Remarkable hostility and strange circular logic from some people posting here. Clearly belief outstrips evidence.
If research suggests there's an observable asymptotic trend, public health dollars at the very least might be better spent on quality of life as much as quantity.
The posts saying an atom of oxygen is potentially infinitely long lived (ignoring radioactive decay?) As a "proof" that life extension has no limit is about as reductively silly as it is possible to be.
Bills of mortality bootstrapped Financial investment in annuities. You think the money people aren't tracking this trend now, when they have for the last 400 or more years?
Radical life extension within our lifetimes has become secular religion substitute. It’s driven more by hope and faith than by scientific fact.
While a lifespan has no limits in theory if technology is advanced enough, the belief that it can be achieved by a living person is based on hope rather than evidence.
- Possible in our lifetime.
- Affordable to the faithful.
You remove these two, and the faithful lose their interest in discussing the matter.
What theory says that human lifespan has no limits with technology assistance? Anything involving replacing biological systems with artificial ones is not really extending human lifespan, it’s replacing human life with something else.
I won't touch on whether or not you're still you as you replace your biological components with artificial ones.
But who says that's the endgame? Presumably an advanced enough medical technology could remove the internal byproducts of aging, and get your cells to stop dying / running out of steam / going cancerous. Obviously we have no idea how to do that, and maybe we never will, but it seems plausible.
You can replace almost whole body and its still you as the mind. But once you replace brain then its just a copy, you can't literally move biolectrical complex that makes us into silicon in any possible way. And brains age like the rest of the body, telomeres issue applies too.
The best possible outcome would be watching your digital copy having digital life, while you yourself wither away regardless. More akin to having a child than oneself preservation. Not really something special, having physical children still beats this.
Ship of Theseus it. Slowly replace the brain bit-by-bit, taking breaks in between. For each component, use three in a democratic redundancy (for future maintenance).
I wouldn't personally do that unless I was already dying. But, I see no reason believe it wouldn't preserve the soul. Your organic brain is already doing it all the time on a small scale.
We know it’s possible for living things to be functionally near immortal.
We also know germ line cells can give rise to new organisms which can give rise to germ line cells in an unbroken chain effectively forever.
This is quite far from making a human immortal but it shows that there appears to be nothing in physical law or intrinsic to biology that prohibits it. Therefore it is possible.
Star travel and terraforming Mars are also possible. Possible does not imply anything about difficulty. We don’t really know if radical life extension or borderline immortality are fusion hard, quantum computing hard, or starship hard.
> We know it’s possible for living things to be functionally near immortal.
Not in any sense that's applicable to humans.
The often-cited animal examples, like greenland sharks, tortoises, and lobsters, are slow-moving ectotherms with "cold" metabolisms. Adjusting for watts per unit mass of biochemistry, they might "live" less in all their centuries than you do in a single decade [0-3].
In that sense they're only "long-lived" in the same way a tree is long-lived. Yeah, it might not die. But it's also not doing much that produces wear and tear, misfolded proteins, scar tissue, plaque buildup, etc.
Microorganisms and cnidarians, which can be truly immortal, are even more divergent. For example a common form of "immortality" involves periodically regenerating body parts by reverting to stem cells. IIRC regeneration is ancestral to all animals, but mostly lost in mammals.
Humans can actually already regenerate to a limited extent [4]. But how are you going to regenerate an entire primate nervous system (which "immortal" animals don't have), without losing everything you are?
In fact, the use of regeneration to achieve "immortality", and even that only rarely and in very simple animals, suggests it may not be possible at all for living organisms to live indefinitely in the same body. Otherwise, why would evolution waste calories rebuilding a whole body?
I suspect some systems-theoretic effect like the Red Queen hypothesis [5], but on a micro scale. Change is the only constant, and immortality implies trying to stay the same when the only thermodynamically favorable options are to grow or decay.
0: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-76371-0
1: # Greenland shark metabolism over entire lifespan
sh -c "units '((30mg/oxygen)*(mol/g))/hour/(1000/1000^0.84*kg) * (434kJ/mol) * 200year' MJ/kg"
2: # Greenland shark lifespan metabolism, alternate estimation
sh -c "units '192kcal/day*200year/126kg' MJ/kg"
3: # Human metabolism over 1 decade
sh -c "units '150W/100kg*10years' MJ/kg"
4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regeneration_in_humans
5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen_hypothesis
I don't think regeneration of bulk tissue is what people are generally talking about when they talk about immortality. Rather they talk about there being advanced homeostasis from yesterday, to today and to tomorrow under "normal" living condition. The point is not that you should be able to regenerate from blowing your brains out.
Yep. The point I'm making is that there is no precedent in nature for a complex animal maintaining homeostasis indefinitely like that (that doesn't rely on bulk regeneration). And given such immortality would presumably be highly evolutionarily advantageous, there is therefore no reason to believe it's possible at all, and many reasons to suspect it might not be (antagonistic pleiotropy, chaos theory, thermodynamics…).
Aren't some trees, some fungi, some sharks and some crabs basically exactly that? They are most certainly complex life. Sure you are right heir metabolic profile is very different.
But really the your argument is already shifting to "there is no life ver similar to humans that do it, so it must be impossible" which imo is a much larger stretch then assuming it's possible.
We aren’t much more complex than a crab, if we are at all. “Complexity” is not what makes us what we are. It’s that we went down an evolutionary path that heavily leveraged intelligence and social cooperation so we got a big hypertrophied brain. Our brain is like a cheetah’s musculoskeletal system or a rabbit’s reproductive system.
The OP is also massively underestimating plant complexity. We aren’t much more complex than a tree either.
We are higher metabolism than both though, and with that the OP has a point. We are already long lived for a high metabolism animal. Our metabolic rate makes it harder for our repair mechanisms to stay ahead of oxidative and radiation damage. That will make extreme life extension hard for us, harder than if we were reptilians or arthropods.
If you had full understanding of human cell and how they contribute to homeostasis, you could reprogram the cell to rejuvenate them endlessly without turning into cancer (many cancers have unlimited lifespan). You would also need to find ways to remove all cruft that gradually accumulates even in healthy body, like heavy metals etc.
How do you know that you could? That’s the question! If we did understand biology perfectly it may be that we would then prove no organism can live forever and reproduction is the only way.
Reproduction doesn't create whole new cells from nothing (except in the ship of Thesius sense). It's existing cells getting reprogrammed to do new things.
Reproduction does result in new matrix/scaffolding being built but the cells build that (and can rebuild it if so directed).
Of course some things "we" care about exist exclusively in the matrix (configurations of neurons, learned behaviors, memories, etc) so that could well be a limit for those parts of the body where we care primarily about preserving the matrix.
Anyway my point is that "reproduction" doesn't create whole new life, it's just a continuation.
> Anyway my point is that "reproduction" doesn't create whole new life, it's just a continuation.
Then you're just arguing that we're already immortal, after all we reproduce, but I don't think that's what we're talking about when we talk about longevity. Longevity is the continued existence of a particular being, not its continuation through descendants.
The point is that a fundamental assumption that "reproduction" does anything that can't be done by regeneration is just a hunch that so far isn't actually supported by anything in microbiology. The existence of reproduction is irrelevant to the question.
Reproduction is not physically special. If it is physically possible to create a new organism with a longer lifespan than its parent (which it is), then it is physically possible to extend the lifespan of an existing organism. This may be impractical, but we cannot prove that no organism can live ≈forever, because it's not a physical impossibility. (Assuming a source of power remains present: it looks like the universe won't last forever, so we can trivially assert that no organism can live forever.)
> it is physically possible to extend the lifespan of an existing organism.
This is not at all guaranteed until we actually manage to do it. And that's exactly what we're discussing, you can't just say "but it must be possible". There's no rule of the universe that says it should, and given life has been around for 4 billion years and there's no single species (specially animals which is what we really should consider here if we're talking about human lifespan) that manages to live for more than a few hundred years, I think that's strong evidence that life is approaching a fundamental limit here. Someone else said "maybe that's enough" - well, why?? Maybe 100 years is already quite enough then??
Take the existing organism apart, fix all the problems, put the organism back together. No laws of physics prevent this, so by the totalitarian principle it's physically possible. Principles of engineering might make it impractical, and even if it is practical we might never discover how to do it, but it's possible.
Because there's absolutely no reason to believe that's the case? Like I don't know what the point of this argument is: maybe it's impossible. Sure, great. Okay. But you know...let's actually find out, because it looks very possible if hard from our current vantage point.
This is perhaps the single worst form of argument I've ever seen. It does not help, it does not engage with anything scientific, it doesn't promote any new ideas (an example of an idea worth exploring is 'how can a cancer cell live indefinitely but other cells cannot' or 'why do different animals live for different lengths of time and what triggers this process'?). Things not worth exploring include whatever you're engaging in.
> This is perhaps the single worst form of argument I've ever seen.
It's because you didn't understand it
> 'how can a cancer cell live indefinitely but other cells cannot'
Cancer cells are damaged cells mutating without regard for function. It's pretty obvious that there is a difference between "living indefinitely in a mutated form devoid of original function" is different from a cell performing a specific function
Do you believe this limit on lifespan is a uniquely human condition? or do you believe that it's impossible for any animal whatsoever to have a long lifespan (let's say 400 years for the sake of argument here).
I mean I also feel like people would be pretty happy with the average lifespan of a tree, or a Greenland Shark, etc.
Also, some few (fairly primitive) animals are "biologically immortal," for example, lobsters (which are motile and vaguely resemble us more than, say, sponges and jellyfish) don't experience senescence.
That being said, I think we have a long way to go if we want to make any progress at all, and I doubt I will live to see it.
If you could put your mind in a robot, is it still you? What if you get a knee replacement? What if you infuse a young persons blood? What if you put on a contact lens? Fun questions, but I’m not sure the answer changes what we will do much.
Two issues here - the first is that relatively new discoveries like the bidirectional gut-brain axis, and the major effects it has on you, pose a technical issue to traditional thought experiments like brains in a vat (or robot as it may be). The second is that this also doesn't really answer the question. Your brain, like everything else in your body, degrades over time. It's not like it becomes immortal if you just stick it in a robot, if that were even possible.
> While a lifespan has no limits in theory if technology is advanced enough, the belief that it can be achieved by a living person is based on hope rather than evidence.
I would say it's based on fear. Ego. Maybe disconnection, bordering on solipsism, as if living in this world is only meaningful if you personally live forever.
Hope motivates aspirational curiosity. The attitude from some longevity enthusiasts here seems to lean more towards vitriol and tautology.
It has also become popular with billionaires to invest huge sums of money into life extension, or at least cosmetic surgeries to appear younger (Hair transplants, etc).
I have come to the conclusion that no amount of money or technology can cure being spiritually empty inside, as well as unable to cope with your own mortality.
Some would say that if they were able to find meaning in life or cope with mortality, then they wouldn't have hoarded so much money and tech in the first place.
This is a very good question which i resonate with. The implications that an extend life is better. In my personal opinion life as we know it would be vastly different and who knows how different it could be, for better or for worse.
Wouldn't it be great if every figure we learned about in history class was still alive and kicking today? Wouldn't that just make everything so much better?
Anyone who says "we will have within this generation technology to extend your lifetime indefinitely" is lying just as much as the priest who says he knows God exists is lying[1]. I would say it's more likely that the scientist liar is accidentally right, than that the priest is; that doesn't make either of them people you should trust.
At the current stage of technology, belief on this process is basically based only on hope. Belief in this is essentially religious.
[1] possibly they both believe they are saying the truth, so you could argue they are wrong rather than lying. They are still both standing on the same grounds.
Actually all the heads of labs and the top 2 cited scientists are saying exactly this. Hassabis Hinton bengio and amodei. It's crazy to think they are lying priests and give 0% probability on this. It's really short minded.
oh thank goodness you've finally shifted the goal post! in other comments you were arguing that radical life extension was impossible but now it's merely impossible within our lifetime! that's a huge shift!
I made two comments in this thread. The one you replied to, and this one I'm using now to respond to you. Do you have me confused with someone else?
But yeah, I think "within our lifetime" is a critical qualifier, and most people who are not writing it down are implicitly assuming that the qualifier is obvious. I have very limited interest in technologies that will not exist until centuries after I'm born, other than as entertainment.
Without that qualifier, almost any practical discussion about technology is moot. It's fun to talk about FTL or whatever, but we certainly should not be investing heavily into it... It might be possible, but most research on that direction would be wasteful.
How do you know it's viable? We may try, but if your argument is merely that it wasn't disproven yet, then it doesn't invalidate OP's point of it being aspirational first.
> Radical life extension within our lifetimes has become secular religion substitute. It’s driven more by hope and faith than by scientific fact.
Did someone prove mice have souls that go to heaven or hell while I wasn't looking?
For all the limits of research that only works in mice and doesn't generalise to humans (I'm *not* going to plan with the assumption of radical longevity) it's not quite as bad as taking everythin on faith.
The secular religion spoken of by nabla has nothing to do with afterlives. It's for people who don't believe in any afterlife trying to placate their fear of death by having faith that technology will somehow grant them an indefinite life, not an afterlife.
(Context: I am firmly an atheist, but I also disapprove of the people who want to live forever. I think that's selfish and childish. People should get to grips with the reality of their mortality and make peace with that.)
> People should get to grips with the reality of their mortality and make peace with that.
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
I agree. For one, most people don't change. In the sense that their ideas don't change. For the ideas to change in the society, sometimes people themselves have to be replaced, i.e. generations have to change.
Heaven and hell, souls, they're just examples sampled from the set of things called "religious".
Radical life extension has been demonstrated… in mice.
If you don't like my chosen examples, take any other religious statement and demonstrate it in a mouse. Have Anubis weigh their heart against a feather, pay Charon to cross the Styx, whatever.
Point isn't the specific it's compared against, it's the entire set that longevity definitely isn't in, because unlike those things it has been demonstrated (in mice).
I don't have to be hostile to be somewhat skeptical about mechanical extensions of current trends into distant future.
An analyst living in 1825 could analyze the traffic stats to conclude that the era of increasing land travel speeds is coming to a close because the horses can't run any faster, and an analyst living in 1975 could analyze the telecom stats to conclude that international calls are always going to cost much more than local calls and remain somewhat of a luxury, particularly in the developing world.
I read an article somewhere around 1960 that predicted we'd achieve travel at the speed of light in 25 years (I forget the real number, but within the lifetime of many people living then), and exceed the speed of light shortly thereafter. He based his prediction on the increases in speed of travel over decreasing spans of time, starting with people running, then tens of millennia later horseback, then a couple millennia later steam ships and trains, then a century later airplanes, then sixty years later orbital space travel.
And that is precisely why I don't find that much value in articles such as "New research reveals longevity gains slowing, life expectancy of 100 unlikely".
Declaration such as:
“We forecast that those born in 1980 will not live to be 100 on average, and none of the cohorts in our study will reach this milestone."
is too self-confident. Their youngest cohort is born in 2000. It is impossible to predict how longevity technology will look in 2070 or 2080, and yet the authors make such bold statements.
To be fair, the study authors explicitly say that their forecast only holds, “In the absence of any major breakthroughs that significantly extend human life," and, "The findings of this study are not intended to be interpreted as evidence in favor or against a biological age limit to human life."
Let's use "time travel" for `$X` and see if we come to a useful forecast: Sure, one could hope that someday we'll have enough major breakthroughs to achieve either one. But "maybe we'll discover something we don't currently know or understand and it will change everything and we will go back in time" isn't a very promising or useful forecast if your aim is fixing a current problem.
You could perform the same exercise substituting "perpetual motion" as `$X`, and come up with an forecast equally useless for solving current problems.
Also: you replaced "major breakthroughs" with "technologies" when paraphrasing. What do you think the difference is between those two different terms? Do you feel your refutation would be as strong if you spoke to the original point, rather than rephrasing it and responding to your own, differently-phrased version (essentially responding only to yourself) ?
This analogy does not seem to be very strong. No one is making any progress on time travel, which may well be totally physically impossible.
On the other hand, our knowledge of mechanisms of aging has been growing fairly rapidly in the last decade or so, and if history is any teacher, such a growing heap of discoveries usually produces some concrete applications sooner or later.
We can already rejuvenate individual cells and smaller samples of tissues in vitro. That is not yet a recipe for a functional treatment of a living organism, but it is a (necessary) step in that direction.
There is also Sima the rat, breaking the longevity record for Sprague-Dawley rats by living for 1464 days after Katcher's treatment. Out of 8 subjects total.
Could be a random occurence, but the chances to break the longevity record in just eight rats are very, very low. And if it wasn't a random occurence, we already saw a meaningful life extension in an ordinary mammal.
The study takes all the advancements you mention into account, and says that even with that rate of progression, the specified life extension target (100y) is unlikely. Just like perpetual motion or time travel.
On the other hand, people have been claiming "breakthroughs" in all 3, so if that is what you want to hope for, that's cool. It just doesn't factor into our forecasts for any of the 3.
"takes all the advancements you mention into account"
And I think that prophecies like this are fundamentally unsound and unscientific. There is no way you can extrapolate from basic experiments like Katcher's to the year 2080.
It does not. There is a lot of useless papers produced because of the "publish or perish" pressure, and even harder sciences have a massive reproduction crisis.
Feynman diagnosed this sort of cosplay as "cargo-cult science" decades ago.
There are a greater number of useless internet posts produced within the same period, and the `useless/total` ratio is higher for internet posts than for scientific papers.
There's also a practical case today where this applies: cancer treatment. One of the reasons life-expectancy are not given much past a 10-year timeline, is because it's generally expected that over a decade the quality of cancer treatment will have improved substantially and as such the likely patient outcome much beyond that isn't known (and is usually better).
Woa. Hold on. I'm talking about "the future" in the context of history. You can predict the future state of some systems, e.g. we can make fairly accurate weather predictions, from past observations of weather events, for sure. As far as I can tell that's what the authors are trying to do.
But if you want to know when the next big technological leap will happen then you won't learn that by looking at what happened last time: last time is not this time, that's my point.
public health dollars at the very least might be better spent on quality of life as much as quantity.
Improving quality of life often leads to improving quantity of life. Life expectancy is, in part, a policy choice. Be wary of those who are outright against these things.
> If research suggests there's an observable asymptotic trend, public health dollars at the very least might be better spent on quality of life as much as quantity.
Isn’t that already the case with a ton of research going into cancer treatment, Alzheimer’s treatment and how to keep people healthy longer?
Honestly, having seen the life of my grand parents once they past 90 and especially the last 2 when they had significant dementia, I would much rather die before.
Give me a good life as long as possible and spare me and my family the worst of the decline.
The problem is that mistrust is at its highest that it has been. Science and evidence have been used as political tools in the recent past... and it has started becoming clear to more and more people. Either that or to protect financial interests of some legacy chaebol... so people are losing faith.
In my country people both believe and have some evidence that those that live in an orderly fashion, learn to be emotionally detached and focus most of their energies on flow states and forward escapes end up living longer than those who don't and living beyond 100 is not really difficult if one lives a healthy balanced life as prescribed by Yoga philosophy from the get go.
I'm gonna stick my neck out and say that if life's goal is living, like it should be — and not endless economic growth or an endless compulsion on the hedonic treadmill — it isn't hard to live beyond 100.
When life's goal is living every aspect of it from family, to children to rest get the love and attention they deserve and economic outcomes and status games do not dictate life. But for that to happen one needs to realise that the most precious thing they own is their energy and will. And must learn to see which activities increase their leverage and which ones don't. When one lives that way, the most contrarian thing is that you can achieve a lot more than by chasing because you start to intrinsically do rather than chase — the latter being much more expensive energy wise. I understand if this gets too esoteric for HN. But it's what I believe to be true and is also IMHO the reason why many high performing individuals seem to be unaffected by illnesses even at old age because their energy is continuously and exponentially directed in virtuous cycles and not disturbed easily by external happenings. You are energy and can be understood and defined entirely mathematically. Yoga means union with the universe's synchronicity. It originates from Sankhya Philosophy which simply means counting all energy.
I can understand the sarcasm and respect your take
Science has helped reduce mortality at birth and manage or even eliminate a lot of diseases like malaria, HIV, small pox, polio and many more. Also for burns, broken bones and accidents. And continues to. I advocate vaccines. I myself took the Anti Covid shot 3 times. And use medicines and supplements regularly.
There’s another side to it though.
At what point do I just take an Adderall that’s prescribed to me? Or a pain killer? Rather than trying preventive lifestyle cures? We need a way to tell when to apply what but IMHO in practical life what gains ground is what serves the providers more rather than the beneficiaries. An interesting example is that Anaesthesia was a more quickly adopted invention than Anti-Septic. Even though the latter is more important for the safety of patients. But the former makes life easier for docs, hence it was adopted much faster.
There is a place for both and knowing when to apply which is key. You cannot trust HCPs using allopathy aka science backed by academia in every case cause they’re motivated by self interest and aren’t perfect! Even people like Gabriel Weinberg have acknowledged this in his book Super Thinking when touching upon inefficiencies in healthcare and academia.
I believe that to be able to trust science more we need to save science from p-value manipulation by self-interest groups…
You don't trust doctors but you took the covid jab three times? I accept that I will never understand some people. If anything the covid jab is the reason we're not going to get longevity anytime soon. The medical establishment destroyed all the trust and hope people had in the future of biotechnology with that thing.
When you say you’ll “never understand some people,” it sounds less like a statement about me and more like a limitation you’ve accepted for yourself. From a psychological perspective, that reads as defensiveness — dismissing what feels uncomfortable rather than trying to process it. It might be worth asking yourself why you feel the need to provoke instead of engage.
Because if you zoom out enough you'll learn that we're all one... so I believe in doing what's right. Your comment deserved that response because it's doing exactly what I've described. Anyways, take care! Hope you get a hug from someone today :) (even that helps with strengthening the immune system because it stimulates your thymus gland which then releases the good hormones you need).
The COVID vaccines are an absolute miracle of modern medicine and it's people like yourself who have turned it into a tragedy.
Without the hysterical and scientifically illiterate people complaining about the COVID vaccines, we very likely could've had a renaissance of investment into next generation biotech platforms like mRNA. Instead, they "have" to be destroyed because the woke right can't read a scientific paper and real information takes more than a tweet or TikTok video to convey.
Very few people have the genetics to support living past 100 regardless of lifestyle. In other words, lifestyle choices can help prevent premature death (and improve healthspan) but they can't extend maximum lifespan.
For sure, they won’t guarantee being a centenarian but will increase the odds for it to happen in my opinion
The word forward escape is borrowed from author Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi which as I understand it means just doing what you like and is good for you both as opposed to doing what you like but is bad for you aka vices which he refers to as backward escapes.
I was walking on the street the other day. It was fine summer, and I saw so many elderly walking outside. All of them were using one type of aid or another; some even had a social worker at their side. As I saw them, I was thinking that my 63% marginal tax was paying for it, while I part with 25% of my income after taxes to pay my mom’s pension. That monetary cost is nothing, I would gladly pay it for the rest of my life if it could give my mom a good life for that long. Her old age is my single biggest source of stress.
In the political sphere, some countries are tearing themselves apart on the question of immigration and identity. But immigration is the only thing that can replenish their workforce.
So, we are paying an extremely high cost for letting God go on with His Slow Tormentous Cooking of Souls before Consumption, and things are only going to get worse, given the demographic expectations. Wouldn’t it make sense to put a big chunk of budget into creating life-extension tech?
> So, we are paying an extremely high cost for letting God go on with His Slow Tormentous Cooking of Souls before Consumption, and things are only going to get worse, given the demographic expectations. Wouldn’t it make sense to put a big chunk of budget into creating life-extension tech?
It's controversial, but I think it would be tremendously beneficial to our society if we accepted that death is (currently) inevitable and that past some point, assisted suicide is a lot better than artificially prolonging suffering at great cost for as long as possible.
> assisted suicide is a lot better than artificially prolonging suffering at great cost for as long as possible.
I beseech you to contemplate how badly this might be abused, and how monstrous the consequences could be. Even now MAID in Canada and other forms of assisted suicide in Europe have arguably gone way too far.
I'm not familiar with MAID, but AFAIK I live in the European country with the most liberal euthanasia policy, and hardly anyone here thinks it's gone too far, let alone way too far.
There are lots of ways for you to end your life. You do not have to involve government or society. You do not require sanction or assistance.
The only people who might require assistance and sanction are those who are so catastrophically ill that they cannot function independently at all. But MAID has already killed people who were able-bodied! (And some for stupid or trivial reasons: https://care.org.uk/news/2024/10/poor-lonely-and-homeless-op... )
> There are lots of ways for you to end your life. You do not have to involve government or society. You do not require sanction or assistance.
By the time you think suicide is the better option, you are often already in a managed and locked down environment in which it is difficult to impossible to commit suicide in an acceptable manner. Believe me I know it.
"Suicide in an acceptable manner" sounds as like an oxymoron.
Why would you care that it's "acceptable" by society which you will no longer take part of ? If your concern is pain, then perhaps that is your mind telling you NOT to end your life and seek therapy instead.
Assisted suicide only makes sense in situations where the person is in extreme chronic pain and no palliative care or treatment can be provided, which is rather rare.
We should not be encouraging or celebrating suicide, it takes away innocent lives, especially younger ones. If you ask the survivors, many of them are glad they didn't go through with it.
> Assisted suicide only makes sense in situations where the person is in extreme chronic pain and no palliative care or treatment can be provided, which is rather rare.
As medicine and technology advance, assisted suicide will make sense/be required in nearly 100% of natural human deaths. With enough money, we will be able to keep people "alive" (on paper) arbitrarily long. It will be nothing like what people think of when they describe extended lifespan, but turning off all the robotic parts will still be tantamount to assisted suicide.
If you're (a) unconscious, (b) hooked up to a bunch of machines, and (c) can't wake up or live without an operational hookup to those machines, then: When the doctors turn them off that is neither suicide nor murder. It will be then, as it largely is now, an informed decision made by medical staff and next of kin.
Acceptable by the person who wants to die. That usually means not too painful, and not causing more stress than necessary to the persons you care about.
Wanting to avoid pain is very much not a reason to seek therapy, what an absurd thought.
The article you shared mentions a report and a committee that analyzed the report. You don’t happen to have any further details on those do you? I couldn’t immediately find the details in the article
> However, lobbying efforts have steadily pushed for broader access and eligibility...British legislators have to consider how easily assisted dying can be expanded, how easily abuses can go undetected.
Wait, how exactly does one "abuse" MAID?
People being so deep in poverty and addiction that they opt for MAID as an option isn't a symptom that it's "too easy" to access it, but rather that _society_ is failing them. And when those people finally say "Well fuck this shit I'm out", we reply "That's not allowed". Disregarding that companies won't hire them, rent & housing are ridiculous, they''re not allowed to put their tents anywhere and when they get kicked out their tents & belongings are trashed instead of being given back.
The argument is that society should not put resources into things like assisted dying programmes: they should put resources into making life worth living for people who would otherwise take the assisted dying option.
If this is true (and I don't think it is), then we need a fundamental, radical overthrowing of the social order, and a lot of work put into constructing a new one. Any system where putting people to death is more "practical" than giving them fulfilling lives must be destroyed, and replaced. (It may be more effective to destroy and replace the system gradually – "reform" – since revolutions tend to have too many moving parts for Blanquists to keep track of, the situation has to be pretty bad before a popular revolution becomes likely, and the world's so interconnected now that foreign powers will take advantage of the malleability of a society undergoing revolution, likely to the detriment of the locals.)
It's funny to say this when there in fact is wealth but is mostly tied up in assets owned by rich douchebags and trust fund kids. Financially practical is just a nonsense word considering money isn't even tied to anything anymore either.
Several people in the Netherlands have died through MAID who had only psychiatric conditions with no serious physical problems. And these were not people mired in poverty and addiction who were failed by society. We can argue the merits of particular cases but many people would consider that an abuse.
Traditional suicide is incredibly stigmatized; ending one's life manually is a huge trauma to place on loved ones. The benefit of MAID is that it's dignified, and won't leave families searching for answers after a death.
It's controversial, but I think it would be tremendously beneficial to our society if we accepted that death is (currently) inevitable and that past some point, assisted suicide is a lot better than artificially prolonging suffering at great cost for as long as possible.
I hold the opposite view on this issue. While I firmly believe that everyone should have the freedom to make their own choices about their lives, my primary concern is that certain groups and especially governments are actively promoting assisted suicide. Even if it's merely coincidental, I find the underlying incentives perverse, for lack of a better word. Admittedly drawing from a Hollywood sci-fi perspective, I would much prefer that, instead of programs like MAID, people were offered options such as cryopreservation.
> But immigration is the only thing that can replenish their workforce.
Unchecked immigration of people who do not share the majority of the destination’s cultural values leads to a monoculture that is terrible for everyone. Multiculturalism doesn’t work when everyone’s culture is equal everywhere. And unless it wasn’t obvious, I firmly believe in multiculturalism, but I believe we (here in Europe in particular) have been misled about what it should look like. And no it’s not about ethnicity.
And that’s saying nothing about the impact on source countries as some other comments go into.
As another European I don't understand your argument because Europe has seen so much internal migration over the hundreds of years that it is weird to argue it is leading to monoculture.
Also unchecked migration to Europe is down to 200.000 people per year so less than 0.1% of population.
I include poor vetting and integration as unchecked immigration if that wasn’t obvious. And do note that I wrote
> people who do not share the majority of the destination’s cultural values
No culture should nor can stay stagnant. But if we allow in people who do not share or wish to share a majority of our cultural values, which vary a lot between European countries as well, then we deteriorate what made our countries lucrative destinations for these people faster than we can maintain it.
It’s not complicated. Why are all those people coming here if all cultures are equal?
> It’s not complicated. Why are all those people coming here if all cultures are equal?
Because they're coming from resource poor countries to those which are richer? Or from regimes that have been captured by an oppressive minority. Or because their nation is being attacked by an aggressive neighbor (or distant empire)?
That's a great soundbite but if you asked e.g. the average British person just before Brexit they'd tell you that they are worried about all the Poles, Bulgarians and Romanians, i.e. other Europeans, coming here, taking our jobs, scrounging wellfare and so on.
I mean, realistically speaking, they'd be bitching about Pakistanis and Indians and Middle Eastern immigrants also, but in 2016 the British voted to exit the European Union, not the Middle Eastern Union. The hint is right there, in the name.
Right, and now UK voters are increasingly opposed to immigration from India, Nigeria, and China. The UK government allowed a large increase in legal immigration, particularly to find more elder care workers. But that appears to be causing a backlash.
Certainly an interesting source of cognitive dissonance. Few would admit it, but in practice I can see many people feeling more strongly about foreigners than humane care for the elderly (we've alredy done a good job at putting them out of sight, out of mind!)
I'm pretty sure US cultural slop destroyed more of my culture in the last 20 years than immigration ever did, and while immigrants are part of the movement for sure (especially English retirees, but also a lot of 2nd/3rd gen migrants from eastern Europe/North Africa), they're not the main driver.
100% I often say to people that the reason for the UK’s loss of culture is not immigration but the fact that we, as British people, stopped being British in pursuit of the ‘American dream’.
Somewhere along the line we stopped looking to our own previous generations (which include European nations as, you know, we’re Europeans) for cultural identity and started following Hollywood as our cultural oracle.
Generations of this has lead to the mess you see unraveling in the UK at the moment.
Following the 'American Dream' in the UK isn't the problem. No one I know in the UK wants that. It's hugely more nuanced than that. Culture requires groups of people with similar views, opinions, and values. And that goes to a very, very, local level. We now have expensive houses, a mobile population, a London-centric economy, and fractured and geographically spread families.
The decline in Christianity in the UK probably has something to do with it, and that in turn is loosely correlated with WWI and WWII. That's also another historic factor - families destroyed, and fewer families and so on.
And then the elephant in the room - London.
Want a job? Move to London or the south east and leave your family behind. Born in the south east? Want to live in the same street as you parents? No chance. Same town? Unlikely. Do you know your neighbours? Maybe. Do you see them in the church any more, or even when you walk down the street?
Culture is alive and well outside of London, despite its drain on the rest of the UK.
Social, and economic mobility is good, but some of the side effects are only now becoming apparent. Successive short-termist poor governance for decades has been the problem.
Not only this, I feel if people in the UK somehow were able to travel back in time and encounter "their culture", they'd feel extremely alienated and maybe even feel a level of disdain. The daily prayers, Bible reading, strict Sabbatarianism and religious festivals would seem completely alien. Without a doubt the modern Muslim or asian immigrant, especially after the first generation, are so much closer to the average UK resident than their traditional culture.
Not a single British person I know has ever pursued the "American dream". In fact all of them have historically been far more negative towards America than I have, myself being Norwegian.
The UK is large, so maybe either of us are just looking into a small bubble not representative of the whole, but the times I've visited the UK in the past, I didn't see much of what you seem to describe. Perhaps in the very center of London and its shopping malls, but those are not representative of the UK whatsoever.
A few Pakistanis moving in down the road doesn't stop British people practicing British culture. The reason they don't can be summarised as laziness and ignorance.
"The pub got turned into a mosque", maybe it did but it wasn't because the Moors invaded fgs. A successful pub gets to carry on being one - if it's not successful, maybe that's because people stopped using it.
Depends how they're influxing. If they're seizing our homes and land by force and taking over our government, sure.
But as far as I can see, they're working for the NHS, running restaurants and shops and so on, and buying/renting homes that come up on the market like everyone else. London's Muslim mayor was elected by an absolute majority even though Muslims are only about 12% of the city's population.
Nobody is stopping Brits from doing Brit stuff - it's our own fault if we choose not to.
Far as I can see, what's done a lot of basic pubs in is a combination of lifestyle changes, people who don't like the smoking ban, and younger people wanting to spend time down the gym instead of drinking.
We all kinda did. There's a clear drift in France too after the 70s. The acceleration of communication, US cultural exports, a strong trend of modernization all led to our current situation. And also part of the reason why there are so many traditionalist movements popping up.
>it is weird to argue it is leading to monoculture.
As an outside that has visited your large continent a fair few times, yeah, you guys are pretty monocultural.
I know that such a statement is just literal nonsense to y'all and quite unbelievable.
And yes, you all have a different flag, and a different language.
But the day-to-day details are very similar.
Every day y'all wake up at pretty much the same time, everyone eats a light breakfast of some pastry or another and a lot of caffeine and nicotine. Then off to work on pretty much the exact same road in the same little cars. 10 rolls about and y'all fuck off to grab an espresso (Yes UK, you too, the tea thing is BS, you love coffee, we all see it) and a cigarette. You raff about for 30 min. Then back to work for a bit. Lunch rolls on by and it's carb and protein time for the men and salads for the women. By this I mean potatoes and something with a french sauce. More caffeine and nicotine. The afternoon is then set for either sleeping, or pretending not to (I love this about y'all). Work fucks off at about 4-5 depending, nothing on Fridays though. You all then fuck off to a place to get more nicotine and then alcohol or a few hours. Dinner comes after round 2-3, more carbs and meat this time, maybe pasta. Half cocked, you all end up in the same small homes. (yes, yes, but everyone is like this too!. No, you all do it the same way at the same pace, all of you.)
It's all the same sports (football), the same seasons, the same lives. Yes, you all think that your life is so different for your neighbor, but I'm telling you, the pace, the styles, the food, the drinks, the drugs of choice, the houses, the children, Europeans may not be brothers, but you are very close cousins. The rest of the world think you all mad that you hate each other so much when you're living in the same house, acting the same way. It's the same Euopean culture.
Well thank you to put it so brilliantly. Since what you describe seems mostly a global experience by now for all who can afford it, I am wondering what other cultures you have in mind which has a dislike for breakfast, coffee, booze and cigarettes.
The problem in Europe is not immigration, the problem is there being no European country with a vision of the future for immigrants to buy into.
Aesthetic Traditions ≠ Culture. Traditions are just one aspect, but as Nietzsche wrote about the death of God, traditions are not a substitute for values.
America for hundreds of years has offered a shared vision of the future and values to immigrants of every background, and within <1 generation most immigrants become fully integrated.
When European identities are all built around stories from the past, and the only vision of the future being offered is one of impending doom and urbanist intellectual memes (climate apocalypse, population decline, social welfare breakdown, economic malaise, technophobia), it's no wonder that immigrants wouldn't want to buy into your culture. I'll enjoy your aesthetic traditions and take your free social welfare, but I'll keep my own culture and values, thank you very much.
When your sales pitch is: "we don't like new things here so there's nothing to create, but life here is easy, you don't have to do much because the state will take care of you!" I don't think you're attracting the best citizens.
> the only vision of the future being offered is one of impending doom and urbanist intellectual memes
I agree with this. Far too many European countries have no optimistic or even productive outlooks on the future, instead seeming to trade in a form of pessimistic reductionism. Eat less, do less, be less.
However:
> it's no wonder that immigrants wouldn't want to buy into your culture
Then why do they stay as long as they can drain resources? I would never move to a country I don't respect, let alone stay to drain resources and give nothing back. That mentality is alien to me. That isn't to say every immigrant is a drain on resources, but the ones that do not buy into the culture, do not buy into the vision (or lack thereof), and do not contribute -- why are they here? Simply because despite all of that it's better than where they came from? If so, we're doing both ourselves and them a disservice by not denying them entry, because both parties end up miserable.
In my perspective it's not that complicated. I'd like to have a good life and I would like for every other human on the planet to also have a good life sustainably. I think it's a rather optimistic vision.
This is one of the weirdest religions in modern Europe and I struggle to explain it. It's a performative self-loathing that accrues social capital in certain circles, with no real end goal. I want to ask these people...so once you eliminate the impact of the human species from the earth...then what? Wait for the asteroid to hit or the sun to engulf the earth, to restore it to its pre-life state?
> The problem in Europe is not immigration, the problem is there being no European country with a vision of the future for immigrants to buy into
That's fair and I think it's mostly true. At the same time, comparing "Europe" as a monolith compared to the US doesn't make a lot of sense, the history, languages and religions aren't shared for many countries, contrary to the US. We can circle back to saying it was and is a lack of vision from the EU to not have been more aggressive in creating this culture.
> I'll enjoy your aesthetic traditions and take your free social welfare, but I'll keep my own culture and values, thank you very much.
From what you wrote, I can somewhat understand this standpoint but this creates strong segregation between communities that aren't healthy and it sounds like a breeding ground for conflict as well.
It is a prime example for why most of European politics are shifting rightwards. And I'm not saying that's a good thing, overall, it simply is the reason. Far too many who've immigrated here have the GP's viewpoint, and the conflict seems inevitable since our elected representatives have acted paralyzed for decades on this issue.
And I personally fear where this is going. Because as much as I want to vet immigrants much more thoroughly and for a time hopefully have net-negative immigration in my country's case, I also know so many immigrants who came here to blend with our culture and are fantastic fellow countrymen. They've enriched our country and culture. When our representatives let it get as bad as it's getting, the ensuing conflict is one that I fear will end up harming indiscriminately, based on ethnicity and simple identifiable markers. All because spineless bureaucrats would rather not put their neck on the line, instead opting to let it all slide into the historically inevitable ugly conflict that seems looming.
I am actively looking into non-European destinations to emigrate to, and only ones where I feel I can be a net-positive on their culture and contribute to their economy and society. Because if my worst-case scenario for Europe comes to pass, I don't want to be here to be dragged into it. I don't want to be a contributor in that ugliness.
This sounds very defeatist? I still believe in the European project but it gets hard when you see the current political landscape. That said, I don't think we can only put it on spineless bureaucrats, I don't see many countries having bold policies of integration even at the national level.
When I'm looking into countries to emigrate to, I don't expect _them_ to take on the burden of integrating _me_, I take that burden of responsibility on myself.
Likewise I never understood why we blame ourselves for a lack of effective integration when, particularly in Norway's case, we offer all the services you could want. But you have to _want_ to integrate, we can't force you. And if you don't want to, please leave.
> Likewise I never understood why we blame ourselves for a lack of effective integration
Because the country of arrival is usually the stronger economic party. You have the capability of emigrating and integrating because you speak multiple languages, have most likely attained high education and you probably have the means to start a new life some place else. Honestly, good for you but not everyone has those benefits.
In the case of someone poorer, it might take a significant amount of resources and time they don't have, hence more of the burden being on countries integrating the immigrants. Let's also not kid ourselves, it's a trade for their labor in often bad conditions; not something from the grace of our hearts.
> But you have to _want_ to integrate, we can't force you. And if you don't want to, please leave.
This is imo a question the EU has struggled with for a long time. You'll want people to have their personal freedoms: culture, religion, language, etc. But you also want a cohesive whole where citizens can live and work together peacefully. This is a much more difficult question than "integrate or get out".
Which is why socialism is fundamentally incompatible with immigration, and why the US, being a nation of immigrants, is structured the way it is (more individualist). Nobody wants to pay for the new guy to have a luxury first world lifestyle with free healthcare, education and pension.
The more a society adopts socialist policies, the less friendly to immigration it becomes.
Both the US and most large European countries had roughly the same percentage of GDP driven by central government spending (socialism) in the 1960s...roughly 25-30%.
Socialist policies have steadily grown that percentage in both regions, with it happening more dramatically in Europe. The US is now at 35-40%, and Europe at 45-50%.
You can map the slowly rising anti-immigrant backlash in the US (and especially in Europe) to this perfectly.
Do we really have to read again and again the same fantasies the far right spew out continuously here in France on Hacker News? It’s so easy to factually disprove, it’s kind of boring.
I will keep it short because I value my time but here some things you might want to ponder:
- America integration doesn’t exist. The American strategy has always been leave people alone to keep living in their own culture. There is no actual American identity. The only things American have in common in the shared trauma of slavery and the civil war, and the founding myth which is why they remain so prevalent in the US modern discourse. Meanwhile, people will happily talk about "race" culture, half the country would be happy to slaughter the other half and culturally linked riots are a thing.
- Europe has a cultural entity doesn’t exist. The UK is different to France which is different to Germany or Danemark. Most of these countries immigration come from former colonies who already understand these countries social norms.
- Access to social welfare is severely limited to immigrants. Most of the system drain comes from people who were born in the country, not immigrants. Take any economic studies, you will see than immigration is a net positive in every European country. These are country where the population is aging fast. We simply need the immigrants to prop up the work force.
- Integration is a false issue. Most of the problems in France for example come from second generation immigrants who actually went through the French education system. The problem is mostly economic.
- The way Islam has been managed is an issue in itself. People deserve to be able to practice their cult freely and in good condition but most European countries have refused to take charge of the question. France for example left far too much space to extremist countries like Saudi Arabia. When most of your imams have been trained in the worst possible interpretations and mosques are financed by countries you shouldn’t want anything to do with, you have a major issue. There clearly is space for better solutions here.
- Plenty of political parties in Europe have strong visions for the future. Some of them are linked to social justice and preserving the environment, things you obviously dislike. The fact you can’t understand something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist however.
> - America integration doesn’t exist. The American strategy has always been leave people alone to keep living in their own culture. There is no actual American identity. The only things American have in common in the shared trauma of slavery and the civil war, and the founding myth which is why they remain so prevalent in the US modern discourse. Meanwhile, people will happily talk about "race" culture, half the country would be happy to slaughter the other half and culturally linked riots are a thing.
As an immigrant to USA, living here for 20 years, you're unequivocally wrong about this point. There is an American culture, and cult of "American dream". There are English as a Second Language programs, job integration programs, classes at every language of educations, rules and traditions for immigrant flow. The police, governments, and citizens of USA all know this is a country of immigrants and all have respect for immigrants, even if there is an "illegal" immigrant backlash right now. The threat of violence coming from political extremes absolutely does not represent the majority of people every day interactions.
In sum, American integration does exist, and I have first hand and second hand data to prove it. I'm not an expert on your other points, and I think you're trying to prove the sky is not blue, but genuinely, good luck.
This is incoherent babble. Not in a figurative or metaphorical way, you are not making sense and this kind of discourse is exactly what ensures that the far right will occupy most governments in Europe in some 10-20 years time, which I'm absolutely not looking forward to.
>America integration doesn’t exist.
This premise
> The American strategy has always been leave people alone to keep living in their own culture.
Contradicts this. You can't have both of those things. you EXTRA can't have them when you further talk about American culture in the same goddamned line.
> Europe has a cultural entity doesn’t exist.
This premise
>The way Islam has been managed is an issue in itself. People deserve to be able to practice their cult freely and in good condition but most European countries have refused to take charge of the question
Contradicts this.
And to be completely honest, this ending:
>Plenty of political parties in Europe have strong visions for the future. Some of them are linked to social justice and preserving the environment, things you obviously dislike. The fact you can’t understand something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist however.
Straight up makes me think you are not serious at all and straight up trolling. But in the off chance you aren't, I mean it when I say you are the problem you want to fight against.
There are no contradictions where you pretend they are. You can’t claim something doesn’t make sense because you have nothing to oppose to it. Nice try in your last paragraph anyway.
Most European countries can fail at the same things while not having a shared culture identity. I have pointed you towards one example.
Same about America. This is not a contradiction. America purposefully doesn’t integrate people because there is nothing to actually integrate them into. America taken as a whole is from my point of view not a nation. It is a collection of groups often with little in common forming a country but in tension about how it should work. Some subgroups in the USA could arguably be considered nations with shared identities but certainly not the federation.
I find it very ironic your username is 'StopDisinfo.'
First, the idea there is no American integration is just funny, given millions of your countrymen moved to the US just 2-3 generations ago and yet French identity is essentially non-existent in the US.
In fact, there's more ethnically french people in America than in Canada, and yet Canada has very strong french cultural identity by comparison.
Second, I wasn't arguing against immigration and am not "far-right" (I'm absolutely pro-immigration), just explaining why Europe will never be able to do it en masse like the USA used to (they can't do it as much anymore either).
The reality: Socialist policy makes immigration an impossibility. The more socialist a country, the more aggressive its stance against immigration becomes. This is not a coincidence but a direct causal relationship.
People don't want to pay for random 2nd/3rd-world immigrants to suddenly get free healthcare, education and pension. It's that simple.
It's no secret that after America built its welfare state in the 1930s, this led to a dramatic shift to a closed immigration policy. And as the welfare state in the US has grown (from 25% of GDP in the 1950s to 35% today), the anti-immigrant sentiment just keeps rising.
European countries are no different, having grown their socialist welfare states dramatically over the past 60 years (from 25-ish% to 50% of GDP today). And thus, you get increasingly aggressive anti-immigrant backlash when times get tough.
The irony of the modern leftist is they don't understand the impossibility of their supposed beliefs. You cannot be both pro-immigration and pro-socialism. They are oil and water.
Either you believe immigration is a good force in the world, and thus want libertarian capitalist policy like the US pre-1930s. Or you want socialism, which leads to closed borders, and only pretend to like immigration to make people think you're a good person at parties.
Has any country succeeded medium-term in increasing its birth rate? AFAIK quite a few have tried, but if people don't want to have babies, it's difficult to change their minds about that - short of allocating a pretty big chunk of a country's economic capacity towards the pursuit of raising children.
> In almost all cases immigration replaces the need for native births - the latter being a key component for a strong, safe culture that creates a happy median population.
Immigration in USA has multiple components, but it seems to be you're undervaluing the amount of opportunistic intellectual workers, who come here to participate in high level education, and entrepreneurial capitalism. But, here are the numbers across multiple sources (thx GPT):
- High-skilled (H-1B + EB green cards + PhD retention): ~200–300k annually.
- Low-wage (H-2A + H-2B + others): ~500k+ legally, probably >700k when including unauthorized inflows.
This a pretty good amount of brain power absorption, not just farm work.
Most Americans want a country that benefits Americans. High skilled immigrants:
1. Take jobs an American would otherwise fill, which would not be a problem except
2. The economy disproportionately benefits the capitalist class (billionaires). Bringing over immigrants to boost the economy doesn’t help the median American, and it creates competition for natives
I’m not undervaluing it. Im saying it provides no value for the majority of Americans. And this on a purely economic axis - social and cultural angles are arguably all negative.
That's a big assumption. Yeah, take out all the H1b immigrant that came to this country since 1985, what do you think the US economy looks like, filled exclusively with Americans? Where do you think US economy would be? Where do you think the Silicon Vally would be now? Do you think US and Americans would be better off? Do you think that the economic input of the immigrants is net negative?
I don't think you need to answer. I think you've already said no, these workers, and their contibutions are net negative. I just don't see how that makes any sense, given they're clearly a big part of the economy.
If you ever think about getting into an online argument with these people, let the fact that pointing out that not white people are americans gets you downvoted stop you.
> Wouldn’t it make sense to put a big chunk of budget into creating life-extension tech?
Only if it can improve life quality rather than length alone.
Of course if we make it so you can live to 200 in the body of a 24-year-old and then suddenly drop dead, the good news is there will be no pensions to pay any more and the bad news is you will drop dead at your 180th year at work.
Which is not to say I would not take that deal. Aging is brutal and I've just about had enough already!
I would take that deal without even thinking about it. Heck, I would take it even if it was for only 100 years. Keeping the energy of a body in its twenties, not risking illnesses like Alzheimer's, dementia, a fragile body that can break at any time for the cost of working 8 hours a day (which we are already doing)? Tell me where to sign it.
Historically, increases in total lifespan have always corresponded to increases in the length of healthy lives. People don't only live longer, they also live without being sick a whole lot longer.
Exactly. It is far more fantastical to imagine such lifespan improvements resulting in a planet of crypt keepers than one of external youth. What magic do you expect would keep such people alive?
The same magic that keeps some people on quasi-life support for sometimes decades already.
You could imagine entirely curing cancer, heart disease, frailty and infection but not brain degeneration, for example.
Curing everything else except frailty also seems invidious, though with sufficiently good brain-machine interfaces perhaps that would be less of a problem: you can just float in anti-impact gel from 100 and 200 and mentally roam the wreckage of the internet! If AI takes over knowledge work, how you pay for your life support and data connection may become an issue.
Weird that you say that because these life support systems are exactly what I had in mind as evidence to the contrary. Without such an external life support system attached keeping you alive, there's not going to be some drug that holds your body together in a zombified form. Whatever treatment sustains the health of your heart muscle will surely be equally helpful to all the other muscles in your body, as would whatever keeps your circulatory system and all the other tissues in all your other vital organs in working order. The alternative would be to encase the body in ever increasing layers of machinery, which is definitely not what anyone talking about life extension means.
> Whatever treatment sustains the health of your heart muscle will surely be equally helpful to all the other muscles in your body
I'm not sure that's a foregone conclusion. Loads of interventions put extra pressure on other body systems (often, but not always, the liver and kidneys). Sometimes to the extent that even if you may "manage" the original complaint, it comes at a substantial cost to overall health. And heart muscle is pretty special anyway, so it's quite possible it's a separate treatment to skeletal muscle problems.
And pretty much any system failing can kill you so if long term life extension comes from targeted treatments per problem, you need to hit bones and cartilage, muscles, skin, nerves, brain, GI tract, kidneys, liver, immune system, endocrine system, lungs, etc etc, but also not overstress any one with the treatments of the others and also handle almost-inevitable cancers.
Keeping a person _technically_ alive is not that difficult with modern technology. We can circulate blood without hearts, keep the brain-dead "alive", "feed" people intravenously. I don't know the absolute limits of this in practice, but the more autonomy you're willing to sacrifice the easier it becomes to keep a human body alive by artificial means.
> But immigration is the only thing that can replenish their workforce.
Not in a sustainable way.
Immigration is only viable as long as the countries of origin are so bad to live in so it's "better" to migrate. This is not really a world we want, is it?
Don't forget that the recipient countries of immigrants are brain-draining the countries they're leaving. Arguably those motivated individuals are precisely those that should stay in their country and make it less 'bad'.
The middle path is limiting (not ending) migration while actually trying to help these counties (in particular victims of one’s past colonial ambitions) through aid, investment, and free/subsidised education for their youth.
I say this as a someone who immigrated from a dangerous country to the first world.
The only way the current plan even approaches sustainability is if the brain drain on source nations is sufficient to keep them stuck and suffering. That should make it very clear that the humanitarian impact is a side effect and not the goal.
Selecting "the best people" is the often-overlooked step. A lot of countries just want to import cheap labor and get easy economic growth today, damned be the consequences.
But more importantly wealthy countries shouldn't depend on there being poor countries where women still have "too" many children but rather we should fix our own problems so we want and can have sufficient young people of our own (not said in a nazi way).
And we should also redistribute wealth so there aren't any poor countries to exploit for natural resources, crops and people.
Redistributing wealth will not make poor countries rich. Most poor countries are poor because of bad governance, corruption, political problems (including armed conflicts), culture, and geography. I support some limited forms of foreign aid but when we simply redistribute wealth it mostly gets stolen or wasted without achieving any sustainable improvements.
> But immigration is the only thing that can replenish their workforce.
You cannot discount the destabilising potential of immigration, and the lowering of societal trust it comes with. As we saw multiple times, integration is the edge case and not the rule. It will be especially harder to integrate people the way the demographic pyramid is looking right now in "developed" countries.
I would also question the desire of immigrants to pay for the welfare of the senile of their respective state, given the fact that they are more than likely to feel mistreated and wronged by the western, "developed" countries that will be hosting them.
I am an immigrant (expat?). I don't enjoy paying contributions for the welfare of the people who played in a huge role in the reasons I had to emigrate.
> As we saw multiple times, integration is the edge case and not the rule.
Is that true? Are you sure the edge cases where people didn't integrate aren't just bigger stories than the many many people who arrive and live normal boring lives?
> question the desire of immigrants to pay for the welfare of the senile of their respective state, given the fact that they are more than likely to feel mistreated and wronged
Maybe we could stop wronging and mistreating them? Or is that an important part of our European heritage?
I appreciate you being honest, but I also don't want people like you to immigrate to my country. How are you so sure of the role our old people played in your reasons for emigrating? Even if you're in the US and from a country the US has actively destabilized, how many of the people on welfare -- old and/or infirm -- were instrumental in the actions that led to the destabilization of your country? How many of these people had any active choice?
Apart from the complex topic of political complicity, I am talking about events and actions that the majority of the local population supported. I would of course have to reveal quite a bit about me in order to be more specific.
But even if I were an immigrant to the US from Venezuela or any of the tens if not hundreds countries that the US destabilised, I would indeed think of the majority of US's population as complicit. The people that are against such acts seem to always be the minority.
There are plenty of countries to go to that are not complicit in your home countries issues if your issue is with the US.
Russia and China have well above average lifestyles based on PPP. So do many South American countries, as well as Japan, and South Korea and other Asian countries. Also a number of countries in the middle east.
Yes, I understand the US is a very very bad country. I am also a very very bad person because I am very grateful, proud, and and supportive of this country for providing my family an opportunity to thrive even though it took decades for my "type" to be accepted and not discriminated against. My grandparents fled from other countries to be here, for a better life.
Note that I say "opportunity", because nothing was handed to my grandparents or my parents. They were given opportunity, not a subsidized life. They were also, as many immigrants have been, discriminated against for decades, but never complained or held grudges.
I am a huge believer in immigration, but have zero tolerance for those demanding to be supported or who commit crimes or those that choose to come here and bitch about this country. There are plenty of other places to go to.
Oh rest assured, I am not in the US. I would never do that. I find the mentality there insufferable. The mentality that you laid bare in your comment. About the land of opportunity, as long as the cost is externalised.
The US has a lot of history to deal with - genocide of Native Americans, slavery, treatment of women, to name a few. A number of horrible wars since the aftermath of WW2.
We are also going through significant challenges right now - social, political, economic, foreign relationships.
We may or may not survive as a country. We may have a positive or adverse effect on the rest of the world as we go through what we must go through.
However, the rest of the world is simply not innocent.
Europe has a lot to account for. So does Russia, China, Japan. And lets not forget the Islamic and Ottoman empires, which easily matched and in many respects put to shame the slavery, colonization, genocides, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid of the American, European, and Asian empires.
Most of the worlds current problems are the result of the collapse of these empires about 100 years ago, payment for the failure of their insufferable mentalities over many centuries.
Right now the US is facing payment for its past, the rest of the world is still paying for its past.
Maybe you feel the need to equate everyone in order to feel better with your complicity, but it is simply not true. Every empire has committed atrocities, sure. Not every country or ethnic group though. Some have been historically non aggressive and grossly mistreated by greedy emperors, conquerors and politicians.
"Europe" has nothing to account for. Western Europe ? Sure.
> But immigration is the only thing that can replenish their workforce.
Have you ever asked yourself what the purpose is of what you call "workforce"? Exactly what work are they doing that is more important than the survival of the native population? It's completely dehumanizing, and I can't find the logic behind it. If a geographical place needs constant influx of people from other places because the "system" there is slowly killing the population, then for what purpose should that continue?
> As I saw them, I was thinking that my 63% marginal tax was paying for it, while I part with 25% of my income after taxes to pay my mom’s pension. That monetary cost is nothing, I would gladly pay it for the rest of my life if it could give my mom a good life for that long. Her old age is my single biggest source of stress.
That “monetary cost” is not nothing. It represents a share of the finite resources your tribe has (individual/family/city/country) being spent on something with little return for future generations.
Developed countries are asking people who put in the effort to raise kids well to support those that don’t. That works when maybe 1 in 10 people don’t raise kids well, for whatever reason, but it doesn’t work so well when large portions of the population do not.
And there very well may be a justification to not raise kids well, but the math is going to be the math regardless of justifications.
The interventions that have worked in laboratory mice seem unlikely to translate to humans. Those mice live in nice safe flat little cages where there's no risk of trauma or infectious disease. In the real world a frail old human will fall down the stairs, break a hip, lose mobility, and end up dead within a few years because of that original injury.
Conceptually no, unless you specifically target end-of-life fatal ailments for some reason. Extending the healthy lifespan is a pretty reliable way to extend overall lifespan.
I think it's important to distinguish between "life expectancy gains have slowed substantially" vs "meaningful longevity increases are not reachable".
A huge fraction of deaths in the developed world are from "lifestyle diseases" from obesity, poor food choices, sedentary behaviors, alcohol, tobacco, etc, all of which we could improve. We eat too many highly processed foods, added sugars, etc. We have places without infrastructure for clean water. We have gun deaths and traffic deaths, and we have bad gun laws and car-centric communities. We have flooding/hurricane/heatwave deaths and we have a climate-denial public policy. There are _so many fixable things_ that shorten people's lives, and we'd all probably also live happier lives if we fixed them.
Is it just genetic? On my father’s side, people typically live to 100 at a minimum and are perfectly healthy mentally and physically right up till a week or so before they die. My grandmother is 103 and can still lives alone in her house and can walk unassisted, has a memory sharp as anything, and so on. Maybe look at long lived families and figure out what is different about them?
I think it's just plus or minus 10 years for whatever fate (genetics) had in store for you. That plus or minus being the little we can control (diet/activity).
So much of the modern US diet that’s being exported to the world negatively impacts life and health span. It’s very much controllable, just harder than the default.
We're also exporting modern US attitudes and psychology (expectations, worldview), which is just an engine for stress. I think overeating is a stress response. Not everyone was a fiend for vanity at the scale we are today.
My grandfather looked in his 50s and had more mobility than 50 year old men well into his 80s it’s only when cancer got to him that he started looking his age.
I've definitely experienced mental states that were worse than being dead. I don't regret remaining alive because of all the positive experiences I've had afterwards. But if we are talking about extending suffering that's only followed by death, I don't see the point.
I’m wondering if you’ve ever felt debilitating acute pain. I had nerve pain in the past to where my leg felt like it was on fire. It was then I understood how people get addicted to pain killers. I was able to address the problem and I’ve been fine for many years, but it hurt more than any pain I’ve ever had - and I have had many from sports.
You know this is how we will end eventually in the best case. We won’t master our biology, we will simply transcend it by pro-creating offspring that have something better. It’s also a much easier solution than untangling evolved biological systems that are not designed to last for what have been very beneficial reasons (e.g. scientific advances occur via death of the old guard).
We need to remember that our bodies are evolutionarily optimized for getting to childbearing years, and then living long enough to get our children to a point where they can be independent. After that there are really no evolutionary pressures keeping us around.
Untangling all that and re-engineering ourselves (biologically) to overcome that is probably a pretty monumental task; starting from scratch with something simpler (and perhaps non-biological) might be easier, with sufficiently advanced technology.
Not even that. I guarantee you that once really good brain computer interfaces are a thing, investments into "brain in a vat" companies are going to start being a thing. Because keeping just the brain young and then alive is almost certainly very possible if that's the whole focus.
There are no new modes to switch to. We can’t fly supersonic passenger airlines anymore and haven’t been to the moon since 1972. The new Accela trains run slower than the old ones.
Half true. You can switch to the mode of not needing to go halfway around the world (or even just across the country) so often, because efficient information flows allow you to accomplish vastly more while mostly staying relatively local.
Sure, we all like to complain about burrito taxis, dating apps and endless Zoom calls, but in terms of quality-of-life per unit of energy, it's a step change.
Aging isn't even recognized as a disease yet, and it well should be.
Very little research currently goes into attacking aging directly - as opposed to handling things that are in no small part downstream from aging, such as heart disease. A big reason for poor "longevity gains" is lack of trying.
>Sleeping well, eating well and exercising does work. Science about this is well-established. So why arent we?
Those will give you at best another marginal decade. By all means worth doing but its not radical life extension. At the same time a young body can take lack of sleep and can physically perform even if not exercising much better than an old one. So there's more to it than just lifestyle.
Doesn't scale. If you could put "sleeping well, eating well and exercising" into a $0.25 once a week pill and make that available to everyone, it would work. As is, it doesn't.
We want solutions that can be scaled and rolled out broadly, and "basic healthy lifestyle" ain't it.
The kind of solution that scales as "O(n) effect with the number of people involved", but isn't broadly implemented? It's usually at least O(n log n) on the effort required to actually involve those people. This vital input is the source of piss poor scaling in practice.
Why? Because there's a massive variation in people. Everyone who finds it "very easy" to as much as "sleep well, eat well and exercise" already does just that, and the implementation difficulty ramp up gets brutal quickly. It's simple to suggest and hard to execute.
Pharmaceutics are so valuable because they offer good sublinear scaling on many of the inputs. They're extremely hard to develop, but they're often well worth it, because the implementation scales in a way those "simple" solutions don't.
Pharmaceutics are so valuable because they can be sold.
A healthy lifestyle must be earned. It is a constant struggle against the fastfood industry.
Soon you'll see Coca-cola or Nestlé [0] selling both very unhealthy quasi-addictive food and drinks to kids and magic pills that cure obesity. Sounds scalable enough ?
If you think that being healthy should be a reward for a lifestyle of virtue, that's your problem, not mine. I'd rather have an actual solution than a blanket "those people don't struggle hard enough", pointed at the majority of US population that's overweight.
Just considering one component, what is stopping good sleep? Here's a random list of what I can think of:
- noise pollution
- lack of fitness
- stimulant use during the day
- inability to manage a clean, nice sleeping environment
- obesity and sleep apnea
- a partner who can't sleep
- heat or cold in your bedroom
- mental illness
So, just from that list, we see that we'd need to overhaul housing quality so everyone has quadruple glazing and an air-conditioner, stop them chugging coffee, get them help with their laundry, fix their fitness and cure their obesity (which are themselves caused by poor sleep), and get them into therapy.
That sounds hard! Also, we're already working on a lot of it, but it's generally difficult or impossible to fix all of those problems.
The scaling challenge here comes from scaling across the various types of life situations and personality types out there. Some people work too much to be able to live a balance lifestyle. Other people just can’t summon the motivation.
Either way, a pill would scale better across all these people.
> Sleeping well, eating well and exercising does work. Science about this is well-established. So why arent we?
Because although longevity is a nice recurrent idea for everyone in theory, when the rubber meets the road people routinely want to optimize time spent in living in pleasure.
The pleasurable stuff is almost all about "YOLO!" in every domain. A candle that shines twice as bright ends up consuming itself twice as fast and all that
Aging itself is not a disease, it's just stuff falling into disrepair over time.
Age-related illnesses shouldn't be dismissed with "they're just old" of course but there's no reason to expect a single cause. Other than passage of time itself.
Cancer is "stuff falling into disrepair over time" too. Get enough faulty cells with DNA damage and one of them is going to make itself a problem. The only way to avoid cancer is to have something else kill you before you get it.
That's not a reason to say that cancer is somehow "not a disease". It obviously is. We don't want cancer. We fund efforts to research cancer and funnel money into better cancer treatments, and we get results.
Solving any of the existing diseases, will not result in significant upheaval of society.
I am not against trying to "solve aging", but I don't think we should think of it as just a disease, and there should be more plans on how to deal with the sudden "infinite" number of humans. While I may want to live forever, I would definitely not enjoy that in all circumstances.
Do you think that there's a single "aging" master switch that could be flipped to "off", resulting in zero aging and immortality for everyone forever?
That's beyond optimistic. What's more likely to happen is, we'll uncover some major pathways for aging and find a way to target them to slow aging down somewhat, at first.
People who get anti-aging treatments would live for longer, and would be healthier while they do. The adoption would be gradual, and it'll take a while for them to come down in price and proliferate worldwide - and it would still be up to people to decide whether they want them, although most doctors would recommend they do. The first generations of anti-aging treatments would allow people to live to the age of 100 fairly reliably, and remain healthier and more active while they do. Future generations would improve on that.
There will be no "sudden infinite number of humans" to deal with. Even if we started out tomorrow (for example, if it was confirmed that Ozempic has broad anti-aging effects), it'll take decades for this effect to become noticeable. Humanity can adapt to something like that easily.
That’s kind of naive. Plenty of people definitely “try”, billionaires would love to live a few hundred more years. We know how aging occurs, there is degradation in DNA, telomeres shorten, and a bunch of other things. The main problem is that biological life simply can’t undergo overhauls like machines do, and we will probably just solve aging by creating successor beings that can.
Just compare the effort and the investment that goes into fighting aging with what goes into fighting cancer.
You can't rely on billionaires to fix everything for you. The kind of research effort that would be required to make meaningful progress against aging would likely demand hundreds of billions, spent across decades. Few billionaires have the pockets deep enough to bankroll something like this, or the long term vision.
Getting aging recognized as a disease and a therapeutic target, and getting the initial effort on the scale of Human Genome Project would be a good starting point though.
If there was understanding that a drug "against aging" is desirable by the healthcare systems and can get approved, Big Pharma would have a reason to try - as opposed to developing drugs for other things and hopefully stumbling on something that makes progress against aging by an accident.
Bill Gates has enough money for effective longevity research. Longevity research isn't even particularly expensive.
The actual problem is that you would have to do selective breeding and genetic modification of humans the same way we do it with plants and animals. It is primarily an ethical problem.
Not necessarily. We already have drugs that can hit "genetic disease" targets in adults, and we can modify adult genomes to a minor degree.
Sure, it would be nigh impossible to do something like cram "genetic resistance to cancer" into a grown adult with current day tech, but there are other surfaces to attack in longevity.
Global investment in cancer research (not treatment) between 2016 and 2020 came in just under $25 billion [1]. That means someone like Elon could have financed basically all cancer research around the globe for a decade. Instead he bought twitter. And remember that the Forbes billionaires are not the most wealthy people in the world. They are just the ones living in countries with public company accounting. There is a lot of dark money in the Middle East and Russia. So it's not like they can't, it's more that this is still seen as a delusion or megalomania in these circles, since most anti aging research funded by billionaire happens very quitely by comparison. You won't hear them announce it like they do with e.g. malaria.
Two decades of this kind of research spending add up to $100 billion. And most billionaires are closer to $5 billion rich than to $500 billion rich.
It would sure be nice to have an infinite money glitch billionaire who cares a lot about funding anti-aging research and lobbying for anti-aging efforts, the way Musk cares about space exploration and trolling people online. We're lucky that at least some neglected fields get billionaire attention like this. But we can't rely on that happening.
The point is if anti-aging didn't have this edgy image in billionaire circles, there would be more than enough money to go around. If everyone agrees that we should get on this like we do certain other diseases, we could certainly tap into a lot of resources.
Given the current state of the NIH, I'm not sure if we are "getting on this" with any diseases right now. I've seen quite a number of my colleagues end up retiring or stopping their research programs all together at a university that has its NIH funding halted for being politically insubordinate.
Trump might get the science out of america, but he won't be able to get rid of science in general. It will just happen elsewhere. Europe is already becoming the center for mRNA vaccine research, and other places with less regulation will not sleep on biotech possibilities either. We just got a malaria vaccine that is not perfect, but good enough for Africa and about to be actively deployed in endangered areas, potentially saving hundreds of thousands of lives every year. It took decades and cost hundreds of millions of dollars, but people like Bill Gates fronted most of the bill. There's no reason to think that science couldn't attack aging disease with the same ferocity if someone foots the bill.
Seems more like billionaires spending money on trying to live forever has an edgy image in non-billionaire cycles. Sure, maybe Gates and Buffet really aren't that interested in living forever, but the likes of Thiel and Musk aren't exactly noted for techno-pessimism or caring whether the average normie thinks they and some of their investments are creepy, and they absolutely have the dealflow and the connections to evaluate any promising life extension ideas. If they're still spending more on stuff like 140 characters, maybe the low hanging fruit just aren't that low
Thiel put a couple of million in some edgy stuff with little to show for. It is nothing compared to the order of magnitude that Gates invested in malaria.
Well yeah, that's my point. He's the exact opposite of the scenario you suggest, someone who's so committed to promoting the idea of life extension he'll chuck a couple of million at woo merchants in the space purely for signalling purposes, someone who go on podcasts talking about the compatibility of "ending death" with Christianity and has a personal life extension regime, but when it comes down to actually putting significant capital down towards near term life extension, he doesn't see the opportunity. It's not because he doesn't want to look edgy, it's because he doesn't believe what he's being pitched is going to deliver on useful timelines.
I don't think there would be "enough money" just from that, but I agree that it would sure help.
It's why I stress that aging should be recognized as a disease. If we had the likes of WHO and FDA in agreement that aging is unwanted and treating aging is desirable, even if it can't be done yet, it would shift the perception considerably.
It would make it easier for billionaires to contribute to anti-aging research as a philanthropic effort - but it would also open many doors in terms of research funding and corporate investment.
This would require extreme amounts of embryo selection and getting results will require multiple generations, nothing in your lifetime.
The biggest bottleneck is that humans evolved to have children in their 20s. After that age, the old compete with the young for resources, so there is no evolutionary incentive for humans to live indefinitely.
Aging past fertility is like momentum in stochastic gradient descent.
I'm sure there are longevity gains that can be attained with embryo selection or direct embryo genetic editing. Might even be some low-hanging fruit there. But I see no reason to believe this to be the only possible source of longevity gains.
Sure, the evolution may oppose longevity, but evolution can go eat shit and die. It still works on humans, but it works too slowly to be able to do too much - we can't rely on it to fix our problems, but it also wouldn't put up this much of a fight if we fixed our problems on our own.
The assumption that everything can be “fixed” is one I will never understand. It’s so obvious when studying organisms in all their shapes and forms how everything is a tradeoff, and nothing can be stable. The fundamental truth of the universe is change.
Senescence is a tradeoff to ward against cancer earlier in life. Eventually it will lead to cancer as a side effect, but optimally something else has failed before then. You can’t patch it out completely without breaking something else.
This is a catch-all dismissal that you could make about any medical innovation throughout history. There are a lot of things we can fix, and we’ve had a lot of success so far in doing so.
It’s not. We never fix anything in medicine: We treat and prevent. Removing the appendix prevents or treats acute appendicitis, but it also has a tradeoff in terms of removing a gut biome reservoir.
This isn’t me dismissing the incredible improvements to our way of life modern medicine has brought. In essence it’s given everyone access to the same potential standard of living as was reserved for kings and nobility in the past — and then some.
But you can’t fully fix aging. You can’t infinitely improve standard of living.
I'm a resident doctor and profoundly disagree. And I fail to see how you define words so that "fixing" and "treating" are not at least overlapping, if not similar.
Aging isn't even recognized as a disease yet, and it well should be. Once it gets at least the same kind of focus cancer or heart disease does now? Then we'll talk about how it's "impossible to fix".
That’s a naive take on what senescence is. Look it up. You can stop it, but be prepared to then have to figure out how to deal with all the side effects it prevents. And then you can fix those but be prepared to deal with those side effects. And so on. My point isn’t to stop researching and understanding and even treating, but it’s that life is a balance of tradeoffs. Looking at it as if energy is a universal currency that can be traded for every other function is a fundamental misinterpretation of everything we understand about biology.
There is no physical or biological constraint that says "senescence absolutely has to happen".
In some species, it doesn't seem to happen at all. In others, it happens extremely slowly. Clearly, there are massive longevity gains left on the table - ones we'll never pick up if we keep whining about "life" being "a balance of tradeoffs".
And in those species there's other constraints that weigh up for it. I'm not sure which ones you're thinking of, but in every single one I know of there's other tradeoffs. And if there's some without them, I'm pretty sure we just haven't discovered them yet.
I find it peculiar that you interpret my statements as "whining". I specifically wrote:
> My point isn’t to stop researching and understanding and even treating, but it’s that life is a balance of tradeoffs
What's whiny about that? Modern medicine has for a while been in a position of treating symptoms of symptoms of symptoms, often of its own making. That doesn't mean we should stop treating symptoms! But it means we have to look at the bigger picture and stop thinking everything is a "problem" to be "fixed", and work harder to understand why things work the way they do, and what the costs of altering them truly are. Sometimes fixing one thing isn't worth the tradeoffs in other areas.
There is no "fairness enforcement" in life, and biology is no exception. The closest we get is conservation laws, and those do not forbid living healthily well into your 500s.
You're out looking for "tradeoffs" that may not be there, or may not be worth caring about. There is no "balance of tradeoffs" in everything. There isn't an Authority on Biology that says "if you get good X then you must take bad Y to keep things fair for everyone". There are just shitty local minima you get stuck in unless you manage to climb your way out.
Do you want to get 50% less cancer, or to live to 120? The answer is "yes". You can have both. Nothing forbids you from having both. Is it easy to get both? No. It's not easy to get even one of those. But nature barely even tried. Humans can do better than that.
> But nature barely even tried. Humans can do better than that.
~3.8 billion years of evolution "barely even tried"? There's hubris and then there's _hubris_. But to repeat myself: I am not saying we shouldn't try. I'm saying we should expect no free lunch, and that the concept of tradeoffs for every alteration is a much healthier mental framework to work off of because _so far_ that's been the one consistent truth in all of biology.
If you think evolution was optimising for longevity, then you really haven't thought it through.
For 3.8 billion years, organisms just needed to survive long enough to reproduce. Cancer, heart disease, and other age-related diseases only became significant killers in the last few hundred years. That's nowhere near enough time for evolution to address them. And even then, age-related diseases don't directly influence people's chance of reproducing and passing on their genes.
Conversely, evolution has had millions of years to work on fighting infectious diseases, which have been bigger killers for most of our history.
And evolution eventually led to mammals with complex brain plasticity and an almost _unreasonably_ long and fragile childhood that allowed in-generation transmission of lessons and knowledge bypassing the traditional, heavily trial and error -based approach of just gene transmission and instinctual knowledge.
I think evolution did a damn fine job. And yes there's surely more we don't know than we know or understand, which might change the future just as much as bacteriology has, but let's also be humble and learn from what came before. Both things are possible.
And tell me - for those "~3.8 billion years of evolution", what was the optimization target?
What was natural selection selecting for, exactly? Longevity? Happiness? Quality of life?
Hahahahaha hahaha hahah ha no.
There is no "fairness" in biology, and natural selection isn't your friend. It's aligned with your interests sometimes - but if evolution could make humans reproduce much more effectively by making them live half as long and ten times as miserable? It would. There's just one primary metric that evolution cares about, and it totally would throw your well-being under the bus for it.
Evolution doesn't care much about whether humans live long and happy lives. Only humans themselves care about that. There are a lot of optimizations possible there, and humans have to be the ones to find them.
Their average life expectancy is around 70 years, and yes, cancer is rarer in elephants, potentially due to the species having extra copies of the TP53 gene.
Cancer is also a result of many other factors of which humans are more exposed to than elephants typically are, environmental and pollution being a major one, and food ingredients being another. A life expectancy of 70 years for a human isn't that great; in 2024 in Europe it was 79 years for males and 84 years for women, and that's with all the contributing cancer risk factors in society as mentioned earlier.
A more interesting species might be immortal jellyfish, but the simplicity of the organism might be a contributing factor in why it works the way it does.
The only reason aging can’t be reversed is because we don’t know how to do it, but that doesn’t mean that it is inherently impossible to achieve. The only things that are impossible to do are the ones that break the laws of physics.
Genetics required. Natural evolution has zero interest in old people, so there has been no evolutionary pressure to extend lifespan. Possibly even the opposite.
We could apply that pressure, either through selective breeding over generations, or through direct genetic modification. Maybe we aren't quite there yet, but it won't be long.
Experiments on insects with selective breeding have easily tripled lifespans. How well that would transfer to mammals is hard to say, but a substantial increase is certainly possible.
Mick Jagger had his most recent son at the age of 73. Today, that's an anomaly, but historically, older men fathering children was not at all uncommon (73 would probably be an outlier, but successful men were fathering children well past the age when women can no longer bear children). That would exert significant evolutionary pressure for men to have longer lifespans.
Watch out for news such as Jagger's , Bernie Ecclestone etc.
We never know if it's their or not.
Famous people are just people who are famous and while the prenup rates are high, people who actually do the DNA test for paternity purposes are low as they are in the general population
In modern society there is little evolutionary pressure to extend lifespan, but that's a very recent phenomenon. If my parents watch my kids and do the cooking so I have more time to hunt or work the field that improves the survival chances of my children, and my children share 25% of their DNA with their grandparents. The grandparents living a long productive life is good for the survival of their grandchildren, and thus for the reproduction of their DNA, causing evolutionary pressure. It's mostly the unproductive years (dementia, debilitating illness, severely limited mobility) that are a detriment.
You could argue the same forces are still at play at societal levels. People around the age of 50 have a vast economic impact, having accumulated experience and relationships over many decades. And the average age of soldiers in Ukraine is somewhere around 40-45. If one country had a population that stayed at the mental and physical fitness of a 50 year old for another 20 years that would be a drastic advantage, both in terms of skilled workforce and in terms of military capability. Even just another 5 productive years are a big deal in a world where the time you spend productively working is about twice the time you spend "growing up" and getting an education. And my nation doing well means my children can afford more children, spreading my DNA, making it favored by evolution
Not an expert by any stretch of imagination. But it seems to be that not only is there almost no selection pressure on increasing lifespan, bc of medical advances in healthcare there's also less evolutionary pressure on reducing diseases and infertility (i guess there should still be substantial health related evolutionary pressure from sexual selection) in modern society. Why shouldn't we expect long term deterioration of fitness of genome similar to the deer in Yellowstone before reintroduction of wolves?
Sure, but your average 50-year-old already had their children. They have passed on their genetics, good or bad. No evolutionary pressure.
The life-span extension experiments I have read about specifically only allowed older adult insects to reproduce, pushing that age later and later. Adults that died early did not reproduce. Massive evolutionary pressure.
I find it a tough sell to add another 20 years to life expectancy, considering that by the time you reach 70, most people are already in decline (some worse than others), and the drop from 70 to 80 tends to be steep for many. Those who make it past 80 into their 90s or even 100s often aren’t living particularly fulfilling lives, if you can even call it living at that point.
Losing your vision, your hearing, your mobility, and worst of all, your mind, doesn’t sound very appealing to me.
So unless we find a way to both live longer and to decliner slower, I just don't see the point for the majority of people who will unfortunately live lonely worse lives.
My own observation is that a lot of decline happens because people stop living and start coasting to the grave, and that can happen decades earlier than 70.
My great-grandfather was physically very active into his 90s, still running his businesses, working in his orchards, and generally being surprisingly productive. He was mentally sharp too; I remember him teaching me about the physics of vacuum energy at length. Seemed like he could go on indefinitely. Then his wife died and he died less than a year later.
I always have him as my model for what I want to be like when I am old. He was still in the game until he wasn’t.
I think this is a huge misconception and I don't think it works this way. have you heard people say 50 is the new 40, etc.? The same thing would work at older ages. Sure the last 10 years are a decline, but you are pushing those years out not adding more of them.
This. Expecting a "150 years lifespan" to look like "90 years of aging normally and then staying at 90 for another 60 years" is simply unrealistic.
The very reason you're expected to die in your 90s is that your body has decayed into a complete mess where nothing works properly anymore and every single capability reserve is at depletion. You die in old age because if you spend long enough at "one sliver away from the breaking point", statistics make going over it inevitable. Even a flu is a mild inconvenience to the young, but often lethal to the elderly.
To make it to the age of 150, you'd pretty much have to spend a lot more time as a healthy, well functioning adult.
It really depends on how you live your life. My grandfather on my dad's side never drank or smoked, got a ton of exercise, avoided candy etc. he's in his 80s and still lives in a detached house and walks his two very large dogs daily. My grandmother on my mom's side smoked multiple packs of cigarettes a day, drank a ton of sugary soda, rarely got any real exercise, and died in her 50s after a number of very rough years.
Everyone keeps talking about health care but IMO it's really downstream of you attending yourself. It's almost a spiritual thing really. American health is so bad because Americans don't feel like they themselves are worth taking care of. The contrast between the people who disagree here gets extreme as they age.
Exactly. I'm the youngest in my family many aunts and uncles are already dead. those who still live are in a huge decline or completely lonely (sometimes both). Mom is in her late 70s and is in good shape, but she complains a lot about loneliness (even though I and my brothers visit her almost daily for a coffee or lunch). I think the joy of living ends with people around you dying.
We still don't have any 80+ year olds who have been striving for longevity since their 20s. Nutrition labels and ingredient lists on food didn't even exist the 90s. An 80 year old was born into a world of nonstop cigarettes, drinking while pregnant, etc.
So our current obsession with longevity through fitness and nutrition is new and we can't really tell what someone like Bryan Johnson will be like at 80. If he is significantly declined in 20 years despite his rigorous longevity routine then we will know.
I don’t care at all about the pope; they’re meaningless entities.
The President, however, especially when Congress is forced to toe their line, is. No president should be permitted to be more than 20 years older than the median age of the general population when they’re done leading the country. In this case, they shouldn’t be more than 58y old when their 8y term is up. This way, they and their progeny need to live with the decisions made for at least ~20y after they’re out of office.
There’s a reason there is forced retirement in some industries and government groups. Why the fuck we don’t enforce similar rules on the president I’ll never know.
> There’s a reason there is forced retirement in some industries and government groups. Why the fuck we don’t enforce similar rules on the president I’ll never know.
Yep, I am not a big fan of our military policy, but I have a friend who recently retired as an Army LTC.
At his level there are standard procedures - at each rank you have a timeframe, and the rule is "promote or retire". Precisely to ensure you don't break the assembly line.
Even in software. "We don't hire mid level/junior/associate engineers, only senior/staff". No pipeline can hurt. Yeah, you can hire for all that, but there's value of having junior staff within, when you promote those staff level folks to EMs and Directors.
Politics & World Leaders
• Nelson Mandela (1918–2013) – Former President of South Africa, died at 95.
• George H. W. Bush (1924–2018) – 41st U.S. President, died at 94.
• Jimmy Carter (1924– ) – 39th U.S. President, currently 100 (as of 2024).
• Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother (1900–2002) – Died at 101.
• Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh (1921–2021) – Died at 99.
Arts & Entertainment
• Kirk Douglas (1916–2020) – Actor, died at 103.
• Olivia de Havilland (1916–2020) – Actress, died at 104.
• Betty White (1922–2021) – Actress/comedian, died at 99.
• Norman Lear (1922–2023) – Television writer/producer, died at 101.
• Tony Bennett (1926–2023) – Singer, died at 96.
Science & Literature
• Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) – Philosopher, died at 97.
• Rita Levi-Montalcini (1909–2012) – Nobel Prize–winning neurologist, died at 103.
• Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) – Architect, lived to 91.
• Maya Angelou (1928–2014) – Poet and author, died at 86 (not 90s, but close).
• Isaac Asimov (1920–1992) – Science fiction author, died at 72 (not 90s).
Business & Other Notables
• David Rockefeller (1915–2017) – Banker/philanthropist, died at 101.
• John D. Rockefeller (1839–1937) – Oil magnate, died at 97.
• Iris Apfel (1921–2024) – Fashion icon, died at 102.
People thought the President had died just yesterday because of how rapidly his health has declined since taking office in January. Bernie Sanders, for example, has had multiple health emergencies over the past few years.
Using a few famous people as examples is hardly a reliable metric. My aunt is still alive at 103 and will likely make it to 104 if nothing changes. She has fewer health problems than other family members in their 60s if you discount the fact that she’s basically blind, can't hear well, is stuck in a bed 24/7, and has severe dementia that prevents her from recalling things seconds after being told, aside from some specific memories from her youth. Meanwhile, almost all of her children died under very poor health conditions in their 70s and 80s. Her oldest daughter looked like she was a corpse at 80.
Some people just get lucky with their genes, and it doesn’t always pass on to their children or grand-children.
PS: For reference, she had 11 children, almost all dead now while she's alive and can't recall their names or ever having children.
Humans can't grasp the actual possible future with radical lif extension. They like to be contrarians and talk trash on outlandish science fiction like breakthroughs. It's not everyone's cup to understand the limits of science and usually journalists and old scientists are pretty bad at projecting.
I don’t want to be that guy but isn’t this kind of an obvious result? The main claim is that life expectancy improvements in the past century are mostly due to decreases in childhood mortality.
During the Roman period, the average life expectancy was only 22-25 years old because so many babies were dying prematurely.
If you could make it past the age of 10, then you were expected to make it to about 50, which almost doubles life expectancy.
There were also major gains in things like access to clean water, general safety from the perils of war (which often drives famines, etc), and so on. If one only looked at e.g. Roman aristocracy (which essentially controls for these sort of variables) then their life expectancy would likely be similar to our own. This exact study was carried out on the Ancient Greeks [1], even prior to the Romans, and found a life expectancy of 72 years. [1]
And while I know some will contest the source, while intentionally conflating the mystical with the historical, even the Bible hits on the average age of man: "The days of our lives are seventy years; And if by reason of strength they are eighty years, Yet their boast is only labor and sorrow; For it is soon cut off, and we fly away."
Notably that is in Psalms, Old Testament, and so it was like written over the time frame of 400-1400BC. And I think it's fairly self evident that that segment was written in the context of plain historical observation with no mysticism implied or stated. Basically life expectancy once you leave childhood, let alone peak longevity, hasn't changed all that much over thousands of years.
That's 100% on the mark. Infants aren't dying anymore.
Real longevity is hard science and we're still at the punch card phase of biology.
Wake me up when we can make headless, full body monoclonal donors for human head transplants. Antigen free / HLA neutral so immunosuppressants are a thing of the past. That'll cure every cancer except brain and blood, cure every other injury, and increase health span of everything but the brain.
The tough problems:
- religious ick and luddite ick
- artificial gestation
- deactivating the brain stem without impacting development
- keeping the body physiologically active and developmentally normative
- head transplants that preserve spinal cord function
- lots of other ancillary issues with changes to pulmonary and immune flux.
This looks pretty trivial. Obviously modern gains in life expectancy were from removing things that killed us in early age. This says nothing about future gains in life expectancy which may come from biological/medical interventions that reduce senescence.
There are plenty of longevity things and new meds still being researched. Living longer is possible and there are a fair number of people who make it to 100 all things considered. However, life expectancy reaching 100 does seem unlikely to me. With the issues of drugs and obesity being rampant in many parts of the population, what can we expect?
I wonder if as a species we can ever get more comfortable with death. We’re built not to be I realize, and we should never be for those that are young but I feel like we should be ok with living 80ish or more years and then clocking out. That being said, I’m not cool with the idea of dying when good, but when I’m in a major depressive episode, the idea of immortality is terrifying.
For me, the sad part about dying isn’t the loss of agency in the world as much as missing the rest of the movie. At 43 I already feel like I’ve mostly realized my potential and I’m just here to raise my kids and then I become a burden. But I really want to know what happens next!
In Hollywood, they have 12 types of scenarios. Choose your type of life. Tragedy? Love story? Adventure? Becoming someone?
Life is too short to experience all scenarios that is why we want live longer…
After 60 life sucks. Not always but very often.
So we should use Tim Urban's life-week calendar to being aware how little time we have and not waste it.
> I feel like we should be ok with living 80ish or more years and then clocking out.
Some people would very much prefer if their consciousness wouldn't have an end date, after which they'll never experience or think anything and will just cease to exist.
Though it would be nice if they had the option of choosing that for themselves, instead of being told that they don't really want long lives and that they should kneel before biology. Whether they're content with 100 years or 100'000 years, that should be up to them.
Or, as others pointed out, if at least whatever amount they're gonna be around for was more dignified and they had a better quality of life, instead of their bodies slowly wasting away.
We did that, it’s only the Western consumerist society that started getting scared to the Moon and back when it comes to dying, you can see it in one of the comments above where another commenter sees life as a movie that needs to be consumed as long as possible. Really bleak.
"Accept death, it's beautiful" is cope. It's not beautiful. It's suboptimal horror.
I find it offensive that so many "universe experiencing itself" entities willingly accept a return to dust. Our sun dies, and with it everything on this planet will become metal inclusions in a decaying solar body. You know what doesn't matter in light of that? All other perspectives. Every other conception of death and meaning tends to zero.
I accept death personally. It's 99.9999manynines likely. But I would love to spend my limited energy trying to conquer it or to push forward the societal envelope. Something from earth should conquer the vastness of spacetime and physics.
It's not like how any of us spends our time matters anyway. We're all already dead, geologically timespan speaking.
And who knows. Maybe the gods of the future will reverse simulate the light cone down to your femtosecond neurotransmitter flux. Maybe that's you right now. And maybe they'll pull you forward into an eternity of bliss instead of a read-only memory or sadistic eternal hell simulation. But probably none of those things given how more likely we are to accept doom.
>Something from earth should conquer the vastness of spacetime and physics.
I hear this claim often, but I never hear any particular reason for why it's so important compared to e.g. letting Alpha Centauri colonize where the lightcones overlap.
Consider that some people have gotten past it, and that it's not a "cope". Enlightenment is real even if it horrifies you because you aren't there yet.
I've visited that space before. Its greatest tragedy isn't the ideas it births, but how seductive the nihilism becomes. You recognize its smallness once you've outgrown it.
In my experience (with both my age peers and people a generation older) as a 52 year old most people who aren't sociopathic narcissists just naturally get more comfortable with the idea of their own death with age.
Not like they long for it or whatever, but anxiety about it goes down, acceptance of it goes up.
Because a cancer cell pulls it off by sacrificing all of the cell's useful functions, resulting in the destruction of the host organism as well as the death of the cell itself.
The "law of biology" at play here is tradeoffs. Aging is not single disease, but an accumulation of error states and maladaptations which arise in a thermodynamically unstable system of high complexity, existing in an even more dynamic environment, likely due to the inescapable mathematics of chaotic systems.
In the N-dimensional gradient from homeostasis to oblivion, N is high enough and the ground shakes often enough that it is not statistically feasible for there to be local minima. Only saddles, in one dimension or another other.
Cells from cancerous tumors do not prove biological immortality is technologically viable for humans, nor do hydras nor Greenland sharks, because the tradeoffs they have to make in order to obtain "immortality" (in only a very technical sense) would be wholly unworkable for the complexity and the experience of a human, as well as extremely destructive to human society.
Just think about this for a moment. "Cells from deadly tumors full of mutant hair and teeth refuse to die (until they kill their entire environment), therefore humans can be immortal?" Really? That's the argument you're going with?
People have been trying to explain this to you through this entire thread. But despite leaving 22 comments, you seem impervious to it. Personally, I think we should strive to be less like cancers, not more.
Tradeoffs aren't real. Your human brain expects them to be, but they aren't. Life isn't fair, and you can get all downsides with no upsides, or the other way around.
There is no Authority on Biology that says "if you want good X, you'll have to take bad Y to keep things fair for everyone". It's just hard to get "good X, good Y, good Z" at once, and nature never really tried. That's up to us then.
That little "cancer" metaphor of yours is a worthless fluff piece meant to make you feel better about dying a protracted, miserable death before you hit the age of 100.
Personally, I think we should be coping less, and doing more about the problems we're facing - of which aging is one.
So… You're just approaching this with, like, zero reference to actual science at all? "My mind imagines I can have eternal life, and therefore I can, and anybody pointing out flaws with my position is worthless miserable fluff"?
Look, I don't like the limits of thermodynamics more than anyone does. But I think it says a lot that there are, you know, actual real diseases that people suffer from and we can make a cost-effective amelioration of with focused effort. And instead you're here raging that we as a society aren't spending billions of dollars trying to make you immortal.
Evolution doesn't care. It's a greedy optimizer that loves its local minima. If it happens to optimize for things like quality of life, it's incidental. Humans can do better than that.
I'm baffled by your desire to defend the status quo that involves you and everyone you love dying a long and miserable death before the age of 100. Even more so with the amount of "actual real diseases" that loop back around to aging.
The article doesn't make sense to me.
They mention 1900-1938 life expectancy rose by ~5 months per generation. And then say it grew from 62 years to 80. Does that mean each generation is ~2-3 years?
What unit of measurement is that supposed to be?
Then for 1938-2000 they say it's 2.5 months per generation. If generation is 2-3 years we should already be at 100 year expectancy.
Also having 1900-1938 and 1938-2000 as the only points in time seem meaningless. Does the entire 1938-2000 have a single graident? What's the slope here?
They also mention that the main advancement in 1900-1938 is infant mortality. Which is really uninteresting for the old age.
I admire the human belief that the improvement of technology and our living standards will be infinite. It will be a bitter moment if we finally realize the plateau we've been stuck on is not temporary and all future gains will be marginal.
This realisation is by definition wrong, or coincidence. You can’t know the future, so you’ll never know whether something will eventually come around and change everything.
I think this is a great point. It's not a robust counter-point, but Gödel's incompleteness theorems come to mind. We do know there are limitations to formal systems, we think there may be limitations to computational complexity. Maybe we haven't developed the tool set to make similar claims about biology (or maybe such tools cannot exist) or technology in the abstract. But these may also come in the future.
Fair enough. If we reach a point where we’ve discovered all fundamental truths of the universe and no more knowledge is helping towards solutions we need, then yes, that may imply awareness of the plateau; I’ll give you that. It also seems fantastically far away, so much so that it seems an exercise in futility to speculate about it.
We didn't need to discover every mathematical truth to discover that there are limits to what we can mathematically prove. Nor did we need to discover every algorithm to know that we can't determine if a program will halt. Both of these have helped understand where plateaus exist in their respective domains. We don't need to enumerate every truth to understand that there are some things we cannot do.
And it even might be a rather short (in length, not height) peak we won't ever reach again. Nowadays I don't see a single reason to believe that children won't be put back to work in western societies in 200 years, unless massive hypothetical innovations are made to replace depleting oil and keep the very high productivity per capita we've been enjoying for decades.
Longevity in misery can be a form of cruelty in itself...
Someday, I don't think synthetic intelligence will escape this facet of existence. After 84 humans call it the forth age, and things tend to stop getting better for ones quality of life. =3
My understanding was that life expectancy has been declining for like a while, not merely slowing in gains -- first because of opioids and then because of COVID.
There is no physical/chemical/biological reason you can’t live indefinitely with the health and vitality of a 25-35 year old. Aging isn’t a law of nature.
I think OP is not entirely incorrect. Reproductive cells undergo processes like epigenetic reprogramming, which basically strips away many of the chemical marks (like DNA methylation patterns) that accumulate with age. That’s one of the reasons babies don’t start with the cellular age of their parents. Researchers can take adult cells, reprogram them back to an embryonic like state using Yamanaka factors (a set of four genes) effectively erasing their biological age.
I think scientists currently are testing ways to "partially" reprogram cells to make them younger while keeping their function. Early studies in mice have shown some reversal of aging signs.
Seems like an engineering problem more than an absolute limitation.
DNA damage inevitably accumulates. The big reason children are younger than their parents DNA wise is because the parents' DNA undergo random recombination to create something that is the mixture of the two.
This doesn't help overall. Mixing two roughly equally broken things just yields the mean of the two. But the trick is that roughly 60 to 70% of conceptions will not survive to birth. This rejection sampling is ultimately what makes children younger.
If you had a population of single cells that didn't undergo this rejection sampling at some point, entropy and Muller's ratchet would actually age the entire population and kill it.
You are right that DNA damage inevitably accumulates and that selection (including miscarriages) weeds out embryos with severe defects but that doesn’t fully explain why a newborn’s biological age is near zero.
What scientists usually mean by "cellular age" isn’t mutation load, it’s the epigenetic and functional state of cells. During gametogenesis and early embryonic development DNA undergoes extensive repair, telomere maintenance and global epigenetic reprogramming that wipes and rewrites methylation patterns. This resets the cellular "clock" even though some mutations are passed on.
So while mutation load drifts slightly each generation, the reason babies start biologically young is this large scale reprogramming. That’s also why researchers are trying to mimic this process in adult cells (Yamanaka factors etc) to reverse aspects of aging.
Fully agree! I don't think life is much more than a sort of chemical engineering, "designed" with the "purpose" of self-replication. Our engineer, natural selection, didn't have "healthspan" in mind; insofar as we are human-making machines, we're pretty well built. I fail to see any reason that necessarily precludes a retooling of our internal machinery to accomplish our desires, not nature's.
More over, babies can clearly grow from limited cells to "young" versions of fully differentiated human tissues. Which means from some initial stock, you can replace the vast majority of the bodies cells with younger versions - i.e. with plausible, attainable technology we would generally expect to be able to grow immunologically identical replacement organs and major tissues. That definitely is an engineering problem, more then anything else.
The only truly troubling one is the brain, and we're very much not sure if it actually is one or for example, suffers degradation from the degradation of the body its attached to - likely both - but we also know that the brain is not a static structure, and so replacement or rejuvenation of key systems would definitely be possible (certainly finding any way to protect the small blood vessels in the brain would greatly help with dementia).
Social shaming is a big way humans deal with unchangeable things. They impose a cost for anyone expressing a desire for that thing to be different.
And it makes sense, really. You can't have a functioning society if everyone is running around freaking out about death all the time.
But we're entering a weird time where we might actually be able to add more good years to our lives. One of the steps towards getting there is being a little more okay with people seriously exploring these ideas.
> If not, the point in doing that is the enormous amount of suffering you create while thrashing against an inevitability.
This is absurd. Of course mortality is inevitable -- eternity is a very long time -- but working to increase lifespan, prolong one's youth and vigor, and delay the inevitable doesn't cause an "enormous amount of suffering" (far less than the diseases of aging cause) and it's unfair to characterize it as "thrashing" when it can be approached in ways which are thoughtful and reasonable.
You aren't wrong. I was replying to a flippant declaration "I don't see the point [in coming to grips with mortality]", which is quite different from your nuanced reply.
I tried to convey that I'm not saying "this is as good as it gets and it's wrong to try for longer life". Your "thoughtful and reasonable" approach was exactly what I had in mind.
What I say leads to suffering arises from denying that mortality is inevitable and tarring those who say otherwise as defeatists. Death is another part of life, as you acknowledged. It unnerves me to see denying that truth cast as a virtue.
This is unfair, and akin to branding anyone who takes medicine as being unhinged.
There is evidence we can extend our health spans. By how much and how are open questions. And if we can actually stop aging, versus slow it down, has not been demonstrated. Some people engage with this unhealthily, just as many terminally-ill cancer patients unhealthily engage with long-shot treatment options. That doesn’t make everyone taking those treatments delusional.
I’d hope we more mature as a society than decrying real medical research that could materially increase our health spans because they’re heretical.
It's the 'indefinite' part that I react negatively to. I don't have a good impression of people who are obsessed with abolishing death, as opposed to your example of maximizing quality of life (or minimizing illness) without getting too hung up on overall age.
Actually they said: "Aging isn’t a law of nature." But it kind of is. Almost all biological organisms age and the ones that don't are much simpler than us. That's not to mention entropy which is both a law of physics and dictates an inescapable form of aging for the universe as a whole.
They also said there isn't a physical reason, that is often meant to mean "it isn't a law of physics".
The fact that something happens doesn't mean it's a law of anything. Cars didn't exist before we built them - no law of "no cars". People died of TB before we had a cure - no law of "TB". Same for various types of cancer.
In practice when someone says "live forever", they don't mean to imply they'll live the 10^100 (or whatever the guestimates are) years to the end of the universe. They mean they'll stop aging in the sense that we do now. Maybe we could live to 10,000 or 50,000 or whatever. You can always get hit by a bus, or get some strange disease from a bat, or whatever.
We have been trying since medicine existed. Granted we can see much further now thanks to modern knowledge and tools, but we still can't see far enough to identify the causes or even speculate about actual solutions to aging. For all our technology and medical knowledge, getting somebody to live past 100 is still 95% a mix of genetic lottery and the chance of not developing too serious of cancer until really late.
The vast majority of medical spending is on treatment of illness/problems and always has. Very little money is spent on actually understanding and figuring how to pause aging itself.
This is not true and easily countered by any sort of investigation.
Lobsters, flatworms, immortal jellyfish and hydras are all believed to be immortal.
In fact we know how to live forever, control our telomeres. We know it works because cancer exists. We just can’t control it but controlled cancer is effectively immortality.
Cancer is a parasitism that kills the host (or the host dies from other causes and it is not self-sufficient). Just because something is defined by uncontrolled self-replication doesn’t mean it is stable to live forever (Which is as much a comment on homeostasis as self-renewal)
[EDIT: Biologically] immortal doesn’t mean indestructible. It just means they don’t age.
Lobsters aren’t truly biologically immortal. They “continue to grow throughout their lives,” with “increasing amounts of energy” being needed to mount ans they grow larger [1]. “Eventually the cost is too high and lobsters can die from exhaustion.” (That said, if our cells aged like lobsters we’d live something like thousands of healthy years.)
For true biological immortality, look to some jellyfish [2]. You literally can’t tell if a cell is taken from an old or juvenile.
> Immortal doesn’t mean indestructible. It just means they don’t age.
Technically “immortal” means “never dying”, it has nothing to do with age. You could be unable to die but continue to age and become ever more decrepit (although the Oxford dictionary does list “never decaying” in its definition), for sure there’s a sci-fi short story about that out there.
The mentioned creatures all age, they do get older, it just so happens their bodies don’t deteriorate, or they do but regenerate.
That’s the second paragraph. I was specifically addressing only the first (the one I quoted). In that one you seem to be saying that “immortal means not aging”. That’s the only part of your post I wanted to address, the rest was very clear.
Lobsters die of old age when they fail to molt, become trapped in their shells, and starve. The lobster body plan does not scale indefinitely. Presumably at a certain point they'd boil in their own metabolic heat.
> What is the oldest known living individual for each of these species, and for how long are they alive?
For the jellyfish, we don’t know. Their cells are indifferentiable by age and they’re bastards to study, with only one scientist in Kyoto having managed to culture them [1].
> no physical/chemical/biological reason you can’t live indefinitely with the health and vitality of a 25-35 year old
We don’t know this. We know of no creatures as biologically complex as humans that demonstrate biological immortality. That might be because nature never bothered. It might be because it can’t.
But you are generally correct: we have strong evidence healthspan-increasing interventions are not only possible, but proximate. That research could move faster with more funding, particularly from the public, since if we relinquish this funding to the rich it will not prioritize treatments which may be slightly less effective but much cheaper and thus broadly applicable.
(1) Yes we do have an example: us. Why is a baby’s cells young and healthy, and not the age of the parents? Dormant eggs are not the answer as you’d still get accumulating damage over time. Turns out there are mechanisms for cellular reprogramming which rejuvenates cells. There are mechanisms for making ages cells indistinguishable from young cells. We just haven’t fully harnessed this capability on therapeutics yet.
(2) The deeper point is one of logical necessity. No bird flies faster than the speed of sound, yet that doesn’t work as an argument for the impossibility of the SR-71 or Concorde. No physical law prevents restoring tissue to healthy young state. We just haven’t developed the tools to do so (yet).
> No physical law prevents restoring tissue to healthy young state. We just haven’t developed the tools to do so (yet)
You’re speculating too far beyond what we know to speak so definitively. Plenty of biology and even thermodynamics suggests there may be limits. That doesn’t prove they exist. But it’s in the same category as saying there are no know physics which prohibit time travel or transcending the human condition into a state of pure consciousness. Like, sure, there aren’t, but to use your analogy, ancient Romans didn’t know about the speed of light.
The difference between healthy young cells and diseased old cells is no more or less than the difference in configurations of atoms.
Diseased old cells have accumulated damage in a multitude of different forms, as well as accumulated junk. Fix the errors and remove the junk. It is as easy and as hard as that.
Nothing in thermodynamics or organic chemistry prevents this from being possible in principle.
You can't invoke thermodynamics, because thermodynamics doesn't work that way - the Earth is not a closed system. The sun continuously imparts a stupendous amount of energy to the planet, sufficient to allow the entire biosphere to continuously replace itself.
Thermodynamics is not a limit on an intelligent agent reconfiguring atoms on Earth for the next several billion years.
It doesn’t really matter. If you can exist as a 25 year-old, there is some change you can make to your body and cells that will indefinitely preserve that. It may not be within our grasp for maybe even up to another century, but it truly is inevitable.
I'm not saying this isn't possible, as some simple lifeforms seem to be basically immortal but our systems are much more complex and consist of many more moving parts and we are just meat machines. Machines wear out and you have to replace the parts. We're no where near being able to replace all of our parts. So there is a pretty good reason why at least the people currently alive aren't going to see what you're saying come to fruition. Entropy is a bitch.
Assuming no proton decay, its life span (for baryonic beings such as us) is far beyond 10^1500 years, so I don't think that "lifespan of the universe" is a limiting factor here. Nobody's speaking of living an infinitely long life.
> isn't telomeres a physical/chemical/biological reason we can't live forever?
It’s one component, but not the only reason [1].
Naked mole rats’ telomeres do “not shorten with age but rather showed a mild elongation” [2]. They are long lived, for rodents, and don’t degrade into balls of cancer [3]. They nevertheless age.
There are a handful of animals, mammals even, that essentially don't get cancer (some/all large whales and naked mole rats IIRC). So that might be solvable other ways.
And I wouldn't expect it to be, given that were are the product of billions of years of an evolutionary process that has relied on 'scrap and rebuild from scratch' as a mechanism to control errors.
Physical/chemical maybe not, but biologically there might be strong reasons to not allow a complex organism to live forever. Evolution might be accounting for a lot of the reasons leading to the death of the individual organism. For one it would stimulate evolution itself and also alleviate the inevitable resource pressure.
A species that lives forever must adjust to reproduce relatively slowly to not overwhelm the local environment. A species that lives short lives will reproduce at much higher rates. So at any time the fewer “immortal” individuals would be vulnerable to competition from the many “mortals”, or to predators.
Humans are a special case because we don’t operate only on biological imperatives so you could make immortal humans but with implications we can’t even think of now. Maybe our limitation will not be biological but societal.
You are mixing up evolutionary incentives with real chemistry-driven biological constraints. The base incentives of reproduction-driven natural selection may make aging inevitable under natural selection, but that says nothing of artificial selection or bioengineering.
> You are mixing up evolutionary incentives with real chemistry-driven biological constraints
> but that says nothing of artificial selection or bioengineering
Feel free to be specific. Start from here and describe your revelation about my “confusion”:
>> Humans are a special case because we don’t operate only on biological imperatives so you could make immortal humans
Natural life o overwhelmingly selects for well defined, limited lifespans. Engineered human life likely won’t see any natural pressure but rather societal pressure to set a well defined, limited lifespan.
There’s a well-known short story called “ The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant” meant to reveal how ridiculous and nonsensical society’s attitude towards death is. You seem to be taking the opinion that the society shown within, in which death is artificial and societally enforced, is ideal and something to emulate.
I truly don’t know how to respond to this. If you want to die on a rigid time table, fine. Don’t take the rest of us out with you.
The longevity trend is fascinating.
It’s mostly fueled by people who hoard money and power and realize they will just lose it all like everyone else when death will inevitably come.
This fear has driven men for a long time, but we used to focus on living through memory. So we tried and gain literary and art fame, if coming for poorer backgrounds, or we built mausoleums and palaces that were supposed to outlive us in the centuries.l, if rich and powerful.
Now the shallow uncultured tech billionaires just believe their own simplistic mechanistic lies and focus on living longer themselves.
The result is there’s nothing trickling down for all the others.
This that we have to all endure must be the most inane and distasteful class of rich and powerful people to ever walk the Earth.
I believe this is mostly due to misdirected healthcare efforts.
I think we could get the average life expectancy up to 100 if we did a better job of all the preventative things:
* Prevent airborne disease by having all indoor spaces getting 50 air changes/filters per hour.
* Prevent waterborne disease by having all tap water RO treated in homes, and by heating all shit up to boiling point before it leaves toilets.
* Large scale animal and human trials of every chemical used in daily life to find those things like a pacifier which gives you cancer 60 years later. It is far better to do an 'unethical' trial of a chemical than the current system of just putting it in all products and going bankrupt later.
* Prevent spread of other diseases like the common cold with daily covid-like lateral flow tests for everyone, with the government bringing you food and paying you to stay home if infected with any spreadable disease.
* Work on many more vaccines and give them out for free to the whole world to eliminate more diseases like we did with smallpox (that vaccine has saved around 800 million lives).
* Dramatically reduced effort on individual treatment (cancer, care homes, etc) by putting a 200% tax on healthcare, and funnelling that money into preventative things so the next generation doesn't get the health issues at all.
The main causes of death in the US are literally sloth and gluttony, none of your points adress that. If people wanted to live long the single most effective thing they can do is exercise and eat clean, apparently the vast majority of people simply don't care.
European here. I've been to the US and holy mother of Jesus, you put sooooo much sugar into everything. I had to buy 'European' bread because your normal bread made my gums hurt, and even then that was the sweetest bread I've ever eaten.
Seriously, when your one large oreo shake has 2600 calories, no wonder your obesity rate is 35% and isn't slowing. Driving to the toilet instead of walking also doesn't help. Then your hospitals get overrun with preventable diseases and healthcare gets expensive. This isn't a 'caring' problem when getting fat is the only option for most people, the way most people life is specifically designed to make you obese.
A little hyperbole, but as an American, the idea that the average person in my country would rather drive somewhere rather than feel inconvenienced by a short walk is very accurate.
This sounds like RFK's type of "medicine". The number of people dying from transmissible diseases is a lot less than people dying from heart attacks, cancer, etc. which are linked a lot more to lifestyle than to diseases.
My hypothesis is most heart attacks and cancer are also caused by transmissible diseases, but ones which are mostly symptomless.
We already know the link between cervical cancer and HPV, various cancers are caused by EBV, hepatitis virus often causes liver cancer, herpes virus also causes some cancers.
Plenty of viruses are also linked to a substantially increased risk of heart disease, including the common cold.
I suspect that nearly all cancers are caused by viruses, and are often just viruses that have no other symptoms and might take decades to cause the cancer. If we can stop the transmission of those viruses, cancer rates will eventually drop.
The challenge is how to do that smartly - not having half the population sitting at home twiddling their thumbs because they have some symptomless virus and 'feel fine'.
> daily covid-like lateral flow tests for everyone
How would you prevent people from abusing this system? Covid tests were simple to get to show a positive result, and I know some people who would make this instantly unsustainable.
I'd have the tests not show a simple line, but instead a complex checkerboard pattern you scan with a phone. The scan results would simultaneously test for 100+ diseases, and be uploaded to some department of health server which would then decide if you specifically should be paid to stay home.
That decision can be made based on fraud risk, but also on the benefit to society of that person not spreading that disease further. For example if a disease has already infected most of the town in the last few weeks, it makes no sense for someone to stay home because local immunity is already probably high and further spread unlikely.
However the first case in a new town would 100% be worth staying home for to avoid infecting thousands of others.
When you have general anesthesia, you experience nothing, not even the vague sense of time passing like when sleeping, it's just an edit in time. You basically don't exist when you're under general anesthesia.
If a little propofol in my brain can make me not exist, I'm pretty sure when I don't even have a brain I will definitely not exist.
The only thing life extension will get us is a very powerful class of ancient people that will have ownership of just about everything. The only thing that resets the clock on wealth accumulation under the capitalist system is death. No matter how much of a grifter you are the grim reaper will force you to divide it amongst your heirs. But if that no longer happens and if capital keeps begetting more capital then the end game would be a very sober one for an even larger slice of humanity than it already is.
I don't, he's using he body like a lab. One of those experiments is likely to go terribly wrong rather than just eating optimally and exercising and crossing your fingers and hoping that you won the genetic lottery.
It is ironic that many of the people obsessed with life extension are also those deeply involved in creating systems that deliberately waste the time we already do have, via addictive algorithms, clickbait content, unnecessary consumerism, etc.
“It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it… Life is long if you know how to use it.”
I was already familiar with Seneca and that quote, but reading it now it sounds condescending. Of course a stoic would say that. Even if we concede that most people “waste” most of life, claiming it is “long enough” and we have a “sufficiently generous amount of it” is just opinion and not something to be prescribed to others. “Long enough” for what? For what Seneca enjoyed, maybe, he had nothing to do and only a fraction of the available world knowledge.
Nowadays one lifetime isn’t even enough to read every book one would find interesting, and reading might be your favourite thing in the world that you do at literally ever opportunity. Long enough… Pft… Seneca clearly wasn’t familiar with the essentially infinite world of fan fiction. He surely would’ve judged it if he had.
Just to drive the point home: The comment is tongue in cheek. I agree with your first paragraph.
Well sure but we waste it for circumstantial reasons. Wisdom is scarce by definition. Denying people a second chance because they messed up with literally zero information isn’t something we should condone.
Remarkable hostility and strange circular logic from some people posting here. Clearly belief outstrips evidence.
If research suggests there's an observable asymptotic trend, public health dollars at the very least might be better spent on quality of life as much as quantity.
The posts saying an atom of oxygen is potentially infinitely long lived (ignoring radioactive decay?) As a "proof" that life extension has no limit is about as reductively silly as it is possible to be.
Bills of mortality bootstrapped Financial investment in annuities. You think the money people aren't tracking this trend now, when they have for the last 400 or more years?
Radical life extension within our lifetimes has become secular religion substitute. It’s driven more by hope and faith than by scientific fact.
While a lifespan has no limits in theory if technology is advanced enough, the belief that it can be achieved by a living person is based on hope rather than evidence.
- Possible in our lifetime.
- Affordable to the faithful.
You remove these two, and the faithful lose their interest in discussing the matter.
What theory says that human lifespan has no limits with technology assistance? Anything involving replacing biological systems with artificial ones is not really extending human lifespan, it’s replacing human life with something else.
I won't touch on whether or not you're still you as you replace your biological components with artificial ones.
But who says that's the endgame? Presumably an advanced enough medical technology could remove the internal byproducts of aging, and get your cells to stop dying / running out of steam / going cancerous. Obviously we have no idea how to do that, and maybe we never will, but it seems plausible.
You can replace almost whole body and its still you as the mind. But once you replace brain then its just a copy, you can't literally move biolectrical complex that makes us into silicon in any possible way. And brains age like the rest of the body, telomeres issue applies too.
The best possible outcome would be watching your digital copy having digital life, while you yourself wither away regardless. More akin to having a child than oneself preservation. Not really something special, having physical children still beats this.
Ship of Theseus it. Slowly replace the brain bit-by-bit, taking breaks in between. For each component, use three in a democratic redundancy (for future maintenance).
I wouldn't personally do that unless I was already dying. But, I see no reason believe it wouldn't preserve the soul. Your organic brain is already doing it all the time on a small scale.
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We know it’s possible for living things to be functionally near immortal.
We also know germ line cells can give rise to new organisms which can give rise to germ line cells in an unbroken chain effectively forever.
This is quite far from making a human immortal but it shows that there appears to be nothing in physical law or intrinsic to biology that prohibits it. Therefore it is possible.
Star travel and terraforming Mars are also possible. Possible does not imply anything about difficulty. We don’t really know if radical life extension or borderline immortality are fusion hard, quantum computing hard, or starship hard.
> We know it’s possible for living things to be functionally near immortal.
Not in any sense that's applicable to humans.
The often-cited animal examples, like greenland sharks, tortoises, and lobsters, are slow-moving ectotherms with "cold" metabolisms. Adjusting for watts per unit mass of biochemistry, they might "live" less in all their centuries than you do in a single decade [0-3].
In that sense they're only "long-lived" in the same way a tree is long-lived. Yeah, it might not die. But it's also not doing much that produces wear and tear, misfolded proteins, scar tissue, plaque buildup, etc.
Microorganisms and cnidarians, which can be truly immortal, are even more divergent. For example a common form of "immortality" involves periodically regenerating body parts by reverting to stem cells. IIRC regeneration is ancestral to all animals, but mostly lost in mammals.
Humans can actually already regenerate to a limited extent [4]. But how are you going to regenerate an entire primate nervous system (which "immortal" animals don't have), without losing everything you are?
In fact, the use of regeneration to achieve "immortality", and even that only rarely and in very simple animals, suggests it may not be possible at all for living organisms to live indefinitely in the same body. Otherwise, why would evolution waste calories rebuilding a whole body?
I suspect some systems-theoretic effect like the Red Queen hypothesis [5], but on a micro scale. Change is the only constant, and immortality implies trying to stay the same when the only thermodynamically favorable options are to grow or decay.
I don't think regeneration of bulk tissue is what people are generally talking about when they talk about immortality. Rather they talk about there being advanced homeostasis from yesterday, to today and to tomorrow under "normal" living condition. The point is not that you should be able to regenerate from blowing your brains out.
Yep. The point I'm making is that there is no precedent in nature for a complex animal maintaining homeostasis indefinitely like that (that doesn't rely on bulk regeneration). And given such immortality would presumably be highly evolutionarily advantageous, there is therefore no reason to believe it's possible at all, and many reasons to suspect it might not be (antagonistic pleiotropy, chaos theory, thermodynamics…).
Aren't some trees, some fungi, some sharks and some crabs basically exactly that? They are most certainly complex life. Sure you are right heir metabolic profile is very different.
But really the your argument is already shifting to "there is no life ver similar to humans that do it, so it must be impossible" which imo is a much larger stretch then assuming it's possible.
We aren’t much more complex than a crab, if we are at all. “Complexity” is not what makes us what we are. It’s that we went down an evolutionary path that heavily leveraged intelligence and social cooperation so we got a big hypertrophied brain. Our brain is like a cheetah’s musculoskeletal system or a rabbit’s reproductive system.
The OP is also massively underestimating plant complexity. We aren’t much more complex than a tree either.
We are higher metabolism than both though, and with that the OP has a point. We are already long lived for a high metabolism animal. Our metabolic rate makes it harder for our repair mechanisms to stay ahead of oxidative and radiation damage. That will make extreme life extension hard for us, harder than if we were reptilians or arthropods.
If you had full understanding of human cell and how they contribute to homeostasis, you could reprogram the cell to rejuvenate them endlessly without turning into cancer (many cancers have unlimited lifespan). You would also need to find ways to remove all cruft that gradually accumulates even in healthy body, like heavy metals etc.
How do you know that you could? That’s the question! If we did understand biology perfectly it may be that we would then prove no organism can live forever and reproduction is the only way.
Reproduction doesn't create whole new cells from nothing (except in the ship of Thesius sense). It's existing cells getting reprogrammed to do new things.
Reproduction does result in new matrix/scaffolding being built but the cells build that (and can rebuild it if so directed).
Of course some things "we" care about exist exclusively in the matrix (configurations of neurons, learned behaviors, memories, etc) so that could well be a limit for those parts of the body where we care primarily about preserving the matrix.
Anyway my point is that "reproduction" doesn't create whole new life, it's just a continuation.
> Anyway my point is that "reproduction" doesn't create whole new life, it's just a continuation.
Then you're just arguing that we're already immortal, after all we reproduce, but I don't think that's what we're talking about when we talk about longevity. Longevity is the continued existence of a particular being, not its continuation through descendants.
The point is that a fundamental assumption that "reproduction" does anything that can't be done by regeneration is just a hunch that so far isn't actually supported by anything in microbiology. The existence of reproduction is irrelevant to the question.
Reproduction is not physically special. If it is physically possible to create a new organism with a longer lifespan than its parent (which it is), then it is physically possible to extend the lifespan of an existing organism. This may be impractical, but we cannot prove that no organism can live ≈forever, because it's not a physical impossibility. (Assuming a source of power remains present: it looks like the universe won't last forever, so we can trivially assert that no organism can live forever.)
> it is physically possible to extend the lifespan of an existing organism.
This is not at all guaranteed until we actually manage to do it. And that's exactly what we're discussing, you can't just say "but it must be possible". There's no rule of the universe that says it should, and given life has been around for 4 billion years and there's no single species (specially animals which is what we really should consider here if we're talking about human lifespan) that manages to live for more than a few hundred years, I think that's strong evidence that life is approaching a fundamental limit here. Someone else said "maybe that's enough" - well, why?? Maybe 100 years is already quite enough then??
Take the existing organism apart, fix all the problems, put the organism back together. No laws of physics prevent this, so by the totalitarian principle it's physically possible. Principles of engineering might make it impractical, and even if it is practical we might never discover how to do it, but it's possible.
Some cells are literally hundreds of millions of years old.
That’s not forever and it required a very specific environment, but biological degradation on that timescale can be effectively zero.
Because there's absolutely no reason to believe that's the case? Like I don't know what the point of this argument is: maybe it's impossible. Sure, great. Okay. But you know...let's actually find out, because it looks very possible if hard from our current vantage point.
> Because there's absolutely no reason to believe that's the case?
The fact we haven't seen an organism live forever is strong evidence that that's the case. You're the one making the case without any evidence!
There's also no reason to believe the opposite is the case.
> Like I don't know what the point of this argument is
The point of the argument is to stop people like you from making declarations about what is possible without any evidence
> Sure, great. Okay. But you know...let's actually find out
Can you show me where anyone said we shouldn't find out?
> because it looks very possible
There's absolutely no reason to believe that's the case
This is perhaps the single worst form of argument I've ever seen. It does not help, it does not engage with anything scientific, it doesn't promote any new ideas (an example of an idea worth exploring is 'how can a cancer cell live indefinitely but other cells cannot' or 'why do different animals live for different lengths of time and what triggers this process'?). Things not worth exploring include whatever you're engaging in.
> This is perhaps the single worst form of argument I've ever seen.
It's because you didn't understand it
> 'how can a cancer cell live indefinitely but other cells cannot'
Cancer cells are damaged cells mutating without regard for function. It's pretty obvious that there is a difference between "living indefinitely in a mutated form devoid of original function" is different from a cell performing a specific function
Do you believe this limit on lifespan is a uniquely human condition? or do you believe that it's impossible for any animal whatsoever to have a long lifespan (let's say 400 years for the sake of argument here).
> Do you believe this limit on lifespan is a uniquely human condition
No
> or do you believe that it's impossible for any animal whatsoever to have a long lifespan
Let's pick an arbitrary timeframe and declare that as long
No, I don't think anything is impossible when you pick dates "for the sake of argument"
if you claim to think that 4x your current max-ish lifespan isn't long, then you're not having an argument in good faith, are you?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenland_shark
yes precisely. that's why I picked 400 years
I mean I also feel like people would be pretty happy with the average lifespan of a tree, or a Greenland Shark, etc.
Also, some few (fairly primitive) animals are "biologically immortal," for example, lobsters (which are motile and vaguely resemble us more than, say, sponges and jellyfish) don't experience senescence.
That being said, I think we have a long way to go if we want to make any progress at all, and I doubt I will live to see it.
You know what a chaotic system is, don't you? That goes for a simple double pendulum.
There is no "full understanding" of a complex system.
If you could put your mind in a robot, is it still you? What if you get a knee replacement? What if you infuse a young persons blood? What if you put on a contact lens? Fun questions, but I’m not sure the answer changes what we will do much.
Two issues here - the first is that relatively new discoveries like the bidirectional gut-brain axis, and the major effects it has on you, pose a technical issue to traditional thought experiments like brains in a vat (or robot as it may be). The second is that this also doesn't really answer the question. Your brain, like everything else in your body, degrades over time. It's not like it becomes immortal if you just stick it in a robot, if that were even possible.
> While a lifespan has no limits in theory if technology is advanced enough, the belief that it can be achieved by a living person is based on hope rather than evidence.
I would say it's based on fear. Ego. Maybe disconnection, bordering on solipsism, as if living in this world is only meaningful if you personally live forever.
Hope motivates aspirational curiosity. The attitude from some longevity enthusiasts here seems to lean more towards vitriol and tautology.
It has also become popular with billionaires to invest huge sums of money into life extension, or at least cosmetic surgeries to appear younger (Hair transplants, etc).
I have come to the conclusion that no amount of money or technology can cure being spiritually empty inside, as well as unable to cope with your own mortality.
Some would say that if they were able to find meaning in life or cope with mortality, then they wouldn't have hoarded so much money and tech in the first place.
Yes very illogical to hope that life will get better when my analysis proves the opposite. Bazinga!
Why do you believe that extending human life will make “life better”?
This is a very good question which i resonate with. The implications that an extend life is better. In my personal opinion life as we know it would be vastly different and who knows how different it could be, for better or for worse.
Wouldn't it be great if every figure we learned about in history class was still alive and kicking today? Wouldn't that just make everything so much better?
"So long as men die, liberty shall never perish."
Have you heard of term limits?
You mean those words written on paper that get immediately torn up as soon as they become inconvenient for people in power?
Russia had term limits too. Once.
> very illogical to hope
Hope is a feeling of expectation of positive outcomes, therefore illogical by definition.
Religion is a lie. This is actually a possible science path. Don't get confused.
> Religion is a lie
Anyone who says "we will have within this generation technology to extend your lifetime indefinitely" is lying just as much as the priest who says he knows God exists is lying[1]. I would say it's more likely that the scientist liar is accidentally right, than that the priest is; that doesn't make either of them people you should trust.
At the current stage of technology, belief on this process is basically based only on hope. Belief in this is essentially religious.
[1] possibly they both believe they are saying the truth, so you could argue they are wrong rather than lying. They are still both standing on the same grounds.
Actually all the heads of labs and the top 2 cited scientists are saying exactly this. Hassabis Hinton bengio and amodei. It's crazy to think they are lying priests and give 0% probability on this. It's really short minded.
oh thank goodness you've finally shifted the goal post! in other comments you were arguing that radical life extension was impossible but now it's merely impossible within our lifetime! that's a huge shift!
I made two comments in this thread. The one you replied to, and this one I'm using now to respond to you. Do you have me confused with someone else?
But yeah, I think "within our lifetime" is a critical qualifier, and most people who are not writing it down are implicitly assuming that the qualifier is obvious. I have very limited interest in technologies that will not exist until centuries after I'm born, other than as entertainment.
Without that qualifier, almost any practical discussion about technology is moot. It's fun to talk about FTL or whatever, but we certainly should not be investing heavily into it... It might be possible, but most research on that direction would be wasteful.
If you believe it will take centuries for AI assisted biology to discover new paths..
How do you know it's viable? We may try, but if your argument is merely that it wasn't disproven yet, then it doesn't invalidate OP's point of it being aspirational first.
Don’t get confused yourself: You will still die, even if you live as old as trees can get.
Thee is a lot of psychology background that made you say this comment. Understand your bias.
> Radical life extension within our lifetimes has become secular religion substitute. It’s driven more by hope and faith than by scientific fact.
Did someone prove mice have souls that go to heaven or hell while I wasn't looking?
For all the limits of research that only works in mice and doesn't generalise to humans (I'm *not* going to plan with the assumption of radical longevity) it's not quite as bad as taking everythin on faith.
The secular religion spoken of by nabla has nothing to do with afterlives. It's for people who don't believe in any afterlife trying to placate their fear of death by having faith that technology will somehow grant them an indefinite life, not an afterlife.
(Context: I am firmly an atheist, but I also disapprove of the people who want to live forever. I think that's selfish and childish. People should get to grips with the reality of their mortality and make peace with that.)
> People should get to grips with the reality of their mortality and make peace with that.
- George Bernard ShawThat's nice, but you're still going to die. We all will, and the world is better off for it because progress happens one funeral at a time.
That mistakes academic personal power for all power:
If funerals were in general the only way progress happened, every genocide would cause scientific/technological/economic revolutions.
Recessions are sufficient to clear bad leadership in the private sector; elections in democratic governments.
I agree. For one, most people don't change. In the sense that their ideas don't change. For the ideas to change in the society, sometimes people themselves have to be replaced, i.e. generations have to change.
> Did someone prove mice have souls that go to heaven or hell while I wasn't looking?
What does this have to do with a soul? The comment was about people treating life extension as a religion based on faith more than evidence.
Nothing to do with the soul, or heaven, or anything else.
Heaven and hell, souls, they're just examples sampled from the set of things called "religious".
Radical life extension has been demonstrated… in mice.
If you don't like my chosen examples, take any other religious statement and demonstrate it in a mouse. Have Anubis weigh their heart against a feather, pay Charon to cross the Styx, whatever.
Point isn't the specific it's compared against, it's the entire set that longevity definitely isn't in, because unlike those things it has been demonstrated (in mice).
> Did someone prove mice have souls that go to heaven or hell while I wasn't looking?
Yep, here is the documentary: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3804810/
I don't have to be hostile to be somewhat skeptical about mechanical extensions of current trends into distant future.
An analyst living in 1825 could analyze the traffic stats to conclude that the era of increasing land travel speeds is coming to a close because the horses can't run any faster, and an analyst living in 1975 could analyze the telecom stats to conclude that international calls are always going to cost much more than local calls and remain somewhat of a luxury, particularly in the developing world.
In both cases, technological changes intervened.
I read an article somewhere around 1960 that predicted we'd achieve travel at the speed of light in 25 years (I forget the real number, but within the lifetime of many people living then), and exceed the speed of light shortly thereafter. He based his prediction on the increases in speed of travel over decreasing spans of time, starting with people running, then tens of millennia later horseback, then a couple millennia later steam ships and trains, then a century later airplanes, then sixty years later orbital space travel.
And in 1968 an analyst may conclude that space travel could never become routine and still be perfectly on the money even after the moon landings.
So what? We can't see into the future. The future is never like the past, not least because a lot of present tends to intervene.
And that is precisely why I don't find that much value in articles such as "New research reveals longevity gains slowing, life expectancy of 100 unlikely".
Declaration such as:
“We forecast that those born in 1980 will not live to be 100 on average, and none of the cohorts in our study will reach this milestone."
is too self-confident. Their youngest cohort is born in 2000. It is impossible to predict how longevity technology will look in 2070 or 2080, and yet the authors make such bold statements.
To be fair, the study authors explicitly say that their forecast only holds, “In the absence of any major breakthroughs that significantly extend human life," and, "The findings of this study are not intended to be interpreted as evidence in favor or against a biological age limit to human life."
Isn't that completely circular then? E.g. "if there are no technologies which change $X, then we predict that $X will stay the same."
Let's use "time travel" for `$X` and see if we come to a useful forecast: Sure, one could hope that someday we'll have enough major breakthroughs to achieve either one. But "maybe we'll discover something we don't currently know or understand and it will change everything and we will go back in time" isn't a very promising or useful forecast if your aim is fixing a current problem.
You could perform the same exercise substituting "perpetual motion" as `$X`, and come up with an forecast equally useless for solving current problems.
Also: you replaced "major breakthroughs" with "technologies" when paraphrasing. What do you think the difference is between those two different terms? Do you feel your refutation would be as strong if you spoke to the original point, rather than rephrasing it and responding to your own, differently-phrased version (essentially responding only to yourself) ?
This analogy does not seem to be very strong. No one is making any progress on time travel, which may well be totally physically impossible.
On the other hand, our knowledge of mechanisms of aging has been growing fairly rapidly in the last decade or so, and if history is any teacher, such a growing heap of discoveries usually produces some concrete applications sooner or later.
We can already rejuvenate individual cells and smaller samples of tissues in vitro. That is not yet a recipe for a functional treatment of a living organism, but it is a (necessary) step in that direction.
There is also Sima the rat, breaking the longevity record for Sprague-Dawley rats by living for 1464 days after Katcher's treatment. Out of 8 subjects total.
Could be a random occurence, but the chances to break the longevity record in just eight rats are very, very low. And if it wasn't a random occurence, we already saw a meaningful life extension in an ordinary mammal.
The study takes all the advancements you mention into account, and says that even with that rate of progression, the specified life extension target (100y) is unlikely. Just like perpetual motion or time travel.
On the other hand, people have been claiming "breakthroughs" in all 3, so if that is what you want to hope for, that's cool. It just doesn't factor into our forecasts for any of the 3.
"takes all the advancements you mention into account"
And I think that prophecies like this are fundamentally unsound and unscientific. There is no way you can extrapolate from basic experiments like Katcher's to the year 2080.
> I think that prophecies like this are fundamentally unsound and unscientific.
Well, the study is literal science from a scientific institution, compared to an internet comment so... It wins here.
It does not. There is a lot of useless papers produced because of the "publish or perish" pressure, and even harder sciences have a massive reproduction crisis.
Feynman diagnosed this sort of cosplay as "cargo-cult science" decades ago.
There are a greater number of useless internet posts produced within the same period, and the `useless/total` ratio is higher for internet posts than for scientific papers.
There's also a practical case today where this applies: cancer treatment. One of the reasons life-expectancy are not given much past a 10-year timeline, is because it's generally expected that over a decade the quality of cancer treatment will have improved substantially and as such the likely patient outcome much beyond that isn't known (and is usually better).
Woa. Hold on. I'm talking about "the future" in the context of history. You can predict the future state of some systems, e.g. we can make fairly accurate weather predictions, from past observations of weather events, for sure. As far as I can tell that's what the authors are trying to do.
But if you want to know when the next big technological leap will happen then you won't learn that by looking at what happened last time: last time is not this time, that's my point.
public health dollars at the very least might be better spent on quality of life as much as quantity.
Improving quality of life often leads to improving quantity of life. Life expectancy is, in part, a policy choice. Be wary of those who are outright against these things.
https://thehill.com/policy/equilibrium-sustainability/570293...
Personal longevity is a topic that seems maximally suited to drive wishful thinking.
> If research suggests there's an observable asymptotic trend, public health dollars at the very least might be better spent on quality of life as much as quantity.
Isn’t that already the case with a ton of research going into cancer treatment, Alzheimer’s treatment and how to keep people healthy longer?
Honestly, having seen the life of my grand parents once they past 90 and especially the last 2 when they had significant dementia, I would much rather die before.
Give me a good life as long as possible and spare me and my family the worst of the decline.
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The problem is that mistrust is at its highest that it has been. Science and evidence have been used as political tools in the recent past... and it has started becoming clear to more and more people. Either that or to protect financial interests of some legacy chaebol... so people are losing faith.
In my country people both believe and have some evidence that those that live in an orderly fashion, learn to be emotionally detached and focus most of their energies on flow states and forward escapes end up living longer than those who don't and living beyond 100 is not really difficult if one lives a healthy balanced life as prescribed by Yoga philosophy from the get go.
I'm gonna stick my neck out and say that if life's goal is living, like it should be — and not endless economic growth or an endless compulsion on the hedonic treadmill — it isn't hard to live beyond 100.
When life's goal is living every aspect of it from family, to children to rest get the love and attention they deserve and economic outcomes and status games do not dictate life. But for that to happen one needs to realise that the most precious thing they own is their energy and will. And must learn to see which activities increase their leverage and which ones don't. When one lives that way, the most contrarian thing is that you can achieve a lot more than by chasing because you start to intrinsically do rather than chase — the latter being much more expensive energy wise. I understand if this gets too esoteric for HN. But it's what I believe to be true and is also IMHO the reason why many high performing individuals seem to be unaffected by illnesses even at old age because their energy is continuously and exponentially directed in virtuous cycles and not disturbed easily by external happenings. You are energy and can be understood and defined entirely mathematically. Yoga means union with the universe's synchronicity. It originates from Sankhya Philosophy which simply means counting all energy.
> Science and evidence have been used as political tools for a while... and it has started becoming clear to more and more people.
Yeah, they noticed when their lives kept getting longer and longer thanks to science and evidence-backed policy.
I can understand the sarcasm and respect your take
Science has helped reduce mortality at birth and manage or even eliminate a lot of diseases like malaria, HIV, small pox, polio and many more. Also for burns, broken bones and accidents. And continues to. I advocate vaccines. I myself took the Anti Covid shot 3 times. And use medicines and supplements regularly.
There’s another side to it though.
At what point do I just take an Adderall that’s prescribed to me? Or a pain killer? Rather than trying preventive lifestyle cures? We need a way to tell when to apply what but IMHO in practical life what gains ground is what serves the providers more rather than the beneficiaries. An interesting example is that Anaesthesia was a more quickly adopted invention than Anti-Septic. Even though the latter is more important for the safety of patients. But the former makes life easier for docs, hence it was adopted much faster.
There is a place for both and knowing when to apply which is key. You cannot trust HCPs using allopathy aka science backed by academia in every case cause they’re motivated by self interest and aren’t perfect! Even people like Gabriel Weinberg have acknowledged this in his book Super Thinking when touching upon inefficiencies in healthcare and academia.
I believe that to be able to trust science more we need to save science from p-value manipulation by self-interest groups…
This video by Veritasium also talks about how the accuracy of most published research is contestable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42QuXLucH3Q
I don’t think this is an easy problem to solve or has ever been
You don't trust doctors but you took the covid jab three times? I accept that I will never understand some people. If anything the covid jab is the reason we're not going to get longevity anytime soon. The medical establishment destroyed all the trust and hope people had in the future of biotechnology with that thing.
When you say you’ll “never understand some people,” it sounds less like a statement about me and more like a limitation you’ve accepted for yourself. From a psychological perspective, that reads as defensiveness — dismissing what feels uncomfortable rather than trying to process it. It might be worth asking yourself why you feel the need to provoke instead of engage.
Why would you offer impromptu psychoanalysis to a stranger on the Internet?
Because if you zoom out enough you'll learn that we're all one... so I believe in doing what's right. Your comment deserved that response because it's doing exactly what I've described. Anyways, take care! Hope you get a hug from someone today :) (even that helps with strengthening the immune system because it stimulates your thymus gland which then releases the good hormones you need).
The COVID vaccines are an absolute miracle of modern medicine and it's people like yourself who have turned it into a tragedy.
Without the hysterical and scientifically illiterate people complaining about the COVID vaccines, we very likely could've had a renaissance of investment into next generation biotech platforms like mRNA. Instead, they "have" to be destroyed because the woke right can't read a scientific paper and real information takes more than a tweet or TikTok video to convey.
Very few people have the genetics to support living past 100 regardless of lifestyle. In other words, lifestyle choices can help prevent premature death (and improve healthspan) but they can't extend maximum lifespan.
That makes sense, I agree
People who do live long and well, chose the right parents.
DNA is conditioned too, it’s not immutable. Parents hand us probabilities, not fixed outcomes.
No amount of good vibes, energy, or flow states are going to guarantee one lives to 100+.
For sure, they won’t guarantee being a centenarian but will increase the odds for it to happen in my opinion
The word forward escape is borrowed from author Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi which as I understand it means just doing what you like and is good for you both as opposed to doing what you like but is bad for you aka vices which he refers to as backward escapes.
I was walking on the street the other day. It was fine summer, and I saw so many elderly walking outside. All of them were using one type of aid or another; some even had a social worker at their side. As I saw them, I was thinking that my 63% marginal tax was paying for it, while I part with 25% of my income after taxes to pay my mom’s pension. That monetary cost is nothing, I would gladly pay it for the rest of my life if it could give my mom a good life for that long. Her old age is my single biggest source of stress.
In the political sphere, some countries are tearing themselves apart on the question of immigration and identity. But immigration is the only thing that can replenish their workforce.
So, we are paying an extremely high cost for letting God go on with His Slow Tormentous Cooking of Souls before Consumption, and things are only going to get worse, given the demographic expectations. Wouldn’t it make sense to put a big chunk of budget into creating life-extension tech?
> So, we are paying an extremely high cost for letting God go on with His Slow Tormentous Cooking of Souls before Consumption, and things are only going to get worse, given the demographic expectations. Wouldn’t it make sense to put a big chunk of budget into creating life-extension tech?
It's controversial, but I think it would be tremendously beneficial to our society if we accepted that death is (currently) inevitable and that past some point, assisted suicide is a lot better than artificially prolonging suffering at great cost for as long as possible.
> assisted suicide is a lot better than artificially prolonging suffering at great cost for as long as possible.
I beseech you to contemplate how badly this might be abused, and how monstrous the consequences could be. Even now MAID in Canada and other forms of assisted suicide in Europe have arguably gone way too far.
I'm not familiar with MAID, but AFAIK I live in the European country with the most liberal euthanasia policy, and hardly anyone here thinks it's gone too far, let alone way too far.
This! Eurovision has prepared us for this moment of unity: Knuckles-Knuckles
It is my life. Not yours. What you are afraid of is openly murdering people.
There are lots of ways for you to end your life. You do not have to involve government or society. You do not require sanction or assistance.
The only people who might require assistance and sanction are those who are so catastrophically ill that they cannot function independently at all. But MAID has already killed people who were able-bodied! (And some for stupid or trivial reasons: https://care.org.uk/news/2024/10/poor-lonely-and-homeless-op... )
> There are lots of ways for you to end your life. You do not have to involve government or society. You do not require sanction or assistance.
By the time you think suicide is the better option, you are often already in a managed and locked down environment in which it is difficult to impossible to commit suicide in an acceptable manner. Believe me I know it.
"Suicide in an acceptable manner" sounds as like an oxymoron.
Why would you care that it's "acceptable" by society which you will no longer take part of ? If your concern is pain, then perhaps that is your mind telling you NOT to end your life and seek therapy instead.
Assisted suicide only makes sense in situations where the person is in extreme chronic pain and no palliative care or treatment can be provided, which is rather rare.
We should not be encouraging or celebrating suicide, it takes away innocent lives, especially younger ones. If you ask the survivors, many of them are glad they didn't go through with it.
> Assisted suicide only makes sense in situations where the person is in extreme chronic pain and no palliative care or treatment can be provided, which is rather rare.
As medicine and technology advance, assisted suicide will make sense/be required in nearly 100% of natural human deaths. With enough money, we will be able to keep people "alive" (on paper) arbitrarily long. It will be nothing like what people think of when they describe extended lifespan, but turning off all the robotic parts will still be tantamount to assisted suicide.
If you're (a) unconscious, (b) hooked up to a bunch of machines, and (c) can't wake up or live without an operational hookup to those machines, then: When the doctors turn them off that is neither suicide nor murder. It will be then, as it largely is now, an informed decision made by medical staff and next of kin.
Acceptable by the person who wants to die. That usually means not too painful, and not causing more stress than necessary to the persons you care about.
Wanting to avoid pain is very much not a reason to seek therapy, what an absurd thought.
The article you shared mentions a report and a committee that analyzed the report. You don’t happen to have any further details on those do you? I couldn’t immediately find the details in the article
> However, lobbying efforts have steadily pushed for broader access and eligibility...British legislators have to consider how easily assisted dying can be expanded, how easily abuses can go undetected.
Wait, how exactly does one "abuse" MAID?
People being so deep in poverty and addiction that they opt for MAID as an option isn't a symptom that it's "too easy" to access it, but rather that _society_ is failing them. And when those people finally say "Well fuck this shit I'm out", we reply "That's not allowed". Disregarding that companies won't hire them, rent & housing are ridiculous, they''re not allowed to put their tents anywhere and when they get kicked out their tents & belongings are trashed instead of being given back.
The argument is that society should not put resources into things like assisted dying programmes: they should put resources into making life worth living for people who would otherwise take the assisted dying option.
Only one of those options seems financially practical, unfortunately.
If this is true (and I don't think it is), then we need a fundamental, radical overthrowing of the social order, and a lot of work put into constructing a new one. Any system where putting people to death is more "practical" than giving them fulfilling lives must be destroyed, and replaced. (It may be more effective to destroy and replace the system gradually – "reform" – since revolutions tend to have too many moving parts for Blanquists to keep track of, the situation has to be pretty bad before a popular revolution becomes likely, and the world's so interconnected now that foreign powers will take advantage of the malleability of a society undergoing revolution, likely to the detriment of the locals.)
It's funny to say this when there in fact is wealth but is mostly tied up in assets owned by rich douchebags and trust fund kids. Financially practical is just a nonsense word considering money isn't even tied to anything anymore either.
Several people in the Netherlands have died through MAID who had only psychiatric conditions with no serious physical problems. And these were not people mired in poverty and addiction who were failed by society. We can argue the merits of particular cases but many people would consider that an abuse.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/article/2024/may/16/dutc...
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/...
Why is a psychiatric problem less "deserving" of MAID than a physical problem?
Traditional suicide is incredibly stigmatized; ending one's life manually is a huge trauma to place on loved ones. The benefit of MAID is that it's dignified, and won't leave families searching for answers after a death.
It's controversial, but I think it would be tremendously beneficial to our society if we accepted that death is (currently) inevitable and that past some point, assisted suicide is a lot better than artificially prolonging suffering at great cost for as long as possible.
I hold the opposite view on this issue. While I firmly believe that everyone should have the freedom to make their own choices about their lives, my primary concern is that certain groups and especially governments are actively promoting assisted suicide. Even if it's merely coincidental, I find the underlying incentives perverse, for lack of a better word. Admittedly drawing from a Hollywood sci-fi perspective, I would much prefer that, instead of programs like MAID, people were offered options such as cryopreservation.
> I would much prefer that, instead of programs like MAID, people were offered options such as cryopreservation.
That's just assisted suicide with extra steps.
How do you stop forced assisted suicide or do you think it will never happen?
But then how would you justify the healthcare racket?
Ah, the good old ‘your medical bill is my dividend’ retirement plan.
> But immigration is the only thing that can replenish their workforce.
Unchecked immigration of people who do not share the majority of the destination’s cultural values leads to a monoculture that is terrible for everyone. Multiculturalism doesn’t work when everyone’s culture is equal everywhere. And unless it wasn’t obvious, I firmly believe in multiculturalism, but I believe we (here in Europe in particular) have been misled about what it should look like. And no it’s not about ethnicity.
And that’s saying nothing about the impact on source countries as some other comments go into.
As another European I don't understand your argument because Europe has seen so much internal migration over the hundreds of years that it is weird to argue it is leading to monoculture.
Also unchecked migration to Europe is down to 200.000 people per year so less than 0.1% of population.
I include poor vetting and integration as unchecked immigration if that wasn’t obvious. And do note that I wrote
> people who do not share the majority of the destination’s cultural values
No culture should nor can stay stagnant. But if we allow in people who do not share or wish to share a majority of our cultural values, which vary a lot between European countries as well, then we deteriorate what made our countries lucrative destinations for these people faster than we can maintain it.
It’s not complicated. Why are all those people coming here if all cultures are equal?
> It’s not complicated. Why are all those people coming here if all cultures are equal?
Because they're coming from resource poor countries to those which are richer? Or from regimes that have been captured by an oppressive minority. Or because their nation is being attacked by an aggressive neighbor (or distant empire)?
That's a great soundbite but if you asked e.g. the average British person just before Brexit they'd tell you that they are worried about all the Poles, Bulgarians and Romanians, i.e. other Europeans, coming here, taking our jobs, scrounging wellfare and so on.
I mean, realistically speaking, they'd be bitching about Pakistanis and Indians and Middle Eastern immigrants also, but in 2016 the British voted to exit the European Union, not the Middle Eastern Union. The hint is right there, in the name.
Right, and now UK voters are increasingly opposed to immigration from India, Nigeria, and China. The UK government allowed a large increase in legal immigration, particularly to find more elder care workers. But that appears to be causing a backlash.
https://www.wsj.com/world/uk/britain-farage-migration-debacl...
Certainly an interesting source of cognitive dissonance. Few would admit it, but in practice I can see many people feeling more strongly about foreigners than humane care for the elderly (we've alredy done a good job at putting them out of sight, out of mind!)
Maybe the UK voters are idiots who dont learn from their mistakes?
I'm pretty sure US cultural slop destroyed more of my culture in the last 20 years than immigration ever did, and while immigrants are part of the movement for sure (especially English retirees, but also a lot of 2nd/3rd gen migrants from eastern Europe/North Africa), they're not the main driver.
100% I often say to people that the reason for the UK’s loss of culture is not immigration but the fact that we, as British people, stopped being British in pursuit of the ‘American dream’.
Somewhere along the line we stopped looking to our own previous generations (which include European nations as, you know, we’re Europeans) for cultural identity and started following Hollywood as our cultural oracle.
Generations of this has lead to the mess you see unraveling in the UK at the moment.
Following the 'American Dream' in the UK isn't the problem. No one I know in the UK wants that. It's hugely more nuanced than that. Culture requires groups of people with similar views, opinions, and values. And that goes to a very, very, local level. We now have expensive houses, a mobile population, a London-centric economy, and fractured and geographically spread families.
The decline in Christianity in the UK probably has something to do with it, and that in turn is loosely correlated with WWI and WWII. That's also another historic factor - families destroyed, and fewer families and so on.
And then the elephant in the room - London.
Want a job? Move to London or the south east and leave your family behind. Born in the south east? Want to live in the same street as you parents? No chance. Same town? Unlikely. Do you know your neighbours? Maybe. Do you see them in the church any more, or even when you walk down the street?
Culture is alive and well outside of London, despite its drain on the rest of the UK.
Social, and economic mobility is good, but some of the side effects are only now becoming apparent. Successive short-termist poor governance for decades has been the problem.
Not only this, I feel if people in the UK somehow were able to travel back in time and encounter "their culture", they'd feel extremely alienated and maybe even feel a level of disdain. The daily prayers, Bible reading, strict Sabbatarianism and religious festivals would seem completely alien. Without a doubt the modern Muslim or asian immigrant, especially after the first generation, are so much closer to the average UK resident than their traditional culture.
Not a single British person I know has ever pursued the "American dream". In fact all of them have historically been far more negative towards America than I have, myself being Norwegian.
The UK is large, so maybe either of us are just looking into a small bubble not representative of the whole, but the times I've visited the UK in the past, I didn't see much of what you seem to describe. Perhaps in the very center of London and its shopping malls, but those are not representative of the UK whatsoever.
British people love to compensate for being so globally irrelevant with an irrational sense of superiority over the US.
Yes, this!
A few Pakistanis moving in down the road doesn't stop British people practicing British culture. The reason they don't can be summarised as laziness and ignorance.
"The pub got turned into a mosque", maybe it did but it wasn't because the Moors invaded fgs. A successful pub gets to carry on being one - if it's not successful, maybe that's because people stopped using it.
>A successful pub gets to carry on being one - if it's not successful, maybe that's because people stopped using it.
And pray tell, how does the influx of a muslim, non-alcohol-drinking population, influence this?
Depends how they're influxing. If they're seizing our homes and land by force and taking over our government, sure.
But as far as I can see, they're working for the NHS, running restaurants and shops and so on, and buying/renting homes that come up on the market like everyone else. London's Muslim mayor was elected by an absolute majority even though Muslims are only about 12% of the city's population.
Nobody is stopping Brits from doing Brit stuff - it's our own fault if we choose not to.
Far as I can see, what's done a lot of basic pubs in is a combination of lifestyle changes, people who don't like the smoking ban, and younger people wanting to spend time down the gym instead of drinking.
Are you seriously claiming with a straight face that there are too few pubs in England and that they are a threatened species?
We all kinda did. There's a clear drift in France too after the 70s. The acceleration of communication, US cultural exports, a strong trend of modernization all led to our current situation. And also part of the reason why there are so many traditionalist movements popping up.
What British values do you think have been abandoned in favor of American values?
>it is weird to argue it is leading to monoculture.
As an outside that has visited your large continent a fair few times, yeah, you guys are pretty monocultural.
I know that such a statement is just literal nonsense to y'all and quite unbelievable.
And yes, you all have a different flag, and a different language.
But the day-to-day details are very similar.
Every day y'all wake up at pretty much the same time, everyone eats a light breakfast of some pastry or another and a lot of caffeine and nicotine. Then off to work on pretty much the exact same road in the same little cars. 10 rolls about and y'all fuck off to grab an espresso (Yes UK, you too, the tea thing is BS, you love coffee, we all see it) and a cigarette. You raff about for 30 min. Then back to work for a bit. Lunch rolls on by and it's carb and protein time for the men and salads for the women. By this I mean potatoes and something with a french sauce. More caffeine and nicotine. The afternoon is then set for either sleeping, or pretending not to (I love this about y'all). Work fucks off at about 4-5 depending, nothing on Fridays though. You all then fuck off to a place to get more nicotine and then alcohol or a few hours. Dinner comes after round 2-3, more carbs and meat this time, maybe pasta. Half cocked, you all end up in the same small homes. (yes, yes, but everyone is like this too!. No, you all do it the same way at the same pace, all of you.)
It's all the same sports (football), the same seasons, the same lives. Yes, you all think that your life is so different for your neighbor, but I'm telling you, the pace, the styles, the food, the drinks, the drugs of choice, the houses, the children, Europeans may not be brothers, but you are very close cousins. The rest of the world think you all mad that you hate each other so much when you're living in the same house, acting the same way. It's the same Euopean culture.
Well thank you to put it so brilliantly. Since what you describe seems mostly a global experience by now for all who can afford it, I am wondering what other cultures you have in mind which has a dislike for breakfast, coffee, booze and cigarettes.
How it doesn't work if it actually is?
However there is a lack of law enforcement and lack of integration programs for immigrants.
Huh?
The problem in Europe is not immigration, the problem is there being no European country with a vision of the future for immigrants to buy into.
Aesthetic Traditions ≠ Culture. Traditions are just one aspect, but as Nietzsche wrote about the death of God, traditions are not a substitute for values.
America for hundreds of years has offered a shared vision of the future and values to immigrants of every background, and within <1 generation most immigrants become fully integrated.
When European identities are all built around stories from the past, and the only vision of the future being offered is one of impending doom and urbanist intellectual memes (climate apocalypse, population decline, social welfare breakdown, economic malaise, technophobia), it's no wonder that immigrants wouldn't want to buy into your culture. I'll enjoy your aesthetic traditions and take your free social welfare, but I'll keep my own culture and values, thank you very much.
When your sales pitch is: "we don't like new things here so there's nothing to create, but life here is easy, you don't have to do much because the state will take care of you!" I don't think you're attracting the best citizens.
> the only vision of the future being offered is one of impending doom and urbanist intellectual memes
I agree with this. Far too many European countries have no optimistic or even productive outlooks on the future, instead seeming to trade in a form of pessimistic reductionism. Eat less, do less, be less.
However:
> it's no wonder that immigrants wouldn't want to buy into your culture
Then why do they stay as long as they can drain resources? I would never move to a country I don't respect, let alone stay to drain resources and give nothing back. That mentality is alien to me. That isn't to say every immigrant is a drain on resources, but the ones that do not buy into the culture, do not buy into the vision (or lack thereof), and do not contribute -- why are they here? Simply because despite all of that it's better than where they came from? If so, we're doing both ourselves and them a disservice by not denying them entry, because both parties end up miserable.
>I would never move to a country I don't respect, let alone stay to drain resources and give nothing back.
Hey, good for you. But there are many societies where making a living without working is something to be proud of. I know because I live in one.
In my perspective it's not that complicated. I'd like to have a good life and I would like for every other human on the planet to also have a good life sustainably. I think it's a rather optimistic vision.
Also an unrealistic one. A lot of hard work is necessary for that. Most people don’t want or can’t do that work.
> Eat less, do less, be less.
This is one of the weirdest religions in modern Europe and I struggle to explain it. It's a performative self-loathing that accrues social capital in certain circles, with no real end goal. I want to ask these people...so once you eliminate the impact of the human species from the earth...then what? Wait for the asteroid to hit or the sun to engulf the earth, to restore it to its pre-life state?
> The problem in Europe is not immigration, the problem is there being no European country with a vision of the future for immigrants to buy into
That's fair and I think it's mostly true. At the same time, comparing "Europe" as a monolith compared to the US doesn't make a lot of sense, the history, languages and religions aren't shared for many countries, contrary to the US. We can circle back to saying it was and is a lack of vision from the EU to not have been more aggressive in creating this culture.
> I'll enjoy your aesthetic traditions and take your free social welfare, but I'll keep my own culture and values, thank you very much.
From what you wrote, I can somewhat understand this standpoint but this creates strong segregation between communities that aren't healthy and it sounds like a breeding ground for conflict as well.
It is a prime example for why most of European politics are shifting rightwards. And I'm not saying that's a good thing, overall, it simply is the reason. Far too many who've immigrated here have the GP's viewpoint, and the conflict seems inevitable since our elected representatives have acted paralyzed for decades on this issue.
And I personally fear where this is going. Because as much as I want to vet immigrants much more thoroughly and for a time hopefully have net-negative immigration in my country's case, I also know so many immigrants who came here to blend with our culture and are fantastic fellow countrymen. They've enriched our country and culture. When our representatives let it get as bad as it's getting, the ensuing conflict is one that I fear will end up harming indiscriminately, based on ethnicity and simple identifiable markers. All because spineless bureaucrats would rather not put their neck on the line, instead opting to let it all slide into the historically inevitable ugly conflict that seems looming.
I am actively looking into non-European destinations to emigrate to, and only ones where I feel I can be a net-positive on their culture and contribute to their economy and society. Because if my worst-case scenario for Europe comes to pass, I don't want to be here to be dragged into it. I don't want to be a contributor in that ugliness.
This sounds very defeatist? I still believe in the European project but it gets hard when you see the current political landscape. That said, I don't think we can only put it on spineless bureaucrats, I don't see many countries having bold policies of integration even at the national level.
When I'm looking into countries to emigrate to, I don't expect _them_ to take on the burden of integrating _me_, I take that burden of responsibility on myself.
Likewise I never understood why we blame ourselves for a lack of effective integration when, particularly in Norway's case, we offer all the services you could want. But you have to _want_ to integrate, we can't force you. And if you don't want to, please leave.
> Likewise I never understood why we blame ourselves for a lack of effective integration
Because the country of arrival is usually the stronger economic party. You have the capability of emigrating and integrating because you speak multiple languages, have most likely attained high education and you probably have the means to start a new life some place else. Honestly, good for you but not everyone has those benefits.
In the case of someone poorer, it might take a significant amount of resources and time they don't have, hence more of the burden being on countries integrating the immigrants. Let's also not kid ourselves, it's a trade for their labor in often bad conditions; not something from the grace of our hearts.
> But you have to _want_ to integrate, we can't force you. And if you don't want to, please leave.
This is imo a question the EU has struggled with for a long time. You'll want people to have their personal freedoms: culture, religion, language, etc. But you also want a cohesive whole where citizens can live and work together peacefully. This is a much more difficult question than "integrate or get out".
I'm an immigrant to the UK. Do you want to tell me what I need to do to "integrate"? Because I have no idea what you may mean by that.
> I'll enjoy your aesthetic traditions and take your free social welfare, but I'll keep my own culture and values, thank you very much.
And I have every right to want you out of country and my taxes not to be wasted on the likes of you.
Which is why socialism is fundamentally incompatible with immigration, and why the US, being a nation of immigrants, is structured the way it is (more individualist). Nobody wants to pay for the new guy to have a luxury first world lifestyle with free healthcare, education and pension.
The more a society adopts socialist policies, the less friendly to immigration it becomes.
Both the US and most large European countries had roughly the same percentage of GDP driven by central government spending (socialism) in the 1960s...roughly 25-30%.
Socialist policies have steadily grown that percentage in both regions, with it happening more dramatically in Europe. The US is now at 35-40%, and Europe at 45-50%.
You can map the slowly rising anti-immigrant backlash in the US (and especially in Europe) to this perfectly.
Immigration is not the problem. The problem lies on the kind of people we allow in and who gets to get welfare.
Do we really have to read again and again the same fantasies the far right spew out continuously here in France on Hacker News? It’s so easy to factually disprove, it’s kind of boring.
I will keep it short because I value my time but here some things you might want to ponder:
- America integration doesn’t exist. The American strategy has always been leave people alone to keep living in their own culture. There is no actual American identity. The only things American have in common in the shared trauma of slavery and the civil war, and the founding myth which is why they remain so prevalent in the US modern discourse. Meanwhile, people will happily talk about "race" culture, half the country would be happy to slaughter the other half and culturally linked riots are a thing.
- Europe has a cultural entity doesn’t exist. The UK is different to France which is different to Germany or Danemark. Most of these countries immigration come from former colonies who already understand these countries social norms.
- Access to social welfare is severely limited to immigrants. Most of the system drain comes from people who were born in the country, not immigrants. Take any economic studies, you will see than immigration is a net positive in every European country. These are country where the population is aging fast. We simply need the immigrants to prop up the work force.
- Integration is a false issue. Most of the problems in France for example come from second generation immigrants who actually went through the French education system. The problem is mostly economic.
- The way Islam has been managed is an issue in itself. People deserve to be able to practice their cult freely and in good condition but most European countries have refused to take charge of the question. France for example left far too much space to extremist countries like Saudi Arabia. When most of your imams have been trained in the worst possible interpretations and mosques are financed by countries you shouldn’t want anything to do with, you have a major issue. There clearly is space for better solutions here.
- Plenty of political parties in Europe have strong visions for the future. Some of them are linked to social justice and preserving the environment, things you obviously dislike. The fact you can’t understand something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist however.
> - America integration doesn’t exist. The American strategy has always been leave people alone to keep living in their own culture. There is no actual American identity. The only things American have in common in the shared trauma of slavery and the civil war, and the founding myth which is why they remain so prevalent in the US modern discourse. Meanwhile, people will happily talk about "race" culture, half the country would be happy to slaughter the other half and culturally linked riots are a thing.
As an immigrant to USA, living here for 20 years, you're unequivocally wrong about this point. There is an American culture, and cult of "American dream". There are English as a Second Language programs, job integration programs, classes at every language of educations, rules and traditions for immigrant flow. The police, governments, and citizens of USA all know this is a country of immigrants and all have respect for immigrants, even if there is an "illegal" immigrant backlash right now. The threat of violence coming from political extremes absolutely does not represent the majority of people every day interactions.
In sum, American integration does exist, and I have first hand and second hand data to prove it. I'm not an expert on your other points, and I think you're trying to prove the sky is not blue, but genuinely, good luck.
This is incoherent babble. Not in a figurative or metaphorical way, you are not making sense and this kind of discourse is exactly what ensures that the far right will occupy most governments in Europe in some 10-20 years time, which I'm absolutely not looking forward to.
>America integration doesn’t exist.
This premise
> The American strategy has always been leave people alone to keep living in their own culture.
Contradicts this. You can't have both of those things. you EXTRA can't have them when you further talk about American culture in the same goddamned line.
> Europe has a cultural entity doesn’t exist.
This premise
>The way Islam has been managed is an issue in itself. People deserve to be able to practice their cult freely and in good condition but most European countries have refused to take charge of the question
Contradicts this.
And to be completely honest, this ending:
>Plenty of political parties in Europe have strong visions for the future. Some of them are linked to social justice and preserving the environment, things you obviously dislike. The fact you can’t understand something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist however.
Straight up makes me think you are not serious at all and straight up trolling. But in the off chance you aren't, I mean it when I say you are the problem you want to fight against.
There are no contradictions where you pretend they are. You can’t claim something doesn’t make sense because you have nothing to oppose to it. Nice try in your last paragraph anyway.
Most European countries can fail at the same things while not having a shared culture identity. I have pointed you towards one example.
Same about America. This is not a contradiction. America purposefully doesn’t integrate people because there is nothing to actually integrate them into. America taken as a whole is from my point of view not a nation. It is a collection of groups often with little in common forming a country but in tension about how it should work. Some subgroups in the USA could arguably be considered nations with shared identities but certainly not the federation.
I will hasard you actually are the problem.
"half the country would be happy to slaughter the other half"
You are talking complete nonsense.
I find it very ironic your username is 'StopDisinfo.'
First, the idea there is no American integration is just funny, given millions of your countrymen moved to the US just 2-3 generations ago and yet French identity is essentially non-existent in the US.
In fact, there's more ethnically french people in America than in Canada, and yet Canada has very strong french cultural identity by comparison.
Second, I wasn't arguing against immigration and am not "far-right" (I'm absolutely pro-immigration), just explaining why Europe will never be able to do it en masse like the USA used to (they can't do it as much anymore either).
The reality: Socialist policy makes immigration an impossibility. The more socialist a country, the more aggressive its stance against immigration becomes. This is not a coincidence but a direct causal relationship.
People don't want to pay for random 2nd/3rd-world immigrants to suddenly get free healthcare, education and pension. It's that simple.
It's no secret that after America built its welfare state in the 1930s, this led to a dramatic shift to a closed immigration policy. And as the welfare state in the US has grown (from 25% of GDP in the 1950s to 35% today), the anti-immigrant sentiment just keeps rising.
European countries are no different, having grown their socialist welfare states dramatically over the past 60 years (from 25-ish% to 50% of GDP today). And thus, you get increasingly aggressive anti-immigrant backlash when times get tough.
The irony of the modern leftist is they don't understand the impossibility of their supposed beliefs. You cannot be both pro-immigration and pro-socialism. They are oil and water.
Either you believe immigration is a good force in the world, and thus want libertarian capitalist policy like the US pre-1930s. Or you want socialism, which leads to closed borders, and only pretend to like immigration to make people think you're a good person at parties.
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Has any country succeeded medium-term in increasing its birth rate? AFAIK quite a few have tried, but if people don't want to have babies, it's difficult to change their minds about that - short of allocating a pretty big chunk of a country's economic capacity towards the pursuit of raising children.
> In almost all cases immigration replaces the need for native births - the latter being a key component for a strong, safe culture that creates a happy median population.
Immigration in USA has multiple components, but it seems to be you're undervaluing the amount of opportunistic intellectual workers, who come here to participate in high level education, and entrepreneurial capitalism. But, here are the numbers across multiple sources (thx GPT):
This a pretty good amount of brain power absorption, not just farm work.Most Americans want a country that benefits Americans. High skilled immigrants:
1. Take jobs an American would otherwise fill, which would not be a problem except 2. The economy disproportionately benefits the capitalist class (billionaires). Bringing over immigrants to boost the economy doesn’t help the median American, and it creates competition for natives
I’m not undervaluing it. Im saying it provides no value for the majority of Americans. And this on a purely economic axis - social and cultural angles are arguably all negative.
> Take jobs an American would otherwise fill
That's a big assumption. Yeah, take out all the H1b immigrant that came to this country since 1985, what do you think the US economy looks like, filled exclusively with Americans? Where do you think US economy would be? Where do you think the Silicon Vally would be now? Do you think US and Americans would be better off? Do you think that the economic input of the immigrants is net negative?
I don't think you need to answer. I think you've already said no, these workers, and their contibutions are net negative. I just don't see how that makes any sense, given they're clearly a big part of the economy.
> An American is (on the whole) somebody who’s genetically European and has had family here for generations.
This is obviously nonsense. "White" Americans are something like 57% of the population. The US is very mixed, and always has been.
The US was 80% White 35 years ago
https://www.iowadatacenter.org/datatables/UnitedStates/usstr...
> The US is very mixed, and always has been
You can search US demographic data from a plethora of sources to see this is not true. It’s a recent development enabled by modern laws and policies.
If you ever think about getting into an online argument with these people, let the fact that pointing out that not white people are americans gets you downvoted stop you.
Americans have no culture so it makes sense there. No need to have same happen in Europe.
What do you mean Americans have no culture? Have you never been to a monster truck rally?
> Wouldn’t it make sense to put a big chunk of budget into creating life-extension tech?
Only if it can improve life quality rather than length alone.
Of course if we make it so you can live to 200 in the body of a 24-year-old and then suddenly drop dead, the good news is there will be no pensions to pay any more and the bad news is you will drop dead at your 180th year at work.
Which is not to say I would not take that deal. Aging is brutal and I've just about had enough already!
I would take that deal without even thinking about it. Heck, I would take it even if it was for only 100 years. Keeping the energy of a body in its twenties, not risking illnesses like Alzheimer's, dementia, a fragile body that can break at any time for the cost of working 8 hours a day (which we are already doing)? Tell me where to sign it.
Historically, increases in total lifespan have always corresponded to increases in the length of healthy lives. People don't only live longer, they also live without being sick a whole lot longer.
Exactly. It is far more fantastical to imagine such lifespan improvements resulting in a planet of crypt keepers than one of external youth. What magic do you expect would keep such people alive?
The same magic that keeps some people on quasi-life support for sometimes decades already.
You could imagine entirely curing cancer, heart disease, frailty and infection but not brain degeneration, for example.
Curing everything else except frailty also seems invidious, though with sufficiently good brain-machine interfaces perhaps that would be less of a problem: you can just float in anti-impact gel from 100 and 200 and mentally roam the wreckage of the internet! If AI takes over knowledge work, how you pay for your life support and data connection may become an issue.
Weird that you say that because these life support systems are exactly what I had in mind as evidence to the contrary. Without such an external life support system attached keeping you alive, there's not going to be some drug that holds your body together in a zombified form. Whatever treatment sustains the health of your heart muscle will surely be equally helpful to all the other muscles in your body, as would whatever keeps your circulatory system and all the other tissues in all your other vital organs in working order. The alternative would be to encase the body in ever increasing layers of machinery, which is definitely not what anyone talking about life extension means.
> Whatever treatment sustains the health of your heart muscle will surely be equally helpful to all the other muscles in your body
I'm not sure that's a foregone conclusion. Loads of interventions put extra pressure on other body systems (often, but not always, the liver and kidneys). Sometimes to the extent that even if you may "manage" the original complaint, it comes at a substantial cost to overall health. And heart muscle is pretty special anyway, so it's quite possible it's a separate treatment to skeletal muscle problems.
And pretty much any system failing can kill you so if long term life extension comes from targeted treatments per problem, you need to hit bones and cartilage, muscles, skin, nerves, brain, GI tract, kidneys, liver, immune system, endocrine system, lungs, etc etc, but also not overstress any one with the treatments of the others and also handle almost-inevitable cancers.
Keeping a person _technically_ alive is not that difficult with modern technology. We can circulate blood without hearts, keep the brain-dead "alive", "feed" people intravenously. I don't know the absolute limits of this in practice, but the more autonomy you're willing to sacrifice the easier it becomes to keep a human body alive by artificial means.
> But immigration is the only thing that can replenish their workforce.
Not in a sustainable way.
Immigration is only viable as long as the countries of origin are so bad to live in so it's "better" to migrate. This is not really a world we want, is it?
Don't forget that the recipient countries of immigrants are brain-draining the countries they're leaving. Arguably those motivated individuals are precisely those that should stay in their country and make it less 'bad'.
That's for them to decide, not you.
I don't have enough cruelty in me to demand that someone should stay in Sudan and try to "fix" what's happening there.
The middle path is limiting (not ending) migration while actually trying to help these counties (in particular victims of one’s past colonial ambitions) through aid, investment, and free/subsidised education for their youth.
I say this as a someone who immigrated from a dangerous country to the first world.
The only way the current plan even approaches sustainability is if the brain drain on source nations is sufficient to keep them stuck and suffering. That should make it very clear that the humanitarian impact is a side effect and not the goal.
Would you have said the same about the USA's founding fathers in 1776 who stayed to fix what was happening there?
Yes. That was very much their own decision to make.
Do you have enough cruelty to promote immigration, grabbing the best people a country has to offer, leaving it in the gutter?
That would be an upgrade, really.
Selecting "the best people" is the often-overlooked step. A lot of countries just want to import cheap labor and get easy economic growth today, damned be the consequences.
Yes!
But more importantly wealthy countries shouldn't depend on there being poor countries where women still have "too" many children but rather we should fix our own problems so we want and can have sufficient young people of our own (not said in a nazi way).
And we should also redistribute wealth so there aren't any poor countries to exploit for natural resources, crops and people.
Redistributing wealth will not make poor countries rich. Most poor countries are poor because of bad governance, corruption, political problems (including armed conflicts), culture, and geography. I support some limited forms of foreign aid but when we simply redistribute wealth it mostly gets stolen or wasted without achieving any sustainable improvements.
> But immigration is the only thing that can replenish their workforce.
You cannot discount the destabilising potential of immigration, and the lowering of societal trust it comes with. As we saw multiple times, integration is the edge case and not the rule. It will be especially harder to integrate people the way the demographic pyramid is looking right now in "developed" countries.
I would also question the desire of immigrants to pay for the welfare of the senile of their respective state, given the fact that they are more than likely to feel mistreated and wronged by the western, "developed" countries that will be hosting them.
I am an immigrant (expat?). I don't enjoy paying contributions for the welfare of the people who played in a huge role in the reasons I had to emigrate.
> As we saw multiple times, integration is the edge case and not the rule.
Is that true? Are you sure the edge cases where people didn't integrate aren't just bigger stories than the many many people who arrive and live normal boring lives?
> question the desire of immigrants to pay for the welfare of the senile of their respective state, given the fact that they are more than likely to feel mistreated and wronged
Maybe we could stop wronging and mistreating them? Or is that an important part of our European heritage?
I appreciate you being honest, but I also don't want people like you to immigrate to my country. How are you so sure of the role our old people played in your reasons for emigrating? Even if you're in the US and from a country the US has actively destabilized, how many of the people on welfare -- old and/or infirm -- were instrumental in the actions that led to the destabilization of your country? How many of these people had any active choice?
This is why we need strong vetting of immigrants.
Apart from the complex topic of political complicity, I am talking about events and actions that the majority of the local population supported. I would of course have to reveal quite a bit about me in order to be more specific.
But even if I were an immigrant to the US from Venezuela or any of the tens if not hundreds countries that the US destabilised, I would indeed think of the majority of US's population as complicit. The people that are against such acts seem to always be the minority.
There are plenty of countries to go to that are not complicit in your home countries issues if your issue is with the US.
Russia and China have well above average lifestyles based on PPP. So do many South American countries, as well as Japan, and South Korea and other Asian countries. Also a number of countries in the middle east.
Yes, I understand the US is a very very bad country. I am also a very very bad person because I am very grateful, proud, and and supportive of this country for providing my family an opportunity to thrive even though it took decades for my "type" to be accepted and not discriminated against. My grandparents fled from other countries to be here, for a better life.
Note that I say "opportunity", because nothing was handed to my grandparents or my parents. They were given opportunity, not a subsidized life. They were also, as many immigrants have been, discriminated against for decades, but never complained or held grudges.
I am a huge believer in immigration, but have zero tolerance for those demanding to be supported or who commit crimes or those that choose to come here and bitch about this country. There are plenty of other places to go to.
Oh rest assured, I am not in the US. I would never do that. I find the mentality there insufferable. The mentality that you laid bare in your comment. About the land of opportunity, as long as the cost is externalised.
The US has a lot of history to deal with - genocide of Native Americans, slavery, treatment of women, to name a few. A number of horrible wars since the aftermath of WW2.
We are also going through significant challenges right now - social, political, economic, foreign relationships.
We may or may not survive as a country. We may have a positive or adverse effect on the rest of the world as we go through what we must go through.
However, the rest of the world is simply not innocent.
Europe has a lot to account for. So does Russia, China, Japan. And lets not forget the Islamic and Ottoman empires, which easily matched and in many respects put to shame the slavery, colonization, genocides, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid of the American, European, and Asian empires.
Most of the worlds current problems are the result of the collapse of these empires about 100 years ago, payment for the failure of their insufferable mentalities over many centuries.
Right now the US is facing payment for its past, the rest of the world is still paying for its past.
Maybe you feel the need to equate everyone in order to feel better with your complicity, but it is simply not true. Every empire has committed atrocities, sure. Not every country or ethnic group though. Some have been historically non aggressive and grossly mistreated by greedy emperors, conquerors and politicians.
"Europe" has nothing to account for. Western Europe ? Sure.
Then why would you move there?
> But immigration is the only thing that can replenish their workforce.
Have you ever asked yourself what the purpose is of what you call "workforce"? Exactly what work are they doing that is more important than the survival of the native population? It's completely dehumanizing, and I can't find the logic behind it. If a geographical place needs constant influx of people from other places because the "system" there is slowly killing the population, then for what purpose should that continue?
> As I saw them, I was thinking that my 63% marginal tax was paying for it, while I part with 25% of my income after taxes to pay my mom’s pension. That monetary cost is nothing, I would gladly pay it for the rest of my life if it could give my mom a good life for that long. Her old age is my single biggest source of stress.
That “monetary cost” is not nothing. It represents a share of the finite resources your tribe has (individual/family/city/country) being spent on something with little return for future generations.
Developed countries are asking people who put in the effort to raise kids well to support those that don’t. That works when maybe 1 in 10 people don’t raise kids well, for whatever reason, but it doesn’t work so well when large portions of the population do not.
And there very well may be a justification to not raise kids well, but the math is going to be the math regardless of justifications.
> Wouldn’t it make sense to put a big chunk of budget into creating life-extension tech?
Won't that just make the problem worse?
Most longevity enhancing interventions that have worked in mice have extended healthspan and lifespan at the same rate.
The interventions that have worked in laboratory mice seem unlikely to translate to humans. Those mice live in nice safe flat little cages where there's no risk of trauma or infectious disease. In the real world a frail old human will fall down the stairs, break a hip, lose mobility, and end up dead within a few years because of that original injury.
Conceptually no, unless you specifically target end-of-life fatal ailments for some reason. Extending the healthy lifespan is a pretty reliable way to extend overall lifespan.
dsign says "But immigration is the only thing that can replenish their workforce."
should be
"immigration or automation are the only things that can replenish their workforce."
That conception of God sounds positively Eldritch!
I was in need of a compliment today. Thank you :-) !
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I think it's important to distinguish between "life expectancy gains have slowed substantially" vs "meaningful longevity increases are not reachable".
A huge fraction of deaths in the developed world are from "lifestyle diseases" from obesity, poor food choices, sedentary behaviors, alcohol, tobacco, etc, all of which we could improve. We eat too many highly processed foods, added sugars, etc. We have places without infrastructure for clean water. We have gun deaths and traffic deaths, and we have bad gun laws and car-centric communities. We have flooding/hurricane/heatwave deaths and we have a climate-denial public policy. There are _so many fixable things_ that shorten people's lives, and we'd all probably also live happier lives if we fixed them.
Is it just genetic? On my father’s side, people typically live to 100 at a minimum and are perfectly healthy mentally and physically right up till a week or so before they die. My grandmother is 103 and can still lives alone in her house and can walk unassisted, has a memory sharp as anything, and so on. Maybe look at long lived families and figure out what is different about them?
You're asking if anyone has bothered to study long lived people to determine why they live a long time?
Maybe living the blue zone [1] lifestyle?
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_zone
I'd be cautious of Blue Zones, they're potentially not actually a real thing and more of a statistical construct.
https://www.science.org/content/article/do-blue-zones-suppos...
The lifestyle with olive oil and fish, or pension fraud? [1]
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/archive/2025/04/are-blu...
a familial history of shoddy record keeping?
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I think it's just plus or minus 10 years for whatever fate (genetics) had in store for you. That plus or minus being the little we can control (diet/activity).
I think you can safely double that to plus or minus 20 years for what "little" we can control.
So much of the modern US diet that’s being exported to the world negatively impacts life and health span. It’s very much controllable, just harder than the default.
We're also exporting modern US attitudes and psychology (expectations, worldview), which is just an engine for stress. I think overeating is a stress response. Not everyone was a fiend for vanity at the scale we are today.
Wow that’s such a blessing. You are going to have maybe 50% more quality time than many people.
What about quality of life adjusted life years? I don’t want to live to 100 and be miserable for the last 30
But if you can get me 90 years where I feel like a spring chicken until 89, then that’s just fine.
My grandfather lived to 102 and only the last few months were bad, nothing dramatic, just fading away at home, no hospital.
I'd sign up for the same
My grandfather looked in his 50s and had more mobility than 50 year old men well into his 80s it’s only when cancer got to him that he started looking his age.
I’d sign up for that.
Yea I would sign up to win the lottery too.
Yes, the term is “health span” and that’s basically what everyone is talking about every single time you read an article on the subject.
You may feel differently when you get there. Be careful of present you making decisions about future you.
That’s the best part! Making decisions that keep you in good shape until 89 are also likely to help you live until 100.
At that age if you can avoid cancer the rest is stuff like “Strong enough so you don’t break a hip when tripping on the stairs”
My grandfather had a little saying at each of his birthdays:
88, feeling great!
89, feeling fine
90, less mighty*
91, not yet done!
92, don’t think I’ll hit 102!
He died a couple years later, just a few months after getting my grandmother into an assisted living facility.
*note, I struggle to recall the rhyme for 90, so this one might not be accurate!
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I’d rather be alive engulfed in flames than dead.
Have you been engulfed in flames before?
I've definitely experienced mental states that were worse than being dead. I don't regret remaining alive because of all the positive experiences I've had afterwards. But if we are talking about extending suffering that's only followed by death, I don't see the point.
Not yet fortunately. All life is some amount of suffering and then you die. I agree I’m probably not correct about how I would feel in the moment.
I’m wondering if you’ve ever felt debilitating acute pain. I had nerve pain in the past to where my leg felt like it was on fire. It was then I understood how people get addicted to pain killers. I was able to address the problem and I’ve been fine for many years, but it hurt more than any pain I’ve ever had - and I have had many from sports.
I guess I just mean to say I love living and I’ll enjoy it to the last drop.
This is probably untrue (but you do you!)
Beginning at some acute level of pain you actually want to detach from the failing body.
Yeah you right
New research reveals horse-drawn wagon engineering gains slowing, travel at speeds beyond 12mph unlikely.
Right, we’ll just replace ourselves with humanoid robots. Only half joking
You know this is how we will end eventually in the best case. We won’t master our biology, we will simply transcend it by pro-creating offspring that have something better. It’s also a much easier solution than untangling evolved biological systems that are not designed to last for what have been very beneficial reasons (e.g. scientific advances occur via death of the old guard).
I think this is reasonably likely.
We need to remember that our bodies are evolutionarily optimized for getting to childbearing years, and then living long enough to get our children to a point where they can be independent. After that there are really no evolutionary pressures keeping us around.
Untangling all that and re-engineering ourselves (biologically) to overcome that is probably a pretty monumental task; starting from scratch with something simpler (and perhaps non-biological) might be easier, with sufficiently advanced technology.
Arguably there are some evolutionary advantages to the presence of elders in social species with cultural transmission but your point stands
Not even that. I guarantee you that once really good brain computer interfaces are a thing, investments into "brain in a vat" companies are going to start being a thing. Because keeping just the brain young and then alive is almost certainly very possible if that's the whole focus.
There are no new modes to switch to. We can’t fly supersonic passenger airlines anymore and haven’t been to the moon since 1972. The new Accela trains run slower than the old ones.
Half true. You can switch to the mode of not needing to go halfway around the world (or even just across the country) so often, because efficient information flows allow you to accomplish vastly more while mostly staying relatively local.
Sure, we all like to complain about burrito taxis, dating apps and endless Zoom calls, but in terms of quality-of-life per unit of energy, it's a step change.
true now
Exactly
Aging isn't even recognized as a disease yet, and it well should be.
Very little research currently goes into attacking aging directly - as opposed to handling things that are in no small part downstream from aging, such as heart disease. A big reason for poor "longevity gains" is lack of trying.
I wonder if I would really like to pour billions of taxpayer money into aging when we are not even able to live a basic healthy lifestyle.
Sleeping well, eating well and exercising does work. Science about this is well-established. So why arent we?
It would not raise the life expectancy to 100 years but it would considerably reduce the health burden on the economy.
>Sleeping well, eating well and exercising does work. Science about this is well-established. So why arent we?
Those will give you at best another marginal decade. By all means worth doing but its not radical life extension. At the same time a young body can take lack of sleep and can physically perform even if not exercising much better than an old one. So there's more to it than just lifestyle.
> Those will give you at best another marginal decade.
Those will give you an entire life. Living while being healthy is an entirely different life than surviving while being unhealthy.
I would say it gives you +25 years of healthy lifespan.
Compare it to being obese, wich can happen very young and is in part determined by how you are fed when you are a baby/child.
Doesn't scale. If you could put "sleeping well, eating well and exercising" into a $0.25 once a week pill and make that available to everyone, it would work. As is, it doesn't.
We want solutions that can be scaled and rolled out broadly, and "basic healthy lifestyle" ain't it.
Why not? What is not scalable about it, specifically ?
I mean, sure, it doesn't scale as well as a magic pill as a business. But is certainly is O(n) with the number of people involved.
The kind of solution that scales as "O(n) effect with the number of people involved", but isn't broadly implemented? It's usually at least O(n log n) on the effort required to actually involve those people. This vital input is the source of piss poor scaling in practice.
Why? Because there's a massive variation in people. Everyone who finds it "very easy" to as much as "sleep well, eat well and exercise" already does just that, and the implementation difficulty ramp up gets brutal quickly. It's simple to suggest and hard to execute.
Pharmaceutics are so valuable because they offer good sublinear scaling on many of the inputs. They're extremely hard to develop, but they're often well worth it, because the implementation scales in a way those "simple" solutions don't.
Pharmaceutics are so valuable because they can be sold.
A healthy lifestyle must be earned. It is a constant struggle against the fastfood industry.
Soon you'll see Coca-cola or Nestlé [0] selling both very unhealthy quasi-addictive food and drinks to kids and magic pills that cure obesity. Sounds scalable enough ?
[0] https://www.nestle.com/brands/healthcare-nutrition/medical-n...
Miss me with that "must be earned" bullshit.
If you think that being healthy should be a reward for a lifestyle of virtue, that's your problem, not mine. I'd rather have an actual solution than a blanket "those people don't struggle hard enough", pointed at the majority of US population that's overweight.
Yes that's correct, we can't just expect people to lead that struggle alone.
How about some regulation in the F&B industry? Reducing screen time at school? Those can be done now and don't really cost much.
And then make our cities pedestrian and bicycle friendly. More difficult but definitely a win.
Or would you rather pour billions hoping for a magic pill that solves it all? This is not realistic.
Just considering one component, what is stopping good sleep? Here's a random list of what I can think of:
- noise pollution
- lack of fitness
- stimulant use during the day
- inability to manage a clean, nice sleeping environment
- obesity and sleep apnea
- a partner who can't sleep
- heat or cold in your bedroom
- mental illness
So, just from that list, we see that we'd need to overhaul housing quality so everyone has quadruple glazing and an air-conditioner, stop them chugging coffee, get them help with their laundry, fix their fitness and cure their obesity (which are themselves caused by poor sleep), and get them into therapy.
That sounds hard! Also, we're already working on a lot of it, but it's generally difficult or impossible to fix all of those problems.
The scaling challenge here comes from scaling across the various types of life situations and personality types out there. Some people work too much to be able to live a balance lifestyle. Other people just can’t summon the motivation.
Either way, a pill would scale better across all these people.
> Sleeping well, eating well and exercising does work. Science about this is well-established. So why arent we?
Because although longevity is a nice recurrent idea for everyone in theory, when the rubber meets the road people routinely want to optimize time spent in living in pleasure.
The pleasurable stuff is almost all about "YOLO!" in every domain. A candle that shines twice as bright ends up consuming itself twice as fast and all that
Aging itself is not a disease, it's just stuff falling into disrepair over time.
Age-related illnesses shouldn't be dismissed with "they're just old" of course but there's no reason to expect a single cause. Other than passage of time itself.
Cancer is "stuff falling into disrepair over time" too. Get enough faulty cells with DNA damage and one of them is going to make itself a problem. The only way to avoid cancer is to have something else kill you before you get it.
That's not a reason to say that cancer is somehow "not a disease". It obviously is. We don't want cancer. We fund efforts to research cancer and funnel money into better cancer treatments, and we get results.
Aging should get the same treatment.
Solving any of the existing diseases, will not result in significant upheaval of society.
I am not against trying to "solve aging", but I don't think we should think of it as just a disease, and there should be more plans on how to deal with the sudden "infinite" number of humans. While I may want to live forever, I would definitely not enjoy that in all circumstances.
Do you think that there's a single "aging" master switch that could be flipped to "off", resulting in zero aging and immortality for everyone forever?
That's beyond optimistic. What's more likely to happen is, we'll uncover some major pathways for aging and find a way to target them to slow aging down somewhat, at first.
People who get anti-aging treatments would live for longer, and would be healthier while they do. The adoption would be gradual, and it'll take a while for them to come down in price and proliferate worldwide - and it would still be up to people to decide whether they want them, although most doctors would recommend they do. The first generations of anti-aging treatments would allow people to live to the age of 100 fairly reliably, and remain healthier and more active while they do. Future generations would improve on that.
There will be no "sudden infinite number of humans" to deal with. Even if we started out tomorrow (for example, if it was confirmed that Ozempic has broad anti-aging effects), it'll take decades for this effect to become noticeable. Humanity can adapt to something like that easily.
Cancer at least has a shared mechanism at the level of human biology.
That’s kind of naive. Plenty of people definitely “try”, billionaires would love to live a few hundred more years. We know how aging occurs, there is degradation in DNA, telomeres shorten, and a bunch of other things. The main problem is that biological life simply can’t undergo overhauls like machines do, and we will probably just solve aging by creating successor beings that can.
Just compare the effort and the investment that goes into fighting aging with what goes into fighting cancer.
You can't rely on billionaires to fix everything for you. The kind of research effort that would be required to make meaningful progress against aging would likely demand hundreds of billions, spent across decades. Few billionaires have the pockets deep enough to bankroll something like this, or the long term vision.
Getting aging recognized as a disease and a therapeutic target, and getting the initial effort on the scale of Human Genome Project would be a good starting point though.
If there was understanding that a drug "against aging" is desirable by the healthcare systems and can get approved, Big Pharma would have a reason to try - as opposed to developing drugs for other things and hopefully stumbling on something that makes progress against aging by an accident.
Bill Gates has enough money for effective longevity research. Longevity research isn't even particularly expensive.
The actual problem is that you would have to do selective breeding and genetic modification of humans the same way we do it with plants and animals. It is primarily an ethical problem.
Not necessarily. We already have drugs that can hit "genetic disease" targets in adults, and we can modify adult genomes to a minor degree.
Sure, it would be nigh impossible to do something like cram "genetic resistance to cancer" into a grown adult with current day tech, but there are other surfaces to attack in longevity.
Global investment in cancer research (not treatment) between 2016 and 2020 came in just under $25 billion [1]. That means someone like Elon could have financed basically all cancer research around the globe for a decade. Instead he bought twitter. And remember that the Forbes billionaires are not the most wealthy people in the world. They are just the ones living in countries with public company accounting. There is a lot of dark money in the Middle East and Russia. So it's not like they can't, it's more that this is still seen as a delusion or megalomania in these circles, since most anti aging research funded by billionaire happens very quitely by comparison. You won't hear them announce it like they do with e.g. malaria.
[1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanonc/article/PIIS1470-2...
That's consistent with what I said, yes.
Two decades of this kind of research spending add up to $100 billion. And most billionaires are closer to $5 billion rich than to $500 billion rich.
It would sure be nice to have an infinite money glitch billionaire who cares a lot about funding anti-aging research and lobbying for anti-aging efforts, the way Musk cares about space exploration and trolling people online. We're lucky that at least some neglected fields get billionaire attention like this. But we can't rely on that happening.
The point is if anti-aging didn't have this edgy image in billionaire circles, there would be more than enough money to go around. If everyone agrees that we should get on this like we do certain other diseases, we could certainly tap into a lot of resources.
Given the current state of the NIH, I'm not sure if we are "getting on this" with any diseases right now. I've seen quite a number of my colleagues end up retiring or stopping their research programs all together at a university that has its NIH funding halted for being politically insubordinate.
Trump might get the science out of america, but he won't be able to get rid of science in general. It will just happen elsewhere. Europe is already becoming the center for mRNA vaccine research, and other places with less regulation will not sleep on biotech possibilities either. We just got a malaria vaccine that is not perfect, but good enough for Africa and about to be actively deployed in endangered areas, potentially saving hundreds of thousands of lives every year. It took decades and cost hundreds of millions of dollars, but people like Bill Gates fronted most of the bill. There's no reason to think that science couldn't attack aging disease with the same ferocity if someone foots the bill.
Seems more like billionaires spending money on trying to live forever has an edgy image in non-billionaire cycles. Sure, maybe Gates and Buffet really aren't that interested in living forever, but the likes of Thiel and Musk aren't exactly noted for techno-pessimism or caring whether the average normie thinks they and some of their investments are creepy, and they absolutely have the dealflow and the connections to evaluate any promising life extension ideas. If they're still spending more on stuff like 140 characters, maybe the low hanging fruit just aren't that low
Thiel put a couple of million in some edgy stuff with little to show for. It is nothing compared to the order of magnitude that Gates invested in malaria.
Well yeah, that's my point. He's the exact opposite of the scenario you suggest, someone who's so committed to promoting the idea of life extension he'll chuck a couple of million at woo merchants in the space purely for signalling purposes, someone who go on podcasts talking about the compatibility of "ending death" with Christianity and has a personal life extension regime, but when it comes down to actually putting significant capital down towards near term life extension, he doesn't see the opportunity. It's not because he doesn't want to look edgy, it's because he doesn't believe what he's being pitched is going to deliver on useful timelines.
I don't think there would be "enough money" just from that, but I agree that it would sure help.
It's why I stress that aging should be recognized as a disease. If we had the likes of WHO and FDA in agreement that aging is unwanted and treating aging is desirable, even if it can't be done yet, it would shift the perception considerably.
It would make it easier for billionaires to contribute to anti-aging research as a philanthropic effort - but it would also open many doors in terms of research funding and corporate investment.
This would require extreme amounts of embryo selection and getting results will require multiple generations, nothing in your lifetime.
The biggest bottleneck is that humans evolved to have children in their 20s. After that age, the old compete with the young for resources, so there is no evolutionary incentive for humans to live indefinitely.
Aging past fertility is like momentum in stochastic gradient descent.
I'm sure there are longevity gains that can be attained with embryo selection or direct embryo genetic editing. Might even be some low-hanging fruit there. But I see no reason to believe this to be the only possible source of longevity gains.
Sure, the evolution may oppose longevity, but evolution can go eat shit and die. It still works on humans, but it works too slowly to be able to do too much - we can't rely on it to fix our problems, but it also wouldn't put up this much of a fight if we fixed our problems on our own.
The assumption that everything can be “fixed” is one I will never understand. It’s so obvious when studying organisms in all their shapes and forms how everything is a tradeoff, and nothing can be stable. The fundamental truth of the universe is change.
Senescence is a tradeoff to ward against cancer earlier in life. Eventually it will lead to cancer as a side effect, but optimally something else has failed before then. You can’t patch it out completely without breaking something else.
This is a catch-all dismissal that you could make about any medical innovation throughout history. There are a lot of things we can fix, and we’ve had a lot of success so far in doing so.
It’s not. We never fix anything in medicine: We treat and prevent. Removing the appendix prevents or treats acute appendicitis, but it also has a tradeoff in terms of removing a gut biome reservoir.
This isn’t me dismissing the incredible improvements to our way of life modern medicine has brought. In essence it’s given everyone access to the same potential standard of living as was reserved for kings and nobility in the past — and then some.
But you can’t fully fix aging. You can’t infinitely improve standard of living.
I'm a resident doctor and profoundly disagree. And I fail to see how you define words so that "fixing" and "treating" are not at least overlapping, if not similar.
Not if you throw your hands up and never try!
Aging isn't even recognized as a disease yet, and it well should be. Once it gets at least the same kind of focus cancer or heart disease does now? Then we'll talk about how it's "impossible to fix".
That’s a naive take on what senescence is. Look it up. You can stop it, but be prepared to then have to figure out how to deal with all the side effects it prevents. And then you can fix those but be prepared to deal with those side effects. And so on. My point isn’t to stop researching and understanding and even treating, but it’s that life is a balance of tradeoffs. Looking at it as if energy is a universal currency that can be traded for every other function is a fundamental misinterpretation of everything we understand about biology.
There is no physical or biological constraint that says "senescence absolutely has to happen".
In some species, it doesn't seem to happen at all. In others, it happens extremely slowly. Clearly, there are massive longevity gains left on the table - ones we'll never pick up if we keep whining about "life" being "a balance of tradeoffs".
And in those species there's other constraints that weigh up for it. I'm not sure which ones you're thinking of, but in every single one I know of there's other tradeoffs. And if there's some without them, I'm pretty sure we just haven't discovered them yet.
I find it peculiar that you interpret my statements as "whining". I specifically wrote:
> My point isn’t to stop researching and understanding and even treating, but it’s that life is a balance of tradeoffs
What's whiny about that? Modern medicine has for a while been in a position of treating symptoms of symptoms of symptoms, often of its own making. That doesn't mean we should stop treating symptoms! But it means we have to look at the bigger picture and stop thinking everything is a "problem" to be "fixed", and work harder to understand why things work the way they do, and what the costs of altering them truly are. Sometimes fixing one thing isn't worth the tradeoffs in other areas.
There is no "fairness enforcement" in life, and biology is no exception. The closest we get is conservation laws, and those do not forbid living healthily well into your 500s.
You're out looking for "tradeoffs" that may not be there, or may not be worth caring about. There is no "balance of tradeoffs" in everything. There isn't an Authority on Biology that says "if you get good X then you must take bad Y to keep things fair for everyone". There are just shitty local minima you get stuck in unless you manage to climb your way out.
Do you want to get 50% less cancer, or to live to 120? The answer is "yes". You can have both. Nothing forbids you from having both. Is it easy to get both? No. It's not easy to get even one of those. But nature barely even tried. Humans can do better than that.
> But nature barely even tried. Humans can do better than that.
~3.8 billion years of evolution "barely even tried"? There's hubris and then there's _hubris_. But to repeat myself: I am not saying we shouldn't try. I'm saying we should expect no free lunch, and that the concept of tradeoffs for every alteration is a much healthier mental framework to work off of because _so far_ that's been the one consistent truth in all of biology.
If you think evolution was optimising for longevity, then you really haven't thought it through.
For 3.8 billion years, organisms just needed to survive long enough to reproduce. Cancer, heart disease, and other age-related diseases only became significant killers in the last few hundred years. That's nowhere near enough time for evolution to address them. And even then, age-related diseases don't directly influence people's chance of reproducing and passing on their genes.
Conversely, evolution has had millions of years to work on fighting infectious diseases, which have been bigger killers for most of our history.
And evolution eventually led to mammals with complex brain plasticity and an almost _unreasonably_ long and fragile childhood that allowed in-generation transmission of lessons and knowledge bypassing the traditional, heavily trial and error -based approach of just gene transmission and instinctual knowledge.
I think evolution did a damn fine job. And yes there's surely more we don't know than we know or understand, which might change the future just as much as bacteriology has, but let's also be humble and learn from what came before. Both things are possible.
And tell me - for those "~3.8 billion years of evolution", what was the optimization target?
What was natural selection selecting for, exactly? Longevity? Happiness? Quality of life?
Hahahahaha hahaha hahah ha no.
There is no "fairness" in biology, and natural selection isn't your friend. It's aligned with your interests sometimes - but if evolution could make humans reproduce much more effectively by making them live half as long and ten times as miserable? It would. There's just one primary metric that evolution cares about, and it totally would throw your well-being under the bus for it.
Evolution doesn't care much about whether humans live long and happy lives. Only humans themselves care about that. There are a lot of optimizations possible there, and humans have to be the ones to find them.
Aging is a disease in the same way children are parasites. Fix one, fix the other.
What is your end goal with this opinion? Just getting everyone to stop looking, because "you can't"?
It's okay if you want to die, but I think I draw the line at demanding others want it too.
Everything can be fixed. There are just things we figured out how to fix, and ones we didn't yet.
The only real, fully enforced tradeoff is "energy is always required to keep the lights on". And it's not like humans are strapped for energy.
Aren't there already large long-living animals like elephants that basically don't get cancer?
Their average life expectancy is around 70 years, and yes, cancer is rarer in elephants, potentially due to the species having extra copies of the TP53 gene.
Cancer is also a result of many other factors of which humans are more exposed to than elephants typically are, environmental and pollution being a major one, and food ingredients being another. A life expectancy of 70 years for a human isn't that great; in 2024 in Europe it was 79 years for males and 84 years for women, and that's with all the contributing cancer risk factors in society as mentioned earlier.
A more interesting species might be immortal jellyfish, but the simplicity of the organism might be a contributing factor in why it works the way it does.
The only reason aging can’t be reversed is because we don’t know how to do it, but that doesn’t mean that it is inherently impossible to achieve. The only things that are impossible to do are the ones that break the laws of physics.
Okay, sure. But it seems reasonable to expect we can keep improving the tradeoffs.
In other words, 7 bits is still sufficient to hold the age of a human.
I like my structs packed and my lifetimes finite.
Genetics required. Natural evolution has zero interest in old people, so there has been no evolutionary pressure to extend lifespan. Possibly even the opposite.
We could apply that pressure, either through selective breeding over generations, or through direct genetic modification. Maybe we aren't quite there yet, but it won't be long.
Experiments on insects with selective breeding have easily tripled lifespans. How well that would transfer to mammals is hard to say, but a substantial increase is certainly possible.
Mick Jagger had his most recent son at the age of 73. Today, that's an anomaly, but historically, older men fathering children was not at all uncommon (73 would probably be an outlier, but successful men were fathering children well past the age when women can no longer bear children). That would exert significant evolutionary pressure for men to have longer lifespans.
Watch out for news such as Jagger's , Bernie Ecclestone etc.
We never know if it's their or not.
Famous people are just people who are famous and while the prenup rates are high, people who actually do the DNA test for paternity purposes are low as they are in the general population
In modern society there is little evolutionary pressure to extend lifespan, but that's a very recent phenomenon. If my parents watch my kids and do the cooking so I have more time to hunt or work the field that improves the survival chances of my children, and my children share 25% of their DNA with their grandparents. The grandparents living a long productive life is good for the survival of their grandchildren, and thus for the reproduction of their DNA, causing evolutionary pressure. It's mostly the unproductive years (dementia, debilitating illness, severely limited mobility) that are a detriment.
You could argue the same forces are still at play at societal levels. People around the age of 50 have a vast economic impact, having accumulated experience and relationships over many decades. And the average age of soldiers in Ukraine is somewhere around 40-45. If one country had a population that stayed at the mental and physical fitness of a 50 year old for another 20 years that would be a drastic advantage, both in terms of skilled workforce and in terms of military capability. Even just another 5 productive years are a big deal in a world where the time you spend productively working is about twice the time you spend "growing up" and getting an education. And my nation doing well means my children can afford more children, spreading my DNA, making it favored by evolution
Not an expert by any stretch of imagination. But it seems to be that not only is there almost no selection pressure on increasing lifespan, bc of medical advances in healthcare there's also less evolutionary pressure on reducing diseases and infertility (i guess there should still be substantial health related evolutionary pressure from sexual selection) in modern society. Why shouldn't we expect long term deterioration of fitness of genome similar to the deer in Yellowstone before reintroduction of wolves?
Sure, but your average 50-year-old already had their children. They have passed on their genetics, good or bad. No evolutionary pressure.
The life-span extension experiments I have read about specifically only allowed older adult insects to reproduce, pushing that age later and later. Adults that died early did not reproduce. Massive evolutionary pressure.
I find it a tough sell to add another 20 years to life expectancy, considering that by the time you reach 70, most people are already in decline (some worse than others), and the drop from 70 to 80 tends to be steep for many. Those who make it past 80 into their 90s or even 100s often aren’t living particularly fulfilling lives, if you can even call it living at that point.
Losing your vision, your hearing, your mobility, and worst of all, your mind, doesn’t sound very appealing to me.
So unless we find a way to both live longer and to decliner slower, I just don't see the point for the majority of people who will unfortunately live lonely worse lives.
My own observation is that a lot of decline happens because people stop living and start coasting to the grave, and that can happen decades earlier than 70.
My great-grandfather was physically very active into his 90s, still running his businesses, working in his orchards, and generally being surprisingly productive. He was mentally sharp too; I remember him teaching me about the physics of vacuum energy at length. Seemed like he could go on indefinitely. Then his wife died and he died less than a year later.
I always have him as my model for what I want to be like when I am old. He was still in the game until he wasn’t.
I think this is a huge misconception and I don't think it works this way. have you heard people say 50 is the new 40, etc.? The same thing would work at older ages. Sure the last 10 years are a decline, but you are pushing those years out not adding more of them.
This. Expecting a "150 years lifespan" to look like "90 years of aging normally and then staying at 90 for another 60 years" is simply unrealistic.
The very reason you're expected to die in your 90s is that your body has decayed into a complete mess where nothing works properly anymore and every single capability reserve is at depletion. You die in old age because if you spend long enough at "one sliver away from the breaking point", statistics make going over it inevitable. Even a flu is a mild inconvenience to the young, but often lethal to the elderly.
To make it to the age of 150, you'd pretty much have to spend a lot more time as a healthy, well functioning adult.
It really depends on how you live your life. My grandfather on my dad's side never drank or smoked, got a ton of exercise, avoided candy etc. he's in his 80s and still lives in a detached house and walks his two very large dogs daily. My grandmother on my mom's side smoked multiple packs of cigarettes a day, drank a ton of sugary soda, rarely got any real exercise, and died in her 50s after a number of very rough years.
Everyone keeps talking about health care but IMO it's really downstream of you attending yourself. It's almost a spiritual thing really. American health is so bad because Americans don't feel like they themselves are worth taking care of. The contrast between the people who disagree here gets extreme as they age.
Exactly. I'm the youngest in my family many aunts and uncles are already dead. those who still live are in a huge decline or completely lonely (sometimes both). Mom is in her late 70s and is in good shape, but she complains a lot about loneliness (even though I and my brothers visit her almost daily for a coffee or lunch). I think the joy of living ends with people around you dying.
Wouldn't the people around you also benefit from these advances so in theory they wouldn't be dead in this scenario?
in theory yes, but in practice will the majority of people get the benefits?
We still don't have any 80+ year olds who have been striving for longevity since their 20s. Nutrition labels and ingredient lists on food didn't even exist the 90s. An 80 year old was born into a world of nonstop cigarettes, drinking while pregnant, etc.
So our current obsession with longevity through fitness and nutrition is new and we can't really tell what someone like Bryan Johnson will be like at 80. If he is significantly declined in 20 years despite his rigorous longevity routine then we will know.
> I find it a tough sell to add another 20 years to life expectancy
20 years would be difficult, but 10 or so years would be very attainable.
The president of the United States is almost 80. Bernie Sanders is 83. The Stones are still touring, …
Ed Thorpe is well into his 90s. Here’s an interview with him at 89. Seems quite healthy: https://youtu.be/CNvz91Jyzbg?si=VNj61A256ZOBM977
This 10 minutes deals directly with fitness and longevity: https://youtu.be/dzCpUbkC1dg?si=LqV-tUFyxyYMW0qC
Mentioning the president is a bit like saying the pope is old. They are both selected/elected old.
I don’t care at all about the pope; they’re meaningless entities.
The President, however, especially when Congress is forced to toe their line, is. No president should be permitted to be more than 20 years older than the median age of the general population when they’re done leading the country. In this case, they shouldn’t be more than 58y old when their 8y term is up. This way, they and their progeny need to live with the decisions made for at least ~20y after they’re out of office.
There’s a reason there is forced retirement in some industries and government groups. Why the fuck we don’t enforce similar rules on the president I’ll never know.
> There’s a reason there is forced retirement in some industries and government groups. Why the fuck we don’t enforce similar rules on the president I’ll never know.
Yep, I am not a big fan of our military policy, but I have a friend who recently retired as an Army LTC.
At his level there are standard procedures - at each rank you have a timeframe, and the rule is "promote or retire". Precisely to ensure you don't break the assembly line.
Even in software. "We don't hire mid level/junior/associate engineers, only senior/staff". No pipeline can hurt. Yeah, you can hire for all that, but there's value of having junior staff within, when you promote those staff level folks to EMs and Directors.
Yeah, I’m just being lazy because I’ve answered this question many times.
Here’s one from 3 years ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34985088
You can always ask the AI:
Politics & World Leaders • Nelson Mandela (1918–2013) – Former President of South Africa, died at 95. • George H. W. Bush (1924–2018) – 41st U.S. President, died at 94. • Jimmy Carter (1924– ) – 39th U.S. President, currently 100 (as of 2024). • Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother (1900–2002) – Died at 101. • Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh (1921–2021) – Died at 99.
Arts & Entertainment • Kirk Douglas (1916–2020) – Actor, died at 103. • Olivia de Havilland (1916–2020) – Actress, died at 104. • Betty White (1922–2021) – Actress/comedian, died at 99. • Norman Lear (1922–2023) – Television writer/producer, died at 101. • Tony Bennett (1926–2023) – Singer, died at 96.
Science & Literature • Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) – Philosopher, died at 97. • Rita Levi-Montalcini (1909–2012) – Nobel Prize–winning neurologist, died at 103. • Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) – Architect, lived to 91. • Maya Angelou (1928–2014) – Poet and author, died at 86 (not 90s, but close). • Isaac Asimov (1920–1992) – Science fiction author, died at 72 (not 90s).
Business & Other Notables • David Rockefeller (1915–2017) – Banker/philanthropist, died at 101. • John D. Rockefeller (1839–1937) – Oil magnate, died at 97. • Iris Apfel (1921–2024) – Fashion icon, died at 102.
The powerball lottery is the greatest investment you can make also if you happen to win.
You have no point.
People thought the President had died just yesterday because of how rapidly his health has declined since taking office in January. Bernie Sanders, for example, has had multiple health emergencies over the past few years.
Using a few famous people as examples is hardly a reliable metric. My aunt is still alive at 103 and will likely make it to 104 if nothing changes. She has fewer health problems than other family members in their 60s if you discount the fact that she’s basically blind, can't hear well, is stuck in a bed 24/7, and has severe dementia that prevents her from recalling things seconds after being told, aside from some specific memories from her youth. Meanwhile, almost all of her children died under very poor health conditions in their 70s and 80s. Her oldest daughter looked like she was a corpse at 80.
Some people just get lucky with their genes, and it doesn’t always pass on to their children or grand-children.
PS: For reference, she had 11 children, almost all dead now while she's alive and can't recall their names or ever having children.
I’m not sure what we’re arguing here.
I responded to someone who said that people in their 70s are already in decline.
How many good years after 70 did she have?
A few weeks ago, I had lunch with a friend and his 80-year-old wife. I would’ve never guessed she was 80.
Humans can't grasp the actual possible future with radical lif extension. They like to be contrarians and talk trash on outlandish science fiction like breakthroughs. It's not everyone's cup to understand the limits of science and usually journalists and old scientists are pretty bad at projecting.
I don’t want to be that guy but isn’t this kind of an obvious result? The main claim is that life expectancy improvements in the past century are mostly due to decreases in childhood mortality.
During the Roman period, the average life expectancy was only 22-25 years old because so many babies were dying prematurely.
If you could make it past the age of 10, then you were expected to make it to about 50, which almost doubles life expectancy.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_the_Roman_Empi...
There were also major gains in things like access to clean water, general safety from the perils of war (which often drives famines, etc), and so on. If one only looked at e.g. Roman aristocracy (which essentially controls for these sort of variables) then their life expectancy would likely be similar to our own. This exact study was carried out on the Ancient Greeks [1], even prior to the Romans, and found a life expectancy of 72 years. [1]
And while I know some will contest the source, while intentionally conflating the mystical with the historical, even the Bible hits on the average age of man: "The days of our lives are seventy years; And if by reason of strength they are eighty years, Yet their boast is only labor and sorrow; For it is soon cut off, and we fly away."
Notably that is in Psalms, Old Testament, and so it was like written over the time frame of 400-1400BC. And I think it's fairly self evident that that segment was written in the context of plain historical observation with no mysticism implied or stated. Basically life expectancy once you leave childhood, let alone peak longevity, hasn't changed all that much over thousands of years.
[1] - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18359748/
I think antibiotics also have a lot to do with the initial gains.
That's 100% on the mark. Infants aren't dying anymore.
Real longevity is hard science and we're still at the punch card phase of biology.
Wake me up when we can make headless, full body monoclonal donors for human head transplants. Antigen free / HLA neutral so immunosuppressants are a thing of the past. That'll cure every cancer except brain and blood, cure every other injury, and increase health span of everything but the brain.
The tough problems:
- religious ick and luddite ick
- artificial gestation
- deactivating the brain stem without impacting development
- keeping the body physiologically active and developmentally normative
- head transplants that preserve spinal cord function
- lots of other ancillary issues with changes to pulmonary and immune flux.
Won't happen for broadly the same kind of reasons interstellar travel won't happen.
Lab-grown organs is doable, but the brain and spinal column just aren't modular in that way.
In-place system renovation and targeted replacement is a more likely way to yield results.
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Most longevity supplements and drugs work by pulling biological processes to baseline
That's all they do
So for someone sitting around 24/7 maybe vaguely helpful
For someone active, they defeat stress adaptations, so your "gains" disappear or never happen in the first place
They also do nothing for disease, they may help avoid some disease but once the disease is in progress, they can't cure anything
There's going to have to be a "next gen" of such drugs, years if not decades away
The next-gen will probably deal with mitochondria function, enhancing and restoring/rebooting dysfunction, which actually might cure some disease
So hopefully investment will continue towards "next gen", it's a very long road
This looks pretty trivial. Obviously modern gains in life expectancy were from removing things that killed us in early age. This says nothing about future gains in life expectancy which may come from biological/medical interventions that reduce senescence.
Life extension will happen. It’s really just a matter of time with the upper bound being no later than a century from now in my opinion.
There are plenty of longevity things and new meds still being researched. Living longer is possible and there are a fair number of people who make it to 100 all things considered. However, life expectancy reaching 100 does seem unlikely to me. With the issues of drugs and obesity being rampant in many parts of the population, what can we expect?
I wonder if as a species we can ever get more comfortable with death. We’re built not to be I realize, and we should never be for those that are young but I feel like we should be ok with living 80ish or more years and then clocking out. That being said, I’m not cool with the idea of dying when good, but when I’m in a major depressive episode, the idea of immortality is terrifying.
For me, the sad part about dying isn’t the loss of agency in the world as much as missing the rest of the movie. At 43 I already feel like I’ve mostly realized my potential and I’m just here to raise my kids and then I become a burden. But I really want to know what happens next!
In Hollywood, they have 12 types of scenarios. Choose your type of life. Tragedy? Love story? Adventure? Becoming someone? Life is too short to experience all scenarios that is why we want live longer…
After 60 life sucks. Not always but very often.
So we should use Tim Urban's life-week calendar to being aware how little time we have and not waste it.
Immortality is a long time to waste on shit that don't matters.
Your never done raising your kids regardless of how old they are.
You're never "done" but at some point you have to stop. For your sake and theirs.
so if i had kids that would mean planning to maintain a decades old Minecraft server to play with them?
If you're very fortunate, yes.
> I feel like we should be ok with living 80ish or more years and then clocking out.
Some people would very much prefer if their consciousness wouldn't have an end date, after which they'll never experience or think anything and will just cease to exist.
Maybe, but I feel like most would eventually reach same conclusion as the (majority of) protagonists in the good place…
Perhaps!
Though it would be nice if they had the option of choosing that for themselves, instead of being told that they don't really want long lives and that they should kneel before biology. Whether they're content with 100 years or 100'000 years, that should be up to them.
Or, as others pointed out, if at least whatever amount they're gonna be around for was more dignified and they had a better quality of life, instead of their bodies slowly wasting away.
That's just terror management of death.[1] That's why we say things like "death gives life meaning".
Utter bollocks.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terror_management_theory
There's no reason to be terrified of death.
We did that, it’s only the Western consumerist society that started getting scared to the Moon and back when it comes to dying, you can see it in one of the comments above where another commenter sees life as a movie that needs to be consumed as long as possible. Really bleak.
> I wonder if as a species we can ever get more comfortable with death.
Psychedelics for everyone!
https://hms.harvard.edu/news/how-psychedelic-drugs-can-help-...
https://www.vice.com/en/article/taking-psychedelics-helps-pe...
It's not our species, it's our culture. Anxiety over death leads to consumption, so it's a consumer society's virtue.
You're not dreaming big enough.
"Accept death, it's beautiful" is cope. It's not beautiful. It's suboptimal horror.
I find it offensive that so many "universe experiencing itself" entities willingly accept a return to dust. Our sun dies, and with it everything on this planet will become metal inclusions in a decaying solar body. You know what doesn't matter in light of that? All other perspectives. Every other conception of death and meaning tends to zero.
I accept death personally. It's 99.9999manynines likely. But I would love to spend my limited energy trying to conquer it or to push forward the societal envelope. Something from earth should conquer the vastness of spacetime and physics.
It's not like how any of us spends our time matters anyway. We're all already dead, geologically timespan speaking.
And who knows. Maybe the gods of the future will reverse simulate the light cone down to your femtosecond neurotransmitter flux. Maybe that's you right now. And maybe they'll pull you forward into an eternity of bliss instead of a read-only memory or sadistic eternal hell simulation. But probably none of those things given how more likely we are to accept doom.
>Something from earth should conquer the vastness of spacetime and physics.
I hear this claim often, but I never hear any particular reason for why it's so important compared to e.g. letting Alpha Centauri colonize where the lightcones overlap.
There no one on Alpha Centauri
You are not alone in this. Though I would say it is absolute horror, not just suboptimal one.
Practically speaking, I have no idea what I _personally_ can do except of accepting the inevitable.
Consider that some people have gotten past it, and that it's not a "cope". Enlightenment is real even if it horrifies you because you aren't there yet.
I've visited that space before. Its greatest tragedy isn't the ideas it births, but how seductive the nihilism becomes. You recognize its smallness once you've outgrown it.
If it's nihilism, it's not enlightenment! There is still/more meaning in impermanence.
Sure if it helps you sleep at night, but it also leads to a lot of unhealthy behaviors such as drinking, smoking, and not taking care of yourself.
Enlightenment is cope. It's literally coping so hard you enjoy the cope itself.
In my experience (with both my age peers and people a generation older) as a 52 year old most people who aren't sociopathic narcissists just naturally get more comfortable with the idea of their own death with age.
Not like they long for it or whatever, but anxiety about it goes down, acceptance of it goes up.
"Get comfortable with death" is the mortal cope.
We should get less comfortable with death, and we should attack the problem until it's solved.
That's the logic of a cancer cell.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immortalised_cell_line
If cancer cells can pull it off, then why not humans? Clearly, there are no "laws of biology" that would forbid it.
Because a cancer cell pulls it off by sacrificing all of the cell's useful functions, resulting in the destruction of the host organism as well as the death of the cell itself.
And? How does that apply in any way, fashion or form to making humans biologically immortal?
The "law of biology" at play here is tradeoffs. Aging is not single disease, but an accumulation of error states and maladaptations which arise in a thermodynamically unstable system of high complexity, existing in an even more dynamic environment, likely due to the inescapable mathematics of chaotic systems.
In the N-dimensional gradient from homeostasis to oblivion, N is high enough and the ground shakes often enough that it is not statistically feasible for there to be local minima. Only saddles, in one dimension or another other.
Cells from cancerous tumors do not prove biological immortality is technologically viable for humans, nor do hydras nor Greenland sharks, because the tradeoffs they have to make in order to obtain "immortality" (in only a very technical sense) would be wholly unworkable for the complexity and the experience of a human, as well as extremely destructive to human society.
Just think about this for a moment. "Cells from deadly tumors full of mutant hair and teeth refuse to die (until they kill their entire environment), therefore humans can be immortal?" Really? That's the argument you're going with?
People have been trying to explain this to you through this entire thread. But despite leaving 22 comments, you seem impervious to it. Personally, I think we should strive to be less like cancers, not more.
Tradeoffs aren't real. Your human brain expects them to be, but they aren't. Life isn't fair, and you can get all downsides with no upsides, or the other way around.
There is no Authority on Biology that says "if you want good X, you'll have to take bad Y to keep things fair for everyone". It's just hard to get "good X, good Y, good Z" at once, and nature never really tried. That's up to us then.
That little "cancer" metaphor of yours is a worthless fluff piece meant to make you feel better about dying a protracted, miserable death before you hit the age of 100.
Personally, I think we should be coping less, and doing more about the problems we're facing - of which aging is one.
> Tradeoffs aren't real. Your human brain expects them to be, but they aren't.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antagonistic_pleiotropy_hypoth...
So… You're just approaching this with, like, zero reference to actual science at all? "My mind imagines I can have eternal life, and therefore I can, and anybody pointing out flaws with my position is worthless miserable fluff"?
Look, I don't like the limits of thermodynamics more than anyone does. But I think it says a lot that there are, you know, actual real diseases that people suffer from and we can make a cost-effective amelioration of with focused effort. And instead you're here raging that we as a society aren't spending billions of dollars trying to make you immortal.
Evolution doesn't care. It's a greedy optimizer that loves its local minima. If it happens to optimize for things like quality of life, it's incidental. Humans can do better than that.
I'm baffled by your desire to defend the status quo that involves you and everyone you love dying a long and miserable death before the age of 100. Even more so with the amount of "actual real diseases" that loop back around to aging.
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People have been conditioned to think in exponential growth.
Some generations ago that was likely also a reasonable approximation.
But with the hyper growth we see today, it becomes ever clear that we always work with sigmoidal growth.
We can see that because more an more system are in the latter half of the sigmoid.
The article doesn't make sense to me. They mention 1900-1938 life expectancy rose by ~5 months per generation. And then say it grew from 62 years to 80. Does that mean each generation is ~2-3 years? What unit of measurement is that supposed to be?
Then for 1938-2000 they say it's 2.5 months per generation. If generation is 2-3 years we should already be at 100 year expectancy.
Also having 1900-1938 and 1938-2000 as the only points in time seem meaningless. Does the entire 1938-2000 have a single graident? What's the slope here?
They also mention that the main advancement in 1900-1938 is infant mortality. Which is really uninteresting for the old age.
I admire the human belief that the improvement of technology and our living standards will be infinite. It will be a bitter moment if we finally realize the plateau we've been stuck on is not temporary and all future gains will be marginal.
This realisation is by definition wrong, or coincidence. You can’t know the future, so you’ll never know whether something will eventually come around and change everything.
I think this is a great point. It's not a robust counter-point, but Gödel's incompleteness theorems come to mind. We do know there are limitations to formal systems, we think there may be limitations to computational complexity. Maybe we haven't developed the tool set to make similar claims about biology (or maybe such tools cannot exist) or technology in the abstract. But these may also come in the future.
Fair enough. If we reach a point where we’ve discovered all fundamental truths of the universe and no more knowledge is helping towards solutions we need, then yes, that may imply awareness of the plateau; I’ll give you that. It also seems fantastically far away, so much so that it seems an exercise in futility to speculate about it.
We didn't need to discover every mathematical truth to discover that there are limits to what we can mathematically prove. Nor did we need to discover every algorithm to know that we can't determine if a program will halt. Both of these have helped understand where plateaus exist in their respective domains. We don't need to enumerate every truth to understand that there are some things we cannot do.
Its so far away, in fact, considering that we cannot even observe most of the universe, or even have a fully coherent notion of what the universe is.
Natural one maybe.
Humans are biological machines. We know how to replace hearts with artificial ones that can last years. Soon they may start lasting decades.
We can replace many hormones with artificial ones.
I do not see any reason we can’t learn how to replace other organs and systems.
And in this case you may as well live 200+ years
And it even might be a rather short (in length, not height) peak we won't ever reach again. Nowadays I don't see a single reason to believe that children won't be put back to work in western societies in 200 years, unless massive hypothetical innovations are made to replace depleting oil and keep the very high productivity per capita we've been enjoying for decades.
How can you think this in a world where AI is making miracles happen?
Which miracles has it enabled yet other than human-sounding chatbots and humongous capital investment sums?
> llms are somewhat good at some things hence immortality is around the corner
Idk if we should study age as a disease but we surely should study the delusions of techno solutionists
Longevity in misery can be a form of cruelty in itself...
Someday, I don't think synthetic intelligence will escape this facet of existence. After 84 humans call it the forth age, and things tend to stop getting better for ones quality of life. =3
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Have_No_Mouth,_and_I_Must_Sc...
My understanding was that life expectancy has been declining for like a while, not merely slowing in gains -- first because of opioids and then because of COVID.
Edit: In the U.S. that is.
>life expectancy has been declining
Only in the US whereas the OP "analyzed life expectancy for 23 high-income and low-mortality countries".
There is no physical/chemical/biological reason you can’t live indefinitely with the health and vitality of a 25-35 year old. Aging isn’t a law of nature.
You haven’t quite come to grips with mortality, I think.
I think OP is not entirely incorrect. Reproductive cells undergo processes like epigenetic reprogramming, which basically strips away many of the chemical marks (like DNA methylation patterns) that accumulate with age. That’s one of the reasons babies don’t start with the cellular age of their parents. Researchers can take adult cells, reprogram them back to an embryonic like state using Yamanaka factors (a set of four genes) effectively erasing their biological age.
I think scientists currently are testing ways to "partially" reprogram cells to make them younger while keeping their function. Early studies in mice have shown some reversal of aging signs.
Seems like an engineering problem more than an absolute limitation.
DNA damage inevitably accumulates. The big reason children are younger than their parents DNA wise is because the parents' DNA undergo random recombination to create something that is the mixture of the two.
This doesn't help overall. Mixing two roughly equally broken things just yields the mean of the two. But the trick is that roughly 60 to 70% of conceptions will not survive to birth. This rejection sampling is ultimately what makes children younger.
If you had a population of single cells that didn't undergo this rejection sampling at some point, entropy and Muller's ratchet would actually age the entire population and kill it.
You are right that DNA damage inevitably accumulates and that selection (including miscarriages) weeds out embryos with severe defects but that doesn’t fully explain why a newborn’s biological age is near zero.
What scientists usually mean by "cellular age" isn’t mutation load, it’s the epigenetic and functional state of cells. During gametogenesis and early embryonic development DNA undergoes extensive repair, telomere maintenance and global epigenetic reprogramming that wipes and rewrites methylation patterns. This resets the cellular "clock" even though some mutations are passed on.
So while mutation load drifts slightly each generation, the reason babies start biologically young is this large scale reprogramming. That’s also why researchers are trying to mimic this process in adult cells (Yamanaka factors etc) to reverse aspects of aging.
Fully agree! I don't think life is much more than a sort of chemical engineering, "designed" with the "purpose" of self-replication. Our engineer, natural selection, didn't have "healthspan" in mind; insofar as we are human-making machines, we're pretty well built. I fail to see any reason that necessarily precludes a retooling of our internal machinery to accomplish our desires, not nature's.
More over, babies can clearly grow from limited cells to "young" versions of fully differentiated human tissues. Which means from some initial stock, you can replace the vast majority of the bodies cells with younger versions - i.e. with plausible, attainable technology we would generally expect to be able to grow immunologically identical replacement organs and major tissues. That definitely is an engineering problem, more then anything else.
The only truly troubling one is the brain, and we're very much not sure if it actually is one or for example, suffers degradation from the degradation of the body its attached to - likely both - but we also know that the brain is not a static structure, and so replacement or rejuvenation of key systems would definitely be possible (certainly finding any way to protect the small blood vessels in the brain would greatly help with dementia).
Social shaming is a big way humans deal with unchangeable things. They impose a cost for anyone expressing a desire for that thing to be different.
And it makes sense, really. You can't have a functioning society if everyone is running around freaking out about death all the time.
But we're entering a weird time where we might actually be able to add more good years to our lives. One of the steps towards getting there is being a little more okay with people seriously exploring these ideas.
I don't see the point in doing that
If mortality is just a tradition and you're the first to realize you needn't acquiesce, sure.
If not, the point in doing that is the enormous amount of suffering you create while thrashing against an inevitability.
That is not to say you should take naps and wait patiently for death, but it's a line to walk.
> If not, the point in doing that is the enormous amount of suffering you create while thrashing against an inevitability.
This is absurd. Of course mortality is inevitable -- eternity is a very long time -- but working to increase lifespan, prolong one's youth and vigor, and delay the inevitable doesn't cause an "enormous amount of suffering" (far less than the diseases of aging cause) and it's unfair to characterize it as "thrashing" when it can be approached in ways which are thoughtful and reasonable.
You aren't wrong. I was replying to a flippant declaration "I don't see the point [in coming to grips with mortality]", which is quite different from your nuanced reply.
I tried to convey that I'm not saying "this is as good as it gets and it's wrong to try for longer life". Your "thoughtful and reasonable" approach was exactly what I had in mind.
What I say leads to suffering arises from denying that mortality is inevitable and tarring those who say otherwise as defeatists. Death is another part of life, as you acknowledged. It unnerves me to see denying that truth cast as a virtue.
> You haven’t quite come to grips with mortality
This is unfair, and akin to branding anyone who takes medicine as being unhinged.
There is evidence we can extend our health spans. By how much and how are open questions. And if we can actually stop aging, versus slow it down, has not been demonstrated. Some people engage with this unhealthily, just as many terminally-ill cancer patients unhealthily engage with long-shot treatment options. That doesn’t make everyone taking those treatments delusional.
I’d hope we more mature as a society than decrying real medical research that could materially increase our health spans because they’re heretical.
It's the 'indefinite' part that I react negatively to. I don't have a good impression of people who are obsessed with abolishing death, as opposed to your example of maximizing quality of life (or minimizing illness) without getting too hung up on overall age.
The person just said aging isn't a law of physics. They are right, you are the fool here.
Actually they said: "Aging isn’t a law of nature." But it kind of is. Almost all biological organisms age and the ones that don't are much simpler than us. That's not to mention entropy which is both a law of physics and dictates an inescapable form of aging for the universe as a whole.
They also said there isn't a physical reason, that is often meant to mean "it isn't a law of physics".
The fact that something happens doesn't mean it's a law of anything. Cars didn't exist before we built them - no law of "no cars". People died of TB before we had a cure - no law of "TB". Same for various types of cancer.
In practice when someone says "live forever", they don't mean to imply they'll live the 10^100 (or whatever the guestimates are) years to the end of the universe. They mean they'll stop aging in the sense that we do now. Maybe we could live to 10,000 or 50,000 or whatever. You can always get hit by a bus, or get some strange disease from a bat, or whatever.
Odd then that every living thing ages and eventually dies?
but we haven't really even tried...
We have been trying since medicine existed. Granted we can see much further now thanks to modern knowledge and tools, but we still can't see far enough to identify the causes or even speculate about actual solutions to aging. For all our technology and medical knowledge, getting somebody to live past 100 is still 95% a mix of genetic lottery and the chance of not developing too serious of cancer until really late.
The vast majority of medical spending is on treatment of illness/problems and always has. Very little money is spent on actually understanding and figuring how to pause aging itself.
This is not true and easily countered by any sort of investigation. Lobsters, flatworms, immortal jellyfish and hydras are all believed to be immortal.
In fact we know how to live forever, control our telomeres. We know it works because cancer exists. We just can’t control it but controlled cancer is effectively immortality.
Cancer is a parasitism that kills the host (or the host dies from other causes and it is not self-sufficient). Just because something is defined by uncontrolled self-replication doesn’t mean it is stable to live forever (Which is as much a comment on homeostasis as self-renewal)
Is it true that those creatures are believed to be immortal or we’ve just never seen one die of natural causes?
[EDIT: Biologically] immortal doesn’t mean indestructible. It just means they don’t age.
Lobsters aren’t truly biologically immortal. They “continue to grow throughout their lives,” with “increasing amounts of energy” being needed to mount ans they grow larger [1]. “Eventually the cost is too high and lobsters can die from exhaustion.” (That said, if our cells aged like lobsters we’d live something like thousands of healthy years.)
For true biological immortality, look to some jellyfish [2]. You literally can’t tell if a cell is taken from an old or juvenile.
[1] https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/are-lobsters-immortal.html
[2] https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/immortal-jellyfish-secret-to-...
> Immortal doesn’t mean indestructible. It just means they don’t age.
Technically “immortal” means “never dying”, it has nothing to do with age. You could be unable to die but continue to age and become ever more decrepit (although the Oxford dictionary does list “never decaying” in its definition), for sure there’s a sci-fi short story about that out there.
The mentioned creatures all age, they do get older, it just so happens their bodies don’t deteriorate, or they do but regenerate.
> Technically “immortal” means “never dying”, it has nothing to do with age
Hence my use of the term biologically immortal.
> mentioned creatures all age, they do get older, it just so happens their bodies don’t deteriorate
Were you really confused that OP was talking about stopping physical time?
> Hence my use of the term biologically immortal.
That’s the second paragraph. I was specifically addressing only the first (the one I quoted). In that one you seem to be saying that “immortal means not aging”. That’s the only part of your post I wanted to address, the rest was very clear.
Got it, thank you. Edited for clarity.
I believe one listed converts back to a polyp form under bad conditions and just has another go.
Lobsters die of old age when they fail to molt, become trapped in their shells, and starve. The lobster body plan does not scale indefinitely. Presumably at a certain point they'd boil in their own metabolic heat.
> Lobsters, flatworms, immortal jellyfish and hydras are all believed to be immortal.
What is the oldest known living individual for each of these species, and for how long are they alive?
> What is the oldest known living individual for each of these species, and for how long are they alive?
For the jellyfish, we don’t know. Their cells are indifferentiable by age and they’re bastards to study, with only one scientist in Kyoto having managed to culture them [1].
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turritopsis_dohrnii
> no physical/chemical/biological reason you can’t live indefinitely with the health and vitality of a 25-35 year old
We don’t know this. We know of no creatures as biologically complex as humans that demonstrate biological immortality. That might be because nature never bothered. It might be because it can’t.
But you are generally correct: we have strong evidence healthspan-increasing interventions are not only possible, but proximate. That research could move faster with more funding, particularly from the public, since if we relinquish this funding to the rich it will not prioritize treatments which may be slightly less effective but much cheaper and thus broadly applicable.
Two points:
(1) Yes we do have an example: us. Why is a baby’s cells young and healthy, and not the age of the parents? Dormant eggs are not the answer as you’d still get accumulating damage over time. Turns out there are mechanisms for cellular reprogramming which rejuvenates cells. There are mechanisms for making ages cells indistinguishable from young cells. We just haven’t fully harnessed this capability on therapeutics yet.
(2) The deeper point is one of logical necessity. No bird flies faster than the speed of sound, yet that doesn’t work as an argument for the impossibility of the SR-71 or Concorde. No physical law prevents restoring tissue to healthy young state. We just haven’t developed the tools to do so (yet).
> No physical law prevents restoring tissue to healthy young state. We just haven’t developed the tools to do so (yet)
You’re speculating too far beyond what we know to speak so definitively. Plenty of biology and even thermodynamics suggests there may be limits. That doesn’t prove they exist. But it’s in the same category as saying there are no know physics which prohibit time travel or transcending the human condition into a state of pure consciousness. Like, sure, there aren’t, but to use your analogy, ancient Romans didn’t know about the speed of light.
The difference between healthy young cells and diseased old cells is no more or less than the difference in configurations of atoms.
Diseased old cells have accumulated damage in a multitude of different forms, as well as accumulated junk. Fix the errors and remove the junk. It is as easy and as hard as that.
Nothing in thermodynamics or organic chemistry prevents this from being possible in principle.
You can't invoke thermodynamics, because thermodynamics doesn't work that way - the Earth is not a closed system. The sun continuously imparts a stupendous amount of energy to the planet, sufficient to allow the entire biosphere to continuously replace itself.
Thermodynamics is not a limit on an intelligent agent reconfiguring atoms on Earth for the next several billion years.
It doesn’t really matter. If you can exist as a 25 year-old, there is some change you can make to your body and cells that will indefinitely preserve that. It may not be within our grasp for maybe even up to another century, but it truly is inevitable.
I'm not saying this isn't possible, as some simple lifeforms seem to be basically immortal but our systems are much more complex and consist of many more moving parts and we are just meat machines. Machines wear out and you have to replace the parts. We're no where near being able to replace all of our parts. So there is a pretty good reason why at least the people currently alive aren't going to see what you're saying come to fruition. Entropy is a bitch.
>There is no physical/chemical/biological reason you can’t live indefinitely
Given that that the universe hasn't an indefinite life span there is at least physical reason why we can't live indefinitely.
Assuming no proton decay, its life span (for baryonic beings such as us) is far beyond 10^1500 years, so I don't think that "lifespan of the universe" is a limiting factor here. Nobody's speaking of living an infinitely long life.
Indefinite doesn’t mean infinite.
When is the universe definitely going to die?
If the if is certain the when doesn’t matter.
How certain could anyone possibly be on this subject? I can agree it likely doesn't matter to us either way.
It out of my wheelhouse but isn't telomeres a physical/chemical/biological reason we can't live forever?
> isn't telomeres a physical/chemical/biological reason we can't live forever?
It’s one component, but not the only reason [1].
Naked mole rats’ telomeres do “not shorten with age but rather showed a mild elongation” [2]. They are long lived, for rodents, and don’t degrade into balls of cancer [3]. They nevertheless age.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senescence#Theories_of_aging
[2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6651551/
[3] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abe0174
I believe the argument would go "there's no fundamental reason we can't fix telomeres".
We need ECC for DNA, I could probably use a deep scrub.
Isn't the reason cancer? Eventually the DNA copying errors add up.
There are a handful of animals, mammals even, that essentially don't get cancer (some/all large whales and naked mole rats IIRC). So that might be solvable other ways.
Nitpick, it is far less likely, but they can still get cancer.
Cancer is not fundamentally unsolvable (AFAIK?). This is a tough question to answer though. Can we prove cancer to be solvable without solving it?
You also fix the copying errors.
But that doesn't mean that it will be economically feasible.
The cost of tech tends to fall as a rule. Why wouldn’t it eventually become feasible?
And I wouldn't expect it to be, given that were are the product of billions of years of an evolutionary process that has relied on 'scrap and rebuild from scratch' as a mechanism to control errors.
Good point. Glad someone pointed this out
Oxygen is on oxidizer and evolution only needed to keep our gene carriers optimized to reproduce within our fitness landscape trough.
Are you watching "Alien: Earth" series?
Interesting claim. Care to state your age?
Why is that relevant.
entropy comes for us all
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Physical/chemical maybe not, but biologically there might be strong reasons to not allow a complex organism to live forever. Evolution might be accounting for a lot of the reasons leading to the death of the individual organism. For one it would stimulate evolution itself and also alleviate the inevitable resource pressure.
A species that lives forever must adjust to reproduce relatively slowly to not overwhelm the local environment. A species that lives short lives will reproduce at much higher rates. So at any time the fewer “immortal” individuals would be vulnerable to competition from the many “mortals”, or to predators.
Humans are a special case because we don’t operate only on biological imperatives so you could make immortal humans but with implications we can’t even think of now. Maybe our limitation will not be biological but societal.
You are mixing up evolutionary incentives with real chemistry-driven biological constraints. The base incentives of reproduction-driven natural selection may make aging inevitable under natural selection, but that says nothing of artificial selection or bioengineering.
> You are mixing up evolutionary incentives with real chemistry-driven biological constraints
> but that says nothing of artificial selection or bioengineering
Feel free to be specific. Start from here and describe your revelation about my “confusion”:
>> Humans are a special case because we don’t operate only on biological imperatives so you could make immortal humans
Natural life o overwhelmingly selects for well defined, limited lifespans. Engineered human life likely won’t see any natural pressure but rather societal pressure to set a well defined, limited lifespan.
There’s a well-known short story called “ The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant” meant to reveal how ridiculous and nonsensical society’s attitude towards death is. You seem to be taking the opinion that the society shown within, in which death is artificial and societally enforced, is ideal and something to emulate.
I truly don’t know how to respond to this. If you want to die on a rigid time table, fine. Don’t take the rest of us out with you.
[0]: The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant: https://nickbostrom.com/papers/the-fable-of-the-dragon-tyran...
That kind of thinking is fuel for the AI accelerationists
But Bilbo Baggins!
And my cat recently had his one hundred eleventieth birthday, based on one cat year = five human years. (He's now about 23.)
Since there's talk of euthanasia: Soylent (green) is now available off-the-shelf (Saw it at Walmart yesterday, in a handy half-gallon container):
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DF54G8F9/
For reference: the movie "Soylent Green" https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070723/
What will happen first, immortal humans, or 100% general purpose desktop computer?
Something to think about, HN.
Depends on the definition for both. Henrietta Lacks and Turing completeness respectively.
The longevity trend is fascinating. It’s mostly fueled by people who hoard money and power and realize they will just lose it all like everyone else when death will inevitably come. This fear has driven men for a long time, but we used to focus on living through memory. So we tried and gain literary and art fame, if coming for poorer backgrounds, or we built mausoleums and palaces that were supposed to outlive us in the centuries.l, if rich and powerful. Now the shallow uncultured tech billionaires just believe their own simplistic mechanistic lies and focus on living longer themselves. The result is there’s nothing trickling down for all the others. This that we have to all endure must be the most inane and distasteful class of rich and powerful people to ever walk the Earth.
I believe this is mostly due to misdirected healthcare efforts.
I think we could get the average life expectancy up to 100 if we did a better job of all the preventative things:
* Prevent airborne disease by having all indoor spaces getting 50 air changes/filters per hour.
* Prevent waterborne disease by having all tap water RO treated in homes, and by heating all shit up to boiling point before it leaves toilets.
* Large scale animal and human trials of every chemical used in daily life to find those things like a pacifier which gives you cancer 60 years later. It is far better to do an 'unethical' trial of a chemical than the current system of just putting it in all products and going bankrupt later.
* Prevent spread of other diseases like the common cold with daily covid-like lateral flow tests for everyone, with the government bringing you food and paying you to stay home if infected with any spreadable disease.
* Work on many more vaccines and give them out for free to the whole world to eliminate more diseases like we did with smallpox (that vaccine has saved around 800 million lives).
* Dramatically reduced effort on individual treatment (cancer, care homes, etc) by putting a 200% tax on healthcare, and funnelling that money into preventative things so the next generation doesn't get the health issues at all.
The main causes of death in the US are literally sloth and gluttony, none of your points adress that. If people wanted to live long the single most effective thing they can do is exercise and eat clean, apparently the vast majority of people simply don't care.
European here. I've been to the US and holy mother of Jesus, you put sooooo much sugar into everything. I had to buy 'European' bread because your normal bread made my gums hurt, and even then that was the sweetest bread I've ever eaten.
Seriously, when your one large oreo shake has 2600 calories, no wonder your obesity rate is 35% and isn't slowing. Driving to the toilet instead of walking also doesn't help. Then your hospitals get overrun with preventable diseases and healthcare gets expensive. This isn't a 'caring' problem when getting fat is the only option for most people, the way most people life is specifically designed to make you obese.
Is this hyperbole or do Americans actually drive rather than walk to toilets? Not being hostile, genuinely curious.
A little hyperbole, but as an American, the idea that the average person in my country would rather drive somewhere rather than feel inconvenienced by a short walk is very accurate.
This sounds like RFK's type of "medicine". The number of people dying from transmissible diseases is a lot less than people dying from heart attacks, cancer, etc. which are linked a lot more to lifestyle than to diseases.
My hypothesis is most heart attacks and cancer are also caused by transmissible diseases, but ones which are mostly symptomless.
We already know the link between cervical cancer and HPV, various cancers are caused by EBV, hepatitis virus often causes liver cancer, herpes virus also causes some cancers.
Plenty of viruses are also linked to a substantially increased risk of heart disease, including the common cold.
I suspect that nearly all cancers are caused by viruses, and are often just viruses that have no other symptoms and might take decades to cause the cancer. If we can stop the transmission of those viruses, cancer rates will eventually drop.
The challenge is how to do that smartly - not having half the population sitting at home twiddling their thumbs because they have some symptomless virus and 'feel fine'.
> daily covid-like lateral flow tests for everyone
How would you prevent people from abusing this system? Covid tests were simple to get to show a positive result, and I know some people who would make this instantly unsustainable.
I'd have the tests not show a simple line, but instead a complex checkerboard pattern you scan with a phone. The scan results would simultaneously test for 100+ diseases, and be uploaded to some department of health server which would then decide if you specifically should be paid to stay home.
That decision can be made based on fraud risk, but also on the benefit to society of that person not spreading that disease further. For example if a disease has already infected most of the town in the last few weeks, it makes no sense for someone to stay home because local immunity is already probably high and further spread unlikely.
However the first case in a new town would 100% be worth staying home for to avoid infecting thousands of others.
I think it’s fine. When I get older I’m more intrigued whether there is an afterlife, whatever it is.
When you have general anesthesia, you experience nothing, not even the vague sense of time passing like when sleeping, it's just an edit in time. You basically don't exist when you're under general anesthesia.
If a little propofol in my brain can make me not exist, I'm pretty sure when I don't even have a brain I will definitely not exist.
Why would they pull you out of the sim if you're not dead? For all we know you need to sleep up on the spaceship too.
Yeah I did have one and it was as you said, an edit in time. However this is after all still different from real death so we will see.
> I’m more intrigued whether there is an afterlife
That’s only intriguing if the answer is “yes”. Otherwise it doesn’t matter.
Yeah the if is where the intriguing is.
There isn’t, you’re just looking for something as your life comes to an end.
Trump administration isn't helping either ...
The only thing life extension will get us is a very powerful class of ancient people that will have ownership of just about everything. The only thing that resets the clock on wealth accumulation under the capitalist system is death. No matter how much of a grifter you are the grim reaper will force you to divide it amongst your heirs. But if that no longer happens and if capital keeps begetting more capital then the end game would be a very sober one for an even larger slice of humanity than it already is.
Interesting story on this theme:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_the_Benefit_of_Mankind
Oh, crap
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bryan johnson has entered the chat
I have this feeling he's going to die way earlier than he would have if he just lived a normal life.
I have the opposite feeling.
I don't, he's using he body like a lab. One of those experiments is likely to go terribly wrong rather than just eating optimally and exercising and crossing your fingers and hoping that you won the genetic lottery.
I mean he's just marketing eating well, sleeping and exercising.. how on earth would that make him die way earlier?
The number of supplements and treatments he’s taking are probably too much, and some are quite experimental. He’s definitely rolling some dice.
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For anyone else who didn’t know the name, you may recall the shredded weirdo in the helmet from 2021: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-06-16/braintree...
Water is wet and internet influencers are going to "influence". Regardless of what happens to him, his Blueprint brand will outlast him.
It is ironic that many of the people obsessed with life extension are also those deeply involved in creating systems that deliberately waste the time we already do have, via addictive algorithms, clickbait content, unnecessary consumerism, etc.
“It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it… Life is long if you know how to use it.”
- Seneca
I was already familiar with Seneca and that quote, but reading it now it sounds condescending. Of course a stoic would say that. Even if we concede that most people “waste” most of life, claiming it is “long enough” and we have a “sufficiently generous amount of it” is just opinion and not something to be prescribed to others. “Long enough” for what? For what Seneca enjoyed, maybe, he had nothing to do and only a fraction of the available world knowledge.
Nowadays one lifetime isn’t even enough to read every book one would find interesting, and reading might be your favourite thing in the world that you do at literally ever opportunity. Long enough… Pft… Seneca clearly wasn’t familiar with the essentially infinite world of fan fiction. He surely would’ve judged it if he had.
Just to drive the point home: The comment is tongue in cheek. I agree with your first paragraph.
There seem to be a few stoics on Royal Road O:-) https://www.royalroad.com/fictions/search?globalFilters=fals...
That makes perfect sense, since you’re meant to spend any additional time with the profit-generating pastimes you mentioned.
Hah, you’re right. I didn’t think about that- of course the extra time gained will be spent the same way it’s spent now.
Well sure but we waste it for circumstantial reasons. Wisdom is scarce by definition. Denying people a second chance because they messed up with literally zero information isn’t something we should condone.