150,000 people die every day, and 2/3 of them die of age related diseases. The developed world and China are racing towards a demographic nightmare where fewer and fewer people are left to take care of the elderly. The older someone becomes, the more of a burden they become on the young. As people get older they begin to develop the diseases of old age and have an increasingly pain-filled life. People are forced to save for a future where they have enough to survive for a few years and then pay to have someone take care of them, instead of doing what they actually want to do.
Why are we not all collectively trying to solve this problem? Dying of age related diseases is as natural as dying from malaria or childbirth, yet we try to solve those issues and pretend age related diseases are inevitable. COVID largely shut the world down because the largest risk factor for complications is how old someone is. The gains in productivity alone should make human longevity the number one priority for every government.
I also think it would solve climate change because if you expected to live much longer, the obvious problems are no longer just future generations problems.
That's always being worked on - modern medicine is nothing short of miraculous.
People are trying. We want to cure cancer, and find effective general-purpose antivirals, and help people maintain healthy bodies, and figure out how to repair hearts, and cure diabetes, and fix autoimmune disorders, and figure out general-purpose gene therapies, and work out what exactly is up with the gut microbiome, and make prosthetic ears/eyes/etc, and then there's the brain...
There's only so much that you can do with the technology we have right now. Advances in other fields will eventually help, but you can't just spend a trillion dollars and make people live an extra decade.
Anyways, wouldn't significantly longer-lived people exacerbate climate change? You'd have many more people on the planet, and individuals would accumulate much more total wealth to spend on wasteful consumer goods thanks to the power of compound interest.
I think what OP means is rather than trying to fix deceases one by one, why aren't we focusing more on the root cause (aging)? This seems like a much more efficient way of solving many of these things. There are a bunch of initiatives in this area already, but not nearly enough to be proportional to the potential.
> but you can't just spend a trillion dollars and make people live an extra decade.
This I don't get though. Why not? We already do that. Making people healthier for longer is a massive win.
You're right that it's being worked on - organizations like the SENS Research Foundation have been advocating it for years and pushing the field. From what I see though, far more resources are spent attempting to fix symptoms of aging (cancer, heart disease, frailty), than on preventing those conditions from occurring in the first place.
If we cure cancer, at best we're adding a few years to the average lifespan before something else kills you off. If we rejuvenate the immune system to that of a 20 year old, not only are those cancerous cells far more likely to be killed off at an earlier stage, but also prevent a ton of other age related diseases.
I don't think it's something that should just have a blank cheque written for it, but I think that governments should encourage young people to become researchers in the field and should spend far more resources on basic science. We can change the incentives for insurance companies to pay for preventing diabetes instead of treating it.
Climate change is solvable - it requires both research and effort to get us there. Many people are simply not willing to sacrifice to solve it since it won't affect them. We also have tons of older people who go from producers to consumers, and are not contributing to fixing climate change. A 75 year old can be building windmills instead of hanging out on a golf cart in florida. A research scientist can continue their work instead of experiencing cognitive decline. We'd probably experience a short term increase in carbon emissions but I think the long term trend would be much lower since we'll get past the technological hurtles quicker with more people working on the problem.
As a collective, we try. But are we really trying as hard as we should be? Companies have influenced the public and even health research to be in favor of sugar. I'm pretty sure the rate of diabetes is going up and that doesn't help. Companies contributing to global warming have influenced policies and discredited science they knew would harm their businesses.
There are plenty of smart people doing what they think is best for us, but then there is also greed that hinders us. Sure some of us are trying, but not even close to as much as we should be. The money just isn't there.
End of life care is an incredibly expensive endeavor; why are we so adamant about extending the inevitable?
IMO it's a subconscious projection of the fact that we do _not_ live meaningful lives in our day to day, and so we fixate on a fantastical (yet inspiring, universal) compensation of extending it forever.
"Left to take care of the elderly" suggests we don't value life in the first place. Why extend it further?
The idea isn't that people will live in that fragile and unhealthy state even longer, the idea is to also extend how long we're healthy. Imagine being as healthy as a 30 year old when you're 70 for example. This is often also called healthspan and we probably don't want to extend lifespan too much without also extending the healthspan.
I think it's a fair assumption to make that we cannot increase healthspan significantly more than we can increase lifespan. The increases to each would be similar; after all, a healthy body won't just keel over and die. The post you were responding to specifically mentioned the costs of end of life care. If we can't reduce the amount of time between when a body begins to fail and when a person dies, then we've done nothing to address that issue.
Probably controversial here but as far as I can see correct:
This seems like a shortcut to hell on earth.
Who do you think will have the means to pay for this first?
It won't be the saints, it will be the greediest ones.
So we (or rather out descendants) would probably be stuck with a ruling class of demigods.
Why?
1. They were already pretty well off (since they are the ones who can pay for this treatment in the first place.
2. Now they suddenly also have all the time they want and need.
3. They will now have generations to build alliances etc.
Within three generations no normal person has a chance anymore.
Also for many of those persons I guess it will become nightmarish after a while: the though of dying from a car crash at age 100 probably feels much worse if you are planning to live forever than if you know your lifespan is lifespan.
Most things go to the wealthy first, but usually it's worse quality and very rapidly becomes democratized and improved. Consider how great life was 100 years ago for the wealthy compared to the average person today. I would definitely prefer air travel and computers to being wealthy but stuck in the past. Almost every technology has gotten much better when it becomes mainstream.
If treatments become available, the pressure to make it available to everyone will be immense. Consider how much of a government budget goes to health care and how much productivity and resources are wasted on those who have exited the workforce due to age. It will be economic and political suicide not to ensure everyone gets access to anti-aging treatments.
As for a ruling class, the problem exists with or without anti-aging treatments. We're already moving to a world where more wealth is concentrated with fewer people. The solution to this is to demand taxation on wealth and enforce it globally.
I feel the extension of young and healthy life (ideally to infinity) is a number one priority.
Surprisingly, people almost always strongly oppose when I just start expressing my views. I never understood this.
Wouldn't it be nice to see Mars colonized and terraformed? Wouldn't it be great to see the completion of a Dyson swarm and using 100 % of the Sun energy for some ultra-mega-project we can't even fathom yet? Wouldn't it be cool to see the spectacular Betelgeuse star going supernova show in 10 000 years? Wouldn't it be awesome to witness full Milky Way galaxy colonization?
If I would ever become an Earth dictator, I'd use all available resources to fight ageing :).
Even if we cure all illnesses and find a way to halt ageing at 25, and we got rid of car accidents (the biggest accidental killer) and suicide (the biggest deliberate killer), the remaining types of accident and homicide would probably still give humans a mean lifespan in the order of a few thousand years — I doubt I’d be bored of life after a mere few thousand years.
Hundreds of thousands of years would be utterly unpredictable given how big the scale change is (fun though the idea of star-lifting is), but a few thousand years is definitely still in the range of learning to master skills that I admire others demonstrating.
Not dying from aging in not the same as being immortal though. You could still die from a car accident for example, and there is of course the option to kill oneself (even if I'd consider that a tragedy.)
This is if biological aging could be _fully_ fixed, the first steps are rather to live a healthier life a bit longer.
I would expect people to live until they got bored.
I don't have the exact number, but without aging, we'd statistically only live until ~1000 on average before getting hit by a bus or choking on a bite of steak.
I don't think it is true for developing world. The cost of taking care of olders are low. Yes, they probably cannot afford the medicine to prolong the cancer patients for 6 months or 1 year, and maybe even other conditions, they are not worse off comparing to their previous generation. If you look from developed world of view, anything below the developed world standard is bad, but comparing to previous generations, they are not.
I might be misunderstanding what you're trying to say, do you mean that because the previous generation had it worse we shouldn't strive to improve things even more?
No, what I mean is looking at the world from your standard, you won't have patience for things to play out. We definitely should improve things, but also we need to have patience for people to catch up. You can definitely help, but help also needs understanding. For example, the problem you are looking at may not be something of high priority to people need help. To understand what people really need will require more than compassion.
Helping people in developing countries and curing aging in not mutually exclusive the way I see it, they can be done in parallel. They also usually require very different skills and usually have different budgets for example.
I don't want to take resources away from helping the poor but rather see more focus in the medical world towards aging/longevity. Rather than spending a lot of money on trying to cure (for example) Alzheimer's decease I'd like to see more of those resources spent on trying to solve aging, which seems to be the root cause of Alzheimer's (and many other deceases.)
Does that make sense? Or maybe I misunderstood you again.
Taking care of older people is very expensive right now. The majority of health care costs are for end of life care in the developed world. Those costs are going to increase as the largest generation ever (the baby boomers) approaches the point in their lives where they need to access that care.
The birth rate in the developed world is way below replacement, so unless we import workers through immigration, there will be fewer workers to take care of the previous generation.
Not necessarily. There are science fiction stories about extension of youth without extension of lifespan, and ancient myths about people cursed to live a long time without youth.
It's possible to imagine health-extending treaments (artificial joints and organs (heart), lung flushes) that don't extend lifespan). We already have treatments that can extend people's lives without health. (Unsuccessful chemotherapy, for one; insulin for type 2 diabetes mellitus, for another.)
And then we end up with a Gerontocracy where 100+ year olds are in charge of humanity's future, no thanks. What good is it to live forever if society stagnates intellectually? You may argue this wouldn't happen or that these treatments would also rejuvenate the mind in some fashion, but that seems dubious.
Science advances one funeral at a time and so does perhaps also humanity in general.
(That's not to say that I didn't wish that friends or family lived long lives, but that's not the point here of course.)
> that these treatments would also rejuvenate the mind in some fashion, but that seems dubious.
This is of course included in that and we're already seeing some research into it. To prolong life itself isn't a goal if we can't keep healthy, and the brain is part of that.
If we slow down or reverse aging the brain won't deteriorate either. It's all about solving the root cause of why our bodies and mind fails us over time.
It definitively does. The plasticity of the mind decreases with age, so if we're able to rejuvenate the brain, we would also increase it's plasticity, and we won't stagnate.
If everyone has been rejuvenated, then age would no longer matter. Someone who is 100 can have just as valid opinion as someone who is 25. Better yet, someone who is 100 will still able to contribute intellectually rather than needing to be taken care of by someone younger.
I understand the fear of a geneontocracy, but I think it's unfounded. New people will still be born, older people will get tired of living and opt to end their lives. If age no longer matters, the range of people in ones social group would only expand. The only advantage longer lives people would have is wealth and influence. We can solve the former with taxation and the latter is more dependent on the individual.
150,000 people die every day, and 2/3 of them die of age related diseases. The developed world and China are racing towards a demographic nightmare where fewer and fewer people are left to take care of the elderly. The older someone becomes, the more of a burden they become on the young. As people get older they begin to develop the diseases of old age and have an increasingly pain-filled life. People are forced to save for a future where they have enough to survive for a few years and then pay to have someone take care of them, instead of doing what they actually want to do.
Why are we not all collectively trying to solve this problem? Dying of age related diseases is as natural as dying from malaria or childbirth, yet we try to solve those issues and pretend age related diseases are inevitable. COVID largely shut the world down because the largest risk factor for complications is how old someone is. The gains in productivity alone should make human longevity the number one priority for every government.
I also think it would solve climate change because if you expected to live much longer, the obvious problems are no longer just future generations problems.