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Comment by bpodgursky | Hacker News Reader

By the time anyone is 200, much less 300, assuming we have truly managed to cure ageing, I don't think we're going to be worrying about the impact on this particular planet. There's a whole universe out there to spend the next centuries of your life seeing.

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Imagine this hypothetical discussion is discovered and read by someone in 10,000 years from now, when living over 300 years is already a reality and the normal. What a feeling to realize that the things you now take for granted, were at one point simply out of reach. I wonder if we have specific examples of such recorded discussions of things that today are a reality.

Future societies will definitely look back at the "age of death" with complete horror. How could humans accept aging while at the same time desperately clawing for life when death came near? How could they move the world and spend trillions fighting COVID while not even spending a billion fighting aging? People will shake their heads in fascination and perhaps a feeling of disgust at our obvious shortsightedness.

In the future, even a single death will be a very significant event, similar to how we might see a high-mortality catastrophe like 9/11 today.

90% of covid deaths are people over 70, most with multiple co-morbidities and thus a very limited remaining life expectancy any way. We went to such extreme lengths to prevent the deaths of these people from covid, yet so many are willing to see those same people die just a few years later from other aging-related illnesses, when it is within our power to cure aging.

Deaths. There is so much beyond "merely" dying within the actual events that unfolded and continue.

Only less than 60,000[0] people die per year from influenza, a family of viruses that is well understood, vaccines somewhat effective and available, and almost everybody has some immunological response against due to previous exposure. Tens of millions are affected by influenza yearly, it stops their work for weeks, causes their family to stop their work and care for them, causes errors and economic cost, social cost, etc. People hate influenza and it does result in critical hospitalizations and death among people all over the place. Mostly old people die from that too, but it ruins everybody's productivity.

A novel virus that is at best like influenza, with an additional asymptomatic cadre, affecting the entire country or world, with a completely naive immune response? You should read Guns, Germs, and Steel[1]

We are clearly capable of acting against and preventing Sars-CoV-2 infection, we are as yet unable to cure aging. How preposterous.

[0] - https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel

People are not fighting COVID because of the productivity impact but because of the deaths, otherwise we'd treat it like the flu.

> we are as yet unable to cure aging. How preposterous.

We put zero effort into anti-aging research but we moved the world for COVID. If we put the same amount of effort into anti-aging research, a cure to aging could be well within most people's lifetimes, effectively saving billions of lives.

My impression is that COVID is problematic because a lot of people spend weeks on the ICU. The death toll itself is not that big, but having ICUs overflowing is a bad thing.

ICUs were built to take care about acute problems and there is a silent expectation that most patients admitted into ICU care either die quickly or recover enough within 2-3 days to be transferred into regular care. Having people around on ventilators for weeks destroys logistics of ICU systems.

We put way more than zero research into anti-aging research. Granted, COVID attracted a lot more money and attention, but anti-aging research is gaining traction. And with the tech moguls of SV aging, you can bet on some extra investments.

I for one don't believe that people like Bezos (a notorious fitness and health fanatic) are just going to succumb to natural aging without a fight.

The number of deaths has been the overwhelming concern of public health authorities and other major decision makers. Even the concern over ICU capacity depletion has largely stemmed from the concern that this would increase covid mortality.

we are treating it like a flu to which we are completely immunogically naive. this kind of thing is not mysterious.

its a natural disaster or global catastrophe and its happened before.

we have also had the mrna technology for over a decade.

if we put the coronavirus effort into aging or global warming, we would not have solutions in 1year. masks and hygeine dont work for aging.

it is a totally different problem space and not comparable in the least.

I feel like HN'ers interested in curing aging could make a fantastic thinktank/action group, and provide a meaningful purpose to our lives where most of us have "meaningless" jobs at some big Big N.

I genuinely think that this site's users could be an impressive force for anti-aging technology research and implementation.

I fully agree.

Citation needed. I doubt very much that percentage.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-73777-8/figures/1

Depends on what consciousness turns out to actually be in my opinion (which is another unknown that'll no doubt be looked back on in amazement). If it's something that can be recorded in a sense then I imagine death without having first "backed up" will be seen as a tragedy! It might be the case one day that biology is simply be the first stage of the human lifecycle and just like birth, puberty etc "death" becomes a major life milestone that involves exchanging our frail bodies for something much more durable.

If even if we manage to colonize other worlds, exponential population growth can't be sustained. The habitable space scales at most as the volume of a sphere growing and light-speed centered around Earth, so subexponential. You'd also need to constantly ship people from inner space to ever more distant new colonies.

Fortunately humans seem to have the tendency of having fewer children as they become more wealthy and educated. Many countries already are below replacement rate. It is plausible that birth rates would drop even further if death became optional.

If you truly cured death you'd have to worry about the exponent eventually, but realistically people would start pushing back childbearing even further (dramatically further potentially).

And it's possible that the TFR for any individual would not increase meaningfully (not clear to me that a 300 year old would feel the need to continue having children). Could just have 2.1 children and then call it quits and enjoy your great-great-great grandchildren, in which case population growth is only linear, not even exponential.

This assumes we can live in space indefinitely without any problems or that settling other planets won't be a problem. Both of those could be great filters.

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