Faced with their own mortality,a bunch of aging billionaires and multimillionaires tend to pour money into longevity research. I'd be very upset if governments increased spending on fighting senescence today, instead of lower-hanging fruit .
>It is important for us to die because most of the time people don't change their mind, they just die. If you live forever, we might become a very ossified society where new ideas cannot succeed.
There are also solutions like term limits, or generational tenure limits or something that could help reduce any negative effects without needing to continue unnecessary loss of life.
It's not (only) about old people having short term vision/not enough time for reeducation.
25 or 30 year old people are already very often set in stone and unable to change their views and they have most of their life ahead of them.
This argument is philosophical i.e. worthless. We will actually have to win with death to answer the question if it's good or not. It's not something you can figure out without doing it.
On the whole I think it's worth it, but it will definitely exasperate the problems already inherent to our economic system.
What till he's 75 and see if he still holds that view.
Mechanism that could be applied way earlier than old ossified out of touch rulers die now. And applied more merit based.
It is so right now only because of how good modern common people have. But it's going away now. And if security of elites depend of well being of others it's sort of self-regulating system albeit way too slowly.
There's also pressure from the other side. The longer living elites means it will get crowded at the top, so elites might be open to some means of culling their numbers.
To add some good mood, I stole a comment from reddit [1] which describes one of millions of media dealing with this question:
> In The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy series, immortality is fine if you're born that way. It's only if you accidentally obtain it after an accident with a few rubber bands, a liquid lunch, and a particle accelerator is it a bad thing that you are not equipped to deal with and so decide to insult everyone in the universe in alphabetical order.
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/books/comments/tpzb4e/immortality_i...
2. Even if it was, it doesn't make the "wisdom" any less relevant. There's no shortage of relevant wisdom in Douglas Adams' writing.
3. I intentionally quoted Elon specifically, because it is a relevant reply to the parent comment about billionaires pouring money to longevity research.
But for the time being, nice to see him stating something I don't disagree with.
PS: Oh sorry I understood that as a question of what would be useful, not what is actually spent.
I meant what lower hanging fruits governments ought to spend on. However, since you asked, here are some of the things governments are currently spending on, but could bear improvement: eradicating preventable diseases, ensuring kids get good nutrition, better tracking, and hopefully prevention of e. coli/salmonella outbreaks, funding basic research into improving outcomes for patients, reducing profiteering off the products of publicly-funded research, medical pricing transparency, better organ donor policies (universal opt-out)
We have a whole host of societal functions that are not geared to cope with longevity: including social security plus the associated tax-rates
We, like, know how to solve some of those other problems. Sure, there's politics and bureaucracy and complications and the opportunity for corruption, but you can assign a p close to 1 we could get it done in an arbitrary timeframe.
Meanwhile, what's the probability that dumping a particular amount of money into aging is going to pay off? Even taking a thousand years you need a p>0.002 to make it worth diverting money from the safe bet of getting a couple of years off the other things.
Yikes! That's a scary conspiracy theory!
(Note that I don't agree it would cause a breakdown in society.)
My comment comes across as semantic nitpicking, but I don't mean it that way; I just think I'm not understanding what you mean by reasoning "by induction" here.
I am a mathematician, so am most familiar with induction in its technical mathematical sense, which I assume isn't what you mean. More generally, my dictionary says that induction is "the inference of a general law from particular instances". For that to be what you mean here, you would need to infer that "someone makes sure they don't" (meaning, I assume, "they don't succeed in curing death by aging") in general from the fact that someone has done so in particular cases. Is that what you meant? If so, who and when? Or is my dictionary wrong, or are you using some other sense of 'induction'?
Death is good on so many levels - equalizer that removes most horrible tyrants like Stalin who would easily burn whole world just to be immortal and stay on top. If you are a normal decent person you can't even comprehend mindset of such sociopaths and their eternal greed. Don't think there are few people like that in a generation, rather few millions, just with fewer options.
Death also makes whole nations eventually forget wrongs on the past, otherwise we would still be hating mongols and huns and romans and swedes and british and slavers and germans as nazis etc. If for nothing else, just to remove threat of semi-eternal planetary dictator death is great.
My grandparents from my dads side both died few months ago aged 94 and 95. They saw all their friends, neighbors and colleagues die decades ago, and they were witnessing same starting to happen to kids of those close people. They were both depressed from this, gradual loss of everything that has any long term meaning plus decline of everything health-related. It sucks to be the last living guy from say group of friends, you think you would find tons of solace in the fact you are still alive but thats not how reality on the ground looks like. People just wait for death to come and many prefer it comes soon.
All because you don't want to bother inventing an orbital ring or an arcology tower or society where suicide by choice is the accepted way out.
> "removes most horrible tyrants like Stalin"
"we" could still kill him; immortal or ageless doesn't necessarily mean invincible.
All the while the are almost endless resources and options how to solve these issues waiting in the solar system!
Its like hauling old people to the mountains to die because your village can't support them. We got over that & we should should get over our current terrestrial problems as well by moving on and expanding out of our cradle.
Consider: it seems that we should be able to support a technological civilization of billions of people on renewable energy alone. That means literally on a fraction of the sunlight that Earth captures. Now, Sun isn't focusing on Earth, it's an omnidirectional emitter. Which means there's some 74 000 times more energy than Earth is receiving from the Sun available just in Earth's orbital band alone.
Fortunately, space-related energy problems seem like they'll be solving themselves, in lock step with increased space capabilities.
There's no way we're going to rocket launch billions to Mars, and there isn't another planet worth living on without unreasonable amounts of energy for Terraforming. But we are capable of rebuilding the atoms of Earth into much larger living environments - there are so many atoms it wouldn't mean destroying the Earth to do it. A Space Elevator doesn't need diamond nanowire, it could be built with enough steel chain. An orbital ring around the Equator would be enormous and would take approximately nothing of the Earth's matter to construct.
Isaac Arthur's YouTube channel is full of speculation and plans for all kinds of possible or nearly-possible futures, as well as more distant dreams. e.g. the playlists:
- "The future of Energy, Industry and Agriculture" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChTJHEdf6yM&list=PLIIOUpOge0...
- "Earth v2.0" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6mRjsxQQJE&list=PLIIOUpOge0...
- "Outward Bound" - near-Earth space exploration and living - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmFOBoy2MZ8&list=PLIIOUpOge0...
- "Visions of Earth" - arcologies, megacities, ecumenopolises, geoengineering, weather control - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqKQ94DtS54&list=PLIIOUpOge0...
And somewhere in there, megastructures such as Dyson Spheres, ringworlds, etc.
Also, since death is apparently good then Stalin was not bad? Right?
Most of it is on fruit flies and mice then takes a life time to test on humans!
What we do know is that being fit and exercising with some semblance of healthy eating helps people live a lot longer. But no one wants to do it.
No, abstaining from things like alcohol and smoking mostly does that.
Exercise and healthy eating markedly improves quality of life at old age, but it doesn’t extend it by huge amounts.
For what it's worth obesity accounts for about 5-10 year shortening. Not dissimilar to smoking.
Sport is good for you. Extreme sports markedly cuts short average life expectancy and late quality of life. With your logic, that makes sports bad.
Edit: actually, I guess it depends on where you live. In America, obesity probably is the median..
There is this weird defense of obesity and being sedentary in western culture it's just inexplicable.
Interestingly we've just had the first case of manslaughter by obesity trial going on in the UK [1]. The mum has admitted manslaughter the dad is going to trial. Over death of their 16yo girl.
If my kids, or their kids, or their kids, etc. ever wanted me to die in order to "bestow" them with something...well, too bad. I wish my grandparents, and their parents, etc. were alive today.
Eventually all the atoms we know and love will decay and "disappear."
If we get to a place where people can live healthy lives until they are 300 years old, why do you think someone who finished college 40 years ago will be more valuable for a company than a fresh graduate? Because nowadays we have exactly this setup minus the 300 year lifespan, and often times the company is happy to let go of the senior guy.
You don't know that. You think that is the case, but (I) you don't know what death is like, so you cannot realistically claim it is worse than anything (II) until you qualify 'fucked up' then this is a pointless claim, since your version of 'fucked up' may not be that bad compared to what is in the realm of possibility.
It's incredibly more likely that continued existence will be no worse than the world today, which is quite nice. Even if it becomes torturous existence beats non-existence.
The only reason population numbers aren't collapsing is immigration, but that comes with its own issues. Extending live expectency and productive lifetime isn't that crazy (if we can get a handle on our rising living standards and resource consumption).
People who are physically young are at a much lower risk of cancer, cardiovascular disease, Type II diabetes/Alzheimer's, etc. Stopping/reversing the aging process kind of fixes the root cause of a lot of those diseases.
We're probably not far off from that reality, either. Then we move onto more controversial questions, e.g. Do physically healthy people have the right to end their own lives? Not everyone want to live to be 300 years old, especially those who have lost most of their family and friends over those years.
I've experienced extreme loss, but continue to expreience new connections, knowledge, etc. There's simply no small limit to what a human can experience, and hundreds of years is paltry compared to when it would take to even be on the verge of boredom/emptiness, if such a verge could actually ever be reached.
I suppose there are others but like you I don't understand why there isn't more focus and media attention on the root causes of aging, the ultimate killer.
As parent poster wrote, we like nostalgia, because we clutch to our experiences. We compare them instead of collecting it. On the other side the more we experience something the more we stall or get bored. Even with other people - with increase of lifespan we also increased number of divorces, lost connections etc. That doesn’t make us happier.
One could argue that we, as humans, suffer more today from out deteriorating bodies, than people in medieval time, when it was shorter, and that we suffer more psychologically due to increased influx of information, global conscience and artificial constructs we build every day.
Resources would also be an issue, so even if immortality would be obtainable it’d be either reserved for the richest or would divide people with almost impassable line splitting centuries of servitude and centuries of indulgence.
So to answer your question - why not? Because it’ll bring suffer to many on many levels except for a blessed few and we should focus first on making life great for everyone present before trying to make it infinitely longer.
Joking lightly (as subject is very deep) - it’s somewhat useful skill to know when to get off the stage.
Humans dont progress in terms of biological evolution anymore but instead technologically. The increased lifespan would allow scientist to master multiple fields which would be great for progress.
As of 2019 1/3 of world’s population doesn’t have access to clean drinking water. Would they be glad that instead of clean water and sanitary conditions they were granted endless life?
It’s nice to focus on optimistic outcomes but except for genius scientists world is full of mobsters, greedy bankers and ruthless corporation heads. They’d had a chance for longevity way sooner than the best of scientists (who have “infinite memory” trait, which isn’t true even for the healthiest of humans).
Sure, we’re speculating (and it’s fun) but I’d invite to mix at least 30% of “what could go wrong” as part of the context.
Let’s have a thought experiment: who would be the first to get such treatment - Nobel prize winner or a dictator? What would be the route, who would pay for that, would they even want that (as that’s not guaranteed).
If the technology first emerges you could probably get it quite cheaply because its not proven yet. Afterwards there will be a scarity due to everyone wanting it which will drive prices up. In the long run it becomes a free commodity due to being a net saving for governments.
But even if the rich and ruthless get it first, that doesnt matter much in the long run. Medical improvements tend to get cheaper with time. The incentives are there to provide it to everyone. And especially so in a democracy.
Immortality also doesn’t equal invincibility. One can get sick, one can brake their bones and still suffer. With assumption that immortality would come with great regenerative capabilities - would that include teeth as well? What would happen if we’d lost some due to accident? Would it extend to limbs?
I think main question is why one would like to be immortal? Experiencing thing is nice thing, but with great biological change world would change too. Population would grow and scarcity would be even worse. Probably people would work most of the time just to be able to sleep (due housing shortage) and eat (due food shortage as a result of decreased production area).
It’s possible that bigger chunks of our lives (except “the winners”) would consist of work (another prior example - while we work less for last couple centuries, work devices are omnipresent falsifying data, and we still work much more than in pre-industrial times [1])
If you hadn’t had chance I’d recommend Upload show available on Amazon Prime. It’s somewhat tangential (as it’s endless virtual afterlife) but it touches some possible issues relatable to our discussion
[1]: https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_...
Immortality is maybe the wrong word for what i have in mind. Its more eternal youth but you can still be killed. Best analogy would be the elves in lord of the rings.
My hope would be that the higher life experience combined with a healthy body would allow us to be better as a species.
Media seems pretty dystopian and dark in general right now. I think that may influence the outlook of many regarding the future. Certainly could turn out that way but i think there is also a big chance it will be way different and better then we think right now.
Sure we will, just not in the traditional natural-selection sense. In many ways humans have "beaten" evolution by finding medical means to allow "unfit" humans to live full lives, and often pass on their genes.
Evolution in the future could be via technical means, either through advancements in medicine, or with cybernetic implants. If humans could ever become intellectually & ethically pure enough to be trusted with genetic engineering ourselves, that's another form of self-made evolution.
> If we had many lives then each one would be less meaningful.
That's a very personal thing, and just an opinion. With changes in lifespan, attitudes change, purpose changes, and people change their outlook. Once upon a time, humans lived much shorter lives, with many/most not making it out of their 30s. Now life expectancy is in the 70s and 80s. And yet we don't look at this doubling of our lifespans and believe that all that extra time robs our lives of meaning. So why should that be the case if we could live to be 500?
> We’d at least need to put age limits on political participation.
Perhaps, but that should be a floating limit that gets adjusted upward with life expectancy. If people regularly lived to be 200, maybe 190-year-olds wouldn't be fit to serve, but a 100-year-old? Why not? And if we managed to push that to 400, those 190-year-olds would start to seem pretty relevant; it would be an injustice to deny them participation in the political system.
Regardless, our idea of society itself would need a huge overhaul even if our lifespans were doubled, let alone made effectively limitless. Political participation would likely be the least of our worries.
Citation needed; because that's commonly believed to be average life expectancy - brought down by infant mortality. If you made it past ~5 years old, you had a good chance of living to 60-80.
"The days of our years are threescore years and ten" - Psalm 90:10, the King James Bible.
"A man will spend ten years as a child before he understands death and life. He spends another ten years acquiring the instruction by which he will be able to live. He spends another ten years earning and gaining possessions by which to live. He spends another ten years up to old age, when his heart becomes is counsellor. There remain sixty years of the whole life, which Thoth has assigned to be the man of god." - A passage from The Insinger Papyrus, in the Ptolemaic period"
Not as a species though. We just have to keep reproducing more of us that are good at staying alive and also reproducing to evolve. You and I theoretically could live forever in the same state, and still, our species would evolve via our offspring and theirs and so on.
If you're actually worried about evolution you'll want to bring back eugenics. Current selective pressures are quite relaxed, leading to an increase in deleterious mutations and rising future healthcare costs.
Currently our culture/civilisation can be expected with my life. We won't adapt as you can see by us not adapting even now for mitigation on a societal level at all.
But yes, death of old age is the sorrow of our days!
> I could spend a lifetime in each trying to develop mastery
No, you couldn't. You would still be your aged brain, not capable of learning hundreds of professions, and your frail body, not capable of replacing its cells any longer. It requires more than a better way to heat up a corpse to extend life.
I'll leave you with this (paraphrase of a) quote: millions long for immortality, but don't know what to do on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
How would you fix your brain? Its capacity is obviously limited, and tinkering with plasticity almost certainly will have unexpected and undesirable consequences. You simply won't be the same person.
Is it obvious? How would you repair a piece of metal suffering metal fatigue? A perished elastic band? A screw with a chewed head? These are trivial things compared to a human body and we haven't a clue how to rejuvenate them, all we can do is replace them. But how do you replace "a muscle" without surgically damaging the tissue around it? How do you keep "muscle memory" after doing so? How do you reconnect your replacement eye to the optic nerve? How do you replace cells like for like when there's tens of trillions of them in each person, and each cell is a machine a hundred trillion atoms complex? How do you target the cellular machinary inside one cell and find out that it's in need of repair? Is it 'pretty obvious' you can do so?
What does it mean to reverse aging? Younger me was smaller. Younger me moved differently. Younger me liked different foods and knew different facts. Younger me didn't have scar tissue in certain places, are you going to swap that out for normal tissue (how)?
It's pretty obvious that 'repair' does not undo the effects of ageing, it prolongs them - restored old cars are not new cars, they still need to be driven gently. People with plastic surgery don't look like young people, they look like old people who fell into uncanny valley.
The huge difference between repairing a piece of metal, and repairing a living tissue, is, obviously, the living tissue can repair itself. The mechanisms of self-repair are built in, and they are extremely effective. The problem is these mechanisms break down with age, so the task becomes figuring out how to re-enable them. Yes, we don't know how to do that yet, but keep in mind - just 10 years ago we didn't know how to do things like CRISPR gene editing and now we can do something like this: https://www.bbc.com/news/health-63859184. The point is, we are making progress towards the goal of controlling all the processes in our bodies. There's absolutely no reason to believe this progress will stop any time soon. Even if we can't do it today, things like organ or limb regeneration do not sound like science fiction any more, it's a question of when, not if.
Yes, it's quite likely every one of us Millennials will grow old and die, but I'm much less sure about our kids, and our grand kids will most likely be able to stay forever young if they so desire.
I'd certainly rather live 100 years with a 20 year old body than 200 years with a 90 year old one.
To offer one example democracy would be mostly impossible in a post mortality world.
Also immortal humans would be either fertile or infertile and both cases would create quite weird situations.
If I can conclude with some posturing, it is part of human nature to strive toward better conditions and solve the problems around us. This might be our demise, as both giving up on that nature and following it to its logical end might lead to our end.
Change in viewpoints, lifestyle or behavior become exceedingly rare the older people get. Also, the youth is always incapable, stupid and wrong. It's so much of a phenomenon that I wouldn't dare blaming anyone for this. It almost seems to be part of normal development.
People just tend to become more mentally rigid with age and they have a perfect justification ready for you: experience. They have seen it all and can therefore judge everything and everyone (without considering changed circumstances of course which would require to adjust the mental frame that was rigidly formed across the ages).
There are a couple of things that make death bearable. Any longevity treatment should placate the first and we should aim to compensate the second with plenty of change in our lives.
First is physical ailments. Even a healthy person will accumulate aches, and those will slowly erode they will to live. Several of my grandparents (and some that were not mine) have expressed that they were waiting to be taken, and I'd wager that would be a part.
Second is the mental fatigue. Not only your mental state is akin to your physical one, so you might be mentally exhausted, but also you begin to get bored with most media. It's hard to find a story that hasn't been told before, music that you find original and good, few dishes that you still dare to discover, ... .
Apart from the personal point of view there's also the general one. There two more problem arise.
Sustainability, as the planet can support what it can. The society and the way resources are managed will have to change a lot if people live longer. But don't worry because...
Power. You'd go from families holding power to individuals. No longer the young master will spend all the money and none will be left, because their parents will have control over that. Situation could become even more oppressive with them withholding the longevity treatments, giving some to their employees and none to the general public.
So while I agree with your sentiment, which is also beautifully expressed in HPNOR, I'd say that there's a lot of transformations to be made before it's good.
This isn’t absolute. Of course with an infinite life some of these restrictions go away, but unless we get rid of the meat minds I think we’ll have some built-in limitations that are core to who we are as humans. I honestly think I learn more than most of my peers because I keep trying to, but I do find myself getting less interested in the latest fad. Some amazing people can learn entirely new life journeys, Carmack or SamA, say. But look at most people you know. Most are going to keep plugging away getting crankier and crankier. If those people hold power and grow their wealth indefinitely, I think that’s a net negative.
Max Plank said, paraphrased: Science progresses one funeral at a time.
We make way for the youth to have their go, with our influence reducing over time.
This all ends when AI arrives anyway. Change has to outpace us. Someone or something will get your wish of indefinite life, and we’ll find out how these patterns change.
But rarely do you get an excellent back and forth as these thought provoking, diametrically opposite but equally compelling comments!
Is that enough? Can I go now? Isn't that enough? I still have possibly 3-4 decades of life left to average life expectancy, and for what - to grind through more experiences? Even though I've already had vastly more than most humans who ever lived? I have no great purpose to achieve, there's nothing I can do which millions of others can't do. The main reason to go on living is because dying would hurt others unnecessarily. Brute forcing through everything-there-is-to-experience is not an enticing vision for the future at all, it's a grind.
> "but if it wasn't for some limit forced upon me, if it was really my choice, then there's a lot more I'd like to do."
It seems common that people who become rich enough to do anything end up depressed doing nothing. Taking the forcing function out seems to make people miserable rather than happy. Even people who said beforehand that they had lots they'd like to do often seem to lose motivation to actually do any of it.
[1] there's a phrase.
Speak for yourself, but please don't confuse that for a good argument for the death of others with a different perspective. (I don't think longevity advocates generally want to prevent suicide or force people to live forever if they don't want to.)
Whom do you think I am speaking for?
> "please don't confuse that for a good argument for the death of others with a different perspective."
"I want everything" is a youthful perspective that adults grow out of by gaining things and realising that drowning in endless things isn't happiness, it's a hoarding disorder. People with a PetaByte storage array of media aren't the happiest film watchers on the planet, people with a garage full of Lamborghinis aren't the best drivers or the happiest people, Billionaires aren't satisfied with 'enough' money. Indeed, the opposite as one anecdote in this thread commented - a child with nothing who gets an orange is happy; a child with 9 consoles who gets a 10th console and wants an 11th, isn't happy. Saying "I want 1000000 consoles" seems more cringeworthy than convincing. "I want a career" "I want ten careers!" "I want a pony" "I want a hundred lifetimes of pony ownership!". "I want to master an instrument" "I want to master infinity instruments!". Ok mr oneupper. But it makes no difference whether "you" lived all those lives you can't remember, or someone else did. No difference at all. In fact, you may as well assume that other people are you, and their lives are ones you lived and can no longer remember. Everything becomes much simpler and it makes just as much sense.
> "I don't think longevity advocates generally want to prevent suicide or force people to live forever if they don't want to."
I suspect they are against suicide; why would someone who promotes longevity so much also be pro-dying-early? I also suspect one of the reasons our societies are against suicide is because workers can't be allowed an easy escape from their suffering. The kind of people who are in favour of working infinity lifetimes of careers are probably in the upper/white collar classes if they see that as a good thing; to a huge amount of the world, retirement is the carrot dangled ahead of them and dozens of lifetimes of work would be a pretty bad thing.
I think you're speaking for "adults", given your next sentence.
> "I want everything" is a youthful perspective that adults grow out of...
Also:
> > "I don't think longevity advocates generally want to prevent suicide or force people to live forever if they don't want to."
> I suspect they are against suicide; why would someone who promotes longevity so much also be pro-dying-early?
I was ambiguous, sorry. I know for a fact that a great many of longevity advocates advocate legalized suicide. My "I think" was hedging against the fact that I haven't done a survey and don't have hard data. But I think you - understandably, given this is what you're doing - took it as idle, uninformed speculation.
My advice would be actually to read serious arguments in favor of longevity before forming opinions on them. Maybe start here: https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/cryonics
That's the kind of out of touch that E Yudkowsky's writing has, from his position of employing someone to sit next to him to remind him he's supposed to be writing Harry Potter fan fiction instead of procrastinating. Quite possibly I would agree more if I was a genius academic able to write about anything that interested me for a living and had an audience hanging on my every blog post. Here for example[1] is a LessWrong post from Gwern which I resonate more with. Quotes: "Next to life itself, freedom is the most precious value; and most people’s lives are functionally devoid of it. Many cryonicists fail to see this, because they are self employed, are in jobs that offer them compensating satisfaction, or that they don’t perceive as “work”". and "Heaven isn’t waking up from cryopreservation and having to go into work two weeks later – FOREVER. That is the very definition of hell for most people."
And even then it doesn't capture several things about cryonics arguments which bother me; the fiddling of the finances with insurance. Sure it may cost more than a normal person earns in a lifetime to cryopreserve someone, but if we handwave it away with "insurance" then it will all be fine. Insurance companies are scummy, the academic calculations about risk/reward/probability never take that real world fact into account, "markets are great" they say while everyday people are swindled by marketeers day in, day out. Or the delight in drastic medical treatments where the results may look good on paper, but look at people's lived experience of medical procedure aftermaths, problems they are left with, and it looks uncomfortably different. e.g. [2], c.f. how many doctors would personally refuse the old age treatments their elderly patients+families ask for. And then wonder what the actual lived experience of the cryo-revived would be, separate from the paperwork which says 'revived successfully'.
And then how self-satisified the whole thing is, e.g. from the Gwern post: "many of the arguments that make cryonics credible, require a remarkable degree of both intelligence and scholarship. Inability to understand the enabling ideas and technologies usually means the inability to understand, let alone embrace, cryonics.". Now that alone wouldn't change how likely it is to work, but consider Eliezer Yudkowsky who values his own intelligence more than most things; he is overweight and under exercised[3]. Caloric restriction is the only proven way to extend life in any creatures, and it's much more likely that it is effective in humans than it is that you personally will be cryonically revived, but he doesn't do it. Why not? Exercise is about the only proven way to slow IQ decline with age, something you'd think he would value highly, and it appears he doesn't do that either. Why not?
Compare with Ray Kurzweil and his book "the Fantastic Voyage - live long enough to live forever"[4], he has been partnering with a doctor for decades studying body biochemistry and interventions to improve his health and increase his life expectancy - and doing them - incredibly fiddly diet and micronutrient tracking and regular medical interventions at the doctor's office, dozens of regular blood tests. Seen through the lens of this book what it takes to try and live longer, makes it a bit less attractive to bother, doesn't it? Ray Kurzweil's reason was to live long enough to see the singularity in about 2035 and become immortal and revive his father. EY argues much more strongly for live extension than Ray Kurzweil, but apparently takes far less interest in doing anything about it today. The pro-cryonics arguments are often about how clever the cryonics suporters are for seeing a loophole in the universe - and conveniently it's a loophole that only needs an online signup with a credit card, but if you look at their 'revealed preferences', they aren't convinced enough to act on things which are much more likely to work but involve effort, so maybe agreeing with cryonics isn't about how intelligent you are, it's about how tempted you are to an easy low-effort fix?
Compared to most creatures on Earth we already have longevity, btw. Imagine how much more you could master if you hadn't spent so long commuting, washing vegetables, making your bed, showering, gazing out the window, vacuuming dust-catcher carpets, polishing silverware ... if you surgically removed all your life, how much more life you could cram in. Oh you don't want to give up eating delicious calories for decades for the hope of a few more years at the end? Funny, me either. You don't want to spend hours exercising for the hope of a few more IQ points near the end? Weird, I don't either. You don't want to wash your vegetables in acid and drink only filtered water and spend hours a week analysing your blood test results making microadjustments to your dozens of regular nutritional supplements using the latest medical study results for guidance?[5] Hah, guess what, me either.
[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mkrvsNi8cYGSjGqkh/on-the-unp...
[2] https://collateral-damage.net/ read the Preview of Chapter One. The developing full story used to be there as blog posts before it was turned into a book, you might find them on https://web.archive.org/web/20081215144025/http://adventures...
[3] https://live.staticflickr.com/6035/6262275090_186d29a15c_b.j... (belly)
[4] http://www.fantastic-voyage.net/ and https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/83538.Fantastic_Voyage
[5] Ray Kurzweil on supplements: "For boosting antioxidant levels and for general health, I take a comprehensive vitamin-and-mineral combination, alpha lipoic acid, coenzyme Q10, grapeseed extract, resveratrol, bilberry extract, lycopene, silymarin (milk thistle), conjugated linoleic acid, lecithin, evening primrose oil (omega-6 essential fatty acids), n-acetyl-cysteine, ginger, garlic, l-carnitine, pyridoxal-5-phosphate, and echinacea. I also take Chinese herbs prescribed by Dr. Glenn Rothfeld. For reducing insulin resistance and overcoming my type 2 diabetes, I take chromium, metformin (a powerful anti-aging medication that decreases insulin resistance and which we recommend everyone over 50 consider taking), and gymnema sylvestra. To improve LDL and HDL cholesterol levels, I take policosanol, gugulipid, plant sterols, niacin, oat bran, grapefruit powder, psyllium, lecithin, and Lipitor. To improve blood vessel health, I take arginine, trimethylglycine, and choline. To decrease blood viscosity, I take a daily baby aspirin and lumbrokinase, a natural anti-fibrinolytic agent. Although my CRP (the screening test for inflammation in the body) is very low, I reduce inflammation by taking EPA/DHA (omega-3 essential fatty acids) and curcumin. I have dramatically reduced my homocysteine level by taking folic acid, B6, and trimethylglycine (TMG), and intrinsic factor to improve methylation. I have a B12 shot once a week and take a daily B12 sublingual. Several of my intravenous therapies improve my body’s detoxification: weekly EDTA (for chelating heavy metals, a major source of aging) and monthly DMPS (to chelate mercury). I also take n-acetyl-l-carnitine orally. I take weekly intravenous vitamins and alpha lipoic acid to boost antioxidants. I do a weekly glutathione IV to boost liver health. Perhaps the most important intravenous therapy I do is a weekly phosphatidylcholine (PtC) IV, which rejuvenates all of the body’s tissues by restoring youthful cell membranes. I also take PtC orally each day, and I supplement my hormone levels with DHEA and testosterone. I take I-3-C (indole-3-carbinol), chrysin, nettle, ginger, and herbs to reduce conversion of testosterone into estrogen. I take a saw palmetto complex for prostate health. For stress management, I take l-theonine (the calming substance in green tea), beta sitosterol, phosphatidylserine, and green tea supplements, in addition to drinking 8 to 10 cups of green tea itself. At bedtime, to aid with sleep, I take GABA (a gentle, calming neuro-transmitter) and sublingual melatonin. For brain health, I take acetyl-l-carnitine, vinpocetine, phosphatidylserine, ginkgo biloba, glycerylphosphorylcholine, nextrutine, and quercetin. For eye health, I take lutein and bilberry extract. For skin health, I use an antioxidant skin cream on my face, neck, and hands each day. For digestive health, I take betaine HCL, pepsin, gentian root, peppermint, acidophilus bifodobacter, fructooligosaccharides, fish proteins, l-glutamine, and n-acetyl-d-glucosamine. To inhibit the creation of advanced glycosylated end products (AGEs), a key aging process, I take n-acetyl-carnitine, carnosine, alpha lipoic acid, and quercetin." - now that's longevity in practise, who's still interested? Who even bothered to read this, let alone do it?
With unlimited time, million man-hour projects go from necessarily requiring an army of workers to just requiring an exceedingly patient individual and a long enough time frame.
Personally, I've always had the itch to recreate as much of the computing stack I rely on as possible. I love the idea of running my own text editor in my own shell, written in my own programming language, compiled with my own compiler, running on my own operating system. Not because I think I would be pushing the state of the art forward or that it would be commercially viable, but just for kicks. The joy of truly understanding.
I think this is not a completely uncommon feeling, which is why a lot of programmers could look at Terry Davis and say "okay, aside from the obvious mental illness, the racism and the antisemitism, there is something there." He spent years building something with little value to anybody beyond himself. Zach and Tarn Adams spending twenty years on Dwarf Fortress also comes to mind, to the extent they are doing it for themselves. These projects require huge sacrifices on the part of their creators. The opportunity costs incurred shape their lives (e.g. the Dwarf Fortress decisions currently being made based on health insurance coverage). I can't imagine inflicting the programmer monk lifestyle that would come along with such long term non-commercial work on my young kids when the end state is just "Yeah, it's useless but I got a kick out of doing it."
Being honest, it's also hard to imagine that once my kids move out and I can pick a more austere lifestyle just for myself, I'll look at the remaining ~20 years of my life and say, "I think I will devote the rest of my life to this one single 'that would be kinda neat' drive."
If I had, say, 100, 200, 500 more good years where I could just subsist and pursue passion projects? I'd love to spend 10-20 years going down the "recreate all your software from scratch" rabbit hole.
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A thought on the "society needs death" idea: if my continued existence pursuing obscure hobbies without economic value is a drain on society, maybe the fix isn't that I must die at some arbitrary age fixed by evolution, maybe the fix is just a better way to account for the costs and benefits of our actions. Don't say nobody can spend 10,000 years jetsetting from tourist spot to tourist spot, just require them to offset it themselves.
When something is very painful and inescapable you can: Fight it, run away from it (not talk about it, ignore it, pretend it's not there or won't happen), freeze (dissociate, ie shut down emotions, be stoic, feel nothing or little) or fawn (appease, please, embrace the pain in order to feel a sense of control over it, and some release from the torment of powerlessness+pain).
My guess is that we’ll inevitably begin to forget the older, less important stuff even with a completely healthy brain simply due to size constrain.
Quick note because you seem like the type of person who’d like to know, it’s “per se”: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/per_se
If we think of some collective 'Gaia Hypothesis' rather than yourself, then keeping you (specifically) around forever is kind of a big commitment, no?
Perhaps you are just not that big of a deal to be worthy of keeping around? And how would you square keeping you around and not Joe? Is it resources based? Than we would be stuck with a collective of eternal wealthy people, which judging by the sample of mortals available today sounds pretty uninteresting.
Yes it's amazing and you're having your turn at it right now! Enjoy it and then pass it forward.
I suspect in hundreds or thousands of years we'll look back at age-related death culturally the same way we look at infant mortality during the medieval ages: commonly accepted as part of life at the time, but unnecessary and completely solvable in retrospective.
I think fear is the wrong word per-say. If it's something I can't change, that's fine. But if there's an avenue to change it, even if unlikely, why not try?