5 ms·

If you believe that aging and death is a natural part of life that we should passively accept and are thus opposed to the work done by the SENS Foundation, I en

If you believe that aging and death is a natural part of life that we should passively accept and are thus opposed to the work done by the SENS Foundation, I encourage you to read the Fable of the Dragon Tyrant by Nick Bostrom: https://nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html https://nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html Life extension remains a currently a critically underfunded part of medical research, primarily due to the social attitudes towards it.

tfha 9y ago
Across almost all kingdoms of life, death is a common denominator. It is how a species is able to evolve over time and keep up with a dynamic landscape. Death is very healthy at the species level.
- icelancer 9y ago
  This is true, no question about it. But humanity is exempt from a lot of basic ecosystem analyses given our position in the world today. People act like this isn't the case, but it very clearly is; no combination of species has the impact that we do on our environment and the other species on the planet.
  - tfha 9y ago
    How about the combination of species that created the atmosphere at all? Gave it oxygen? Enriched the soil?
- AgentME 9y ago
  Intelligence can accomplish many things faster, better, and in less morally-horrifying ways than evolution through natural selection can. I think it's desirable for us to take over the reins. (Of course, there will still always be natural selection operating, just in a new style. People/ideas that can't participate in society, at least in a way to sexually reproduce, obtain the resources for cloning / life extension, or spread their ideas, won't be selected for.)
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
trgv 9y ago
I don't think we should passively accept aging or death, but I'm not sure if life extension is underfunded, or how you would even demonstrate that. Many different areas of research, such as cancer research, could fit under the umbrella of "life extension."
- reasonattlm 9y ago
  Aging research as a whole is miserably underfunded. Perhaps $3-5B/year at most, if you take the NIA budget and then make some sketchy multiplications based on studies of public/private research expenditure and US/rest of world research expenditure. Compare that with the cost of merely coping with age-related disease and disability, added to the opportunity cost of loss of capability and life, which is in the trillions per year. The ratio between costs that might be addressed and research funding is very low in comparison to other fields. Then bear in mind that most aging research is still purely investigational, not aimed at producing any sort of intervention. Calico falls into this category, more is the pity. Then bear in mind that of the interventional research, most of that is focused on calorie restriction mimetic or similar stress response tinkering that can't possibly significantly extend human life span. Then at the far bottom of this funnel, with a tiny amount of funding, is rejuvenation biotechnology of the sort advocated by the SRF, repair the damage that causes aging in order to reverse aging. So, yes. Very underfunded. Then if we look at cancer research, there is a different problem and effort to change the split of research strategy and allocation of dollars. Cancer research has progressed very slowly because there are hundreds of subtypes of cancer and researchers have been pursuing strategies that only tackle one, or only tackle a mechanism that cancers can evolve away from. What is needed for progress in cancer research is greater funding and attention for strategies that are general to many or all cancers, and which cancers cannot evolve away from. Such as CAR-T therapies, or a few other types of immunotherapy that are comparatively general, or have low costs of adaptation to different cancers, or interdiction of telomerase and ALT to prevent cancers lengthening their telomeres, or the like. The latter of those is a SENS Research Foundation initiative.
marcelluspye 9y ago
Earlier this week there was a post on this site about the definition of death vs brain death. That article pointed out that many doctors oppose any questioning of the idea of brain death = death for at least partly economic reasons: taking care of braindead patients uses up greatly needed resources. (in fact, the article mentioned that the proposal of such a definition was based on medical care facilities growing full of braindead people) I wonder, if the idea were more mainstream, if life extension funding on a large scale would be opposed by similar arguments: 'we as a society can't afford to have everyone live a lot longer, so we should put our resources towards other medical pursuits.' https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16262046 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16262046
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- orangecat 9y ago
  'we as a society can't afford to have everyone live a lot longer, so we should put our resources towards other medical pursuits.' Which is silly, because ending aging would save huge amounts of money. Compare the health care expenses of the average person at 30 and 80.
icelancer 9y ago
>> If you believe that aging and death is a natural part of life that we should passively accept and are thus opposed to the work done by the SENS Foundation This seems like a very weird thing to be opposed to. I can see a personal disagreement with life extension, usually rooted in religion, but to oppose research in this area? I guess there's all sorts of people.
pavlov 9y ago
Abolishing natural death may be desirable, but there's no question it would mean dramatically less children in the world. Instead of new minds and new experiences, human society would be dominated to an even greater extent by old minds and their established patterns. In Bostrom's "Fable of the Dragon Tyrant", note the line spoken by the aged king at the end: "Today we are like children again." When the dragon is vanquished, the old are children again – but they're also the last children.
- drharby 9y ago
  Uhm...spoilers?
  - pavlov 9y ago
    It's explicitly a parable about natural death's cost to society. There's not much to spoil?
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
- pjscott 9y ago
  That's a problem. It's a better problem than being locked in the dungeons of the dragon tyrant for lonely years while you wait for it to consume you. Please let's address these things in order of priority.
  - pavlov 9y ago
    How do you know that "potential end of all human creativity" is a smaller and better problem than "individuals eventually cease to exist"?
    - IntronExon 9y ago
      These are lovely existential questions, but how about a more practical end of it? A lot of comments here seem to assume that this post-dragon society would ever make it past them initial shock. There also seems to be an assumption that everyone would have access. How much do you think it would cost to halt aging? Unless it’s essentially magic like “Booster Spice” from Larry Niven, this tech would almost certainly be an ongoing series of treatments and modifications, probably not cheap either. What do you think would be the reaction of the world at large when faced with the prospect of some fraction of the “1%” becoming functionally immortal while they’re still dirt poor and mortal? I don’t think humans would accept that particular inequality. We live in a world full of nuclear weapons and other horrors, and I can’t think of anything more calculated to lead to them being used than the ultra-rich cheating death and aging. Aside from the sense of unfairness, you’d be faced with the practical horrors of immortal oligarchs and plutocrats. Control over who gets to be ageless would also be an obvious way to create a permanent ruling class. An end to aging only starts to seem like something other than them prelude to our own destruction if we’ve solved a number of other problems first. If you just throw functional immortality into the world as it is, and has been to date, the outcome would be apocalyptic. Freedom from aging only sounds paradisical if everyone has equal access to it, otherwise it’s just how the world ends.
almostApatriot1 9y ago
what are the social attitudes exactly? That the world can't sustain an undying, continually growing population? The end of aging will lead to extermination/genocide in one form of another. There is no way around it.
- naasking 9y ago
  > That the world can't sustain an undying, continually growing population? Except that won't happen, because population growth or plateau or start falling within the next century die to spreading affluence. Native population growth in every first world nation is already negative. The end of aging is probably inevitable, but it won't necessarily a yield a continuously growing population.
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    > Native population growth in every first world nation is already negative. No, it's not; the US is, notably, among the first world nations with a positive rate of natural growth.
andrepd 9y ago
>Life extension remains a currently a critically underfunded part of medical research, primarily due to the social attitudes towards it. Not really. Life extension remains a currently a critically underfunded part of medical research primarily because it's a hard problem, with no breakthrough in sight.

tfha 9y ago

Across almost all kingdoms of life, death is a common denominator. It is how a species is able to evolve over time and keep up with a dynamic landscape. Death is very healthy at the species level.

icelancer 9y ago
This is true, no question about it. But humanity is exempt from a lot of basic ecosystem analyses given our position in the world today. People act like this isn't the case, but it very clearly is; no combination of species has the impact that we do on our environment and the other species on the planet.
- tfha 9y ago
  How about the combination of species that created the atmosphere at all? Gave it oxygen? Enriched the soil?
AgentME 9y ago
Intelligence can accomplish many things faster, better, and in less morally-horrifying ways than evolution through natural selection can. I think it's desirable for us to take over the reins. (Of course, there will still always be natural selection operating, just in a new style. People/ideas that can't participate in society, at least in a way to sexually reproduce, obtain the resources for cloning / life extension, or spread their ideas, won't be selected for.)

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

trgv 9y ago

I don't think we should passively accept aging or death, but I'm not sure if life extension is underfunded, or how you would even demonstrate that. Many different areas of research, such as cancer research, could fit under the umbrella of "life extension."

reasonattlm 9y ago
Aging research as a whole is miserably underfunded. Perhaps $3-5B/year at most, if you take the NIA budget and then make some sketchy multiplications based on studies of public/private research expenditure and US/rest of world research expenditure. Compare that with the cost of merely coping with age-related disease and disability, added to the opportunity cost of loss of capability and life, which is in the trillions per year. The ratio between costs that might be addressed and research funding is very low in comparison to other fields. Then bear in mind that most aging research is still purely investigational, not aimed at producing any sort of intervention. Calico falls into this category, more is the pity. Then bear in mind that of the interventional research, most of that is focused on calorie restriction mimetic or similar stress response tinkering that can't possibly significantly extend human life span. Then at the far bottom of this funnel, with a tiny amount of funding, is rejuvenation biotechnology of the sort advocated by the SRF, repair the damage that causes aging in order to reverse aging. So, yes. Very underfunded. Then if we look at cancer research, there is a different problem and effort to change the split of research strategy and allocation of dollars. Cancer research has progressed very slowly because there are hundreds of subtypes of cancer and researchers have been pursuing strategies that only tackle one, or only tackle a mechanism that cancers can evolve away from. What is needed for progress in cancer research is greater funding and attention for strategies that are general to many or all cancers, and which cancers cannot evolve away from. Such as CAR-T therapies, or a few other types of immunotherapy that are comparatively general, or have low costs of adaptation to different cancers, or interdiction of telomerase and ALT to prevent cancers lengthening their telomeres, or the like. The latter of those is a SENS Research Foundation initiative.

marcelluspye 9y ago

Earlier this week there was a post on this site about the definition of death vs brain death. That article pointed out that many doctors oppose any questioning of the idea of brain death = death for at least partly economic reasons: taking care of braindead patients uses up greatly needed resources. (in fact, the article mentioned that the proposal of such a definition was based on medical care facilities growing full of braindead people) I wonder, if the idea were more mainstream, if life extension funding on a large scale would be opposed by similar arguments: 'we as a society can't afford to have everyone live a lot longer, so we should put our resources towards other medical pursuits.' https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16262046 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16262046

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
orangecat 9y ago
'we as a society can't afford to have everyone live a lot longer, so we should put our resources towards other medical pursuits.' Which is silly, because ending aging would save huge amounts of money. Compare the health care expenses of the average person at 30 and 80.

icelancer 9y ago

>> If you believe that aging and death is a natural part of life that we should passively accept and are thus opposed to the work done by the SENS Foundation This seems like a very weird thing to be opposed to. I can see a personal disagreement with life extension, usually rooted in religion, but to oppose research in this area? I guess there's all sorts of people.

pavlov 9y ago

Abolishing natural death may be desirable, but there's no question it would mean dramatically less children in the world. Instead of new minds and new experiences, human society would be dominated to an even greater extent by old minds and their established patterns. In Bostrom's "Fable of the Dragon Tyrant", note the line spoken by the aged king at the end: "Today we are like children again." When the dragon is vanquished, the old are children again – but they're also the last children.

drharby 9y ago
Uhm...spoilers?
- pavlov 9y ago
  It's explicitly a parable about natural death's cost to society. There's not much to spoil?
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
pjscott 9y ago
That's a problem. It's a better problem than being locked in the dungeons of the dragon tyrant for lonely years while you wait for it to consume you. Please let's address these things in order of priority.
- pavlov 9y ago
  How do you know that "potential end of all human creativity" is a smaller and better problem than "individuals eventually cease to exist"?
  - IntronExon 9y ago
    These are lovely existential questions, but how about a more practical end of it? A lot of comments here seem to assume that this post-dragon society would ever make it past them initial shock. There also seems to be an assumption that everyone would have access. How much do you think it would cost to halt aging? Unless it’s essentially magic like “Booster Spice” from Larry Niven, this tech would almost certainly be an ongoing series of treatments and modifications, probably not cheap either. What do you think would be the reaction of the world at large when faced with the prospect of some fraction of the “1%” becoming functionally immortal while they’re still dirt poor and mortal? I don’t think humans would accept that particular inequality. We live in a world full of nuclear weapons and other horrors, and I can’t think of anything more calculated to lead to them being used than the ultra-rich cheating death and aging. Aside from the sense of unfairness, you’d be faced with the practical horrors of immortal oligarchs and plutocrats. Control over who gets to be ageless would also be an obvious way to create a permanent ruling class. An end to aging only starts to seem like something other than them prelude to our own destruction if we’ve solved a number of other problems first. If you just throw functional immortality into the world as it is, and has been to date, the outcome would be apocalyptic. Freedom from aging only sounds paradisical if everyone has equal access to it, otherwise it’s just how the world ends.

almostApatriot1 9y ago

what are the social attitudes exactly? That the world can't sustain an undying, continually growing population? The end of aging will lead to extermination/genocide in one form of another. There is no way around it.

naasking 9y ago
> That the world can't sustain an undying, continually growing population? Except that won't happen, because population growth or plateau or start falling within the next century die to spreading affluence. Native population growth in every first world nation is already negative. The end of aging is probably inevitable, but it won't necessarily a yield a continuously growing population.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > Native population growth in every first world nation is already negative. No, it's not; the US is, notably, among the first world nations with a positive rate of natural growth.

andrepd 9y ago

>Life extension remains a currently a critically underfunded part of medical research, primarily due to the social attitudes towards it. Not really. Life extension remains a currently a critically underfunded part of medical research primarily because it's a hard problem, with no breakthrough in sight.