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If it ends up working and is cheap enough for everyone then society will quickly have massive (more than now) issues with population growth & infrastructure tha

• whatshisface 5y ago
  I don't know about you but I put more in than I take out. I'm fine with continuing to do that in one way or another for as long as I'm good for it.
  • Ericson2314 5y ago
    I bet when your ecological toll is accounted for, you take out more than you put in.
    • ineedasername 5y ago
      Considering the ecological deficits the world is running, that's going to be true for the vast majority.
• Retric 5y ago
  If you slow down aging the percentage of healthy people goes up making the elderly a tiny percentage of the population. Right now about 80% of men in the US live to 65. If you slow aging by 1/10 so someone at 650 would theoretically be as healthy as a current 65 year old only ~(0.8) ^ 10 or 10.7% of men live that long. Push it to say 1/100th and accidents are basically going to kill everyone while their healthy, in theory only about 7% of men would live to the equivalent of 30.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • renewiltord 5y ago
    Would you mind walking through the math there? Are we modeling this “aging to 650” process as 10 “aging to 65” processes? I don’t see why that is a reasonable model, but I’m no actuary so I’m just curious.
    • Ericson2314 5y ago
      Yeah if people can live 1000 years they will probably become more risk adverse. I don't buy the argument at all; I think we'll end up with just as many elderly people --- or maybe even more person-years of infirm-but-not-dying. And while I don't think this has to be bad for society, I think it will be unless we fix a bunch of problems first. The individualist myopia with all things life-extension is staggering.
      • Retric 5y ago
        I am not saying anything negative about life extension, I would love to avoid aging. Someone is going to be that cautious simply based on their personality. However, someone isn’t everyone more importantly even healthy 70 year olds are at increased risks. Let’s push things to a 1,000,000,000 years theoretical lifespan. At that point freak accidents are extremely deadly. Essentially your arguing people will 1:1 become more cautious as lifespan increases. Further, that caution will make a difference, you can play it safe that’s not going to prevent terrorist bombings etc on those timescales.
        • Ericson2314 5y ago
          I do agree there is a point where accidents will predominate, but one simple drug doesn't seem like something that would get us anywhere near that, no?
          • Retric 5y ago
            I agree and would be extremely excited if it added even 10%. On the other hand I also doubt people would stop speeding because a cheap drug extended healthy lifespan by say 10 years. It’s an obvious thing to take, but people don’t seem to care that much. Just look the effort it took to get people to use seatbelts.
• alluro2 5y ago
  This matches my thinking as well...In general, we are relatively close to breaking new ground in longevity or even aging reversal on multiple fronts...Yet, we are utterly socio-economically, ethically and morally immature for any side-effects that might bring. It's hard to be optimistic about the further divisions this would create in society, and the sheer scale of change that would be required to mitigate the consequences...We are still much more interested in throwing of feces at each other (luckily, mostly symbolically) across imaginary borders, fighting over imaginary tales and dieties and chasing to posses the latest material object which signals success to anyone who can see it, while rapidly destroying our own habitat...I doubt that there is anything that can happen in the short term that could turn things around and make us grow more mature to tackle advancements like this and battle biological and technological challenges before us...Even as an optimist at heart, it seems hard to not have the impression of sliding downwards in recent history / present.
  • nefitty 5y ago
    Atheism and agnosticism are increasing every year. Deaths due to war have been decreasing steadily since World War 2. Some people argue that younger people are becoming less materialistic (https://www.econlib.org/archives/2016/10/non-materialist.html https://www.econlib.org/archives/2016/10/non-materialist.htm...). I’m not sure what you mean by “make us grow more mature”, but there could conceivably be some major technological advancement that would give us enough time to deal with the sociological effects of increased longevity. For example, electric cars are taking over, CRISPR gene editing exists, fusion is moving forward with the ITER project and various start-ups, space rockets are now reusable, etc. I would say we have more objective reasons to be optimistic about our future prospects than not. Things are getting better, and it might just be that train wrecks and car crashes are more interesting to focus on. No one writes stories about the days that someone gets home on time safely.
• xattt 5y ago
  This generalizes into discussion for any treatment that promotes longevity. The thing that comes to mind is that it overcomes or breaks various “policy levers” that rely on an expected course of life. Some examples: 99-year leases, defined benefit pension plans and life insurance policies. I also wonder how many mainframe systems assume a maximum possible age of 2^7 years.
  • jnsie 5y ago
    The impact on copyright would also be interesting (I’m imagining an artist holding copyright for an extra 75 years). Not to mention reunion tours. :-)
  • ineedasername 5y ago
    >mainframe systems Yep, a whole new Y2K when people live 2000 years. And then many years later, "sorry boss it's gonna crash in a few months. The was written in ancient times and only supports 32bit ages."
• grishka 5y ago
  The thing to keep in mind is that, essentially, preventing aging is the endgame of medicine as a science. Right now, enormous amounts of resources are used by healthcare systems everywhere in the world to care for the elderly. And even then, all this effort eventually fails. What I'm trying to say is that just from an economic point of view, it's more beneficial to rejuvenate people enough that they don't have any age-related conditions than to treat those conditions. Even if the cost of whatever the rejuvenation intervention is is high. So, IMO, it's very unlikely that we'll see a class division, especially in countries with universal healthcare.
  • Ericson2314 5y ago
    Does anyone think this would make you ageless until one day you drop dead? I certainly don't. If we all require the elderly care at 150 as we do at 75, all those problems GP mentioned will still exist and all the problems you mention will still be around.
    • grishka 5y ago
      The term you're looking for is longevity escape velocity. It's when lifespan is extended faster than real time. > this would make you ageless until one day you drop dead No, that's not how this works. How would a person die of an old chronological age if their biological age is, as far as their body is concerned, still 25 years? It's not like there's a time bomb that goes boom after a certain number of years regardless of what you do.
      • Ericson2314 5y ago
        I meant that to be an absurd prediction. Editted to be clear. But if that's not true I don't get the "but all will be good because no elderly care" argument.
        • tempestn 5y ago
          Because in the process of extending life, you will also forestall the other effects of aging besides just death by old age. And if you cure aging entirely, then people won't just live indefinite lifespans, they also wouldn't become elderly.
• world_peace42 5y ago
  At some point humans cannot villainize conversations about population control. Yes, it has social consequences and problems. On the other hand, allowing countries to average 7 children per woman is the path to destruction. Unfortunately, yes, this would exacerbate class issues, and there doesn’t appear to be a good solution. The worst part is the generational wealth-the rapid (re?)growth of the do-nothing scion/aristocrat class in the western world. There will be a bloody wealth redistribution event eventually in the future, medicine like this could certainly accelerate it.
• ClumsyPilot 5y ago
  On the contrary, people living 200 years would actually have a reason to care about climate change and invest long term.
  • awslattery 5y ago
    Unless we adopt a Logan's Run strategy for the common person.
  • Ericson2314 5y ago
    That assumes we do nothing in the US because people in power will die soon. I don't think that's the case. I think we do nothing because our governance has too many veto points and other ossifying characteristics, and that our governance can't respond to future problems because the present is more salient and the bar is very high at which our democracy responds to anything at all. Longevity doesn't help with any of that.
• chii 5y ago
  > population growth & infrastructure that can't keep pace why would that be a problem? the healthier the older population gets, the more they can work and produce more (instead of "retiring"), and this production includes making more infrastructure (directly, or indirectly via taxation).
  • ineedasername 5y ago
    Because having it happen all at once would strain many things to the breaking point. If it only extended life by 7 years then we'd have roughly 10% higher population-- on top of normal population growth. If it became widely available, the second that happened it would be a race to invest in infrastructure and especially higher yield food production-- investments that would need to be measured in large fractions of the world's GDP. And it wouldn't even add to the viable workforce for a while: this is life extension, not rejuvenation. We're stuck with the working population we have now: People past 65 aren't going to be able to get out there and build infrastructure. Plenty of them wouldn't want to either if they were otherwise near retirement or actually retired: It would require uprooting their entire lives to change tracks. I'm not saying it's theoretically impossible, just that I see no likely way it would actually happen given the state the world is in right now.
• 1e-9 5y ago
  I believe it would have the opposite effect. Lower death rate appears to lead to people having fewer children. Most countries with GDP over $20K per person now average fewer than 2 children per woman[1]. I think a widely-available longevity breakthrough will lead to a population decline that will have to be managed. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility
  • ineedasername 5y ago
    Those are cultural changes that evolve over time. Also lower death rates correlate to higher socioeconomic status, which is what correlates to fewer children. Either way, a widespread treatment becoming available over a relatively short period of time would not give society time to adjust in this way. There would be a crisis, perhaps even imposed limits on having children in many places. Assuming we got through it, things might settle down. The hard upheaval to deal with is if it was available only to the wealthy. Class warfare would be taken to a whole new level.
    • 1e-9 5y ago
      All successful species have strongly developed instincts to maximize the probability of passing their DNA to children who can in turn do the same. For humans, birth timing and number of children are some of the most critical parameters in achieving this. Having too few, having too many, having them too soon, and having them too late, all lower the odds of success. The optimal parameter values depend on environmental risks, our abilities, resources, and our reproductive window. If we expect a longer lifespan and higher odds of survival for potential children, our instinct is to delay reproduction and have fewer children in order to increase resources available per child. This instinct developed over a very long period of time, but our technological advances have created a degree of safety and abundance that our instinct was never “trained” on and thus I suspect it is over-suppressing fertility. A longevity breakthrough will appeal to this instinct even more strongly than living in one of today’s highly developed countries. Consequently, I think our instinct will then suppress fertility even further.
      • 5y ago
• tempestn 5y ago
  Currently developed countries are all struggling with fertility rates below the replacement rate, so while something like curing aging would certainly lead to those sorts of problems, I would expect extending healthy lifespan by some decades could actually solve more problems than it creates. Also as health and lifespans increase, people tend to delay having children, and have fewer overall. Also thinking a bit bigger picture, even if people didn't die of old age at all, couples could still have approximately 1.1 children each on average without the population increasing beyond ~1.5x its initial level. Of course, even that level of restriction seems far-fetched (but then, so does a cure to aging), but it's not like people would need to stop having children entirely.
  • tempestn 5y ago
    Can't edit: the 1.5x was wrong. Assuming no one dies, if every couple has 1 child, population would approach a limit of double its initial level. Since some will die in accidents, you could have slightly more than 1 child per couple without unbounded population growth.
• vixen99 5y ago
  Max Planck suggested that "Science progresses funeral by funeral!". I think we know that this doesn't only apply to science. A marked absence of funerals in the cadre of very powerful people reluctant to let go, might present yet another problem. Could be a tyrant's charter.
  • xvector 5y ago
    Still, not a reason to let billions of people die. We can solve that problem asynchronously.
• xvector 5y ago
  If it works and is expensive, governments will be forced to nationalize it. There are precisely zero nations on this planet whose citizens would accept death should a true cure become available. Governments would be faced with either total destruction or producing the cure themselves.
• xvector 5y ago
  Any path that works ends better than billions of people dying and being forever cast into the void.