4 ms·

I genuinely think death will be conquered, for all practical purposes, within this century. In our vast 300 thousand year history, we are likely in the last cen

I genuinely think death will be conquered, for all practical purposes, within this century. In our vast 300 thousand year history, we are likely in the last century of mortal humans, and in the last millennium of biological ones. Future generations will wonder at our coping mechanisms for something so tragic and horrifying as death, and wonder why we didn't try harder, earlier. Why isn't the longevity problem our #1 tax expense? Because the culture believes the problem is insurmountable, inevitable, and not worth solving. Our parents try to hide their grief and dread at the inevitability, telling us it's okay, but the tears at a funeral disagree. As an aside, I would pay vast sums of money (millions of dollars) to live my final days at an old folks' home that was capable of monitoring my health on a frequent basis, catching things early, and integrated SOTA cryonics facilities to maximize my chance of revival in case LEV doesn't become a possibility in my lifetime.

JumpCrisscross 1y ago
> Future generations will wonder at our coping mechanisms for something so tragic and horrifying as death We’re on a path to curing aging. We have no clue how to cure death.
- xvector 1y ago
  If you can cure aging, death itself becomes an engineering problem. Curing aging gives you the time you need to figure out gradual replacement, uploading (transfers, not copies), distributing consciousness across multiple fault-tolerant nodes in orbit or beyond, etc. Then you have cured death for all practical purposes. You will still be vulnerable to certain cosmic catastrophes (which you can plan around) and the heat death itself, but I would still call that "cured." Edit reply because of HN rate limit: Transfers are possible, copies aren't our only option. Consider replacing one neuron at the time with an uplink to a virtual neuron in the cloud. An implant (at the cellular scale) reflects communication back to your physical neurons - they don't even notice it disappeared. Wait for your thoughts to normalize, rinse, repeat. This is gradual replacement. You'd do it with more than one neuron (a cluster of neurons) realistically.
  - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    > Curing aging gives you the time you need to figure out gradual replacement Sure. > uploading (transfers, not copies), distributing consciousness across multiple fault-tolerant nodes We have no idea what the path to any of this looks like. We could easily cure aging without making progress on this for centuries, maybe millennia.
    - xvector 1y ago
      Well, yes, if we had an idea we'd be there by now.
  - ViscountPenguin 1y ago
    I have a very strong metaphysical prior against consciousness uploads being possible, but I hope to live in a universe structured in the right way to make me wrong. It's not the difference in substrate that makes me doubt it's possible (I'm a very strong believer in panpsychism), but I doubt the transfer could ever be "continuous" in a way that my monkey brain was satisfied with.
    - JoshTriplett 1y ago
      The continuity flaw is a reasonable concern; I have it as well. (I don't want a copy of me to live on; I want to live on, myself.) However, I do think it's entirely possible to solve, if we're already at the point where uploads are possible. It's harder than the alternative, but theoretically possible.
      - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
        > it's entirely possible to solve, if we're already at the point where uploads are possible The fundamental gating discoveries are all around the nature of consciousness. Is it emergent? Is it empirically detectable? Is it quantum magic? We have inklings around this. But our understanding of it hasn't fundamentally changed since, arguably, Descartes.
      - 1y ago
kiba 1y ago
Death from aging maybe. But as we saw, the next most dangerous things are each other and the systems that push toward people to death. Psychological health and well being are going to be key to resolving the problem of peaceful coexistence between humans.
- ViscountPenguin 1y ago
  Funny that we've gotten to the point where we can imagine an end to aging but not war. Me and my partner always lement that we didn't evolve from capybaras instead.
MisterBastahrd 1y ago
Never going to happen. We don't have the technology, we're not going to get the technology, and nobody benefits by having wealthy people around forever. Your body parts will eventually wear out regardless of what you try to do to mitigate the situation, and everybody will get terminal cancer sooner or later regardless of anything else. And even if THAT doesn't get you, an accident eventually will. Doesn't matter if it's a car wreck, a plane crash, someone coughing on you at the wrong moment, or you sneezing and bursting a blood vessel in your head.
- xvector 1y ago
  The big assumption in this counterargument is that we stay biological forever. I see biological "immortality" (anti-aging) as a temporary stopgap while we develop gradual replacement and migrate to a synthetic/digital consciousness, hosted on nodes distributed throughout Earth orbit or beyond for fault tolerance and availability. I'd be shocked if this didn't happen in the next thousand years. Needing air/water everywhere we go is incredibly limiting as well.
  - ddq 1y ago
    You won't "migrate", it will just be a copy of you. Your conscious perspective will not transfer to the copy of you. You will still be bound to the original, even if a simulacrum of your mind is created.
    - xvector 1y ago
      You can "migrate" with a technique such as gradual replacement, which in a simplified form replaces one physical neuron at a time with an uplink to a virtual neuron, and waits for your thoughts to equalize. Realistically you'd do clusters of neurons.
      - ddq 1y ago
        And how do you plan to deal with the latency of connecting the neurons of your brain to a remote virtual uplink? The speed of light limits the size of a virtual brain that is able to function in the same manner as a biological one. The truth is our understanding of consciousness and its neurological foundation is nowhere close to the level that would allow us to recreate it artificially. We don't even know how it works normally. It will not happen in your lifetime and you are going to die like the rest of us, and very likely this will not change even in the next thousand years.
hapticmonkey 1y ago
I'm sure various scifi authors have covered this topic to death (pun intended). But something about eternal life just feels so empty to me. And without changes to laws around euthanasia or suicide, it means being forced to stay alive forever, which is even more dystopian.
- xvector 1y ago
  If life feels empty to you, I'm sorry to hear that. I hope it gets better soon. I feel the opposite - there is so much to do, and so little time. I am also happy and content just... existing. I don't think a social problem (that will be solved in time, and is already solved in some countries) is a reason to prevent this from happening. Social problems can be fixed, death is final. If euthanasia doesn't become legal before, it certainly will be after.
  - caseyy 1y ago
    I think they meant eternal life much more in the “I have no mouth, and I must scream” sense. Much has been said and written about the cruelty of immortality, since the myth of Sisyphus and probably before. “The Mortal Immortal” is a story about prolonging lifespan but not healthspan, and also not emotional fulfilment in life — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mortal_Immortal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mortal_Immortal. There are also TV shows (“Altered Carbon”, “Black Mirror” USS Callister and other episodes, “Twilight Zone”) and video games (“Nobody Wants to Die”) about it. What your parent comment speaks about (the vanity of endless life) is particularly explored in Bernard Williams’s “The Makropulos Affair”. Endless life could mean no regard for quality of life and endless trivial pursuits.
    - xvector 1y ago
      Yes, I've read/watched most of those and I believe they are just entertainment. I can perfectly envision people living happy, long lives. These books and shows have manufactured conflict for drama.
      - 1y ago
ViscountPenguin 1y ago
I'm not too confident that mortality will be cured this century. Even if we cure some of the big targets (dementia, muscle wasting and cancer come to mind) there will inevitably be a long tail of problems. If it were just that, I might still be hopeful, but the latency on aging cure experiments is inevitably going to be quite long, and that won't change without massive advances in biological simulations.
fsociety 1y ago
Mortality is not meant to be cured. Quality of life on the other hand..
- ViscountPenguin 1y ago
  I'm not sure any disease is "meant" to be cured. The fact that we can cure any diseases at all is a lucky accident. Is this a religious conviction, or something else? I've heard that viewpoint a lot, but I've never heard anyone really explain where it comes from.
- JoshTriplett 1y ago
  Smallpox was not meant to be cured anyway, but we did, and we're better for it. One of the defining qualities of humanity is the ability to better ourselves and overcome challenges.
computerthings 1y ago
[dead]
VonTum 1y ago
I agree, likely the first immortal person has already been born. Perhaps even large swaths of the population are already effectively immortal, but they just don't know it yet. Sadly, my main fear is that immortality will only be available to the extremely rich and powerful. Generally historical progress is made when the old guard die, be it in science with the leaders clamoring to old theories, dictatorships falling when their leader does, companies setting a new course when their founder/CEO retires. I shudder at the thought of living in a world where everyone still dies like before, except an entrenched immortal powerful elite.
- xvector 1y ago
  All medical technology developed 50 years ago is now available to the general public, so I think it'd be available to everyone.
  - ziddoap 1y ago
    All medical technology is maybe "available", but if you google "person dies from not being able to afford insulin", we can see that availability is only half the equation. It has to be affordable, too.
    - xvector 1y ago
      If immortality becomes as available as insulin, it will be a smashing success. Nearly everyone that wants insulin gets it.
- nonameiguess 1y ago
  I feel like you and the parent need to give a better operational definition of what you mean by "practical purposes." The ultimate destiny of every bit of matter out there is to become part of a black hole, evaporate to Hawking radiation, then succumb to the expansion of space gradually putting every discrete particle outside of the future light cone of all others. This should take unfathomably long epochs of time well beyond the current age of the universe, but it will still inevitably happen. This is even putting aside possibilities like proton decay and false vacuum collapse. Don't get me wrong. Given the choice between a 100 year lifespan and a quadrillion year lifespan, my first instinct is to take the quadrillion year lifespan, but even then, it seems like you're incurring the very real risk that you'll eventually remain "alive" but in complete isolation with no matter to interact with that isn't part of your body, waiting for thousands of times longer then the Milky Way will exist for the attraction of a supermassive black hole to finally pull you in and end it. Given whatever sort of brain you might have has to have a finite storage capacity for information, you also open up the possibility that you'll spend the last few trillion years of your life with no memories except that complete isolation and experience of utter nothingness. These are all sci-fi scenarios and there is no way to know for sure what will actually happen or what it will be like, but we do know for sure that a functionally immortal being would not just be living a normal life doing things animals typically enjoy doing, but forever. There are plenty of possible fates worse than death.
cess11 1y ago
We've wrecked our habitat and keep most of humanity in some form or other of slavery, and there are exactly zero credible social movements aiming for another course. Why would we want to watch this deterioration and tyranny go on for centuries more? As for 'non-biological' humans, I'm assuming you believe in some soul that could be transfered from your body to a computer? If so, that's clearly into deeply religious territory. You are an analog being, you view the world as analog projections onto a mammal cortex. That is fundamentally, ontologically very different from digitally virtual environments. The digital lacks identity, which is the source of security issues in the computerised society. There is no difference between 1011011001 and 1011011001 regardless of source, it can be a biometry reader sending an encoding of your thumb print or another computer hooked into a network sending the same bytes. If we for the sake of argument ignored the problems with the transfer, then you still propose a deeply restricted existence, a machine prison, where there is no way for you to discern whether your experience actually comes from your sensors or some other source feeding digital signals into your machine. At best it is a simulacra of a dream you can't wake from. You'd be absolutely cut off from any possibility of freedom and immediate engagement with the universe. Now, I do understand that many people enjoy living almost their entire adult lives mediated through digitally transmitted images and sounds, but at least they still have the option to look away and out of their own bodies and into the remnants of the world that birthed our and many other species. Removing that option entirely and replacing it with the most intimate and absolute form of imprisonment we have yet been able to imagine does not seem at all attractive to me. Regarding "longevity", currently billions are suffering under the rule of a few generations that refuse to let go of power even though they are well beyond what is the common age of retirement in vast parts of the world. If allowed they will for sure continue this refusal and they signal clearly that they are going to kill and maim a lot of people just to try and stay in power now. Locking borders against climate refugees, taking resources from things like education and art and medicine and pushing it into war industry, inventing new insidious forms of surveillance and control to try and make sure dissent becomes impossible. If you get to watch them follow through on this, how do you expect to keep some semblance of sanity? Are you hoping to be able to ignore it, sitting on a server in a bunker being fed a constant soap opera of fiction and simulated conversations, humming away at some 200 watts or so?
- 1y ago

JumpCrisscross 1y ago

> Future generations will wonder at our coping mechanisms for something so tragic and horrifying as death We’re on a path to curing aging. We have no clue how to cure death.

xvector 1y ago
If you can cure aging, death itself becomes an engineering problem. Curing aging gives you the time you need to figure out gradual replacement, uploading (transfers, not copies), distributing consciousness across multiple fault-tolerant nodes in orbit or beyond, etc. Then you have cured death for all practical purposes. You will still be vulnerable to certain cosmic catastrophes (which you can plan around) and the heat death itself, but I would still call that "cured." Edit reply because of HN rate limit: Transfers are possible, copies aren't our only option. Consider replacing one neuron at the time with an uplink to a virtual neuron in the cloud. An implant (at the cellular scale) reflects communication back to your physical neurons - they don't even notice it disappeared. Wait for your thoughts to normalize, rinse, repeat. This is gradual replacement. You'd do it with more than one neuron (a cluster of neurons) realistically.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago
  > Curing aging gives you the time you need to figure out gradual replacement Sure. > uploading (transfers, not copies), distributing consciousness across multiple fault-tolerant nodes We have no idea what the path to any of this looks like. We could easily cure aging without making progress on this for centuries, maybe millennia.
  - xvector 1y ago
    Well, yes, if we had an idea we'd be there by now.
- ViscountPenguin 1y ago
  I have a very strong metaphysical prior against consciousness uploads being possible, but I hope to live in a universe structured in the right way to make me wrong. It's not the difference in substrate that makes me doubt it's possible (I'm a very strong believer in panpsychism), but I doubt the transfer could ever be "continuous" in a way that my monkey brain was satisfied with.
  - JoshTriplett 1y ago
    The continuity flaw is a reasonable concern; I have it as well. (I don't want a copy of me to live on; I want to live on, myself.) However, I do think it's entirely possible to solve, if we're already at the point where uploads are possible. It's harder than the alternative, but theoretically possible.
    - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
      > it's entirely possible to solve, if we're already at the point where uploads are possible The fundamental gating discoveries are all around the nature of consciousness. Is it emergent? Is it empirically detectable? Is it quantum magic? We have inklings around this. But our understanding of it hasn't fundamentally changed since, arguably, Descartes.
    - 1y ago

kiba 1y ago

Death from aging maybe. But as we saw, the next most dangerous things are each other and the systems that push toward people to death. Psychological health and well being are going to be key to resolving the problem of peaceful coexistence between humans.

ViscountPenguin 1y ago
Funny that we've gotten to the point where we can imagine an end to aging but not war. Me and my partner always lement that we didn't evolve from capybaras instead.

MisterBastahrd 1y ago

Never going to happen. We don't have the technology, we're not going to get the technology, and nobody benefits by having wealthy people around forever. Your body parts will eventually wear out regardless of what you try to do to mitigate the situation, and everybody will get terminal cancer sooner or later regardless of anything else. And even if THAT doesn't get you, an accident eventually will. Doesn't matter if it's a car wreck, a plane crash, someone coughing on you at the wrong moment, or you sneezing and bursting a blood vessel in your head.

xvector 1y ago
The big assumption in this counterargument is that we stay biological forever. I see biological "immortality" (anti-aging) as a temporary stopgap while we develop gradual replacement and migrate to a synthetic/digital consciousness, hosted on nodes distributed throughout Earth orbit or beyond for fault tolerance and availability. I'd be shocked if this didn't happen in the next thousand years. Needing air/water everywhere we go is incredibly limiting as well.
- ddq 1y ago
  You won't "migrate", it will just be a copy of you. Your conscious perspective will not transfer to the copy of you. You will still be bound to the original, even if a simulacrum of your mind is created.
  - xvector 1y ago
    You can "migrate" with a technique such as gradual replacement, which in a simplified form replaces one physical neuron at a time with an uplink to a virtual neuron, and waits for your thoughts to equalize. Realistically you'd do clusters of neurons.
    - ddq 1y ago
      And how do you plan to deal with the latency of connecting the neurons of your brain to a remote virtual uplink? The speed of light limits the size of a virtual brain that is able to function in the same manner as a biological one. The truth is our understanding of consciousness and its neurological foundation is nowhere close to the level that would allow us to recreate it artificially. We don't even know how it works normally. It will not happen in your lifetime and you are going to die like the rest of us, and very likely this will not change even in the next thousand years.

hapticmonkey 1y ago

I'm sure various scifi authors have covered this topic to death (pun intended). But something about eternal life just feels so empty to me. And without changes to laws around euthanasia or suicide, it means being forced to stay alive forever, which is even more dystopian.

xvector 1y ago
If life feels empty to you, I'm sorry to hear that. I hope it gets better soon. I feel the opposite - there is so much to do, and so little time. I am also happy and content just... existing. I don't think a social problem (that will be solved in time, and is already solved in some countries) is a reason to prevent this from happening. Social problems can be fixed, death is final. If euthanasia doesn't become legal before, it certainly will be after.
- caseyy 1y ago
  I think they meant eternal life much more in the “I have no mouth, and I must scream” sense. Much has been said and written about the cruelty of immortality, since the myth of Sisyphus and probably before. “The Mortal Immortal” is a story about prolonging lifespan but not healthspan, and also not emotional fulfilment in life — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mortal_Immortal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mortal_Immortal. There are also TV shows (“Altered Carbon”, “Black Mirror” USS Callister and other episodes, “Twilight Zone”) and video games (“Nobody Wants to Die”) about it. What your parent comment speaks about (the vanity of endless life) is particularly explored in Bernard Williams’s “The Makropulos Affair”. Endless life could mean no regard for quality of life and endless trivial pursuits.
  - xvector 1y ago
    Yes, I've read/watched most of those and I believe they are just entertainment. I can perfectly envision people living happy, long lives. These books and shows have manufactured conflict for drama.
    - 1y ago

ViscountPenguin 1y ago

I'm not too confident that mortality will be cured this century. Even if we cure some of the big targets (dementia, muscle wasting and cancer come to mind) there will inevitably be a long tail of problems. If it were just that, I might still be hopeful, but the latency on aging cure experiments is inevitably going to be quite long, and that won't change without massive advances in biological simulations.

fsociety 1y ago

Mortality is not meant to be cured. Quality of life on the other hand..

ViscountPenguin 1y ago
I'm not sure any disease is "meant" to be cured. The fact that we can cure any diseases at all is a lucky accident. Is this a religious conviction, or something else? I've heard that viewpoint a lot, but I've never heard anyone really explain where it comes from.
JoshTriplett 1y ago
Smallpox was not meant to be cured anyway, but we did, and we're better for it. One of the defining qualities of humanity is the ability to better ourselves and overcome challenges.

computerthings 1y ago

[dead]

VonTum 1y ago

I agree, likely the first immortal person has already been born. Perhaps even large swaths of the population are already effectively immortal, but they just don't know it yet. Sadly, my main fear is that immortality will only be available to the extremely rich and powerful. Generally historical progress is made when the old guard die, be it in science with the leaders clamoring to old theories, dictatorships falling when their leader does, companies setting a new course when their founder/CEO retires. I shudder at the thought of living in a world where everyone still dies like before, except an entrenched immortal powerful elite.

xvector 1y ago
All medical technology developed 50 years ago is now available to the general public, so I think it'd be available to everyone.
- ziddoap 1y ago
  All medical technology is maybe "available", but if you google "person dies from not being able to afford insulin", we can see that availability is only half the equation. It has to be affordable, too.
  - xvector 1y ago
    If immortality becomes as available as insulin, it will be a smashing success. Nearly everyone that wants insulin gets it.
nonameiguess 1y ago
I feel like you and the parent need to give a better operational definition of what you mean by "practical purposes." The ultimate destiny of every bit of matter out there is to become part of a black hole, evaporate to Hawking radiation, then succumb to the expansion of space gradually putting every discrete particle outside of the future light cone of all others. This should take unfathomably long epochs of time well beyond the current age of the universe, but it will still inevitably happen. This is even putting aside possibilities like proton decay and false vacuum collapse. Don't get me wrong. Given the choice between a 100 year lifespan and a quadrillion year lifespan, my first instinct is to take the quadrillion year lifespan, but even then, it seems like you're incurring the very real risk that you'll eventually remain "alive" but in complete isolation with no matter to interact with that isn't part of your body, waiting for thousands of times longer then the Milky Way will exist for the attraction of a supermassive black hole to finally pull you in and end it. Given whatever sort of brain you might have has to have a finite storage capacity for information, you also open up the possibility that you'll spend the last few trillion years of your life with no memories except that complete isolation and experience of utter nothingness. These are all sci-fi scenarios and there is no way to know for sure what will actually happen or what it will be like, but we do know for sure that a functionally immortal being would not just be living a normal life doing things animals typically enjoy doing, but forever. There are plenty of possible fates worse than death.

cess11 1y ago

We've wrecked our habitat and keep most of humanity in some form or other of slavery, and there are exactly zero credible social movements aiming for another course. Why would we want to watch this deterioration and tyranny go on for centuries more? As for 'non-biological' humans, I'm assuming you believe in some soul that could be transfered from your body to a computer? If so, that's clearly into deeply religious territory. You are an analog being, you view the world as analog projections onto a mammal cortex. That is fundamentally, ontologically very different from digitally virtual environments. The digital lacks identity, which is the source of security issues in the computerised society. There is no difference between 1011011001 and 1011011001 regardless of source, it can be a biometry reader sending an encoding of your thumb print or another computer hooked into a network sending the same bytes. If we for the sake of argument ignored the problems with the transfer, then you still propose a deeply restricted existence, a machine prison, where there is no way for you to discern whether your experience actually comes from your sensors or some other source feeding digital signals into your machine. At best it is a simulacra of a dream you can't wake from. You'd be absolutely cut off from any possibility of freedom and immediate engagement with the universe. Now, I do understand that many people enjoy living almost their entire adult lives mediated through digitally transmitted images and sounds, but at least they still have the option to look away and out of their own bodies and into the remnants of the world that birthed our and many other species. Removing that option entirely and replacing it with the most intimate and absolute form of imprisonment we have yet been able to imagine does not seem at all attractive to me. Regarding "longevity", currently billions are suffering under the rule of a few generations that refuse to let go of power even though they are well beyond what is the common age of retirement in vast parts of the world. If allowed they will for sure continue this refusal and they signal clearly that they are going to kill and maim a lot of people just to try and stay in power now. Locking borders against climate refugees, taking resources from things like education and art and medicine and pushing it into war industry, inventing new insidious forms of surveillance and control to try and make sure dissent becomes impossible. If you get to watch them follow through on this, how do you expect to keep some semblance of sanity? Are you hoping to be able to ignore it, sitting on a server in a bunker being fed a constant soap opera of fiction and simulated conversations, humming away at some 200 watts or so?

1y ago