[scandox]

> But with longevity and other deeply existential problems, the horror of what’s happening has been tragically normalized.

I will never understand this attitude. Why don't we see how valuable aging and death are? How can we possibly reframe this as a "horror". The horror is this idea that personal identity can go on indefinitely. Aging is a process of coming to terms with death. None of this is being "tragically normalized". What's being normalized is the idea that we can have everything we want all the time forever without any spiritual or material costs.

[JoshTriplett]

> Why don't we see how valuable aging and death are?

Because they're horrific tragedies that we should be fighting tooth and nail until they're extinguished and nobody ever has to deal with them again. They should be consigned to the history books.

> Aging is a process of coming to terms with death.

Aging is a biological problem that we continue to debug. And nothing should make us "come to terms" with being obliterated. If someone is attacking you, you don't "come to terms" with your impending injury or death, you fight back.

When a problem has thus far been a seemingly immutable property of life, it can be difficult to envision a world where that property has been overcome. It can be difficult to even see it as a problem. And it's understandable that people's first instinct is to somehow justify the status quo, that there must be a good reason that 150,000 people die every day. One step towards solving the problem is to reset that expectation, to get people to recognize the problem as a problem rather than a "fact". In the meantime, progress will continue to be made by people who see it as a problem, but far too slowly without more widespread support. Every day longer it takes is 150,000 people lost.

[klagermkii]

From an individual perspective I don't think there should be any doubt that solving death is a fantastic goal. It's the threat that is poses to the system, threats to which we have no better tool than death.

Old age and death is still the number one tool for solving: - empires and tyrants

- outdated societal opinions and prejudices (racism/sexism/etc)

- locked in privilege and wealth

- ossification of social roles

- stagnation within fields and industry ("Science progresses one funeral at a time")

We have no truly effective tools for these problems, except wait for people to die. I'd be much more supportive of ending aging if we had anything that worked.

[JoshTriplett]

> We have no truly effective tools for these problems

We have many effective tools for these problems. Death, in addition to everything else wrong with it, is already not particularly effective in that regard. (And "we should let 150,000 people die every day because some subset of those people are hurting others" is not a good argument.)

Societal problems should not wait for a generational time-scale. People will not wait that long, nor should they have to.

[ryandrake]

I agree: social progress, political progress, economic justice all also happen one funeral at a time. Look at Congress, CEOs and corporate boards, academic and other major institutional leaders. They're all elderly, and we have no (in practice) ability to change them out except by waiting for them to die! If they all of a sudden couldn't die, they'd be there for eternity. Imagine 600 years of Strom Thurmond and Ted Kennedy!

EDIT: I guess "geezers" is no longer PC. Apologies

[ballenf]

I worry about what immortality would do to our legal system, moral judgments and overall progress. If a life is immortal then life preservation actually becomes priceless in a non-hyperbolic way. And that means it really does outweigh everything else -- including wellbeing and the cost-benefit of taking risks gets very lopsided. People could still do risky things individually, but any business that had inherent risks would be very difficult to do on any scale. And that includes way more businesses than just the unpopular ones. Think human drug trials, eg.

Or at least that line of thinking becomes very difficult to resist. I still want to promote the research, but like AI progress I hope we think about the second-order effects sufficiently along the way.

One of the cliches around progress in certain fields is that it requires the death of those unwilling to change. Would immortality slow down progress in those fields? Would we have to place more "term limits" on those in authority (whether political or in organizations).

[yourapostasy]

Then move onto the next "immutable law of the universe" to make cry in submission: figure out how to backup mindstate and restore it into a resheathed young blank mindstate clone. Chances are good we'll have to solve both relatively simultaneously, as well as the problem space of what to do with memories/experience, which I suspect are all entangled together.

[comboy]

Until we go fully digital this makes no sense. Brains develop in a specific way. We become more wise during our lifetime but we keep getting worse at learning. It's not as easy as "let's fix dying neurons". Society without death would be quite retarded compared to the one we have. Retarded i.e. one that is learning much slower.

You and your beloved ones are going to die. Just accept it. This is as big of a fact as gravity given our scientific understanding. It's not about magic cure. It's just that on long enough time probability of your pattern being destroyed goes to one, whether you are a living organism, a program or some handy-wavy. That's just physics.

And if you really want to fight biology, why put longevity over decreasing suffering? So far, I would argue, artificial lifespan extension increased physical suffering despite enormous progress that we made in terms of multiple forms anesthesiology.

[JoshTriplett]

It's going to take a long time to move past the limitations of biology, and in the meantime we need lots of work on biology to save people we have today.

> It's not as easy as "let's fix dying neurons".

Fortunately, people working on the problem don't think it's that easy either. They're also not giving up on it just because it's difficult.

> You and your beloved ones are going to die. Just accept it.

Why is it important to you that people accept that particular premise (which I will never do), and thus stop working on the problem or supporting those who do? Why is it important to you to make this argument?

The first step towards solving a problem is refusing to simply "accept it".

> It's just that on long enough time probability of your pattern being destroyed goes to one, whether you are a living organism, a program or some handy-wavy.

We will have a very long time to deal with problems like the heat death of the universe, or shorter-term problems like our sun burning out, once we've dealt with more time-critical problems. We're not going to be able to suddenly flip a switch and everyone lives forever, but we can save as many people as we can and help them live longer and ultimately put the probability of everyone's continued survival as close to 1 as possible.

Imagine, just for a moment, a world in which actual death is so incredibly rare that one person dying makes news around the world, and after time is spent figuring out what went wrong and how to prevent it from happening again, people mourn the senseless tragedy.

> And if you really want to fight biology, why put longevity over decreasing suffering?

What makes you think I do? They go hand in hand. A huge amount of suffering arises from aging-related degeneration. People working on extending lifespans are in the process extending healthy life.

[klmadfejno]

> We become more wise during our lifetime

In my experience this peaks and declines somewhere before 50

[talentedcoin]

I find this kind of outlook very confusing. Don't you think that assuming life to be an engineering problem is a very strong assumption? Seems a bit above my pay grade to me ...

[ativzzz]

Everything in life is an engineering problem until someone makes a breakthrough/discovery at which point it becomes an ethical, moral, political and financial problem.

[schwartzworld]

They aren't going to cure death in your lifetime. you will almost certainly die of something. if you think it's healthier not to come to terms with that... well, you're entitled, but I think you'll be disappointed

[dekhn]

This sort of leaves out the reality that decomposing bodies are a critical part of the ecosystem, and that eliminating death in humans would have huge ecological consequences beyond just the nutrients of decomposing bodies. If/when you have reasonable solutions for overpopulation, massive resource consumption by advanced societies, and pollution, then we can talk about longevity.

[JoshTriplett]

> This sort of leaves out the reality that decomposing bodies are a critical part of the ecosystem

Buy fertilizer. Of all the possible attempts at arguments that could possibly be raised in support of letting people continue to die, the last one I'd expect is "those human lives are more valuable as rotting corpses to fertilize plants".

> If/when you have reasonable solutions for overpopulation, massive resource consumption by advanced societies, and pollution, then we can talk about longevity.

1) There are documented studies that people have less children and do so less quickly when they feel safer. And in any case, it's a very big universe and this is not a reason to let 150000 people die every day.

2) We can and have built more efficient ways to make use of resources, and we will continue to do so. Killing off humans is not a reasonable way to solve resource consumption problems. The primary problem of excessive resource consumption is that it threatens human lives, which makes it utterly self-defeating to argue that humans should die so we use less resources.

3) Pollution is a serious problem. We've only got the one planet (for now), and we need to take care of it and make sure it continues to support life and help life flourish. So by all means let's solve that problem. Fortunately, we've got billions of people, and we're capable of working on multiple massive problems at once. (You might also recognize that one of the biggest problems with pollution is people not acknowledging it as a problem; there's a parallel here.)

4) People will continue to talk about longevity, and more importantly actually work towards fixing the problem. Once people understand that we can actually do something about it, consciously choosing to not do something about it is a choice measured in lives lost, and inaction becomes far less excusable. Trying to stop other people from doing something about it is tantamount to murder, in much the same way as trying to stop a doctor from treating a patient.

[majkinetor]

We should fix health span first, not life span. I would rather live 80 like a champ to the last day and then just drop dead, then few more years on ibuprofen and friends.

[JoshTriplett]

They're heavily correlated, and nobody is talking about just increasing the length of life without also inherently making people healthier. People talking about working on longevity are talking about giving you more years where you feel 30 or 40, not just more years where you feel 90.

[ksdale]

Quite some time ago, I remember scrolling Imgur and there was a short video of some people in jeeps watching a lion (or a couple lions?) chase a young hippo across the road. Several people in the comments remarked that they couldn't believe no one tried to help the hippo, and I thought it was interesting that they didn't consider that helping the hippo meant starving the lion.

I feel the same way about organizations that rescue injured wild animals that aren't endangered. It's certainly nice for the injured animal, but there's some creature out there that doesn't eat as a result.

I haven't thought much at all beyond the usual sci-fi tropes regarding human immortality, but I think it's very difficult to fully appreciate what circle of life means.

Edit: I also think it's perfectly plausible that technological advances could indefinitely offset the environmental impact of human immortality or greatly increased longevity, I just wanted to point out my observation that in most of nature, death is very important for continued life.

[realbarack]

> decomposing bodies are a critical part of the ecosystem

Is this true? Most human bodies (at least in the US) decompose in cemeteries (not exactly verdant ecosystems) or are burned. Plenty of other organisms will continue to die, there's plenty of carbon to recycle without human contribution.

> If/when you have reasonable solutions for overpopulation, massive resource consumption by advanced societies, and pollution, then we can talk about longevity.

We already have to solve these problems (well, except overpopulation, I don't think this is a real problem). I think it's reasonable for us to work on longevity in parallel, just as we work on curing cancer in parallel.

[jniedrauer]

A relatively simple solution is that the price of admission for biological immortality is voluntary sterilization. No doubt this would be circumvented by the elite, but it probably wouldn't lead to runaway population growth.

[dekhn]

"A relatively simple solution.... is voluntary sterlization". We're discussing what would be one of the most consequential technological changes in the existence of humanity. There are no "relatively simple solutions".

[apsec112]

"If a young child falls on the train tracks, it is good to save them, and if a 45-year-old suffers from a debilitating disease, it is good to cure them. If you have a logical turn of mind, you are bound to ask whether this is a special case of a general ethical principle which says “Life is good, death is bad; health is good, sickness is bad.” If so – and here we enter into controversial territory – we can follow this general principle to a surprising new conclusion: If a 95-year-old is threatened by death from old age, it would be good to drag them from those train tracks, if possible. And if a 120-year-old is starting to feel slightly sickly, it would be good to restore them to full vigor, if possible. With current technology it is not possible. But if the technology became available in some future year – given sufficiently advanced medical nanotechnology, or such other contrivances as future minds may devise – would you judge it a good thing, to save that life, and stay that debility?

The important thing to remember, which I think all too many people forget, is that it is not a trick question."

http://yudkowsky.net/singularity/simplified/

[lisper]

> if a 120-year-old is starting to feel slightly sickly, it would be good to restore them to full vigor, if possible

That is far from clear. It is even far from clear that this is true all else being equal, and all else is definitely not equal. Extending longevity exacerbates the strain on global resources caused by overpopulation -- most notably at the moment, the capacity of the planet to absorb carbon emissions, but that's a detail. Exponential growth is not sustainable on a finite planet. If carbon weren't the limiting factor, it would be something else.

But we humans were designed to die. Our evolutionary purpose is to raise children to the point where they are able to have children of their own. A longer lifespan than that doesn't advance our reproductive fitness, and so we're not designed to live any longer than that. So even if we could tweak our bodies to live longer, it is not a foregone conclusion that this would be healthy for our minds and souls.

[TeMPOraL]

> A longer lifespan than that doesn't advance our reproductive fitness, and so we're not designed to live any longer than that. So even if we could tweak our bodies to live longer, it is not a foregone conclusion that this would be healthy for our minds and souls.

It's also not a foregone conclusion that this wouldn't be healthy for our minds and souls. The problem with death is that it's irreversible. At any point, you can decide you're too bored or too miserable, and end your existence. But once that decision is made - usually for you - it cannot be reversed. So it's better to err on the side of more options, i.e. more years to live.

[JoshTriplett]

> Extending longevity exacerbates the strain on global resources

Suppose we didn't die. Would you start killing people (yourself or others) in order to "reduce the strain on global resources"?

It helps to not take the status quo as a given, or as immutable.

> So even if we could tweak our bodies to live longer, it is not a foregone conclusion that this would be healthy for our minds

We're going to need to solve that problem too. I'm currently supporting people working on Alzheimer's research, for instance.

[lisper]

> Suppose we didn't die.

You may as well say, "Suppose there were unicorns." All sexually reproducing organisms die.

[JoshTriplett]

Solving a problem starts with seeing it as a problem rather than an immutable fact. And "suppose we didn't have the problem" is a thought experiment. In this case, it helps show the moral equivalence between killing people and stopping people from living longer.

[lisper]

I'm not saying we should stop people from trying to live longer. I'm saying be careful what you wish for.

[jniedrauer]

This really sounds like mind-body dualism. There's no difference between our "minds and souls", and we weren't designed to do anything. We have woken up and find ourselves in our present circumstances. But we don't have to accept them. We choose our destiny.

[lisper]

I was using the word "designed" metaphorically. Of course we were not actually designed. The point is that our fundamental nature is determined by evolution, and evolution only "cares" about reproductive fitness, so that's what we're "optimized" for. (I put these words in scare quotes because evolution doesn't actually "care" about anything, and it doesn't optimize, it merely satisfices.)

[mc32]

I think one big problem I see is that there becomes no need for younger generations. It’ll all be old people. If you have low turnover then there is little change —society stagnates.

If people had discovered 3x lifespans and birth rates were thirded in the 1900s, we’d be living near-ossified lifestyles (and other things) from back then.

Also, the longer you live the more mental trauma there is to deal with. One lifetime is enough. As it is we have enough people who slowly decline and go crazy.

[jniedrauer]

A key dynamic shift that might offset this is that "old people" would suddenly have to plan for thousands of years. Many of the problems that generations currently solve are due to short-term thinking.

[mc32]

I think you’re being way optimistic. Longer lifespans means you can procrastinate and put things off even further.

[zhoujianfu]

Agreed... “people shouldn’t live forever... except for me” seems to be a popular sentiment, but it’s along the lines of “people shouldn’t get this or that freedom/resource... except for me.”

[realbarack]

Could you describe what you think the spiritual and mental costs are?

I love life (I've been fortunate to live in health and relative privilege) and would very much prefer an additional 150 years before eternal nothingness, assuming sound mind and body. It's not clear to me what spiritual downsides I would experience.

[realtalk_sp]

The only reason we exist is because our genes "wish" to remain immortal. Not dying is the fullest realization of our biological (and likely only empirically valid) purpose. Science also suggests that consciousness ceases with death. It seems strictly preferable to exist as opposed to not exist. Looked at this way, pursuing immortality is utterly rational. In fact, it's surprising this isn't our highest current priority.

[lliamander]

"Genes" remaining immortal is quite distinct from an organism remaining immortal. I would say that death+reproduction is a better solution to preserving genes than immortality.

[realtalk_sp]

> I would say that death+reproduction is a better solution to preserving genes than immortality.

It's just the solution nature came up with. It's also optimal at a population level and far less so at the organism level.

Again: it is strictly preferable (by a very wide philosophical margin) to exist than to not exist. Of course, anyone who believes otherwise would be welcome to not participate in the concept of biological immortality.

[lliamander]

> It's just the solution nature came up with. It's also optimal at a population level and far less so at the organism level.

My point is that what is optimal for the organism is different than what is optimal for it's genes, and that trying to derive the biological purpose based on the "desire" of our genes is invalid (or at least, it does not imply that our purpose is to continue existing as individual organisms).

> Again: it is strictly preferable (by a very wide philosophical margin) to exist than to not exist.

Agreed, which is why I think religious pursuits are also perfectly rational. If there is some eternal, transcendent reality outside of the material world, and we have a chance of participating in that reality, it is preferable to do so.

I hold nothing against those who would wish to extend human life. My critique was just regarding what I understood to be your chain of reasoning from genetic imperative to biological purpose.

[realtalk_sp]

I think the nuance of what I was implying got lost there. It seems likely there is no inherent purpose to human life and that we're simply an accidental byproduct of the natural laws of our reality.

Yet the closest identifiable thing we could conceivably call a "purpose" is gene propagation. I should have clarified that this isn't necessarily a "good" purpose. In fact, much of what is programmed by evolution is arguably net detrimental insofar as it is readily exploited.

[concordDance]

Ageing in particular is hugely expensive (most medicine is spent on the old and the old cannot work effectively) and causes incalculably huge ammounts of suffering (COVID-19? War? Racist killings? Rape pandemics? Drug addiction? None cause as much suffering as ageing).

Is it wrong to repair someone's heart, brain, joints, skin, bones, kidneys, liver or muscles? If not, why is it wrong to prevent them degenerating in the first place?

[jonstewart]

I think “the idea that we can have everything we want all the time” has been normalized for Peter Thiel (et al), so he’s working on the “forever” aspect.

[lachlan-sneff]

I hate this perspective. Aging and imminent death aren't valuable. This is a view popularized by "deathists" and those paralyzed by fear of death.

[corpMaverick]

Death is the greatest equalizer.

It worries me that even now you have rich people that are 70 and are still trying to make more money abusing other people. Imagine if you could keep your wealth for 50 more years. Further more if money is the gateway to 50 more years. Money would be even more important than it is now.

I really don't want to significantly expand lifespans unless we can keep things fair for everybody.

[TomMarius]

I don't think it's good to make 99% suffer because 1% could keep their wealth.

[echelon]

> Why don't we see how valuable aging and death are?

Death is the greatest weakness of humanity, and to think otherwise is fatalist. We don't have to live eighty years at best and die. We can do better.

If everyone on this planet had solving death as their single-minded focus, we'd accomplish it within our lifetimes.

[klmadfejno]

> If everyone on this planet had solving death as their single-minded focus, we'd accomplish it within our lifetimes.

This is a particularly advanced form of wishful thinking.

[echelon]

It's not wishful thinking. It's not going to happen.

We can, however, do a better job of championing science and long-term thinking.

I think setting a high water mark inspires people to reach for the stars, if only to land on the moon.

I like to imagine that world so that I can see the delta between.

[abjKT26nO8]

> Death is the greatest weakness of humanity, and to think otherwise is fatalist. We don't have to live eighty years at best and die. We can do better.

Science advances one funeral at a time. ~ Max Planck

I'd add to that that it's not only science that advances in this way.

[jniedrauer]

If someone has been artificially kept alive beyond their natural lifespan, and you had the power to reverse the effect such that they instantly died, would that be ethical?

Attempting to preserve the status quo of aging and death is the same thing in a more roundabout way.

[fizixer]

At what age would you like to have:

- Alzheimer's?

- Cancer?

- Arthritis?

[AbrahamParangi]

If you don't believe progress can be made, then don't worry about others who strive to make it. Worst case they're wrong. Best case, you're wrong and the whole world moves upward.

Otherwise it's just crab bucket mentality.