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Comment by ucaetano | Hacker News Reader

Funny how as billionaires get older, they start backing anti-aging and life-extension initiatives.

Billionaires are not immune to the terrifying realities of life and death, they're just more likely to delude themselves into thinking that like so many rules, they can beat that too. The result is, on the bright side, that sometimes they do some real good by funding research. The downside is that often they blow that money on extremely expensive snake oil.

But Kurzweil has been banging this drum for a long time. He has means but still isn't near being a billionaire. He just believes.

Kurzweil actually not just believes but sells his own snake oil.

http://www.rayandterry.com/

Despite there being no evidence of any effect.

He still needs money to fund, for example, his cryogenic payments. He wears that little metal bracelet everywhere he goes (I got to a lot of conferences), I can't imagine the service is cheap.

I read that you set it up so that the cryo people get your life insurance.

This is accurate. The absolute cheapest option is around $35k plus an annual membership fee (or a one-time few-k fee I believe). The more premium (but head-only) option is $80k plus annual membership fee. (A bit more if you opt for a standby team.) A life insurance policy that covers these amounts does not cost very much.

Sure, most people bang some form of this drum, but when they do people chuckle. When someone starts swinging tens of millions of dollars whiling banging the drum though... people pay attention. For some strange reason though, they stop seeing it for what it is... dazzled by the money as they are.

And that when you're a billionaire you have much more to lose when you die.

I don't understand this belief, can you expand on it? The way I see it, you don't "lose" anything when you die, because a "loss" implies the lack of ability to use something you once were able to use, and the feeling that comes from that lacking. When someone dies they'll never again be able to use stuff, so there is no loss.

I think we agree up to "a 'loss' implies the lack of ability to use something you once were able to use". Since a dead person is unable to do anything, being a billionaire or not leads to the same conclusion.

Where we differ is on the feeling that comes from that lacking. A dead person feels nothing and by your definition is not losing anything since they can't feel it.

this is all very true and I agree, however as humans we can sense impending events and a since death is an indisputable fact the feeling of this eventual loss can begin to haunt one before it actually sets in. So technically we can argue that a billionaire begins to feel the cost of losing it when she becomes a billionaire. (since she knows she will die and lose it).

You think, when billionaires think about death, that they're bemoaning the loss of their money? That's a very strange thing to believe, and I'm very sure it's wrong.

Perhaps think of it as lost opportunity, instead. More money often provides for more opportunity.

I think it is very natural to preemptively feel sorrow for some of the opportunities you will give up when you die.

Don't we all lose the same thing and the only thing that matters?

I would say that death is the great equaliser.

Can't take that money with you!

> real good by funding research

Like the planet need humans to live longer???

The planet has no needs at all, and human longevity is unlikely to be a major issue when most of our human ventures center around efficient ways of killing each other.

A ,ore appropriate question would be, "Does humanity need longevity for humans?"

Unknown. There is are reasons to believe that longevity isn't necessarily a bad thing however, and many reasons to believe that it could have global value. You have to remember that in such a rosy future, we still have the oceans to colonize, and then space. Longevity would bring problems with it, but they could be solved by sensible controls on birth rates.

That's blatantly incorrect. The radical majority of human ventures center around improving the quality of life for humans on the planet. An extremely small percentage of human ventures are focused on finding new ways to kill (less than 1%). US defense spending for example - most of which goes to human soldier expenses for pay / benefits / veterans etc - is merely 3% of US GDP. The actual amount of that 3% that goes into figuring out new ways to kill, is less than Google's revenue. In other words, you missed by greater than a factor of 100x (I'd guess greater than 1000x) in your estimation regarding how much effort/money/time humans as a whole are putting into killing each other.

>most of our human ventures center around efficient ways of killing each other.

Excuse me? What planet are you living on? I thought I was already living on the dystopian-social-scifi planet.

Yes, because a huge part of the reason people disregard climate science today is because many of the people with the decision making authority to invest in actually correcting for it also judge they won't be alive to suffer from the consequences.

Make humans live forever and suddenly everything matters. Interplanetary colonization for the preservation of the species alone is not enough, but to preserve themselves it becomes essential.

Why develop Type 2 civilization power generation technology if you would never live long enough to see the transition? Make people live longer and you increase the likelihood the long term becomes relevant to them.

That's the theory. Practically, almost all humans don't give a shit about the 5-year consequences of their actions even though they will most likely leave at least another 50 years.

Oh, if it only were that simple.

Create a class of longer living humans and you double down on the problem we have today.

Half the number of the species on top of the food chain, then I'll take you seriously.

And what are the long term consequences of immortality?

The planet doesn't need billionaires, but there they are. Cue George Carlin.

All we know is that the planet needs plastic... etc.

All due respect to Mr Carlin, the guy was insightful and funny, but a solution he did not provide.

He made a lot of money out of pointing out what was wrong with the setup, a solution to the shithole we're in was not part of his schtick.

I love the man and will point people at his skit on 'save the whales' but nothing he's done or said changes shit.

He would be the first to admit that btw.

We're royally fucked.

You say we're royally fucked, meanwhile the condition of human existence, or the standard of living at the median, has done nothing but drastically improve over the last 5,000 / 500 / 100 / 50 years.

We're the exact opposite of royally fucked. We've been dealt the greatest hand imaginable. Improvements in the human condition are accelerating by the decade.

You've misread the thread. We're talking about the planet, not the fact we all get to live to 100.

If I was a billionaire I might start early, leaving it late just seems like poor planning.

Wasn't the first act of a Pharaoh traditionally to begin construction of their tomb?

Glad to have individuals in our world we can plausibly compare to Pharaohs. That's justifiable.

When you look at the equation of what you do with your life it starts to become more of an imperative to work on ending aging because if that is solved it gives you an infinite or at least much longer time to work on whatever else you want. I am now also starting to get pangs to work on climate damage mitigation because it won't be fun to live in a super hot or flooded world.

Life extension would really help environmental concerns. The problem with things like global warming, ocean acidification, biodiversity collapse, etc. is that the negative effects are usually too far in the future. But if you're actually going to be around that long, it suddenly becomes a matter of self-interest.

Most actually don't. The field is dramatically under-funded.

Life extension industry is too early. It is much more productive to work on other problems (e.g. solving more immediate problems and do scientific research to help solving these immediate problems).

Then later, when technology is robust enough - meaningfully invest into actual anti-aging efforts.

Unfortunately the time for meaningful anti-aging research may come in ~100 years when we all would be already long dead.

Sadly very true. Wealth doesn't grant vision.

Well, I would definitely do the same thing myself.

Doesn't everyone?

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