Hacker News Reader

Comment by b_emery | Hacker News Reader

The thought has recently occurred to me that we should all be working on the "aging problem", until it's solved, and then spending all our extra time on other pursuits.

View on HN

Tangential pet peeve: but this kind of thinking, while noble in principle ("let's not waste resources / brain power on what doesn't matter"), tends to lead to stagnation, not innovation.

Paradigm-shifting discoveries tend to come from unexpected, unexplored territory. By taking away funding from "useless" pursuits (like pure maths, arts, theoretical researchers) and focussing solely on the bottom line (i.e: what matters, what is profitable), we make advances in a given field less likely, not more.

Reminds me of the Louie bit where David Lynch instructs Louie to "Be funny: 3... 2... 1... Go". -- That's not how things work. Achieving that level of mastery of his craft is 90% non-funny related activities (life experiences, personality, self-reflection etc.), and 10% actually focusing on "being funny" in itself.

What if the key to longevity comes from a cancer researcher, what the techniques needed come from an applied mathematician researching complex systems? What if the technology required to even model the problem in order to ask the right question is developed by computer scientists modelling data in a completely different field of research? There's just no way to know.

Tangential pet peeve: but this kind of thinking, while noble in principle ("let's not waste resources / brain power on what doesn't matter"), tends to lead to stagnation, not innovation.

I don't think, in this case, it's a "let's not waste resources" argument being made. The GP post wasn't saying "Hey, cancer! AIDS! Lazy non-cancer/non-AIDS scientists!" but rather, "Fixing aging will give us the time and resources we need to do everything else."

In other words, investing in a cure for aging will pay huge dividends in other areas of research. It's like earning $0/yr going to college for four years so you can get $100+k/yr for the next 60, instead of $50k/yr.

My thoughts exactly, except more fleshed out and well worded!

We still do not have enough computing power to model human body A to Z, so the next logical solution would be working on graphene based or biological computers. Quantum is still too far.

There's evidence in the scientific literature that we already know how to slow aging.

Hundreds of leads are summarized in the histogram at http://morse.kiwi.nz/kingsley/lib/exe/fetch.php?cache=&media...

The May 22 paper by Hashizume et al suggests glycine[1].

I took the liberty of data mining my big spread sheet of life span experiments[2] for it.

It turns out that it was reported in 2011 that adding glycine to the diet of lab animals let them live 28% longer[3].

A ton of other cool experiments have already been done[2].

References

[1] Epigenetic regulation of the nuclear-coded GCAT and SHMT2 genes confers human age-associated mitochondrial respiration defects, Nature, May 22, 2015, Hashizume et al. http://www.nature.com/srep/2015/150522/srep10434/full/srep10...

[2] The World's Biggest Spread Sheet of Life Span Experiments http://morse.kiwi.nz/kingsley/doku.php?id=science:kingsleys_... http://morse.kiwi.nz/kingsley/lib/exe/fetch.php?media=:scien...

[3] The FASEB Journal. 2011;25:528.2, Dietary glycine supplementation mimics lifespan extension by dietary methionine restriction in Fisher 344 rats, Brind et al. http://www.fasebj.org/cgi/content/meeting_abstract/25/1_Meet...

So where do I get high quality glycine? Seriously. :-)

People may stop dying but they won't stop reproducing. Let's make sure we master space exploration and terraforming before we start overpopulating the earth.

Birthrates are declining across the world. While everyone won't stop having children, lots of countries are already below replacement rate, and other countries will follow as they industrialize.

Space exploration and terraforming will need a lot of manpower. We should overpopulate first to shorten the schedule!

Actually, it will need a lot of well-coordinated brainpower. We don't really need to send a 1000-man chain gang to suffocate on mars. This is likely to come from the sort of societies that have low infant mortality rates and high levels of education.

Why would you assume this? Space exploration and terraforming are absolutely never going to solve the population problem. Population problems need to be solved with (possibly government enforced) fucking restraint. You don't get to have kids if you're going to live forever. Or the option to reproduce could be handed out on a lottery basis to replace losses from people who decide to stop living forever or die from accidents / not yet cured disease.

That's the only solution. Space travel isn't it.

That's incredibly defeatist approach.

Space travel it is.

Given the latest global birth and death rates of 19.5 and 7.89 persons per 1000 respectively, we'd have to launch people into space at the rate of over 200,000 individuals per day just to keep the current population constant.

There's lots of good reasons for humanity to go into space; population control is not one of them.

I hope it's not a lottery basis... I hope there would be some intelligence to the choices.

It would be nice to reverse Idiocracy tendancies (Stupid people procreating more than intelligent leading to a general decline)

A lottery would have no selective pressure, so no Idiocracy tendancy. That was part of the reason I suggested that. But the only thing I think the system needs is to have some very basic requirements, and then choose mostly randomly among applicants that want to have children.

Anything more, like only allowing the smartest or the most wealthy is going to get dystopian pretty fast, I would think

That movie is based on a flawed premise: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect

The movie is based on the idea that intellegence has a large inherited (~.7) component. Whatever is causing the Flynn effect is acting on the smaller non-genetic component. Interestingly the Flynn effect is only acting on the bottom half of the bell curve suggesting it is the result of the removal of environmental factors that destroy intelligence - things like lead or poor nutrition.

Self preservation is possibly the most powerful instinctual urge humans experience. It doesn't seem very likely that child-bearing people will stick to their mortality pledge when faced with death.

I'd expect this approach would just slightly delay the population issue meanwhile creating a massive black market for pledge-breakers.

Sex is a powerful motivator. Which effects can be fairly easily mitigated by condoms and other birth control options. Maternal and paternal instinct are powerful motivators, but they seem to affect people who are already parents. First they would need to become parents. Is there some abstract force that compels people to become parents? Or is that kind of thing taken care of by simpler urges, like sexual feelings?

People might be mistaking more abstract, existential urges with more plain ones. Do you really want to, in some kind of sense, propagate yourself through time after your death? Or do you just want to fuck, and perhaps also take care of little people (they're so cute...)?

Evolution and survival happens to most species with less developed and abstract brains. I don't see why our own needs for survival would be tied to some idea of "carrying on ourselves after we die".

The technology required to cure aging is more difficult than the technology required to build food factories. The earth can support many more billions of people on far less land than we use today if there are investments into architecture and war/corruption is mitigated.

What is the point of that? Just have lots of people? That doesn't help anything. The whole idea of anti-aging is for individuals to live longer. Have their hard won expertise and skills continue to be of use longer, have them enjoy life more rather than a constant progression that ends in death.

That would be fine if we had a billion people on Earth, but whatever number ends up being stable, it's an orthogonal issue.

> You don't get to have kids if you're going to live forever.

Well, we can make it so that every human can have at most one child. If the rule is enforced perfectly, each generation will have at most half as many offspring, and the series sum of 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + ... is 1, leading to at most a doubling of the population, even if everyone lives forever.

Hah, that's interesting. But that last person is going to feel ripped off.

They can "accidentally" be born sterile. Shh, nobody tell.

It may work as long as each child has more than one parent. And the last child born is not allowed to have children, because he/she cant find partner without children.

Another interesting idea for population control is giving every person the right to 3/4 of a child. A couple then has the right to 1.5 children, so they can have one child and sell the right to the remaining half, or they can buy the half they need to get two from another couple. Or even sell/buy 1.5. (This idea is from Kim Stanley Robinson's "Green Mars")

I think it would drastically change the way people see the world. If you slow down aging in your early 20s, you'll probably push off having a kid until way farther down the line because you now have time to do all the things you'd want to do while you're young, and still have energy for kids later on.

As long as population keeps growing exponentially, we'll have many more young people than old people. So extending the lives of old people doesn't make that much difference. To prevent overpopulation, lower the birth rate.

Yes, it's a crime that such an obviously desirable thing has been pushed out of common discussion, so many of us focus on absurdities like advertising.

The one other thing that might tail into that is working on the "sleeping problem."

If sleeping were eliminated we would all have to work more.

The idea would be that ideally—assuming sleep isn't actually necessary for anything (and it seems not to be, in most species, but our brains might make us a special case)—we would have 50% more man-hours to put on the aging problem. (And solving the sleep problem would likely require solving the tiredness problem, which would then solve quite a large part of the motivation problem, so we could put much of those hours to use.)

If sleep is actually unnecessary, how do you account for it having evolved in almost all species? It seems highly implausible, given that a predator that didn't need sleep would seem to have a great advantage over prey that do.

Clearly sleep has to do a lot with earth rotation & day/night pattern.

Physiologically, IIRC, sleep cleans brain up from certain metabolites, which happens in REM state. If we eventually manage to induce REM artificially, I assume you wouldn't want to experience REM in awake mode, during your job.

Artificial REM would be a trillion dollar drug.

After reading wiki further (which has quite an extensive description), it looks it is somewhat possible:

Injections of acetylcholinesterase inhibitor, which effectively increases available acetylcholine, have been found to induce paradoxical (REM) sleep in humans and other animals already in slow-wave sleep. Carbachol, which mimics the effect of acetylcholine on neurons, has a similar influence. In waking humans, the same injections produce paradoxical sleep only if the monamine neurotransmitters have already been depleted.

Based on the last sentence (and provided the Carbachol mechanism of action is the same), it looks like you can't enter REM sleep if you aren't 'tired' enough.

Thanks - mostly I was curious about what leads the parent poster to believe that sleep is unnecessary.

Too bad you didn't get past the vague thought because there must be things we can do to accelerate health research, in general. Should we donate money? Should we all become scientist? Should we all start wearing wearables and try to make some sense out of the data? Should we submit our DNA and data to a research center?

At any rate, aging is going to take a long time to solve. Throwing time and money directly at it might not be the most effective solution. Maybe we invent an AI to do research and it eventually solves the problem, for example.

Step 1: solve the problem of AI Step 2: use your AI to solve every other problem.

That's 30 years away with the accepted guesses. Can we do it in 15 years? Too bad Elon is afraid of AI. He's the type of person who would take on a crazy project like that.

Step 3. The AI decides that the atoms that make up your body are being very innefficently used and decides to rearrange them into a computationally more efficient structure with a sorry-this-is-the-price-of-progress excuse.

For example, to make way for a hypergalactic bypass.

Imagine that we figured out a remedy to aging 1000 years ago. Then 90% of the people today would be, say, 500+ years old.

What an interesting world that would be, a world where we would still be burning witches. You wouldn't be typing this on a computer musing about ending aging; computers would not exist and neither would you.

Don't you think that's kind of a reach? I feel like you could just as easily guess that the smartest people of 1000 years ago, given an extra couple hundred years of lifetime, would have come up with computers way before we did.

Edit: Not that I consider either answer particularly likely; I have no idea what would happen.

Most people's ideas and worldview get basically frozen in time when they reach 25. Maybe not everyone, but a large enough majority that a death-free society would be effectively stagnant, socially and technologically.

> technologically

Seems many invent at an old age. Also seems that some few are responsible for great many breakthroughs, only stopping at their death beds...

"Most people's ideas and worldview get basically frozen in time when they reach 25."

Not by choice, in most cases. N.B. There's also a lot of research on restoring neural plasticity.

That's quite an assumption. I'm guessing you are young.

Was it Louis CK who said he doesn't understand why this crappy generation should be the one that deserves immortality? And it's a good thing it wasn't invented last generation or we'd have a universe full of misogynists and racists living forever.

Can't find it now but it sure resonated with me. Invent immortality, kiss social change goodbye.

I think you are being far too pessimistic.

In the US we went from sexual orientation being something that was socially acceptable to ridicule or attack with violence, to widespread social acceptance and same sex marriage being law in most of the county in just 15 years - less than one than one generation.

This change wasn't brought about by killing off every over the age 30. I think as long there is some kind of reconciliation method in place for people to say "I was wrong and now I've changed" without being attacked (like Sen Matt Kirk was), then social change can be facilitated much quicker than waiting for an entire generation to die.

I'm more pessimistic. I'd say homophobes just accept that the political wind changed and learned to shut up about it. There are still prolific undercurrents of sexism, racism and homophobia in the US, and here in the UK.

It depends if social rigidity is caused by the ageing process or not. It might be that once the effects of the ageing process are removed that people become much more socially flexible.

What about maybe solving the global warming problem? The where does all this energy come from to feed & provide for all the people on the planet, eensy teensy weensy little problem that it may be.

That assumes our other problems can wait. Climate change is one that won't. It'd be pretty sad to solve aging but irreversibly lose most of the planet's food production.

There's still the matter of war and poverty to be solved.

What are you doing at work or on your computer not off solving the war and poverty problem? Get on that!

We can't since the OP would like us to first solve the "ageing problem" before anything else. But I suppose war wouldn't easily nullify your potential of advanced age if you close your eyes hard enough? Perhaps those living on $2/day will be comforted by the fact that they can continue to do so for another 150 years.

Maybe we need to work on how humans tend to prioritize longevity over things like whether your neighbor can eat. I don't think that the "aging problem" is even in the top 100 of "problems humanity needs to solve." Reproduction has been working great for keeping population up, and "defeating death" has always been seen as somewhat quixotic of a quest.

> Reproduction has been working great for keeping population up

Well, if keeping population up is your goal, then fine, sure. Obviously some people have different priorities.

Phrased like that, it's basically "myself before the children". A lot of people have an emotional response to that.

Most people want to have children, and many even see the cyclic regeneration of the entire population as a net benefit to humanity. If anti-aging is to become a popular movement, it needs to have better answers to the questions of how to solve overpopulation and what a world with nearly no children should be like to be livable.

I would rather die by my own choice, once I no longer feel I contribute to the world(s) that I and my progeny inhabit. Even then, there are things I might want to do -- learn languages, master calligraphy, etc. In a hypothetical diaspora of space exploration, the option to be immortal sounds like a HUGE benefit.

The question of overpopulation is a non-problem. You can't have children, period. It has to be regulated. There will have to be replacement for accidental death and people who choose to end their life early (or people that leave to space, which I think will never be a big number, but who knows). To replace those, either a random lottery or a lottery for "qualified parents" (who want to), whatever that is. I say lottery because anything other than basic requirements would get really controversial really fast.

I'm not sure what you mean "what a world with nearly no children should be like to be livable"? I don't see how it would be any more or less livable. That doesn't even seem to make any sense.

Have you considered that in a world without children, many people would likely suffer from serious depression and other mental disorders? There is a profound reason most humans choose to have children even though they're a lot of work and often a pain in the neck.

> There is a profound reason most humans choose to have children even though they're a lot of work and often a pain in the neck.

Pretty much everyone I've ever asked who have had kids wasn't consciously trying for their first child. I've personally always felt that a lot of parents later rationalise a decision they didn't really make.

According to the paper "Intended and Unintended Births in the United States: 1982–2010" where they interviewed 12 000 women, for women aged 15-24 either married or living together with their partner, a little more than half of all pregnancies were intended. I think it's safe to assume that most of those were first pregnancies.

> The question of overpopulation is a non-problem. You can't have children, period. It has to be regulated.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welcome_to_the_Monkey_House_%28...

Frankly, what a depressing world.

I'm not sure what you mean "what a world with nearly no children should be like to be livable"? I don't see how it would be any more or less livable. That doesn't even seem to make any sense.

Do you have children? I do. Given the choice of extending my own life indefinitely but having my daughter vanish from the world, or dying today but knowing her life will go on, I would undoubtedly choose the latter.

It's sentimental, but that doesn't make it any less true. To many people, children bring a fundamental joy to the world, and it's hard to understand why it should be replaced with neverending calligraphy practice in spaceships.

> it's hard to understand why it should be replaced with neverending calligraphy practice in spaceships.

Those people are free to kill themselves. That's not just a flippant response- nobody is talking about forced immortality.

> many even see the cyclic regeneration of the entire population as a net benefit to humanity

Is life a team sport, where we're all just trying to get as many points as possible for "team human"?

The flaw in your argument is that at some point, you're going to have to pick a maximum allowable age. How old is "too old"? At what age should we set mandatory executions? And, on a side note, have you seen Logan's Run?

You are likely correct, it may not be in the top 100 for humanity. It would be great for me personally though ...

>>It would be great for me personally though ...

Maybe

Umm, it kills all of us currently. I would say that puts it pretty high on the list.

Not to mention, more than one problem can be worked on at a time.

> I would say that puts it pretty high on the list.

I would say it puts it pretty LOW. It's not like death is a hard thing to accept. We've always been dying. Life would suck without it.

For an individual, why should he/she care about keeping the population up? If that's the only point to our existence, we sure waste a lot of time with arts and sciences. We should be training everyone to just grow food and mate as soon as possible.

> For an individual, why should he/she care about keeping the population up?

They shouldn't.

> If that's the only point to our existence, we sure waste a lot of time with arts and sciences

There is no point to our existence. Extending your existence will not change the quality.

Quixotic? People used to die at 45 in 1900.

And people have been living to 100 since forever.

Solving whether your neighbor can eat is not a technological problem. There's already plenty of food. I'm not sure why you'd waste everyone's time using that example.

If you don't want to work on that problem I understand. Which of the other top 100 problems are you currently working on? There are 7 billion people on the planet. There are more than enough people to work on all of the problems.

We do not have plenty of food. There are news stories today about predicted famines in South Sudan and Sierra Leone. What we have is mostly adequate food supplies, and that only until inevitable fossil fuel shortages cut into fertilizer and pesticide production. The green revolution has an expiration date.

We have plenty of food. Do you have any supporting facts? Here's mine:

http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2014/oct/16/wo...

404 not found

Missing r

http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2014/oct/16/wo...

Yes, and how do you get access to that food? It's more of a distribution problem than anything, especially given how little money there is feeding those with no resources.

Yes, it's a distribution problem. I'm glad we wasted so much time before dawn we agreed.

Many do not view aging as a problem. In fact, if we didn't age, we would be trying to solve the "aging is not a thing" problem and figuring out how to humanely eliminate ourselves after living for so long.

People already do that, it's called Suicide, and is generally frowned upon.

I said humanely...like the euthanasia that is becoming legal in some places in the states, with much controversy o course. Ordering people to commit suicide would generally be frowned upon.

But...if we were to live forever, that time would be so different than anybody could think of today, and the ethics, relative to ours, would be pretty incomprehensible today. So...doesn't matter right now I suppose.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com