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Comment by raugustinus | Hacker News Reader

What makes people think we want to have them around any longer? To extend life is to decrease it's value. Simple economics tells us it's inflation.

edit: I think Neil deGrasse Tyson says it a lot better than me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3G9LOJZTmM

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This makes no sense. Longer productive lifespan means that people can acquire more expert skills and become more proficient at what they do. Or for example switch professions if the economic climate has changed - which will be still much faster than teaching a completely new individual to learn that profession, if there is even a little overlap between them.

I'm not saying that economics should even have any say in making people live longer (I don't think the purpose of life is to make the economy work well, it's the other way around), but even from the point of view of economics, we would want to make everyone live longer.

From the point of view of economics maybe. Switching professions can be done in a current lifespan and is not done very often. I don't see people changing just because their life is extended. I just don't understand people's fixation on having a longer life. Seems to me people just keep looking at the horizon to bring them what they want and they forget what's right in front of them.

One reason not to switch professions is affordability. Few established mid-career professionals can afford to either take time out to train and qualify in another trade, or jump back down to the bottom rung and take a junior role in something else.

If, at 60, you have paid off your mortgage, amassed some savings, and seen your adult children leave home, then you can consider it. However, by then, you only have 5-7 years left until your pension kicks in and 10 before cognitive decline starts to take hold (either may have already happened), so you will probably just plod on doing what you already know. You might not even have enough time to really get to the interesting part of being a whatever-your-new-career-is.

If at 60, you are still in the prime of your life, with 60 more years on the clock, and 30 more years of full cognition and physical fitness available to you, then the idea of a career shift becomes more attractive.

Even without the affordability question, there is likely to be a point in most people's careers where the pursuit of mastery stops and the doldrums set in. The longer the working life, the more likely you are to reach that tipping point at a point when you have time to do something about it.

The hell are you on about? That’s like trying to minimize healthcare costs by killing all humans.

Hah good one. On the other hand, medical possibilities will be increasing way beyond what we'll be able to afford.

Yet it may turn out that performing regular maintenance on the human body is the cheapest way to keep it healthy.

I am 100% for a (more) healthy life. I have no interest in 'extending my lifespan' except for the 'few' extra years that the healthy life might bring.

Combating aging will mainly extend your healthy lifespan.

You are free to kill yourself when you feel like you had enough. Just because you don't want to have the body of a thirty year old forever, that doesn't mean that you should subject others to the incredible suffering that old age brings.

We are not free to end our own life when you feel you had enough. There's laws for that. But yes, I'll reflect on my options whether or not I'll have that chemo when I'm in my sixties/seventies.

I doubt that they'll put you in jail after you killed yourself.

On the other hand, they could do that if you don't. There are a few scifi novels where the concept of forced retirement (in form of euthanasia) is explored.

There is a theory that some math problems are not solved because people who are solving them have to few time to think on them.

Other theory states that 100 years war between France and England lasted so long because there were left 0 leaders older than 30+ years old and these guys were not good at negotiation.

The main point of anti-aging is not to keep people around longer, but to keep them healthy since they're going to be around for quite a while anyway. Lifespan increase is a possibility, but might also turn out to be quite hard; health-span increase is the real low-hanging fruit of anti-aging research.

Reading the article beyond the second paragraph actually affirms kinda what you're saying. I guess I shot straight into a kneejerk reaction on the subtitle 'extending the human lifespan' :)

Related to this:

Elderly Researchers Are a Drain on Publicly Funded Science [ https://www.realclearscience.com/articles/2019/03/16/elderly... ]

Saying the only motivation to create is urgency through the fleeting nature of life is hardly different from a religious person claiming someone non-religious can't have morals because they don't believe in God.

It is entirely subjective and for all I care wrong until proven otherwise.

That makes no sense. Disposable things almost always have much lower value than thigns that last.

"Solving" life is the key if we want to go to the stars.

Wouldn’t it be easier to send an artificial womb and the necessary freeze-dried ingredients on a thousand-year journey to the stars, instead of grown humans who you’d need to keep fed, watered, and happy?

The real trick then becomes raising babies entirely through automation. Of course, any automatic system up to the task may be smart enough to just colonize the planet itself.

There will be no thousand year journies. You’d be overtaken by the generation after which left in faster ships and arrived in half the time. Make the trip in a few decades or don’t bother making it at all.

Enter K-level thinking:

What if we did send a ship on a thousand year journey, and learn more about building fast ships than if we hadn't? Such that the second ship we send, would be quicker than the first ship we'd have sent if we waited a few decades?

Hah, you made me think of this: "what's really going to bake your noodle later on is would you still have broken it if I wouldn't have said anything".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVF4kebiks4

Do you put off buying electronics knowing that next year's product will be faster than this year's? At some point you just got to say, screw it, I'd rather do this now instead of waiting for some hypothetical future where the cost-benefit ratio is at its highest.

Additionally, why do you expect the old ship cannot be retrofitted or replaced and travel sped up incrementally?

It should be easy to find a hot broadcasting object in space and rendezvous with it. The crew might face some future shock.

Going faster means expending more energy. At some point it won't make economic sense to go faster, even if technically you could. Freeze dried wombs don't care whether the journey takes a thousand years or five hundred, but the costs are very different.

It takes the same amount of energy to accelerate at any speed in space. The limit is our determination really, it is possible to visit our nearby star with ~200 hydrogen bombs

It doesn't take the same amount of energy to accelerate (and later brake) to 0.5c as it does to accelerate to 0.1c.

0.1c would be sufficient for a single generation ship.

Depends on where you want to go. The universe is a pretty big place.

No it doesn't. Your mass increases the faster you go, so that more and more energy needs to be expended to accelerate more. At 50% light speed, you're 15% heavier. At 90% light speed, you're 129% heavier. At 99% light speed, you're 608% heavier. Your mass goes to infinity as you approach the speed of light, which is why the speed of light is unattainable for objects that have mass.

And objects that have to carry their own fuel have problems even at much lower speeds.

right i assumed low-relativistic speeds. also i got the number of bombs wrong, it's 300.000 not 200. Here's the relevant pbs video

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

At the same time, you could send information, compressed, enough to accurately reconstitute the travelers in spacetime. That would take some raw materials and a plenty of energy. However, the required devices might be much more resilient to acceleration and radiation than any possible human body.

the point is to create self-sustaining colonies that will travel into the unknown for probably hundreds of years before finding appropriate planets to colonize.

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