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Comment by solveit | Hacker News Reader

Imagine that the status quo was that everyone lived forever. If someone suggested that we should kill literally everyone to solve overpopulation or rich people or meaning of life or whatever, they would rightly be called batshit insane.

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I think this is the appropriate framing.

The problems that would arise as a result of a “cure for aging” should result in societal decisions that fix existing problems we just push to the side because death kind of solves them.

Sadly I’m not sure I’m convinced that a need for a solution generates one. See Covid response or climate change.

People often do learn their lesson. The problem is that they then die and a new generation makes all the same mistakes again.

Making people like forever would automatically incentivise people to solve a whole host of problems.

The young care more about the future because they worry how emerging problems may affect them, and death is distant and abstract. Whereas older people feel their mortality more concretely, and wonder how they extract as much in the time they have left.

Also as you grow older the number of viable paths the keep life looking worthwhile really shrinks because there's so much less opportunity. If you're 50 and your retirement is entirely reliant on housing being wildly unaffordable most people will fight to keep housing unaffordable because the personal cost is too high (e.g. dying poor).

In your 20s or early 30s financial shocks are generally a lot less scary because you can still pivot, life will just be a little tougher for a while. At 60, it's usually utterly terrifying.

Your second paragraph is just wrong in my experience. You are seeing the protracted childhood extend into your 30's for a large subset of millenials now. I don't see any way living forever will make someone going through their 20's and 30's care about the future if they don't have a personality already prone to that. It seems far more likely this protracted childhood without many cares extending out further and further is far more likely. Also old people aren't sitting around wondering how to extract more. They are generally sitting around thinking about how their money can continue pushing the world in the direction they want after they are gone. You may have observation bias because you only see old people in high positions that didn't tap out at some earlier point where their lust was satiated and they moved on to doing something else (of which there will be far more of than those that got to those high positions just by nature of the math of old people vs % of positions that are "high").

I think the only thing that will happen for sure if we make people live forever is stagnation as all the people who feel strongly about something that is wrong don't die off and instead accumulate, likely filling up good positions in society that otherwise would have gone to a younger, more dynamic up and coming person.

Would enough people die in accidents? Also heart attacks and cancer. And how would it work? Some drug you take after a certain age?

Aging is not solved unless cancer is solved. Youre guaranteed to getcancer if you live long enough.

Ageing and cancer are correlated but I don't think ageing alone causes cancer. You could be very old, alive and full of cancer. Hela cells for example.

The way I interpret agelessness is that your body would be capable of maintaining homeostasis over indefinite periods of time. Internally caused disease would need to cease to exist (cancer, heart disease, dementia etc.). Essentially your body would be indistinguishable medically speaking, year to year, decade to decade. Of course extreme external factors could still kill you. Trauma, Infectious diseases etc.

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