521–530 of 599 posts
Never understood the quest for immortality. We are the children of our time. When our time passes, we will live as strangers in a strange land, drowning in the sea of nostalgia. Death will simply takes us back to where we came from before our birth. Don’t fear the reaper.
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This is a (common) fallacy that could be applied to any funding or focus decision. It reduces to "Why focus on X when Y is more important?". You could use your same examples here as an argument for why not to support space exploration, or environmental conservation, for example.
Government budgets are finite: prioritization is not a fallacy but comes built-in, as anyone who has written a grant application knows. We have a whole host of societal functions that are not geared to cope with longevity: including social security plus the associated tax-rates
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What lower hanging fruit are governments currently spending on? Giant militaries? Healthcare for those last few months of life?
Comprehensive worldwide healthcare plan to successfully fight pandemic events comes to my mind. PS: Oh sorry I understood that as a question of what would be useful, not what is actually spent.
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There's a decent amount of research but it's hard! 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.
> What we do know is that being fit and exercising with some semblance of healthy eating helps people live a lot longer. 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.
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One shouldn't put money into "curing death by aging" without fixing society first; while birth rates exceed death rates, the world fills up and drains natural resources etc etc. There's a ton of problems that need resolving if living longer is to be a thing.
The bigger issue isn't population here but rather than if older folks live not simply longer but more productive lives that those in the top tiers will always be seen as more valuable therefore more employable. We're not just taking 1%ers here, we're talking the top 20% of folks becoming a permanent worker's aristocracy that gets to lord over the youngin's forever. I don't like the prospect of that being 42 myself. I…
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If aging is cured then the elderly could be fully productive.
At the cost of less elderly who'll miss out on being reproductive die to all the spots already being taken. Achieving immortality would be robbing from your descendants what your ancestors bestowed.
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I was responding to a specific point to which your response seems irrelevant. 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.
Space on earth is finite. And even if add more hypotheticals like us becoming an interstellar species (actually I'd wager that's less unlikely than overcoming aging), in absence of aging exponential breeding would eventually outpace even the fastest space frontier colonization imaginable.
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I'm absolutely shocked that more money and time is not spent researching how to cure death by aging. (Note that for those who discuss this semi-regularly, that's understood to be very different than seeking a cure for any particular age related disease, which usually we attempt to address when it's too late.). There are groups like https://www.levf.org/ doing some early work like Robust Mouse Rejuvenation (in mid-lif…
Yeah, I'd just rather have medicine make my finite life less painful thanks without the need for opioids (not saying being a bit stone is bad, just that too much will make life not worth living). Like being able to still walk around without a cane and clean and dress myself by the end would be nice. Not asking for olympic athlete level capability, just decent mobility with not much pain or senility.
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You cite "Stalin bad" but Stalin only killed about 40,000/week for 30 years. You're talking of personally paying to support the deaths of everyone at the current world-wide all-cause death rate of 1,000,000/week, forever . Surely in some way that makes your plans infinitely worse than Stalin's? Imagine all the wailing and gnashing of teeth, all the veil of mourning and tears, the darkness your plans will cloud the su…
> You cite "Stalin bad" but Stalin only killed about 40,000/week for 30 years. Also, since death is apparently good then Stalin was not bad? Right?
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In case it's insightful, I've correspondingly never understood the common contentment with death. The world is an incredible place, and there's so much to experience and do. If I had the time there's hundreds of careers I could spend a lifetime in each trying to develop mastery. I think I could live a thousand lives with the people I care about and not be done. I've had to choose one life, and it's a nice one, but if…
I've lived a modern day life of comfort, opportunities and experiences unimaginable compared to even my grandparents (all deceased now). I've been to places and had opportunities to try things which they never did. Compared to my grandma who cooked during food rationing and had to save sugar rations to make a cake, who lived a frugal life of 'make do and mend', I have the spare money and first world surroundings to i…