Comment by rolenthedeep | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rolenthedeep | Hacker News Reader

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Hesitant agree, but we must also keep the opposite side of the coin in mind. Any meaningful cure for aging would be suicide of the species unless we also have birth control figured out and in place everywhere. We'd need massive programs to control the size of a population that doesn't age and die.

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.

Is there any advancement people won't decry?

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.

> Is there any advancement people won't decry? 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.

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.

> Aging and death are awful.

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.

It is also awful at the civilization level. There is a huge amount of knowledge loss occurring every generation.

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.

> Humanity could do with a bit more wisdom.

like the wisdom to know when to give way to a new generation?

If you imagine a reality where humans only die because of accident/homicide/suicide, the necessity for generational replacement would be a moot point.

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.

> Even if you’re going to live three thousand more years, or ten times that, remember: you cannot lose another life than the one you’re living now, or live another one than the one you’re losing. The longest amounts to the same as the shortest. The present is the same for everyone; its loss is the same for everyone; and it should be clear that a brief instant is all that is lost. For you can’t lose either the past or the future; how could you lose what you don’t have?

> 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.

If there were no deaths the knowledge would be in stasis due to the nature of what gets funded and the power structure inherent under limited resources.

I think this can be debated, but I am not as pessimist. In any case, the whole dynamic is hard to predict.

The whole society would change, including many roles and structures.

Check out Max Planck's principle of "Science progresses one funeral at a time"

What wisdom? On average I haven't found any particular correlation between age and wisdom. In fact, most of the advice I have received from elderly people was worse than useless.

Another aspect here is that there will be no change or evolution in society if no one dies from old age. Everything will be controlled by grumpy old men! They will look like they are 25, but the mindsets will be ossified.

Let's make it so everyone's body is 25 until they suddenly painlessly die around age 125 or so.

A cure for aging, would, of course, not be shared equally across the globe. It would be monopolized by the very rich, who would establish a permanent aristocracy. Cultural attitudes would be frozen in time. It would be a hellscape for everyone except the very top.

Why would it be different for aging that any other medicine?

Not perfectly distributed, but largely available nonetheless.

Because immortality is different than health-span…

Rich people aren't rich enough to do that. That's just not enough customers.

How much would Warren Buffett pay to be 20 years old again?

The revealed preferences aren't promising, considering his unhealthy diet.

Not sure why you've been downvoted, because you bring up valid points.

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.

People don't like facing up to the negative consequences of new technologies. It forces them to consider the wild concept of "other people"

I think this is extraordinarily pessimistic and Malthusian. These problems are easily solved and the benefit of having all this human wisdom around would help solve them. Indeed the most advanced populations in the West and Asia are already in decline.

Regardless of if the problems should/could be solved it seems like people will continue to work towards living forever. It just seems like enough humans share the desire to make it happen eventually.

And after all, wouldn't you like to keep your pet alive for a bit longer too?

Strangely enough, the desire to live forever is shared by many, but the actual research has been rather anemic compared to almost everything else.

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...)

> Indeed the most advanced populations in the West and Asia are already in decline.

Right, but they haven't defeated aging yet, like we're talking about.

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