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The story doesn't exist to discuss the right approach to curing death, or the most efficient and expedient way to get there, or the current techniques in the field.

The story exists to help get people to the baseline point of acknowledging that death is bad, because even that much can be shockingly non-universal. If we could get to a point where a large fraction of people genuinely believed that, then the rest of the problem becomes far easier.

If the primary problem was simply "how do we solve this", that'd be hard enough.

The fact that developed nations spend 10% of GDP on healthcare belies this. (That fraction is significantly higher in the US.) The potential market for viable treatments to extend human lifespan is in the trillions. Maybe some individuals don't care about death because they are carefree people, but society as a whole seems convinced it's something to fight. It's a revealed preference, from how much money we spend to stay healthy.

Let's put it another way: do you think pharmaceutical companies and academics aren't trying hard enough to attack this multidimensional problem? Who seems to be lacking urgency?

> The fact that developed nations spend 10% of GDP on healthcare belies this.

In the parable, this would be mostly equivalent to people who find themselves on the list of next dragon transport spending money on getting themselves pushed to a list in the future. Everyone expects to be eaten by the dragon, but if there's money, you can be eaten later and not just now. Most of that money is then burned somehow, and very little of it finds its way to anti-dragon research.

This seems to reflect the views of a lot of people on on aging and death itself. "Death is good and natural, and I'll eventually die too, but I'd prefer to die later".

> Let's put it another way: do you think pharmaceutical companies and academics aren't trying hard enough to attack this multidimensional problem? Who seems to be lacking urgency?

Do you think this is how urgency looks? It isn't. Urgency looks like Apollo Program. Or every single Olympics. Lost of people working directly on a particular goal, with lots of money flowing in. As it is, there seems to be only few people working on aging/life extension directly.

Urgency would be when, besides that 10% GDP spent on healthcare, you'd spend a few percent more directly on life extension.

What is health care if not life extension?

Life preservation against non-aging-related causes, reduction of suffering, improving quality of life. As it is, healthcare isn't really directly concerned with extending human lifespan beyond the expected figures.

A huge amount of health care is preserving life in the face of aging. There are a ton of diseases that come from aging, and many treatments for them.

This whole thing seems to be about drawing a nonsensical line between “disease” and “aging” and either ignoring the former as a cause of death, or deciding that it has enough effort behind it already.

If someone has a cancer that’s going to kill them in six months, and it’s cured with a medical treatment, how is that not extending their lifespan? What would lifespan extension look like, if not a slow, broad development of myriad treatments to treat or cure the many things which kill us?

>> This seems to reflect the views of a lot of people on on aging and death itself. "Death is good and natural, and I'll eventually die too, but I'd prefer to die later".

Why do you say this? I have never met anyone who thought that "death is good and natural". I've heard many people say that it is inevitable and it is futile to try and avoid it, but "good and natural"?

There is no such thing as a natural death. Nothing that happens to Man is ever natural, since his presence calls the whole world into question. All men must die, but for every man his death is an accident. And even if he knows it and consents to it, an unjustifiable violation.

Simone de Beauvoir after Tolkien:

http://confusedneurons.tumblr.com/post/80683906667/all-men-m...

> Why do you say this? I have never met anyone who thought that "death is good and natural". I've heard many people say that it is inevitable and it is futile to try and avoid it, but "good and natural"?

I've run into a huge number of people who say this, or equivalents. "It was their time." "They lived a good life." "Death gives meaning to life." Those are cliches and thought patterns that make it harder to recognize aging and death for the tragedy it is, and thus make it harder to rally against them.

If you go back through the comments on various HN stories about aging and the possible cures thereof, you'll also find many people here who seem to hold similar positions, as though death is an essential part of humanity without which various horrible problems would befall us.

There also exist a substantial number of stories featuring, for want of a better description, "immortality angst". Oh, how terrible a thing it is to live forever, how meaningful is the life of Man for its limited time, would that we could do the same... There are far fewer stories that take the opposite approach, treating immortality as a thing to be desired and death as a tragedy to be solved. Even in science fiction, where we should be aspiring to far more, I've seen many otherwise good stories and series include musings similar to those above. They reach for the comforting rationalization instead of the inspiring future.

>> "It was their time." "They lived a good life." "Death gives meaning to life."

Of these, the first two sound like empty platitudes said to avoid an awkward conversation witht the relatives of a deceased person. The last one, I don't know what it means. It sounds like a contradiction to me and I really wonder what you mean by "a huge number", for this experssion in particular. Personally, I would only use the words "huge number" to describe the behaviour of a group of people if I was talking about, say, a crowd in a stadium, which is many more people than I'm ever likely to have a conversation about death with. So, forgive me if I keep my doubts about your assessment of the general public's attitudes about mortality, only from your experience of such conversations.

Literature is another issue altogether. I agree that there is plenty of literature of the kind you describe and I'm sure someone must already have conducted a study, even. On the other hand, for every "Who wants to live forever" kind of story, there is a Dylan Thomas, or at the very least a Love Story (the 1970 film- if you google it, beware of the SPOILERS) that laments the death of a loved one as the greatest tragedy that can befall a human being. And let's not even start on religion and its promises of life eternal and raising of the dead.

But, since I'm chomping at the bit for a chance to quote this in its entirety:

  Do not go gentle into that good night,
  Old age should burn and rage at close of day;
  Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
  
  Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
  Because their words had forked no lightning they
  Do not go gentle into that good night.
  
  Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
  Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
  Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
  
  Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
  And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
  Do not go gentle into that good night.
  
  Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
  Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
  Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
  
  And you, my father, there on the sad height,
  Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
  Do not go gentle into that good night.
  Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

- Dylan Thomas, Do not go Gentle into that Good Night.

Indeed, I, for one, intend to kick and scream, and bite and scratch, and drag my heels all the way to the grave.

Because nothing helps solve an intractable problem better than poorly defined outrage right?

"Hey I'm really mad that I'm gonna die! Someone do something about this!"

Wow you mean this whole time you didn't want to die. What an absolutely shocking revelation. That changes everything.

It only took 66 years from the Wright Brothers flying at Kitty Hawk to Apollo 11 landing on the Moon. Healthy skepticism is warranted, but outright pessimism is not.

We have many great challenges ahead of us as a species. It’s important to keep in mind our priorities and how we’re allocating our resources, even as it relates to curing aging/death.

Sidenote: I enjoyed that the CGP Grey animation of this fable cribbed off of Kennedy’s speech kicking off the space race to the Moon.

And since Apollo 11, nothing. Can be for lack of trying, but likely it's also that low hanging fruit has been picked and it's really difficult to continue.

It was lack of trying, as evidenced by last 10 years in the space sector. You had NASA quietly mumbling about science, and a couple of contractors happy to take lots of cash for an occasional launch. Then SpaceX came out of nowhere, with very Bostromian mission-like motivation, and lit the fire under everyone's asses. Now everyone is scrambling to compete and it turns out that somehow you still can make progress, and there's plenty of fruits to pick left.

SpaceX is a good example. The number of people who would benefit from such a moonshot-like effort to cure ageing, if it was driven by private entreprise, would be about the same as the number of people who can afford space tourism currently. A privately-developed cure of ageing would be astronomically expensive, indeed.

Oh, I have no doubt that the prices would eventually go down- in like a few hundred years after the cure was invented. Until then the people not able to afford it would still die in droves while a few powerful and affluent people would ascend to a kind of immortality.

Bostrom doesn't even try to think of how a very expensive panacea that cured ageing and all the ailments that came with it would be distributed to a majority of the human population that even now cannot afford basic healthcare to extend their health-span even for a few years.

How is this current state of affairs supposed to be ethical? And how can we ethically justify halting ageing for only a tiny handful of people out of the entire world population?

> How is this current state of affairs supposed to be ethical? And how can we ethically justify halting ageing for only a tiny handful of people out of the entire world population?

How do you ethically justify not pursuing such treatment if it becomes feasible? How do you justify denying it altogether, unless everyone can get it at the same time? Impossible perfection or nothing at all?

Instead of SpaceX, I'd look here at all the other medical procedures that are accessible to western citizens. No one could afford them if they were to foot the entire bill for a single-off cure. Yet somehow, through combination of private and public action and group efforts, we've figured out to make them affordable.

(Same will happen with space travel, when more companies get to the place where SpaceX is now, and if we manage to pull off the whole cislunar economy thing. Then the economies of scale and various business model magic will kick in. Note that this is what happened to air travel, to the point plane tickets are ridiculously cheap compared to the direct costs involved.)

> Bostromian mission-like motivation

I had no idea Boz had the patent on being very motivated. Color me surprised.

>> After cancer no longer kills you, something else will.

Well, currently, unless something else kills you, cancer certainly will. Cancer is a biological inevitability, that can only be kept at bay for so long by the efforts of the human immune system. And as we all know, the longer we all live, the more of us will get cancer, because the transcription errors that eventually cause it become all the more likely as time goes by.

Bostrom seems to think -it's not expressed in so many words- that if we halt ageing, we'd also defeat cancer, somehow, perhaps by having an immune system that is forever as powerful as a young person's. The problem with this idea is that young people do get cancer, despite their healthy immune systems.

It looks like everyone alive has a probability to get cancer at some point in their life. For younger people this probability is relatively low, but currently, we only spend a few years of our lives (let's say 20) being young. If our "young" period is suddendly extended to 50 or 60 years, or more, the probabilty to get cancer while "young" in this sense, will increase. Imagine rolling a 100-sided die every year for 20 years, hoping not to roll a 01. Now imagine doing the same for 100 years. It's obvious that you're much more likely to roll at least one 01 in 100 years, than in 20.

So maybe Bostrom's magical health-extension pills won't work exactly like he thinks. Maybe we can all extend our life spans (well, those of us who can afford that mythical panacea) but not for as long as we'd like, and maybe we will find that if we extend our life for long enough, we will increase our likelihood to die of the most dreaded of diseases to an absolute certainty.

And wouldn't that really suck?

Whether cancer is special in this regard depends on what you mean by aging. I work in this area and consider it to mean "damage (maladaptive changes) that accumulate over time, first degrading function and ultimately leading to catastrophic failure" . This is not the only model but it is widespread.

So for something like the cardiovascular system, chronic stress, inflammation, ROS etc are the triggers, atherosclerosis and endothelial weakening is the damage, and stroke or heart attack is the failure. In the case of cancer, it is radiation or replication error, DNA mutation, and metastasis, respectively.

The key for "curing" aging would be the ability to reverse or repair damage (in this case, to selectively kill cells that are mutated or precancerous). To extend life it is sufficient to merely slow damage accumulation rate.

I don't claim to understand how all this stuff works, besides the part about modelling it as a probability (a Bernoulli process), but I wonder to what extent it is possible to slow the damage. For instance, if you're bleeding, you may be able to slow it - but if you don't stop it completely, eventually you will bleed to death.

I also wonder whether someone living for a very long time wouldn't eventually suffer irreparable damage because of the radiation from the environment accumulating in the tissues. Nobody's claiming that we can survive, say, being thrown into a volcano (an active one, I mean), just by being more healthy and young. There are clearly environmental hazards that the body cannot withstand, senescence or no senescence. It is very likely that such environmental hazards hitherto unforseen will begin to reveal themselves once our lives are extended enough and that we will eventually find out that there is a hard upper limit for the amount of time that these frail bodies can keep serving for.

I clarify that this is not something to celebrate, or even accept. Let us not go gentle in to that good night, by all means. On the other hand I think it is ridiculous to believe that in a universe where galaxies die, human beings can keep going like the Duracell bunny for as long as we like, thanks to Nick Bostrom's Amazing Rejuvenating Pills™.

> I wonder to what extent it is possible to slow the damage. For instance, if you're bleeding, you may be able to slow it - but if you don't stop it completely, eventually you will bleed to death.

Yes, exactly. Well, the simplistic model is that you have a rate of damage (RD) and rate of repair/replacement (RP), and if RD > RP, the system will eventually fall apart. "Repair" consists of both your body's endogeneous repair or replacement processes and exogeneous things we might do.

Most researchers focus on RD, because it seems easier for us to do things about that. Calorie restriction probably mostly affects RD instead of RP, for example. In high theory, one could stop aging purely by lowering RD enough so that it is below the body's endogeneous RR.

But in reality, it is easier for the body to detect and repair some kinds of damage than others. It is quite hard for the body to detect DNA mutation in a cell before it starts actively causing aberrant behavior in a cell, although such mechanisms exist.

> I think it is ridiculous to believe that in a universe where galaxies die, human beings can keep going like the Duracell bunny for as long as we like

Well, at THAT timescale, we are talking about problems of physics and thermodynamics, not biology. But if you consider that in some sense life on Earth has proceeded in an unbroken chain for ~4B years, you can see that it is possible to go quite far by decreasing local entropy at the expense, of course, of global entropy. I do not see how physics prevents human lifespan of at least 10K years, but the technical problems are immense, and I do not predict major success within our lifetimes.

You don't seem a death-worshipper. This is only skepticism about the practicality of eliminating death, not a rejection of the central thesis that "The dragon is bad!".

Well, I am in favor of extending life indefinitely and even creating "back-ups" of people.

But I think it's important to emphasize this would not be some easy victory or simple change in society whose implications we wouldn't have to very carefully consider.

There's everything from overpopulation to society become stagnant to universal boredom and beyond to consider.

We humans are biological creatures. Aging is part of our present day existence so this level of change would change a whole lot.

So, I don't necessarily disagree that "death is bad" but I think ONLY saying may also be bad.

> There's everything from overpopulation to society become stagnant to universal boredom and beyond to consider.

If you stop to consider that at all, it's equivalent to stopping to consider the idea that "old people are wasting our resources, maybe there's some value in killing them off once they start repeating themselves too much". Because it's the exact same thing but one is shoot them with a gun and the other is deny them healthcare to prolong life. Nothing wrong with considering that of course, but it should never be a reason to avoid discovering immortality.

The whole death-worshipper thing in this fable is so deeply flawed that's its fatal to the whole argument.

The author frames the "death worshipper" as wrong because the dragon is an obviously artificial threat that came along one day and imposed its will on humanity, that there was a time before the dragon that the worshippers are ignoring.

As an analogy for death, this is a crock, frankly.

What about the position that there is no dragon?

I find this focus on “eliminating death” to be extremely confusing. Death isn’t actually a thing. It’s a bazillion different things with a bazillion different causes.

You’ve probably seen people criticize the concept of “curing cancer” because cancer is actually a broad term for a bunch of different diseases, and there won’t be a single cure for everything. “Death” is like that times a million.

I think it's more about preventing aging than diseases. There are a lot of people who are "monstrous death worshipers" because they want to cure cancer but not aging. They see cancer as a problem that's worth solving but old-age-death is part of being human so they just don't care about it at all. Even criticizing rich people for trying to prolong their own lives.

I agree though that it completely ignores all other causes of death and the incremental improvements we're making. We'll still get hit by cars even if we don't age. I see that more as a lack of detail than an important problem with the story.

I think the difference between your perspective and Bostrom's is his thinking is, in as non-pejorative sense as I can spin it, childish. Most people, when they are children, tend to imagine that problems have simple solutions, and can be solved by commitment, faith, and good intentions.

When people grow up, through a process of disappointment, failure, and gradual acclimatization to the muddy vagaries of reality, they tend to get increasingly suspicious of grand goals and simple solutions. And that's because, like you point out, doing stuff is really fucking hard.

The problem is, of course, that sometimes really amazing, or really terrible things can be done. The Marshall plan, or the Manhattan project, the end of Smallpox. World hunger is manifestly solveable - the only thing we lack is the will - i.e., as a society, we consider malnutrition and starvation acceptable.

So people who are suspicious of grand goals tend to get lumped in with the people that opposed all the grand goals that have gone before us, universal literacy, political freedom, and so on. Bostrom is just taking this pattern to an absurd conclusion, by making the grandest of all possible goals, then casting himself as being in the tradition of the people who ended smallpox, and anybody who disagrees as being in the tradition of those who opposed the vaccination program.

Which is where the whole thing gets incredibly obnoxious. The thing about the Manhattan project is, it was a technical challenge, but not a political one. There were no political interests arrayed against it. Anything that affects who dies and who lives is a political challenge - like smallpox, or nuclear disarmament, for example. And that takes a vast amount more work, even if the technical challenge is very simple. And that shows - the only vast political challenges that have been overcome were ones where the technical portion was basically a done deal.

Ending death isn't a technical problem - or at least, isn't right now. There are lots of extremely low-hanging fruit that the Bostrom line-of-thought is basically ignoring - child mortality, and so on. It's primarily a political one. So pretending it is a technical challenge, and ignoring the low-hanging fruit, is a kind of fantasy, where Bostrom gets to play the role of revolutionary, without actually having to do anything, make any messy compromises, or actually say anything controversial, all the while burrowing the mantle of all the people who achieved great things, like ending smallpox, or winning universal suffrage.

> We already get to live 2-3 times as long as our ancestors

Not really, at least those that survived long enough to become our ancestors. When you take childhood mortality out of the mix, the numbers don't look that different than our current life expectancy. The other thing pulling the curve down in previous eras is the high rate of death for women in childbirth.

If you dodged those bullets, and didn't get knocked on the head or cut down by a major epidemic, living into your 60s or 70s has pretty much always been possible.

I somewhat agree about the diminishing marginal utility.

However, the real criticism is actually in the fundamental goal. The ultimate point of everything is to create sustainable civilizational progress that eradicates suffering and provides the good life to as many people as possible.

Simply living longer doesn't help achieve that. Indeed, it would cement unequal power relationships. Rulers, especially those who rule for life, would be in power for much longer. There would be compound interest over longer timescales, without the asset division that happens upon death.

Of course, a good counterargument is simply that such medical progress is inevitable. But if so, the point would not be to simply fund efforts to push it forward. The point would be to fund efforts to distribute the benefits broadly, and find ways to constrain the downsides.

Wait, you think the dragon is... death itself? Is that actually what it's supposed to be? I supposed that it was something more like climate change due to hydrocarbon fuels or something of that nature. The story clearly depicts a world where the dragon did not exist at one point, but it then showed up and society adapted to it. That never happened with death.

I also figured that a large part of the story was unrealistic in the way society was presented. It depicts a society which is entirely cowed in its approach to the dragon... and yet is capable of a wholesale overturning of literally generations of worldview on a dime. Humanity doesn't tend to work like that. A more realistic take would have had the dragonologists fed face-first into the dragons maw so that society could avoid facing the notion that not only had they been seeing the world the wrong way their entire lives, but so had their ancestors, and it had cost them countless loved ones while they simply quietly accepted it. Those who are invested in irrationality generally react to damage caused by the irrationality with doubling down, not backing off. Especially with a whole room full of people lamenting all the people lost to the dragon, the last idea that is going to gain widespread popularity is "all those deaths were for nothing."

Not death, but aging. From the "Moral" section in the end

> Our situation with regard to human senescence is closely analogous and ethically isomorphic to the situation of the people in the fable with regard to the dragon

Both aging and death have been with us since before we were apes, small furry mammals, fish, or had any form of consciousness at all. You'd have to argue specifically why the analogy is still valid despite that.