Longevity Inc
foundersfund.com
foundersfund.com
I honestly can't wrap my head around this. The conversations I've tried to have with people who don't want to live longer never go anywhere, because they can't help but associate "old" (as in "high number of years") with sickness and reduced faculties, and I can't get through to them that I mean "really really old and really really healthy". Maybe it's as the article says, some people refuse to believe because they don't want to create what they see as false hope.
I myself hope to live as long as I can, ideally forever. There are so many things to do, there are so many things to learn, the universe is just too awesome for just one [current standard human] lifetime!
There are terrible experiences we can have as human beings. I'm going through one myself right now, as I work to diagnose some terrible chronic pains, while my wife is in rehab care after a pretty bad accident that has left her unable to move without help.
If we can heal 100% from these experiences, sure, longevity sounds good. But under our current medical knowledge, that is a big "If".
This living forever idea is great but so set apart from modern science it's amazing how serious some can be about it.
Live forever with your deafness or blindness from birth! Got herpes in college? It's only another infinity years of those outbreaks! If you were able to live infinite years you would ultimately wind up in some vegetative state. Between accidents dismembering people, un-curable ailments, etc.
If you actually spend any time looking at what is going on in the labs, treatments for any and all viral infections, universal cancer therapies, ways to repair some of the cell and tissue damage that causes aging, ways to repair any and all genetic defects, and more, are all on the verge and will emerge over the next decade or two.
Other than the social/resource implications (eg: there not being enough food/water/etc to feed everyone) of everybody living forever, I also think chasing immortality is a way of dealing with the anxiety that the looming nature of death induces. Maybe it is the anxiety of not existing someday that drives people to make the most of their 75 years. If everyone had an infinite amount of time, would our society advance just as rapidly? I don't know. But it's a point worth thinking about.
[1] https://www.quora.com/Given-5-000-years-and-plenty-of-resour...
1. Advancement: Having immortality would reduce the need to re-learn and re-experience everything over and over again. While the learning and experiencing process in itself is innovative (because just like life itself, it evolves through mutation between one specimen to the other), you could argue that having a 200 years old Einstein around wouldn't be bad for science.
2. Resources: with immortality, the issue of family will be very different. Being young forever, you probably wouldn't feel as great of a need to raise children (which serve, among other purposes, the assure your genetic continuity after death). A rich, self centered, immortal population would probably see a decline in its numbers.
The idea of immortality is appealing and frightening all at once. It would create a completely new society and world order, and I'm not sure it's a world I'd (forever) like to live in.
With that being said, I think wisdom is one area that (assuming the right mind-set) can continue to grow richer with age. I think it would result in much better politicians, judges, teachers and similar roles that involve application or imparting of wisdom.
There's string theory but it's still unproven stuff. I failed to see how new scientists will actually solve the problem beyond having fresh new minds to look at it from a different direction.
Perhaps we don't need old scientists to die, but just new scientists.
I totally agree that there are disadvantages to indefinite lifespans. It's just that those disadvantages are overwhelmed by the fact that aging kills 100,000 people every day. And it's not just that people die, it's that they spend decades becoming frail and less capable. They can't enjoy as many things as they used to. Their vision, hearing, and even their minds fail them.
If we lived in a world without aging, only a sadistic monster would want to inflict such suffering on others.
Edit: link
As far as the loaded question is concerned, I did sense an inflammatory tone in kobeya's response with the gas chambers question. Your response, on the other hand, is more discussion-oriented and open-minded.
Halting aging to me is science fiction, mostly of the dystopian kind.
First, eliminating aging won't make people immortal. People will still die from accidents, violence, disease, and suicide. I vaguely remember doing the math, and without aging, life expectancy would be around 300 years. (The variance in LE would be huge though, since one's age would have no effect on mortality.)
Second, arguments about overpopulation prove too much. If you're against anti-aging because of overpopulation, you should also be against reproductive freedom. After all, any couple that has more than two children is contributing to overpopulation. Anyways, there's a simple solution to overpopulation: A one child policy. Even if everyone's immortal, you'll only end up with 2x the original population. (8 billion people have 4 billion children, who have 2 billion children, who have 1 billion children...) I submit that such a policy is more humane than forcing everyone to spend decades becoming senescent before dying.
And finally: Who are we to decide for our descendants that anti-aging technologies are bad? Assuming no civilizational collapse, future generations will be smarter, wiser, and more knowledgable than we are. It's better to invent these technologies sooner so that they can choose for themselves whether or not to use them. If they agree with us, we'll have wasted some research money. But if we're wrong, we'll have condemned millions to die. Unless we're damn sure it's bad, the cost-benefit analysis favors inventing anti-aging tech.
I think that is caused by we know the end of life is closer. We do not want to take the effort to change. If we know we will live forever or much longer, I think we are more apt to be flexible and change.
To summarize a couple of the more compelling arguments in the camp _against_ extending lifespans:
1. Turnover of ideas from the older generation to a new generation with fresh ideas. This turnover is healthy and benefits our society's ability to progress.
2. Negative impact on our decision making processes. We construct a narrative of our lives and often the decisions we make are based on how they impact our personal narrative, knowing there is an 'end' to our story makes us value each decision we make, and thus make better decisions.
[1] http://intelligencesquaredus.org/debates/past-debates/item/1... (warning: video will autoplay)
Max Planck said "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."
A world where the richest live forever would be a dystopia frozen in time.
Imagine if King Henry VIII had somehow figured out immortality. Do you think humanity would be better of today, some 500 years later, with him still sticking around and laying claim to the place? Pretty unlikely, right?
Equally, what right do you or anyone else living in this time have to steal the future from the generations that are to come? They will look back at this time and wonder about our ignorance, intolerance, and small-scale thinking. And fortunately both you and I will be long dead so as to not embarrass ourselves too much with our primitive ways of thinking.
Have anything more than a nice sounding quotations? Like actual evidences?
A world where the richest live forever would be a dystopia frozen in time.
It would defeat the point of inventing anti-aging biotechnology by people not having access to said medical technology.
Also, last week's UK Remain vote is a pretty good indicator how old and young people think different. Young people today consider themselves more global, while old people are afraid to loose their national identity and pride. Both are OK, but as long as the young keep replacing the old the current path of humanity will, in a few generations perhaps, hopefully lead to global unification. On the other hand, if everyone suddenly became immortal it would put the world in stasis as the ones who currently hold the wealth (overwhelmingly the boomer generation) would cling to what they own and their ways of thinking instead of passing on the torch so to speak.
If humanity discovers immortality before we become an expanding multi-planet and post-scarcity society it will be an absolute disaster. Because immortality doesn't change human nature.
Imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.
There's also no guarantee that we have further moral progress in the future, especially when you consider the last century's two global wars.
People always love to think they're at the pinnacle. The future will be far more fantastic than either of us could possibly imagine, because it will be imagined by people who grow up learning from the mistakes we make today.
It's also important for longevity technology to be preceded by advances in food production, otherwise the poor will be exploited/starved to maintain the larger population size. Contrast Western Europe with the Soviet / Asiatic civilizations to see the stark differences when the order of these technologies is reversed. Historically, it's been catastrophic.
As to population growth, even putting aside the point that Malthusian predictions have always been wrong, and that there is more than enough food production to feed everyone in the world going forward for even quite large increases in population:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3192186/
"This study explores different demographic scenarios and population projections, in order to clarify what could be the demographic consequences of a successful biomedical war on aging. A general conclusion of this study is that population changes are surprisingly slow in their response to a dramatic life extension. For example, we applied the cohort-component method of population projections to 2005 Swedish population for several scenarios of life extension and a fertility schedule observed in 2005. Even for very long 100-year projection horizon, with the most radical life extension scenario (assuming no aging at all after age 60), the total population increases by 22% only (from 9.1 to 11.0 million)."
And the issue I'm referring to with food production is the order and distribution of the diffusion of the technology. In Europe, the agricultural revolution preceded breakthroughs in medical technology, and it worked out great. However, the rate of diffusion of medical technology to the east was greater than the diffusion of agricultural technology, which is what caused catastrophic results. Yes, they could have produced enough food, but because the rate of diffusion of the technologies was different, they didn't. We should apply this historical lesson.
In Tragedy and Hope, Carroll Quigley argues:
> importation of an element of material culture from one society to another is helpful to the importing society in the long run only if it is a) productive, b) can be made within the society itself, and c) can be fitted into the nonmaterial culture of the importing society without demoralizing it.
For longevity technology, a) is perhaps true but it's not clear that b) and c) would be for most societies. There's a calculus here worth getting right, otherwise longevity technology could end up doing more harm than good.
If there is no upper limit on population growth, you also need no upper limit on your rate of expansion.
Suspended animation could work, but now you've just admitted that you're putting a limit on reproduction, but even that ends when those people wake up and arrive somewhere.
Even allowing all that, "we'll solve this unsolved problem by solving another unsolved problem!" does not inspire a lot of confidence.
Immortality will reduce reproduction rates intrinsically; 500 years ago it was common to be married off and breeding before you were 15, now you're 'having kids young' if you start before 25, how long will people wait when they live 100s of years?.
Improving global standards of education and quality of living also slow down reproduction. Countries scoring highest in both of these metrics are often fairly stable in population, some even depend on immigration to maintain current levels.
Residual growth after these two factors are taken into account is low enough that the odd colonisation attempt or newly built orbital habitat will be ample space. And this is without even considering that we could end up living as uploads in virtual worlds long before these things become possible.
Entropy is still increasing.
For example, there's a recent discovery which shows with age we loose a particular population of naive T cells that binds to a really wide class of antigens [1]. If we were able to restore that population, I imagine it could potentially have big implications in how we age, as our immune system would keep learning forever.
SENS tries to answer lots of these questions too. I think brain plasticity or immune plasticity can be restored. It will just take time to unravel all the epigenetics, but some principles are already popping up.
And it works pretty well to use it in arguments about the subject ;)
Older years are spaced out between dealing with problems of choices made in the past (e.g. being young and poor is not a 100% bad situation, being old and poor is rather depressing, as chances of a light at the end of the tunnel are somewhat bleak) and health issues. He dedicates somewhat lengthy paragraphs to the correlation between depression and [lack of] sexual desire/performance, reverting back to the idea that our internal state (happiness/depression) is nothing but a hormonal construct.
Of course, that supposes such a level of immortality that we actually do experience anything and everything there is to experience. And we're nowhere close to that yet.
Maybe once I get to see attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. Or C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. Maybe that'd be a good time to die.
I don't hate fun and definitely think people should get out there and experience things, but wanting to live forever so you can do IT ALL feels like a form of mental hoarding.
I just see life as a much deeper gift and one that I don't want to wear out my welcome with. People are still going to die accidentally and in conflict/war and stuff right? Who would want to live through that? Who would want to watch generations of those without immortality die off. yuck.
The human mind can only witness so much pain in the world before it's kind of toast, at least that's my opinion. To think of oneself as worthy of immortality before it's available to every living human is a sickness people need to cure first. Death is the great equalizer and that is a good thing.
The rest of the venture community is beginning to wake up now - if even I, with my limited connections, am aware of a couple of groups raising new venture funds to target the biotechnologies of longevity, then I'm sure there are a bunch more I don't know about.
Expect to see a crop of companies working with the biochemistry of aging over the next few years now that deep pockets like Google, Abbvie, and the Human Longevity backers have expressed their interest with dollars. That sets up all the right signals for acquirers and other liquidity events.
Sadly I imagine that most of these companies will be garbage - either a waste of everyone's time like Elysium or a clever way of getting for-profit investors to pay for fundamental research that goes nowhere other than knowledge generation, like Sirtris.
Still, there are gems in there for those who understand the science well enough to identify high expectation value lines of research. Oisin Biotechnologies, for example, and perhaps UNITY Biotech if they choose a good therapy. Both are aiming to clear senescent cells, which has a lot of backing as an approach.