The fight to cheat death is heating up | Hacker News Reader

The fight to cheat death is heating up

economist.com

175 pointsedward211 comments

I don't think that "I" from 10 years into the future is the same as the "I" from 10 years ago. The accumulation of small changes is like a "small death" that comes every day. We forget most of everything, we are thrust in different situations, and those situations make ourselves effectively different because they trigger our abilities in a different way.

Fighting death is more about the immortality of the body. The mind is recycled much sooner. The "I" is created by the mind anew every moment. Even sleep is like a mini-death, because we "don't exist" for a short time, then we continue existing again.

But, of course, if we actually get to cheat death and live forever, a new kind of life opens up. If we can back up our minds and then upload them into a young body or in a virtual reality, then we can also be more like a character in a game. We could have many "lives", we could have "save checkpoints", we could restore from previous points, or fork and create more of us. In fact life would not be the same as it was during "linear life". Would a meta-life such as this be the same as immortality? I don't think it would. It would be a completely different thing altogether.

Or you know the universe is a simulation and you and I are already temporary characters.

The notion of our reality being an emulation feels analogous to the "we're first; we're few; we're fucked" notion of whether there's alien life. Someone has to create the emulator, if an emulator indeed exists (at any given time). Maybe that will be us.

Sure, but that doesn't mean we live in base reality. Simulations running simulations!

Something, something... Rick and Morty

Let's say that you believe (or know) that. What difference does it make? You still have no access to the base reality, and you still have to make your life around the rules of this one. In fact, how does it change a single thing and/or emotion in your life?

For example: I go to work and do some project there. Let's say that I now found out that there is a base reality, and my work won't matter in the base reality, that there it's all like a video game. It doesn't change anything for me, does it? I only do the work because I enjoy doing things with my mind, because I enjoy the experience. I also know that my work will cause changes in this reality (I have a lot of past evidence for this), like give me a paycheck or change some part of the world in some way, and so I can plan according to this and how the things I do will affect other parts of the reality, including other people. All that still happens even if it's a simulation.

So why would you ever want to even think about if it's a simulation or not? There is still no way to go to the "base" reality.

Also, if it's simulation, wouldn't you want to make your life here longer? (Or are you just assuming that when you die, all your experience will somehow travel with you into some base reality that you have no way of accessing now? )

>Let's say that you believe (or know) that. What difference does it make? You still have no access to the base reality, and you still have to make your life around the rules of this one. In fact, how does it change a single thing and/or emotion in your life?

Would be amazing if it was a simulation. You would be able to hack this reality, like in movie The Matrix, and perform hacks that seems like miracles, for example, opening the sea, walking on water, and turning water into wine.

>Also, if it's simulation, wouldn't you want to make your life here longer?

If it's a simulation, you can just restore your HP.

Derek Parfit (a philosopher), in "Reasons and Persons", considers many of the cases you hint at, as well as few more tricky ones (such as progressively replacing your brain cells with someone else's, or splitting someone's brain [1] and putting the two halves in different bodies). He ultimately argues for two points:

1. Personal identity is basically just psychological continuity (physical continuity doesn't matter). That psychological continuity needs to be "non-branching" -- identity has to be one-to-one, and so if there's a clone of you walking around, it makes more sense to say neither of you are "you" than to say "both" are.

2. As the weirdness in (1), suggests, Parfit doesn't think personal identity matters very much. Self-interest (as opposed to altruism) seems a little silly when you linger on who exactly you care about, especially in the face of blended-brains and split-brains.

If we were immortal but had finite memory, Parfit would argue that personal identity is more of a sliding window. As we forgot our ancient memories, we would lose touch with that part of ourselves, eventually becoming totally distinct persons over time. Which, of course, sounds a lot like the actual human condition.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain

Point 1 there sounds like nothing but convention.

A few weeks ago I wrote, what I thought was a simple comment about how I use fasting/calorie restriction that ended up getting 210 votes and causing a lot of differing opinions as to its health benefits.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12188577

Aubrey De Grey is someone who has done alot of work in this area and I recommend watching his TED talk.

https://www.ted.com/talks/aubrey_de_grey_says_we_can_avoid_a...

Like almost all science in this area, nothing is really proven to work yet.

You mentioned potentially lower cancer risk, is there any other reason you fast 6pm - noon next day?

I've done intermittent fasting before, which is basically the same as what you said you do every day, but not sure if you call it that. Like, do you feel better during the day? I did it just to help lose weight, but would be interested in doing it again if there are other possible benefits.

Can you please describe how you do your 3 day fast? There were similar questions to your comment on the prior HN thread that were likely missed and went unanswered. Thank you!

In case anyone was wondering what the "Seven ways we age" are and doesn't want to sit through a TED video, you can find them here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aubrey_de_Grey#The_seven_types...

The BBC documentary Eat, Fast and Live Longer by Michael Mosley also discusses the benefits of fasting:

https://vimeo.com/103656060

>Like almost all science in this area, nothing is really proven to work yet.

That's why nobody should really buy into these fad diets until such a time as one is rigorously shown to be beneficial.

I read The Dying Man by Damon Knight when I was a teenager and it had a profound affect on me at the time in regards to thoughts about immortality (it would be interesting to read it again, it would probably seem less significant now).

It is not at all dystopian which puts it out-of-style but it paints an interesting picture of a far-future where the population has settled and immortality is essentially the norm. I recommend picking it up as a quick short read.

Personally I find myself being more cynical about these kinds of things because I think all reality this will not be a good thing in the near future for all but a very small set of people who will (without changes to the system) be able to maintain wealth and control for generations and further imbalance our already imbalanced world.

My real hope is that this increased understanding can lead to increased quality of life for all people if not widespread immortality, but given our ability to disregard the suffering of other people already it seems unlikely. Those of us living in the first world will probably continue to lead longer, more comfortable lives at the expense of or disregarding that of the rest of the world.

Forget achieving immortality - if we manage to extend average lifespan to even 120 years of age then almost all of our socioeconomic systems break down and we have to more or less rebuild society from the ground up.

Hey on the bright side it's not like any of our existing socioeconomic systems are great. Last I checked we did not live in a utopia.

Not utopia compared to what?

My great grandmother had to have 8 kids so that she could have 4 or 5 adult children. That was less than 100 years ago.

My grand parents were the children of subsistence farmers without running water or electricity. They went to high school, worked in factories, and could get broadcast TV in their living room. Electricity and running water became a base default.

My parents work in an office pushing papers around. Even the society of their youth seems alien in its antiquatedness of both social mores and amenities.

I get paid to think things and can reasonably expect to live essentially disease free until my 70's. Achieving 90 in relatively good health and vitality doesn't seem out of the question.

Seems pretty utopic to me. What not-utopia are you talking about?

EDIT: Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo Over the past 200 years, the difference between 1st world and 3rd world has all but vanished. We still have a ways to go, but no utopia is perfect. Even in the movies.

Sex trafficking, international terrorism, homelessness, racism, crushing poverty, wage theft, mass shootings, income inequality, food deserts...are you for real?

Try walking alone unarmed across any city late at night from any era over 100 years ago and you took your life in your hands. Just because mass media is bringing you stories of the miseries of the world does not mean they are more prevalent. The majority of the world has been lifted out of poverty in the past 200 years to something unrecognizable and the pockets of turmoil that still remain will be fixed as time goes on.

Delightfully faith-based assertions regarding the future. You'll note we were discussing the near total lack of semblance between modern society and any number of utopian ideals. Apologetics aren't making the comparison any more flattering.

and the people that grow your coffee beans? How long do they live for? There is a tension between believing that a rising tide will lift all boats (eventually, someday) and that part of the prosperity of much of the West is directly built upon the back of a system that disenfranchises most of the developing world -- depending upon it for cheap and disposable labor, waste dumping sites, etc.

The people who grow my coffee beans also live much better than they used to. We're enjoying a before unseen period of peace and prosperity. Globally.

Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo

Over the past 200 years, the difference between 1st world and 3rd world has all but vanished. We still have a ways to go, but no utopia is perfect. Even in the movies.

I take your point, and it is one interpretation. There is another interpretation as well. Here, I'll trade you videos. From a now-ethereum venture capitalist, so not just a hippie dippie leftist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkQCy-UrLYw

it's short, ten minutes

Compared to Star Trek. That we are doing better than previous generations only inspires confidence that we could do even better in the future.

We are better than we were the generation before. Big deal. That's precisely the point: we aren't at the end game, there is still far ahead to push forward to.

>I get paid to think things and can reasonably expect to live essentially disease free until my 70's. Achieving 90 in relatively good health and vitality doesn't seem out of the question.

No, you'll probably start suffering from diseases of affluence well below that. Sooner or later, heart disease, lung disease, diabetes, cancer, and pals crop up among basically everyone who doesn't carefully optimize their lifestyle to maximize health.

In fact, the same principle applies to most of the rest of your lifestyle: it all seems very nice because you're discounting the incredibly careful and difficult-to-duplicate optimization of everything from personal habits to major life choices.

Your entire life (our entire lives, really: it's me too) is essentially golden handcuffs. This is a major step up from handcuffs made of rusty saw-blades that cut and give you tetanus whenever you move, but you're still actually handcuffed.

Sure but the anarchism of blowing up existing systems in hopes of great ones hurts a ton of people in the process with marginal likelihoods of success

Whereas desperately clinging to the decaying hulk of existing systems guarantees continued suffering and exploitation with literally no chance of success. So...

No chance of success? They are by no means perfect, but millions of people in the US alone benefit from our decaying hulks of existing systems. Sure, an ideal system can help millions more or help those millions more, but blowing them up and hoping something better comes out of it leaves millions that rely on them in the cold.

Go look at a graph of income inequality over the last 30 years. Reflect on the fact that 30 years ago Detroit was a bustling industrial hub. Contemplate the fact that we have more people in jail in this country than any other country in the world. Child poverty & homelessness are at near-historic levels and rising. Critical environmental regulations are being dismantled at the state and federal levels and we have politicians openly discussing further deregulation of industry. So when you say millions of people are benefitting you'll excuse me if I ask you to define what that means. Incidentally, why do you assume real political reform (or even revolution) requires blowing a bunch of people up?

Never said blowing people up, I said blowing the systems up.

You don't have to convince me that there are serious systemic issues in this country. However, existing systems have done a lot of good, and need consistent improvements, not a lazy call for revolution without considering who gets affected by it.

We passed critical environmental regulations in the first place. Crime rates continue to decrease across the country across generations. Millions of those people in poverty or out of work benefit from the safety net, disabled people are protected, minorities are protected from segregation, public schools and colleges educate millions for free or close to it.

All these systems can and should improve. But just throwing out "revolution" doesn't solve any of these problems.

The systems you're infatuated with have done at least as much harm as good, currently work mostly in favor of individuals who least need the help, and for at least the last 30 years have steadily grown more dysfunctional. Working within a system only works when the system works, and there's nothing lazier than calls to work within a system that's directly responsible for the overwhelming majority of society's ills. But by all means feel free to keep painting would-be revolutionaries as lazy, bomb-throwing nihilists.

We're probably going to have to do that anyway with the huge growth in automation and ML/AI. Might as well kill two birds with one stone.

The next time this topic comes up, notice how quickly people run into the weeds to discuss all of the social impacts. Happens every time.

There are a handful of people working on the tough problems in the world, the rest are just bullshitting about why if it ever happens, society will collapse.

Society will inevitably change as technology changes. I see no reason to avoid thinking about the problems that technology might cause.

Hate to break it to you but I worked around some of the most prolific hard scientists in the world and many of them genuinely enjoyed bullshitting about the potential future social impact of their work.

Good for them. Kept them motivated. The rest of us aren't adding any value. Straight to the bullshit.

Our socioeconomic systems are already on the verge of collapse. We don't need life extension technology to achieve it. Just the fact that more and more jobs are being lost to automation and fewer people are dying due to everyday problems such as infant mortality and smoking. The coming revolution of self driving cars is going to exasperate both "problems": fewer jobs, fewer car fatalities.

Wouldn't we just be forced to move to a more simple life?

Well, some people may be forced to move to a simple live, others may be forced to not live, others may continue as we go... Deciding who is going to take which path will probably be the topic of the next world war.

Feel free to explain because I don't see what would be the problem.

Looking at the US, our society is based on working from 18 till about 65-67. Your plan for "retirement" includes living from ~67-85 on a fixed income. That income is a combination of (ideally) retirement income, and social security, coupled with socialized care.

If you live from 120, that changes that "retirement" point.

Mortgages are 30-year fixed rate. Social Security kicks in at 65.

You could make the case that you continue to work past 65, but in what field. How many 85 year olds are in fields they could stay relevant in?

You could retrain at 65 or simply continue learning as you age. We simply don't do that because people know they will retire and die, or otherwise lose the quick wit of youth.

The last part is generally a prejudice nowadays. It is either laziness (and if you don't use it, you lose it) or senility due to medical reasons.

What actually might be happening is genetics and society prodding young people to actually be smarter.

An alternative way of looking at it is that societies do better when they make full use of their resources. Saudi Arabia has long been criticised (by lots of people, but particularly relevant here) by economists for the way they keep women out of the labour pool. They are making themselves uncompetitive by this.

It's the same for North Korea - who are getting rid of their most interesting voices for change into hell holes.

So an economic argument would be that we are currently running the years 67+ as unproductive, and the first society to change that will do better than the others. It's also possible that this is the first time in history it would be safe to allow life extension in a lot of countries due to the falling birthrate at the same time.

Oh, and immortality doesn't mean living forever. I read somewhere that even if we could extend lifespan, actuarial tables show that on average people would live to about 700 before dying of accidents.

> You could make the case that you continue to work past 65, but in what field. How many 85 year olds are in fields they could stay relevant in?

I think this depends on whether the brain can be made young, too.

Let's assume you're right -- we still have decades before anybody even reaches that age. We've dealt with bigger shocks in shorter spans of time.

This is true, but my guess is an extension of life like you are talking about will probably come with increased health and hopefully a big decrease in health costs. I think that the terrible heath of most of our elderly people and the cost that incurs is a big part of where our entitlement systems take the most damage. We have a lot of room to improve there without even extending human life.

Filing "the problem of optional immortality" under "good problems to have"

I have it filed under "problems to ponder, and possibly angst about, at great length. If time permits."

Cannot ponder it at length and necessary depth if you're too mortal or preoccupied with survival.

In the UK, your chance of death within the year crawls from approx 0 to 5% between 0 and 80 but then climbs rapidly to 30% by 100 and >50% by 110.

https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html

The recent 100 years of medical advances have lead to massive life expectancy gains (1/4-1/3 year per year in the developed world) but has had no noticeable impact on the age of the oldest living humans or mortality rates of centurions.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_verified_oldest_...

Based on this, I think there's a good case for pessimism when speculating whether any living human will live to 150+.

"I confess that in 1901, I said to my brother Orville that man would not fly for fifty years" - Wilbur Wright

"It is apparent to me that the possibilities of the aeroplane, which two or three years ago were thought to hold the solution to the [flying machine] problem, have been exhausted, and that we must turn elsewhere." - Thomas Edison

"There has been a great deal said about a ... rocket shot from one continent to another, carrying an atomic bomb and so directed as to be a precise weapon ... I say, technically, I don't think anyone in the world knows how to do such a thing. and I feel confident it will not be done for a very long period to come. I think we can leave that out of our thinking. I wish the American public would leave that out of their thinking." - Dr. Vannevar Bush

Edited: what I meant by the above is that humanity has a solid track history of mis-estimating the pace of progress in new fields.

But mis-estimation goes both ways. Most academics were very optimistic about early general AI, for instance.

Absolutely. Also, there was a lot of misplaced optimism about helicopters replacing cars. But either way, I don't think the pessimism is justified.

I just find it a little difficult to believe that the one thing to have truly plagued mankind for all his existence (death) has suddenly received a serious blow. It has literally never happened before (as far as we know), and I'm not saying it can't, but current technology is like an infant if you consider it in the scale of what could be. I don't think death is just some easily fixed malfunction, but maybe many do.

I don't find it that hard to believe. I think of doctors as highly trained mechanics. We've already figured out how to keep old cars going forever. Humans are several orders of magnitude more complex but the basic idea is the same: fix the problems that kill you, one at a time.

How is death the "only thing" that has truly plagued mankind?

What about the need to eat? Relieve ourselves? The need for love and social connection?

These are universal as well, and there are many other things that we have always been faced with.

I accept that its impossible to forecast the future with certainty. Sometimes humankind makes amazing breakthroughs that domain experts did not see coming (and sometimes progress is much slower that anticipated).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_to_the_Future_Part_II

I wouldn't assign a probability of 0 that humans make the breakthroughs needed to see many of us becoming double-centurions.

However, the last hundred years of medical research hasn't made much meaningful progress in preventing the rapid death of centurions, so I assign a probability far lower than 1.

> Edited: what I meant by the above is that humanity has a solid track history of mis-estimating the pace of progress in new fields.

There is a difference. Annual probability of death does NOT appear to be a distribution that we just have to expand. If it were, we should have had some human get to 150 years old by now--there appear to be real internal biological limits that kill us off before that.

Having to remove (likely multiple) real hard limits from the human biological system is a very different problem. You will likely have to get them all before you get any extension.

Of course, once you do that, you will likely get a HUGE extension.

That's correct. It will take a fundamental change that may only be possible with genetic modification to get past the 110-130 range. 150 appears to be solidly out of reach.

Given enough genetic modification, nothing is really out of reach.

And more basic biotech is probably enough for massive improvement.

I think the centurion thing is probably just because we have not focused on the types of things that kill them yet. Look at this: https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy/#it-is-not-only-a...

Life expectancy for a 50 year old has gone from 71 100 years ago to 83 today, and shows no signs of slowing. If anything, it appears to be accelerating. In just the last 50 years, life expectancy at 80 has increased by 50% (from 86 to 89). The data in this graph suggests that it takes longer for life expectancy to start to go up at higher ages, but does not suggest that there's any age at which this will stop happening. We probably just have to wait until enough people start making it to that age that it makes sense for us to focus on the relevant problems for that age.

That is a really interesting visualisation, but I believe it supports my argument. Now, 30% of the UK population reach 90, but there has been no meaningful progress in post-90 life expectancy in the last 100 years.

It is commonly claimed that close to 50% of heath services resources are dedicated to caring for you in the last year of your life. As an anecdote, my friends who work for the NHS have noted that they now see 60 year olds as 'young' in the wards. A back of the envelope estimate would be that 1/6 of NHS resources are dedicated to caring for 90+. How much is enough?

I think a better way to frame my argument is: look at the inflection points for each of the starting ages in the graph. 'at birth' has been going up since we have reliable data (1845). @20 has been going up since 1875. @60 has been going up since 1915. @75 has been going up since 1945. @85 only started to go up around 1980. @90/@95 look like they've only barely started to go up in the last decade. @100 and above are still completely flat.

100 years ago you could have looked at this data and just as easily said that there must be genetic/resource barriers to increasing life expectancy for 60-year-olds, since we've never been able to make a dent in their life expectancy -- at the time, the graph for @60 would still have been flat. Today that is obviously incorrect. The same thing could have been said 50 years ago for 80-year-olds, and again, that's now obviously incorrect.

It's entirely possible that your hypothesis is valid, but if I had to guess I would say mine is more likely. Put another way, it's possible that 50 years from now the graph will still be flat for 100-year-olds, but I see no fundamental reason why that should be true, and the data certainly suggests to me that it won't be. A good way to test this might be the following: Based on the rest of this graph, I would guess that a decade from now, we'll see noticeable acceleration in the @100 line. If we don't, that might suggest that there is some fundamental barrier, or at least some anomalously hard problems there.

I suppose both stories would be consistent with this graph. To me:

"the data certainly suggests to me that it won't be"

is a bit strong for a data series which is completely flat for 100 year old life expectancy and 90 year old life expectancy only increases by 1 year between 1948 and the present day.

I guess I would be a little disappointed if my life expectancy at 90 hasn't crawled up to say 96, but I see many people on HN placing a high weight on it being somewhere in the range of 200-infinity.

The other interesting context is that all lines would be close to flat for most of human history. The idea that I can expect to die much older than my father did is as unique to the past 150 years as the expectation that I will die with significantly higher hourly wage than my father. I guess this is another version of Gordon's tech-progress debate.

This is an incredible graph, an excellent example of nonobviousness of how to properly do trend extrapolation. Thanks for sharing.

Before being diagnosed with a chronic disease, I was very interested in life extension. Now, I really couldn't care less about living a long time and try to enjoy the life I have-- inconvenient and frustrating though it may be.

In a way it's funny. Now I think about how I plan to shorten my life when/if the need arises rather than extending it at all costs.

I guess I don't understand the desire to live forever. Do people really want suffer through daily life for eternity? Disclaimer: I barely make it through a week without thinking about not wanting to live though.

I certainly would at least like to be able to live exactly as long as I want. You can always choose to end your life, i'd just prefer not to have the choice made for me by nature.

I guess I tend to think about living longer as having more of those later years. That seems kind of pointless. My life really peaked at 23 and has been downhill since. So if I could live the time from like 18-23 longer then that would be kind of cool. Some of that time was great because of less responsibility but the part I really miss is my body. At 30 I cannot physically do the things I did at 23.

I find that the older I get, the more wisdom I accumulate (or at least experience and the application of that experience). I'm... over 50, and if living indefinitely means being stuck with my current body, I'd accept that. Plus, the longer I live, the better the odds that someone will develop a treatment to regress my body's age to 25.

You should seek help.

Part of the reason I have the occasional suicidal thought is because I'm physically dying right now because nature is killing me. If you took that away I'd actually be quite a bit happier.

No one wants to be forced to live forever but having the option would be nice. Also, it's likely that medicine will advance a lot in the next thousand years and most diseases will eventually be cured (including psychiatric ones).

I would argue that immortality should address problems like yours. It's not really immortality if normal, random lifetime ups and downs (the inverse of the regression to the mean [1]) make half your population commit suicide every hundred years. That's a pathetic excuse for immortality, and you can't claim to have defeated death until people don't want to die just as much as they can accomplish that goal. Same way that it's not really immortality if you can still starve to death, or die because you got hit by a train and your seat of consciousness got obliterated, or die because your anti-aging medicines don't do anything about your risk of cancer. Defeating old age is the biggest obstacle right now, but defeating traumatic risk and psychiatric risk are just as important.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-value is also relevant - consider "person has no unsolvable long-term problems and if maintained at their average level would live forever" to be the null hypothesis and "has a bad century and commits suicide" to be the observation.

Devising ways to prevent such an end and making people psychologically tougher is also part of life extension. Not the most interesting one, but least researched.

There really is so much beauty (and yes, meaning) out there to experience, comprehend, and enjoy. And there are so many kind, brilliant, fascinating people (and other living entities) to experience and share notes on it all with. Despite all the inevitable hassle and suffering and messiness.

So yes, I'd say it's worth it. You don't have to try to stretch it out indefinitely, time-wise, if that's not your thing. I think the key to our journey through all of "this", whatever it is, is to treat it as if it is, in fact, infinite (or rather timeless), even though our conscious experience of it happens to be stuck on a one-way track which makes it seem (to our primitive minds) like it's finite.

But why do you need to experience that beauty through one particular consciousness track, experienced through one particular mind (even this statement is incorrect, because if you define a person as a particular configuration of matter, then you are a new mind each time-interval)? Make way for new configurations, for more brilliant, fascinating minds.

If you are speaking in terms of spiritual experiences, you can of course be having any kind of those and nothing can really be argued about it, because they are subjective.

If, however, you are making an objective claim about "past lives" and reincarnation - there is no solid evidence for it. 99% of "past life memories" examples are in the form of "I had a family and we had a house" (omg, that sounds like our dead relative, you must be him reincarnated), or in a form of an obviously imagined past life of a historic figure, with details which have been read in history books by the individual claiming to experience the said past life. And interestingly they always seem to read about the historic figure first (giving their subconscious mind the change to soak up that knowledge (in this life though)), and "experiencing a past life" only after.

So to answer your question - because you only get one particular mind, and that's it. This is what science shows us. Whether you "feel like" you are "one with all other minds" is just a subjective experience. It's not physical reality.

I'm not making a claim about reincarnation or past lives. I'm saying something along the lines of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_individualism. And no, science has not shown that you get one particular mind. It could, at best, show that you experience one mind at a time. But what is experiencing the mind?

It's a physics thing - our current manifestations are biochemical, so our perceptual experiences are constrained by the laws of thermodynamics that hold sway at that scale. Of course, sooner or later they'll figure out a way to upload it all into some kind of a computational environment that's entirely different from anything that can be conceived based on the laws of physics as we understand them now; that exists entirely independent of the notions of "time" and "space" as we currently perceive them.

But them I'm not sure we'd still be "us", anymore, by that point.

"timeless" is a very good word for describing all phenomena that could be connected to the experience of a "soul". There is no evidence, nor really even clues to the soul being infinite, continuously going on to eternity.

However, if one studies the experience itself, it would be very accurate to say that the soul is timeless. It is simply that there is no information about time in the feeling of a soul. It's not connected to any time-based experience.

It's like there is an object in the mind's processor that described the "soul". And in that object there is no field with the type "Datetime". It's not needed. The object can very well function without it. It is also very compatible (or rather accessible from) with any other experience, whether it has a Datetime field or not. One can think about the past, the present, the future, the Abstract - and one can feel the "soul" in any of them.

Since the experiences connected to the soul are really the only ones that seem to "matter", (being in this regard different from any practical life problems or circumstances), it behooves a lot to understand this timeless nature of it.

Honestly? My answer would be a concatenation of my "Someday/Maybe" list and "To read" list. So many things to do, so many things to learn. So little time.

> I barely make it through a week without thinking about not wanting to live though

That.. is not normal. Are you ok? Do you have a support network to just.. talk to about stuff?

Maybe try talking to a therapist just to see what's going on, no shame in that at all. Can work wonders just to talk about what you're thinking...

Thanks for caring. I have a close family, wife, and a 5 month old. I went to a therapist for about 1.5 years but it didn't seem to help much. I go to a psych now. I've been seriously trying to figure it out for about 8 years now but not really having a ton of luck. Believe it or now this is the best I have felt in a long time. Having a son is a good reason to stay around though.

I honestly think I may have chronic traumatic encephalopathy but they can't really diagnose you without a brain biopsy. I got hit by a car and suffered several concussions in hockey and football where everything was just spinning. Sometimes I randomly blackout while working out.

Glad that you're on the up, a bit, at least.

Randomly blacking out is... not good. I'm sure that doesn't help.

Hopefully the psych will help but if, after 1.5 years, you feel the therapist isn't helpful maybe try a few different ones?

It's not an exact science and finding the right fit can be hard.

+1 on "You should seek help.". If that is your current experience - that's not the natural mode for a human being. That's not something everyone automatically arrives at by just going through life. That's just your own psychological problems that are causing you to perceive life like that. Someone who is in such dark mood most of the time, will naturally attract other people who live in the same mood currently, and as a result, it will look like the rest of the people are all like that, and such person have a hard time to understand the happy ones. And it does not have to be this way, the problem in your thoughts and beliefs. In order to change them you need help.

Whatever you do, at least don't undermine the science that tries to prolong life. I am not saying that you might have wanted personally to undermine it, it's just that the argument of yours (coming from similar people) comes up EVERY TIME eternal life is discussed.

The world is beautiful & fascinating, and given the chance I wish I could learn every discipline involving the natural sciences. (I still could, but it would have to replace something else)

I guess you could say I want to know everything about the natural world, and it will be a long time before humanity learns everything about it, so I wish I could stick around to see all those discoveries.

Curiously, just today I was researching the public health efforts in the Finnish town of North Karelia which is known in public health as a place that started reducing heart attacks beginning in the early 1970's and saw an article referencing Blue Zones.

The Blue Zones Solution: Eating and Living Like the World's Healthiest People https://www.amazon.com/dp/1426211929/

https://communities.bluezonesproject.com

From the first Amazon review of the book, written by a woman:

"I first ran into my own "Blue Zone" when I hiked up a mountain near Zermatt, Switzerland to a village that was only accessible by hiking or cable car. A 102-year old woman dashed past me, UPHILL ON ICE, in felt boots, while I was (in my 40's) trying to struggle up the incline with the assistance of two ski poles. Later, I found her, running the local inn and making strudel, which was the most delicious I've ever had. She was making the strudel that day, because her OLDER sister was taking a nap."

Reminds me of the Steve Jobs quote:

"Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.

Almost everything--all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure--these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.

Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet, death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it, and that is how it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It's life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new."

That's just an appeal to nature. Just because something was an evolutionary necessity (and that is not even clear in this case) it does not follow that that thing should actually be desirable for us.

A plausible explanation of aging is for example the evolutionary shadow: From the perspective of your genes you don't matter (much) after you've successfully passed on you genes to the next generation. Thus there is no evolutionary pressure for longevity. The programmed cell decay of aging might be a way of multicellular organisms to fight cancer.

There is another aspect for which the longetivity could be selected by the evolution, besides passing on the genes: it's passing on the knowledge.

As a social species, in the development of humans it's not only the biological structures that are important (the body itself), but the informational, social structures. A tribe which works well socially (helping each other, keeping together etc.) will survive much better and longer than a tribe of individualists, and yet even better than individuals living on their own. A big part of actually keeping a tribe structure alive is the knowledge than elders constantly pass on to the new generation. And that does not stop after the genes are passed.

Additionally, there seems to be some (deeper, philosophical) knowledge that is very hard to acquire before a certain age. It just takes that long to collect enough experience to be able to connect certain high level concepts. It's very likely that a tribe with longer-living monkeys (metaphorically) would have more of these wise elders that have acquired the knowledge and could pass it on better to the rest, than a tribe with monkeys that would die off fast after making babies.

But this still would only mean that the evolution would not kill you off directly after passing on the genes, but instead some time afterwards, after you've already learned all important things about life and were able to quickly teach them to the new generation. It would still kill you off either way.

Even more, evolution is often 'ineffective' and also can't make big leaps without complete disasters. It is quick only when you die young, as you already mentioned. It could happen that aging became unneeded at some epochs/species, but there was no easy way and/or strong reason to "turn it off" again.

Our bodies are not well-designed, they are full of legacy. The whole idea of moving via contracting meat is... strange. For real, lower half of me exists only to move the upper half. That's crazy.

Don't flap your meat at me like that.

Well, good for Steve. I'm happy just rambling along and it would be nice if I had more time to do it. Maybe I wouldn't be as worried about status, money, pride or achievement if I didn't feel like I was in a race against time.

Longevity research is interesting because you could theoretically get to a point where one year of research extends people's lives more than one year. Then the people who avoided car accidents and the flu could live indefinitely, which is much more of a transformation than people living to 120.

Will we live to see this happen? The optimistic view is that longevity research is very under explored right now, and there may be some significant low-hanging fruit. Also, if AI or nanotechnology live up to their hype quickly enough, they could significantly accelerate research.

More pessimistically, I see at least three major obstacles:

(a) Medical research sucks as it is, and longevity research is inherently time-consuming. There are ways to ease this, like testing treatments on mice first, but I don’t see an easy way around the need to apply the test to humans and wait many years to see the results.

(b) The human body is hard to understand and manipulate - we haven’t cured cancer yet, despite all our effort.

(c) Until people’s attitudes about death change (or those people die and are replaced by people with different attitudes), longevity research will continue to attract much less attention than it deserves. Most people have psychologically committed themselves to doing nothing about death. They accept it will happen to them with 100% certainty, but they deny it will happen to them anytime soon, so they ignore it.

It's scary to think of what life would be if you are immortal, but can still die from an accident. Makes you wonder if you ever want to leave the house until society becomes safer.

The trouble is, your house is a death trap too. Heck, the whole planet is. Typically, mobility and active approach to such immortality brings better results.

I'm surprised there's no mention of Buddhism here. To accept death as a natural process, to realise that every being is subject to birth, old age, sometimes sickness and death, to constantly remind oneself of death leads to, in many ways, a more fulfilling life.

Clinging to youth, good looks, being alive itself - these are all causes of suffering, as there is nothing permanent. People wanting to "cheat death" are attempting to find refuge in impermanence. But there isn't any to be found. What is changing is unsafe. Of course this doesn't mean we shouldn't take medications or life-saving surgeries, as those aren't done with the intention of permanence in mind.

Buddhism says that superior to "cheating death" is in fact fully comprehending death, the unsatisfactory nature of our lives and the fact that the self cannot be found in any of these passing phenomena. To realise this puts an end to birth and therefore death. But in the context of here and now, our suffering is reduced.

The search for youth only causes suffering. Desire is a root of suffering.

Without hope, we should indeed accept. Let's make the most of what we have.

Death is not like that. It is not clear we couldn't find ways to double or triple our lifespan. It is not clear reincarnation (of the non-imaginary kind, mind uploading) is utterly impossible. It is not clear we couldn't find ways to keep our lives interesting for a very, very long time.

Simply put, this is not hopeless.

Yes, desire is a root of suffering. But it is also a root of progress. I'd rather not cut that root just yet.

The fascinating thing about the transition of aging research from mere investigation to the possibility of intervention is that many researchers don't even want to talk about extending life, but only a small expansion of healthspan. This lack of ambition, and refusal to engage with the large body of evidence that suggests we can do far better, is why we need organizations like the SENS Research Foundation and Methuselah Foundation, working to make the better option happen. It is possible and plausible to extend healthy life and overall lifespan indefinitely by implementing the approach of repairing the cell and tissue damage that causes aging. Yet all too much of the rhetoric and effort in the scientific community still goes towards tinkering with the operation of metabolism to slightly slow the pace at which damage accumulates - a clearly far inferior approach, that can at best produce only marginal outcomes.

All of the technologies and approaches mentioned in this article are marginal, ways to only modestly slow the damage of aging from accumulation. They are very limited in what they can achieve - adding five to ten years to life would be an enormous, unlikely success for any one of these. Calorie restriction we know doesn't add more than that to human life spans, since we have plenty of examples to look at. Metformin data is all over the map in animal studies, just as contradictory and half-refuted as sirtuins. The transfer of young plasma to old individuals doesn't extend life in animal studies; it is pretty unlikely to have the desired effect in humans - that isn't the same thing as parabiosis. Human Longevity Inc is a personalized medicine company in fancy clothing, doing nothing that will greatly extend life, but rather looking for incremental gains in ordinary medicine. And so on.

Sadly journalists typically don't distinguish between the potential value and outcome of different approaches to aging - it is all the same to them, just a flat list. So they pull five or ten items from the larger list to populate their articles, and mark them all equivalent. That's something of a problem when the differences are in fact enormously important and the expected outcomes are night and day when comparing approaches that repair damage versus approaches that do not repair damage. If there is to be significant progress towards healthy life extension in our lifetimes, the better strategies, those involving damage repair, must gain far greater support. This means the SENS list: senescent cell clearance, mitochondrial DNA damage, clearing metabolic waste like amyloid, lipofuscin, and cross-links, and so on.

Relevant reading from philosopher Nick Bostrom:

http://www.nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html

Death makes space for new life, and new strategies. It's a key part of the evolutionary process, and thus of life itself. Yet another sign of the desperate egocentrism of a generation alienated from what it means to live.

>Yet another sign of the desperate egocentrism of a generation alienated from what it means to live.

I disagree. Fear of death is a cultural constant that almost every religious/spiritual movement in history has tried to assuage, either through the promise of an eternal afterlife or a belief in some pan-consciousness that we are all part of (i.e. eternal life).

I find it amusing how you make an extraordinary claim as though its obviously true, and then criticize life extension as "desperate egocentrism".

How exactly is death directly responsible for new strategies? And how is it a "key part of the evolutionary process"?

If there are no known answers to these questions, it is absurd to think they are true.

Trees can live for hundreds, even thousands of years.

Which is exactly why we are cutting those egotistical bastards down and sitting on them.

Evolution is an awful optimization process. It's only effective in real life because it's had literally billions of years to work. Intelligently-guided directed optimization is vastly superior and we should prefer it whenever possible, if only for reasons of practicality and efficiency. For example, look at the development of flight: biological evolution took probably a few billion years to evolve things like pteranodons and archaeopteryx; we landed on the moon in about seventy years.

Evolution is amazing, sure. It's also evil, bad, and wrong, even without getting into ethical issues. Don't do it.

(speaking of ethical issues: http://ttapress.com/553/crystal-nights-by-greg-egan/)

Funnily enough I was just thinking today about how a living organism is in some ways essentially a brute force attempt at finding the solution to persistence.

EDIT > great story thx

The one thing evolution has going for it is that the process avoids local traps in the long run, while directed approaches... Not necessarily.

I'm not sure you understand much about the evolutionary process, or life.

Trying to cheat death entirely isn't some perversion of evolution, its the pinnacle of it. It's the purest expression of the desire for self-preservation, which was hardwired into us by evolution, that there is.

If you don't like human beings trying not to die, then don't blame them for being "egocentric", blame evolution for making them that way.

Aren't you doing the same mistake now? "Egocentrism" which you see in the core of these attempts to prolong life - that's just a "new strategy". It has has obviously survived in humans through the billions of years of evolution (because we see it living in us now). Right now it has lead us to pursue this technology. We shall see how it goes. Maybe these efforts will prove futile, and other humans will evolve which will not have such egocentrism. Or maybe this new strategy will win and all of you (royally speaking) who think that it's bad will simply die off, because you couldn't keep up with the new evolutionary trends didn't believe that we should use tech to prolong life.

In either way, pursuing such goals is EXACTLY what it means to live. It's the process of the evolution itself. We are not alienated from it, on the contrary we are in the very heart of it and we get to experience it first-hand.

Alienation from life is more like non-accepting a certain aspect of it which is obviously happening. An aspect like people researching into biology to cheat death. So isn't that what your comment is?

I do not really understand this perspective. Could you help me figure out where you're coming from?

My current model for comments like this would suggest it would be made by one of two categories of individuals: 1) An innocent. A person who has not yet personally been touched by death, and who has not already put some thought into it. The full weight of death isn't real yet. 2) Someone who has at the very least brushed by the darker side side of things- maybe their parents, maybe friends, maybe their own disease, maybe depression... and they came out the other side with an attempt at a coping mechanism. Some form of spirituality, philosophy, or maybe just hardened nihilism, that let them look away, or 'accept' it.

But the above is too general to really provide any insight. And to be clear, I am not upset at people like the above- I can understand how it happens, even if I strongly disagree with the results.

I just have a very hard time squaring the above... approaches... with the special, horrible kind of sound someone makes when they are weakly screaming for their life and they are terrified that no one will be able to help them. I can't unhear that. And I can't help but try to listen for all those other people in the same position, thousands of times a day.

My own perspective is simple: death doesn't have any special meaning, and it causes absurd levels of suffering. Any uses it has are so inefficient and unethical that any attempt by a human to emulate them would (rightfully) be considered comically evil. We can do better- unlike raw evolution, we have brains.

So if nobody dies, how do we deal with evolution in the case that we need it. What about brain plasticity? Young brains learn new concepts well and use those experiences to create new ideas and innovations.

We should try to fight aging, but if that succeeds there are a lot of other societal problems that need to be solved as well.

tDCS appears to help with Neuroplasticity.

So if nobody dies, how do we deal with evolution in the case that we need it?

It needs to be seen that having older people around isn't a hindrance to evolution, but rather a great assist to it -- precisely because they have so many memories, and so many of the positive qualities (patience, forbearance... and a general lack of vanity) that naturally come with being around the planet for so long.

Which those of stuck in (seemingly) lively, energetic younger bodies can greatly benefit from.

>It needs to be seen that having older people around isn't a hindrance to evolution, but rather a great assist to it ...

That seems rather unlikely.

"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." -Max Planck

He could have been wrong too. Because he was still alive. ;-)

I mean the kind where we swap genes. A lower birthrate doesn't help much. Genetic engineering exists, but we can't change how our bodies have already developed quite so easily.

I think occasional increases in brain plasticity may be more useful to change society itself (assuming you can get people to do something that alters their brains). That may not be necessary of course.

Of course it is, the baby boomers are dying. 10-15 years from now, they'll all have left their positions of authority, and the fight to cheat death will cool down again.

I'm not so sure about the cool down, but i think you're exactly right about the baby boomers. Nobody wants to die. I don't think many baby boomers are connecting the anti-aging dots directly. But that large, wealthy, aging group of people are certainly spurring a ton of research.

Take this pill to not die is the ultimate killer app.

I don't think it's going to work out. I think a lot of money will go to snake oil, but hopefully something good will come of it.

>> "Nobody wants to die."

I do. Living for ever, or even much longer than our current life expectancy doesn't appeal to me at all. I like my life, but I also like that someday it will end. Back when I was religious (I'm not now) the idea of heaven or eternal life seemed strange to me as it was 'the goal' yet not something I wanted and the idea that I had to 'live forever' was quite worrying.

I'm curious if I'm in a minority on this. It's probably important to point out I don't want to die anytime soon but the idea that I continue living for longer than another 80 years for example is not appealing.

If you were in some parts of Africa, your life expectancy would be 50...Why does current life expectancy matter? As long as you still maintain quality of life and can be happy, why die? I think as soon as you are not happy and have no contributions to society, then there's less reason to increase life expectancy.

>> "Why does current life expectancy matter?"

It doesn't - I was using it as an approx. number instead of putting a specific age. What I meant was living into my 80's is sufficient for me.

It's hard to say if I'd actually like to live, say, a thousand years — neither I nor anyone else has experienced even a fraction of that, so who knows what it's like? I certainly don't want to die in the next few decades, but that's what's likely to happen. The life expectancy for a male in the US is about 75 years. I'm almost halfway there, but I don't feel like I'm halfway done living. Assuming you're still kinda young, do you really expect to hit 40 and think, "Bring on the decrepitude and death"?

If living forever were the default, would you choose to intentionally kill yourself?

It would be the last new experience, after everything else had been done to death...

It's not like people haven't done it before, or does it not count if you get a revive after 30 minutes without any brain activity?

It only counts if you don't know that there is a revive available ;)

Hell - in a world where living forever is the default, you can always kill yourself if and when you get bored.

There are many situations where it would make sense to intentionally let yourself die. Are your neighbors starving? Maybe let the younger generations eat instead of you.

If we can successfully cure death, I don't think we'll have a shortage of people willing to fund the spread of that cure universally. And once we have it, perhaps all remaining deaths will start to seem sufficiently tragic and avoidable that we'll do something about those, too. My reaction to your scenario is not "better die then", it's "better work faster and solve the problem then".

> If we can successfully cure death, I don't think we'll have a shortage of people willing to fund the spread of that cure universally.

This is optimistic and naive. It will be another privilege for the rich; it is the only way we will have any chance to avoid overpopulation.

I too share the worry of living forever. I am still religious but I wonder what will you do if you live forever.

I wonder where that comes from, too. You're definitely not the only one - I've seen plenty of people expressing similar opinions here on HN.

That said, for me the idea of eternal life seems very appealing. There are so many things I'd like to do, so many areas of knowledge I'd like to explore, etc. that it would take me 10 lifetimes and it still would not be enough. I'm nearing 30, which means that I'm almost halfway through life. Life feels too short.

I agree. I'm 50, and am in no way conceivably done living. Just the programming projects I want to do in the short term will take me a couple of decades to accomplish. If I knew I could stay at a reasonable level of health for another 100 years minimum, I'd tackle some harder problems that could take much longer.

Also, as a spectator in this world of ours, I'd like to see what happens, good and bad, over the next century or two (or more).

How old are you now? It's very easy to say you're not scared of dying when it's a distant, abstract concern that you aren't really confronted with.

Some people, upon becoming terminally ill, suddenly realize that dying is a much bigger deal for them than they thought, now that it's an imminent possibility.

>> "How old are you now? It's very easy to say you're not scared of dying when it's a distant, abstract concern that you aren't really confronted with."

That's the odd thing - I'm definitely scared of dying. I don't want to die - now. But I can definitely see a tipping point. I guess it maybe depends on how happy you are with your life. If I was financially secure and could spend my life doing what I liked 100% of the time then maybe there isn't a reason not to keep living. Otherwise I just feel like eventually I'll get exhausted overcoming one challenge after the other.

It is not like this kind of longevity would be impossible to opt out of. Why not try it first instead of dissmissing it out of hand?

It might be quite hard to opt out of unless society vastly changes it's views on dying. I brought this up in another comment. [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12272372

I, like you, would probably not sign a paper where it stated that I would live eternally, but I'm sure we both agree that having the choice to live for as long as we want (or rather, choosing when we want to stop living) is a pretty good choice to have. I think that's what most humans would want.

I do agree it's a good choice to have. Would we be given that choice though? I could be stricken with an incredibly painful disease tomorrow and have zero quality of life - and even if I wanted to die (and couldn't do it myself) nobody would be allowed to help. Now we're talking about a perfectly healthy person wanting to die. There's also your question of responsibility to others (young children for example) and whether or not you're making a rational decision or one clouded by temporary mental illness. Society will need to change massively before we have the choice to die when we want (assuming eternal life).

I agree with you. It's actually a pretty interesting point of view, because I've thought about it too. Once we have enough knowledge to cure aging completely, we will probably have enough knowledge to cure depression and the likes. I support anti-aging research, but I agree that there are quite a few points that need to be discussed.

So maybe anti-aging for you just means you die at age 100 by falling off a cliff you're free climbing, instead of languishing for a decade in some crappy nursing home.

At this point I can recall reading starry eyed articles about future life extension technologies 10-15 years ago. My question is simple: what products have been brought to market that can be classified as "life extension" and are we certain they work? Is there actually anything out there yet which is as effective as good old diet and exercise?

With obesity at 66% (in the United States) I think the average life expectancy will start going down.

1900/day isn't very extreme. It's what I do on days I don't go to the gym (and 2200/day on days I do go). And I'm not underweight either--I'm within the healthy BMI range. People just eat too much food!

66% is overweight OR obese[1]. Being overweight doesn't pose as many health-risks as being obese.

Heck, obesity correlates well with life expectancy but that's probably because sickness causes weight loss.

Seems like this will be a growth technology field. Though I am making the assumption that developments will also apply to more then just the elderly. An example would be keeping a larger percentage of the population in peak or near peak mental and physical health for longer.

The discussion of calorie restriction (CR) brought to mind a piece by NYmag reporter Julian Dibbell on his experience trying out CR for two months:

http://nymag.com/news/features/23169/

On the sillier side, I recommend "Super Sad True Love Story" by Gary Shteyngart. It's an entertaining novel with themes of life extension and near-future dystopian technology. Anyone who liked the "please drink a verification can" greentext will probably enjoy it.

Are there any benefits from fasting without calorie restriction? e.g. fasting for 23 hours then eating all recommended calories?

I'm curious on this too but I'm thinking of doing a Belgian monk fast though which allows beer of course. :)

Lost weight and drink solid beers? Nice! I found a post about this experience [1] which also has a few bits of research [2] linked as per your question.

One of the articles says "Water-only fasting should only be done in a specialized clinic" and "certain types of very low calorie diets, and particularly those with high protein content, can increase the incidence of gallstones in women at risk"

So perhaps the Belgian monks know what they are doing with the calories and low protein in the beers!

[1] https://www.beeradvocate.com/community/threads/monk-style-be...

[2] https://news.usc.edu/82959/diet-that-mimics-fasting-appears-... and http://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/fulltext/S1550-4131%2815...

This article illustrates superbly what Bill Gates said "We tend to overestimate the impact of changes that will happen in 2 years, and underestimate those that will happen in next 10 years"

We should focus on reducing suffering, not on creating arbitrarily long life-times. When suffering is low enough that death-anxiety is the greatest source of human angst, then work on immortality.

Looking at the bigger picture, too many people are doing utterly useless or even harmful stuff. If you're reassigning efforts, you should start there.

Why not work on both at the same time?

Considering that age-related illnesses are responsible for 100,000 of the 150,000 deaths each day[1], I think working on aging is a very effective way to reduce suffering.

Also, I hope readers notice that nobody makes this criticism when someone works on a new mobile app, another static site generator, or My Little Pony fanfiction. It's an excellent example of the Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics.[2]

1. http://www.sens.org/files/pdf/ENHANCE-PP.pdf

2. https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-eth...

Whatever life is worth living for, I don't think it requires eternity.

How long does it require? And might the answer, perhaps, be higher than 78.8 years?

Or maybe higher than 200?

How about 1000?

To put it simply, I don't feel like the current human lifespan is too short.

"hotting up"?

http://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/hot-up

It's the trend against declension so instead of using "heating", you use "hotting", or instead of total "spending", total "spend". For many it sounds like it's more modern and young. But there are times when using the base word introduces collision with other meanings.

Interesting. My mental association is quaint and old. Where I live, it's the elderly who use the expression "hotting up;" generally in relation to food.

"Hotting up" appears to be a quirk of British journalism, not necessarily a "trend." Not exactly modern and young when the first usage was in 1923 by P. G. Wodehouse.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/10/magazine/10wwln-safire-t.h...

Declension is for nouns, inflection's the more general term

Who wrote this? There is no byline.

See this....

http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2013/09/ec...

The Economist’s writers are always anonymous.

It's appalling that something like this, which would fundamentally alter what it means to be human in a profound and everlasting way, can be so casually described and is being pursued with relatively little debate. I guess we'll have plenty of time to debate our folly after the immortal/vampire class has put the leashes on us for a few half-centuries.

Oh but how much fun is it to contemplate? How does love, war, work, retirement, achievement, purpose, etc. change once you can live forever? Or once some subset of humanity can live forever? If you were nearly immortal how long would you mourn the death of a non-immortal spouse? Would you work an additional 5 years before retirement on the off chance that they figure out how to make you immortal between now and then? How would you treat a person who was immortal because they spent $1 million on a treatment that you couldn't afford? How would that treatment affect inflation? How would immortals affect inflation? There is so much awesome material here for science fiction writers!

I fully intend to write this science fiction, but the fact that this COULD be reality (and I think the biology is tractable) should be sparking some sort of policy debate. There is actual capital flowing into these ventures... Speculative fiction is ten years behind where the money is.

As frequently happens, Bruce Sterling was there. Pick up a copy of _Holy Fire_.

Drew Magary beat you to it.

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10673576-the-postmortal

(It's a good read)

Pandora's Star is the first book of a series that explores many of these themes as well.

If you were immortal, you could pay off a loan over hundreds of years. Imagine a mortgage of $500K being paid off over 3 years. Suddenly, paying $1M-$2M isn't such a barrier.

It doesn't work that way -- the upper limit is still the monthly interest on the loan. So at 3%, 1M is still 25K per month. Unless I'm missing something? (I believe that there is a classification of interest-only loans currently).

Yes, your math is off. At 3% the annual interest on a $1M loan would be $30-$40K (depending on how the interest is calculated), per year. Monthly, that would only be around $2500-$3500. Principal repayment be +/- $833/month.

> How would you treat a person who was immortal because they spent $1 million on a treatment that you couldn't afford?

I'm thinking of a great Prachett-esque scene where the newly ageless billionaire walks out of the clinic and then slips on a banana (or a soylent puddle) and dies from head trauma.

You could come up with a better ironic hell than that.

They walk outside, get assaulted by an angry mob of people opposed to the rich paying to live forever, and end up with locked-in syndrome for the next thousand years from the head trauma.

I'm a terse man. Take pithy on me.

On the contrary the position of most people seems to be knee-jerk opposition to any possibility of extending life indefinitely.

It's always a good idea to apply https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversal_test. Given you lived in a world where death was a choice, would you prefer to take that away?

I was barely able to understand what the Internet would do to the world, and still don't. You're asking me to successfully imagine the consequences of ending death, and then apply a 'reversal test' in that society? This methodology is too difficult.

Using the reversal test: I imagine living in an overcrowded world whose population was out of control with nothing to cull its growth. With resources running out, and we had the opportunity to slowly and 'naturally' phase out individuals to reduce the population (read: dying of natural causes as people do now), then yes, I would prefer that.

At the moment the majority of the developed world is suffering from underpopulation and an aging population.

Immortality would change that but I expect by the time we figure actual immortality out we'll have either gotten off the planet or figured out brain uploads (this is what I imagine applying the reversal test to). In both those cases overpopulation is not a significant problem.

In the mid-term we're much more likely to see life extension and staving off dementia, and that would be helpful to countries struggling to sustain a workforce.

1) We're not getting off this planet for centuries, if ever. Don't hold your breath. Doing this is MUCH harder than solving immortality, which probably is about as difficult as patching some stem cells.

2) Brain uploads are dumb. Let me ask you this: I create a 'brain upload' program, run it on you, and tell you, "OK, now your brain is uploaded!" Will you walk willingly into a blender? You are your body. It does not matter what sort of digital derivative has been made of you, your subjective experience is tied to your corpse.

> 1) We're not getting off this planet for centuries, if ever. Don't hold your breath. Doing this is MUCH harder than solving immortality, which probably is about as difficult as patching some stem cells.

It's not harder, it's much easier. Hell, it's somewhat within our current technological capabilities. It's just expensive and we have zero economic incentive to do it.

Sure, we can blast off and die in space of cold and asphyxiation. I assumed this meant 'move to inhabit another planet indefinitely in a manner that does not suck'.

I meant exactly that. We are technologically advanced enough to blast off to Mars and build a permanent settlement there. We just don't have the will (as measured in money - the unit of caring). Would the colony suck? Initially, probably yes. But hey, if we were to suddenly hit immortality tomorrow, we have enough space in deserts and oceans to inhabit before going to Mars that we'll be experts in self-contained settlements by the time colony ship reaches red planet's surface.

There is the "does not suck" part to consider, though. I have a hard time thinking of any parameters in which a current or nearish-future self-contained settlement would not, across many parameters, suck. Maybe it's a failure of imagination, but...I dunno.

I'm inclined to believe that the "sucking" part of it is a consequence of new technology and capabilities. It's rarely the case that something that is done for the first time is even remotely comparable in quality to the mass marketed refined implementation of that thing.

No matter what our technological capabilities are at the time of doing so, I believe the first colonies on other planets will "suck" by the standards of living of that era.

>2) Brain uploads are dumb. Let me ask you this: I create a 'brain upload' program, run it on you, and tell you, "OK, now your brain is uploaded!" Will you walk willingly into a blender? You are your body. It does not matter what sort of digital derivative has been made of you, your subjective experience is tied to your corpse.

I agree with you about the brain uploads, but I think that the final conclusion is that either continuity of consciousness is an illusion, or it spans all life (i.e. pan-consciousness). Most cells, and all atoms, in your body will be cycled many times before you die. Why would there be any continuity of consciousness across those total changes? How is it fundamentally any different than the brain upload scenario?

The only reason why you think that your consciousness is continuous from even a moment ago is that you have memories of it (just like your uploaded self would, by the way). Just as you insist that you are the same person you were a minute ago, your uploaded self would insist it is the same person as it was before the upload.

Yeah, my subjective experience is an illusion. But:

1) My uploaded self would probably immediately be appalled at the loss of that subjective experience. You identify deeply with your embodied self; I am my vagus nerve and the intestinal distress it transmits as much as I am anything.

2) My embodied self would still have its own subjective experience and would experience dying, none the happier that there's some counterfeit digital version running around claiming to be me.

> Let me ask you this: I create a 'brain upload' program, run it on you, and tell you, "OK, now your brain is uploaded!" Will you walk willingly into a blender?

If it was well researched, well tested, had been known for some years to work, and I could meet with my virtual self and confirm his authenticity, then yes, absolutely I would. Assuming this "blender" of yours isn't painful, of course. What a small price to pay for immortality!

Consider taking a look at the book Glasshouse. It portrays a world where this is normal.

How would you confirm his authenticity? I mean, if I was a machine created from a human who would stand to inherit all of that human's wealth, power, and status, I'd say whatever the hell I thought he wanted to hear to make him walk into a blender.

You don't think you could tell yourself from a stranger?

Absolutely not, I've never talked to myself as a stranger.

For 2), the standard "ship of Theseus" argument applies: progressively replace your brain by parts which are emulated. Initially you are you, at the end of the process you are uploaded. When did your "subjective experience" change?

The notion of the continuity of consciousness is not well-defined, so I don't think we have any idea about whether brain uploads can make sense or not. But I don't see why it's obvious that they wouldn't.

It's not the brain that I'm worried about losing, it's the body. The ship of Theseus imagines I am replacing parts with nigh-indistinguishable parts. There is a fundamental difference in going from squishy biology to program in the cloud. I'm not even sure it's possible for a machine to have a subjective experience like a human's without the squishy meat parts, and I doubt we'll learn enough to emulate those parts successfully for a good while. I'm pretty attached to my hands and face and would probably be very unhappy if I lost them.

One thing about that hypothetical world - we would have a strong economical incentive to expand inwards and outwards - to start underwater settlements, to turn deserts into habitable, arable lands, to build Mars colonies and Venus cloud cities. Those things aren't beyond our technological capabilities now, we just have no strong incentive to do them.

And to just be more thrifty with our resources in general.

>...to build Mars colonies and Venus cloud cities.

That doesn't solve the problem on Earth, it only spreads it across the solar system.

It's logical, it's clear - there's only one way to go from here. Without a doubt, the only way to go from here is out!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ab_mH8R0KTM

http://lyrics.wikia.com/wiki/Julia_Ecklar:One_Way_To_Go

I imagine we'd just end up with some sort of extreme aversion to reproducing. It's not hard to imagine - many people don't even care to reproduce now, and fertility rates in advanced countries are sometimes below replacement fertility levels. The replacement rate drops dramatically when you can stop aging and most forms of death, but I imagine that if you always had the body of a 22-year old Olympic athlete, you might be less interested in having children. You might even develop an ethos like buying organic food or being vegetarian - it's gauche to have children once you're taking stem cell patches.

No, it's appalling that something like this is not already done. That it requires bunch of rich people to become seriously discussed at all, instead of being a continued major focus of medical research for decades now. People are funny this way. They'll bury their dead and mourn their loss, consider their own mortality and preach about life everlasting, or write stories about elixirs of youth. But to actually move a finger and support the war against death? No, that's insane.

> write stories about elixirs of youth

One of our earliest extant pieces of literature (fragments from ~2100 BCE, earliest complete version before 1000 BCE) is about that, in fact. It's a cautionary tale.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_of_Gilgamesh

It's easy to be cautionary if there's no chance of actually achieving it. http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2625

Truth be told, we have cautionary tales in our literature about pretty much any single thing a human being can desire. Power? Check. Riches? Check. Love? Check.

I don't think it's as easy as you portray it. To "cure death", you have to cure every thing that can go wrong with you.

Look at just once thing that can go wrong with you: cancer. There are huge amounts of money poured into cancer research around the world.

But I don't even know if my wife, only 30 years old but recently diagnosed with cancer, will live long enough for us to have kids and see them grow up.

"which would fundamentally alter what it means to be human in a profound and everlasting way"

This has periodically happened over the long course of our species existence. A hundred years ago the average lifespan was half what it was today. Simply because medicine improved. Treating death as a disease instead of a natural thing seems perfectly rational to me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com