Who wants to live for ever? Ageing can be cured–and, in part, it soon will be | Hacker News Reader

Who wants to live for ever? Ageing can be cured–and, in part, it soon will be

economist.com

39 pointsjkuria104 comments

Come on The Economist, no mention at all of the economic implications of this? Of people getting older and older and richer and richer without end, hoarding all the wealth and power, and young people with flexible minds being very rare indeed.

We’ve worked that bit out. Our generation gets to be methuselahs, and subsequent generations get to serve us.

For this to work, we need to continuously outlaw any affordable anti-aging therapies.

(Altered Carbon is one of my favorite recent sci-fi dystopias, though it’s somehow more offensive than Repo: The Genetic Opera)

> though it’s somehow more offensive than Repo: The Genetic Opera

On the upside, it doesn't have Paris Hilton

Another interesting dystopian exploration is the Miracle Day season of Torchwood. They don't even go onto long term outcomes outside of in-world speculation, but it primed me very 0well for the methuselah topic in Altered Carbon.

Maybe people would start caring about mother nature and the environment if they'd live forever.

Perhaps that's what it'd take for the widespread mentality of «après moi, le déluge» to finally come to an end.

I know many people 3 times older than I am with much more flexible minds. I also don't think there is a biological basis for inflexible minds.

Actually the smartest person and the most flexible mind I know is also the oldest man (87 y/o) I know. It's infeasible for younger people to have his outlook, that simply comes with his life experience.

My neighbor is 89 and still works part time as orthodontist for children here in Toronto. When he was 6, his job was to run from one outpost to another delivering messages during World War 2.

He volunteers weekends removing trash from the public parks and cleaning up our streets of litter.

I am teaching him how to play professional chess and we had plans to go to professional tournaments (but covid hit so maybe next year) and he is picking up really well.

Feels like this is a totally different topic.

What if: Neuroplasticity allows you to build new base cognitive tools from sensory information, or dump/change existing tools. If you build sufficiently numerous, broad, and adaptive tools when you are young, you will be able to do many, many things when you are older.

Still might have challenges learning new languages, or say to dance if you never learned how to dance at all, at the same rate as a toddler, tho.

Maybe compared to a toddler, but this person I am talking about became a programmer at 65 after being a physicist and then a biologist. I know more old people like that from the university. I really don't think age is so much of an issue that it should us stop from prolonging life. I really want these brilliant people to have more time on Earth. And I want more time too, even if I can't learn anything new at all past 125. Life is beautiful.

Yes, I also ignore the basic science behind neuroplasticity. There is no doubt that the developing brain has a higher plasticity than the fully adult brain.

From what i understood by other articles posted here at the past, unless there is some actual brain issue, the practical difference is very small and it is largely a matter of self-imposed limitation (e.g. people stop learning or get set into their ideas because that is the path of least resistance, but if are placed in an environment that encourages or forces them to learn they can do that fine).

Regardless, if we figure out how to live more and end up with brain zombies, we'll also have an incentive to figure out how to improve our brains. There is a lot of research into such topics too (see topics on research on Alzheimer's disease which are also posted here often).

perhaps flexibility of thinking is not about neuroplasticity, but instead having many pools of thought and experience to draw from.

Sure, so do I, but that doesn't change the general outlook. Just look at the boomers voting for the most regressive policies to entrench their wealth and privilege.

It's not only about flexibility. When eventually Rupert Murdoch dies, his wealth and power will be split up amongst his children and the state. But if he lived on and on we'd be stuck with him forever.

Your sweeping, ageist generalizations about one generation don’t lend any credibility to your assertions about ageless society.

Yeah, but is it because of their age or because of their psychology? My bet is on the latter. Minds are flexible - if they want to.

Truly curing aging should mean keeping minds flexible, too.

Keeping minds flexible is both a nature and nurture issue. We can increase neuroplasticity and new neuron/dendrite growth with a variety of compounds that trigger BNDF secretion, but people still have to expose themselves to and try to learn new things.

... necessarily to the point of being able to wipe some memories/knowledge out to free up space.

Your mind already does this by itself. Of course, nobody knows what would happen if we left our natural "garbage collector" running for multiple centuries.

It's an interesting thought. If we radically extended life (say to 1000 years), how would society change?

Would people still want to marry? Would we pursue careers as aggressively? You could spend your first 80 years in school and still have 9 centuries of career left. How would savings change? Criminal justice?

I don't know what would happen, but the changes would be radical and have many knock-on effects that we cannot predict.

Personally, I wouldn't spend 80 years in school in one go. I would likely have taken a break to reset in the middle of my undergrad - and would certainly be in grad school now.

I'd imagine that many individuals will grow bored with their career after some number of decades and will switch. Starting at the bottom doesn't sound so bad if you can get to the top of the skill tree in 10-15 years out of 1000. It would practically be the same as spending a year on a transition today.

Society and human progress could likely stagnate.

So much of human progress depends on old, inflexible minds passing away to make room for new, young minds and ideas to take hold and evolve.

Can there be evolution without death and rebirth?

Divorce is common a thing, perhaps we'd move to something more like family pacts that last a decade or two... raise some kids then re-evaluate.

Maybe have a crypto-contract for that at 20 years you need to each pay a token to remain married else it's automatically disolved.

It's kind of cold, but so is living 1000 years I'd imagine. Though, I'd signup first thing just to see tech evolve.

Science risks being ground to a halt according to Planck's Principle[1].

> Science progresses one funeral at a time.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle

Inequality is what causes revolution. They are not going to get richer and richer without end.

Sounds no worse than people dying, and their children inheriting their assets with a stepped-up cost basis.

Related: Bruce Sterling's novel 'Holy Fire'.

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?4803

> power

You mean, political implications? (I can’t even imagine what the world would look like today if some old ... would still be alive.)

Political power is just one form of power, with economic power being the other great influencer in our capitalistic world. Given that capital can accrue exponentially, I'd say that capital power would outweigh political power in this theoretical world.

Imagine if Trump was the last President to pick a Supreme Court justice.

Imagine if he ran + lost for the next century.

Or if Hillary Clinton could decide to run again.

The Methuselahs of Altered Carbon soon come alive.

... Or continue their extended living. (At least until they get a chance to swap sleeves.)

Somehow I feel living forever may not be what it cracked up to be unless you have a great working brain and lack of mental issues

If I put a gun to your head, and give you a choice, with great probability you would choose life. Most people would. Your choice will likely be the same the day after, the day after that, next month, next year.

The only reason to choose death is if you're suffering so much, you don't want to live anymore.

Most people are doing fine. Most people will happily accept 100 or 1000 more years of life, given a choice.

I, personally, will happily accept millions of years. There's so much to learn, so many great books to read, so much of universe to explore.

I wonder how much time you’ve spent with the very old? My 97 year old grandmother passed last year, in the last conversation I had with her she expressed to me just how ready she was to go. I told her that I thought I understood and hoped that when my time came I too would be ready. She assured me I would be.

This was also my experience with my grandparents (died in their 90s and 80s), but they all suffered towards the end and I wonder if they'd say the same thing if they could have had a 20-something year old's body.

I wonder what portion of that being ready is due to physical pain and limitations.

I’d bet a 97 year old with the body of a 25 year old would have a different sentiment.

I've reached an age where I appreciate the sentiment that youth is wasted on the young. The ability to put my current sentience in my 20-something physical body would be incredibly freeing for all of the stereotypical reasons.

The work of curing aging should greatly reduce the pain and suffering of our later years. Reducing age related diseases and struggles. So not only will you live longer, those years will be better , for longer, and remain good closer to the end

Aging cure pretty much has to address health problems. Your grandmother was ready because she was suffering in an old body. If you gave her an option of rejuvenation, she'd likely go for it.

An assumption. It's not hard to imagine becoming exasperated with the way of things and people and the endless cycle of the easily preventable or tired by any other number of the worlds pains. No amount of progress brings that friction to 0. Over time, I have to think it'll wear anyone away.

It seems rational to want to exist to day N+1 if you presume there's any chance that any present-day problems you have will be resolvable. Suffering may be intolerable, of course, but hope that it may one day end while still remaining alive would be a strong force in a world where life can be indefinitely extended.

hah. there is a big difference between 1000 years and immortality. imho we would have to completely rethink how we live and most importantly why we live if immortality was, even remotely, on the table

You must not have read the article mate.

"The giant tortoises of the Galapagos Islands show no age-related decline, in some ways seeming as youthful at 170 as at 30. Mr Steele thinks this phenomenon, known as negligible senescence, is within humanity’s grasp, too."

A lot of the developments around slowing down aging aren't just about doing so for the physical body - they also improve the longevity of the brain. Plus if you're living for a very long time, that's a lot of time for science to advance. Unless you believe that things like dementia are totally incurable, it's pretty reasonable to believe that sometime in the next few decades we'll make big advances in curing or at least dealing with them.

Some questions about living forever:

If we can live forever, can we also be productive citizens forever?

If not, is it ethical to want this? Assuming "living forever" becomes everyone's right, we would be forever increasing the burden on the young/productive citizens. For how long can it go on?

If we can be productive forever, would we be taking opportunities away from younger members of society? Would we continue reproducing, or would civilization become static?

If we have all eternity, would we have the drive to keep improving ourselves and our society?

The focus of anti-aging research is to maintain good health for a prolonged period of time. I don't see any reason why we wouldn't be productive for far longer in such a world. While doing the same grind could get old after a while, there would be far less restriction on taking prolonged "time out periods"

Imagine being able to take a year off for the Appalachian trail or get a PhD in your 50s without concern for ROI or the short-term career impact of losing 4-5 years. Not be viewed as having hit peak potential in your late 20s/30s.

> Imagine being able to take a year off for the Appalachian trail or get a PhD in your 50s without concern for ROI or the short-term career impact of losing 4-5 years.

How do I not interpret this as wanting everybody, at a time when our society is facing huge challenges, to spend time and resources on prolonging your life, so you can walk around the poorest parts of the US, without it costing you? I mean, it's natural in way, I suppose, to want everything for oneself without investing anything, but it also seems laughably childish, selfish and short-sighted.

Will the people of Appalachia also have access to immortality, in your vision? If so, how?

You’re assuming that we continue the current version of capitalism. Your interpretation doesn’t fit if you assume something like automation-funded UBI.

I feel like if we live forever, we’ll have to drastically re-think money anyway or if parents put in money with compound interest at the birth of their child it might provide that child financial security forever.

> If we have all eternity, would we have the drive to keep improving ourselves and our society?

Are we improving ourselves or society now?

I doubt many decisions humans make are concerned with improving society. Even if they are it is with respect to their perspective of what it means to improve society.

A given society places constraints on people and incentivizes them to act in certain ways and over time this elicits changes in that society, but I don't see that constituting an improvement, unless your notion of improvement is simply change in the manner induced by societal pressures. But then improvement is guaranteed, tautologically, hence it is a a rather poor definition.

If humans were to become immortal then it seems likely that the constraints and incentives of a given society would elicit different responses from its members, thereby inducing a different type of change. And again whether this is an improvement depends on what your definition of improvement is taken to be. Surely, should such a time come, these new immortals' notion of improvement should take precedence over our own. But I doubt they would take conscious control over the manner in which their society changes any more than we do presently.

I have similar issues with the notion that we are, presently or at any time in the past, improving ourselves.

As knowledge and technology, and thus capacity, advances, the definition and moral implication of "productive" changes.

Is it ethical to deny essentially free resources from people simply because they didn't perform some act you consider "productive" according to the medieval definition of working real hard?

Is it ethical for 11 rich people to simply own all the robots and all the land that actually produces all material needs, and since no one else except a few technicians and engineers can possibly have any sort of productive job by the old rules, they get none of the resources and shall just die, or, be relegated to agency-less slaves for the pointless amusememt of the few with actual jobs?

Is it ethical to pick any arbitrary time limit and say on day X you die, because that's the rules we made up? Even if that time limit is 1000 years, it's still arbitrary and constitutes a murder.

What younger members? There is no reason to assume that the birth rate will not eventually decrease to match the death rate, or eventually our expansion into space.

I see no problems with longer life that are worse than the current problem of dying.

These sorts of arguments are like being handed a bag of gold bricks and complaining that they are so heavy.

You know, you're right. Them gold bricks is just sooo annoyingly heavy. Because I am just that nice, I will suffer their burden for you.

You can die at your religion's appointed 80 years or whatever number you imagine, but there is no ethical argument why everyone else shouldn't seek to live both as long and as well as they can possibly manage, by any means short of vampirism.

Merely a lot of standard rules about how resources are distributed and how decisions and policy are made today would need to change to fit that different context of tomorrow. The ethical solution to that problem is to simply work on it.

I imagine retirement would disappear in its current form, and be replaced by super long vacation where you spend your savings, only to start working again (maybe in a new career) afterwards. Economic pressure wouldn’t allow for lifelong retirement.

AFAIK China already has a limit of a single child, so i guess we'll end up placing restrictions - perhaps needing a license for childbirth that wont be given in overpopulated areas. Also perhaps in the future we'll manage to colonize other planets, so living longer will help there too.

And let's not forget that living forever here really means not dying due to age. We'll still die from other reasons.

if we’re going to live forever, do we have to do it in the same biological form?

also, ethics if all fun and games until you are confronted with your own mortality.

Article is pay walled, does it add anything on top of: https://nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html ?

What worked for me: Reload the page and hit the "Stop" button.

It's written by the author of this book: https://www.amazon.com/Ageless-Science-Getting-Older-Without...

This story alwahs bothers me, because much of the story seems to be a parallel me on the dangers of capitalism - and that even the top must fight it if they truly care about those they rule over (ha!) - but then it just bends off into an ageing is a disease moral.

Ita a good story, it just feels off.

I see no paywall. Probably due to NoScript, or possibly uBlock Origin.

For myself I would prefer a solution were I would still die but can retain all my functions until that day (mental performance, muscle mass, strong bones, bodily functions, etc).

Living - literally - forever would render life meaningless. Every choice would become inconsequential since every possible outcome and situation would be relived an infinite number of times.

Curing biological aging that this article is about is something else entirely and obviously very desirable. Should people think it is not very desirable - after the lengths we have collectively taken over the past year to prolong the lives of a few by a little bit - it would be... strange.

Every choice would become inconsequential since every possible outcome and situation would be relived an infinite number of times.

Depends on the society in place.

If there are still criminal records, social memories, credit scores, etc. then if you commit various types of financial or bodily crime then you could become a pariah for, well, ever. I think such a thing would ultimately push more people to either being particularly virtuous, to completely change their identity, or terminate their lives.

It's obviously desirable, but it's going to be a really funny joke when they realise you can still die incredibly easily by a fatal accident, robbing you of your promised 800 years of life. It doesn't help that these types of accidents are exacerbated by climate change, political instability, crime, etc. Problems we still haven't solved, yet somehow we will be able to solve ageing. Right.

> Every choice would become inconsequential

Except the choice of finally stepping in front of a train you've taken daily for the past 300 years.

Forever? The mean time to dying in an accident is around 200 years.

Our current risk/reward tradeoffs are made knowing how we stand to lose at most a handful of decades. If aging is cured, risk tolerance will go down.

We haven't cured all diseases yet either, such as cancer.

Most diseases disproportionately affect the old. It stands to reason that if you cure ageing, most diseases will become less common also.

would you still drive a car if you could live forever?

No, I would buy a cabin in the woods where I could die from CO poisoning.

I doubt it'll be possible in our lifetime but if it is, I'd gladly take it.

The only drawback is that you’d have to kill yourself, eventually.

Eternal life is already granted. All you need to do is to accept Jesus: https://ivypanda.com/essays/what-does-it-mean-to-have-eterna...

It's physically impossible to live forever. I would be the saddest person if I lived forever, and people around me kept dying due to age... And don't forget about overpopulation as Earth would have became extremely polluted.

It would be nice to have more time to get stuff done, for sure

But I also have an uncomfortable feeling that no matter how long I live I probably wont ever do the things I want, for various reasons. Something to think about I guess.

There is a huge leap from curing aging and living forever, because you cannot cure being killed by a fatal, acute disease; poisoning; disaster or accident.

If someone lives to 200, 500, 1000, does their brain "fill up", run out of room for new memories? Do you forget entire decades from earlier, do you stop being able to form new long-term memories? Do you pick up a book and wonder if you've read it before? How many times?

Given our current rate of advancement I fully expect aging to be curable, in a few hundred years. Our current knowledge of cellular mechanics is so limited it's like we're trying to understand a car having just recently figured out why ball bearings are round.

Does this estimate take into account the continued acceleration of science and medicine?

Just one interesting metric that comes to mind is the cost of genome sequencing, which has dropped 6 orders of magnitude over 20 years[1]

[1] https://www.genome.gov/about-genomics/fact-sheets/DNA-Sequen...

Yep, and we're finding out just how limited raw genomic data is for understanding biology. Epigenetics plays a vastly larger role than anyone expected and the newly-discovered field of bioelectric computation could turn out to be nearly as important as genetics itself. We're still at the stage where what we don't know keeps getting bigger and bigger.

Aging will soon be cured. Would love to be able to time travel and see how this headline ages.

Second law of thermodynamics would like a word with you.

Also, if the world fills up with people that stops aging, they will still get murdered by those who can’t afford the operations (according to sci fi)

I am not sure how second law of thermodynamics comes into play here. We refresh almost all aspects of ourselves not having the same atoms in our body after a decade or two. The whole system of the world would still gain entropy even if every living creature on earth was immortal.

Every ordered system is a local entropy reduction that is compensated by a larger entropy gain somewhere else (usually in the form of heat) to satisfy the 2nd law (which is an arrow of time).

We can calculate the minimum entropy right after the big bang, and can estimate the maximum entropy after the heat death of the visible universe.

We are about half way there.

I suppose that's literally true, but living for a million years would be effectively immortal but is still no where close to heat-death-of-the-universe long.

I wonder what the practical upper limit is. Like, 100 million miles accident fatalities would contribute to said limit.

Living approximately until the heat death of the universe (which is the only real consequence of the second law) is a bit different than living for a few more decades, I'd say.

I don't think it would disobey any laws of thermodynamics if we continuously depleted external resources to keep ourselves going 'forever' (until those resources deplete). It's theoretically doable (if the technology is actually real and not economist pop science)

people exists in complete defiance of entropy. One could argue that life itself defies entropy. Yes, it’s a temporary defiance, the amazing complexity that we have evolved is mind bending if you go down to the atom level. There is no reason, apart from not having a full understanding and the tech needed, to doubt that people will live forever at some point in the future (probably not within our lifetimes and probably at some point we will discard the biological part, but still)

Too bad we don't get these headlines in printed form anymore! Saving enough of them as papers throughout an average lifespan probably would made it possible to recycle promising texts into a nice tombstone.

Resolving problems related to ageing by addressing the telomere problem is a double edged sword, because no diminishing telomeres means much more cancer. In order to defeat ageing we also have to defeat cancer.

hah. telomeres and cancer are a drop in the bucket.

google “the hallmarks of aging” to see roughly what are the problems that we are confronted with

Even as a person with occasional death anxiety episodes I must say, living forever (or being forced to) is the only thing scarier than death. for example:

How will people deal with the fact that rebelling against oppressors will carry the possibility of becoming a Prometheus like figure, doomed to eternal suffering?

Also, I have a feeling that awareness of one's mortality is not an insignificant motivating factor in life. Like, how would anything in life have any weight when you know you will live forever anyways? A bit like how bringing back a character in a movie feels cheap and removes and weight knowing they will be fine in the end regardless of what happens.

I am quite confident that whoever wants to live forever, has not spent too much time thinking how long time forever actually is. I mean, it is damn long time.

Death will always be an option.

Let’s start with abortion as an option (which it isn’t in some places).

Your lives are measured in years, and decades. You wither, and die. We ... are eternal. The pinnacle of evolution and existence.

Destroy (which should be canon) says otherwise :)

I think most people when they truly think of what it would mean to live forever, it is more scary than comforting.

We're also very good at not thinking about certain things, though. And I doubt anybody would make a system of immortality that didn't have an escape hatch.

Alpha Centauri is prescient as ever on this subject:

>I plan to live forever, of course, but barring that I'd settle for a couple thousand years. Even five hundred would be pretty nice.

- CEO Nwabudike Morgan, Morganlink 3D-Vision Interview

Of course, we would surely need to expand to other planets before we got anywhere near a 500-year lifespan. We can't manage this planet's resources properly even with a 70-year one.

Fortunately this technology does nothing of the kind. Crashes, choking, and shower falls just to name a few enduring killers will continue to cull our numbers. Even with aging itself there are many factors involved so making major progress does not mean eliminating aging, just greatly reducing the impacts.

it depends. who gets to live forever and what is the cost of living forever?

i can totally see this being unrealistic/unpractical for the majority of people which bring in another can of worms

>Who wants to live for ever

For a possible answer to that question, I recommend reading Transmetropolitan [1]

TL;DR: It ain't necessarily going to be a bed of roses.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmetropolitan

A, the same story that appears once a year for 50+ years...

Like the Cold Fusion stories, it never not fails to dissapoint...

Ah, the hopeless pursuit of eternal life. Old people's desperation shows itself every single time this headline pops up. You only get one life and you will still only have one life if we cure ageing. Don't let it get to your head.

200 years is good enough for me, how can I do that? How much do I need to get that? Do I need replace my blood every 3 months like Peter Thiel is doing?

Read somewhere saying our DNA is coded at 120 years 16 days or something like that, everything expires after that point, unless you can replace them ahead of time, if we know how that is.

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