There's a fascinating book containing short first-person accounts of living through the industrial revolution called Pandaemonium: Coming of the Machine as Seen by Contemporary Observers edited and with notes by Humphrey Jennings. It covers 1660-1886, and it's one of the few books that genuinely blew my mind. It's extremely accessible because of the first-person nature of the accounts, and I think one of the reason it's so compelling is that you can feel the change sweeping through so many aspects of daily life. I find it a very interesting lens through which to look at the current digital revolution.
I've been looking for exactly this: first-hand accounts of technological progress and societal change in the 17th and 18th centuries. It's a fascinating time in history.
You may be interested in Liberty's dawn: a people's history of the Industrial Revolution
> This remarkable book looks at hundreds of autobiographies penned between 1760 and 1900 to offer an intimate firsthand account of how the Industrial Revolution was experienced by the working class. The Industrial Revolution brought not simply misery and poverty. On the contrary, Griffin shows how it raised incomes, improved literacy, and offered exciting opportunities for political action. For many, this was a period of new, and much valued, sexual and cultural freedom.
I got my (physical) copy through ABE Books, but as as a sibling comment has pointed out it's also on Kindle. There are very few pictures and they're all in black and white, so Kindle would be fine.
Boyle's goals were super creative! A lot of them have been reiterated by the modern-day Transhumanist movement (longevity, expanding the mind, reducing the need for sleep, etc etc), and some of them sound like Marvel superpowers (e.g. the ability to grow gigantic is one of Ant-Man's powers). And he foresaw the need for a way to remain and work underwater! Super imaginative.
Boyle's "growing giant" idea probably at least partly inspired Jonathan Swift's Brobdingnagians in Gulliver's Travels several decades later in 1726.. maybe the natural inverse the Lilliputians. By the 1800s Mary Shelly & Jules Verne would strike out a bit further on speculative-technologico-science fiction. Things picked up with HG Wells, and by The Atomic Age imagination literally exploded even before comic books got popular.. :-)
Asimov's 1966 Fantastic Voyage was likely more inspirational to the 1970s _Ant Man_ than Boyle. I wonder if Asimov knew of Boyle (or was derivative of other things - no dis meant to Asimov - dude was The Master).
I'd wager pretty heavily that Asimov, with a doctorate in chemistry, would have been exposed to Boyle at some point, what with the ideal gas law bearing his name.
Agreed! I would not take the other side of that bet! :-) Asimov sure liked to type words on a typewriter, too. So, he may well have even documented such.
Just to point out the perhaps obvious, though, in terms of the history of that specific idea, long shadows of things / your body / arms / head around sunrise / sunset could probably inspire this vague concept (in the embiggen direction) in people pre-historically. The idea can be re-cast as just "make such projection/optics 'more' real".
My pet peeve is when people start saying life-extension is around the corner.
No it's not, there is just a lot of hype and a lot of money behind that hype.
They cannot even cure the most basic aging diseases like Raynauds and so many others, they don't even really understand them.
They can't even detect long-covid, forget treating it and definitely not curing it.
Basically the world ends with half the population getting long-covid over the next 100 years if they don't figure it out because for all the studies there is zero true understanding and zero cures.
This is also a pet peeve of mine, but I think an even more compelling argument is simply to look at how long people lived in the past. For instance, just among the Founding Fathers - John Adams lived to 90, Sam Adams to 81, Ben Franklin to 84, John Jay to 83, Thomas Jefferson to 83, James Madison to 85. The only person that didn't make it to their 50s, Alexander Hamilton, was killed in a duel (by the current vice president, at the time, no less).
Most people know about low life expectancies in the past, but then extrapolate that to your expected age of age of death, but that's completely wrong. Low life expectancies were owing almost entirely to extremely high rates of infant mortality. If one guy lives to 80, and another dies shortly after birth - you now have a life expectancy of 40 years. The peaks of human longevity don't seem to have changed much, if at all, for millennia.
More people are able to hit those peaks, but that's generally owing to pretty simple advancements like antibiotics, as well as doing away with what were probably overtly harmful treatments. For instance George Washington died relatively young at 67. And while there is some debate on the exact cause, there's reason to believe that his treatment contributed to it. He was being leeched, which was supposed to balance out the 4 humors of the body by drawing out 'bad blood.' And people were reaching the same heights of longevity in the context of that being the bleeding edge of medicine.
When mankind had become corrupted in the period preceding the flood, God said: 'My spirit shall not abide in man for ever, for he is flesh; his days shall be a hundred and twenty years' (Gen. 6:3).
This probably dates back to the early bronze age or even the neolithic. For all the hype it seems human biology hasn't changed since the appearance of humans.
Another biblical example is Psalm 90:10: "Our days may come to seventy years, or eighty, if our strength endures; yet the best of them are but trouble and sorrow, for they quickly pass, and we fly away."
That sounds about right. Though George Washington was probably about average age for his time. I did some back of envelope math once which came to about 10 years. That is to say, absent wars and famines, through most of human history, if you made it to the age of ten, you had about equal odds to making it to 70. Today it's about 80.
Among the very long-lived in my own family, until the end and final decline, they have often never been seriously sick and have never had any major medical care in their adult lives. Such good luck seems to have also been known to happen to the ancients, if perhaps slightly less often.
People were decrepit at age in the previous century. Long-life wasn't something enjoyable.
But today everything is toxic, there is still leaded gas being sprayed in the air everywhere by propeller craft. Fracking fumes poison the water and air up to 50 miles downwind. All the freshwater fishing is toxic in the USA, there are industrial zones pollution like crazy right over where people live in density. All the food and milk (even breast milk) has forever chemicals in them now.
None of that toxicity existed previous century.
Making it to 50 or 60 without getting some kind of cancer or other fatal diseases in another generation will be impossible. And even if it's not a fatal disease there are plenty to make life miserable every day.
Maybe you’ve missed the longevity science developments in the last 5-10 years. We’ve mostly understood exactly what “aging” is, and are now on our way of nudging it in various directions with very promising results in mice. The lifespan podcast can be a nice primer to where we are right now. Though its such a fast moving field it might be out of date now already.
So while we’ve “always” been about to cure aging, this time its actually closer to real than ever before.
More over, since we understand the reasons for aging, there are things you can do to extend life that don’t involve medication. Like traditional techniques that we know work, but now we’re aware exactly why. Like fasting for example. And its not just the actual age you die that can be affected but how you feel throughout your life - e.g. how “young” you feel. And the great thing is that those techniques have been tested in various cultures around the world for centuries, so there is some actual data to back things up, and with the recent discoveries we can separate the things that actually made a difference with the pageantry and the irrelevant or bad stuff, and get you to live at the longest your genes can do, maybe even a bit longer.
The truly great thing for me is that we now apparently can measure biological age accurately without having to wait for people to die to add to a datapoint, so that we can quickly iterate, and obviously we’ll need to wait for decades to be sure and prove stuff without a shadow of doubt, but seems to me we might be closer than ever before!
We all know what to do to extend our lifespan but with 70% of the west being obese or overweight and the average westerner walking like 2500 steps a day as their sole physical activity we also know people don't care about extending their lifespan
Sure, great thing though is that bad choices other people are making don’t affect your body too much. You’re free to fast a few weeks a year / intermittently regardless of how much everyone else is eating.
Also west =/= usa, europe is not as obese and maintaining a healthy lifestyle is actually quite easy, since most of it is far from car dependent, lots of nature and healthy food options.
I’ve recently found out it’s actually way harder to do all that in south asia where a lot of the fasting traditions come from, since most people live much further away from nature (big unregulated cities) and transport options are as bad if not worse than USA
There isn't a single country in EU with under 50% overweight rate
> since most of it is far from car dependent, lots of nature and healthy food options.
We must not be living in the same world then, every mid sized / big city is the same in every country in the west, people barely walk or exercise and everybody's overweight
There is no reliable scientific evidence that fasting extends lifespans for humans who are already at a healthy weight and body composition. In fact, there is reason to expect the opposite effect due to the increased risk of sarcopenia. Studies in mice and other small animals living in safe, sterile lab cages can't be extrapolated to humans living in the wild.
Lifespan extension has been observed in studies which have restricted either calorie intake or protein intake or only methionine intake.
I have not seen any studies that clarify whether calorie restriction has any effects beyond those caused by the protein restriction included in the calorie-restricted diet and whether protein restriction has any effects beyond those caused by the methionine restriction inherent to a protein-restricted diet.
Methionine is required for the initiation of any protein synthesis, so presumably when it is deficient the global rate of protein synthesis in the body is lowered, which is what might be the cause of the extension of the lifespan.
However this may cause problems when a high rate of protein synthesis is needed, e.g. in cases of diseases or accidents.
Maybe for mice living in safe little cages where they don't have to worry about falling down the stairs and breaking a hip. Telling humans to restrict protein intake is idiotic, bordering on irresponsible. Sarcopenia is a huge risk factor for the elderly. Lack of lean muscle mass is a risk factor for metabolic disease (type-2 diabetes) and disabling falls. We need a large amount of protein (including the right mix of essential amino acids) to build and maintain muscle. And as we age the digestive system becomes less effective at absorbing protein, so we should increase consumption a bit as we age.
Aging is the breakdown of your biological functions. We can measure it therefore we can fix it. Be it with genetic engineering or with a external treatment.
Two things can be true at the same time. Long Covid is not understood well. Still, senolytics are already in the clinical trials. And we’re getting better and better at understanding the underlying molecular mechanisms or ageing.
Long COVID isn't worth worrying about for most of us. Most any serious viral infection can potentially cause post-viral fatigue syndrome and SARS-CoV-2 is nothing special. Only a small fraction of the population is susceptible, way less than "half". While we should try to find effective treatments for those patients it's hardly the end of the world. Stop being a catastrophist.
Eric Topol is an alarmist attention seeker and not taken seriously in the field. I wouldn't believe anything he says without extensive independent validation.
I’m not entirely sure I agree - the advances we’ve made in cancer treatment certainly will improve life expectancy and will improve quality of life in aging. Further a lot has been accomplished in terms of identifying amino acids and other gross systemic declines that can easily be supplemented and improve aging. A lot of aging pathways are being explored and identified. I think we are not going to see a juice box elixir of youth but a steady improvement that accelerates.
Long covid is three years old. That’s absurd to use as a comparison.
> My pet peeve is when people start saying life-extension is around the corner.
But life extension is already here! We used to be quite old by 65, now you have people completing iron mans in their 80's.
One of the biggest looming economic threats is that everyone is old and there aren't enough young'uns. That sure sounds like we're dying a lot later than we used to.
Data says we've gone from 5-20% of the population over 65yo in the 1950's to 15-75% in 2023. 36% of americans are older than 65, that's a lot.
The primary reason populations are getting older is due to lower fertility rates. A fertility rate of "N" results in a generational ratio of 1 person of the current (older) generation to (N/2) of the next (younger) generation. So a fertility rate of 2 means the current (older) generation will be exactly the same size as the subsequent (younger) generation.
But if we assume a fertility rate of 1, which is the direction most developed countries are headed, then each successive (younger) generation will be half as large as the (older) one before. This means society will be disproportionately composed of the ever-more elderly, with socioeconomic chaos, or Logan's Run, soon to follow. This would, counterintuitively, be true even if life expectancy was low. If we all died at 50 you'd just end up with a society with a larger and larger chunk of your population around 50 years old, until eventually there was no population left at all.
And, vice versa, a fertility rate of e.g. 6 (as is the case in some places in Africa), means that each successive (younger) generation will be 3x as large as the previous (older) one. So you will always have extremely low mean and median ages in this context, again regardless of whether life expectancy was high or low.
I suspect OP means life extension through directly targeting the nmolecular mechanisms of aging - "Howarth's clock", telomerases, transcription factors etc.
Not sure the satire at play here? Is it because he gets mentioned a lot when people refer to outdated science about aging, or that he himself is quite active in the media?
