
thing is like it's not just a let's cling to
life till the very limits of our of our ability,
(03:15):
because that's that's the really sad and that's one of
the things that that I think that theres a lot
of people from thinking about, um, you know, life extending research,
because we have that picture in our mind of somebody
wasting away um often with a you know, in an
enfeebled mind, if not in sometimes it seems like it's
it's either one or the other. Half the time, it's
like either the mind goes or the body goes, and
(03:36):
I guess sometimes both go and then very rare instances
both seem to hang on a little while. But he's
saying it doesn't have to be like that. We can
It's not just prolonging life, but but making the good
part last longer. It's not just keeping the clunk or
car going, you know, and just to the point we're
just pushing it along the road, but actually maintaining it,
replacing the parts that need replacing, uh doing you know,
(03:59):
giving at the service it requires to keep that that
car nice and road worthy for for you know, a
long time. That's interesting and one interview he actually uses
that same analogy and it says, Yeah, that's why do
you think we have like these cool antique cars that
are in mint condition because we continue to rejuvenate them
at every pass. And it's and basically that aging is
(04:22):
an engineering problem. Yeah, and he can fix it. And
I totally buy into this guy, and part of it
maybe his awesome beard. Will you describe this man's beard.
The beard is very, very long, it's pointy. Um, it's
kind of got a ginger colored brownish hue to it. Um.
It speaks to me literally, it says hello, Julie, and
(04:44):
it has it has actually caused me to form a
crush on this man. I know it sounds weird, but
besides the fact that he's brilliant, he's doing all these
incredible things. Yes, he looks like a tall, linky gnome. Yeah,
people like Gandalf and Alan Moore look at this guy
and they're like, man, and that has got a cool beer. Yeah,
just bears mentioning, that's all. Yeah, And and also it's
(05:05):
easy to reconnife. You see a YouTube clip with a
guy with an epic beer talking about living to be
a thousand years old. It's this guy. There's not another.
It's not a crazy homeless guy. It's most likely all
breated de gray. So so yeah, this is it's it's
a very cool Argumentum. I I think I've spoken before
in the podcast about when we think about death, there
are sort of like two camps. There's like in one
(05:27):
of our a lot of our problems with death and
our belief systems about death correspond with this idea that
death isn't something that our body does, but something that
happens to our body. And uh, and he's just he's
basically saying, yeah, this is something our body does, but
it happens in seven ways, and these are seven battles
(05:49):
that we can win. All right, all right, this is
like the Scott Pilgrim versus the world things seven evil boyfriends. Yeah, yeah,
it's like that he's vanquishing each one. But um, we
should probably talk a little bit more about, um, some
of the nuts and bolts stuff that we know, like
the Hayflick limits. Oh yes, the Hayflick limit is a
big one. Um. And this involves that this gets a
(06:11):
little technical. Will bear with me. This involves something called
yeah yeah, and there'll be more beerd jokes later, but
it involves telomeres, in and telomerase. Okay, let's hit telomeres first.
All right. These were discovered in Night by geneticist Hermann J. Mueller.
(06:31):
Telomeres is Greek for in part and basically what you
need to think about our shoelaces. Okay, Because these are
telomeres are essentially protective caps composed of short DNA sequences
on the tips of chromosomes. All right. The chromosomes they protect,
in turn, contain the DNA that determines our entire biological profile,
(06:52):
everything about you. Um. Geneticist Elizabeth Blackburn compared them to
the little caps on the ends of our shoelaces. That's
where I get this fantastic analogy. I can't take full
credit for it, but anyway, Without them, the laces begin
to unravel. So you see the problem. The unraveling of
the laces is aging. Each time the cell divides, the
telomeres become shorter. Okay, so it's kind of like each
(07:12):
time you wash your shoes in the water, it breaks
down the odal plastic capitittle Okay, if the telomeres grow
too short, they reach the hay flick clement. All right,
this is the point at which they can no longer
protect the chromosomes from damage. So in this you can
think of them and you know, less like shoe laces
and more like a lit candle. So even now, your
(07:33):
telomeres are burning down, and they're getting shorter with each division,
and uh, you know, reaching the point of of guttering out.
And some people have are have longer telomeres than others.
The longer you have, the longer um life you have. Yeah. Yeah,
And when I was getting your article on how to
telomeres work, I noted that you had a photo of
(07:54):
a woman I think ditavanties. Yeah, okay, and she's got
you know, it's a picture of a mole. And I
guess that there's a connection between people who have moles
in the length of their telomeres. Right. It took me
a long time to find a close up of her
face on Getty Images, but I wonder why. Yeah, but yeah,
I mean that's interesting. Right, So if you have a mole,
(08:15):
then you might say to yourself, hey, I won the
the telomere jackpot. Here might are pretty long, Yeah, if
you have a lot of molds, all the better. That
was from a two thousand not two thousand seven. I'm sorry,
dermatology study conducted by King's College, London, And yeah, I
said people with more moles often have longer deal mirrors. Yeah,
and then you've got that tim raise, which is the
enzyme that helps, yeah, rebuild telomerase to enumerase. I only
(08:40):
know that because I had to look at some YouTube
videos right before we came in here to get appreciation.
That's good. That's because I was just going to go
off with like telomerase for something like elomerase. But that
is something you know. That enzyme is very active when
we're young, obviously, and helps us um rebuild damage to
ourselves or rebuild ourselves, so on and so forth. But
(09:00):
as we get older, it decreases, and the only time
that we see an uptick and its production is when
there are cancerous cells right right now. To tilomerase again,
it it basically repairs and lengthens the telomeres. Yes, So
that that's why why it's important. But but like you're
about to say, the problem is it's not just a hey,
(09:21):
let's pump ourselves full of tilomeraise and and read the benefits,
because too much tilomeraise is not a good thing, right,
And we think that it happens in cancer cells because
it's sort of an ingrained UM algorithm that goes, oh, hey,
we're being attacked. We need to repair these cells. But
in fact you probably shouldn't prear these cells because these
are the these are the cancer as cells, and these
are the ones that are eating your body up essentially um.
(09:43):
And so that's why that's one of the reasons why
cancer cells are so aggressive, is because you've got the
two mares going on there. But it's it's all sorts
of interesting implications with telomerase, this enzyme. There's the possibility
that we could use them in a way that we
wouldn't be destroying ourselves and we might be rejuvenating ourselves
(10:04):
from stem cells. So yeah, there go yeah. And this
is part and parcel of Aubrey de Gray's um thinking Yeah,
which we will talk about more. This presentation is brought
to you by Intel sponsors of Tomorrow and in fact,
(10:25):
in Nature magazine, Harvard Medical School published the results of
their study in which they treated my suffering from age
related to degeneration and with Tela Maris, and they found
that the damage didn't just go away, but the mice
actually repair their cells to an earlier, healthier and younger state.
So there's there's possibilities here. We shouldn't, you know, wholesale
(10:46):
poopo it right now, we just don't quite understand how
it could work for us. Yeah, but let's talk about
the bearded one. Oh yes, yes, his his seven the
seven battles, the sevel seven fronts in the War to
defeat aging. That's right, Um, I guess we can just
blow through these. Uh, this guy can talk a lot
about them. So it's you know, each each one is
(11:07):
is a very deep issue and if we really wanted to,
we could probably do a podcast on each of these.
Oh yeah, and and talk about the different examples, because
you could go on and on. But just just for
brevity's sake, we'll just kind of go for them, talk
about them. Let's blow through them. Here we go, all right?
So number one, cells that die off aren't naturally replaced
in the heart and brain. Okay, so you it's it's
(11:28):
again kind of wear and tear. Things are are are
crapping out on you and they're not getting fixed, all right.
His fix is, uh, you have stem cell replacements. Yes, okay,
And again that's simple, that's a simplification. It's a very
in depth of field of study. But that's the basic
idea of the fix, all right. Number two, proliferation of
(11:49):
unwanted cells, such as fat cells that replace muscle like
this kind of thing leads to diabetes. His fix trick
them into destroying themselves through suicide gene therapy, which sounds
pretty awesome. Number three. Yeah, Number three, formation of links
between certain proteins and the lack of elasticity in certain
tissues like artery walls that cause high blood pressure. The
(12:13):
fix drugs that break these bonds. Okay. Number four cellilar
garbage inside the cell, like build up of ane as
between the brain. Uh, in the brain that causes Alzheimer's right.
His fix engineer genes and enzymes to digest the junk. Um.
This would be like you know, enzyme injections, and he
thinks that, interestingly enough, we might find the bacteria in graveyards,
(12:37):
which has a nice creepy twist on this. Like I said,
there's a whole podcast um. Then cellular garbage outside the
cell um. The fix is the same enzymes and injection,
but an example of of how celar garbage outside the
cell leads to aging and death. This is hardening of
arteries and heart disease. Number six aging damages mitochondria that
(12:59):
produced energy for cellular activity. His fix swap around the
mitochondrial DNA through gene therapy to protect it. And then
finally the big one number seven cancer runaway cell divisions.
And his fix for this is awesome, um because they
basically the idea came to him while he was in
(13:19):
an Italian bar and he was on his second beer.
And this is why this is I really love this
is because there's a there's a British sketch comedy show
called That Mitchell and web Look and they have this
one sketch about how about this like secret group kind
of an illuminated group to control of the world and
run everything. And they're based along the principle that, um,
(13:40):
you should never finish your second drink, like this is
an alcoholic drink things, so you know, you know, if
you're not drinking age, you you don't know exactly what
I'm talking about, and nor should you tell appropriate drinking
rate age if you so choose but the argument in
the sketch was that by the middle of that second drink,
everything is possible. You have this this feeling of optimism
that you can conquer anything, and you just you know,
(14:02):
just use jazz, like throw a problem at me, death, cancer,
I got it, I'll figure it out. But if you
finish that second drink, then any number of catastrophes could happen.
So their whole thing is just never finished the second drink.
So I love the idea that the bearded one came
up with this idea halfway through that second beer. Um.
And the idea is something called wilt or whole body
(14:24):
interdiction of lengthening telomeres. And he's talking about destroying the
replicating abilities of all potentially dangerous cells before they can
become cancerous and replace and basically and you would also
like pump in replacement stem cells every decade and so
it's sort of like heading them off with the past. Yeah, okay, UM,
I don't know this is this is so fascinating because
(14:46):
what's what is weird about this is that this guy
didn't set out to be a biogerontologist, right, like I
believe that he's got a degree in computer sciences, and
he's quite esteemed, although a bit of a lightning rod,
and not just because of his of his beard, but
because of what he's proposing. But he's done so much
(15:06):
research and he has published so much on this that
he really is making inroads in terms of logistics. And
he's basically saying, I can't do this tomorrow, but I
think within ten years we're within reach of of extending life.
Find like, if we can really sink some money into
(15:27):
looking at the best way to apply this to humans. Um.
And again, he's done a ton of work with rats
and so on and so forth. If only there were
some old people with a lot of money concerned about dying.
I don't know. I'm not sure the research is going
to come together on this one, but we'll see. Uh yeah,
I know where could he find those people? And how
could he transmit his message? I don't know to these people? Uh,
(15:49):
but I mean people really are interested in though. But
in his Ted dot com bio because he had does
this great Ted talk? Uh? They say. In July two,
the m I T. Technology Review challenge scientists to disprove
degrees claims, offering a twenty thousand dollar prize, half of
which was money put up by Degrades Foundation, which is
(16:10):
called appropriately enough Methuselah Foundation. Of course, is one of
the Biblical characters that lived to an advanced stage. I
think he, along with Noah and Adam supposedly lived to
be nine They are going um. But anyway, they put
up this challenge basically any molecular biologist who could demonstrate
(16:34):
that his sins which is the abbreviation for what he's doing,
is so wrong that is unworthy of learned debate, and
the challenge remains open. So and there are a lot
of people who are looking at this and it's you know,
it's within his field and outside of his field. And
what I think is interesting is that Raymond kurts Wheel,
(16:55):
who I don't know if we could call him the
father of the singularity, you know that's appropriate, but certainly
someone who has been talking about the singularity um. And
this is again for anybody just joining this, uh and
not for those of you who are sick of hearing
about singularity. Is that the idea that computers continue to
advance and advance, and they're advancing at such a rate
(17:15):
that they will eventually surpass humans and then the singularity
will occur where they you know, they nose ahead in
the race. Yeah, and he says, uh, this isn't an
interview with Ram Kurts. Well, he says, we'll get to
a point in my view, it's only about fifteen years
away where every year that goes by, we're adding more
than a year to your remaining life expectancy. So that's
(17:36):
a tipping point. And he points directly to degray Um
and then to kind of back that up, he said,
he likes to point out that, you know, look look
at technology, and we've talked about more slaw before and
so on and so forth, and he's sort of applying
this analogy to um the medical field. But he's saying, like,
you know, look at your average cell phone. It's about
a million the size of the millions of the price
(17:59):
of an of a thousand times more powerful than the
computer he had an m I T forty years ago.
So his point is that technology is speeding up. These
things are happening. Um, the human genome, you know, nobody
thought that would ever get mapped, got mapped two years
earlier than it was supposed to. Uh, we're moving toward this,
(18:20):
you know, especially in churs Wheel's opinion, at this point
where technology and science and medicine are converging to create
this this circumstance where we possibly could extend our life
in a meaningful way, not as you have pointed out,
just sort of crawling toward death at you know, age nine,
but feeling actually robust, yeah, or you know, are also
(18:40):
these sort of sci fi visions too, of like just
being a feeble thing locked away in a pod somewhere
on life support. Like nobody wants that. I mean, you
want the state you want to You don't want some
weird sci fi state of living death. And and certainly
that's that's the the dystopian vision of what the prolonged
life might be like. But the the side is yeah,
(19:01):
being you know, being in your sixties, being in your
seventies and still being able to body you know, yeah, yeah,
I mean so, I mean there's some interesting information about that. UM.
And he even feels like he can bear this out
again within ten years, particularly through his his mouse rejuvenation
is which what he calls it UM and I think
(19:22):
that's interesting too. He has in his ted talk this
graph of how all of these different aspects work together.
To create what he calls longevity escape velocity just you know, yeah,
because it's it's kind of like these seven factors are
like different, like seven different. Gravity is holding us to
the to the sphere of mortality. We can free ourselves
(19:45):
with those bonds than you know, the sky's the limit,
right Yeah. And uh another interview, this I believe, was
with The Guardian, uh De Grace said there was a
question to him and says, you've talked about enriching people's lives,
but isn't it the very fact of death that gives
our lives me? And he says, that's nonsense. The fact
is people don't want to get sick. I'm just a
practical guy. I don't want to get sick, and I
(20:07):
don't want you to get sick. And that's what this
is all about. I don't work on longevity. I work
on keeping people healthy. The only difference between my work
and the work of the whole medical profession is that
I think we're in striking distance of keeping people so
healthy that it at age ninety, the will carry on
waking up in the same physical state as they were
at the age of thirty, and the probability of not
(20:27):
waking up one morning will be no higher than it
was at the age of thirty. So this is where
we kind of begin to float off into the philosophical
deep end of the pool. Right the implications, Yeah, because
death is is an insensial, essential aspect of human life.
It's it's the big reality that everybody faces, no matter
(20:49):
what you do in your life. This is one of
the things you're definitely going to get around to doing.
Um and uh. And it it defines so much of
who we are. But then, but then how much of
it does it really define? That you into two questions
of again, is it does death inspire us as does
the does it motivate us the idea that we're not
going to be here forever and we only have you know,
a finite amount of time to do these things on
(21:10):
the on this planet, or you know, is it kind
of a false view. I don't know. Yeah, it's interesting.
And there was a question from an audience member and
Degray's Ted talk and the guy was basically saying, well,
aren't we sort of evolved to die? And his comment
was no, not really, I mean like we that we
just as a function we die. In the moderator kind
(21:31):
of chimed In and um and said, oh, well, so Degray,
are you saying that the genes don't care? And then
it's us that care? And he's like, exactly, that's it.
You know, So basically there's yeah, you could diet your
one thousand or one hundred or fifty, it doesn't really
matter to your genes. They just want to be expressed.
(21:53):
And I was actually thinking that if if the whole
point is that, you know, like Richard Dawkins, that we
were just here to spread our genes, it actually would
makes sense that we'd have a longer lifespan so would
have the ability to spread more of our genes, you
know what I'm saying. And it's it's kind of a
it's a bit of a wacky argument, but yeah, so
I don't think that we're actually we've evolved to die,
(22:15):
so to speak. Yeah. There, I mean, on one hand,
there's you know, to take it into extremes of dystopian
and utopian um. On the utopian end of things, you know,
their ideas of like hey you have an Einstein or
a Hawking, they let's just have them live forever, or
you know, or let's have them live twice as long
three times as long, and uh, and get more out
(22:37):
of them. You have somebody like a Gandhi. You know,
you have all these these great, great people. Imagine them
living uh, you know for several hundred years and being
able to contribute more to our civilization and culture on
the Charlie five hundred years of Charlie Sheen, five years
of winning. Yeah. Um, that's the other end of it,
you know, uh, annoying or pointless people, Um, I mean not.
(23:02):
Celebrity plays an important role, and it seems like there
was there There have probably been good Charlie Sheen movies.
I don't have his filmography at hand, but but but no, um,
you know the idea that still you can't it's hard
to argue that five hundred years of of Charlie Sheen
would significantly in a rich um our, culture or supportation. No,
(23:23):
but I like to think that if you're going to
live that long, and and especially if you've got your
you know, physical prowess and your wits about you, then
perhaps after a hundred years, two hundred years, maybe you
become a stage person or do we all become Charlie
Sheen after after three hundred years of life, we reached
that point where it's just like I don't care. I'm
(23:43):
just gonna have a good time, you know. Yeah, I
mean you do have to revisit what Middle Ages? Right,
So maybe age five hundred, we're all like cruising around
in Ferraris. We quit working. Yeah, we're just hanging out
the trevy fountain, you know, uh, causing trouble. It's it
is it's an interesting question, like what do you do
with all of those years? And and it's so it's
(24:06):
a seductive idea because none of us want to die, right,
I mean we that that's one of the bittersweet things
about living is that it's it is precious and you
know that, Um, if if we could, we could extend
it as long as possible. Yeah, and especially if we
felt good, you know. But also the fear of death,
you know, it prevents us from doing certain things because
us you know, their ramifications like this, when you know
(24:28):
there was no death, more people, more of us would
have jet skis, right, um, because they look like a
lot of fun. But but yeah, what does it keep
us from doing? What is it enables to do? I mean,
if if we knew we had three hundred years, which
some of us. Wait, two hundred and ninety years before
we started writing that book, we've been dreaming about writing.
I mean I say, no, yeah, I say, if you're
(24:51):
not going to write that books, you're just not going
to That's true. Continue to put that off from a procrastinator,
uh speaking right now? Okay, well how about this. Look
at authors who you know they write that those you know,
those like three year two, one to three really good books,
and then they just write a lot of less interesting stuff.
We're musicians, you know, artists where they have that one
(25:12):
burst of creativity and then it kind of dwindles out
throughout the rest of their career. You have exceptions to
this rule, but you see it a lot. Yeah, but
didn't you want to see what Stephen King is doing
in five years? I don't know, because that's a good example,
you know. I mean, I I've I've really loved Stephen
King in the past, but I I'm not necessarily as
into his recent works, So you know, I don't know,
(25:36):
like the would ones work get better? Would it? Would?
It would? Living three hundred years, so that means that
you'd be at your best for three best. But that
give you completely different understanding about living in a whole
new new tool set to express yourself. That's that's one
of the questions. Um. And then another just on a
you know, very like nuts and bolts level, what about
(25:57):
social security? Yeah? How do we for all this? Right?
And I mean there are people right now who are
saying we have to revisit the you know, sixty five
cut off I think within the States, right, So security,
you know, starting these benefits sign because the life expensency
has already become much greater than what we had before.
(26:17):
And just think about this too. But before the fifteenth century,
I mean, most people did not live to like age thirty.
So we really have made a lot of games. We
just don't think about it right now. Um. And so
you know, even if Degray is like completely off his rocker,
there's a really good chance that we're still going to start,
(26:37):
you know, reaching ages of a dred and fifty and
so on and so forth. So, so security, what do
you do about that? You know, what do you do
about overpopulation? Yeah, I mean it's it's it's a it's
a real concern. Also, look at your health benefits. Do
does health insurance then pay for your longevity treatments? Gets
who gets to live this long and then does it
(26:59):
become a a basic human right to get I mean,
would do one day instead of being you know, someone
making the argument, hey, you know this is irresponsible behavior
because they're starving people in sub Saharan Africa, or there's
rampid disease and Subsora Saharan Africa. What if people were saying,
you know, this is irresponsible to be because there are
people dying of old age at eight in sub Saharan Africa, which,
(27:20):
granted by contemporary standards, that would be great, wonderful situation.
But but yeah, imagine a time where that's the arguments,
you know, or you know, you end up having, you know,
an elite class that gets to live as long as
they pretty much want to live, and then everybody else
can't afford it. I mean, you see this type of
idea of popping up in science fiction for a reason
because some of these and this is something we're thinking about, well,
(27:43):
and if it were then available to everyone again over population,
So you have to make a choice at some point
as as a society, do you have a low death
rate or do you have a low or a high
birth rate? You know what I'm saying you're just like
a mandatory death at a certain time or what was
it close? It not calliope? What was the thing in
(28:05):
Logan's Run? Mmmm, I don't know, it's like not callioppy.
What's the thing with the horses? Yeah, what's the thing
with the horses that goes? You know, you ride the
horse and you know it's like at the circus circus
riding horse. I haven't seen the movie recently enough at
any rate. That thing that they had, they've ensured that
everybody died at thirty and Logan's Run carousel, I think
(28:30):
it was a carousel. Okay, we would never do well
on sixty five dollar pyramid. We we would just select.
So so anyway, maybe you'd have to have something like
that where everyone's like, all right, you can live to
be five, but then you gotta call it quits or
if you know, or maybe they're special exceptions if you're
going and it just gets really complicated and mucky, it does,
(28:51):
and there's just so many different problems with this, and
of course, um, you know, I I even just look
at our skin and say, I'm pretty sure that this
skin is not going to make it to one tho
years and yes, I know that there are in vitro
meat uh. You know method that we could probably apply
to you know, where you take that that that's that
skin cells from a cow and grow meat out of that.
Every U we can grow our own skin. Every twenty years.
(29:14):
You go down to the to the cloning vats. Uh.
They give you a good flame and then you get
a new skin out of the vats. So you get eviscerated.
And then we'll not eviscerated. You get to keep your gut,
your guts, you know, okay, but you lose the skin
get a new skin. The evisceration. That's a separate treatment
where you get all new guts. All right, all right,
there you go. That's there's just a their myriad of
(29:37):
different challenges. Also, oh wait, there's one more I have
to have to bring up to is the idea like
just psychologically and emotionally what happens to us over the
course um because memory memory. Um. There's a great like
one of the more dystopian uh concepts of immortality out
there comes from one of my favorite authors mentioned before,
(29:58):
our Scott Baker. He has this U. He has this
epic fantasy series that is just really chocked with a
lot of philosophical stuff because he was a philosophy PhD
guy and U and he has this idea of this
immortal race that he calls the non men, and they
all basically they've basically forgotten everything about their their history
(30:18):
except for the traumas. Like after a while, after you know,
a long life of just accumulating trauma after trauma and
misery after misery, it just compiles. It's like kind of
like your skin analogy, you know what their skin like.
If you know, we get a scar here, a scar here,
do we eventually just become all scar tissue? And these
guys are like all emotional scar tissue after centuries of life,
(30:39):
and they're just they don't remember the people they loved.
They only have vague memories of the horrors they've suffered.
So how do we avoid that? All? Right? Eternal sunshine,
the spotless mind, right, okay, okay, so you basically can
erase the memories. And I think about the Blue Brain
project that we talked about in cyber Immortality, which you
know there there's I believe it's in Germany. There's team
(31:00):
um that are working on this to try to to
map the human brain and basically you know, in this
mathematical model, and so the idea is that one day,
not only can we see how our brains are working,
but it's very possible that you could like download a
copy of your own brain. So why wouldn't you be
able to to erase those memories and just re upload, okay?
(31:23):
Or but in a sense, you kind of it's kind
of like playing poker. It's like you, where's it blackjack? Oh, anyway,
you keep getting cards in your hand until you're like,
all right, whole, that's good. So it's like you you
you let your mind developed a certain point and then
you're like, all right, that's good. We're not going to
add any more experiences to this. We're just going to
sort of hold and erase things since they o yeah,
(31:43):
and and and just as a practical matter too, by
the time that you reach one dred, you're probably gonna
want a copy of your brain, right so you can
start to index your memories and um, I mean, because
that's just that's enormous. That's that's one of the things
that I think, well, is the human brain actually equipped
to hold on to a thousand years worth of memories, UM, emotions,
(32:04):
that are attached to him, so on and so forth.
So now I'm liking this idea. And maybe the way
living well it's gonna point us to. But maybe the
way living for six years is that every two hundred
years you kind of push the reset button and you
sort of clean out everything that's not completely relevant and
start new, because you know, new friends, new family, new
uh new you know, purpose in life. I see lawsuits happening.
(32:29):
I'm thinking of like Lasic Surfery, you know, like when
when that was that first came out, And I'm thinking
about like someone resets your brain on accident to like
some sort of failing, you know, Toddler infancy memory bank,
and and all of a sudden, like you have to
relearn the entire world as an adult. I don't know,
these are things to think about. We could keep going
(32:50):
on about this for sure, Yeah, I know we could,
but but yeah, birthday candle, it's possible. Get your fire
extinguishers ready. Yeah, So hey, I have a couple of
listener males here. This is just a quick one um
our listener by the name of Eric right soon and
(33:10):
says in this episode that he's referring to the Tyrannossaur
Sex podcast. He says, in this episode, Julie said hard
to imagine dinosaurs quote kicking boots. I'm almost sure she
meant to say knocking boots. Had me laughing all day.
Loved the podcast. I didn't notice, but kicking boots, kicking
or knocking, it is knocking boots. I feel like it
could be kicking boots somewhere. I was going to make
(33:31):
a joke that, like in my my mom, you know,
Michigan Dutch upbringing that it was. We called it kicking boots.
But now I know better it it's it's knocking boots.
You could get away with it. This thing was a
regional thing. Yeah, it's kicking boots in Michigan. Um And anyway,
I just that's just another opportunity to promote the dinosaurs
(33:51):
Knocking boots episode. And then here's another one referring to
that particular episode. Jordan's right, sin Hi, Robert and Julie. Yesterday,
I was listening to your episode on dino sex. One
word and I couldn't help but think chloacle Kiss sounded
like a good name for a metal band. I like
the phrase so much I even used it on my
(34:12):
Facebook status score. A friend later informed me that there
is in fact a decent metal band called chloacle Kiss.
I've tried to give them a listen, but every time
I do, I get a vision of uh, look, shall
we say vallesca raptor indecency with the grinding and screeching
of the music as the soundtrack. Anyway, despite my unfortunate,
unfortunate and then old pictures, I wanted to thank you
(34:34):
for bringing my love of music and science together. I'm
a huge fan of the podcast. I'm pretty sure you're
sure you guys play a big part in keeping me
saying while I'm at were Some might argue that um
prolonged descriptions of dinosaurs doing it would would have the
opposite effects and insanity, but but you know, I feel
like our listeners are the ones that are enriched by
(34:55):
such things, not to be over the edge. Yeah, So,
if you have any thing you would like to share,
you can check out our own Facebook status updates on
Blow the Mind on Facebook, and we're also on Twitter
as Blow the Mind, and we update that those feeds
pretty regularly. Different stuff on each We kind of try
to diversify, but you know, cool links to stuff that
we're finding, cool stuff, links to stuff we're writing, and
(35:17):
updates on what the latest episodes are about. And as always,
you can always drop us a line at blow the
Mind at how stuff works dot com. For more on
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(35:38):
The how Stuff Works iPhone app has a ride. Download
it today on iTunes.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. And
you know, humans have always been pretty interested in the
idea of living longer, living forever, even it's uh, it's
(00:26):
pretty much the thing we're most into. Oh yeah, the
fountain of youth, right, that that trophy that we continue
to pursue. Yeah. I I always think back to the
line and Blade Runner with Rudgar Howard's character Roy Batty. Yeah,
Roy Batty, where he says I want more life father, Yes, yeah,
and sometimes he says other things to slightly different things
depending on the cut. But that's the director's the most
(00:47):
recent director's cut, and I think that's the final word
on the matter. It's a little creepy too, right, yeah,
because I think then you like poke somebody's eyes out
or something. Yeah, and then there's a couple of backflips. Yeah,
because he's in shape. He only lived to be like three.
That was the thing. The uh, the fake people and
that the replicants, um, they had very short lifespans and
(01:08):
they were kind of pissed about it. They only lived
to be three years old, even though they were they
were full grown, you know, sexy adults, but they were
they were only three years old when they died, that's right.
And if they all wore makeup or was it just
Darryll Hannah who uh, Darrell Hannah were makeup? I think
Rugger Howard just went around shirtless and whip that's right.
And it was this blazing blue eyes. That's what I'm
thinking about the makeup. Well, I guess that if they
(01:30):
were if replicants were real, and and and if Blade
and I actually happened and they found about this guy,
this dude named Aubrey de Gray, Yeah, this is the
guy they would be running down. Because the whole sci
fi thing of like, oh, I'm not gonna live very long.
I need to fix it. I mean, that's just an
amplification of the very real life scenario that everybody's in,
(01:50):
except I mean some people are more denial. They're just
kind of like, oh, I guess I'm gonna get old
and die and you know, there's nothing I can do
about it. And some would arguable that's the healthy approach
that you're you know, you're but but not but no,
not Aubrey to Gray right like he's he's this biogerontologist,
self taught by the way, but at the same time
is just has pulled the rug out from under the
(02:11):
whole field of gerontology, and um, he's sitting there saying,
you know what, it's it's not that we can't live
much longer. It's just that we are we are sitting
there just sort of giving up, when in fact, there
there are things that we can pursue and do today,
and that it's very possible that the first person to
live to one thousand years old has been born is
(02:34):
in and it could be you or I or both
of us. Are all of us depending on what sort
of research and what sort of breakthrough has happened. It's
not gonna be me. I'm gonna cut it off around
five hundred years, you know, because I think five that's
a good that's a good cut off point. After that
it gets kind of tacky. I mean, how bad of
a driver am I going to be by five? Well?
(02:55):
I mean according to him though that you there's good.
You know, I'm jumping ahead a little bit, but there
are all sorts of cellular rejuvenations happening that are kind
of keeping you at this baseline level, always feeling like
you're thirty years old. Well, that's his thing. His his
thing is like it's not just a let's cling to
life till the very limits of our of our ability,
(03:15):
because that's that's the really sad and that's one of
the things that that I think that theres a lot
of people from thinking about, um, you know, life extending research,
because we have that picture in our mind of somebody
wasting away um often with a you know, in an
enfeebled mind, if not in sometimes it seems like it's
it's either one or the other. Half the time, it's
like either the mind goes or the body goes, and
(03:36):
I guess sometimes both go and then very rare instances
both seem to hang on a little while. But he's
saying it doesn't have to be like that. We can
It's not just prolonging life, but but making the good
part last longer. It's not just keeping the clunk or
car going, you know, and just to the point we're
just pushing it along the road, but actually maintaining it,
replacing the parts that need replacing, uh doing you know,
(03:59):
giving at the service it requires to keep that that
car nice and road worthy for for you know, a
long time. That's interesting and one interview he actually uses
that same analogy and it says, Yeah, that's why do
you think we have like these cool antique cars that
are in mint condition because we continue to rejuvenate them
at every pass. And it's and basically that aging is
(04:22):
an engineering problem. Yeah, and he can fix it. And
I totally buy into this guy, and part of it
maybe his awesome beard. Will you describe this man's beard.
The beard is very, very long, it's pointy. Um, it's
kind of got a ginger colored brownish hue to it. Um.
It speaks to me literally, it says hello, Julie, and
(04:44):
it has it has actually caused me to form a
crush on this man. I know it sounds weird, but
besides the fact that he's brilliant, he's doing all these
incredible things. Yes, he looks like a tall, linky gnome. Yeah,
people like Gandalf and Alan Moore look at this guy
and they're like, man, and that has got a cool beer. Yeah,
just bears mentioning, that's all. Yeah, And and also it's
(05:05):
easy to reconnife. You see a YouTube clip with a
guy with an epic beer talking about living to be
a thousand years old. It's this guy. There's not another.
It's not a crazy homeless guy. It's most likely all
breated de gray. So so yeah, this is it's it's
a very cool Argumentum. I I think I've spoken before
in the podcast about when we think about death, there
are sort of like two camps. There's like in one
(05:27):
of our a lot of our problems with death and
our belief systems about death correspond with this idea that
death isn't something that our body does, but something that
happens to our body. And uh, and he's just he's
basically saying, yeah, this is something our body does, but
it happens in seven ways, and these are seven battles
(05:49):
that we can win. All right, all right, this is
like the Scott Pilgrim versus the world things seven evil boyfriends. Yeah, yeah,
it's like that he's vanquishing each one. But um, we
should probably talk a little bit more about, um, some
of the nuts and bolts stuff that we know, like
the Hayflick limits. Oh yes, the Hayflick limit is a
big one. Um. And this involves that this gets a
(06:11):
little technical. Will bear with me. This involves something called
yeah yeah, and there'll be more beerd jokes later, but
it involves telomeres, in and telomerase. Okay, let's hit telomeres first.
All right. These were discovered in Night by geneticist Hermann J. Mueller.
(06:31):
Telomeres is Greek for in part and basically what you
need to think about our shoelaces. Okay, Because these are
telomeres are essentially protective caps composed of short DNA sequences
on the tips of chromosomes. All right. The chromosomes they protect,
in turn, contain the DNA that determines our entire biological profile,
(06:52):
everything about you. Um. Geneticist Elizabeth Blackburn compared them to
the little caps on the ends of our shoelaces. That's
where I get this fantastic analogy. I can't take full
credit for it, but anyway, Without them, the laces begin
to unravel. So you see the problem. The unraveling of
the laces is aging. Each time the cell divides, the
telomeres become shorter. Okay, so it's kind of like each
(07:12):
time you wash your shoes in the water, it breaks
down the odal plastic capitittle Okay, if the telomeres grow
too short, they reach the hay flick clement. All right,
this is the point at which they can no longer
protect the chromosomes from damage. So in this you can
think of them and you know, less like shoe laces
and more like a lit candle. So even now, your
(07:33):
telomeres are burning down, and they're getting shorter with each division,
and uh, you know, reaching the point of of guttering out.
And some people have are have longer telomeres than others.
The longer you have, the longer um life you have. Yeah. Yeah,
And when I was getting your article on how to
telomeres work, I noted that you had a photo of
(07:54):
a woman I think ditavanties. Yeah, okay, and she's got
you know, it's a picture of a mole. And I
guess that there's a connection between people who have moles
in the length of their telomeres. Right. It took me
a long time to find a close up of her
face on Getty Images, but I wonder why. Yeah, but yeah,
I mean that's interesting. Right, So if you have a mole,
(08:15):
then you might say to yourself, hey, I won the
the telomere jackpot. Here might are pretty long, Yeah, if
you have a lot of molds, all the better. That
was from a two thousand not two thousand seven. I'm sorry,
dermatology study conducted by King's College, London, And yeah, I
said people with more moles often have longer deal mirrors. Yeah,
and then you've got that tim raise, which is the
enzyme that helps, yeah, rebuild telomerase to enumerase. I only
(08:40):
know that because I had to look at some YouTube
videos right before we came in here to get appreciation.
That's good. That's because I was just going to go
off with like telomerase for something like elomerase. But that
is something you know. That enzyme is very active when
we're young, obviously, and helps us um rebuild damage to
ourselves or rebuild ourselves, so on and so forth. But
(09:00):
as we get older, it decreases, and the only time
that we see an uptick and its production is when
there are cancerous cells right right now. To tilomerase again,
it it basically repairs and lengthens the telomeres. Yes, So
that that's why why it's important. But but like you're
about to say, the problem is it's not just a hey,
(09:21):
let's pump ourselves full of tilomeraise and and read the benefits,
because too much tilomeraise is not a good thing, right,
And we think that it happens in cancer cells because
it's sort of an ingrained UM algorithm that goes, oh, hey,
we're being attacked. We need to repair these cells. But
in fact you probably shouldn't prear these cells because these
are the these are the cancer as cells, and these
are the ones that are eating your body up essentially um.
(09:43):
And so that's why that's one of the reasons why
cancer cells are so aggressive, is because you've got the
two mares going on there. But it's it's all sorts
of interesting implications with telomerase, this enzyme. There's the possibility
that we could use them in a way that we
wouldn't be destroying ourselves and we might be rejuvenating ourselves
(10:04):
from stem cells. So yeah, there go yeah. And this
is part and parcel of Aubrey de Gray's um thinking Yeah,
which we will talk about more. This presentation is brought
to you by Intel sponsors of Tomorrow and in fact,
(10:25):
in Nature magazine, Harvard Medical School published the results of
their study in which they treated my suffering from age
related to degeneration and with Tela Maris, and they found
that the damage didn't just go away, but the mice
actually repair their cells to an earlier, healthier and younger state.
So there's there's possibilities here. We shouldn't, you know, wholesale
(10:46):
poopo it right now, we just don't quite understand how
it could work for us. Yeah, but let's talk about
the bearded one. Oh yes, yes, his his seven the
seven battles, the sevel seven fronts in the War to
defeat aging. That's right, Um, I guess we can just
blow through these. Uh, this guy can talk a lot
about them. So it's you know, each each one is
(11:07):
is a very deep issue and if we really wanted to,
we could probably do a podcast on each of these.
Oh yeah, and and talk about the different examples, because
you could go on and on. But just just for
brevity's sake, we'll just kind of go for them, talk
about them. Let's blow through them. Here we go, all right?
So number one, cells that die off aren't naturally replaced
in the heart and brain. Okay, so you it's it's
(11:28):
again kind of wear and tear. Things are are are
crapping out on you and they're not getting fixed, all right.
His fix is, uh, you have stem cell replacements. Yes, okay,
And again that's simple, that's a simplification. It's a very
in depth of field of study. But that's the basic
idea of the fix, all right. Number two, proliferation of
(11:49):
unwanted cells, such as fat cells that replace muscle like
this kind of thing leads to diabetes. His fix trick
them into destroying themselves through suicide gene therapy, which sounds
pretty awesome. Number three. Yeah, Number three, formation of links
between certain proteins and the lack of elasticity in certain
tissues like artery walls that cause high blood pressure. The
(12:13):
fix drugs that break these bonds. Okay. Number four cellilar
garbage inside the cell, like build up of ane as
between the brain. Uh, in the brain that causes Alzheimer's right.
His fix engineer genes and enzymes to digest the junk. Um.
This would be like you know, enzyme injections, and he
thinks that, interestingly enough, we might find the bacteria in graveyards,
(12:37):
which has a nice creepy twist on this. Like I said,
there's a whole podcast um. Then cellular garbage outside the
cell um. The fix is the same enzymes and injection,
but an example of of how celar garbage outside the
cell leads to aging and death. This is hardening of
arteries and heart disease. Number six aging damages mitochondria that
(12:59):
produced energy for cellular activity. His fix swap around the
mitochondrial DNA through gene therapy to protect it. And then
finally the big one number seven cancer runaway cell divisions.
And his fix for this is awesome, um because they
basically the idea came to him while he was in
(13:19):
an Italian bar and he was on his second beer.
And this is why this is I really love this
is because there's a there's a British sketch comedy show
called That Mitchell and web Look and they have this
one sketch about how about this like secret group kind
of an illuminated group to control of the world and
run everything. And they're based along the principle that, um,
(13:40):
you should never finish your second drink, like this is
an alcoholic drink things, so you know, you know, if
you're not drinking age, you you don't know exactly what
I'm talking about, and nor should you tell appropriate drinking
rate age if you so choose but the argument in
the sketch was that by the middle of that second drink,
everything is possible. You have this this feeling of optimism
that you can conquer anything, and you just you know,
(14:02):
just use jazz, like throw a problem at me, death, cancer,
I got it, I'll figure it out. But if you
finish that second drink, then any number of catastrophes could happen.
So their whole thing is just never finished the second drink.
So I love the idea that the bearded one came
up with this idea halfway through that second beer. Um.
And the idea is something called wilt or whole body
(14:24):
interdiction of lengthening telomeres. And he's talking about destroying the
replicating abilities of all potentially dangerous cells before they can
become cancerous and replace and basically and you would also
like pump in replacement stem cells every decade and so
it's sort of like heading them off with the past. Yeah, okay, UM,
I don't know this is this is so fascinating because
(14:46):
what's what is weird about this is that this guy
didn't set out to be a biogerontologist, right, like I
believe that he's got a degree in computer sciences, and
he's quite esteemed, although a bit of a lightning rod,
and not just because of his of his beard, but
because of what he's proposing. But he's done so much
(15:06):
research and he has published so much on this that
he really is making inroads in terms of logistics. And
he's basically saying, I can't do this tomorrow, but I
think within ten years we're within reach of of extending life.
Find like, if we can really sink some money into
(15:27):
looking at the best way to apply this to humans. Um.
And again, he's done a ton of work with rats
and so on and so forth. If only there were
some old people with a lot of money concerned about dying.
I don't know. I'm not sure the research is going
to come together on this one, but we'll see. Uh yeah,
I know where could he find those people? And how
could he transmit his message? I don't know to these people? Uh,
(15:49):
but I mean people really are interested in though. But
in his Ted dot com bio because he had does
this great Ted talk? Uh? They say. In July two,
the m I T. Technology Review challenge scientists to disprove
degrees claims, offering a twenty thousand dollar prize, half of
which was money put up by Degrades Foundation, which is
(16:10):
called appropriately enough Methuselah Foundation. Of course, is one of
the Biblical characters that lived to an advanced stage. I
think he, along with Noah and Adam supposedly lived to
be nine They are going um. But anyway, they put
up this challenge basically any molecular biologist who could demonstrate
(16:34):
that his sins which is the abbreviation for what he's doing,
is so wrong that is unworthy of learned debate, and
the challenge remains open. So and there are a lot
of people who are looking at this and it's you know,
it's within his field and outside of his field. And
what I think is interesting is that Raymond kurts Wheel,
(16:55):
who I don't know if we could call him the
father of the singularity, you know that's appropriate, but certainly
someone who has been talking about the singularity um. And
this is again for anybody just joining this, uh and
not for those of you who are sick of hearing
about singularity. Is that the idea that computers continue to
advance and advance, and they're advancing at such a rate
(17:15):
that they will eventually surpass humans and then the singularity
will occur where they you know, they nose ahead in
the race. Yeah, and he says, uh, this isn't an
interview with Ram Kurts. Well, he says, we'll get to
a point in my view, it's only about fifteen years
away where every year that goes by, we're adding more
than a year to your remaining life expectancy. So that's
(17:36):
a tipping point. And he points directly to degray Um
and then to kind of back that up, he said,
he likes to point out that, you know, look look
at technology, and we've talked about more slaw before and
so on and so forth, and he's sort of applying
this analogy to um the medical field. But he's saying, like,
you know, look at your average cell phone. It's about
a million the size of the millions of the price
(17:59):
of an of a thousand times more powerful than the
computer he had an m I T forty years ago.
So his point is that technology is speeding up. These
things are happening. Um, the human genome, you know, nobody
thought that would ever get mapped, got mapped two years
earlier than it was supposed to. Uh, we're moving toward this,
(18:20):
you know, especially in churs Wheel's opinion, at this point
where technology and science and medicine are converging to create
this this circumstance where we possibly could extend our life
in a meaningful way, not as you have pointed out,
just sort of crawling toward death at you know, age nine,
but feeling actually robust, yeah, or you know, are also
(18:40):
these sort of sci fi visions too, of like just
being a feeble thing locked away in a pod somewhere
on life support. Like nobody wants that. I mean, you
want the state you want to You don't want some
weird sci fi state of living death. And and certainly
that's that's the the dystopian vision of what the prolonged
life might be like. But the the side is yeah,
(19:01):
being you know, being in your sixties, being in your
seventies and still being able to body you know, yeah, yeah,
I mean so, I mean there's some interesting information about that. UM.
And he even feels like he can bear this out
again within ten years, particularly through his his mouse rejuvenation
is which what he calls it UM and I think
(19:22):
that's interesting too. He has in his ted talk this
graph of how all of these different aspects work together.
To create what he calls longevity escape velocity just you know, yeah,
because it's it's kind of like these seven factors are
like different, like seven different. Gravity is holding us to
the to the sphere of mortality. We can free ourselves
(19:45):
with those bonds than you know, the sky's the limit,
right Yeah. And uh another interview, this I believe, was
with The Guardian, uh De Grace said there was a
question to him and says, you've talked about enriching people's lives,
but isn't it the very fact of death that gives
our lives me? And he says, that's nonsense. The fact
is people don't want to get sick. I'm just a
practical guy. I don't want to get sick, and I
(20:07):
don't want you to get sick. And that's what this
is all about. I don't work on longevity. I work
on keeping people healthy. The only difference between my work
and the work of the whole medical profession is that
I think we're in striking distance of keeping people so
healthy that it at age ninety, the will carry on
waking up in the same physical state as they were
at the age of thirty, and the probability of not
(20:27):
waking up one morning will be no higher than it
was at the age of thirty. So this is where
we kind of begin to float off into the philosophical
deep end of the pool. Right the implications, Yeah, because
death is is an insensial, essential aspect of human life.
It's it's the big reality that everybody faces, no matter
(20:49):
what you do in your life. This is one of
the things you're definitely going to get around to doing.
Um and uh. And it it defines so much of
who we are. But then, but then how much of
it does it really define? That you into two questions
of again, is it does death inspire us as does
the does it motivate us the idea that we're not
going to be here forever and we only have you know,
a finite amount of time to do these things on
(21:10):
the on this planet, or you know, is it kind
of a false view. I don't know. Yeah, it's interesting.
And there was a question from an audience member and
Degray's Ted talk and the guy was basically saying, well,
aren't we sort of evolved to die? And his comment
was no, not really, I mean like we that we
just as a function we die. In the moderator kind
(21:31):
of chimed In and um and said, oh, well, so Degray,
are you saying that the genes don't care? And then
it's us that care? And he's like, exactly, that's it.
You know, So basically there's yeah, you could diet your
one thousand or one hundred or fifty, it doesn't really
matter to your genes. They just want to be expressed.
(21:53):
And I was actually thinking that if if the whole
point is that, you know, like Richard Dawkins, that we
were just here to spread our genes, it actually would
makes sense that we'd have a longer lifespan so would
have the ability to spread more of our genes, you
know what I'm saying. And it's it's kind of a
it's a bit of a wacky argument, but yeah, so
I don't think that we're actually we've evolved to die,
(22:15):
so to speak. Yeah. There, I mean, on one hand,
there's you know, to take it into extremes of dystopian
and utopian um. On the utopian end of things, you know,
their ideas of like hey you have an Einstein or
a Hawking, they let's just have them live forever, or
you know, or let's have them live twice as long
three times as long, and uh, and get more out
(22:37):
of them. You have somebody like a Gandhi. You know,
you have all these these great, great people. Imagine them
living uh, you know for several hundred years and being
able to contribute more to our civilization and culture on
the Charlie five hundred years of Charlie Sheen, five years
of winning. Yeah. Um, that's the other end of it,
you know, uh, annoying or pointless people, Um, I mean not.
(23:02):
Celebrity plays an important role, and it seems like there
was there There have probably been good Charlie Sheen movies.
I don't have his filmography at hand, but but but no, um,
you know the idea that still you can't it's hard
to argue that five hundred years of of Charlie Sheen
would significantly in a rich um our, culture or supportation. No,
(23:23):
but I like to think that if you're going to
live that long, and and especially if you've got your
you know, physical prowess and your wits about you, then
perhaps after a hundred years, two hundred years, maybe you
become a stage person or do we all become Charlie
Sheen after after three hundred years of life, we reached
that point where it's just like I don't care. I'm
(23:43):
just gonna have a good time, you know. Yeah, I
mean you do have to revisit what Middle Ages? Right,
So maybe age five hundred, we're all like cruising around
in Ferraris. We quit working. Yeah, we're just hanging out
the trevy fountain, you know, uh, causing trouble. It's it
is it's an interesting question, like what do you do
with all of those years? And and it's so it's
(24:06):
a seductive idea because none of us want to die, right,
I mean we that that's one of the bittersweet things
about living is that it's it is precious and you
know that, Um, if if we could, we could extend
it as long as possible. Yeah, and especially if we
felt good, you know. But also the fear of death,
you know, it prevents us from doing certain things because
us you know, their ramifications like this, when you know
(24:28):
there was no death, more people, more of us would
have jet skis, right, um, because they look like a
lot of fun. But but yeah, what does it keep
us from doing? What is it enables to do? I mean,
if if we knew we had three hundred years, which
some of us. Wait, two hundred and ninety years before
we started writing that book, we've been dreaming about writing.
I mean I say, no, yeah, I say, if you're
(24:51):
not going to write that books, you're just not going
to That's true. Continue to put that off from a procrastinator,
uh speaking right now? Okay, well how about this. Look
at authors who you know they write that those you know,
those like three year two, one to three really good books,
and then they just write a lot of less interesting stuff.
We're musicians, you know, artists where they have that one
(25:12):
burst of creativity and then it kind of dwindles out
throughout the rest of their career. You have exceptions to
this rule, but you see it a lot. Yeah, but
didn't you want to see what Stephen King is doing
in five years? I don't know, because that's a good example,
you know. I mean, I I've I've really loved Stephen
King in the past, but I I'm not necessarily as
into his recent works, So you know, I don't know,
(25:36):
like the would ones work get better? Would it? Would?
It would? Living three hundred years, so that means that
you'd be at your best for three best. But that
give you completely different understanding about living in a whole
new new tool set to express yourself. That's that's one
of the questions. Um. And then another just on a
you know, very like nuts and bolts level, what about
(25:57):
social security? Yeah? How do we for all this? Right?
And I mean there are people right now who are
saying we have to revisit the you know, sixty five
cut off I think within the States, right, So security,
you know, starting these benefits sign because the life expensency
has already become much greater than what we had before.
(26:17):
And just think about this too. But before the fifteenth century,
I mean, most people did not live to like age thirty.
So we really have made a lot of games. We
just don't think about it right now. Um. And so
you know, even if Degray is like completely off his rocker,
there's a really good chance that we're still going to start,
(26:37):
you know, reaching ages of a dred and fifty and
so on and so forth. So, so security, what do
you do about that? You know, what do you do
about overpopulation? Yeah, I mean it's it's it's a it's
a real concern. Also, look at your health benefits. Do
does health insurance then pay for your longevity treatments? Gets
who gets to live this long and then does it
(26:59):
become a a basic human right to get I mean,
would do one day instead of being you know, someone
making the argument, hey, you know this is irresponsible behavior
because they're starving people in sub Saharan Africa, or there's
rampid disease and Subsora Saharan Africa. What if people were saying,
you know, this is irresponsible to be because there are
people dying of old age at eight in sub Saharan Africa, which,
(27:20):
granted by contemporary standards, that would be great, wonderful situation.
But but yeah, imagine a time where that's the arguments,
you know, or you know, you end up having, you know,
an elite class that gets to live as long as
they pretty much want to live, and then everybody else
can't afford it. I mean, you see this type of
idea of popping up in science fiction for a reason
because some of these and this is something we're thinking about, well,
(27:43):
and if it were then available to everyone again over population,
So you have to make a choice at some point
as as a society, do you have a low death
rate or do you have a low or a high
birth rate? You know what I'm saying you're just like
a mandatory death at a certain time or what was
it close? It not calliope? What was the thing in
(28:05):
Logan's Run? Mmmm, I don't know, it's like not callioppy.
What's the thing with the horses? Yeah, what's the thing
with the horses that goes? You know, you ride the
horse and you know it's like at the circus circus
riding horse. I haven't seen the movie recently enough at
any rate. That thing that they had, they've ensured that
everybody died at thirty and Logan's Run carousel, I think
(28:30):
it was a carousel. Okay, we would never do well
on sixty five dollar pyramid. We we would just select.
So so anyway, maybe you'd have to have something like
that where everyone's like, all right, you can live to
be five, but then you gotta call it quits or
if you know, or maybe they're special exceptions if you're
going and it just gets really complicated and mucky, it does,
(28:51):
and there's just so many different problems with this, and
of course, um, you know, I I even just look
at our skin and say, I'm pretty sure that this
skin is not going to make it to one tho
years and yes, I know that there are in vitro
meat uh. You know method that we could probably apply
to you know, where you take that that that's that
skin cells from a cow and grow meat out of that.
Every U we can grow our own skin. Every twenty years.
(29:14):
You go down to the to the cloning vats. Uh.
They give you a good flame and then you get
a new skin out of the vats. So you get eviscerated.
And then we'll not eviscerated. You get to keep your gut,
your guts, you know, okay, but you lose the skin
get a new skin. The evisceration. That's a separate treatment
where you get all new guts. All right, all right,
there you go. That's there's just a their myriad of
(29:37):
different challenges. Also, oh wait, there's one more I have
to have to bring up to is the idea like
just psychologically and emotionally what happens to us over the
course um because memory memory. Um. There's a great like
one of the more dystopian uh concepts of immortality out
there comes from one of my favorite authors mentioned before,
(29:58):
our Scott Baker. He has this U. He has this
epic fantasy series that is just really chocked with a
lot of philosophical stuff because he was a philosophy PhD
guy and U and he has this idea of this
immortal race that he calls the non men, and they
all basically they've basically forgotten everything about their their history
(30:18):
except for the traumas. Like after a while, after you know,
a long life of just accumulating trauma after trauma and
misery after misery, it just compiles. It's like kind of
like your skin analogy, you know what their skin like.
If you know, we get a scar here, a scar here,
do we eventually just become all scar tissue? And these
guys are like all emotional scar tissue after centuries of life,
(30:39):
and they're just they don't remember the people they loved.
They only have vague memories of the horrors they've suffered.
So how do we avoid that? All? Right? Eternal sunshine,
the spotless mind, right, okay, okay, so you basically can
erase the memories. And I think about the Blue Brain
project that we talked about in cyber Immortality, which you
know there there's I believe it's in Germany. There's team
(31:00):
um that are working on this to try to to
map the human brain and basically you know, in this
mathematical model, and so the idea is that one day,
not only can we see how our brains are working,
but it's very possible that you could like download a
copy of your own brain. So why wouldn't you be
able to to erase those memories and just re upload, okay?
(31:23):
Or but in a sense, you kind of it's kind
of like playing poker. It's like you, where's it blackjack? Oh, anyway,
you keep getting cards in your hand until you're like,
all right, whole, that's good. So it's like you you
you let your mind developed a certain point and then
you're like, all right, that's good. We're not going to
add any more experiences to this. We're just going to
sort of hold and erase things since they o yeah,
(31:43):
and and and just as a practical matter too, by
the time that you reach one dred, you're probably gonna
want a copy of your brain, right so you can
start to index your memories and um, I mean, because
that's just that's enormous. That's that's one of the things
that I think, well, is the human brain actually equipped
to hold on to a thousand years worth of memories, UM, emotions,
(32:04):
that are attached to him, so on and so forth.
So now I'm liking this idea. And maybe the way
living well it's gonna point us to. But maybe the
way living for six years is that every two hundred
years you kind of push the reset button and you
sort of clean out everything that's not completely relevant and
start new, because you know, new friends, new family, new
uh new you know, purpose in life. I see lawsuits happening.
(32:29):
I'm thinking of like Lasic Surfery, you know, like when
when that was that first came out, And I'm thinking
about like someone resets your brain on accident to like
some sort of failing, you know, Toddler infancy memory bank,
and and all of a sudden, like you have to
relearn the entire world as an adult. I don't know,
these are things to think about. We could keep going
(32:50):
on about this for sure, Yeah, I know we could,
but but yeah, birthday candle, it's possible. Get your fire
extinguishers ready. Yeah, So hey, I have a couple of
listener males here. This is just a quick one um
our listener by the name of Eric right soon and
(33:10):
says in this episode that he's referring to the Tyrannossaur
Sex podcast. He says, in this episode, Julie said hard
to imagine dinosaurs quote kicking boots. I'm almost sure she
meant to say knocking boots. Had me laughing all day.
Loved the podcast. I didn't notice, but kicking boots, kicking
or knocking, it is knocking boots. I feel like it
could be kicking boots somewhere. I was going to make
(33:31):
a joke that, like in my my mom, you know,
Michigan Dutch upbringing that it was. We called it kicking boots.
But now I know better it it's it's knocking boots.
You could get away with it. This thing was a
regional thing. Yeah, it's kicking boots in Michigan. Um And anyway,
I just that's just another opportunity to promote the dinosaurs
(33:51):
Knocking boots episode. And then here's another one referring to
that particular episode. Jordan's right, sin Hi, Robert and Julie. Yesterday,
I was listening to your episode on dino sex. One
word and I couldn't help but think chloacle Kiss sounded
like a good name for a metal band. I like
the phrase so much I even used it on my
(34:12):
Facebook status score. A friend later informed me that there
is in fact a decent metal band called chloacle Kiss.
I've tried to give them a listen, but every time
I do, I get a vision of uh, look, shall
we say vallesca raptor indecency with the grinding and screeching
of the music as the soundtrack. Anyway, despite my unfortunate,
unfortunate and then old pictures, I wanted to thank you
(34:34):
for bringing my love of music and science together. I'm
a huge fan of the podcast. I'm pretty sure you're
sure you guys play a big part in keeping me
saying while I'm at were Some might argue that um
prolonged descriptions of dinosaurs doing it would would have the
opposite effects and insanity, but but you know, I feel
like our listeners are the ones that are enriched by
(34:55):
such things, not to be over the edge. Yeah, So,
if you have any thing you would like to share,
you can check out our own Facebook status updates on
Blow the Mind on Facebook, and we're also on Twitter
as Blow the Mind, and we update that those feeds
pretty regularly. Different stuff on each We kind of try
to diversify, but you know, cool links to stuff that
we're finding, cool stuff, links to stuff we're writing, and
(35:17):
updates on what the latest episodes are about. And as always,
you can always drop us a line at blow the
Mind at how stuff works dot com. For more on
this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works
dot com. To learn more about the podcast, click on
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(35:38):
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