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Comment by ggambetta | Hacker News Reader

Second question in the interview: "There are a lot of people out there who actually don’t want to live longer, even if given the chance. How could someone possibly be against living longer?"

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!

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Unlocking immortality would be a fantastic scientific achievement, but I see the pursuit of immorality as being very self-centered. As Richard Muller implies in his response to this question [1], we need death to ensure a consistent advancement of civilization. As we age, we get more and more set in our ways. So we need the older generation to eventually die off so new ideas and ways of thinking can take hold and push humanity an inch forward. And the cycle goes on.

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...

I can present two counterpoints:

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.

To play devil's advocate, Einstein did a lot of work after his major breakthroughs that didn't amount to much. To steal a line from Roger Waters, he was a "spent force." To quote Einstein, "You cannot solve a problem at the level of thought that created it." This suggests that in order to smooth the wrinkles between general relativity and quantum theory, someone would have to come along with a new way of thinking.

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.

Beethoven wrote Ode to Joy long after he was dismissed as an irrelevant, deaf old man.

This suggests that in order to smooth the wrinkles between general relativity and quantum theory, someone would have to come along with a new way of thinking.

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.

Reversal test: In a world where people didn't get old, would they decide to invent aging? I'm certain they wouldn't.

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.

I agree with your point. Part of aging research is to reduce the rate of deterioration and maybe avoid it altogether. I just have a problem with the idea of living forever. Maybe add a cap on human lifespan?

Let's say we live in a world where human bodies don't age. How do you suggest enforcing that cap? Gas chambers?

I don't have an answer to your loaded question (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loaded_question).

Edit: link

The problem is that it's not really a loaded question, but a valid response to the idea of an age cap amidst indefinite life spans. How do you propose capping the life span of an adult without the use of a termination agent?

I am not proposing anything. I don't know how we can cap the lifespan of an adult. But I do know that if we have a cure for aging today, i.e. people stop dying from this day onwards, the population is only going to keep growing and that doesn't seem very sustainable. This is, of course, given that people continue to have children. Halting the production of new offspring could be interesting to witness from an evolutionary standpoint.

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.

Except it's not a loaded question at all -- administrative murder seems to be exactly what you are proposing.

Plain old accidents? No cap required.

Jeez, no, not a cap on lifespan please haha. No one can still wrap in their heads what indefinite lifespans will mean, but I'm sure adding a cap on lifespan is not something we want to do.

I would imagine that an immortal society would value individual lives less, since endless population growth eventually becomes a nuisance, and people would implement some kind of population culling. Whether old or young lives would be valued more is anyone's guess but probably the old and powerful would keep the amount of young at a manageable level. It could take the form of endless wars, blood sports, or a Logan's Run-esque age limit.

Halting aging to me is science fiction, mostly of the dystopian kind.

A few points:

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.

"As we age, we get more and more set in our ways"

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.

I will be very interesting to see what theses companies claim they expect to achieve in terms of the maximum human life span, instead of the mean. I for one don't think that we have made very much progress at all in that area, and I would be very (pleasantly) surprised if I lived to see anyone reach the age of say, 150 in my lifetime. On the other hand her prediction of being able to extend many peoples life span from say 80 to 100 doesn't strike me as too far fetched because it's basically moving the mean life span up, but not really moving the maximum up.

Brain plasticity is high for young people and significantly drops after around age 30. Immortalizing petrified minds seems like it could lead to heavy stagnation. Death allows room for evolution to take place.

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.

So you fix brain plasticity as well. The point of the exercise is identify and revert changes, and loss of synaptic/neural plasticity with age is well known and well studied already.

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)."

That'd certainly be ideal, but seems like a more difficult problem which would probably take longer to solve. So my concern would be old, healthy bodies hitting the market without plastic minds. The lag time before brain plasticity breakthroughs is still a problem.

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.

Until we solve the problem of entropy(doubtful), we'll have to decide between children and old people.

Not in the near future, as long as we also get effective space travel...

Cool, so we just have to crack the light barrier, too, while we're at it. No problem!

Not at all. Generation ships, suspended animation, there are plenty of other, more possible options than superluminal travel.

Immortality + reproduction means population rate expands at a blistering pace. You cannot build generation ships big enough, and you will fill up every habitable scrap of the solar system, including artificial habitats.

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.

You're running afoul of the pitfalls of static analysis. Humans don't have an immutable reproduction rate of X% every Y years.

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.

That doesn't solve the problem. All you do is move the problem beyond our star.

Entropy is still increasing.

Not only brain plasticity. Biologically, I think many systems in our body stop being flexible.

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.

[1] http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/06/17/059535

Intelligence Squared[1] did a debate on this topic. It's definitely worth listening to.

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)

Most people who are worried about living longer have experienced trauma, pain, and illness. It is not just a matter of preventing normal aging. You need to be able to fully heal from traumatic injury and illness. You need to be able to truly diagnose and correct the sources of chronic pain. And you need to be able to heal emotionally as well as physically.

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".

I was thinking this as I read through this thread;

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.

It is quite amazing to me that someone can seriously suggest that a scientific community with the biotechnology to control aging as a chronic medical condition would somehow lack the biotechnology to defeat inherited and infectious disease.

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.

That is easy to say... but there are still chronic pain cases where people do not even have a diagnosis of what is wrong. There are blood disorders for which the recommended treatment is still bleeding the patient. Chemotherapy is basically poisoning people and hoping they survive but the cancer does not. All of these things will hopefully one day seem barbaric and we will have better answers. But we are absolutely not on the verge of having all the answers.

Immortality will mean the stagnation of humanity.

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.

There are probably ways of solving these problems that are better than killing everybody.

The risk is too great. To give humanity immortality at this immature age would be like giving a cave man a fully functional nuclear bomb. No matter how useful nuclear power is to us in this day and age.

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.

Sure. See slavery, interracial marriages, racism in general, LGBT acceptance etc. The world is now more liberal not because people suddenly saw the light and became accepting, but because old people who would never accept these things fortunately keep dying off. A significant percentage of each new generation (not everyone of course) then just doesn't see what the hubub was all about, and they accept it as normal. Progress.

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.

Societies aren't static, even when everyone is immortal.

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.

The last 10 years has seen major global progress, let alone the last century, wars included.

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.

If phrasing it as living longer isn't working, don't phrase it that way. Maybe phrase it as staying healthy or attractive longer? People have a very strong revealed preference for those things, judging by the amount of money they spend on products that claim to provide them but don't actually work.

I feel like the "so many things to do" thing is weird and not human. It feels to me like the illusion of choice one is presented with when they enter a supermarket and have 30 brands of the same thing.

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.

This reminds me of the episode where the Q on Star Trek wanting to commit suicide because they were bored of being immortal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_Wish_(Star_Trek:_Voyager...

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.

Hopefully we will forget earlier experiences, if we ever become anything near immortal.

French author/philosopher Michel Houellebecq dedicated a rather [unnecessarily] lengthy science fiction novel "The Possibility of an Island" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Possibility_of_an_Island to this subject, with the grand idea being presented that out of all years humans mainly enjoy a tiny segment of it - when they're young, as it's defined by hormonal overabundance and "seeking oneself".

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.

I have once written some thoughts on immortality (http://melvinmt.com/the-immortality-paradox) and I came to the conclusion that while we basically always act like we're immortal in our whole decision making and lifestyle, it is mortality that allows us to advance humanity as a whole.

I am also confused by this. I found that the absurdity of seeing death as a necessary thing to be captured really well in Nick Bostrom's The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant http://www.nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html

And it works pretty well to use it in arguments about the subject ;)

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