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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Plus, aging will reduce the quality of life you have.
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.
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.
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.
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%.
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.
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.
Expect massive social change.
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.
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
Those of us who actually like the life they live would at least have the option of continuing that life
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.
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.
Which is terrible. It means that there are all sorts of barriers in place to developing drugs or therapies that prevent or reverse aging -- because you couldn't get FDA approval for something that it doesn't consider disease. It’s hard to even get the studies approved.
More details:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/scientists-new-goal-growing-old...
https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/10/19/1061070/is-old-a...
At least, that's how the articles about how "we know this field has a reputation for scammers but we're legit honest" phrased it.
With a GCSE grade C in biology, I can't tell what's a scam and what's a legitimate breakthrough, and I'm also mindful of the Gell Mann Amnesia Effect.
Longevity research = Maintain the health equivalent of a young person, indefinitely.
So longevity expands regular medicine to include interventions in everybody (at least all adults) regardless of normal health, as early as possible, to halt or reverse age related loss of functions and maximally delay death.
There's no diagnosis when you start treatment.
https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2021/11/04/nothing-is-right-about-...
Imagine the situation were reversed: nobody is aging, and we're worried about Earth's limited resources. Your proposed to solution is to kill everyone over a certain age!?
This isn't to say that "therefore we should all accept the inevitability of death"--just that we should consider carefully whether, in ending (or forestalling) death, we might improve the lot of the individual at the expense of the greater whole (society, other life on the planet, etc.).
Another thought--what if avoiding death ends up taking exponentially more resources as one gets older, and society becomes a superorganism oriented around keeping a small number of egos alive for as long as possible, where capacity to age becomes the ultimate expression of power?
What is society oriented around now? While the idea of living under an immortal human god doesn't sound particularly appealing to me, it would probably be better than the present situation (i.e. living under mortal, short-lived human gods with nukes)
- Why Age? Should We End Aging Forever? - Kurzgesagt - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GoJsr4IwCm4
- How to Cure Aging – Kurzgesagt - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjdpR-TY6QU
- Why Die? - CGP Grey - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C25qzDhGLx8
As an analogy, it is like a weekend cyclist spending $10,000 on a high end bike to save a pound or two off their bike, meanwhile they are 30 pounds overweight. It would be better to lose that weight (for cycling performance and for many better reasons) before trying to buy cycling performance at $10,000/lb.
Getting back to the point, people imagine it would be great to live 500 years, perhaps longer. Ask yourself: are you maximizing your current life? If you are currently unhappy, bored, sick, lonely, feeling like you are trapped in a certain lifestyle, why would you want an extra 400 years of that?
If we gave you another 500 years you’d waste them too, begging us for more.
It's all a bit... self-defeating? You're going to live forever spending your entire life.... trying to live forever? Living a long life isn't necessarily living a good life, and wasting the time you have in order to get more time.... maybe stop doing that and just get on with doing the stuff that you want to do given the time.
Having said that, on your analogy, it's a great business selling $10,000 bikes to rich idiots...
The idea of doing self-improvement and min/maxing my lifestyle for 500 years sounds like a nightmare. The whole point would be getting to dive recklessly into anything without fear that you may be wasting your short life. Get fat as hell, get in insane shape, get hooked on heroin, start a successful company, be homeless, whatever. With 500 years of being 30 years old locking yourself into any "maximized" lifestyle seems stupid. A huge part of feeling trapped is knowing you are wasting the few years you have.
Edit - I'm an idiot, ignore me. It's clearly not 'private longevity' but 'private companies [that deal with longevity]'
So they are 'private companies' (private ownership) in the longevity business.
They are working on longevity.
The company is not working on "private longevity"
I think you're reading the phrase wrong.
If they wanted “private” to modify “companies” (rather than longevity) it should read: “…raised by private, longevity companies”.
Also Dr Andrew Huberman has interviewed him. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9IxomBusuw&t=6692s
The first is Gregory Fahy, who works on thymus rejuvenation, and actually has a bunch of people (not mice), whose epigenetic clocks have turned back a bit, together with some improvements in physiology which indicate that the rejuvenation, albeit modest, was real.
The second is Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte, who works on cell rejuvenation using Yamanaka factors. He was already able to pull this off in living rats without killing them - a major success given that the Yamanaka factors aren't exactly safe.
Are people disproportionately afraid of old age and death here?
The paywall let me through so hopefully others can also view:
https://www.ft.com/content/649b0446-698c-4363-82ad-0be5b5faa...
Its amazing how even the ultra rich who hoard dozens of billions act as if they will live forever, hoard their wealth without investing it in anything tangible but using it to hoard even more wealth, then rapidly decline in health in their later years without their wealth doing them any good.
With such investments, at they can make life longer and better for themselves and the humanity at the same time, putting that wealth into a tangible good use.
Humans take a long time and a lot of investment to bring up and educate. Any singular human lost is a loss for humanity due to the creativity and resourcefulness that even the dumbest members of human race have are invaluable. If everyone lived longer and healthier, we could be living in a much better paradigm then our current one that is still stuck somewhere in between late 20th century and the start of 21st century. The progress we can make is indescribable.
We can live longer, and if we look at the other species in our planet, we !should! be living much longer: There are tortoises that live centuries. There are sharks who live centuries. Even cetaceans can live well over a century. Higher mammals living in very hard, hostile conditions live 70 years or longer like elephants.
The biology of this planet basically says that living long is the norm for complex organisms. We humans are the exceptions to that, by living a ~70 years on average and living the last 2 decades of it with declining capacity. The problem is with our civilization and the way we live - not with biology itself.
...
There is absolutely no benefit to anyone in the hoards of imaginary wealth of this planet amassing more useless hoards of imaginary wealth by sitting in investment tools.
If even a fraction of that wealth is actually put to use, everything can change.
100 bucks says it's the latter. I therefore eagerly await a VC-subsidized BBaaS (Blood Boy as a Service).
Reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBA0AH-LSbo
