What if aging weren’t inevitable, but a curable disease? | Hacker News Reader

What if aging weren’t inevitable, but a curable disease?

technologyreview.com

34 pointst2324 comments

From a cynical point of view, the biggest problem with life extension is that you usually end up extending the worst years of life rather than the best. The article somewhat covers this, but if anti aging treatments only manage to keep people alive who are barely functional, you've actually made things worse for society as a whole instead of better. We need ways to extend productive years of life and potentially keep people in the workforce (or at least the socially contributing force) longer. I'm hopeful for some of the treatments mentioned, but I think a lot of them are going to fall into the "we managed to keep people in a hospital bed for an extra year" category.

On a side note - has anyone heard anything from Calico recently? I seem to remember a lot of hopeful statements when they started up years ago with the intent of doing a lot of the research mentioned in this article, and then they went silent.

Re: Calico. Lots of turnover, lots of focus on basic science. Still recruiting wonderfully talented scientists. Still very secretive about progress. Note sure if that is useful or not!

I find it amazing that people unironically advocate the deaths of literally everyone because they can't be arsed to deal with overpopulation. If immortality were the default, it would rightly be seen as batshit insane to force everyone to die to solve overpopulation.

I wonder if social progress or change at all would halt without death as an agent of change and creation? It seems like a great sci fi premise.

That would mean we've invented a huge population problem, and hundred+ year working lives.

Do people really want to live forever? My impression amongst my now mainly middle aged friends is that no, that's for a hope for the naivety of youth. Or the hyper-wealthy who can fund a hedonistic century or three. In my fifties I am quite chilled and happy that I come with an as yet unknown expiry date.

Am I intrigued what life will be like in the 23rd century? Definitely, presuming we get past our little climate emergency, which I doubt. Do I want 300 years of mainly boredom and frustration working my way to get there? Most certainly not. :)

It’s optional.

Those who don't want it for themselves still can't opt out of the problems created by unchecked population growth. Everyone is screwed.

I think getting [human consciousness] software to run in other hardware will come before biological immortality, and once that happens there's no point in keeping a biological form.

The only pain point that I have as a software engineer, I have no clear idea on how to not shutdown the software before loading in to another medium.

Loading to the new medium would work like a multi master db cluster; attach, copy, verify, shutdown old master.

> The only pain point that I have as a software engineer, I have no clear idea on how to not shutdown the software before loading in to another medium.

It's not a problem. Live migration of running software is a thing. Whether it's actually possible for humans remains to be seen.

The principle is the same, though. In my view, it makes sense to see myself as a software process running on biological hardware, so if there were a way to simulate a live migration from one hardware to a compatible one, there would be no point which I could consider a discontinuity, since merely suspending a process does not lose information.

However, I do think that I'd prefer a method which gradually integrates my brain with a non-biological implant that eventually takes over. It seems more plausible.

Two points:

1) The "discontinuity" is a red herring. You get one of those every time you fall asleep.

2) It doesn't really make sense to speak of your brain as software running on hardware. That's a metaphor informed by the behavior of digital computers, whose state is comparatively easy to approximate due to their binary nature (and yet still very difficult, as anyone knows who's tried writing a 100% compatible emulator for a different computer). But in your brain, the software and the hardware are the same thing. It's just a hyper-complex object that interacts with its environment.There's no guarantee there's any way to abstract that above the molecular level without losing information, and even if you think you have, there's no way to verify that the behavior of a new system will match the behavior of the old system in every case.

Take a system you don't normally regard as information-processing, and see if it works the same way. Can we migrate the software process that runs a ball of plasma to compatible hardware? Or a rock?

>Can we migrate the software process that runs a ball of plasma to compatible hardware?

That's kind of what people who build tokamaks are trying to do when they run plasma simulations.

This reply is a bit late, but I think I'll clarify myself anyway. The way I see it, it's not my brain or body that's "me". It's the ongoing process, which doesn't really exist as anything concrete (even though it's caused by a material body). Therefore if there were some way of seamlessly transition this process to continue in a different body, I would still consider it "me" even if the new body actually behaves differently (my body certainly doesn't behave the same way it did ten years ago).

> Do people really want to live forever?

No one's going to live forever, just not get old. I'm also in my fifties, and would love to have another 50 years of being a naïve youth :)

Personally I hope to live long enough to go to 'heaven' — i.e. retire to the Moon, Mars, or an orbiting space habitat.

That's the promise discussed, aye. Yet that's not a new intent, far from it. As another commenter notes improvements frequently extend a poor quality and phase of life, or an extra decade parked in a care home. I can't help but expect that despite intent this will end up achieving more of the same...

As for naive youth, I'm less sure - just a decade out of twenties leads to different outlook and choices. I suspect the people who keep that naive youthful mindset, are one of the very rare few who manage that naturally. I suspect this is the hard part. A octogenarian, with the health of a thirty year old, is still likely to have an elderly - or extremely experienced if you prefer - outlook. Will that lead to apparently 25 year old octogenarians yelling at actual 25 year old's to turn off the infernal noise? :)

We certainly grow old more disgracefully than our grand or great grandparents, who seemed positively old at 40. That seems to be societal rather than longevity or medical. I suspect there isn't much more to come there.

I think cranky old people are cranky due to their poor health and old brains as much as their experience. The healthy ones are often quite youthful in outlook. It's going to be the actual 25 year olds yelling at the apparently 25 year old octogenarians — or more probably, the middle-aged parents yelling at the kids, the octogenarian grandparents, and the supercentenarian great-grandparents.

I think it's not quite right to put it in the same category as normal disease or initially have the goal of "curing" it, but I do believe that understanding and attempting to mitigate or at least partially reverse some of the underlying mechanisms of aging is the primary path forward for medicine.

I think the SENS approach is most realistic https://sens.org

Accidental death is ~50/100k/lifetime. So 0.9995^n = 1/2 is our accidental halflife. Works out to about 100,000 years on average. Someone please check;)

Of course it's not just accidents we'd need to worry about if we didn't age — there's also murder, warfare, suicide, infectious diseases, etc. I think Aubrey de Grey said the average lifespan would be ~500-1000 years absent age-related diseases.

I think people's risk tolerances would dramatically change with unbounded lifespans, and we would take any threat to life much more seriously than we do now.

For a while yes. Though I can imagine very old but fit people taking up extreme sports when they get bored with life and dying in entirely avoidable accidents.

The probability to get murdered in a lifetime is already higher than that (a little bit higher in Europe, a lot higher in US).

It would be more than enough to cure hair loss, it's almost the same thing.

Then there would be time enough for love.

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