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Comment by inglor_cz | Hacker News Reader

The vast majority of healthcare spending and disease burden is made worse by aging. In cases of diseases like cancer, several orders of magnitude worse.

If we could stretch people's healthspan to 90 or even 110, the resulting society would be much happier and could spend more money on the other important urgent problems.

> Let's not even talk about the fact that any meaningful advances in the field would benefit the top 0.0001% of the world and would never trickle down to the rest of us.

You are literally writing this on a device that 50 years ago would cost millions. It somehow trickled down to you and me.

I fail to see why something that would be almost universally demanded could stay outside of common reach forever.

Consider that just the cost of DNA sequencing, arguably an interesting and important biotech, went down six orders of magnitude within 20 years. It is literally 1000000x cheaper than in the mid-90s.

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> You are literally writing this on a device that 50 years ago would cost millions. It somehow trickled down to you and me.

Not to disagree with your point, but the performance of Neural Engine in a new iPhone would cost about $200 billion in inflation adjusted 2013 dollars of implement at the prices of even a 37 year old 1984 Cray X-MP.

> I fail to see why something that would be almost universally demanded could stay outside of common reach forever.

You fail to see how the elite would keep advances letting them live longer/healthier for them ? You probably don't have a very fruitful imagination then. What about a 250 years old Jeff Bezos ? 250 years old Putin ? The only limit to these people is literally ageing and being mortal

Do you think people who aren't able to live decently and afford food at every meal in 2021's America would be offered a "longer and healthier life" pill ? Do you think people dying in 2021's America of diabetes because they can't afford insulin would be offered a "longer and healthier life" pill ?

> You are literally writing this on a device that 50 years ago would cost millions. It somehow trickled down to you and me.

If you fail to see the moral difference between typing on a computer and "curing ageing"... I don't know what to say to be honest

I have enough imagination to be a professional writer. You still do not convince me. Life extension is desired by too many people to be kept in billionaire's circle forever, or even for too long. As soon as the details of any procedure leak out, you can bet that someone in Brazil or India will set up a clinic to run the treatments for reasonable price.

> What about a 250 years old Jeff Bezos ? 250 years old Putin ? The only limit to these people is literally ageing and being mortal

I can imagine that very well and frankly, this seems to me the only downside to the whole process. Yes, this is troubling.

> Do you think people who aren't able to live decently and afford food at every meal in 2021's America would be offered a "longer and healthier life" pill ? Do you think people dying in 2021's America of diabetes because they can't afford insulin would be offered a "longer and healthier life" pill ?

Not everywhere is America, in fact, 95 per cent of the world is not America. Single payer systems might do just the thing you consider absurd.

How Americans respond to that is up to them. Also, looking at Americans in general, their general problem is not lack of food, but excess thereof. Most American health problems are caused by overeating.

> If you fail to see the moral difference between typing on a computer and "curing ageing"...

This is Hacker news, not Preacher news, and I haven't addressed the morality of the intervention at all. You are shifting the goalposts, it is fairly clear that I addressed your "trickle down" argument in my rebuttal. Technologies that are expensive in the beginning tend to become cheaper over time and "trickle down" to the less wealthy precisely in the way that you denied. Look around the very room you are sitting in, most things there would be way less affordable to your grandfather.

Aside from that, the whole purpose of medicine is to prevent death and foster health/vitality . It’s literally there for that purpose specifically. Why research medicine at all if we don’t want to actually prevent death?

> It’s literally there for that purpose specifically.

Theoretically. It's also a massive money printing industry full of for profit companies with little to no scruples. The problem, again, isn't "What are the consequences of something in a perfect world, with morally perfect people who only want the best for humanity?", the problem is that every systems are corruptible and most are corrupted, playing god won't do any good in such a framework

> Why research medicine at all if we don’t want to actually prevent death?

Because it makes tons of money. That's why most companies prefer researching and selling symptoms relievers instead of cures. Spend any amount of time to research about the pharma industry and you'll quickly understand that it's not so much about "preventing death" and "foster health/vitality"

The point of capitalism is to align the interests of those with no scruples with the interests of everyone else.

How well it does this and what else might do better is a matter for frequent — and loud — debate, but it is certainly better aligned than the feudal setup which preceded it.

Anyway, here is a link to some open-sourced generically engineered spider-silk producing yeast, to demonstrate that advanced cutting-edge biotech is getting to be as accessible as computing was getting in the 80s: https://youtu.be/2hf9yN-oBV4

> This is Hacker news, not Preacher news

> and I haven't addressed the morality of the intervention at all.

This is the root cause of all the troubles we're facing with tech today. Spend everything on the tech, nothing on the morality of it. Break things and think about the consequences when it's too late. I don't believe we should, or even can, discuss these separately, especially for such matters.

"Science sans conscience n'est que ruine de l'âme." Rabelais

> If you fail to see the moral difference between typing on a computer and "curing ageing"... I don't know what to say to be honest

GP's not alone, maybe you're not too, but the point is, GP's point of view is not a snowflake. This person sounds mentally able, keeps her tone gentle, and make sensible arguments. Maybe it could be a wise move for you to reassess a logic you seems to adhere to a bit too much, so that there could be room for discussion? Because, liking it or not, anti-ageing medication and aging prevention is already here.

Well maybe people should stop letting the minority push them around and pretending like there’s nothing they can do. Money isn’t even real it’s an idea we use to represent work and debt. It people like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are glitches in that system economics nothing more. Putin is another story because he has sole control of a powerful military

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