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I am so incredibly envious of the future humans that will live in a world without death. I have decided that soon I will quit my job ($1M+ TC at FAANG), and I

• mensetmanusman 2y ago
  Delay death as you will, but thermodynamics will always have the last laugh.
  • xvector 2y ago
    One dollar or a million - which would you rather have?
    • YurgenJurgensen 2y ago
      Ironically, your example shows the main flaw of your position: Dollars are only worth what you can buy with them.
  • ThrowawayTestr 2y ago
    Nearly all of humanities pursuits is giving the middle finger to entropy. Yes, we're accelerating it's eventual win, but in the short term we're comfortable.
  • goatlover 2y ago
    Forget quantillions of years, It would be nice to live a few centuries without the ravages of old age.
  • grishka 2y ago
    Thermodynamics only applies to closed systems. Living beings are open systems because they constantly exchange energy and matter with their surroundings. Earth is also an open system because it receives energy from the sun (and, to a much lesser degree, from other stars), and sometimes things from outer space fall here.
    • YurgenJurgensen 2y ago
      Hubble expansion makes everything a closed system in the long term.
    • mensetmanusman 2y ago
      Entropy applies across the universe. We know the minimum entropy it started with, where we are now, and the maximum entropy possible. We are about halfway there.
• makeitshine 2y ago
  It's not possible to escape death, and all timelines will feel short when it comes to their end. Reducing the suffering of life, whether mental or physical, seems a more achievable pursuit. To die without cancer, dementia, chronic pain or the so many other ailments would be amazing.
  • JoshTriplett 2y ago
    They go hand in hand. Any reasonable path to eliminating mortality will entail eliminating aging and degenerative conditions. Often, when people first imagine living much much longer, they imagine having more years feeling 90 or progressively worse, rather than having more years feeling 50 or 30. But much of what makes 90 feel 90 is the degenerative problems of age that also end up killing you.
    • zerocrates 2y ago
      If the pathway to where you're looking to go runs mostly through a fight against age-related degeneration, why not pitch it that way and just avoid the controversy that "ending death" attracts as a concept? Who's out there handwringing against fighting, just to pick a random example, dementia?
      • stale2002 2y ago
        > why not pitch it that way and just avoid the controversy that "ending death" attracts as a concept? There are both drawbacks and benefits to the controversy of "ending death". You have mentioned the drawbacks, but the benefits are that it attracts the interest of the individuals that care about the most important problem in the world, which is specifically this problem of ending death.
      • JoshTriplett 2y ago
        That's the idea behind marketing campaigns like "healthspan". It's a trade-off. It's very easy to get dragged into a pivot that focuses on one specific condition rather than mortality and age-related degeneration in general.
• farseer 2y ago
  Future humans will live in a world where some can purchase an extended life span. Death will still be there.
  • jaharios 2y ago
    We already live in a world where you can extend your lifespan with money. Millions die from lack of healthcare or from poor childhood.
• JoshTriplett 2y ago
  Thank you for taking the problem seriously and working on it.
  • knodi123 2y ago
    or at least resolving to. :-P
• ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
  > I think there are a lot of engineers out there looking for something more meaningful than their FAANG or tech job. Immense potential to be leveraged here if we come together. Amen. I want to build dyson spheres myself. Gathering the money right now for it. Of course I know it won't happen in my lifetime but you got to start.
• seletskiy 2y ago
  I will never understand people who say that mortality is what gives life a meaning. It is exactly opposite. If I can't observe effects of my actions (and most likely "I" would not be able to do so after death), then it does not matter for me what I do during life, since outcome is all the same. There should be no death. For whatever reason, it is incredibly hard to find people thinking the same, despite, paradoxially no one wants to die. Can we chat? My e-mail is in the profile.
  • pwnOrbitals 2y ago
    Fully aligned, and would love to join forces on such a project. Let's have a chat :)
  • jajko 2y ago
    You are confusing You-level and mankind-level, it was never about You. Meaning is there, but its not kind to people who think themselves as center of universe and mandatory part of it (we all are of our own version of reality but thats not what I mean). Life well lived is a life thats easier to let go, believing in afterlife or not. Now what does that mean is highly individual but for most its around friends, family and children, mostly children. Most prople with kids have no problem seeing that meaning in mortality, plus there are even more logical and potent arguments (resources, selfishness, not ending up with immortal dictator forever etc but thats for longer)
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • Viliam1234 2y ago
    > I will never understand people who say that mortality is what gives life a meaning. Same here. I wonder why they don't give even more meaning to their life by killing themselves right now. Oh wait, it doesn't work that way. Death gives a meaning only when it is in a distant future... or some other excuse like that. But for some people, that future is now, or very soon. They would probably also prefer to have a "meaningful" death later rather than now.
• lisper 2y ago
  > I am so incredibly envious of the future humans that will live in a world without death. A world without death is also necessarily a world without birth once the whole biosphere has been converted to immortals. I'm not sure living amongst a bunch of old people is something to be envied. I also don't think that people who think that immortality is enviable have really come to grips with how long forever actually is.
  • shiroiushi 2y ago
    >A world without death is also necessarily a world without birth once the whole biosphere has been converted to immortals. You think no one is ever going to die from accidents or murder or natural disasters?
    • forgetfreeman 2y ago
      You think those numbers are enough to keep the population from ballooning to entirely unmanageable numbers? Consider the global population is increasing now and we're talking about removing a big chunk of all-cause mortality from the field. So unless there's a plan to replace natural causes with artificial causes (which moots functional immortality entirely) some form of population control is an absolute requirement.
      • shiroiushi 2y ago
        >You think those numbers are enough to keep the population from ballooning to entirely unmanageable numbers? If we keep reproducing at today's rates, of course not. However, birthrates are in free-fall worldwide due to many factors, with the biggest ones probably being education, women's rights, and access to reliable contraception. As the high birthrate countries improve in these areas, their birthrates fall; we've seen this universally in countries across the world. Of course, there's other factors too, like high costs of living, gender divides in some cultures, etc. The latter ones might be solved eventually, but I truly hope we don't regress on the former ones. With life-extension research, I think it's highly unlikely someone is going to find the Holy Grail anytime soon that suddenly makes humans biologically immortal. Instead, it'll probably be a slow process of incremental improvements. So while those improvements chip away at the death rate, cultural changes will continue to decrease the birthrate: people will continue to choose to have fewer children, people will wait longer to have children, etc.
• forgetfreeman 2y ago
  Is this sarcasm? Functional immortality without a complete redesign of the economic system guarantees the least ethical among us would come to own and control everything with no failsafes. Beware what you wish for.
• adastra22 2y ago
  Email me (address in profile). I’ve already made this step. I am presently launching a molecular nanotechnology startup, under the not unreasonable assumption that better tools are required to fully solve the problem. Edit: not saying we should join forces or that you should work on nanotechnology, but we are clearly value aligned and should connect.
• placebo 2y ago
  I think the part of "even if I never benefit from it" is a key point in living a meaningful life and transcending the fear of death, though hopefully you have carefully considered your decision from a financial perspective since material aspects are obviously also a part of being able to carry out your plans in this life. I don't think there is anything wrong in seeking the longest healthiest possible life, but suspect that in many cases that the motivation for it comes more from fear of personal death than the love of what life is. It's great to be an agent in this incredible adventure but my take on it is that when the means (a specific localized self consciousness) become the end ("being me is the most important thing and it should be great forever") then that is where you get stuck in a local maximum and some sort of suffering is bound to follow. Another aspect is that of how much more time do you think will be enough? 1000 years? 10,000 years? As someone has already stated, you will not be able to avoid death forever and even in the most optimistic case (at least from this myopic view of immortality) you won't win against entropy. No matter how long of a good life you are granted, it will never seem enough because from the subjective point of view it will seem to be over soon at which point personal death will again become very real and very alarming. It seems the only way out of this is to be able to transcend the personal sense of self and see that your real immortality lies in realizing that in a very real sense you are also something much greater than just a localized version of it. I'm not some Zen master and am probably afraid of my own personal mortality as much as the next person, but after a long time of thinking deeply about it, this seems to be the most probable conclusion.
  • xandrius 2y ago
    10,000 years could be good, especially if you still get to choose to get out if you change mind.
• tayo42 2y ago
  If you're making 1m +, just work for like 1 or two more years and you have retire to work on this passion project and have your life if comfort. With so much money idk how you couldn't have both?
• dsign 2y ago
  You are not alone. I can't retire yet to start working on this, but I'm looking forward to when that day comes. In the meantime, I'm working my day job and writing at night speculative fiction on the intersection of this topic and our current value systems. A big chunk of the problem is that most people are extremely conservative when it comes to death... and perhaps for good reason. But the time has come when more of humanity should leave the shelter of resignation and faith and go into that battlefield.
• myworkinisgood 2y ago
  Lack of death just means that people won't have the courage to take risks against injustices anymore.
  • khafra 2y ago
    This seems approximately as likely as people not having the courage to enact injustices (since their victims will have unlimited time to plot a perfect revenge and gather all the resources that would require).
    • myworkinisgood 2y ago
      Real life accounts always say otherwise. Death is a limited liability card that people can use to commit anything. People who commit injustices, even today, are often confident enough that they will be in a position to kill themselves before suffering at hands of others.
      • khafra 2y ago
        That doesn't contradict my point: universal mortality means the potential losses of an oppressor are bounded, and the bound is acceptably low to many people. Immortality removes that bound.
        • 8372049 2y ago
          Life in itself is worthless. The only reason why life is valuable is because it is a canvas, a vessel through which you can find happiness, meaning and so on. This means that if you have a life that isn't worth living, you are not at risk of losing anything of value, and so the potential loss is still bounded. Sure, there is the potential that life can change in the future, but whether you have 10, 100 or 1000 years left of potential life, you don't really care much about that if your life is an agonizing living hell. Don't ask me how I know.
          • khafra 2y ago
• kbrkbr 2y ago
  For now it looks like death can't be "solved" at all. You may be able to prolong individual human life, even by a lot. But how to solve entropy and the end of an empty, cold universe? There is even speculation that life is from a certain angle only an effect to accelerate entropy under the umbrella of the Maximum Entropy Production Principle (but I do not remember the source). So from the standpoint of current knowledge of how nature works this seems to look dire. I also personally disagree. I do not think that the beautiful chaos of life is strictly preferable to the requiem eternam of death. I'll go when I have to, without hesitation and regrets. It's not the things that terrify us, but our opinion of the things.
  • bboygravity 2y ago
    You should see what they can do with mice/rats nowadays: -- Immunity to prion diseasy by epigenetically silencing the prion gene, -- Cure (almost) all cancers -- life long HIV AIDS immunity with 1 vaccination (based on a modified virus) -- Extend life by a factor 2 (if I'm not mistaking) -- Make them light up in the dark with a human ear growing on their back (this one is decades old already). And all of the above is without considering the AGI singularity. Human immunity is really not that far away. Depending on how AGI will respond to us we will soon either be wiped out or be immortal IMO.
    • zeofig 2y ago
      AGI singularity is science fiction and, while interesting, none of that research comes close to biological immortality in humans. Don't deceive yourself.
      • ben_w 2y ago
        Every tech is science fiction until it's done, and sometimes continues to be present in fiction even while also being deployed. Not fooling yourself is hard, because it goes both ways.
    • kbrkbr 2y ago
      Thanks for your reply! I am not argumenting against curing stuff and prolonging life. I just think it is not immortality. I don't think immortality is to have given our current knowledge. It's like saying: "and then we build the perpetuum mobile. We're just short of it. One or two more breakthroughs". I like ambition, I just don't think we even have a trace of a path
• crngefest 2y ago
  A world without death would be the worst nightmare I can imagine.
• Ygg2 2y ago
  > I am so incredibly envious of the future humans that will live in a world without death. There will never be a world without death. Not, unless you have a way to reverse the laws of thermodynamics, on a universe scale. Only world where people die later. Also, keep in mind, your most disliked people will probably remain in power for longer. Next, Putin or Xi will remain in power for centuries.
• komali2 2y ago
  What's the pathway you're thinking in this effort? I had a similar plan I envisioned in my early 20s, which led me to become an engineer. I'll be ready to go down the same path pretty soon, would love to chat with more people in a similar mindset. Email in the profile if anyone wants to talk more about this.
• bboygravity 2y ago
  Holler if you want some help, lol. I like that.
• qsdf38100 2y ago
  "Solving death" won’t help humanity. Isn’t that obvious to you?? For a starter, birth rates and death rates should be about the same otherwise it’s not sustainable. If you "solve death", birth rates will need to drop a lot. Do you want to live in a world with almost no children? Just very old people all over the place. Sounds like a nightmare to me. You need to let go, accept your mortality and leave some room for new humans to live. At some point you’ll have had your time, death is part of life.
  • kevlened 2y ago
    > birth rates and death rates should be about the same otherwise it’s not sustainable In 1798, Thomas Malthus predicted famine due to overpopulation, because he didn't predict the discovery of nitrogen fixation, which allowed scaling food production. There are likely many technological leaps we've yet to make which will change your definition of sustainable.
    • grugagag 2y ago
      All technological leaps come at a cost. Future technological leaps have unknown costs.
      • kevlened 2y ago
        True, but maintaining status quo has unknown opportunity costs.
    • qsdf38100 2y ago
      Do you know about exponential growth? If birth and death rates are not about the same, it means the population will double every X years. You’ll need a major breakthrough in food production every X years. For ever. Even if we achieve that, at some point there just won’t be enough square meters on earth. But I guess it’s okay to you since we’ll have solved space travel and we’ll just send billions of people to Mars? Then other planetary systems? Then other galaxies? In any case, as I don’t buy we’ll ever be able to send billions of people to other planets, let alone make them habitable, this is exponential growth with finite ressources. Doesn’t sound sustainable to me.
• disambiguation 2y ago
  This is so monumentally stupid I want to believe it's a joke but something tells me it isn't. Alas, I wish you luck captain Ahab.
• mchinen 2y ago
  I'm also ex-Google working in the space on the funding and company formation side. Would love to chat.
• elsewhen 2y ago
  I am truly humbled by your decision. If you haven’t done so already, check out the folks at vitalism.io who share your view and are very ambitious.