There’s another super-important piece of aging puzzle revealed in a recent paper: with a lot more observations, the mortality hazard of naked mole-rats failed to increase with age. One picture is worth a thousand words.
Biotech/LongevityIt is already known that moe-rats are really, really, cancer resistant. So now we are just seeing the obvious outcome of a species that rarely get cancer at all. One could argue that ageing is just mini-cancers that get halted in time before humans notice, but happens constantly and wears your body down.
The thing is, mutation is literally how evolution works. So flaws in replication is not inevitable, it is just evolutionary beneficial to the species. But for the individual who doesn't want to die, mutation is bad.
It is very encouraging that there are already organisms in nature that have overcome aging. But if they do not age, then for what reason are they dead, and why have no individuals been identified that have lived for hundreds of years?
for what reason are they dead
They either get eaten or their parachute fails to open.
What is that a reference to?
Well, they aren't immune to cancer, just highly highly resistant. But also, not biologically aging doesn't mean biologically eternal. Even if one never ages, things can still wear on the body over time, even a youthful body doesn't have the ability to endlessly rejuvenate (which is why rejuvenation is key to immortality even if we find out how to stop the biological clock. Eventually we'd just wear down.). This varies between species of course, but a species ability to heal is separate from biological aging.
They also aren't immune to ever other possible way animals die. Injury, predation, disease, starvation, etc. And the afformentioned wear-and-tear makes one more susceptible to these things over time. And if one of these things happens, but doesn't manage to kill you, it makes it less likely for you to survive the next one. Particularly in the case of wild animals, humans would have a pretty distinct advantage in this regard if we could stop biological aging at least.
Living for hundreds of years as an animal requires being inherently very very hardy (physically hardy and a general resistance to disease) to overcome the general hardships of life, and an environment that is conducive for long life, keeps you healthy and stimulated, and doesn't harshly punish less capable, older specimens. It's why we got old ass trees, they're naturally hard AF, much better at healing from minor injuries, and have far fewer environmental vulnerabilities than we do (once fully grown). It's just hard to make it as a squishy, vulnerable animal.
In humans for instance, barring other medical advances, we'd still have people dying from things like heart disease due to genetics, lifestyle, and poor diet. It'd be less prevalent, but the build-up of factors that lead to things like heart disease and strokes would still happen, as they are only exacerbated by age, not caused by it. So even a bunch of folks eternally in their 20s could develop hypertension. And there are other examples of things that would weed people out over time despite the lack of biological aging outside of the obvious things like violent death or infectious disease.
So the requirement for biological immortality is becoming a toothy testicle ?
Dont forget eusocial.
I feel it’s a bit of a monkeys paw deal.
You want to live forever? Fine, but you have to do it as a hairless lump of ugliness stuck underground…
Important to point out that a constant (age independent) hazard function will still kill you eventually, there are just no ages of particularly high risk. Which is obviously quite different from humans.
Fun fact: constant hazard means that the survival time follows an exponential probability distribution, which is remarkable for being an example of a "memoryless" process: your expected remaining lifetime is the same no matter how long you've already lived.