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Comment by sriram_malhar | Hacker News Reader

Nice review.

But I get the ick. As with AI/ML research, it has tremendous political, social, economic, environmental consequences. As AI/ML has shown, the pace of development and availability has outpaced humans' ability to think through the consequences until they have already happened and are in the hands of very powerful techbros and oligarchs. I have no appreciation of Hinton and other leaders' change of heart about the catastrophic consequences of their research.

A PhD in Longevity research, should be evaluated for its philosophical deliberations as much as it pokes the edge of the state of art.

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Death is a tragedy. I see zero issue with longevity research.

Any second-order societal effects can be dealt with, but this is absolutely not an area where we need regulations and deliberation of "safety" when literally everyone you know, your children, and your loved ones will die without this research.

The problem of dying is a much more urgent problem than, say, overpopulation or duration of power. Those can be solved once we aren't all, well, dying.

Death is by design and is a vital part of evolution. I don't have issues with trying to make our human lives a bit longer (and preserving same quality of life), but achieving biological immortality would open a lot more problems.

This is getting close to negative eugenics. You might want to rethink your position.

This is just what life is... We can spend all day talking about fairy tales of living forever but this is reality lol. What position is there to rethink ?

Wrote the commentor on a sheet of glass and metal, sharing their thoughts at the speed of light over a planet-spanning communications network with thousands of nodes in low-Earth orbit, while others on that network acts as patrons to sponsor such research as "can we grow mouse fibroblasts in gatorade and other soft drinks as part of an ongoing project to build a meat robot?" (the answer, is this is surprisingly more viable than they expected).

It's very easy to be overconfident where the boundary is between fairy tales and engineering, the boundary between fairy tales and science is even harder, and even domain experts can get that wrong in both directions.

Not really some variant of eugenics. GP didn't identify any subset of humanity

That evolution be allowed to operate unencumbered by mitigation on human populations is literally a eugenic position. It's not necessary to identify specific genes or traits that evolution would act on for this to hold.

There are species that have negligiable sensesence, QED death isn't vital part of evolution.

But even if it was, why should we limit ourselves to evolution? Evolution did not design us to go to the moon, to split the atom, to have transplantable organs, to fly, to brush our teeth with fluorinated toothpaste, or to use contraceptives — it has only just managed to keep up with us wearing clothes and cooking our meals.

> Death is by design

This betrays a deep misunderstanding of the mechanics of evolution. Design is literally not even part of the equation. I suspect you actually know that, but may have let an emotional response confuse your position.

Radical ideas like "let's stop dying" often evoke powerful irrational responses from all sorts of people, but it's very important to stop and consider the source of that response.

For example, I'm envious of those who would live in an age of immortality (if it were to happen), as I don't expect such an outcome for myself, but I don't want to take that away from them if it's a real possibility.

> Death is a tragedy.

And so is life. One thing is sure, life is much better enjoyed when you don't spend the entirety of it trying to bend the rules and worrying about things you have no power over.

If you're not fit, exercising two hours per day, eating clean food at every single meal, skipping alcohol, living in a rural area far from pollutants, &c. you have no business discussing longevity in the first place imho. It's too easy to wait for the silver bullet complaining about how death is tragic while letting ourselves rotting away every second of every day

There's a lot of things people can do to improve life expectancy, but it is impossible for most people to move to the countryside because houses aren't mobile like that.

Even then, good as fitness is, it doesn't make us agesless. We can research aging without solving all the rest of the issues first — not even maximum life duration, as 81 years where your body clock never goes past 25 is still an improvement on 81 years where you slowly wind down from 25 onwards.

Also with the food, there are often efforts to get the population as a whole to eat healthier, these get pushback that calls it "nanny state" (in the UK) or just outright denies the health impacts of the food that's being advised against (I wonder, find a "end fat shaming" headline, go into details, will you find a maker of junk food sponsored the research?)

Weird take. It's actually totally normal to be shaken by death, regardless of how fit you are. I would imagine most people don't want to die.

> The problem of dying is a much more urgent problem than, say, overpopulation

How are you not connecting overpopulation and longevity? The earth is already straining, even with the current level of population and longevity. If no one is dying until they are 200, and increasingly consuming like the richer nations, we are going to be living miserable lives.

Perhaps the people who advocate for longevity should spend a year in any one of the third world's populated cities and experience it first-hand.

If we live to 25 and have 5 kids, population goes up.

If we live to 200 and have 1 kid, population goes down.

> and increasingly consuming like the richer nations, we are going to be living miserable lives.

Tautologically false; if the worst off are empowered to consume as we do now, those lives will be *amazing*.

Also, the sustainability level of consumption depends on tech, not population. If we wound back to 1930 tech and population, we were reliant on coal and oil, we couldn't substitute other things for them — if peak oil/coal had happened in that decade, we'd have been stuck; now we're good, coal is being phased out as fast as we can build the alternatives, and we have partial alternatives for oil and are working on the reminder.

Let's say longevity was already a solved problem and people had unlimited lifespans. Would you advocate executing everyone once they reach 85 so that we can avoid the problems you refer to? If the answer is no, then the only consistent position is that longevity research shouldn't be blocked. In both scenarios, the solution is to work on those additional problems rather than deliberately kill people.

Well, I don't want it to get to a point where it is already a solved problem.

Length of life should not be the criterion; quality of life should be. If every one lives to be 200, then the quality of life will necessarily reduce for everyone; we are already straining the planet's resources, even if we don't make strides in keeping everyone fit and independent until they die.

This hinges on the idea that death is preferable to a lowering of your current quality of life, which is very much not something that people are going to agree on.

There might be some parallels with petroleum extraction. It would have seemed impossible to ban / regulate drilling even if the global warming in 100 years had been obvious.

So many good things made and personal fortunes generated by oil extraction; preventing those benefits would've seemed immoral.

Life extension is kind of like that, it's easy to say "someone will deal with potential problems later". A person only looking out for themselves and an altruist can both present an argument based on morality.

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