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Comment by yreg | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

https://existentialcomics.com/comic/353

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

There’s always a tweet

I hope he changes his mind about Twitter soon

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