This article drew me in because I'm obsessed with anti-aging tech, but to take something that isn't all evil, and twist it is horrible. I think the biggest issue is income inequality personally, --when the rich DO figure out immortality, it may only be accessible to the billionaire class at which point -- they're essentially giving everyone else a death sentence.

1. Pharmaceutical companies want people to take it.

2. Insurance companies would want humans to take it.

3. Once a drug is invented, if it is kept hidden or secret, the people who administer the drug would want it for their families. There would be whistle blowers, there would be leaks.

As soon as it is leaked labs in China or India or anywhere would reproduce it and longevity tourism would ensue.

You know, like healthcare, or trips to the moon.

People with a lot of money get access to things before people without a lot of money.

Even gene therapy, is primarily bounded by R&D and then delivery may or may not be expensive, I don’t know.

It would much more interesting if the focus was on the societal/inequality angle that it's billionaires (who, yes, are mostly men) who are seeking to extend their dominance by living longer.

Please don't post ideological flamebait to HN. The GP comment managed to stay on the ok side of the line. Your comment did not.

Fortunately reading articles isn’t necessary for a good discussion on Hackernews.

Food for thought is that life extension treatments once developed will ultimately be cheaper and safer than hospital care. So they'll be compulsory, in effect. Or rather everyone will continually face the question: more extension, or voluntary euthanasia? No more waiting around to die. Purpose, metaphysics, mental health all brought into sharp focus.

I think a simple poll would find that practically no one feels they deserve to die.

I agree this is not what the author intends by the term, but your comment "no one feels they deserve to die" is too absolutist, at least in my experience.

You wouldn't ask your electrician to put his tools down until the mechanic was finished working on your car.

The rest of your statement is absurd.

I think a more apt analogy would be asking a Rolls Royce mechanic to stop and come work on fixing the public's broken down busses.

Immortality limited to the powerful few could have huge downsides, at least now we can count on them dying eventually.

Maintenance of consolidated power through the generations is not an easy problem to solve and we shouldn't be making it any easier until our society is more equitable.

I'm not even making this up. This is a widely accepted phenomenon and there are even many books on this.

Uber was a limo service for rich people in the beginning, but now it's grown into a whole industry which is beneficial to people who previously couldn't easily move around, such as the disabled and the elders. If everyone acted like smug pseudo intellects and tried to ostracize Uber saying "it's for some rich bros", the world wouldn't be where it is.

It is arrogant to believe that one can predict what will exactly happen because of just one piece of technology. Most of the human history is full of things that nobody saw coming.

I agree which is why I wouldn't count on immortality being shared with the unwashed masses just because a ride sharing app was.

I don't see how questioning the benefit of having enormously powerful people of dubious morals become immortal makes one a pseudo-intellectual or smug. I suppose I forgot to adhere to the Valley orthodoxy that technological advancement will always improve the lives of all.

Any technology that has potential to do good for the humanity will eventually be shared with the masses if it exists. For example, RSA and Diffie-Hellman algorithm--arguably two of the most important technological inventions of the 20th century--were originally invented by government secret agencies but kept from the public for many years before being "rediscovered" by some other people later and made available to the public. And this was even before the wide-spread of the Internet.

It's becoming increasingly difficult to keep things from the public. Unix was kept away from the public by being super expensive, and Linux came along to made it completely free. Wikileaks came along and made classified information no longer classified, giving more power to the public. Drug companies which charge tons of money to people (see martin shkreli) get slammed and hated in public, giving incentive to upstarts that try to be more transparent and ethical as a marketing strategy. The only place where information is kept from the public is dystopian sci-fi films.

Unless you truly think this hypothetical immortality technology can be kept completely private from the public FOREVER, what you're basically saying is "Only the rich will have access to the technology initially, and that's not fair, so we should ban the technology."

edit: guess I touched a nerve, but please have some respect. I wasn't being facetious, just so you know. I lost a newborn brother at age 5 and my father at age 11, so I've experienced death. I've grieved deeply. Yes there's tragedy in death. I can't and won't invalidate that. But there is so much more to death than tragedy. And more often than not, the tragedy is rooted in unfulfilled lives, not in death itself. I don't see how longer lifespans are going to magically cure the bigger problem of unfulfilling life habits being normalized, even enforced. There are too many people on this planet who haven't made peace with death, and who externalize their fear onto others. I believe this is the author's point. You downvote me without asking any questions? Call the author a luddite? I imagine you are someone who hasn't made peace with death and the forces of evolution. I urge you to face it from a fresh angle, to have courage and take a good look, it's not a monster unless you make it be.

And honestly, people who treated my father's death like a monster kinda traumatized me. They encouraged me to idolize my father in a way that distracted me from his wonderful, raw humanity, both in living and dying.

P.S. If anyone open minded wants an interesting perspective on death, check out the book "Living Your Dying" by Stanley Keleman.