> I concluded to improve quality of life, no matter how finite, is a better endeavour than to prolong it.

Seems like a false dichotomy.

Aside from life support in one's final days, most practical medical interventions for prolonging life also result in significant improvements in quality of life.

For example, healthy diet and exercise contribute to extended lifespan, but they also improve quality of life significantly during all stages of life.

> Aside from life support in one's final days, most practical medical interventions for prolonging life also result in significant improvements in quality of life.

I can assure you that you'd never ever hold that opinion if you were a healthcare worker. A big part of our job is to maintain alive people with a horrible quality of life who should be long dead, oftentimes without even being able to know if they'd in fact prefer dying...

There is a lot of subjectivity in your conclusion.

Healthy diet for example is not a singularly defined term and depending on specifics can be argued to lower quality of life even if they improve health.

Are you over 50? A year over 50 feels as satisfying as one month being 18. I’d rather enjoy what I have left.

Can you paraphrase this? Having trouble understanding what you mean and I want to know.

I'm not afpx, but I understood them to be saying "you have fewer good days when you're 50 than when you're 18." That is, health wise, it's better to be 18 than to be 50. :)

A related concept is the quality-adjusted life year (QALY), which is used when weighing the cost/benefits of certain interventions.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality-adjusted_life_year

Oh so when you’re 18 you extract as much pleasure/utility/etc from a month of life as you do from a year at 50? Maybe my late teens were lame because those times were not that awesome lol. Nor any other time I can think of. It’s all mostly been the same, except, say, when I was 4-8, when time just dragged on and on so slowly everything felt like eternity all the time. Then that ended and everything has been more or less the same from a psycho-emotional perspective.

Health-wise yeah it’s great to be young :)

How does one start to see a healthy diet as a “quality of life”? QoL is when you eat a chunk of anything you feel like, down it with soda and feel nothing bad next hour or day. I could do that, lie on a couch watching mtv or go fall from a tree when I was young. That was quality of life. Everything after 30 is just a life support. You improve life support by a diet or a (careful) walk.

This is the mindset of most of the medical field so basically you bought into the status quo. Nothing profound about that. Those that are interested in longevity reject such notions because it leads to very little research in how to prolong life, or see death as a disease worth curing.

Ask an oncologist if they feel that is the status quo. 20% of people who get chemotherapy get it within weeks of dying, as if suffering even more will prolong their life. Not all oncologists are like that but many feel harsh treatments which ruin a person's other healthy cells with tons of side effects is worth it for keeping a patient alive just a few months more.

I don't know much about oncology, but it strikes me that they probably don't know with certainty which of the 20% it will be. They have a limited number of interventions that put the patient through hell, and it sometimes works.

There's probably extreme cases with bad metastasis where it's very unlikely that they can be saved, and they can probably tell some of those. But I think not all the time.

Must be a very depressing job to observe this over the years.

I suppose what I didn’t reveal is that I spent a lot of time before medicine trying to coax cells whether in a culture or some other medium to grow in the way I wanted it to grow. And it was hard. It’s been a while, but if I could recall correctly, cells tended to have a finiteness in their very nature. I think at some subconscious level, I interpreted this as nature’s way of expressing that is how things are designed to be.

I don’t do life science anymore, but deal with computers now. And it’s a whole lot more predictable and malleable. (Heck, it’s easy if I were to compare it to running gels or prepping cell lines.)

But I would be ecstatic if I could witness some science fiction level advancement in this field in my lifetime. I doubt it, but I would be amazed should it happen.

> It’s been a while, but if I could recall correctly, cells tended to have a finiteness in their very nature.

This is known: https://en.wikipedia.org//wiki/Hayflick_limit

Yeah that. There’s something even more subtle. Experiments run with certain older lines just… failed more. It’s weird. The supervisor would say, “Yeah go to X’s lab and grab theirs.”

Like the reproducibility is contingent on so many factors. Very depressing and tedious.

There’s definitely a lot we don’t know and the knowledge gap is huge. And even if it can be done in the lab, translating some finding to a workable therapeutic is another story.

Yes, but:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeLa

On the other hand, there are 150-year-old tortoises and 200-year-old whales out there. So it's not like there is some finite impossibility to living a long time, other animals have figured it out.

Even better, human species live indefinitely through human cells making new human fetal cells. At it's essence, it's still a chemical transformation process. Some compounds are being converted, old human to new human, which keeps life going indefinitely.

And possibly 500 year old sharks. (Not yet confirmed)

If you look about it a certain way. At the species level, we've already reached biological immortality.

The trick is to have some cells starting the process over. Sexual reproduction always started from pre-existing cells, rebuilding a full individual.

Using this process to repair all the living cells does not seem impossible.

Our understanding of DNA programming is far from sufficient to enable this kind of project, but I don't see why it could not be possible at some point.

The DNA in the nucleus of a human cell has telomeres, which effectively function as a countdown timer for reproduction. Every cell division drops the timer by one, and when the timer hits zero, the cell enters senescence and stops working so hard. Killing off senescent cells improves quality of life in several aspects.

Then there are transposons, elements of ancient retroviruses embedded in our DNA, that can awaken and spray themselves thousands of times over the cell's genome. Usually, these new inserts don't hit anything important. Usually. Germline cells have mechanisms to suppress this, but most cells undergo this once a month.

You are talking about a lot of damage to repair in an older cell.

No, fuck the older cell, replace everything with new, but slow enough.

>so basically you bought into the status quo. Nothing profound about that

Nothing profound in being scared shitless of it either

Someday they'll demonstrate existence of an afterlife to the satisfaction of the average consumer and the whole world is gonna do a Homer Simpson.

I mean, it'll flip our whole value system.

So the religious fanatics were right all along? I think the afterlife is actually the life after you realise there is no afterlife. Many never reach it.

Well a lot of those guys are just citing other guys. Not the most robust epistemology.

It's pretty hard to dispute the thousands of NDE reports. Similar experiences, descriptions across different cultures and religions. Young children, even the blind since birth all fairly consistently report the same.

Genuinely curious for your perspective- can you elaborate?

I'm into meditation and similar mystic weirdness.

I've seen what appears to be a literal "city of the dead".

No doubt a metaphor. But metaphor appears to be a big part of "reality".

I've also seen what appears to be a "creator of reality".

So ya, it's a weird world.

Perhaps the disease worth curing even more is the mindset that rejects longevity.

I don't agree, and you shouldn't force those of us who don't agree to die.

You're going to die eventually whether you like it or not. Better to get comfortable with this fact, rather than fight it.

Doesn't that argument prove too much? In the past, people's lives were shorter and more full of misery. Every improvement we've gotten has been due to people rejecting your philosophy. Assuming one can live longer (without being frail and demented) why not?

It seems like if most people could choose, they'd prefer to have the mental and physical abilities of a 20-something while living as long as they wanted. Eventually, medical technology will get to the point where that is possible. Why not hasten such a day rather than let more people get old and frail? Yes, people will still eventually die, but living for 300 years in peak condition seems better than the status quo.

so do you really prefer society putting effort in very complex labour that is unknown than making people aware of how important is a good diet and exercising often?

as the website article typed, there is a long way to tickle trustable keys to preservation, let alone reviving a frozen body, let alone understanding what we have to do to live in peak capacity for 50 years, let alone to live 300…

i sincerely prefer public and private money being wasted on improving our ‘short’ lives than MAYBE discovering some esotericism that probably very few people will have access

We have 8 billion people, no need for either ors.

i mean, is better to have a solid foundation to discover and create things… some people still do not have access to proper nutrition

There is so much money spent on crap by organisations and individuals around the world, and we should save money for the abjectly poor or to promote healthy habits and prevention by not trying to radically improve the human condition itself?

As for a solid foundation to discover and create things, you need to be healthy and have time first of all. The logistics of life just suck as it is now unless you are really lucky. It used to be much worse but it can get much better.

"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 reject your reality and substitute my own. I'm immortal and I will make it so

Is there a proof that we have to die? Or that immortality for a human is impossible? Seems more like a lot in the medical field have experienced so much death that they simply have accepted it for a fact.

If you asked someone centuries back if we would go to the moon, they will laugh you out of the room. Similarly, if you said that people will consistently live to their 90+ years of age.

It seem pretty likely that we have to die, based on the second law of thermodynamics. The whole universe has to end eventually, after many trillions of years. There's no physical law that would stop a person sticking around for those trillions of years, but it would be technologically very difficult.

If you were going to die tomorrow, and if you had the option to live another day, what would you choose? Then days become months and months become years and so on and so forth.

We all die eventually. This isn't the Sandman Universe [1].

[1] https://majorspoilers.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Sandman...

We all die eventually, so far...

you'd figure if biology was capable then it would have found a solution by now. But as far as I'm aware immortality isn't a trait of any multi-cellular organism that has ever lived on this rock.

I mean maybe we can stick some pipes in a corpse and get it to move around or make a digital echo of a dead personality and have that rattle around inside a robot. However, I feel like we're drifting into wishful thinking if we figure genuine immortality is a going to be a some sort of scientific given.

Consider that death may actually not be as selected against in nature as you seem to imply. An everliving organism would not as easily adapt to a changing environment, if and until a new mechanism of evolution is generated. We may be stuck in a local minima.

Nature doesn't have goals. Humans, as far as I can tell, very much do. Put another way. Evolution didn't find a way to get life onto the Moon. Humans did.

>if biology was capable then it would have found a solution by now

It did though.[0]

There is likely very little evolutionary pressure for immortality, therefore this kind of thing isn't more widespread. If anything, at population level evolution might generally select for the population that produces a new generation and dies quicker.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turritopsis_dohrnii

Oh cool, thanks for that. I would argue that's not exactly the sort of immortality we have in mind when we discuss it though.

You'd have someone else wipe your ass rather than embrace death? How dignified.

Yes, all paralyzed people should kill themselves.

That you cannot imagine a reason does not mean they don't have one, or that it is your business.

His choice. Not yours.

It’s funny on HN tonight. We have one thread where a county in rural Tennessee lets houses burn down for want of a $75 free or 0.13% tax increase, because freedom.

And here, because freedom, people are advocating for the freedom to pretend death isn’t approaching, at the cost of millions to society.

How do you equate some people's denial of death with a cost of millions to society rather than as costs to the indovidual?

It's a legitimate consideration.

The point of drug discovery to slow down or stop aging is not to keep people in that frail state of life for as long as possible. Instead is to keep people in their 30s for as long as possible. Most research out there is trying to solve aging, not death.

I think the person you're replying to is referring to cryonics (the topic of the original article), which is still illegal in many jurisdictions.

In a hopeless situation, I would not prolong my life. But that would be my choice for myself. I don't get to make that choice for others. Why should you?

The trick is that's hard to know the hopeless situation. Many people get away with cancer so are you ready to deny yourself one more chance to live?

What a strange statement, who said anything about forcing anyone to do anything?

Do you think GP's decision not to focus their work on life extension is forcing you to die?

Absolutely. Place aux autres - make room for others.

That seems to be the literal opposite of almost all public health advice - we always seem to focus on how there may be some potential negative consequence of everything and ignore the impact on quality of life (I'm mainly thinking of food and drink, but I think it extends e.g. to covid hysteria). In the end, advice just gets ignored, or forms part of a puritanical shaming system that nobody adheres to but everybody judges others based on. It would be nice if more public health institutions adopted your attitude and realized life is worth living and isn't just about living as long and boring a life as possible.

A very predictable line of thought to have in your twenties

If there’s enlightenment to be had, don’t withhold it.

> just the recycling of life so that new life can happen

You have no idea if that is true or not though.

I think they just mean reproduction?

So... you're _for_ cryopreservation? Because having it as a standard end-of-life option is the simplest way of cutting on unnecessary live prolonging procedures. You get sick, you enjoy the time you have, you get frozen. It's a win-win proposition from pretty much every point of view.

> recognizing

You're not recognizing anything you're deluding yourself to accept the incredible loss that is death.

> death is just the recycling of life so that new life can happen.

This is Stockholm syndrome. We all die, so some of us choose to think it's a good thing. Death in general is needed for recycling, but not human death. Humans represent 0.00000001% (warning, made up number) of the available matter. We don't need to die for others to live.