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Comment by Cthulhu_ | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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 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.

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.

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.

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