Outed on my birthday

excessor opened up his big mouth typed freely and revealed that it's my birthday. Yup, I'm 48 now, which doesn't seem like something to celebrate. I really don't like having a fuss made over me, 'specially when it's about aging, which I'm doing as much as possible to slow down; I hate being the center of attention.

I did get treated well this morning by mike_norcal, who put roses on my desk and made me a most excellent omelette. We plan to go out to dinner at Kabul, a fine Afghan restaurant nearby, with the aforementioned excessor.

Feel free to leave me birthday greetings in a comment.

Life Extension politics

I do the obvious things to keep from falling apart too rapidly -- exercise, attention to good eating, avoidance of aging factors like smoke, sun, stress, and drugs. I take antioxidants and hormone boosters, and improve my lipid consumption by getting lots of salmon and flaxseed oil. But this just keeps you a bit healthier, and at best slows the rate of aging a little; as bioscience continues to progress, it's now forseeable that aging will be more drastically slowed (leading to healthy lifespans of 120 or more) or even halted ("immortality") in the near future.

Most people have bought the meme that "natural is good for you." To an extent this is true -- many of our dietary and obesity problems are due to modern changes away from the lifestyle we evolved under; processed foods (from the starch-heavy diets of early agrarian empires to corn-syrup-sweetened drinks) damage our bodies, lack of the exercise required to survive in a hunter-gatherer society leaves many prone to diseases of aging and death. But it's important to remember that the average lifespan in those supposedly healthy, natural times was mid-20s, and evolutionary pressure only extends to the creation and successful rearing of offspring. While there is evidence that longer lifespans can impove the survival of human groups by allowing increased childcare and accumulation of cultural knowledge, this was not a factor until relatively recently in human evolution, so in large part our body systems begin to decay at almost the same time our ability to procreate declines.

Life extension is becoming a more controversial topic as the reality of it draws closer. Reactionaries like Leon Kass, the Chair of the President's Council on Bioethics, believe efforts to extend human life are dangerous affronts to the social and moral order. Meanwhile, leftist critics object to any procedure that might create a longer-lived class of wealthy individuals who retain their wealth and power while poorer people lack access to the same procedures. The enemies of the future have any number of reasons to stop others from extending their lives, and unless their influence is limited by public pressure to continue anti-aging research, it's easy to imagine a regime which, Logan's Run-like, rations medical care to ensure that no one escapes the Reaper.

http://fightaging.org/ has lots of good information on this topic, with links to more scientific sites.