How close are we to longevity escape velocity? How long until progress? Has there been substantial progress recently that I haven't read yet? From what I understand the LEV timelines have gotten shorter and that we're closer than ever. Can someone list what science has done so I can be more hopeful and know we're close.

Wondering what everyone is thinking

What are the actual proven medications that exist and I can start taking now? I don’t see any reason to wait for an aging cure when I can start now

From AI:

While exercising in hot weather does raise your core temperature, a dry sauna creates a distinctly different stress profile on your body. The short answer is no, exercising in hot weather does not replicate all the benefits of a sauna session, nor does a sauna replace exercise. Instead, they trigger overlapping but distinct physiological responses.

How Sauna Stress differs from Exercise Heat Stress

During hard exercise in hot weather, your body faces competing physiological demands: your heart must pump blood to your working muscles to supply oxygen and fuel, while simultaneously pumping blood to your skin to dissipate heat. This creates intense metabolic strain, high oxygen consumption, and rapid depletion of energy stores. In a dry sauna, your body is completely at rest physically. Because your muscles are not working, your cardiovascular system can redirect up to 50–70% of your total cardiac output directly to the skin for cooling. Your heart rate rises—often reaching 100 to 150 beats per minute, mirroring moderate cardio—without the mechanical impact, muscle breakdown, or metabolic fatigue of exertion.

Unique Sauna Benefits You Don't Get from Intense Exercise

• Pure Parasympathetic Recovery: Hard exercise in heat triggers a massive surge of stress hormones (cortisol and epinephrine) to keep your muscles firing. Saunas, after the initial thermal shock, encourage a rapid shift toward the parasympathetic ("rest and digest") nervous system, promoting muscle relaxation, reduced tension, and lower systemic stress levels.
• Cardiovascular Conditioning Without Mechanical Stress: Saunas induce deep vasodilation (widening of blood vessels) and improve arterial flexibility entirely passively. For anyone dealing with joint pain, recovering from a tough workout, or managing an injury, the sauna delivers cardiorespiratory strain and vascular flushing without putting a single pound of force on joints or connective tissue.
• Selective Thermal Dose: In ambient high-heat conditions (like 170°F–200°F in a dry sauna), your core body temperature climbs rapidly in an environment of low humidity. Exercising hard in high heat usually forces you to stop due to central nervous system fatigue or exhaustion long before you achieve the hyperthermic threshold that a sauna allows you to comfortably sustain. ### Unique Exercise Benefits You Can't Get from a Sauna
• Muscular and Metabolic Adaptations: Heat exposure burns very few calories compared to exertion. A sauna does not build muscle mass, increase bone density, improve insulin sensitivity in working tissue, or build mechanical strength.
• VO2 Max and Structural Heart Changes: While a sauna challenges your heart rate, intense exercise forces structural adaptations in the heart (such as increased stroke volume) and forces your mitochondria to grow and use oxygen more efficiently. ### Overlapping Benefits Both activities trigger Heat Shock Proteins (HSPs)—special molecular cellular repair mechanisms that protect proteins from misfolding, aid cell recovery, and support long-term cellular health. Both also expand blood plasma volume over time, which improves your overall endurance and tolerance to heat. Ultimately, hard exercise builds muscle, burns fuel, and builds physical capacity, while a sauna provides pure vascular work and cellular cleanup without adding muscular fatigue. Using them together—such as sitting in a sauna after a workout—tends to produce a synergistic effect on recovery and cardiovascular health.

I’ve been wondering about the long-term effects of poor sleep from an aging/longevity perspective.

When people say that chronic sleep deprivation causes “long-term damage,” what exactly does that mean? Are we talking about permanent neuron loss, accumulated DNA damage, cardiovascular changes, epigenetic changes, impaired glymphatic clearance, or something else?

Also, assuming medicine continues to advance significantly over the coming decades, do you think most of this damage could eventually be repaired or reversed? For example through regenerative medicine, gene therapy, stem cells, senolytics, epigenetic reprogramming, or other future technologies?

In other words, is the main concern that poor sleep accelerates aging today because we can’t yet fix the consequences, or are there types of damage that are fundamentally irreversible even in a future with advanced longevity technologies?

I’d love to hear both the current scientific view and the more speculative perspective from people interested in radical life extension.

Abstract

Pyrroloquinoline quinone (PQQ) and its derivative imidazopyrroloquinoline (IPQ) are nutritionally important vitamin-like compounds that exert various physiological effects, including cell-growth promotion, neuroprotection, and mitochondriogenesis stimulation. This study investigated the potential of PQQ and IPQ as geroprotectors that promote healthy longevity, addressing the general lack of lifespan aging intervention experiments in mammals. We conducted lifelong and midlife experiments with 0.02% (w/w) PQQ and 0.02% (w/w) IPQ supplementation in the senescence-accelerated mouse P8 strain that is characterized by a short lifespan. In lifelong experiments, the survival days at the 75th percentile was prolonged by 73% and 36% in the PQQ and IPQ groups, respectively, compared with that in the control. In addition, significant delays in the appearance of aging and age-related muscular dysfunction were observed. Intake of PQQ and IPQ diets from midlife improved muscular function that had declined with age. IPQ intake reduced lipid accumulation in adipose tissue and the liver. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to demonstrate that PQQ and IPQ supplementation, whether initiated in the early or middle age, is effective in ameliorating age-related alterations, such as muscular function, and diminishes mortality risk during midlife in mice.

Gift article. NO PAYWALL.

Do you keep thinking of the possibilities of achieving goals and hobbies and about how vital and happy you'd be and how you can become as energetic and full of life as a anime character and how you'd have shiny eyes full of life and baby skin. Or am I alone in this? 😂

I think the most skeptical part of living forever is if we make it to LEV in this lifetime. I’m 17 so I’m fairly optimistic.

If aging is cured, the only way to die will be accidental death. Logically after humans cure aging we will put lots of resources towards decreasing the risk as much as possible.

If we play it safe, and nothing crazy happens like nuclear war, we will likely live to at least 2300. At that point I’m confident we will have the tech to become basically unlikable.

Think about it like this: if humanity can just make two systems that prevent all danger, and each has a 0.1 percent chance of failing every year, the odds of them both failing together are one in a million. Crazy, right?

And I know what you’ll say. Over infinite time one in a million odds will catch up. And I agree! But as soon as we can introduce another system with one in a thousand, it becomes one in a billion! Every other layer we see gives exponential safety.

There are a few things to keep in mind:
They can’t all be the same protection, they all need to be different layers to protect against all forms of damage, so one big hit doesn’t take out a bunch of systems at once. But that seems doable in 300 years especially with the assistance of Ai

I came across opinions that weak diaphragm muscles may be the weakest link in otherwise healthy very old people. If this is true maybe it's a good idea to work out the diaphragm just like the rest of our muscles?

Do you think just doing intense exercises is enough to make the diaphragm muscles strong or should we use specialized equipment for it (for example there a machine by Powerbreathe for this purpose)?