It’s a form of bike shedding. Immortality is a really hard problem so we kill time playing “what if”
https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2017/03/
“”” Some stories on HN are a complete waste of time. Little real knowledge is ever included in the threads. No one learns anything. We just bullshit for a few hours. And this happens a few times a year for each topic.
My first suggestion is stories related to immortality. Most of the comments immediately turn philosophical.
“Death gives life meaning”
“It’ll only be for rich people”
“The money should be spent on something better.”
On HN, most people don’t want to learn anything about aging. No one discusses the basic science that we might gain by doing the research. The knowledge gained could have benefits in other areas of medicine like heart disease and cancer, for example. You aren’t going to want to live forever and have Alzheimer’s.
“””
What is with this new thing where we call death a "disease" anyways? A disease implies that getting rid of it is a good thing. It's sneaking a very controversial statement (dying should be eradicated) into the post.
“Finally, let’s not delude ourselves into thinking that death is going to be an easy disease to cure. Maybe we’ll get a few breakthroughs over the next couple of decades and we’ll figure out how to add a few extra healthy years to the average person. We definitely need to move beyond long term studies and peer deeper into our bodies.”
from: https://www.heavenofhorror.com/reviews/ad-vitam-season-1-net...
> Obviously, this poses quite a few problems; One is overpopulation and the other is the fact that there’s no need for the next generation. People aren’t getting older and they simply change jobs because they get bored. How do you enter the job market, when your competition is essentially a few years older than you (looks and health wise), while having decades more experience than you? The answer: You don’t.
> Basically, the laws have been changed making anyone younger than 30 years old a minor. Also, you can’t choose to regenerate until your 30th birthday. As someone stated in Ad Vitam “They’ve turned youth into a waiting room”. You’re not old enough to do anything and really, you’re not needed.
With sufficient AI (doesn't need to be AGI or ASI), we're all fundamentally unemployable no matter how long or short our lives.
Without AI, eternal youth might very well do what you fear.
But seriously, life should be fun. If it's not I'd encourage you to think about how you can make a change, even if it's just your mindset.
If I have had a nice length of life (lets say something like 70 years), and am no longer happy, healthy or capable of taking care of myself, don't save me next time I need saving (in order to live longer).
Most commonly this means that CPR can't be performed.
But, I'd argue that should be a call for you to be even more intentional about adding more joy, beauty, and real, meaningful pleasure into your life. Those are the things we most easily give up, and if we're not careful we're bound to have little of it around.
Plus, aging will reduce the quality of life you have.
Depends on the manner of your exit. You may not be blessed with a merciful swift stroke in your sleep. Some ways of dying (like ALS) are absolutely horrible and I am sure that in the concoction of emotions that the victim feels, sadness is a significant component. Regardless of what they imagined when they were 40 and death was still a distant event.
Yet we have this disease, it's called aging, and it just takes awhile to kill people. For some reason it is considered by many to be normal and good.
Further, typically anti-aging implies better health, which we can infer would lead to less strain on our current health care system (in the US).
But you do have a point, where this could be exploited. But seeing the pushback in France regarding raising retirement age, I’d hope we could come together as a country and push back against such efforts.
Expect massive social change.
First, eternal youth isn't a cure for all illnesses. Second, even if all illnesses were also cured and the only causes of death were injuries, malicious or accidental, the average human lifetime would be something like 1000 years (at current rates). Third, as nations get richer, the reproduction rate goes down, and in many cases is currently below replacement.
I also don't expect it to only be available to the rich. The first 5-20 years perhaps, but in my lifetime full genome sequencing has gone from impossible at any price to a few hundred USD. I expect similar for anti-aging. Even if the stuff is patented and restricted, I can say similar about heroin and cocaine, and yet the black market for those exists.
In such a system, you can never solve overpopulation - the less people there are, the more system will try to make things more scarce to extract more profit from those people. A system built to be inefficient (from our perspective) so that it can be efficent from the profiteers' perspective
If you want legalized assisted suicide for those with terminal diseases then that's a tricky issue. It's a good idea in principle but we need careful controls to prevent abuse or coercion.
Edit: There are a few posts, but this is the one with the most engagement https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34149793
Those of us who actually like the life they live would at least have the option of continuing that life
First of all, if the treatments are simple enough, there will be a ton of third world countries doing it in cheap clinics and the US won't be able to stop it. Imagine trying to pressure China or India into discontinuing such services.
Second, it is advantageous for the billionaires to collect massive data on safety and efficiency of such treatments before testing them themselves, and data on mice are almost irrelevant here; for such profound treatments, you need to know how they work in people, and your dataset needs to be huge, because people are a pretty diverse lot.
Third, all developed countries struggle with aging populations. In order to keep their economies afloat, they need to be able to reduce impacts of aging across the board, not just in a few privileged people.
How much has the cost of a heart transplant gone down since its invention in 1967?
Realistically though, we have a pretty good idea of what we're looking for. We don't know the exact combination of chemicals that cures aging, but we know it's going to be a combination of chemicals, and we know we can mass produce those.
I get a med that's $18k every three months, for a mililiter of fluid. I wouldn't have a hope of paying for that without health insurance, and I'd expect health insurers to be resistant to covering mega-expensive life extension therapies.
Generally, the more common diseases are cheaper to treat, because the burden of development, IP etc. gets spread across more people.
Medications for ubiquitous stuff such as high blood pressure tend to be comparably cheap, unless they are a fresh novelty. And aging is even more widespread than HBP.
Estimated at 2-3% of the world population, so 100M+ people.
I am sorry to be prying such information out of you, but things with such a cost label tend to be very high-tech (e.g. tumor-invading lymphocytes etc. that need to be cultivated for each patient separately, which cannot possibly be cheap).
I suspect it'll look cheap in comparison to life extension treatments.
https://peterattiamd.com/ama43/
People seem to want some kind of magic pill that will prevent chronic diseases while still allowing them to eat junk food and not exercise. They are going to be disappointed.
Eating well and exercising enough pushes all sorts of problems a decade or two away, I know it pretty well. But that still does not mean that the last quarter or so of your life will be OK.
The intended target of anti-aging is precisely this part of lifespan that sadly cannot be called healthspan.
We would need stricter capitalism I think. Immortals would be even more self-absorbed, and lack the motivating aspects of mortality. I personally would be content to throw away a few decades doing drugs and playing video games if I had unlimited time.
Of course this assumes that the economic system remains reasonably unchanged. It's possible that once we're all living such long lives and everyone has had enough time to build up large amounts of wealth that patterns of consumption and growth will be significantly different. But that said, the current expectation that people save up for retirement or die destitute is really a product of our current system and would likely change as well.
That isn't a rule of thumb for an infinite lifespan. It's probably not even a rule of thumb for surviving retirement from 1928 through 1938.
7% compound interest is a wacky assumption considering over the last 122 years global equity has returned real returns of 5.3%.
If human lifespans increase to many centuries, it would be reasonable to assume a productive person could take a five to ten year break every so often without losing too much ground to their peers.