$250K Longevity Prize Announced
longevityprize.com
longevityprize.com
Also, I can't remember a single mainstream book[^1], movie or tv-series where the guys who want to live beyond their natural lifespans are not the antagonists.
We need mainstream movies, tv-series and books where the guys who want to live longer are the good guys and they do it through science. That instead of, say, a dramatization of the life of Elizabeth Báthory, or another vampire movie. In other words, we are very much in need of a cultural movement that makes socially acceptable to fund and to work in these types of projects.
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[^1]: Somebody already commented here that it's better to put that money into fighting infant mortality. As often the case with moonshots, it's easy to find more "rational" things to allocate the money to.
[^2]: I guess there are some people in the Bible that live for a long time. Maybe priests talk about them at mass sometimes?
In that respect, Vitalik Buterin is a great role model, in presenting the case for longevity front and center on his Twitter profile:
I say that people should stop killing each other. Now I'm a role model for world peace.
Faust? Not sure he is a good guy though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faust
In that respect Ghost In the Shell and the protagonist moving beyond the human body seems like an alternative take on this issue.
More broadly, it looks to me like the ones who succeed in going beyond their allocated life-time are rarely at the center of the story, and more assisting figures or legends. The witch who've lived for 500 years stays in a remote forest far from the world, will help the heroes in a Deus Ex Machina way and get back in the background once her part is done.
It's not so simple. If we could be like in the famous Alphaville song, longevity seems exciting. Imagine. on the other hand, that you are senile, can hardly move, and have a multitude of ailments in addition to your main disease. No wonder many old people don't perceive death as an unfortunate event, on the contrary. Also, I think there is an Eastern proverb, "Miserable people pass away easily."
Also some of this is a bit confusing 'the longevity prize' (singular) but multiple prizes apparently? Only a $20k prize mentioned on front page?
More seriously though, its small change for some of the donors listed here.
Vita(lik)DAO wink wink
To quote: "Over a century of all the world’s biological knowledge is available to anyone taking the time to read the literature."
That's very good money if you already have the right idea.
Or can come up with one real easy.
A storage problem on the horizon...
It's a good thing for society and humanity that people die. It ensures change, innovation and the flow of new ideas.
Don't get me wrong: I think we should invest money and resources that help people live healthy lifes. But the idea of stopping aging or wanting to live to hundreds of years just seems that it comes from people who have deep psychological problems with themselves.
If we had a way to live forever healthily, essentially no one would chose to die except the people with deep psychological problems with themselves
You are probably rational enough to give up getting new kids if that means achieving longlevity/immortality. But most people aren't as rational as HN forum members.
Earth could easily carry 100 billion people, we could build cities on venus and mars, and if people could live for thousands of years, 100 year journey to another star on a slow ship would become quite acceptable.
Bedsides, In most places birth rate is already below replacement level, so longer lifespan is necessary to prevent population collapse.
No, it's not. Current estimates are that population will stabilize around 10bn people, not collapse: https://ourworldindata.org/future-population-growth
There would also be a necessity to allow (and even force) euthanasia for people in persistent vegetative state.
Source? Based on what standard of living/level of technology? There was even a time I thought Julian Simon had a point, but in the years since then everything I've witnessed has suggested quite the opposite. The more of us there are it's just as likely a tiny percentage will destroy the planet for the rest of us than it is a few geniuses will help us invent our way out of trouble.
(Edit: Just saw that you aren't the person who left the original comment, so I guess the above is moot unless the original commenter feels the same way.)
This is not hypocritical in my mind. It would be hypocritical if I myself would work on or invest money into longevity tech and make a statement like this.
> [Y]ou might want to consider why many folks would believe your stance on the matter of human longevity to be fundamentally inconsistent.
Why? Why should I be content with the years nature has given me? Why should I not seek to have more? Do you not get joy from living? From being with the people you love? From exploring, learning, experiencing?
Why is a 'normal' human lifetime the perfect and most moral amount of years to have?
Your attitude is so full of suppositions. Frankly it seems to me that anyone who doesn't want more life must have deep psychological problems, some deep rooted depression or ennui.
Without the cycle of life there's no evolution, with no evolution there's no progress. That goes for biology, but certainly also for ideas.
Actually we don't have to imagine, for instance we can see that in general birth rates drop when infant mortality falls.
The idea that stagnation is the only possible outcome of longer lifespans seems ... reductivist.
The answer is I don’t know, and further, that trying to predict the outcome of societal change like that is probably a fool’s game. Pre-emptive, discriminatory rules seem like the absolute worst way to start out. Well, perhaps second worst compared to an outright ban on the technology, which is unfortunately where I think we’ll probably go first due to societal fear of change. Which is ironic given how much you and the OP think it would cause stagnation…
You've started by assuming the same as the OP, that having older people will necessarily cause societal stasis. But you're basing that both on a preconception of what you think older people are like now (personally I dispute this, and I'm not that old), and on a supposition that whatever longevity treatment we come up with won't change that. How do we know? How do we know that a particular treatment to, say, keep people younger for longer, wouldn't result in more youthful and dynamic society?
We don't know. And any supposition is based on flawed ideas.
I do think that we as a humans need to become more responsible with developing new technologies. There are technologies that do more bad than good, and we should develop techniques to better asses this before we just yolo a technology and then try to damage control later.
And once upon a time 40% of children died before the age of 5. That had been the norm throughout the entirety of human history, and indeed throughout the entire history of all animals.
Things will change and we will look back upon the times when people only lived to 70 years as the dark ages, and the justifications given for this brutal mortality as a coping mechanism.
The anti-longevity position doesn't stand up to scrutiny. Just think: we locked down billions of people to prevent the spread of COVID, mostly because of the toll it takes on those over the age of 70, who died at a rate 5 percent upon infection, yet aging is going to kill the vast majority of those over the age of 70 within a decade, and the resources going toward stopping it are infinitismal in comparison to those spent trying to stop COVID.
I aleady had one parent die before their time, and would love to not experience that again.
I don't think we can become immortal within my lifetime, nor will we live for hundreds of years but it would be nice if all our parents could at least live into their 90s.
Beyond that, I don't see what's wrong with immortality as a goal. Yes it's impractical but if you fail to attain it, at least you gain massive health benefits for the already elderly who have poor quality of life.
Immortality has no tolerance for stagnant dynasties. Intertwined with mortality and death is one chimp tribe believing they are superior to another, biologically identical chimp tribe simply due to differing starting circumstances or chance (right place, right time, right background, “wow I must be a genius!”).
As long as our economy plays out via genetic and social lottery instead of true merit, rewards the unrewarding, and allows small groups to profit while large groups toil and suffer, immortality will be out of reach.
Might also want to be in space, too, since Earth has limited capacity. May also want to have more reliable energy that can come with us into the depths of space.
What do I know though, just some nobody.
I’d you are immortal then why worry about not having children, over a long enough timeline eventually your turn in the queue will come.
But that’s just philosophical thought. In reality, we are too far away from even living to 200 years old to start worrying about what comes after that.
I know close to nothing about decentralized finance, coins, etc., but this caught my eye because I am interested in longevity research and tech. Does anybody know more about VitaDAO? Are they successful? Reputable?
I'd go as far as to say "obsession with not dying" is a, if not the most, common behavior for living things in general
I'd say it's more like
"People are obsessed with not dying early."
How evil of them!
Someone who is happy has no need of working towards success (defined conventionally, as getting close to the top of the wealth/career/peer ranking). It is often unhappiness that drives people towards success. And then, due to hedonic adaptation, they find they are not necessarily much happier, there is always someone ahead of them on some metric so there is always more success to strive for to alleviate unhappiness.
It only really works when what you call success comes as a byproduct of something else, not as a goal, of an activity that makes one happy regardless of peer ranking or any other such 'success' metric. Feynman comes to mind, who seemed to be mostly driven by curiosity and the joy of finding out how things work. In fact, according to his own writings (or my interpretation of them), he was most unproductive and miserable when he was trying to be 'successful'.
But there is one problem with longevity: Boredom is a thing. When you are a toddler even a small piece of paper or a string can excite you. But then you get bored and you need to find something else. I am almost 40 years old now and pretty much all my drive in life is my two kids. If I didn't have them I doubt I would find reason to get up from bed every morning. If I had to live forever or for a very great number of years I believe life would become a burden. It's always been possible to be old and sick and thus unable to do things you crave. But I fear one day it will be possible to be young (in body) and healthy and unwilling to do things because you've done them all before too many times.
They should rather set a prize over a million usd to generate additional interest from the research community, otherwise it's just beer money for researchers that are already deeply invested in the topic.
My family has been through a lot of death in the last few years. We've had 6 fairly close members die since the pandemic started, accounting for ~15% of the family. Most were unexpected, some weren't. It's been real rough. So, I think I have a bit of a 'fresh' perspective on how people view death and dying.
This is going to sound strange, but you know how to die. Some of my family has been lucky enough to pass with all their marbles in a 'comfortable' place. Their deaths seemed to have taken the same paths. It's as if the body knows what is coming and knows how to do it. It's not painless, by any means, but it's predictable. Food and water refusal, organ failure, death, those kids of things. It's not panicked; your loved ones sure are, but not you.
Also, your time here on Earth is very very short. With some family, we were lucky enough to have the time to play old VHS movies of old Christmases and other holidays. (ProTip: Take more pictures and movies of people you love) But it's just amazing to see how short it all is. Our lives are a flash, a few days of a few movies, a picture book, old baseball games, memories, nothing more. But, they really can't be more.
Pain is where most of my family took the dive. They could endure and hold on for a long time. But when the pain came, that was the end of the line. Have plans for when that happens.
One family member was obsessed with life extension and health. They forbid microwaves and cell phones near them. They kinda mostly ate supplements and nootropics and kale. They ran miles everyday. Lots of podcasts on life extension. Maybe they had a premonition, but cancer took them pretty quick and pretty young for nowadays. Again, life is short, eat the fries, or not. Just don't worry about death so much that you don't live and love.
You're remembered by your loved ones. One family member was very well regarded in their field. Lots of people came by to say their goodbyes. You may know a few of them as minor intellectual-ish celebrities. Now that they died, those people will talk to us and try to remember and commiserate. It's stunning to see how little they knew of them. You may have good work friends, but your true loved ones know you much better. Fortunately, you can have as many true loved ones as you'd like.
Get a death-doula. For those family members that passed in 'comfort', it was anything but. Your family has to take over your bodily functions for a lot longer than you'd think. And you are very heavy as nearly-dead weight. Just keeping your urine away from your skin and not making more open sores is really time consuming and difficult, let alone fecal matter, bed sores, etc. Sure, hospice says that they'll be by daily, but the realities of the staffing shortage can't be avoided these days. Pay someone to help out your family in helping you.
I know this is super jumbled and doesn't read well. Sorry about that.