What could possibly go wrong?

Welcome to the Monkey House.

Probably triples cancer rates, too

Car_Ramrod: I've seen this thread before, and here's my oblig contribution to it: yes, I want to live for hundreds of years, even if I was the only person with that lifespan.

Now think about that for a second. Time is relative. Remember when you were a kid, a half hour seemed like a long time? And December was the longest month because it seemed forever until Christmas?.....now you can kill a half hour just staring off into space, doing nothing, and Christmas seems to come too frequently.

The more you age, the more your perception of time slows down. When you're ten years old, a year seems like a long time because it's 10% of your life. But when you're 100, you can easily doze off an entire year and not notice (and, consequently, a decade will take as long as a year does when you were a child, from your perspective).

When you're hundreds of years old, or even thousands, a human lifespan will feel like a blip to you. Life will race by you, you'll get bored and eventually want to kill yourself. Life doesn't really have any meaning without death.

Dr Jesus Gil, from the Medical Research Council's clinical science centre, said the findings needed to be "taken with a bit of caution. It is a preliminary study".

Well look who shows up to ruin the fun for us would-be immortals.

Gunther: Even if you completely remove all cells too old to divide, this won't magically make you immortal.

Aging is sort of like getting a half-dozen fatal diseases at once, and this is a a cure for one of them. Just because the cell senescence won't kill you, it doesn't mean the other crap won't, it just means the corpse you leave will be slightly prettier.

What they're addressing here is the underlying cause for most of the other crap. Senescent cells are basically what causes aging processes- the other crap is often caused by the fact that you have weak cells that aren't working right that aren't getting replaced with fresh ones. When you're in your youth, we get rid of those cells naturally. For some reason, that stops after a certain point, and they start accumulating. What this is is a way to keep clearing those things out as you age.

This will increase cancer rates though. As you live longer and longer and your cells are replicating more and more, the percentages of cells that mutate into cancer doesn't increase, but you go through more cells in your lifetime, so while we'll live longer, we'll be dying from cancer rather than from fat deposits helping to give us heart attacks.

Basically, it keeps the body fresh. A natural death is basically when you stop getting oxygen to critical systems, for whatever reason. If you're keeping the cells in here fresh, you're keeping those parts healthy and young. And you don't die from your heart muscle not being strong enough to keep fresh oxygen flowing to your brain anymore. You die from other things.

This seriously is eternal youth. Not just cosmetically, but substantially. If it translates from mice to humans, anyway. We'll still die, true, but it won't be from the stuff we traditionally associate with aging, because if this is fully realized, we flat out won't age. Cancer and motorcycle accidents while trying to jump the Grand Canyon will be the leading causes of death.

Reason itself does not work instinctively, but requires trial, practice, and instruction in order gradually to progress from one level of insight to another. Therefore a single man would have to live excessively long in order to learn to make full use of all his natural capacities.

-Immanuel Kant

/I wouldn't be bored

AstralRunner: I've always just assumed that people who don't want to live forever, or at least a very long time, just don't have anything to live for. Surely somebody with any kind drive or purpose would want to extend their life purely for the sake of living, rather than to avoid death. Is there truly nothing in your live that holds greater meaning to you then a means to starve off boredom until oblivion?

Let me put it to you this way:

Think of something you really enjoyed doing as a child. Like play with your toys or something. You don't do that anymore. Why? You've matured...you've grown out of it. Toys no longer have the fascination they once did.

Now, apply this perspective to everything else. Eventually, everybody runs out of things to live for, and we all grow out of the things we love doing. You're not going to be doing the same things at 40 that you were at 20. Or at 60. or 80.

Ultimately, we all stop playing with our toys.

Fano: So, your imagination is limited; you cannot imagine the toys a person free to live to 500 might have. Long term goals and projects.

At age 500, 50 years will feel like 1 year to you. People's entire lives will shoot right past you, from infancy to middle age, without you scarcely noticing. The entire world would be a detatched blur, moving too fast for you to interact with it.

And there will be nothing -- ABSOLUTELY NOTHING -- at that age that you would feel the slightest bit compulsion toward doing. Your life would be fraught with ennui.

I know you don't think that would happen because you're young and you think the way you think right now is the way you'll think forever. But that's not going to happen. Your tastes, habits, interests, and your imagination changes.... you won't even want to do the same things 10 years from now, much less a hundred.

Remember that at age 5, you thought a ten minute timeout felt like a life sentence and you thought you would watch cartoons forever. But you grew out of them.

Everything you're doing now, you will grow out of.