Why? Human longevity is a source of problems, and I personally wish we'd work harder at making the quality of our lives better instead of extending our time here.
Human longevity goes hand in hand with making our lives better. You don't make people live longer without drastically reducing diseases and healthcare costs whilst also greatly increasing the lifetime earning potential. Human longevity is one of the most important things we can be focusing on.
I disagree with that assessment, and it isn’t what I was referring to. Of course advances in healthcare are good for people, especially for things that address disorders that strongly affect someone’s health and quality of life and also those that prematurely end life. But these things are already under heavy research and development. So it calls into question what the original commenter and I suppose you are searching for. Why do we have a need for additional work on explicitly increasing human longevity whenever such a thing is already a secondary or tertiary effect of what we’re already doing?
But a cure for cancer, for example and if it ever happens, will have no effect on poverty, lack of education, inequalities of all kinds, mental disorders, and the multitude of other societal and environmental problems.
There are tons of things we can be doing that can improve people’s quality of life, standard of living, enjoyment of life, reducing stress, and more that have little if nothing to do with healthcare advances.
Even advances in the fields of psychology and psychiatry are a bit like trying to plug a leak with bubble gum. Certainly helping people to recover from and live with mental disorders is a good thing, although seemingly underfunded in current times, but one must understand that humans are not emotionally built for the societies we’ve created. I just don’t see how longevity should be an explicit goal when the lives for so many people are a complete struggle.
Because longevity is barely studied. It receives near no funding. It has barely any attention and yet it kills more people than any other disease.
The quest for longevity explicitly helps many things. Fixing cancer is reactionary, preventing cancer from starting is longevity.
You’re confusing existing medical research with longevity research. They are very different. Almost all medical research is for fixing things that have gone wrong, longevity is trying to prevent them going wrong in the first place.
There’s always the idea that we could be doing something else, something that helps more. No one said you need to stop all other research and funding, but if we are able to prolong aging diseases you’ll help near everyone on the planet.
I have never seen that characterization of longevity before, so I am generally confused by what you’re discussing. It is my understanding that prevention is heavily researched. I equate longevity with duration, not with preventing illnesses and diseases. Even Science Direct defines it as:
> Longevity is one of the commonly used terms in aging research that may be defined as an individual’s ability to reach longer life span under ideal conditions.
That is the definition I was asking why against. My genuine question was and is: if life is such a struggle and tough for such a huge portion of the population, why is increasing the duration of life an interesting goal?
It's usually implied that it would also increase the healthspan, rather than prolonging suffering.
Aging itself isn't something you die from, you die from age related deceases. By living longer (eg. slowing down aging) it usually means we somehow avoid and/slow down the occurrence of these deceases. On a high level this isn't something new (eg. working out, not smoking etc), but on a medicine level slowing/stopping/reversing aging isn't something that's very researched and have just recently started to get some kind of traction.
So you're correct in your thinking, we don't want to increase the duration of life without also increasing the duration of healthy life.
Edit: see my other comment with some resources you might find useful/informative.
> It's usually implied that it would also increase the healthspan, rather than prolonging suffering.
As I've stated multiple times now, this is only true if you consider suffering related to health, and I am not considering just health-related suffering. Please read my other comments before replying. I keep getting replies only talking about health in the very physical and medical sense. When I say "quality of life", I mean it in the holistic sense. For example, if someone who is poor, disenfranchised, has no retirement, lives paycheck to paycheck, lives in heavy pollution both of air and water, etc., is living longer really on top of their list?
And of course, no one has addressed the societal issues that longevity creates.
> Aging itself isn't something you die from, you die from age related deceases.
That's kind of pointless semantics, but anyway, it doesn't address anything I've said.
If we go back to the original query: "what are you surprised isn't being work on?", then is it really surprising longevity is a niche thing when there's so much else to work on (i.e., so much going wrong)? If someone really thinks longevity is interesting enough, then I'd like to see the political, societal, and environmental, not just the medical, arguments and solutions that would need to come along with it to make it a net positive.
Wanting longevity seems to be a rather privileged position.
The surprise comes from all the resources we put on solving deceases that are caused by aging. Why not solve the root cause? That's where I and many others are surprised.
> For example, if someone who is poor, disenfranchised, has no retirement, lives paycheck to paycheck, lives in heavy pollution both of air and water, etc., is living longer really on top of their list?
Maybe, maybe not. Most people don't want to die even if they don't live in the western world. Some of the things mentioned here (eg. no retirement, polluted air) wouldn't be as big of a problem if aging was solved since they would be healthier.
I would agree most people in developing countries wouldn't put longevity on top of their list (seems like people in the richer countries doesn't do that either) but the thing is we can work on multiple problems at the same time. People generally aren't suggesting we take money from aiding the poor to instead focus more on solving biological aging. It's rather using resources allocated to fighting age related deceases one by one, to instead fight aging (which seem to be the root cause) and/or adding _more_ resources to the pool of doing good in the world.
I searched the internet for “telomere therapy” earlier today. I was curious if there had been any interesting advancements in the past year. Almost all hits were holistic healing sites.
There was a big splash about this just a couple of weeks ago: hyperbaric oxygen treatment triggering telomere restoration.
Don't know if anybody has shown any actual benefit from having the telomeres boosted. Some of what had seemed like a good idea (antioxidants!) have turned out to interfere in essential signaling pathways, and be therefore harmful in excess.
There was a study in the last month showing telomere lengthening in humans via hyperbaric oxygen chamber. Still waiting for more reproductions of the study but quite promising.
