You may find this organization (working on extending healthy human lifespan) interesting. https://www.levf.org/

I'm not involved with that organization, but I find their work very interesting.

As a backup plan, there's Alcor. https://www.alcor.org/

As much as I’d like to live forever, I couldn’t in good conscience monetarily support research that’s explicitly focused on extending the life span of the privileged (including me) when more resources are needed in finding how to lift up everyone else left behind today.

Would it not be reasonable to assume that the first anti-aging therapies that are approved will go to the privleged? Then they would be commodified and provided to the less economically fortunate.

The first monoclonal antibody therapy hit markets decades ago. It still hasn’t percolated to even the middle class in countries like india.

If a drug or therapy truly does extend life span I can also see systems forming where the few want to keep it to themselves and away from the many. One way or another I can’t imagine this being the the top priority of anyone but the most vain (personal opinion) so I would not associate myself with such research is all.

Whenever we find the way to immortality, it will be exclusive to the richest of the rich at first. But equally inevitable, it will eventually trickle down to all. The business will be just to good.

There are many arguments for longevity, even if it were temporarily for the rich, or those in advanced economies.

For example, people who live much longer would probably think about the environment on longer time scales. That includes climate change, pollution, resource exhaustion, and so on. They might consider helping to improve their society, because even if it took several generations they might live to see the benefits.

People who live longer can afford to make better long term investments, instead of trying to cash in on short get rich quick schemes.

They might take better care of their health, knowing that they're not just risking the usually healthy 20s-60s range, but a 20s-200s range, when doing risky activities. Those risky activities sometimes affect others.

People may care to invest in research to cure other diseases because more people will live long enough to suffer from them.

And so on...

It doesn't seem that life extension is going to be unreachable for the majority of the people. Look at what happened with DNA sequencing. Anyone can get their DNA sequenced today (yeah, I know some people in very poor countries can't afford it because they don't even have food but hey, you had breakfast today). Comparing with the human genome project, the target price of most drugs that are in clinical trials today is ridiculously low. And it has to be that way because investors wouldn't be interested in those companies. As a biotech/longevity company, you need a reasonable plan on how to market and sell your research. "Immortality is only for the rich" is cyberpunk science fiction.

Well you better not support cancer research either, as to at goes to the rich first long before it trickles down to public health systems.

I actually did half my PhD on cancer research and yeah I ideally want no part in it. At least the way it’s done in academia today.

Do you give half your income to the top Give Well charities too?

Honestly this seems like a better use of resources than a holiday or a new TV.

I actually have not spent more than 25% of my income, yes, and have actually started researching starting my own institution. Where I hope to put the majority of my income and money made. I feel like NGOs have a cancer where CEOs are paid millions to increase fund raising with the actual “doing good” part being at best an after thought. Give well is awesome but I didn’t find a single charity I could believe in (I’d rather help orphans, victims of domestic abuse and if possible, help victims of human trafficking. Tall order but also paradoxically not in GiveWells docket apparently).

I am signed up with Alcor, and I’m well aware of Aubrey’s work, thank you!

I personally think we need better tooling. We need atomically precise manufacturing, so as to create medical interventions on the smallest scale.

To this end I hope to be launching a molecular nanotechnology startup in the near future.

I want to be immortal. If I ever tire of existence and achieve terminal boredom, I'll just use technology to forget (temporarily or permanently) some memories and experience them again anew.

I'll see you all at the heat death of the universe.

semi relevant user name ironically

Not at all ironic or accidental.

If you like that premise, you'd like to read "The Golden Age" by John C. Wright. It's hard scifi.

Thanks!

I think 100 is quite enough -- life is meant to be lived with people one knows.

You’re always free to take the quick way out. Don’t be so quick to condemn 8 billion other humans to the same short lifetime just because you can’t imagine living longer.

That's very rude.

Advocating that others should not be allowed to live is beyond rude.

Nipping a fantasy =/= killing people

Asking people to "take the quick way out", though, IS asking someone to kill himself for having an opinion you don't seem to like.

Ok you very much misunderstood. I was saying that nobody would be forced to live forever: assisted suicide would always be an option for those who tore of life.

> assisted suicide

looks like I didn't misunderstand at all.

It's all about perspective. From where you are, 100 seems enough. For a 7 year old, 42 seems enough. But if could die tomorrow and you'd be offered the chance to live another day, you'd probably take it. And then the next day, and then the next. And days will become months and months will become years and so on and so forth.

I'm a fourth of the way in. Your outlook is fully alien to me. We die when we die. This struggle for X more years of life is at best vain.

Not a fan of lone immigrants then?

I don't think lone immigrants would immigrate if they had to cut contact with people they knew.

It's also a big difference in outlook -- people that would scoff at life extension would also be the people ready to "end" something in life, and not constantly be at the teat of something. For example, young soldiers in WW1. That sort of outlook is alien to most now, modernity's pit of comfort makes a fool of anyone who partakes.

If others do the same, you could spent more time with people you know than you can now!

Somewhere between 10,000 years and 100,000 years seems like the right amount to live as a human being and die with absolutely no regrets. Dying as a 257 years old you can still imagine feeling some resentment for the future beyond you: what will they discover, how will the music sound. But dying as a 84,751 years old, after an incomprehensible amount of sensory data, inner and outer experiences, concepts, technologies, maybe even a bit of interstellar exploration, feels just natural.

Therefore, no, we should not search for immortality, Terra will be unliveable for carbon-based organisms in 1 billion years, but we should look for mechanisms to preserve a somewhat trivial metabolism of ~50-90 kg of mass for 10,000 to 100,000 years.

[1] "1.2 billion years [from now], high estimate until all plant life dies out [...] rising temperatures will make any animal life unsustainable from this point on" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future#Ear...

I’m just being reasonable here. It’s _possible_ I might find life that’s thousands of years long interesting, but it’s beyond my current imagination. I’ll be perfectly happy with doubling my lifetime (tripling my productive life?). as a biologist, that sounds more reasonable anyway.

Jeanne Louise Calment lived 122 years and 164 days [1]. Doubling the lifespan, 240+ years, is most certainly not possible, not reasonable, using diets, exercises, and so forth: if it were, we would have already been there. Even if we could push the body using current technology, no one will want to live 100+ years (from age 70 to 160+) as an old person, being in pain constantly, fighting all kinds of cancers.

Therefore, the only way I can see a lifespan push, not only x2, but x10, or even x100 (10,000 years—once you get x3/x4, it probably scales trivially) is through 100% organ regeneration and 100% programmatic control over the morphospace. Broke an arm? Amputate the limb and grow another one back, your cells already did it before. Liver cancer? Regrow another liver. Heart issues? Make another heart. Spend all the years above 35 as a perpetual 35 year old, eventually in the bodyshape of Chris Hemsworth/Margot Robbie (to keep the examples in Australia). This scientific fancy is somehow grounded in the mind-enlarging perspectives coming from Dr. Michael Levin's lab [2]. Personally, I believe enough in their thesis, programmatic control over cells, that I started learning about their work, BETSE, Bio Electric Tissue Simulation Engine [3], and try to build on top a BioElectric Simulation Orchestrator, BESO [4]. Most probably, however, we won't see 100% human organ regeneration in our regular lifetimes, but never say never.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Calment

[2] Speaking with Cells: the Electrical Future of Regenerative Medicine with Dr. Michael Levin https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzGaakopAKU

[3] https://github.com/betsee/betse

[4] https://github.com/daysful/beso

You’re right we can push beyond that limit or even there (assuming that person actually lived that long, look up the controversy) with just diet or the biology we know today. But as you point that’s nothing fundamentally problematic with the idea of our body being viable for hundreds of years with the right support. So I’m hopeful.