How should we pursue human longevity?
milan.cvitkovic.net
milan.cvitkovic.net
Organisms are evolved to utilise short life-spans to quickly adapt changing environmental conditions.
Let’s assume humanity finds a cure to death and also without dwelling into dystopia that this finding is cheaply available to everyone. What will most likely happen is that bad ideas will haunt the humanity forever as older generations won’t die and remove their bad ideas with them. There might come a point that humanity will completely collapse due to rule by elders where they can be expected to accumulate much of the available wealth. So bad ideas of older generations can lead to total collapse of species.
Honestly I don’t see anything other than dystopia occurring with the cure to death, regardless if it is expensive or cheap.
I’m also impressed people want to live forever, this is something I cannot possibly understand, don’t people at least want to see what is at the other side? Do they think they will never get bored from material existence?
Biological immortality (negligible senescence) would not prevent suicide, homicide or accidental death.
Why should we be bored?
The universe is a large and complex space, And there are many mysteries to solve...
And when the real world is too boring it is always possible to create/explore virtual worlds.
Death is clearly an evolutionary result as species all live in a different range of lifespans. It can neatly argued that we are now seeing consequences of this just by extending lifespans from 60 to mid 80s in both economics and governance.
It's always nice when HN truly shifts a perspective.
Have one internet on me today.
also, how do you know there is another side?
Sure, but I want to do it on my schedule, and it would be nice to have some level of understanding of "what's next after death" before I choose that option.
Do they think they will never get bored from material existence?
Oh, probably; but I think it will take me somewhere north of 500 years before I tire of being alive. Even if Earth is boring, I'd rather move to another planet rather than just off myself out of boredom.
I'd take boredom over non-existence.
Think about how much people will change, how many lives they will live over 300 years.
Also keep in mind a society that is able to develop and sustain anti-aging medicine has to be by definition more advanced than ours.
Boredom is not valid, since nobody talks about people being forced to live. However, I don't think I would be ever bored. There is so much to do. So much space so many things and so many minds to explore. The tragedy, the insult of the brevity of life outweighs the dangers of boredom infinitely.
Is that because older people willingly changed their views, or older people died and younger people replaced them? I suspect 90% of that change is from generational shifts, not people learning with time. In other words, the old died out and the young replaced them.
In my anecdotal experience, most older people I know aren't any less racist/prejudiced than they used to be - they're just afraid to talk about it more.
I find the notion that old people are all stupid, racist bastards very insulting, even though I am under 30. Older people tend to be happier, kinder and have more perspective. Imagine how much more wisdom, knowledge and skill people could accumulate if they did not die so young. If they lived, what would Arthur C. Clarke, John von Neumann and Ludwig van Beethoven be up to today?
It is true young people in our world are often more radical. For better and worse. And for every good change there are other examples where young people changed the world for the worse. The nazis and communists were quite young when they rose to power.
Moreover, I can only reiterate. A fixed world assumption is not valid here. A world with little or no aging will be vastly different.
They don't utilize short life span, but rapid replication
For many organisms short life span is simply a byproduct of their biology, but take an immortal mosquito and its rapidly evolving offspring will adapt as well as the immortal father did.
Of course immortal mosquitos would never be possible because the equilibrium would collapse if too many mosquitos are alive in a limited resources pool
But humans are not mosquitos
And this is valid up to a point.
If you think about it, all technologies are first available to a minority and then to a much larger population, and eventually to almost everyone.
I think most dystopia are simplistic and wrong on this topic.
Biological organisms already have an impressive capacity to repair themselves. They don't avoid death at the cellular level, they simply replace dying cells with new cells.
And this is the case for many if not most of our cells.
As long as they don't die all at the same time, a biological organism should be able to maintain this cycle of replacement forever.
It might even be something simple, like the telomere repair mechanism.
Regardless of that, given the veneer of rationality in discussions of this topic (not just this source, but more generally) are there any strong arguments for extending human lifespans? The four reasons following “Because death is bad” (including footnote 4) seem like a superficial analysis based on a cartoonish model/philosophy of life.
Personally, it seems far more useful to think about how we might make human life happier and more meaningful; longevity research seems particularly pointless & banal as it is unlikely to improve well-being in any significant way in and of itself. (I’m not referring to preventing unnatural mortality, but extending median lifespan). (This is somewhat opinionated, and of course, others are welcome to alternative opinions.)
I fully understand the central role of death in the evolution of life.
At the same time, this is incredibly wasteful for a species like us.
Life is usually preserving knowledge with DNA copies over generations, but individual knowledge is lost and in our case it is not negligible.
Most of it is really lost.
I am not sure if it’s wasteful. In the current context maybe.
Nonetheless, learning is still a long and painful process, even when it is about knowledge that has been known for centuries. And when a master in a field dies, his unique mix of knowledge and views dies with him, without any ways to transfer it.
Human language is a powerful tool but still weak and unreliable to transfer knowledge.
That's the thing. I would choose the same, and I know many others who would. For the people who would prefer to live what they consider to be a "normal" lifespan, they can simply choose to end their life when they want, or not avail themselves of whatever treatments become available to increase lifespan.
So many "anti" arguments against so many things boil down to "I wouldn't want that so you shouldn't get to have it either". Those arguments are tedious and annoying.
I was flippant about the arguments against longevity only because other authors (linked in the appendix) have done such a thorough job of making the case already. The goal of this piece was to help push the longevity discussion past that a bit.
Completely agree that the arguments against longevity should be taken seriously. I just happen to think they're wrong.
Sometimes your post focuses on one thing and the HN discussion finds another aspect more pressing :-)
>> whole point of the piece being to NOT discuss the arguments for/against longevity, basically all the comments are about that.
Step one: Learn to Weaponized Autism better?
I'd still be working on a technology that allows longevity to be explored more at different levels. Why do we not have a clearer way forward? Why are Instagramers not pushing what we have more? Why is there not more money in this? Why was it so hard for me to buy metformin illicitly on the internet?