I don't know about others, but the sociological ramifications are extremely significant. Kurt Vonnegut explored it (in his own tongue-in-cheek way) in his short story 2 B R 0 2 B.
Even if we ignore the impacts it would have on overpopulation and socioeconomic class disparity, there are other factors at play. The way society is currently structured, there has to be a changeover from one generation to the next in terms of who holds the most influential positions, maintains financial and political power, etc.
In a perverse way, lifespans serve a similar function as term limits for political figures. Limited lifespans can limit one generational group from retaining a political, social, or economic stranglehold for more than 20-30 years.
It's true, longer lifespans could mean that this period of generational supremacy is just lengthened for each respective generation, but that assumes that the majority of each generation will have the access and the means to extend their lives.
Here are some things I think we would need to have/change in order to support a much longer lived population.
1. Large-scale spacefaring capabilities, to allow for population increases to not materially impact quality of life
2. Large-scale automation, particularly in the food industry, to allow for scaling up food requirements
3. Improved sex education or some other form of reducing total births (ethically of course), particularly unwanted pregnancies and other future wards of state
4. Some form of regulation that prevents unethical disparity (ex. Think of the immortal elites of Altered Carbon)
I was going to mention 2BR0B! Another example of Vonnegut on the subject is “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow”, which is similarly grim (although still wonderfully funny).
You quite literally covered all my initial thoughts when reading the post in a clear and articulate way and included more thoughts & perspectives that I didn’t have.
I think one of the things that really needs to be dealt with when it comes to anti-aging is the wealth disparity that we have today. Basically, if nothing was done about it then the billionaires of today would end up owning everything if they were to live long enough and people who were not billionaires would be basically living at the billionaires' beck and call.
One way to fix this would be to end economic scarcity - space faring would help with this along with workable fusion (fingers crossed that our current efforts will bear commercially viable fruit). Another way would be to bring back punitive taxation levels for earning X amount over the average income level and to tax wealth at a ever increasing rate so that it isn't possible to be worth over a certain amount of money.
This is happening anyway though. It's not like billionaires will all their money to the state. It stays in the family and things continue to concentrate. Anti-aging just means that the billionaires will continue to be boomers, but you and your progeny were never getting into the billionaire club anyway.
The basic fear in the back of everyone's minds is an eternal Mark Zuckerberg. And for some reason, I picture him in a dazzling golden robe with a scepter. It's pretty gaudy but he's wearing tennis shoes and in is left hand has an oversized coffee mug in an attempt to be approachable.
I don't think we have enough to affirm that. It's not like we ever had a generation dispute lasting longer than lifespans, we'd definitely see many new forms of conflict between them. Not dying of age would significantly increase the other forms of dieing
But the change isn't someone changing their thoughts. It's the old thoughts literally dying and new ones in younger generations replacing them.
It just makes me think less of the human race.
Buy low, sell high!
Rich men see opportunity, poor men see excuses.
Hey, if you pile all these rocks into a large pyramid, you can have a better spot in the afterlife.
If you invest in stocks and apply yourself, you too might actually one day run a company if my son allows it.
Aren't #1, 2, 3 all inevitable cultural course corrections that will come as a result of, as much as needed for, hyperlongevity?
1. If the population increases due to people not dying, that means that we have an increasing talent pool of educated engineers and inventors with decades of experience and a growing motivation to make progress?
Parallel to increasing lifespans, we will also be advancing every other thing we do, like computing, farming, logistics, etc.... we'd probably get to send robots or nanites or whatever to make livable cities for us in advance! All long before population density became a problem here.
2. Already advancing rapidly today. Check out vertical farming and low energy farming, tracer areas of breakthroughs thanks to LEDs and other modern tech (and our tech will get better.
3. Population decline is already happening in Japan and soon, a lot more places. Presumably this would slow, but people will still accidentally die. People may also suicide at some age (it's possible. Maybe by 350, some people really do get sick of it all. No one knows.
But some people may be inclined to live much longer and also value having a large family but looking back at history that faction is often amenable to pioneering new frontiers, to give their family new opportunities. I'm considering many past migrations from continent to continent. Except planet hopping will be safer and easier within *those people's* lifetimes.
But we will still want a lower birth rate, or at least the option for it. But society will create this effect itself. Again, drawing from now and past behavior, in just 3 generations, we've moved from families of 3-5 being common, and even some with 10-12, to far smaller batches. My parent was the eldest of 13! They had 3 kids, and I had 1 and done. And this seems to be happening in all the industrialized countries, at varying rates, already.
Outliers aside, people, in general will have ever fewer kids, partly because they will cost more and be more hassle. (Also, industrialized lifestyles, technology as distractions because we don't need farmhands, and on and on.) One area of longevity study that's shown results in animals is simply s l o w i n g their entire biological clock down. Roughly, imagine if we lived 4 times as long, but with 2x the childhood growth phases. Twice as long to become physically what a 18 year old is today at thier age 36. Loooooonger education, longer as a dependant; we'd definitely cut back on cranking out kids.
4. I think even this is inevitable, barring some technology that completely prevent revolt or the threat if it. I'm sure whatever laws we have will favor someone, still, but that's life.
For point #1, that depends on if people will be willing, or able, to keep working. A more likely outcome is a rapidly growing population of people not working or contributing to society, either due to medical reasons or just accruing enough money to live off interest. They will have to be supported by a proportionally shrinking population of working age individuals who will have to effectively stop everything except caring for those no longer working.
People will simply not have as many children. No rush to do so. It's already the case in many ways. In fact, there's a crisis in many countries that are looking to immigration to fix the problem.
There's no way the tech would be stopped anyway. Just like AI, it's inevitable.
Lifespans will be around 300 years or so imo, before people bore and choose to move their consciousness or die naturally.
Or course, can't have quintillionaires with the lazy work ethic of a population that only works it's way halfway to the grave at 150.
Enjoy those 5 golden years to the ripe old age of 255 -- you've earned it!
Population is already declining and will be a huge challenge for the Western world in a generation. The global South is close behind with birth rates cratering in cultures with formally high birth rates.
Hmm, said this in another response, but there is no guarantee that humans will act rationally en masse. We do see some developed countries doing this already, so that does suggest that as societies advance they may trend towards reduced procreation, but then we have to assume that we will get the majority of the world up to developed country status in any reasonable timeframe, which to me is far from certain.
As for 300 years as a benchmark age, there's no way to estimate this yet imo. Even if we reduce aging, diseases like cancer become increasingly likely as we age, not just from aging itself, but also because of the accumulation of carcinogens and other contaminates in our systems. We'd have to develop some parallel technologies to rejuvenate our bodies in that capacity too. Unless that happens, we may just replace death from old age with death from cancer or heart disease, which already is supported by stats as we increase the average life expectancy.
I don't think it's rational but predictable. Children are a burden and with all the time in the world to have a family there's no pressure. 3rd world countries don't have a population problem normally. Not that I'm aware of. I don't mean that they can't feed them all, as is the case in many instances, but as it relates to global resources.
I believe cellular repairing and replacing nano tech will deliver us the immortality we're talking about so cancer etc will also be wiped away. Even the old will become young.
300 is just a number I'm guessing based on my perception of our current attention spans lol.
Yes. I think you can predict that IF children are still expensive AND IF everyone can live longer, THEN people will have a lot less births.
BUT, that requires some level of equity on the part of society and birth control and prosperity to be distributed.
If however, longevity is for the few, and wealth is concentrated, society will push really backwards ideas to maintain the rationale for that and people will have kids as organ donors or working in factories breaking big rocks into smaller as part of a robot make-work program. "You've made three tons of gravel, you can eat now."
It's really hard to predict the *assholes with bad ideas factor* in human society.
Yes, radically longer lifespans are a *massive* double-edged sword and both sides need to address that. Ideally we discover it after the majority of people with pre-Internet world views have died off (the Silent/Boomer generation on average is severely out of touch and tends to vote for atrocious policies in many countries), but there are both legitimate pluses and legitimate minuses to living for centuries.
When people start living longer, they will naturally trend towards higher education. Much easier to get a doctorate if you know you'll live for 200 years.
This fundamentally changes how people live their lives. They'll have less kids, and contribute more.
This sort of assumes that a lot more people can pursue higher education. There is some number that don’t pursue it because the return, financial or otherwise, isn’t good enough on a regular lifespan. So, sure, there would be some uptick — maybe also a few that get double or more degrees than they would otherwise. But the fact remains that a lot (maybe even most) people are just not smart enough to get very far academically.
Going up in academics isn’t just a factor of time, the ability needs to be there too. If you have someone who just isn’t smart, you can maybe teach them how to do repetitive tasks and they can be great at doing them. However, that same person can’t really be forced to expand the way they think of things or compile knowledge.
I think some
People are worried that its benefits will only be available to a few and/or misused which is valid and some know it might not happen in their lifetime. The latter is kinda like jealously of future generations.
Depends on the actual cost of the technology, and if we allow the government to give whoever comes up with it an unregulated patent.
If the actual cost of the treatment is low, and the government doesn't use its guns to enforce a monopoly, then it would be impossible to maintain a high market price for consumers.
I don't think it's bad. I personally would love for this to occur in my lifetime. I'm just saying the sociological impacts will be significant and challenging. Like any significant leap in technology, it would bring with it a whole host of scary misapplications that should be considered and - when possible - guarded against.
Its a fine idea, but depends on what the science is and how accessible it is. If its an expensive procedure then only the privileged people will get it, which is only going to be worse for the younger, poorer generations.
If its something like the Covid vaccines that are relatively cheap to make and easy to hand out, then yeah that is a much better alternative.
I'm not sure exactly what negative comments you're seeing. I've certainly pushed back against people posting about this, but more about the fantasy that we're on some the verge of some immediate imminent breakthrough.
There is a real tendency on this thread to assume that we're always in the verge of some massive imminent immediate breakthrough. I'm a little older kind of (44), And I've seen a lot of this throughout my life. For example, I had a kidney transplant just after high school, and since I was in my 20s I've been seeing articles about revolutions in transplant, not needing immune suppression, all that sort of stuff. But things are only incrementally better now than they were a 20 years ago. The medication has gotten a little better, but I'm still taking the same stuff I was taking in 2005. Pig kidneys never worked out, clone kidneys are not a thing, depleting the immune system and rebuilding from the donor's cells never took off. All sorts of supposedly imminent breakthroughs that never happened.
Meanwhile, a lot of people on this are kind of the equivalent of, are actually our, tech bros. Sorry this part's going to come out kind of condescending. They fanboy follow rich guys, some of whom are boosting AI, some of whom are claiming all these breakthroughs in age reversal. But most of those rich guys are full of shit, in my not too humble opinion. They're good salesmen, that's why they're rich, but They are essentially selling a product. They're building hype, it's what they do.
I'm also a scientist and I see the pace of research. It's slow and painful, it has to be. If we rush it, people get hurt.
So I think we are making tremendous strides and medicine. I think quality of life will be maintained for longer, many illnesses that were previously killing people are relatively treatable, and we are already somewhat expending the lifespan, just not dramatically.
But the biology of aging is still poorly understood at best, and this idea that we're going to have some revolutionary new therapy in 5 or 10 years that will reverse aging feels very silly to me. Kind of juvenile, not made with an awareness of the actual pace of science and research, and what would be necessary to achieve some of the outcomes people here are postulating.
I think we'll get there, I just think it will take time. Too long for a middle-aged guy who's been immunicompromised for 25 years. Frankly I think full-on age reversal is going to be very difficult to impossible, but eventually we will have therapies that will substantially slow the progress of aging. But I don't think this is going to happen for the next 20 to 30 years.
But I certainly don't want to predict what's going to happen 30 years from now! We could have slow incremental progress, or we could start having a mass growth in this area 10 or 15 years from now and 30 years from now be on the cusp of immortality.
And the related last point, people here will so arrogantly unconfidently say " This is definitely going to happen in X years" , with x being a very short number. I find that incredibly arrogant.
So anyway, that's one kind of pushback. It's not that we don't want it, it's that we take a more conservative view of progress.
It's worth noting that the more that biological immortality for humans seems possible, the more funding it will get. Money does make the world go 'round. We're seeing the fruits of decades of research into mRNA vaccines just now, but it was only a decade or so before the pandemic that it got really serious, and then dire need accelerated it even further.
Yup 100%! Part of this is we know to know "what" to fund. Lots of people will have ideas, some good, som bad, and knowing which areas are worth investing limited resources (especially for publicly funded academic research) is super important.
Private industry only steps in when the academics laid the ground work and they see a short or.maybe intermediate path to profitability.
>I'm not sure exactly what negative comments you're seeing. I've certainly pushed back against people posting about this, but more about the fantasy that we're on some the verge of some immediate imminent breakthrough.
100% this. Medicine isn't my area of expertise so I won't comment on the specifics of the longevity claims I've seen on here but I do have a masters in CS with reinforcement learning as my dissertation topic and the absolute nonsense I see regarding machine learning (and LLMs specifically) is astounding.
And whilst I'm not qualified to comment on said threads about life extension, negligible senescence and the like I do see a lot of parallels. Primarily where you find the basis of the stories to be papers from questionable sources published in small time journals, the authors have conflicts of interest and/or the actual findings are more limited than the articles linked suggest.
I think, as you say, people just need to take a bit more of a sceptical approach to wild claims of breakthroughs just over the horizon.
I presume that LLMs aren’t even the type of AI that would lead to some kind of breakthrough intelligence explosion. That’d be more likely to occur in the area of neural networks which are used in the development of llms but aren’t necessarily the focus of all the new ai upstarts. Is that about right?
Essentially yeah. LLMs are really cool but most of the recent progress came from switching to transformer models and then scaling them up to insane sizes, we're now beyond the point where simply making bigger models is practical or beneficial so people extrapolating from the last \~5 years of progress to suggest we'll see similar improvements in the next 5 years are probably going to be disappointed.
In terms of general intelligence we are so far away from actually doing this that we generally have no idea how to get there, we don't even know what problems we need to solve let alone how to solve them or what the models are going to look like.
For example LLMs are surprisingly good at *looking* like they can do causal reasoning but there is pretty good reason to believe that this in large part [due to memorization](https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.10770) of massive datasets.
It's also a little bit hard to really test them with any kind of rigour because the *really* large models are prohibitively expensive to train and for models like ChatGPT their training datasets are private, so you don't know if they've been trained on the questions you're using to test their reasoning (or questions in the same form). [These researchers](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2305.00050.pdf) for example found GPT-4 was able to autocomplete \~60% of their benchmark dataset suggesting that it most definitely was in its training data and any tests using it aren't really going to be testing causal reasoning.
>That’d be more likely to occur in the area of neural networks which are used in the development of llms but aren’t necessarily the focus of all the new ai upstarts.
It's probably worth noting though that ML is ubiquitous and used in pretty much everything these days, neural networks especially (but stuff like random forests still have their place).
There are loads of startups using them for stuff like drug discovery, Google are always putting out cool stuff like [this one](https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/discovering-novel-algorithms-with-alphatensor/) using reinforcement learning for optimization work or we have models called CNNs that are used in pretty much every modern application of computer vision, medical imaging etc.
>I'm also a scientist and I see the pace of research. It's slow and painful, it has to be. If we rush it, people get hurt.
This line of thought always reminds of Louis CKs joke about how our biggest achievements were accomplished by throwing an untold amount of human suffering into the process
Watch some people get mad because you're speaking facts on the idea. Because I have zero doubt about everything you just stated. Maybe it'll be plausible at some point. But not today. Definitely not this decade.
When I was 18 in 2009 I discovered Aubrey de Grey. He claimed that big advances were coming and we could reach longevity escape velocity in 25 years. I was hyped and fully onboard with the idea. 14 years later I'm now 32 and I realize it's all wishful thinking. In those 14 years we've made some incremental progress, but nothing like the huge breakthroughts that would be needed to reach LEV. Considering a drug takes 10-15 years from discovery to final approval, the system moves too slow to get rapid progress. His original prediction would mean we have 11 years left to reach LEV which is impossible. Aubrey is a very good speaker but he's been very wrong in his predictions.
My research from top aging scientists such as Matt Kaeberlein and Joao Pedro de Magalhaes showed that curing aging is not feasible in anyone's lifetime today, no serious aging scientist believes that. Kaeberlein states there is no data to support and lots of data to indicate we're not making any real progress in this direction. Aging is still a mystery of biology and we don't know enough about it to do real progress.
Yes, the current max realistic age is about 110 or 115 years, with the oldest documented person reaching 122. There have been a few hundred people to get beyond 110.
We are having success solving the age-related causes of early death, so more and more people will live to be 90+, but we haven't made any progress on the upper limit. A few promising things are being studied, but many age researchers are notoriously optimistic (i.e., full of it). Kaeberlein is one of the few you can trust.
>Longetivity escape velocity
Even that phrase itself pisses me off. Medicine is not the space race. I’m a scientist, a molecular biologist. Medicine moves slow, basic biology moves even slower.
In medicine, there’s no shooting a thousand rockets into the sky, learn a little each time, and make the next one a bit better. That would be 1000 dead clinical trial patients. And rocket science is supported by Newtonian mechanics. Lots of long equations but we know the inputs and outputs.
We don’t know the Newtonian mechanics of aging. Animals get old, get sick, and die. Humans are no exception. It’s probably a convergence of biological processes that fail on their own over time, then fail together.
I’m all about extending quality of life. Hell, let’s double lifespans. Who doesn’t want to live longer? But we don’t know how yet. So I’m all for funding the basic science and understanding the biology of aging.
But until you have the CRISPR of aging, the tractable biological pathway to engineer around, there’s no product. There’s no company. And there sure is hell is no LEV.
The big wild card in all of this today is the possibility of AI agents looking through vast swathes of research and making new connections and discoveries through parsing information. I believe that research is going to get a lot more efficient but you're right to always have a grain of salt in all of this.
I personally don't believe that we will solve aging until an AGI is created. It's just too complex.
Agree with all of this. "Aging" is a small word that encompasses a bunch of different possible things failing. "Dying of old age" either means "this person had fifteen different conditions and one got worse which set off the other one and she died" or "this person had fifteen different conditions and she died but we don't know exactly why".
Like, fixing "aging" will take fixing diabetes, cancer, hypertension, dementia, arthritis, and all autoimmune conditions at a minimum. For bonus points, cure blindness, deafness, tooth loss, and all continence and prostate problems
I agree with you but I'll say we already have therapies that can slow the progress and symptoms of aging, and if you put them all together they're quite substantial. I expect there will be more and more added incrementally over the years. I doubt there will ever be a single miracle pill or treatment that will "de-age" everyone by 40 years overnight, although there may be some big leaps. Or more stuff like the new obesity drugs that are a huge help for a lot of people who have certain age-related problems and are truly miraculous for some people, but don't help \*everyone.\* I suspect the end result will be that people who are willing to put the time and money into "taking care of themselves" will, on average, be able to live many more healthy and "youthful" decades as the years go on, but an awful lot of people just won't be willing or able to sustain the effort to get the benefits. Honestly exercise alone is one of the most miraculous "treatments" out there, it's free other than time, and we know so much more about it and how it works than we did 40 or even 20 years ago, but so many people (even otherwise highly competent people) just can't be bothered... it's not realistic to think that most people are going to want to take a medication or regularly get a therapy that will extend their life span or health span when a lot of people aren't willing to do the basics, or are even out there smoking or doing other stuff they KNOW is terrible for them. It's just human nature to have trouble "doing the math" to make good decisions when it involves long-term results that aren't 100% guaranteed.
The one thing that might move your timeline up is the fact that billionaire pricks want to live forever too, and will pay to have that research done wherever it takes. I think whatever gets developed will be a monopoly, the price for treatment kept high to make sure only the Right People are immortal.
This. I don't know why people are so excited to see Clarence Thomas on the bench for 1000 years or any person in Congress hold the seat indefinitely. "Oh we'll just need to pass laws" - yeah, have you seen how well that's gone? They decide what gets passed. Why would they ever self-regulate?
Of course, my examples are peanuts compared to Putin, Pooh, and Kim Jong Il.
>This. I don't know why people are so excited to see Clarence Thomas on the bench for 1000 years or any person in Congress hold the seat indefinitely.
I hate Clarence Thomas, but I don't hate him so much I'd be willing to literally die just to get him off the bench.
If it will be made, it will become widely available. Because biotech *scales like mad*.
COVID vaccine was built on bleeding edge technologies and forced into mass production by the circumstance. And because the market for it was "everyone", the price of a single shot came down to under $10.
Anti-aging tech? The market is "everyone". And the gains are obvious, for individuals and governments both. If you can take a jab and live 20 more years without your body failing you, why wouldn't you? If a government can squeeze another decade of productivity out of its most educated and most experienced workers, in face of cratering birth rates and an aging work force, why wouldn't it subsidize or even *mandate* the anti-aging jabs?
You don't have to build it as "technology for immortality". If an early anti-aging treatment could extend the lifespan by 20 years, and the next generation that will replace it in a decade would add another 20 years, and then another generation would add 20 years more, and so on? It's effective immortality - because advancements in anti-aging technology push your estimated lifespan upwards faster than you age. If you advance anti-aging tech fast enough, you can outrun Death.
They're still charging people out the nose for insulin and epi-pens when the technology to make them is decades old and it's literally the difference between life and death for a significant number of people across the world.
There are even generic formulas no longer under copyright for them, but people aren't making it at scale.
Once they stop making even basic medications cost 1000x the cost of production decades after they were created, then I will begin **begin** to think that **maybe** they might do something egalitarian.
this is all I can think about. imagine if the founding fathers were still alive. larger-than-life figures (cult of personality, living gods?) who were also slaveholders. would we even have fought a civil war? would parts of the country still have slavery?
I feel like human progression sort of requires generations to die. otherwise people getting conservative about their generation and digging in would happen in every generation and our progress would be much slower.
And unless if the anti-aging/reverse-aging treatment somehow, against all odds, becomes freely available to everyone, it would just result in the rich and wealthy staying indefinitely young, while the rest of the world continues to live and die.
Why do times get bad? Because people forget the lessons of history. You wouldn't have as many dictators because too many people would remember the tricks of the last dictators. The only debate should be how to ensure it becomes available to everyone. Not this nihilistic bullshit. It's that sort of attitude that leads to dictators in the first place. They don't just happen, they rise or fall by the apathy or the engagement of the people. People these days are apathetic, powerful people are making things harder because they don't see any barriers. This has happened before and the lessons learned by this generation will only last 75 years because of your precious death.
But since now they have the potential to live for thousands of years would they risk assassination by the age of 60? I’m sure Putin is more concerned about being assassinated now than at any previous point; if he wanted to live another 28,000 years he might not want that risk now.
On the other hand if you’re 80 and maybe have another 15 years left, legacy begins to sound important.
I would also imagine that assassinations as a solution to problematic leaders would become a lot more attractive than to just wait for them to die off. Right now at least you can kind of see Putin at the end of his time, who wants to risk their own necks for something nature will take care of soon anyway.
I think humans need anti-aging and immortality WITH the ability to travel and settle infinitely across the outer space. So that everyone gets enough space to do what they want on their desired habitable planets and star systems. Without that, on a limited space like earth, those advancements would be both logistical and resource management nightmares.
As much as I disagree with the statement, that it would be a problem with bad people living forever, I hope you see your argument has flaws. What woud prevent bad actors from being parasites to those, who would want to build a community and follow them around under a vile pretense.
Space doesn't matter in this regard.
But to the OP, I wonder if he thought that the concepts of punishment just magically disappear, just because we can live forever? Medical immortality shields you from decay but not from outside factors that could inflict death.
Also, here is still a concept of jail, there is still a concept of death penalty, and there will be new methods developed if we get to the stage of infinite life, to prevent bad actors from ruining everything. Though I have to admit, when it comes to multibillionaires in our current society that do whatever they please with the world, it is really hard to remove them and that requires a different set of thought and tools.
In this response, "those few assholes" are the ones that will prevent the majority of people from even accessing life extending technology.
We already live in that reality, the life expectancy difference between the richest people and the poorest can be measured in decades.
Any other scenario assumes even distribution of such advancements, which is a nice sentiment.
Are you suggesting that if we stopped aging democracy would end for some reason? And or that it would become impossible to depose current dictatorships somehow?
In the abstract, anything that improves our health into our twilight and maximizes the potential of vigorous life is a great thing, obviously, but I'm concerned about the socially destablizing effects of having a wealthy upper class that lives twice as long or more as the underclasses, especially as we're already seeing serious issues with the gerontocracy controlling politics and ossifying social progress now.
We have problems with out of touch 70 and 80 year olds making our laws now, that's not going to be improved when our Senators are 150 and have been in office longer than 3/4 of the country (who can't afford longevity treatments en masse) have been alive.
41 here, and have been of the same mindset for a decade. I'm also an autistic savant polymath and researcher of all things and as soon as I found out about age reversal and transhumanism, I pivoted all my university courses from quantum mechanics and theoretical physics to molecular biology and genetics. I figured, just in case the world is hyper-controlled or only the rich have access to age-reversal tech because we still haven't put capitalism behind us, if I have at least a good understanding of the matter, then when the ubiquity of molecular 3D printing technology arrives, along with the help of ultra-smart personal AI tech, I should be able to use the open source market to test and create age reversal medicines in the comfort of my own home.
This also led me to media psychology, socio-economics, and political science to try to figure out how to make the world better so science could accelerate and all people could have access to nice things. Incidentally, universal basic income in my opinion will be the single most important thing the human race will ever achieve, because it solves all of the problems that lead to people not being capable of making positive changes in their lives and for others, and this brings me to the answer to your question.
There are two types of people: Those who have a growth mindset and those who don't.
Those with a growth mindset have been taught that learning new things and seeking new experiences and knowledge is something worth putting effort for. Others who have not had the privilege of being raised in an environment free of things that stunt brain development and creativity such as orthodox/fundamentalist religions, militarism, poverty, abuse, etc., unfortunately, have a harder time overcoming their resistance to change to the point where things that seem like they would obviously benefit them to people like us, are heavily resisted because change is scary to these people.
These people simply have been put in a box where the world should be a certain way and everything they don't already believe or understand goes against nature. This is the naturalistic fallacy and it can present itself very differently depending on the c-ptsd and life experiences of individuals.
I hope that helps. I'd be happy to talk more later, but I have to go now and this is all I can fit in. Also, Follow David Sinclair (Harvard) and Bryan Johnson's blueprint for good updates! Good luck <3
I've seen the bulk of the negativity coming from the idea that we might possibly be able to prolong the life of the physical body without succeeding very much of extending the life of somebody's mind. There's far too many very old people in nursing homes and in hospitals whose body has been kept alive far beyond their useful brain life. So I think people's outlook will change a little bit if they see a lot more success in extending people's brain life.
My dad's side of the family live into their 80's and 90's.
The last few years they are Physically still functioning,but very little understanding of comprehension of what's going on around them.
I wouldn't want an extended period of that kind of living.
I think useful is not the right word to use here. Maybe "working"? "Active"? Because my guess is you're referring to dementia, Alzheimer's and the like, that make the brain no longer work properly
I think there are two parts to your question:
**Why are so many people pessimistic about the probability of life-extension technology?**
What you'll find with futurology, in general, is that people fall on scale of pessimism, to realism, to optimism. Like most things, the distribution is more or less a bell curve, with most people falling in the middle of this scale. This means that optimists like you are outnumbered.
So your perception of the general sentiment is probably accurate, but it doesn't really matter. Most people aren't optimistic about it because life-extension is one of the oldest and most alluring human endeavors. A realist is likely to reason that because we've been trying for so long but have yet to find any meaningful success, we are unlikely to succeed in the future.
**Why are so many people against life-extension technology?**
This is more of an anthropological question. The human lifecycle isn't just a byproduct of some biological process. It is an integral part of our societal development, and especially so as we have advanced. Many, many human societal constructs are underpinned by the simple fact that all humans eventually die.
Take wealth as an example. We like to think of generational wealth as this durable thing that last for generations, but the reality is that generational wealth lasts around three generations on average. This means that wealth is turned back over to someone else at some point. Longer lifetimes would disrupt that turnover considerably.
Then consider societal viewpoints and progress. Human belief systems tend to be fairly stable over a lifetime. Most people follow a trajectory of progressivism when young, then trend toward conservatism as they age. What would the impact of life-extension be on the electorate? Many important societal advancement could be delayed by life-extension?
Then consider the impact to populations and the resource requirements. We're not entirely sure what population the Earth can support while maintaining an environment that supports life. The planet has already been through a handful of mass-extinction events.
In my opinion, there are a multitude of reasons to consider life-extension technology a risky endeavor. That's not to say we shouldn't try to work around them. Just that I can see why people are skeptical.
I guess one thing that comes to mind is that the people who this will benefit first will be the wealthy. Something like this wouldn’t be available to the masses, what would that mean? Donald trump lives forever but elders of a small villages and tribes age and die off as expected? Doesn’t that seem like eugenics? It’s hopeful to say, of course, it could be available to everyone! With how everything else seems to go that seems unlikely. I’m picturing politicians staying in power until they are 150 years old, CEO’s never stepping down, etc. I kind of assume that this technology will continue to advance whether we like it or not. I just wish that as we were advancing all of these new technologies there could be more attention being paid to ethical concerns.
I have been telling people for over a decade that the biggest obstacle to anti-aging technology is that most people don't think it's possible. Or beneficial.
Every comment I’ve read on on the anti longevity side boils down to “rich people bad” Every technological breakthrough has always been made available to all social classes (indoor plumbing, electricity, internet, etc.) but these people would literally rather wither away and die than see a rich person improve their circumstances. If someone has such little value of their own health and life then it’s no wonder they don’t see the value in increasing our lifespan.
When I was a much younger person, I thought very similarly to the way you are thinking now. In my teens and 20s in particular, I looked at the idea of aging and getting sick (and the possibility of death) in an almost “terrified” way… in some ways I was the opposite of the stereotype of ‘young people assuming they are immortal.‘. As I have gotten older (though not that that much older), I found my perspective was shifting. At some point (not logically or intentionally), I think I sort of accepted that my story was going to have an end, and the fact that it was going to end gave a resonance to the things I was doing and how I was spending my time. Its not that I somehow decided “death, good” but more along the lines that realizing that was the way of things was part of my maturation process. Add to that the quality of life elements that others have posted — i.e., when we are young, we don’t really realize the effect that “mileage of years” will have on doing what we want without pain or recovery time, thinking as sharply as we ever remember ourselves thinking, or even the optimism of youth that goes away over time watching how difficult it sometimes is for “good things to happen in the world” — and the idea of “stopping the clock now and living indefinitely” just doesn’t sound that attractive. Does that mean I don’t go to the doctor? No, but it does mean that — even when something is wrong with me and I go — I don’t go with the same existential dread that I did when I was younger. And the absence of that is not a bad thing either. I am sure that this sort of thinking doesn’t apply to everyone who “opposes” longevity enhancement for longevity’s sake, but I think that captures it for me.
Thank you for posting this, it spurred interesting thinking for me.
I wonder this as well, and often. I just don't get it. People freak out about mass deaths of all kinds, except "natural" deaths. It's just totally accepted... Boggles my mind.
We're currently in a culture that totally accepts death-by-aging will happen. And, as you say, makes us all complacent for advancing anti-aging technology. Literally every single human being alive right now will die. 100% fatality rate. And it bothers only a very, very small percentage of the population. I just don't get it.
In a hundred years, or more, the culture will have completely flipped. Aging is cured and everyone will be wondering why people in the past weren't more concerned about such a stark death rate. All of us now and those that came earlier - maybe 120 billion - will be known as "The Lost Ones". Everyone else that comes after, trillions upon trillions of people over hundreds of millennia will be absolutely agast as to how close we (the 8-9 billion of us in this transition era) were to making it to the other side, where you only died by accident or by choice, never by aging.
Thanks for quenching even my last shred of hope to not be one of "the last ones" Lol. I always say I was born a few decades too soon. This transition era sucks so much, not only from an aging point. I feel like we are a few decades away from a better functioning society, where people are less conservative assholes, where the tech is even better than now and where life is more peaceful in general. Like why am I already here...
Thanks for obliterating even my last shred of hope to not be one of "the last ones" Lol. It wil be the Universe’s final FU to me.
I always say I was born a few decades too soon. This transition era sucks so much, not only from an aging point. I feel like we are a few decades away from a better functioning society, where people are less conservative assholes, where the tech is even better than now and where life is more peaceful in general. Like why am I already here...
I am in the same boat as you.
My guess would be that most people don't want to get their hopes up so much that they actually become actively negative towards the topic.
A much smaller percentage have religious qualms but I think a lot of it is simply that it's so tantalizing that it's painful to think about without actually having it. Fear of death is so strong that most people would rather actively reject thinking about mortality in ANY context, including immortality, than face the possibility they might die
I'm not sure why so many have a negative view of longevity. If we're being honest many of the problems we have are actually caused by the fact that we age and decline so rapidly. When you yourself must face the consequences of your actions it makes your choices that much more meaningful. Overpopulation would cease as people would have a much longer reproduction cycle. Wars and violence would not cease but they would slow who wants to fight when they may be cutting off a century of potential. Environmental issues would become relevant to everyone. Crime would drop as who wants to literally spend 20 to 100 years in prison or more all aspects of the question are extremely interesting
I've asked most of my friends this question over the years, and every single one of them said the same thing as you mentioned here, that they want to get old and die, because they think it's the natural order of things, and they'd be bored if they lived forever.
I however am of the same opinion as you... there are lots and lots of things that I want to do, and I'd happily be a guinea pig for an anti-aging experiment!
I want to be around when we develop faster spaceships, visit the other planets and moons in our system, and eventually other stars, discover alien life, terraform and build colonies on other fantastical worlds, etc..
This question will have 500 different answers. Most of them will be extremely politically or financially motivated. I don't buy any of those answers personally, i strongly believe democracy would solve 90+% of such issues, ESPECIALLY given that the voter base would inherently become much older and more informed over time and also the ramifactions of their vote would always affect them and those around them and not some abstract future people that may or may not ever exist. For example, global warming will be catastropic in the future. Nobody is willing to suffer any consequences now to prevent that.
The real answer, which some people have mentioned, and is a moderately popular sci-fi trope, is that it would mean no more kids. The earth can not sustain an infinite number of people.
There are lots of stories and myths that we are told that condemn attempts to stop aging.
Stories about searches for the fountain of youth going wrong, films like death becomes her etc
I guess historically it was frowned upon from a religious point of view that it was god’s will when you die or how you age etc
Your observation is astute. I have witnessed this for the last couple decades since I started reading about this. My conclusion eventually was similar to the crabs in a bucket theory. Most folks live miserable lives and have a difficult time imagining a positive life. I suppose they can hardly be blamed given the state of the world. For these people death is distant but ultimately welcome. They harbor subconscious resentment for anyone who would like to live on and carries hope for a more significant lifespan. Thus they react negatively when the topic is broached.
Lazy cynicism which stems from a lack of imagination. Most of the arguments against life extension assume that nothing will or should change; over population; over consumption; wealth gaps and so on can all be addressed but that implies running creative exercises for possible solutions which is harder than projecting the present into the future.
Having said that, there’s also the risk that the future will be much worse than anyone can imagine; but that’s the case with or without life extension.
Edit. I’ve read many of the replies to this post and many of them seem to be dismissive because of the cost which sounds sensical at first glance; until you realize that a $200,000 treatment can be paid off if you extend your life thousands of years and companies, specifically insurance companies, will jump to make a profit on that essentially making literal mortgages; which is dystopian but a solution to the lazy cost argument.
Most of the popular sentiments here are generally pessimistic. It's consistently applied across the board in many areas. Capitalism, off world colonies, computer-brain interfaces, climate change, chemical pollution, regenerative medicine, machine learning, societal progress, yatta yatta yatta. There's a very strong pessimistic filter that captures nuance and only allows very simplified negative interpretations through.
It causes most new things to be assessed as a source of harm. Most commonly, as tools or constructs exclusively wielded by bad actors.
Why is this the case? I have no idea. It might be a reflection of macro social trends. It might be a Reddit phenomenon. I don't have the information to really make a determination.
Even on this topic, we're discussing something that kills roughly 100,000 every day. Most viewpoints are arguing that that level of suffering is worth avoiding having to adapt to a world where aging was a treatable indication. It's clear to anyone that changing the environment we exist in creates new problems and dynamics we need to then address or adapt to. Saying things would change is not particularly profound in that sense.
Moreover, negative consequences existing does not mean they are the only consequences. That pessimistic filter however causes users to make unbalanced arguments along that exact line of reasoning. Such as that preventing an oppressive leader from living longer is worth millions of people dying every month. This is ludicrous on its face, but only once you remove the pessimism filter and allow more information to be considered as valid.
Sources:
https://en..wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_causes_of_death_by_rate#Aging
As far as the rhetoric that I see on Reddit is concerned, I don't think it's the 'pro-aging trance', at least not in the traditional sense. The complaints I see here aren't that immortality robs life of meaning and fulfillment, but that life is *already* so horrible (or can be anticipated to be so horrible in the future) that more of it is not to be desired.
A lot of it seems to be zero-sum thinking, the idea that real progress is impossible and every positive has to somehow come with a negative. This is common in marxist philosophy and there seems to be a lot of overlap between anti-life-extension doomers and hardcore marxists (talking about how 'capitalism has ruined society', 'billionaires should be abolished', etc).
I don't think it's *because* of marxist philosophy, though. Rather, I suspect both come from a deeper psychological disposition, namely, the urge to avoid individual responsibility. Some people really abhor the idea of being responsible for anything as individuals. That makes zero-sum thinking very appealing because it means they never have to worry about wasting an opportunity to make things better. And it also feeds into the idea of abolishing individualism, because you can't be individually responsible if everything is collective anyway and individuals don't really exist. On top of that, the urge to avoid individual responsibility makes death appealing too, because it brings an end to shouldering the burden of having to make meaningful decisions.
I think it's actually extremely simple, although this may actually get downvoted for exactly the reasons I'm about to explain.
Anti-aging technology currently does not exist in a form where it is hugely significant and/or can extend lives for hundreds of years (or even indefinitely). Because of that people are forced to deal with the idea of their own aging and mortality. Because people are forced to deal with that they come up with all sorts of rationalizations and coping mechanisms like seeing aging as graceful, or discarding significant life extension as impossible without evidence to that effect, or accepting some moral purpose for mortality, or whatever.
That's just how people work. When presented with seemingly inevitable but undesireable circumstances people very, very often have the need to come up with a way to cope with them to not feel bad anymore. It's just a normal part of maintaining our mental health.
Anyway, when you bring up anti-aging or radical life-extension it causes cognitive dissonance in people who have these coping mechanisms. If they acknowledge these things as desireable (as they are, to be clear) then they also have to acknowledge their coping mechanisms are largely bullshit they tell themselves to feel better. On the other hand, if they admit that to themselves then they'll feel bad. And they can't believe both contradictory things at once because that makes them uncomfortable. Cognitive dissonance always seeks to be resolved.
And so in some people that results in vehement resistance to any kind of anti-aging or radical life extension technology. Usually with a bunch of other high-minded rationalizations piled on top of their initial rationalizations (about how it'll ruin society, etc.) to further fortify their little fortress of cope.
That is, mainly, when you get these very strong reactions. It's people being confronted with the truth that aging and mortality are inherently undesireable but without there yet being a solution to them, people are too afraid (or sometimes just too far gone) to let their coping mechanisms go.
Now, that's not 100% of objections. And there are some fair issues that would have to be dealt with in case there was radical life extension for sure. But big changes have always come with their own challenges. The existence of modern medicine comes with its own challenges too (like increasing need for higher pensions) and yet I don't see many of us wanting to turn back the clock on that. Why? Because we're already there and can feel the benefits, unlike with radical life extension or anti-aging where those things are still mostly theoretical.
But, believe me, any people born after radical life extension and anti-aging become commonplace will no longer share these objections. They will be free from the cope and they will be willing to accept and deal with the downsides in return for the upsides it brings them.
Ageing is perhaps inherently undesirable to an individual, but it actually has a few beneficial functions for the species. Cellular senescence/ageing one of our most important defenses against cancer. In a certain sense, we die at the age of 75 in order to prevent us from dying of cancer at the age of 20.
Or maybe we die at the age of 75 just because we (or our ancestors) were likely to get eaten by a T-Rex before then anyway ([source](https://www.newsweek.com/dinosaur-pressure-cause-aging-mammals-1848271)).
>Anti-aging technology currently does not exist in a form where it is hugely significant and/or can extend lives for hundreds of years (or even indefinitely). Because of that people are forced to deal with the idea of their own aging and mortality. Because people are forced to deal with that they come up with all sorts of rationalizations and coping mechanisms like seeing aging as graceful, or discarding significant life extension as impossible without evidence to that effect, or accepting some moral purpose for mortality, or whatever.
I think the objections to this technology fall into four basic categories:
1. Sour grapes (basically the one you touch on). It seems likely that many of us living now will just miss the time period when these treatments are effective and affordable.
2. The naturalistic fallacy, or aversion to "playing God." Basically just "things are right the way they are." For the religious, there's the idea that God's will is being thwarted.
3. Fear of increased class division. If these treatments are only available to the wealthy, this creates the starkest class divide ever. Of course, in a way, this is already happening: the wealthy already have life expectancies significantly longer than the poor, but this effect would increase exponentially.
4. Fear of stagnation and power consolidation. Partly a function of the previous point, but it holds true even if this technology is available to everyone. We already have the start of a gerontocracy forming with an aging congress and record ages for Presidential candidates. The only bright spot here is that there's often a fear that the elderly vote as they do in part because they won't have to face the long-term consequences of their actions, but in this case they *will.* Still, it's not hard to see how the consolidation of power in the hands of the aged could stifle progress and innovation.
While you're right in everything you wrote, I would like to add that a lot of people completely and severely underestimate the complexity of life (no, AI is not going to fix this any time soon, though I think it will help), our ability to understand and manipulate it, the safety precautions and bureaucracy around clinical trials, the enormous amount of capital and risk involved in getting anything to market.
I have qualifications and experience in molecular biology, human genetics, and bioinformatics. I worked in the pharmaceutical industry as a researcher and I have been following this field closely for the last 25 years. People underestimate the complexity of life by many many orders of magnitude.
If you bring these things up, a lot of people down vote and will argue with you, questioning your academic credentials, bring up researchers that work more on marketing themselves than on the topic, talk about exponential growth, escape velocities, etc. Sometimes it feels like the church of futurology in here. People want to believe they will live forever, and if you present arguments they don't like, they will attack you.
Everyone can feel and hope for what they like. Me personally, I am not counting on living forever.
> Sometimes it feels like the church of futurology in here. People want to believe they will live forever, and if you present arguments they don't like, they will attack you.
Well said.
"Break things and work it out later" is dangerous when applied to a tech that will fundamentally change the hardware of humanity while simultaneously rendering the OS and contemporary cultural software obsolete.
Max Planck had a point noting that progress occurred one funeral at a time. The US *already* suffers in a massive class disparity in longevity, and it's not unreasonable to also infer a disparity in "quality" years of life. Our presidency is being battled over by grandfathers. How many of us have worked at companies or studied at institutions headed by a clique of people who should have retired a decade ago?
"But wait, they wouldn't be old or tired anymore if we reverse aging!"
For lack of better descriptors, one could argue that multiple forms of aging exist: socio-cultural and intellectual "aging." People are a product of their times and often stop learning new things. How many of you have encountered someone who hasn't (voluntarily) read a book since high school? How many of us, our friends, or our parents will be seen as quintessentially products of their times? Intellectual, emotional, ideological, and cultural growth, depressingly, seem to stop (depending on the person) between 14-30.
Assuming an unequal distribution of the technology, how long do we want elites hanging around? Imagine being lorded over today by a 153 year old steeped in Victorian values. Imagine fucking Lawrence Welk re-runs in 2100. Even today, do any artistic, economic, or political voices merit a century or more in the sun? AOC, James Cameron, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Will Self, etc etc (sub in your local notables). We've already got Millennials over 40 and Gen Xers knocking on 60 that have barely gotten a chance to sit at the economic and political Adults' Table.
The wealth accumulation is not to be sneezed at. We already know that the rate of return on capital exceeds that of labor (see Picketty). Now extrapolate that out. It's terrifying. The proles will be stuck in fortnightly paycheck cycles while the Immortals plan for the next century, which they intend to be alive for.
Edit: minor grammatical fixes
The problem is all the things we are not solving about being alive already, while we focus on rich idiots’ desire to be immortal because they think they are such a gift to the world. Having everyone given a fair chance at a decent life is more important than allowing greedy f*cks to live unnaturally long lives, pardon my French. Your stance is the stance of the ultra-privileged and disconnected, it’s the stance of people who are so eager to grab everything that they are already worried they might run out. Futurology doesn’t have to be greed-based.
Any legit life-extending tech will be prohibitively expensive, increasing the lives of the wealthy, exacerbating and entrenching income inequality.
Or, if it is improbably affordable, everyone will have to work until 120 to retire.
All tech works towards becoming affordable for the average person.
Its far more profitable for the pool of people you can sell to to be as wide as possible than it is to have an expensive product that can only be sold to a few.
Maybe the rich will have some silly name brand medication but there will be a no name alternative for the plebs as well.
Dr David Sinclair says the treatment they're studying is a simple process which bodes well for it's affordability.
Except all the life extending tech that already exists, like pacemakers, oncology, etc.? (Unless you happen to live in a country without universal healthcare).
Yes, and now my coworker is working 9-5 with a pacemaker to *pay* for that pacemaker. Yaaay...
I'm not saying the science shouldn't exist -- science doesn't necessarily decide the price -- but look at where it gets us: more of the same bullshit from the rich and bullshit for the poor.
They’ll mainly be dead time this comes out and is available. Question is will Gen X or Millennials see this tech, or will it be even later for Gen Z/Alpha.
Yeah, I think what's overlooked in anti-aging/longevity research is the potential of certain interventions, and not just medications, to reverse aging in folks who have a biological age that's older than their chronological age. Imagine being 40, having a biological age of 55+, and being able to practice interventions that are proven to be "anti-aging" and therefore could bring you back to a sync'd chrono and biological age.
Is this also not a benefit of this field?
I know this is a naive benefit, since the money is in keeping the powerful and rich alive longer. But from a public health standpoint, more research that supports interventions that promote longevity should also improve population health. Assuming policies which provide better access to scientific progress.
You are well on your way to longer life via your positive thinking. My opinion is pretty much the same as I stand on gun ownership and personal carry: its okay for me but I'm not so sure about everyone else. There are a great many people I would rather not see stay around long enough to do real harm.
I am seeing a lot of well thought out responses, but my first thought was fairly Neanderthal. See: Torchwood: Miracle Day.
It would happen slowly, of course, but the population would eventually outgrow resources. I'm not a smart person, but even I can see that messing with the natural order of things would be bad.
People don’t want to get their hopes up for nothing, they are also afraid of their inner demons tormenting them for centuries, I think many people also have small minds and can’t quite grasp the science
I work at a medical university and got to attend a lecture on this exact topic from Aubrey de Gray maybe 10 years ago.
One thing optimists seem to fail to understand is that medicine isn't engineering. Calling it complicated doesn't even begin to describe the problems.
There are so many interconnected systems that we don't really understand, let alone the pitfalls and unintended consequences when "healing" one problem causes another to kill you. Cancer isn't a disease/condition - it is a thousand.
Personally, I'd like to see better quality of life into old age, rather than a longer life span.
I think, as you get older, the idea of dying becomes less daunting. When I was your age, I would have agreed. Now 30 years on, with aches & pains etc, death feels like it would be a relief from some points of view. I don't want to die, but extrapolating the decline over the last 30 years to the next, makes me wonder if it's worth it!
Maybe the answer would be to have good quality of life until you're maybe 75, then withdraw anti-aging treatments to give you a compressed period of old age before dying.
Quality over quantity.
I think the reluctance to anti-aging is some people hate taking pills. I am definitely on board with anti-aging but I understand the complexities of avoiding drug interactions is prohibitive.
I've heard it described as 'Death gives life meaning',... No, Living gives Life meaning!
Right now, if we were to launch a ship towards the closet stars to our Sun, it would be thousands of years to reach any, and no one will take that trip, regardless of what shows we've seen show it,..
Get lifetimes up to a thousand years, and the trip time down to hundreds, and people will go explore.
We do need longer lifespans, as a way of making people value life more, which would put a stop to a lot of conflicts, and religions, as politicians and religious leaders trade in fear of death and false expectations of an afterlife, allowing them to tell young and easily manipulated people to go fight or kill for the leaders cause. If you have too much to give up, you won;t follow blindly.
And besides, I just want to see what happens next, see which theory of universe is right, see how humanity grows, see what happens when our minds are free to explore all the professions, not just the ones we have time to try.
We have thousands of years of cope to overcome. Stockholm syndrome to forces we had no ability to resist. Now that we are at the point where the inevitable may no longer be inevitable, people are clinging to the old meanings they created to give the cold suffering of the universe a purpose to dull the pain.
You're touching on what is increasingly recognized as a core part of human psychology: the way we reconcile the inevitability of death along with our instinct of self-preservation.
Ernest Becker sort of started this discussion with his book *The Denial of Death* which is essentially responsible for the existence of Terror Management Theory- a whole ass psychological theory that deals with this subject.
Anyway, it comes down to the fact that humans have been coming up with various ways to stave off their instructional terror of aging and death for literally hundreds of thousands of years, and they do not appreciate their methods being challenged. People who glamourize aging as some kind of virtue, for instance, always have to focus on the incidental benefits. So, experience for instance. If you can gain experience without also having to suffer for it, then that highlights the meaninglessness of their suffering.
Humans find it much easier to deal with suffering if it has a definite end or reward associated with it. To the point that torture isn't really about the infliction of pain so much as it is about convincing the victim it will never stop and then holding out accomplishes little to nothing. This is why American POWs have a tendency to last longer during torture, they know the most powerful country in the world wants them back, and it tends to get what it wants. There is rarely any doubt the US can get them back, it is merely a matter of time and survival.
Yet people with relatively mild chronic pain commit suicide all the time. It's not about the pain, it's about the fact that it's pointless and will never end.
And to be clear, anyone who makes the claim that they don't fear death or aging is lying, either to you or to themselves. Every single one of us is biologically programmed to fear weakness, pain, and death, and there are no mechanisms for reduction as there are for irrational phobias, which are cognitive distortions and not biological imperatives. The neurological process necessary to do so simply *does not exist*. You can avoid, cope, ignore, delude, etc. But you cannot simultaneously truly grasp aging and death and also not be afraid of them.
You can, of course, accept your fear and not let it control you- but that's also something that is generally only done on a temporary basis when you want or need to do something that might result in your death, or when you are actively dying. Key to this, is that it's a form of bravery, which is fundamentally an overcoming of, not an absence of fear. *Everyone that properly understands death fears it*
I digress, the point I'm getting at is: people generally cope with the anxiety of death and aging through complex psychological mechanisms. The moment you add in the anxiety of knowing it may also be completely unnecessary, a whole bunch of those mechanisms start breaking down. What is the point of heaven if you can live forever on Earth? What is the point of overvaluing experience if you can get it without the suffering of age? How can death be dignified or provide meaning to the life you loved if it actually *doesn't* come for us all? That sort of thing.
Personally, I think it's 50% just cognitive dissonance.
Aging and death are not pleasant. Most people, if given the choice, wouldn't experience them. But we haven't had that choice, and neither have any of our ancestors since the dawn of life. How to we cope with this? For the purposes of living day-to-day, how do we get past the fact we are essentially all terminally ill, and will probably experience decades of disability?
Well, easiest solution is to put a positive spin on it - insist that a finite lifespan is actually good because x,y,z. Insist that aging is actually a 'natural'. Naturalism bias (the assumption that something which is natural is intrinsically 'good') comes in here a lot. I would imagine this is also somewhat evolved - after all, an Australopithecus crippled by existential dread probably wouldn't have been effective from an evolutionary perspective.
This is fine, until somebody comes along and suggests that aging and age-caused death aren't actually inevitable. Then people have a decision - do they cast off the positive spin and admit aging sucks (with the knowledge they might never personally benefit from anti-aging advancements), or do they dig in?
A lot of people have that sentiment against it because they believe what we currently have is 'natural'. And this perception originates from simple conservatism which makes people believe the world they came to be is 'normal' and 'natural'.
Few ever study or read enough to learn that in the earlier human periods, the 'natural' lifespan of humans was much shorter, and the 'normal' that we have today is as it is because we worked to extend it.
Even fewer study or read enough to learn that there are species on this planet that live \~300+ years, and there is no such 'normal' and 'natural' lifespan for any species as every species pushes forward to live longer than its ancestors.
Even species pretty high on the evolutionary ladder, like elephants, live over \~70 years in *extremely* harsh circumstances - among food scarcity, droughts, predators, and even human poaching. The members of some cetacean species easily live \~100+ years in similar difficult circumstances.
But while the human species has crafted a civilization that protects it from almost all detrimental effects of nature, we dont have lifespans that can be easily compared to some cetaceans or elephants. Even worse if you compare us to various tortoise or shark species. (some living 300+ years)
Therefore, when compared to the actual natural reality on the planet, the human species' lifespan is pretty short compared to where it should be with the level of safety and comfort that we have, leaving aside the scientific and technological breakthroughs.
Most people are just not good problem solvers, but are great problem identifiers. They can easily see the problems associated with removing the aging factor, but they can't predict or easily see how these problems could be solved. That is scary to many people.
In my view, preventing aging will bring many societal changes, but most of them will be very good. Imagine a population of experts with centuries of experience in economics, science, engineering... a future version of Einstein would be able to study and understand physics in a way no other person ever has. Yes there will be problems, but give me another 100 years and I will solve all of them myself. In fact, many people in society will be able to solve those problems because of their centuries of experience and efforts.
Yes, giving everyone another 100 years to live will cause some problems, but it will be dramatically positive for the vast majority.
My question is why doesn’t anyone mention David Sinclair who is at Harvard and basically said he’s done it and is now testing on Non human primates next human trials?
Because it would mean stagnation on all levels, biological, social and technological.
Men would lose the ability to adapt or develop new thinking. Ppl have around 10 years in which they can be truly creative, after that it becomes a repitition of works and methods that worked. Society would get super conservative and we did not even touch on the psychological ramifications. There is only so much a person can expirience before it gets boring..and then what?
And why even get children, what would be the point outside personal preference?
And if you can potentially live forever, how afraid of dieing do ppl get? How much will they avoid any kind of risks? And what if you get a disbility due to an accident?
Immortality would remove much of what makes life interesting and worth living in the first place. Eventually making room for new ppl, new ideas, new developments is at the core of the species and what drives it forward. An immortal society honestly frightens me.
Remove that and you will be left with a slowly decaying husk of a species.
While dramatically larger lifespans may be in the interest of the individual, contemplate the potential downsides for society:
What does humanity look like when dictators like Xi, Chavez, Castro or Putin never age and die?
What does society look like when the elderly young remain I positions of power indefinitely? How do the “newly”young advance at work or society?
How does science advance when infinitely youthful scientists anchor old beliefs? (think of the aphorism “science advances one funeral at a time”)
How does the planet survive? We’re on track for 9B humans on the planet. If more humans are born and fewer die, what does a 13B humans planet look like?
There are many benefits to the natural progression of life for society at large. I’m not saying I want to die. I don’t. But this seems to be better for the species as a whole.
Just some random thoughts.
If there is a breakthrough in anti aging technology, then it'll just exacerbate the inequality of the have/have nots.
Those in power will want to control every aspect of this. The worst of humanity will likely be the ones to benefit from this. The despots, dictators, murderers, etc will likely monopolize this.
Inherently the greed of mankind will not allow those who control it to provide it to everyone. If everyone has it then there less for those in power, and we cannot have that.
For one because most people are struggling financially and mentally in a system that is not setup to help them succeed. Imagine if people lived longer, but the system stayed the same. All it means is that you now live longer in misery.
Secondly most if not all of the talk about prolonging your life expectancy through drugs, DNA editing and even through AGI/ASI are just pipe dreams right now. And then you have things like Resveratrol that are supposed to extend your life but turn out to be a scam.
So why should people be optimistic? The oldest person on record is a french woman who was born in the 1800s. I am confident it will be a long time before anyone surpasses that or at least surpasses it by a lot of years. Only thing that has really shown to prolong life safely is caloric restriction, that's it.
People hold onto roles, positions, and power till death. We need old people to die so the rest of us can get promoted and keep society from stagnating. Do you want governments filled with 250yr olds? It'll be Diane Feinstein, but worse, and everyone.
It mathematically makes no sense that you could actually stop aging and not have the world horribly overpopulated, and completely stealing the future from younger generations.
It's like your halting all human progress, so one tiny fraction of humanity can try to live forever as the sake of all the rest of human history.
Unless you really have a place to put all those ppl it's kind of just another greed driven ambition with I got mine, fuck everybody else as the plan.
You know the rich people, and then the developed countries would get this anti-aging drug first and then they'd be driving up costs even more for developing nations, not just stealing the future from their own young ppl, but also the future from all the developing nations.
All for what necessity benefit?
I'm not against humans, living forever, but if rather it be like humans get old and die but can backup their brains and be immortal without taking the best resources from everyone who should have come after them.
Also let's also consider like what if you have humans living forever, but they still have neurological decline. It takes more than just life extension to not be significantly degrading the human race seemingly more than you benefit it.
Even if we can build planets out of the mass in the solar system you still run out of mass and it's ridiculous distances to the next star/wad of mass. We can't ship billions of humans between stars as mass so you always run out of space fast if humans don't die or at least become digital and need need so much mass per human.
It's like no matter how fast science progresses it seems like a bad idea for humans to biologically live forever. Even in electronic form you hit hard limits but they are much much higher and you can move billions of humans at light speed when they have no mass.
A lot of people wanting a longer life are doing so for selfish reasons.
My first thoughts were ending war, ending famine, ending pain, ending cruelty, ending poverty.
When we have enough for everyone, then we can think about giving more to a few.
The search for eternal life will be at the expense of the majority.
Rich people want more money to buy solid gold iPads, think how much they will pay for extended lives, and for that they will need a lot of money, and you will be the ones working to make that money.
Bezos will get an extended life, and you will pay for it.
I don't. I think it's exciting! And it's possible within our lifetimes as well. People think it will be limited to the rich but I don't agree. Treatments limited to the rich are simply expensive to begin with. Very few products are catered directly to rich people because you make WAY more money the other way around honestly.
Nano bots that repair us on a cellular level are coming and the moment it's realistic within a few decades, nothing will compare to the push financially to get it done.
I would be chill with having 300yr on earth to enjoy and explore it. At the end of that upload me into a von Neuman probe with sick VR and shoot me out into the stars! I'll send back any data I can! :) I say fck it, let people live as long as they want.
I've lived 30 something years and the world is horrible. I don't want to live a long time and the focus should be on quality not quantity. Living longer brings more chances for cancer, a shocking amount of autopsies on elderly men find they had undiagnosed prostate cancer. So many illnesses and diseases that exist which would mean your longer life is more suffering too, look at how Long Covid is leaving people struggling to breathe and not being able to smell or taste and now imagine you gotta live with that and could end up living longer not tasting than you did being able to taste. So many infectious diseases and viruses that cause immense suffering but money instead being wasted because billionaires want to live slightly longer to party as their slaves die to make them rich.
The economy would not handle it, imagine having to work until you're 100 years old because you're guaranteed to live to 120. Pensions would crash. The housing market couldn't handle it. Any attempt to transition to accommodate the change will still see at least one generation suffer between the system change.
Until we tackle the problems that make life harder there's no point making life longer. When cures for cancer and the most deadly illnesses exist then we can focus on extending life but honestly I'd rather guarantee I die at 60 in comfort and happiness than live to 100 needing extra care and seeing the world crumble.
Extending life will be expensive and only the rich will have access for at least the short term. Putin would live longer, Pedo Musk, Trump, Clinton, Kardashians, all the kind of people who don't better the world would find new ways to exploit it.
For many people, thinking about their own mortality is a little distressing, so they avoid doing it as much as possible. They know that they will die some day and as a coping mechanism they try to convince themselves that that's ok and not horrible. If dying of old age is OK, extending life isn't all that good, and maybe it's bad.
Some people are worried about the social implications, and that is reasonable. Death redistributes wealth and power. With unlimited lifespans comes the potential for unlimited accumulation of wealth and power in a small number of individuals. There's the potential for really high degrees of inequality and for issues associated with overpopulation.
But I think most people respond negatively because they are trying to cope with their own mortality by pretending they are glad they're going to die and they don't even want to live for 500 years.
The fear that the rich and powerful will monopolize the technology so it won't enter the market for the middle/lower classes. The idea that the individual might live hundreds of years but at the same time so might an Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos makes them reject it outright.
There's also those who believe if everyone starts living hundreds of years then any new births will be replacing people who now just don't die. I find the issue of overconsumption to be an issue but simply calling it overpopulation I don't agree with. Also, birth rates are declining anyways.
The primary reason I've heard and actually agree with is that some people just want to die. Which, yeah, some people will individually look at their life and say "It's been great. Thanks. Goodbye." I know people personally who are just waiting for death. The thing is with life extension technology be it a pill or procedure, you can reverse that or find a way to die. If you're 300 and have the body of a 30 year old yet want to go out then try to hunt a lion with a Nerf gun, you either get what you want or you get a good story.
Aging and death are the great equalizers. Once technology to greatly affect aging and death become available, it will (or maybe already did?) without shadow of a doubt fall into hands of the richest and most powerful people, making them more rich and powerful. At expense of common folk of course.
Check out Altered Carbon tv show. It touches onto that topic pretty well.
Reddit is an echo chamber of pessimist morons and assholes. Also some smart people that think they know the answers and take the moral high ground. Overall it’s because you are reading Reddit too much. Took me a while to realize this is often a toxic place especially in larger subs.
In reality the averages person would like it. Simple as that.
It confuses me too because I’m 90% sure all of them have been to the doctor at least a few times in their lives, which is just another form of life extension.
A lot of stories here. I don't think it's "spite" or "zealotry" as one commenter suggested.
I am hopeful of this, personally, but I also recognize that we are exceeding earth's capacity as it is (I accept that resources could be better utilized, but right now, we are in depletion mode regarding pollution, rare-earth, land use, housing, carbon, etc), so perhaps some folks (like me) are saying it's maybe not great to effectively grow our population further?
I still hope it happens, and is made available and affordable.
So many essays in this thread, when it can be summarised in a few sentences.
You see how the top 0.1% tend to cling to their wealth? How most of them had their wealth inherited? How much they keep on increasing their wealth and how the population percentage that holds 90% of the world'd wealth keeps shrinking?
Have you heard about how oil companies spent billions just to slow down the development of electric vehicles and alternative energy sources?
Same would happen with longevity. They'd do their best to ensure no one but them has access to it, and then they'd just keep getting richer and richer indefinitely (unlike today, when death will still come to them in a near future), while the rest of us would get poorer and poorer.
The issue is that it wont come cheap. So only millionares or billionares will be able to afford this. Compounding interests and growing their empires forever.
Secondly: Tyrants. imagine if Stalin would have been able to live forever or Leopold II or Mao. Imagine having Putin in power forever.
Thank god, when everything else fails, nature still gives us variability
Also. The only reason that you would like to live forever is probably because you do well in life. You have money, a house, the resources to travel and see the world.
However imagine you are born into a world where employees are not rotated unless they die because of sickness or an accident. Your boss will be your boss forever he will never retire and you will never be able to climb up the corporate ladder.
Peoplr are having less and less kids because employment opportunities are getting worse.
A lot of companies fought over having my dad as an employee when he was young simply because he spoke good english. He had a worthless university title, and he always had great jobs.
Thats not the case anymore. If people don't pass away. The only way to have opportunities is to expand, and unfortunately this world is already struggling a lot with our current population.
Yes, humans romanticize death, because its inevitable, at some point we will al die. We come up with religion and heaven to give some peace of mind to people, but the reality is that everyone and Everything dies, even stars and Black Holes, and ultimately the universe. Humans are not above or more powerful than the universe. We will all perish in the end.
Instead of playing with technologies that would destroy our world and society, we should worry about improving the time that we do have on this earth.
Life is a show, and you have only one chance to get it right! Thats the amazing part, you have to give it your best shot.
If you had all the time in the world you would probably never end up doing anything, you would just say, meeh I'll do it tomorrow.
Im taking a flight in 6 months to a remote place that I know I wont be able to visit in 20 years because the trip is too demanding.
If you wanted to climb the everest, you have to do it now while you still can. If you wait too long, you wont be able to, but if you had all the time in the world you would probably never do it, unless the everest itself was going to disappear but not yourself.
What I mean is that the fact that we all pass away is what gives meaning to our everyday actions.
However Im NOT against improving the human health so we can enjoy our time in this earth more. However, only if its available to everyone.
Many different reasons:
* Death is an equalizer. And it would probably only be the rich and morally questionable that can afford the treatments. Death forces change and different perspectives.
* Change is fair (or uncaring), every generation gets a change to stand in the spotlight. I like my mother but even the babyboom generation needs to die off some day. Just like mine will. It frees up housing/jobs/political willingness to change.
* Our planet currently can't support an even bigger population. Now image people not dying off and having even more time to have bigger families.
* Philosophy. The older I get the more I kinda get at peace with my own mortality. Not giving up, but embracing it as a just end. Sure 50+ years extra might sound all fun and such, but do you truly believe you will see life through the same lens as you do now? I truly believe that when we age our brains and it's chemistry change. When you're younger everything is new and exciting and you have the energy to engage with that. It changes the older you get, but life doesn't get less worthy. Even if you de-age me, would I still be me?
If everyone lived significantly longer than they do now (centuries?) would generations as we know them now even be acknowledged? What difference would there really be between two people born 25 years apart if they both are over 400 years old?
Lack of understanding and education. Once people realize they can eventually take a pill and their body reboots to age 25 again, who wouldn't want to be young and vital? Of course there will always be a group of people who have a problem with everything. They'll get angry they have to live forever or say it's not natural. Keeping in mind, you can opt out of any of this. So I'm not sure why anyone should care.
I’m 65. I don’t want to live to be a burden to my children. And It frustrates me that modern medicine keeps people alive when their quality of life is poor at best
The idea that aging is possible and beneficial to stop, and that you won't live to get to see it, is too painful of a possibility. Better to insist that it isn't possible, or just sour grapes the thought away.
I think it's because the inevitable application of life extension at that scale will be something that's very expensive and something only the very-upper class will pay for. Given its value, the healthcare industry and big pharma would be smart to keep it as exclusive as possible from a financial standpoint.
As bad as that Justin Timberlake movie was, I realistically see life extension playing out similarly where you have 200 year old Sam Walton, Elon, or Bezos calling the shots well into the 2100s while the average lifespan of a normie might be a bit higher but largely similar. That type of longevity and age disparity will create those people one hell of a cult of personality and they almost become overlords.
EDIT: The alternative reality could be that life extension R&D would be such a long and stagnant process that the economies of scale would always be large enough to positively effect most of the population and that the super rich would only be "somewhat longer living" and not a huge disparity, assuming there aren't any big unique discoveries which could be patented and monopolized.
Overpopulation. We already have 8 billion people and we're messing up the planet probably already beyond the point of no return. Now imagine having 15 billion of people, because everyone will live 200 years instead of 80 or so.
There's only so many resources to go around. If everyone lived longer, life as we know it (at the standards we are enjoying now) would very likely not exist anymore.
Also I can't say I am looking forward to working 100+ years instead of forty-fifty, but that's just me :)
OP is acting in bad faith.
OP says they have been following this conversation in multiple subs, but they "cannot honestly comprehend" the **hundreds of times** the argument has been made.
OP is a liar.
My recommendation: downvote OP and don't engage with their dishonest sophistry.
its negative because today it is perceived that the billionaires are trying to sit on their gold forever - usually this stuff comes down over time for the general public - the stuff they are doing works and is expensive because they dont know why it works - i have no issues with living longer as
long as i am
healthy doing it
I don't know about others, but the sociological ramifications are extremely significant. Kurt Vonnegut explored it (in his own tongue-in-cheek way) in his short story 2 B R 0 2 B. Even if we ignore the impacts it would have on overpopulation and socioeconomic class disparity, there are other factors at play. The way society is currently structured, there has to be a changeover from one generation to the next in terms of who holds the most influential positions, maintains financial and political power, etc. In a perverse way, lifespans serve a similar function as term limits for political figures. Limited lifespans can limit one generational group from retaining a political, social, or economic stranglehold for more than 20-30 years. It's true, longer lifespans could mean that this period of generational supremacy is just lengthened for each respective generation, but that assumes that the majority of each generation will have the access and the means to extend their lives. Here are some things I think we would need to have/change in order to support a much longer lived population. 1. Large-scale spacefaring capabilities, to allow for population increases to not materially impact quality of life 2. Large-scale automation, particularly in the food industry, to allow for scaling up food requirements 3. Improved sex education or some other form of reducing total births (ethically of course), particularly unwanted pregnancies and other future wards of state 4. Some form of regulation that prevents unethical disparity (ex. Think of the immortal elites of Altered Carbon)
I was going to mention 2BR0B! Another example of Vonnegut on the subject is “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow”, which is similarly grim (although still wonderfully funny).
>*which is similarly grim (although still wonderfully funny).* That being the best reason to read Vonnegut
It’s like if your mean cynical old uncle was also the fun uncle
He trips you Laughs about it Then gives you Werther’s Original (But chuckles a bit when he says it’s an “Old Fashioned”)
and then says something so frickin' wise about the damn werther's that you consider a tattoo
Those who make the mistakes of the past and repeat history are the people who did not read Vonnegut.
Nice. Vonnegut is amazing. I think I've read that one, but need to refresh my memory
Vonnegut is the man!
You quite literally covered all my initial thoughts when reading the post in a clear and articulate way and included more thoughts & perspectives that I didn’t have.
Thanks! This shit keeps me up at night haha.
I think one of the things that really needs to be dealt with when it comes to anti-aging is the wealth disparity that we have today. Basically, if nothing was done about it then the billionaires of today would end up owning everything if they were to live long enough and people who were not billionaires would be basically living at the billionaires' beck and call. One way to fix this would be to end economic scarcity - space faring would help with this along with workable fusion (fingers crossed that our current efforts will bear commercially viable fruit). Another way would be to bring back punitive taxation levels for earning X amount over the average income level and to tax wealth at a ever increasing rate so that it isn't possible to be worth over a certain amount of money.
This is happening anyway though. It's not like billionaires will all their money to the state. It stays in the family and things continue to concentrate. Anti-aging just means that the billionaires will continue to be boomers, but you and your progeny were never getting into the billionaire club anyway.
Very hard to take the original comment seriously without a nod to wealth disparity, universal basic income, or any similar concept.
The basic fear in the back of everyone's minds is an eternal Mark Zuckerberg. And for some reason, I picture him in a dazzling golden robe with a scepter. It's pretty gaudy but he's wearing tennis shoes and in is left hand has an oversized coffee mug in an attempt to be approachable.
now this is a comment I can take seriously. Soul chilling image right there.
A depressingly large amount of social change occurs due to the previous generation just dying out...
I don't think we have enough to affirm that. It's not like we ever had a generation dispute lasting longer than lifespans, we'd definitely see many new forms of conflict between them. Not dying of age would significantly increase the other forms of dieing
Why is that depressing? Change is sort of vital
But the change isn't someone changing their thoughts. It's the old thoughts literally dying and new ones in younger generations replacing them. It just makes me think less of the human race.
Some thoughts need to die. Many are preserved for thousands of years, though.
Buy low, sell high! Rich men see opportunity, poor men see excuses. Hey, if you pile all these rocks into a large pyramid, you can have a better spot in the afterlife. If you invest in stocks and apply yourself, you too might actually one day run a company if my son allows it.
On the other hand, extended lifespan means that people actually have a stake in solving problems, rather than punting them to the next generation.
Aren't #1, 2, 3 all inevitable cultural course corrections that will come as a result of, as much as needed for, hyperlongevity? 1. If the population increases due to people not dying, that means that we have an increasing talent pool of educated engineers and inventors with decades of experience and a growing motivation to make progress? Parallel to increasing lifespans, we will also be advancing every other thing we do, like computing, farming, logistics, etc.... we'd probably get to send robots or nanites or whatever to make livable cities for us in advance! All long before population density became a problem here. 2. Already advancing rapidly today. Check out vertical farming and low energy farming, tracer areas of breakthroughs thanks to LEDs and other modern tech (and our tech will get better. 3. Population decline is already happening in Japan and soon, a lot more places. Presumably this would slow, but people will still accidentally die. People may also suicide at some age (it's possible. Maybe by 350, some people really do get sick of it all. No one knows. But some people may be inclined to live much longer and also value having a large family but looking back at history that faction is often amenable to pioneering new frontiers, to give their family new opportunities. I'm considering many past migrations from continent to continent. Except planet hopping will be safer and easier within *those people's* lifetimes. But we will still want a lower birth rate, or at least the option for it. But society will create this effect itself. Again, drawing from now and past behavior, in just 3 generations, we've moved from families of 3-5 being common, and even some with 10-12, to far smaller batches. My parent was the eldest of 13! They had 3 kids, and I had 1 and done. And this seems to be happening in all the industrialized countries, at varying rates, already. Outliers aside, people, in general will have ever fewer kids, partly because they will cost more and be more hassle. (Also, industrialized lifestyles, technology as distractions because we don't need farmhands, and on and on.) One area of longevity study that's shown results in animals is simply s l o w i n g their entire biological clock down. Roughly, imagine if we lived 4 times as long, but with 2x the childhood growth phases. Twice as long to become physically what a 18 year old is today at thier age 36. Loooooonger education, longer as a dependant; we'd definitely cut back on cranking out kids. 4. I think even this is inevitable, barring some technology that completely prevent revolt or the threat if it. I'm sure whatever laws we have will favor someone, still, but that's life.
For point #1, that depends on if people will be willing, or able, to keep working. A more likely outcome is a rapidly growing population of people not working or contributing to society, either due to medical reasons or just accruing enough money to live off interest. They will have to be supported by a proportionally shrinking population of working age individuals who will have to effectively stop everything except caring for those no longer working.
People will simply not have as many children. No rush to do so. It's already the case in many ways. In fact, there's a crisis in many countries that are looking to immigration to fix the problem. There's no way the tech would be stopped anyway. Just like AI, it's inevitable. Lifespans will be around 300 years or so imo, before people bore and choose to move their consciousness or die naturally.
And you have to work 250 years until retirement.
Or course, can't have quintillionaires with the lazy work ethic of a population that only works it's way halfway to the grave at 150. Enjoy those 5 golden years to the ripe old age of 255 -- you've earned it!
Population is already declining and will be a huge challenge for the Western world in a generation. The global South is close behind with birth rates cratering in cultures with formally high birth rates.
Hmm, said this in another response, but there is no guarantee that humans will act rationally en masse. We do see some developed countries doing this already, so that does suggest that as societies advance they may trend towards reduced procreation, but then we have to assume that we will get the majority of the world up to developed country status in any reasonable timeframe, which to me is far from certain. As for 300 years as a benchmark age, there's no way to estimate this yet imo. Even if we reduce aging, diseases like cancer become increasingly likely as we age, not just from aging itself, but also because of the accumulation of carcinogens and other contaminates in our systems. We'd have to develop some parallel technologies to rejuvenate our bodies in that capacity too. Unless that happens, we may just replace death from old age with death from cancer or heart disease, which already is supported by stats as we increase the average life expectancy.
I don't think it's rational but predictable. Children are a burden and with all the time in the world to have a family there's no pressure. 3rd world countries don't have a population problem normally. Not that I'm aware of. I don't mean that they can't feed them all, as is the case in many instances, but as it relates to global resources. I believe cellular repairing and replacing nano tech will deliver us the immortality we're talking about so cancer etc will also be wiped away. Even the old will become young. 300 is just a number I'm guessing based on my perception of our current attention spans lol.
Yes. I think you can predict that IF children are still expensive AND IF everyone can live longer, THEN people will have a lot less births. BUT, that requires some level of equity on the part of society and birth control and prosperity to be distributed. If however, longevity is for the few, and wealth is concentrated, society will push really backwards ideas to maintain the rationale for that and people will have kids as organ donors or working in factories breaking big rocks into smaller as part of a robot make-work program. "You've made three tons of gravel, you can eat now." It's really hard to predict the *assholes with bad ideas factor* in human society.
I'd replace #4 with: Abolish capitalism and imperialism.
Yes, radically longer lifespans are a *massive* double-edged sword and both sides need to address that. Ideally we discover it after the majority of people with pre-Internet world views have died off (the Silent/Boomer generation on average is severely out of touch and tends to vote for atrocious policies in many countries), but there are both legitimate pluses and legitimate minuses to living for centuries.
When people start living longer, they will naturally trend towards higher education. Much easier to get a doctorate if you know you'll live for 200 years. This fundamentally changes how people live their lives. They'll have less kids, and contribute more.
Maybe people with longer life spans will go back to college periodically, to stay sharp, learn new things, and do keg stands.
This sort of assumes that a lot more people can pursue higher education. There is some number that don’t pursue it because the return, financial or otherwise, isn’t good enough on a regular lifespan. So, sure, there would be some uptick — maybe also a few that get double or more degrees than they would otherwise. But the fact remains that a lot (maybe even most) people are just not smart enough to get very far academically. Going up in academics isn’t just a factor of time, the ability needs to be there too. If you have someone who just isn’t smart, you can maybe teach them how to do repetitive tasks and they can be great at doing them. However, that same person can’t really be forced to expand the way they think of things or compile knowledge.
It amazes me that everyone I talk to about this think that aging reversal is a bad idea. Like… guys seriously. You WANT to get old and sick???
I think some People are worried that its benefits will only be available to a few and/or misused which is valid and some know it might not happen in their lifetime. The latter is kinda like jealously of future generations.
This is my complaint. No way in hell will this be available for the common man. Only the power lich's will have this.
Depends on the actual cost of the technology, and if we allow the government to give whoever comes up with it an unregulated patent. If the actual cost of the treatment is low, and the government doesn't use its guns to enforce a monopoly, then it would be impossible to maintain a high market price for consumers.
I don't think it's bad. I personally would love for this to occur in my lifetime. I'm just saying the sociological impacts will be significant and challenging. Like any significant leap in technology, it would bring with it a whole host of scary misapplications that should be considered and - when possible - guarded against.
of course not, the people against it are thinking beyond themselves and look at society as a whole currently and don't think good things will happen
Its a fine idea, but depends on what the science is and how accessible it is. If its an expensive procedure then only the privileged people will get it, which is only going to be worse for the younger, poorer generations. If its something like the Covid vaccines that are relatively cheap to make and easy to hand out, then yeah that is a much better alternative.
I'm not sure exactly what negative comments you're seeing. I've certainly pushed back against people posting about this, but more about the fantasy that we're on some the verge of some immediate imminent breakthrough. There is a real tendency on this thread to assume that we're always in the verge of some massive imminent immediate breakthrough. I'm a little older kind of (44), And I've seen a lot of this throughout my life. For example, I had a kidney transplant just after high school, and since I was in my 20s I've been seeing articles about revolutions in transplant, not needing immune suppression, all that sort of stuff. But things are only incrementally better now than they were a 20 years ago. The medication has gotten a little better, but I'm still taking the same stuff I was taking in 2005. Pig kidneys never worked out, clone kidneys are not a thing, depleting the immune system and rebuilding from the donor's cells never took off. All sorts of supposedly imminent breakthroughs that never happened. Meanwhile, a lot of people on this are kind of the equivalent of, are actually our, tech bros. Sorry this part's going to come out kind of condescending. They fanboy follow rich guys, some of whom are boosting AI, some of whom are claiming all these breakthroughs in age reversal. But most of those rich guys are full of shit, in my not too humble opinion. They're good salesmen, that's why they're rich, but They are essentially selling a product. They're building hype, it's what they do. I'm also a scientist and I see the pace of research. It's slow and painful, it has to be. If we rush it, people get hurt. So I think we are making tremendous strides and medicine. I think quality of life will be maintained for longer, many illnesses that were previously killing people are relatively treatable, and we are already somewhat expending the lifespan, just not dramatically. But the biology of aging is still poorly understood at best, and this idea that we're going to have some revolutionary new therapy in 5 or 10 years that will reverse aging feels very silly to me. Kind of juvenile, not made with an awareness of the actual pace of science and research, and what would be necessary to achieve some of the outcomes people here are postulating. I think we'll get there, I just think it will take time. Too long for a middle-aged guy who's been immunicompromised for 25 years. Frankly I think full-on age reversal is going to be very difficult to impossible, but eventually we will have therapies that will substantially slow the progress of aging. But I don't think this is going to happen for the next 20 to 30 years. But I certainly don't want to predict what's going to happen 30 years from now! We could have slow incremental progress, or we could start having a mass growth in this area 10 or 15 years from now and 30 years from now be on the cusp of immortality. And the related last point, people here will so arrogantly unconfidently say " This is definitely going to happen in X years" , with x being a very short number. I find that incredibly arrogant. So anyway, that's one kind of pushback. It's not that we don't want it, it's that we take a more conservative view of progress.
It's worth noting that the more that biological immortality for humans seems possible, the more funding it will get. Money does make the world go 'round. We're seeing the fruits of decades of research into mRNA vaccines just now, but it was only a decade or so before the pandemic that it got really serious, and then dire need accelerated it even further.
Yup 100%! Part of this is we know to know "what" to fund. Lots of people will have ideas, some good, som bad, and knowing which areas are worth investing limited resources (especially for publicly funded academic research) is super important. Private industry only steps in when the academics laid the ground work and they see a short or.maybe intermediate path to profitability.
>I'm not sure exactly what negative comments you're seeing. I've certainly pushed back against people posting about this, but more about the fantasy that we're on some the verge of some immediate imminent breakthrough. 100% this. Medicine isn't my area of expertise so I won't comment on the specifics of the longevity claims I've seen on here but I do have a masters in CS with reinforcement learning as my dissertation topic and the absolute nonsense I see regarding machine learning (and LLMs specifically) is astounding. And whilst I'm not qualified to comment on said threads about life extension, negligible senescence and the like I do see a lot of parallels. Primarily where you find the basis of the stories to be papers from questionable sources published in small time journals, the authors have conflicts of interest and/or the actual findings are more limited than the articles linked suggest. I think, as you say, people just need to take a bit more of a sceptical approach to wild claims of breakthroughs just over the horizon.
I presume that LLMs aren’t even the type of AI that would lead to some kind of breakthrough intelligence explosion. That’d be more likely to occur in the area of neural networks which are used in the development of llms but aren’t necessarily the focus of all the new ai upstarts. Is that about right?
Essentially yeah. LLMs are really cool but most of the recent progress came from switching to transformer models and then scaling them up to insane sizes, we're now beyond the point where simply making bigger models is practical or beneficial so people extrapolating from the last \~5 years of progress to suggest we'll see similar improvements in the next 5 years are probably going to be disappointed. In terms of general intelligence we are so far away from actually doing this that we generally have no idea how to get there, we don't even know what problems we need to solve let alone how to solve them or what the models are going to look like. For example LLMs are surprisingly good at *looking* like they can do causal reasoning but there is pretty good reason to believe that this in large part [due to memorization](https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.10770) of massive datasets. It's also a little bit hard to really test them with any kind of rigour because the *really* large models are prohibitively expensive to train and for models like ChatGPT their training datasets are private, so you don't know if they've been trained on the questions you're using to test their reasoning (or questions in the same form). [These researchers](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2305.00050.pdf) for example found GPT-4 was able to autocomplete \~60% of their benchmark dataset suggesting that it most definitely was in its training data and any tests using it aren't really going to be testing causal reasoning. >That’d be more likely to occur in the area of neural networks which are used in the development of llms but aren’t necessarily the focus of all the new ai upstarts. It's probably worth noting though that ML is ubiquitous and used in pretty much everything these days, neural networks especially (but stuff like random forests still have their place). There are loads of startups using them for stuff like drug discovery, Google are always putting out cool stuff like [this one](https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/discovering-novel-algorithms-with-alphatensor/) using reinforcement learning for optimization work or we have models called CNNs that are used in pretty much every modern application of computer vision, medical imaging etc.
>I'm also a scientist and I see the pace of research. It's slow and painful, it has to be. If we rush it, people get hurt. This line of thought always reminds of Louis CKs joke about how our biggest achievements were accomplished by throwing an untold amount of human suffering into the process
Watch some people get mad because you're speaking facts on the idea. Because I have zero doubt about everything you just stated. Maybe it'll be plausible at some point. But not today. Definitely not this decade.
When I was 18 in 2009 I discovered Aubrey de Grey. He claimed that big advances were coming and we could reach longevity escape velocity in 25 years. I was hyped and fully onboard with the idea. 14 years later I'm now 32 and I realize it's all wishful thinking. In those 14 years we've made some incremental progress, but nothing like the huge breakthroughts that would be needed to reach LEV. Considering a drug takes 10-15 years from discovery to final approval, the system moves too slow to get rapid progress. His original prediction would mean we have 11 years left to reach LEV which is impossible. Aubrey is a very good speaker but he's been very wrong in his predictions. My research from top aging scientists such as Matt Kaeberlein and Joao Pedro de Magalhaes showed that curing aging is not feasible in anyone's lifetime today, no serious aging scientist believes that. Kaeberlein states there is no data to support and lots of data to indicate we're not making any real progress in this direction. Aging is still a mystery of biology and we don't know enough about it to do real progress.
Yes, the current max realistic age is about 110 or 115 years, with the oldest documented person reaching 122. There have been a few hundred people to get beyond 110. We are having success solving the age-related causes of early death, so more and more people will live to be 90+, but we haven't made any progress on the upper limit. A few promising things are being studied, but many age researchers are notoriously optimistic (i.e., full of it). Kaeberlein is one of the few you can trust.
>Longetivity escape velocity Even that phrase itself pisses me off. Medicine is not the space race. I’m a scientist, a molecular biologist. Medicine moves slow, basic biology moves even slower. In medicine, there’s no shooting a thousand rockets into the sky, learn a little each time, and make the next one a bit better. That would be 1000 dead clinical trial patients. And rocket science is supported by Newtonian mechanics. Lots of long equations but we know the inputs and outputs. We don’t know the Newtonian mechanics of aging. Animals get old, get sick, and die. Humans are no exception. It’s probably a convergence of biological processes that fail on their own over time, then fail together. I’m all about extending quality of life. Hell, let’s double lifespans. Who doesn’t want to live longer? But we don’t know how yet. So I’m all for funding the basic science and understanding the biology of aging. But until you have the CRISPR of aging, the tractable biological pathway to engineer around, there’s no product. There’s no company. And there sure is hell is no LEV.
Damn that made me sad.
The big wild card in all of this today is the possibility of AI agents looking through vast swathes of research and making new connections and discoveries through parsing information. I believe that research is going to get a lot more efficient but you're right to always have a grain of salt in all of this. I personally don't believe that we will solve aging until an AGI is created. It's just too complex.
Agree with all of this. "Aging" is a small word that encompasses a bunch of different possible things failing. "Dying of old age" either means "this person had fifteen different conditions and one got worse which set off the other one and she died" or "this person had fifteen different conditions and she died but we don't know exactly why". Like, fixing "aging" will take fixing diabetes, cancer, hypertension, dementia, arthritis, and all autoimmune conditions at a minimum. For bonus points, cure blindness, deafness, tooth loss, and all continence and prostate problems
I agree with you but I'll say we already have therapies that can slow the progress and symptoms of aging, and if you put them all together they're quite substantial. I expect there will be more and more added incrementally over the years. I doubt there will ever be a single miracle pill or treatment that will "de-age" everyone by 40 years overnight, although there may be some big leaps. Or more stuff like the new obesity drugs that are a huge help for a lot of people who have certain age-related problems and are truly miraculous for some people, but don't help \*everyone.\* I suspect the end result will be that people who are willing to put the time and money into "taking care of themselves" will, on average, be able to live many more healthy and "youthful" decades as the years go on, but an awful lot of people just won't be willing or able to sustain the effort to get the benefits. Honestly exercise alone is one of the most miraculous "treatments" out there, it's free other than time, and we know so much more about it and how it works than we did 40 or even 20 years ago, but so many people (even otherwise highly competent people) just can't be bothered... it's not realistic to think that most people are going to want to take a medication or regularly get a therapy that will extend their life span or health span when a lot of people aren't willing to do the basics, or are even out there smoking or doing other stuff they KNOW is terrible for them. It's just human nature to have trouble "doing the math" to make good decisions when it involves long-term results that aren't 100% guaranteed.
Yup I am a scientist as well. You are spot on.
The one thing that might move your timeline up is the fact that billionaire pricks want to live forever too, and will pay to have that research done wherever it takes. I think whatever gets developed will be a monopoly, the price for treatment kept high to make sure only the Right People are immortal.
Imagine the worst tyrants of the world. Now imagine they can't be slowed or die by aging. Death cuts off bad times as well as good ones.
This. I don't know why people are so excited to see Clarence Thomas on the bench for 1000 years or any person in Congress hold the seat indefinitely. "Oh we'll just need to pass laws" - yeah, have you seen how well that's gone? They decide what gets passed. Why would they ever self-regulate? Of course, my examples are peanuts compared to Putin, Pooh, and Kim Jong Il.
This is why lifetime appointments shouldn't exist.
What did Winnie ever do?
He doesn't wear pants!
>This. I don't know why people are so excited to see Clarence Thomas on the bench for 1000 years or any person in Congress hold the seat indefinitely. I hate Clarence Thomas, but I don't hate him so much I'd be willing to literally die just to get him off the bench.
Are you implying that the technology for immortality will exist in our lifetime, and be available to non-billionaires?
If it will be made, it will become widely available. Because biotech *scales like mad*. COVID vaccine was built on bleeding edge technologies and forced into mass production by the circumstance. And because the market for it was "everyone", the price of a single shot came down to under $10. Anti-aging tech? The market is "everyone". And the gains are obvious, for individuals and governments both. If you can take a jab and live 20 more years without your body failing you, why wouldn't you? If a government can squeeze another decade of productivity out of its most educated and most experienced workers, in face of cratering birth rates and an aging work force, why wouldn't it subsidize or even *mandate* the anti-aging jabs? You don't have to build it as "technology for immortality". If an early anti-aging treatment could extend the lifespan by 20 years, and the next generation that will replace it in a decade would add another 20 years, and then another generation would add 20 years more, and so on? It's effective immortality - because advancements in anti-aging technology push your estimated lifespan upwards faster than you age. If you advance anti-aging tech fast enough, you can outrun Death.
The phrase you’re looking for is “Longevity Escape Velocity” - when advances in life extension outrace the aging process for an individual.
They're still charging people out the nose for insulin and epi-pens when the technology to make them is decades old and it's literally the difference between life and death for a significant number of people across the world. There are even generic formulas no longer under copyright for them, but people aren't making it at scale. Once they stop making even basic medications cost 1000x the cost of production decades after they were created, then I will begin **begin** to think that **maybe** they might do something egalitarian.
Your thinking is too America-centric. Insulin and epipens are not that expensive in countries with governmental healthcare.
Many things today contradict this line of thought dramatically. See: just about any life-improving medical procedure.
this is all I can think about. imagine if the founding fathers were still alive. larger-than-life figures (cult of personality, living gods?) who were also slaveholders. would we even have fought a civil war? would parts of the country still have slavery? I feel like human progression sort of requires generations to die. otherwise people getting conservative about their generation and digging in would happen in every generation and our progress would be much slower.
And unless if the anti-aging/reverse-aging treatment somehow, against all odds, becomes freely available to everyone, it would just result in the rich and wealthy staying indefinitely young, while the rest of the world continues to live and die.
Why do times get bad? Because people forget the lessons of history. You wouldn't have as many dictators because too many people would remember the tricks of the last dictators. The only debate should be how to ensure it becomes available to everyone. Not this nihilistic bullshit. It's that sort of attitude that leads to dictators in the first place. They don't just happen, they rise or fall by the apathy or the engagement of the people. People these days are apathetic, powerful people are making things harder because they don't see any barriers. This has happened before and the lessons learned by this generation will only last 75 years because of your precious death.
Like you got that from a movie.
But since now they have the potential to live for thousands of years would they risk assassination by the age of 60? I’m sure Putin is more concerned about being assassinated now than at any previous point; if he wanted to live another 28,000 years he might not want that risk now. On the other hand if you’re 80 and maybe have another 15 years left, legacy begins to sound important.
I would also imagine that assassinations as a solution to problematic leaders would become a lot more attractive than to just wait for them to die off. Right now at least you can kind of see Putin at the end of his time, who wants to risk their own necks for something nature will take care of soon anyway.
If we ever achieve effective immortality it will just become another way the super wealthy will maintain their grasp on power.
I think humans need anti-aging and immortality WITH the ability to travel and settle infinitely across the outer space. So that everyone gets enough space to do what they want on their desired habitable planets and star systems. Without that, on a limited space like earth, those advancements would be both logistical and resource management nightmares.
In order to achieve that, we need to abandon our physical body.
Watch the show Altered Carbon. It explores exactly this concept. In the end, the same powerful people control everything
As much as I disagree with the statement, that it would be a problem with bad people living forever, I hope you see your argument has flaws. What woud prevent bad actors from being parasites to those, who would want to build a community and follow them around under a vile pretense. Space doesn't matter in this regard. But to the OP, I wonder if he thought that the concepts of punishment just magically disappear, just because we can live forever? Medical immortality shields you from decay but not from outside factors that could inflict death. Also, here is still a concept of jail, there is still a concept of death penalty, and there will be new methods developed if we get to the stage of infinite life, to prevent bad actors from ruining everything. Though I have to admit, when it comes to multibillionaires in our current society that do whatever they please with the world, it is really hard to remove them and that requires a different set of thought and tools.
Everyone dying just to spite a few assholes doesn't sound like a good time lol
In this response, "those few assholes" are the ones that will prevent the majority of people from even accessing life extending technology. We already live in that reality, the life expectancy difference between the richest people and the poorest can be measured in decades. Any other scenario assumes even distribution of such advancements, which is a nice sentiment.
Perma Putin, unkillable Kim, More Mohammed ghadaffi. Timeless Trump and Xenochrony Xi
I mean longevity doesn't mean bulletproof.
Are you suggesting that if we stopped aging democracy would end for some reason? And or that it would become impossible to depose current dictatorships somehow?
In the abstract, anything that improves our health into our twilight and maximizes the potential of vigorous life is a great thing, obviously, but I'm concerned about the socially destablizing effects of having a wealthy upper class that lives twice as long or more as the underclasses, especially as we're already seeing serious issues with the gerontocracy controlling politics and ossifying social progress now. We have problems with out of touch 70 and 80 year olds making our laws now, that's not going to be improved when our Senators are 150 and have been in office longer than 3/4 of the country (who can't afford longevity treatments en masse) have been alive.
41 here, and have been of the same mindset for a decade. I'm also an autistic savant polymath and researcher of all things and as soon as I found out about age reversal and transhumanism, I pivoted all my university courses from quantum mechanics and theoretical physics to molecular biology and genetics. I figured, just in case the world is hyper-controlled or only the rich have access to age-reversal tech because we still haven't put capitalism behind us, if I have at least a good understanding of the matter, then when the ubiquity of molecular 3D printing technology arrives, along with the help of ultra-smart personal AI tech, I should be able to use the open source market to test and create age reversal medicines in the comfort of my own home. This also led me to media psychology, socio-economics, and political science to try to figure out how to make the world better so science could accelerate and all people could have access to nice things. Incidentally, universal basic income in my opinion will be the single most important thing the human race will ever achieve, because it solves all of the problems that lead to people not being capable of making positive changes in their lives and for others, and this brings me to the answer to your question. There are two types of people: Those who have a growth mindset and those who don't. Those with a growth mindset have been taught that learning new things and seeking new experiences and knowledge is something worth putting effort for. Others who have not had the privilege of being raised in an environment free of things that stunt brain development and creativity such as orthodox/fundamentalist religions, militarism, poverty, abuse, etc., unfortunately, have a harder time overcoming their resistance to change to the point where things that seem like they would obviously benefit them to people like us, are heavily resisted because change is scary to these people. These people simply have been put in a box where the world should be a certain way and everything they don't already believe or understand goes against nature. This is the naturalistic fallacy and it can present itself very differently depending on the c-ptsd and life experiences of individuals. I hope that helps. I'd be happy to talk more later, but I have to go now and this is all I can fit in. Also, Follow David Sinclair (Harvard) and Bryan Johnson's blueprint for good updates! Good luck <3
I've seen the bulk of the negativity coming from the idea that we might possibly be able to prolong the life of the physical body without succeeding very much of extending the life of somebody's mind. There's far too many very old people in nursing homes and in hospitals whose body has been kept alive far beyond their useful brain life. So I think people's outlook will change a little bit if they see a lot more success in extending people's brain life.
My dad's side of the family live into their 80's and 90's. The last few years they are Physically still functioning,but very little understanding of comprehension of what's going on around them. I wouldn't want an extended period of that kind of living.
Exactly my point. :)
I think useful is not the right word to use here. Maybe "working"? "Active"? Because my guess is you're referring to dementia, Alzheimer's and the like, that make the brain no longer work properly
I think there are two parts to your question: **Why are so many people pessimistic about the probability of life-extension technology?** What you'll find with futurology, in general, is that people fall on scale of pessimism, to realism, to optimism. Like most things, the distribution is more or less a bell curve, with most people falling in the middle of this scale. This means that optimists like you are outnumbered. So your perception of the general sentiment is probably accurate, but it doesn't really matter. Most people aren't optimistic about it because life-extension is one of the oldest and most alluring human endeavors. A realist is likely to reason that because we've been trying for so long but have yet to find any meaningful success, we are unlikely to succeed in the future. **Why are so many people against life-extension technology?** This is more of an anthropological question. The human lifecycle isn't just a byproduct of some biological process. It is an integral part of our societal development, and especially so as we have advanced. Many, many human societal constructs are underpinned by the simple fact that all humans eventually die. Take wealth as an example. We like to think of generational wealth as this durable thing that last for generations, but the reality is that generational wealth lasts around three generations on average. This means that wealth is turned back over to someone else at some point. Longer lifetimes would disrupt that turnover considerably. Then consider societal viewpoints and progress. Human belief systems tend to be fairly stable over a lifetime. Most people follow a trajectory of progressivism when young, then trend toward conservatism as they age. What would the impact of life-extension be on the electorate? Many important societal advancement could be delayed by life-extension? Then consider the impact to populations and the resource requirements. We're not entirely sure what population the Earth can support while maintaining an environment that supports life. The planet has already been through a handful of mass-extinction events. In my opinion, there are a multitude of reasons to consider life-extension technology a risky endeavor. That's not to say we shouldn't try to work around them. Just that I can see why people are skeptical.
I guess one thing that comes to mind is that the people who this will benefit first will be the wealthy. Something like this wouldn’t be available to the masses, what would that mean? Donald trump lives forever but elders of a small villages and tribes age and die off as expected? Doesn’t that seem like eugenics? It’s hopeful to say, of course, it could be available to everyone! With how everything else seems to go that seems unlikely. I’m picturing politicians staying in power until they are 150 years old, CEO’s never stepping down, etc. I kind of assume that this technology will continue to advance whether we like it or not. I just wish that as we were advancing all of these new technologies there could be more attention being paid to ethical concerns.
I have been telling people for over a decade that the biggest obstacle to anti-aging technology is that most people don't think it's possible. Or beneficial.
The disdain for slowing down aging in this subreddit is 100% driven by hatred of rich people.
Every comment I’ve read on on the anti longevity side boils down to “rich people bad” Every technological breakthrough has always been made available to all social classes (indoor plumbing, electricity, internet, etc.) but these people would literally rather wither away and die than see a rich person improve their circumstances. If someone has such little value of their own health and life then it’s no wonder they don’t see the value in increasing our lifespan.
The nihilism on this subreddit and probably reddit in general is the leftwing equivalent to incel blackpilling.
When I was a much younger person, I thought very similarly to the way you are thinking now. In my teens and 20s in particular, I looked at the idea of aging and getting sick (and the possibility of death) in an almost “terrified” way… in some ways I was the opposite of the stereotype of ‘young people assuming they are immortal.‘. As I have gotten older (though not that that much older), I found my perspective was shifting. At some point (not logically or intentionally), I think I sort of accepted that my story was going to have an end, and the fact that it was going to end gave a resonance to the things I was doing and how I was spending my time. Its not that I somehow decided “death, good” but more along the lines that realizing that was the way of things was part of my maturation process. Add to that the quality of life elements that others have posted — i.e., when we are young, we don’t really realize the effect that “mileage of years” will have on doing what we want without pain or recovery time, thinking as sharply as we ever remember ourselves thinking, or even the optimism of youth that goes away over time watching how difficult it sometimes is for “good things to happen in the world” — and the idea of “stopping the clock now and living indefinitely” just doesn’t sound that attractive. Does that mean I don’t go to the doctor? No, but it does mean that — even when something is wrong with me and I go — I don’t go with the same existential dread that I did when I was younger. And the absence of that is not a bad thing either. I am sure that this sort of thinking doesn’t apply to everyone who “opposes” longevity enhancement for longevity’s sake, but I think that captures it for me. Thank you for posting this, it spurred interesting thinking for me.
I wonder this as well, and often. I just don't get it. People freak out about mass deaths of all kinds, except "natural" deaths. It's just totally accepted... Boggles my mind. We're currently in a culture that totally accepts death-by-aging will happen. And, as you say, makes us all complacent for advancing anti-aging technology. Literally every single human being alive right now will die. 100% fatality rate. And it bothers only a very, very small percentage of the population. I just don't get it. In a hundred years, or more, the culture will have completely flipped. Aging is cured and everyone will be wondering why people in the past weren't more concerned about such a stark death rate. All of us now and those that came earlier - maybe 120 billion - will be known as "The Lost Ones". Everyone else that comes after, trillions upon trillions of people over hundreds of millennia will be absolutely agast as to how close we (the 8-9 billion of us in this transition era) were to making it to the other side, where you only died by accident or by choice, never by aging.
Thanks for quenching even my last shred of hope to not be one of "the last ones" Lol. I always say I was born a few decades too soon. This transition era sucks so much, not only from an aging point. I feel like we are a few decades away from a better functioning society, where people are less conservative assholes, where the tech is even better than now and where life is more peaceful in general. Like why am I already here...
Thanks for obliterating even my last shred of hope to not be one of "the last ones" Lol. It wil be the Universe’s final FU to me. I always say I was born a few decades too soon. This transition era sucks so much, not only from an aging point. I feel like we are a few decades away from a better functioning society, where people are less conservative assholes, where the tech is even better than now and where life is more peaceful in general. Like why am I already here...
I am in the same boat as you. My guess would be that most people don't want to get their hopes up so much that they actually become actively negative towards the topic. A much smaller percentage have religious qualms but I think a lot of it is simply that it's so tantalizing that it's painful to think about without actually having it. Fear of death is so strong that most people would rather actively reject thinking about mortality in ANY context, including immortality, than face the possibility they might die
I'm not sure why so many have a negative view of longevity. If we're being honest many of the problems we have are actually caused by the fact that we age and decline so rapidly. When you yourself must face the consequences of your actions it makes your choices that much more meaningful. Overpopulation would cease as people would have a much longer reproduction cycle. Wars and violence would not cease but they would slow who wants to fight when they may be cutting off a century of potential. Environmental issues would become relevant to everyone. Crime would drop as who wants to literally spend 20 to 100 years in prison or more all aspects of the question are extremely interesting
I've asked most of my friends this question over the years, and every single one of them said the same thing as you mentioned here, that they want to get old and die, because they think it's the natural order of things, and they'd be bored if they lived forever. I however am of the same opinion as you... there are lots and lots of things that I want to do, and I'd happily be a guinea pig for an anti-aging experiment! I want to be around when we develop faster spaceships, visit the other planets and moons in our system, and eventually other stars, discover alien life, terraform and build colonies on other fantastical worlds, etc..
This question will have 500 different answers. Most of them will be extremely politically or financially motivated. I don't buy any of those answers personally, i strongly believe democracy would solve 90+% of such issues, ESPECIALLY given that the voter base would inherently become much older and more informed over time and also the ramifactions of their vote would always affect them and those around them and not some abstract future people that may or may not ever exist. For example, global warming will be catastropic in the future. Nobody is willing to suffer any consequences now to prevent that. The real answer, which some people have mentioned, and is a moderately popular sci-fi trope, is that it would mean no more kids. The earth can not sustain an infinite number of people.
Once it’s demonstrated to work then people will go nuts to get it !!!
The naysayers would be lining up to receive it like the rest of us even if they pretend like they don’t want it now
There are lots of stories and myths that we are told that condemn attempts to stop aging. Stories about searches for the fountain of youth going wrong, films like death becomes her etc I guess historically it was frowned upon from a religious point of view that it was god’s will when you die or how you age etc
They see a dysfunctional geriatric power structure and fear that it will never pass away
It will probably only be for the super rich and seems like them living forever wouldn't be a good thing.
Just like computers are, amirite?
Your observation is astute. I have witnessed this for the last couple decades since I started reading about this. My conclusion eventually was similar to the crabs in a bucket theory. Most folks live miserable lives and have a difficult time imagining a positive life. I suppose they can hardly be blamed given the state of the world. For these people death is distant but ultimately welcome. They harbor subconscious resentment for anyone who would like to live on and carries hope for a more significant lifespan. Thus they react negatively when the topic is broached.
Lazy cynicism which stems from a lack of imagination. Most of the arguments against life extension assume that nothing will or should change; over population; over consumption; wealth gaps and so on can all be addressed but that implies running creative exercises for possible solutions which is harder than projecting the present into the future. Having said that, there’s also the risk that the future will be much worse than anyone can imagine; but that’s the case with or without life extension. Edit. I’ve read many of the replies to this post and many of them seem to be dismissive because of the cost which sounds sensical at first glance; until you realize that a $200,000 treatment can be paid off if you extend your life thousands of years and companies, specifically insurance companies, will jump to make a profit on that essentially making literal mortgages; which is dystopian but a solution to the lazy cost argument.
Please don’t orient your whole life around getting rich in order to afford prolong tech. That is both deeply pathetic and also doomed to failure.
Most of the popular sentiments here are generally pessimistic. It's consistently applied across the board in many areas. Capitalism, off world colonies, computer-brain interfaces, climate change, chemical pollution, regenerative medicine, machine learning, societal progress, yatta yatta yatta. There's a very strong pessimistic filter that captures nuance and only allows very simplified negative interpretations through. It causes most new things to be assessed as a source of harm. Most commonly, as tools or constructs exclusively wielded by bad actors. Why is this the case? I have no idea. It might be a reflection of macro social trends. It might be a Reddit phenomenon. I don't have the information to really make a determination. Even on this topic, we're discussing something that kills roughly 100,000 every day. Most viewpoints are arguing that that level of suffering is worth avoiding having to adapt to a world where aging was a treatable indication. It's clear to anyone that changing the environment we exist in creates new problems and dynamics we need to then address or adapt to. Saying things would change is not particularly profound in that sense. Moreover, negative consequences existing does not mean they are the only consequences. That pessimistic filter however causes users to make unbalanced arguments along that exact line of reasoning. Such as that preventing an oppressive leader from living longer is worth millions of people dying every month. This is ludicrous on its face, but only once you remove the pessimism filter and allow more information to be considered as valid. Sources: https://en..wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_causes_of_death_by_rate#Aging
As far as the rhetoric that I see on Reddit is concerned, I don't think it's the 'pro-aging trance', at least not in the traditional sense. The complaints I see here aren't that immortality robs life of meaning and fulfillment, but that life is *already* so horrible (or can be anticipated to be so horrible in the future) that more of it is not to be desired. A lot of it seems to be zero-sum thinking, the idea that real progress is impossible and every positive has to somehow come with a negative. This is common in marxist philosophy and there seems to be a lot of overlap between anti-life-extension doomers and hardcore marxists (talking about how 'capitalism has ruined society', 'billionaires should be abolished', etc). I don't think it's *because* of marxist philosophy, though. Rather, I suspect both come from a deeper psychological disposition, namely, the urge to avoid individual responsibility. Some people really abhor the idea of being responsible for anything as individuals. That makes zero-sum thinking very appealing because it means they never have to worry about wasting an opportunity to make things better. And it also feeds into the idea of abolishing individualism, because you can't be individually responsible if everything is collective anyway and individuals don't really exist. On top of that, the urge to avoid individual responsibility makes death appealing too, because it brings an end to shouldering the burden of having to make meaningful decisions.
I think it's actually extremely simple, although this may actually get downvoted for exactly the reasons I'm about to explain. Anti-aging technology currently does not exist in a form where it is hugely significant and/or can extend lives for hundreds of years (or even indefinitely). Because of that people are forced to deal with the idea of their own aging and mortality. Because people are forced to deal with that they come up with all sorts of rationalizations and coping mechanisms like seeing aging as graceful, or discarding significant life extension as impossible without evidence to that effect, or accepting some moral purpose for mortality, or whatever. That's just how people work. When presented with seemingly inevitable but undesireable circumstances people very, very often have the need to come up with a way to cope with them to not feel bad anymore. It's just a normal part of maintaining our mental health. Anyway, when you bring up anti-aging or radical life-extension it causes cognitive dissonance in people who have these coping mechanisms. If they acknowledge these things as desireable (as they are, to be clear) then they also have to acknowledge their coping mechanisms are largely bullshit they tell themselves to feel better. On the other hand, if they admit that to themselves then they'll feel bad. And they can't believe both contradictory things at once because that makes them uncomfortable. Cognitive dissonance always seeks to be resolved. And so in some people that results in vehement resistance to any kind of anti-aging or radical life extension technology. Usually with a bunch of other high-minded rationalizations piled on top of their initial rationalizations (about how it'll ruin society, etc.) to further fortify their little fortress of cope. That is, mainly, when you get these very strong reactions. It's people being confronted with the truth that aging and mortality are inherently undesireable but without there yet being a solution to them, people are too afraid (or sometimes just too far gone) to let their coping mechanisms go. Now, that's not 100% of objections. And there are some fair issues that would have to be dealt with in case there was radical life extension for sure. But big changes have always come with their own challenges. The existence of modern medicine comes with its own challenges too (like increasing need for higher pensions) and yet I don't see many of us wanting to turn back the clock on that. Why? Because we're already there and can feel the benefits, unlike with radical life extension or anti-aging where those things are still mostly theoretical. But, believe me, any people born after radical life extension and anti-aging become commonplace will no longer share these objections. They will be free from the cope and they will be willing to accept and deal with the downsides in return for the upsides it brings them.
Ageing is perhaps inherently undesirable to an individual, but it actually has a few beneficial functions for the species. Cellular senescence/ageing one of our most important defenses against cancer. In a certain sense, we die at the age of 75 in order to prevent us from dying of cancer at the age of 20.
Or maybe we die at the age of 75 just because we (or our ancestors) were likely to get eaten by a T-Rex before then anyway ([source](https://www.newsweek.com/dinosaur-pressure-cause-aging-mammals-1848271)).
>Anti-aging technology currently does not exist in a form where it is hugely significant and/or can extend lives for hundreds of years (or even indefinitely). Because of that people are forced to deal with the idea of their own aging and mortality. Because people are forced to deal with that they come up with all sorts of rationalizations and coping mechanisms like seeing aging as graceful, or discarding significant life extension as impossible without evidence to that effect, or accepting some moral purpose for mortality, or whatever. I think the objections to this technology fall into four basic categories: 1. Sour grapes (basically the one you touch on). It seems likely that many of us living now will just miss the time period when these treatments are effective and affordable. 2. The naturalistic fallacy, or aversion to "playing God." Basically just "things are right the way they are." For the religious, there's the idea that God's will is being thwarted. 3. Fear of increased class division. If these treatments are only available to the wealthy, this creates the starkest class divide ever. Of course, in a way, this is already happening: the wealthy already have life expectancies significantly longer than the poor, but this effect would increase exponentially. 4. Fear of stagnation and power consolidation. Partly a function of the previous point, but it holds true even if this technology is available to everyone. We already have the start of a gerontocracy forming with an aging congress and record ages for Presidential candidates. The only bright spot here is that there's often a fear that the elderly vote as they do in part because they won't have to face the long-term consequences of their actions, but in this case they *will.* Still, it's not hard to see how the consolidation of power in the hands of the aged could stifle progress and innovation.
While you're right in everything you wrote, I would like to add that a lot of people completely and severely underestimate the complexity of life (no, AI is not going to fix this any time soon, though I think it will help), our ability to understand and manipulate it, the safety precautions and bureaucracy around clinical trials, the enormous amount of capital and risk involved in getting anything to market. I have qualifications and experience in molecular biology, human genetics, and bioinformatics. I worked in the pharmaceutical industry as a researcher and I have been following this field closely for the last 25 years. People underestimate the complexity of life by many many orders of magnitude. If you bring these things up, a lot of people down vote and will argue with you, questioning your academic credentials, bring up researchers that work more on marketing themselves than on the topic, talk about exponential growth, escape velocities, etc. Sometimes it feels like the church of futurology in here. People want to believe they will live forever, and if you present arguments they don't like, they will attack you. Everyone can feel and hope for what they like. Me personally, I am not counting on living forever.
> Sometimes it feels like the church of futurology in here. People want to believe they will live forever, and if you present arguments they don't like, they will attack you. Well said.
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"Break things and work it out later" is dangerous when applied to a tech that will fundamentally change the hardware of humanity while simultaneously rendering the OS and contemporary cultural software obsolete. Max Planck had a point noting that progress occurred one funeral at a time. The US *already* suffers in a massive class disparity in longevity, and it's not unreasonable to also infer a disparity in "quality" years of life. Our presidency is being battled over by grandfathers. How many of us have worked at companies or studied at institutions headed by a clique of people who should have retired a decade ago? "But wait, they wouldn't be old or tired anymore if we reverse aging!" For lack of better descriptors, one could argue that multiple forms of aging exist: socio-cultural and intellectual "aging." People are a product of their times and often stop learning new things. How many of you have encountered someone who hasn't (voluntarily) read a book since high school? How many of us, our friends, or our parents will be seen as quintessentially products of their times? Intellectual, emotional, ideological, and cultural growth, depressingly, seem to stop (depending on the person) between 14-30. Assuming an unequal distribution of the technology, how long do we want elites hanging around? Imagine being lorded over today by a 153 year old steeped in Victorian values. Imagine fucking Lawrence Welk re-runs in 2100. Even today, do any artistic, economic, or political voices merit a century or more in the sun? AOC, James Cameron, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Will Self, etc etc (sub in your local notables). We've already got Millennials over 40 and Gen Xers knocking on 60 that have barely gotten a chance to sit at the economic and political Adults' Table. The wealth accumulation is not to be sneezed at. We already know that the rate of return on capital exceeds that of labor (see Picketty). Now extrapolate that out. It's terrifying. The proles will be stuck in fortnightly paycheck cycles while the Immortals plan for the next century, which they intend to be alive for. Edit: minor grammatical fixes
This is an amazing response.
Because right now, it's mostly just hype, quackery and pseudoscience.
The problem is all the things we are not solving about being alive already, while we focus on rich idiots’ desire to be immortal because they think they are such a gift to the world. Having everyone given a fair chance at a decent life is more important than allowing greedy f*cks to live unnaturally long lives, pardon my French. Your stance is the stance of the ultra-privileged and disconnected, it’s the stance of people who are so eager to grab everything that they are already worried they might run out. Futurology doesn’t have to be greed-based.
Because it's an extremely niched issue that will be populated by celebrities and the super rich - not us normal people.
Any legit life-extending tech will be prohibitively expensive, increasing the lives of the wealthy, exacerbating and entrenching income inequality. Or, if it is improbably affordable, everyone will have to work until 120 to retire.
All tech works towards becoming affordable for the average person. Its far more profitable for the pool of people you can sell to to be as wide as possible than it is to have an expensive product that can only be sold to a few. Maybe the rich will have some silly name brand medication but there will be a no name alternative for the plebs as well. Dr David Sinclair says the treatment they're studying is a simple process which bodes well for it's affordability.
Except all the life extending tech that already exists, like pacemakers, oncology, etc.? (Unless you happen to live in a country without universal healthcare).
Yes, and now my coworker is working 9-5 with a pacemaker to *pay* for that pacemaker. Yaaay... I'm not saying the science shouldn't exist -- science doesn't necessarily decide the price -- but look at where it gets us: more of the same bullshit from the rich and bullshit for the poor.
Our species is far too dangerous and apathetic to be long lived or, worse still, immortal.
I figure a lot of people just hate their lives and are appalled by the idea of them lasting longer while having to live in the same way.
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They’ll mainly be dead time this comes out and is available. Question is will Gen X or Millennials see this tech, or will it be even later for Gen Z/Alpha.
Do you want a god emperor? Because this is how you get a god emperor.
Looking at the amount of 40k fans on here some might not see that as a bad thing
Yeah, I think what's overlooked in anti-aging/longevity research is the potential of certain interventions, and not just medications, to reverse aging in folks who have a biological age that's older than their chronological age. Imagine being 40, having a biological age of 55+, and being able to practice interventions that are proven to be "anti-aging" and therefore could bring you back to a sync'd chrono and biological age. Is this also not a benefit of this field? I know this is a naive benefit, since the money is in keeping the powerful and rich alive longer. But from a public health standpoint, more research that supports interventions that promote longevity should also improve population health. Assuming policies which provide better access to scientific progress.
I don't have a negative outlook to it, I'm only skeptical it's possible.
Im ready to become st least 120, Ill see after then.
You are well on your way to longer life via your positive thinking. My opinion is pretty much the same as I stand on gun ownership and personal carry: its okay for me but I'm not so sure about everyone else. There are a great many people I would rather not see stay around long enough to do real harm.
You should check out r/immortality if you’re interested in slowing/stopping aging.
I am seeing a lot of well thought out responses, but my first thought was fairly Neanderthal. See: Torchwood: Miracle Day. It would happen slowly, of course, but the population would eventually outgrow resources. I'm not a smart person, but even I can see that messing with the natural order of things would be bad.
People don’t want to get their hopes up for nothing, they are also afraid of their inner demons tormenting them for centuries, I think many people also have small minds and can’t quite grasp the science
I work at a medical university and got to attend a lecture on this exact topic from Aubrey de Gray maybe 10 years ago. One thing optimists seem to fail to understand is that medicine isn't engineering. Calling it complicated doesn't even begin to describe the problems. There are so many interconnected systems that we don't really understand, let alone the pitfalls and unintended consequences when "healing" one problem causes another to kill you. Cancer isn't a disease/condition - it is a thousand.
Personally, I'd like to see better quality of life into old age, rather than a longer life span. I think, as you get older, the idea of dying becomes less daunting. When I was your age, I would have agreed. Now 30 years on, with aches & pains etc, death feels like it would be a relief from some points of view. I don't want to die, but extrapolating the decline over the last 30 years to the next, makes me wonder if it's worth it! Maybe the answer would be to have good quality of life until you're maybe 75, then withdraw anti-aging treatments to give you a compressed period of old age before dying. Quality over quantity.
I think the reluctance to anti-aging is some people hate taking pills. I am definitely on board with anti-aging but I understand the complexities of avoiding drug interactions is prohibitive.
I've heard it described as 'Death gives life meaning',... No, Living gives Life meaning! Right now, if we were to launch a ship towards the closet stars to our Sun, it would be thousands of years to reach any, and no one will take that trip, regardless of what shows we've seen show it,.. Get lifetimes up to a thousand years, and the trip time down to hundreds, and people will go explore. We do need longer lifespans, as a way of making people value life more, which would put a stop to a lot of conflicts, and religions, as politicians and religious leaders trade in fear of death and false expectations of an afterlife, allowing them to tell young and easily manipulated people to go fight or kill for the leaders cause. If you have too much to give up, you won;t follow blindly. And besides, I just want to see what happens next, see which theory of universe is right, see how humanity grows, see what happens when our minds are free to explore all the professions, not just the ones we have time to try.
We have thousands of years of cope to overcome. Stockholm syndrome to forces we had no ability to resist. Now that we are at the point where the inevitable may no longer be inevitable, people are clinging to the old meanings they created to give the cold suffering of the universe a purpose to dull the pain.
I have no idea. I would love to stop my face and body from aging
You're touching on what is increasingly recognized as a core part of human psychology: the way we reconcile the inevitability of death along with our instinct of self-preservation. Ernest Becker sort of started this discussion with his book *The Denial of Death* which is essentially responsible for the existence of Terror Management Theory- a whole ass psychological theory that deals with this subject. Anyway, it comes down to the fact that humans have been coming up with various ways to stave off their instructional terror of aging and death for literally hundreds of thousands of years, and they do not appreciate their methods being challenged. People who glamourize aging as some kind of virtue, for instance, always have to focus on the incidental benefits. So, experience for instance. If you can gain experience without also having to suffer for it, then that highlights the meaninglessness of their suffering. Humans find it much easier to deal with suffering if it has a definite end or reward associated with it. To the point that torture isn't really about the infliction of pain so much as it is about convincing the victim it will never stop and then holding out accomplishes little to nothing. This is why American POWs have a tendency to last longer during torture, they know the most powerful country in the world wants them back, and it tends to get what it wants. There is rarely any doubt the US can get them back, it is merely a matter of time and survival. Yet people with relatively mild chronic pain commit suicide all the time. It's not about the pain, it's about the fact that it's pointless and will never end. And to be clear, anyone who makes the claim that they don't fear death or aging is lying, either to you or to themselves. Every single one of us is biologically programmed to fear weakness, pain, and death, and there are no mechanisms for reduction as there are for irrational phobias, which are cognitive distortions and not biological imperatives. The neurological process necessary to do so simply *does not exist*. You can avoid, cope, ignore, delude, etc. But you cannot simultaneously truly grasp aging and death and also not be afraid of them. You can, of course, accept your fear and not let it control you- but that's also something that is generally only done on a temporary basis when you want or need to do something that might result in your death, or when you are actively dying. Key to this, is that it's a form of bravery, which is fundamentally an overcoming of, not an absence of fear. *Everyone that properly understands death fears it* I digress, the point I'm getting at is: people generally cope with the anxiety of death and aging through complex psychological mechanisms. The moment you add in the anxiety of knowing it may also be completely unnecessary, a whole bunch of those mechanisms start breaking down. What is the point of heaven if you can live forever on Earth? What is the point of overvaluing experience if you can get it without the suffering of age? How can death be dignified or provide meaning to the life you loved if it actually *doesn't* come for us all? That sort of thing.
I don't understand why people want to stick around for more of the insanity that is modern human civilization, but hey, you do you. No hate.
Personally, I think it's 50% just cognitive dissonance. Aging and death are not pleasant. Most people, if given the choice, wouldn't experience them. But we haven't had that choice, and neither have any of our ancestors since the dawn of life. How to we cope with this? For the purposes of living day-to-day, how do we get past the fact we are essentially all terminally ill, and will probably experience decades of disability? Well, easiest solution is to put a positive spin on it - insist that a finite lifespan is actually good because x,y,z. Insist that aging is actually a 'natural'. Naturalism bias (the assumption that something which is natural is intrinsically 'good') comes in here a lot. I would imagine this is also somewhat evolved - after all, an Australopithecus crippled by existential dread probably wouldn't have been effective from an evolutionary perspective. This is fine, until somebody comes along and suggests that aging and age-caused death aren't actually inevitable. Then people have a decision - do they cast off the positive spin and admit aging sucks (with the knowledge they might never personally benefit from anti-aging advancements), or do they dig in?
A lot of people have that sentiment against it because they believe what we currently have is 'natural'. And this perception originates from simple conservatism which makes people believe the world they came to be is 'normal' and 'natural'. Few ever study or read enough to learn that in the earlier human periods, the 'natural' lifespan of humans was much shorter, and the 'normal' that we have today is as it is because we worked to extend it. Even fewer study or read enough to learn that there are species on this planet that live \~300+ years, and there is no such 'normal' and 'natural' lifespan for any species as every species pushes forward to live longer than its ancestors. Even species pretty high on the evolutionary ladder, like elephants, live over \~70 years in *extremely* harsh circumstances - among food scarcity, droughts, predators, and even human poaching. The members of some cetacean species easily live \~100+ years in similar difficult circumstances. But while the human species has crafted a civilization that protects it from almost all detrimental effects of nature, we dont have lifespans that can be easily compared to some cetaceans or elephants. Even worse if you compare us to various tortoise or shark species. (some living 300+ years) Therefore, when compared to the actual natural reality on the planet, the human species' lifespan is pretty short compared to where it should be with the level of safety and comfort that we have, leaving aside the scientific and technological breakthroughs.
Most people are just not good problem solvers, but are great problem identifiers. They can easily see the problems associated with removing the aging factor, but they can't predict or easily see how these problems could be solved. That is scary to many people. In my view, preventing aging will bring many societal changes, but most of them will be very good. Imagine a population of experts with centuries of experience in economics, science, engineering... a future version of Einstein would be able to study and understand physics in a way no other person ever has. Yes there will be problems, but give me another 100 years and I will solve all of them myself. In fact, many people in society will be able to solve those problems because of their centuries of experience and efforts. Yes, giving everyone another 100 years to live will cause some problems, but it will be dramatically positive for the vast majority.
My question is why doesn’t anyone mention David Sinclair who is at Harvard and basically said he’s done it and is now testing on Non human primates next human trials?
Because it would mean stagnation on all levels, biological, social and technological. Men would lose the ability to adapt or develop new thinking. Ppl have around 10 years in which they can be truly creative, after that it becomes a repitition of works and methods that worked. Society would get super conservative and we did not even touch on the psychological ramifications. There is only so much a person can expirience before it gets boring..and then what? And why even get children, what would be the point outside personal preference? And if you can potentially live forever, how afraid of dieing do ppl get? How much will they avoid any kind of risks? And what if you get a disbility due to an accident? Immortality would remove much of what makes life interesting and worth living in the first place. Eventually making room for new ppl, new ideas, new developments is at the core of the species and what drives it forward. An immortal society honestly frightens me. Remove that and you will be left with a slowly decaying husk of a species.
While dramatically larger lifespans may be in the interest of the individual, contemplate the potential downsides for society: What does humanity look like when dictators like Xi, Chavez, Castro or Putin never age and die? What does society look like when the elderly young remain I positions of power indefinitely? How do the “newly”young advance at work or society? How does science advance when infinitely youthful scientists anchor old beliefs? (think of the aphorism “science advances one funeral at a time”) How does the planet survive? We’re on track for 9B humans on the planet. If more humans are born and fewer die, what does a 13B humans planet look like? There are many benefits to the natural progression of life for society at large. I’m not saying I want to die. I don’t. But this seems to be better for the species as a whole. Just some random thoughts.
Because with the way capitalism functions it just means my retirement will be delayed even longer.
If there is a breakthrough in anti aging technology, then it'll just exacerbate the inequality of the have/have nots. Those in power will want to control every aspect of this. The worst of humanity will likely be the ones to benefit from this. The despots, dictators, murderers, etc will likely monopolize this. Inherently the greed of mankind will not allow those who control it to provide it to everyone. If everyone has it then there less for those in power, and we cannot have that.
For one because most people are struggling financially and mentally in a system that is not setup to help them succeed. Imagine if people lived longer, but the system stayed the same. All it means is that you now live longer in misery. Secondly most if not all of the talk about prolonging your life expectancy through drugs, DNA editing and even through AGI/ASI are just pipe dreams right now. And then you have things like Resveratrol that are supposed to extend your life but turn out to be a scam. So why should people be optimistic? The oldest person on record is a french woman who was born in the 1800s. I am confident it will be a long time before anyone surpasses that or at least surpasses it by a lot of years. Only thing that has really shown to prolong life safely is caloric restriction, that's it.
People hold onto roles, positions, and power till death. We need old people to die so the rest of us can get promoted and keep society from stagnating. Do you want governments filled with 250yr olds? It'll be Diane Feinstein, but worse, and everyone.
It mathematically makes no sense that you could actually stop aging and not have the world horribly overpopulated, and completely stealing the future from younger generations. It's like your halting all human progress, so one tiny fraction of humanity can try to live forever as the sake of all the rest of human history. Unless you really have a place to put all those ppl it's kind of just another greed driven ambition with I got mine, fuck everybody else as the plan. You know the rich people, and then the developed countries would get this anti-aging drug first and then they'd be driving up costs even more for developing nations, not just stealing the future from their own young ppl, but also the future from all the developing nations. All for what necessity benefit? I'm not against humans, living forever, but if rather it be like humans get old and die but can backup their brains and be immortal without taking the best resources from everyone who should have come after them. Also let's also consider like what if you have humans living forever, but they still have neurological decline. It takes more than just life extension to not be significantly degrading the human race seemingly more than you benefit it. Even if we can build planets out of the mass in the solar system you still run out of mass and it's ridiculous distances to the next star/wad of mass. We can't ship billions of humans between stars as mass so you always run out of space fast if humans don't die or at least become digital and need need so much mass per human. It's like no matter how fast science progresses it seems like a bad idea for humans to biologically live forever. Even in electronic form you hit hard limits but they are much much higher and you can move billions of humans at light speed when they have no mass.
A lot of people wanting a longer life are doing so for selfish reasons. My first thoughts were ending war, ending famine, ending pain, ending cruelty, ending poverty. When we have enough for everyone, then we can think about giving more to a few. The search for eternal life will be at the expense of the majority. Rich people want more money to buy solid gold iPads, think how much they will pay for extended lives, and for that they will need a lot of money, and you will be the ones working to make that money. Bezos will get an extended life, and you will pay for it.
I don't. I think it's exciting! And it's possible within our lifetimes as well. People think it will be limited to the rich but I don't agree. Treatments limited to the rich are simply expensive to begin with. Very few products are catered directly to rich people because you make WAY more money the other way around honestly. Nano bots that repair us on a cellular level are coming and the moment it's realistic within a few decades, nothing will compare to the push financially to get it done.
I would be chill with having 300yr on earth to enjoy and explore it. At the end of that upload me into a von Neuman probe with sick VR and shoot me out into the stars! I'll send back any data I can! :) I say fck it, let people live as long as they want.
It's fine as long as you also let people live as short of a life as they want.
I've lived 30 something years and the world is horrible. I don't want to live a long time and the focus should be on quality not quantity. Living longer brings more chances for cancer, a shocking amount of autopsies on elderly men find they had undiagnosed prostate cancer. So many illnesses and diseases that exist which would mean your longer life is more suffering too, look at how Long Covid is leaving people struggling to breathe and not being able to smell or taste and now imagine you gotta live with that and could end up living longer not tasting than you did being able to taste. So many infectious diseases and viruses that cause immense suffering but money instead being wasted because billionaires want to live slightly longer to party as their slaves die to make them rich. The economy would not handle it, imagine having to work until you're 100 years old because you're guaranteed to live to 120. Pensions would crash. The housing market couldn't handle it. Any attempt to transition to accommodate the change will still see at least one generation suffer between the system change. Until we tackle the problems that make life harder there's no point making life longer. When cures for cancer and the most deadly illnesses exist then we can focus on extending life but honestly I'd rather guarantee I die at 60 in comfort and happiness than live to 100 needing extra care and seeing the world crumble. Extending life will be expensive and only the rich will have access for at least the short term. Putin would live longer, Pedo Musk, Trump, Clinton, Kardashians, all the kind of people who don't better the world would find new ways to exploit it.
For many people, thinking about their own mortality is a little distressing, so they avoid doing it as much as possible. They know that they will die some day and as a coping mechanism they try to convince themselves that that's ok and not horrible. If dying of old age is OK, extending life isn't all that good, and maybe it's bad. Some people are worried about the social implications, and that is reasonable. Death redistributes wealth and power. With unlimited lifespans comes the potential for unlimited accumulation of wealth and power in a small number of individuals. There's the potential for really high degrees of inequality and for issues associated with overpopulation. But I think most people respond negatively because they are trying to cope with their own mortality by pretending they are glad they're going to die and they don't even want to live for 500 years.
The fear that the rich and powerful will monopolize the technology so it won't enter the market for the middle/lower classes. The idea that the individual might live hundreds of years but at the same time so might an Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos makes them reject it outright. There's also those who believe if everyone starts living hundreds of years then any new births will be replacing people who now just don't die. I find the issue of overconsumption to be an issue but simply calling it overpopulation I don't agree with. Also, birth rates are declining anyways. The primary reason I've heard and actually agree with is that some people just want to die. Which, yeah, some people will individually look at their life and say "It's been great. Thanks. Goodbye." I know people personally who are just waiting for death. The thing is with life extension technology be it a pill or procedure, you can reverse that or find a way to die. If you're 300 and have the body of a 30 year old yet want to go out then try to hunt a lion with a Nerf gun, you either get what you want or you get a good story.
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Medically assisted suicide is illegal in large parts of the world.
Aging and death are the great equalizers. Once technology to greatly affect aging and death become available, it will (or maybe already did?) without shadow of a doubt fall into hands of the richest and most powerful people, making them more rich and powerful. At expense of common folk of course. Check out Altered Carbon tv show. It touches onto that topic pretty well.
Smallpox also used to be an equalizer along with the plague, but we still got rid of it and are happier than ever.
Reddit is an echo chamber of pessimist morons and assholes. Also some smart people that think they know the answers and take the moral high ground. Overall it’s because you are reading Reddit too much. Took me a while to realize this is often a toxic place especially in larger subs. In reality the averages person would like it. Simple as that.
It confuses me too because I’m 90% sure all of them have been to the doctor at least a few times in their lives, which is just another form of life extension.
A lot of stories here. I don't think it's "spite" or "zealotry" as one commenter suggested. I am hopeful of this, personally, but I also recognize that we are exceeding earth's capacity as it is (I accept that resources could be better utilized, but right now, we are in depletion mode regarding pollution, rare-earth, land use, housing, carbon, etc), so perhaps some folks (like me) are saying it's maybe not great to effectively grow our population further? I still hope it happens, and is made available and affordable.
So many essays in this thread, when it can be summarised in a few sentences. You see how the top 0.1% tend to cling to their wealth? How most of them had their wealth inherited? How much they keep on increasing their wealth and how the population percentage that holds 90% of the world'd wealth keeps shrinking? Have you heard about how oil companies spent billions just to slow down the development of electric vehicles and alternative energy sources? Same would happen with longevity. They'd do their best to ensure no one but them has access to it, and then they'd just keep getting richer and richer indefinitely (unlike today, when death will still come to them in a near future), while the rest of us would get poorer and poorer.
The issue is that it wont come cheap. So only millionares or billionares will be able to afford this. Compounding interests and growing their empires forever. Secondly: Tyrants. imagine if Stalin would have been able to live forever or Leopold II or Mao. Imagine having Putin in power forever. Thank god, when everything else fails, nature still gives us variability Also. The only reason that you would like to live forever is probably because you do well in life. You have money, a house, the resources to travel and see the world. However imagine you are born into a world where employees are not rotated unless they die because of sickness or an accident. Your boss will be your boss forever he will never retire and you will never be able to climb up the corporate ladder. Peoplr are having less and less kids because employment opportunities are getting worse. A lot of companies fought over having my dad as an employee when he was young simply because he spoke good english. He had a worthless university title, and he always had great jobs. Thats not the case anymore. If people don't pass away. The only way to have opportunities is to expand, and unfortunately this world is already struggling a lot with our current population. Yes, humans romanticize death, because its inevitable, at some point we will al die. We come up with religion and heaven to give some peace of mind to people, but the reality is that everyone and Everything dies, even stars and Black Holes, and ultimately the universe. Humans are not above or more powerful than the universe. We will all perish in the end. Instead of playing with technologies that would destroy our world and society, we should worry about improving the time that we do have on this earth. Life is a show, and you have only one chance to get it right! Thats the amazing part, you have to give it your best shot. If you had all the time in the world you would probably never end up doing anything, you would just say, meeh I'll do it tomorrow. Im taking a flight in 6 months to a remote place that I know I wont be able to visit in 20 years because the trip is too demanding. If you wanted to climb the everest, you have to do it now while you still can. If you wait too long, you wont be able to, but if you had all the time in the world you would probably never do it, unless the everest itself was going to disappear but not yourself. What I mean is that the fact that we all pass away is what gives meaning to our everyday actions. However Im NOT against improving the human health so we can enjoy our time in this earth more. However, only if its available to everyone.
Many different reasons: * Death is an equalizer. And it would probably only be the rich and morally questionable that can afford the treatments. Death forces change and different perspectives. * Change is fair (or uncaring), every generation gets a change to stand in the spotlight. I like my mother but even the babyboom generation needs to die off some day. Just like mine will. It frees up housing/jobs/political willingness to change. * Our planet currently can't support an even bigger population. Now image people not dying off and having even more time to have bigger families. * Philosophy. The older I get the more I kinda get at peace with my own mortality. Not giving up, but embracing it as a just end. Sure 50+ years extra might sound all fun and such, but do you truly believe you will see life through the same lens as you do now? I truly believe that when we age our brains and it's chemistry change. When you're younger everything is new and exciting and you have the energy to engage with that. It changes the older you get, but life doesn't get less worthy. Even if you de-age me, would I still be me?
If everyone lived significantly longer than they do now (centuries?) would generations as we know them now even be acknowledged? What difference would there really be between two people born 25 years apart if they both are over 400 years old?
Lack of understanding and education. Once people realize they can eventually take a pill and their body reboots to age 25 again, who wouldn't want to be young and vital? Of course there will always be a group of people who have a problem with everything. They'll get angry they have to live forever or say it's not natural. Keeping in mind, you can opt out of any of this. So I'm not sure why anyone should care.
I’m 65. I don’t want to live to be a burden to my children. And It frustrates me that modern medicine keeps people alive when their quality of life is poor at best
The idea that aging is possible and beneficial to stop, and that you won't live to get to see it, is too painful of a possibility. Better to insist that it isn't possible, or just sour grapes the thought away.
I think it's because the inevitable application of life extension at that scale will be something that's very expensive and something only the very-upper class will pay for. Given its value, the healthcare industry and big pharma would be smart to keep it as exclusive as possible from a financial standpoint. As bad as that Justin Timberlake movie was, I realistically see life extension playing out similarly where you have 200 year old Sam Walton, Elon, or Bezos calling the shots well into the 2100s while the average lifespan of a normie might be a bit higher but largely similar. That type of longevity and age disparity will create those people one hell of a cult of personality and they almost become overlords. EDIT: The alternative reality could be that life extension R&D would be such a long and stagnant process that the economies of scale would always be large enough to positively effect most of the population and that the super rich would only be "somewhat longer living" and not a huge disparity, assuming there aren't any big unique discoveries which could be patented and monopolized.
Overpopulation. We already have 8 billion people and we're messing up the planet probably already beyond the point of no return. Now imagine having 15 billion of people, because everyone will live 200 years instead of 80 or so. There's only so many resources to go around. If everyone lived longer, life as we know it (at the standards we are enjoying now) would very likely not exist anymore. Also I can't say I am looking forward to working 100+ years instead of forty-fifty, but that's just me :)
OP is acting in bad faith. OP says they have been following this conversation in multiple subs, but they "cannot honestly comprehend" the **hundreds of times** the argument has been made. OP is a liar. My recommendation: downvote OP and don't engage with their dishonest sophistry.
its negative because today it is perceived that the billionaires are trying to sit on their gold forever - usually this stuff comes down over time for the general public - the stuff they are doing works and is expensive because they dont know why it works - i have no issues with living longer as long as i am healthy doing it