I have to say, it's annoying to have been born before radical life-extending technology becomes available, but late enough in the timeline to consider it an actual possibility.
TL;DR these aren’t mutually exclusive and are synergistic approaches
I think immortality would be bad for humanity, but ~40 more productive years would be beneficial. Currently we take 25 years of preparation in order to work 35.
I can go into a longer diatribe here, but the short story is:
1) Most people have a hard time finding jobs at any age. Recent college grads can't all be wrong. :)
2) There is always a strong reversion to mean
3) Most of the people in their 50s or 60s whom I hear complaining were an outlier for employability for their age group in their 20s and 30s (e.g. straight out of Stanford).
Most older people I know are /very/ employable, and don't complain. Another pathway:
- Finish a state college. Have a very hard time finding a first job.
- Work up the career ladder, and build up a resume, reputation, and track record.
- Much easier time finding jobs in their 50s and 60s than straight out of college or early career.
Some of this also has to do with bust/boom cycles. People who entered the workforce during recessions had a hard time finding a job in their 20s, and then found things comparatively easy. People who entered during a boom cycle are the opposite.
Ageism might still exist but significantly pushed back.
A lot of life now is ordained on the idea that we don’t live forever and we can’t see change in our lifetimes… but if the lifetime is forever - well, I’m gonna fight to make it better immediately cause then I have forever to enjoy it.
Where I live, no one struggles to buy insulin. And if there is any kind of anti-aging treatment available, I don't doubt it will be offered to the general population without much ado. Compared to the rising cost of the pension systems in aging populations, treatments like that would be probably "dirt cheap".
When anti-aging becomes real rather than fantasy, there are going to be so many mutually incompatible conspiracy theories.
You're assuming the rich are rational. The billionaires on the OceanGate Titan didn't think this way; they were perfectly happy to beta-test a shoddily-designed sub.
(The recent explosion was such a test).
(And that sub had apparently been to depth before? I didn't follow the details…)
I think the OceanGate disaster just shows that billionaires aren't any smarter or more rational than the rest of us.
Also I don't see what would be to gain to not do it for those in power.
I’m sure a lot of people would defend the arrangement. “Of course Elon Musk can have inmortality and you don’t. He’s a genius”.
Don't judge the prospects of the entire humanity by the pathology that is called the US healthcare system.
Bezos would be the guy, spending billions on Altos Labs.
https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html
Based on the rates of various types of accidental deaths, you could extend that quite a bit by avoiding dangerous drugs and and living in an area where you're unlikely to get shot. If we figure out really safe self-driving cars, that'll make a big difference too. In much of Europe you can already get the same effect by taking public transport everywhere. Air travel is quite unlikely to kill you.
https://www.iii.org/fact-statistic/facts-statistics-mortalit...
Put all that together and a 10,000-year expected lifespan looks pretty achievable.
In addition some cells reproduce only a few times, often only during youth.
And there is sometimes involution like in thymus.
No some cells never reproduce, for example motor neurons.
> "I imagine that if aging can be reversed new cell growth could also be stimulated."
I have a hard time to imagine how to replace a up to one meter/yard long cell with sometimes hundred of synapses which is surrounded by cells such as astroglia and microglia that are equally important.
[0] Cancelling the subscription may result in accelerated aging and immediate organ and heart failure.
Neither of these were based on the scientific method, a proven process for discovery and knowledge refinement.
We all know this, but it is worth bringing it up on a regular basis.
So anyway "animal models" just means "an animal mice/rats/monkeys/etc. that we have decided has enough of the same symptoms of the human disease that we can use it to study treatments of that disease", and it's fairly common for something to work in mice but fail in monkeys, or even to work in both mice and monkeys but not work or have very undesirable side-effects in humans. (side note: one of the least discussed things in pharma is how they source the first humans for trialling a new treatment, which does carry non-trivial risk to the human "guinea pigs" - it's generally people who are poor and desperate.)
1 https://embryo.asu.edu/pages/studies-thalidomides-effects-ro...
I think age extension is likely possible, and that it will require continual rewriting of the human genome to regress cellular aging, fight cancer, and repair damage to the brain and vascular systems - and all other organs, really. It will require a stupendous technological investment and infrastructure and require much better knowledge of the human brain and cognition than we have today. Certainly nowhere in the next 100 years, we do not even know the causes of or have effective treatments for common forms of dementia, and our cancer treatments are frankly barbaric.
I think I'll drink beer again someday but the increased memory has really made me question whether I actually will if presented with it.
Not sure if you drink or not but if you do, I'd recommend trying it. For me it was an unexpected benefit.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1040079/life-expectancy-...
I don't know if they'd live as long as people today but I'd be surprised if many didn't at least go till at least 70+?
Medieval European burials at least tend to cluster way lower than that. In the Dark Ages, skeletons of people older than 60 are rather uncommon (like 1:30), in the High Middle Ages, they become somewhat more common, but still less than 1:10.
Of all the population groups, the clergy was by far the most long-lived in pre-modern times. A nonviolent line of work, plus almost guaranteed supply of food.
Even in the 18th century in fairly developed Britain, only about 70 per cent of adults (18+) celebrated their 40th birthday.
Even then the mortality was still quite high compared to today.
And most agricultural societies before that were regularly swept by famines, which disproportionately took the young and the aging ones.
When judging historic lifespans, we tend to judge by the famous people. Cardinals, popes, kings, emperors. The population average was way, way lower, and the bones from churchyards tell the real story.
The median death for 25 year olds was about 58 in Ancient Rome for example
Also, Rome itself (as a city) had never problem supplying its population with food. There was a special office (Cura Annonae) that coordinated import of food from Hispania, Africa and Egypt to Rome so that the city was never threatened with starvation. I just recently visited Ostia Antica, the main port of Ancient Rome; it was absolutely massive. Rome certainly had a lot of problems, but it was fairly secure in food.
Things were different in 11th century Germany or Sweden. Without an extensive network of long-distance trade, if crop failed in your region, there wasn't any way to prevent famine.
Even deep in the 18th century, during the last peacetime famine in Czechia (1770-3 approx., caused by rainy and cold weather), the attempts to alleviate the hunger by importing food from Hungary were only partly successful; even though by that time, the road network was fairly developed and the state capacity was orders of magnitude higher than several centuries ago. As a result, something between 5 and 10 per cent of the population died.
I imagine the risk of contracting fatal diseases in a rural setting was much less.
(And that was something that happened about a year ago already).
With that in mind, the moral thing is to use the very best tools available to at least counter those efforts.
Defeating aging does not make anyone immortal!
If we invent practical fusion power by then, we can also spread out into the Oort Cloud.
We could be alive now because it's the statistically most likely time for most humans to be alive, right between the time it took us to slowly explode in population and the time we implode and make ourselves extinct. Otherwise we'd more likely live further in the future since if we continue growing then there's vastly more humans that will live then. We could very well be living in the best time ever, full stop. Food for thought.
But, most people have already died https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12288594/#:~:text=Assuming%2.... And population growth is shrinking. So I think we're safe
It's also entirely possible that ancient Greeks had a discussion like this and decided that they'll all be dead soon, and couldn't have been more wrong, so the error bars are obviously massive when dealing with only an arbitrary fraction of the distribution.
Is the purpose of life hedonic consumption, where there seems to be no other point than racking up a high score? Is there something more?
As with Moore's Law for decades, there have been many similar predictions in the past, and they fell by the wayside as technology, output, and productivity improved. At some point, Moore's law gave way to more gradual increases, and the same may happen here, but we have no idea how or when.
- We might be sitting at a 500M population after the [climate / pandemic / AI / nuclear / system collapse / etc] apocalypse.
- We might be sitting on a terraformed Mars (or in bubbles under the ocean)
- We might be sitting in glass domes in the middle of an increasingly climate-hostile Earth
... and so on. We're very bad at predicting the future; it's hard to pick from thousands of (individually highly unlikely) possibilities.
Admittedly this isn't true of all possible scenarios. And in some, longevity would be really helpful.
Lol jk I still don't want to age and die to be honest
Edit: to be clear I would still take the immortality like 100%
Wouldn’t making them healthier increase their economic output at the same time it’d decrease their cost to the healthcare system?
If that were an option, I'd be happy to forgo social security. If everyone were biologically young, there'd be a lot less for a healthcare system to do.
wow. So progress at any cost? Seems misguided to me
You can get started by reading the following article:
I remember in Cocoon, one of the most touching scenes is between a husband who just lost his wife and an alien captain who just lost a friend for the first time in his multi millennium life. The alien’s empathy towards the tragedy of human condition drives him to offer immortality to the old humans he befriended. And all of them accept, with the exception of the one who lost his wife.
We should also strive to reach to a state where we realize experientially our true nature of eternal, pure consciousness, and then we can manufacture whatever body we would need just like our mind manufacture new worlds, objects and different bodies for us in dreams during sleep.
These flow of energy changes the states of neurons and sum total of that is perception of the 'world' which we think is the consciousness.
Corollary - Due to the quantity and 'quality' of each neuron in each individual, the perception of the world or the reality would also vary for each individual.
(Justin Timberlake) "Cry me a river"
Maybe there’s an economic system that would not do this, but currently most people’s lives are not improved with increased longevity across the board.
It’s one of the reasons I left my job in pharma. The constant circle jerk about making the world better + comparative low pay when so few could afford a condo on their own salary. Whose lives are we making better? Certainly not the lives of the people I see every day.
I don't think we've yet learnt that technological progress today comes with much more risk and is not an automatic good. The atomic bomb probably should have woken us up to this, but I worry we'll need to learn this lesson the hard way eventually.
For example, a forest fire in California isn't a big deal in the context of global ecosystem, but if that forest is your world then it's everything. The invention of fire might come at the risk of burning down a forest or two, but it doesn't come at the risk of burning down the entire Earth. If fire did come at that cost humans wouldn't have made it.
AGI doesn't just have the ability to make you a useless immortal meat bag as you apparently desire. It also has the ability to provide the intelligence and knowledge needed so that every human on Earth can create create a civilisation destroying virus if they so choose.
I know it's weird, but I like the present. We have problems, but all in all it's a great time to be alive. I'm not immortal, but I think that's okay.
We should be more careful about seeking to make radical changes which could destabilise the progress we've made.