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For my money the nuclear DNA damage angle is actually the more interesting part of this. The research community has for some years been debating whether or not

For my money the nuclear DNA damage angle is actually the more interesting part of this. The research community has for some years been debating whether or not stochastic nuclear DNA damage is important in aging outside of the issue of cancer. The consensus educated assumption has long been to think of course, nuclear DNA damage should lead to loss of protein homeostasis, and is therefore a meaningful contributing cause of aging, not just of raised risk of cancer. However there is nowadays plenty of evidence to support the opposite view, that the levels of stochastic nuclear mutations seen in human tissues really don't matter over the present human life span. Other than cancer. This would be good if it continues to hold up. The less we have to fix in order to produce a first generation of treatments that effectively treat aging - i.e. produce rejuvenation - the better. Fixing nuclear DNA damage is going to be plausible via global DNA editing technologies like CRISPR, but we're a long way from doing it for all genes to restore to a template and erase damage. Cancer therapies on the other hand are going to improve enormously in the near future as forms of narrowly targeted cell destruction take over from the present standards of chemotherapy and radiotherapy, coupled with greatly improved early detection. If you're 20-40 years away from peak cancer age in a wealthy region of the world, then I don't think your odds of dying from cancer are very large at all.

sspiff 12y ago
You say this as if rejuvenation would be a good thing. Rejuvenation would further divide the poor from the rich, as the poor are unable to afford such treatment. Wealthy dynasties would continue to acquire wealth (because wealth builds more wealth), while one of the current rebalancing mechanisms (people dying without heirs) would be significantly reduced or even completely disappear. Furthermore, we'd have even more competition over the limited amount of resources and habitable land than we have today. Let's just hope we figure out that space thing before they ever figure out rejuvenation.
- rch 12y ago
  Don't worry, I'm sure there will be rejuvenation visas for engineers who are willing to work at a discount for the remainder of their extended lives.
  - sitkack 12y ago
    I am sorry ma'am, but you cannot go into retirement and will not be allowed to die, you have an important piece of infrastructure to maintain for the rich.
    - saalweachter 12y ago
      Laugh now, but COBOL programmers are going to live forever.
      - anon4 12y ago
        That's not all that bad, when you think about it. You get to work on a piece of software that is probably older than you and has been hardened over decades, your entire set of responsibilities is light maintenance. This should leave you enough time to also work on other projects, preferably open-source ones and hone your skills in preparation for the day that software gets replaced.
    - clem 12y ago
      Why, oh why, did I ever learn COBOL? Just let me die.
      - Ygg2 12y ago
        There is always the memory erasure pill.
- jodrellblank 12y ago
  Translation: "I'm so jealous of rich people that I want people to die because of it". Edit: See also the SciFi story Trouble with Lichen by John Wyndham - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trouble_with_Lichen http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trouble_with_Lichen
  - Ygg2 12y ago
    No, he presents a valid problem, what if rich people would automatically mean smarter, faster, stronger (harder) people? It would turn the current divide between rich and poor into a chasm. I doubt they wouldn't demonize the poor as the lesser species, much like Americans did to Native Americans and British did to their colonies? Another problem that might present itself is that often people have to die for new ideas to be accepted. Think of racist uncle, but now think he can live for a thousand years. Thinking stuff like that will 'trickle down' is a fallacy. Just look at the American health system.
    - jodrellblank 12y ago
      No, he presents a valid problem, what if rich people would automatically mean smarter, faster, stronger (harder) people? It would turn the current divide between rich and poor into a chasm. He presents an irrelevant problem. OK, what if it would? So what? Right now, do you say "rich people can afford more medicine and thereby live longer, therefore we should not develop medicine for anyone, to keep things fair"? Do you say "rich people can afford more food and live healthier, therefore we should do away with agriculture and everyone should be a subsistence farmer to make it fair"? Do you say "rich people can afford more education about health, and thereby live longer. Therefore we should forbid people from learning to make it fair"? De you say "many poor/working class people have to work as basically indentured servants to survive, therefore they are better off dead"? No, you don't. There is a rift between rich and poor. It's better to have inequality and life, than equality and death. Obviously.
      - Ygg2 12y ago
        I'm not saying that. I said it's best to have equality and life. Please don't warp my words. The GP has a point, if flawed one at that. Extending life by a certain amount isn't bad, it's bad if only the rich can have it. Also directly extending life is a huge boon, I think it puts many other methods (even if it's +20 years) in the dust. The rift between rich and poor needs to close.
- wyager 12y ago
  >You say this as if rejuvenation would be a good thing. Rejuvenation would further divide the poor from the rich You say this as though the primary concern of human existence is economic equality. You're also making the assumption that rejuvenation tech won't be cheap enough for everyone at some point.
  - Glyptodon 12y ago
    You say your spiel as though we haven't spent hundreds of years trying to move beyond dictatorships, empires, and dynasties that treat their citizens as chattel. I don't know if care per se about economic inequality, but a singular group that's able to maintain and extend its status as an insular elite and accrue resources for timescales in excess of those outside its ranks is likely to have interests that become increasingly at odds with those of the everyday human with a shorter lifespan. Now it'd be fine if rejuvenation became cheap and accessible to all, but I think there's a very real danger that it becomes available to an elite first, an elite which would then create barriers to such technology's spread as means of maintaining status.
  - Ygg2 12y ago
    > You're also making the assumption that rejuvenation tech > won't be cheap enough for everyone at some point. You're making an assumption that human life can be valued in terms of money. Take any surgery for instance. They are all life extension technologies. If someone came to you and told you, if you don't pay us 100k you'll die within next 30 years from cancer, would you pay? If the price became 200k would you still pay? If the price became too large to pay, wouldn't you attempt to steal/beg for the money to not die? Some things are too valuable to haggle and you'll accept any price. This is why surgeries cost as much as they do in USA. Stuff like this might be cheap or expensive depending on how it's bargained. Things like this are better left to be mandated by the government.
    - pdonis 12y ago
      > Things like this are better left to be mandated by the government. Only if you assume the government is somehow magically immune to the same problems of asymmetric power relationships that you describe. It isn't. Also, earlier in your post you say: > You're making an assumption that human life can be valued in terms of money. Which is exactly what governments that are tasked with rationing health care have to do. They only have a finite amount of the taxpayers' money to spend, vs. a potentially infinite demand for health care.
- exratione 12y ago
  There is something about the prospect of treating aging that makes people take leave of all economic common sense. Move your argument to 1940 and make it about the prospect for future treatments for heart disease to see how ridiculous it is to suggest that only the wealthy would have access to these medical technologies. One of the interesting things about our age is that medicine is largely flat. Rich people can buy more time from more expensive physicians, and pay people to do their legwork and phone calls for them, and lie in pain in better-looking ward rooms, but there are very, very few forms of medical technology available to them that is unavailable to someone with a few tens of thousands of dollars and the time to make the phone calls and do the legwork. Given that the treatments for human rejuvenation will be infusions (made up in a lab-factory in bulk, or a specialist clinical plant to order, and requiring very little attention from trained staff to administer) rather than surgeries (requiring a great deal of time from specialist staff to carry out), I think that the odds of their remaining expensive for long are minimal. Economies of scale emerge rapidly for such things. (Infusions because these treatments will be things like delivery of engineered bacterial enzymes, gene therapies for mitochondrial DNA, drugs to break down cross-linked proteins, stem cell transplants, and so forth). Look at stem cell transplants as the model of how the price of such therapies rapidly moves downward due to inter-regional competitive pressure for treatments of this nature.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - coldtea 12y ago
    >Move your argument to 1940 and make it about the prospect for future treatments for heart disease to see how ridiculous it is to suggest that only the wealthy would have access to these medical technologies. Actually only the wealthy have access for heart disease even know. Vast masses in developing and third world countries don't have access to such treatments.
    - leoedin 12y ago
      The grandparent of your comment said: > Wealthy dynasties would continue to acquire wealth (because wealth builds more wealth), while one of the current rebalancing mechanisms (people dying without heirs) would be significantly reduced or even completely disappear. Which means that in the context of this conversation, "wealthy" means the extremely wealthy members of society (the 1%). If you define "wealthy" as meaning anyone living in the developed world, then maybe this is true. In the context of this conversation though, medical technologies are available to broad swathes of society. In countries with socialised medical systems, heart disease treatment which is close to the forefront of medical developments is available to everyone, regardless of means. Extreme wealth will buy you better medical treatment, but only marginally. You can afford more experienced surgeons and the latest machinery and drugs, but within 5 years that machinery drugs will be widely available.
- carbocation 12y ago
  The same is true of all medical therapy to some extent.
- chongli 12y ago
  Rejuvenation would further divide the poor from the rich, as the poor are unable to afford such treatment. The problem with inequality is not that rich people exist or that they live powerful, opulent lifestyles. The problem with inequality is poverty. Shutting down amazing research such as this is not going to solve poverty. To argue otherwise risks running afoul of the fallacy of relative privation. The scientists working on this would not be able to solve the issues of poverty and inequality anyway since it has absolutely nothing to do with their area of expertise.
  - mcguire 12y ago
    Do be so kind as to wake me up when the leading cause of death is la revolucion.
- JoshTriplett 12y ago
  > You say this as if rejuvenation would be a good thing. Your response implies that any of the concerns you raised is sufficiently large that letting a hundred people die every minute is better. Yes, curing death would raise other problems. Bring them on.
  - sspiff 12y ago
    Your argument makes sense. The problem is that the funds raised for research have no incentive to solve those issues.
  - collyw 12y ago
    Serously? I think more emphasis should be put on reduction of suffering rather than number of years lived. It is kind of cool that we are beginning to get rid of many diseases and people are living longer, but the people doing such research so never seem to give much thought to overpopulation and limited resources. Imagine for example that no one dies ever, as of tomorrow, do we think the world would be a more pleasant place in 100 years time? More people, more pollution, less resources to be shared. It seems obvious to me that the environment is struggling with the current number of people (climate change, seas being over fished, oil that is going to run out relatively soon....) How will it be if we have even more people?
    - JoshTriplett 12y ago
      > It is kind of cool that we are beginning to get rid of many diseases and people are living longer, but the people doing such research so never seem to give much thought to overpopulation and limited resources. So you'd like to kill 100 people per minute to solve overpopulation and limited resources?
      - lutusp 12y ago
        That was the conclusion you came to on the basis of the OP's remarks? What about free access to birth control methods? Are you aware that fertility control is a huge political issue in the U.S., complete with the occasional murder and terrorist attacks on doctor's offices? Unless, of course, you regard birth control as "killing".
- 3pt14159 12y ago
  Oh please. The rich always pay for the research and advances that the poor eventually get for commodity prices. And even if we fully cure death by aging, death by accidents puts the average lifespan somewhere in the 1000 to 2000 year period, given the drastically dropping birth rates in the first world, we'll have more than enough time to reach space or colonize the oceans, or build low orbit cities. With every new 1000 people we get 10 new scientists, 10 new engineers, 10 new software guys; and technological advancement is easily sharable.
- Houshalter 12y ago
  Healthcare is free if not heavily subsidized in much of the world already. And there is no reason such a technology would be more expensive than existing health care. But why am I even bothering to say this. You're literally arguing it's bad to save people's lives or advance medicine. Even if it really did only benefit rich people, so what? Rich people dying doesn't benefit poor people in any significant way. See zero-sum bias (http://lesswrong.com/lw/2gd/fight_zerosum_bias/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/2gd/fight_zerosum_bias/). "I want to see rich people suffer" rather than "I want to see poor people benefit."
- fsk 12y ago
  Even if it were possible to 100% eliminate death by aging for $1, it's statistically impossible for everyone to live forever.
  - Crito 12y ago
    I wonder what implications immortality would have on the Doomsday Argument: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_argument http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_argument
    - Ygg2 12y ago
      I think there would be some kind of semi-voluntary exile or drastic reduction in number of children or mandatory death sentence. Having thousands of immortal beings, is the best way to colonize the stars. Just fire them at Mars and let them multiply there.
      - fsk 12y ago
        The problem is that it costs a LOT OF ENERGY to launch someone into orbit. (plus food, oxygen, etc.)
        zo1 12y ago
        Hence why they are going to Mars and the rest of space: to find more of it. Please, pay attention, try to keep up!
      - Crito 12y ago
        Hmm, this reminds me of Asimov's Robots/Empire/Foundation universe. In this universe, before the events of Foundation, there are two main waves of human expansion. During the first, humans populate and terraform a few dozen planets. By tightly regulating their man-made planets, automating everything, and having excessively tight import restrictions, they live better lives than those packed in on Earth. Their lifespans increase dramatically, and their birth rates drop to sustenance levels. These factors create a strong cultural divide between them and the humans who are still on Earth. Eventually the humans on Earth get their act together and begin expanding throughout the galaxy again. This time however they do it quick and dirty. Short lives, lots of kids. Their population growth remains unbounded while the initial wave of human settlers becomes increasingly isolationist. Eventually the people and worlds in the first wave of expansion are forgotten.
- option_greek 12y ago
  It's not the poor or the rich that matter. Its the advancement of human race that matters. Just think of scientists being able to use their experience for ever in pushing the boundaries. We probably won't even have to be earth bound anymore and can expand to other planets due quickening of scientific pace.
  - collyw 12y ago
    "Its the advancement of human race that matters." Is it? Its all going to fizzle out anyway.
- zo1 12y ago
  Looks like someone has been watching too many Matt Damon movies. <ducks> On a more serious, less snarky note, though: Why are you so scared of there even being a "wealthy dynasty"? For that matter, you and people with similar views as you are yet to prove that it would even be a bad thing. I'm curious how you arrive at such a conclusion; step me through it? "Let's just hope we figure out that space thing before they ever figure out rejuvenation." Doom-sayers were spreading similar fud about food and population growth barely a century ago, and look how that turned out. Science is always a few steps away from fixing a plethora of the world's ills. Precisely as the above food-dilemma shows. And yet on the other side, you would seek to deny science power to prevent such things from actually being a problem? Sort of a self-fulfilling prophesy you have there, buddy.
- cwp 12y ago
  Rejuvenation would be a good thing. It may not be available to everyone immediately, but that's true of every technology. What makes you think this would only be available to the rich? That could happen, but it's not a given. The actual techniques that we're talking about might not be expensive. The original article mentioned saving stem cells extracted early in life and reintroducing them in old age. That sounds like something that could be done cheaply on a large scale. And even if it is expensive, we don't have to make everyone pay out of their own pocket. Redistribution is a dirty word in the US, but that's not true everywhere in the world. So yes, there may be social issues to deal with, but that's not a reason not to develop the technology. It's a reason to develop our society.
- ufmace 12y ago
  The trouble with the "space travel will save us from overpopulation" argument is that, no matter what technology we come up with in the medium-term future, it is difficult to imagine ever solving overpopulation problems with emigration of any type - we just can't move enough people fast enough. As far as I know, in the entire history of the world, we have never moved enough of a population of healthy, established citizens of any region to alleviate any overpopulation issues. Anything even kind of like that mostly involves heavily threatened populations relocating under duress with little more than what they can carry. If they're lucky, they might manage to settle somewhere that will help them get back on their feet. There was an interesting passage in the Red Mars series about this. On their Earth, then had 11 (!) operational space elevators and a severe overpopulation problem. The numbers were all theoretical, of course, but they calculated that, even with 11 space elevators working full-tilt on sending people off the planet, they still wouldn't come close to making a dent in the world population. It's hard to imagine any kind of technology that could actually move and settle people off of Earth by the billions.
  - AnthonyMouse 12y ago
    We could combine population controls with emigration incentives. If you want to have more than two kids, you can... on Mars. And here's a free ticket.
dekhn 12y ago
So, as cancer is one of the leadng causes of death, your prediction implies that population (especially older population) will increase. Or people will die of other things. That's an important thing to be prepared for (the other thing people die of in first world countries is heart disease). Anyway, I suspect the future won't be quite so rosy as you predict. Many people have predicted revolutions in cancer treatment, but realistically, we've only made incremental (great, but only incremental) progress.
- embwbam 12y ago
  Have you read The Emperor of all Maladies? The impression I got from the book was that we are finally beginning to understand the mechanisms behind specific cancers and create therapies to fix them. It seems like we are close to beating cancers one at a time with targeted drugs.
  - dekhn 12y ago
    Yes I have read it. PS: I'm a scientist and studyng cancer is part of what I do. Please read "Molecular Biology of the Cell". yes, we're learning a lot, but no, the promised revolutions aren't forthcoming. Not only are there technical reasons why it's unlikely we'll see a very near term revolution in treatment. There are huge political, monetary and bureaucratic reasons, too. They are just as important to understand as the technical reasons.
    - daeken 12y ago
      From the technical side of things, where do you see the biggest challenges today? Where do you see the biggest potential wins? What are we not looking at deeply enough? This is a field that deeply interests me, but my knowledge is effectively zero. I'd love to get your insight, as one that is on the ground in the field.
      - leeoniya 12y ago
        from my recent Human Genetics course, I learned quite a lot about what cancer actually is. It helped a great deal to understand why there's no "cure" and treatments are usually brute force and imprecise. Cancer is basically a generic term for the loss of a cell's division control cycle - the cell starts to divide uncontrollably, forms tumors, metastasizes, causes neovascularization to feed itself, etc. This loss of control can happen for so many different reasons related to the quantities and ratios of proteins synthesized that each cancer is like a separate class of disease that needs its own treatment. It's the same reason that there's no single fix for "car is broken". Except our understanding of this car is orders of magnitude more limited than one that we designed ourselves.
briantakita 12y ago
> Cancer therapies on the other hand are going to improve enormously in the near future as forms of narrowly targeted cell destruction take over from the present standards of chemotherapy and radiotherapy, coupled with greatly improved early detection There have also been innovations in holistic care, including cases of cancer remission. Promising aspects of holistic care is it's relatively inexpensive, easy to train practitioners, & covers a wide swath of healthy living. Some of it is incorrect and some of it works. I trust that our culture will iterate & hone in on the good practices.

sspiff 12y ago

You say this as if rejuvenation would be a good thing. Rejuvenation would further divide the poor from the rich, as the poor are unable to afford such treatment. Wealthy dynasties would continue to acquire wealth (because wealth builds more wealth), while one of the current rebalancing mechanisms (people dying without heirs) would be significantly reduced or even completely disappear. Furthermore, we'd have even more competition over the limited amount of resources and habitable land than we have today. Let's just hope we figure out that space thing before they ever figure out rejuvenation.

rch 12y ago
Don't worry, I'm sure there will be rejuvenation visas for engineers who are willing to work at a discount for the remainder of their extended lives.
- sitkack 12y ago
  I am sorry ma'am, but you cannot go into retirement and will not be allowed to die, you have an important piece of infrastructure to maintain for the rich.
  - saalweachter 12y ago
    Laugh now, but COBOL programmers are going to live forever.
    - anon4 12y ago
      That's not all that bad, when you think about it. You get to work on a piece of software that is probably older than you and has been hardened over decades, your entire set of responsibilities is light maintenance. This should leave you enough time to also work on other projects, preferably open-source ones and hone your skills in preparation for the day that software gets replaced.
  - clem 12y ago
    Why, oh why, did I ever learn COBOL? Just let me die.
    - Ygg2 12y ago
      There is always the memory erasure pill.
jodrellblank 12y ago
Translation: "I'm so jealous of rich people that I want people to die because of it". Edit: See also the SciFi story Trouble with Lichen by John Wyndham - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trouble_with_Lichen http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trouble_with_Lichen
- Ygg2 12y ago
  No, he presents a valid problem, what if rich people would automatically mean smarter, faster, stronger (harder) people? It would turn the current divide between rich and poor into a chasm. I doubt they wouldn't demonize the poor as the lesser species, much like Americans did to Native Americans and British did to their colonies? Another problem that might present itself is that often people have to die for new ideas to be accepted. Think of racist uncle, but now think he can live for a thousand years. Thinking stuff like that will 'trickle down' is a fallacy. Just look at the American health system.
  - jodrellblank 12y ago
    No, he presents a valid problem, what if rich people would automatically mean smarter, faster, stronger (harder) people? It would turn the current divide between rich and poor into a chasm. He presents an irrelevant problem. OK, what if it would? So what? Right now, do you say "rich people can afford more medicine and thereby live longer, therefore we should not develop medicine for anyone, to keep things fair"? Do you say "rich people can afford more food and live healthier, therefore we should do away with agriculture and everyone should be a subsistence farmer to make it fair"? Do you say "rich people can afford more education about health, and thereby live longer. Therefore we should forbid people from learning to make it fair"? De you say "many poor/working class people have to work as basically indentured servants to survive, therefore they are better off dead"? No, you don't. There is a rift between rich and poor. It's better to have inequality and life, than equality and death. Obviously.
    - Ygg2 12y ago
      I'm not saying that. I said it's best to have equality and life. Please don't warp my words. The GP has a point, if flawed one at that. Extending life by a certain amount isn't bad, it's bad if only the rich can have it. Also directly extending life is a huge boon, I think it puts many other methods (even if it's +20 years) in the dust. The rift between rich and poor needs to close.
wyager 12y ago
>You say this as if rejuvenation would be a good thing. Rejuvenation would further divide the poor from the rich You say this as though the primary concern of human existence is economic equality. You're also making the assumption that rejuvenation tech won't be cheap enough for everyone at some point.
- Glyptodon 12y ago
  You say your spiel as though we haven't spent hundreds of years trying to move beyond dictatorships, empires, and dynasties that treat their citizens as chattel. I don't know if care per se about economic inequality, but a singular group that's able to maintain and extend its status as an insular elite and accrue resources for timescales in excess of those outside its ranks is likely to have interests that become increasingly at odds with those of the everyday human with a shorter lifespan. Now it'd be fine if rejuvenation became cheap and accessible to all, but I think there's a very real danger that it becomes available to an elite first, an elite which would then create barriers to such technology's spread as means of maintaining status.
- Ygg2 12y ago
  > You're also making the assumption that rejuvenation tech > won't be cheap enough for everyone at some point. You're making an assumption that human life can be valued in terms of money. Take any surgery for instance. They are all life extension technologies. If someone came to you and told you, if you don't pay us 100k you'll die within next 30 years from cancer, would you pay? If the price became 200k would you still pay? If the price became too large to pay, wouldn't you attempt to steal/beg for the money to not die? Some things are too valuable to haggle and you'll accept any price. This is why surgeries cost as much as they do in USA. Stuff like this might be cheap or expensive depending on how it's bargained. Things like this are better left to be mandated by the government.
  - pdonis 12y ago
    > Things like this are better left to be mandated by the government. Only if you assume the government is somehow magically immune to the same problems of asymmetric power relationships that you describe. It isn't. Also, earlier in your post you say: > You're making an assumption that human life can be valued in terms of money. Which is exactly what governments that are tasked with rationing health care have to do. They only have a finite amount of the taxpayers' money to spend, vs. a potentially infinite demand for health care.
exratione 12y ago
There is something about the prospect of treating aging that makes people take leave of all economic common sense. Move your argument to 1940 and make it about the prospect for future treatments for heart disease to see how ridiculous it is to suggest that only the wealthy would have access to these medical technologies. One of the interesting things about our age is that medicine is largely flat. Rich people can buy more time from more expensive physicians, and pay people to do their legwork and phone calls for them, and lie in pain in better-looking ward rooms, but there are very, very few forms of medical technology available to them that is unavailable to someone with a few tens of thousands of dollars and the time to make the phone calls and do the legwork. Given that the treatments for human rejuvenation will be infusions (made up in a lab-factory in bulk, or a specialist clinical plant to order, and requiring very little attention from trained staff to administer) rather than surgeries (requiring a great deal of time from specialist staff to carry out), I think that the odds of their remaining expensive for long are minimal. Economies of scale emerge rapidly for such things. (Infusions because these treatments will be things like delivery of engineered bacterial enzymes, gene therapies for mitochondrial DNA, drugs to break down cross-linked proteins, stem cell transplants, and so forth). Look at stem cell transplants as the model of how the price of such therapies rapidly moves downward due to inter-regional competitive pressure for treatments of this nature.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- coldtea 12y ago
  >Move your argument to 1940 and make it about the prospect for future treatments for heart disease to see how ridiculous it is to suggest that only the wealthy would have access to these medical technologies. Actually only the wealthy have access for heart disease even know. Vast masses in developing and third world countries don't have access to such treatments.
  - leoedin 12y ago
    The grandparent of your comment said: > Wealthy dynasties would continue to acquire wealth (because wealth builds more wealth), while one of the current rebalancing mechanisms (people dying without heirs) would be significantly reduced or even completely disappear. Which means that in the context of this conversation, "wealthy" means the extremely wealthy members of society (the 1%). If you define "wealthy" as meaning anyone living in the developed world, then maybe this is true. In the context of this conversation though, medical technologies are available to broad swathes of society. In countries with socialised medical systems, heart disease treatment which is close to the forefront of medical developments is available to everyone, regardless of means. Extreme wealth will buy you better medical treatment, but only marginally. You can afford more experienced surgeons and the latest machinery and drugs, but within 5 years that machinery drugs will be widely available.
carbocation 12y ago
The same is true of all medical therapy to some extent.
chongli 12y ago
Rejuvenation would further divide the poor from the rich, as the poor are unable to afford such treatment. The problem with inequality is not that rich people exist or that they live powerful, opulent lifestyles. The problem with inequality is poverty. Shutting down amazing research such as this is not going to solve poverty. To argue otherwise risks running afoul of the fallacy of relative privation. The scientists working on this would not be able to solve the issues of poverty and inequality anyway since it has absolutely nothing to do with their area of expertise.
- mcguire 12y ago
  Do be so kind as to wake me up when the leading cause of death is la revolucion.
JoshTriplett 12y ago
> You say this as if rejuvenation would be a good thing. Your response implies that any of the concerns you raised is sufficiently large that letting a hundred people die every minute is better. Yes, curing death would raise other problems. Bring them on.
- sspiff 12y ago
  Your argument makes sense. The problem is that the funds raised for research have no incentive to solve those issues.
- collyw 12y ago
  Serously? I think more emphasis should be put on reduction of suffering rather than number of years lived. It is kind of cool that we are beginning to get rid of many diseases and people are living longer, but the people doing such research so never seem to give much thought to overpopulation and limited resources. Imagine for example that no one dies ever, as of tomorrow, do we think the world would be a more pleasant place in 100 years time? More people, more pollution, less resources to be shared. It seems obvious to me that the environment is struggling with the current number of people (climate change, seas being over fished, oil that is going to run out relatively soon....) How will it be if we have even more people?
  - JoshTriplett 12y ago
    > It is kind of cool that we are beginning to get rid of many diseases and people are living longer, but the people doing such research so never seem to give much thought to overpopulation and limited resources. So you'd like to kill 100 people per minute to solve overpopulation and limited resources?
    - lutusp 12y ago
      That was the conclusion you came to on the basis of the OP's remarks? What about free access to birth control methods? Are you aware that fertility control is a huge political issue in the U.S., complete with the occasional murder and terrorist attacks on doctor's offices? Unless, of course, you regard birth control as "killing".
3pt14159 12y ago
Oh please. The rich always pay for the research and advances that the poor eventually get for commodity prices. And even if we fully cure death by aging, death by accidents puts the average lifespan somewhere in the 1000 to 2000 year period, given the drastically dropping birth rates in the first world, we'll have more than enough time to reach space or colonize the oceans, or build low orbit cities. With every new 1000 people we get 10 new scientists, 10 new engineers, 10 new software guys; and technological advancement is easily sharable.
Houshalter 12y ago
Healthcare is free if not heavily subsidized in much of the world already. And there is no reason such a technology would be more expensive than existing health care. But why am I even bothering to say this. You're literally arguing it's bad to save people's lives or advance medicine. Even if it really did only benefit rich people, so what? Rich people dying doesn't benefit poor people in any significant way. See zero-sum bias (http://lesswrong.com/lw/2gd/fight_zerosum_bias/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/2gd/fight_zerosum_bias/). "I want to see rich people suffer" rather than "I want to see poor people benefit."
fsk 12y ago
Even if it were possible to 100% eliminate death by aging for $1, it's statistically impossible for everyone to live forever.
- Crito 12y ago
  I wonder what implications immortality would have on the Doomsday Argument: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_argument http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_argument
  - Ygg2 12y ago
    I think there would be some kind of semi-voluntary exile or drastic reduction in number of children or mandatory death sentence. Having thousands of immortal beings, is the best way to colonize the stars. Just fire them at Mars and let them multiply there.
    - fsk 12y ago
      The problem is that it costs a LOT OF ENERGY to launch someone into orbit. (plus food, oxygen, etc.)
      - zo1 12y ago
        Hence why they are going to Mars and the rest of space: to find more of it. Please, pay attention, try to keep up!
    - Crito 12y ago
      Hmm, this reminds me of Asimov's Robots/Empire/Foundation universe. In this universe, before the events of Foundation, there are two main waves of human expansion. During the first, humans populate and terraform a few dozen planets. By tightly regulating their man-made planets, automating everything, and having excessively tight import restrictions, they live better lives than those packed in on Earth. Their lifespans increase dramatically, and their birth rates drop to sustenance levels. These factors create a strong cultural divide between them and the humans who are still on Earth. Eventually the humans on Earth get their act together and begin expanding throughout the galaxy again. This time however they do it quick and dirty. Short lives, lots of kids. Their population growth remains unbounded while the initial wave of human settlers becomes increasingly isolationist. Eventually the people and worlds in the first wave of expansion are forgotten.
option_greek 12y ago
It's not the poor or the rich that matter. Its the advancement of human race that matters. Just think of scientists being able to use their experience for ever in pushing the boundaries. We probably won't even have to be earth bound anymore and can expand to other planets due quickening of scientific pace.
- collyw 12y ago
  "Its the advancement of human race that matters." Is it? Its all going to fizzle out anyway.
zo1 12y ago
Looks like someone has been watching too many Matt Damon movies. <ducks> On a more serious, less snarky note, though: Why are you so scared of there even being a "wealthy dynasty"? For that matter, you and people with similar views as you are yet to prove that it would even be a bad thing. I'm curious how you arrive at such a conclusion; step me through it? "Let's just hope we figure out that space thing before they ever figure out rejuvenation." Doom-sayers were spreading similar fud about food and population growth barely a century ago, and look how that turned out. Science is always a few steps away from fixing a plethora of the world's ills. Precisely as the above food-dilemma shows. And yet on the other side, you would seek to deny science power to prevent such things from actually being a problem? Sort of a self-fulfilling prophesy you have there, buddy.
cwp 12y ago
Rejuvenation would be a good thing. It may not be available to everyone immediately, but that's true of every technology. What makes you think this would only be available to the rich? That could happen, but it's not a given. The actual techniques that we're talking about might not be expensive. The original article mentioned saving stem cells extracted early in life and reintroducing them in old age. That sounds like something that could be done cheaply on a large scale. And even if it is expensive, we don't have to make everyone pay out of their own pocket. Redistribution is a dirty word in the US, but that's not true everywhere in the world. So yes, there may be social issues to deal with, but that's not a reason not to develop the technology. It's a reason to develop our society.
ufmace 12y ago
The trouble with the "space travel will save us from overpopulation" argument is that, no matter what technology we come up with in the medium-term future, it is difficult to imagine ever solving overpopulation problems with emigration of any type - we just can't move enough people fast enough. As far as I know, in the entire history of the world, we have never moved enough of a population of healthy, established citizens of any region to alleviate any overpopulation issues. Anything even kind of like that mostly involves heavily threatened populations relocating under duress with little more than what they can carry. If they're lucky, they might manage to settle somewhere that will help them get back on their feet. There was an interesting passage in the Red Mars series about this. On their Earth, then had 11 (!) operational space elevators and a severe overpopulation problem. The numbers were all theoretical, of course, but they calculated that, even with 11 space elevators working full-tilt on sending people off the planet, they still wouldn't come close to making a dent in the world population. It's hard to imagine any kind of technology that could actually move and settle people off of Earth by the billions.
- AnthonyMouse 12y ago
  We could combine population controls with emigration incentives. If you want to have more than two kids, you can... on Mars. And here's a free ticket.

dekhn 12y ago

So, as cancer is one of the leadng causes of death, your prediction implies that population (especially older population) will increase. Or people will die of other things. That's an important thing to be prepared for (the other thing people die of in first world countries is heart disease). Anyway, I suspect the future won't be quite so rosy as you predict. Many people have predicted revolutions in cancer treatment, but realistically, we've only made incremental (great, but only incremental) progress.

embwbam 12y ago
Have you read The Emperor of all Maladies? The impression I got from the book was that we are finally beginning to understand the mechanisms behind specific cancers and create therapies to fix them. It seems like we are close to beating cancers one at a time with targeted drugs.
- dekhn 12y ago
  Yes I have read it. PS: I'm a scientist and studyng cancer is part of what I do. Please read "Molecular Biology of the Cell". yes, we're learning a lot, but no, the promised revolutions aren't forthcoming. Not only are there technical reasons why it's unlikely we'll see a very near term revolution in treatment. There are huge political, monetary and bureaucratic reasons, too. They are just as important to understand as the technical reasons.
  - daeken 12y ago
    From the technical side of things, where do you see the biggest challenges today? Where do you see the biggest potential wins? What are we not looking at deeply enough? This is a field that deeply interests me, but my knowledge is effectively zero. I'd love to get your insight, as one that is on the ground in the field.
    - leeoniya 12y ago
      from my recent Human Genetics course, I learned quite a lot about what cancer actually is. It helped a great deal to understand why there's no "cure" and treatments are usually brute force and imprecise. Cancer is basically a generic term for the loss of a cell's division control cycle - the cell starts to divide uncontrollably, forms tumors, metastasizes, causes neovascularization to feed itself, etc. This loss of control can happen for so many different reasons related to the quantities and ratios of proteins synthesized that each cancer is like a separate class of disease that needs its own treatment. It's the same reason that there's no single fix for "car is broken". Except our understanding of this car is orders of magnitude more limited than one that we designed ourselves.

briantakita 12y ago

> Cancer therapies on the other hand are going to improve enormously in the near future as forms of narrowly targeted cell destruction take over from the present standards of chemotherapy and radiotherapy, coupled with greatly improved early detection There have also been innovations in holistic care, including cases of cancer remission. Promising aspects of holistic care is it's relatively inexpensive, easy to train practitioners, & covers a wide swath of healthy living. Some of it is incorrect and some of it works. I trust that our culture will iterate & hone in on the good practices.