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Its always been astounding to me that these muti billionairs we have today put so little of their vast fortunes into research for something that will 100%affect them.

I know one of the rockafellers was into life extenssion big time but he died of old age (91) a few years back. Im not sure what kind of legacy he as left if any on that front as far as funding. I fear his death likely set back research by decades though

Billionaires either have to volunteer to be the guinea pigs for radical experimental anti-ageing therapies or accept that by the time treatments are proved safe and somewhat effective it's probably going to be too late for them. And if it isn't going to save them, there's plenty of strong competition for their philanthropic dollars, some of it with impressive results.

Surely it's not hard to come up with ways to avoid being the guinea pig. Find multiple aging based ailments that have lots of patients and fund a study.

The issue is that you will get the results on the subjects after your life is over or coming to end, unless it is the case that we could make life of a person currently >60 years old long which seems unlikely to me. So you would have to wait for 40 years before you know the results with good enough certainty.

Zuck is still relatively young. Maybe he'll become our first immortal overlord.

Seems to me if you life is coming to an end that would increase the urgency. Remember money is not an object here it is basically just will to do it. The money is irrelevant. There is also the possiblity of increasing quality of life even if it doesn't save you.

I mean do nothing 0%, do something and any chance is better. The money doesn't matter.

Won’t help much. I read that if we cure all types of cancer it will extend average life expectancy by just over a couple of years. Because if not cancer then something else will get you in old age. I guess if cancer did not affect younger people then we wouldn’t have cared about curing it as much. 8 year old with leukemia looks a lot more dramatic than a 80 years old :)

I'm not sure that's true. There are plenty wealthy twenty somethings. I don't think it's out of question anti aging treatment bears significant fruit in the next 70 years.

There is no requirement to be a guinea pig for the research. Why do you think that?

My whole point was if you have more money than god what is a few hundred million to setup a research lab for something that will definitely kill you? If I knew an army was coming to kill me and I had no hope I would still start using my billions to rally some sort of defense. Why sit around and do nothing when I have resources sitting idle?

well, the conditions of the society you live in also 100% affect you. So contributing to things you think will improve this is just as logical.

the whole point of obscene wealth is it allows you to shield yourself from many of the conditions of society that less wealthy people must suffer, at least as long as society itself allows this. The dying of old thing seems more a thing they should be concerned with.

Jeffrey Epstein is known for his interest in and material support for longevity research. Let’s see if he outlives Rockefeller

He was also known, among scientists, to be a charlatan and relatively stupid about the science (relative to his pretensions). So he probably wasn't allocating the funds very well.

> Let’s see if he outlives Rockefeller

lol

With all the money he has, he could even fund research in sexual pathology, suicide, and conspiracy prevention.

He proved that blackmailing the rich and powerful shortens one's lifespan.

One of the biggest arguments for radical wealth redistribution is just seeing what people do with their money.

And the pandemic and the billions that have been spent/redistributed in "relief" answered that question: watch Netflix and make TikToks.

There is a confounding factor there: deadly disease necessitating people staying home

but they do...

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/21/silicon-valleys-quest-to-liv...

'Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Alphabet’s Larry Page, Oracle’s Larry Ellison and Palantir’s Peter Thiel are just a few of the super-rich who have taken a keen interest in the fast-emerging field of longevity`

Regarding Google / Larry Page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calico_(company).

has this company done anything note worthy since 2013?

I've seen some of these but they all seem to be operating quietly like some zero sum I live forever you die game. That is not going to work. The amount of money they have life extension should be encouraged as a college major. People still barely think about it as a serious avenue for their life direction.

It's a pretty big, and terrifying, mindset change to go from "death from old age is natural and to be accepted" to "death from old age is preventable and tragic."

But arguably it is natural because .. it's what our organisms are designed to do.

That is, we're not "designed" (I mean by evolution, of course) to have lifespans beyond 100 or so years. We're specifically optimized to have about two or three decades as healthy, independent adults (from age 20 to about 40-50) which are devoted either to (1) raising children or (2) contributing to the welfare of the species or tribe as a whole.

That is -- we're specifically designed and optimized to promote the longevity of the group, not the individual. In fact, individual longevity is explicitly sacrificed in favor of group longevity.

That's just how we're built. And that's what's why longevity research is (apart from all the unknowns) fundamentally different from, say, finding research for cancer or AIDS. The latter group are unequivocal dysfunctional states ("preventable and tragic" if you will), and the basic goal of the research for these cases is to return the organism to it's correct, functional state.

But aging (with its inevitable end state), on the other hand... is the organism's "correct, functional" state. So to find a categorical "remedy" for aging (beyond extending its horizon for a decade or two) is not to merely find the right "correction" for a certain set of dysfunctional states... but to alter the organism's functional nature entirely.

That's why it is categorically a completely different beast of problem than, say, finding a treatment for AIDS. It may also be "terrifying" to our poor psyches strapped into these inevitably self-destructing organisms -- but to the collective goal of our DNA (that is, to promote the group over the individual -- it is also entirely moot.

You'd be saying the precise same thing if our natural span was 30 years, or 200. That is, you're using our current state, to explain why our current state exists.

You'd be saying the precise same thing if our natural span was 30 years, or 200.

Well, yeah.

That is, you're using our current state, to explain why our current state exists.

Woah there, that's a big misread of what I was saying.

I'm not using the "state" (the number X of years that is the currently observed natural lifespan) to "explain" the value X. But rather the intrinsic design and function of the system as a whole.

There's a huge difference there.

There is nothing "correct", "intrinsic", or "functional" about aging. That's conflating evolution with lack thereof. We evolved to sustain a reproductive cycle and propagate ourselves. That evolutionary optimization has no direct bearing on the specifics of how we age. What we know about aging so far indicates that it's an accidental byproduct of many side effects of the functions of our systems, including the hormonal system that governs puberty, the immune system, the metabolic system, and the higher order DNA management systems (epigenetic programming and replication). None of those side effects are in any known way selected for by evolution, and most of them seem to be tunable to achieve far more durability or regenerative capacity out of our bodies than we are currently used to. Multicellular aging is a collection of random side effects that vary between species - there are many animal species that are effectively immortal.

Please see my response to the sibling comment, in which I attempt to respond to both of these critiques at once.

My point is, you are inside the system, using values from the system, to explain the system.

If humans lived 200 years, but went infertile at 50, you'd be explaining how the system was designed to entice grandparents to care for grandkid's babies, because they were infertile and couldn't have their own, and because it would improve their genetic bloodline's chances.

I still feel much of your reasoning was using what is, to explain why is, because what is.

This response applies both the above and its sibling comment, which are quite valid in asking that I should perhaps clarify further. So if I may:

Yes, our current "operating mode" (with an apparently built-in expiration date at roughly 2x peak fertility) is but one of (infinitely many adaptively stable configurations ("local minima" as it were, in the fitness landscape). It is by no means the only possible (let alone the best possible). As the above comment points out, we can easily imagine other operating modes that are also viable and stable.

But the basic point I was trying to make is: though it isn't the only possible mode of operation for our species -- it is also far from random, and most likely the result of many interlocking tradeoffs in our basic genetic program (which we are just beginning to map out and understand).

The upshot being -- my hunch is that, while we will probably figure out how to tweak some of the dials, attaining a substantially different mode of operation ("longevity for everyone", basically) will require changes substantially beyond tweaking of dials -- or a "patch" here and there. Most likely it will require something akin to a top-down rewrite (or that is, a comprehensive rewrite of many interlocking mechanisms at once). Which will require not only conceptual advances, but to be blunt, "trial and error" (live trials, most of which probably won't work out so well for the test subjects).

That is to say -- qualitatively different from merely deriving a "patch" to our system sufficient to, say, obviate the risk to certain diseases like dementia or cancer.

>from age 20 to about 40-50

Really? Just that range? Not sure about your own family history but the vast majority of 50+ and 60+ year olds I know are quite healthy, vital and fully independent, perhaps more so and especially more independent than many people in their 30s and 40s even due to greater accumulated assets and self care. There are many exceptions of course but most people in developed places seem to live quite well and independently into their 70's even these days.

I just mean that "societal contribution" (that is, towards group fitness) peaks in the age window, on average.

After age 50 or so many of us may be living perfectly well, but by and large, we're coasting (or at least slowing down).

Agree. I'm in my mid 50s; I figure anything more than another 15 years or so is a gift. That doesn't sound like a lot of time in retrospect; thinking about 2006 does not seem like very long ago to me. So there's a growing sense of there not being a lot of time left, and a stronger desire to spend it on simple things that give me satisfaction rather than building more software that will be obsolete before it's really even finished or learning new technologies that will be "legacy" by the time I can really be productive with them.

At the same time I have zero interest in longevity. I will live the life I've been granted, for as long as it lasts. Then I'll get out of the way.

I think you're ignoring the "to be accepted" part of the text you quoted. Just because something is what we were "designed" for or how we lived prehistorically doesn't make it right or desirable (nor the opposite--in this case fighting aging--wrong or undesirable).

You're right I am, basically.

I offer no insight as to whether the finiteness of our lifespans is "right" or "desirable". And I certainly am not saying that fighting aging is wrong or undesirable.

Just that there's a structural reason as to why our organisms are built the way they are -- and a pretty deep structural reason at that.

> aging (by definition) doesn't impact a young, healthy, active population

There's actually a rare syndrome, progeria, that does cause aging in young people and this will likely provide insight toward solving aging https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/progeria/symp...

To your larger point, I would agree that self-medicators will be useful too. Can't that be true at the same time as the problems described in the article?

To kill something, you need to know one way to do that. To keep it alive, you need to avoid _all_ the ways of killing it.

I think that is a strong argument for preventing aging being a much more difficult problem.

Not really. It’s more of a “how do you eat an elephant” problem. Answer: one bite at a time.

We’re doing that, even without the anti-aging label. E.g., things we now call “preventable deaths”. Even within that label, there’s a lot of opportunities that are far more tractable than others.

Not really. Longevity research is about significantly extending the healthy lifespan. What we’ve done so far is increased the likelihood that an individual will live as long as the longest living human. But we haven’t meaningfully increased the lifespan of the longest living human. Theoretical human lifespan is about the same it has been thousands of years ago.

That onky gets us so far. Mostly just extending us to the limits of our natural lifespan with aging included.

There will have to be direct work on tje processes that lead to aging. Audrey degray has a good ted talk on what he belives are the primary processes that cause aging. Seven of them i think and all of them are vastly complex

I don't feel like you can treat aging as simply a sum of its parts.

Sure, there are some major causes of age related deaths like heart disease that we can work on and potentially expand average lifespan by a few years. However, the core problem of aging is probably best thought of as a disease in and of itself, where the things that actually kill you are symptoms.

We need to make progress on the underlying mechanism that makes us more brittle over time.

I'm reminded of the story about Henry Ford asking which part never broke down, and then using that to cut costs -- maybe evolution is like that too, and once we fix one problem we'll find the next isn't far behind?

Except now that I've searched for a link for that, one of the first results actually questions that story, ha! https://johnhawks.net/weblog/topics/urban_legends/henry_ford...

I keep wondering how the pandemic will affect public opinion. I think it’s an opportunity. Excess deaths and total death rates are being reported to wide public for the first time. Czech Republic is one of the worst affected countries, it has at times doubled it’s monthly death rate. If people mourn and are angry about the half that died from covid, will they be more opposed to the other half dying of other causes (most related to aging). Covid of course is linked to aging as well.

I wonder, but I’m not sure. The “death is a natural part of life” is an extremely strong narrative, a coping mechanism really.

Death of old age /is/ a natural part of life, but so was high infant mortality until we found solutions to that. The problem is that until we actually have solid proof of anti aging science, people will continue to believe it's part of life.

Insightful take on it. Yet to be seen whether age halting/regression goes the path of HIV medication or the perpetual motion machine that humanity has likewise spent significant effort to attain.

I get what you're trying to say, but it's not that hard to make a perpetual motion machine if you're willing to keep putting energy into it. It's just hard to maintain, which is a much better match for aging research.

The perpetual motion machine analogy is quite apt, because fighting aging is ultimately fighting entropy. Both are doomed to fail in their quixotic battle against thermodynamics.

This is a common misconception about the second law of thermodynamics. That law implies that all life must eventually starve to death if nothing else kills it first, because the universe will have run out of usable energy. But as long as the energy supply lasts, non-aging life forms are possible. (Bacteria are arguably an example.)

I recommend spending some more time understanding the second law of thermodynamics.

You're the one who needs spending more time understanding it, as you obviously have no clue.

If what you said was true then life itself couldn't exist.

If you take this stance you might as well start arguing for the extinction of humanity and destruction of earth. After all everything is "doomed to fail in their quixotic battle against thermodynamics".

A classic is/ought distinction error.

Observing reality is not the same as prescribing a particular course of action.

Your post heavily implies anti aging beeing futile. Likening it to the search of a perpetual motion machine. I fail to see how this is not heavily suggesting a course of a action.

Yeah biotech by its nature is super iterative and has fits and starts and takes a long time.