How to live forever: meet the extreme life-extensionists

You raise a very good point. I hadn't thought of looking up research on attitudes towards death in actual elderly people.

It's an unusual one because I'm specifically thinking about people who might want to die simply because they've seen and gotten from life all that they want, not people who are fed up with the (present-day) privations of old age. I suspect you're right that only a very small proportion of today's elderly match this

The closest thing I found after a little looking around is a recent initiative in the Netherlands called "Completed Life" - which seeks to extend the option of euthanasia to relatively healthy elderly people who have decided that their life is complete - and some associated research [0][1].

Lastly, on a slightly pedantic note, I think it's valid to invoke fictional worlds in response to someone who says that it's "insane" to feel a certain way.

[0] http://www.elsvanwijngaarden.com/

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027795361...

One account I have heard from nurses in Geritology is the apparent importance of "will to live" - they have witnessed many times death following them psychologically giving up.

There could be some chicken vs egg factor (do they lose the will from health being hopeless or does their health decline with their psychological state influencing immune system, and to what extent?). That or spurious human pattern recognition (superstition) but it is possible that there is some literal survivalship bias.

When I was 9, I cried all night because I realized that one day, we might meet aliens and go to other galaxies and whatnot, and I would just be dust in the ground by then. The thought of thousands, millions of years of events and me just having been a blip, felt crushing. And there are many people I miss, and many people who died before I was born I would have loved to get to know; that I "made peace" with that doesn't mean it doesn't make me sad. It is sad, it's sad that people die, even after a long life. It's sad for friendships to end. But that I'm sad doesn't mean I'm not also happy and grateful, and prefer to be content with being a single finite thread in a much bigger tapestry of life, rather than just going on forever, kinda defacing that tapestry.

I mean, that's the binary "immortality" option. I'm not against medicine, or people living longer. But if someone genuinely wants to live forever forever, I really would question how much they thought it through.

> you are positing that an extended amortal life is at the expense of someone elses' birth.

> But why should it be?

That's the default, considering we live on a finite planet with finite resources, and even without immortality on the expensive of others is already quite the thing. I'd say the burden is on showing how that could change, not to mention why it absolutely must and will change... rather than just assuming it.

> we're talking SF

I'm "just" talking immortality, that I take for granted in this context, not additional things. At the least, those additional things can't just go one way, just because assuming immortality is assuming something hitherto impossible, doesn't warrant assuming other impossible things, while dismissing other possibilities, both possible and hitherto impossible, just because they'd spoil the parade.

Why would some live at the expense of others, or prevent others being born? Well, having "eternity" to lose, one must not let anything unpredictable happen, one certainly must not let anyone have the ability to harm oneself. The universe is too big to let anyone just get away and potentially hatch unpredictability. That is certainly a way to look at it, and it only takes a few with enough power to have that outlook for my dystopia to occur -- while your utopia would require nobody with power going that route, everybody always agreeing on "playing nice".

We can't even agree on a way so people don't starve and die for lack of water, we can't exactly agree to not ruin the planet, potentially leading to catastrophic shifts in rather short timespans, we already live at the expense of those who might be born after us -- but we're going to handle immortality well, if only we had it? We're greedy and murderous about shitty trivialities, about trinkets -- but we'll play nice when it comes to something like living forever? Seems unlikely, certainly not a given.

The possiblity of immortality combined with the fact of ongoing concentration of wealth and power, plus automation, might lead to a rapid depopulation of the planet indeed, but not by moving anyone anywhere. Why keep people around that are nothing but a potential threat, that serve no use, that are not even an exploitable resource, because they take up more space and resources than means of production requiring no workers that are orders of magnitude more powerful, and after some point plain unnecessary either way? After people "have everything", not by being content and loving life and the world, but by owning it personally, what they still need is for nothing else to be able to rise up.

(I also meant to write a short story once, about a little girl who skipped the weekly dose of the government mandated antidote for the biological weapon terrorists supposedly unleashed, say, 150 years ago, because she wonders if it's even true that not taking it is lethal, since nobody she knows ever failed to take it even once. She manages to hide the pain and the skin discolorations that appear after a few days, finally staying up all night the last night gritting her teeth before the day the next weekly dose is given out, sneaking into the bathroom early to wash off her sweat, before her mother wakes her. It was supposed to begin with her vowing to never do that again, then starting to ask questions about the past, but I never got beyond that.)

The kind of biotechnology we are talking about will be more like a cocktail of drugs and gene therapies. The price of entry will be in the millions, and maintenance in the tens of thousands per year. It will take many generations to be affordable to the masses

Because living in a world where you live to work for the next 30 years until climate change kills us all is not a good prospect.

I was not talking from a religious perspective, I thought it was funny because I found the 70 year-good-life (health-wise) to be very accurate even in modern times; to me it seems the psalmist simply recorded what he saw around him (just like the Book of Ecclesiasticus is a very sobering/"uninspired" perspective of a "simple" man, very much unlike most of the bible).

The religious explanation for the longer lives of early humans, I think it is that there were very few people and they needed the longer lifespans in order to reproduce more and somehow humanity became more degenerate down the line; also back then people could marry their sisters so I suppose there were very few recessive genes (guess that could also contribute to the longer lifespans) :) ?

So perhaps the DNA could be somehow cleaned up and people could live 900 year life-spans ?

Also, in a post messianic age, in the Old Testament it was written than people dying in their 120th year would be considered to die young (I vaguely remember reading that just because in the christian post-messianic age you wouldn't die at all)?

I read somewhere that those years could have just been lunar cicles, so 900 cicles would be about 75 years.

Sorry, too long ago to remember the source, and if it has any backing.

Well, yes, in that no one has lived forever yet. :) But that he has established a substantial research foundation and normalized a subject that was virtually fringe science a few decades ago is tremendous success in itself.

How much of that effect comes about because people's brains stop being flexible due to age?

> while very helpful, can only increase your chances for your regular long life, and have a relatively small effect at that.

> Poor lifestyle can severely diminish base lifespan, but a good one cannot increase lifespan by a lot.

Depends on your definition of "living", being obese/out of shape and on constant medication for diabetes/heart issues, not being able to do the most basic exercises, &c. isn't life by my standards. I don't care if I die at 40, at least I would have reached my peak physical and mental shape.

To me fighting to increase lifespan is complete non sense, look around, we don't need more time, we just need less work, mindless activities and gadgets. We spend our lives slaving away until we're literally too old to do it anymore to buy shit we don't need. I notice it all the time around me, most people are miserable, they live in the constant hope of a better day by thinking about their next weekend or vacation, some people in their 20s already talk about what they'll do when they retire (at fucking 67 years old). Increasing our lifespan won't do anything meaningful besides putting more strain on the world, both economically and ecologically.

Like most things, it was figured out a long time ago by people who had way way way more time to spend on thinking and less time to spend on mindless information consumption. Take Seneca for example:

> A person like him has not lived; he has merely tarried awhile in life. Nor has he died late in life; he has simply been a long time dying. He has lived eighty years, has he? That depends upon the date from which you reckon his death! ... [He] has lived eighty years, has he? Nay, he has existed eighty years, unless perchance you mean by "he has lived" what we mean when we say that a tree "lives."

> No man can have a peaceful life who thinks too much about lengthening it, or believes that living through many consulships is a great blessing. Rehearse this thought every day, that you may be able to depart from life contentedly; for many men clutch and cling to life, even as those who are carried down a rushing stream clutch and cling to briars and sharp rocks.

> Show me that the good in life does not depend upon life's length, but upon the use we make of it; also, that it is possible, or rather usual, for a man who has lived long to have lived too little.

> We should strive, not to live long, but to live rightly; for to achieve long life you have need of Fate only, but for right living you need the soul.

For a long time, I thought that my relatively poor health was mostly caused by my shitty lifestyle choices. It turns out that I have multiple genetic diseases, and the lifestyle choices made them worse. YMMV.