When you're young, you expect to have a great deal of time ahead of you. You haven't spent much time yet, and so what remains seems like a fortune in comparison - enough to squander. Think of the way that wealthy children so often turn out despite the best efforts of their parents, their view of the value of money and economic common sense poisoned by having grown up with access to a great deal of money. But before you look down on them or pity them, think of your own situation with respect to the expected time remaining in your life. Your viewpoint on time, life, and the future was poisoned by having what appeared to be a great deal of remaining time, far more than it was easy to compare against what little you had lived to date ... so you valued time poorly.

We are evolved to squander the resources that shower upon us and gather in their piles, while spending a great deal of care, thought, and worry on resources that are scarce. So we care little about air, not so very much more about water, and not at all about time when we are young. But that stock of time diminishes as you grow old, and because there is less of it, it becomes more valuable. This is one reason why people are willing to spend greatly on medical technologies at the end of their lives - and here I am talking only of willingness, not any need to spend more. Aging brings with it degeneration and disease, and the cost of remaining alive and able to enjoy life accelerates with the passing years: the old spend increasingly more than the young because they have to in order to stay in the game. Note that "have to in order to stay in the game" is not the same thing at all as "willing to."

To be old is to live in in the mirror image of youth: time and no money has turned into money and no time. The value of money to an old person is typically less than it is to a young person, and that is nothing more than a measure of how much of the stuff you have: old people are typically much wealthier. The converse is true of remaining time, of which the young have a great deal, whilst the old are time-poor; thus the exchange rate between the time and money is radically different at the opposite ends of life. A young person will give away an hour to gain a small number of dollars, while an old person will spend ten times that sum to gain another hour. A cynic might suggest there is some form of arbitrage to found in this truth of human nature. If you like thinking along these lines, you might look back at past ruminations on the nature of wealth in a past post.

Time is everything. How much have time you spent reading this far? Could you have been doing something more useful, more optimal from your perspective? We make these small evaluations constantly, because time is the most valuable thing we have.

There are always people in the academic world who'd rather spend time looking at factors other than the obvious ones when it comes to aging and economic activity, of course:

Low opportunity cost, weak influence of quality of life in the face of death, the social value of life extension to others, shifting psychological reference points, and hope have been proposed as factors to explain why people apparently perceive marginal life extension at the end of life to have disproportionately greater value than its length. Such value may help to explain why medical spending to extend life at the end of life is as high as it is, and the various factors behind this value might provide normative rationale for that spending.

Upon critical analysis, however, most of these factors turn out to be questionable or incompletely conceived; this includes hope, which is examined here in special detail. These factors help to explain complexity and nuance in the normative issues, but they do not provide adequate justification for spending as high as it often is. In any case, two additional factors must be added to the descriptive explanation of high spending, and they throw its normative justification into further doubt: the "insurance effect" and provider-created demand. Overall, the perception of especially high value of life at the end of life provides some normative justification for high spending, but seldom strong justification, and not for spending as high as it often is.

The trouble begins with a person deciding that an entire clade of people are making systematically incorrect assessments of value despite having access to complete and correct data. Value is subjective, not objective, and it shouldn't be at all surprising that at the end of life there are radical shifts in the value placed by a dying person upon money and time. Note that I don't say "perceived value" - that phrase is just a subtle way of suggesting that the author is correct and the members of the clade are systematically wrong, which is in turn a subtle way of suggesting that value can be objective.

If you have bad or incomplete data, the value you ascribe will probably prove to be unhelpful if you act upon it, but it is still your subjective value: there is no "wrong" or "right" here, just a record of the outcome of a series of actions. People have a way of saying that you valued something wrongly if, by your actions based on that value, you manage to do yourself harm, economic or otherwise. But that really isn't a helpful way to look at subjective value: it is what it is, at any given moment. Either way, I'd argue that when it comes to life, longevity, and medical technology, there's a lot of reliance on bad and incomplete data taking place these days, given the possibilities presented by longevity science and the level of public ignorance of those possibilities. A fraction of people alive today will have the opportunity to live for centuries or longer, but consideration of that possibility is almost entirely absent from their economic calculations.

I suppose I should also mention that this short discussion has nothing much to say in connection with the horrible state of medical economics in the US. Participation in the heavily regulated marketplace for medical technology and services is a pit of horrors for both old and young: everyone suffers from the effects of regulation, lack of accountability for costs incurred, and the general miasma of government-induced systems failure. So arguments based on differential willingness to spend on medicine by age stand apart from that mess.

The neat endpoint to this post, if you want one, is that it can't hurt to think on the value you place on the time remaining in your life expectancy, and to look at whether you are basing both expectation and value on factual data.

When you're young, you expect to have a great deal of time ahead of you. You haven't spent much time yet, and so what remains seems like a fortune in comparison - enough to squander. Think of the way that wealthy children so often turn out despite the best efforts of their parents, their view of the value of money and economic common sense poisoned by having grown up with access to a great deal of money. But before you look down on them or pity them, think of your own situation with respect to the expected time remaining in your life. Your viewpoint on time, life, and the future was poisoned by having what appeared to be a great deal of remaining time, far more than it was easy to compare against what little you had lived to date ... so you valued time poorly.

We are evolved to squander the resources that shower upon us and gather in their piles, while spending a great deal of care, thought, and worry on resources that are scarce. So we care little about air, not so very much more about water, and not at all about time when we are young. But that stock of time diminishes as you grow old, and because there is less of it, it becomes more valuable. This is one reason why people are willing to spend greatly on medical technologies at the end of their lives - and here I am talking only of willingness, not any need to spend more. Aging brings with it degeneration and disease, and the cost of remaining alive and able to enjoy life accelerates with the passing years: the old spend increasingly more than the young because they have to in order to stay in the game. Note that "have to in order to stay in the game" is not the same thing at all as "willing to."

To be old is to live in in the mirror image of youth: time and no money has turned into money and no time. The value of money to an old person is typically less than it is to a young person, and that is nothing more than a measure of how much of the stuff you have: old people are typically much wealthier. The converse is true of remaining time, of which the young have a great deal, whilst the old are time-poor; thus the exchange rate between the time and money is radically different at the opposite ends of life. A young person will give away an hour to gain a small number of dollars, while an old person will spend ten times that sum to gain another hour. A cynic might suggest there is some form of arbitrage to found in this truth of human nature. If you like thinking along these lines, you might look back at past ruminations on the nature of wealth in a past post.

Time is everything. How much have time you spent reading this far? Could you have been doing something more useful, more optimal from your perspective? We make these small evaluations constantly, because time is the most valuable thing we have.

There are always people in the academic world who'd rather spend time looking at factors other than the obvious ones when it comes to aging and economic activity, of course:

Low opportunity cost, weak influence of quality of life in the face of death, the social value of life extension to others, shifting psychological reference points, and hope have been proposed as factors to explain why people apparently perceive marginal life extension at the end of life to have disproportionately greater value than its length. Such value may help to explain why medical spending to extend life at the end of life is as high as it is, and the various factors behind this value might provide normative rationale for that spending.

Upon critical analysis, however, most of these factors turn out to be questionable or incompletely conceived; this includes hope, which is examined here in special detail. These factors help to explain complexity and nuance in the normative issues, but they do not provide adequate justification for spending as high as it often is. In any case, two additional factors must be added to the descriptive explanation of high spending, and they throw its normative justification into further doubt: the "insurance effect" and provider-created demand. Overall, the perception of especially high value of life at the end of life provides some normative justification for high spending, but seldom strong justification, and not for spending as high as it often is.

The trouble begins with a person deciding that an entire clade of people are making systematically incorrect assessments of value despite having access to complete and correct data. Value is subjective, not objective, and it shouldn't be at all surprising that at the end of life there are radical shifts in the value placed by a dying person upon money and time. Note that I don't say "perceived value" - that phrase is just a subtle way of suggesting that the author is correct and the members of the clade are systematically wrong, which is in turn a subtle way of suggesting that value can be objective.

If you have bad or incomplete data, the value you ascribe will probably prove to be unhelpful if you act upon it, but it is still your subjective value: there is no "wrong" or "right" here, just a record of the outcome of a series of actions. People have a way of saying that you valued something wrongly if, by your actions based on that value, you manage to do yourself harm, economic or otherwise. But that really isn't a helpful way to look at subjective value: it is what it is, at any given moment. Either way, I'd argue that when it comes to life, longevity, and medical technology, there's a lot of reliance on bad and incomplete data taking place these days, given the possibilities presented by longevity science and the level of public ignorance of those possibilities. A fraction of people alive today will have the opportunity to live for centuries or longer, but consideration of that possibility is almost entirely absent from their economic calculations.

I suppose I should also mention that this short discussion has nothing much to say in connection with the horrible state of medical economics in the US. Participation in the heavily regulated marketplace for medical technology and services is a pit of horrors for both old and young: everyone suffers from the effects of regulation, lack of accountability for costs incurred, and the general miasma of government-induced systems failure. So arguments based on differential willingness to spend on medicine by age stand apart from that mess.

The neat endpoint to this post, if you want one, is that it can't hurt to think on the value you place on the time remaining in your life expectancy, and to look at whether you are basing both expectation and value on factual data.

Here is another piece in the exceedingly complicated puzzle of metabolism and longevity, touching on some other pieces that have shown up here before, such as adenylate cyclase: "Despite the various roles of regulator of G protein signaling (RGS) protein in the G protein signaling pathway that have been defined, the function of RGS has not been characterized in longevity signaling pathways. We found that reduced expression of Loco, a Drosophila RGS protein, resulted in a longer lifespan of flies with stronger resistance to stress, higher MnSOD activity and increased fat content. In contrast, overexpression of the loco gene shortened the fly lifespan significantly, lowered stress resistance and reduced fat content, also indicating that the RGS domain containing GTPase-activating protein (GAP) activity is related to the regulation of longevity. Interestingly, expressional changes of yeast RGS2 and rat RGS14, homologs to the fly Loco, also affected oxidative stress resistance and longevity in the respective species. It is known that Loco [reduces] activity of adenylate cyclase (AC) and RGS14 interacts with activated H-Ras and Raf-1 kinases, which subsequently inhibits ERK phosphorylation. We propose that Loco/RGS14 protein may regulate stress resistance and longevity as an activator in AC-cAMP-PKA pathway and/or as a molecular scaffold that sequesters active Ras and Raf from Ras*GTP-Raf-MEK-ERK signaling pathway. Consistently, our data showed that downregulation of Loco [leads to] higher resistance to the oxidative stress."

Link: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21776417

DNA methylation is proposed to be a good biomarker of aging, and here researchers show that calorie restriction slows the progression of DNA methylation in the hippocampus - continuing the expected trend of calorie restriction slowing near every identified biological change that occurs with aging: "Aberrant DNA methylation patterns have been linked to molecular and cellular alterations in the aging brain. Caloric restriction (CR) and upregulation of antioxidants have been proposed as interventions to prevent or delay age-related brain pathology. Previously, we have shown in large cohorts of aging mice, that age-related increases in DNA methyltransferase 3a (Dnmt3a) immunoreactivity in the mouse hippocampus were attenuated by CR, but not by overexpression of superoxide dismutase 1 (SOD1). Here, we investigated age-related alterations of 5-methylcytidine (5-mC), a marker of DNA methylation levels, in a hippocampal subregion-specific manner. Examination of 5-mC immunoreactivity in 12- and 24-month-old wild type (WT) mice on control diet, mice overexpressing SOD1 on control diet, wild type mice on CR, and SOD1 mice on CR, indicated an age-related increase in 5-mC immunoreactivity in the hippocampal dentate gyrus, CA3, and CA1-2 regions, which was prevented by CR but not by SOD1 overexpression. ... These findings suggest a crucial role for DNA methylation in hippocampal aging and in the mediation of the beneficial effects of CR on aging."

Link: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21764481

To my eyes, Chronosphere is chiefly important as an insider's personal view of the 40-year history of modern cryonics movements. For decades, people have been working on the indefinite low temperature storage of the deceased, aiming to preserve the fine structure of the brain that encodes the mind's data. There is, to my eyes, still far from enough of a recounting of that history, the lessons learned, and efforts made - the more memoirs and personal accounts presented online the better. So here are pointers to a couple of recent Chronosphere posts on what went on, back in the day, when cryonics was a younger initiative, both of which are liberally scattered with photographs:

In Camera Historia: Cryonics Institute Facility, 1978

On 21 March, 1978 the Cryonics Institute (CI) acquired their first facility, a storefront building in the Detroit Metro area. The CI building was the first wholly owned (cash purchase) patient storage facility in the history of cryonics, and remains one of only two in the world today. ... As was the case with all cryonics organizations' initial facilities, the CI facility was small and cramped. It also lacked the ceiling height necessary for upright (open at the top) cryostats and this limitation was an additional impetus for CI to develop the fiberglass-epoxy resin type of cryostat (using perlite and low vacuum insulation) that they currently use to store their patients.

The Armories of the Latter Day Laputas, Part 7

The Alcor Life Extension Foundation, Inc. (Alcor) and its brother for-profit organization, Manrise Corporation (Manrise), were founded in 1972 by Fred and Linda Chamberlain ... The Chamberlains had previously been members of the Cryonics Society of California (CSC) and both had served as officers of CSC. When they became suspicious about the integrity of CSC's financial and cryogenic patient care operations and were unable to obtain answers to their questions, they left CSC and founded Alcor/Manrise. As was the model at the time, Alcor was the 501c3 non-profit organization tasked with accepting cryonics patients under the Uniform Anatomical Gift Act (UAGA) and acting as their custodian and advocate until such time as reanimation might become possible.

If this were a better world then cryonics or a similar industry based on plastination would be large and well known, and a majority of people would be spared the oblivion of the grave. We don't live in that world, evidently, and is a sad statement on vision, priorities, and human nature that cryonics remains a small industry.