Billions’ worth of high-tech research seeking to make death optional | Hacker News Reader

Billions’ worth of high-tech research seeking to make death optional

newyorker.com

168 pointsjseliger184 comments

When I see things like this, I'm reminded of a story an old co-worker told me who was a war veteran years ago in his home country. He and many others were made to go to war for their country and risk their lives. However, those who were wealthy and/or well-connected could find ways out of being compelled to go into the military and risk their lives.

One of the wealthy, well connected young men he knew who got out of going into military was killed getting hit by a bus in an accident. The guy telling the story actually went into a bloody war seeing people get killed around him, yet he somehow was alive today to tell the tale.

What's my point? I don't think it's pointless to research life-extending technology. It seems like some forms of death couldn't be avoided 'post-hoc', if one had a particular accident or the like, no matter how many resources were at your disposal, however. I guess lowering the overall probability of dying of 'something' in general would be nice though.

I agree. Even if you conquer conventional biological aging via nanobots in your bloodstream or whatever, you'd still be vulnerable to random space elevator accidents, particle beam malfunction, etc.

It's still better to have an option of dying than to have a certainty of dying[0]. Also, avoiding accidents and even malicious actions becomes an engineering problem to be solved too. Maybe we'll end up having mind backups, so if you die in that elevator, you'll get restored from last night's copy into a freshly-grown body?

[0] - sure, when lifespan approaches infinity, the probability of dying due to external factors will approach 1 anyway, but it's still better than having your lifespan capped at 120 years or something (last decades of which barely qualify as living).

Right, I agree that pursuing life-extension is worthwhile. Even living a few more decades at the height of our productivity would benefit society immensely, given how long it takes to train humans to be experts at anything.

I'm just trying to inject a little reality into the more starry-eyed Singularitarianist fantasies about living for millions of years among the stars as an uploaded member of a hive-mind or something.

I'm not a "deathist" by any means, but I accept that one day, it is overwhelmingly likely that my consciousness will end.

I think that if we could defeat aging, living one million of years wouldn't be that hard to achieve. People would just focus more on preventing fatal accidents. Plus, more accidents would be survivable because healthcare would be much more advanced too.

Your story has a more sinister moral. Wealth and privilege can allow people to achieve statistically better life outcomes. Conquering aging would be nice, reserving it for a select few will simply exacerbate the existing inequality in the world. Surely we can come up with some better rules for this game.

Probably no better chance for humanity to transcend its current perennial state of warfare and short term thinking than to make people live for a few centuries. Imagine a world where life is precious and they have to live with the consequences of their choices rather than having the next generation deal with their decisions.

By the same token, humanity hasn't changed so much that the rich and powerful don't eventually realize the terror of their mortality, and desperately try to buy their way out of it. While it's always possible that this will be the generation to discover the Philosopher's Stone, there is no real indication that's the case.

I wish I could agree with your rosy outlook, but my view of a realistic form of immortality is in line with Richard K. Morgan's vis a vis 'Altered Carbon'. People keep looking for a technology to change us as humans, but we're going to have to do it ourselves, and soon, or die. Technology doesn't change our nature, it just empowers us to act more freely on it.

At the end of the day the impetus behind the desire to extend life doesn't matter. If the outcome is that we are around for centuries at a time, we all win as a species. It's a bit idealistic but it would be wonderful to have truly wise people in power who have to care about the long term for once, even if at first not all of the masses get to live much longer.

Right now life is so short that by the time you barely start getting a grasp of what's going on, it's already time to go.

That's true, but nothing on the horizon is changing that for us in our lifetimes, no matter how desperately we wish for something else. Meanwhile problems with solutions do exist, which could enable our species to be around and civilized for long enough to eventually reach that dream.

Our current course ends in death, not immortality.

Well, not with that attitude.

Believe it or not, a positive attitude isn't the magic ingredient to immortality, any more than a lack of skepticism helps a psychic work better. Science is a beautiful edifice, in part because it works in spite of attitude and expectation. The world can laugh at you while you putter away in your shed, but if you can fly at the end of the day, you're going down in history.

The only thing that needs a positive attitude and a suspension of disbelief is fraud.

Suspension of disbelief doesn't make science go better, but science that doesn't get popular support or widespread credibility doesn't get funded as readily, or accepted as quickly, or treated as urgent. And an excess of incredulity can become fear and rejection.

150,000 people die every day. That's bigger than a moderate-sized city. That's not a problem to casually get around to maybe thinking about in the perpetual "a few years from now but really never"; that's a problem we should be devoting a substantial part of our total resources to.

Why? There's no reason other than wishful thinking to expect that devoting substantially more resources would actually deliver significant life extension.

There are many such reasons to expect that research would produce good results, including past research that already has, and ongoing research that continues to.

No past research has ever pushed up the maximum age of humans. It remains at about 124. There has been no progress in that field.

Other medical research has helped prevent people from dying early and that's certainly worth continuing. But that's not what we're discussing here.

The past and ongoing research lets us understand in more details the processes that make humans have the maximum age. Unless you believe ~124 is a hard limit mandated by God himself (which, BTW., is something that the Bible says explicitly), that research is crucial to eventually overcoming the limit. Is there anything you believe that makes life extention a problem that's impossible to solve? Because if not, it's always a matter of throwing more resources at it.

There are other problems that show indications of having solutions, and which could realistically be applied to most or all humans. The dream of being an immortal Martian might be an appealing one, but it is no less a distraction or a religion at this point than people paying for salvation in Scientology or looking to the pope for an indulgence.

I understand that this is something that's almost impossible to accept though.

Personally I'm not having much hope of either standing on Mars or living past the age of 100, but I do believe those - and others - are problems that need attention and serious resource investments. It pains me to see just how much productivity on this planet is wasted on utterly pointless things, when big problems affecting us all remain almost unaddressed.

Well we're in total agreement then, just with slightly different perspectives. I think if we were both told to come to a mutual decision about a plan for the future of humanity, the plans would resemble each other more than anything. Space is the future if we live that long, and longevity is an issue that needs to be addressed. In the near-term though, we're on the bubble of losing our civilization in the next century or so and we need to put that fire out now.

> In the near-term though, we're on the bubble of losing our civilization in the next century or so and we need to put that fire out now.

Yes, I agree with that strongly. In fact, this is a fear of mine - we're pretty much on the verge of quality-changing breakthroughs for life itself, and yet it can all go to hell if we fuck up the next few decades over petty issues like profits and power.

I'll go further and say that IMO the most important goal right now in solving any kind of sociopolitical issue should be stability of technological civilization. This should come first before anything - because if we last a bit longer, we might be able to solve other issues long-term, and if we fuck up now, there won't be a technological civilization for the next couple thousand (if not million) years.

Science researches problems that are deemed important, and funding of those problems should be proportional to the importance of the problem. Death I argue is one of the most important problems of all so research on how to cure it should be funded much better than it is. If it happens in our lifetime or in our children's or in 100 years doesn't matter. What matters is that every day we accelerate the curing of aging we're saving 150K lives.

How would everyone win? Not having deaths to offset birth grows the population even faster. Unless such a thing were more likely to produce people capable of solving humanity's imminent crises, within a decade or two you'd see life getting a lot worse if immortality went mainstream

Assuming quality of life is high enough for most of the world, births will automatically adjust themselves. If you know you have a couple of centuries to decide whether you want a kid or not, you don't have to rush into it, you have options.

I'm a bit skeptical that the human sex drive is going to automatically adjust itself downwards at the same rate as the death rate suddenly plunging, even with modern contraception.

People don't rush into it because they're worried about time, they rush into because:

- its an accident - they want some sort of benefit, e.g. farm help or gov assistants - biological urges

Making people immortal wouldn't affect any of those. Which do you think is worse for the poor who tend to rush into kids: a lifetime of poverty, or an eternity of it?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsBT5EQt348

Nevermind that it feels good?

>It's a bit idealistic but it would be wonderful to have truly wise people in power who have to care about the long term for once

No it's not. Idealistic is to have the masses wise and involved enough to get rid of persistent leader-castes. This sort of getting-rid is likely to happen quite soon, especially if we in the masses hear that the leader-caste are likely to become immortal while we remain subject to the Reaper.

Old people can be wise (i.e. experienced) but they also become conservative and rigid. Youth is what drives change and when people do their best work. Old people need to get out of the way at some point.

And unfortunately they are back in power now in the US. Prime example IMHO. Both Trump and Clinton were like giving the AARP the reigns. Now it's like the old boy's club is having one last run at managing our country. After the 40-something Obama from 2008 it really feels like a step backwards. Wise? How far has these people's thinking evolved from their 30's or 40's? How "wise" was our country back then?

It's morbid to say it but I have no reservations in admitting that I(and I'll throw out there most others I know) am looking forward to these people "moving on".

And by "moving on" I mean dying and getting out of the way.

The thing is, if you don't like the old people and they way they govern, you're free to not elect them. They're only "in the way" because stupid voters elect them.

On top of that, we had an extremely progressive candidate running; his name was "Bernie", and he was older than both Hillary and Donald. He was far more progressive than "young" Obama, and he was also very popular with the youngest voters. You don't have to be young to be popular with young people, and think in idealistic ways like younger people.

I don't want to see these people die of old age; I'd rather keep great old people like Bernie around. If the people of our country are so stupid that they keep electing people like Hillary and Trump and rejecting people like Bernie, then they deserve that kind of governance.

Unfortunately young people also sign up for many unfortunate causes because they have no historical perspective, nor do they understand how subtle and not black-and-white real life can be. Young people aren't a panacea and there absolutely is such a thing as a wise but also modern older leader.

Do the elderly really become conservative and rigid from mere age, though? How much of that process is driven by declining health and feelings of alienation from modern society? How much by the belief that people of significantly different ages can't have meaningful friendships? I have a hard time believing that we'd see the same patterns if 20-year-olds and 200-year-olds saw each other on the metro every day.

> Imagine a world where life is precious

We are in a world that has stretched overall life expectancy by dozens of years already in the past 100 years. Humans have not changed THAT much for it.

Life expectancy has changed in the sense that fewer people die to do preventable causes such as childbirth, bacteria, viruses etc, not that our life span has increased in any significant way: http://www.ancient-origins.net/news-evolution-human-origins/...

better nutrition and hygiene, and generally lower alcohol and tobacco consumption (in the West anyway) have slightly extended the total lifespan for people who don't die early of accidental or pathogenic deaths.

however, you're still absolutely right that senescence is inevitable and we have very little, besides nutrition and exercise, that can do anything about it.

Look at the values of the people who ruled a mere hundred years ago. It's a damn good thing for "savages," women, LGBT folks, etc. that ruling classes, no matter how authoritarian, eventually abdicate by dying and that the next generation views the world a little differently.

Could you imagine being governed the way that your 500-year-old elders deem fitting? We wouldn't need violent extremists to try to reimpose 16th century public morals. They would simply never have left.

To support this, you have to believe we are perfect now, that there are no more controverises between the young and the old that the young need to win. Otherwise, this is one of those moments where society pulls up the drawbridge, comes full circle. We'll have leaned so far into science and technology that the next time the elders cry "Witchcraft!" they will never go away.

Suppose I could imagine being ruled by people from a couple of millenia ago when homosexuality was normal. Morality progresses and regresses all the time, unfortunately it is not guaranteed to go in the "right" direction either way. See what happened to same sex relationships in Western history. There were plenty of young folks who deemed it to be worth killing for at one point. Unfortunately the young are much more likely to give in to the latest moral fashions and mob mentality than they are to do a fully informed historical evaluation of the current state of morality.

My current belief is that morality is indirectly related to the progress of technology, by being directly related to the stability and wealth of the society. Basically, when most people aren't afraid of going hungry or getting invaded by their neighbours, they suddenly have time to discuss issues like homosexuality and generally relax the social norms that in the past were necessary for survival (by maintaining group cohesion).

> It's a damn good thing for "savages," women, LGBT folks, etc

When will religion die out? In time to save the religious from persecution?

That could easily backfire if the problem is a matter of nature, rather than nurture. Cycles of vengeance wouldn't burn themselves out.

> "How fortunate that science hasn't cracked human immortality. It's a great blessing that we can outlive old wars. And old warriors."

-- Komarr by Lois McMaster Bujold

"When the last man who remembers the horrors of the last great war dies, the next great war becomes inevitable."

The human race is like a giant fuzzing machine, we just try everything, push every boundary, bad and good, and see what happens.

But, our lives are too short for the lessons to last very long, and we repeat our mistakes relatively frequently. We try to encode some of the lessons into social structures, from religion to literature to law, to pass onto future generations.

But I can't help but wonder how things would be in this regard if we all just lived an order of magnitude longer. Less war? Fewer financial collapses?

I also wonder if less innovation too, but I imagine if the great inventors of our time lived 10x longer we'd get more rather than less, given that it takes an increasingly large portion of a lifetime to learn enough of our growing body of scientific knowledge to be able to make real contributions to it.

What really aggravates me about this article is the exceedingly disingenuous dismissal of SENS rejuvenation research programs it puts forward.

The author settles on allotopic expression of mitochondrial genes in the cell nucleus as an example of a project so difficult it is impossible. But allotopic expression is a very poor example to pick for something that is alleged to be "a doomed labor." The work has been accomplished for three of the thirteen genes needed; this is a capability that exists, and is underway towards completion. The allotopic expression of mitochondrial gene ND4 is the basis for a therapy that is currently going through clinical trials in Europe! It exists, it works! Yes, it took effort to get there, effort funded at the early stages by the SENS Research Foundation and those who donated to it, I should note, but so does everything else.

This is one of the things that frustrates me immensely about many of the critics of SENS - they willfully ignore some of the progress that has been made, pretending it doesn't exist.

Yet their behavior for progress that is so compelling they can't ignore it is in many ways worse. Let us look at what is said - and, more importantly, not said - about senescent cell clearance, something that de Grey and other SENS advocates have been promoting as a path to treat aging for the past fifteen years, on the basis of strong evidence, that they assembled from the various groups who created it across the research community, laid out, and made the argument for. It is right there in the SENS outline; hard to miss, and has been from pretty much day one back at the turn of the century. Senescent cell clearance is a core part of the SENS agenda.

Fortunately for all of us, targeted removal of senescent cells has finally taken off these past few years, the evidence for a significant impact on aging has grown to be nigh irrefutable, and near everyone in the research community is enthused. Yet SENS and many researchers' past vocal rejections of senescent cell clearance as a part of SENS is swept under the rug, never to be mentioned. It is unconscionable behavior, and it happens in this article: despite covering UNITY Biotechnology, the senolytics company, no mention of senescent cells is made in connection with the SENS vision. It takes some brass to claim SENS to be a doomed effort and then roll right on in the next paragraph to a discussion with one of the UNITY co-founders on the topic of removing senescent cells to treat aging.

SENS was right, and they're not getting credit for being right, when everyone else was wrong. Let's hope their other predictions come true as well!

I actually believe its highly important we achieve this sooner rather than later. Because we are currently limited by death for a lot of things. One example is Inter-Planetary Space Travel. If you could live longer then you can travel farther and explore more.

As if it's not going to be exclusively available for the ultra billionaires. Immortality will be the final divider of the classes.

Nonsense. The promise of natural death for ultra billionaires is the only thing protecting them from the guillotine.

It's not going to be exclusively available for ultra billionaires, if it is possible at all. There are lots of things that would be powerful advantages if only a tiny elite had access to them: vaccines, antibiotics, anti-retroviral drugs, digital computers... but if a thing is demonstrated possible at all, others will figure out how to do it again. And if the first inventors refuse to sell or share the technology it will just be spread by the second or third group to figure out the trick.

Already wealth is a big factor in longevity.

I don't think they will conduct clinical trials on ultra billionaires only. THere's not enough of them to know if it works...

Consider the cost of polio vaccine versus the cost of keeping a polio victim undead for a year in an iron lung. It's ineffective medical treatment that really costs. Even if you don't care about human life, even if money is your only preoccupation, we need life extension technology to stop the cost of end-of-life care from bankrupting modern society.

I think that cryogenic hibernation is a significantly easier way to achieve interplanetary travel.

Immortality -- to me at least -- doesn't seem like it will end up providing that many benefits to humanity as a whole. Population control will become much more difficult, unless all over-aged males are somehow forced to undergo a vasectomy. And I highly doubt that people living longer will lead to increased productivity. On the contrary, I think that people will rely on welfare more and more as they age, not because of health, but because of burnout. The obvious solution to this is the creation of a general AI that provides the majority of humans with unlimited income for life. But then, if everyone is rich, people will quickly get bored after experiencing everything they're interested in, making immortality essentially useless!

It might be that I just don't follow the topic, but cryogenic hibernation sounds to me like just a science fiction idea with no real advancement ever having happened. Curing illnesses, instead, we do constantly and steadily. So the latter seems to me much more easier.

I don't think curing illnesses is the same as extending life, but if it is I might agree with you.

Well, so far curing and preventing illnesses is how we've extended life. There's room for an argument that, after we're done with all current major illnesses, we'll still have to solve the problem of debilitating aging to increase life further. But who knows if that's just pessimism.

Even if it's the case, we're also doing steady progress in the "make people more robust" department: orthopedics, transplants, pacemakers, better nutrition and supplements, better environmental health, ...

I guess it makes sense, because there's strong and continuous economic pressure to achieve those things, while there isn't a case (yet?) for getting to hibernation via baby steps.

>But then, if everyone is rich, people will quickly get bored after experiencing everything they're interested in, making immortality essentially useless!

Says you.

Yes, it's nothing but an opinion.

Assuming you mean interstellar space travel (interplanetary spaceflight is quite achievable with current human lifespans and technology), we don't need to live longer to do it.

Due to the principle of special relativity, if you could build a spaceship that accelerates at a constant 1g, the people on the ship could get anywhere in the entire galaxy without aging more than 24 years [1]. So a person could easily travel from one end of the galaxy and back in a normal human lifespan. Of course to a "stationary" observer (e.g. on Earth) watching the spaceship, it would appear to take a couple hundred thousand years for the trip to take place. But this doesn't matter a bit to people aboard the ship (well, aside from the fact that everyone they left behind on Earth would be dead just a few months into their trip).

So the hard part isn't getting people to live long enough. It's building a ship that can accelerate at a constant 1g for years on end. :)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_travel_using_constant_ac...

I had this thought but the downer is: where are you getting your energy? And all of the mass you need to eject to keep your rocket accelerating, you'll have to carry with you. I guess if you could stop and eat some suns along the way -- but we're not talking about current technology anymore.

On the other hand, some really fucking rotten ideas go into the dirt when people die, too. And somewhat related to that idea, but more specific, there is a lot of truth behind the saying that science advances one funeral at a time.

The financial impact of this is an interesting angle to me.

Considering that many of us hope to retire (or at least not have to work a stressful job) a lot of effort goes into saving up enough money to last just ~20 years after finishing work.

I'm not sure how most of us would be able to ammass sufficient wealth to be comfortably retired even for 60 years (ie live to "just" 120-130 years of age).

If you have to worry about that you won't be able to afford these treatments anyway.

Strangely, this is both reassuring and scary at the same time.

The point of longevity is that you retain your mental and physical facilities far longer, so it's almost a certainty people would continue working until the last ~20 years of their life, just like now. You'll still only need to save for the last ~20yrs of life, but you'll have a longer time working during which to do so.

If the ages of dogs and cats don't increase accordingly, the smart money would be on domesticating longer lived species of pets. e.g. Tortoises live up to 2 centuries.

I'm only in my forties and I've buried 5 pet cats already! I'm not sure I could live to 130 and go through the trauma of outliving quite a significant number more.

More likely would be parrots, which can in some circumstances outlive humans, and are much more intelligent and social than tortoises. Unfortunately most birds are fundamentally fractured in their braincases and they are insane uncontrollable maniacs. They act like they are controlled by a twitch stream.

https://np.reddit.com/r/AnimalsBeingJerks/comments/42vlvs/ne...

"A side note, I am fully convinced that ALL cockatoos are insane. They are fun to own, they are adorable to watch, but deep inside that tiny feathered skull is a scratched, perpetually skipping warped record playing the soundtrack to Silent Hill backwards. If you could experience the brain of a cockatoo first hand, you would probably feel like you had dropped 1,000 hits of premium acid and boarded the scariest roller coaster ever imagined. I love each and every one I have ever met, but they are ALL insane."

or just make your dog immortal.

Supposing an incredible anti-aging pill is invented, what do you suppose the chances are the pill-taker begins to feel like one Bilbo Baggins? "I feel thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread."

Amy Wagers, a researcher at Harvard, told me, “Part of the meaning of life is that we die.”

I wouldn't want to live forever if I had to keep hearing this.

I'd happily wait until all who keep believing that die of old age.

On a large scale, I don't have any objection to seeking to end human mortality. However, I'm skeptical of our ability to maintain a functional society given the existence of immortal humans. I can't even imagine the levels of inequality when portions of the population can live forever.

Never mind the ethics of figuring out how to dole out immortality, and to whom.

One of the recent discoveries is mentioned:

He praised their work with enzymes that help regulate aging; with teasing out genes that control life span in various dog breeds; and with a technique by which an old mouse is surgically connected to a young mouse, shares its blood, and within weeks becomes younger.

When I originally read about that work I pictured some people with money and no moral compass kidnapping children and getting a similarly minded surgeon to perform the procedure on themselves. A recent spike in child trafficking could be a direct result of this. It makes for the most frightening villain I can think of. So lets hope they figure out how to get these benefits without grafting the young onto the old sooner rather than later.

This is the ultimate necessary thing to do actually for human beings. All economics and social activities stem from the quest to live forever, though it's impossible to implement before. But today, technologies have made this promising. Believe me, it's not absurd at all.

Think about all religions, they come from the quest to live forever deeply inside human's unconscious, but today, technology and science have become the new religion, and its goal, in fact, is still the same here, because human beings never change much.

Combine biology and information theory, I think this can be done before 2500 A.D..

> I think this can be done before 2500 B.C.

Uh, I'm pretty sure it's already too late for Gilgamesh. Sorry to give you the bad news.

Sorry buddy, I made a silly mistake, you got it.

The date coupled with your optimism made me wonder whether the rest of the post was parody. You know, "we have the technology now. We can do this. Why, just as soon as our great God King returns from distant lands of the dead bearing the mysteries of mortality we'll build the proper Moon Temple to achieve everlasting life..." That sort of thing.

This comment is hilarious. I don't have any additional remarks, but I wanted to indicate that with more than an anonymous upvote.

> All economics and social activities stem from the quest to live forever

This is quite an assertion.

> Think about all religions, they come from the quest to live forever deeply inside human's unconscious

Yeah, I don't agree with this one either.

I have no expectations about this stuff. I suppose I find it all pretty fantastical and I probably will until there's hard evidence all this hype is actually leading somewhere.

>> Think about all religions, they come from the quest to live forever deeply inside human's unconscious

>Yeah, I don't agree with this one either.

Follow the commandments and you are guaranteed to live forever in heaven. It doesn't get more concrete than that.

"In an age of explosive development in the realm of medical technology, it is unnerving to find that the discoveries of Salk, Sabin, and even Pasteur remain irrelevant to much of humanity."

-Paul Farmer

What the article doesn't discuss is genetic engineering to make longer-lived humans. That's more likely to work than a rejuvenation scheme. But it's a tougher sell; it benefits only the unborn.

A major genetic redesign might require generating a new species, one that doesn't interbreed with old-style humans. Or maybe several new species; Squibb people and Novartis people might not interbreed. That's a social problem for 50-100 years out.

When finally science unlocks the secret of immortality, they'll raise the retirement age correspondingly…

Official retirement age? Once you build up some passive income sources you can retire whenever you want. And you can do that as simply as having a nest egg sitting in an investment portfolio.

Because immortality is quite plausible, but the idea that your portfolio is not guaranteed to continue to return an inflation-adjusted 4% over the long term is inconceivable.

In other words, you expect post-immortality born generations to work for you forever? You'd be lucky if you lived to see more than one revolution.

I expect automation to replace most human jobs. At some point in the future we'll move to a universal basic income funded by the work robots do. I think we'll be forced to.

Automation is already displacing massive numbers of workers. The Economist argues[1] that the current rise of populist leaders is partially a result of this. People in poorer areas are angry at offshoring and trade for the lack of jobs, and vote for Trump and Brexit to fix it.

[1] https://twitter.com/theeconomist/status/835429157475528705

Oh, it's just that easy? And I can do it whenever? I just need a nest egg? What is that exactly? Oh, but I also need a passive income source? That's all?

So explain how exactly does "anyone" pull this off, or explain how there a massive gap which prevents most people from doing this. Bonus points for explaining how one or the other situation is better.

Its simple, but that doesn't make it easy.

The most tractable way to pull it off is to dramatically lower your expenses. How much do you need to live? If you can get a consistent 5% interest from your assets (-2% inflation) then $1m will net you $30k of spending money per year without digging into the base. Saving up that much money in the tech sector over an entire career (especially one thats been extended due to anti-aging research, which is what we're talking about) is very doable. Lots of people pull it off, they just call that asset 'their house' and call saving money 'paying off the mortgage'. If you sell / rent out the house and move somewhere cheap then you can be pretty comfortable living on less than $30k/yr, depending on what you want to do.

If you want more information:

http://www.mrmoneymustache.com

https://www.reddit.com/r/financialindependence/

Doesn't it take some time to take care of the assets though? Or are you able to get those returns without touching them at all?

There is a plethora of companies who will solve that problem for you, in exchange for a small cut of the investment returns.

Eg, https://www.betterment.com for stocks & bonds, and http://www.ipmanagers.com.au for managing property. (For property you obviously want someone local to your area.)

once we get that space travel will be indispensable. you'll have to send retires to other planets, maybe say you have to leave your planet of birth.

Or rather, humankind's quest to not die quite so very quickly.

Just don't forget - eventually the universe dies, and your immortal body along with it.

I never understand why this always gets brought up. Yes, let's worry about the universe dying after a few billion years when people are currently dying at ~100 if they're lucky. Talk about scale mismatch.

I think it's because existentially, it doesn't really matter if you live 80 years or until the final heat-death of the universe. When you get to the end, you'll still want to live longer and marvel at how fast it all went by.

The miracle is that we existed at all, and that we recognized ourselves (or whatever consciousness is). Next to that, duration is insignificant. A scale mismatch.

How successful are humans at rejuvenating large codebases back to when they were new and small and fresh? (Without rewrites or replacements)

Surely human bodies will be easier to rejuvenate than that, eh?

Some of these "benefits" of death are just ridiculous. If you don't like a long life you can always end it. It's not like anyone is going to invent mythology-grade immortality and then chain you to a rock to be tormented by an eagle tearing at your liver.

I don't expect that anti-aging research is going to significantly extend my own lifespan or healthspan. Biology is really complicated. But that doesn't justify sugar-coating age related morbidity and mortality. They are really bad. The only thing worse than death is great pain. Old age deals out both: pain and death. It torments and finally kills you. People trying to defeat death may be delusional about their prospects for success, but they are at least trying to do the best thing humans have tried to do in generations.

If you are under 40 I don't think the prospect of a fair amount of additional healthy years as a result of this research is a particularly delusional one. Actual immortality seems unlikely to me, however.

I feel anyone born post 1980 has a shot at slowed-aging, maybe even reversed for post 2000's. No data, just a hunch on the pace I've seen from the biotech sector.

As someone disconnected from that industry, I don't know of the major breakthroughs since 2000. Do you have have a "biotech advancements in the last 15 year executive summary"?

Well for one thing, around 2000 we completed our first human genome sequencing effort of Craig Venter's genome at a cost of $3 billion over 10 years. Today we can sequence an entire human genome for about $1000 in a few days, and we've sequenced thousands of genomes including all kinds of cells and organisms that affect human health. We're generating craploads of very valuable data just waiting to be explored.

We can now take data from a computer and synthesise DNA for a cell from basically nothing, load that DNA into a 'blank' cell and start it up, making it grow and replicate - almost like making life!

We can use CRISPR/Cas9 to accurately cut and paste active DNA anywhere we want with high precision.

All these tools are ready, we just have to work out how to use them

Data doesn't equal breakthrough. For example : better climate models doesn't help us to fight climate change; centuries of football scores doesn't help us to win bets :-)

Really?

I meant data doesn't always equal huge breakthrough. For example, theorems, neural networks, quantum physics, etc. existed long before data were available. Data helps, supercharges them, but that doesn't count as "breakthrough" for me (so, I have a very ambitious notion of breakthrough)

If we don't learn a crap load from DNA in the next 20 years, I'll be very surprised.

DNA technology is hardly used medically, even though it is becoming cheap and relatively old.

CRISPR/Cas9 is more precise than technologies before, but still not perfect: http://www.nature.com/news/enzyme-tweak-boosts-precision-of-...

... yet ;)

These things have a way of being impossible until they are not. It used to be impossible to communicate with someone a great distance away, then we invented the telegraph. It used to be impossible to see someone at a great distance, then our seemingly-unrelated breakthroughs in network technology brought us easy consumer video chat.

Wikipedia has a list:

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

Dammit, I'm 41. Oh well, death it is.

He actually does have a point. It's pretty difficult to actually reverse aging once it has started, as everything kind of feeds back into itself. There are a few exceptions- Alzheimer's may be reversible, but things like heart damage, immune weakness or DNA degradation may not be. The way it looks right now it may be easier to stop aging from starting than to stop the damage from occuring. Once it starts happening, even if aging stops the damage will still accrue.

From a computational POV DNA damage should be trivial to repair. You have so many redundant copies in your body. Of course building a fault-free copy, creating stemcells from that and coaxing those into fixing any defects without causing cancer is still scifi, but not the physics-violating kind.

" It's pretty difficult to actually reverse aging once it has started"

As far as I know, there are two paradigms about ageing: There is a biological clock inside us or it's only entropy acting (damage accumulation).

Both would start in the moment of conception. So, what it means "once it has started"?

> things like heart damage

Could be reversed with a heart transplant?

Today is my 40th birthday. sad face.emoji

Happy Birthday :)

> I don't think the prospect of a fair amount of additional healthy years

Based on what data ? Read newspapers back in the 80s, we were going to solve every disease by the year 2010 or so. But for the most part medicine has not evolved by huge leaps. Sure, we have made some important drug discoveries, but by far and large we are notoriously bad at predicting what we can achieve in a set span of time.

There's a difference between you wanting to die personally and death being good for society as a whole. Death keeps old things from taking up the resources that new things need to live. When our cells don't die, that's called cancer. It's great for the cells involved -- until it kills the person they're a part of.

> When our cells don't die, that's called cancer.

No. No, when cells multiply uncontrollably, that's called cancer.

So, right now, in fact it's unchecked population growth that's much more akin to a cancer, than any hypothetical immortality.

As for unnecessary (or less important) things taking up resources; how many people do you know who have had their appendix and gallbladder taken out?

the appendix and gallbladder are non-vital organs but they still perform useful functions.

unchecked population growth is indeed a problem, what impact do you suppose it will have on the population when people keep living longer and longer, and a few of them are essentially undying?

in your comment, are you meaning to speak metaphorically or am I reading into it too much. the symbolic reading of your words suggests that certain people might have the status of a gallbladder. did you mean to imply that?

The organs remark was bonus snark, but yes: we will have to address unchecked population growth sooner or later, because lifespans will – should – continue to rise as well anyway, thanks to advances in medicine and hygiene, unless something goes terribly wrong in some area.

Luckily this problem has been solved in high brow science fiction: http://futurama.wikia.com/wiki/Near_Death_Star

In all seriousness I find that to be an unconvincing argument; isn't it better to have that choice rather than let it be made for us? Where would we be if Newton and Einstein were still alive? The only argument for aging I've ever liked is that culture just can't really advance without it- old people (on the whole! many older people are fantastic and very progressive) eventually seem to stop catching up to the rest of society. But still, it seems like insufficient reason to let brilliant people die.

As an example, wasn't Einstein a strong opponent to some of the weirder conclusions that would later be drawn by Quantum Physics? Even the brilliant people get stuck at some point (as you alluded to), and fresh perspectives are needed to make progress.

In addition, you don't get to pick who lives on and who doesn't. Think of all the people you would find to be very culturally backwards that would still be alive and hold a lot of power.

Getting to choose to live longer = good. I'm not trying to argue against that. I'm just trying to point out the benefits that natural death provides to society, because these benefits are something I personally plan to think carefully about as the choice to live longer and longer becomes an option.

> Think of all the people you would find to be very culturally backwards

Is the assumption that each generation is better than the last?

Hopefully if the previous generation paid it forward.

And as long we are talking about scientists, Feynman said this in his speech:

"The ideas I wish to describe are old ideas. There is practically nothing that I am going to say tonight that could not easily have been said by philosophers of the seventeenth century. Why repeat all this? Because there are new generations born every day. Because there are great ideas developed in the history of man, and these ideas do not last unless they are passed purposely and clearly from generation to generation."

> Where would we be if Newton and Einstein were still alive?

Or you could also point on the other end of the spectrum ? What if Attila or Stalin were still alive? Would that be a good thing for humanity ?

Putting it negatively, the myth of eternal return states that a life which disappears once and for all, which does not return, is like a shadow, without weight, dead in advance, and whether it was horrible, beautiful, or sublime, its horror, sublimity, and beauty mean nothing.

[....]

If the French Revolution were to recur eternally, French historians would be less proud of Robespierre. But because they deal with something that will not return, the bloody years of the Revolution have turned into mere words, theories, and discussions, have become lighter than feathers, frightening no one. There is an infinity of difference between a Robespierre who occurs only once in history and a Robespierre who eternally returns, chopping off French heads.

[....]

For how can we condemn something that is ephemeral, in transit? In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.

- Kundera, from the first chapter of The Unbearable Lightness of Being; mistakes mine, typed hastily from my dead-tree copy for want of a quickly DuckDuckGoable digital one.

(yes, it goes on to wrestle with many of the objections/concerns you should already have about the small snippet above)

You inspired me to pick up that book again for this week. Thanks!

"Where would we be if Newton and Einstein were still alive?"

Einstein and Newton contributed a lot but they were part of a historical trend, not genetic hail marys who ushered mankind from one epoch to the next.

"...it seems like insufficient reason to let brilliant people die."

This is - look, you can't argue that someone has the right to live based on their life achievements. This is like the ultimate perversion of the 'american drem' delusion - just achieve great thing and you can live forever.

Unfortunately Johnny never did crack the Navier-Stokes equation so instead of given the Immortality Treatment he became fertilizer in the end

Newton and Einstein were absolutely brilliant beyond their time, and would definitely have continued to make great contributions. Overall people have gotten smarter over the generations, but the geniuses of the past would still be geniuses today. In mathematics alone there are dozens of examples of people who were proving things that we still haven't replicated. Just by looking through their notes we have found solutions to problems we hadn't been able to solve yet.

>This is - look, you can't argue that someone has the right to live based on their life achievements. This is like the ultimate perversion of the 'american drem' delusion - just achieve great thing and you can live forever.

I'm very anti-libertarian and totally against the idea that the ends justify the means wrt achievement. However geniuses do exist, and their productivity is very often cut short by death or age. As a race we would have been able to gain immensely if a few hundred people had lived a decade or two longer.

I most certainly don't deny that geniouses are critical for moving forward. What I was after, is that there never is just one - the one we remember is the one who publishes first - and it's sometimes hard to tell who they are from an institutional perspective.

> old people ... eventually seem to stop catching up to the rest of society

If (happy to be proven wrong here) we can assume that this trend has to do with an age-related decrease in brain functionality, maybe this could be mitigated anyway.

> Where would we be if Newton and Einstein were still alive?

If Newton were alive, would Einstein's theories ever have seen the light of day?

Where would we be if Vlad the Impaler or Nero or Genghis Khan were still alive?

It's not like we'll run out of brilliant people. There are always new ones being born. I think it's much better to have the opportunity for new brilliant people to rise with a different point of view from having been raised in a different environment in a different time.

this is a deeply pernicious argument, in my opinion. who gets to be the judge of when a person is "brilliant" enough to grant immortality to? what if a "brilliant" person decides they don't want to perform their brilliance for you anymore? Would you permit immortal Newton to take up painting or golfing at the expense of time he could be spending on his brilliant mathematics?

>It's not like anyone is going to invent mythology-grade immortality and then chain you to a rock to be tormented by an eagle tearing at your liver.

You upload a brain into a computer and you might have exactly this.

I never got the brain upload style of immortality. I desire myself to live eternally, not a simulacrum or copy. What you're describing is a fancy way of creating, and then torturing, an AI.

Obligatory https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFe9wiDfb0E

The Ship of Theseus would like to be so certain.

At what point are you not you?

Bionic organs? limbs? New bones, artificial blood? Neuro-prosthetic interfaces or implants? "Biologically integrated coprocessors"?

I'm Genuinely curious where you choose to draw the line since it's not often discussed from a personal standpoint it's usually just the philosophical arguments that get discussed in what I've read.

I am my experience of the world, so to speak.

Creating an exact copy of me wouldn't make me experience the world from two different perspectives at the same time. It would just create a new human being that, allegedly, would be a "copy" of me (or so people would say).

To me, it would just be another person walking around. There wouldn't be any essential difference between this person and an adult child of mine.

But today's you has diverged from yesterday's you just as much as tomorrow's copy would have diverged from today's original. At the moment of copying - assuming a sufficiently high fidelity - they would be practically identical. The differentiation would only happen over time.

So if you kill the original - maybe because the procedure is destructive or because it's a consciousness-saving emergency measure - the "copy" would have a pretty good claim to be a continuation of you.

But why is "your experience of the world" tied to your current physical body? I think that the brain is just a machine that creates the illusion of a consciousness. If you turn the machine off, copy the all the data into new hardware, and turn it back on, it will start back where it left off, and the "you" inside won't know the difference. You might not even notice it happened

Agreed. Responding to the replies, regarding the fidelity of a copy: Yes, the copy would have a great claim to being you. Assuming the physiology of the copy is also (nearly) identical (behavior and personality is not a pure function of the brain), the world at large would also identify it as you.

But I'm not interested in legacy style immortality. I don't care at all if a separate version of me continues to exist – I want to be continuous with the physical substrate I now occupy. In other words, we are all Ship's of Theseus, and that's fine, but a perfect replica of the Ship breaks my internal narrative of continuity.

To distinguish: If a form of "immortality" supports the possibility of another copy of me existing simultaneously with the current incarnation, then it is not the immortality I'd desire.

Responding to the parent, I would much prefer slowly replacing my neural hardware with circuitry to wholesale scanning and instantiation in another substrate.

Summarize: Identity is (partially) a function of substrate. Change the substrate in a discontinuous fashion, and identity itself becomes discontinuous. I call that discontinuity (one form of) "Death".

That begs the question of what are "you". I personally believe that I am just the data contained in my brain, and it can be copied and transferred around, but where ever it ends up would still be me.

I occasionally wonder if the "me" that goes to sleep is really the same "me" that wakes up or whether it is another instance of me restored from a backup.

There's a lot of recent psychology research that suggests you're very wrong and that your body and physical experience is fundamental to our existence as beings.

That's trivially invalidated by observing that there are people without various limbs and/or other body parts that are nevertheless happily alive and considered to exist as beings.

The physical body - and the physical environment we live in - are just variables that can be gradually altered. Even if the brain is optimized towards a particular environment, it doesn't mean it won't handle a different one.

It is not trivial, nor invalidated.

They do exists as beings, yes, but different beings than the ones who possessed (or would have possessed) those limbs.

The question is not one of necessary conditions for "being-hood", it is one of identity via continuity.

Identity via continuity sounds like the Ship of Theseus problem[0], and it doesn't seem like any kind of a roadblock for anything.

As for being a different being, I personally wouldn't mind. I'm not the same being I was yesterday, or last year, anyway. For instance, over the past few years, I have many parts of my teeth removed and replaced with artificial components. I do not feel worse because of that.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus

Would you mind sharing some links? And maybe explaining your thoughts further? Are you saying that you can't have a consciousness without a physical body?

I'm a bit slammed, but the book The World Beyond Your Head by Matthew Crawford summarises a lot. Not necessarily can't have consciousness, but the research he cites argues that we are more than just a brain.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Have_No_Mouth,_and_I_Must_Sc...

> Old age deals out both: pain and death

Not all the time. If you die in your sleep, it's either painless or you have no time to realize what's occurring. Not everyone dies from a 2 years fight with cancer.

philipkglass probaby refers to pain inflicted as a side-effect of aging (joint pains etc.) not the immediate precursors to death.

Aging is not really the cause of joint pains - the simple act of living is what causes a lot of these pains. The repeated use and abuse of joints which have non-regenerating components is what causes joint pain. There are also several diseases which accumulate damage over time.

These would need to be addressed independently of prolonging life. That there is no real mention of them when talking about prolonging life makes me shake my head - living at 200 with destroyed joints and a mind which is failing due to Dementia or alzheimers doesn't sound like much fun to me.

> That there is no real mention of them when talking about prolonging life makes me shake my head - living at 200 with destroyed joints and a mind which is failing due to Dementia or alzheimers doesn't sound like much fun to me.

Indeed, cartilages and joints get damaged because of prolonged usage, and not just aging. If we were to live much longer, we would have to also tackle how to make such factors less a problem to maintain an active lifestyle beyond age 100.

Read up on Near-Death-Experiences, go with the natural and relax.

"Can billions of dollars’ worth of high-tech research succeed in making death optional?" No, because you were never alive in the first place. Well not that in the way you thought you were. Insert Alan Watts quote.

I have a tough time seeing that worldview as anything much different from solipsism ("it's my brain which creates the world as much as the world creates me, it's you who makes the sun bright, it's you who makes the sky blue, it's you who makes rocks heavy - so you can't say anything objective about anything") and nihilism ("everything is subjective and relative, nothing matters, not joy, not torture") and fatalism ("you can't change yourself to be better, because you don't know what better is, and the you which is supposed to do the changing doesn't exist either").

As he says, you start learning that you are one with everything, because you don't realise that you always were one with everything and can never have become separated from it. A skillful person operates on two levels simultaneously.

And then he enlightenedly cheated on his wife, married again twice, and drank himself to death. (Which is not to ad-hom his position, but to point out that for all his studying and meditation, he doesn't seem to have had all the answers)

Well we do have a label of what death is, and we might have a chance of changing it, and if we prefer that, what does it help to say "you weren't alive"?

Ok, the OPs post wasn't fantastic, but I have to be honest, the logic you're applying here is a little confusing.

If I understand you correctly, you're point is Alan studied Zen Buddhism but didn't take it as the gospel, therefore the original teachings are false. Which doesn't really seem correct to me

I'm by no means an Alan Watts fan, it just seemed like strange reasoning.

My main point was: Alan Watts explicitly said that concepts don't go away once you realise they exist in your head not in the world, and concepts are useful - 'skill' is being able to see both interpretations simultaneously. Well we have concepts of life and death. The parent post saying "you can't put off death if you were never alive" is like saying "you can't take colour photos after you realise the colours exist only in your heads". But you can. It sounds connected, but it's unconnected, it's crossing over two worldviews in one sentence. In one worldview you are alive and can die and can apply medical intervention to try and live longer, in the other view a rippling part of the universe that you call 'medical intervention' connects with a rippling part of the universe that feels like 'you' and the consequence is that the ripple ripples for longer.

And it's .. the same thing. You can't really use that view to argue that it can't happen, or that it shouldn't happen.

(Intermixed with meanderings about how that worldview seems pretty dismal in some respects, and I don't really get it).

Watts also said you are the Big Bang. Think of an ink bottle thrown at the wall and BOOM ink goes in every direction on the wall, and the tiny little bits of ink at the ends are us. We are the Big Bang, and before it went boom it was 1 solid object. That's the "real you" that can never die. And the illusion you have for 100 years is that you are this separate create called a human with the name John Smith etc etc. but it's all intentional amnesia by the real you. Because, try this, it's absolutely impossible to surprise yourself. You can't sneak up on yourself and go boo and actually be surprised. You need someone else. So, just for fun, the real you broke into different selves. And once you realize this (satori) you laugh and laugh and relax and enjoy the ride to "death" which really isn't death. Therefore drinking lots of alcohol and bringing on this death quicker isn't disallowed. Or 2nd wives or any other sin you want to name.

That's quite a leap, to go from finite to infinite. Or, it's not even a leap but more of an engulfing. It is not so easy and I don't think death alone is sufficient for revealing the mystery. But perhaps we can be on a trajectory to that revelation, analogous to how the entire universe is on a trajectory to its eventual collapse. The method is at the heart of religion.

Watts also said 'praise and blame go together. If there was only praise, everyone would get bored of it, it wouldn't mean anything. So long as you're going to get a kick out of being praised then you have to go around blaming people too. But if you see the folly of that, that praising and blaming are just creating each other, then you don't praise and you don't blame, you just dig the whole thing'.

But I feel there's something wrong with this.

Just for fun the universe broke up into pieces, OK. Go further -> just for fun the pieces invented tribes and societies and languages and technologies and 'toys' of all kinds and companies and ... anything and everything above the unified fundamental forces.

very Terence McKenna and the observation that the universe doesn't appear to be 'winding down', it appears to be 'winding up', 'generating novelty', up from the unified forces to the separate fundamental forces, up through matter instead of only energy, up through the fundamental particles, through the light elements and galactic clusters and stars, up through heavier elements, up through solar systems and planets, up through geology and plate tectonics, building on the lower levels, up through weather patterns and climatology and elemental chemistry, up through single cell organisms and electro-bio-chemistry, up through multiple cells and branches of life and sexual reproduction, up through sea creatures and reptiles and land mammals and socialisation, up through communication and languages, up through societies and settlements, up through all kinds of technologies ..

and then why say it stops here? Why take the Buddhist style view that this is the arbitrary place to stop generating novelty, to say that nothing matters, to relax and enjoy the ride and get drunk? We should be increasing the number of distinctions and their interactions, that appears to be the direction of everything.

The universe has spent 14 billion years increasing complexity on smaller and smaller scales, on smaller and smaller timescales, winding up and up and up. Instead of seeing that as good or bad, what about seeing that as inevitable? Instead of relaxing and saying that nothing means anything it's all just illusion, why not see the illusion as the whole point of the universe, more important than anything else?

Each layer is harder to create, more costly, than the lower levels. It's harder to get human teamwork than single interest, harder to get human intelligence seeing things as separate and distinct and divided, than lower complexity mammals, harder to get mammals than amoeba, harder to get meltwater planet temperature than extreme heat or cold, etc. Each layer is more valuable because it's more rare.

Therefore drinking lots of alcohol and bringing on this death quicker isn't disallowed.

The liberated, free human who sees the world is an illusion and chooses hedonism, isn't that falling into the spiritual gutter, rather than attaining spiritual enlightenment?

https://youtu.be/Jb8XDalyT0k?t=1030 - he talks about the difference between people who go off the rails and turn to slovenly living and surviving on thievery when they want to live an unplanned life, vs people who don't.

He talks about what he wants - "I like drinking wine, but wine isn't me. I like me and wine together" - well you can have more things to enjoy if you recognise more things as distinct and separate and create more things, surely?

spiritual gutter? Well, it's your choice. If you want to avoid the gutter and spend your 100 year dream doing very "pure" things and not indulging in hedonism go for it. That's a valid choice. But so is mine. You have to ask yourself if you are really not you, you are the universe, what did you want? Did you want a 100 year boring dream or a 100 year exciting dream? How exciting? And is the 100 years serious? Or is it all a big joke? Well, that your choice. What do humans do when all the work is done? Sing and dance. And the real question to ask: should this be allowed? Like how dare we enjoy ourselves!

"Mama always said, dying was a part of life"

-- Forrest Gump

https://youtu.be/nFvASiMTDz0

I just think that death gives life meaning and knowing/accepting that we will die is a part of growing more self aware and focusing on the good things in life like family and love rather than the wasteful things. Maybe that's an unpopular viewpoint in the age of technology but I also think a lot of people are scared to death that they spent decades of their life in a rat race and are desperate to get those years back. All the money in the world can't save you from death and time is our most precious resource.

I would happily spend a thousand years contemplating whether or not you're right.

Everyone devotes resources to saving themselves from death each and every day. Every time they go to the grocery store, in fact. If you are willing to undertake that action, you should be equally willing to to visit a physician to push back your day of death by a day, each and every day.

There is something about considering alterations in the current trajectory of aging that makes people say strange things. People who exercise to improve their health span, people who visit doctors to prolong their health span, people who put off death in hundreds of small ways, constantly, all the time. But suggest that perhaps aging should be modified, and people who are 100% supportive of ending heart disease and Alzheimer's suddenly develop a deep philosophical attachment to inevitable death on exactly the current schedule for inevitable death. Seems a little suspect.

Eating is pleasurable and I have a biological drive to do it.

I have no such drive, nor pleasure association, with visiting a physician.

Death comes for all, and I agree the finite span helps to give meaning, but maybe the 'when' doesn't have to be correlated to biology

I remember discussing this topic with elderly relatives, still fairly capable people who weren't terminally ill and mentally quite with it. They would often tell me they want to die, simply because they've had enough.

From what I could gather it was coming from more of a reflective, happy space, not a negative space, because they would often say things like, "I've had a great life, but I want to go now".

It's hard to imagine what it feels like to be that satisfied.

That doesn't sound satisfied. That sounds exhausted. I sympathize, despite being relatively young.

Nature has programmed us to die. When we reach old age, it's not scary anymore.

It hasn't programmed us to die at all, and death is scary for plenty of people. If we're going with anecdote, my grandmother told me in her 90s she didn't want to die because she wanted to see how things turned out.

and knowing/accepting that we will die is a part of growing more self aware and focusing on the good things in life like family and love rather than the wasteful things.

you say, deciding what's good in life and what isn't, what's wasteful and what isn't, and saying that death is a 'part' of growing more aware but implying it's a necessary or specially good part.

I also think a lot of people are scared to death that they spent decades of their life in a rat race and are desperate to get those years back. All the money in the world can't save you from death

You say, deciding that people who wasted their lives in a rat race focusing on your chosen 'wasteful' things do not deserve any chance to focus on the 'good things' and should not be allowed to even try for one, because ... unspecified reasons.

"Lol at all the desperate people who wasted their lives" - that's your argument in favour of their death?

How long would you personally like to live if you could be healthy the entire time and not age any more or any faster than you'd like to? 50 years? 150? 1000?

80. Seems about right.

You say you want people to enjoy the good things in life, but then criticise people who now desperately want to but don't have time left to do so?

We only call time precious because it is so terribly scarce. If we can make more of it, why shouldn't we?

>All the money in the world can't save you from death and time is our most precious resource.

Now, yes. But the question is whether it should be like that or not, rather than whether it is so.

Until science has an effective solution for male pattern baldness I think the idea that we're going to be able to cheat death is premature. (...and please don't troll me and say Propecia or Rogaine, I used both and I'm still bald)

Propecia and Rogaine don't work if you're already bald.

Just like cures for death.

become transgender, get hormone therapy. your hair will grow back.

once we have a 3d cancer detection, we can gamma ray cancer out. and take telomere enhancing pills. also we could replace our limbs and nonessential parts so that there are less biological parts to get cancer or get old.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com