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Comment by epicureanideal | Hacker News Reader

I'm absolutely shocked that more money and time is not spent researching how to cure death by aging. (Note that for those who discuss this semi-regularly, that's understood to be very different than seeking a cure for any particular age related disease, which usually we attempt to address when it's too late.). There are groups like https://www.levf.org/ doing some early work like Robust Mouse Rejuvenation (in mid-life for mice) to try to figure out how to help us all live much longer. https://www.levf.org/projects/robust-mouse-rejuvenation-stud...

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> I'm absolutely shocked that more money and time is not spent researching how to cure death by aging.

Faced with their own mortality, a bunch of aging billionaires and multimillionaires tend to pour money into longevity research. I'd be very upset if governments increased spending on fighting senescence today, instead of lower-hanging fruit .

When Elon was asked why longetivity research didn't pick his interest as worthy of an investment, he said:

>It is important for us to die because most of the time people don't change their mind, they just die. If you live forever, we might become a very ossified society where new ideas cannot succeed.

The opposite could also be true though. Longer lifespans permit more people gaining education, working more years, saving more money with a longer term vision, and rising to be a new economic upper class. Short lifespans make that a very difficult to coordinate multi generational project.

There are also solutions like term limits, or generational tenure limits or something that could help reduce any negative effects without needing to continue unnecessary loss of life.

Or alternatively, a stratum of leadership class who actually worry about problems coming 100 years down the line because they fully expect to be effected by them.

I'm all for longetivity, but I admit what he said has substance.

It's not (only) about old people having short term vision/not enough time for reeducation.

25 or 30 year old people are already very often set in stone and unable to change their views and they have most of their life ahead of them.

Why not die at 30 then in the spirit of societal progress?

This argument is philosophical i.e. worthless. We will actually have to win with death to answer the question if it's good or not. It's not something you can figure out without doing it.

Raising children (and later, grandchildren) is the obvious answer.

Why not grand-grand-children? Current point looks like optimum, but it's really arbitrary and imposed only by external constraint of length of human life.

Well, Elon is working on building tunnels and (maze) cars, I guess if Mars doesn't work out, we can have Logan's Run.

We could have blinking red lights in our palms for that occasion

I generally agree with you, except for the view on class mobility. If we defeat aging altogether, I strongly suspect society to stratify aggressively between those that can afford it and those who can't, and worse, a class of immortal wealth to form. Today, maintaining generational wealth requires A) balancing relatively small family sizes to keep the exponential growth of family members relatively inline with the exponential growth of well-managed wealth against dying off because no one had kids and B) a mostly continuous line of responsible investors. In a future where dying of old age isn't a problem, A becomes much easier and B) is eliminated entirely. It's all the problems of generational wealth with none of the saving graces.

On the whole I think it's worth it, but it will definitely exasperate the problems already inherent to our economic system.

Max Planck said that science advances one funeral at a time

There’s always a tweet

I'd argue he doesn't care about ageing because he's 51.

What till he's 75 and see if he still holds that view.

Maybe old people living longer would make us finally create some mechanisms of power rotation instead of just patiently waiting for old power to die.

Mechanism that could be applied way earlier than old ossified out of touch rulers die now. And applied more merit based.

Why would we make such a mechanism instead of the currently entrenched powers just further solidifying their hold on society?

Out of necessity? I know we live in times when elites seem secure. But it wasn't always so and it won't be always so.

It is so right now only because of how good modern common people have. But it's going away now. And if security of elites depend of well being of others it's sort of self-regulating system albeit way too slowly.

There's also pressure from the other side. The longer living elites means it will get crowded at the top, so elites might be open to some means of culling their numbers.

This wisdom was already the topic of cartoons, books and movies 30+ years ago. If you attach 'Elon Musk' to a quote it immediately becomes relevant to some gullible people, it's truly amazing.

To add some good mood, I stole a comment from reddit [1] which describes one of millions of media dealing with this question:

> In The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy series, immortality is fine if you're born that way. It's only if you accidentally obtain it after an accident with a few rubber bands, a liquid lunch, and a particle accelerator is it a bad thing that you are not equipped to deal with and so decide to insult everyone in the universe in alphabetical order.

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/books/comments/tpzb4e/immortality_i...

1. The statement you quote is not the same idea.

2. Even if it was, it doesn't make the "wisdom" any less relevant. There's no shortage of relevant wisdom in Douglas Adams' writing.

3. I intentionally quoted Elon specifically, because it is a relevant reply to the parent comment about billionaires pouring money to longevity research.

It'll be interesting to see if he holds that view over the longer term.

Wonder how long he'll stick to that line. I can almost see that Twitter poll he'd currently use to rationalize the change of mind: "Should I try to not die? [ ] yes [ ] no"

But for the time being, nice to see him stating something I don't disagree with.

I'm just confused about why he didn't followed his train of thought further (i.e. first principles thinking) on that. As I see it, people don't change their mind mainly for two reasons. One is that no compelling new information reaches them, and the other is that as people age, they have to be more conservative on their own diminishing energy, which affects them in multiple ways (avoiding the challenge of their current beliefs, which can be tiresome and not that necessary compared to someone younger that has to find out more about the world in order to grow and gain competence; or increasingly limiting the circle of people that is one's idea exchange medium, which can devolve into something where politeness becomes more important than other things; etc.), then there is just the custom of leaving the elderly be as their change is not worth the cost. (On the last one it's not only the elderly, as many aspects that people give up on attempts to "fix" each other starting from much earlier ages.) Now, if only that aging and age related energy decay could be solved, there would be an entirely new game, looking for a new homeostasis! ...or maybe one has to be young enough to be curious enough about something like this?

I hope he changes his mind about Twitter soon

This conversation reminds me of "The Elflord and the Mayfly":

https://existentialcomics.com/comic/353

What lower hanging fruit are governments currently spending on? Giant militaries? Healthcare for those last few months of life?

Comprehensive worldwide healthcare plan to successfully fight pandemic events comes to my mind.

PS: Oh sorry I understood that as a question of what would be useful, not what is actually spent.

You were on the right track: I'm gp, and I meant there are other lower-hanging fruit that government ought to tackle ahead of senescence.

Why do you think all countries and their citizens would want you to impose your healthcare system on them?

> What lower hanging fruit are governments currently spending on?

I meant what lower hanging fruits governments ought to spend on. However, since you asked, here are some of the things governments are currently spending on, but could bear improvement: eradicating preventable diseases, ensuring kids get good nutrition, better tracking, and hopefully prevention of e. coli/salmonella outbreaks, funding basic research into improving outcomes for patients, reducing profiteering off the products of publicly-funded research, medical pricing transparency, better organ donor policies (universal opt-out)

This is a (common) fallacy that could be applied to any funding or focus decision. It reduces to "Why focus on X when Y is more important?". You could use your same examples here as an argument for why not to support space exploration, or environmental conservation, for example.

Government budgets are finite: prioritization is not a fallacy but comes built-in, as anyone who has written a grant application knows.

We have a whole host of societal functions that are not geared to cope with longevity: including social security plus the associated tax-rates

I don't follow your social security point; could you please explain? Thank you.

Medical & aged care social security costs are tied to deaths of recipients: the bigger the delta between retirement and death,the greater the cost. If the average lifespan grows rapidly, current social security funding will become insolvent, requiring taxes to be raised and/or retirement age to bw raided to leep the current average delta: neither option will be popular with the electorate.

I think you misunderstand the intent behind longevity research and goals: It's to eliminate the senescence period, or to slow everything down if unable to achieve that.

You only need social security if you’re unable to work. If we increase healthspan to the point that you can maintain the physical condition of a 30 year old indefinitely then you are able to pull your own weight.

Do you think you could work for 200 years straight? I suspect that'd be disastrous to mental health. Society will need to figure out PTO under the new regime as well, or additional research will need to be undertaken just so our minds can keep up with our foerever-young bodies.

Those things are nice, but individually they each only have an expected value of maybe a couple of extra years of living time. Contrast that to curing ageing that would put that number in the hundreds or thousands.

Contrast that to mind uploads and humans become practically immortal with an infinite expected value - but I don't want the governments spending any money on that either at this point in time, before the human race addresses certain structural issues.

Honestly I'm not sure those numbers are compelling enough.

We, like, know how to solve some of those other problems. Sure, there's politics and bureaucracy and complications and the opportunity for corruption, but you can assign a p close to 1 we could get it done in an arbitrary timeframe.

Meanwhile, what's the probability that dumping a particular amount of money into aging is going to pay off? Even taking a thousand years you need a p>0.002 to make it worth diverting money from the safe bet of getting a couple of years off the other things.

Curing age related diseases is permanent fix, and makes curing any low hanging fruits trivial.

Not sure about anyone else but if I was a billionaire researching it I certainly wouldn’t tell anyone if possible.

Seems like some are fairly open about it. I recall hearing about some trying blood transfusions for example.

One shouldn't put money into "curing death by aging" without fixing society first; while birth rates exceed death rates, the world fills up and drains natural resources etc etc. There's a ton of problems that need resolving if living longer is to be a thing.

If aging is cured then the elderly could be fully productive.

At the cost of less elderly who'll miss out on being reproductive die to all the spots already being taken. Achieving immortality would be robbing from your descendants what your ancestors bestowed.

I was responding to a specific point to which your response seems irrelevant.

If my kids, or their kids, or their kids, etc. ever wanted me to die in order to "bestow" them with something...well, too bad. I wish my grandparents, and their parents, etc. were alive today.

Space on earth is finite. And even if add more hypotheticals like us becoming an interstellar species (actually I'd wager that's less unlikely than overcoming aging), in absence of aging exponential breeding would eventually outpace even the fastest space frontier colonization imaginable.

Yeah, and if you go from 100 year lifespan to 300 years and survive the societal collapse, would you be happy then? What about in 300 years?

Eventually all the atoms we know and love will decay and "disappear."

Give me a few million years of life and I'll still have billions more to think about what to do in the event of a heat death of the universe.

About that exponential breeding thing, I’ve got some bad news. You’d better sit down…

Here's a little thought experiment: when a company has layoffs, do more young people or more old people get the axe?

If we get to a place where people can live healthy lives until they are 300 years old, why do you think someone who finished college 40 years ago will be more valuable for a company than a fresh graduate? Because nowadays we have exactly this setup minus the 300 year lifespan, and often times the company is happy to let go of the senior guy.

Not aging is not the same as being invincible. There would still be turn over. You can also legislate things like mandatory retirement from a position so that others get a chance to move up. The legal aspects of longevity are easy to solve compared to the task of curing aging.

So the solution is to have the equivalent of a mass genocide in old people? I would much, much, much rather be alive in a fucked up world than dead in a nice world.

> I would much, much, much rather be alive in a fucked up world than dead in a nice world.

You don't know that. You think that is the case, but (I) you don't know what death is like, so you cannot realistically claim it is worse than anything (II) until you qualify 'fucked up' then this is a pointless claim, since your version of 'fucked up' may not be that bad compared to what is in the realm of possibility.

Death is worse, we do know that - outside of religious afterlifes, having continued brain patterns is preferable to non-existence.

It's incredibly more likely that continued existence will be no worse than the world today, which is quite nice. Even if it becomes torturous existence beats non-existence.

Basically all developed countries already have birth rates below the replacement rate. In the US each women on average gives birth to 1.64 children, in Germany there it's 1.5 per women, in Japan 1.33 and in Korea 0.84. To keep population constant without immigration, the average women would have to give birth to slightly above 2 children.

The only reason population numbers aren't collapsing is immigration, but that comes with its own issues. Extending live expectency and productive lifetime isn't that crazy (if we can get a handle on our rising living standards and resource consumption).

https://data.oecd.org/pop/fertility-rates.htm

The bigger issue isn't population here but rather than if older folks live not simply longer but more productive lives that those in the top tiers will always be seen as more valuable therefore more employable. We're not just taking 1%ers here, we're talking the top 20% of folks becoming a permanent worker's aristocracy that gets to lord over the youngin's forever. I don't like the prospect of that being 42 myself. It just means that younger folks will always be poor, shutout, and forever at the margins of such a hypothetical society. Life extension in this context should only be allowed if we break down the barriers of a potential gerontocracy.

Law generally follows technological advancement, if you try to do it the other way you’ll end up passing laws for things that will never happen.

The main reason to attempt to stop aging is to prevent other illnesses from taking effect.

People who are physically young are at a much lower risk of cancer, cardiovascular disease, Type II diabetes/Alzheimer's, etc. Stopping/reversing the aging process kind of fixes the root cause of a lot of those diseases.

We're probably not far off from that reality, either. Then we move onto more controversial questions, e.g. Do physically healthy people have the right to end their own lives? Not everyone want to live to be 300 years old, especially those who have lost most of their family and friends over those years.

I've never understood the "not wanting to live 300 years" sentiment.

I've experienced extreme loss, but continue to expreience new connections, knowledge, etc. There's simply no small limit to what a human can experience, and hundreds of years is paltry compared to when it would take to even be on the verge of boredom/emptiness, if such a verge could actually ever be reached.

Aubrey de Grey is the only person I'm aware of who seems to be considering the disease of aging seriously and passionately. He seems to be single handedly pushing the issue forward with multiple foundations and papers.

I suppose there are others but like you I don't understand why there isn't more focus and media attention on the root causes of aging, the ultimate killer.

There are now plenty of scientists pushing for aging to be classified as a disease, rather an inevitability. It is becoming much more mainstream and has seen lots of money flowing to it.

A recent article mentioned how leprosy can regenerate livers or maybe other organs, nerves, vessels etc. It does it so it can infect it again. Pretty close to human regeneration if the kinks are worked out.

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-63626239

There's a decent amount of research but it's hard!

Most of it is on fruit flies and mice then takes a life time to test on humans!

What we do know is that being fit and exercising with some semblance of healthy eating helps people live a lot longer. But no one wants to do it.

> What we do know is that being fit and exercising with some semblance of healthy eating helps people live a lot longer.

No, abstaining from things like alcohol and smoking mostly does that.

Exercise and healthy eating markedly improves quality of life at old age, but it doesn’t extend it by huge amounts.

See people don't want to even believe healthy eating and exercise long life expectancy!

For what it's worth obesity accounts for about 5-10 year shortening. Not dissimilar to smoking.

Obesity is something else than median ( = control group) living.

Sport is good for you. Extreme sports markedly cuts short average life expectancy and late quality of life. With your logic, that makes sports bad.

Edit: actually, I guess it depends on where you live. In America, obesity probably is the median..

I'm not trying to invent some new science here. Just what I've read in journals.[0]

There is this weird defense of obesity and being sedentary in western culture it's just inexplicable.

Interestingly we've just had the first case of manslaughter by obesity trial going on in the UK [1]. The mum has admitted manslaughter the dad is going to trial. Over death of their 16yo girl.

[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41366-018-0210-2

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-64045049.amp

Also comparing exercise to extreme sports is a bit absurd.

That was the entire point..

You’re either misreading or strawmanning. I’m not defending obesity. I’m saying a person living a what one would consider ‘neutral’ lifestyle will not live massive amounts shorter than someone living very healthy. They’ll just have a much lower quality of life the last 15-20 years.

Yeah, I'd just rather have medicine make my finite life less painful thanks without the need for opioids (not saying being a bit stone is bad, just that too much will make life not worth living). Like being able to still walk around without a cane and clean and dress myself by the end would be nice. Not asking for olympic athlete level capability, just decent mobility with not much pain or senility.

That’s actually the point of most longevity research. Figuring out how to keep people healthy for as long as possible. That may eventually lead to effective immortality but the first step is the prevent senescence.

I would actively pay to fight such a movement. The world is full, yes it can be fuller but we are seriously cracking whole ecosystem and one of main reason is simply the amount of people living on this planet. If you prolong life say 2x it means Earth has 2x the population long term just due to this. Lets focus on serious issues hindering our growth as a race and not some vanity fears of few rich and powerful who think they are oh-so-special while they are not.

Death is good on so many levels - equalizer that removes most horrible tyrants like Stalin who would easily burn whole world just to be immortal and stay on top. If you are a normal decent person you can't even comprehend mindset of such sociopaths and their eternal greed. Don't think there are few people like that in a generation, rather few millions, just with fewer options.

Death also makes whole nations eventually forget wrongs on the past, otherwise we would still be hating mongols and huns and romans and swedes and british and slavers and germans as nazis etc. If for nothing else, just to remove threat of semi-eternal planetary dictator death is great.

My grandparents from my dads side both died few months ago aged 94 and 95. They saw all their friends, neighbors and colleagues die decades ago, and they were witnessing same starting to happen to kids of those close people. They were both depressed from this, gradual loss of everything that has any long term meaning plus decline of everything health-related. It sucks to be the last living guy from say group of friends, you think you would find tons of solace in the fact you are still alive but thats not how reality on the ground looks like. People just wait for death to come and many prefer it comes soon.

You cite "Stalin bad" but Stalin only killed about 40,000/week for 30 years. You're talking of personally paying to support the deaths of everyone at the current world-wide all-cause death rate of 1,000,000/week, forever. Surely in some way that makes your plans infinitely worse than Stalin's? Imagine all the wailing and gnashing of teeth, all the veil of mourning and tears, the darkness your plans will cloud the surface of the Earth with. All the sobbing parents, grieving siblings, depressed grandparents and grandchildren.

All because you don't want to bother inventing an orbital ring or an arcology tower or society where suicide by choice is the accepted way out.

> "removes most horrible tyrants like Stalin"

"we" could still kill him; immortal or ageless doesn't necessarily mean invincible.

Exactly - this obsession with planets it toxic, you see it all the time. People just consider Earth as the only available finite resource and thus take some problems as unsolvable and a lot of suffering as normal and unavoidable.

All the while the are almost endless resources and options how to solve these issues waiting in the solar system!

Its like hauling old people to the mountains to die because your village can't support them. We got over that & we should should get over our current terrestrial problems as well by moving on and expanding out of our cradle.

The energy needed to move millions to a different planet is enormous with current physics. So, until you solve that, the obsession with Earth is not toxic, it's realistic.

It's not enormous, it's just significant compared to our current production/use, but here's the good news: there's more than enough energy for that available off planet. There's absurd amounts of energy available everywhere around us.

Consider: it seems that we should be able to support a technological civilization of billions of people on renewable energy alone. That means literally on a fraction of the sunlight that Earth captures. Now, Sun isn't focusing on Earth, it's an omnidirectional emitter. Which means there's some 74 000 times more energy than Earth is receiving from the Sun available just in Earth's orbital band alone.

Fortunately, space-related energy problems seem like they'll be solving themselves, in lock step with increased space capabilities.

The Sun radiates about 400 trillion trillion Watts in all directions, and only a couple of billionths of it crosses Earth. There's a lot more radiant energy spreading out into the void waiting to be Dyson Swarmed.

There's no way we're going to rocket launch billions to Mars, and there isn't another planet worth living on without unreasonable amounts of energy for Terraforming. But we are capable of rebuilding the atoms of Earth into much larger living environments - there are so many atoms it wouldn't mean destroying the Earth to do it. A Space Elevator doesn't need diamond nanowire, it could be built with enough steel chain. An orbital ring around the Equator would be enormous and would take approximately nothing of the Earth's matter to construct.

Isaac Arthur's YouTube channel is full of speculation and plans for all kinds of possible or nearly-possible futures, as well as more distant dreams. e.g. the playlists:

- "The future of Energy, Industry and Agriculture" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChTJHEdf6yM&list=PLIIOUpOge0...

- "Earth v2.0" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6mRjsxQQJE&list=PLIIOUpOge0...

- "Outward Bound" - near-Earth space exploration and living - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmFOBoy2MZ8&list=PLIIOUpOge0...

- "Visions of Earth" - arcologies, megacities, ecumenopolises, geoengineering, weather control - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqKQ94DtS54&list=PLIIOUpOge0...

And somewhere in there, megastructures such as Dyson Spheres, ringworlds, etc.

> You cite "Stalin bad" but Stalin only killed about 40,000/week for 30 years.

Also, since death is apparently good then Stalin was not bad? Right?

He was just clearing the way for the new generation of communist youth.

You should check out Hans Rosling's talk on overpopulation.

This is what being a supervillain feels like from the inside.

Imagine if they succeeded. Instant breakdown of society. So by induction, perhaps someone makes sure they don't.

> So by induction, perhaps someone makes sure they don't.

Yikes! That's a scary conspiracy theory!

(Note that I don't agree it would cause a breakdown in society.)

It doesn't seem to be happening that way. Current research doesn't seem to aim at indefinite life extension but at some decades more of healthy life. The current goal of most companies and foundations is to make 90 the new 50. So it seems that it will happen gradually.

> Imagine if they succeeded. Instant breakdown of society. So by induction, perhaps someone makes sure they don't.

My comment comes across as semantic nitpicking, but I don't mean it that way; I just think I'm not understanding what you mean by reasoning "by induction" here.

I am a mathematician, so am most familiar with induction in its technical mathematical sense, which I assume isn't what you mean. More generally, my dictionary says that induction is "the inference of a general law from particular instances". For that to be what you mean here, you would need to infer that "someone makes sure they don't" (meaning, I assume, "they don't succeed in curing death by aging") in general from the fact that someone has done so in particular cases. Is that what you meant? If so, who and when? Or is my dictionary wrong, or are you using some other sense of 'induction'?

If you replace "induction" with "implication" then the comment is probably closer to what the poster meant.

You are correct; I have ESL'd a malformed meaning, I admit.

Society won't break down. Societies of the high longevity future are almost certain to look back at the current age and balk in confusion at the number of people afraid of living longer the same way we balk at things like human sacrifice.

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