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Comment by exratione | Hacker News Reader

Well, sure. Being older is so absolutely amazing in terms of experience, assurance, wealth, power, confidence, and so forth, that all those similar things can actually for a time outweigh the crumbling of your health and your increasing frailty and pain.

But only for a time.

It is a measure of how much people are predisposed to accept the status quo that we don't see far more engaged in serious, scientific efforts to apply modern biotechnology to build rejuvenation treatments. Certain death and present pain is more acceptable than effort, uncertainty, and change.

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People have been looking into 'life extension' for at least 10,000 years.

It's a hard problem and despite what snake oil salesman say we are unlikely to make real progress in the next 100 years.

PS: Drugs for example are a completely useless approach long term. (Short term gains might be possible though.) Realistically we would need to disassemble someone without killing them or do the equivelent without taking them apart which is probably harder.

People had been looking for a cure for infection for at least 10,000 years, and then we came up with antibiotics.

Science has progressed amazingly during the past centuries. There is no reason to give up hope.

There where actually a wide range of effective treatments for infections before antibotics. EX: Hunny works as a topical treatment. Dioscorides (c.50 AD) (http://www.worldwidewounds.com/2001/november/Molan/honey-as-...) The problem is Aging is a single word discribing thousands of individual problems. It's like someone saying they can solve 'network secuirty' with a simple patch. Cancer is a similar issue because what's being discribed is a symptom not a unified underlying breakdown.

EX: Cantagious cancer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil_facial_tumour_disease

On the other hand we have zero effective treatments for aging.

    > The problem is Aging is a single word discribing 
    > thousands of individual problems

...

    > On the other hand we have zero effective treatments for 
    > aging.

Sure. We just have treatments for many of the thousands of individual problems, and we're developing new ones all the time.

> There where actually a wide range of effective treatments for infections before antibotics.

Antibiotics have been a key vehicle for human life extension. If you think the effect of honey(not sure what hunny is) on a topical wound is anything close to what a modern antibiotic is capable of, you are not paying attention.

    > It's a hard problem and despite what snake oil salesman
    > say we are unlikely to make real progress in the next
    > 100 years.

Why?

When people express these sentiments, I like to remind them that about 100 years ago Penicillin was discovered. About fifty or sixty years ago hip replacements became a thing.

Sure the problems we have to solve are getting progressively harder, but we are also getting progressively better at solving them with new platform technologies like genetic manipulation and finer control of immune biotechnology. I think medicine is going to be substantially better in 50 years seeing as nearly all of the development in medicine has occurred in the last two or three hundred years at an accelerating pace with most of the development occurring in the past 100.

In response to your PS, I'd like to note that stem cell therapies are just starting to be approved. That field has an incredible amount of promise for developing replacement parts. Sometimes all it takes is an injection of the stuff prepared in the right way rather than wholesale surgical replacement.

Actually, despite increasing chronic conditions and obesity, people are living longer lives, with morbidity compressed into a shorter period of frailty and pain at the end. Boring incremental progress has made real gains.

And for dramatic, status quo changing efforts, we now have Google's Project Calico.

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