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Taking this with a grain of salt, of course, but cool! Worth pointing out the concept of "healthspan," which is pretty much like it sounds like: how long you s
by narush 5y ago
Taking this with a grain of salt, of course, but cool!
Worth pointing out the concept of "healthspan," which is pretty much like it sounds like: how long you stay healthy to do the things you want to do.
Long lifespan seems worthwhile if it's accompanied by a long healthspan as well.
- rantwasp 5y agothis person gets it. who wants to live to 150 is you’re in constant pain, take 150 medications/day and you cannot move? now, let’s say that at 90s you could do what a 40yo can do. GAME CHANGING!
- varjag 5y agoLong life in poor health is statistically possible but at the same time not very frequent.
- grishka 5y agoI don't understand this whole idea of "healthspan". Making people not age at all is the endgame for medicine as a science. Anything lesser would still be putting an enormous strain on healthcare systems to make dying people die a bit slower. And if you've solved aging, there's not such a thing as a lifespan any more because people would only be dying of accidents. It's definitely not going to work such that someone lives to 80 with a health of a 25-year-old and then something clicks and they start having age-related conditions, all of them at once for good measure.
- thebean11 5y agoHealthcare isn't really a limited resource though, there's nothing stopping the healthcare industry from just growing until it meets demand.
- grishka 5y agoOh I see, you're from the US. In most other countries, healthcare isn't much of an industry, but is funded by the government. Taxes are a limited resource. There isn't an infinite supply of people with relevant education either.
- thebean11 5y agoTaxes can be increased to cover higher usage of benefits, and people can be trained. The same principles apply in the end. This doesn't happen over night so there's time to increase capacity.
- Retric 5y agoIt doesn’t actually work that way. Assuming a treatment that effectively slows aging by half... Basically the odds of death don’t drop, you simply have 2 years vs 1 year at every stage of decline. Which means you end up with fewer people that are living to the equivalent of 70 as they had twice as many chances of dying before 70. And reaching the equivalent of 80 means surviving 20 years with the body of someone in their 70’s etc. Thus the number of people living in nursing homes drops. Another way of thinking about things, if you slow down physical aging to 1/10th, few people would live to reach a 650 year old retirement age unless you also reduce all other risks of death per year to 1/10th.