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Comment by shafyy | Hacker News Reader

There is something dystopian, childish, naive, desperate, arrogant, sad and tragic about billionaires founding and funding longevity companies and projects. They think that they've got it all, but deep down there's still this gaping hole of meaninglessness. They can control evertything. Everything but death. If only they can find a way to live longer, maybe even a way to never die of natural causes, everything will be better.

I'm not against research to better understand aging and diseases that are a consequence of aging such as dementia and various cancers. But when I read this announcement I feel an air of arrogance that fucking annoys me.

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There's very little funding of longevity research apparently. Probably because of people sharing your opinion that stopping aging is selfish/immoral. But this is not right, we've severely underestimated the biological dangers of our overpopulated-overconnected world. We find ourselves needing to fight a pandemic with similar methods as in 1917, because we ve not prepared for that. Biotech should be an imperative for humanity if we want to live in an open connected world or if we want to go to space.

> I'm not against research to better understand aging and diseases that are a consequence of aging

That's like researching the symptoms instead of the cause, it's the wrong way to do medicine

> people sharing your opinion that stopping aging is selfish/immoral.

People share this opinion until they're on their deathbed. If offered a pill to be restored to youthful longevity in that moment, most people would give up everything and endure just about anything for a mere chance at it.

People are remarkably shortsighted and don't take the time to comprehend what the horror at the end of the tunnel will really feel like.

I’m not even sure it’s that deep. Having listened to some of David Sinclair’s work, he talks about how modern medicine doesn’t see old age as an illness to cure, hence it not getting any funding.

It’s just accepted that you get old and your health goes down the toilet, because “that’s life”. Nobody bats an eyelid when we hear “died of natural causes”.

>If offered a pill to be restored to youthful longevity in that moment

The only enticing thing of that pill would be if you'd retain all your memories and material possessions, because let's say you had to compromise that:

- You get a pill but your memory will be wiped;

- The cost of the pill would be so high you'd lose all your material possessions;

What would be the difference between that and dying?

People would still take the deal because it gives them the hope that they can somehow avoid the biggest, most unavoidable, irreversible unknown: death.

And for a billionaire the second choice is a no-brainer. They lose all the material possessions but still have all the knowledge, experiences and relationships that would allow them to easily get back in the saddle.

On the other hand for a person living day-to-day trying to make ends meet the idea of "enjoying" some more years of the same may not be as thrilling as it is for a millionaire. Sure, nobody wants to die, leave family and loved ones but at some point they may want an out. Some lives are hard or become unpleasant enough to feel like a never ending punishment, like extending a life sentence in prison.

You've said it all man.

The value of life seems to only be worth if you've got enough material possessions - else, it's a prison.

How messed up is that?

How fucked up are we that this is even a discussion without the prior discussion about the value of life to begin with.

So, this would only make sense if after you take the pill, your memory is wiped and you're given a random geographical location on earth.

Would be fun to see a billionaire having to make it somewhere in the horn of Africa.

> Would be fun to see a billionaire having to make it somewhere in the horn of Africa.

"Naked and Afraid 2: Bezos in Somalia."

People would love that. It'd be like Black Mirror S02E05, White Bear.

Cable news outlets would have to air live human sacrifice just to keep up.

Anderson Cooper reluctantly lifts the obsidian blade. He looks distraught. "Do we really have to do this, guys?" From Erin Burnett, he hears a bene gesserit voice of outrage and command. Down plunges the knife. Mixed with the blood, tears stream down Anderson's face.

(On Fox, Tucker Carlson has a pro wrestler do it for him, and they just Photoshop his face on.)

You flip the channel.

Jeff Bezos has somehow acquired a bandolier, and is wearing the pelt of a human being.

"Damn."

I remembered a person asked questions about everlasting youth and indefinite lifespan to people, with the option to commit suicide.

People weirdly reject it for some reason, even though there's no catch. I suspect it's a cultural cached response, because taking these pill always mean some sort of catch.

> most people would give up everything and endure just about anything for a mere chance at it

I feel like you just make assumptions here.

Although I don't disagree, I think that's a very narrow way to look at it.

I think it's more about the fear of dying than about actual death. If you just died tomorrow in your sleep, what would it matter? Assuming you didn't have a terminal illness or are of old age, you probably didn't fear immediate death. And you didn't suffer one bit.

Sure, it would suck for your friends and family, but for you, it wouldn't matter.

It's different for everyone.

I fear non-existence more than dying.

Why do you fear it? You didn't fear it the 14 bn years before you existed, did you?

> Probably because of people sharing your opinion that stopping aging is selfish/immoral

That's not what I said at all.

So humanity has problems stemming from overpopulation and your take is that we should reduce the rate at which nature makes space for others? Death scares me as much the next person, but I feel like we’re not fully considering the consequences of “curing” it.

And call me cynical but IMO it’s naive to think that this technology would be accessible to the average person. If it makes it to market it’s going to cost a small fortune and every super wealthy person in the world is going to be throwing money at it. It’s going to be the luxury yacht of healthcare.

There's necessarily no reason to think it will be horrifically expensive. Maybe it will be, maybe it will not. mRNA vaccines cost something like ~25 dollars and yet it will save lives for many years to come. It's a very effective medicine.

It's also incorrect to think that this is necessarily one treatment or one therapy. It may be a whole series of therapies that treat one aspect of aging over another.

the same concerns have been raised for every technoogy ever

Is it not arrogant and selfish to tell people that they should die at 80-90 years old, if there could be a way to live longer?

If we flip the script and imagine a world where everyone lives healthily, forever, the person advocating that everyone die painfully at 70 seems like a murderous psychopath.

How exactly are you guys imagining that we support a population that lives forever? Earth’s population cannot grow exponentially indefinitely. Where do these people live, what do they do, where does their trash go?

It’s not clear whether humans can live on the moon long-term. The more likely solution is that we’ll need to heavily discourage people from having kids. Is that really more humane?

Well, maybe we should focus on expanding outside of the earth too? Population is growing anyways.

Also that seems like a way more rewarding way to spend life, than meaninglessness, risk-less human zoo, that some commenters are trying to sell, while bashing any project more ambitious than just keeping general population warm and cozy.

No if we lived to a 1000 years, almost all of our problems here would be solved -- as people would finally take responsibility for their futures.

they 'd push all their problems to the next millenium

Hahaha. That's not bad, actually. :)

The dystopian take on this being that longevity will always be gated, limiting it to the wealthy. They would continue to externalize the actions as being the result of lesser people.

The way the wealthy will take responsibility is by taking up the mantle of human zookeeper, restricting lesser people's locations and movements. Just look at where the toll roads are near you, it's already happening.

Then the negative actions necessary to create personal benefit will be limited to the areas of the lesser people. After you find the toll roads, look for the power plants and factories in your area.

There's a reason we keep coming back to fiction that elevates the obscenely wealthy as being beyond the law, beyond the control of governments, and eventually physically beyond the world in floating cities.

It's a small solace that rich people continue to die within the same age range as poor people. I hope I don't live long enough to witness longevity being solved for the 1% only.

edit: changed "gated behind price" to just "gated" since gatekeeping comes in many forms.

There's a reason for that. It makes for entertaining fiction. Why would anyone reads utopian novels anyway? They're boring.

It's also a not a good idea to base your model of society on fiction. Fiction is not evidence for anything.

Fiction is evidence for trends in cultural thought. I did not say the wealthy will live in the clouds one day in the far future, I implied here and now we as a society produce fiction that dreams that this will be the future. It's indicative of how a subset of people around you actually feel based on their real world experiences.

Ok. But why would mass production of longevity treatment not be affordable. Maybe you live in the US -- this is pretty much the only place where the price of medicine and medical treatment is obscene.

If longevity comes -- it will be affordable for $1000 once a year for as long as you like in some other part of the world. Or if you live in any other Western country, part of your universal medical plan.

Thanks, I updated my post. Gatekeeping comes in many forms, not just price.

OK! Alot of your other points I agree with actually :)

Your feeling of arrogance seems to be a product of a cultural programmed reaction. There's no shortage of movies, cultural works, and tv shows that tell us that immortality is unwanted, unattainable, selfish, or somehow otherwise bad, starting with our oldest myths and stories, Epic of Gilgamesh.

If the goal of medicine is to cure or prevent every diseases and dysfunction in the human body, then we must conclude that as an unavoidable side effect that being healthier will extend long life.

If we care about our fellow human beings, especially the elderly, then we do not want them to live in pain, to be in dementia, or otherwise have a poor quality of life. We must also recognize that many of them may not want to die.

I applaud the pursuit of longevity and health so long it is paired with the egalitarian outcome in that everybody will be entitled and receive it, regardless of who they are and what they did.

> I applaud the pursuit of longevity and health so long it is paired with the egalitarian outcome in that everybody will be entitled and receive it, regardless of who they are and what they did.

And therein lies the crux. I don’t believe that’ll be the actual outcome.

We are already doing the unegalitarian distribution of medicine with horrifically expensive drugs for fighting cancers.

We are also seeing relatively egalitarian drugs like mRNA vaccine against COVID being distributed to the population at large, only that some refused it. Meanwhile, the third world just lag behind in vaccination.

Some of which can be solved through better social cohesion and better systems, but a lot of the challenge will be simply in getting the cost of technology down or finding cheaper way to do something.

Therapies for longevity is unlikely to be a single drug or treatment, more likely a whole series of them. I also don't know if they're going to be expensive or cheap.

However, the best and most effective medicine in the world are often very cheap or relatively so, such as mRNA vaccines(~25 USD or so) and they saved countless lives. I am hopeful that more effective medicine will be cheap and affordable, or at least basically 'self-funding' in that lives saved will dramatically affect the economic balance sheet of countries for the better.

> I applaud the pursuit of longevity and health so long it is paired with the egalitarian outcome in that everybody will be entitled and receive it, regardless of who they are and what they did.

Aren't Americans struggling getting diabetes medicine? And chemo? Is it a reasonable expectation that this treatment, whatever it is, will be any different?

This is just deathist brainrot. If we lived for 10k years "naturally", would you support killing people off after 70-80 years? Of course living longer would make things better.

Better?

Arguably worse since old people have stubborn thought processes, especially politically. Usually the only way societies get change is once all the "boomers" die off.

I think it sad but death is evolved for a real reason and we should not forget Chesterton's fence, even if it was not designed but rather converged on by almost all species except for trees.

Youthful longevity would obviously be a focus of any longevity initiative. Far future, we are unlikely to remain on any fragile biological substrate. Not sure why people keep on bringing up the idea of 90-year-olds living forever.

> death is evolved for a real reason

Not necessarily true. Evolution only cares that we fuck and pop out kids and they grow up and do the same. Once we've accomplished that goal, we are irrelevant from an evolutionary perspective.

The psychological rot is what I'm talking about - not anything physical. Perhaps it has to do with aging brain anatomy but we don't know that it isn't due to the arduous nature of life itself. Life has a way of beating people down and making them bitter, far too often. Hell, you could be right and perhaps seeing everyone they know and love, sans their children, get sick and die, perhaps that is traumatizing though we have normalized it.

P.S. Don't know why you are being downvoted. Some people find fault in healthy discussion :-/

In any longevity scenario we will necessarily have the time to iron these problems out :) No technology, no matter how good, has been perfect from the beginning.

I suppose, we just have to be real careful that we aren't preserving Emperor Palpatine.

Change isn’t always a good thing. Having your elders all die before they can pass on their knowledge, culture, and values isn’t the panacea you’re describing.

I agree. I was just providing some contrast. I am not pro-death.

You have to remember that society changing over 200-300 years is an anomaly in the history of humanity.

Also, I am pretty sure that old people were involved in historical changes themselves, or will be forced to confront historical changes anyway.

Living that much longer through disease and natural degeneration elimination with the possibility of still dying from trauma might be quite horrible. Aversion to risk would logically skyrocket. Would skiing or even driving make sense?

You'd make the same argument if your life expectancy was 40 years and people proposed medicine could let you live to 80.

You'd also make the same argument if your life expectancy was 200 years and medicine advancements could let you live to 300.

I suspect almost no human beings actually carry out such a rational calculation of risk.

What are you even talking about? Of course I wouldn't. I also didn't say that I'm against researching ways to live longer, actually I said the opposite.

Increase in human lifespan (and longevity of "youth") is the most obvious sign of the success of modern civilization. We have doubled the average life expectancy in just about a century, so by your reasoning, past humans would likely call us "arrogant" when on average we live better, more fuller lives than they ever did.

There will be unintended consequences of humans living longer, of course but those are problems which will be solved by smart people of the future (and present).

There is no "by your reasoning" here at all. That is miles away from what he actually said.

>We have doubled the average life expectancy

The only reason the average value shifted so much is drastically reduced infant mortality rate. If you managed to live to the age of twenty two centuries ago, chances were you'd die as an old man

Or twenty two centuries ago.

Even in Roman times healthy individuals lived to 60

We've doubled life expectancy by lowering the rates of early deaths.

Even in antiquity, healthy people lived to their 60s.

That might be the 70s or 80s now, but the quality of life at those ages isn't great - take a stroll to your local elderly home.

On the other hand, I think that aging is an extremely destructive process to the individual (while possibly still a net good for the species) and billionaires who spend their money on longevity research are doing a good thing, regardless of their motivation.

It is not just death, it is the long period of chronic illness that currently tends to precede it. Understanding aging will let us combat a thousand diseases at once.

I thin the reason why this wasn't attempted before wasn't humility. Rather, people (including many people today) did not think of aging as something modifiable. Aging has been until today understood as an unstoppable force beyond human possibilities, something like gravity or a hurricane.

Now that the viewpoints are slowly changing, we may be up to picking some low hanging fruit, and if a billionaire or ten decides to fund the necessary research, I won't be complaining. Unless they somehow manage to hoard the necessary knowledge only to themselves, which is rather unlikely in the modern world, where technological and scientific capabilities are spread more than ever before.

To be a little less than polite: fuck cancer, fuck cardiovascular disease, fuck Alzheimers, fuck severe covid etc. And whoever contributes to this great fucking of age-related disease is a friend of the whole humanity.

I don't see it as arrogance at all, I see it as being uniquely fortunate to be in a position where one can attempt to address a fundamental problem that affects most people.

I'm not a billionaire and have zero prospects of ever becoming one. Maybe this would also be considered arrogance, but I don't want to grow old and die. Neither do any of my friends or family. None of them are billionaires either.

Life is absolutely incredible. Humanity is on the brink of technological progress the likes of which we've never seen before, and I'd love to (selfishly) stick around to experience it. I also don't see anything noble or enjoyable in watching friends, family and other people slowly break down and eventually die. I'd hazard a guess that a lot of people share this opinion.

I sadly don't have the resources to direct activity against the scourge of aging and death, and can only hope that fortunately-resourced individuals decide to do so.

The extradordinary negativity of this comment actually got to me, I wish I hadn't read that; it's really just a string of adjectives and name-calling that finished with "fucking annoys me".

Please reconsider sharing this type of thinking, it's too arrogant for anyone.

On the one hand, it is another step towards more inequality, a society of Eloi and Morlocks, since these treatments will only be available to the very rich who develop them. They claim in the announcement that the costs will (eventually) come down so ordinary people can afford this, but that's not the way all tech goes. As shown by the rising difference in health-span between the wealthy and working poor, medical advances do not always trickle down.

On the other hand, it could actually provide tangible benefits to some human beings. Saying "I was the first to land a human on Mars" has no such advantage.

Longevity is a worthwhile goal for striving for. It is horrific that beings with hopes, dreams, and loves are forced to die and lose everything they have ever had, doomed to an eternity of the black void of nonexistence. That should be a choice.

I for one am thrilled that society is starting to view death as something we might be able to one day defeat, rather than the resigned acceptance that has reigned throughout the history of our species.

That's a very egocentric view of the whole endeavor of life.

Part of the game is the renewal process of it.

If for once find it way more creepy to have centennial billionaires that are hoarding land and resources, because they have the illusion that things belong to them, when in reality it was never theirs to begin with.

> to have centennial billionaires

All technologies are expensive at first. To imply that longevity will not some day be available to all is absurd. The riots would collapse society.

Technology becomes affordable over time.

> Part of the game is the renewal process of it.

There is no renewal process. There is only a permanent end. A void that you will never escape from.

Whether you agree with that or not, what's clear is that this stuff should be a choice. Who are you to tell someone that they shouldn't live as long as they want? It's their body.

>The riots would collapse society.

Except you're starting to see the first cracks of that, but we're just too busy to see it: when you have people willing to die for a chance of a better life, then you're not that far from it.

>To imply that longevity will not some day be available to all is absurd.

How can you say that when longevity isn't available to all in the current days?

>There is no renewal process. There is only a permanent end. A void that you will never escape from.

Of course there's a renewal process, old habits, vices, skewed and biased perspectives of the world are all flushed and reset with death. The only void is the space you leave and that will eventually be filled up, and that's ok.

> How can you say that when longevity isn't available to all in the current days?

Because technology inevitably becomes cheaper. Your smartphone did not exist 20 years ago, and 15 years ago only the rich could afford it. Today the whole world has one. Such is the way of technology.

> Of course there's a renewal process, old habits, vices, skewed and biased perspectives of the world are all flushed and reset with death.

Let's say people lived forever. Would killing them at 80 years be justifiable because "we need to flush out their ways of life?"

Humanity can progress without death. It might be slower, even glacial, but that is completely irrelevant because you will experience more net progress in the end.

Don't call it renewal, call it rot. Some things, we let rot. We shouldn't let people rot.

Some people call it stasis, when you're in equilibrium with the system you're in.

People call things a lot of things. People die because of disequilibria in their bodies, because their own internal systems come undone. I care more about the internal systems of humans that break and murder non-sentient cells, than the external systems of nature that break and murder things that can scream.

The problem IMO is that average person would want to live longer as long as they can still eat pizza, drink beer, sit all day and not work out much.

I mean there is decent research on calorie restriction. Of course the huge problem with calorie restriction is the eating less part.

That just seems really presumptuous to me: I don't see anything in the article to support that outlook -- it even contradicts your position by emphasizing healthspan over lifespan.

Rather than your judgemental take-- Why not adopt the simpler theory that these are simply parties that can afford fund very expensive efforts which are extremely likely to fail?

I agree with all that you said, but I'd add [0] I'd rather see them pouring money here, than funding real estate bubbles or oil companies you know.

[0] unless their ventures are really immature glorifying ways to spend money and produce nothing

The number one factor driving cancer, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, heart disease, and a myriad of other types of human suffering by an order of magnitude is biological age.

But how is it different from a company spending money to find cure for cancer which also ultimately extends the lives of the people? Am I missing something?

How do you know what their inner thoughts and motives are?

Unless they explicitly communicate this, you are just guessing.

Argumentum ad absurdum.

According to this, all of medicine is pointless.

Would you not want grandma's back to hurt a little less?

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