Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: life extension

A discussion on whether or not extended lifespans might make us paranoid about every tiniest risk.

Some months back, I read “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind” by Yuval Noah Harari. It’s a really good book, though it did disappoint me significantly when, after discussing the past and the present of our species, the author began glancing towards possible futures. At that point, the impartiality required of a historian, which Harari had thus far managed to keep up more or less evenly throughout the book, gave way to a subtly implied pessimism pervading, among other things, his views on future rejuvenation biotechnology.

Honestly, I wasn’t expecting him to even touch upon the subject; I was pleasantly surprised, at least until I realized that his concerns, most of which were the usual ones you’d expect, seemed to make him inclined to see rejuvenation as a plague rather than a blessing.

A curious new concern

Harari presented his concerns but didn’t venture imagining any solutions to them, which I find to be a fatal flaw that pushes readers to assume that they are insolvable and inescapably destined to materialize, and neither of these things is necessarily true.

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Fasting has been found to have a range of health benefits, and appears to slow down the aging process. Now, researchers from MIT have found that fasting for just 24 hours is enough to improve the regeneration of a person’s intestinal stem cells, which naturally declines with age. Better yet, with the metabolic switch identified, in the future the effect could be mimicked with a drug.

As with stem cells in all parts of the body, intestinal stem cells are in charge of growing new cells in the organ. They maintain the lining of the intestine, which is shed and replaced every few days, fight off infection and repair damage to the tissue. But as is usually the case, these stem cells get less and less effective at their job with age.

Previous research has found that caloric restriction, or continual fasting, has a profound effect on health and longevity. These effects have been seen in mice, rats, monkeys, lemurs, and other animals, and although human studies haven’t really been conducted, it seems that we could also benefit from harnessing the diet. So the MIT team set out to study the effects of fasting on intestinal stem cells.

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Today we take an amusing look at how science fiction is often portrayed in a jarring way especially when dealing with the topic of life extension.

Those of us who fancy science fiction stories are used to all sorts of technological miracles taking place in them; some are plausible and might become reality at some point in the future, while others are mere fantasies, artistic liberties that are taken to tell a better story and will likely never translate into real-life technologies—or, if they will, they will do so at the cost of rethinking fundamental principles that we’ve thus far considered to be fully established.

In science fiction, we’ve seen faster-than-light travel, teleportation, portals, energy weapons, strong AI, telepathic powers, and radiation-induced superpowers of all kinds; unfortunately, the only “superpower” known to be actually induced by radiation thus far is cancer. Entire imaginary worlds have revolved around the existence of one or more of these marvels, and series and shows have assumed that they’re possible and imagined what our society would be like with them, but one particular possibility has been neglected or relegated to one or two episodes and then forgotten, as if it was of no importance whatsoever: the defeat of aging.

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Today, we have an interview with the Longevity Research Institute, a new group set to launch in April 2018 of this year. The goal of the Institute is to identify therapies that can demonstrably extend healthy human lifespan by 2030 at the latest.

Searching for longevity

There are dozens of compounds and therapies that have been demonstrated to increase the lifespan of mammals. Recently, there have been some impressive examples of rejuvenation in animals using a variety of approaches, including partial cellular reprogramming, stem cell therapy, and senescent cell removal. More importantly, in many of these studies, age-related diseases have been delayed or even reversed.

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America’s water is under threat from many sides. It faces pollution problems, outdated infrastructure, rising costs, and unprecedented droughts and rainfall patterns as the climate changes. Yet at a recent event hosted by the Columbia Water Center, the tone was cautiously optimistic, and the conversation centered on solutions.

“If we have aging that’s falling apart, and we’re dealing with climate variability and change, isn’t that a good opportunity to actually do something?” suggested Upmanu Lall, director of the Columbia Water Center.

For decades, the U.S. has been a leader in . Now we’re falling behind; in the latest infrastructure report card, dams, drinking water and wastewater all received D ratings. But Lall thinks the country could get an A. Here are some of the solutions, presented at the event, that could help to get us there.

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