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Comment by woke_neoliberal | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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".

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.

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 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 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.

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.

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).

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.

> 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.

>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.

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.

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

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.

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

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!

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 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.

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.

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