I'm not against research to better understand aging and diseases that are a consequence of aging such as dementia and various cancers. But when I read this announcement I feel an air of arrogance that fucking annoys me.
> I'm not against research to better understand aging and diseases that are a consequence of aging
That's like researching the symptoms instead of the cause, it's the wrong way to do medicine
People share this opinion until they're on their deathbed. If offered a pill to be restored to youthful longevity in that moment, most people would give up everything and endure just about anything for a mere chance at it.
People are remarkably shortsighted and don't take the time to comprehend what the horror at the end of the tunnel will really feel like.
And call me cynical but IMO it’s naive to think that this technology would be accessible to the average person. If it makes it to market it’s going to cost a small fortune and every super wealthy person in the world is going to be throwing money at it. It’s going to be the luxury yacht of healthcare.
That's not what I said at all.
The way the wealthy will take responsibility is by taking up the mantle of human zookeeper, restricting lesser people's locations and movements. Just look at where the toll roads are near you, it's already happening.
Then the negative actions necessary to create personal benefit will be limited to the areas of the lesser people. After you find the toll roads, look for the power plants and factories in your area.
There's a reason we keep coming back to fiction that elevates the obscenely wealthy as being beyond the law, beyond the control of governments, and eventually physically beyond the world in floating cities.
It's a small solace that rich people continue to die within the same age range as poor people. I hope I don't live long enough to witness longevity being solved for the 1% only.
edit: changed "gated behind price" to just "gated" since gatekeeping comes in many forms.
Your feeling of arrogance seems to be a product of a cultural programmed reaction. There's no shortage of movies, cultural works, and tv shows that tell us that immortality is unwanted, unattainable, selfish, or somehow otherwise bad, starting with our oldest myths and stories, Epic of Gilgamesh.
If the goal of medicine is to cure or prevent every diseases and dysfunction in the human body, then we must conclude that as an unavoidable side effect that being healthier will extend long life.
If we care about our fellow human beings, especially the elderly, then we do not want them to live in pain, to be in dementia, or otherwise have a poor quality of life. We must also recognize that many of them may not want to die.
I applaud the pursuit of longevity and health so long it is paired with the egalitarian outcome in that everybody will be entitled and receive it, regardless of who they are and what they did.
And therein lies the crux. I don’t believe that’ll be the actual outcome.
Aren't Americans struggling getting diabetes medicine? And chemo? Is it a reasonable expectation that this treatment, whatever it is, will be any different?
There will be unintended consequences of humans living longer, of course but those are problems which will be solved by smart people of the future (and present).
The only reason the average value shifted so much is drastically reduced infant mortality rate. If you managed to live to the age of twenty two centuries ago, chances were you'd die as an old man
Even in antiquity, healthy people lived to their 60s.
That might be the 70s or 80s now, but the quality of life at those ages isn't great - take a stroll to your local elderly home.
It is not just death, it is the long period of chronic illness that currently tends to precede it. Understanding aging will let us combat a thousand diseases at once.
I thin the reason why this wasn't attempted before wasn't humility. Rather, people (including many people today) did not think of aging as something modifiable. Aging has been until today understood as an unstoppable force beyond human possibilities, something like gravity or a hurricane.
Now that the viewpoints are slowly changing, we may be up to picking some low hanging fruit, and if a billionaire or ten decides to fund the necessary research, I won't be complaining. Unless they somehow manage to hoard the necessary knowledge only to themselves, which is rather unlikely in the modern world, where technological and scientific capabilities are spread more than ever before.
To be a little less than polite: fuck cancer, fuck cardiovascular disease, fuck Alzheimers, fuck severe covid etc. And whoever contributes to this great fucking of age-related disease is a friend of the whole humanity.
I'm not a billionaire and have zero prospects of ever becoming one. Maybe this would also be considered arrogance, but I don't want to grow old and die. Neither do any of my friends or family. None of them are billionaires either.
Life is absolutely incredible. Humanity is on the brink of technological progress the likes of which we've never seen before, and I'd love to (selfishly) stick around to experience it. I also don't see anything noble or enjoyable in watching friends, family and other people slowly break down and eventually die. I'd hazard a guess that a lot of people share this opinion.
I sadly don't have the resources to direct activity against the scourge of aging and death, and can only hope that fortunately-resourced individuals decide to do so.
Please reconsider sharing this type of thinking, it's too arrogant for anyone.
On the other hand, it could actually provide tangible benefits to some human beings. Saying "I was the first to land a human on Mars" has no such advantage.
I for one am thrilled that society is starting to view death as something we might be able to one day defeat, rather than the resigned acceptance that has reigned throughout the history of our species.
Part of the game is the renewal process of it.
If for once find it way more creepy to have centennial billionaires that are hoarding land and resources, because they have the illusion that things belong to them, when in reality it was never theirs to begin with.
I mean there is decent research on calorie restriction. Of course the huge problem with calorie restriction is the eating less part.
Rather than your judgemental take-- Why not adopt the simpler theory that these are simply parties that can afford fund very expensive efforts which are extremely likely to fail?
[0] unless their ventures are really immature glorifying ways to spend money and produce nothing
Unless they explicitly communicate this, you are just guessing.
According to this, all of medicine is pointless.
Would you not want grandma's back to hurt a little less?
Fairness
Only rich people will get it. (No tech has ever done this.)
Better to give money to the poor than science. (family, city, state, nation, has proven local investment beats foreign.)
Bad for society
Dead people make more room for new, other people. (consider going first.)
Run out of resources (live people discover/extract/renew better than dead or nonexistent)
Overpopulation (colonize the seas, solar system, or have a war.)
Stop having kids
Worse wars (nukes are more dangerous than having your first 220 year old person in 2136)
Dictators never die (they die all the time and rarely of age)
Old people are expensive (50% of your lifetime medical cost occur in your final year. Delay is profitable.)
Old people suck. (death is an inferior cure to robustness.)
Bad for individual
You'll get bored. (your memory isn't that good, or your boredom isn't age related)
You'll have to watch your loved ones die. (so you prefer they watch you?)
You'll live forever in a terrible state. (longevity requires robustness.)
Against gods will (not if he disallows suicide, then it is required.)
People will force you to live forever (they aren't able to do this now, why would they begin to be?)
More people make more progress faster. Aren’t you glad your parents didn't decide the world would be prettier or work better without you in it? If great minds like Einstein, Bell, Tesla, Da Vinci etc., were still alive and productive today, the world would be a better place. You're literally asking for others to die out of your fear. The burden should be higher. Have courage. If living longer comes with too many disadvantages, we'll know 100 years from now and decide then.
Man up, save your family, save yourself.
P.S. Curing aging isn't immortality. You die at 600 on average by accident, and if the parade of imaginary horrible things comes true, even earlier.
> More people make more progress faster.
Really? Have you ever seen an urban slum, or an overpopulated rural area?
> Stop having kids
Even if this were a viable solution (history teaches us it is not) dont you think that this wouldnot deprive many from most of the meaningful aspects of their lives?
> If living longer comes with too many disadvantages, we'll know 100 years from now and decide then.
What if longevity causes social changes which are difficult or impossible to reverse? What about those who will suffer the many disadvantages?
> Old people suck.
No, they don't. Whoever makes this argument does not deserver a response. What is true however is that most old people seem to have less flexibility to adapting to change, and with accelerating progress the chasm between the generation widens. The generational conflicts may be very high in the ageless society you envision.
There is no courage in choosing death. If people could live forever, and some people suddenly started choosing death at 80, that wouldn't be seen as "courageous" but just plain weird.
> Have you ever seen an urban slum, or an overpopulated rural area?
Historically, higher populations do result in faster progress. This is pretty much fact.
> dont you think that this wouldnot deprive many from most of the meaningful aspects of their lives?
It would be a choice - live forever or have kids. Many people would find life much more meaningful choosing the former.
> What if longevity causes social changes which are difficult or impossible to reverse?
The slow deaths of billions of people, entire generations, is not an acceptable cost for faster progress.
It is absurd to justify the cost of progress with death. If people lived for 10k+ years in a static society, you would be called a monster if you implied that they should be dying slowly and painfully at 80 so some aspects of their society evolve faster.
> The generational conflicts may be very high in the ageless society you envision.
Again, this is not worth the deaths of literally BILLIONS of people! It is mad scientist talk to say that death on such a massive scale is acceptable for any cost.
Thank you for this snarky remark.
Every time I hear people arguing against having kids for reasons (overpopulation, bad for environment, pessimism about the future), I cannot help but think: "why doesn't that argument extend to the present generation - i.e. suicide?"
So far, the best answer I've gotten is equivalent to "suicide is bad" (a.k.a. "I have no good rational arguments but it makes me feel bad")
Also, imagine all the various hardware updates I could get - how cool would it be to see UV/IR?
"Conscious entity doesn't want to die" should be justification enough for not wanting to die. However, it seems that just because we've lived with a naturally imposed expiry date for so long, we are expected to accept death after an arbitrarily imposed time limit.
I live in an artificial structure because I do not accept the natural outdoor conditions that my ancestors lived in.
I communicate with people around the world, using horrendously artificial means, because I refuse to accept the silly natural limitations of local auditory communication.
I choose to accept antibiotics for infections that would otherwise naturally kill or maim me.
And if I can, I will choose to opt-out of death, the greatest disease that afflicts all of us.
As an aside, I do fear the tragedy of the aging process, for both myself and other people, but although that's presently a tightly-coupled problem, I'm assuming we're strictly discussing death and not aging.
I think that’s a legitimate fear, and nothing to do with what happens next to me.
citation needed
We define the meaning of life, not death. I would find my life perfectly meaningful without death.
For one there is a substantial amount of people just trying get by and being like 50/50 on the choice of rather being dead already or trying to get through somehow 'till the next day, ad infinitum: from depressives who are stuck in a loop of ever growing void of meaningless in "wealthy" countries to factory workers serving as means to an end kept away from "jumping to termination" by saftey nets. And of course those infamous 10% in absolute poverty which nowadays is more like a definition game by statisticians sponsored by the World Bank showing steady progress since the 1800s.
From a psychological point of view it becomes exponentially difficult to not have an inflated ego with more and more wealth. If I would win the lottery today my ordinary psyche would not be able to process it adequately, I would inevitably grossly overestimate my contribution to it, we are simply not finetuned to handle gigantic orders of probabilites. So it comes off as a childish thing for most of us mere mortals trying to overcome your "lifetime" limitations without taking into account your environment the "soil of decaying and growing matter" in a biosphere going around an unimaginable ball of pure "fuel" in its dimension and age seperated by a vastness of nothingness in between.
At some point in the "success-intoxicated" linear chase of an ever increasing personal "lifetime" I would speculate that one would reach a critical point, a no point of return in which the sense of the self would ultimatley shatter, your (biographical) memories become obliterated beyond "recognition", so just another death-life cycle we are seeing and studying already in all life around us.
So, I would appreciate the more sober tone of just improving life in general like addressing immediate, mundane and unspectcular things like e.g. the wealth gap instead of playing on the reptilians chords of our brains by searching the "cure of aging" which kind of gives off a vibe of an coke head.
If you look 100 years back, Rockefeller was the richest man in history (and might still be...), yet 1 of his 5 children died in infancy of a bacterial disease. These days, such diseases are extremely rare for about 1bn people in the western world, all of whom are effectively wealthier than Rockefeller was.
Yes, you can "save" people from poverty by giving them money, but ultimately you're just condemning their children to the same fate (after your money runs out). The only real progress is technology. And billionaires spending on anti-aging is exactly the kind of technology that will immensely benefit billions of people in the future.
Perhaps Mansa Musa [0] has that title?
[0]: https://www.indiatimes.com/trending/human-interest/richest-m...
They will find it barbaric and terrifying that people could not live life out to contentment, but rather, were forced to die, and people merely accepted it rather than doing anything to fight it.
Finally, addressing the wealth gap is not mutually exclusive from solving much more important problems like death.
Biggest problem with people living longer is the costs of supporting them increase dramatically, and who's going to pay these costs?
Increasing longevity places a burden on our children, and their children
(1) better healthcare, reducing poverty etc. lift the floor of longevity but not the ceiling
(2) "cost of old age" is exactly what longevity research attempts to reduce - noone is interested in living longer as a vegetable; instead, the goal is to increase healthspan - living healthier for longer
In many parts of the worth we are living longer due to these things (or were before Covid)
Longevity research may also be interested in lifting this further but are all these people who now live cor even longer going to want to carry on working?
If not what are they going to live on, how are their pensions going to be paid for, how are we going to mitigate the extra demand placed on earth etc.?
I'm going to die one day and I'm fine with that
Humans are a burden to humans, but we're also humans' best shot at prosperity. Let's not be so quick to deny the upside of living longer, healthier.
(That said I agree with you that up to age 80 or so the recipe for general healthspan is very simple and up to personal responsibility)
Most rich folks would rather preserve their fortune for their offspring or try to make the world a better place. Eventually many people, rich or not, notice that the younger generations are better equipped to run the world.
Not to mention we'd be better off extending human life by preventing and curing diseases and ailments like cancer and heart disease.
People generally have a knee jerk hate for such things but I welcome that with open arms too.
It's a philosophy problem about consciousness and continuity more than anything else. Call it the star trek teleporter problem.
Also asking your employees to work over the holidays (SpaceX Company email) because of your management failures is not a good company culture.
On the other hand, accelerate the burning of the planet by giving more people access to an energy-wasting ponzi scheme.
Your 2 goals are incompatible with each other, Brian and Blake.
It is debatable whether they truely understand the financials of biotech. The grind of basic research will never go away. Many successful biotech company essentially acquihire researchers and work that is already 80% complete, the role of the company is to bring it to production. That itself will make up the bulk of the company's workload. Similarly, SpaceX had the benefit of leveraging an existing pool of talent and resources; you cannot build a heavy launch company in Zimbabwe. If they want to do both active basic research and at the same time trial therapies, then they would need an enormous amount of funding (on the software unicorn level). You will need scale on the same magnitude as Pharma giants like Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson and Johnson to be able to acquire companies, run trials, and discard ideas that do not work. In the current bull market, this is the perfect company to build with Coinbase's founder as the chief fundraiser.
Only Burroughs could truly capture the ghastly consequences.