5 ms·

The reason doesn't really matter, this is still incredibly valuable work. Death is terrible, and should be eradicated, but Alzheimer's is a few steps above tha

The reason doesn't really matter, this is still incredibly valuable work. Death is terrible, and should be eradicated, but Alzheimer's is a few steps above that. There's nothing worse than seeing a loved one be slowly destroyed by that horrific disease, and I'm so glad there are people willing to work on it.

pmelendez 9y ago
"Death is terrible, and should be eradicated" We are sensitive to death but it is the only mechanism I know that would control overconsumption of natural resources. If nobody dies, then we would deplete the resources in a few decades.
- sheepdestroyer 9y ago
  We have death and at the same time over-consumption, so the control is not working that well. Did you mean that it would effectively control the over-consumption if better implemented (with a higher rate)?
  - freeflight 9y ago
    Parent merely stated that we are already over-consuming with rather high death rates, not having any deaths at all most certainly wouldn't help with our current unsustainable ways, as we'd most likely overpopulate the planet pretty quickly with all it's resulting woes (even more pollution, killing off the rest of the biosphere). Imho it'd only work the other way around: For us to beat death, we first have to solve our sustainability/resource problems. What point is there to "endlessly living" if the reality of that boils down to being stuck in overcrowded and miserable living conditions? That sounds more like hell than utopia.
    - Filligree 9y ago
      You're making the mistake of changing one parameter, but not projecting the entire world forwards. Immortality would be impossible without massive technological improvements that certainly would have other benefits; you can pretty well assume that both molecular nanotechnology and genetic engineering will be mature by then. In combination, those should dramatically increase the carrying capacity of the world. Ignoring all of that, though... Don't you think it's likely that people will start caring more about the future onceb they know they'll live to see it?
      - coldtea 9y ago
        >Immortality would be impossible without massive technological improvements that certainly would have other benefits; you can pretty well assume that both molecular nanotechnology and genetic engineering will be mature by then. I don't think we'll see anything like increased exponential progress of the kind that has been (and has already slowed down) during the industrial age. All low hanging fruit have been gathered, and at this point there are diminishing returns. We will have a few breakthroughs here and there but nothing to write home about the way the steam engine, electricity or the computer have been. >Ignoring all of that, though... Don't you think it's likely that people will start caring more about the future once they know they'll live to see it? Most people are terrible managing their own lives a few years ahead, much less decades ahead. So no reason to think they'll be any more apt when its something so vague as centuries ahead.
        melling 9y ago
        Then we probably won’t cure death without large technological improvements. Problem solved. This conversation is going in circles. Has anyone brought up “death gives life meaning”? https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2017/03/28/stories-that-should-be-banned-from-hacker-news-immortality/ https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2017/03/28/stories-that-should-...
        Filligree 9y ago
        > This conversation is going in circles. Has anyone brought up “death gives life meaning”? A platitude uttered by people who believe they have no way out, and are desperate to make themselves feel better about that. Not necessarily a bad thing, so long as there really is no way out, but catastrophic once that changes. Destroying death will lose us something, most certainly; there are any number of great works of art and philosophy that would never have been created without the pressures and emotions it creates. But none of that, I think, can even remotely make up for the sheer awfulness of the downside. There has to be a better solution than this creeping horror.
        9y ago
- Chris2048 9y ago
  On the other had, technological progress is also proportional to population, so not necessarily so..
- humanrebar 9y ago
  > We are sensitive to death but it is the only mechanism I know that would control overconsumption of natural resources. Also prices. New kinds of mining are invented to circumvent cost restrictions. Otherwise, certain kinds of metals and gasses would stay forever buried as unusable junk. Also note that fish that are significantly easier to eat (not a lot of bones, easy to farm, etc.) are more utilized. "Trash fish" are usually just full of bones or too much work to prepare to eat in a tasty way.
- coldtea 9y ago
  >If nobody dies, then we would deplete the resources in a few decades. The idea of those wanting that is to perpetuate themselves (and their current generation) in eternity, screw successors.
  - creep 9y ago
    This is also a fundamental problem of eternity. If one is eternal, he/she can create or destroy at will. But our current social model is based upon the creation of successors. In fact, the evolution of the universe seems to be based upon successors, upon the "future". In eternal life, time looks different. Nonetheless, physical bodies of any kind cannot seem to exist as they are for eternity. Even diamonds decay. Abstractions change as well-- ideas thought to be immortalized actually do change, actually do die. And they can be immortalized in time, in the past-- but towards the future, there has never been a concrete conception of such immortality, only in the frozen sense.
- edanm 9y ago
  These are hard problems. The worst solution we can come up with is to literally kill everyone. We can find a better way.
- folli 9y ago
  I'd rather willingly visit Futurama's suicide booth than slowly deteriorate due to Alzheimer's.
ahussain 9y ago
It's not common to share poems on HN, but this is a great spoken word piece about how terrible dementia and alzheimer's can be for families: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5HRBib3hNs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5HRBib3hNs
ZenoArrow 9y ago
> "Death is terrible, and should be eradicated" Is death really that terrible? There's plenty of things I'd like to try before I die, and I hope to live until I'm much older, but on the other hand becoming immortal doesn't seem like paradise to me. If I were to suggest what we'd be better off eradicating I'd suggest fear of death over death itself. I'd rather live 100 years free from fear of dying than 1000 years in constant fear of dying.
creep 9y ago
>Death is terrible, and should be eradicated I strongly disagree with this statement. We learn through death, and yet we don't know what death is. We do not know the fundamentals of death, yet it occurs on all abstractions. I think of this poetically, because I don't understand death. But all things being relative, life does not make sense without death. Edit: On this topic I would also like to point out the eagerness of the immortal mindset. We are living 30 years+ in comparison to our ancestors, but it seems we approach an asymptote. With alzheimers and other neuro-degenerative diseases, we lose our mental faculties. We lose memories, emotions, we lose everything. Yes this is the topic at hand, but does that not indicate something fundamental as well? We have a reached a point where living implies the dissolution of what we used to be, of what we spent so long striving towards the future to do. And at that point of degeneration, we no longer exist in that sense. We can no longer orient ourselves towards the future, and decay while living. If there is something after death-- if whatever composes our consciousness is actually tangible, autonomous, and not an emergent result of our brains (similarly, if emergence itself is autonomous), then after the alzheimers individual dies in body, he/she will not exist in consciousness either. After this point, his/her consciousness will have dissolved. And these are rather philosophical points, but this is how I see things. Science and philosophy, science and spirituality even, do coexist in my subjective experience.

pmelendez 9y ago

"Death is terrible, and should be eradicated" We are sensitive to death but it is the only mechanism I know that would control overconsumption of natural resources. If nobody dies, then we would deplete the resources in a few decades.

sheepdestroyer 9y ago
We have death and at the same time over-consumption, so the control is not working that well. Did you mean that it would effectively control the over-consumption if better implemented (with a higher rate)?
- freeflight 9y ago
  Parent merely stated that we are already over-consuming with rather high death rates, not having any deaths at all most certainly wouldn't help with our current unsustainable ways, as we'd most likely overpopulate the planet pretty quickly with all it's resulting woes (even more pollution, killing off the rest of the biosphere). Imho it'd only work the other way around: For us to beat death, we first have to solve our sustainability/resource problems. What point is there to "endlessly living" if the reality of that boils down to being stuck in overcrowded and miserable living conditions? That sounds more like hell than utopia.
  - Filligree 9y ago
    You're making the mistake of changing one parameter, but not projecting the entire world forwards. Immortality would be impossible without massive technological improvements that certainly would have other benefits; you can pretty well assume that both molecular nanotechnology and genetic engineering will be mature by then. In combination, those should dramatically increase the carrying capacity of the world. Ignoring all of that, though... Don't you think it's likely that people will start caring more about the future onceb they know they'll live to see it?
    - coldtea 9y ago
      >Immortality would be impossible without massive technological improvements that certainly would have other benefits; you can pretty well assume that both molecular nanotechnology and genetic engineering will be mature by then. I don't think we'll see anything like increased exponential progress of the kind that has been (and has already slowed down) during the industrial age. All low hanging fruit have been gathered, and at this point there are diminishing returns. We will have a few breakthroughs here and there but nothing to write home about the way the steam engine, electricity or the computer have been. >Ignoring all of that, though... Don't you think it's likely that people will start caring more about the future once they know they'll live to see it? Most people are terrible managing their own lives a few years ahead, much less decades ahead. So no reason to think they'll be any more apt when its something so vague as centuries ahead.
      - melling 9y ago
        Then we probably won’t cure death without large technological improvements. Problem solved. This conversation is going in circles. Has anyone brought up “death gives life meaning”? https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2017/03/28/stories-that-should-be-banned-from-hacker-news-immortality/ https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2017/03/28/stories-that-should-...
        Filligree 9y ago
        > This conversation is going in circles. Has anyone brought up “death gives life meaning”? A platitude uttered by people who believe they have no way out, and are desperate to make themselves feel better about that. Not necessarily a bad thing, so long as there really is no way out, but catastrophic once that changes. Destroying death will lose us something, most certainly; there are any number of great works of art and philosophy that would never have been created without the pressures and emotions it creates. But none of that, I think, can even remotely make up for the sheer awfulness of the downside. There has to be a better solution than this creeping horror.
        9y ago
Chris2048 9y ago
On the other had, technological progress is also proportional to population, so not necessarily so..
humanrebar 9y ago
> We are sensitive to death but it is the only mechanism I know that would control overconsumption of natural resources. Also prices. New kinds of mining are invented to circumvent cost restrictions. Otherwise, certain kinds of metals and gasses would stay forever buried as unusable junk. Also note that fish that are significantly easier to eat (not a lot of bones, easy to farm, etc.) are more utilized. "Trash fish" are usually just full of bones or too much work to prepare to eat in a tasty way.
coldtea 9y ago
>If nobody dies, then we would deplete the resources in a few decades. The idea of those wanting that is to perpetuate themselves (and their current generation) in eternity, screw successors.
- creep 9y ago
  This is also a fundamental problem of eternity. If one is eternal, he/she can create or destroy at will. But our current social model is based upon the creation of successors. In fact, the evolution of the universe seems to be based upon successors, upon the "future". In eternal life, time looks different. Nonetheless, physical bodies of any kind cannot seem to exist as they are for eternity. Even diamonds decay. Abstractions change as well-- ideas thought to be immortalized actually do change, actually do die. And they can be immortalized in time, in the past-- but towards the future, there has never been a concrete conception of such immortality, only in the frozen sense.
edanm 9y ago
These are hard problems. The worst solution we can come up with is to literally kill everyone. We can find a better way.
folli 9y ago
I'd rather willingly visit Futurama's suicide booth than slowly deteriorate due to Alzheimer's.

ahussain 9y ago

It's not common to share poems on HN, but this is a great spoken word piece about how terrible dementia and alzheimer's can be for families: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5HRBib3hNs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5HRBib3hNs

ZenoArrow 9y ago

> "Death is terrible, and should be eradicated" Is death really that terrible? There's plenty of things I'd like to try before I die, and I hope to live until I'm much older, but on the other hand becoming immortal doesn't seem like paradise to me. If I were to suggest what we'd be better off eradicating I'd suggest fear of death over death itself. I'd rather live 100 years free from fear of dying than 1000 years in constant fear of dying.

creep 9y ago

>Death is terrible, and should be eradicated I strongly disagree with this statement. We learn through death, and yet we don't know what death is. We do not know the fundamentals of death, yet it occurs on all abstractions. I think of this poetically, because I don't understand death. But all things being relative, life does not make sense without death. Edit: On this topic I would also like to point out the eagerness of the immortal mindset. We are living 30 years+ in comparison to our ancestors, but it seems we approach an asymptote. With alzheimers and other neuro-degenerative diseases, we lose our mental faculties. We lose memories, emotions, we lose everything. Yes this is the topic at hand, but does that not indicate something fundamental as well? We have a reached a point where living implies the dissolution of what we used to be, of what we spent so long striving towards the future to do. And at that point of degeneration, we no longer exist in that sense. We can no longer orient ourselves towards the future, and decay while living. If there is something after death-- if whatever composes our consciousness is actually tangible, autonomous, and not an emergent result of our brains (similarly, if emergence itself is autonomous), then after the alzheimers individual dies in body, he/she will not exist in consciousness either. After this point, his/her consciousness will have dissolved. And these are rather philosophical points, but this is how I see things. Science and philosophy, science and spirituality even, do coexist in my subjective experience.