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Comment by atemerev | Hacker News Reader

I don’t understand this pervasive fear of death in the tech community. Yes, one day we are all going to die. Yes, one day the human civilization itself is going to die. The entire universe will die too. So what? We all knew this from the age of five or so.

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I don’t want to die today, and tomorrow I’m not going to want to die, and the day after I’m not going to want to die, and so on. Therefore, I want to live forever — proof by induction on the natural numbers.

And I want to become a billionaire tomorrow. Except there is some actual very small probability of me becoming a billionaire, but I am nearly absolutely certain that one day I am going to die (save for some miracle-grade event). This worries me about as much as the fact that the sun will rise tomorrow.

These websites will look so funny 100 years from now when everyone involved is dead.

It will look to the future exactly like emperors drinking mercury to extend their lives. I love it.

Drinking mercury is quite a bit different than having dozens of biomarkers showing that you're 95+ percentile in health and fitness.

There are also people who have drunk alcohol and smoked tobacco their entire lives and are in the same percentaile for health.

I liked the song I'm listening to 1 minute in. I liked it 2 minutes in. Therefore, I want to listen to this song forever -- proof by induction on the natural numbers.

We all agree it would be bad to die at 40 if you could have lived to 60. By that logic, isn't it bad to die at 80 when you could have lived to 100? If you could do something to increase that probability, wouldn't that be a good thing? Good health also increases quality of life, independent of whether it extends lifespan.

To put it another way, pre-civilization life expectancy was somewhere around 30 years. Would it have been wise to say to someone who was trying to live to 60, "So what? We all knew we're going to die from the age of five or so. This is pointless."

I agree that sometimes these health protocols are excessive, and can be driven by fear of death, among other things. It's also uncertain how many years on average any given habit will add, and there are opportunity costs that need to be factored in. At the same time, I see this common knee-jerk response to dismiss any attempt to extend human life. Given the abysmal state of health of the average person, I think it's a good thing that some people are working on figuring out what contributes to optimal health.

> To put it another way, pre-civilization life expectancy was somewhere around 30 years.

You probably mean life expectancy at birth. The birth and childhood were pretty tough, but if you lived to adulthood, life expectancy was just a bit smaller.

I think the point still stands. In the Paleolithic era, life expectancy for the 60% reaching age 15 averaged 39 remaining years [1], so you could have expected to live into your mid 50s, compared to mid 80s today in developed countries [2]. That's a 30 year difference, so it's more than "a bit smaller".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy

[2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy-at-age-15

Immortality has been the pursuit of people with fuck you money and/or fuck you power since time immemorial, as they don’t have much to worry about otherwise and have the resources to do wacky shit. The rest of us mostly don’t really care much about it. Nothing special about “the tech community” here.

I believe it's part of the hacker culture. Limitations in life span? Let's hack it!

My idea of doing this is bringing AGI sooner. Human body is an inelegant and unoptimized vehicle for intelligence.

>Human body is an inelegant and unoptimized vehicle for intelligence. Why do you think so? the impermanence of it? the gradual performance decrease? the biological/physical limitations that constraint it?

Yes, all of this.

Yes but if we all just bent over to the status quo our entire lives we‘d still be living in caves

Ah yes, because fear of mortality is restricted to tech people.

Well, I don’t see, say, medical doctors designing “protocols” taking dozens of pills every day.

Because that is how you lose your medical license.

Go back 150 years and it was much more common.

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