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1. Removing senescent cells extends life by 30-40% with huge quality of life improvements in the last 25% of the life (relative to control), in mice. This isn't

1. Removing senescent cells extends life by 30-40% with huge quality of life improvements in the last 25% of the life (relative to control), in mice. This isn't an elimination of all aging, but quite a valuable thing regardless. Eventually, other causes of aging would kick in and still cause death, without a single senescent cell in your body (e.g. DNA methylation). 2. I believe all governments should create Warpspeed for this approach. At the depths of covid lockdowns, GDP was down 20%. Imagine the massive GDP creation from making every 65+ year old feel 40 again. They'd work, consume, and generally flourish. Even if it's only 10 more years of quality life, this is the greatest good that could be done for humanity. To avoid another 10 years of my parents death is something I'd do a lot for. Economically and ethically, we should prioritize this research above most else. 3. This approach is scientifically sound. Certain aspects of aging cures are approaching engineering levels of work rather than pure science. We simply know that many diseases are caused or amplified by senescent cells. And we have ample evidence that elimination of these cells reverses diseases in complex mammals, as long as you don't remove too many, too quickly. The rest, is the engineering problem of how to remove the right cells at the right cadence. 4. This is the kind of thing biohackers should hack on. Find an aging part of your skin, and attempt to convince your body to kill the senescent cells. If you succeed, you will have benefited humanity, become beautiful, become wealthy, and be remembered forever (is there any other fundamental need humans have, not covered)? Let the race begin!

Synaesthesia 5y ago
Maybe instead of maximising GDP we should maximise happiness and there's plenty of low hanging fruit. I mean people are still starving to death and dying of preventable diseases...
- kingcharles 5y ago
  Do we want peak happiness, though? Almost all advances of civilisation are created through unhappiness about something. Would a state of total happiness stop creativity?
- randmeerkat 5y ago
  It’s an interesting idea, but how would you measure happiness? For example coal pollutes, so at first glance maybe coal plants should get a negative happiness index. Then some plants close, and heating costs go up and people get cold because they can’t afford the electric heat in their homes. Are they happier without the coal? Would they be happier with the coal and the pollution? Does this solve the problem in a way that GDP measures can’t?
  - Jedd 5y ago
    > It’s an interesting idea, but how would you measure happiness? This (the measuring, at least) is mostly a solved problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Happiness_Report https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Happiness_Report
    - randmeerkat 5y ago
      > This (the measuring, at least) is mostly a solved problem. I disagree. I’m familiar with the world happiness report. I don’t think that would be an adequate measurement to replace GDP with.
      - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
        "adequate measurement to replace GDP with" There seems to be annunderlying assimption that GDP is a good meaurement? In UK we had reduction of life expectancy, wages, trade and production of physical goods while GDP grew. The only sources of GDP growth seem to be never-ending rise of house prices and inequality.
        randmeerkat 5y ago
        I’m not arguing that there aren’t problems with benchmarking society against GDP, there are. What I’m asking is, what is a better measurement? If it is something like happiness, then how do we quantify that in a meaningful way?
        5y ago
mustacheemperor 5y ago
>Economically and ethically, we should prioritize this research above most else. This research and all similar research (and sentiments like yours, which I strongly agree with) remind me of the classic Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant.[0] It feels as though we are finally on the cusp of learning the shape of the armaments that will one day slay the dragon. And I wish the world could band together the way we attacked COVID to attack this problem. >the king answered in a broken voice: “Yes, we did it, we killed the dragon today. But damn, why did we start so late? This could have been done five, maybe ten years ago! Millions of people wouldn’t have had to die.” [0]https://www.nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html https://www.nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html
- khazhoux 5y ago
  Ugh, that was a slog to read. TLDR: a big dragon (represents aging) kills tens of thousands of people every day, until the people invest in technology to defeat it, and then vaguely wish they'd started the research sooner.
  - Tmpod 5y ago
    CGP Grey has a video with him reading the short over some neat drawings, which is more enjoyable I suppose: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZYNADOHhVY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZYNADOHhVY
- renewiltord 5y ago
  Surely could have been much shorter! An enjoyable parable but clearly written by a philosopher.
  - khazhoux 5y ago
    I'm actually in awe of how long he was able to stretch such a simple concept, with no payoff at the end.
    - rewq4321 5y ago
sumedh 5y ago
> They'd work So less jobs for young people.
- novok 5y ago
  We also have to take care of old people, and the less we have to do that for the period of their lives, the cheaper everything could be because there are less dependents to support. A countries economy is often reflected in their dependent / non-dependent ratio, and the less non-dependents you have, the better economies perform!
- raylad 5y ago
  Jobs are not the sole way to distribute resources. In fact they are a rather recent way (in human history) to do so. And they're going away anyway soon enough, as automation develops.
  - cellis 5y ago
    Great, a gigantic underclass of people forever stuck with no upward mobility!
    - TOMDM 5y ago
      So, not much has changed?
    - arcticbull 5y ago
      Yes, what will we do without the famous upward mobility of the factory worker? Seriously though, the majority of humans never see material upward mobility in their lifetimes, and a world without mandatory low-wage jobs per se isn't necessarily a world without upward mobility.
      - cellis 5y ago
        A world without mobility is one without agency...and humanity has been defined by agency. Without it, we might as well not exist, not as humans anyway.
abletonlive 5y ago
I'm sorry but so many people are waiting for the boomers to die and relinquish control over our lives. I'm not sure we should warp speed this quite yet
q1w2 5y ago
This is essentially creating an auto-immune disease in old age - by having the body target it's own cells. It's also not clear how the researchers prevented the immune cells from dying in the Thymus (who's function is specifically to prevent immune cells from being coded to attack cells in the body - it's like a UAT environment). ...but the bigger question would be - If this protein encoded a protein that identified cells which should always be eliminated in old age; why hasn't any mammal evolved to start destroying them? It's more likely that there is some trade-off which we have not discovered yet.
- Glyptodon 5y ago
  There's doesn't have to be a major (from our perspective) trade-off if historically the benefit under selection was very marginal, probably somewhat more so both because of menopause and historical lifespans often being shorter.
- hoseja 5y ago
  What? Immune cells attack the body all the time, how do you think you're not all cancer. It's only a disease when they attack useful cells too much.
- ahD5zae7 5y ago
  > why hasn't any mammal evolved to start destroying them? I think that evolution selects mostly for reproduction and not longevity. You don't have to live very long to have many kids (in like caveman / hunter-gatherer type of context as this is where evolution is basically), you just need to have great genetics. I guess sticking around for a few years after to protect the kids and provide for them is a bonus, but that part may be handled by the tribe too. But there's not much to be gained (from evolutionary point of view) from an individual living up to a 100 years or so.
- haxiomic 5y ago
  I think there’s plenty of room for life extension Evolution doesn’t optimise for length of life, just propagation. A number of species have evolved to have very short life cycles because that enabled greater propagation. Presumably shorter lives generally confer greater adaptability as it increases the opportunity for evolutionary change
gumby 5y ago
> I believe all governments should create Warpspeed for this approach. What would that mean in practice?
- zemvpferreira 5y ago
  Lots of money and no red tape.
  - ixfo 5y ago
    Red tape in the medical trials domain is forged from blood. Human experimentation is limited and carefully managed for very good reasons. Killing people to extend other people's lives is not a good tradeoff.
    - strken 5y ago
      Voluntary human experimentation is less clear-cut. Having watched the decline of members of my family through their 80s and 90s, some of whom have clearly wanted to die in the last few years, I'd seriously consider taking a risky treatment for senescence at that age. Trading the worst years of your life for medical data and a tiny bit of hope could be a good deal.
    - zemvpferreira 5y ago
      Wouldn't say otherwise, I don't necessarily agree it's a good idea.
  - bradleyjg 5y ago
    I thought it was interesting that no country in the world did challenge vaccination trials despite there being many volunteers. I don’t know if I’d call that refusal red tape exactly but it’s in the neighborhood.
    - gumby 5y ago
      The big issue is consent.
Terry_Roll 5y ago
> 2. I believe all governments should create Warpspeed for this approach. It wont be because of Govt but private business or a Uni maybe, you see if everyone lived a US lifestyle we need 4 planet earths, everyone living a UK lifestyle would required 2.5 planet earths, an EU lifestyle 2 planet earths, so do you see the problem if lifespans were increased any more than they currently are? Humans have exceeded the carry capacity of this planet decades ago, which is why some people consider the "boomer" generation to have been the most fortunate to have lived. Our hopes are things like Labgrown meat and other energy saving innovations which can increase Planet Earths carry capacity. Until such time we will have to put up with life as it currently is, with some having a better life than others.
- charcircuit 5y ago
  We'll just need to start living in VR. This will reduce the consumption of physical resources.
- randmeerkat 5y ago
  Or we move into space, that’s already part of the reason Bezos founded Blue Origin: https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/science/jeff-bezos-foresees-trillion-people-living-millions-space-colonies-here-ncna1006036 https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/science/jeff-bezos-foresees-tri...
unobatbayar 5y ago
In an ideal world. Even if we achieve longevity with this approach, we can't use it for everyone. People need to die now more so than ever, where would we put them otherwise? The whole idea behind the current pandemic is that people need to die, via vaccines, or the virus, or the media.
- 8bitsrule 5y ago
  > we can't use it for everyone. Obviously it should only be used by the poor, so they have longer to find happiness. Someone has to blow the horn and push the wheelbarrows.
- bamboozled 5y ago
  Why do people need to die now more than ever ?
  - vasco 5y ago
    There's queues everywhere
    - beenBoutIT 5y ago
      If this technology is real it needs to be expensive enough to prevent the vast majority of people on earth from having access to it.
      - gremlinsinc 5y ago
        Nah, instead of that it requires winning a dose via lottery, and only 10k people are allowed per year. Ran via blockchain w/ complete transparency and no way to cheat or buy a dose if you're super wealthy. Your way is depressing and dystopian AF.
  - unobatbayar 5y ago
    We are currently at the brink of extinction, ironically by overpopulation. Everyone knew rapid growth is unsustainable, with 7.9 billion people on earth right now, we are causing more: Carbon emissions, global warming, pollution, environmental damage, ozone depletion etc. Soon we won't have a planet to live in. I am sure mother nature will find more subtle but beautiful way to eradicate us. But, hopefully we leave this small planet and explore other planets in near future.
throwaway984393 5y ago
> Even if it's only 10 more years of quality life, this is the greatest good that could be done for humanity Why would that be your conclusion? It's 10 more years of life. It's not 10 more years of better life. It's a little more of the same. That 10 years is "experienced" as only a short increase in local time. Whereas before 33% of your life would have been 28 years old, afterwards 33% of your life would be at 31 years old. So life events would happen a couple years sooner or later but you wouldn't feel the difference. It's not like world hunger would end. In fact we would need more food, because more humans would be alive at any point, because people are dying later. The senior citizen voting block would increase, expanding the lobbying power of senior citizens, which has a disproportionate unfair effect on the young. Which will get interesting as time goes on seeing as the birth rate has been declining steadily. It also means your retirement would not last long enough anymore, meaning you would either have to work longer or harder or save more in order to retire. Social security dates would also have to change, and paycheck contributions may even have to increase. But corporations won't want to increase wages (as they never want to) so your money won't go as far in retirement, and inflation would act on it over a longer time, reducing it further than before. And since it would be a voluntary vaccine, as we have seen from the COVID-19 insanity, just having a life-saving vaccine available is no guarantee people will take it. So there would be controversy over whether to extend social security, and some significant amount of the population is going to get screwed over. Finally, as the wealthy will live even longer, more wealth will get tied up in private ownership for longer, extending the wealth gap. Copyright would also take even longer to expire as it's based on how long since the creator died. There's tons of other random ways that arbitrarily extending the life of a portion of the population will not immediately lead to the greatest good that could be done for humanity. Call me crazy, but I think we could do much more good for humanity today than just making it take longer for them to die.
- sangnoir 5y ago
  Also, stagnation as the ruling class, politicians, CxOs, artists, singers, authors, researchers and professors have longer to propagate their outdated mindsets. Paraphrasing Planck, "Science progresses one funeral at a time". Death makes room for the new.
- 5y ago
na85 5y ago
>Imagine the massive GDP creation from making every 65+ year old feel 40 again. They'd work, consume, and generally flourish. Yet another opportunity for boomers to fuck over their kids' generation by squeezing them out of the workforce again, and the lingering around longer than ever before, creating an unprecedented drain on social services that their children will have to pay for. Can't wait!
consultutah 5y ago
The Red Mars series by Kim Stanley Robinson covers this in some detail. It's called the Longevity Treatment: https://www.kimstanleyrobinson.info/content/longevity-treatment https://www.kimstanleyrobinson.info/content/longevity-treatm...
ngcc_hk 5y ago
Great but the jump to the gov side really have a lot of nasty question. Who pay for the extra age? When you got to 65 now or to be is this extension good or bad for you and for those youngster 20-30 waiting for you to go. It is social, political and psychological major changes. Revolution may be. Good luck.
mlcrypto 5y ago
Your view is too optimistic. We have all our financial problems now because baby boomers have been racking up unfunded liabilities and competing with millennials for the same jobs in the age of automation.
namelosw 5y ago
> Imagine the massive GDP creation from making every 65+ year old feel 40 again. Come on. It's like more than half a century ago some economists predict because of the improvement of technology and the overall production, most people only need to work 4 hours per day. aaand now we have a lot of people working 12 hours a day over the wire already. GDP is the millstone that when it's bigger it grinds more soul - because things are operated in scale as technology develops, individuals can only grab every opportunity they have, in order to participate in the economy, even when the opportunity is outstraight abusive. There will be new jobs but new jobs are either rockstar economies like being social media celebrities, or bullshit jobs that people have to scratch their head and come up with overpriced bullshit products from nothing and marketing those as the best thing ever. It's not unlikely we ended up working 16 hours a day pointlessly in the so-called metaverse half a century from now on.
- gremloni 5y ago
  Go be cynical in the corner. Maybe your life hasn’t panned out all that well but stop injecting your pessimism into everything so the rest of us can have nice things.
- Arubis 5y ago
  This strikes me as similar to arguing that we shouldn’t give money to panhandlers because they’ll only go spend it on drugs. Yes, we as a society have historically made poor decisions about what to do with productivity and lifespan increases. Let’s work on making better choices _and_ enhance our lifespans.
  - namelosw 5y ago
    I'm not saying that we should stop making progress - creating new technologies that benefit the world is no doubt a great thing. It's just the stress on GDP which makes me feel alarmed - historically speaking, things like GDP are always excuses to convince people they're goals worth following before we improve things like inequality or the quality of life. Do people now generally feel happier than half a century ago since GDP has drastically increased? Or the mental health of a large fraction of us was deteriorating all along over the decades? It almost feels lies like "let us focus on delivering the features first, we'll get back to the technical debt once we have time" in some organizations - there are always new features, and always room for development, other things are always overlooked or keep bare minimum. Back to the specific topic of increasing lifespan. Inequality is a problem much harder to solve than the technology itself. If we don't solve it carefully, it's very likely to be more harmful than helpful to the world. The right to live and the right to reproduction are the two most sensitive things to creatures - fundamentally it's much more risky than inventing the Internet or plastic surgery. I can't help but think what I saw in the hospital - people with cancer and with no money giveaway their painkiller to drug dealers in exchange for some dirty motel nearby. Meanwhile, I know there are old, important figures who live in the hospital and spend several years of the average person's income per day, taking up a large fraction of scarce medical resources, equipment, and wards, just because they're old (many of them have no serious problems, just in case) and "important". Think about the ancient tyrant who spent a lot, searching for immortality elixir died from poisoning. He became a laughing stock because the elixir didn't work, but it wouldn't be so funny if the elixir works. Nowadays, rich people can already fight cancer much better than poor people. Just imagine, how it feels when you know the first 0.1% of powerful figures you know (name the first 3 at least), are going to live for the next 500 years, but not everybody else?
benghunt 5y ago
Senescent cells are not permanent. They have a lifetime of days to weeks, and then they turn over and new cells become senescent. Also, there have been a number of trials of senolytic drugs, in Alzheimer's and in arthritis. Neither of them have had an effect. The senescence theory of aging is visually compelling but lacking in evidence in humans.
Sophistifunk 5y ago
The idea that anti-aging medicine is good because we could force a bunch of old people out of retirement is horrifying.
- anonymoushn 5y ago
  The old people could have retired much earlier if they had shorter lifespans, so we should work on pro-aging drugs.
  - FredPret 5y ago
    Cigarettes for babies… for early retirement
sAbakumoff 5y ago
>>Economically and ethically, we should prioritize this research above most else. Sure, f*ck climate change, let's just live and suffer longer
- lambdadmitry 5y ago
  This is such a poor argument. - the GP haven't said "fuck climate change", you did. There is no contradiction there, we can try and solve more than one issue at once. - climate change objectively speaking kills way less people than ageing and will continue to kill less for the foreseeable future. You grandma (or grand-grandma) wasn't killed by climate change, neither will you. - I don't know about you, but my life is not full of suffering, climate change or not, and I would prefer it to be longer and healthier. If yours is, I suggest looking at reasons other than climate change. - We have to retrain every generation of scientists and engineers before they can contribute to solutions for any problem, climate change included. Increasing the amount of output per trainee by half goes a VERY long way towards solving our issues including climate change.
  - sAbakumoff 5y ago
    >> I would prefer it to be longer and healthier. So, you are fixating on "healthy" and "long" life and you are SO afraid of death that the idea of aging cure seems to be attractive. Delusion, greed, and aversion are classic poisons that are the root cause of all human suffering.

Synaesthesia 5y ago

Maybe instead of maximising GDP we should maximise happiness and there's plenty of low hanging fruit. I mean people are still starving to death and dying of preventable diseases...

kingcharles 5y ago
Do we want peak happiness, though? Almost all advances of civilisation are created through unhappiness about something. Would a state of total happiness stop creativity?
randmeerkat 5y ago
It’s an interesting idea, but how would you measure happiness? For example coal pollutes, so at first glance maybe coal plants should get a negative happiness index. Then some plants close, and heating costs go up and people get cold because they can’t afford the electric heat in their homes. Are they happier without the coal? Would they be happier with the coal and the pollution? Does this solve the problem in a way that GDP measures can’t?
- Jedd 5y ago
  > It’s an interesting idea, but how would you measure happiness? This (the measuring, at least) is mostly a solved problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Happiness_Report https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Happiness_Report
  - randmeerkat 5y ago
    > This (the measuring, at least) is mostly a solved problem. I disagree. I’m familiar with the world happiness report. I don’t think that would be an adequate measurement to replace GDP with.
    - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
      "adequate measurement to replace GDP with" There seems to be annunderlying assimption that GDP is a good meaurement? In UK we had reduction of life expectancy, wages, trade and production of physical goods while GDP grew. The only sources of GDP growth seem to be never-ending rise of house prices and inequality.
      - randmeerkat 5y ago
        I’m not arguing that there aren’t problems with benchmarking society against GDP, there are. What I’m asking is, what is a better measurement? If it is something like happiness, then how do we quantify that in a meaningful way?
        5y ago

mustacheemperor 5y ago

>Economically and ethically, we should prioritize this research above most else. This research and all similar research (and sentiments like yours, which I strongly agree with) remind me of the classic Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant.[0] It feels as though we are finally on the cusp of learning the shape of the armaments that will one day slay the dragon. And I wish the world could band together the way we attacked COVID to attack this problem. >the king answered in a broken voice: “Yes, we did it, we killed the dragon today. But damn, why did we start so late? This could have been done five, maybe ten years ago! Millions of people wouldn’t have had to die.” [0]https://www.nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html https://www.nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html

khazhoux 5y ago
Ugh, that was a slog to read. TLDR: a big dragon (represents aging) kills tens of thousands of people every day, until the people invest in technology to defeat it, and then vaguely wish they'd started the research sooner.
- Tmpod 5y ago
  CGP Grey has a video with him reading the short over some neat drawings, which is more enjoyable I suppose: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZYNADOHhVY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZYNADOHhVY
renewiltord 5y ago
Surely could have been much shorter! An enjoyable parable but clearly written by a philosopher.
- khazhoux 5y ago
  I'm actually in awe of how long he was able to stretch such a simple concept, with no payoff at the end.
  - rewq4321 5y ago

sumedh 5y ago

> They'd work So less jobs for young people.

novok 5y ago
We also have to take care of old people, and the less we have to do that for the period of their lives, the cheaper everything could be because there are less dependents to support. A countries economy is often reflected in their dependent / non-dependent ratio, and the less non-dependents you have, the better economies perform!
raylad 5y ago
Jobs are not the sole way to distribute resources. In fact they are a rather recent way (in human history) to do so. And they're going away anyway soon enough, as automation develops.
- cellis 5y ago
  Great, a gigantic underclass of people forever stuck with no upward mobility!
  - TOMDM 5y ago
    So, not much has changed?
  - arcticbull 5y ago
    Yes, what will we do without the famous upward mobility of the factory worker? Seriously though, the majority of humans never see material upward mobility in their lifetimes, and a world without mandatory low-wage jobs per se isn't necessarily a world without upward mobility.
    - cellis 5y ago
      A world without mobility is one without agency...and humanity has been defined by agency. Without it, we might as well not exist, not as humans anyway.

abletonlive 5y ago

I'm sorry but so many people are waiting for the boomers to die and relinquish control over our lives. I'm not sure we should warp speed this quite yet

q1w2 5y ago

This is essentially creating an auto-immune disease in old age - by having the body target it's own cells. It's also not clear how the researchers prevented the immune cells from dying in the Thymus (who's function is specifically to prevent immune cells from being coded to attack cells in the body - it's like a UAT environment). ...but the bigger question would be - If this protein encoded a protein that identified cells which should always be eliminated in old age; why hasn't any mammal evolved to start destroying them? It's more likely that there is some trade-off which we have not discovered yet.

Glyptodon 5y ago
There's doesn't have to be a major (from our perspective) trade-off if historically the benefit under selection was very marginal, probably somewhat more so both because of menopause and historical lifespans often being shorter.
hoseja 5y ago
What? Immune cells attack the body all the time, how do you think you're not all cancer. It's only a disease when they attack useful cells too much.
ahD5zae7 5y ago
> why hasn't any mammal evolved to start destroying them? I think that evolution selects mostly for reproduction and not longevity. You don't have to live very long to have many kids (in like caveman / hunter-gatherer type of context as this is where evolution is basically), you just need to have great genetics. I guess sticking around for a few years after to protect the kids and provide for them is a bonus, but that part may be handled by the tribe too. But there's not much to be gained (from evolutionary point of view) from an individual living up to a 100 years or so.
haxiomic 5y ago
I think there’s plenty of room for life extension Evolution doesn’t optimise for length of life, just propagation. A number of species have evolved to have very short life cycles because that enabled greater propagation. Presumably shorter lives generally confer greater adaptability as it increases the opportunity for evolutionary change

gumby 5y ago

> I believe all governments should create Warpspeed for this approach. What would that mean in practice?

zemvpferreira 5y ago
Lots of money and no red tape.
- ixfo 5y ago
  Red tape in the medical trials domain is forged from blood. Human experimentation is limited and carefully managed for very good reasons. Killing people to extend other people's lives is not a good tradeoff.
  - strken 5y ago
    Voluntary human experimentation is less clear-cut. Having watched the decline of members of my family through their 80s and 90s, some of whom have clearly wanted to die in the last few years, I'd seriously consider taking a risky treatment for senescence at that age. Trading the worst years of your life for medical data and a tiny bit of hope could be a good deal.
  - zemvpferreira 5y ago
    Wouldn't say otherwise, I don't necessarily agree it's a good idea.
- bradleyjg 5y ago
  I thought it was interesting that no country in the world did challenge vaccination trials despite there being many volunteers. I don’t know if I’d call that refusal red tape exactly but it’s in the neighborhood.
  - gumby 5y ago
    The big issue is consent.

Terry_Roll 5y ago

> 2. I believe all governments should create Warpspeed for this approach. It wont be because of Govt but private business or a Uni maybe, you see if everyone lived a US lifestyle we need 4 planet earths, everyone living a UK lifestyle would required 2.5 planet earths, an EU lifestyle 2 planet earths, so do you see the problem if lifespans were increased any more than they currently are? Humans have exceeded the carry capacity of this planet decades ago, which is why some people consider the "boomer" generation to have been the most fortunate to have lived. Our hopes are things like Labgrown meat and other energy saving innovations which can increase Planet Earths carry capacity. Until such time we will have to put up with life as it currently is, with some having a better life than others.

charcircuit 5y ago
We'll just need to start living in VR. This will reduce the consumption of physical resources.
randmeerkat 5y ago
Or we move into space, that’s already part of the reason Bezos founded Blue Origin: https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/science/jeff-bezos-foresees-trillion-people-living-millions-space-colonies-here-ncna1006036 https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/science/jeff-bezos-foresees-tri...

unobatbayar 5y ago

In an ideal world. Even if we achieve longevity with this approach, we can't use it for everyone. People need to die now more so than ever, where would we put them otherwise? The whole idea behind the current pandemic is that people need to die, via vaccines, or the virus, or the media.

8bitsrule 5y ago
> we can't use it for everyone. Obviously it should only be used by the poor, so they have longer to find happiness. Someone has to blow the horn and push the wheelbarrows.
bamboozled 5y ago
Why do people need to die now more than ever ?
- vasco 5y ago
  There's queues everywhere
  - beenBoutIT 5y ago
    If this technology is real it needs to be expensive enough to prevent the vast majority of people on earth from having access to it.
    - gremlinsinc 5y ago
      Nah, instead of that it requires winning a dose via lottery, and only 10k people are allowed per year. Ran via blockchain w/ complete transparency and no way to cheat or buy a dose if you're super wealthy. Your way is depressing and dystopian AF.
- unobatbayar 5y ago
  We are currently at the brink of extinction, ironically by overpopulation. Everyone knew rapid growth is unsustainable, with 7.9 billion people on earth right now, we are causing more: Carbon emissions, global warming, pollution, environmental damage, ozone depletion etc. Soon we won't have a planet to live in. I am sure mother nature will find more subtle but beautiful way to eradicate us. But, hopefully we leave this small planet and explore other planets in near future.

throwaway984393 5y ago

> Even if it's only 10 more years of quality life, this is the greatest good that could be done for humanity Why would that be your conclusion? It's 10 more years of life. It's not 10 more years of better life. It's a little more of the same. That 10 years is "experienced" as only a short increase in local time. Whereas before 33% of your life would have been 28 years old, afterwards 33% of your life would be at 31 years old. So life events would happen a couple years sooner or later but you wouldn't feel the difference. It's not like world hunger would end. In fact we would need more food, because more humans would be alive at any point, because people are dying later. The senior citizen voting block would increase, expanding the lobbying power of senior citizens, which has a disproportionate unfair effect on the young. Which will get interesting as time goes on seeing as the birth rate has been declining steadily. It also means your retirement would not last long enough anymore, meaning you would either have to work longer or harder or save more in order to retire. Social security dates would also have to change, and paycheck contributions may even have to increase. But corporations won't want to increase wages (as they never want to) so your money won't go as far in retirement, and inflation would act on it over a longer time, reducing it further than before. And since it would be a voluntary vaccine, as we have seen from the COVID-19 insanity, just having a life-saving vaccine available is no guarantee people will take it. So there would be controversy over whether to extend social security, and some significant amount of the population is going to get screwed over. Finally, as the wealthy will live even longer, more wealth will get tied up in private ownership for longer, extending the wealth gap. Copyright would also take even longer to expire as it's based on how long since the creator died. There's tons of other random ways that arbitrarily extending the life of a portion of the population will not immediately lead to the greatest good that could be done for humanity. Call me crazy, but I think we could do much more good for humanity today than just making it take longer for them to die.

sangnoir 5y ago
Also, stagnation as the ruling class, politicians, CxOs, artists, singers, authors, researchers and professors have longer to propagate their outdated mindsets. Paraphrasing Planck, "Science progresses one funeral at a time". Death makes room for the new.
5y ago

na85 5y ago

>Imagine the massive GDP creation from making every 65+ year old feel 40 again. They'd work, consume, and generally flourish. Yet another opportunity for boomers to fuck over their kids' generation by squeezing them out of the workforce again, and the lingering around longer than ever before, creating an unprecedented drain on social services that their children will have to pay for. Can't wait!

consultutah 5y ago

The Red Mars series by Kim Stanley Robinson covers this in some detail. It's called the Longevity Treatment: https://www.kimstanleyrobinson.info/content/longevity-treatment https://www.kimstanleyrobinson.info/content/longevity-treatm...

ngcc_hk 5y ago

Great but the jump to the gov side really have a lot of nasty question. Who pay for the extra age? When you got to 65 now or to be is this extension good or bad for you and for those youngster 20-30 waiting for you to go. It is social, political and psychological major changes. Revolution may be. Good luck.

mlcrypto 5y ago

Your view is too optimistic. We have all our financial problems now because baby boomers have been racking up unfunded liabilities and competing with millennials for the same jobs in the age of automation.

namelosw 5y ago

> Imagine the massive GDP creation from making every 65+ year old feel 40 again. Come on. It's like more than half a century ago some economists predict because of the improvement of technology and the overall production, most people only need to work 4 hours per day. aaand now we have a lot of people working 12 hours a day over the wire already. GDP is the millstone that when it's bigger it grinds more soul - because things are operated in scale as technology develops, individuals can only grab every opportunity they have, in order to participate in the economy, even when the opportunity is outstraight abusive. There will be new jobs but new jobs are either rockstar economies like being social media celebrities, or bullshit jobs that people have to scratch their head and come up with overpriced bullshit products from nothing and marketing those as the best thing ever. It's not unlikely we ended up working 16 hours a day pointlessly in the so-called metaverse half a century from now on.

gremloni 5y ago
Go be cynical in the corner. Maybe your life hasn’t panned out all that well but stop injecting your pessimism into everything so the rest of us can have nice things.
Arubis 5y ago
This strikes me as similar to arguing that we shouldn’t give money to panhandlers because they’ll only go spend it on drugs. Yes, we as a society have historically made poor decisions about what to do with productivity and lifespan increases. Let’s work on making better choices _and_ enhance our lifespans.
- namelosw 5y ago
  I'm not saying that we should stop making progress - creating new technologies that benefit the world is no doubt a great thing. It's just the stress on GDP which makes me feel alarmed - historically speaking, things like GDP are always excuses to convince people they're goals worth following before we improve things like inequality or the quality of life. Do people now generally feel happier than half a century ago since GDP has drastically increased? Or the mental health of a large fraction of us was deteriorating all along over the decades? It almost feels lies like "let us focus on delivering the features first, we'll get back to the technical debt once we have time" in some organizations - there are always new features, and always room for development, other things are always overlooked or keep bare minimum. Back to the specific topic of increasing lifespan. Inequality is a problem much harder to solve than the technology itself. If we don't solve it carefully, it's very likely to be more harmful than helpful to the world. The right to live and the right to reproduction are the two most sensitive things to creatures - fundamentally it's much more risky than inventing the Internet or plastic surgery. I can't help but think what I saw in the hospital - people with cancer and with no money giveaway their painkiller to drug dealers in exchange for some dirty motel nearby. Meanwhile, I know there are old, important figures who live in the hospital and spend several years of the average person's income per day, taking up a large fraction of scarce medical resources, equipment, and wards, just because they're old (many of them have no serious problems, just in case) and "important". Think about the ancient tyrant who spent a lot, searching for immortality elixir died from poisoning. He became a laughing stock because the elixir didn't work, but it wouldn't be so funny if the elixir works. Nowadays, rich people can already fight cancer much better than poor people. Just imagine, how it feels when you know the first 0.1% of powerful figures you know (name the first 3 at least), are going to live for the next 500 years, but not everybody else?

benghunt 5y ago

Senescent cells are not permanent. They have a lifetime of days to weeks, and then they turn over and new cells become senescent. Also, there have been a number of trials of senolytic drugs, in Alzheimer's and in arthritis. Neither of them have had an effect. The senescence theory of aging is visually compelling but lacking in evidence in humans.

Sophistifunk 5y ago

The idea that anti-aging medicine is good because we could force a bunch of old people out of retirement is horrifying.

anonymoushn 5y ago
The old people could have retired much earlier if they had shorter lifespans, so we should work on pro-aging drugs.
- FredPret 5y ago
  Cigarettes for babies… for early retirement

sAbakumoff 5y ago

>>Economically and ethically, we should prioritize this research above most else. Sure, f*ck climate change, let's just live and suffer longer

lambdadmitry 5y ago
This is such a poor argument. - the GP haven't said "fuck climate change", you did. There is no contradiction there, we can try and solve more than one issue at once. - climate change objectively speaking kills way less people than ageing and will continue to kill less for the foreseeable future. You grandma (or grand-grandma) wasn't killed by climate change, neither will you. - I don't know about you, but my life is not full of suffering, climate change or not, and I would prefer it to be longer and healthier. If yours is, I suggest looking at reasons other than climate change. - We have to retrain every generation of scientists and engineers before they can contribute to solutions for any problem, climate change included. Increasing the amount of output per trainee by half goes a VERY long way towards solving our issues including climate change.
- sAbakumoff 5y ago
  >> I would prefer it to be longer and healthier. So, you are fixating on "healthy" and "long" life and you are SO afraid of death that the idea of aging cure seems to be attractive. Delusion, greed, and aversion are classic poisons that are the root cause of all human suffering.