Why We Age, Part III: Can We Live Forever?
mitchkirby.com
mitchkirby.com
It costs two billion dollars or more to push through one drug candidate for a given desired effect. Current estimates suggest you could implement the entire SENS program of rejuvenation treatments in mice for that amount of money over 10 years. Those are technologies with potentially unbound gains on healthy life span; not just slowing down aging, but actually reversing its causes. Periodic repair has no limit on the degree to which it can extend life, and is far more effective for old people than merely slowing aging. Given the options here I know what I'd rather see the research community focusing on, but getting more R&D to focus on repair over metabolic tinkering is an ongoing process of persuasion and disruption.
You might look at senescent cell clearance for an example of a SENS technology that is slowly breaking into mainstream research notice. Oh so slowly. It's almost painful to watch so much time and effort being directed to old-style mine the natural world drug discovery for marginal treatments unlikely to move the needle when we're in the midst of a biotechnology revolution and so much more is possible.
2) A perception as "natural", together with the naturalistic fallacy. The black plague and cancer are "natural" too, but we have no qualms eradicating them; yet for some reason, people romanticize death, especially when thinking primarily about it applying to other people rather than themselves.
3) Related to that naturalistic fallacy, aging afflicts a less sympathetic group. Given a disease that strikes down the "young and healthy", or the affliction hidden behind such thoughtless and abominable phrases as "it was their time" or "natural causes", the former will tend to attract more funding.
4) In a word, spirituality, whether spoken of or otherwise.
5) Too many crackpots through history have tried to peddle life extension, creating guilt by association.
2) regulation strongly constrains funding by steering it towards drug discovery.
3) people don't like being told they're doing it wrong, even when it is absolutely true.
4) the real goal of most researchers is to catalog metabolism, not to produce any way of treating aging.
In a lot of ways, the concern over mass longevity squeezing the world to death is like the concern over AI robots who become intelligent enough to eradicate all of humanity or the gays mass-releasing gay gay-marriage-spores that make all the straight people fall out of love. It's fun to speculate, write country songs about, and produce post-apocalyptic movies around, but being seriously worried about it as a social issue is a little unrealistic.
Consider, however, whether you'd choose to die if you had an alternative, or whether you've simply accepted something horrific because you don't think you can do anything about it.
If you do not die and plan to stay on Earth, then you will have a (probably very negative) impact on other people's lives. They can choose not to accept it.
Where else could you possibly go? Sending you anywhere else (like a terraformed Mars) might cost more resources than would keeping you alive on Earth for hundreds of years.
If your society attempted to commit mass murder, your society would be removed by force and replaced by one that did not.
And if that sounds like hyperbole, so does the concept that all societies would intentionally withhold a cure to the single most deadly affliction humanity suffers from: aging.
Death is not an unmitigated evil, nor is eternal youth an unmitigated good. I don't think that's a radical argument.
I agree. Discussing ways to solve those problems would be an aspect of the former, which is completely reasonable. However, at the point where you suggested that society could ban life extension, you started arguing for the latter.
Follow your argument to its logical conclusion. What are you proposing, and what would the effect be? You suggested intentionally withholding a cure for a degenerative disease (namely, aging). How else could that possibly be interpreted?
> Death is not an unmitigated evil, nor is eternal youth an unmitigated good. I don't think that's a radical argument.
It's safe to say that's our fundamental point of disagreement.
Personally, I plan to address that disagreement by continuing to donate to fund the development of effective treatments for aging, as well as the development of longer-term cures for mortality. At the point where those treatments become more widely available, arguments against them will start looking a lot sillier.
It really, really doesn't. Note the first item "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness", or the equivalents in other fundamental statements of rights.
In some respect, it's no different than if everyone died at fifty years of age. That's a travesty, yet something close to that was the norm for millennia. We expect more now.
People not dying is the "travesty", and preventing death is probably one of the worst things you could do to humanity.
What a gain it would be to have people continue their productive lives for decades or centuries longer.
The costs: we would give up having children. The replacement rate for an immortal race must be very low. The weight of old, bad ideas might be harder to shake off.
This sort of thinking seems to me a consequence of assuming that brains are somehow separate from the rest of the body, almost bordering on dualism.
They might be easier to shake off, and I suspect this to be the case, if all human brains are rejuvenated brains with 25 year-old physiology. It is not clear that "old people set in their ways" is a result of minds that have simply been around a long time, regardless of their physical condition (i.e. immortal or not), as opposed to a consequence of a physically aging, deteriorating human brain.
So we might find ourselves with the equivalent of a population composed entirely of twenty or thirty-somethings, except some of them happen to have many decades (eventually centuries and millenniums) of experience. We may well be much better off than now.
The other problem is economic - ownership doesn't expire so in a gerontocratic society the older members will by default end up holding more and more of the wealth.
Of course, one could argue that medical are in old age is a massive sink of wealth, and so anti-aging research has the possibility to mitigate that. But unless one proposes to make people immortal - which would entail massive social disruption - such advances are likely to just postpone those expenses.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Idea-Factory-American-Innovation/d...
ETA: the article gives a sense of vastly hugely mind-meltingly large numbers; when considering a number so staggeringly gargantuan is just an infinitesimal speck at the mere beginning of "forever", the thought of living that long becomes crushingly daunting. I suggest potential downvoters read the link first.
You should be worried about far smaller numbers that relate to the explosion of the sun, and the heat death of the universe.
EDIT: Sorry, I just finished reading the article :P He talks about death briefly at the end. I still strongly disagree, and would jump at the chance to live forever, although it's definitely scary to think about. I would always want to have suicide as an option, for unexpected events such as a life in prison, or never-ending torture.
The human brain is definitely not equipped to think about timescales on the order of Graham's number, but I would probably only be "human" for an infinitesimally small period of time, relatively speaking.
One day someone from the future might stumble upon these comments and laugh. I hope we make it that far, as a species.
Look at the few hundred people who joined the Methuselah Foundation's 300 [1] over the past decade, and collectively their individual contributions of $1000/yr helped to launch early SENS research and provided seed investment in Organovo, now a successful tissue engineering concern and whose founders are a steadfast part of the New Organ initiative [2].
Or look at the crowd centered around Longecity [3] who have raised $10,000 here and $20,000 there for discrete projects in aging research, ranging from exploratory laser ablation of lipofuscin (not a success, but a worthy attempt at a technology demonstration) to a SENS project to demonstrate allotopic expression in two mitochondrial genes (did quite well, thank you). Early stage research is cheap, falling over yourself cheap. Meaningful cutting edge projects can run for a few tens of thousands of dollars over six months - you just have to know who to fund.
Fortunately there are good, responsible, aggressive research organizations out there like the SENS Research Foundation [3] that are coin slots for rejuvenation research and advocacy: you can be sure that money goes to good uses, funding areas of research that need unsticking and accelerating, picking those programs that have the best expectation values. You can put in a few thousand and be in good company with hundreds of other people, many from the tech industry, who have decided that it is well worth giving a small fraction of what you make each year to help ensure that when we are old there will be treatments to prevent the medical conditions that presently harm our parents and grandparents.
What use is it making a good wage, enough to greatly influence the medical technology of your future, while sitting on the sidelines and doing nothing but hoping? Who else is going to make a difference if not you? You have the choice of living the same life as before, and suffering and dying in great pain at the end, or making a better future for everyone. It really seems like a no-brainer to me. There are few places where so little money can produce so great a beneficial outcome at this time.
[1]: http://mfoundation.org/300
[2]: http://neworgan.org
[3]: http://longecity.org
[4]: http://sens.org