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Comment by gizajob | Hacker News Reader

We do put huge amounts of effort into ending it, which so far has only served to delay it by decades.

It's part of life that it ends, it seems. No way of getting around that no matter how many sci-fi solutions Bostrom proposes as realistic.

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I think there's a much more firm reason you're right - life expectancy isn't increasing how most think it is. There was an interesting study [1] that examined the life expectancy of all known individuals from Ancient Greece, excluding those with violent deaths (assassination, forced suicide, etc) and found the average male born before 100BC lived to 72 years old on average. In America in 2019 (to avoid COVID biases), the life expectancy for a male was 76.3 years.

The knee-jerk response is to imagine there was a literal survivorship bias. Yet these individuals all made their names long before their deaths. Had Hippocrates, Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles, or whomever else (in general) died at 50 - their names would still have gone down in the annals of history. However, you certainly wouldn't have heard of them had they died at 10. And that's what's really changed.

We're now able to keep infants, even those who are unhealthy, alive at a much higher rate. Something like 40% of children in Ancient Greece did not make it to their 10th birthday. But for those that did, there was a chance pretty comparable to modern times that they'd see many more decades yet. By contrast today, even for unhealthy children, mortality before age 10 is approaching 0.

Life expectancy is increasing, but longevity isn't really changing much at all. Even in a world of mortality obsessed billionaires using every technological method known to try to increase their life expectancy, they're not really getting much further than the average man. What little longevity they do gain can probably be more accurately explained from simple things like better exercise habits and lower levels of obesity, than esoteric young blood plasma treatments and the like.

[1] - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1294277/pdf/jrs...

That study is based on a very biased sample, and is very much not about life expectancy at birth. It is based on records of noteworthy people: "both ancient and modern samples were comparable with respect to males who survived into adulthood and who achieved notability (or notoriety)."

This was all covered in the post you are responding to.

Well we’ve made heaps more people live that long, and live their potential.

For me, Bostrom is an egotist of the type that wishes to escape his thanatotic drive and acceptance that life just ends. It’s unfortunate, terrible even, but it seems as natural as birth. Proposing solutions such as “mind uploading” are not only ridiculous but the reality of the idea would be hellish. What’s worse is that he’s a philosopher so actually creating the technology to do it simply is not his problem – someone else will have to do the implementation, regardless of how nightmarishly difficult it could be. He could just as easily be inventing hoverboards or time machines. It’s not his problem to stay within the bounds of possibility, even the accepted bounds of what can realistically be designed and coded and implemented – he just has his graphs and statistics of work that other people have done in the past, and can now order them to fulfil his desires in future, one of the main ones being his egotistic desire for his ego to never die.

I don't like to comment much anymore, but I feel like I have spent a substantial portion of my life on this topic, and consequently can direct people to some resources that can bridge the knowledge gap a bit in this regard.

>delay it by decades

Yes, but we aren't solving the problems, we are dealing with symptoms. The entire industry is currently treating old age diseases as diseases, and not as symptoms of bodily decay. This is covered extensively by the work of Dr Aubrey de Grey (yes, that one), in any case, he documents 7 different ways in which the body accrues damage over time, and is actively researching in all these fields to find methods to mitigate, and reverse said damage.

To aid in this regard, feel free to visit the SENS research foundation website at https://www.sens.org/

This approach is very different from the one currently deployed in the field afaik. The idea is that the human body, like a car, can be kept in pristine condition if these 7 sources of deterioration is reversed/addressed.

It is really quite fascinating. I would advise you to go check out the healthspan discord on https://discord.gg/sCwyPXu

There are a number of highly motivated individuals actively researching and following the SOTA as well as excellent news aggregation.

This is the initial reason I got interested in this in the first place: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvWtSUdOWVI

One of Dr de Grey's quotes that I find quite compelling is:

"There is no difference between saving lives and extending lives, because in both cases we are giving people the chance of more life."

I find it funny how Aubrey de Grey is so focussed on life extension while making himself look about as ancient as he possibly can...

> It's part of life that it ends, it seems. No way of getting around that no matter how many sci-fi solutions Bostrom proposes as realistic.

That's not a general truth. The Turritopsis dohrnii jellyfish is biological immortal.

Nothing is immortal

Entropy guarantees that every system will eventually disintegrate

I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with this, but I would suggest reading this: https://www.sidis.net/animate.pdf

I mean if you want to get real crazy speculative, my personal philosophy assumes that the universe is on a loop and at some point in every loop, some version of that universes intelligent system figures out how to build the Daemon and that kicks off the next loop.

Can't argue with that tbh. only that we then start to talk about unimaginable timeframes.

Something like proton decay resulting in the permanent non-existence of baryonic matter is unimaginable timeframes, but the Earth will lose all of its carbon dioxide, and hence all eurkaryotic life, within around 1.3 billion years of now. So that's the longest any multicellular creature inhabiting the ocean can still be around, unless far future tool-users figure out how to migrate to a new planet with chemically similar oceans and give them an assist by taking some.

I would argue that by invoking the concept of immortality, you have therefore invoked the “unimaginable timeframe” of infinity to the conversation from the outset.

so it’s not like it was ever not part of the conversation

I also specified that this jellyfish is BIOLOGICAL immortal. If it were provided with a livable space indefinitely, it would live forever.

The better word to avoid confusion here is amortal, meaning it would not die of old age. True immortality is much harder, as accidents would still pose a risk in the long term. Like the janitor pulling the plug on the livable space you set up for the jellyfish, without warning.

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