Well, that's another data point to suggest that we remain a culture of suicidal, negligent barbarians - quick to accept the suffering and death of billions, and happy to condemn our future selves to the same.
Any present horror is accepted, indeed mandated, by the ape inside - conform, conform, it cries, so hungry to belong and be inside the visible peer group that this instinct overrides any rational consideration of what it actually means to age to death, and just how much might be done to prevent that from happening in this age of biotechnology.
Nobody is quick to accept aging or death. But it's understood that we are very far from medical technology that can tackle the problem. Aging is deeply ingrained in our DNA. So far the world has spent countless billions trying to cure cancer and has largely failed. We can't even control the growth of a few measly cells with mutated DNA. Yet we are composed of trillions of cells, all 'programmed' to deteriorate over time.
The idea that we can cure aging with some miracle cure is a pipe dream until we have a far better understanding and control of biological processes.
Please see the following links on the two broad and very different approaches to research into interventions in aging. Your comment is only reflective of one of them, the slow and very hard task of slowing aging by reprogramming metabolism and epigenetics, which is an immense and very poorly understood challenge at this time. The research community is struggling to fully figure out calorie restriction - a billion dollars on sirtuin biochemistry alone, and next to nothing to show for it - which itself is just a tiny slice of the realm of evolved alterations to aging:
The other path ahead is much more clear, however: it is based on identifying and reversing fundamental changes/damage/lesions at the level of cells and biomolecules, and sidesteps much of the complexity of metabolism by focusing only on reversing these changes, not on the vast networks of reaction in our biochemistry that spiral outward from these comparatively few changes.
There is in fact a very detailed set of proposals out there on how to reverse aging and make its root causes go away, including everything from broad cost and time estimates through to exact descriptions of the biotechnologies needed, some of which are partially realized already. See this is a starting point for a layperson's overview, and then feel free to delve as deeply into the papers and ongoing research as you like:
People who offer solutions and timetables are researchers trying to get funding(always overly optimistic).
The fact is that we have a relatively tiny amount of understanding and control over organic matter. And far more basic research breakthroughs are required before aging can seriously be discussed. SENS and transhumanists are like a primitive civilizations enchanted by the prospect of landing a man on the moon before the horse and buggy was invented, which is why most biologists don't take them seriously.
Most biologists do in fact take SENS seriously - you are very behind the times, and your characterization of the technologies involved is outright wrong.
See the SENS Foundation advisory board, for example, as a representative sample of influential figures in the life sciences:
Equally, see the proposed plan for moving thirteen mitochondrial genes into the cell nucleus: this has been achieved over the past five years for three of the thirteen, and last year someone came up with a generalizable method that should be applicable to all of them, rather than having to hack a separate methodology for each one.
I agree with the gist of your comment (that we're VERY far away from anything like conquering mortality) but I am a biologist and I would describe myself as a transhumanist — not the Ray Kurzweil, this-is-happening-in-the-next-50-years sense, just in the sense that I think the transhumanist vision is something we should strive for (however far away it may be) and use an inspiration.
> Yet we are composed of trillions of cells, all 'programmed' to deteriorate over time.
That is incorrect. The diseases of aging are the result of evolutionary neglect, they aren't 'programmed in' as if there was a timer running. They're a bug, not a feature.
The lack of progress so far certainly doesn't mean that we can't make progress, especially if we take a different approach and we use tools that weren't available before (and never underestimate using a different angle/mindset -- as long as we consider aging itself 'normal' and just something to be slightly delayed, we certainly won't make progress). The SENS 'engineering' approach mean that we don't have to understand metabolism or fix everything that goes wrong, just to periodically do repairs on whatever long-lived molecules are accumulating over time to cause pathologies. That's a lot easier than the past gerontological approaches of trying to understand and cure everything.
>> Yet we are composed of trillions of cells, all 'programmed' to deteriorate over time.
> That is incorrect. The diseases of aging are the result of evolutionary neglect, they aren't 'programmed in' as if there was a timer running.
No, the earlier poster is exactly right -- all living cells are programmed to deteriorate over time. There are no examples of immortal cells, with one exception -- cancer cells, like those that were harvested from Henrietta Lacks in 1951 and live on today in Petri dishes all over the world (so-called HeLa cells).
A quote from the second article: "Programmed cell-death (or PCD) is death of a cell in any form, mediated by an intracellular program.[1][2] PCD is carried out in a regulated process, which usually confers advantage during an organism's life-cycle. PCD serves fundamental functions during both plant and metazoa (multicellular animals) tissue development."
There is a reason we die -- it makes evolutionary sense. If there was an advantage to living longer, we would live longer. If there was an advantage to living a shorter time, we would live a shorter time. Our present lifetimes result from natural selection and evolution.
You are looking at it the wrong way. Yes, from the point of view of an individual cell, you are correct. But from the point of view of a whole human, that's not how it works. At 25 pretty much all your cells have died and been replaced many times, and if over evolutionary times we had lived to be 500 years on average, we'd have mechanisms to keep up healthy that long. But we haven't, and so we don't, which is why everything starts going wrong as soon as you get to evolution's blind spot, past the age at which most of us lived and reproduced.
If damage didn't accumulate past thresholds that cause various pathologies, we'd basically stay young adults forever. If we can figure out how to fix that damage before it reaches those levels, that's what is going to happen. It's a lot easier to figure out how to fix those few kinds of damages than to change metabolism so that damage doesn't occur, or to cure diseases after they begin.
> There is a reason we die -- it makes evolutionary sense. If there was an advantage to living longer, we would live longer. If there was an advantage to living a shorter time, we would live a shorter time. Our present lifetimes result from natural selection and evolution.
What is "good enough" for our genes isn't always good for us as people. Most of what can be called "modern progress" is about protecting us from what would happen to us if nature was left to itself. Curing the diseases of aging is just the continuation of that (unless you don't wear glasses, don't live inside a building, don't wear shoes, don't get vaccinated, don't take antibiotics, don't wear any kind of protection, don't brush your teeth, would never have surgery, wouldn't get hearing aids, dentures, etc).
> At 25 pretty much all your cells have died and been replaced many times, and if over evolutionary times we had lived to be 500 years on average, we'd have mechanisms to keep up healthy that long.
You're missing the point that some cells, essential to our survival, are never replaced, and when they decay, we die. One example is brain cells -- they're never replaced, and when they're done, so are we. This means that, unless we can get around apoptosis (programmed cell death), then we won't ever move beyond a certain age. We aren't close to understanding apoptosis.
> What is "good enough" for our genes isn't always good for us as people.
Ah, someone who thinks he can outwit nature. When we try to outwit nature, we end up outwitting ourselves.
> Most of what can be called "modern progress" is about protecting us from what would happen to us if nature was left to itself.
You mean, like antibiotics? The antibiotics that we have foolishly mismanaged to the extent that they simply don't work any more?
Contrary to your thesis, we need to figure out how to get along with nature, not pretend we can dominate nature. We've tried to run the show, and nature has responded by showing us how naive we are.
And this idea isn't some airy-fairy New Age philosophy, it's the result of careful scientific work. We're just getting started in figuring out how to get along with nature, and everything we've tried to date has backfired:
Medical and nutritional advances -> overpopulation
Antibiotics and other medical breakthroughs -> the gradual evolution of antibiotic-immune microbes.
Longevity extension -> overcrowding, a plague of chronic diseases in the elderly, deep philosophical questions about meaningless long lives.
> Curing the diseases of aging is just the continuation of that
Curing the "diseases of aging" is not your topic. Your topic is the disease of age. That's not the same thing at all.
> You're missing the point that some cells, essential to our survival, are never replaced, and when they decay, we die. One example is brain cells -- they're never replaced, and when they're done, so are we. This means that, unless we can get around apoptosis (programmed cell death), then we won't ever move beyond a certain age. We aren't close to understanding apoptosis.
These cells can be replaced via stem cell therapy, and the more we look into things, the more we find that certain types of cells that we thought weren't replaced actually are.
> Ah, someone who thinks he can outwit nature. When we try to outwit nature, we end up outwitting ourselves.
That sounds really good, but I believe it's BS. You are anthropomorphizing nature. And every day you are "outwitting it" I'm sure. I bet you are quite happy for yourself and your loved ones not to be living like humans were living 20,000 years ago. And who's to say that technological and scientific progress isn't part of nature anyway? Why is curing diseases "against" nature? Not that nature is an entity in the first place.. All there is are the laws of physics.
> Curing the "diseases of aging" is not your topic. Your topic is the disease of age. That's not the same thing at all.
"age" is not an abstract thing that kills you. There are specific diseases of aging - which are diseases that old people get that young people do not get - that are curable, and that includes all the things that make us frail but aren't usually categorized as diseases (loss of muscle mass, change in texture of skin, etc).
Are you saying that Alzheimer's disease and heart disease and going blind and getting fat and arthritis and losing your muscles and sex drive are good things? If so, you are welcome to refuse these therapies when they are developed, but I will gladly take them, just like I'm sure you are taking advantage of all the other modern ways of making human life easier and more enjoyable.
You seem to be under what Aubrey de Grey calls the "pro-death trance"; happy that we cured smallpox and you wish we could cure AIDS and whatever, but you don't think we can cure the diseases of aging, so you find excuses for why they are actually good.
>> You're missing the point that some cells, essential to our survival, are never replaced, and when they decay, we die.
> These cells can be replaced via stem cell therapy ...
Brain cells replaced by stem cell therapy? Have you given this any thought? A brain cell replaced by stem-cell therapy is empty -- it's not a replacement for the cells that contain the memory of your fifth birthday party, or that contain your knowledge of Calculus.
There's a reason brain cells aren't replaced -- it's the same reason you can't swap a running hard drive for a replacement that has no data written to it.
> "age" is not an abstract thing that kills you.
No, not abstract -- apoptosis is not abstract, it is a fact of life. And we have a very poor understanding of it.
> Are you saying that Alzheimer's disease and heart disease and going blinde and getting fat and losing your muscles and sex drive are good things?
Only you said that, and the remainder of your post relies on an argument only you have made.
> but you don't think we can cure the diseases of aging, so you find excuses for why they are actually good.
1. Stop making arguments for other people.
2. Learn the science. You have suggested stem cell therapy to replace brain cells, but without asking yourself what brain cells do, how they function. You would do well to learn that first.
> Brain cells replaced by stem cell therapy? Have you given this any thought? A brain cell replaced by stem-cell therapy is empty -- it's not a replacement for the cells that contain the memory of your fifth birthday party, or that contain your knowledge of Calculus.
Maybe if you replaced all cells at once or something stupid like that, but that's not what is being suggested here.
> No, not abstract -- apoptosis is not abstract, it is a fact of life. And we have a very poor understanding of it.
You have a poor understanding of it. First of all, a lot of the diseases of aging come about because apoptosis stops working and these malfunctioning zombie cells hang around and gum things up and produce erroneous signals/proteins. Rejuvenating the apoptosis process is part of the SENS platform. Cells that commit apoptosis are replaced all through your life.. It's when that process stops working well that things go wrong; they don't go wrong because of that process.
In other words, apoptosis doesn't make us old, it keeps us young. It's when it stops working well - along with other things - that we get frail and sick.
I asked you questions, and you didn't answer them.
> 2. Learn the science. You have suggested stem cell therapy to replace brain cells, but without asking yourself what brain cells do, how they function. You would do well to learn that first.
Have you read Aubrey de Grey's book? It goes quite deep into the biology of his proposals (and he cites the papers that go even deeper). If you haven't, you don't even know what is being proposed so how can you know if it makes sense or not?
This is where I think we're headed. We're going to figure out exactly what all the moving bits do in our DNA and mitochondria and we'll be in a position to re-write it at will. When that happens, the question of what it means to be 'you' is going to get very pertinent, a safe example if it turns out your love of certain foods is a result of wiring in your brain due to your DNA makeup, do you change it? Do you add new foods? Do you delete old foods?
What happens to social justice when one person can afford gene therapy to make their children 99% more capable than average and others can't? If you ever saw the movie Gattica (not a great movie but it tried) don't worry about people who are born 'perfect' or born the 'natural' way, think about people who re-write their own genetics to have the mutation that gives Sherpa in the Himalayas more, and more efficient red blood cells. Very scary tech talk at Google on this once where a researcher in gene therapy was getting approached by trainers already.
Well, the people were asked how long they wanted to live, not what they believe is medically achievable within their livetime. Only one percent wanted to live forever. That sounds like acceptance of death for me.
>But it's understood that we are very far from medical technology that can tackle the problem.
That's not what the question in the survey was. The question was "how long do you WANT to live?", not "how long do you think you WILL live?". Saying you don't want something just because you can't have it is just sour grapes.
>The idea that we can cure aging with some miracle cure is a pipe dream until we have a far better understanding and control of biological processes.
I don't think any informed people believe that some "miracle cure" is going to come along and cure death and aging. Curing death and aging is going to be a slow, incremental process because aging is made up of many components (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aubrey_de_Grey#The_seven_types_...)
In the bigger picture of the species, death and birth are what prevents stagnation and enables the next generation tackle new challenges. We are imperfect copying machines, both at biological and intelectual level. Stop the renewal cycle and not enough copy errors happen anymore, leading to the ultimate failure of the species in front of the fast pace of change in the surrounding environment.
That sounds nice and tidy in the abstract. Make it more concrete: do you, personally, want to die to fulfill some perceived evolutionary imperative? If so, feel free. I don't, ever.
Are you saying you don't ever want to die at all?
That's interesting because there are some people who feel very strongly that they should die, and there are those who feel that they would never want to and should not need to.
Some people faced with certain death will go to very extreme lengths to prolong their lives by the tiniest amount. Others will accept it.
There's a sort of "natural way of things" mentality that is very pervasive. People believe that we are meant to die. I think this is another very difficult barrier that the SENS community faces.
> Are you saying you don't ever want to die at all?
Emphatically yes.
> That's interesting because there are some people who feel very strongly that they should die
People often accept what they feel they can't change, more because they don't see any obvious way to change it rather than actually liking the situation they find themselves in. That can lead to rather impressive rationalizations of why we "need" to die, but that seems like sour grapes to me. I think a majority of that set of people would choose to live forever if they actually had the option. If the option actually existed in practice, rather than in philosophical conversations, intentionally choosing not to use it would amount to suicide. I'm not suicidal, so I want to live forever; I really don't see a middle ground there, other than indecision and procrastination.
Frame the question inductively instead, to help people think about it less abstractly; I bet you'd get an almost universally positive response to "do you want to live at least one more day?". Or phrase it negatively and count the "no"s: I doubt you'll get many positive responses to "do you want to die tomorrow?", and the ones you do get probably indicate a need for immediate psychological help.
> Some people faced with certain death will go to very extreme lengths to prolong their lives by the tiniest amount. Others will accept it.
Depends on whether you think of "dead" as the absolute zero point on your value scale or not. If you don't, you can imagine scenarios in which you'd prefer death. Personally, I do see that as the zero point, so no scenario exists for which I'd consider death a preferable alternative.
> There's a sort of "natural way of things" mentality that is very pervasive.
I think almost all instances of this argument would very quickly dissolve in the face of an actual option to live forever, leaving only a few random fanatics who really believe that they "should" die.
Say you were given some gene therapy at age 15 or so, and you will never die of natural causes. Would you take a pill at age 80 to end it?
The way the survey questions were asked must have just been terrible. I think what happens is people get this picture in their mind of someone that looks like a damned ghoulish skeleton if they live to be 150, which is just silly.
One of the commenters on the site was a good example. He said something along the lines of "people start losing their senses, things stop working..." etc. No. No they don't - these are the things that kill you which would not exist if we could allow people to live indefinitely.
That started as a concise response to you, and went on to be me venting about the subject. Of course I want to live forever!
>I think what happens is people get this picture in their mind of someone that looks like a damned ghoulish skeleton if they live to be 150, which is just silly.
Far from silly it is what has happened to everyone who lived to be even 120 or 90. And the people know enough people to know it.
So they answered based on actual experience and observation instead of wishy washy Kurzeill-like hopes...
Why would one call this silly?
It's like calling someone who thinks that travelling to Africa and back to SF every day tiring "silly", because he doesn't take into account the possibility of tele-portation...
I don't want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying. I don't want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen; I want to live on in my apartment.
>Some people faced with certain death will go to very extreme lengths to prolong their lives by the tiniest amount. Others will accept it.
And I wouldn't want to be with the first guys company. They would screw you or everybody to achieve it.
One would never want to experience war, mass violence or extreme events of course. But ever more so, one would never want to experience war or mass violence near those kind of people.
Remember those taking the place of kids in the lifeboats of Titanic? You think in another, non life and death, social situation, but one that could have great benefit for them, they would be more graceful?
On the contrary, I can easily see a pile of fascinating societal consequences if everyone lives forever. Sounds like an awesome set of problems to have; bring them on.
There is only a finite number of living beings this planet can sustain at any given moment - if there really is a possibility to "disable" aging, how do you think we should decide which of all those potential beings will be given a chance to live? Who are we to consider ourselves more worthy of life than any of the previous or possible next generations?
"on this planet." Maybe that would give people motivation to get off it. Regardless if you want to weigh counter-factual people against living people your moral system will have some curious implications which you might not like. If someone threatens to not have children if you don't give them your money are you going to take into account the non existent future lives snuffed out and give in?
Most of the major causes of suffering have already been fixed by 'biotechnology' eg vaccines, condoms, sanitation, basic nutrition, obstetrics. But we still fail to apply them in many places due to well, negligent barbarianism as you put it. Will it really fix these problems if we start embalming billionaires and dictators?
Your blog seems free of any consideration of the social consequences of anti-ageing technology. Do you worry about it? For example, Neil Armstrong died today, and by all accounts he was a great man. But recently he stood up and decried NASA funding private space ventures like SpaceX. Now if the next dragon probe punches a hole in the ISS he may turn out to be right. But all these historical figures who are proven to be wrong or misguided won't be historical figures if you make them live forever... is this unequivocally positive? And if it isn't, how do we deal with it?
Doesn't your Neil Armstrong argument kind of undermine itself given that Armstrong did live long, did decry private space venture, and yet private space ventures are happening anyways?
I think the GP's point is that, as more people live longer, more people with "antiquated", or even "Luddite" world-views will be around, creating friction for the technophiliacs and their notions of how things "should be."
Yes, my characterization is hyperbolic, and pretty blatantly so. I'm trying to stand out from the subtle ageism, couched as progress-ism, in the GP post and countless other poorly thought-out screeds like it.
Your point that progress occurs regardless of that friction is exactly the right counter-argument. In fact, I'd even suggest that the friction being decried is a necessary sanity check on our progress. With every advance we make, we should be asking ourselves how it improves the world, and if the improvement it brings is worth its cost, or its consequences. For private spaceflight, that's a pretty unqualified yes in most peoples' books (Armstrong notwithstanding), but consider all the pharmaceuticals given fast-track approval that turn out to have horrible side-effects, which even token further testing could have uncovered.
But all these historical figures who are proven to be wrong or misguided won't be historical figures if you make them live forever... is this unequivocally positive? And if it isn't, how do we deal with it?
We already have political dissenters: how do you currently "deal with it"? Do you murder them? Do you selectively deny them life-saving medical treatment, so as to silence their views and improve society?
I have a modest proposal. Why not just let poor Neil Armstrong live, and merely censor his writings? The effects are the same, and there's less blood.
There may be some long-term bias going on here. It would be interesting to see what correlation there is between current age and preferred age of death. You'll might find that 60 year olds (with death only 20 years away) would answer differently to 18 year olds.
Can you point me to where it says this in the article? Because I don't see it - he mentions talking to people from "all walks of life", but that's different to having no correlation.
>These percentages have held up as I’ve spoken to people from many walks of life in libraries and bookstores; teenagers in high schools; physicians in medical centers; and investors and entrepreneurs at business conferences.
The percentages are the same for groups of teenagers, and for groups of physicians investors and entrepreneurs. There could be a jump at 60+, but based on his data there isn't a difference between teenagers and working adults.
>Well, that's another data point to suggest that we remain a culture of suicidal, negligent barbarians - quick to accept the suffering and death of billions, and happy to condemn our future selves to the same.
Actually it's a sign that we are NOT a culture of negligent barbarians.
It's a sign that we are mature individuals, with an understanding of the cycle of life, and not me!me!me! egoists that seek to prolong their lives forever, earth, resources and other generations be damned.
How you approach death is the ultimate test of a civilisation's sophistication.
>It's a sign that we are mature individuals, with an understanding of the cycle of life, and not me!me!me! egoists that seek to prolong their lives forever, earth, resources and other generations be damned.
Not hardly. Keep in mind that most people believe in some form of afterlife, so they don't actually think they're going to die at all. If the approach to death is the ultimate test of a civilization's sophistication (which, frankly, is just a silly thing to say, even if it does sound Deeply Wise), then surely it would be the infantile civilization that deals with death by making up a bunch of fairy tales to convince itself that death doesn't really happen after all.
>Not hardly. Keep in mind that most people believe in some form of afterlife, so they don't actually think they're going to die at all.
I don't think people believe that "realistically" to that afterlife, including religious people. Else they would not be sad at funerals.
>If the approach to death is the ultimate test of a civilization's sophistication (which, frankly, is just a silly thing to say, even if it does sound Deeply Wise
Actually it's a common theme in philosophy and religion, far for a "silly thing to say".
One might hope for some Kurzweil like magic cure, but for several millennia of civilisation we had to make do without it (and will have to for quite a while). And people that couldn't accept that cycle made society hell. How a civilisation approaches death says the most about their way of life as well (e.g clinging to money, sex and stuff like it's the be all end all instead of creating things).
>then surely it would be the infantile civilization that deals with death by making up a bunch of fairy tales to convince itself that death doesn't really happen after all.
Nothing infantile about it. Those 'fairytales' are the basis of civilisation. They were forms of reasoning about the universe and existence, but their utility was not on their validity in the physics sense, but on the lessons they gave about current life. Put another way, they really were morals, philosophy and law, not physics and cosmology, even if they seemed like the latter. The important part of the Bible was not "god created this or that in x days", but the keeping-a-civilisation-together part (the creationist loonies in the Bible Belt mostly keep the first part of course).
So, if you think the 10 commandments are silly, you should have witnessed the society without them or something analogous. It's easy to pass judgement upon such things with some milleniums of hindsight and the benefit of a modern upbringing.
>I don't think people believe that "realistically" to that afterlife, including religious people. Else they would not be sad at funerals.
No, most probably don't believe believe in the afterlife, but they escape the reality of the situation by pretending, and if you point out that they are pretending, they will actually become more convinced that they truly do believe in an afterlife.
Arguably, though, they would still cry at funerals even if they did really believe, just as you might cry when a friend or family member leaves and you have no idea when you will see them again.
>Actually it's a common theme in philosophy and religion, far for a "silly thing to say".
Religion and philosophy are full of very silly things to say. My point is that there is no basis for the claim that the approach to death is the "ultimate test". "Ultimate" in what sense?
>And people that couldn't accept that cycle made society hell.
Evidence, please.
>Nothing infantile about it.
Roughly everything you said after this sentence is inaccurate, but more importantly it is all completely irrelevant. Whatever guidance religions may provide about morality will not change the fact that they also provide the primary approach to handling death for most of their adherents. And that approach is to hide behind fanciful lies and ridiculous stories built to replace the terrifying realization that your life is finite and can end at any moment, really and forever, with the feel-good belief that when you die, you will get to go and see everyone who died before you and spend eternity with blah blah blah.
You know how misguided parents sometimes tell their kids, when a dog has to be euthanized, that they are taking him to a "new home" where he will "play in the yard every day with all of the other dogs"? That's exactly how most religious people approach death, except in their case it is self deception rather than lying to a kid.
And if that's how they want to cope with it, that's fine. But don't try to tell me that it's "sophisticated".
First reaction: What kind of stupid question is that? I want to live as long as possible.
Having read the article: less than 1% share my view. Yikes.
I think for most people, questions like this are what I'd call a "philosophy landmine"; say certain things and it causes people to stop thinking and repeat some standard cultural tropes or go spinning off into faux-philosophy-land.
For the first question, there was no guarantee that aging would be slowed. You might feel very, very old and infirm at 150 even if you could take pills that keep you from dying. I think the responses reflected pessimism about quality of extended life.
Which again brings us back to the "philosophy landmine" aspect of the question. If you ask people if the mind is a function of the body, most of them will emphatically say no. These same people will have no trouble accepting the existence of Alzheimer's disease.
I suspect that when you ask someone a question about something that is far outside their range of experiences, exactly how you frame that question is going to make a big difference in determining their answer.
"Would you like to live 500 year with the body of a twenty year old?" might give different results from "if the technology existed to avoid aging, would you use it?" and both might give different results than this poll.
Indeed. People also need to realize that you live one day at a time, and if today you are healthy and having fun, you'll want to live until tomorrow. Asking people "do you want to live 500 years" makes people look at all those years at once rather than at how these years would actually be experienced.
If everybody died at 25 and you asked someone "do you want to live to be 100?" it would seem like a very long time and I'm sure people who thought it wasn't possible would rationalize and find excuses why it's not desirable anyway and it's better to die at 25 ("makes life more meaningful" or some other BS).
Isn't this kind of a stupid question? If age were truly just a number, I don't think people would bother asking it.
If you looked and felt like you were 30 at 130, would you say to yourself, I've lived long enough? You could have several careers. For example, you might decide to be a writer or do research that takes decades when you are 80.
How much imagination does it take to want to live for centuries? I just bought a Wacom drawing tablet today. I can't draw a straight line. I think I'll need a decade just to learn how to draw.
There's a great quote from "Beat the Devil": "Time. Time. What is time? Swiss manufacture it. French hoard it. Italians squander it. Americans say it is money. Hindus say it does not exist. Do you know what I say? I say time is a crook."
We just lost Armstrong (Neil, not Lance). And Phyllis Diller. And Sally Ride. And Scott McKenzie. Just to name a few. Even if we were to live far longer, there would be deaths (accidents, suicides, murders, sudden medical conditions). And changes to neighborhoods and buildings and art and music.
With time, you come to realize that there are ghosts, but they're in your head, not out in the world. Doesn't stop you from seeing them.
If life expectancies go way up, I think your view will come to be seen as just common sense. Most fantastic things seem different when they become a mundane part of everyday life. You're ahead of the curve.
"This surge comes mostly from improved hygiene and nutrition, but also from new discoveries and interventions: everything from antibiotics and heart bypass surgery to cancer drugs that target and neutralize the impact of specific genetic mutations."
No. This is a common misperception that's easily debunked with two minutes of Googling and I'm shocked to see this in an NYT article. The change is almost entirely due to reduction in infant mortality.
which says that yes, the greatest reductions in death rates were for infants and children, but for every group under 85, mortality dropped by at least 50% from 1935 to 2010.
which seem to say that those who are 18 today expect about 15 more years than they would have in 1900.
Not to mention nutrition, hygiene, and antibiotics are probably reasonably important in reducing infant mortality. I do agree that for an article specifically about aging they might have been more careful about those numbers, though.
Yeah, the only thing I would add is that "people living longer" historically hasn't been about prolonging life so much as preventing early death. Some people have always lived to be 80, 90, 100. What we've really accomplished is that more people live to be 80, 90, 100 than ever before. For me to live to be 80 or 90 probably just takes reasonably good luck and staying in the upper-middle-class, instead of a one-in-a-million kind of luck.
I am hopefully about the future, but I won't really be confident until I start seeing people live to be 120, 130, 140. Unfortunately, this takes a lot of time. The most optimistic test I can think of for an anti-aging drug is to take a large number of 80-year-olds, who are common enough you should be able to find a number of good, healthy, but old test subjects, and give them anti-aging treatments. If a large number of them live to be 120, I feel comfortable saying we're on track to beat death.
This experiment takes 40 years to run. Granted, you can do a lot of other work before it finishes, like examine tissue samples and various health metrics to show the treated 80-year-olds aren't aging like the control group. But for even a young'un like me to actually see 120-year-olds before I myself am 80, this experiment has to begin in the next 10 years, which I find terribly unlikely.
So while I'm going to cling to life as bitterly as I can as long as I can -- my own goal is to see the tricentennial, the dawn of the 22nd century, and maybe the transit of Venus, which I missed this year -- my personal immortality likely depends on not just discovering a safe way to halt aging and prolong life, but a way to reverse senescence and restore youth. I think it's possible, but forecasting it as happening before I die is a bit cliche in this domain.
Socrates' death is famous for how it was done; nobody mentioned that he lived "twice the average life expectancy" (You'd think we'd make a note of killing a 70 year old -- a 150 year-old in today's terms).
You are indeed correct. The life expantancy increases is due to a reduction in child mortality. Take a look at the second chart in this article http://www.caseyresearch.com/cdd/how-health-care-can-cost-so...
It shows that if you made it to 75 in 1900, you can expect it make it to 80 today.
This is just one more instance in which the average is an extremely misleading statistic. The fact is that it's been true for a long time that if you survived childhood you had a good chance of living to a ripe old age, barring accidental death. We've just gotten a lot better at reducing child mortality.
Most older people seem to be less likely to adapt to changes to society. E.g. Elderly people are less likely to take up new technology. Perhaps it might be related to the fact that babies' brains form new connections at a much faster rate than a thirty year old's whose brain form new connections at a much faster rate than an eighty year old's?
If you've played with machine learning, many machine learning algorithms are able to "learn" quickly initially but later on, it can less quickly adapt to changes. (Someone more knowledgeable may correct me here).
Consider the possibility that old people can have young bodies forever, but their brain / world view / whatever will not fundamentally change from when they were teenagers. i.e old people will continue to think outdated ideas and use outdated technologies, and not die. Whenever we talk about the establishment, congressmen thinking in outdated ways, these are the exact same people! Unless we can find a way to keep the brain young without continually causing amnesia, people with control over society to its detriment will continue living, forever.
Do you want to be a 250 year old who thinks that the world is wrong and you are right, that the old ways are best, while everyone else tries to convince you to move on?
I'd like to live as a 22 year old forever, but unfortunately that is not possible without freezing time (or resetting my brain using version control every birthday).
As a 66 year old, who just finished the Coursera machine learning course with a score of 750/700 on the programming assignments, and is currently ranked in the top 8% in the current Caltech online ML course, I think you're talking prejudiced and prejudicial BS.
Some people can't adapt to new ideas at any age, and some remain flexible, mentally and physically. My mother was mentally alert and engaged up until her death at 99, although her body was failing.
Many 22 year olds have lousy judgement compared to adults - I know that I did.
Since the topic of machine learning came up in this thread: what you've said is a special case of Bayesian inference, as applied to demographic groups.
Strawman, but valid thoughts. I have had similar misgivings, but if we have cured aging, part of that should include a cure for our minds aging aswell.
I tend to agree with you overall. I think society would move much slower if people lived to 250, and I think it would be a net negative.
However, some of the concepts you're talking about were based on flawed studies done decades ago. Old people's thinking and learning abilities do not diminish nearly as much as we used to believe.
Even if I asked them to imagine that a pill had been invented to slow aging down by one-half, allowing a person who is, say, 60 years old to have the body of a 30-year-old, only about 10 percent of audiences switched to favoring a life span of 150 years.
Bring it on. If you can double my lifespan, I can do twice as much good.
From my own experiences and thoughts on this, I think part of the problem is that this would give people unpresented amounts of freedom in defining their own life. I can barely figure out what to do with my one pathetic life span, with only a couple or few decades of productivity if I do things right (and by all accounts I am not doing it right; I can barely summon the strength now).
What would it mean to have several or perhaps an infinite amount of time and freedom to figure out what to do with as many lives as you want?
I think most people can't handle that responsibility at this stage in human history so people kind of reject the question.
Personally, I've been hearing all my life about the Serious Philosophical Issues posed by life extension, and my attitude has always been that I'm willing to grapple with those issues for as many centuries as it takes.
Specifically the quote "Hey, since we live for millions of years, let's go make some staggeringly beautiful art that can only be created by synthesizing thousands of years of experience, hopes, fears, triumphs and failures into one transcendental expression of life!"
I think the problem with the question as posed by the author is that he offers no "very long but finite" life span. Most people reject (correctly, I think) the possibility of living forever; "living forever" is actually code for "living until some accident kills you" or "living until society breaks down to the point where your life-extension technology is irrelevant." Moreover, people may realize that there may come a time at which they have accomplished everything they want to do. If you live forever, however, you would be forced to carry on living with no goal in life. Could you endure 10 years of life without a purpose? 100 years? In other words, people may ultimately want to die even though they are healthy. An "infinite" lifespan raises the possibility that you might just kill yourself at some point.
A better set of numbers might have been 100 years, 1000 years, 10,000 years, etc.
People have already said this, but to reinforce: what a dumb question. The surrounding context is more important than the actual question. Very few would choose to live to any age if it required massive medical intervention, and very few would ever choose to die if they were happy, healthy and general content.
I am totally in favour of removing limits on human life span and think it's an inevitability rather than a possibility (although I don't expect it to happen in my lifetime). Here is why I disagree with some of the objections made to it in this article.
No Jobs for the younger generation - I think the notion of requiring someone being forced to have job to earn a living is another concept that will eventually be regulated to the past. However, that's my post scarcity fantasy and it's very likely life extension will come before that. We're at 7 Billion people now we're still find jobs for them. An economy is about people, and more people means more economic activity.
The planet won't be able to support all the people - This is correct, although the planet can support more than we think, especially with cleaner and more efficient energy sources. Even if it turns out to be a huge problem, it would hopefully have the benefit of pushing us to expand to other parts of the solar system and universe. An extended or unlimited life span it would make it viable to for people to travel the long distances involved.
Evolution will stop - I'm of the belief that mankind's real evolution is now happening in its shared intelligence. We're already starting to gain the ability to bend DNA to our will. Biological evolution through natural selection is not the way forward for us.
Boredom - Perhaps. We really don't know. Hopefully the lack of a natural death would force us to finally create sensible laws regarding the ending of one's existence. It would be nicer to have a choice when to leave the party, rather than be forced out the door.
Less than 1 percent embraced the idea that people might avoid death altogether.
Actually wasn't Kurzweil promoting the idea of a downloadable brain? Is this just wishful thinking or is there actually any hope for that?
This would be somewhat an acceptable alternative, i.e. to live forever as a digital element. Otherwise I guess by best try is still with the cryonic guys.
Uploading is an expensive way to reproduce; it doesn't solve the problem at hand. You'd want a slow ongoing replacement and integration process of switching out neurons for machinery to achieve the translation of the mind to a machine substrate without either creating a copy or engaging in suicide. e.g. see thoughts here:
Rejuvenation biotechnology of the sort put forward in great detail by the SENS Foundation and others is a much better prospect than cryonics for those who can wait for its advent, but that will require much greater investments in research - i.e. hundreds of millions or billions in funding rather than the present paltry few millions a year.
Living forever/longer doesn't make much sense, when:
1. You have to take 15 pills with every meal you eat to do so.
2. You have to work 15 hours a day to make ends meet, pay your bills and take care of yourself to what one would describe a good life.
3. You have no strength in your bones, you feel weak all the time. You can't eat much because your teeth have fallen off.
4. Law of diminishing utility with regards to world kicks in, your spirit dies away but you body just lives on.
I would be happy to live up to 65, in full health without requiring to eat pills and depending on other people to do so. Its my perspective, yes.
Also nobody is taking into account problems due to lack of exercise, physical work and food we eat. There are also things like diabetes and hypertension which is almost at a level of epidemic in the world today.
Another thing is research might be giving us better machinery for healthcare, better pills and doctors. But if our lifestyles are messing up our health, there is little help somebody else can offer.
Death is so scary because so little of our conscience self is passed onto the next generation. All of our experiences, memories, and feelings cease to exist. Only a fraction of our heritage is passed onto the next generation. That is all that survives of our mind.
Compare this to our genetic code. Approximately half of our genetic code is passed down in each offspring. Death only partially erases our genetic makeup, and so no one is scared of their genes being lost when they die.
Death is scary because we have no means to pass on our memories and experiences to the next generation. It is as if we were meant to be scared of death, so that we fight against it.
I'm torn by the prospect of a technological solution to aging.
On one hand, I certainly don't want to get old and die -- at least, not on nature's time table.
On the other hand, if no one else got old and dies, we'll quickly become an over populated, stagnant society. From a more "objective" perspective, there's something beautiful about life because it's so temporary.
Absolutely. Life expectancy at birth (in the U.S.) has increased by more than 20 years since 1900. Life expectancy at age 65 has still increased by ~10 years though:
This is something that my friends and I talk about often, and it's a subject of particular interest for me. In particular, here are some of the things that I find to be obstacles to the idea of living forever, or at least for a tremendously extended period of time:
-Population growth. Right now it's pretty well established that three generations will be in the world at any given time, with around 25-30 years between each generation. If we were to live to 150 (much less 750), suddenly that's five or six generations instead of three, potentially doubling the world's population, and that's assuming that people still follow the custom of having an average number of children between the ages of 25-35 and then stopping.
-On that note, if we are given the capability to remain sexually active for hundreds of years, then one person will be capable of multiplying into far more new people, rapidly increasing population growth. If we are not given that capability, then we'd all end up miserable as the period of our lives in which we have sexually fulfilling relationships becomes small.
-If we conquer diseases with such efficiency, then the tragedy of random, accidental deaths becomes greatly more pronounced. People may die from heart disease and cancer at a far reduced or nonexistent rate, but people will still die from car crashes, drug-related violence and suicide at the same rate they do now. Those deaths will become a lot more significant and difficult to handle, and we as a society will become either super-anxious and paranoid about the possibility of losing our lives or either perpetually in mourning (as our lives become longer we will have more connections and friendships and familial relationships, so we'll have more people whose deaths will affect us) or somehow immune or numb to the pain as a coping mechanism. The idea of war will become far more barbaric as suddenly instead of taking 60 years and a family away from a young man, you're taking hundreds of years and whatever else he could have done in that time.
-Any disease we are unable to cure with the potential to permanently affect people will instantly become far more terrifying. Non-fatal sexually transmitted diseases, loss of limbs or appendages, and debilitating mental diseases will be far, far more damaging given the greater lifespan that they will affect.
-Medical care will still, presumably, be as expensive and challenging as ever; however, we will have more people who need it and more reasons that those people need it. Most of these reasons will probably be expensive - for instance, if cancer treatment ends up being very very expensive, everybody will still want it - so our society is going to have to find some way to handle that. In a best-case scenario, most of the money we made would end up going to medical care, and we would never retire. The proportion would probably be far from that though, with 99% of people being unable to feasibly afford to maintain their own lives. Furthermore, we would need far, far more doctors, and therefore we would have to develop even more incentives for people to take that path in life and stay on it for as long as possible.
-Concepts that we have now (some of which I mentioned tangentially above) that are based on the idea of a 70-90 year lifespan and that we rely on will no longer exist. These include the eventual death of all dictators/tyrants, fairly consistent sizes in the nuclear and extended families, the age-based progression of opportunities and decisions, life sentences for crimes, marriage (would you want to keep the same spouse for 500 years?), retirement, etc.
You make some good points, but I think I prefer all of those problems to dying before I've even lived for my first century. :-)
> If we are given the capability to remain sexually active for hundreds of years, then one person will be capable of multiplying into far more new people, rapidly increasing population growth.
People can be sexually active without being able to have children. Ask anybody who's infertile, or uses contraception.
> Any disease we are unable to cure with the potential to permanently affect people will instantly become far more terrifying. Non-fatal sexually transmitted diseases, loss of limbs or appendages, and debilitating mental diseases will be far, far more damaging given the greater lifespan that they will affect.
That is as it should be. Horrible things are horrible; that they are overshadowed by worse things does not make them any nicer.
> Medical care will still, presumably, be as expensive and challenging as ever; however, we will have more people who need it and more reasons that those people need it.
While it's possible that medical care will continue to cost the same amount for the next few hundred years, it seems kind of unlikely. A lot can happen in a century.
People inevitably bring up population. The simple answer is that living forever would have no impact on population at all. We are already very close to the max population our planet can sustain (maybe past it) so we need to deal with that problem anyway with regulation (or unfortunately, war). People living forever doesn't really change the equation, just changes the regulations.
The rest of those are true but don't sound like problems.
So he prepped them by reminding them such life extending technology might not exist (at which point they feel like it's a test) and then, shocker, they didn't opt for nonexistent tech?
http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2011/05/when-did-we-becom...
Any present horror is accepted, indeed mandated, by the ape inside - conform, conform, it cries, so hungry to belong and be inside the visible peer group that this instinct overrides any rational consideration of what it actually means to age to death, and just how much might be done to prevent that from happening in this age of biotechnology.