81–90 of 162 posts
Thus I see any aging treatment that doesn't fix dna damage as fundamentally a blind alley. And conversely if someone manages to fix dna damage, then the rest should just be some small details.
It’s obvious that healthy people that live shorter are better for the ‘economy’ but clearly humanity doesn’t live to optimize for the economy. If we did, we would be fighting obesity with 10x the seriousness of how we fight COVID.
The linked abstract claims the opposite: "We show that a slowdown in aging that increases life expectancy by 1 year is worth US$38 trillion, and by 10 years, US$367 trillion." Is saying the opposite is just "obvious" enough of a rebuttal?
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I think "those people would be assasinated more frequently than they are today" is a much more plausible outcome than "subject all of humanity to debilitating degenerative diseases." At the country-level scale, that certainly sounds better than everyone aging and dying. But what would individuals do on a smaller scale? Would this also incentive a lot more violent death among the rest of the population too, to change…
If you live forever, committing crimes seems like it carries a larger risk. Including a much higher risk of actually being murdered, in prison.
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My favorite response to this and related objections to ending aging (such as “what about the dictators”): imagine a scenario where humans did not age, but still had the problems of “gerontocracy” and dictatorships. Would you propose subjecting the whole of humanity to debilitating degenerative diseases and ultimately death to solve these societal problems? I picked this up from Ageless by Andrew Steele, a highly reco…
I might not have the heart to but a rational agent acting in the interest of the entire population would. In fact this is basically what natural selection did to us. If much longer lifespans would have benefited our species we would already have them. It turns out that the way out brains crystallize as we age and make us better at teaching but worse at changing our minds means our ideal lifespan is not very different…
Natural selection doesn't act upon humans for the sake of humanity, nor did it ever asked what humans want or need.
It turns out that the way out brains crystallize as we age and make us better at teaching but worse at changing our minds means our ideal lifespan is not very different than the ones we have. I know individuals can work very hard to avoid this outcome but most people don't.
Citation? I would argue that adults are better at learning languages, because we have the benefit of hindsight, experience, and reasoning.
Whereas children are merely subjected to immerse learning environment from which to acquire languages pretty much every waking hours of their life.
I'm reminded of Nick Bostrom's story called "The Dragon Tyrant"[0][1] and David Foster Wallace's "This is Water"[2]. The dragon became so normal in our lives that we do not even question it, like a fish does not question what water is. That we've created a society around this how to deal with this inevitability. But at the end of the day if we could, killing the dragon would be more beneficial and reduce harm by a si…
I think many do. One of my takeaways from the pandemic is that there are people--intelligent, informed, unoppressed people--who will self select away from benefits. Even seemingly obvious ones.
The fictional dystopias of the last century would have had an immortal elite keeping aging treatments from clamoring masses. I don't think that's how it would turn out. Many people--including leaders--would choose not to get the treatment. Still others would push their societies to ban treatments for everyone.
I don't know how you model this. It's a different form of haves and have-nots than we're accustomed to. But it would undoubtedly feed into and ameliorate the concerns brought up in this thread.
A cure for aging only needs to get through human clinical trials for treating one aging-associated condition like osteoporosis. Once it has FDA approval for treating that one condition it can be prescribed off-label by a willing physician. If the osteoporosis treatment has unusual side effects of also making skin appear more youthful, improving short term memory, and increasing libido, then there will probably be a l…
If anyone actually comes up with an empirically verified treatment for aging (let alone a "cure"), market access or payment is not a problem they will face.
Clinical trials are expensive. To fund them you need billions of dollars. Pharmas won’t fund research in anti-aging directly because it’s not considered a disease, can’t get FDA approval, and thus couldn’t be sold.
So, yes, you need to find another route to approval, similar to metformin and rapamycin.
I only skimmed past the abstract (wolverine case is gold, lol) feel that such an analysis gets squirrely, both morally and technically. A few years back, there seemed to be a desire to justify cigarette taxes with a "it costs the state money when you get cancer" rationale. Some of the analysis seemed to indicate opposite results. Lung cancer, for example, tends to kill more quickly than age related diseases, saving o…
When you have guaranteed pension funds for an ever growing number of bureaucrats, you HAVE to find new ways to tax. Taxing unpopular things is the easiest thing (and doesn't hurt for reelection).
If you actually extended lifespans by a significant margin (say to 200 years) there would be other knock on effects that would completely derail the global economy & markets. This study doesn't seem to think about how those things could actually negatively impact economics.
Eventually if you're intelligent and you're trying to self-fund your retirement you build up assets that are growing at a sufficient rate that you can live off the growth without touching your principal. Once you hit that, work becomes unnecessary.
If everyone goes from retiring for 20-30 years to suddenly possibly retiring for 120-140 years things get all kinds of strange things happening, the percentage of the population working would diminish. But then that would negatively impact companies due to increasing difficulty in finding workers, which would negatively impact markets, which would then feedback into ruining the investments allowing all these retirees to live off investments & savings. The current system couldn't work without room to greatly expand the population of living people to ensure growth of the workforce.
I have seen these ideas explored in Science Fiction occasionally, but not many other places.
There is another aspect as well, if you lived 200 years, what if you ended up having multiple successive families? Raise a family, your kids grow up, then you raise another family 50 years later?
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This is nonsense. We change everyday through forgetting and remembering and learning. Physical and cultural evolution don't stop. It's another sign of the selfish immaturity ingrained into our culture. Selfish immaturity? It seems that you yourself is a reflection of culture. One of our very first epic poems, the Epic of Gilgamesh basically railed against immortality and accepting one's fate.
I am constantly attempting to improve myself. Sometimes, I wonder if I will finally achieve perfection only to run out of time and die :-/ There's a heluva lot I wish I could tell my 20 year old self. Sometimes I counsel my friends in their 20s, but they don't believe me, as I didn't believe this stuff in my 20s.
The average age of university presidents and members of Congress in the USA is in the 70s. At the risk of sounding callous can we fix our gerontoctratic system and then fix aging?