Overpopulation Concerns As Life Extending Drug Trialled In Humans
An experimental drug has increased the lifespans of laboratory animals by almost 25%, in a discovery scientists hope can also slow human ageing.
The treated mice, known in the lab as ‘supermodel grannies’ because of their youthful appearance, were healthier, stronger and developed fewer cancers than mice not medicated with the life extending drug.
The drug is already being tested in humans and although it is not yet know whether it would have the same anti-ageing results, there are already concerns over what effect this would have on population growth.
The quest to discover the secret to longer life is nothing new, as history shows. And scientists have long known the ageing process is malleable – laboratory animals live longer if you significantly reduce the amount of food they eat.
Now the field of ageing-research is booming as scientists and researchers try to uncover – and control – the molecular processes of ageing.
The research teams at Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore, and the MRC Laboratory of Medical Science, Imperial College London, were investigating a protein called interleukin-11. Levels of interleukin-11 increase in the human body as we get older, contributing to higher levels of inflammation which the researchers say flips several biological switches that control the rate of ageing.
The results, published in the journal Nature, showed that lifespans were increased by 20-25% depending on the experiment and sex of the mice.
Old laboratory mice frequently die from cancer. The mice lacking interleukin-11, however, had far lower levels of the disease. They were leaner, showed improved muscle function, had healthier fur and scored better on numerous frailty-focused tests.
Longer lives, bigger populations
One of the researchers, Prof Stuart Cook, was asked whether the data was too good to be believed. He replied: “I try not to get too excited”, adding that it was “definitely worth trialling in human ageing.”
Cook believes the impact would be transformative and stated that if it worked he was prepared to take the experimental life extending drug himself.
Prof Anissa Widjaja, from Duke-NUS Medical School, said: “Although our work was done in mice, we hope that these findings will be highly relevant to human health, given that we have seen similar effects in studies of human cells and tissues.”
Widjaja added: “This research is an important step toward better understanding ageing and we have demonstrated, in mice, a therapy that could potentially extend healthy ageing.”
Ilaria Bellantuono is a professor of musculoskeletal ageing at the University of Sheffield. She said: “Overall, the data seems solid, this is another potential therapy targeting a mechanism of ageing, which may benefit frailty.”
The human trials are still in their early stages and likely to be a long way short of actually extending human life for any significant period of time. But if, in the near future, combatting human aging does become a reality, what are the consequences for overpopulation?
With the human population predicted to reach 11 billion by the end of the century, there are likely to be many who would prefer to see human life extending trials go no further.
What will the world look like if we all live 20 years longer?
byu/Yan_Vana_Author inFuturology
34 Comments
The rich people will be able to afford it, the masses probably not
I’ve seen articles about the population boom followed immediately by articles that talk about the impending baby bust all over the world. I think we might need to work out which one of those is more likely before we blame anti-aging tech for population problems.
They’ll continue to fuck with the economy and federal deficits so people are forced to work until they’re 80 to avoid retiring in poverty. Enjoy your 60 years flipping burgers, everyone!
Honestly, I would love research into extending child-bearing age (including extending energy/mobility into later years). Imagine if we could work from 18-60, get ourselves emotionally and financially secure, and then raise children in some kind of part-time retirement. Like, have kids from 60-80 when you can devote time and energy to your kids and maybe make some money and keep busy during school hours with a part time job (the types of jobs late-career people tend to have: consulting, supervising, speaking, teaching, etc.). Then use 80-120 to have full retirements.
This is what already happened in the 20th Century in most developed countries–life expectancy increased 20-30% between 1900 and 2000. What happened is the development of pension schemes and health care options. If people are living longer lives with higher quality of life, they will live longer, work longer, (hopefully) save longer, and be retired longer. It’s not a catastrophe, we just have to adapt as a society.
If life extension isn’t coupled with forced sterilization it would lead to societal collapse and/or ww3.
What is going on with this “overpopulation” trolling recently on Reddit? There is a catastrophic collapse of the population in progress. Who is still hiding under the rock? Who is paying for this?
How are we going to have over population when no one can afford to have kids ? Need two incomes to survive as is and daycare is another mortgage payment.
Seems like a solution to plummeting birth rates and aging population.
We can’t be overpopulated with a declining birth rate. Nice try
The world would almost certainly just be worse off with longer living humans, especially because they’d probably still face mental degeneration so now you just have older crazier ppl than ever who look younger.
I hope we don’t get too much life extension and we skip right to brain copy since that would be a lot more efficient and not over-crowd the planet and you could backup people’s minds in the prime instead of extending their neurodegeneration.
Lol. Like the elite will give it to the masses. Think dummies, think.
Living longer would be great if we can decrease our stable population to match
5 Billion people living 150 years is better that 10 billion living 75 yrs
It would be naive to think that if such a drug did exist, the rich wouldn’t gate it from the poor and middle classes for as long as possible
All we need now is for a drug that means women can have babies until they are 75, and a drug that stops us being tired at 3am because the baby won’t go to sleep.
Seems easy. If you take life extending drugs, you have to abide by a one child policy like China did. If you have a second, you lose the drugs plus a massive fine relative to your income.
There are concerns about population decline all over the world. No worries, it would be good if anything
Countries everywhere will increase the legal retirement age to 10-15 years of the average life expectancy.
I used to think this would be a wonderful thing, but having seen how the world is going recently…
I’m 57, and no way I’d have kids at this age, regardless of my level of health. I’ve done that, had fun, moved on to other things.
This doesn’t matter much at all. Of course the media will tell you gloom and doom. Regardless, the youth are not having children, they just aren’t. So if this drug does become a thing, most if not all baby boomers will die before it gets rolled out and the youth still won’t be producing. Also if the youth are not producing because they think the future is bleak, then they would not want to take this drug to live longer in this bleak world.
A lot of doomers on here like to say it would lead to the end of civilization. But if anything life extension treatments would be the one thing to save our society from population collapse.
Suddenly you don’t have to choose between raising children and personal growth. You can afford to do both, at once, or one at a time.
Current lifespan is really lagging behind the modern lifestyle.
Create a population stasis as fewer are opting to have children.
Everything will be more expensive, salaries will be basically the same they are right now (which means people can afford far less), PhD is the new bachelor’s, corporations are even more powerful, weather gets worse and worse: hurricanes, cyclones, tornadoes, you name it.
Cynical corporations will whine that “nobody wants to work anymore” even though a month’s pay for the average white collar job won’t cover rent in most places, and automation/Ai does most jobs now
We sometimes need generations to die off to get social progress. I am in my 50s and as much as I miss them I wonder if gay marriage would be legal if their generation had another 20 years.
There are presently 3,667,758 births per year, and 3,279,857 deaths per year on Earth.
There isn’t sufficiently thorough data on the causes of all deaths, but parsing through what we have, maybe a third have a very strong causal link to age. So even we if we assume a treatment that is 100% effective, applied to 100% of all humans and gives complete agelessness (rather than merely adding ~20 years), that means reducing deaths per year to 2,186,571.
Should this not affect the age of fertility, we’re talking about 1 million more people on Earth per year, for every year henceforth. Meaning that it would take a millennium before there are a billion ‘extra people’ alive. Even this is frankly not an issue. The UN estimate for 2100 used to be 11.2 billion, it’s had recently to be reviewed down to 10.4. The accumulated change from complete biological immortality starting tomorrow would be updating this number to 10.5. We already make enough food for 12.
Complete non-issue.
What we’re actually seeing in what’s discussed is a treatment that only some people will get, and even assuming is 100% effective (which is absurd, btw), shouldn’t add an excedent of more than some tens of thousands of people per year. Meaning that the length of time before this has a very large impact on world population is longer than the time that human civilization has existed.
11 billion by 2100 is likely not happening without some drastic life extention. Every year the max predicted pop drops thanks to declining birth rates worldwide. Some of the most recent estimates have us peaking by 2061 at only 9.4 billion. And that prediction will probably drop too in the coming years.
Life extension would benefit society. Healthier people for longer is good for pretty much every facet of society.
Longer lives, more prosperity – – – > Lower birth rates.
That’s the trend, folks. Overpopulation will NOT be a problem for most of humanity moving forward.
Considering the worldwide drop in birthrate I don’t see much of an effect.
Depends on what longer means. Like, healthy 100 old, or our natural aging is spread over 100 years? So a 60 year old will be more like our 45 year Olds? If anyone works in health care, I do not want to be a “healthy” 100 year old. Talking about the average healthy geriatric patient, I’d prefer to just die at 75-80. No need to be 90-100. If you’re saying I can slow aging down significantly, then yes. I wouldn’t mind living my prime years longer, then performing medically assisted death at 80 (in the body of a 60 year old). I don’t need to take up more resources. Also, the world would be messed up. Enjoy working even longer…. Right now, America is considering raising the retirement age just shy of average life expectancy. Anyone feel like working from 18 to 90 in a world where we live to 100?
Tests show the mice were healthier.
But it won’t necessarily translate to making humans actually “look younger”.
Considering most of the advanced world is flatlining or heading toward population decline I’m not the least bit concerned.
Extending human life expectancy is utterly selfish and short sighted and is hurtful for the human genus. You don’t need to live longer, just live a more meaningful life.
People die. Deal with it.
Fun fact: around 90% of the drugs that perform well in animal experiments fail in clinical trials because people are not mice. That being said, I’m fairly certain we will get to effective and affordable longevity treatments in the foreseeable future. A 20 year boost is something I would consider minor, actually – as of now, life expectancy increases about 1 year every 5-6 years. A 20 year boost is just something another century or so of the current trend would bring about. I know, I know, trends can’t be projected into infinity, but a 20 year boost would still be *well* under the theoretical limit of 120, and would result from essentially the same incremental developments that drive longevity increase today.
If we assume that the relatively new field of longevity research matures into something clinically effective, I would assume we’ll see much more than that.
**Population boom:**
I consider this unlikely, at least in within the span of a century or so. There seems to be a strong negative correlation between human development index and fertility rate. It looks like when you provide humans with the knowledge and the means for effective contraception, let women have careers, and give people enough financial independence to nor rely on children for support in old age, they will stop having kids beyond *maybe* 1-2. It also looks like that people have kids later and later in life, if that becomes biologically feasible. Almost as if people weren’t mindless replicators that pump out 2x offspring in 2x time, but K-strategists through and through, who use extra resources to maximize the quality of their offspring, rather than their quantity.
It is possible, that *given enough time*, fertility rates would actually increase as people decide to have kids again after raising some, but for several decades after radical longevity comes around, it should slow down population decline rather than create a boom.