Dissolution Foretold: A neurosurgeon on the reality of his diagnosis
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Short of achieving everlasting fame with no permanent decline, I grow more and more thankful everyday that I chose to have kids, so that I have the next closest thing to immortality.
There's no justice.
Even if you somehow achieve mega-fame it doesn't take, but 50-200 years for people to start really not caring. 1-4 generation, and a nanosecond in geological time (maybe a picosecond).
I do agree that death seems like an ideal one. I don't want to die slowly of a debilitating condition... on the other hand, there's some pluses to knowing you'll die and being able to prepare.
> Cerebrospinal fluid, known to doctors as CSF, as clear as liquid crystal, circulating through the strands of the arachnoid, flashes and glistens like silver in the microscope’s light. Through this I can see the smooth yellow surface of the brain itself, etched with minute red blood vessels–arterioles–which form beautiful branches like a river’s tributaries seen from space.
Previous HN discussion on that chapter here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9733730
I wish him well.
Once you start thinking just a little bit about this problem it becomes increasingly horrifying. If we cured aging today, how long before India or China enacts forced sterilization to prevent their populations from starving to death? How long before countries start to cull parts of the population? How could we possibly cope with Africa, where women have 5 kids in the hope one lives?
Famine like the world has never seen. Energy wars over the last scraps of land you can put solar on. Fresh water in the middle east would be unobtainable and spark some of the worst wars ever.
Then all the carbon emissions from an ever-larger population would destroy a climate that just barely survived the 2020s.
Curing aging creates a thousand times as many problems as it solves. Curing aging without already having a population control system in place globally could very easily destroy us.
I think we will eventually solve aging one way or another, but whether we can control the population of an entire planet I'm not so sure of.
And after all, wouldn't you like to keep your pet alive for a bit longer too?
Nothing close to the collective effort deployed for the Apollo program or the Manhattan project.
I think that we're simply collectively skeptical about the outcome, seems too far off, too big of a moonshot, and also the fear of death is pushing us to rationalize the situation and find solace in the status quo. (death is part of life, this is natural, god's plan or even that life would be boring without death...)
Right, but they haven't defeated aging yet, like we're talking about.
Defeating aging would be the most significant achievement in human history. But sure, let's worry about centuries old overpopulation concerns instead, despite having demonstrated them false continually.
Yes, a 2-3°C increase in earth's temperature would be an unbearable cost for DEFEATING AGING.
Aging and death are awful. Unavoidable, currently, and so must be acknowledged and prepared for, but still unspeakably destructive.
Discussing concerns and potential scenarios doesn't have to be viewed as decrying. I would argue it's a normal and healthy way of advancing science safely.
For whom? For the dying and aging sure. For the young who want to make space for themselves in the world and make their own mark, ageless elderly could be a sentence to a life not worth living. The ability to progress career wise and find good work could be stunted. Political and social change could be halted even more than it is today.
I’m not saying that we shouldn’t do it if we can, but one thing that is certain is that it’s going to drastically adjust human society in a very unequal way.
Our culture and technology are evolving as they are supported by language, but this is barely enough and from the societal organization (politics) we keep collectively falling in the same traps over and over.
Humanity could do with a bit more wisdom.
The whole society would change, including many roles and structures.
like the wisdom to know when to give way to a new generation?
You have to imagine a whole population with a biology locked at around 25 years old, with a very small minority of infants and teenagers, to stabilize population growth.
> Remember two things:
> 1) that everything has always been the same, and keeps recurring, and it makes no difference whether you see the same things recur in a hundred years or two hundred, or in an infinite period;
> 2) that the longest-lived and those who will die soonest lose the same thing. The present is all that they can give up, since that is all you have, and what you do not have, you cannot lose.
I have one to add, let's imagine that we science our way into living much longer - our bodies may continue to live, but what state will our minds maintain? Keeping a body alive by no means guarantees a healthy mind.
We might discover that despite the healthy condition of the human body, no sense of self is able to survive over a few hundreds years before losing coherency. Perhaps the human brain just wasn't designed to contain more than one lifetime. In such a scenario we would be sitting on a whole lot of perfectly healthy vegetables who will continue to live very long lives thereafter. I for one never want to live as a vegetable. My dad told me the same thing, if ever he's a vegetable then pull the plug. I would do that for him, and I hope someone would do it for me if the day came.
Not perfectly distributed, but largely available nonetheless.
Let's make it so everyone's body is 25 until they suddenly painlessly die around age 125 or so.
The solutions to the horrors of aging are psychological and social, not scientific, and entail coming to terms with your own mortality (life is fatal, your capacity will inevitably fade), and having mechanisms in place so that the elderly can live with dignity. Anything else seems like a sure path to dystopia.
An eternal Putin? A permanent Xi?
The only reason it is difficult to get rid of tyrants is because a large amount of people in their countries benefits from this arrangement.
I am saying that this particular problem is not related to the increase of life expectancy.
The fact that tyrants are dying of old age at some point does not solve anything, if they have support, they are replaced.
The Hitler issue would never be as easy as killing baby Hitler.
I agree that killing baby Hitler wouldn’t help, but that’s not what’s being discussed.
A stroke-free Stalin would have been an issue.
Extreme environments lead to extreme leaders. I’m not sure that giving unlimited time is a good idea, as that would seem likely to cement a situation permanently.
1) Instead of getting sick and feeble, enjoy your health until you've had enough, then take up free climbing or wing jumping, and enjoy that until you go out with a bang.
2) Save your money, and periodically take a sabbatical for a few years.
3) Find a job that doesn't seem worse than slowly falling apart until you die.
Dictators are only a problem because the population let them take power. They could not do anything or even stay in power without population consent, especially the aristocracy/priests caste of this particular society.
Dictators/Billionaires themselves are in practice only a very small part of our power distribution issues. (really the very visible but small tip of the proverbial iceberg)
Speaking of which, Medicare would save enormous amounts of money if it made anti-aging meds available to all of its recipients. Mass-market drugs aren't the most expensive ones, and anti-aging drugs would have to be pretty expensive to outpace heart surgery, cancer, and extended hospital stays. My mom for example cost Medicare a million dollars just for her last year. The government also pays a lot of nursing home expenses, which would also mostly go away.
Then there's retirement. The world is facing an enormous demographic crash, because it's been urbanizing and urban populations have fewer kids. Birth rates are below replacement rates, in some cases far below. China's is around one, and its population started shrinking last year. It's going to be harder for governments to pay for retirements from shrinking tax bases. If people were healthy enough to keep working, that problem goes away too.
Shrinking populations aren't great for economic growth either. Wealthy people tend to have a lot of money invested in stocks, and if they want them to keep going up, they'll support anti-aging for everyone.
There are some other reasons for them to support it too. One is that no anti-aging treatment will be perfect right out of the gate. The more people are using it, the quicker the problems will be found and fixed. If the elite keep it to themselves, they'll be the ones encountering all the problems.
And finally, if you're not aging then accidents and violence are much more prominent risks of death, percentage-wise. Having anti-aging tech and not sharing sounds like a great way to get yourself killed by the envious masses.
The world will need to learn to deal with shrinking populations at some point. Economic growth is not, in my opinion, a particularly compelling argument. All systems have physical limits, and the extensive collapse of the biosphere suggests that our level of population and economic growth are both unsustainable. Aside from the cultural stagnation that an immortal aristocracy would represent, it would be an absolute disaster for the planet.
As for the wealthy sharing for their own benefit: when has that happened in history, ever? Extraction continues until the peasants storm the gates. In the short term, it's cheaper to invest in better security.
Is the solution to losing short range vision in your 40s philosophizing about how literature is best left to the young, or getting reading glasses?
Anything else seems like a sure path to dystopia.
Are you opposed to researching cures for cancer or Alzheimer's? What about preventing heart disease and strokes? What about treatments to help older people preserve their mobility and short term memory? At what point does allowing people to retain their physical and mental health become a dystopia?
Stopping senescence will not be something that is equitably distributed, because modern medicine already has those same issues. There's a certain comfort and equality in knowing that everyone gets old, and everyone dies, no ifs or buts. This ride only has one exit, and you have a finite amount of time to make the most of it.
Death and aging sucks; and that is fine. It is part of being alive. The utter fear of death many of us harbour inside is a strong force that manifests itself in many beautiful forms.
I am terribly afraid of death, yet I would not choose to upload my consciousness to a machine. I would not put myself in suspended animation. I would not like to live 300 years either. There is deep comfort in knowing that my days on this planet are limited and life is short. Better get a move on.
That's understandable. I'm concerned for my loved ones and the impact it may have on them when I go, but I have no fear of death for myself. I have no memory of the millions of years that passed before I was born and expect to have no memory, feelings or consciousness after I have died. I just won't be here any more and that's perfectly okay.
If you want to reduce the effects of aging we already know how to do that though physical activity, proper diet, sleep hygiene, toxin avoidance, etc. Most people don't care enough about aging to optimize those factors.
But living much longer is definitely something to be desired, and I don't see why people have a problem with it.
Imagine having a young body into your 100s. People do change their mind with experience and age, mostly for the better, so I think it will be a net good thing. Having a long time at your physical best would allow the world to benefit more from the experience, wisdom, and skills acquired.
The human spirit is young and deserves a body that does not age.. Aging is an affront to it. It is a disease that we have a moral imperative to eradicate.
Evolution is inherent to the universe, and our spirit yearns for it.
It is not. Change and entropy is. And what is more change than death and dissolution of your physical body?
Life is anti-entropic, and acts in the opposite direction than the universe itself. But eventually entropy has to win, for it is the universal law.
Entropy decreases in lifeforms and increases in the universe. The former process helps to accelerate the universal rise of entropy, so is entirely consistent with the universe.
In the end, according to our current understanding, yes, entropy rises until it consumes all energy, and no more life is possible, but that is many trillions of years in the future, and until that time, the nature of the universe is to create ever more sophisticated life.
What you ascribe to universe, I ascribe to nature, as seen on Earth and, as far as we know, nowhere else in the universe.
The universe doesn't evolve. The universe doesn't create sophisticated life. It just is, and changes, and moves toward entropy. Nature is just a very small and very young system within that, by pure chance or other unknown factors, has managed to move a little upstream.
There is good indication that evolution began long before the Earth, and the classical life on it, emerged:
https://www.technologyreview.com/2013/04/15/113741/moores-la...
But you're assuming a state of affairs that we dare not even dream about yet, and spending it all on your hobby horse. There are other, more urgent needs, right now, on this planet. We should not allocate resources to the whimsical needs of a hedonistic few.
All humans on Earth could fit in a city with NYC's population density covering an area the size of Texas, which is only 0.48% of the Earth's land area. We could massively increase living space on a given area of land by building vertically as well.
And outside of Earth, in the rest of the solar system, I think you don't understand how much space and matter there is.
In terms of energy, I suggest this:
https://planetocracy.substack.com/p/space-for-8-billion-peop...
>>For each photon of light that strikes the Earth from the Sun, around two billion miss it. Say that, using the materials of the solar system, we can practically harvest only 1/1000th of that solar output. That would still leave an opportunity to increase our energy budget as a civilisation by a factor of 2,000,000 - a population of 16 trillion each consuming 1000 times as much energy as the average person on Earth does. That figure includes the energy required to power the biospheres on which they depend. Once seeded with payloads from Earth, further growth in the solar system would not have an impact on the Earth’s biosphere at all. There would no longer be a conflict between human and environmental needs. We could allow the population to rise, fall, or remain steady as we wished based purely on social preference, not under a perceived or real physical constraint.
And an upper limit of harvesting only a thousandths of the sun's energy is extremely conservative.
>>We should not allocate resources to the whimsical needs of a hedonistic few.
1. Wanting to live is not hedonism. It is the most basic human drive, and it should not be stigmatized out of an unrealistically pessimistic assessment of humanity's potential combined with a misapprehension that life and prosperity are zero sum, and thus wanting more of them for one's self is immoral.
2. Solving aging is a need for all humanity, not just a few. Almost all medical expenses essentially go to forestalling its effects.
Life itself is not aging. Sexual reproduction manages to regularly reset the aging clock by building a new organism from already existing cells, there is no discontinuity in life.
At some point, the mother and her child are the same organism.
Biology is already immortal, but the resetting process is quite lossy.
I am pretty sure that at some point our biology can be hacked to perpetually rejuvenate, in this case our bodies would look like 25 years old, not centenarians.
-- unknown poet on a card my wife was given by a friend