What do you think about him and his quest to end aging? Do you think it is a credible goal or a pipe dream? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aubrey_de_Grey
I am personally open to the idea, but lack the fundamental knowledge to judge its validity. Since I know posters here come from diverse backgrounds (some even in the hard sciences), I would like to see what others think.
Ambition is a dream with a V8 engine - Elvis Presley
He's a smart guy, no doubt. I've actually started reading one of his books, but haven't finished it yet. Very lofty goals.
He looks at the aging process differently than most. Aubrey likes to become the "engineer" instead of the scientist, so to speak.
On the one hand, I really think that his work holds much promise and am really fascinated by it. On the other, I know how academic scientists can be, and, at times, their ranting and exotic claims are just a ploy to get more funding.
I think it's possible to slow aging significantly, and some day bring it down to perhaps negligible speeds (but I suspect AI and brain uploading will come first, and then the AI might just invent anti-aging for us). Jon Barron and some other alternative health buffs cover anti-aging quite well.
Caloric restriction is the only thing that's been shown conclusively to extend life across the board by 50% or more. If this sounds like a dismal prospect, I suspect it's not necessary to restrict calories as much as it is to dull insulin response. Gymnema sylvestre and other cheap herbs taken before high-glycemic meals already do a bang-up job at this. Digestive enzymes can be awesome as well.
To me, the big three aging factors in developed countries are stress, poor nutrition/digestion, and insulin over-response. The rest are relatively minor, and can be worried about later. Why bother with these other minor factors like cell senescence when most of the cells of most of the population would die long before their Hayflick limit is reached anyway, because of their stressful, sedentary lives and horrendous diets?
Why anarchy fails
Biological immortality is far from a pipe dream. Actually aging and dying are the odd things out, not living ‘forever’.
Still we must understand that biological immortality would be the worst thing that could ever happen to humans as a race. Just think about it: you never die on your own and, statistically someone calculated that an immortal being would live an average of 1200 years before dying in some accident.
1200 years! Assuming you brain would not be totally melt by the memories at that age, what kind of fertility rates do you think we’d see in such a world? 0.2? 0.1? if we kept a fertility rate even close to 2, earth would be massively, massively overpopulated within a decade. Skyrocketing land prices! No, a biologically immortal society would procreate very, very sparsely.
and that is the problem: no procreation, no evolution! The moment we achieve biological immortality we practically let homo sapiens lurk where he is indefinitely. Human evolution is already very slow due to the long generations (25 years vs. 2 years for, say, mice). Biological immortality would bee the end of our race.
Thus, I believe aging and dying are actually a byproduct of evolution. The animals that did not age where exterminated by the (evolved) animals that did. Do we want to be exterminated by mice as we exterminated Enki and his fellows?