A $3B bet on finding the fountain of youth | Hacker News Reader

A $3B bet on finding the fountain of youth

economist.com

140 pointsaxiomdata316202 comments

Maybe I’m interpreting the article wrong but it looks like they’re going to try temporarily activating a handful of transcription factors (Yamanaka) through a crispr mediated gene alteration/insertion.

I suppose if you created a viral vector that injected an mRNA with a nuclear localization signal - what would you use to activate it? Include a steroid promoter (or other) and co-inject with cortisone? None of my prediction needs crispr though so i don’t think that’s what they’ll do.

They’ll also need to address cellular debris/degradation products as well as gene issues. I’m sure lipofuscin, anthracotic plaque, tau tangles, amyloid plaques, oxidative damage, non-enzymatic glycosylation, etc will all ultimately need to be addressed.

I hope they do skin first, I’m tired of looking like a wrinkle.

> I hope they do skin first, I’m tired of looking like a wrinkle.

Imagine inventing a cream that actually makes skin look younger, and then realizing people have tried to sell that (without delivering) for a century so no one will believe you.

The inventor can go old school and use it personally until it catches on with friends/family. Or is this a monkeys paw kind of cream?

What about cream that works for 10-20 years but ends with rapidly progressive multifocal melanoma? I would probably still do it if i was 65-70 years old.

Look up tretinoin it reverses aging to some degree.

I wish our brightest minds were all working in areas like this instead of social apps and advertising. Is there even any doubt that with a better understanding of biology we could meaningfully prolong the human lifespan? What are we doing working on apps lol.

I think that for most workers it's about paying the mortgage and raising your kids. Once bio-hacking starts paying the bills you may see more interest in it

As a secondary thought, I never would have gotten into code-hacking if I didn't have access to a terminal and some open source. I don't think that model would ever work for something like this

So how can I, as a software developer, meaningfully contribute to this area? I would very much prefer to live forever.

I guess you could dive into the world of home-brew biohacking? Understanding genetics and lab techniques doesn't seem out of reach for programmer types, but I don't really know.

I tried it (shoutout to The Odin's biohacking courses!) but I found it requires a lot more manual skills than I was used to from programming. Not out of reach but quite different, the most similar existing skill for me was actually cooking. Though I never made it past beginner stage, so take my experience for what it's worth.

You could gain computational biology experience from working at biotech until you have enough to work at one of these longevity startups.

This is exactly what I'm doing - working at a bioinformatics startup as a SDE, and slowly picking up comp bio projects.

Bioinformatics is a huge field and a lot of software developers are working there. It's science with multi-year career paths, so you cannot just start working on everything without learning the basics first. But with a bit of training, many former software developers have contributed as lab techs, PhD students or other types of associates.

most leading biohackers have a patreon or subscribestar page where you could help fund their research, that might be a start.

Competitive advantage says that in the vast majority of cases you should do more or less what you're doing now, perhaps adjust your behaviour to optimise for compensation, and spend/donate money to have more biologists work on this. This is very general advice for anyone with a cause that they would like to get done without regard to who does it.

It's only true when money is the bottleneck.

It's true as long as you personally are not particularly suited to widen the bottleneck. Which is most of the time.

In this particular case, it's very unlikely a typical dev would contribute more by taking a few years off to learn biology and maths and statistics, instead of just making money and paying someone who has already spent that time.

No, money is not the answer and just paying money is just plain boring. Especially when guys like Bezos have already put $3B into this. My donations would be a drop in the ocean.

I want to do something meaningful myself.

In an ideal world, biology salaries would be on par with tech salaries, so more intelligent ambitious young people will pursue education and careers in biology.

I'm personally not driven by money and never was. First and foremost I would like to make the world a better place.

Calico[0] is funded by Google, so advertising is obviously a necessary evil.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calico_(company)#_sarcasm

The problem is that anything related to the human body is super-heavily regulated, which creates a ton of friction and risk to doing anything innovative.

I think the folks that would get very excited about working on the problem of aging would not be excited about the amount of regulatory bureaucracy (trying to find a non-judgmental word to use there) that necessarily goes along with it.

In fact I think that the reason that so much innovation and wealth creation is concentrated in things which such dubious social benefit is exactly that it isn't regulated, because it doesn't matter. If it matters and is important, it becomes regulated, which slows and discourages innovation and the people who want to innovate.

I don't think that the main problem is the regulation. The regulations are a side effect of how difficult and harmful these experiments could to humans. In the software business when a project fails we can just used a starting point for the next iteration. In life sciences they don't have that luxury. There is no way to test something quickly (in seconds and minutes).

May be one day we'll have a complete model of the human body and medicine and drugs can be tested through a software.

"...anything related to the human body is super-heavily regulated"

In the Western world this is true. Countries with less oversight stand to benefit from regulation arbitrage.

Of course, China already has refuted your thesis. Due to lack of oversight and regulation (and enforcement), their health care system is mistrusted by everyone. That's why the country's covid inoculation rate has been so low. Because trust is very hard to regain once lost, ensurance of safety and efficacy in healthcare through regulation has clear advantages.

There's tons of basic research that could be done before we ever get to the regulatory question of human trials. If we could get pigs to live for 50 years (currently ~20) it would be a huge step forward in our understanding of aging.

On the other hand, pig life extension is not really a product you can sell. Even human life extension, which should theoretically be worth trillions if it works, seems like too much of a pipe dream. The benefits of basic research only become apparent years or decades down the road, and a lot of it is going to be dead ends.

Whereas it's pretty firmly established that if you can make a $700 smartphone that's slightly better than last year's, you can sell millions of them.

(Although apparently you can find a handful of people who want to inject sheep cells in their butt despite having no proven benefit: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg15320660-500-germany-... )

I for one would prefer to live to 80 with "apps" than make it to 90 but live in a cave

maybe our brightest minds ARE working on areas like this, but the smart folks working in social apps and advertising provide tools that help the bright minds collaborate?

You can play "didn't read the article" bingo with these posts every time.

1. This isn't technology that increases lifespan dramatically. No one is going to live to 150 because of this work. Instead, they might live an extra decade at absolute best, but more likely (and the goal) is that they'll have a longer healthy life. That is to say, maybe you'd die at the same age, but you'd be walking around, feeling young and energetic, for more years of your life.

2. This technology is unlikely to extraordinarily expensive. Even current anti-aging pills that are patented are easily affordable by the middle class. But more importantly, imagine if you eliminated cancer, alzheimers, and other age-related illnesses - imagine the economic impact, what that would do to insurance premiums, etc. It would have a significant overall positive impact on the economy.

Almost every post will make the mistake of talking about immortality, absurd age extensions (150 year lifespans), etc. None of that is on the table.

There have been several companies formed in the past few years whose premise is researching in industry anti-aging or basic science more generally (Calico, Altos Labs, Arcadia, etc.)... Does anyone understand the underlying economics or motivations? They can't be gambles when they raise $B's, and I'm too cynical to believe these are altruistic endeavors. Certainly there is research that cannot be reasonably expected to get funding from academic sources, but what results could be worth the squeeze?

Researching immortality or unnatural longevity isn't worth the investment for a society because a society of immortals becomes either stagnant or unsustainable. But making individual billionaires immortal is something billionaires might find worth investing in.

>a society of immortals becomes either stagnant or unsustainable

Which society of immortals are you referring to?

Tolkein's Elves :)?

More seriously, it's a common theory that age-related diseases are an evolved adaptation because over time a species must form an equilibrium with its resource base.

Yes, but pretty much every other equilibrium based limit is something humans decided we didn't want anymore either.

We are better than other species at filling new niches. But being champion is no excuse for getting cocky.

Our general mode of operation seems to be the very opposite. Getting cocky, causing some very untoward consequences, then learning from them.

I don't even think it is necessarily bad in toto. The other pole could look like stagnation fueled by indecisiveness and fear of possible consequences. I definitely know some individuals who spend their lives like that, and they don't seem to be happy.

> Researching immortality or unnatural longevity isn't worth the investment for a society because a society of immortals becomes either stagnant or unsustainable.

This is said with an awful lot of certainty for something that's never been accomplished before. Do people and systems get stuck in their ways? Absolutely. But they also change for better and for worse. There's no guarantee/proof that living forever ends in stagnation or an unsustainable culture.

An immortal fascist dictator may be expected to get assassinated early on, versus people waiting for him to die from natural causes.

The problem with this conversation is that it's about immortality, which no one is going for right now. The best research is looking at addressing specific age related issues in order to increase your healthy years and, potentially, increase your lifespan by maybe a decade.

But the conversation is always "immortal billionaires".

It's a totally fake problem to talk about that.

The universe is huge and the Solar System alone could probably accomodate 50 billion humans. With something like artificial hibernation (we are discussing a pretty far future here), you could travel to nearby stars as well.

As for stagnation, there is an unspoken presumption built into your thought, namely that older rejuvenated people will gain younger bodies back, but that they will stay mentally old. I don't think this will be necessarily true. It rejuvenation works, it will have to work on the brain too, and rejuvenated people will revert to younger patterns of thinking as well. Only with more memories and experiences, which could actually improve their results. For example, they will be unlikely to join some populist cause if they burnt themselves twice already.

The straightforward and cynical answer is that the people funding these things have basically unlimited money, at least for practical purposes, but as with everyone alive, they have limited time. Therefore it's a perfectly rational trade to give up even a substantial percent of their money in exchange for even the possibility of more time (especially because if you have a lot of money, more time means you can turn it into even more money).

But also, while a lot of the headlines are about living longer, the research is largely about treating aging as a disease, or at least a cause of diseases like Alzheimer's, etc. Even if you don't actually extend human lifespan, you keep people healthier much longer, which among other things has enormous economic value (people don't required as much expensive medical treatment and can continue to be productive for longer).

I think aultruism is part of it, if you've seen a relative succumb to advancing age especially dementia it can be quite moving.

But another less popular view I have is that many of these people have spent all their life focusing on the things of the world and the money and the grind and the etc, etc. Their focus is on the work the money the grind and so they simply want to continue getting a return on their investment without having it get interrupted by something as pesky as death.

After all no matter who you are Stalin or a poor Russian peasant death is the great equalizer and comes for us all eventually, at which point all the grind, all the work, all the money, doesn't make much different when you are lying in the hospital bed taking your last breaths. The only thing you have at that point is to reflect on your life and what you've done. It is a sobering thought.

Im of the opinion that treating diseases caused by a weakening body is a net good.

But you are right ofcourse. All thats left for us is to decay beneath the soil or burn to ashes.

If this research can reduce the enormous cost of old age frailty, even if not extending life by much, the payoffs are there.

Age-related diseases and degeneration are a massive burden on modern healthcare systems, are difficult to treat because we don't understand many of the underlying pathways, are extremely debilitating for patients, and are difficult for their family and loved ones. Properly understanding these cellular mechanisms and pathways can open up new avenues for treatment for cancer, Alzheimers, and other diseases, all of which would result in lucrative new drugs. The market for age-related diseases is extremely large, and it only grows every year.

They can be gambles when they raise billions. Welcome to biotech investing, where even 20 year old public companies with 5B+ market caps can have very little to show for it!

Does anyone understand the underlying economics or motivations?

How much would you pay for a treatment to prevent or repair the negative effects of aging? For me the answer is "well over 100% of my net worth".

"The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy went and sold all he had and bought that field."

Nice

I'm looking forward to when all the people who can't pay either start murdering wealthy immortals or are galvanized by a strongman who convinces them that this is actually good for them because one day maybe they too could become immortal, and that who they should really hate are immigrants.

Youth extension therapies will be cheaper for insurance companies than current hospice care. As such it will not cost more than the price of your current insurance premiums. However, while the intellectual property is still protected, there may be some hiccups but they seem unlikely.

Specifically manufacturing of medicine is cheap. The R&D is expensive. As such even if the company owning the IP kept prices artificially high. Facilities in Africa, China, India, etc would reverse engineer them and medical tourism would become even more common. This is a constant threat for COVID vaccine manufacturers today. It’s very likely the prices of youth extension are not much greater than the COVID vaccine (I.e. about $20 per dose)

Meanwhile, the population of countries with single payer health care (e.g. Canada, New Zealand, etc), will also reject intellectual property protections for a company halfway around the world. Life extension for the population is more valuable than a few potential tariffs.

Definitely this. What people don't get is that an optimal solution in insurance is to have everyone healthy. If everyone is healthy then there's no one drawing money from the pool and the insurance company is only collecting money.

Of course the other optimization is forcing everyone to have insurance when healthy and kicking them off when they get sick.

They have actuaries to make sure they get their profit margin either way. Healthy insurance customers just make sick insurance customers happier since the price goes down.

I am going to tell you something very depressing. Saving health insurance companies money (and taking a cut of the savings) is not a viable business model. Health insurance companies are pass through entities. They do not really care about the cost of treatments.

I could imagine living as a subscription model...

Maybe with an implanted chip that kills you if you didn’t manage to acquire the necessary time currency to live another minute.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Time

We have that, except you need to acquire calories.

Yeah but I'm guessing you wouldn't be willing to pay them that now.

Their point was the high risk versus the high reward. Even if investors gave such money to thousands of longevity startups, would they produce something that makes all the investing pay off better than what they sunk into them? (without pivoting to something other than longevity).

The wealth of the world is controlled by Baby Boomers, and all of them are too old to die young at this point. You can't take it with you.

Economic incentive? Every billionaire on earth would gladly give up their fortune for just 100 extra years, and they'd probably be a billionaire again within a decade.

I love this. People are starting to realize how powerful the logic of life extension is. Think about this: if this startup succeeds only at extending human life expectancy by a single day, it's already worth it. A life is about 3e4 days, and there are 9e9 humans, so giving 1 extra day to every human is the equivalent of saving 3e5 lives.

That's assuming the day doesn't cost $1,000,000 for each person treated.

A single day would be insignificant and very hard to measure.

> startup succeeds only at extending human life expectancy by a single day

https://donate.worldvision.org/give/east-africa-hunger-crisi...

Only if it's actually available to every living human on Earth, which unfortunately isn't the case for plenty of things we already have, like food, clean water, medical care and so on. Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy[1] books explore what longevity treatments for some but not all could mean (along with terraforming Mars, and lots of other great stuff, that is).

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_trilogy

I have a really big problem with this mathematical reductionist view of the value of life and human time. A life is much more that the sum of its days, basically because for any individual the loss of a single day is basically indistinguishable from a loss of 0 days over a lifespan, but obviously the loss of ~300,000 people would be a catastrophe.

Indeed, days of lived experience are not fungible.

I can't help thinking that people dying of old age is our last defense against consolidation of power. No matter how much power someone accrues they're eventually going to die. That power always dissipates, dynasties never last forever.

This might be an extremely cynical take, but it feels like if we did discover a scientific fountain of youth we would end up with immortal billionaires rather than the likes of you and I becoming immortal. There's literally thousands of people dying prematurely in the US from lack of access to healthcare technology that we already have right now.

Power is already consolidated. It just passes generationally. Living longer won't change that, especially when we're talking optimistically about 10-20% longer lifetimes and, more likely, not much longer lifetimes but more healthy years with the same end date.

Another article covering this with an interesting quote, "Mid-life crisis? It’s been said that young people dream of being rich, and rich people dream of being young." [0]

[0] https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/09/04/1034364/altos-la...

I'm no demographer, but I would hazard a guess that >1% of folks are young

I messed up, I wanted to say that very few people are rich + young, actually.

Understood haha! Just joking around :)

https://archive.is/KHPVe

Trying to fix aging for existing humans is like trying to patch a binary that's already running, it would be way easier to build new humans with better source code imo.

But that does nothing to save the rich bastards funding it from dying.

Death sucks, but I’m not sure indefinite life extension is a great idea for humanity at large.

Yeah, indefinite life extension sounds like a fools bet. However, extending the human body's abilities in order to enjoy old age better would be something I wouldn't mind.

That's essentially life extension. Improving your healthspan is likely linked to longer lifespan.

It will definitely cripple progress. Even with our current lifespans we see past generations blocking progression with their death grips on powerful positions

Shame this is being downvoted. Because of course an upside down population pyramid is going to influence policies. The needs of younger people will simply get dismissed more and more as the population ages.

If you don't even have a compiler, it's easier to patch a binary that's already running than make one from scratch. That's a closer analogy to the situation under discussion.

Your mom’s a compiler.

There are other ways of doing this even without germline editing - you could for example train a linear transformer model that does DNA phenotype prediction, then just do regular IVF and choose the embryo with lowest predicted risk of (cancer, heart disease, etc)

The only roadblock to doing this right now is access to training data.

I agree. There is no secret magic cure to aging. There's never going to be a pill that makes you younger. The reason the human body ages is that it's a lot easier to build a new human from scratch than it is to repair damaged cells, damaged tissue, etc. Nature doesn't know how to do that effectively, at least not for complex life forms as large as human beings.

Ultimately, I think that if we want to extend life indefinitely, we'll need a strategy that involves replacing organs, replacing brain tissue, and maybe replacing most of the human body. You might be able to boost someone's life span by a few years with stem cells and such, but that's just patching the binary like you said. It's like repairing a home. You can patch drywall, but eventually, to fix a very old house, you might have to rip everything open and replace most of the materials. At some point it's easier to rebuild parts of the house than to keep patching.

IMO, we should be harnessing the fact that nature is very good at growing new healthy tissue. There has to be a way to coax stem cells into growing a new heart, a new liver, or a new arm. We ought to figure out how to do that. Then we could potentially grow you a new liver in a vat based on your own stem cells in a matter of months. We might even be able to automate surgeries such as liver replacement. That kind of technology seems like it should be feasible within 20-30 years with targeted research.

But much disease is acquired environmentally, and many repairs are due to normal wear and tear, building anew would be useless to serve both of those ends.

And unless you can figure out why cells age, you can't build new humans who are immune to senescence either.

Defeating the aging process is critical to solving both problems.

People have been trying to “cure cancer” for a while, and though there is some success, we have many more cure for mice, no?

However, I have not heard of even a 10 year old lab mouse that has the health of a young mouse. Isn’t that a bad sign we can’t even slow aging (beyond fractional amounts) in a mouse?

This reasoning depends on how much effort has gone into the two goals.

Cancer therapies are a proven business model, so a lot of R&D funding has been poured into searching for them.

I'm not sure how comparably much has gone into slowing mouse aging.

Aging is not an irreversible process like most people think it is. It would make much more sense to research rejuvenation than to try to cure various age-related conditions individually.

In general: cells see signaling molecules in the bloodstream and "act their age" according to these signals. It's a self-sustaining process too. Google "heterochromic parabiosis" for actual research papers. It's impressive stuff.

Both your arguments share one feature: rapid iterations. It's much easier to iterate over various cancer factors/treatments/conditions when the duration of a single mouse experiment is in the range of maybe 6 months. But when you want a mouse to live for 10 years your iterations take 10 years. And you cannot do the research anymore with PhD students or postdocs because they aren't with you for long enough. A problem that actually arises right now in organoid research as human organs, for some reason, need in the order of 9 months to fully develop. And 9 months plus learning, experimental planning, analysis and thesis writing gets you uncomfortable close to the 3-4 years a PhD typically takes (or at least doesn't allow much back and forth iterating).

Looking at it from an engineering perspective it's a pretty dumb problem to go after. Coming mostly from my experience with minification of electronics.

E.g. the problems you get at 150nm are almost the same you'd get at 140nm or close but going down to 22nm is a whole different story. The effects that you could skim over before begin to matter in a critical way forming a sort of butterfly effect of ridiculous complexity.

So I think they'll be able to push it to let's say 120 years. Then after that something that you did 110 years ago, e.g. jumping too much in the bed will be the thing that leads you to develop a certain condition in your 120s. This is of course cascading so your related conditions contribute too even if you've dealt with them. Also we're not talking electronics here, but the human body so the baseline complexity is much much higher. And we're not even counting in *meaningful life* years.

AND with that being said I wouldn't take the economist way too seriously. They have had all sorts of Chicken Little style articles before so who knows what they are actually after.

> And we're not even counting in meaningful life years.

I think it's likely that a lot of these treatment paths end up cumulatively increasing QALY's (quality-adjusted life years) by more than they increase life expectancy. That is, they add more good time than total time, in part because of a lot of the factors you mention. If we pick up 5 years of QALY and 4 years of increased lifespan, that's a pretty huge win, IMO. It means getting to know grandchildren much more meaningfully as the typical age of parents at childbirth has increased.

To heck with human longevity research, I want to see dog longevity research. Losing a dog every 10-20 years is too much.

Living for 200 years seems kind of pointless. The person I was at 30 is so completely different from the person at 20 that I may as well be a completely different person. I barely even share significant memories with that person. Adding 100 years onto the tail end of my life, I may as well just die and let some new person live that life.

Then again, being able to spend the next 40-60 years with my parents would be nice.

it's good to see billionaires putting money into health moonshots (vs real moonshots). Helps so many more people.

TBH, the research produced from unrelated moonshots help out in many different areas.

If immortality was somehow cracked, it would cause the end of civilization if it became available to everyone. Imagine the population of Earth ballooning to 12+ billion. Instead, it would be kept for the billionaires. Imagine the staggering inequality of 180-year-old trillionaires and their kin, that never ever relinquish their hordes. It's straight out of a cyberpunk dystopia. (Tessier-Ashpool comes to mind)

That sounds terrifying. Imagine a 5 century reign by one and the same dictator. Can't think of too many positives for this scenario.

would you rather face that - or death?

I would face death in both scenarios. I prefer the scenario where the ultra elite also face death.

One could imagine a societal model where the number of children is restricted instead of access to life prolonging technology. So to target a stable population, you'd allow people to have only as many children as people have died in the last couple of years.

It's doable, we already had societies that deployed such restrictions on a scale similar to the global human population. Whether it should be done is another question, as many people criticize the issue of the state policing procreation.

We're accustomed to thinking about the population boom, but the derivative looks like it peaked just before 1970 and there doesn't seem to be much in the way of it continuing to fall below 0%. While I personally feel that that's probably a good thing in the short term, in the longer term we will probably want to decrease the negative side of the population equation more than we want to increase the positive side.

That may be particularly true for billionaires, who profit off of a growth engine that is going to be under serious pressure once the population starts dropping for real. Increasing life span (in particular increasing the span of life not dominated by illness) could balance out quite a bit of declining fertility rate. And I for one think that if fertility became more dominated the people who want to be fertile, it would be a Good Thing.

I'm not going to worry about immortality, because I think it's still very very far out. Which means your trillionaires are about generational wealth. Generational wealth is lost by the first generation 70% of the time, by the second 90% of the time. It's not that big of a thing.

I'm just not too worried that 110 years of healthy life is going to tip the balance too far. It'll slow down progress some ("X advances one funeral at a time"), and we'll massively screw things up for a while, but long term it seems good to me.

what do HN folks think about efforts of Dr david sinclair of https://sinclair.hms.harvard.edu/ ?

Any thoughts on how these efforts could conflict with our climate goals? Should we have an age ceiling? (that sounds awful, but so does the idea of everyone living to 150)

There will be a bump as people live longer, but, assuming fertility is extended by similar amounts of time, it will just lead to people delaying having kids until they're pushing 80 or so.

People would have a harder time pushing off climate problems because they themselves have to face the consequences, not their children.

I think a society that lives hundreds of years will have better future foresight. Similar to how when you get older 5 or 10 years doesn't seem nearly as long and you make many more decisions at these scales regularly.

That's a great question. I know almost nothing about climate science. I assume though that it's directly tied to human consumption, and more people years means more consumption.

Easy. If you don't breed, you get to take The Pill of Eternal Youth. If you do breed, you don't. Any other solution would be unjust or unsustainable.

Any countries with a significant population of people who would be taking this are already seeing population decrease.

Let's do a moonshot -- make it 3 trillion.

“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”

– Max Planck[1]

Often paraphrased as "Science progresses one funeral at a time."

I don't think we really want immortality or unnatural longevity.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle

I would agree “we” don’t. Whoever “we” is. The problem is the hypothetical billionaires and politicians expanding their power with elongated lifespans. Imagine the ramifications if Supreme Court justices lived 50+ more years, for one example.

Of course, we'd have to change how many things work in the world, this specific example seems like a rather simple one to change.

How do you propose we do it?

I don't really understand the US systems very well, but I'd probably start with putting a maximum term in place, instead of membership for life.

Yes, it was a simple example but regardless I have a hard time believing that the needed changes would happen before powerful people achieve and take advantage of supraphysiological lifespans.

Also I’m not sure how simple changing it would be to change Supreme Court justice retirement.

Should watch "Altered Carbon" if you haven't already...

Fiction is not an argument for against immortality.

Wasn't meant to be an argument for or against -- merely a relevant & entertaining piece of science fiction.

Indeed, I can agree that there are all kinds of practical disadvantages if other people would start living forever.

On the other hand, if we're talking about me or you then suddenly it's different, isn't it? I think I'd choose to take unnatural longevity for myself even if it imposes some problems for the social fabric.

That's the crux of it — visions aside, day-to-day, nobody is going to suddenly "solve aging" for everyone. Progress comes gradually, in the form of everyone's loved ones dying and suffering less often and less early — and very few people are opposed to that.

You hear about older people fall ill and think things like "I've lived long enough, I don't want to go through the ordeal of treatment X for a .05 probability of living for one more year in bad health" — but would they see it that way if the treatment were to become much better and safer?

I'd definitely want immortality in the sense of stopping physical (and mental) deterioration. You can always just commit suicide if you're done.

I discuss this with friends and family occasionally, and they all seem to have these ideas that we're "only supposed to live 100 years or so". But that seems like a logical fallacy (appeal to nature) to me, it's not an actual argument.

And sure, there are plenty of dystopian movies about how all of your friends die while you live on. But you know, you can make new friends. As someone who has moved often and had to make new friends often: it's not that bad. Friendships come and go.

Just imagine the things you could get done if you weren't pressured by time. You could witness the colonization of other planets, the unification of humanity. And if everyone were immortal, we wouldn't have to worry about things like pensions anymore, and I bet that we'd see an extreme lowering of crime and violence.

The only read problem I see would be overpopulation, and possibly draconion measures to regulate it.

There's the problem of the elderly continuing to accumulate wealth and power without ceding any to the younger generations.

It's already happening. Look no further than the geriatric US lawmakers and how out of touch they are with the future.

Create a startup and disrupt them with a new technology.

Disrupt the US government or wealth inequality?

Of course there exists no problem that HN won’t unironically propose solving with a startup.

I, too, would rather not die. But "the only real problem" you see being overpopulation speaks to a limited effort in thinking out the consequences.

Let's imagine such a solution was available. Let's remember that insulin today is barely affordable to most people, a mere "stay alive and subsist" drug. So it's probably safe to assume that a literal immortality treatment would be only available to the most wealthy and powerful.

So, what we'd get is Nancy Pelosi, Mitch McConnell, Biden, Trump, Putin, Kim Jong-Il, Clarence Thomas, and many others still alive by the year 2250, with no signs of slowing down.

Just imagine how much the world would cease to change if the people running it never experienced turnover. "The unification of humanity" - yeah right! We can't even get a minimum wage increase, and Russia is actively planning an invasion. The only hope for these things is that these people will die, and be replaced by younger generations who grew up with different ideals.

I hope to be cryogenically frozen and one day awake into a world like that of the Culture in the books of Iain Banks, but I know on some level that this isn't just decades or centuries away: it's millennia.

Just as likely you’d awaken to planet of the apes or morlocks.

> Let's remember that insulin today is barely affordable to most people

If you are talking about the US, then it is a structural problem of your healthcare system: https://pharmanewsintel.com/news/insulin-prices-8x-higher-in...

If you are talking about many countries with socialised healthcare systems (both rich and poor), then it is free or minimal cost to the user. In New Zealand I have diabetic friends that get virtually free checkups and prescriptions (although they do have other out of pocket expenses like time off work, or replacing expensive electronic monitors).

If you are talking worldwide, then many poor people in some countries can’t afford insulin but neither can they afford other critical goods.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/cost-of-i...

If we were to immediately acquire immortality then society would need to evolve a structure that deliberately kills ideas and pushes itself past ideologic ruts, etc. Do you really want boomers running government and owning land for longer? Society would be down right miserable. Think about it in terms other than “yourself transcending all your peers” for a moment.

It may sound cool to you to live to see the day we colonize planets, but your entire comment reeks of narcissism and maybe regret. I’ll give you that there are perhaps a few scenarios where extended longevity would be convenient, like allowing a research group a little extra time to achieve a likely breakthrough, but beyond that I really can’t imagine society where everyone lives forever looking remotely like it does today. If the only problem you can imagine is overpopulation then you aren't really thinking critically at all. Why do Tolkien elves always fade away?

We’re supposed to invest our resources as a human race into raising the next generation to achieve the things we collectively dream of but couldn't in out generation. Sure if we can extend lifetimes gradually over time and reduce deterioration and suffering that’s one thing and I believe we’d adapt naturally. But arguing for immortality by default right now? That is perverse and not remotely biologically appropriate. You’ve got one shot on this earth to make a difference. Don’t squander it. Don’t steal from future generations. Listen to the wisdom of others around you. And learn to embrace your mortality, because you will die.

If you're immortal, then you're stuck with whatever problems we have right now and forever.

Honestly, it sounds better than leaving it to future generations, because we are the future generations.

Interesting spin. I guess I wouldn't mind a society where everyone was accountable for the long term consequences of their actions, policy decisions, research, etc… however we achieve it. The problem lately is we don’t seem to want to hold people accountable almost because we consider a right to life and success to be overly precious. CEO ran a company into the ground, meh they were just doing their fiduciary duty. Politician demonstrably implemented a policy that increases crime, meh they were just a conduit for the will of their constituents. Perhaps these attitudes would be fixed by longer lifespans.

This a dumb argument. Steve Jobs was a boomer and created the reality we live in today. He definitely wasn't lacking for any innovation or ideas.

I like the Apple Pencil.

It's pretty great -- I agree! :)

What makes us human, aka the “human condition” would definitely change. Motivation, knowledge, relationships, resources. It would be an evolutionary change in a non evolutionary timeline. Pretty crazy.

I think it's because people think they stop growing. I was listening to Levitt's People I (Mostly) Admire and on a recent show he was talking about progress. How everyone will say in the last 10 years they've changed but if you ask them what they'll be in the next 10 years they think they'll be the same. But there's a lot of insight we often ignore.

I think similarly people ignore political and cultural progress. It's easy to blame the lack of progress on the old guard. But if we look at history we go much faster than that. One great example of this is the legalization of gay marriage. Pee [0] tracks support of it and it's clear that attitude is changing faster than the old people dying.

Also I think part of the problem is we've all gotten used to the Dragon Tyrant[1] that we accept our fate.

[0] https://www.pewforum.org/fact-sheet/changing-attitudes-on-ga...

[1] https://youtu.be/cZYNADOHhVY

> The only read problem I see would be overpopulation, and possibly draconian measures to regulate it.

Like, for example, releasing a weaponized virus from a lab. Oh wait...

Most people won't have access. Just the ultra elites.

You might not. Sign me up. Maybe just maybe if people live longer, they will be more likely to change their beliefs over time.

I would rather be alive and trying to work that out than dead.

I say the same goes for business models. About 15 years ago I spent 5 years in the early SaaS space, and it was extremely difficult to convince IT Mgrs and CTOs that software as a service was not some evil plan. Today, it is hard to sell software that is not sold as a service. Why? The old guard management is gone, and tech is managed by people who grew up with SaaS and/or are afraid of managing their own hardware infrastructures.

I don't think we really want immortality or unnatural longevity.

Imagine Putin, Trump, and Xi still running the world in 2100.

There's nothing Silicon Valley billionaires will throw money at faster than the ability to live longer/forever. Makes sense in a way, but pretty much everyone in the field will tell you that the science is simply not there yet. Calico is similarly funded and has been at it for a decade now, with nothing to show for it.

That Japanese vaccine that helped your immune system target half dead zombie cells seemed pretty promising.

Science may not be there yet but throwing money at it will help in the long run.

I have snake oil for sale

You do? How much! It seems hard to get the temp right, during rendering, so I often burn the fat and...

(Even snake oil has value...)

On a funny side note, you can actually buy snake oil and it does actually have a metabolic purpose. It is most commonly used to relieve pain and inflammation and is used to treat arthritis and bursitis. The biggest contributing factor is the Omega-3 fatty acids. I prefer Krill oil for this as it sometimes also has Astaxanthin depending on the formulation.

Pretty simple. Fixing all of our diseases is actually low hanging fruit.

Head transplants onto monoclonal human bodies grown in a lab. Gestated in chimeric pigs, genetically or surgically decephalized before birth, electronically innervated and artificially sustained until use in science or medicine.

Bodies are O-, HLA neutral, and do not require immunosuppressants.

Transplant beneficiaries receive a new and healthy thymus and immune system, unaged cardiovascular and pulmonary system.

Not only a fix for aging, this would solve heart disease, organ failure, AIDS (flush existing cells), and most non-brain/non-blood cancers. It's the fabled cure all.

Brain age would still be an issue, but with a renewed cardiovascular and immune system it may be prolonged or even rejuvenated to a degree.

The technologies are here today. We just have to assemble them.

After delivering on the health promises, there's all sorts of optimizations. You could give people the body they wanted. Male, female, short, tall, strong, athletic, skinny, tan, whatever. Even transgenic with all sorts of modifications. No body odor, big muscles, fur, new skin and hair colors... there's practically unlimited potential.

If I ever have a billion dollar exit, I'm doing it.

the neural reattachment seems really hard. Where are we on spinal cord recovery after a complete sever? If you are an oligarch and don't mind murdering a healthy young type o- isn't that really the only barrier?

> Where are we on spinal cord recovery after a complete sever?

It's been performed in animals, though it resulted in paralyzation and subsequent euthanization. Human attempts have been prepped for on several occasions, but never carried out.

Past human candidates have been paraplegics, but I think you'd find even more willing patents amongst those with terminal cancers.

It would probably take trial and error before we can reattach a spinal cord successfully. Early patients will likely be paralyzed.

> If you are an oligarch and don't mind murdering a healthy young type o- isn't that really the only barrier?

This isn't scalable and also doesn't confer the advantages of a neutral immune system.

Monoclonal bodies can be used for all other sorts of uses. Wide-scale and repeatable studies, basic research, smaller scale blood and organ transplants, etc.

Since attempts would be limited, the difficult kinks would not be worked out of the protocol. By building a scalable methodology, it begins to work for everyone and becomes safer and more practical over time.

Lets make sure we solve the monoclonal bodies thing before the reattachment thing. I'm pretty sure there will be some dying oligarchs that aren't worried about scalability or immunosuppressants.

Your post seems to imply that because the science isn't there yet, it doesn't make sense to throw money at it.

But isn't the whole point that you're using the money to bring on the scientists and give them the resources in order to develop the science?

I was always for idea of defeating aging, and moving on on your own terms.

Until I watch Altered Carbon, I think it premise of rich capturing the technology and using it to divide haves from have-nots is pretty realistic.

The good old Larry Ellison gambit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=37m36s

This is such a confusing attitude along a number of axes.

1. Science isn't there so we shouldn't spend billions yet.

Maybe spending billions can advance the science sufficiently?

2. There is a "there" to get to.

People regularly spend millions in healthcare costs to live a few extra years. What is the "there" that we're imagining? Would someone with >$100B not spend $1B to live 10 more years? You don't need a fountain of youth, just more time in a not-terrible state of health to be worth all this investment and more.

3. There is a there to get to.

This isn't like the discovery of fission. It might take a dozen different interventions to provide another decade of life to an individual, or a disjoint set of a dozen interventions to provide another decade of life to people in general. One discovery probably won't cut it, and that's ok.

We've been finding ways to live longer since the advent of modern medicine[0]; these moonshot projects funded by the likes of Google via Calico aren't literally trying to find a way to live forever, just mitigate or cure the things that cause death.

Now, perhaps some day in the future we'll have learned enough about how the brain works to keep it alive simply by continuing to supply blood and emulating/simulating the nervous system to allow the person to continue to exist within a virtual environment (or simply via an ipad on some motorized wheels). Some work has been done on the 'staying alive' front[1] but it's very unlikely this sort of biotech matures to work on Humans within the next 50-100 years.

0: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1040079/life-expectancy-...

1: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01216-4

The real question is whether you believe the science is not there yet, or not there at all? If it is possible then it is perfectly understandable that people would be willing to throw money at the issue even if it is decades away, mostly because a lot of things remain decades away because those decades need to be full of research that nobody wants to spend money on. On the other hand if it is impossible (or at least impossible without some sort of impossible to predict advancement in biological science) then this is just another attempt to funnel money from people by playing on fear of death.

> the science is simply not there yet

How do you suppose it gets there?

The science is there, but there has actually been a stigma against generalized life extension research because that particular project has been the purview of cranks for literally thousands of years.

What with their lifestyles (along with other wealthy) climate change and an overpopulated planet, I don't think life extensions over the normal range make much sense.

Better invest in healthier living within the normal window. (in other words a robust body and mind till the time comes).

This all feels like the Ocean's 11 version of biotech

The straight laced CEO as foil with an amazing reputation and a ticking biological clock (1)

The mad scientist known for mixing human and monkey embryos (2)

The beautiful and brilliant husband & wife whiz kid team (3)

All funded by the secretive Russian billionaire with questionable fortune originations (4)

Grabbing the popcorn

(1) https://altoslabs.com/team/executive-leadership/hal-barron/

(2) https://altoslabs.com/team/scientific-leadership/juan-carlos...

(3) https://altoslabs.com/team/principal-investigators-san-diego... & https://altoslabs.com/team/principal-investigators-san-diego...

(4) https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/05/world/yuri-milner-faceboo...

You are forgetting the iron law of real-life business stories: the better they seem, the worse they are.

>the better they seem, the worse they are

Is this common knowledge? I've seen it empirically but I don't know how much is that a widespread feeling. (Not being snark or sarcastic).

I think it's a principle everyone knows but nobody can bring themselves to put in to practice.

I suspect the recent Elizabeth Holmes conviction of investor fraud at Theranos might contribute to the idea of flashy names propping up an unsustainable idea (e.g. with so many high-ranking names in the US military establishment previously supporting the company).

I'm not aware of other recent high-profile examples, though I would be interested in learning about them.

Every high-profile failure of the last century fits the bill, because bad business teams cannot get invested in, by definition, without looking good.

Good business teams tend to be good in the details, which leads to them struggling to find willing audiences.

Adam Neumann/WeWork, Doug Evans/Juicero; there's plenty of 'em.

A few more for real scam connoisseur's:

Stacy Spikes/MoviePass (70M+ for selling dollars at a penny; outstanding growth and metrics though, if only the "lose on every sale but make it up in volume" stance ever worked ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)

Steve Newcomb/famo.us (30M+ seed funding for what was essentially a shitty JS library)

Bill Nguyen/Color (40m+ seed funding for a photo app with no extra features; you know, like the one that comes for free in your phone ..., but with ads, ... also a social network? no one really knew, not even them)

People just want shiny stories and plausible deniability. It's pretty much subconscious risk management. Then you have people who play the next-level game of exploring this risk management heuristic, hence -- pretty young people with pedigree scamming the old money.

From what I have heard the CEO is not only worse than you imagine, he is worse than you can imagine. But it's all scuttlebutt and hearsay for now. Rich aging VC got to reach for those stars...

http://www.cafepharma.com/boards/threads/hal-barron-racks-up...

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/banks-ready-34-billion-financ...

To be fair: there are some areas of research [0][1] which cannot but help sound like fantasy.

Even were they to be pursued with the utmost rigor. Which by definition they can't be, because the very people and institutions required to do so would shy away because it's too fantastic of an endeavor.

So here's to the dreamers! It's your (Russian oligarch) money, break a leg!

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/02/magazine/dead-pig-brains-...

Biosphere 2 didn't turn out very well if I'm remembering the story right.

Seems legit, they just need to add the Pharma bro and Rachel Dolezal and it'll be a true shit show.

The mad scientist really looks the part

simulation esque

If we'd all just cleaned up diets and got in shape, Covid wouldn't have been such a big deal.

You can do lots, such as diet and exercise, to live better and longer, but nobody does. We want a magic pill.

To live a few years longer, at most, and you might still get unlucky.

There is no magic. Our bodies are machines, and one day we’ll figure out how to repair them. That day might not be today, but I will never object to anyone working to bring it closer.

Not only that but with universal healthcare meaning that I'm subsidizing someone else's poor health habits, I want everyone on a government-prescribed workout + diet plan ASAP. Then again maybe COVID has been a blessing for culling the weak with minimal end-of-life costs, natural selection and all. Not going to be a popular opinion, but that's the emotionless conclusions of a purely scientific worldview.

> Not only that but with universal healthcare meaning that I'm subsidizing someone else's poor health habits

Fyi you're doing that with your insurance too

With universal healthcare you can start to work on environment as well. There should be no "food deserts" in the richest country in the world but this is the reality we are in. HFCS should be curtailed so that as a regular citizen at any income level, you have access to food with real nutrition and can easily avoid sugar.

[1]:https://www.aecf.org/blog/exploring-americas-food-deserts

It starts with Universal Healthcare (to stop the so called "bleeding") but expands with cooperation with the FDA to eliminate the symptoms that cause people to fall into these addictive habits. The end result should be lower health costs for you and everyone else and an overall more dynamic society (since a healthy society can work better than an unhealthy society).

If we'd all just cleaned up diets and got in shape, Covid wouldn't have been such a big deal.

It might have been somewhat better, but Covid is vastly more dangerous to the elderly than the young, and you're not getting around that with diet and exercise.

You can do lots, such as diet and exercise, to live better and longer

None of which is going to give an 80 year old the strength, mobility, and cognitive capacity they had when they were 30.

This view is both boorish and ignorant. There are many types of coronaviruses, including MERS and SARS. They can't be mitigated through "diet and exercise". These diseases often occur in parts of the world with much lower obesity rates than the West

Further, the idea that you won't get a serious respiratory virus if you just exercise and diet is offensive. You're just trying to reduce something that is incredibly complex into a bumper sticker slogan that you can wrap your mind around with the least amount of effort.

My comment addressed Covid-19 and the United States, sorry I was unclear.

Seems to me that if you follow an anti-inflammatory routine, smoke weed, and are physically fit, you stand a better chance than others of handling Covid.

Isn;t one of the problems that not everyone is a net benefit to society so if they already cause 70 years of disturbance, who would want them living another 70? It;s one thing for an Elon Musk type who has loads to do and never wants to die but I can't really see this happening unless, I guess, it is an option.

"Dear Mr Smith, you are getting a bit old and to be honest, you haven't made a great stab at life. However for only $299.99, you can have this injection which will give you another 50 years."

Reminds me of 2 B R 0 2 B by Kurt Vonnegut, just the opposite since they had a quota and no one could be born unless someone died:

"Thank you, sir," said the hostess. "Your city thanks you; your country thanks you; your planet thanks you. But the deepest thanks of all is from all of the future generations."

We talk a lot (actually, not enough) about the dangers of AI, but we rarely discuss the perils of longevity. Not that they are similar, but both are somewhat underrated.

- Once there will be a scientific breakthrough in longevity, everything will happen very fast. The time between the first and the billionth vaccine against ageing probably won't be much longer than one year.

- The breakthrough may be just around the corner (10, 20 30 years...) - many people seem to be putting their money on it.

- Sudden increase in the average lifespan by as little as 10 years would throw most pension funds and state budgets into disarray. Mind you, a 70 years old retiree rejuvenated back to his 60 won't be magically as productive as she was before she retired. She will be unemployed and 10 years behind on everything.

- Any significant lifespan enhancement will mean we have to renegotiate social contract about having kids. Will the vaccine come with strings attached? We can't even control our population explosion today.

- Not just science progresses one funeral at a time.(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30025879). Imagine having no real possibility progressing in your career, once the "best" will fill the ladder. Would you want your judge or police chief to be the same person for 50 years?

PS: That being said, I don't think we can or should hold back and it will be all worth it.

I think several of these are solved. Though pensions is a difficult one but they aren't nearly as common as they used to be.

If you live forever you can learn a new skill. There's also an incentive to get to financial independence.

Population isn't an issue and I'm confused why this is frequently brought up. But then again people think America is over populated while it's extremely population sparse. The truth is that every first world country has birth rates well below replacement. Most developing countries do too or are on their way. Countries where people live longer and have education have declining populations. It's wouldn't be surprising if people who were immortal didn't have kids until they were able to reach financial independence. Be that in their 90's or 900's.

I also don't think people will want to do the same jobs forever. We have infinite time. It's okay if it takes 50 years of schooling and 50 years to become a Sr engineer. Time is different. It's also more incentive for automation so little can just live.

Guess we're never going to retire

even a year of additional lifespan is sure to bankrupt the pension/retirement liabilities that seem to already hang by a thread

NMN

There's 6 years of free beer longevity just figuring out what the United States is doing incorrectly and what Hong Kong is doing right. I wonder what that's actually worth.

https://www.worldometers.info/demographics/life-expectancy/

instead of dreaming of immortality, get off this dumb ass site and do something meaningful with your waning youth! and who wants to live forever in this hellscape anyways? just more of the same hollow experience.

Nah, I'm vibing.

Likewise

more dead than alive i would say

vibes eternal? sign me up

Bee pollen must be checked as anti aging agent. It not one miracle cure but thing of big puzzle. So i guess flower pollen collected by bee - must prolong 30-40 additional years at once. +Melatonin + NAC+ vitamin C + resveratrol + all bags of vitamin and mineral essentional to human being.

Also daily yougurt dose must saving life like not one product before.

Considering the general trajectory of the world, its surprising people want to stay in it longer, but I guess I too have a portion of morbid curiosity to see just how much we keep screwing everything up. To actually witness cities becoming submerged.

Also, if I didn't have to slave away most of my life to survive, if I could live the life I want, I could probably have a full life by 60, with maybe only a few books still left to read. That would be sufficient and good, very few complaints. But with this stuff.. If I gained another 50 expected years, its just that much more work and sacrifice I gotta do to have a chance of retiring!

> Considering the general trajectory of the world, its surprising people want to stay in it longer

It is a popular myth that the world is getting worse. But by almost every measure of human wellbeing, things are getting better. Yes, climate change is a real problem, but it doesn't mean the end of human wellbeing. Even if we don't manage to slow/reverse climate change with innovation (I believe we will), we will manage to adapt. Climate related deaths continue to decline, despite real climate problems. Despair is not the only option.

I hope you are right! But I am not in despair, I know why these things are happening, what structures and systems cause them (which is in part why I don't personally share your optimism). I think humanity falling from grace and prominence is just as beautiful as us keeping going. It's all just a blip of time in the universe, no need to think about it so selfishly or tragically. Humanity as we know it might just be a moral allegory about energy and language anyway.

The world aint that bad my friend, just a little crazy atm - it'll get better. Hang in there. If you're on this website, you're one of the lucky few that has their needs taken care of and an ability to traverse up Maslow's pyramid.

Besides, shit is just getting interesting. Strap in.

Thank you, I am personally fine, living the life I want within my circumstances, I am not sad. I think it's a little interesting that feeling pessimistic about the course of civilization necessarily means I am in despair. Humans are just one creature on the earth, our fate as a species need not be the determination of an individual's happiness.

Also, I might need to check to see if I have the required income to be eligible for being this site, I might not make the cut...

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