In case it's insightful, I've correspondingly never understood the common contentment with death. The world is an incredible place, and there's so much to experience and do. If I had the time there's hundreds of careers I could spend a lifetime in each trying to develop mastery. I think I could live a thousand lives with the people I care about and not be done. I've had to choose one life, and it's a nice one, but if it wasn't for some limit forced upon me, if it was really my choice, then there's a lot more I'd like to do.
I suspect in hundreds or thousands of years we'll look back at age-related death culturally the same way we look at infant mortality during the medieval ages: commonly accepted as part of life at the time, but unnecessary and completely solvable in retrospective.
I think fear is the wrong word per-say. If it's something I can't change, that's fine. But if there's an avenue to change it, even if unlikely, why not try?
I'm absolutely shocked that more money and time is not spent researching how to cure death by aging. (Note that for those who discuss this semi-regularly, that's understood to be very different than seeking a cure for any particular age related disease, which usually we attempt to address when it's too late.). There are groups like https://www.levf.org/ doing some early work like Robust Mouse Rejuvenation (in mid-life for mice) to try to figure out how to help us all live much longer. https://www.levf.org/projects/robust-mouse-rejuvenation-stud...
> I'm absolutely shocked that more money and time is not spent researching how to cure death by aging.
Faced with their own mortality, a bunch of aging billionaires and multimillionaires tend to pour money into longevity research. I'd be very upset if governments increased spending on fighting senescence today, instead of lower-hanging fruit .
When Elon was asked why longetivity research didn't pick his interest as worthy of an investment, he said:
>It is important for us to die because most of the time people don't change their mind, they just die. If you live forever, we might become a very ossified society where new ideas cannot succeed.
The opposite could also be true though. Longer lifespans permit more people gaining education, working more years, saving more money with a longer term vision, and rising to be a new economic upper class. Short lifespans make that a very difficult to coordinate multi generational project.
There are also solutions like term limits, or generational tenure limits or something that could help reduce any negative effects without needing to continue unnecessary loss of life.
Why not die at 30 then in the spirit of societal progress?
This argument is philosophical i.e. worthless. We will actually have to win with death to answer the question if it's good or not. It's not something you can figure out without doing it.
Why not grand-grand-children? Current point looks like optimum, but it's really arbitrary and imposed only by external constraint of length of human life.
I generally agree with you, except for the view on class mobility. If we defeat aging altogether, I strongly suspect society to stratify aggressively between those that can afford it and those who can't, and worse, a class of immortal wealth to form. Today, maintaining generational wealth requires A) balancing relatively small family sizes to keep the exponential growth of family members relatively inline with the exponential growth of well-managed wealth against dying off because no one had kids and B) a mostly continuous line of responsible investors. In a future where dying of old age isn't a problem, A becomes much easier and B) is eliminated entirely. It's all the problems of generational wealth with none of the saving graces.
On the whole I think it's worth it, but it will definitely exasperate the problems already inherent to our economic system.
Or alternatively, a stratum of leadership class who actually worry about problems coming 100 years down the line because they fully expect to be effected by them.
I'm just confused about why he didn't followed his train of thought further (i.e. first principles thinking) on that. As I see it, people don't change their mind mainly for two reasons. One is that no compelling new information reaches them, and the other is that as people age, they have to be more conservative on their own diminishing energy, which affects them in multiple ways (avoiding the challenge of their current beliefs, which can be tiresome and not that necessary compared to someone younger that has to find out more about the world in order to grow and gain competence; or increasingly limiting the circle of people that is one's idea exchange medium, which can devolve into something where politeness becomes more important than other things; etc.), then there is just the custom of leaving the elderly be as their change is not worth the cost. (On the last one it's not only the elderly, as many aspects that people give up on attempts to "fix" each other starting from much earlier ages.) Now, if only that aging and age related energy decay could be solved, there would be an entirely new game, looking for a new homeostasis! ...or maybe one has to be young enough to be curious enough about something like this?
Out of necessity? I know we live in times when elites seem secure. But it wasn't always so and it won't be always so.
It is so right now only because of how good modern common people have. But it's going away now. And if security of elites depend of well being of others it's sort of self-regulating system albeit way too slowly.
There's also pressure from the other side. The longer living elites means it will get crowded at the top, so elites might be open to some means of culling their numbers.
Wonder how long he'll stick to that line. I can almost see that Twitter poll he'd currently use to rationalize the change of mind: "Should I try to not die? [ ] yes [ ] no"
But for the time being, nice to see him stating something I don't disagree with.
This wisdom was already the topic of cartoons, books and movies 30+ years ago. If you attach 'Elon Musk' to a quote it immediately becomes relevant to some gullible people, it's truly amazing.
To add some good mood, I stole a comment from reddit [1] which describes one of millions of media dealing with this question:
> In The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy series, immortality is fine if you're born that way. It's only if you accidentally obtain it after an accident with a few rubber bands, a liquid lunch, and a particle accelerator is it a bad thing that you are not equipped to deal with and so decide to insult everyone in the universe in alphabetical order.
2. Even if it was, it doesn't make the "wisdom" any less relevant. There's no shortage of relevant wisdom in Douglas Adams' writing.
3. I intentionally quoted Elon specifically, because it is a relevant reply to the parent comment about billionaires pouring money to longevity research.
> What lower hanging fruit are governments currently spending on?
I meant what lower hanging fruits governments ought to spend on. However, since you asked, here are some of the things governments are currently spending on, but could bear improvement: eradicating preventable diseases, ensuring kids get good nutrition, better tracking, and hopefully prevention of e. coli/salmonella outbreaks, funding basic research into improving outcomes for patients, reducing profiteering off the products of publicly-funded research, medical pricing transparency, better organ donor policies (universal opt-out)
Those things are nice, but individually they each only have an expected value of maybe a couple of extra years of living time. Contrast that to curing ageing that would put that number in the hundreds or thousands.
Honestly I'm not sure those numbers are compelling enough.
We, like, know how to solve some of those other problems. Sure, there's politics and bureaucracy and complications and the opportunity for corruption, but you can assign a p close to 1 we could get it done in an arbitrary timeframe.
Meanwhile, what's the probability that dumping a particular amount of money into aging is going to pay off? Even taking a thousand years you need a p>0.002 to make it worth diverting money from the safe bet of getting a couple of years off the other things.
Contrast that to mind uploads and humans become practically immortal with an infinite expected value - but I don't want the governments spending any money on that either at this point in time, before the human race addresses certain structural issues.
This is a (common) fallacy that could be applied to any funding or focus decision. It reduces to "Why focus on X when Y is more important?". You could use your same examples here as an argument for why not to support space exploration, or environmental conservation, for example.
You only need social security if you’re unable to work. If we increase healthspan to the point that you can maintain the physical condition of a 30 year old indefinitely then you are able to pull your own weight.
Do you think you could work for 200 years straight? I suspect that'd be disastrous to mental health. Society will need to figure out PTO under the new regime as well, or additional research will need to be undertaken just so our minds can keep up with our foerever-young bodies.
Medical & aged care social security costs are tied to deaths of recipients: the bigger the delta between retirement and death,the greater the cost. If the average lifespan grows rapidly, current social security funding will become insolvent, requiring taxes to be raised and/or retirement age to bw raided to leep the current average delta: neither option will be popular with the electorate.
I think you misunderstand the intent behind longevity research and goals: It's to eliminate the senescence period, or to slow everything down if unable to achieve that.
One shouldn't put money into "curing death by aging" without fixing society first; while birth rates exceed death rates, the world fills up and drains natural resources etc etc. There's a ton of problems that need resolving if living longer is to be a thing.
Basically all developed countries already have birth rates below the replacement rate. In the US each women on average gives birth to 1.64 children, in Germany there it's 1.5 per women, in Japan 1.33 and in Korea 0.84. To keep population constant without immigration, the average women would have to give birth to slightly above 2 children.
The only reason population numbers aren't collapsing is immigration, but that comes with its own issues. Extending live expectency and productive lifetime isn't that crazy (if we can get a handle on our rising living standards and resource consumption).
The main reason to attempt to stop aging is to prevent other illnesses from taking effect.
People who are physically young are at a much lower risk of cancer, cardiovascular disease, Type II diabetes/Alzheimer's, etc. Stopping/reversing the aging process kind of fixes the root cause of a lot of those diseases.
We're probably not far off from that reality, either. Then we move onto more controversial questions, e.g. Do physically healthy people have the right to end their own lives? Not everyone want to live to be 300 years old, especially those who have lost most of their family and friends over those years.
I've never understood the "not wanting to live 300 years" sentiment.
I've experienced extreme loss, but continue to expreience new connections, knowledge, etc. There's simply no small limit to what a human can experience, and hundreds of years is paltry compared to when it would take to even be on the verge of boredom/emptiness, if such a verge could actually ever be reached.
The bigger issue isn't population here but rather than if older folks live not simply longer but more productive lives that those in the top tiers will always be seen as more valuable therefore more employable. We're not just taking 1%ers here, we're talking the top 20% of folks becoming a permanent worker's aristocracy that gets to lord over the youngin's forever. I don't like the prospect of that being 42 myself. It just means that younger folks will always be poor, shutout, and forever at the margins of such a hypothetical society. Life extension in this context should only be allowed if we break down the barriers of a potential gerontocracy.
At the cost of less elderly who'll miss out on being reproductive die to all the spots already being taken. Achieving immortality would be robbing from your descendants what your ancestors bestowed.
I was responding to a specific point to which your response seems irrelevant.
If my kids, or their kids, or their kids, etc. ever wanted me to die in order to "bestow" them with something...well, too bad. I wish my grandparents, and their parents, etc. were alive today.
Space on earth is finite. And even if add more hypotheticals like us becoming an interstellar species (actually I'd wager that's less unlikely than overcoming aging), in absence of aging exponential breeding would eventually outpace even the fastest space frontier colonization imaginable.
Not aging is not the same as being invincible. There would still be turn over. You can also legislate things like mandatory retirement from a position so that others get a chance to move up. The legal aspects of longevity are easy to solve compared to the task of curing aging.
Here's a little thought experiment: when a company has layoffs, do more young people or more old people get the axe?
If we get to a place where people can live healthy lives until they are 300 years old, why do you think someone who finished college 40 years ago will be more valuable for a company than a fresh graduate? Because nowadays we have exactly this setup minus the 300 year lifespan, and often times the company is happy to let go of the senior guy.
So the solution is to have the equivalent of a mass genocide in old people? I would much, much, much rather be alive in a fucked up world than dead in a nice world.
> I would much, much, much rather be alive in a fucked up world than dead in a nice world.
You don't know that. You think that is the case, but (I) you don't know what death is like, so you cannot realistically claim it is worse than anything (II) until you qualify 'fucked up' then this is a pointless claim, since your version of 'fucked up' may not be that bad compared to what is in the realm of possibility.
Death is worse, we do know that - outside of religious afterlifes, having continued brain patterns is preferable to non-existence.
It's incredibly more likely that continued existence will be no worse than the world today, which is quite nice. Even if it becomes torturous existence beats non-existence.
Aubrey de Grey is the only person I'm aware of who seems to be considering the disease of aging seriously and passionately. He seems to be single handedly pushing the issue forward with multiple foundations and papers.
I suppose there are others but like you I don't understand why there isn't more focus and media attention on the root causes of aging, the ultimate killer.
There are now plenty of scientists pushing for aging to be classified as a disease, rather an inevitability. It is becoming much more mainstream and has seen lots of money flowing to it.
A recent article mentioned how leprosy can regenerate livers or maybe other organs, nerves, vessels etc. It does it so it can infect it again. Pretty close to human regeneration if the kinks are worked out.
I'm not trying to invent some new science here. Just what I've read in journals.[0]
There is this weird defense of obesity and being sedentary in western culture it's just inexplicable.
Interestingly we've just had the first case of manslaughter by obesity trial going on in the UK [1]. The mum has admitted manslaughter the dad is going to trial. Over death of their 16yo girl.
You’re either misreading or strawmanning. I’m not defending obesity. I’m saying a person living a what one would consider ‘neutral’ lifestyle will not live massive amounts shorter than someone living very healthy. They’ll just have a much lower quality of life the last 15-20 years.
Yeah, I'd just rather have medicine make my finite life less painful thanks without the need for opioids (not saying being a bit stone is bad, just that too much will make life not worth living). Like being able to still walk around without a cane and clean and dress myself by the end would be nice. Not asking for olympic athlete level capability, just decent mobility with not much pain or senility.
That’s actually the point of most longevity research. Figuring out how to keep people healthy for as long as possible. That may eventually lead to effective immortality but the first step is the prevent senescence.
I would actively pay to fight such a movement. The world is full, yes it can be fuller but we are seriously cracking whole ecosystem and one of main reason is simply the amount of people living on this planet. If you prolong life say 2x it means Earth has 2x the population long term just due to this. Lets focus on serious issues hindering our growth as a race and not some vanity fears of few rich and powerful who think they are oh-so-special while they are not.
Death is good on so many levels - equalizer that removes most horrible tyrants like Stalin who would easily burn whole world just to be immortal and stay on top. If you are a normal decent person you can't even comprehend mindset of such sociopaths and their eternal greed. Don't think there are few people like that in a generation, rather few millions, just with fewer options.
Death also makes whole nations eventually forget wrongs on the past, otherwise we would still be hating mongols and huns and romans and swedes and british and slavers and germans as nazis etc. If for nothing else, just to remove threat of semi-eternal planetary dictator death is great.
My grandparents from my dads side both died few months ago aged 94 and 95. They saw all their friends, neighbors and colleagues die decades ago, and they were witnessing same starting to happen to kids of those close people. They were both depressed from this, gradual loss of everything that has any long term meaning plus decline of everything health-related. It sucks to be the last living guy from say group of friends, you think you would find tons of solace in the fact you are still alive but thats not how reality on the ground looks like. People just wait for death to come and many prefer it comes soon.
You cite "Stalin bad" but Stalin only killed about 40,000/week for 30 years. You're talking of personally paying to support the deaths of everyone at the current world-wide all-cause death rate of 1,000,000/week, forever. Surely in some way that makes your plans infinitely worse than Stalin's? Imagine all the wailing and gnashing of teeth, all the veil of mourning and tears, the darkness your plans will cloud the surface of the Earth with. All the sobbing parents, grieving siblings, depressed grandparents and grandchildren.
All because you don't want to bother inventing an orbital ring or an arcology tower or society where suicide by choice is the accepted way out.
> "removes most horrible tyrants like Stalin"
"we" could still kill him; immortal or ageless doesn't necessarily mean invincible.
Exactly - this obsession with planets it toxic, you see it all the time. People just consider Earth as the only available finite resource and thus take some problems as unsolvable and a lot of suffering as normal and unavoidable.
All the while the are almost endless resources and options how to solve these issues waiting in the solar system!
Its like hauling old people to the mountains to die because your village can't support them. We got over that & we should should get over our current terrestrial problems as well by moving on and expanding out of our cradle.
The energy needed to move millions to a different planet is enormous with current physics. So, until you solve that, the obsession with Earth is not toxic, it's realistic.
It's not enormous, it's just significant compared to our current production/use, but here's the good news: there's more than enough energy for that available off planet. There's absurd amounts of energy available everywhere around us.
Consider: it seems that we should be able to support a technological civilization of billions of people on renewable energy alone. That means literally on a fraction of the sunlight that Earth captures. Now, Sun isn't focusing on Earth, it's an omnidirectional emitter. Which means there's some 74 000 times more energy than Earth is receiving from the Sun available just in Earth's orbital band alone.
Fortunately, space-related energy problems seem like they'll be solving themselves, in lock step with increased space capabilities.
The Sun radiates about 400 trillion trillion Watts in all directions, and only a couple of billionths of it crosses Earth. There's a lot more radiant energy spreading out into the void waiting to be Dyson Swarmed.
There's no way we're going to rocket launch billions to Mars, and there isn't another planet worth living on without unreasonable amounts of energy for Terraforming. But we are capable of rebuilding the atoms of Earth into much larger living environments - there are so many atoms it wouldn't mean destroying the Earth to do it. A Space Elevator doesn't need diamond nanowire, it could be built with enough steel chain. An orbital ring around the Equator would be enormous and would take approximately nothing of the Earth's matter to construct.
Isaac Arthur's YouTube channel is full of speculation and plans for all kinds of possible or nearly-possible futures, as well as more distant dreams. e.g. the playlists:
It doesn't seem to be happening that way. Current research doesn't seem to aim at indefinite life extension but at some decades more of healthy life. The current goal of most companies and foundations is to make 90 the new 50. So it seems that it will happen gradually.
> Imagine if they succeeded. Instant breakdown of society. So by induction, perhaps someone makes sure they don't.
My comment comes across as semantic nitpicking, but I don't mean it that way; I just think I'm not understanding what you mean by reasoning "by induction" here.
I am a mathematician, so am most familiar with induction in its technical mathematical sense, which I assume isn't what you mean. More generally, my dictionary says that induction is "the inference of a general law from particular instances". For that to be what you mean here, you would need to infer that "someone makes sure they don't" (meaning, I assume, "they don't succeed in curing death by aging") in general from the fact that someone has done so in particular cases. Is that what you meant? If so, who and when? Or is my dictionary wrong, or are you using some other sense of 'induction'?
Society won't break down. Societies of the high longevity future are almost certain to look back at the current age and balk in confusion at the number of people afraid of living longer the same way we balk at things like human sacrifice.
It's a form of Stockholm syndrome and a coping mechanism against immense, inescapable pain. It's the 4th F of trauma coping mechanisms: Fight, Flight, Freeze, Fawn.
When something is very painful and inescapable you can: Fight it, run away from it (not talk about it, ignore it, pretend it's not there or won't happen, mentally distract away from it with constant stimulation), freeze (dissociate, numbness, ie shut down emotions, be stoic, feel nothing or little) or fawn (appease, please, embrace the pain in order to feel a sense of control over it, believe it's good, you want it or is positive in some way, thereby releasing yourself from the torment of powerlessness+pain).
I've lived a modern day life of comfort, opportunities and experiences unimaginable compared to even my grandparents (all deceased now). I've been to places and had opportunities to try things which they never did. Compared to my grandma who cooked during food rationing and had to save sugar rations to make a cake, who lived a frugal life of 'make do and mend', I have the spare money and first world surroundings to indulge any ordinary luxury[1] on a whim - meal at a restaurant, new clothes, ticket to a show, buy a household goods item or entertaining gadget, holiday abroad in a hotel on a couple of day's notice, all no problem. I've travelled more than she ever did, owned more things than she ever did, experienced many kinds of novelty and variety that she never did.
Is that enough? Can I go now? Isn't that enough? I still have possibly 3-4 decades of life left to average life expectancy, and for what - to grind through more experiences? Even though I've already had vastly more than most humans who ever lived? I have no great purpose to achieve, there's nothing I can do which millions of others can't do. The main reason to go on living is because dying would hurt others unnecessarily. Brute forcing through everything-there-is-to-experience is not an enticing vision for the future at all, it's a grind.
> "but if it wasn't for some limit forced upon me, if it was really my choice, then there's a lot more I'd like to do."
It seems common that people who become rich enough to do anything end up depressed doing nothing. Taking the forcing function out seems to make people miserable rather than happy. Even people who said beforehand that they had lots they'd like to do often seem to lose motivation to actually do any of it.
> Brute forcing through everything-there-is-to-experience is not an enticing vision for the future at all, it's a grind.
Speak for yourself, but please don't confuse that for a good argument for the death of others with a different perspective. (I don't think longevity advocates generally want to prevent suicide or force people to live forever if they don't want to.)
> "please don't confuse that for a good argument for the death of others with a different perspective."
"I want everything" is a youthful perspective that adults grow out of by gaining things and realising that drowning in endless things isn't happiness, it's a hoarding disorder. People with a PetaByte storage array of media aren't the happiest film watchers on the planet, people with a garage full of Lamborghinis aren't the best drivers or the happiest people, Billionaires aren't satisfied with 'enough' money. Indeed, the opposite as one anecdote in this thread commented - a child with nothing who gets an orange is happy; a child with 9 consoles who gets a 10th console and wants an 11th, isn't happy. Saying "I want 1000000 consoles" seems more cringeworthy than convincing. "I want a career" "I want ten careers!" "I want a pony" "I want a hundred lifetimes of pony ownership!". "I want to master an instrument" "I want to master infinity instruments!". Ok mr oneupper. But it makes no difference whether "you" lived all those lives you can't remember, or someone else did. No difference at all. In fact, you may as well assume that other people are you, and their lives are ones you lived and can no longer remember. Everything becomes much simpler and it makes just as much sense.
> "I don't think longevity advocates generally want to prevent suicide or force people to live forever if they don't want to."
I suspect they are against suicide; why would someone who promotes longevity so much also be pro-dying-early? I also suspect one of the reasons our societies are against suicide is because workers can't be allowed an easy escape from their suffering. The kind of people who are in favour of working infinity lifetimes of careers are probably in the upper/white collar classes if they see that as a good thing; to a huge amount of the world, retirement is the carrot dangled ahead of them and dozens of lifetimes of work would be a pretty bad thing.
I think you're speaking for "adults", given your next sentence.
> "I want everything" is a youthful perspective that adults grow out of...
Also:
> > "I don't think longevity advocates generally want to prevent suicide or force people to live forever if they don't want to."
> I suspect they are against suicide; why would someone who promotes longevity so much also be pro-dying-early?
I was ambiguous, sorry. I know for a fact that a great many of longevity advocates advocate legalized suicide. My "I think" was hedging against the fact that I haven't done a survey and don't have hard data. But I think you - understandably, given this is what you're doing - took it as idle, uninformed speculation.
My advice would be actually to read serious arguments in favor of longevity before forming opinions on them. Maybe start here: https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/cryonics
I have read Eliezer Yudkowsky's arguments in favour of longevity, and almost linked them myself. A few of them I can get behind - if there was no death, would we invent it? Probably not. But the cryonics ones I really can't agree with at all. Here in the UK we have a Conservative Prime Minister, a multi-millionaire who, together with his wife, is in the top 250 richest people in the country. And we have nurses, postal workers, transport workers, and more striking for more pay in the wake of the rising living costs, rising inflation, and energy price hikes (hikes which have lead to record profits for energy companies). The Prime Minister recently said that striking workers are "tired of being "foot soldiers" in the union's "class war"".
That's the kind of out of touch that E Yudkowsky's writing has, from his position of employing someone to sit next to him to remind him he's supposed to be writing Harry Potter fan fiction instead of procrastinating. Quite possibly I would agree more if I was a genius academic able to write about anything that interested me for a living and had an audience hanging on my every blog post. Here for example[1] is a LessWrong post from Gwern which I resonate more with. Quotes: "Next to life itself, freedom is the most precious value; and most people’s lives are functionally devoid of it. Many cryonicists fail to see this, because they are self employed, are in jobs that offer them compensating satisfaction, or that they don’t perceive as “work”". and "Heaven isn’t waking up from cryopreservation and having to go into work two weeks later – FOREVER. That is the very definition of hell for most people."
And even then it doesn't capture several things about cryonics arguments which bother me; the fiddling of the finances with insurance. Sure it may cost more than a normal person earns in a lifetime to cryopreserve someone, but if we handwave it away with "insurance" then it will all be fine. Insurance companies are scummy, the academic calculations about risk/reward/probability never take that real world fact into account, "markets are great" they say while everyday people are swindled by marketeers day in, day out. Or the delight in drastic medical treatments where the results may look good on paper, but look at people's lived experience of medical procedure aftermaths, problems they are left with, and it looks uncomfortably different. e.g. [2], c.f. how many doctors would personally refuse the old age treatments their elderly patients+families ask for. And then wonder what the actual lived experience of the cryo-revived would be, separate from the paperwork which says 'revived successfully'.
And then how self-satisified the whole thing is, e.g. from the Gwern post: "many of the arguments that make cryonics credible, require a remarkable degree of both intelligence and scholarship. Inability to understand the enabling ideas and technologies usually means the inability to understand, let alone embrace, cryonics.". Now that alone wouldn't change how likely it is to work, but consider Eliezer Yudkowsky who values his own intelligence more than most things; he is overweight and under exercised[3]. Caloric restriction is the only proven way to extend life in any creatures, and it's much more likely that it is effective in humans than it is that you personally will be cryonically revived, but he doesn't do it. Why not? Exercise is about the only proven way to slow IQ decline with age, something you'd think he would value highly, and it appears he doesn't do that either. Why not?
Compare with Ray Kurzweil and his book "the Fantastic Voyage - live long enough to live forever"[4], he has been partnering with a doctor for decades studying body biochemistry and interventions to improve his health and increase his life expectancy - and doing them - incredibly fiddly diet and micronutrient tracking and regular medical interventions at the doctor's office, dozens of regular blood tests. Seen through the lens of this book what it takes to try and live longer, makes it a bit less attractive to bother, doesn't it? Ray Kurzweil's reason was to live long enough to see the singularity in about 2035 and become immortal and revive his father. EY argues much more strongly for live extension than Ray Kurzweil, but apparently takes far less interest in doing anything about it today. The pro-cryonics arguments are often about how clever the cryonics suporters are for seeing a loophole in the universe - and conveniently it's a loophole that only needs an online signup with a credit card, but if you look at their 'revealed preferences', they aren't convinced enough to act on things which are much more likely to work but involve effort, so maybe agreeing with cryonics isn't about how intelligent you are, it's about how tempted you are to an easy low-effort fix?
Compared to most creatures on Earth we already have longevity, btw. Imagine how much more you could master if you hadn't spent so long commuting, washing vegetables, making your bed, showering, gazing out the window, vacuuming dust-catcher carpets, polishing silverware ... if you surgically removed all your life, how much more life you could cram in. Oh you don't want to give up eating delicious calories for decades for the hope of a few more years at the end? Funny, me either. You don't want to spend hours exercising for the hope of a few more IQ points near the end? Weird, I don't either. You don't want to wash your vegetables in acid and drink only filtered water and spend hours a week analysing your blood test results making microadjustments to your dozens of regular nutritional supplements using the latest medical study results for guidance?[5] Hah, guess what, me either.
[5] Ray Kurzweil on supplements: "For boosting antioxidant levels and for general health, I take a comprehensive vitamin-and-mineral combination, alpha lipoic acid, coenzyme Q10, grapeseed extract, resveratrol, bilberry extract, lycopene, silymarin (milk thistle), conjugated linoleic acid, lecithin, evening primrose oil (omega-6 essential fatty acids), n-acetyl-cysteine, ginger, garlic, l-carnitine, pyridoxal-5-phosphate, and echinacea. I also take Chinese herbs prescribed by Dr. Glenn Rothfeld. For reducing insulin resistance and overcoming my type 2 diabetes, I take chromium, metformin (a powerful anti-aging medication that decreases insulin resistance and which we recommend everyone over 50 consider taking), and gymnema sylvestra. To improve LDL and HDL cholesterol levels, I take policosanol, gugulipid, plant sterols, niacin, oat bran, grapefruit powder, psyllium, lecithin, and Lipitor. To improve blood vessel health, I take arginine, trimethylglycine, and choline. To decrease blood viscosity, I take a daily baby aspirin and lumbrokinase, a natural anti-fibrinolytic agent. Although my CRP (the screening test for inflammation in the body) is very low, I reduce inflammation by taking EPA/DHA (omega-3 essential fatty acids) and curcumin. I have dramatically reduced my homocysteine level by taking folic acid, B6, and trimethylglycine (TMG), and intrinsic factor to improve methylation. I have a B12 shot once a week and take a daily B12 sublingual. Several of my intravenous therapies improve my body’s detoxification: weekly EDTA (for chelating heavy metals, a major source of aging) and monthly DMPS (to chelate mercury). I also take n-acetyl-l-carnitine orally. I take weekly intravenous vitamins and alpha lipoic acid to boost antioxidants. I do a weekly glutathione IV to boost liver health. Perhaps the most important intravenous therapy I do is a weekly phosphatidylcholine (PtC) IV, which rejuvenates all of the body’s tissues by restoring youthful cell membranes. I also take PtC orally each day, and I supplement my hormone levels with DHEA and testosterone. I take I-3-C (indole-3-carbinol), chrysin, nettle, ginger, and herbs to reduce conversion of testosterone into estrogen. I take a saw palmetto complex for prostate health. For stress management, I take l-theonine (the calming substance in green tea), beta sitosterol, phosphatidylserine, and green tea supplements, in addition to drinking 8 to 10 cups of green tea itself. At bedtime, to aid with sleep, I take GABA (a gentle, calming neuro-transmitter) and sublingual melatonin. For brain health, I take acetyl-l-carnitine, vinpocetine, phosphatidylserine, ginkgo biloba, glycerylphosphorylcholine, nextrutine, and quercetin. For eye health, I take lutein and bilberry extract. For skin health, I use an antioxidant skin cream on my face, neck, and hands each day. For digestive health, I take betaine HCL, pepsin, gentian root, peppermint, acidophilus bifodobacter, fructooligosaccharides, fish proteins, l-glutamine, and n-acetyl-d-glucosamine. To inhibit the creation of advanced glycosylated end products (AGEs), a key aging process, I take n-acetyl-carnitine, carnosine, alpha lipoic acid, and quercetin." - now that's longevity in practise, who's still interested? Who even bothered to read this, let alone do it?
If everything in Kruzweil's list was rolled up into one cheap pill I could take daily, I might be willing to try it. I think it's probable that it'd have no significant effect on my lifespan, and I think it's not that unlikely that it would shorten it.
I agree that the idea of crisscrossing the world to take every possible scenic selfie seems empty. For some people, it won't though. There's also so much more available to us than just this sort of consumption.
Personally, I've always had the itch to recreate as much of the computing stack I rely on as possible. I love the idea of running my own text editor in my own shell, written in my own programming language, compiled with my own compiler, running on my own operating system. Not because I think I would be pushing the state of the art forward or that it would be commercially viable, but just for kicks. The joy of truly understanding.
I think this is not a completely uncommon feeling, which is why a lot of programmers could look at Terry Davis and say "okay, aside from the obvious mental illness, the racism and the antisemitism, there is something there." He spent years building something with little value to anybody beyond himself. Zach and Tarn Adams spending twenty years on Dwarf Fortress also comes to mind, to the extent they are doing it for themselves. These projects require huge sacrifices on the part of their creators. The opportunity costs incurred shape their lives (e.g. the Dwarf Fortress decisions currently being made based on health insurance coverage). I can't imagine inflicting the programmer monk lifestyle that would come along with such long term non-commercial work on my young kids when the end state is just "Yeah, it's useless but I got a kick out of doing it."
Being honest, it's also hard to imagine that once my kids move out and I can pick a more austere lifestyle just for myself, I'll look at the remaining ~20 years of my life and say, "I think I will devote the rest of my life to this one single 'that would be kinda neat' drive."
If I had, say, 100, 200, 500 more good years where I could just subsist and pursue passion projects? I'd love to spend 10-20 years going down the "recreate all your software from scratch" rabbit hole.
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A thought on the "society needs death" idea: if my continued existence pursuing obscure hobbies without economic value is a drain on society, maybe the fix isn't that I must die at some arbitrary age fixed by evolution, maybe the fix is just a better way to account for the costs and benefits of our actions. Don't say nobody can spend 10,000 years jetsetting from tourist spot to tourist spot, just require them to offset it through their other actions so that on balance they've made a positive contribution.
Charity, love, contemplation of beauty, building friendships, raising children, many more. These are not empty in many ways, they provide long lasting satisfaction, they help others, they give you a feeling of peace, they can be shared freely, they provide meaning and make the world a better place for yourself and others.
I’ve found learning harder as I age. I can still do it, but I don’t think we’re as elastic as we are at 5, or 18. I’m guessing but I think it’s both internal changes and the sheer product of an expanded mental landscape. We have more to consider than a freshman. I think focusing really hard and making changes is easier when you have less on your plate. In a few years, an 18 year old can transform the trajectory of their life. It’s much harder when you’re 50.
This isn’t absolute. Of course with an infinite life some of these restrictions go away, but unless we get rid of the meat minds I think we’ll have some built-in limitations that are core to who we are as humans. I honestly think I learn more than most of my peers because I keep trying to, but I do find myself getting less interested in the latest fad. Some amazing people can learn entirely new life journeys, Carmack or SamA, say. But look at most people you know. Most are going to keep plugging away getting crankier and crankier. If those people hold power and grow their wealth indefinitely, I think that’s a net negative.
Max Plank said, paraphrased: Science progresses one funeral at a time.
We make way for the youth to have their go, with our influence reducing over time.
This all ends when AI arrives anyway. Change has to outpace us. Someone or something will get your wish of indefinite life, and we’ll find out how these patterns change.
That mental calcification, if it's so universal, seems like it's probably partly physiological in nature. It's the sort of thing that could be changed, in time, if people wanted to make themselves more or less neuroplastic.
> I suspect in hundreds or thousands of years we'll look back at age-related death culturally the same way we look at infant mortality during the medieval ages
Currently our culture/civilisation can be expected with my life. We won't adapt as you can see by us not adapting even now for mitigation on a societal level at all.
But yes, death of old age is the sorrow of our days!
When I was younger I wanted to live forever, nowadays I'm more at peace with the idea of death.
There are a couple of things that make death bearable. Any longevity treatment should placate the first and we should aim to compensate the second with plenty of change in our lives.
First is physical ailments. Even a healthy person will accumulate aches, and those will slowly erode they will to live. Several of my grandparents (and some that were not mine) have expressed that they were waiting to be taken, and I'd wager that would be a part.
Second is the mental fatigue. Not only your mental state is akin to your physical one, so you might be mentally exhausted, but also you begin to get bored with most media. It's hard to find a story that hasn't been told before, music that you find original and good, few dishes that you still dare to discover, ... .
Apart from the personal point of view there's also the general one. There two more problem arise.
Sustainability, as the planet can support what it can. The society and the way resources are managed will have to change a lot if people live longer. But don't worry because...
Power. You'd go from families holding power to individuals. No longer the young master will spend all the money and none will be left, because their parents will have control over that. Situation could become even more oppressive with them withholding the longevity treatments, giving some to their employees and none to the general public.
So while I agree with your sentiment, which is also beautifully expressed in HPNOR, I'd say that there's a lot of transformations to be made before it's good.
The notion that immortality is a good idea fades with age. Youth is more important, because as you age opportunities and options vanish and ailments and limitations arise. If you can give me immortality, health and my youth, I may reconsider.
That's why what most research is trying to extend healthspan and lifespan. All drugs that are in clinical studies today are either trying to push the old part to later in life or just targeting what is making us old so we don't well, get old. The goal is to maintain that youth.
As well as getting used to the idea of losing loved ones. Anyone who doesn't feel anything from the loss of close relationship, or conversely, does not seek out to make new ones, isn't likely going to be a well adjusted noble immortal with humanities best intententions at heart (see: Man From Earth), but an immoral perpetual leach that only serves themselves (see: various vampire films).
Change in viewpoints, lifestyle or behavior become exceedingly rare the older people get. Also, the youth is always incapable, stupid and wrong. It's so much of a phenomenon that I wouldn't dare blaming anyone for this. It almost seems to be part of normal development.
People just tend to become more mentally rigid with age and they have a perfect justification ready for you: experience. They have seen it all and can therefore judge everything and everyone (without considering changed circumstances of course which would require to adjust the mental frame that was rigidly formed across the ages).
Everyone has brain damage that accumulates over the course of your life. A 50-year old has a lot fewer brain cells than a 20-year old; I wonder what would happen if you regrew them?
For a counter thought: while I absolutely agree with you in terms of richness of life, I don’t think pursuing endless life is a sound idea.
As parent poster wrote, we like nostalgia, because we clutch to our experiences. We compare them instead of collecting it. On the other side the more we experience something the more we stall or get bored. Even with other people - with increase of lifespan we also increased number of divorces, lost connections etc. That doesn’t make us happier.
One could argue that we, as humans, suffer more today from out deteriorating bodies, than people in medieval time, when it was shorter, and that we suffer more psychologically due to increased influx of information, global conscience and artificial constructs we build every day.
Resources would also be an issue, so even if immortality would be obtainable it’d be either reserved for the richest or would divide people with almost impassable line splitting centuries of servitude and centuries of indulgence.
So to answer your question - why not? Because it’ll bring suffer to many on many levels except for a blessed few and we should focus first on making life great for everyone present before trying to make it infinitely longer.
Joking lightly (as subject is very deep) - it’s somewhat useful skill to know when to get off the stage.
It would not only be for the rich. Healthcare cost are incredibly expensive especially later in live so governments have a strong inventive to provide it for everyone. Also people wont have to retire anymore (also great for government)
The most expensive part about it would probably be research, but since every person on the planet is a potential user and there a big savings in Healthcare and Pension i don't see costs being a problem.
Humans dont progress in terms of biological evolution anymore but instead technologically.
The increased lifespan would allow scientist to master multiple fields which would be great for progress.
Access to “high end” care (which I suppose would be one) is already high cost which is not that accessible even with technology presence.
As of 2019 1/3 of world’s population doesn’t have access to clean drinking water. Would they be glad that instead of clean water and sanitary conditions they were granted endless life?
It’s nice to focus on optimistic outcomes but except for genius scientists world is full of mobsters, greedy bankers and ruthless corporation heads. They’d had a chance for longevity way sooner than the best of scientists (who have “infinite memory” trait, which isn’t true even for the healthiest of humans).
Sure, we’re speculating (and it’s fun) but I’d invite to mix at least 30% of “what could go wrong” as part of the context.
Let’s have a thought experiment: who would be the first to get such treatment - Nobel prize winner or a dictator? What would be the route, who would pay for that, would they even want that (as that’s not guaranteed).
Dictator could pay more for it but would probably be to paranoid to actually do it until its proven technologically.
So my bet would be on the Noble Prize winner because of curiosity and good connections to the people working on the technology.
If the technology first emerges you could probably get it quite cheaply because its not proven yet. Afterwards there will be a scarity due to everyone wanting it which will drive prices up.
In the long run it becomes a free commodity due to being a net saving for governments.
But even if the rich and ruthless get it first, that doesnt matter much in the long run.
Medical improvements tend to get cheaper with time.
The incentives are there to provide it to everyone. And especially so in a democracy.
Based on previous events Covid provided wealth of data, and it was high profile people who got access to vaccinations and experimental treatment first, in many countries celebrities got their shots before healthcare workers.
Immortality also doesn’t equal invincibility. One can get sick, one can brake their bones and still suffer. With assumption that immortality would come with great regenerative capabilities - would that include teeth as well? What would happen if we’d lost some due to accident? Would it extend to limbs?
I think main question is why one would like to be immortal?
Experiencing thing is nice thing, but with great biological change world would change too. Population would grow and scarcity would be even worse. Probably people would work most of the time just to be able to sleep (due housing shortage) and eat (due food shortage as a result of decreased production area).
It’s possible that bigger chunks of our lives (except “the winners”) would consist of work (another prior example - while we work less for last couple centuries, work devices are omnipresent falsifying data, and we still work much more than in pre-industrial times [1])
If you hadn’t had chance I’d recommend Upload show available on Amazon Prime. It’s somewhat tangential (as it’s endless virtual afterlife) but it touches some possible issues relatable to our discussion
Thanks!, that show sounds interesting. Will look into it.
Immortality is maybe the wrong word for what i have in mind. Its more eternal youth but you can still be killed.
Best analogy would be the elves in lord of the rings.
My hope would be that the higher life experience combined with a healthy body would allow us to be better as a species.
Media seems pretty dystopian and dark in general right now. I think that may influence the outlook of many regarding the future.
Certainly could turn out that way but i think there is also a big chance it will be way different and better then we think right now.
I think this is true for many, but it is not true for all. Some of us would thrive in these new circumstances. I am extremely inflexible when it comes to emotions. There is more to it, but the way I've explained it to others is that my clock for emotions ticks 10 times slower compared to them. That is, if I develop emotions at all. This is something that has affected every aspect of my life for as long as I can remember. There doesn't seem to be a way to "fix" it, but for a long time I've considered "more time" to be the best way to accommodate it and for me to live life at the pace that works for me. Obviously, I won't know until I try, but I would very much appreciate the chance to get a shot at it. And, much like the parent commenter, I am very eager to see more of this world before leaving it. Whatever may or may not come after isn't going anywhere, so might as well take some time.
Yeah! And it would also elreduce ones stress level quite a bit, with a lot of "you need to do X before you are too old for it" no longer being a problem as well as all the emotional damage of people you know dying all the time, especially as you grow old.
Note that you're whole comment is from the perspective of how you benefit from immortality.
If we think of some collective 'Gaia Hypothesis' rather than yourself, then keeping you (specifically) around forever is kind of a big commitment, no?
Perhaps you are just not that big of a deal to be worthy of keeping around? And how would you square keeping you around and not Joe? Is it resources based? Than we would be stuck with a collective of eternal wealthy people, which judging by the sample of mortals available today sounds pretty uninteresting.
Yes it's amazing and you're having your turn at it right now! Enjoy it and then pass it forward.
This is a beautiful feeling, but I believe it is far too easy to dismiss how risky "eliminating death" could be.
To offer one example democracy would be mostly impossible in a post mortality world.
Also immortal humans would be either fertile or infertile and both cases would create quite weird situations.
If I can conclude with some posturing, it is part of human nature to strive toward better conditions and solve the problems around us. This might be our demise, as both giving up on that nature and following it to its logical end might lead to our end.
A world where no people ever died of natural causes would become, fast, a world where war would be the rule, and not the exception. In one generation alone, Earth would go from 7 billion people, to 14 billion. It would be Hell on Earth, literally.
It is also incredibly for me to belive the parent comment about the contentment with death. Why don't people want to escape death? These people are either extremely religious and brainwashed or they are big hypocrites why say morally correct shit like this but will do anything to extend their life if it is within their reach
If we don’t die we don’t evolve. If we had many lives then each one would be less meaningful. I do feel the pull on my heartstrings in your comment (wouldn’t that be wonderful), but an engineer will expand to fit as much time as you give them. We’d at least need to put age limits on political participation.
Sure we will, just not in the traditional natural-selection sense. In many ways humans have "beaten" evolution by finding medical means to allow "unfit" humans to live full lives, and often pass on their genes.
Evolution in the future could be via technical means, either through advancements in medicine, or with cybernetic implants. If humans could ever become intellectually & ethically pure enough to be trusted with genetic engineering ourselves, that's another form of self-made evolution.
> If we had many lives then each one would be less meaningful.
That's a very personal thing, and just an opinion. With changes in lifespan, attitudes change, purpose changes, and people change their outlook. Once upon a time, humans lived much shorter lives, with many/most not making it out of their 30s. Now life expectancy is in the 70s and 80s. And yet we don't look at this doubling of our lifespans and believe that all that extra time robs our lives of meaning. So why should that be the case if we could live to be 500?
> We’d at least need to put age limits on political participation.
Perhaps, but that should be a floating limit that gets adjusted upward with life expectancy. If people regularly lived to be 200, maybe 190-year-olds wouldn't be fit to serve, but a 100-year-old? Why not? And if we managed to push that to 400, those 190-year-olds would start to seem pretty relevant; it would be an injustice to deny them participation in the political system.
Regardless, our idea of society itself would need a huge overhaul even if our lifespans were doubled, let alone made effectively limitless. Political participation would likely be the least of our worries.
> "Once upon a time, humans lived much shorter lives, with many/most not making it out of their 30s."
Citation needed; because that's commonly believed to be average life expectancy - brought down by infant mortality. If you made it past ~5 years old, you had a good chance of living to 60-80.
"The days of our years are threescore years and ten" - Psalm 90:10, the King James Bible.
"A man will spend ten years as a child before he understands death and life. He spends another ten years acquiring the instruction by which he will be able to live. He spends another ten years earning and gaining possessions by which to live. He spends another ten years up to old age, when his heart becomes is counsellor. There remain sixty years of the whole life, which Thoth has assigned to be the man of god." - A passage from The Insinger Papyrus, in the Ptolemaic period"
Not as a species though. We just have to keep reproducing more of us that are good at staying alive and also reproducing to evolve. You and I theoretically could live forever in the same state, and still, our species would evolve via our offspring and theirs and so on.
I think the OP has a point - look at the cycle of innovation e.g in physics - happens almost every 100! I think it’s not an accident - as older generation die out the new ones can easily question the wisdom of the death vs living giants!
Or you could maybe go much faster as you don't have to tech new generations of physicists all iver again & you won't loose all the Nobel Price level geniuses after a few decades.
If you're actually worried about evolution you'll want to bring back eugenics. Current selective pressures are quite relaxed, leading to an increase in deleterious mutations and rising future healthcare costs.
I sort of imagine. Neuralink type of device combined with somatic cell nuclear transfer, cloning oneself but reliving being born again and growing up, accessing your Neuralink at age 18, accessing your memories.
Without age related death people would be terrified to experience anything incase it lead to their death.. crossing the road would be an incredibly high risk activity in such a future.
Infant mortality is quite different: we know that infants are supposed to live. Extending life is the opposite: death is the normal, even unavoidable end. The comparison is misplaced.
> I could spend a lifetime in each trying to develop mastery
No, you couldn't. You would still be your aged brain, not capable of learning hundreds of professions, and your frail body, not capable of replacing its cells any longer. It requires more than a better way to heat up a corpse to extend life.
I'll leave you with this (paraphrase of a) quote: millions long for immortality, but don't know what to do on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
I’m amazed that people who argue against immortality often assume it will come with a frail body and an aged brain. Why? To me, the most basic form of immortality is achieved by reversal of aging, including a brain. Your body is just a machine, it’s pretty obvious it can be repaired, even if we don’t know how yet.
> "it’s pretty obvious it can be repaired, even if we don’t know how yet."
Is it obvious? How would you repair a piece of metal suffering metal fatigue? A perished elastic band? A screw with a chewed head? These are trivial things compared to a human body and we haven't a clue how to rejuvenate them, all we can do is replace them. But how do you replace "a muscle" without surgically damaging the tissue around it? How do you keep "muscle memory" after doing so? How do you reconnect your replacement eye to the optic nerve? How do you replace cells like for like when there's tens of trillions of them in each person, and each cell is a machine a hundred trillion atoms complex? How do you target the cellular machinary inside one cell and find out that it's in need of repair? Is it 'pretty obvious' you can do so?
What does it mean to reverse aging? Younger me was smaller. Younger me moved differently. Younger me liked different foods and knew different facts. Younger me didn't have scar tissue in certain places, are you going to swap that out for normal tissue (how)?
It's pretty obvious that 'repair' does not undo the effects of ageing, it prolongs them - restored old cars are not new cars, they still need to be driven gently. People with plastic surgery don't look like young people, they look like old people who fell into uncanny valley.
How would you repair a piece of metal ... how do you replace "a muscle"
The huge difference between repairing a piece of metal, and repairing a living tissue, is, obviously, the living tissue can repair itself. The mechanisms of self-repair are built in, and they are extremely effective. The problem is these mechanisms break down with age, so the task becomes figuring out how to re-enable them. Yes, we don't know how to do that yet, but keep in mind - just 10 years ago we didn't know how to do things like CRISPR gene editing and now we can do something like this: https://www.bbc.com/news/health-63859184. The point is, we are making progress towards the goal of controlling all the processes in our bodies. There's absolutely no reason to believe this progress will stop any time soon. Even if we can't do it today, things like organ or limb regeneration do not sound like science fiction any more, it's a question of when, not if.
Yes, it's quite likely every one of us Millennials will grow old and die, but I'm much less sure about our kids, and our grand kids will most likely be able to stay forever young if they so desire.
How would you fix your brain? Its capacity is obviously limited, and tinkering with plasticity almost certainly will have unexpected and undesirable consequences. You simply won't be the same person.
Universe is a pretty big place, there's enough room for everyone. Virtual world is even bigger if you decide to move there, and I expect many people will.
Or even it could literally become a machine, potentially with some downsides initially- eq the new parts don't self-regnerate but can be trivially swapped out or repaired.
I suspect in hundreds or thousands of years we'll look back at age-related death culturally the same way we look at infant mortality during the medieval ages: commonly accepted as part of life at the time, but unnecessary and completely solvable in retrospective.
I think fear is the wrong word per-say. If it's something I can't change, that's fine. But if there's an avenue to change it, even if unlikely, why not try?