Living to 120 is becoming an imaginable prospect | Hacker News Reader

Living to 120 is becoming an imaginable prospect

economist.com

38 pointsgiuliomagnifico47 comments

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> The fact of many people living much longer would have wide ramifications.

Larry Niven pointed out that societies with longer lifespans would become more risk averse as you have more to lose.

Conversely he also predicted greater rates of addiction.

The obvious thing to do is to breed for luck.

Hey, great idea! What could go wrong?

Anything, if you are not teela brown.

Larry Niven was a science fiction writer and his predictions have no barring on the real world

So is Vernor Vinge. I think a lot of futurists have sci-fi chops and origins.

This being just a few lines down from a story on housing being unaffordable for the vast majority of Americans in 99% of the country is...well.

They are different issues really. Housing is due to prior low interest rates and a restricted supply, not people living a bit long.

Imagine how constricted the supply would be if people lived 50% longer and stayed in their homes for 40 years more than they do today.

Now imagine what would happen if we built 50% more houses.

... or paid to relocate individuals to places with houses. People dont like to talk about all the empty houses in less than desirable places. Rather, state governments and large businesses talk about needing to build housing everywhere cuz money.

Plenty of house are available in places with shrinking economies. Most folks would rather live where jobs are available. How does shipping people to tiny towns with no job prospects help anybody?

Where are those houses? Where are the jobs that go with those houses?

If there are more people in a place, there will be more demand for workers in the place to support the people, no?

If this is not sufficient we need to look at making places less dependent on centralized specialist geographic areas, because that approach does not scale well.

I know this is borderline ad hominem, but your arguments feel so far from reality that it's hard to discuss in any detail.

Yes, worker demand would go up, but that would only be for a portion of jobs. Imagine you have a small, desktop ant farm with fixed supply of food. You add an additional 10x ants to that farm. Sure, some of the new ants will collect food for the queen, but what do the rest of the ants do? The colony doesn't have any additional food source, they were already surviving with 10x less ants.

Likewise, whether or not centralized geographic areas scale well doesn't really matter. What matters is how all other options scale - and they scale worse.

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I've lived in rural America for the past decade for my wife's job. I've been fortunate to be able to work remotely, but without that I'd likely be unemployed or far underemployed. There just aren't job opportunities for me in small towns.

You can’t put the cart before the horse. There needs to be job prospects in order to relocate.

You certainly can, thats what subsidies are for. Put the jobs back, incentivize corporations to revamp decrepit towns. Like Klamath, a beautiful old city that fell into disrepair because logging and mining gone ... people didnt leave because it was unlivable. Tax breaks for revitalizing a town and tariffs for any virgin ground broken.

We would soon breed 50% more people. Building more houses reduces housing costs like building more highways reduces traffic.

> We would soon breed 50% more people

Not really, fertility rate is going down worldwide regardless of housing costs. Turns out rich families don't need or want as many children as those working the farm.

Hmm, reminds me of a certain movie…

Sure. But more people is good. More traffic is bad.

I'm not on enough drugs right now to be able to imagine that happening.

Old billionaires are a net good for society.

Only if we tax the absolute daylights out of them.

unaffordable housing isnt a supply and demand issue. its an investor issue

Wow... this part of the video blew my mind... comparing human to tortoise.

https://youtu.be/FYr04ymjD1w?si=dd45tE7vKW6ZcIOw&t=224

The risk of death for human exponentially increase as you age, but it is constant for tortoise.

Won't that mean retiring at 90? Otherwise pension funds will become unsustainable.

One could argue that if we are smart enough to make this work, we could be smart enough to have the machines take over as well but I am not holding my breath :)

Fully automated luxury communism in a post scarcity world in our natural lifetime is technologically feasible! Imagine!

they would never let that happen

I thought AI taking our jobs was a bad thing?

Western oligarchs aren't investing billions in AI just to let us retire early. They're trying to create a bigger reserve army of labor.

Yes, retiring age will be delayed, like the politicians are already doing.

Perhaps the physical rigours of work will dictate a retirement age, similar to firefighters retiring at 55.

Today we retire for 20 years and last 5 years are pretty horrible for most people.

Adding 10 years to retirement and 30 years to life span means maybe 15 years living with severe physical and mental degradation.

So even if we retire at 90, pension funds will become unsustainable.

My gosh ... 67 to 90 ... 23 years. Thats an entire career from the 1950's.

Can we get those bionic knees first please?

No thanks.

I mean, it wouldn't be bad if they solved cognitive decline, cancer, and biological aging (collagen, muscle, bone density loss, etc).

I wouldn't want to be 120, looking at folks who are 90. But being youthful till 120 or even until I choose it's time? That would be quite lovely.

Most people could easily live in shape until their natural limit and here we are with half the population obese and not able to run 100 meters in their 30s and some people who have never been physically able to do a single pull up in their entire existence

Doing simple actions right now could easily extend your health span by 20 years, it doesn't get closer to a magic pill

What's the point of living to even 70 if by your 40s you're already a fat useless excuse of a human being. We have an incredible hardware run with absolute shit tier software that's the problem

> Most people could easily live in shape until their natural limit and here we are with half the population obese and not able to run 100 meters in their 30s and some people who have never been physically able to do a single pull up in their entire existence

That's due to excess sugars in our food causing obesity, not the "laziness" of the population. If one person can't control their weight, sure, that might be an example of laziness, but if a population as a whole has increased obesity rates, it's time to look at the structural societal issues that brought about that effect.

"fat useless excuse of a human being" seems a bit harsh.

I thought about rewriting that part for a while and couldn't come up with a better version. I'm not even saying it with anger, more with sadness to be honest. I wish people could see how capable their body is and how relatively easy it is to upgrade oneself.

I've seen friends and family members let themselves rot and wonder why they always feel like shit, it's just plain sad, so much long term happiness wasted for short time joys.

It's never too late to turn around either, my gf's dad is in his 60s and lost 20kg in a few months because we motivated him. He had trouble walking because of painful knees for years and what a miracle!!! he's cured now, all it took is eating a bit less.

Here’s the erudite Socrates version: "It is a disgrace to grow old through sheer carelessness before seeing what manner of man you may become by developing your bodily strength and beauty to their highest limit."

https://archive.ph/JWaHl

Unless you die early of cancer which seems just if not more likely. I wish they would solve cancer

I see 80 year old men on TV and in positions of privilege, but they don't exist in my fam. Now you say 120? Yeah, maybe for someone with an easy life.

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