[an-honest-moose]

It's not about not wanting to die. It's about death being inevitable. Everything dies, or breaks down, or decays. That's just how the universe works.

The best you'll get is extended life, and that's never going to be enough - there's always going to be someone trying to push that limit out a little further. IMO, what matters more, and what some folks here have brought up, is more healthy years. I think wanting to be fitter and healthier in old age is pretty uncontroversial, but the problem is that it gets rolled up with immortality, because getting to say "We conquered death" would be way sexier than saying "We extended good living by a decade or two (and that's being optimistic)".

Immortality has been, and always will be, a fantasy. Better that those resources go to something more productive, like healthcare.

[Nursie]

> Everything dies, or breaks down, or decays. That's just how the universe works.

Sure, that's entropy, but that's only necessarily true at the level of the whole system, energy inputs can and do reduce local entropy.

> The best you'll get is extended life

Sounds good, let's start there. 'True' immortality may or may not be a pipe dream, but it doesn't matter if it is. Almost nobody is talking about living absolutely forever, but looking at ways in which greater longevity can be achieved. I'd bite your hand off for another couple of decades on top of whatever my current 'allocation' might be, I don't give a crap if we've "conquered death" or not, but if we can find ways to give the average person more time, that seems like a win.

> Better that those resources go to something more productive, like healthcare.

How is this not healthcare?

There seems to be this backlash against any talk of life extension, that other things matter more, that it's somehow frivolous, or just morally wrong to seek to live longer. It feels to me entirely arbitrary as we already use all sorts of interventions to help people live longer, and to be healthier for more of that time. This is good and wise and virtuous. But some folks seem to have this weird switch in their heads when extending life gets mentioned, that suddenly they're uncomfortable and the whole thing is not to be discussed by preference.

And I wonder if it's because they don't want to admit to themselves or others that they are terrified, but have rationalised away their fear as "meant to be, can't be changed". Such talk of extension makes them uncomfortable.

[inglor_cz]

Your post is a good example on how even highly educated people need more education, how communication is an important thing in science and how framing changes perception of everything.

Anti-aging science is basically the most audacious preventative program out there. It is not really about "immortality" (even if this level of success were to be reached, one can always kill themselves, no biology will give you immunity to fast flying bullets), but an attempt to prevent or at least delay onset of a host of chronic diseases that are synonymous with aging.

"but the problem is that it gets rolled up with immortality"

Then don't contribute to that problem by insinuating that anti-aging is something different from healthcare. It is not, it is literally about extending healthspan, at least at this point. Rejuvenation means making people live longer by improving their metabolism etc.; how it is not healthcare in the best sense of the word (protecting health instead of treating already extant diseases)?

"Everything dies, or breaks down, or decays."

And yet you can keep your room tidy for long decades even if the entropy of the universe as such increases.

We have a lot of self-repair mechanisms, that is why we live longer than our relatives like dogs and mice. "The universe" does not dictate to us whether to get cancer or not; some species (like whales) seem to be very resistant to cancer and it is absolutely thinkable that we could acquire this ability too, if we happen to learn enough about metabolism. Etc. etc.

Human death at 80 isn't a result of laws of physics, any more than murine death at 2,5. It is a case of biological dysregulation that can possibly be fixed or at least improved, much like we improved other things about ourselves. Few of the HN crowd would proclaim wearing glasses to fix your vision to be unnatural. What we are looking for in anti-aging are "glasses for the body".

[carlmr]

Death is the evolutionary proof that sometimes you need to shut down legacy systems because maintenance has become painful, the system has accumulated too many workarounds, and a rewrite is in order.

[nocsi]

Like a certain generation accumulating too much lead poisoning.