5 ms·

Do you not want to live longer?

flyinglizard 6y ago
I also don’t want to pay taxes but here I am, grudgingly paying them for the benefit of our societal structure. Would I want to live in a world where people don’t have kids, where people can take as much time as they want because time is infinite, a world where you wouldn’t even go out on the street for the chance something would happen to you and deprive you of eternal existence? I’m not sure, and in any case, it will be a vastly different future. Imagine Mark Zuckerberg running his empire for 900 years straight.
- echelon 6y ago
  You do you. I want to live 900 years and explore every discipline under the sun. I want to travel the world twenty times, read every book, see a hundred thousand sunsets. Don't tell me I or anyone else doesn't deserve that. Evolution left us with bodies that don't permit it, but we'll escape that limit someday.
  - flyinglizard 6y ago
    Do you have kids? I think my view on this radically changed as a father. I feel like my generation sticking around forever would come at the expense of our children (or their children, which by proxy is the same thing). With kids around, there’s just something biologically soothing that tells you “you’ve done your part. You can leave this world at peace”. I know it’s not the same for everyone but on a humankind level, that’s exactly how it works. “A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they shall never sit.”
    - bpizzi 6y ago
      Those are beliefs from the past. Given time it will change. What human kind is biologically hardwired for is personal survival ability, not leaving the world for youngsters as soon as possible, and those two precepts are mutually exclusive.
      - flyinglizard 6y ago
        Humans have individually weak survival instincts, which is why soldiers were running into machine gun fire on the beaches of Normandy (or why others ride motorcycles). Some of that is surely the denial of our own mortality. Humans excel at surviving as a group, which is a very different - sometimes contrasting - thing.
    - antepodius 6y ago
      Nobody's telling you you're not allowed to die, and I'll always be on the libertarian end of that equation. Just please don't stop people from trying to live.
  - acituan 6y ago
    Not meaning this in an derogatory manner but this sounds to me something like what Peter Pan wanted. He didn't want to leave neverland and he wanted to be everything (pan). This is also well studied in the Jungian psychology under the term puer aeternus, the infinite child. The problem with this is, personal harm it causes aside, if all adults wanted to be infinite children, it wouldn't leave space to (at least compete with) the incoming, actual children. It would cause great intergenerational conflict. Not leaving resources for the next generation also means endangering the continuity of species altogether. If we take a step back, one might even argue that this is already what is going on today.
- lachlan-sneff 6y ago
  I do want to live in a world where people can take as much time as they want! I'm 20 years old, and there already isn't enough time to do everything I want to do. I also disagree that increased longevity will lead to a stagnant society. Just as we don't expect a 30 year old to be the same person when they're aged to 40 or 50, I don't expect a 100 year old to be the same person when they're 300. Neurons are replaced, old memories are forgotten, old habits are redefined.
fizixer 6y ago
Shhh. Don't wake them up from their pro-aging trance.
- lachlan-sneff 6y ago
  Never understood why so many people are so vehemently against anti-aging sentiments. Are they in denial about their own, current mortality?
  - melling 6y ago
    It’s the same story repeated. I got so tired of listening to people complain I wrote a blog about it 3 years ago so I could hopefully quell the noise. “Death gives life meaning” “It’ll only be for rich people” 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-...
    - autisticcurio 6y ago
      Firstly if you accept we are as human life forms, complex real-time chemical reactions, then in the simplest terms this should show you that extending life should be possible. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darvaza_gas_crater https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darvaza_gas_crater https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia_mine_fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia_mine_fire These fires keep burning because there is enough of the right fuel (diet) to keep them burning, their environment doesnt put them out either, even when pathogens (eg us humans) have tried to put them out. What science is trying to do, is identify what our diet today has or doesnt have in sufficient quantity which can extend life. Take Rampamycin, aka mTor signalling and the role a keto branch chained amino acid can play in extending life. There are so many studies on Rampamycin, mTor, Ketotosis, Leucine, and water only fasting and this is just one component of our diet. https://academic.oup.com/jn/article/131/3/861S/4687154 https://academic.oup.com/jn/article/131/3/861S/4687154 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22029833/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22029833/ As we are now at a stage where we can alter what food would normally contain eg supermarkets want marbleised meat, so livestock get fed a Pantothenic Acid (Vit B5) deficient diet as it reduces subcutaneous fat levels and shift the fat into the muscle and around the organs, as well as affecting the nervous system, not a concern for farmers considering the livestocks short life span, but another simple example being popping a multi vitamin pill, it is now possible to alter our diets in drastic ways. The hard part is knowing when something is giving a herxheimer reaction or is genuinely bad for us. There are a lot of factors to take into account which we just cant measure, the sodium potassium ATPase pump, potassium causes the cell to take up a variety of other chemicals where as sodium makes the cell take up water. Some cells cant handle folded proteins getting inside them for example, yet cooked egg white is a good example of eating folded proteins. We cant measure easily or accurately in-vivo (in the body) what a cell has taken up from interstitial fluid. Thats why radioactive isotopes are sometimes used, or chemicals with an alternated magnetic resonance which can be detected using fMRI scanners. Yet radioisotopes can affect the body, the higher the amount the more obvious the effect as Chernobyl and Fukashima, Radon all demonstrate. Sometimes, studies are portrayed as being negative to health when the lack of understanding means it should have been portrayed as a positive to health in some circumstances and negative to health in the circumstance they carried out the experiment in, but even the year the study was carried out can sometimes account for that lack of knowledge, other times it just wasnt taught or common knowledge in the scientific community. Having done a few of my own experiments, I've already discovered some studys portraying negative health effects, but my circumstances have been different. And as much as we may lambaste the food industry, at least we still have reasonably consistent standardised food to eat which will also help the scientific community. In the past like you see in China, a myriad of things would have been consumed as food with sometimes unknown consequences. Other inhibitors, include what chemical combinations can be made, you'll never see a zinc-sodium supplement because its either too expensive to make, knowledge to make not obtained yet or its just physically impossible to combine the two. So some supplements focus on one element of the chemical combination, and forgets or simply doesnt mention what else its combined with. When you take all the different types of zinc supplements, zinc ions are often a minority to whatever else its combined with, which can also affect the body. As for it being just for rich people, its also for clever people who demonstrate innovation. Very few things will break the bank, if you have a bank account.
teej 6y ago
No. If I could add 10 years on to my 30s I would. But adding 10 years into my 80s doesn’t seem worthwhile.
- lachlan-sneff 6y ago
  The whole point of this is to be able to extend your healthspan, not just your lifespan. This includes age "reversal" and maintenance. A complete solution does not leave you in your 80s, it leaves you in your 20s indefinitely.
millstone 6y ago
"Science advances one funeral at a time." - Max Planck "Death is very likely the best single invention of life. It is life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new." - Steve Jobs I know my life is accreting old biases and obstacles. Today and for years to come (I hope) I have more to do, but some day I will become an agent of stagnation instead of advancement. Nobody wants to die. But in the big picture, the alternative is worse.
- lachlan-sneff 6y ago
  I can't say I understand this viewpoint. If you feel you're going to become an agent of stagnation, as you put it, simply put effort into not stagnating.
  - millstone 6y ago
    I think we stagnate because we accumulate experience. As we grow old, we gain wisdom, but our wisdom is centralized in the past. We can't shed our experiences without forgetting ourselves. Steve Jobs also talked about "the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything." But I can't be a beginner again and again and again: some day my biases/old-dreams and stale-ideas/past-successes will dominate. Nobody has an endless capacity for creating the new.
    - lachlan-sneff 6y ago
      Perhaps stagnation is due to experience, perhaps it's due to accumulated, age-related brain damage. I doubt we'll know until people do live hundreds or thousands of years. Surely you can be a beginner again. Pick something you've never done before, and do that. As fledgling as humanity is, humans already have millions of different traditions and areas of study. Just pick one (or many).
      - pessimizer 6y ago
        > Pick something you've never done before, and do that. You run out of those things shortly after birth. The vast majority of the aspects of everything that you attempt are familiar, and you have already developed habitual approaches to them. Having "never done something before" is shorthand for some experience having some aspect that you have never experienced before, not complete novelty. I'm going to build the strategies of flying a spaceship on the strategies I built learning to drive a car, which were built on the strategies I built learning to walk, which were built on the strategies I built learning to crawl, to manipulate my parents by crying, to identify distinct objects using my eyes, etc... Eventually, the actually novel part of any new experience becomes vanishingly small. If anything, the ability to enjoy novelty, or to even see things as novel, is increased with our ability to forget. Maybe for a society, the ability to innovate relies on the ability to leave behind a bunch of brains whose plasticity has long been lost due to a lack of mental exercise.
koonsolo 6y ago
The real question is what kind of life. I love driving my motorcycle, and I'm well aware of the risks involved. Now let's imagine a world where they cure aging. When dying in an accident, you could lose a whole lot more than now. I'm pretty sure we would quickly evolve to a society where we minimize the risk to die to almost 0. I do not want to live in such a oversafely world. Besides, I'm very happy with 70 or so years here, and try to enjoy all of it. The next generations will inherit it all.
- danieltillett 6y ago
  Wait until you are 69.
- vharuck 6y ago
  I doubt the extra years lost will affect people's decisions. I've seen a lot of 20 somethings weaving in traffic or not wearing protective hear while motorcycling. It's human nature to enjoy life by taking risks, reasonable or not (subjective as that is).

I also don’t want to pay taxes but here I am, grudgingly paying them for the benefit of our societal structure. Would I want to live in a world where people don’t have kids, where people can take as much time as they want because time is infinite, a world where you wouldn’t even go out on the street for the chance something would happen to you and deprive you of eternal existence? I’m not sure, and in any case, it will be a vastly different future. Imagine Mark Zuckerberg running his empire for 900 years straight.

echelon 6y ago
You do you. I want to live 900 years and explore every discipline under the sun. I want to travel the world twenty times, read every book, see a hundred thousand sunsets. Don't tell me I or anyone else doesn't deserve that. Evolution left us with bodies that don't permit it, but we'll escape that limit someday.
- flyinglizard 6y ago
  Do you have kids? I think my view on this radically changed as a father. I feel like my generation sticking around forever would come at the expense of our children (or their children, which by proxy is the same thing). With kids around, there’s just something biologically soothing that tells you “you’ve done your part. You can leave this world at peace”. I know it’s not the same for everyone but on a humankind level, that’s exactly how it works. “A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they shall never sit.”
  - bpizzi 6y ago
    Those are beliefs from the past. Given time it will change. What human kind is biologically hardwired for is personal survival ability, not leaving the world for youngsters as soon as possible, and those two precepts are mutually exclusive.
    - flyinglizard 6y ago
      Humans have individually weak survival instincts, which is why soldiers were running into machine gun fire on the beaches of Normandy (or why others ride motorcycles). Some of that is surely the denial of our own mortality. Humans excel at surviving as a group, which is a very different - sometimes contrasting - thing.
  - antepodius 6y ago
    Nobody's telling you you're not allowed to die, and I'll always be on the libertarian end of that equation. Just please don't stop people from trying to live.
- acituan 6y ago
  Not meaning this in an derogatory manner but this sounds to me something like what Peter Pan wanted. He didn't want to leave neverland and he wanted to be everything (pan). This is also well studied in the Jungian psychology under the term puer aeternus, the infinite child. The problem with this is, personal harm it causes aside, if all adults wanted to be infinite children, it wouldn't leave space to (at least compete with) the incoming, actual children. It would cause great intergenerational conflict. Not leaving resources for the next generation also means endangering the continuity of species altogether. If we take a step back, one might even argue that this is already what is going on today.
lachlan-sneff 6y ago
I do want to live in a world where people can take as much time as they want! I'm 20 years old, and there already isn't enough time to do everything I want to do. I also disagree that increased longevity will lead to a stagnant society. Just as we don't expect a 30 year old to be the same person when they're aged to 40 or 50, I don't expect a 100 year old to be the same person when they're 300. Neurons are replaced, old memories are forgotten, old habits are redefined.

fizixer 6y ago

Shhh. Don't wake them up from their pro-aging trance.

lachlan-sneff 6y ago
Never understood why so many people are so vehemently against anti-aging sentiments. Are they in denial about their own, current mortality?
- melling 6y ago
  It’s the same story repeated. I got so tired of listening to people complain I wrote a blog about it 3 years ago so I could hopefully quell the noise. “Death gives life meaning” “It’ll only be for rich people” 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-...
  - autisticcurio 6y ago
    Firstly if you accept we are as human life forms, complex real-time chemical reactions, then in the simplest terms this should show you that extending life should be possible. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darvaza_gas_crater https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darvaza_gas_crater https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia_mine_fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia_mine_fire These fires keep burning because there is enough of the right fuel (diet) to keep them burning, their environment doesnt put them out either, even when pathogens (eg us humans) have tried to put them out. What science is trying to do, is identify what our diet today has or doesnt have in sufficient quantity which can extend life. Take Rampamycin, aka mTor signalling and the role a keto branch chained amino acid can play in extending life. There are so many studies on Rampamycin, mTor, Ketotosis, Leucine, and water only fasting and this is just one component of our diet. https://academic.oup.com/jn/article/131/3/861S/4687154 https://academic.oup.com/jn/article/131/3/861S/4687154 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22029833/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22029833/ As we are now at a stage where we can alter what food would normally contain eg supermarkets want marbleised meat, so livestock get fed a Pantothenic Acid (Vit B5) deficient diet as it reduces subcutaneous fat levels and shift the fat into the muscle and around the organs, as well as affecting the nervous system, not a concern for farmers considering the livestocks short life span, but another simple example being popping a multi vitamin pill, it is now possible to alter our diets in drastic ways. The hard part is knowing when something is giving a herxheimer reaction or is genuinely bad for us. There are a lot of factors to take into account which we just cant measure, the sodium potassium ATPase pump, potassium causes the cell to take up a variety of other chemicals where as sodium makes the cell take up water. Some cells cant handle folded proteins getting inside them for example, yet cooked egg white is a good example of eating folded proteins. We cant measure easily or accurately in-vivo (in the body) what a cell has taken up from interstitial fluid. Thats why radioactive isotopes are sometimes used, or chemicals with an alternated magnetic resonance which can be detected using fMRI scanners. Yet radioisotopes can affect the body, the higher the amount the more obvious the effect as Chernobyl and Fukashima, Radon all demonstrate. Sometimes, studies are portrayed as being negative to health when the lack of understanding means it should have been portrayed as a positive to health in some circumstances and negative to health in the circumstance they carried out the experiment in, but even the year the study was carried out can sometimes account for that lack of knowledge, other times it just wasnt taught or common knowledge in the scientific community. Having done a few of my own experiments, I've already discovered some studys portraying negative health effects, but my circumstances have been different. And as much as we may lambaste the food industry, at least we still have reasonably consistent standardised food to eat which will also help the scientific community. In the past like you see in China, a myriad of things would have been consumed as food with sometimes unknown consequences. Other inhibitors, include what chemical combinations can be made, you'll never see a zinc-sodium supplement because its either too expensive to make, knowledge to make not obtained yet or its just physically impossible to combine the two. So some supplements focus on one element of the chemical combination, and forgets or simply doesnt mention what else its combined with. When you take all the different types of zinc supplements, zinc ions are often a minority to whatever else its combined with, which can also affect the body. As for it being just for rich people, its also for clever people who demonstrate innovation. Very few things will break the bank, if you have a bank account.

teej 6y ago

No. If I could add 10 years on to my 30s I would. But adding 10 years into my 80s doesn’t seem worthwhile.

lachlan-sneff 6y ago
The whole point of this is to be able to extend your healthspan, not just your lifespan. This includes age "reversal" and maintenance. A complete solution does not leave you in your 80s, it leaves you in your 20s indefinitely.

millstone 6y ago

"Science advances one funeral at a time." - Max Planck "Death is very likely the best single invention of life. It is life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new." - Steve Jobs I know my life is accreting old biases and obstacles. Today and for years to come (I hope) I have more to do, but some day I will become an agent of stagnation instead of advancement. Nobody wants to die. But in the big picture, the alternative is worse.

lachlan-sneff 6y ago
I can't say I understand this viewpoint. If you feel you're going to become an agent of stagnation, as you put it, simply put effort into not stagnating.
- millstone 6y ago
  I think we stagnate because we accumulate experience. As we grow old, we gain wisdom, but our wisdom is centralized in the past. We can't shed our experiences without forgetting ourselves. Steve Jobs also talked about "the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything." But I can't be a beginner again and again and again: some day my biases/old-dreams and stale-ideas/past-successes will dominate. Nobody has an endless capacity for creating the new.
  - lachlan-sneff 6y ago
    Perhaps stagnation is due to experience, perhaps it's due to accumulated, age-related brain damage. I doubt we'll know until people do live hundreds or thousands of years. Surely you can be a beginner again. Pick something you've never done before, and do that. As fledgling as humanity is, humans already have millions of different traditions and areas of study. Just pick one (or many).
    - pessimizer 6y ago
      > Pick something you've never done before, and do that. You run out of those things shortly after birth. The vast majority of the aspects of everything that you attempt are familiar, and you have already developed habitual approaches to them. Having "never done something before" is shorthand for some experience having some aspect that you have never experienced before, not complete novelty. I'm going to build the strategies of flying a spaceship on the strategies I built learning to drive a car, which were built on the strategies I built learning to walk, which were built on the strategies I built learning to crawl, to manipulate my parents by crying, to identify distinct objects using my eyes, etc... Eventually, the actually novel part of any new experience becomes vanishingly small. If anything, the ability to enjoy novelty, or to even see things as novel, is increased with our ability to forget. Maybe for a society, the ability to innovate relies on the ability to leave behind a bunch of brains whose plasticity has long been lost due to a lack of mental exercise.

koonsolo 6y ago

The real question is what kind of life. I love driving my motorcycle, and I'm well aware of the risks involved. Now let's imagine a world where they cure aging. When dying in an accident, you could lose a whole lot more than now. I'm pretty sure we would quickly evolve to a society where we minimize the risk to die to almost 0. I do not want to live in such a oversafely world. Besides, I'm very happy with 70 or so years here, and try to enjoy all of it. The next generations will inherit it all.

danieltillett 6y ago
Wait until you are 69.
vharuck 6y ago
I doubt the extra years lost will affect people's decisions. I've seen a lot of 20 somethings weaving in traffic or not wearing protective hear while motorcycling. It's human nature to enjoy life by taking risks, reasonable or not (subjective as that is).