What is Digg?169 Comments
- Bluetar, on 12/02/2008, -0/+32Oh man hurry up you guys, I'm not getting any younger!
- Ro4ddog, on 12/01/2008, -2/+27Personally, I think that the coming Singularity will be our salvation from death and aging. Interesting read nonetheless.
- Kumah, on 12/02/2008, -1/+21I don't want to die. It's not that I'm afraid of death, I figure that once I'm dead I'm not going to care so it won't matter. But I want to see the wonders of the universe and see what we discover.
I doubt I'll live forever, but a few thousand would be nice.
I'd settle for a hundred or two though. - Leo21k, on 12/01/2008, -0/+19Hope they come out with this before I'm an old man and that I can afford it.
- rolf, on 12/02/2008, -1/+15Say that when you are about to die of old age.
Everybody wants just one more day, week, month, year. Indefinitely. - subliminalurge, on 12/02/2008, -0/+11You wouldn't be immortal. Stepping out in front of a bus would still be just as lethal as ever.
Plus, by my understanding of what he's proposing is that, at whatever point, you could just discontinue receiving treatments and resume aging as normal. (Could be wrong on that point, haven't had time to read his stuff as thoroughly as I'd like just yet.) - inactive, on 12/02/2008, -3/+13Common concerns:
Overpopulation : http://www.mfoundation.org/index.php?pagename=conc ...
Tyranny and tyrants: http://www.mfoundation.org/index.php?pagename=conc ...
Only the rich will get any: http://www.mfoundation.org/index.php?pagename=conc ...
There are more important things: http://www.mfoundation.org/index.php?pagename=conc ...
We shouldn't because it is prideful: http://www.mfoundation.org/index.php?pagename=conc ... - vermontr, on 12/02/2008, -0/+10Is it just me or do all the "anti-aging" scientists have bitchin' beards?
- messiah420, on 12/02/2008, -0/+8And force us off the planet en mass. A major contributor to us becoming a star civilization as we must.
- AmnesiacJack, on 12/02/2008, -0/+8Like I keep telling my self and all my friends roughly my age, I'm 24 and I think all we have to do is make it to roughly 60 - 65. By then hopefully technology and medicine will advance to a point that aging is either gone or we find a way to transfer consciousness.
Some people laugh and say they don't want to live forever. Good for them I for one am not excited about the unknown of death and hope to stave it off for as long as I can. I'd like to last long enough to see other planets, to enjoy a real holodeck, to maybe know world peace.
Of course mankind has to last that long but once again I have faith that calmer minds will prevail. - khaavren, on 12/02/2008, -0/+8Was quoted already a day or two ago, but seems more fitting here: "Speak for yourself sir, I plan on living forever."
- inactive, on 12/02/2008, -0/+8Immortal, for peace sake no. A few millenia should be more than enough.
- Key2gb, on 12/02/2008, -0/+7watch his TED Talk
- apena89, on 12/02/2008, -0/+7I wish i could live long enough to pursue multiple careers and do all sorts of cool things. But I sure as hell do not want to be immortal.
I want my life span to be that of the average Protoss. - rolf, on 12/02/2008, -1/+8Turducken brain?
- thezackisback89, on 12/02/2008, -0/+7Hey...
If he drank from the Holy Grail, how is it that he looked 20 years older in Indy IV?
WTF? - RobotBuddha, on 12/02/2008, -0/+7I used to be really hopeful this was going to happen in my lifetime. Ten years of watching the speed of progress has made me fairly certain it's not. There's just not enough interest to put proper funding into this kind of research, and the legal machine makes it move even slower.
- inactive, on 12/02/2008, -0/+6At the rate things are going we'll have the same overpopulation anyways. Will THAT be an argument to start executing people to make room? Whats this obsession with executing people?
- whoreable, on 12/02/2008, -2/+8Dugg for usage of bootstrap.
- inactive, on 12/02/2008, -0/+6*sigh*
There's not the faintest chance of these therapies being restricted by ability to pay for more than a few years after they arrive. There are many reasons why I'm so sure of this. Here I'll give four of them.
The first reason is a slightly dark one. When a cure for aging is developed, people will want it really quite badly -- more than they want cures for other things that can only extend their lives by a few years. The problem with democracy is that it only works well for issues that a lot of people really really care about, enough to determine whom they vote for. Contemporary medicine just doesn't quite achieve that -- the economy always beats it. But that won't be true of a cure for aging. As soon as a real cure becomes widely anticipated -- let alone actually developed -- it will become impossible to get elected other than on a platform incorporating a Manhattan project to expedite a cure, both in terms of its development and in terms of its dissemination. Patents that seem in danger of slowing down the push towards universal access will simply be subject to compulsory purchase by governments (at a very hefty price, of course, but compulsory nonetheless). All the laws that we currently see impeding such progress will be torn up as quickly as turns out to be necessary. This will happen not only because of the democratic process (which works only at a national level) but also of the global political process. Since 9/11 there is a good understanding that making a lot of people very angry is a bad idea for everyone, and it will therefore be seen to be in the enlightened self-interest of the industrialised world to make rejuvenation therapies available to all (at a price they can pay, even if that means free) as fast as possible, After all, the point of buying rejuvenation therapies is to live a long time, not to get blown up by someone from the other side of the world who resents you and your compatriots because they can't afford those therapies.
The second reason is less threatening. There will be a lead-time of at least a decade, which I call the War On Aging, starting with the achievement of results in mice impressive enough to shake society out of its current fatalism and make people really want to cure aging as soon as possible. At that point, mayhem will ensue -- society will be turned upside-down in a million ways, mostly revolving around increased risk-aversion when so many more years are at stake -- but the big thing of relevance here is that (as noted above) it will become politically mandatory to throw serious money, taxpayers' money, at hastening the end of age-related death. The phrase "War On Aging" is appropriate, unlike "War On Cancer", because people will want to make sacrifices on the scale normally only seen in wartime in order to end the slaughter as soon as possible. The main such sacrifice will be in simple taxation, to pay for training of a staggering number of medical personnel, to deliver these therapies ASAP when they arrive, and also to provide much more thorough traditional medical care in the interim so as to give people as much chance as possible of still being in a reasonably healthy state at that time. That means that by the time rejuvenation therapies actually arrive, society will already have done what was necessary to ensure that they will be free at the point of delivery to all who are aged enough to need them.
The third reason is really a reinforcement of the second one, in that it is a way to help you see that the development I've just described is not at all utopian - in fact, it's completely certain to occur. It's a purely hypothetical scenario, whose consequences in terms of society's reaction are obvious and whose similarity in all relevant respects to the War on Aging is equally obvious. Here goes.
HIV is a virus that we still don't know how to eliminate from the body, nor to vaccinate against (i.e., prevent uninfected people from becoming infected). What we do now have drugs to do is suppress HIV thoroughly enough that it never proceeds to full-blown AIDS, even though it stays in the body forever. But those drugs are pretty expensive, especially in wealthy nations where drug companies are allowed to charge extremely high markups to recoup the investment of developing and testing them.
So here's my scenario: HIV mutates to become as infectious as influenza, spreading by air. What would society do?
Let's first explore what this would mean in terms of disease and mortality if society didn't do very much at all. Many viruses are as infectious as flu, but they fall into two categories: either (a) they make the infected person only briefly infectious, because the person either dies or their immune system eliminates the infectious agent from their body, or (b) they infect the body permanently but with no significant symptoms. The diseases you know most about are in category (a) -- influenza is one. A few things are in category (b) -- the most important is cytomegalovirus (CMV). And I'm sure you know, from the news stories about avian flu and its potential to cause a pandemic, that viruses mutate unpredictably to much more dangerous forms. So the scenario I'm asking you to consider is not ridiculously implausible. (Well, luckily it actually is, because HIV is "the wrong sort of virus" to be able to mutate in this way -- but that shouldn't stop you from considering this scenario and seeing what it means for how people would react to the announcement of successful "robust mouse rejuvenation".)
If this happened, we can be quite sure that virtually everyone in the world would have HIV in only a few years. Most people have CMV, and it's not as transmissible as flu, so this is not a controversial suggestion.
So, time to answer the question: what would we do? Well, one possibility is that we might ramp up the production and administration of anti-HIV drugs so that everyone got them. Is this financially plausible? Well, I've done the arithmetic for you, and it turns out that the cost in the USA would be just about the same as the cost of the war in Iraq. Quite manageable, in other words. The calculations for the rest of the world are not much different; don't forget that the fact that in sub-Saharan Africa far more people have HIV is irrelevant here, because in this scenario everyone everywhere has it.
I contend that it's perfectly clear that the world would respond to the scenario of universal HIV by ploughing the necessary funds into giving everyone effective anti-HIV drugs. Now, let's return to aging: what is the difference? Remember that I'm considering here the point where we've obtained results in mice that convince the scientific community that it's only a matter of time before we can fix aging in humans, and that it could be only a decade or two.
Well, are there any relevant differences? I suggest not. The fact that the anti-aging therapies don't yet exist won't do, because the ability to manufacture enough drugs also doesn't exist in my HIV scenario. I conclude, therefore, that society will not hesitate at all to spend the money (i.e., to elect governments who will levy the taxes to obtain the money) to make aging optional for everyone, irrespective of ability to pay.
Finally, here's my fourth reason for rejecting the "inequality of access" argument against developing anti-aging therapies. This one is a rather dry academic argument, but hey, some of those reading this may think of themselves as philosophers and prefer arguments like this.
The question before us is: even supposing that the above economic and sociological arguments are wrong, and that these therapies (if and when developed) will for many years (or possibly even forever) be available only to a subset of humanity, is it better to develop them and put up with that inequality of access, or is it better to avoid doing so in order to avoid such a divisive situation?
In order to answer this question, I'm going to introduce a third scenario. This third scenario is not a realistic one, but it doesn't need to be for my purposes, because my purpose is to use it as an intermediate between the two alternative realistic scenarios between which we wish to discriminate. In other words, I'm going to present a scenario that is unequivocally better than the scenario of never developing these therapies, and that is also unequivocally worse than the scenario of developing them and making them available to as many people as possible even though, for some time or possibly forever, we can't provide them to everyone. Since merit is transitive, that will suffice to show that developing the therapies to defeat aging is better than not doing so even if those therapies will temporarily (or possibly forever) be available only to the rich.
It's very simple: the scenario is that we develop these therapies as fast as we can, but we don't actually let anyone use them until we've made them cheap enough that we can give them to everyone old enough to need them.
Need I elaborate? I don't think so. The comparison between this scenario and the one of not developing the therapies at all eliminates the issue of unequal access, because in both scenarios access is equal. Thus, it's clear that this hypothetical scenario is better than not developing the therapies at all. Similarly, the comparison between the delayed-access scenario and the option of giving people access as soon as we can despite inequality is also clear: to delay access would be to condemn people to an unnecessarily early death. - starslinger72, on 12/02/2008, -2/+8Mmmm zombie baby back ribs....
- drowningfish, on 12/02/2008, -2/+7There really isn't anything to "come out with" here. The author was using a logical argument by drawing a comparison between the progressiveness of technological growth and the science needed for cell-based repair treatments (treatment 1 would be given to a patient, then 20 years later treatment 2 will be applied which would be a highly refined process, etc. As humans we can "buy" our time to basically leap-frog our way away from death.).
He is not being taken quite seriously right now for reasons ranging from ethical concerns to the very veracity of his theory; it is basically untested.
The article was very interesting though and a good read. - wissler, on 12/02/2008, -0/+5Some of us actually think that there are infinite possibilities that we would love to explore, even in the realm of work. But yeah, being a plumber for 1000 years would get pretty boring.
- TAGline, on 12/02/2008, -1/+6Don't be silly, by that logic we would have no medication at all. People will pay big for even minor increases in life duration or to prevent tiny risks. 20 years extra will have people lining up around the block.
Longer "youthful" lives means more work years, which means more cash too. Getting a "life" mortgage probably wouldn't be uncommon if treatments were hugely expensive. Buy a house and pay it off by 60, then divert those mortgage payments to your life extensions. - FasterGun, on 12/02/2008, -0/+5http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/aubrey_de_grey_ ...
- RobotBuddha, on 12/02/2008, -1/+6Either send people to space or montana, plenty of room in both.
- Pilot85, on 12/02/2008, -1/+5I don't want to live forever; I just want some extra time to do *****. Living forever might drive a person nutso.
- unseenvision, on 12/02/2008, -0/+4Good point, I guess we're all screwed either way then.
- inactive, on 12/02/2008, -2/+6you sound like every other cynic throughout the ages. how about shutting the ***** up and letting things happen without your worthless opinion commentary. or maybe you can contribute something useful. my useful contribution is telling people like to to shut the ***** up and watch and listen, but mostly shut the ***** up.
- SmilinJoe, on 12/02/2008, -0/+4Sucks starting to age, eh? I think that a person of a particular time doesn't care much for their present, we as humans are always looking forward. If the lived two centuries, you'd wonder what wonders would lie ahead the next years - that or come to realize how circular everything really is and be ready to end it.
- groo68, on 12/02/2008, -0/+4For one id move to mars if they offered, and for two humans haven't been alive for billions of years.
- SmilinJoe, on 12/02/2008, -0/+4The vintage car is not the same one that rolled off the production line. With parts replacement you'll be lucky to have 30% - 40% of the original car decades later, but I can see the value off targeted maintenance to stave off the effects of aging a few years.
- subliminalurge, on 12/02/2008, -0/+4So we adjust. We greatly reduce the "birth" component of that equation. Perhaps, as draconian as it sounds, people would be required to be sterilized before accepting this treatment.
People will still die. There will still be accidents, murders, etc... - inactive, on 12/02/2008, -0/+4Great *hundreds of million* more americans
http://www.2bloghumor.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/ ... - Chaoticfist, on 12/02/2008, -0/+4Exactly. I don't want to live for ever but i want to live to see where humanity ends up. I want to see us soar into the heavens and explore other worlds. I want to be on the colony ship going to a new home for humanity. A few thousand years would be amazing hell i would settle for living to 300 and seeing the world advance. I really do hope i get to see us explore other worlds one day.
- starslinger72, on 12/02/2008, -0/+4is that protoss that are living peacefully or protoss that are fighting a zerg rush?
- pe5t1lence, on 12/02/2008, -0/+3Is this dark city all of a sudden?
- messiah420, on 12/02/2008, -1/+4explain.
- inactive, on 12/02/2008, -0/+3People got nobles prizes for research into barely visible worms.
- Kohaxx, on 12/02/2008, -0/+3It's the secret to their powers.
- RobotBuddha, on 12/02/2008, -2/+5Why would there be anything funny. Same thing's going to happen to you as well. If the only difference is that he loved life enough to want more of it and you placed so little value on it that you don't mind seeing it go, I think he'd still have come out the winner.
- michaelrsa, on 12/02/2008, -2/+5Do we really want to not die? I, for one, don't want to live forever, think about it, if you live forever then you will have to keep working and doing the same ***** everyday. Sure, it might be nice to live a while longer, but you do need to feed yourself and living forever would mean that you could never retire. You'd have to work and work and work until you finally decide that the bullet to the brain is better.
- groo68, on 12/02/2008, -0/+3they are like wizards.
- groo68, on 12/02/2008, -0/+3more room for those that do.
- xexx, on 12/02/2008, -0/+3Then you can die off. Natures mechanisms are ours for the manipulation... ***** nature, I'll slap that ***** and make it my bitch.
- AmnesiacJack, on 12/02/2008, -0/+3My worry is (and hopefully this would be ironed out) how could I be sure that "ME" would get transferred as well.
I mean say its all transferred to a machine and uploaded, well what happens if my body is still around, you can't have two consciences at once. Is the original copy you, or is the upload you, which version will be you? - Sraser, on 12/02/2008, -0/+3Unless of course he/she discovered the method to live forever and then as a result of their discovery could live life as they wish forever.
Then that would be a great way to live life. - unseenvision, on 12/02/2008, -4/+6What is with this obsession over not getting older? So what happens when nobody get's older, we'll just have to start executing people to make room for new people? I don't get it.
- vertigo32, on 12/02/2008, -0/+2Nobody WANTS to die, but I don't see that there will ever be a full end to human aging - at least not one that more than a small select (rich) group of people have access to.
The world's resources are finite and very few people are irreplaceable. As long as 'manufacturing' new people is easy and any man and woman can do it, there aren't many good reasons to maintain the existing population rather than replace them with new people. Generally, life is cheap.
Not to mention the social problems that this would cause. The problems go beyond overcrowding - if people don't get old and retire, don't die and pass on their property to their kids and grandkids, you are going to stratify society into old people who control everything and young people who have nothing.
The only reason we would ever want a universal cure for aging would be if there was some plague that made most of the population sterile, or if we were expanding through space quickly enough to keep the population balanced. Most people just don't have enough knowledge to be worth keeping around rather than replacing them with a new generation. - GSnake, on 12/02/2008, -0/+2Flawless logic.
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