As someone 99% confident that we're on the verge of discovering a way of reversing aging, it makes me incredibly sad, almost angry, to realize that many people are literally planning how they'll die.
This happens shortly after Tesla makes the million full self driving robotaxis at the end of 2020?
I think your premise is incredibly ambitious but even if it’s true the vast majority of people aren’t going to get access to the veritable fountain of youth anyways, at least not for a very long time because society will have to fundamentally change both to accommodate the idea and also to allow your average person to have the means to obtain it.
So in the end, a cure for death is also a cure for myriad amount of ailments.
It certainly makes a lot more sense for people to plan their lives around our current understanding of mortality than an increasingly hard to believe pyramid of hypotheticals as the GP has contended.
I believe currently only 3) is a bit controversial, but since there are biologically immortal organisms I find it plausible that it's possible.
Not if you're an amputee. There's a certain amount of damage to the body that isn't due to just aging.
We'll probably figure out how to regrow limbs and organs soon.
So, no, not soon. Unless we introduce dedicated lanes where only self-driving cars are allowed.
It's basically the opposite. Health care for old people is very expensive, precisely because they're old. Reversing or preventing aging to the point where everyone has the health profile of a 30 year old would save a fortune.
The idea that our collective human society is going to be handing out everlasting life to anyone who wants it is, even in light of this, something I can't begin to fathom. Perhaps if the arrival of the immortality drug also coincides with the arrival of a utopian society that actually cares about people beyond their basic (and incredibly power-imbalanced) economics that are skewed to benefit corporations not only over people, but over governments, then I can accept it.
But in context of the way the world currently works, this is an incredibly optimistic or naïve assertation to me. People die every day even in the most developed nations due to a lack of access to healthcare, food and/or shelter.
I do believe it’s going to happen, but personally I’m more pessimistic than GP and don’t think it’ll be within my lifetime. Medical research is so tightly regulated when it comes to testing on humans (for good reason!), and there isn’t enough money going into the field.
They won’t be. They’ll be billionaires, able to buy any scarce resource they need to continue their lifestyle. They might need to cut back on their monthly yacht purchase, maybe, but little else.
Another is that this is the endgame for medicine as there is no other path forward. A huge amount of resources, both human and monetary, is spent to care for elderly people to slow the decline of their fragile health as much as possible — while still inevitably failing eventually. It's as if we've almost hit the ceiling of what can be done here with "traditional" methods. So it's the next logical step to declare aging itself a disease, because it's ultimately the cause of all those conditions, and start looking for the ways to reverse and/or prevent it.
Fix one bug, say hello to another.
* I love peppermint ice cream, but I'd probably get tired of it after a million gallons.
* I'm looking forward to retirement in a few years. I don't desire to work for 5000 years.
* A thing in infinite supply has little value. Why would another year of life be any different?
* Marriages would become limited term contracts, and partners would change every few decades
* Unless society figures out a way to address poverty, do you think the billions of impoverished people will want to live forever?
* Having children will be limited to a chosen few, probably the wealthiest.
* Suicide will have to become socially acceptable when people become
Honestly, I think even if the technology is developed, it will be available only to the rich and powerful. They would be willing to prevent the technology from becoming widely available because it would upset the current order and they dare not risk losing their position of privilege.
> I love peppermint ice cream, but I'd probably get tired of it after a million gallons.
So you'll take a break. Then you'll crave some more. The problem with suicide is that one can't change their mind, because there's no mind any more.
> A thing in infinite supply has little value. Why would another year of life be any different?
We have effectively unlimited supply of water, yet it has a lot of value to us because a person can't survive without water.
More likely, through use of bioinformatics to customize chronic disease treatments, we'll get another few decades of average life expectancy over the next century.
2. https://joshmitteldorf.scienceblog.com (be sure to follow the links to research papers and read the comments)
3. I also made a playlist with videos and lectures on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLvA7pB41pDk27XOjqbXi...
If it's possible do you know why evolution didn't figure out how to do this? Seems like it would be a good adaptation
Besides, the whole premise of evolution is that older generations die.
(disclaimer: I'm a software developer, not a biologist, but I'm fascinated by biology)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Red_Queen:_Sex_and_the_Evo...
On this specific subthread: yes the individual is the level of selection (mainly) but Dawkins has renewed interest in the sequence variant as the ultimate unit of selection. We are protoplasmic bags of gene variants, some of which make it to the next generations.
Just do a text string search. It is on PubMed Central and free.
Aubrey is the foremost expert in the whole field of longevity research as far as I'm concerned, so I don't have any reason to be more or less confident than him about any aspect of it. If you haven't read it, his Ending Aging book covers a lot of details. It was published in 2007 but has still held up, especially with overall strategy. Apart from the various medical developments since then, another encouraging sign is the increase in newly formed companies in the space, lowering the need for philanthropy/government grants. https://agingbiotech.info/ has a list
Conversely, if you believe the universe ceases to exist entirely when you die, you believe other people cease to exist too. In this case, perhaps the only consistent way to think of other people is that they are not like you when you are alive either.
From a more down to Earth perspective, if I left the planet on a one-way interstellar FTL journey, confident I would never return and that there was no way to communicate with the people I left behind, even though it would be a relief in some ways and I'd stop caring about people left behind, I'd still want to arrange good things for some of them after my departure. Because I'm nice like that.
Well, you can't be so sure you'll never see them again and you'll never be able to communicate with them, because of scientific advances and such. The only truly irreversible thing that could happen to a human being is death itself. Everything else being reversible (or eventually reversible) is the nice part about being alive.
That doesn’t really work out in a logical sense if you assume that people are purely self interested, but they aren’t, their behavior is optimized by evolution and self interest is only one of many complicated feelings that people have.
I still share your optimism though that we might cure the diseases of aging, so that people do not suffer from slow decline.
Additionally "living forever" isn't invulnerable immortality where you are doomed to float around alive in the solar system long after the sun has inflated and pulverized the earth as a red giant... You'll still die well before that.
You can also always choose when to kill yourself, whenever. Logically any form of "living forever" described as a scientific possibility is actually more of a "you can choose when you die" or a "you can live much longer than normal"
For arguments sake imagine that your consciousness is transferred into a simulation that runs at a highly accelerated rate so you can experience a very long existence. The custodian of the simulation is benevolent, it tries to keep you happy, lets you shape the world in whatever way you want but the one hard rule is that you are not allowed to end.
You will probably have an awesome time for the first few hundred years. So many fun experiences you could only dream of before. You can explore the stars, turn the world into paradise, come up with new forms of art that no one has imagined.
After a few thousand years things might start getting a bit samey but you will still find new things to do. But how about after a few million years? Or billion? It might start getting pretty boring. You have done all the fun things countless times and all the terrible things too just to do something different. But your looooong adventure is only beginning! There is no exit button. Welcome to hell.
The scenario is not completely implausible, agreed? I think one of the Iain M Banks novels had something similar going on. I think the custodian there was evil but I am arguing that on the looong run that makes little difference.
One might argue that they would transform themselves into something that can tolerate the infinite existence but I call that cheating, such a thing wouldn't really be you anymore. And the custodian might see it that way too.
The ridicule the comment made is for a mindset that actually happens right now, talk to some retired boomer relatives. A lot of them have had actuarial consultations and some of those are treating it almost like gospel, like the other comment wishing he could do the same given 23andMe reporting. This leads to them depleting their savings (mostly held up in "safe" investments that aren't expected to grow or shrink much over the relevant timespan) at some rate so that it gets close to $0 by the time they can expect to die. Some older people have already made it long enough to go past that point, and they get into the same situations that retirees without any savings get into. i.e. you hear about old ladies subsisting on dog food because their only source of income is a small social security check.
A better mindset is the one used by the FIRE crowd, which applies just as well if you're "retired" at 30 or 60: recognize index funds are not just pretty safe but also give a pretty high confidence minimal rate of return, plan for average x% returns per year, and don't withdraw more than x% for income, so that your savings never decreases but in fact increases. This way you can retire whenever your savings hits the right number to support your required income indefinitely, rather than retiring when your savings hits the right number to provide income only for the next X years until you die.
(I shouldn't have to say it but will: this is a theoretical optimal modeling strategy, reality will be messier, any real plan should analyze possible setbacks and ways to deal with them -- the easiest way typically being to seek work again for some period of time, which tends to be easier the more biologically young you are. And of course, regardless of biological immortality or whatever, you could be an unlucky passenger in a car driving down the freeway when a random brick from a truck in the oncoming lane comes loose and collides with your head.)
So if we're speculating here your argument is that boredom is a curse. At my age I'm already bored every single day of my life.
I'd rather be bored than be dead. But again this is speculation. I'd rather be bored for 50 years than die at 50 but would I be the same at 5 billion? Truthfully nobody knows. Even 50 Years is a long time to be bored but if you're not bored at 50 what makes you suddenly conclude that 5 billion is too much?
There's no evidence or weight behind this philosophy. Boredom does not equate to being cursed.
But whether it's good or bad is something that only an individual can determine. It's more/less along the same lines as the question "is life worth living?"
So is pretty much every other creature. We all try to avoid death.