With greater longevity, the quest to avoid infirmities of aging is more urgent
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
Anti-aging science is not just about living more years, it's about being able to live healthy and fulfilling lives both physically and mentally even as you age. Way too many people are broken by age before they die, to prevent that would be fantastic.
Thats's 2/3rds of the picture. The other 1/3rd of "anti-aging" is selling snake-oil fads to suckers and for people with anxieties to obsess over.
One man's lack of anxiety is another man's Stockholm syndrome. That in this day and age, anti-aging research is still considered fringe and frowned upon by the overarching culture, instead of being one of the top priorities of R&D worldwide, is pretty damn shameful.
Well, people have escaped kidnappers. None has escaped death, and until this happens (which very well could happen technically at some point) it's just anxiety over the inevitable.
Why not want to extend it rather than make up reasons for old people to die that aren't killing them?
Summary of pro death arguments:
Fairness
Only rich people will get it. (No tech has ever done this.)
Better to give money to the poor than science. (family, city, state, nation, has proven local investment beats foreign.)
Bad for society
Dead people make more room for new, other people. (consider going first.)
Run out of resources (live people discover/extract/renew better than dead or nonexistent)
Overpopulation (colonize the seas, solar system, or have a war.)
Stop having kids
Worse wars (nukes are more dangerous than having your first 220 year old person in 2136)
Dictators never die (they die all the time and rarely of age)
Old people are expensive (50% of your lifetime medical cost occur in your final year. Delay is profitable.)
Old people suck. (death is an inferior cure to robustness.)
Bad for individual
You'll get bored. (your memory isn't that good, or your boredom isn't age related)
You'll have to watch your loved ones die. (so you prefer they watch you?)
You'll live forever in a terrible state. (longevity requires robustness.)
Against gods will (not if he disallows suicide, then it is required.)
People will force you to live forever (they aren't able to do this now, why would they begin to be?)
More people make more progress faster. Aren’t you glad your parents didn't decide the world would be prettier or work better without you in it? If great minds like Einstein, Bell, Tesla, Da Vinci etc., were still alive and productive today, the world would be a better place. You're literally asking for others to die out of your fear. The burden should be higher. Have courage. If living longer comes with too many disadvantages, we'll know 100 years from now and decide then.
Man up, save your family, save yourself.
P.S. Curing aging isn't immortality. You die at 600 on average by accident, and if the parade of imaginary horrible things comes true, even earlier.
I find this post to be in bad faith evaluation of those making those arguments ('asking people to die out of fear').
Your entire argument seems to be more people = more progress. And longer lives of brilliant people = more progress. What about longer lives of those stuck in their ways or those who want to keep status quo?
And more people != more progress. 1. Billions of uneducated poor. 2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery where several scientists or inventors simultaneously make a break through.
You’re also making an abstract “progress” as the ultimate goal. But what type of progress? Creativity? Technology? What about happiness? Or sustainability?
So the solution is to design a product which suits to the elderly but seems like its designed for young generation.
In the modern society, that is.
In previous eras/societies, it was a badge of honor to be among the elderly, and there were products/lifestyles associated to that that did fine.
And thus, "Where did the soda go?"...
I don't think most elderly don't want to be reminded that they are old. They will happily use stuff that actually works for them.
Yes, we fear death, but we also fear the image of ourselves spending the final years of our lives bedridden and in pain. What we don't seem to understand is that patients in such poor health don't survive very long (despite the inevitable anecdotes about relatives who survived far too long in feeble condition, more a matter of perception than fact).
In other words, unhealthy people tend to have poor longevity.
Whatever you think about his idea of escape velocity you can't doubt the engineering approach he advocates makes sense. Solve these 7 problems [1] and there will be no reason the organism should die.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aubrey_de_Grey#The_seven_types...
de Grey's list is about guiding research directions, it's not for ordinary people to use.
You could fool a person ignorant enough in a speciality with statements such as:
- To fly we just need a way to defeat gravity.
- To resurrect a body we just need to insufflate the soul back to the body.
- To make a head transplant we just need to reconnect the nerves and wait the meat to glue.
- An artificial intelligence will solve our company's problem.
This ver same person could be highly skilled or smart in other aspects. The more technical or scientific we sound the more a subject will give authority to the charlatan.
I ignore if these statements made by this person are overall valid, if the list is exhaust and if the things there are additional factors I ignore. Even in such case we also ignore the deepness of the problem and circumstances related.
Most of people, including myself, are no biologist or cryonogists and have not enough knowledge on that level, in addition it is in the human nature to have high hopes in self perpetuating ourselves. Thats the perfect ground for charlatans to grow.
I don't want to turn that example in an exaggerated dichotomy, but my point is that for someone who lacks skill or knowledge on a deeply complex topic, most of the time by using the specific jargon the person will sounds specific, professional, serious,... they will automatically sound like an expert or authority in the subject.
In other words, I don't think most of people here in this forum, and for sure not myself, is qualified enough to say whether the first sentence is more specific or realizable than the second one:
- We need to find a way to fix mutations in mitochondria by looking at the telanoma and several teams of scientists are looking at that.
- To resurrect a body we just need to insufflate the soul back to the body and several teams of sorcerers are looking at that.
And even if my examples are not good enough, this whole thing could be the "detox" fashion that happened a years ago, just on a different level/topic for a different target audience who needs more complicated words in order to be tricked.
Pretty massive difference.
P.D. many bluff companies have also lots of publications, papers etc... and that doesn't mean that they are innovative.
This recent interview with Aubrey de Grey is really worth listening to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMFST20xHwk
He seems to think that anti-aging science has speeded up drastically recently, both in terms of the science itself, the funding and the popularity. I really love what the SENS Foundation is doing in terms of spinning research avenues into startups, since most investors are far more likely to fund high-risk investments than non-profit ones.
He also mentions other positive developments in terms of legislation and advocacy.
His work of identifying reasons of aging seems really reasonable. Trying to reverse every one of those is incredible challenge. It's the biggest moonshot ever attempted.
It's pretty much a law of nature that the pioneers in any field will be overconfident. If they weren't, they never would've tried.
He is the leader who put himself out there and made it possible for all of these mainstream scientists to pursue anti-aging research seriously in the open.
By the way,his theory is still better than a what many of the mainstream scientists propose because he attributes aging to a more comprehensive (and therefore more realistic) set of problems.
Take a look at http://sens.org
Its actually similar to how people claimed Ben Goertzel was a crackpot, just because he was willing to promote AGI research when it wasn't cool. It always takes some 'crackpots' (i.e. leaders) to do something unfashionable before it can become fashionable and accepted.
Notice how this article doesn't mention de Grey. That is another unfortunate social aspect. The true leaders in science often go unacknowledged. Because society operates as a popularity contest, not a meritocracy.
I struggle mightily with eating less crap, though. (Especially chocolate.) Food is one of the great pleasures in life, and I haven't found really healthy food to be a good replacement for tasty junk.
Maybe advances in food production will bring hope?
You can also reduce how much you eat for your fun meals, but changing the boring meals makes a difference even if you don't.
100% Dark chocolate isn't 100% cocoa butter, it's the non-fat solids. If you eat some it's quite obviously not fatty, it's bitter and dry like a burnt coffee bean.
Edit: I'm mistaken here, dark chocolate is half fat, TIL.
As you add sugar to chocolate, the proportion of total weight that is fat goes down, and fat being more calorie dense than sugar, calories per unit weight go down.
It helps a lot to separate preparation from the moment I want to eat something, like cutting and packing an apple in the morning or washing a bunch of berries and carrying them in a jar.
For cardio you can go to any park for running or biking. It’s way more fun. For strength training you can do bodyweight strength training at home with no equipment required (calisthenics).
Most people fall into the trap of paying for a gym membership, but then they never use it, because let’s face it, going to the gym wastes time and is uncomfortable.
If you train at home by using the weight of your own body for building muscle, all it takes is 10-20 minutes per day and there’s no cost and no excuse for not doing it.
Edit: thanks for the responses, awesome.
https://www.reddit.com/r/bodyweightfitness/wiki/kb/recommend...
I've been doing it for about a year and it's excellent. The only "equipment" I bought are some wooden gymnastics rings.
A gym membership you don't use is useless of course, but having set appointments for sport, getting called on it when you don't show, and getting encouraged when you do, is far easier than trying to work up the self-discipline to do it at home. When you don't go to the gym on your own, what makes you think you'll do your exercises at home?
I started doing crossfit half a year ago, and now I usually go 3 times a week, far more than the maximum of once a week I did for previous sport/exercise attempts. And I manage to keep it up at least partially thanks to the positive and encouraging atmosphere, and the fact that I do it together. I'd never be able to get these results on my own at home.
The worst form I've ever seen has come out of crossfit classes. The way people learn to use ergometers in those classes makes me cringe—just asking for a ruined lower back. And lifting—it just looks painful.
Form, form, form. Can't stress it enough.
I just know I had seen some horrific lifting practices—or rather that no instruction was given except for "Go for it!".
That's good to hear.
You also end up exercising near other sweaty dudes, staying in line for the squat rack or whatever, then showering in conditions that are rarely ideal.
Whenever I go to the gym it takes at least an hour to go through my training, plus 30 minutes to get there and back. At home I can do my strength training in 15 minutes. I will then bike to and from work daily and thus get my cardio too.
A majority of people that pay for a gym membership don’t go to the gym and that’s a fact.
It depends on the individual I guess, but in my case not going to the gym and exercising at home is what made me a doer.
I admit the distance to the gym and the fact that it's crossfit and not something solitary, makes a big difference. If I had to go to the other side of the city, I wouldn't go so much.
A couple of years ago, I did HEMA, which was either on the other side of the city, or in another town altogether. Very inconvenient, but it was fun to do. Once I got kids, the inconvenience eventually won, and now I really prefer my sport closer to home.
Point is: it's a personal preference. Glad you enjoy biking and going to the gym, but both of those sound terrible to me.
I don't really bike for exercise; I do it just to get around, and I hate going slow.
The only way I can really run is when there's something with one of my kids who's a couple of hundred meters away.
I cycle a lot but the benefits for this desk jockey are marginal compared to doing stronglifts twice or thrice a week.
Calisthenics develop muscle more harmoniously and yield stronger joints.
You can also practice them literally anywhere, which helps when on the move.
I did a quick google, and couldn't find any resources comparing bone density and joint strength for calisthenics practitioners vs strongmen or powerlifters. There's no way joint strength doesn't factor in when you're moving multiples of your own bodyweight. That's also a pretty hard limiting factor of calisthenics - once you're moving your own weight effectively, there's not a lot of places to go, unless you load up with more weight, and then, hey, you're weightlifting.
I'm also confused as to what you mean by "harmoniously" - the big compound movements in lifting that are in vogue right now use a ton of muscles to move stuff around, so a lot of muscles come into play. If you're talking about "muscle imbalances", well, if one was to do a ton of pull-ups and not a lot else, that's a calisthenics workout, and not balanced.
And planks/step ups may be great, but they are no replacement for deadlifts and squats.
Running in a public park is a beautiful combination of boring, painful and embarrassing. Gym provides a structure. It is a place I go to exercise and everyone is there for the same reason. I hate it with a fiery passion, but so do many other people. It is just like going to physical therapy after a trauma, it hurts like hell, but if you don't do it you will be worse off in the long run.
Knowing that; living healthy is obviously important, but to suggest that you should also drop your intellectual curiosity for anti-aging science, like your comment essentially did, is just absurd. It's close to saying that people interested in physics should stop reading physics books and start playing ball sports instead.
It won't make substantial change.
It worked very well in small organisms, once you go to apes the results are much less clear: https://www.theverge.com/2017/1/17/14287708/caloric-restrict...
... or me at 18. Damn I miss that metabolism.
The reason could be a tiny outlier minority.
You used the term "many".
In general, being overweight is a far, far larger problem in the West, and being underweight is extremely rare outside of eating disorders like anorexia. There are people who are naturally skinny due to how their metabolism works, but they are rarely truly underweight.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db288.pdf
That's far more a concern than whether men need to bulk up or not. Which naturally happens as men age and their metabolism slows anyway.
[...] according to 2010 data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, these are the measurements of the average American man:
Height: 5 feet 9 inches (69.3 inches) Weight: 195.5 pounds Waist circumference: 39.7 inches
Anecdotal evidence from Europe: in our industry, culturally associated with obesity, I meet roughly equal amount of obese and underweight people. And I seriously doubt those underweight people spend time in the gym.
> In humans, the long-term health effects of moderate caloric restriction with sufficient nutrients are unknown.
This is true of both animal studies, and preliminary statistical data on the few humans that have been trying CR for a few decades now. There is health improvement, but that's because CR is watching your diet, which is generally good for you. You correct for those factors and the effect basically disappears, at least into the high level of noise that comes with low sample sizes.
But if you still believe in CR, even easier is taking resveratrol. My understanding is that the caloric restriction basically causes the production of resveratrol which is the cause of the beneficial effects in mice. So take resveratrol and eat a normal amount of healthy food should have the same result.
This is true for almost every group including scientists studying nutrition, it changes frequently.
(Which includes people into Goop and such -- hardly the "hackers" that want to analyze and hack the human body).
Not having orthorexia among such a group would be like farting in public in less fortunate groups.
(My gripe is less with individuals, who are inconsiderate - it's primarily with aforementioned entertainment sources that purposefully twist and misrepresent actual research and play on people's fears.)
And would there be a way you think to test if that's really the case?
I have talked with some people who had like severe reactions to the drug who managed to get some kind of mitochondria testing and it would say stuff like "30% of the active sites are blocked on the mitochondria"
Even telomere bound is not enough.
It's likely a set of advanced repair and local homeostasis so that feels still execute the complex maturing program correctly.
Too many senescent or damaged cells might just break the conditions... And mitochondria and cells have excellent mechanisms of dealing with reactive species they make, but sometimes chemicals leak in.
I'd be more concerned with infections and resulting damage at this point, plus toxic damage. Including endogenous like glycation.
Cut calories and you cut the amount of cardio and strength training you can do. This cuts muscles mass, bone density, and takes away the IQ-increasing brain simulation factors away. I am not sold at all.
Don't eat sugar. Don't smoke. Don't drink. Eat fruits and vegetables. Exercise regularly. Walking counts, but you probably want to throw some upper-body stuff in there as well. Working in the garden counts.
That's about 80-95% of "how to stay healthy using forces under your control" as far as I can tell.
Oh but where's the fun in that? :)
“The surprising finding is that our relationships and how happy we are in our relationships has a powerful influence on our health,” said Robert Waldinger, director of the study, a psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital and a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. “Taking care of your body is important, but tending to your relationships is a form of self-care too. That, I think, is the revelation.”
I could understand the impulse people would have to not extend their lives if that's truly what they wanted, but the almost _cultural_ belief that seeking immortality is Bad and Wrong, something only pursued by cartoon villains and insane emperors seems like a collective agreement among people to throw their hands up and go "well, fine! I don't even _want_ to live longer, who'd like that?"
All of this, of course, doesn't touch on the moral, economic, environmental, etc. problems that crop up with greatly extended longevity, for which there are a number of altogether more palatable arguments that would need to be engaged with more fully. Still, it's an odd piece of ideology that makes people feel like they don't need to deploy any of these in the conversation - why would they, when they _totally_ don't even want to live much longer than 100 anyways?
The experience of helping taking care someone in hospice care makes it very clear that at some point they can't do much of anything, or enjoy much of anything, and prolonging the suffering is not on the agenda of anyone with a heart.
More: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/07/17/who-by-very-slow-decay...
I can only repeat myself here. If you want to live longer, you want better health. If you don't want better health because "there's no prospect for improvement", then I don't know what to tell you. That's a contradiction.
In any case, slowing the decline due to aging doesn't mean you spend more time in a nursing home. I means you delay entering a nursing home in the first place.
However, you aren't taking the elderly seriously. It's not "wildly pessimistic" to spend time thinking about what happens after people get beyond that point. This is something that happens to everyone who doesn't die first. It's a normal part of life.
>It's not "wildly pessimistic" to spend time thinking about what happens after people get beyond that point.
Your thoughts are pessimistic, not the fact that you are thinking. The main purpose of a nursing home is to extend the length of people's lives. If you think this is inhumane, then perhaps you would prefer a crematorium to a nursing home?
There is nothing about extending the life of people who are in a place specifically to have their lives extended that is 'not taking the elderly seriously.'
"In medical jargon, healthy people are “alert and oriented x 3”, which means oriented to person (you know your name), oriented to time (you know what day/month/year it is), and oriented to place (you know you’re in a hospital). My patients who have the sorts of issues I mentioned in the last paragraph are generally alert and oriented x0. They don’t remember their own names, they don’t know where they are or what they’re doing there, and they think it’s the 1930s or the 1950s or don’t even have a concept of years at all. When you’re alert and oriented x0, the world becomes this terrifying place where you are stuck in some kind of bed and can’t move and people are sticking you with very large needles and forcing tubes down your throat and you have no idea why or what’s going on."
It doesn't happen to everyone, but it does happen enough that people who work in health care, or have had to help elderly relatives, or anyone closer to the end of their life needs to think about what to do about it, and set up things like advance directives and medical power of attorney.
There is also the POLST, which is a pink sheet with doctor's orders that terminally ill people put on their refrigerator that tell paramedics not to do CPR (for example). https://polst.org/polst-and-advance-directives/
Although the health care system is usually about extending people's lives, this is not always appropriate. Acknowledging that is just being real about what goes on as people get close to death.
This is a really silly and non-sensical line of reasoning. We're talking here about achieving biological immortality: stopping the aging process. This would necessarily require understanding human biology and cellular processes at an extremely detailed level, in order to modify them artificially to stop aging altogether. (Most likely, this will require periodic treatments, much like we currently go to the dentist every 6 months for a cleaning.) If we have the technology to do this, people aren't going to be in poor health with "no prospects for improvement": the anti-aging technology or treatments are going to change that.
I think it's more likely that the first ones could add years or decades of life without being nearly that good, and perhaps still having significant side effects or just not affecting some aspects of aging. If so, difficult decisions about what to do when closer to death won't go away.
If life doesn't really go on forever and people still eventually die of some disease or other, that's a lot of old people who are on life support at some point in their lives, right? Just like today.
Note that extending lifespan does not mean overpopulation necessarily nor lack of jobs.
On top of that, now with people delaying parenthood so much, or not even having kids, we're facing demographic problems (too many old people being supported by too few young workers). If people have significantly longer adult lives, this could very well make it more feasible and desirable to have kids at older ages, which could stabilize the population problem. (People could have two kids at 40, and two more at 60, and two more at 80, for instance.)
I'm not sure I buy your arguments, though. For people who earn enough to retire and live off investments, this could mean more time in retirement, rather than more time working. (Still good, but not a productivity boost.)
Also, I don't see a reason to assume that an anti-aging treatment would delay the end of fertility in women past 35 or so, or make egg freezing work for longer. Those would be separate medical advances.
Who cares? As long as they're not a drain on the system (compared to today), what's the problem? That sounds like a big plus actually: people getting to enjoy more time in their lives. Why would anyone not want that, unless they're some kind of religious nut who thinks this isn't "god's will" or something?
>Also, I don't see a reason to assume that an anti-aging treatment would delay the end of fertility in women past 35 or so, or make egg freezing work for longer. Those would be separate medical advances.
I don't think they'd be entirely separate. We can already freeze eggs, and women are able to carry children at older ages (sometimes not even their own children) thanks to IVF now. Anti-aging treatments should make this even better; women may routinely get their eggs frozen at 25, and then use them to make children at 75.
So when you tell somebody that life isn't short, suddenly they are confronted with the fact that maybe they could be those things, and now they have to justify why they haven't been working at it all along. "Well, I wouldn't want it anyway."
Well, the bikeshedding part of the topic.
For some reason, any time we discuss extending human life, it quickly degenerates into an ethical question.
First, I wouldn’t worry about it because we spend more effort discussing ethics than actually trying to solve the problem. Basically, because the problem is so hard we bikeshed on ethics.
Second, it’s a very hard problem. It’s unlikely with the actual amount of effort, that we’ll be able to do much to extend life in the foreseeable future. We need to cure all the cancers, Alzheimer’s, heart disease, etc.
No, we really don't. Heart disease is mostly caused by lifestyle. And cancer and the aging process are two sides of the same coin: solve aging and you'll figure out cancer too. Alzheimer's is now appearing to be caused by a virus, so we'll probably have a vaccine for that before long.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-03848-4
Plenty of young people get cancer. We also have childhood cancers.
Maybe you should include some references? We haven’t had one effective treatment for alzheimer’s in the past 20 years
Of course, there’s a difference between a few lifetimes and thousands of years or immortality.
That said, people who get bored are difficult to be with in my opinion. Cannot remember that last time being bored. You always have the option to spam your unqualified opinion on HN or something, there is so much potential stuff to do that a lifetime probably wouldn't be enough.
Suburban kids in the 70's. Checks out!
I was bored after about 4 months.
I suppose everybody is different though and what works for me, might not work for you.
A lot of cultural baggage and shame in it, most people just end up stressed out and depressed.
> who is going to want to hire you when you haven't had a job in six months or a year?
I’m lucky enough that in our industry, this hasn’t affected me. Tech companies seem pretty open to the idea that people take sabbaticals and such. Don’t get me wrong, I’m under no illusion that this isn’t a problem for other people and other industries, it absolutely is, unfortunately.
[1] Assuming they could financially afford it
Not everyone, of course.
One of the really serious problems is that your brain generalizes, so once you get sick and tired of one thing, it's easier to get sick and tired of the next thing because your brain says, "Oh, this is kinda similar to this other thing that I already got sick and tired of."
Managing all this can be a real challenge. Not that I'm complaining, mind you, it's an incredibly nice problem to have, and I wouldn't trade it for the world (literally!) But even nice problems to have can still be real problems.
I've spent some time thinking about this. Bear with me ...
First, let me agree with you that I am flabbergasted by the notion that one would have nothing but ill-use for another 40 or 80 or 200 years of life - I would certainly find good and productive use for it, provided I was in good physical and mental health.
However, I ask you to consider the most liberal and progressive figures of the 18th century. Pick any that you like (hint: they're all men). Now bring them forward to the present and they are impossibly reactionary and conservative. Their wives didn't wear pants, they would refuse to speak to a divorced woman in public (if such a woman was even present) and they probably believed that homosexuals had no place in society.
That's us 200 years from now. No matter how "woke" you are or how liberal or progressive you believe your attitudes to be: either civilization collapses, or you're hopelessly - even dangerously - conservative and reactionary 200 years from now.
To put it succinctly: progressive people, and their opinions, turn into reactionary conservatives with nothing but the passage of time.
So now consider if all of those "woke" 18th century (white males) were walking around with us today. How does that affect politics and civilization ? We don't need to do a thought experiment - it's right here in front of us: the "villians" in the housing/NIMBY/prop13 debate are basically anyone over the age of 50 who owns property. Those people aren't even a full generation away from us and we're trying to decide whether they're just sort-of evil or all-the-way evil.
So yes, there is a cultural resistance to people living (a lot) longer and if you can extrapolate political mores forward 50-100-150-200 years I think you can see how quickly that would get murderous - and I do mean that.
...
Looking deeper, I think the prohibition is more than a political one, as I've described above, but one of individual vs. group optimization. You are thinking of your personal self as the organism - and that makes sense because we aren't bees or ants. However, there are other units that can be thought of as an organism and there is, by definition, a conflict between optimizing for the individual vs. optimizing for the tribe/race/species.
Remember: we have a word for what happens when a single cell reserves resources and prolongs its own life at the expense of the larger organism: cancer.
But back to topic... even without, I have a hard time accepting that you can simply extrapolate the current "old people behavior" happening for a few hundred years longer. A lot of issues would suddenly affect them. They'd have already lived though multiple revolutions (e.g. new tech, maybe like not paying with hard cash anymore) and internalize this as a part of life. Actually, we're close to having to learn this right now, with how fast progress has accelerated.
But yeah, making it work with stuff like actively seeking peers across a diverse spectrum would probably require drastic effort with a significant burden placed on the individual.
No, not at all.
I am saying that one should be wary of living much longer than a typical lifespan because when people see vampires, they hunt them down and kill them.
I knew a young woman in college who was extremely homophobic. I witnessed her bonding with a gay activist over soap operas and changing her mind. People change and adapt. Also, if you look back at history, you'll find people more "woke" than you.
if you can extrapolate political mores forward 50-100-150-200 years
Human history doesn't really work like that. We may be going beyond human history with AI, and it would work quite like that either.
Remember: we have a word for what happens when a single cell reserves resources and prolongs its own life at the expense of the larger organism: cancer.
A single alien AI that controls the resources of an entire solar system would likely see our civilization in these terms.
Arguably, for example in science, advancing it "one funeral at a time" is too slow even at current life expectancy. So one way of speeding it up is killing any prominent scientists over 30. Lots of benefits, right? We would have moon bases in early hundreds BC if humanity adopted that approach!
Advancing societal progress one generation worth of funerals at a time doesn't sound like a good strategy either. I propose reeducations camps instead. Similarly to how slavery during the time of its invention was a great humanitarian advance (alternative was literally death), imperative to keep up with times would be a good alternative to death as well.
Seriously though, changing society to value rationality, (in lesswrong kind of sense, with obligatory Crisis Of Faith exercises, etc) might be not much harder than extending life expectancy to 1k years.
Re: cancer -- society is not an organism, there is no inherent worth of society separate from what benefits it conveys to individual members. In other words, maybe that's my individual organismic bias showing, but individual cells live for the benefit of the host organism, while society exists for the benefit of individual members. Cancer cells are freedom loving cells!
Why the assumption that Past = Right/Conservative and Future = Left/Progressive? I grew up with about this view of politics, but I don't think it's accurate. It seems like a nice simplification, but it's a gross oversimplification that paints anything right of center as being obviously backwards.
No, that's not really what I am saying ... and you are correct, that would be a very blunt oversimplification (or just plain wrong).
What I am saying is that in an unbroken thread of society (that is, absent disaster or revolution or other "resets") views and mores become viewed as more and more conservative by each successive generation that succeeds them.
As I wrote, "progressive people, and their opinions, turn into reactionary conservatives with nothing but the passage of time." I don't mean that those people become conservatives, I mean that successive generations view them as more and more conservative.
I don't think that implies that conservative views are backwards - unless you start with an assumption that "new is always better". I don't assume that.
I think the underlying thought experiment "would I want to be immortal" is plagued by these and other unspoken assumptions. We simply don't know what it would mean to have a lifespan decoupled from our evolutionary experience. Clearly, we have psychological and emotional development coupled to our physical development and our functional roles within human society.
What does it mean to freeze our physical health at our "prime" of 20s-30s? Would it also freeze our cognition and emotion? Or would an accumulation of experience still shift our minds into very different modes incongruent with what we assume of young adults? Think of idioms like "young at heart", "wise for her age", or "has an old soul". Will people freeze with one personality, or all trend towards some world-weary and sage disposition as they witness more and more of life and loss?
And what of pathologies and maladaption? When would people reproduce, if they are immortal? Where does evolutionary pressure provide feedback, if traits can erupt with arbitrarily inter-generational delay?
Can an economic and social system develop to handle immortal participants? The worst aspects of primacy could emerge, if actual individuals can take the place of dynasties and corporations as permanent centers of wealth and power. Conversely, would any potentially immortal individual want to take on great personal risk for the betterment of a larger group? How does this change with time? Would centuries of experience lead one to sacrifice for the young, or would the absence of decrepitude encourage selfish delusions of grandeur, thinking that an accumulation of vast experience should be preserved by spilling blood of relatively empty youth...?
With respect, we're talking past one another.
I am not talking about the persons whose lives are extended.
I am talking about their new contemporaries - their "younger peers" who, in the past, would have never found themselves cohabitating with people who had lived 1xx or 2xx years ago.
It is those future young people who I think will have a very hard time accepting any views of any kind coming from any "great old ones" - no matter how plastic or malleable or open-minded those old people might be.
Their sin is simply being old and youth defines itself by breaking with the old. Right now there's a throttle on that struggle because people die. Without that throttle, the young will, I fear, kill the "vampires".
Playing devil's advocate: If one had the permanent physical and cognitive characteristics of someone in their 20s-30s, might they not continue to pass as a young person? Unless you look up their identity in some registry, you wouldn't necessarily be able to identify a cohort. Here is urban Southern California, I see plenty of "old" people in their 50s-60s who are trying to pass as young people all the time. What if they don't have to mask fading hair and eyes, sagging or blotchy skin, aching joints, gravely voices, or personality changes?
You describe a person from 200 years ago existing today, as if they step out of a time machine. But, if they have had 200 years to absorb pop culture, mannerisms, dialect, etc. then how would you know? They won't be repelled by garlic nor invisible in mirrors. They won't even be afraid of sunlight (no skin aging!) and their blood-sucking may not be distinguishable from any young go-getter's.
People change over time. My mother is over 80 now, and happily buys all kinds of stuff on Amazon with her laptop or smartphone, even though she said decades ago she didn't see the need for a computer. Her politics are also quite liberal, a lot more so than a lot of 20-somethings I talk to these days who seem to be a bunch of MAGA fans.
Also, how do you know that progressive people from the 18th century would have a problem talking to a divorced woman or women wearing pants? Just because that was the standard of the day doesn't mean that everyone from those times agreed with that.
>progressive people, and their opinions, turn into reactionary conservatives with nothing but the passage of time.
This simply isn't true at all. Many of today's conservatives are quite young, and lots of liberals are quite old. One of the most liberal SCOTUS justices is on her deathbed now, while the youngest one is a Trump appointee.
I'm sorry - that line makes it sound like I am saying those people who were progressive become, themselves, reactionary conservatives.
What I am trying to say is that viewed by successive, future generations those people become reactionary conservatives. That is, simply the passage of time changes the view, from outside, of those people.
"Many of today's conservatives are quite young, and lots of liberals are quite old."
Agreed. What I am saying is that, absent a revolution or other reset of our current society, both of those groups will be considered, 200 years from now, quite conservative.
An example looking backward:
Find me the most liberal and the most conservative participants at the signing of the US Declaration of Independence - now let's sign them up to speak at Berkeley tomorrow and see how that goes. See what I'm saying ?
I can easily find examples of people in my own social circles (mainly through family contacts) where there's young people who are die-hard conservatives, MAGA fans, Christian zealots, etc., and older and elderly people who are staunch defenders of Roe v. Wade.
The things you identify as "liberal" vs. "conservative" simply do not correlate very well with age or generation at all.
I suspect you have not spent much time around eg people with dementia, who are well within their “natural longevity” but for some have not “reasonably enjoyed” anything in many years, sometimes decades.
Visit a nursing home, and you may find yourself pondering that perhaps medicine has by and large given us many more years than we know what to do with already.
For many entering old age, the concern is not about how many years they have left, but if they’ll be able to take care of their basic needs during them.
Instead of that, try visiting some universities where there's still some elderly people working as academics. Or try going to a classic rock concert where guys in their 70s are still playing on stage, sounding just about as good as they did decades before. Obviously, some people don't just give up when they get older, and keep doing the things they enjoy.
... you understand that declining mental health is not the result of "giving up", right? And that the celebrity academics/rockstars still active at 85 often are 1) reasonably wealthy and 2) lucky.
I've TA'd for 70+ years old professors with declining health who were still teaching because they didn't have a choice and had bills to pay, and it was just sad. Complete waste of time for the students (and tragic for the professors to find themselves in that situation).
Your messages give the sense that you have a very naive/idealistic view of aging.
People really underestimate of how much o their life they forget as the decades pass.
you will notice people now look a lot younger. It isn't only the sense of grooming/clothing but also physical attributes which have changed
For muscle-mass, the health benefits come from having higher glycogen storage (helping to prevent diabetes), as well as maintaining function late into life. The latter is subject to diminishing returns, and maintenance is more important than the amount when you peaked. Also, having too much muscle mass would put a strain on the heart.
Daily light movement is important for circulation. 10-12k steps seems to about ideal.
15-20 minutes of moderate-intensity (120-140 bpm) or 4 total minutes of high-intensity (> 160 bpm) cardio improves heart function, blood-flow, and mitochondrial density. Any more seems to be subject to diminishing returns.
Stretching around 10 minutes per day may help prevent cancer and preserve function.
This leads me to the following recommendations:
1-3 weekly strength training sessions of around 45 minutes
10-12k daily steps
2-4 weekly cardio sessions of around 15 minutes
10 minutes daily stretching
You didn't mention it, but the other benefit of strength training is higher testosterone levels.
You can have immortality or reproduction - choose.
You would be forever chasing the dopamine hit of understanding more of the fields that interest you. Or you could just shoot heroin. Without mortality or problems to confront, all meaning would be lost. Math, heroin, sex, all the same. Consider the dissolution of meaning, and the fact that infinity is a very very long time.
And if you get bored after 500 years, you can always opt out. I'd like to have the choice to see if I do like it.
No, that is not the reason for my comment.
It seems clear to me, both by life experience and reading related research that humans require meaning to have lives worth living. This might be a hard pill to swallow, but I suspect that it is ultimately our mortality that gives our lives meaning. If there is nothing to strive for, then there is only pleasure seeking. Your life becomes an infinitely long hedonistic binge. Human beings were not designed to withstand hedonistic binges for too long without dark consequences (as in, dissolution of meaning, extreme depression, etc).
I guess you could argue that with infinite time, you could figure out how to redesign yourself until you are comfortable with immortality. But are you still yourself by then? Or is this problem also already solved by... just dying?
Not for a long, long while in any case.
Few people are trying to make the case for shortening life in the interest of having more children, so is there anything special about the current balance to suggest we should not continue to push it further away from this?
If ageing becomes something we can turn off, and we become biologically immortal, then I think the main unfortunate consequence is that the remaining causes of death become more dominant and are unnatural and unpredictable: accident; poverty; war; disease.
There's plenty of room on the planet for more people, but not if everyone wants to live like a suburban American with 2 big SUVs and a McMansion with a huge lawn. If everyone lived like in Tokyo, we wouldn't be so worried about overpopulation. Better technology will also help us create more food without having to take up more land for it. Finally, technology will allow us to push into space and use that for both resource extraction, manufacturing, farming, and living, giving us space only limited by the amount of building material we can gather there.
Under your philosophy wouldn’t reproducing steal even more resources? If you have three children then you’re stealing them 3X faster.
Not to mention the theft framework is nonsensical - while it is a good thing to have sustainable systems and resources how can one steal from that which does not exist and may not ever even?
Under that framework I could accuse anyone of wrongfully occupying the space of an entity which may only exist at the end of time after all intelligent life is dead - which is more absurd than the invisible pink unicorn arguements.
Reproduction, thanks! Wouldn't mind spending the last 10 years in good health though.
Have you carefully examined the logical outcome of such a line of thinking? Carousel, anyone? Is your life clock blinking?
We live longer than most of the creatures of our size, and we have larger brain. That's the reason of the damage we create to the earth like swarms of locusts do to the green grass fields [1].
And still we wish more life! Sad!
On a serious note, the most intriguing thing I found in the article, is that, If you design & sell items specifically to elderly, they wont buy it. Because they don't want the product to remind that they are old.
So the solution is to design a product which suits to the elderly but seems like its designed for young generation.
Aren't a lot of products you see on infomercials exactly that?
I've seen people argue that it's a market failure or an inefficiency of capitalism that people are trying to market products for elderly and disabled people to younger people and families. From this it seems more likely the opposite. They are designed for the elderly or disabled but are falsely marketed to everyone in order to get their real target audience to buy it.