Should the United States fund a "War on Aging"? | Hacker News Reader

Should the United States fund a "War on Aging"?

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19 pointsjackhoy27 comments

The US shouldn't fund anymore "wars on" anything. Bad metaphor, bad approach.

But a nice targeted NIH funding campaign on ameliorating age-related diseases sounds a great idea.

...if only the United States weren't $15 trillion in debt.

Yeah - I guess it's really unlikely that this will be solved by Government. Perhaps rightfully so this shouldn't be at the top of their agenda.

I think it will be non profits (http://www.sens.org/) or private companies (http://halcyonmolecular.com/) that lead the way.

Questions to which the answer is no.

http://blogs.independent.co.uk/tag/headline/

Why isn't this part of the national defense budget? You know, we've sunk >$1.5T over the past decade into preventing our citizens from becoming casualties of "terrorism", which account for ~0% of all fatalities in a given year.

I don't know about you, but I'd feel much better about our leadership if that money would have been spent on something more relevant to the health of the average citizen, such as anti-aging research.

Why are they spending the money? Why aren't billionaires trying to extend their lives with private research they fund?

The US is already doomed to an economic disaster from the current debt combined with unfunded commitments down the road. I guess get as much good out of the sinking ship as possible?

7 billion people on the planet already, and you want us to fund keeping them alive longer? What a fantasically stupid idea. You're given a decent amount of time on this Earth, already make it count and move on.

Not to mention the idiocy of calling it a 'war on' anything. That pretty much guarantees it'll fail, like all of the other 'war on' something efforts.

"You're given a decent amount of time on this Earth, already make it count and move on."

I hear this all the time, but I still can't wrap my head around it. If you value life, why wouldn't you want to sustain it? If you're content to die, why don't you get it over with?

I don't know how I feel about immortality or hyper-long lives (not sure which one you meant). It's a complex question.

So I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with your conclusion. But your argument isn't very good. I've made one that is exactly parallel.

"If you value pizza, why wouldn't you eat it forever? If you're content to one day stop eating pizza, why not stop eating it right now?"

Replace "pizza" or "life" with "X" and you have a parallel argument.

The (potential) answer is that some things change qualitatively over time, or with quantity. Life may be one of them, or it might not.

I don't think we're capable of imagining the answer. Everything we know about society is based on humans coming and going in cycles. To change this would change everything. It feels like it would be a good change, but the upsides are easier to imagine than the downsides.

"No one wants to die, ergo humanity would be better off without death." is not sound logic. We might be better off without death, but it's truly hard to say.

They are tangential arguments. We get more people through reproduction and we lose people to ageing, disease, and trauma. We don't even need to make Americans live longer to realize soon that we need to cut back heavily on the first.

Regardless of any new contributions to ageing research, the reality is that in this century we have over a hundred countries yet to enter the first world where births per family nears ~2 and until then medical and social advances in those countries will explode their populations.

We are already unsustainable, so the problem of stopping people from spawning more is really unrelated to medical advances in the longevity of first world inhabitants. The population explosion is happening elsewhere but is still a real problem.

Not saying first world countries have nothing to work on. We still consume as many raw resources as 3 - 50 Africans depending on where you live.

At that, scientific progress is always essential. I don't want to live to be 300 where I spend 225 years a vegetable or that my quality of life still free-falls past 60 like it does today. Extending quality of life has the added benefit of meaning you get more bang for your buck per person - if you spent 30 years training a doctor from birth to functionality, and their quality of life starts slipping 30 years later, you only get 30 prime years from them. If you can keep them at middle-age fitness and well being for 70 years, you get significantly more doctor per time spent on the person.

"We are already unsustainable, so the problem of stopping people from spawning more is really unrelated..."

"Extending quality of life has the added benefit of meaning you get more bang for your buck per person..."

Amen.

"We might be better off without death, but it's truly hard to say."

Absolutely. We are simply actors in a complex environment; we have access to limited data points among an equation containing dizzyingly many variables. However, if none of us were to ever press forth for fear of uncertainty, we'd all recede into stasis and eventual extinction.

If you're worried about whether or not this planet contains enough resources to sustain an immortal populace indefinitely, which seems to be a common sentiment, that's a different issue entirely. For the record, it doesn't, but neither does it contain enough resources to sustain a mortal populace indefinitely.

"I've made one that is exactly parallel. ... pizza ..."

Also for the record, this isn't _exactly_ parallel. In your example, if I were to stop eating pizza, I would retain the potential to resume eating it at some later point. The point I was trying to make is that once you're dead, you're absolutely impotent, i.e., unable to effect any further change on reality. For the life of me (pun intended), I can't understand why anyone would be content to forfeit their potential.

Oops, you're right. I should have said "stop eating pizza forever, irrevocably" or "inject yourself with a virus that gives you a fatal allergy to pizza".

Or, perhaps I should have picked a non-pizza argument.

For a more serious exploration of the issue, you could read "The Immortal" by Jorge Luis Borges.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Immortal_(short_story)

He was an Argentine short story writer famed for taking ideas to their logical conclusion. It's worth a read. The story only discusses an individual immortal in a society of mortals though, not a whole society made immortal.

And do you apply this logic to medical treatment in general?

If you think the world is too crowded to let existing people have a few extra years, then you must REALLY hate people with the gall to bring NEW people in the world who each expect to live in it for decades.

A fun sentiment for mother's day.

Even if the United States funded anti-aging. Would the results of its research trickle down to the masses. Or would it stay with the upper tier of society?

It could create a greater class divide.

I am in no position to speculate who actually makes money of our wars. I would love to know. Transparency should be a greater topic of debate.

For the wars question, the most obvious beneficiaries is military arms manufacture all the weapons and vehicles used, the suppliers of perishables to troops (not just food, other supplies). Those two constitute a very huge chunk of the US militaries budget and if that budget disappeared they would as well - private defence contractors have a much smaller market demand for aircraft carriers.

"Would the results of its research trickle down to the masses. Or would it stay with the upper tier of society?"

Only one way to find out.

Instead of starting a half-baked "war on aging" we should perhaps consider trying to improve quality of life for people of all ages. Quality not quantity, people!

If you can't use the bathroom without assistance or recognize your family, that puts a sharp upper bound on your quality of life.

A war on aging would be 1000 times more constructive than our current 'wars'. The war on terror cost us fundamental rights and the war on drugs didn't change the percentage of people who abuse them.

It would have many positive outcomes; technology, healthcare, jobs and understanding of the human body. Even if it doesn't reach its goal of extending lives.

The war on drugs also violates fundamental rights. From a distance, anything a person does to themselves should be their right and nobody else’s business, because anything less violates your freedom in general. As long as you are not harming others with your actions, whatever you do should be nobodies business in abstract.

By even saying drugs should be illegal you tell people what they can and can't possess personally, or do in their own homes without impacting anyone else, and that is as much a rights violation as wire tapping or eavesdropping.

I'll take 60 years of a sharp mind and body over 40 years of productivity and 50 years of senility any day.

What exactly is "aging" in the context of the OP? Would this "War on Aging" actually solve the right problem? Would it even be the right problem to solve for everyone... or even just a majority of the population?

It is very likely that if we can extend human life to any significant degree, we would need to extend the time it is in a healthy state.

Therefore, we don't need to choose or prioritize between senile long life or productive short one. Both go together.

Some more info here: http://www.sens.org/sens-research/what-is-sens

I'm pretty sure that would just worsen our budget problem unless we focus on lengthening the period of time when people can work so that we can raise the retirement age. If we have people retire at 65 and live until 120, they will only have spent 40-45 of those years working. That is unsustainable.

Yes I can't see how that would be sustainable in the current economic state. Perhaps the retirement age would have to increase in line with the years added to the average lifespan.

Obviously the economic/social impact would be enormous and would require many difficult decisions but difficult != impossible. These are challenges that would surely be worth overcoming?

The whole reason that we have Social Security and Medicare is that as people get old, they lose the physical and often mental capabilities needed for work. Fix that and there's no need for permanent retirement, and medical expenses fall drastically.

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