6 ms·

Remarkable hostility and strange circular logic from some people posting here. Clearly belief outstrips evidence. If research suggests there's an observable as

by ggm 1y ago

Remarkable hostility and strange circular logic from some people posting here. Clearly belief outstrips evidence. If research suggests there's an observable asymptotic trend, public health dollars at the very least might be better spent on quality of life as much as quantity. The posts saying an atom of oxygen is potentially infinitely long lived (ignoring radioactive decay?) As a "proof" that life extension has no limit is about as reductively silly as it is possible to be. Bills of mortality bootstrapped Financial investment in annuities. You think the money people aren't tracking this trend now, when they have for the last 400 or more years?

nabla9 1y ago
Radical life extension within our lifetimes has become secular religion substitute. It’s driven more by hope and faith than by scientific fact. While a lifespan has no limits in theory if technology is advanced enough, the belief that it can be achieved by a living person is based on hope rather than evidence. - Possible in our lifetime. - Affordable to the faithful. You remove these two, and the faithful lose their interest in discussing the matter.
- brabel 1y ago
  What theory says that human lifespan has no limits with technology assistance? Anything involving replacing biological systems with artificial ones is not really extending human lifespan, it’s replacing human life with something else.
  - nabla9 1y ago
    If you had full understanding of human cell and how they contribute to homeostasis, you could reprogram the cell to rejuvenate them endlessly without turning into cancer (many cancers have unlimited lifespan). You would also need to find ways to remove all cruft that gradually accumulates even in healthy body, like heavy metals etc.
    - brabel 1y ago
      How do you know that you could? That’s the question! If we did understand biology perfectly it may be that we would then prove no organism can live forever and reproduction is the only way.
      - XorNot 1y ago
        Because there's absolutely no reason to believe that's the case? Like I don't know what the point of this argument is: maybe it's impossible. Sure, great. Okay. But you know...let's actually find out, because it looks very possible if hard from our current vantage point.
        ecb_penguin 1y ago
        [flagged]
        bigDinosaur 1y ago
        [flagged]
        ecb_penguin 1y ago
        > This is perhaps the single worst form of argument I've ever seen. It's because you didn't understand it > 'how can a cancer cell live indefinitely but other cells cannot' Cancer cells are damaged cells mutating without regard for function. It's pretty obvious that there is a difference between "living indefinitely in a mutated form devoid of original function" is different from a cell performing a specific function
        exe34 1y ago
        Do you believe this limit on lifespan is a uniquely human condition? or do you believe that it's impossible for any animal whatsoever to have a long lifespan (let's say 400 years for the sake of argument here).
  - kelnos 1y ago
    I won't touch on whether or not you're still you as you replace your biological components with artificial ones. But who says that's the endgame? Presumably an advanced enough medical technology could remove the internal byproducts of aging, and get your cells to stop dying / running out of steam / going cancerous. Obviously we have no idea how to do that, and maybe we never will, but it seems plausible.
    - szundi 1y ago
      [dead]
    - jajko 1y ago
      You can replace almost whole body and its still you as the mind. But once you replace brain then its just a copy, you can't literally move biolectrical complex that makes us into silicon in any possible way. And brains age like the rest of the body, telomeres issue applies too. The best possible outcome would be watching your digital copy having digital life, while you yourself wither away regardless. More akin to having a child than oneself preservation. Not really something special, having physical children still beats this.
      - Tadpole9181 1y ago
        Ship of Theseus it. Slowly replace the brain bit-by-bit, taking breaks in between. For each component, use three in a democratic redundancy (for future maintenance). I wouldn't personally do that unless I was already dying. But, I see no reason believe it wouldn't preserve the soul. Your organic brain is already doing it all the time on a small scale.
  - api 1y ago
    We know it’s possible for living things to be functionally near immortal. We also know germ line cells can give rise to new organisms which can give rise to germ line cells in an unbroken chain effectively forever. This is quite far from making a human immortal but it shows that there appears to be nothing in physical law or intrinsic to biology that prohibits it. Therefore it is possible. Star travel and terraforming Mars are also possible. Possible does not imply anything about difficulty. We don’t really know if radical life extension or borderline immortality are fusion hard, quantum computing hard, or starship hard.
    - Intralexical 1y ago
      > We know it’s possible for living things to be functionally near immortal. Not in any sense that's applicable to humans. The often-cited animal examples, like greenland sharks, tortoises, and lobsters, are slow-moving ectotherms with "cold" metabolisms. Adjusting for watts per unit mass of biochemistry, they might "live" less in all their centuries than you do in a single decade [0-3]. In that sense they're only "long-lived" in the same way a tree is long-lived. Yeah, it might not die. But it's also not doing much that produces wear and tear, misfolded proteins, scar tissue, plaque buildup, etc. Microorganisms and cnidarians, which can be truly immortal, are even more divergent. For example a common form of "immortality" involves periodically regenerating body parts by reverting to stem cells. IIRC regeneration is ancestral to all animals, but mostly lost in mammals. Humans can actually already regenerate to a limited extent [4]. But how are you going to regenerate an entire primate nervous system (which "immortal" animals don't have), without losing everything you are? In fact, the use of regeneration to achieve "immortality", and even that only rarely and in very simple animals, suggests it may not be possible at all for living organisms to live indefinitely in the same body. Otherwise, why would evolution waste calories rebuilding a whole body? I suspect some systems-theoretic effect like the Red Queen hypothesis [5], but on a micro scale. Change is the only constant, and immortality implies trying to stay the same when the only thermodynamically favorable options are to grow or decay. 0: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-76371-0 1: # Greenland shark metabolism over entire lifespan sh -c "units '((30mg/oxygen)*(mol/g))/hour/(1000/1000^0.84*kg) * (434kJ/mol) * 200year' MJ/kg" 2: # Greenland shark lifespan metabolism, alternate estimation sh -c "units '192kcal/day*200year/126kg' MJ/kg" 3: # Human metabolism over 1 decade sh -c "units '150W/100kg*10years' MJ/kg" 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regeneration_in_humans 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen_hypothesis
  - stocksinsmocks 1y ago
    If you could put your mind in a robot, is it still you? What if you get a knee replacement? What if you infuse a young persons blood? What if you put on a contact lens? Fun questions, but I’m not sure the answer changes what we will do much.
    - somenameforme 1y ago
      Two issues here - the first is that relatively new discoveries like the bidirectional gut-brain axis, and the major effects it has on you, pose a technical issue to traditional thought experiments like brains in a vat (or robot as it may be). The second is that this also doesn't really answer the question. Your brain, like everything else in your body, degrades over time. It's not like it becomes immortal if you just stick it in a robot, if that were even possible.
- arisAlexis 1y ago
  Religion is a lie. This is actually a possible science path. Don't get confused.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - danelski 1y ago
    How do you know it's viable? We may try, but if your argument is merely that it wasn't disproven yet, then it doesn't invalidate OP's point of it being aspirational first.
  - ralfd 1y ago
    Don’t get confused yourself: You will still die, even if you live as old as trees can get.
    - arisAlexis 1y ago
      Thee is a lot of psychology background that made you say this comment. Understand your bias.
  - Fargren 1y ago
    > Religion is a lie Anyone who says "we will have within this generation technology to extend your lifetime indefinitely" is lying just as much as the priest who says he knows God exists is lying[1]. I would say it's more likely that the scientist liar is accidentally right, than that the priest is; that doesn't make either of them people you should trust. At the current stage of technology, belief on this process is basically based only on hope. Belief in this is essentially religious. [1] possibly they both believe they are saying the truth, so you could argue they are wrong rather than lying. They are still both standing on the same grounds.
    - exe34 1y ago
      oh thank goodness you've finally shifted the goal post! in other comments you were arguing that radical life extension was impossible but now it's merely impossible within our lifetime! that's a huge shift!
- ben_w 1y ago
  > Radical life extension within our lifetimes has become secular religion substitute. It’s driven more by hope and faith than by scientific fact. Did someone prove mice have souls that go to heaven or hell while I wasn't looking? For all the limits of research that only works in mice and doesn't generalise to humans (I'm *not* going to plan with the assumption of radical longevity) it's not quite as bad as taking everythin on faith.
  - lupusreal 1y ago
    The secular religion spoken of by nabla has nothing to do with afterlives. It's for people who don't believe in any afterlife trying to placate their fear of death by having faith that technology will somehow grant them an indefinite life, not an afterlife. (Context: I am firmly an atheist, but I also disapprove of the people who want to live forever. I think that's selfish and childish. People should get to grips with the reality of their mortality and make peace with that.)
    - cft 1y ago
      I agree. For one, most people don't change. In the sense that their ideas don't change. For the ideas to change in the society, sometimes people themselves have to be replaced, i.e. generations have to change.
    - ben_w 1y ago
      > People should get to grips with the reality of their mortality and make peace with that. The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. - George Bernard Shaw
      - lupusreal 1y ago
        That's nice, but you're still going to die. We all will, and the world is better off for it because progress happens one funeral at a time.
- sherburt3 1y ago
  Yes very illogical to hope that life will get better when my analysis proves the opposite. Bazinga!
  - bheadmaster 1y ago
    > very illogical to hope Hope is a feeling of expectation of positive outcomes, therefore illogical by definition.
  - pyth0 1y ago
    Why do you believe that extending human life will make “life better”?
    - Intralexical 1y ago
      Wouldn't it be great if every figure we learned about in history class was still alive and kicking today? Wouldn't that just make everything so much better? "So long as men die, liberty shall never perish."
      - sherburt3 1y ago
        Have you heard of term limits?
        Intralexical 1y ago
        You mean those words written on paper that get immediately torn up as soon as they become inconvenient for people in power? Russia had term limits too. Once.
    - sentinelsignal 1y ago
      This is a very good question which i resonate with. The implications that an extend life is better. In my personal opinion life as we know it would be vastly different and who knows how different it could be, for better or for worse.
- Intralexical 1y ago
  > While a lifespan has no limits in theory if technology is advanced enough, the belief that it can be achieved by a living person is based on hope rather than evidence. I would say it's based on fear. Ego. Maybe disconnection, bordering on solipsism, as if living in this world is only meaningful if you personally live forever. Hope motivates aspirational curiosity. The attitude from some longevity enthusiasts here seems to lean more towards vitriol and tautology.
- oceanplexian 1y ago
  It has also become popular with billionaires to invest huge sums of money into life extension, or at least cosmetic surgeries to appear younger (Hair transplants, etc). I have come to the conclusion that no amount of money or technology can cure being spiritually empty inside, as well as unable to cope with your own mortality.
  - Intralexical 1y ago
    Some would say that if they were able to find meaning in life or cope with mortality, then they wouldn't have hoarded so much money and tech in the first place.
inglor_cz 1y ago
I don't have to be hostile to be somewhat skeptical about mechanical extensions of current trends into distant future. An analyst living in 1825 could analyze the traffic stats to conclude that the era of increasing land travel speeds is coming to a close because the horses can't run any faster, and an analyst living in 1975 could analyze the telecom stats to conclude that international calls are always going to cost much more than local calls and remain somewhat of a luxury, particularly in the developing world. In both cases, technological changes intervened.
- YeGoblynQueenne 1y ago
  And in 1968 an analyst may conclude that space travel could never become routine and still be perfectly on the money even after the moon landings. So what? We can't see into the future. The future is never like the past, not least because a lot of present tends to intervene.
  - inglor_cz 1y ago
    And that is precisely why I don't find that much value in articles such as "New research reveals longevity gains slowing, life expectancy of 100 unlikely". Declaration such as: “We forecast that those born in 1980 will not live to be 100 on average, and none of the cohorts in our study will reach this milestone." is too self-confident. Their youngest cohort is born in 2000. It is impossible to predict how longevity technology will look in 2070 or 2080, and yet the authors make such bold statements.
    - XorNot 1y ago
      There's also a practical case today where this applies: cancer treatment. One of the reasons life-expectancy are not given much past a 10-year timeline, is because it's generally expected that over a decade the quality of cancer treatment will have improved substantially and as such the likely patient outcome much beyond that isn't known (and is usually better).
    - WaltPurvis 1y ago
StopDisinfo910 1y ago
> If research suggests there's an observable asymptotic trend, public health dollars at the very least might be better spent on quality of life as much as quantity. Isn’t that already the case with a ton of research going into cancer treatment, Alzheimer’s treatment and how to keep people healthy longer? Honestly, having seen the life of my grand parents once they past 90 and especially the last 2 when they had significant dementia, I would much rather die before. Give me a good life as long as possible and spare me and my family the worst of the decline.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
aaron695 1y ago
[dead]
pfdietz 1y ago
Personal longevity is a topic that seems maximally suited to drive wishful thinking.
r_singh 1y ago
The problem is that mistrust is at its highest that it has been. Science and evidence have been used as political tools in the recent past... and it has started becoming clear to more and more people. Either that or to protect financial interests of some legacy chaebol... so people are losing faith. In my country people both believe and have some evidence that those that live in an orderly fashion, learn to be emotionally detached and focus most of their energies on flow states and forward escapes end up living longer than those who don't and living beyond 100 is not really difficult if one lives a healthy balanced life as prescribed by Yoga philosophy from the get go. I'm gonna stick my neck out and say that if life's goal is living, like it should be — and not endless economic growth or an endless compulsion on the hedonic treadmill — it isn't hard to live beyond 100. When life's goal is living every aspect of it from family, to children to rest get the love and attention they deserve and economic outcomes and status games do not dictate life. But for that to happen one needs to realise that the most precious thing they own is their energy and will. And must learn to see which activities increase their leverage and which ones don't. When one lives that way, the most contrarian thing is that you can achieve a lot more than by chasing because you start to intrinsically do rather than chase — the latter being much more expensive energy wise. I understand if this gets too esoteric for HN. But it's what I believe to be true and is also IMHO the reason why many high performing individuals seem to be unaffected by illnesses even at old age because their energy is continuously and exponentially directed in virtuous cycles and not disturbed easily by external happenings. You are energy and can be understood and defined entirely mathematically. Yoga means union with the universe's synchronicity. It originates from Sankhya Philosophy which simply means counting all energy.
- ModernMech 1y ago
  > Science and evidence have been used as political tools for a while... and it has started becoming clear to more and more people. Yeah, they noticed when their lives kept getting longer and longer thanks to science and evidence-backed policy.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - 1y ago
dfxm12 1y ago
public health dollars at the very least might be better spent on quality of life as much as quantity. Improving quality of life often leads to improving quantity of life. Life expectancy is, in part, a policy choice. Be wary of those who are outright against these things. https://thehill.com/policy/equilibrium-sustainability/570293-cutting-air-pollution-levels-could-raise-life-expectancy-by/ https://thehill.com/policy/equilibrium-sustainability/570293...

by ggm 1y ago

nabla9 1y ago

Radical life extension within our lifetimes has become secular religion substitute. It’s driven more by hope and faith than by scientific fact. While a lifespan has no limits in theory if technology is advanced enough, the belief that it can be achieved by a living person is based on hope rather than evidence. - Possible in our lifetime. - Affordable to the faithful. You remove these two, and the faithful lose their interest in discussing the matter.

brabel 1y ago
What theory says that human lifespan has no limits with technology assistance? Anything involving replacing biological systems with artificial ones is not really extending human lifespan, it’s replacing human life with something else.
- nabla9 1y ago
  If you had full understanding of human cell and how they contribute to homeostasis, you could reprogram the cell to rejuvenate them endlessly without turning into cancer (many cancers have unlimited lifespan). You would also need to find ways to remove all cruft that gradually accumulates even in healthy body, like heavy metals etc.
  - brabel 1y ago
    How do you know that you could? That’s the question! If we did understand biology perfectly it may be that we would then prove no organism can live forever and reproduction is the only way.
    - XorNot 1y ago
      Because there's absolutely no reason to believe that's the case? Like I don't know what the point of this argument is: maybe it's impossible. Sure, great. Okay. But you know...let's actually find out, because it looks very possible if hard from our current vantage point.
      - ecb_penguin 1y ago
        [flagged]
        bigDinosaur 1y ago
        [flagged]
        ecb_penguin 1y ago
        > This is perhaps the single worst form of argument I've ever seen. It's because you didn't understand it > 'how can a cancer cell live indefinitely but other cells cannot' Cancer cells are damaged cells mutating without regard for function. It's pretty obvious that there is a difference between "living indefinitely in a mutated form devoid of original function" is different from a cell performing a specific function
        exe34 1y ago
        Do you believe this limit on lifespan is a uniquely human condition? or do you believe that it's impossible for any animal whatsoever to have a long lifespan (let's say 400 years for the sake of argument here).
- kelnos 1y ago
  I won't touch on whether or not you're still you as you replace your biological components with artificial ones. But who says that's the endgame? Presumably an advanced enough medical technology could remove the internal byproducts of aging, and get your cells to stop dying / running out of steam / going cancerous. Obviously we have no idea how to do that, and maybe we never will, but it seems plausible.
  - szundi 1y ago
    [dead]
  - jajko 1y ago
    You can replace almost whole body and its still you as the mind. But once you replace brain then its just a copy, you can't literally move biolectrical complex that makes us into silicon in any possible way. And brains age like the rest of the body, telomeres issue applies too. The best possible outcome would be watching your digital copy having digital life, while you yourself wither away regardless. More akin to having a child than oneself preservation. Not really something special, having physical children still beats this.
    - Tadpole9181 1y ago
      Ship of Theseus it. Slowly replace the brain bit-by-bit, taking breaks in between. For each component, use three in a democratic redundancy (for future maintenance). I wouldn't personally do that unless I was already dying. But, I see no reason believe it wouldn't preserve the soul. Your organic brain is already doing it all the time on a small scale.
- api 1y ago
  We know it’s possible for living things to be functionally near immortal. We also know germ line cells can give rise to new organisms which can give rise to germ line cells in an unbroken chain effectively forever. This is quite far from making a human immortal but it shows that there appears to be nothing in physical law or intrinsic to biology that prohibits it. Therefore it is possible. Star travel and terraforming Mars are also possible. Possible does not imply anything about difficulty. We don’t really know if radical life extension or borderline immortality are fusion hard, quantum computing hard, or starship hard.
  - Intralexical 1y ago
    > We know it’s possible for living things to be functionally near immortal. Not in any sense that's applicable to humans. The often-cited animal examples, like greenland sharks, tortoises, and lobsters, are slow-moving ectotherms with "cold" metabolisms. Adjusting for watts per unit mass of biochemistry, they might "live" less in all their centuries than you do in a single decade [0-3]. In that sense they're only "long-lived" in the same way a tree is long-lived. Yeah, it might not die. But it's also not doing much that produces wear and tear, misfolded proteins, scar tissue, plaque buildup, etc. Microorganisms and cnidarians, which can be truly immortal, are even more divergent. For example a common form of "immortality" involves periodically regenerating body parts by reverting to stem cells. IIRC regeneration is ancestral to all animals, but mostly lost in mammals. Humans can actually already regenerate to a limited extent [4]. But how are you going to regenerate an entire primate nervous system (which "immortal" animals don't have), without losing everything you are? In fact, the use of regeneration to achieve "immortality", and even that only rarely and in very simple animals, suggests it may not be possible at all for living organisms to live indefinitely in the same body. Otherwise, why would evolution waste calories rebuilding a whole body? I suspect some systems-theoretic effect like the Red Queen hypothesis [5], but on a micro scale. Change is the only constant, and immortality implies trying to stay the same when the only thermodynamically favorable options are to grow or decay. 0: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-76371-0 1: # Greenland shark metabolism over entire lifespan sh -c "units '((30mg/oxygen)*(mol/g))/hour/(1000/1000^0.84*kg) * (434kJ/mol) * 200year' MJ/kg" 2: # Greenland shark lifespan metabolism, alternate estimation sh -c "units '192kcal/day*200year/126kg' MJ/kg" 3: # Human metabolism over 1 decade sh -c "units '150W/100kg*10years' MJ/kg" 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regeneration_in_humans 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen_hypothesis
- stocksinsmocks 1y ago
  If you could put your mind in a robot, is it still you? What if you get a knee replacement? What if you infuse a young persons blood? What if you put on a contact lens? Fun questions, but I’m not sure the answer changes what we will do much.
  - somenameforme 1y ago
    Two issues here - the first is that relatively new discoveries like the bidirectional gut-brain axis, and the major effects it has on you, pose a technical issue to traditional thought experiments like brains in a vat (or robot as it may be). The second is that this also doesn't really answer the question. Your brain, like everything else in your body, degrades over time. It's not like it becomes immortal if you just stick it in a robot, if that were even possible.
arisAlexis 1y ago
Religion is a lie. This is actually a possible science path. Don't get confused.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- danelski 1y ago
  How do you know it's viable? We may try, but if your argument is merely that it wasn't disproven yet, then it doesn't invalidate OP's point of it being aspirational first.
- ralfd 1y ago
  Don’t get confused yourself: You will still die, even if you live as old as trees can get.
  - arisAlexis 1y ago
    Thee is a lot of psychology background that made you say this comment. Understand your bias.
- Fargren 1y ago
  > Religion is a lie Anyone who says "we will have within this generation technology to extend your lifetime indefinitely" is lying just as much as the priest who says he knows God exists is lying[1]. I would say it's more likely that the scientist liar is accidentally right, than that the priest is; that doesn't make either of them people you should trust. At the current stage of technology, belief on this process is basically based only on hope. Belief in this is essentially religious. [1] possibly they both believe they are saying the truth, so you could argue they are wrong rather than lying. They are still both standing on the same grounds.
  - exe34 1y ago
    oh thank goodness you've finally shifted the goal post! in other comments you were arguing that radical life extension was impossible but now it's merely impossible within our lifetime! that's a huge shift!
ben_w 1y ago
> Radical life extension within our lifetimes has become secular religion substitute. It’s driven more by hope and faith than by scientific fact. Did someone prove mice have souls that go to heaven or hell while I wasn't looking? For all the limits of research that only works in mice and doesn't generalise to humans (I'm *not* going to plan with the assumption of radical longevity) it's not quite as bad as taking everythin on faith.
- lupusreal 1y ago
  The secular religion spoken of by nabla has nothing to do with afterlives. It's for people who don't believe in any afterlife trying to placate their fear of death by having faith that technology will somehow grant them an indefinite life, not an afterlife. (Context: I am firmly an atheist, but I also disapprove of the people who want to live forever. I think that's selfish and childish. People should get to grips with the reality of their mortality and make peace with that.)
  - cft 1y ago
    I agree. For one, most people don't change. In the sense that their ideas don't change. For the ideas to change in the society, sometimes people themselves have to be replaced, i.e. generations have to change.
  - ben_w 1y ago
    > People should get to grips with the reality of their mortality and make peace with that. The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. - George Bernard Shaw
    - lupusreal 1y ago
      That's nice, but you're still going to die. We all will, and the world is better off for it because progress happens one funeral at a time.
sherburt3 1y ago
Yes very illogical to hope that life will get better when my analysis proves the opposite. Bazinga!
- bheadmaster 1y ago
  > very illogical to hope Hope is a feeling of expectation of positive outcomes, therefore illogical by definition.
- pyth0 1y ago
  Why do you believe that extending human life will make “life better”?
  - Intralexical 1y ago
    Wouldn't it be great if every figure we learned about in history class was still alive and kicking today? Wouldn't that just make everything so much better? "So long as men die, liberty shall never perish."
    - sherburt3 1y ago
      Have you heard of term limits?
      - Intralexical 1y ago
        You mean those words written on paper that get immediately torn up as soon as they become inconvenient for people in power? Russia had term limits too. Once.
  - sentinelsignal 1y ago
    This is a very good question which i resonate with. The implications that an extend life is better. In my personal opinion life as we know it would be vastly different and who knows how different it could be, for better or for worse.
Intralexical 1y ago
> While a lifespan has no limits in theory if technology is advanced enough, the belief that it can be achieved by a living person is based on hope rather than evidence. I would say it's based on fear. Ego. Maybe disconnection, bordering on solipsism, as if living in this world is only meaningful if you personally live forever. Hope motivates aspirational curiosity. The attitude from some longevity enthusiasts here seems to lean more towards vitriol and tautology.
oceanplexian 1y ago
It has also become popular with billionaires to invest huge sums of money into life extension, or at least cosmetic surgeries to appear younger (Hair transplants, etc). I have come to the conclusion that no amount of money or technology can cure being spiritually empty inside, as well as unable to cope with your own mortality.
- Intralexical 1y ago
  Some would say that if they were able to find meaning in life or cope with mortality, then they wouldn't have hoarded so much money and tech in the first place.

inglor_cz 1y ago

I don't have to be hostile to be somewhat skeptical about mechanical extensions of current trends into distant future. An analyst living in 1825 could analyze the traffic stats to conclude that the era of increasing land travel speeds is coming to a close because the horses can't run any faster, and an analyst living in 1975 could analyze the telecom stats to conclude that international calls are always going to cost much more than local calls and remain somewhat of a luxury, particularly in the developing world. In both cases, technological changes intervened.

YeGoblynQueenne 1y ago
And in 1968 an analyst may conclude that space travel could never become routine and still be perfectly on the money even after the moon landings. So what? We can't see into the future. The future is never like the past, not least because a lot of present tends to intervene.
- inglor_cz 1y ago
  And that is precisely why I don't find that much value in articles such as "New research reveals longevity gains slowing, life expectancy of 100 unlikely". Declaration such as: “We forecast that those born in 1980 will not live to be 100 on average, and none of the cohorts in our study will reach this milestone." is too self-confident. Their youngest cohort is born in 2000. It is impossible to predict how longevity technology will look in 2070 or 2080, and yet the authors make such bold statements.
  - XorNot 1y ago
    There's also a practical case today where this applies: cancer treatment. One of the reasons life-expectancy are not given much past a 10-year timeline, is because it's generally expected that over a decade the quality of cancer treatment will have improved substantially and as such the likely patient outcome much beyond that isn't known (and is usually better).
  - WaltPurvis 1y ago

StopDisinfo910 1y ago

> If research suggests there's an observable asymptotic trend, public health dollars at the very least might be better spent on quality of life as much as quantity. Isn’t that already the case with a ton of research going into cancer treatment, Alzheimer’s treatment and how to keep people healthy longer? Honestly, having seen the life of my grand parents once they past 90 and especially the last 2 when they had significant dementia, I would much rather die before. Give me a good life as long as possible and spare me and my family the worst of the decline.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

aaron695 1y ago

[dead]

pfdietz 1y ago

Personal longevity is a topic that seems maximally suited to drive wishful thinking.

r_singh 1y ago

The problem is that mistrust is at its highest that it has been. Science and evidence have been used as political tools in the recent past... and it has started becoming clear to more and more people. Either that or to protect financial interests of some legacy chaebol... so people are losing faith. In my country people both believe and have some evidence that those that live in an orderly fashion, learn to be emotionally detached and focus most of their energies on flow states and forward escapes end up living longer than those who don't and living beyond 100 is not really difficult if one lives a healthy balanced life as prescribed by Yoga philosophy from the get go. I'm gonna stick my neck out and say that if life's goal is living, like it should be — and not endless economic growth or an endless compulsion on the hedonic treadmill — it isn't hard to live beyond 100. When life's goal is living every aspect of it from family, to children to rest get the love and attention they deserve and economic outcomes and status games do not dictate life. But for that to happen one needs to realise that the most precious thing they own is their energy and will. And must learn to see which activities increase their leverage and which ones don't. When one lives that way, the most contrarian thing is that you can achieve a lot more than by chasing because you start to intrinsically do rather than chase — the latter being much more expensive energy wise. I understand if this gets too esoteric for HN. But it's what I believe to be true and is also IMHO the reason why many high performing individuals seem to be unaffected by illnesses even at old age because their energy is continuously and exponentially directed in virtuous cycles and not disturbed easily by external happenings. You are energy and can be understood and defined entirely mathematically. Yoga means union with the universe's synchronicity. It originates from Sankhya Philosophy which simply means counting all energy.

ModernMech 1y ago
> Science and evidence have been used as political tools for a while... and it has started becoming clear to more and more people. Yeah, they noticed when their lives kept getting longer and longer thanks to science and evidence-backed policy.
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dfxm12 1y ago

public health dollars at the very least might be better spent on quality of life as much as quantity. Improving quality of life often leads to improving quantity of life. Life expectancy is, in part, a policy choice. Be wary of those who are outright against these things. https://thehill.com/policy/equilibrium-sustainability/570293-cutting-air-pollution-levels-could-raise-life-expectancy-by/ https://thehill.com/policy/equilibrium-sustainability/570293...