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Comment by sillygoose | Hacker News Reader

Is aging a disease? :)

Its a cause of death. We like to avoid those. And we know multicellular organisms exist that can maintain their telomeres and avoid senescence.

We are almost certainly going to be able to genetically engineer that into future people at some point, among a lot of other useful things. Dunno if we are going to manage to get gene therapy that can alter living humans so drastically before they die, though. And who knows when it will happen, just that it almost certainly will, unless we blow ourselves up.

I would hate to be poor and immortal. That would be the worst. I feel like immortality is something for the rich.

Becoming rich within 1000 years is more plausible than within ~80 years. Unless the concept of being "rich" disappears due to progress.

>> Is aging a disease?

> [It's] a cause of death.

This is not strictly true; aging is much like having AIDS -- it lets actual causes of death come in and kill you. Nobody ever died (directly) of AIDS, and nobody's ever died of old age either.

Sometimes I feel we should cure living. I would prefer to live only 70 years but fully, having built good human relationships, knowing how to learn, rather than 100 unfulfilled ones.

That's cool, as long as everyone has both options.

Thousand years later, first colonists in a different galaxy:

- Remember that dude from our childhood?

- Yeah, choosing to live a mere 70 years - so weird...

- Never mind, let's keep Terra-forming..."

Everything has an end. Better learn how to use what you have fully rather than being in the dark longer.

Most young people, including myself, do tend to think they would like to live until X years of age. Getting to know some older people, though, it's interesting how we tend to see things differently when we live that many years. I know quite a few people in their late 60s and I think they have Many good years left to enjoy their hard-earned retirement, watch their kids and grandkids grow up, or is some cases continue to do great work.

Ha, I hope I didn't sound like I rejected being 'old' or ageist. I too grew up[1] to be very fond of people of any age and love their perspective and experiences (or lack thereof)[2]. Nor to take away people opportunity to enjoy their closed ones. But I've seen many times broken lives out of misunderstandings that weren't related to biology or aging. When you're almost unable to relate to your family or couldn't build one, you have other things to improve rather than aging.

[1] although very late, maybe on average it's a coming of age thing.

[2] being into computer and technology, I think we have a special relationship to fads, newness, communication and history that makes us (at least I) interested in others in weird ways. How people managed to solve problems or live in a different context, what was the same, what really changed for them as a human.

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