Turning Back the Clock on Aging Cells | Hacker News Reader

Turning Back the Clock on Aging Cells

nytimes.com

77 pointsmhb29 comments

My unrealistically optimistic hope for the post-COVID19 world is that we realize how terrible aging is both from a humanitarian and economic perspective. If everyone had the risk profiles of 30 year olds, this pandemic would be orders of magnitude less harmful.

I think the cumulative effect of things like these does give the longevity movement more support and less skepticism as a group of crazy people.

And then be wiped out by the next spanish flu which targeted the young.

Wars tend to wipe out the young. After WW1 it became popular in France to marry old men.

Not sure about economic perspective... Lots of old people dying prematurely is basically a huge relief on pension funds and health insurance (old slowly dying people are the most expensive to treat).

Moral perspective is obviously different, though I'm not sure there's additional value to old human life over just human life.

I don't know about the US, but my country is expected to lose between 1.2% and 9.7% this year.

If the individuals are healthy/sane, then one could definitely argue that they provide additional value in terms of experience. I find it quite sad and unfortunate that we as humans spend our entire lives accumulating knowledge and experience, only for it to vanish in an instant. Or in the even more unfortunate case, over many years due to dementia and other mental causes.

I'm a much better programmer than I was 5, 10, 20, 30, 40 years ago. Still not happy with the code I write, however.

There's also the possibility that you won't need all those pensions and health care money if people can stay healthy and productive well past their "natural" prime. The amount of accumulated knowledge and skills lost due to aging is also non-trivial.

but maybe that's a good thing. In my experience, most people are not flexible in their mindset and so are averse to change their ideas based on changing times. This would create a world like that of Altered Carbon where people at the top just keep accumulating resources and never die and their ideals never change.

Doesn't sound that different to today.

> their ideals never change

That wasn't enough. They are explicitly shown as slowly becoming amoral monsters. In the end Laurens Bancroft says as much in open text to further drive the point down.

Don't we already see much talk of our living in a "gerontocracy"? I'd like my older family to enjoy better health and longer life as much as anyone, and God knows this pandemic is giving me a healthy sense of my own mortality at age 30.

But... Sometimes I still want my older relatives to stop being such damnable Boomers and get out of the way, in terms of how society is run.

> if people can stay healthy and productive well past their "natural" prime

Ah yes, I'm really looking forward to eternal life of wage slaving where my whole purpose of living is to be productive and bring others profits.

Robots will do most the slaving. You will be lucky to have any job to do.

And people will still be preaching the "just learn a new skill" nonsense and that all the poor unemployed people are lazy.

"Learn a new skill" works perfectly fine now.

The problem is, most people aren't good at learning new things, especially as they age.

I meant productive in the positive sense that a person is able to enjoy their life doing things they find meaningful, not the "productivity" of a broken society where humans are exploited for the benefit of a lucky few.

People in general do not require all that much live happy lives. I think that if there's any point to society existing at all it should be to raise the quality of life above that threshold for as many people as possible while seeking to minimize the strain on those it cannot elevate.

> Lots of old people dying prematurely is basically a huge relief on pension funds

only in systems that collectivize such pension funds and insurances.

If you had old human life that was explicitly not degraded human life (so not at higher risk of death, not having fewer remaining years, and not having issues thinking or learning), I would have assumed old to be more valuable better than young due to accumulated knowledge and experience.

Not me. I don't want to see Trump, Ellison or Murdoch running around with reset 30 year old risk profiles.

Anyway software teaches us there is a constantly increasing cost/work to maintaining complex systems in ever changing complex world - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lehman%27s_laws_of_software_ev...

So no worries of this ever working out imho.

Our genes are the software.

The world would get pretty full after few generations. What do you want to do with 20 billion of 30-year olds? And with 50 billion? Or would you just kill everybody after certain age even if they are healthy?

We can't showel everybody to Mars/wherever in maybe next 500 years, if not more. A tiny base for few, with prison-like life isn't that attractive proposal either.

Not to mention family reunions would get weird when you are biologically exactly the same age as your great grandfather.

I doubt there will ever be mass migrations off-planet. A far more likely scenario would be a few colonists populate off-planet with their descendants.

I wouldn't leave the Earth, as the Earth is a paradise. I was just out today, and the air smells sweet with the lowered pollution and the cherry blossoms out.

> Earth is a paradise

That will surely change if everyone keeps living forever and you get 100 billion people on it.

100 billion wouldn't be bad. We already have 7.53 billion and TONS of open spaces.

Well, for that exact reason immortality has to come with strings attached, in other words, you can have the eternal youth pill but you get your tubes tied. We would have to take population a bit more seriously and set a target of, say, 2 billion humans then implement policies that make the population tend towards that level.

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