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Comment by sethbannon | Hacker News Reader

This is huge. Yes it's in dogs but for the first time the FDA has said lifespan extension is an acceptable endpoint for a therapeutic! This could help open the floodgates for longevity therapeutics and will be written about in the history books.

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What happens when [insert your least favorite political figure here] gets to live to 500?

500 years of Putin - that would be fun.

So this is a common argument against longevity -- that dictators would remain in power for even longer.

A simple counterpoint: imagine a world were we all did live until 500 years old. And there were some bad dictators in that world. If you lived in that world, would you suggest cutting everyone's lifespan to 80 years old to diminish the power of those dictators?

My take is that if the cancer doesn't get you, the angry subjects will. Right now, medical science is what imposes term limits on dictators. But it's likely that humanity will impose their own, like they have in less dictatorial regimes. (Everyone's worried about dictators, but I'm just sitting here thinking about the Supreme Court.)

Or pretend you lived in a world where dictators often live to 80 years of age or more (easy to do, because that is the world you live in).

Would you support cutting everyone's lifespan to 20 to diminish the power of those dictators?

Would you support paying the cost of providing everyone with your life-expanding drug? Because that's never discussed

Do you support paying the cost of providing healthcare for age-related conditions to everyone who does not get the life-expanding drug? People living healthier and longer is extremely economically beneficial for all.

"Everyone's" lifespan?

Is your longevity drug going to be offered for free? Are you going to use taxes to pay for everyone's right to live?

Your scenario is a pure strawman - we all know that in the current social and economic system, anti-aging drugs are just going to worsen inequality...

Is your longevity drug going to be offered for free?

They'll almost certainly be cheaper than the costs of treating the effects of aging.

Are you going to use taxes to pay for everyone's right to live?

We do this already.

we all know that in the current social and economic system, anti-aging drugs are just going to worsen inequality

This is extreme zero-sum thinking. Has chemotherapy worsened inequality?

> They'll almost certainly be cheaper than the costs of treating the effects of aging.

Will they really reduce the medical costs of aging when you take into account the longer lifespan?

To borrow an argument from a different branch of the thread: if everyone lived to be only 20, would you expect that medical expenses would be more than they are today, or less?

Anybody who withholds large scale distribution of these drugs while taking the drugs themselves is just painting a huge target on their back.

No rational person is going to respect intellectual property rights for these sorts of substances and if they're relatively easy to produce then people will make them themselves.

Anyone who tries to stop the production and distribution of them will basically be killing people with more steps and people don't take too kindly to that.

These people may be living twice as long with these drugs while others die, but that doesn't make them immortal.

I can't imagine a world where everyone will live for 500 years because there is zero chance that's how such a magic drug will be distributed. Life is the most valuable commodity we have, and it will absolutely be hoarded by the top 1%.

By that logic things critical to life like water and food would be extremely expensive while useless things like diamonds or gold bars would be cheap.

What benefit would the rich derive by hoarding life extension drugs? Other people taking the same drug as you doesn't make your dose any less effective, nor vice versa.

You don't need to do some crazy speculation to reach this conclusion. People in the richest countries in the world are dying because they can't afford a shot of insulin or an ambulance or the most basic preventative care. Why will life extending drugs be any different? The only concern will be to maximize profit and not much else.

https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy

The rich aren't hoarding insulin, pharma companies are exploiting a specific US patent law loophole to make everyone overpay. Outside of the US, insulin is cheap.

Even if they could profit by hoarding such drugs, what's going to prevent people from manufacturing the same thing elsewhere?

It's just like software "piracy": once the information gets out, there's no way to stop it. Drugs aren't that difficult to manufacture, which is why lots of pharmaceuticals are manufactured, ignoring patent protections, in places like India.

I guess the fear is that only dictators would live for 500 years. But that’s still an argument for longevity research I think. If living to 500 years is a war crime, only war criminals will live to 500 years, and all that.

I think the issue is as you get older, you amass more wealth and power but you amass less open mindedness. You become more conservative, set in your ways.this would permeate every process and institution in our lives.

I see nothing wrong with letting dictators live forever, and stay in power forever, if that's what their people want.

If the people don't like the dictator, it's entirely in their power to remove the dictator. How exactly can one person stay in power over an entire nation of millions? It's only because the people there tolerate it.

If the society needs a lifespan limit to limit the damage dictators can do, the problem isn't the lifespan.

> It's only because the people there tolerate it.

Or they're too poor to leave for greener pastures. Dictators are in power not because their people tolerate them, but because they don't have a choice in many cases. There's exceptions, but generally the stigmatized term "banana republic" aptly describes many of these places dictators control for a reason.

>Dictators are in power not because their people tolerate them, but because they don't have a choice in many cases.

They absolutely do: they can rise up and revolt. How is a dictator going to stop them? He's one person. How exactly does one person stay in power over millions? No dictator in history has ever been a Marvel-comics-style supervillain with fantastical powers. Dictators stay in power because their people tolerate them.

0 worries.

Russsia has a rich cultural history of assassinations. The long lived single party in Japan with the oldest population isn't immune to the disease of assassination either.

You have to go back 1881 to tsar Alexander II to find an assassinated Russian leader.

If you ignore Putin's political assassinations, the assassinations during eras such as the red terror https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Terror where Lenin and trosky were killed, and Nikolas II's 1918 assassination as well as the whole royal Russian family, sure.

Russia has a rich culture of assassination.

None of those examples are of a Russian leader being assassinated.

Putin didn't kill any Russian leader, he is one.

Nicholas II has abdicated the throne so he wasn't in power when he was killed. Lenin was shot but survived. Trotsky was never in power.

All your examples flow from top to bottom, that is the leader of the country likely ordered them.

But your "zero worries" argument rests on bottom up assassination, and Aleksander II is the most recent one.

Maximum human lifespan is still roughly 120 years. All the advances in medical science over the past century has been about getting more people to live longer. The actual maximum lifespan hasn't budged.

Lets see how long David Sinclair lives for. Dude will live to be 200.

Maximum possible? Sure, but the average has gone up considerably. If you just boost everyone to the maximum possible you'd be adding 40-60 years on many people's lives.

Consider that if people lived to a mere 250 years old, we'd probably be living among people who thought slavery was good for the enslav -- nevermind.

You have people in the present that think that. Culture doesn't need the cultivators alive. Prophet's messages are carried on long after they die.

I do wonder, let's think about that. People can change, 500 years is a long time. One could argue living that long may tame or completely change him. Get bored of doing what you did the past 200 years and try something else.

We do have to understand that humans are humans after all. Eventually you will get bored of the same nonsense day in and day out and do something else.

This seems incredibly naive. You seem to think a longer lifespan will somehow make a brutal tyrant more caring, but I think the cruel will likely just get more monstrous with age. A long life means power must be held that much more tightly: what good is your near-immortality if rebels or rivals dethrone and kill you?

Ah yes, surely the Robber Barons would have eventually got "bored" of being in control of all money and politics. Surely that would eventually be something they don't want!

Just as silly as the people who somehow think a billionaire can't be bought and so make better politicians. Surely they became a billionaire because they have a reasonable relationship with money right? Surely you or I can relate to how they think of money!

This is a plot point in Cyberpunk 2077. A main executive/dictator is 158 years old due to medical advancements. The inability of his son to escape from his shadow leads to murder.

500 years of putin but no ageing would still be a net positive. Ageing is really bad in terms of both emotional cost on others and the financial cost.

Why are we focusing on the negative examples? Would you not want George Washington to live to 500? Lots of bad political figures were stopped by good political figures who would also benefit from life extension.

This seems the exception that proves the rule- Washington was good in no small part because he stepped down. He did not rule America as king, even when he had the popularity to claim the throne. He served his stint as president, and then stepped aside.

An immortal Washington would not want to be the permanent head of state.

>first time the FDA has said lifespan extension is an acceptable endpoint for a therapeutic!

Oncology would like a word...(where lifespan extension is the expected endpoint)

If anything, the shock point is that the FDA allowed the claim without lifespan as a study endpoint/outcome, using only proxy measures.

I certainly hope someone does a follow up study to see if or how much lifespan is actually extended.

The reason is that this is an animal medicine so the study endpoints are much more lax than would be allowed for a medicine targeting a human indication.

Perhaps, there have been a few recent human approvals based solely on proxy endpoints as well.

Imo, all such studies, human or animal should require large post approval RCTs

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